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lomonaaerenRemember, DH SPOILERS in this story!
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Chapter Nine—Breakfast at the Malfoys’
“Oh, Harry, thank God.”
Harry felt guilt coil around his heart when he realized that Ginny’s face was tear-streaked, her red hair disordered as if she’d spent hours raking her fingers through it, and that she was reaching through the fire for his hand, which she grasped with almost cruel strength.
“I thought Narcissa contacted you,” he said, stroking her fingers and kissing the back of her wrist. “She told me she would.”
“She did,” Ginny said tersely, “but you know how little information there is to be had from a Malfoy, Harry.”
“Or, at least, one who doesn’t want to talk to you,” Harry murmured, caught between defending Draco and hesitating because he didn’t know what Narcissa had done last night.
Ginny took his words in the way he had intended them, at least. “Yes. And she didn’t want to talk to me. From the way she looked at me, a crushed insect on her shoe would have suited her better as a correspondent.” Ginny’s lips trembled, then tightened. “She only told me you were ‘resting,’ and then she shut down the Floo connection completely. No matter how much powder I threw in, Malfoy Manor was closed to me.”
“I’m sorry,” said Harry, feeling a stab of irritation that Narcissa, who had condescended to take his help on this case, still didn’t think his wife good enough to talk to. “It was literally true, but she should have told you more.”
“What happened, Harry?”
Harry explained Draco’s wounds and his own odd reaction in a few brief words. Since he didn’t understand the source of the visions, or the sweet smells, or the owl feathers, he was thinking more of the argument that Ginny would offer when he told her he was staying at the Manor for the morning.
Her reaction, however, was strange. She went white to the lips when he finished describing Draco’s thoughts on the life-debts, and whispered, “That’s just what I feared when you started going to the Manor.”
“What?” Harry asked, baffled. Ginny certainly hadn’t said anything about scars or feathers.
“I feared they would take you away.” Ginny’s eyes rose and clung to his, desolate. “You’re drifting further and further from me and the children, Harry. Can’t you feel it? Maybe that’s not what you intend, but it’s what’s happening. You’re more interested and invested in figuring out this mystery than you are in spending an ordinary evening at home with me.”
“I’m not—“ Harry shook his head helplessly. Ginny was so wrong that he didn’t know what to say if a flat denial wouldn’t convince her. It was true that he didn’t resent giving his time to Draco and Narcissa as he had a few days ago, but that didn’t mean that he was happy without his children. He thought about them all the time. He could almost feel James crashing into him with the toy broom if he tried, hear the boy’s delighted squeal as Harry swung him up and around in his arms—
The air hissed around him, and odd flickers of colorless light stormed past his eyes for a moment. Harry blinked frantically, but Ginny was still talking and didn’t appear to have noticed anything wrong.
“Mum’s coming this morning to help with the kids. And Luna said she’d stop by this afternoon. I’m late for practice, but Glynnis understood when I explained that you had just vanished.” Ginny leaned forwards and stared at him piercingly. “Maybe you better had stay to breakfast at the Manor, since you’re there already. Just don’t get used to those people taking up so much of your time, Harry Potter. Or you may find out, someday, that other people don’t like to be taken for granted and don’t want you taking up their time.”
The fireplace went dark. Harry knelt where he was, staring into it, and the guilt grew worse and worse, biting his heart with sharp fangs.
Just breakfast, he promised himself firmly as he stood, and then an hour of research with Draco. That’s all. I shouldn’t be spending this much time in the house, anyway, in case Marian decides the time is ripe to make another “confession.”
*
Draco didn’t want to chance either Marian or Narcissa sharing breakfast with them, so he spent the time while Potter firecalled his wife reassuring his mother. It wasn’t easy.
“What were you doing, Draco?”
He sighed and looked up at her from the chair where she’d ushered him the moment he walked through the door into the dining room, while all the while clucking that he shouldn’t be standing. “Nothing unusual, Mother. Putting on my dress robes. Thinking of dinner. I noticed the door had been locked, but I thought Marian had done it.”
“I’ve told you before, Draco, if she respected you—“
“And at this point, I don’t think she’ll ever respect me again,” Draco cut Narcissa off impatiently. “It’s not something I can do anything about. Besides, I thought you wanted to hear what happened to me while I was in the loo?”
Narcissa’s mouth sagged slightly open. Draco thought he knew why. It had been years since he spoke back to her that way. She was used to passive resistance, or whinging and pouting that a child might be embarrassed about. Of course, her eyes were already narrowing, and he suspected that she was thinking of ways that she could use this new spark of his that would support her ambitions for him.
A moment later, she said, “Yes, I do want to know. Go on.”
At least she didn’t seem disposed to disbelieve him now. Draco supposed the miraculous effect of Harry’s touch had been enough even for her. He briefly recounted the shattering mirror, and how the shards had gone straight through his Shield Charm. She stared at her hands when he was done, and shook her head.
“How can we prevent a recurrence?”
