Chapter Twenty-Five of 'Nova Cupiditas'- Five Times Over

[lomonaaeren]

Chapter Twenty-Four.

Title: Nova Cupiditas (25/30)
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 Twenty-Five—Five Times Over

“You don’t know if this is going to work.”

“I don’t know if anything is going to work.” Harry spoke quietly, his eyes on his hands, as if the way they picked up his spoon and the spoon dipped into the porridge was endlessly fascinating. “But yes, you could say that I’m especially uncertain about this one.” He swallowed, and Draco could clearly hear the click of his throat in the silent kitchen.

“Only try it if you want to.” Draco tried to keep the accusation out of his voice. He wasn’t sure he succeeded. From the way Harry hunched his shoulders, he probably didn’t.

Draco attempted to turn back to his own breakfast, but it was difficult. Harry had tried once, yesterday, to cut the knot that he described as winding about Draco’s throat and containing both lust and jealousy. Draco had felt a twanging string separate in his brain, but Harry had shaken his head, and Draco’s yearning to launch himself at Harry and drown him with desire hadn’t lessened at all. Worse, Harry had refused to keep trying, and he had also refused to let Draco comfort him the way Draco had assumed would automatically happen if he gave up. He had turned his back and slouched morosely into his books.

Draco was growing impatient for something to happen. It could be Harry defeating the curse or admitting that was impossible and deciding to live with the uncertainty the way Draco had, but either way, it needed to happen, and soon.

“Why are you uncertain about this one?” Draco asked, for the lack of anything else to do.

Harry cleared his throat with what sounded like a startled noise, as though he wondered why Draco was asking the question. But he said, “Because it depends on me being very quick, very precise. I have to make sure that I cut the knot at two points at once. I think I can do it, but I want to practice first.”

That sounded reasonable, but Draco wasn’t in the mood to be reasonable. “You didn’t manage that last time,” he said. “What makes you think that you will this time?”

Harry pushed his chair back from the table with a scraping noise and carried his bowl to the sink to wash up. Draco watched him, leaning back in his chair, arms folded over his chest, staring at Harry’s back and quietly willing him to turn around. Harry refused.

Just as he refused to touch Draco the way he wanted. Just as he refused to admit reality, which was that none of them could ever know exactly what they were feeling and they had to live with that.

Draco ground his teeth as his impatience flared through him. It didn’t felt like the lust or jealousy did, nowhere near as uncontrollable, but it was powerful and burning. He reached for his glass of pumpkin juice and drank from it, swallowing with more emphasis than necessary. It would be nice if Harry heard him and turned around.

But because Draco wanted it to, of course it didn’t happen. Harry just went on scrubbing dishes, as though it was the most important thing in the world.

A footfall sounded behind Draco before he could make up his mind to confront Harry. He turned around, and saw Granger standing there, peering doubtfully into the kitchen as though she wasn’t sure she could come in. That hesitancy satisfied Draco enough to nod a gracious permission back.

Granger rolled her eyes, possibly because she knew the nod had been a gesture of permission, and then walked in. “Harry,” she said. “I found something on a curse that resembles Nova Cupiditas in one of the books you let me take from the Black library. I think it’s worth your taking a look at.” She glanced at Draco from the corner of her eye and sniffed once. “You too, I suppose, Malfoy.”

Draco snorted at her in return, but stood up, because Harry was already turning eagerly towards her. Anything that kept him from having to deal with Draco, Draco thought, and make an actual decision. God forbid that he should have to do that.

He faced Granger, and the jealousy surged up in him and tried to strangle him with the longing to strangle her. His muscles bulged, and he had to swallow and look away. From the expression in her eyes before he turned his face away, she had seen what he was struggling with and thought it ridiculous.

But Draco hadn’t asked for her opinion. He looked at Harry, but Harry had his back to him.

“I’ll be grateful for any help at this point,” he was telling Granger as they began to move down the corridor. Draco had thought for a moment that Granger had the book at her house and that was where they were going, but she probably didn’t want him in her home, and he didn’t blame her. He walked with his eyes on the floor and tried to calm the emotions that flickered back and forth in him.

“It’s baffling,” Harry went on, and his voice was thick and twisted with what sounded like self-hatred. Draco wouldn’t be surprised if it was. Harry loathed himself for the simplest and silliest of reasons, sometimes. “I’ve never seen anything like it. I thought it was halved, and now it seems as though it’s growing back. I thought I could cut it, and it had no effect at all.”

And it counted as your first try, Draco thought, but he had the sense to keep his tongue behind his teeth for right now. He wanted to listen to Harry’s conversation with Granger. It was always possible that he would learn something he didn’t know right now about Harry, and that would give him a clue on how to make Harry do something. Behave well enough, and they might forget about him altogether.

Well, at least Harry might, Draco amended, as Granger glanced back at him and then pointedly ignored him, in the way that said she was still keeping watch on him from the corner of her eye. But he would take Harry doing so over too much attention at this point.

“I’m not surprised that you’ve never seen anything like it before,” Granger said, her voice calm. “After all, Nova Cupiditas almost has to be a unique combination of circumstances and magic, or someone would have figured out a way to cure it long before this. But the spell I found could give you a good idea of its similarities to others, and its weak points. Perhaps,” she added, with more honesty than tact.

