![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lomonaaerenChapter Five.
Title: Nova Cupiditas (6/?)
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairings: Harry/Draco
Rating: R
Warnings: Attempted rape, issues of consent, violence, gore, sex, heavy angst, profanity. Ignores the epilogue.
Summary: Nova cupiditas—the curse that makes the victim desire someone they hate. There is no cure, and the consequences grow increasingly violent the more the desire is denied. And now someone has cursed Draco Malfoy to desire Harry Potter.
Author’s Notes: This is a very dark story. It will probably be between twelve and twenty chapters.
Chapter One.
Thank you again for all the reviews!
Chapter Six—Half a Dozen Precautions
“What wards are you weaving now?”
Harry tensed once, and then told himself that he had invited Draco into his house and he should have revoked his invitation if he had trouble with him being here. “Some of the variations that I’ve learned through my study,” he responded, tapping his wand against the headboard of the bed and employing the spell nonverbally. Perhaps he was being paranoid, thinking that Draco would work out the counterspell to the ward if he heard the incantation, but it didn’t feel like paranoia, not after seeing what the curse could do if pushed.
“Oh.” Draco leaned against the doorframe of his room and watched him. Harry kept his head turned away. Perhaps he was being stupid, but if so, it was the kind of stupidity that would help them both cope and survive—Harry because it lessened his impulse to chase Draco off, and Draco because then he could be closer to Harry than he could if he had to live in a separate house.
And Harry could help him. They would win through and solve this problem, Harry thought. He couldn’t possibly accept another outcome, so that meant the most hopeful one had to happen.
When he turned around, he saw that Draco still hadn’t moved, and his eyes were fixed on Harry’s face. Harry tensed again, but decided, on a second glance, that Draco’s eyes didn’t have the glaze of the curse. Instead, he looked as though there was some profound question he was trying to figure out, on the level of whether Harry was human or not.
“Yes?” Harry asked, keeping his voice calm and even.
“How do you do it?” Draco asked. “I know that I wouldn’t be able to remain around someone who had nearly raped me.”
“I’m angrier at the people who did this than I am at you,” Harry said. He thought for a moment, torn between the truth and what he thought Draco needed to hear, and then added, “And at myself, too.”
Draco frowned. “I fail to see what you have to blame yourself for, Potter.” There was an undertone of old bitterness in his voice that Harry felt free to snort at. Draco still seemed to think that Harry had never got in any trouble at Hogwarts, which only proved that he hadn’t spied on McGonagall at the right times.
“Because I didn’t anticipate this,” Harry said. “I trusted too much to the Cold Water Curse, and I’ve read enough about Nova Cupiditas now to know that it couldn’t be defeated that easily. If I give in and accept my first conclusions, then I’ll never make a good researcher, and that means that I’ll never solve your problem, let alone all the other ones that I want to solve in the future.”
Draco blinked once. Then he gave Harry a twisted expression that could have qualified as a sneer or a half-smile. “Cause-and-effect thinking, Potter? Complicated sentences? Whatever will you come up with next?”
“Be glad that I’m as smart as I am, and as settled,” Harry said, brushing past Draco when he headed for the kitchen. He thought they should eat again before they went back into the lab. Yes, Draco wouldn’t want the food when he was hungry for something else, but that didn’t diminish his body’s need for it. “I hate to think what I would have done if they had cast this curse when I was still struggling to throw off my trauma from the war.”
“How did you throw it off?” Draco was following Harry closely enough to grope his arse, although he didn’t touch it.
Harry paused and glanced at him. Draco paused in return, then leaned closer and stared into Harry’s face. Harry had no idea what he intended to see there, what he really saw, or what he wanted to see. “Why does it matter?” Harry asked. “It’s not relevant to the story of what we have to do right now, or the procedures. Let me just say that I can handle this—this—much better than I could otherwise.” He wasn’t going to talk about it in detail if Draco wasn’t going to talk about it.
“Because I want to know.”
He seemed to consider that enough excuse, and offered no other. Harry thought about it as he stepped into the kitchen and summoned the makings of sandwiches. He had enough fresh meat and cheese, courtesy of his frequent shopping trips to Diagon Alley, that he could offer Draco his choice of what he wanted, though Harry knew it didn’t rival the Malfoy kitchen.