Draco felt a moment’s surge of deep pride. His mother wanted him to do something worth doing, but she also loved him and wanted to protect him. And now that she believed the curse was real, she wouldn’t waste time wailing about how she’d been wrong or demanding that he hear her apologies.
“Researching the life-debts and the scars we both have from cursed objects seems the clearest course right now,” he said. “And I think we should remove every mirror in the house, Mother, not just cover them.”
Narcissa jumped to her feet. “I’ll do that,” she said, and he knew she was glad to have a task that would offer solid results. He watched her with a fond smile as she departed, and then started to stand as he saw Harry hesitating in the doorway.
“No, no, sit down.” Harry crossed the room to him and fussed about his chair. Draco found the concern simultaneously gratifying and unnerving.
“I’m not an invalid, Potter,” he huffed, rolling his eyes.
“I thought you were going to call me Harry?” Harry straightened from examining the legs of the chair, as though he had wanted to make sure it wouldn’t collapse beneath Draco, and gave him a relaxed, joking smile.
Draco felt another surge of emotion, this time happiness. He hadn’t had a lover he could joke with in years, and it had been longer than that since he had a friend. Whatever he and Harry ended up being to one another—even if it was just friends, and Draco never got to see whether Harry’s ears and neck were really that sensitive—it was worth it to know that they could speak to each other like this.
“No matter what I call you, I’m still not an invalid.”
Harry chuckled at him, and then sat down with a start as the first house-elf appeared, carrying a tray of apple slices, cut strawberries with a small bowl of cream near them, and fresh peaches. Draco watched him slyly as glasses of orange juice appeared next to the fruit, and then more ordinary toast. He could see more than hunger in Harry’s eyes; there was something like covetousness.
“Don’t you have fresh fruit that often?” he asked.
“Oh.” Harry seemed to come back to himself, and enthusiastically took one of the peaches and several of the apple slices from the central plate. He seemed more hesitant about feeding himself with the strawberries, but Draco thought he was fighting an impulse to simply snatch them all. “Of course. But lately James doesn’t like it, even though Al does, so we don’t have it very often.” He bit into the peach, and closed his eyes.
“Tell me about your children,” Draco said, sipping at the tea that Treety had brought him along with his orange juice, and shaking his head when the elf held the Daily Prophet out to him.
Harry’s eyes popped open, cautious slits of green regarding him over the peach. “Why?”
“Because you’ve met Scorpius, and I haven’t met them.” Draco laughed around a small bite of apple. “What, are you afraid I’ll hex them once I know their true names?”
“No,” Harry muttered, looking chagrined. “Just—surprised that you would be interested in them, that’s all.”
Draco leaned forwards, putting a hand on Harry’s arm. No jolt of sensation ran through him at the contact. He wondered idly if lying in bed and holding Harry’s hand all night had immunized him to it.
“Friends are interested in almost everything having to do with their friends,” he said, and tried to control his face for the next words, though it was almost impossible. “That’s what I learned from the strong and sustaining friendships I had in Hogwarts, while you stayed around power-hungry cronies.”
*
Opening his mouth to snap, Harry realized abruptly that Draco was making a joke at his own expense. He shut his mouth and swallowed again, shaking his head in a kind of dazed state.
That Draco had a sense of humor about himself was more than he had expected.
Part of him—the part that still lingered by the fireplace with Ginny, the part that had been stunned and saddened by how much he had saddened her—whispered that this was a bad thing. Harry didn’t need to be fascinated with Draco. The statement Draco had just made about friendships was untrue in more than one way. Friends could drift apart, or have strong obsessions or interests that the others didn’t share. Though he and Ron had taken advantage of Hermione’s research in school, they hadn’t been interested in the subjects for themselves, as she was, and Ron still didn’t share half his wife’s thinking time.
But the majority part of his mind still thought Ginny’s worry was silly. He loved her. His friendships with Ron and Hermione, Luna and Dean, and a few other people who worked n the Blood Reparations Department and whom he’d come to know since the end of the war didn’t threaten his marriage. Ginny was, understandably, grieved that he was spending time with people she hated. But he could laugh with Draco all he liked, and it wouldn’t make him any less eager to share his life with her.
So he laughed, and started telling Draco about James Sirius, and Albus Severus, and Lily Nymphadora. Ginny had fought him on the names at first; she hadn’t thought naming all the children after dead people was healthy, and she particularly hadn’t liked Albus Severus’s name. But Harry had insisted. There was still little he could do to honor the dead; his work had to be among the living, helping those people who had been hurt by the war. And he had promised her that if one of the children ever found the association with the dead oppressive and wanted to change their names, Harry wouldn’t stand in the way of that.
So far, he didn’t think they had to worry. James was so much like his grandfather had been—good and bad qualities both—that it scared Harry sometimes. Al was his own person, and he had a convenient nickname if people teased him. Lily was too young for it to matter to her.
“Did anyone ever tease you about Draco?” he asked Draco.
“Of course,” said Draco, and his mouth twisted in a wry little grimace. “Weasley, the first time we met. Or don’t you remember?”
Harry blinked. He’d forgotten, actually. “I’m sorry for that,” he apologized. “I know it’s years too late, but I really was an ignorant little kid. I didn’t know anything about families or pure-bloods or Houses or anything else. All I knew was the people who were nice to me and the people who weren’t.” He managed a smile of his own that he hoped was sufficiently wry. “And I knew that I didn’t want to be in Slytherin House because you were there, and I didn’t want to be with people who might make me like them—or evil, which I was also afraid of.”
Draco frowned at him. “It’s not as though you have a choice about which House you go into, Harry.”
“I did.” Harry was feeling more and more embarrassed as Draco stared at him. He turned away and dipped a strawberry into cream to cover his flush, wishing for a moment, traitorously, that they could have this at home more often. “The Sorting Hat said I could have fit into Slytherin. I told it I didn’t want to go there, and finally it put me in Gryffindor.”
“Well.”
Harry couldn’t distinguish all the emotions that Draco had piled into that one word. He wasn’t sure he wanted to.
Draco let it go, however, or at least he did in the sense of not referring to it directly. He leaned forwards and tapped Harry on the elbow. “That just goes to show that there are more similarities between us than you once realized, Harry. And the life-debts and the scars make a multitude of resemblances.”
Harry drew his lip in under his teeth, and then flicked his tongue out to lick a bit of cream from one of them. Draco’s face changed, and Harry wondered if he, too, was embarrassed at eating with someone who had so few manners. Harry mentally shrugged. One couldn’t be that particular when sharing the table with three young children.
“So you think we should—what, try to erase the resemblances? Heal the scars? Ignore the life-debts?”
“Idiot,” Draco murmured. “Did ignoring the visions in the mirrors work? Of course not. What we need to do is acknowledge what the similarities, the connections, mean. I think the life-debts might go away if we work to fulfill them.”
“Well,” Harry said slowly, “I’m fulfilling the one I owe your mother by discovering who really murdered Esther. And you wanted—what, friendship? Does our friendship fulfill the one I owe to you?”
“I think it can, yes.” Draco had a calculating look in his eyes, one that Harry tried to dismiss. A calculating look in his eyes was Draco’s natural expression. “I certainly can’t think of anything from you I want more.”
Liar, Harry thought, but kept carefully away from considering what else Draco might want. If Draco wasn’t going to confront it, he didn’t have to. “So that leaves the two life-debts you owe me. Trouble is, I can’t think of anything I want from you.”
“Can’t you?”
Damn it, there was that intensity shining in Draco’s eyes like light through a crystal, as though he were going to break Harry with the silence. But Harry held his gaze, and refused to look away. No more running. Besides, it’s not as though what he’s hinting at could ever become reality. I’m in love with Ginny, and I don’t want to be physically intimate with anyone else.
“I can’t,” he said. “Unless—could it be something small? Could I ask you for small gifts? Would that fulfill the debts?”
“Not unless the gifts themselves greatly mattered to you in some way.” Draco kept his voice husky, either not noticing or refusing to interpret Harry’s annoyed look. “If I were to give you a glass of water when you were in danger of dying of dehydration, for example, that would count. But otherwise, giving small gifts only says that my life is of little value to me.” He cocked his head. “You know that is not true.”
“No,” Harry admitted. “I’ve met Scorpius.” He hesitated again, then shook his head and muttered, “I can’t think of anything else I want from you.”
“Then put it in the back of your mind for now,” Draco said smoothly. “Take it out and think about it later.”
When you’re not in my company, the tone of the voice said. Think about me when you’re trying to be around other people and think about other things.
With an effort, Harry turned his head, breaking the connection of the gaze between them. “Can you show me the research you’ve gathered on life-debts?” His voice felt heavy, his tongue numb. Damn it, being around him shouldn’t be this hard for me. It was easy a few moments ago!
“Just one thing first,” Draco said.
Harry made a dismissive gesture with one hand.
“I want to know,” Draco said. “You said during your last visit that you have dreams somehow connected to the curse. What are those about? For completeness of information, I think we have to consider them.”
*
Harry stiffened, and his eyes flared with an interesting combination of guilt and defensiveness.
Caught, Potter, aren’t you? Draco’s hand twitched, but he kept it at his side despite an instinct to reach out and stroke Harry’s arm elbow to wrist. He wasn’t desperate for the touch of skin, but he liked touching it. Just now, though, it might send Harry running.
Harry cleared his throat at last. “I—I don’t see why you’re interested in that, Draco.”
“For completeness of information, I said.” Draco kept his voice low and his limbs relaxed, as though this really didn’t matter, but he was watching avidly for any telltale twitch or redness in Harry’s face. He wanted to know. Even though he hadn’t known anything about the existence of the dreams until a few days ago—well, he was used to his passions changing abruptly and his fixations becoming unusual around Harry Potter. For as long as they associated, no matter how much older they got, Draco did not think that would change. “I want to know what you see.”
“It’s like—stories.”