Draco once again leaned against the wall and didn’t help him. Harry thought that was less to do with politeness or arrogance than ingrained habit, though. He was used to house-elves serving him, and Harry had taken the place of the house-elves for now. Obviously.
That was what made Harry decide to answer Draco’s question, oddly enough. Draco was seeking to understand him. Well, Harry couldn’t fault that desire, and he thought that Draco would probably trust him more if he did know more about Harry. How many times would he have torn apart from Ron and Hermione if he didn’t know what lay at the bottom of the nagging they gave him or their ridiculous arguments with each other?
“With Hermione’s help, partially,” Harry said. He set out ham, chicken, and beef on a tray and followed it with thin slices of cheddar and Swiss cheese. “She was the one who figured out that I was hurting after the war after all, and persuaded me not to ignore it.”
Draco was so silent that Harry turned around, wondering if he had run into a Malfoy prejudice he hadn’t known about. Draco was staring at him, but there was wonder, not contempt, in his glance.
“It was a war,” he said. “Of course you would have trauma after it.”
“Ah, but I wasn’t in Hogwarts,” Harry said softly. “I didn’t suffer the torture that you did, or that most of the other students did. I was running and doing something that I knew was worthwhile, as long as it took sometimes.” He wanted to shake his head when he thought of the months they had wasted during the search for the Horcruxes. They would know how to conduct a search so much better now, when they weren’t stupid kids. “And then I only had people who were really close to me die during the Battle of Hogwarts. Well, before that, but that was before the war properly began,” he added. He wasn’t going to talk to Draco about losing Sirius and Dumbledore. He thought Draco would probably prefer it if they left his memories of Dumbledore alone, for that matter. “So I thought that nothing had happened to affect me because it wasn’t as bad as what some other people had gone through.”
Draco did sneer this time. “Of course. Gryffindor nobility at its finest.”
Harry shrugged. “Speaking with Andromeda Tonks helped a lot. She’d lost her husband and daughter, and her grandson is my godson. We bonded over that.” He paused again, because now Draco looked as if he were on the point of passing out with astonishment. “What?”
“Andromeda Tonks is my mother’s sister,” Draco said. “My aunt.”
Harry rolled his eyes. “And she’s unprejudiced enough to accept me. That’s what you can do when you think that Muggleborns are people, too.”
Draco bared his teeth at him, but Harry thought it didn’t have much to do with what Harry had just said. Draco was thinking. “I didn’t—know that you were in contact with that part of the family,” he said.
“Do you even consider them part of the family?” Harry asked, truly curious. Andromeda had never talked about the Malfoys, so all Harry had to go on with respect to their attitude towards each other was the burned spot on the Black family tapestry. “I don’t think your mother has tried to make contact again.”
Draco thrust his nose up. “Mother can’t simply acknowledge someone that her family chose to disown. There are complexities here, Potter, that you can’t begin to understand, and it would do you good if you didn’t talk about them.”
“Sure,” Harry said. He had known it was a bad idea to tell Draco too much about himself, he thought. He slapped together his own sandwich, of ham and cheddar, and then stepped away and left the rest of the buffet to Draco. “I’ll be down in the lab the minute I finish this. Come along when you’ve eaten.”
Draco glared at him, probably because he had chosen to cut the conversation short rather than listen to anything else. Harry ignored him and ate the sandwich in a few large, chomping bites, almost glorying in the messiness of crumbs flying everywhere, which couldn’t be much like the refined manners around a pure-blood table. It was also a finger to the Dursleys, in a way. Petunia had always acted as if the world would end if someone left fingerprints on a cup or rings from the cup on a table.
When he was done, the stairs to his lab waited to receive him. Harry went down them without bothering to look in Draco’s direction.
*
Draco had fucked up, and he knew it, but it seemed as though there were so many tripwires between him and Potter that he would inevitably end up falling over one of them. This was one of the milder ones, or at least he thought so. Potter’s reaction was not as encouraging.
Draco thought about the subject of their conversation as he ate ashy bread and meat that had no taste, and eventually came to the conclusion that he hadn’t necessarily needed to snap about Andromeda being his aunt. Potter already knew that. They could have skimmed past it and talked about something else.