Even given his general lack of eloquence, I didn’t expect that. Draco cocked his head. “What do you mean by that?”
“Just what I said.” Harry jerked his head a little, as though he had an insect on his hair and was trying to get it off. “I dream about us—being together. Having rows. Talking to Ron and Hermione. A few nights ago it was a fight about whether I could bring you to my birthday party, if we held the party in their house. It’s quite a different house,” he added hastily, as though Draco cared where the Weasels lived. “No connection at all to the one they actually own.”
“But the house is constant from one dream to another, isn’t it?” Draco asked. “You said they were like stories,” he explained, when Harry gave him a harsh look.
“Yes, it is,” said Harry. “But not, in other ways.”
Draco held his impatience in and merely arched his brows.
“It’s not told in chronological order.” Harry fussed with his fingers, not looking up at Draco. “Sometimes I’ll be dreaming of us as teenagers, then as adults. Once there was a dream where we seemed at least McGonagall’s age.” He arched his shoulders and shook his head. “Just dreams, as I said. Nothing real.”
“But it’s a story about a reality where we chose each other,” Draco said softly. “We row, but we—what? Live together? We’re lovers, Harry, aren’t we?”
“Yes.” Harry had his head turned determinedly away.
“And you wake up aroused, and feeling as though you’ve betrayed your wife in your sleep,” Draco finished, sure that was it. The realization had arrived unheralded in the same part of his brain that knew what sexual positions Harry liked best, and that his ears and neck were sensitive.
Harry nodded once, in a clipped fashion, and said, “And the dreams feel as if they’re real, as if I were really visiting that other life while I was there.”
Draco opened his mouth to ask another question, but Harry turned to face him, and his eyes were brilliant and his mouth set.
“And I don’t want jokes about that,” Harry said harshly. “No teasing, no innuendo, no flirting. It’s quite bad enough that we’ll have to talk about them in more detail when we start our—investigation. No more than that, Malfoy, all right?”
“Ignoring sexual attraction doesn’t make it go away,” Draco said, barely moving his lips, “any more than ignoring dreams and visions in mirrors makes them cease.”
Harry laughed without humor. “And talking about them doesn’t make them palatable, either.” He blew out his breath, and Draco realized that his eyes were weary, his jaw half-relaxed, as if he simply couldn’t keep it clenched any longer.
“Please,” Harry said simply. “I don’t want to discuss this unless we have to.”
And Draco thought about it, and thought about the friendship that he hoped to have with Harry in the coming years—would have, since this friendship was the fulfillment of a life-debt and therefore must endure. Did he want it to be strained and fretful, with Harry always fearful of his efforts to awaken sexual tension between them, or did he want it to be true and relaxed, with Harry feeling free to say whatever was on his mind?
Perhaps it was victory enough to know that Harry’s nervousness meant part of him was indeed attracted to Draco, and that with enough prompting and kindling, his arousal could burst into flame.
Draco touched his hand, lightly, in the same way Harry had held it during the night. “All right,” he said. “I think the most productive course right now is for you to decide what you’d like to fulfill the life-debts, so that I can give it to you.” It took more effort than he had expected not to lower his eyelids and give Harry an inviting sidelong glance when he spoke those words, but he did it.
Harry’s answering smile was luminous, and Draco felt a strained tension in his own belly uncoil and fall limp.
“Thank you,” Harry murmured to him. “Thank you.”
Draco shrugged his acquiescence, but couldn’t keep a smile from rising in return.
*
Harry let himself into the house and looked around curiously. It was quiet, which usually meant trouble.
“Molly?” he called. “James? Al?”
“I sent them away.”
Harry straightened his spine, and then turned. Ginny stood behind him, holding a piece of parchment that looked like a letter in her hand, her head slowly shaking back and forth.
“Gin,” Harry said quietly. If she was about to scold him for the amount of time he’d spent at Malfoy Manor, he would defend himself, but he would not let her rule the argument. He wasn’t leaving her, and Draco had even agreed to stop luring him into doing so.
“Why did you lie to me?” she whispered. “If you believed he was guilty all along, why didn’t you say so?”
Harry felt his jaw drop open a little. “What?” he said helplessly.
Ginny handed the letter to him in silence. Harry read it. It was in his own handwriting, and it detailed several reasons “he” had—including Marian’s confession of Draco going missing for an hour—for believing that Draco Malfoy was guilty of the murder of Esther Goldstein. His signature was at the bottom.
“I didn’t write it.” His voice was dry with panic. “Ginny, there are charms to feign a person’s handwriting. I—“
“I know,” Ginny whispered. “But signatures can be analyzed easily for falsehood, Harry. Someone came up with the spell a few centuries ago to protect the authenticity of legal documents. I tested it on that signature. It’s yours, Harry.” She hesitated, then handed him a smaller slip of parchment. “This was in the envelope with it, lying on the table in the study.”
Harry stared at the parchment. It said:
Copies of this letter have gone to the Daily Prophet, to every member of the Weasley family, to Esther Goldstein’s family, and to Malfoy Manor.
Chapter 10.
Thank you again for all the reviews!
Chapter Nine—Breakfast at the Malfoys’
“Oh, Harry, thank God.”
Harry felt guilt coil around his heart when he realized that Ginny’s face was tear-streaked, her red hair disordered as if she’d spent hours raking her fingers through it, and that she was reaching through the fire for his hand, which she grasped with almost cruel strength.
“I thought Narcissa contacted you,” he said, stroking her fingers and kissing the back of her wrist. “She told me she would.”
“She did,” Ginny said tersely, “but you know how little information there is to be had from a Malfoy, Harry.”
“Or, at least, one who doesn’t want to talk to you,” Harry murmured, caught between defending Draco and hesitating because he didn’t know what Narcissa had done last night.
Ginny took his words in the way he had intended them, at least. “Yes. And she didn’t want to talk to me. From the way she looked at me, a crushed insect on her shoe would have suited her better as a correspondent.” Ginny’s lips trembled, then tightened. “She only told me you were ‘resting,’ and then she shut down the Floo connection completely. No matter how much powder I threw in, Malfoy Manor was closed to me.”
“I’m sorry,” said Harry, feeling a stab of irritation that Narcissa, who had condescended to take his help on this case, still didn’t think his wife good enough to talk to. “It was literally true, but she should have told you more.”
“What happened, Harry?”
Harry explained Draco’s wounds and his own odd reaction in a few brief words. Since he didn’t understand the source of the visions, or the sweet smells, or the owl feathers, he was thinking more of the argument that Ginny would offer when he told her he was staying at the Manor for the morning.
Her reaction, however, was strange. She went white to the lips when he finished describing Draco’s thoughts on the life-debts, and whispered, “That’s just what I feared when you started going to the Manor.”
“What?” Harry asked, baffled. Ginny certainly hadn’t said anything about scars or feathers.
“I feared they would take you away.” Ginny’s eyes rose and clung to his, desolate. “You’re drifting further and further from me and the children, Harry. Can’t you feel it? Maybe that’s not what you intend, but it’s what’s happening. You’re more interested and invested in figuring out this mystery than you are in spending an ordinary evening at home with me.”
“I’m not—“ Harry shook his head helplessly. Ginny was so wrong that he didn’t know what to say if a flat denial wouldn’t convince her. It was true that he didn’t resent giving his time to Draco and Narcissa as he had a few days ago, but that didn’t mean that he was happy without his children. He thought about them all the time. He could almost feel James crashing into him with the toy broom if he tried, hear the boy’s delighted squeal as Harry swung him up and around in his arms—
The air hissed around him, and odd flickers of colorless light stormed past his eyes for a moment. Harry blinked frantically, but Ginny was still talking and didn’t appear to have noticed anything wrong.
“Mum’s coming this morning to help with the kids. And Luna said she’d stop by this afternoon. I’m late for practice, but Glynnis understood when I explained that you had just vanished.” Ginny leaned forwards and stared at him piercingly. “Maybe you better had stay to breakfast at the Manor, since you’re there already. Just don’t get used to those people taking up so much of your time, Harry Potter. Or you may find out, someday, that other people don’t like to be taken for granted and don’t want you taking up their time.”
The fireplace went dark. Harry knelt where he was, staring into it, and the guilt grew worse and worse, biting his heart with sharp fangs.
Just breakfast, he promised himself firmly as he stood, and then an hour of research with Draco. That’s all. I shouldn’t be spending this much time in the house, anyway, in case Marian decides the time is ripe to make another “confession.”
*
Draco didn’t want to chance either Marian or Narcissa sharing breakfast with them, so he spent the time while Potter firecalled his wife reassuring his mother. It wasn’t easy.
“What were you doing, Draco?”
He sighed and looked up at her from the chair where she’d ushered him the moment he walked through the door into the dining room, while all the while clucking that he shouldn’t be standing. “Nothing unusual, Mother. Putting on my dress robes. Thinking of dinner. I noticed the door had been locked, but I thought Marian had done it.”
“I’ve told you before, Draco, if she respected you—“
“And at this point, I don’t think she’ll ever respect me again,” Draco cut Narcissa off impatiently. “It’s not something I can do anything about. Besides, I thought you wanted to hear what happened to me while I was in the loo?”
Narcissa’s mouth sagged slightly open. Draco thought he knew why. It had been years since he spoke back to her that way. She was used to passive resistance, or whinging and pouting that a child might be embarrassed about. Of course, her eyes were already narrowing, and he suspected that she was thinking of ways that she could use this new spark of his that would support her ambitions for him.
A moment later, she said, “Yes, I do want to know. Go on.”
At least she didn’t seem disposed to disbelieve him now. Draco supposed the miraculous effect of Harry’s touch had been enough even for her. He briefly recounted the shattering mirror, and how the shards had gone straight through his Shield Charm. She stared at her hands when he was done, and shook her head.
“How can we prevent a recurrence?”