But Potter had acted as though his going over to her house for tea was normal, and Draco had had to interrupt because—
He leaned back in his chair and stared at the steps Potter had gone down a few minutes before. He could feel him down there when he concentrated, or even when he didn’t, the curse pointed towards Potter like a compass towards the north. And the desire was there, so much thicker and more satisfying in its way than the food Draco held, like the promise of a feast rather than a mere tiny meal.
He had had to interrupt because the image of Potter associating with a former Black, let alone the grandson of that woman, who was a sort of cousin to Draco himself, didn’t fit with his picture of Potter.
And he needed to know as much about Potter as possible.
Draco licked a crumb of bread from his fingers since no one was around to see, and considered that reaction in turn. Did it come from the curse? Of course, the more he knew about Potter, the more easily he could seduce him. And Draco reckoned his mind could also be hungry.
But this was fairly useless knowledge to have. And all his reaction to it had done was to scare Potter off, so that he would be harder to seduce than before.
Yet for all that, Draco felt like hoarding the knowledge, crouching over it and chuckling. It was something that other people knew about Potter, of course it was, but it was new to him. He could hold it and turn it back and forth like a glinting coin, spend the money as he chose and watch out eagerly for what return it would bring to him. His body ached with the eagerness to hint to someone else that he knew this now, and then refuse to tell when they begged him. He could have gone to the papers, but it would be only to drop those hints. He knew he wouldn’t sell what Potter had told him, no matter how minor it was, no matter how much money was offered him in return.
It made no sense, which meant it had to come from the curse. Draco thought he knew what knowledge was worth, and it wasn’t worth—well, this.
He ate his food and went down the stairs. He had been apart from Potter too long, and his cock was starting to swell and point. Draco deliberately didn’t touch it, although it made walking more difficult than normal. He was thinking about the reactions of his mind right now, and not his body. He was going to do that as long as he could, and see if it would help in keeping the curse at bay.
“Malfoy.”
Draco halted and blinked in the door of the lab, struck as by a blow. “Why aren’t you calling me by my first name?” he asked, before he could stop himself.
Potter started up from a bench of vials that he was assembling and gave him a strange look. “I assumed that you would prefer a bit more distance from me,” he answered, “after that row we had, and after—well, the curse pushes you closer to me than normal. Calling you by your first name isn’t right, is it?”
Draco shook his head. He knew that his reluctance to hear his last name from Potter’s lips had a mixture of motives, but he didn’t care. He wanted that intimacy again. “Call me Draco. We didn’t have a row. And I need—I need some gesture of acknowledgment from you.” He flushed as Potter continued to investigate him, but what he had spoken was no more than the truth. He did need that from Potter, and he didn’t see why he should have to justify it endlessly.
“All right,” Potter said, without much breath behind the words, and then nodded Draco towards the circle in the center of the lab again.
Draco went, with the curse pulling at his muscles and controlling every step like the jerk of strings. He wanted to go to Potter and put his hands on his shoulders. He could picture himself apologizing for what had happened in the meadow where his torturers had abused him. He would bite the back of Potter’s neck, lightly, just enough that Potter could feel his teeth and tell Draco if he liked it or didn’t like it. After what had happened that afternoon, Draco knew that Potter’s liking was important to him. He could stroke Potter’s jaw from that angle, and whisper more sweet words, and Potter would lean back until he rested against Draco’s chest and say—
“Get off me.”
Draco blinked and stepped back. He didn’t remember crossing the lab to Potter, but he had done so, because Potter had his wand aimed at him. His eyes were hard and steady, sorrow mixed in them with impatience.
“I know it’s hard,” Potter said, and Draco bit his lip against the impulse to turn that into a pun. “But you have to control it if you can. Get into the circle.”
“I want you,” Draco said. His voice scraped along his throat and made him wince. He was hard put to it not to simply reach out and draw Harry towards him. Some treacherous impulse that made his legs quiver with longing said that Harry would be his if Draco could only show him how wonderful it felt when their bodies were fully pressed against each other.
“I know that,” Harry said. His voice was weary. He looked at Draco with compassion and horror and pity, and Draco hadn’t known that mixture of impulses could exist anywhere. “But you have to control yourself, as hard as it is. When you can’t do that, then we’ll know that the curse has advanced another stage, I think.”