Draco felt a moment’s surge of deep pride. His mother wanted him to do something worth doing, but she also loved him and wanted to protect him. And now that she believed the curse was real, she wouldn’t waste time wailing about how she’d been wrong or demanding that he hear her apologies.
“Researching the life-debts and the scars we both have from cursed objects seems the clearest course right now,” he said. “And I think we should remove every mirror in the house, Mother, not just cover them.”
Narcissa jumped to her feet. “I’ll do that,” she said, and he knew she was glad to have a task that would offer solid results. He watched her with a fond smile as she departed, and then started to stand as he saw Harry hesitating in the doorway.
“No, no, sit down.” Harry crossed the room to him and fussed about his chair. Draco found the concern simultaneously gratifying and unnerving.
“I’m not an invalid, Potter,” he huffed, rolling his eyes.
“I thought you were going to call me Harry?” Harry straightened from examining the legs of the chair, as though he had wanted to make sure it wouldn’t collapse beneath Draco, and gave him a relaxed, joking smile.
Draco felt another surge of emotion, this time happiness. He hadn’t had a lover he could joke with in years, and it had been longer than that since he had a friend. Whatever he and Harry ended up being to one another—even if it was just friends, and Draco never got to see whether Harry’s ears and neck were really that sensitive—it was worth it to know that they could speak to each other like this.
“No matter what I call you, I’m still not an invalid.”
Harry chuckled at him, and then sat down with a start as the first house-elf appeared, carrying a tray of apple slices, cut strawberries with a small bowl of cream near them, and fresh peaches. Draco watched him slyly as glasses of orange juice appeared next to the fruit, and then more ordinary toast. He could see more than hunger in Harry’s eyes; there was something like covetousness.
“Don’t you have fresh fruit that often?” he asked.
“Oh.” Harry seemed to come back to himself, and enthusiastically took one of the peaches and several of the apple slices from the central plate. He seemed more hesitant about feeding himself with the strawberries, but Draco thought he was fighting an impulse to simply snatch them all. “Of course. But lately James doesn’t like it, even though Al does, so we don’t have it very often.” He bit into the peach, and closed his eyes.
“Tell me about your children,” Draco said, sipping at the tea that Treety had brought him along with his orange juice, and shaking his head when the elf held the Daily Prophet out to him.
Harry’s eyes popped open, cautious slits of green regarding him over the peach. “Why?”
“Because you’ve met Scorpius, and I haven’t met them.” Draco laughed around a small bite of apple. “What, are you afraid I’ll hex them once I know their true names?”
“No,” Harry muttered, looking chagrined. “Just—surprised that you would be interested in them, that’s all.”
Draco leaned forwards, putting a hand on Harry’s arm. No jolt of sensation ran through him at the contact. He wondered idly if lying in bed and holding Harry’s hand all night had immunized him to it.
“Friends are interested in almost everything having to do with their friends,” he said, and tried to control his face for the next words, though it was almost impossible. “That’s what I learned from the strong and sustaining friendships I had in Hogwarts, while you stayed around power-hungry cronies.”
*
Opening his mouth to snap, Harry realized abruptly that Draco was making a joke at his own expense. He shut his mouth and swallowed again, shaking his head in a kind of dazed state.
That Draco had a sense of humor about himself was more than he had expected.
Part of him—the part that still lingered by the fireplace with Ginny, the part that had been stunned and saddened by how much he had saddened her—whispered that this was a bad thing. Harry didn’t need to be fascinated with Draco. The statement Draco had just made about friendships was untrue in more than one way. Friends could drift apart, or have strong obsessions or interests that the others didn’t share. Though he and Ron had taken advantage of Hermione’s research in school, they hadn’t been interested in the subjects for themselves, as she was, and Ron still didn’t share half his wife’s thinking time.
But the majority part of his mind still thought Ginny’s worry was silly. He loved her. His friendships with Ron and Hermione, Luna and Dean, and a few other people who worked n the Blood Reparations Department and whom he’d come to know since the end of the war didn’t threaten his marriage. Ginny was, understandably, grieved that he was spending time with people she hated. But he could laugh with Draco all he liked, and it wouldn’t make him any less eager to share his life with her.
So he laughed, and started telling Draco about James Sirius, and Albus Severus, and Lily Nymphadora. Ginny had fought him on the names at first; she hadn’t thought naming all the children after dead people was healthy, and she particularly hadn’t liked Albus Severus’s name. But Harry had insisted. There was still little he could do to honor the dead; his work had to be among the living, helping those people who had been hurt by the war. And he had promised her that if one of the children ever found the association with the dead oppressive and wanted to change their names, Harry wouldn’t stand in the way of that.
So far, he didn’t think they had to worry. James was so much like his grandfather had been—good and bad qualities both—that it scared Harry sometimes. Al was his own person, and he had a convenient nickname if people teased him. Lily was too young for it to matter to her.
“Did anyone ever tease you about Draco?” he asked Draco.
“Of course,” said Draco, and his mouth twisted in a wry little grimace. “Weasley, the first time we met. Or don’t you remember?”