“The curse doesn’t have stages in the sense that you’re thinking of,” Draco murmured. His hands twitched like spiders crawling up a web. “Please, Harry.” The hunger swirled around him like the ocean. He was caught up in the current and could only obey it.
Harry went still for a moment. Then he whispered, in a tone that Draco thrilled to because it showed that Harry was considering their intimacy more closely, “When did you start calling me by my first name?”
“When I realized that I wanted to,” Draco said. The wall was falling! He only had to wait a few more moments, and the curse itself would grant him the patience for that, because of the reward that waited at the end of it. “Harry. Your name feels so good on my tongue.” He paused, but Harry didn’t take his cue and move forwards, so he added, “Your cock would feel better.”
Harry sighed. Even that sound was beautiful, and made Draco envy the air in his lungs. “Draco. Listen to yourself, please. You were calling me Potter an hour ago. This isn’t you. This is the curse’s version of you. Remember that you have a distance to preserve, a dignity to keep up. Remember that, and pull yourself back together.”
“I want you,” Draco said. Somehow this wasn’t working out the way he had envisioned it doing. He could feel his heart swelling in anxiety. He had to make something happen. Why didn’t Harry, who he knew was smart because he had done all this research, take some of the burden off Draco by moving in? “I don’t want to think about the time when I didn’t want you.”
“You have to,” Harry said. “Think about your parents, Malfoy Manor, and the legacy that you fought so hard to preserve. Is this the way that you want to remember it? Do you really want to sleep with someone whom your parents wouldn’t approve of? No. You want to marry a pure-blood witch who can give you a son. You want to hold your blood safe and apart from all Mudbloods.” Harry’s mouth twisted, and Draco made a soft sound. The word pained Harry, and therefore he didn’t want Harry to speak it. “You want to be as cold and calm as a statue of marble. That’s the way you are. I know you.”
“You could know me better,” Draco said. His voice was warm and soft, and he didn’t know what he was saying. A haze seemed to have settled over his mind with Harry’s words, a haze that made sense in one way but also filled his thoughts with flickers of marble walls and bronze, gold and rich tapestries. “Come here and let me touch you.”
“You’re Draco Malfoy,” Harry said. “If you won’t remember who you are, I will. Your enemies wanted to take away who you are by hitting you with this curse. I won’t let them.”
“If I said that I was happy to give up who I am, for you?” Draco asked. He moved a step nearer. He thought, with his instincts finely tuned by the curse, that Harry wasn’t in the mood to prevent him right now. “Would you still say that I didn’t have any right to do that? I fling away this legacy with both hands.” He mimed doing that, so that Harry would see he was serious, although it made an obscure pain flare deep in his heart. “I’ll give up everything, if you’ll come to me.”
“This isn’t you,” Harry said, and then paused and seemed to think about something. Draco didn’t understand that, when Harry could be thinking about his cock instead, and edged to the side, looking for a way to make him pay attention. His defenses might be weak on the left side, Draco thought. The left had never been Harry’s dominant hand.
Harry pointed his wand at Draco. Draco smiled and dropped his hands to his sides, making no effort to defend himself. He wanted to show Harry that he accepted everything Harry could give him, that he trusted Harry.
“Memoria sanguinis,” Harry murmured.
The spell snapped straight into Draco and set his blood fizzing like champagne. He raised a hand and touched his face, expecting to feel that there was a blush on his cheeks. All that blood had to go somewhere, didn’t it?
Then the blood seemed to reach his brain, and suddenly the ghostly images he had been seeing resolved themselves into reality.
He could see the extensive grounds of the Manor. How green they were in the summer, pocked only with spots of white where the albino peacocks strutted and spread their nervous tails. How many hours Draco had spent chasing those peacocks when he was younger, and how his mother had sometimes feared that he would pull out all their feathers before they could grow enough to look beautiful!
There was his private library, which Lucius had given to him the minute he was old enough to show a real interest in books, at eight. Draco had come into the room with his head tilted back and his teeth fiercely locked on his lip so that his mouth couldn’t drop open. He wouldn’t show his astonishment and his gratification, because that would imply that he hadn’t expected this, and Father said that Malfoys should always expect the best. But the shelves that arched up to the ceiling, the leather-bound books that filled them, and the smell of dust, which Draco was already coming to associate with knowledge!