Harry blinked. He’d forgotten, actually. “I’m sorry for that,” he apologized. “I know it’s years too late, but I really was an ignorant little kid. I didn’t know anything about families or pure-bloods or Houses or anything else. All I knew was the people who were nice to me and the people who weren’t.” He managed a smile of his own that he hoped was sufficiently wry. “And I knew that I didn’t want to be in Slytherin House because you were there, and I didn’t want to be with people who might make me like them—or evil, which I was also afraid of.”
Draco frowned at him. “It’s not as though you have a choice about which House you go into, Harry.”
“I did.” Harry was feeling more and more embarrassed as Draco stared at him. He turned away and dipped a strawberry into cream to cover his flush, wishing for a moment, traitorously, that they could have this at home more often. “The Sorting Hat said I could have fit into Slytherin. I told it I didn’t want to go there, and finally it put me in Gryffindor.”
“Well.”
Harry couldn’t distinguish all the emotions that Draco had piled into that one word. He wasn’t sure he wanted to.
Draco let it go, however, or at least he did in the sense of not referring to it directly. He leaned forwards and tapped Harry on the elbow. “That just goes to show that there are more similarities between us than you once realized, Harry. And the life-debts and the scars make a multitude of resemblances.”
Harry drew his lip in under his teeth, and then flicked his tongue out to lick a bit of cream from one of them. Draco’s face changed, and Harry wondered if he, too, was embarrassed at eating with someone who had so few manners. Harry mentally shrugged. One couldn’t be that particular when sharing the table with three young children.
“So you think we should—what, try to erase the resemblances? Heal the scars? Ignore the life-debts?”
“Idiot,” Draco murmured. “Did ignoring the visions in the mirrors work? Of course not. What we need to do is acknowledge what the similarities, the connections, mean. I think the life-debts might go away if we work to fulfill them.”
“Well,” Harry said slowly, “I’m fulfilling the one I owe your mother by discovering who really murdered Esther. And you wanted—what, friendship? Does our friendship fulfill the one I owe to you?”
“I think it can, yes.” Draco had a calculating look in his eyes, one that Harry tried to dismiss. A calculating look in his eyes was Draco’s natural expression. “I certainly can’t think of anything from you I want more.”
Liar, Harry thought, but kept carefully away from considering what else Draco might want. If Draco wasn’t going to confront it, he didn’t have to. “So that leaves the two life-debts you owe me. Trouble is, I can’t think of anything I want from you.”
“Can’t you?”
Damn it, there was that intensity shining in Draco’s eyes like light through a crystal, as though he were going to break Harry with the silence. But Harry held his gaze, and refused to look away. No more running. Besides, it’s not as though what he’s hinting at could ever become reality. I’m in love with Ginny, and I don’t want to be physically intimate with anyone else.
“I can’t,” he said. “Unless—could it be something small? Could I ask you for small gifts? Would that fulfill the debts?”
“Not unless the gifts themselves greatly mattered to you in some way.” Draco kept his voice husky, either not noticing or refusing to interpret Harry’s annoyed look. “If I were to give you a glass of water when you were in danger of dying of dehydration, for example, that would count. But otherwise, giving small gifts only says that my life is of little value to me.” He cocked his head. “You know that is not true.”
“No,” Harry admitted. “I’ve met Scorpius.” He hesitated again, then shook his head and muttered, “I can’t think of anything else I want from you.”
“Then put it in the back of your mind for now,” Draco said smoothly. “Take it out and think about it later.”
When you’re not in my company, the tone of the voice said. Think about me when you’re trying to be around other people and think about other things.
With an effort, Harry turned his head, breaking the connection of the gaze between them. “Can you show me the research you’ve gathered on life-debts?” His voice felt heavy, his tongue numb. Damn it, being around him shouldn’t be this hard for me. It was easy a few moments ago!
“Just one thing first,” Draco said.
Harry made a dismissive gesture with one hand.
“I want to know,” Draco said. “You said during your last visit that you have dreams somehow connected to the curse. What are those about? For completeness of information, I think we have to consider them.”
*
Harry stiffened, and his eyes flared with an interesting combination of guilt and defensiveness.
Caught, Potter, aren’t you? Draco’s hand twitched, but he kept it at his side despite an instinct to reach out and stroke Harry’s arm elbow to wrist. He wasn’t desperate for the touch of skin, but he liked touching it. Just now, though, it might send Harry running.
Harry cleared his throat at last. “I—I don’t see why you’re interested in that, Draco.”
“For completeness of information, I said.” Draco kept his voice low and his limbs relaxed, as though this really didn’t matter, but he was watching avidly for any telltale twitch or redness in Harry’s face. He wanted to know. Even though he hadn’t known anything about the existence of the dreams until a few days ago—well, he was used to his passions changing abruptly and his fixations becoming unusual around Harry Potter. For as long as they associated, no matter how much older they got, Draco did not think that would change. “I want to know what you see.”
“It’s like—stories.”
Even given his general lack of eloquence, I didn’t expect that. Draco cocked his head. “What do you mean by that?”