His mother, with her hair carefully piled on the back of her head and a necklace of round sapphires at her throat. His father, with his careful motions and his fierce, proud glare, like a hawk unhooded. All those things were part of his heritage, and Harry was right. His parents would be ashamed of himself for not being in control. Not even the curse should affect him this much.
It was easier to step away from Potter then and walk to the circle. Harry—Potter—sighed and cast the wards that would close the circle around him.
“How did you know that that would work?” Draco had to ask over his shoulder. He was keeping his back to Potter for the moment, so that he couldn’t look him in the face and be tempted to touch him again.
“I didn’t,” Potter said. “It just seemed like it ought to. I wonder if people have created solutions to handle the more dramatic effects of Nova Cupiditas in the past, but they’re so individual that no one’s bothered to record them. That spell probably wouldn’t have worked on someone who wasn’t pure-blood, or someone who valued his family less than you do.”
Draco grunted. He wanted to hide his head in shame, but on the other hand, he really couldn’t help himself. So he settled for standing still instead while Potter cast some more spells and made some more measurements and murmured to himself.
He thought about Malfoy Manor and the way that his mother had refused to meet Potter at all, an expression of pride that she would certainly expect him to imitate.
He wondered, even as he thought it, whether preserving the pride of his heritage was really worth giving up the feel of Potter’s skin.
Even once he realized that thought came from the curse, it wasn’t any easier to ignore it.
*
Harry sighed out. Finally, he was getting somewhere. He had watched the complex effects the curse had on Draco—or maybe it was best to say that he had reasoned them out afterwards, because it was hard to think about them while he under attack—and he had started to think that they were too complex for just one spell. What if Nova Cupiditas was two or more, joined together?
Of course, that didn’t give him an automatic answer, because he didn’t know if it was made of two or three or more yet, and that meant he didn’t know how many spells he would need to cast to see them.
But at least he could test and get a general outline, to confirm his hypothesis. There were other spells, many of them affecting the mind, like Memory Charms, that were made of multiple effects entwined, and he cast the spell that had allowed him to see them in the past. A cloud of gleaming powder, visible only to Harry, blew towards Draco and stuck there like dust hurled at a sticky wall.
And yes. There it was. Harry scrambled for his notebook and scribbled down the picture of the sight, as long as he could see it; Nova Cupiditas was strong enough to have begun dissolving the dust almost as soon as it hit.
It resembled an ugly crown in the middle, expanding to jagged puzzle pieces perched on Draco’s shoulders. Tendril after tendril linked the crown to Draco’s brain. Harry couldn’t count them all before the vision began to dissolve, but at least he knew they were different from the puzzle pieces. Two different pieces, then.
And it confirmed that the curse worked from the brain outwards, rather than affecting the body itself, something Harry hadn’t been sure about before.
He opened his mouth to tell Draco that, and then abruptly someone else was in the lab. Harry spun around, wand defensively raised.
It was Ron. Harry relaxed with a little sigh. Ron and Hermione were the only ones who had the key to the wards on his house.
“What is it?” he asked, when he realized Ron’s face was pale and the freckles standing out on his skin.
“I came to protect you,” Ron said, darting a look at Draco. “Hermione told me, and, mate—it’s great and noble and all, but I really don’t think you can do it.”
Harry drew himself up to his height, which he still resented wasn’t more impressive, and lifted his chin. “Would you say the same thing if one of your family was under the curse?”
Ron flushed, but said, “I just think it’s more dangerous for you.” Draco had turned around by this time and was watching them without expression. “I think we should set up a guard to make sure that he doesn’t attack you.” He came closer and reached out to put a hand on Harry’s shoulder. “I trust you. You might be able to solve this. But you need to keep safe to do that, yeah?”
Harry started to answer, but then the lab filled with the sound of shattering wards.
*
When he saw Weasley touching Potter, the jealousy in Draco’s chest, already gathering cold and strong and dark from the moment of Weasley’s intrusion into the lab, went insane.
no subject
Date: 2010-10-04 04:27 pm (UTC)