“Just what I said.” Harry jerked his head a little, as though he had an insect on his hair and was trying to get it off. “I dream about us—being together. Having rows. Talking to Ron and Hermione. A few nights ago it was a fight about whether I could bring you to my birthday party, if we held the party in their house. It’s quite a different house,” he added hastily, as though Draco cared where the Weasels lived. “No connection at all to the one they actually own.”
“But the house is constant from one dream to another, isn’t it?” Draco asked. “You said they were like stories,” he explained, when Harry gave him a harsh look.
“Yes, it is,” said Harry. “But not, in other ways.”
Draco held his impatience in and merely arched his brows.
“It’s not told in chronological order.” Harry fussed with his fingers, not looking up at Draco. “Sometimes I’ll be dreaming of us as teenagers, then as adults. Once there was a dream where we seemed at least McGonagall’s age.” He arched his shoulders and shook his head. “Just dreams, as I said. Nothing real.”
“But it’s a story about a reality where we chose each other,” Draco said softly. “We row, but we—what? Live together? We’re lovers, Harry, aren’t we?”
“Yes.” Harry had his head turned determinedly away.
“And you wake up aroused, and feeling as though you’ve betrayed your wife in your sleep,” Draco finished, sure that was it. The realization had arrived unheralded in the same part of his brain that knew what sexual positions Harry liked best, and that his ears and neck were sensitive.
Harry nodded once, in a clipped fashion, and said, “And the dreams feel as if they’re real, as if I were really visiting that other life while I was there.”
Draco opened his mouth to ask another question, but Harry turned to face him, and his eyes were brilliant and his mouth set.
“And I don’t want jokes about that,” Harry said harshly. “No teasing, no innuendo, no flirting. It’s quite bad enough that we’ll have to talk about them in more detail when we start our—investigation. No more than that, Malfoy, all right?”
“Ignoring sexual attraction doesn’t make it go away,” Draco said, barely moving his lips, “any more than ignoring dreams and visions in mirrors makes them cease.”
Harry laughed without humor. “And talking about them doesn’t make them palatable, either.” He blew out his breath, and Draco realized that his eyes were weary, his jaw half-relaxed, as if he simply couldn’t keep it clenched any longer.
“Please,” Harry said simply. “I don’t want to discuss this unless we have to.”
And Draco thought about it, and thought about the friendship that he hoped to have with Harry in the coming years—would have, since this friendship was the fulfillment of a life-debt and therefore must endure. Did he want it to be strained and fretful, with Harry always fearful of his efforts to awaken sexual tension between them, or did he want it to be true and relaxed, with Harry feeling free to say whatever was on his mind?
Perhaps it was victory enough to know that Harry’s nervousness meant part of him was indeed attracted to Draco, and that with enough prompting and kindling, his arousal could burst into flame.
Draco touched his hand, lightly, in the same way Harry had held it during the night. “All right,” he said. “I think the most productive course right now is for you to decide what you’d like to fulfill the life-debts, so that I can give it to you.” It took more effort than he had expected not to lower his eyelids and give Harry an inviting sidelong glance when he spoke those words, but he did it.
Harry’s answering smile was luminous, and Draco felt a strained tension in his own belly uncoil and fall limp.
“Thank you,” Harry murmured to him. “Thank you.”
Draco shrugged his acquiescence, but couldn’t keep a smile from rising in return.
*
Harry let himself into the house and looked around curiously. It was quiet, which usually meant trouble.
“Molly?” he called. “James? Al?”
“I sent them away.”
Harry straightened his spine, and then turned. Ginny stood behind him, holding a piece of parchment that looked like a letter in her hand, her head slowly shaking back and forth.
“Gin,” Harry said quietly. If she was about to scold him for the amount of time he’d spent at Malfoy Manor, he would defend himself, but he would not let her rule the argument. He wasn’t leaving her, and Draco had even agreed to stop luring him into doing so.
“Why did you lie to me?” she whispered. “If you believed he was guilty all along, why didn’t you say so?”
Harry felt his jaw drop open a little. “What?” he said helplessly.
Ginny handed the letter to him in silence. Harry read it. It was in his own handwriting, and it detailed several reasons “he” had—including Marian’s confession of Draco going missing for an hour—for believing that Draco Malfoy was guilty of the murder of Esther Goldstein. His signature was at the bottom.
“I didn’t write it.” His voice was dry with panic. “Ginny, there are charms to feign a person’s handwriting. I—“
“I know,” Ginny whispered. “But signatures can be analyzed easily for falsehood, Harry. Someone came up with the spell a few centuries ago to protect the authenticity of legal documents. I tested it on that signature. It’s yours, Harry.” She hesitated, then handed him a smaller slip of parchment. “This was in the envelope with it, lying on the table in the study.”
Harry stared at the parchment. It said:
Copies of this letter have gone to the Daily Prophet, to every member of the Weasley family, to Esther Goldstein’s family, and to Malfoy Manor.
Chapter 10.