Harry just grimaced and shook his head, and Draco had to clench his teeth against a flare of mingled jealousy and lust that made his limbs shake. Why was Harry paying attention to someone else if he was that hopeless? He should be working night and day. And he should be letting Draco kiss him, touch him, fuck him as much as Draco wanted, at least if Harry believed that there really was no solution.

“Well, anyway,” Granger said, and she was looking back and forth between them with a wise expression on her face that Draco didn’t like at all, “you can take a look at the book and see what you think.”

She led them into the library, a room where Draco had barely spent any time; for one thing, it seemed to be Granger’s territory, and for another, Harry apparently kept most of the books and notes he needed immediate access to in his lab. Granger bent down to the book that lay open on a chair and leafed through it. Draco couldn’t help snorting, loudly. The least she could have done was leave it open to the page they needed, so that they could reach it the moment they wanted it.

Granger glanced at him, undoubtedly hearing his silent scorn, but chose not to make an issue of it, instead finally finding the page she wanted and holding the tome up to Harry. Her hands shook with supporting its weight; the leather binding it was so old that it looked like bark, and it was stuffed with several thousand pages. “In here.”

Harry began to read. Draco moved to the side so that he could keep an eye on the page but even more of an eye on Harry’s and Granger’s hands, to make sure that they never brushed.

He hated that he had to react that way, but he did, and he was growing more and more desperate for an ending to it in one way or another. Perhaps that advice about seeking someone else out to do the research was more kindly meant than Draco had thought.

*

Harry could feel Draco’s smoldering presence beside him, and he winced each time he thought about it. He wanted to help Draco, of course he did. But he didn’t see how he could when Draco kept urging him on so fast that Harry knew he would make mistakes. Technically, one of his tries was already past.

Making decisions like the ones he wanted me to make is a bitch, sometimes, Harry decided, and went back to reading the passage that Hermione had pointed out to him.

It was about a spell called the Soul-Binding Curse, which tied together two people who didn’t love each other and let them see the utmost depths of each other’s souls. They would inevitably learn the secrets their “partner” in the magic hadn’t revealed even to close friends; they would gain the power to destroy someone else with a word. Harry shuddered. Nova Cupiditas was worse, but he could see why Hermione had thought this was similar.

He had reached the end of the passage before he saw the area that Hermione had marked with heavy underlining.

There is no more feared feature of the Soul-Binding Curse than the way that it feeds on itself. The hurt, anger, and fear caused by its effects echo back and forth from partner to partner in the spell, gaining depth and resonance as they travel. By the time one cycle reaches its end and the spell relaxes its hold for a brief time, both partners have grown considerably more stressed than before—which of course increases the effects of the stress and prepares the next cycle for still greater ruthlessness.

Harry read it twice to be sure that he wasn’t missing anything, and then glanced up at Hermione with a frown. She watched him with breathless lips, her hands clasped in front of her as if she was going to wring a rope apart.

“I don’t understand,” Harry said. “This can’t be the similarity that you mentioned, because the curse wasn’t cast on me.”

“I think this is something about Nova Cupiditas that no one has discovered before,” Hermione said, and pushed past him to pick up another book that she’d left lying on a chair. “I’ve been reading about the historical cases. In most situations, the person the victim was cursed to desire hated them back, resisted them, hurt them, and abandoned them—when they didn’t kill them.”

“I know that,” Harry said. He’d learned it in his own research.

“And the victims’ efforts to subdue and rape them became more desperate in consequence,” Hermione said. She spoke the word “rape” without a flinch, though with a sideways nervous glance at Draco that Harry thought she couldn’t control. “On the other hand, in the cases where the object of their desire sympathized with the victims and helped them, the way you did, the victims were more hopeful and had better control. That didn’t entirely matter in the end, of course.”

Harry blinked. “You’re saying that the emotions I feel influence the way Draco feels?”

Hermione bobbed her head. “It’s the only reason for its growing back that makes sense, I think. If you had gone on disliking Malfoy and also helping him, then the lust and jealousy would have withered because they couldn’t sense a corresponding desire in you. But you do like him. And you’re upset that you can’t cure him. So the lust and jealousy are growing again. The curse is limited in the emotions that it can express, since you did damage it. But I think the false love—which isn’t a normal part of most cases that I’ve read about—happened in the first part because you started liking Malfoy as a person as well as desiring him.”

Harry flinched. “So this is my fault,” he said.

“Of course that’s it,” Draco said. His voice was low and vicious, and Harry turned towards him with a start. Draco was staring at him as if he would like to tear Harry’s throat out; his hands opened and closed restlessly, and Harry had never been gladder that he’d taken Draco’s wand away. “Of course you would make this all about you, instead of, for once, thinking about what I need.”

“I’m thinking about what you need,” Harry said, turning so that he could put his body between Hermione and danger. He could see Draco attacking her just to get to him, and he didn’t want that to happen. “Of course I am. I wouldn’t be investigating the spell if I wasn’t.”

Draco sneered at him. “You’re hopeless. You don’t think the cure will work. But you don’t want to give up, either. You just want to shake your head and go on working in gloom. In the meantime, you want me. I know you do. Granger gave me the final clue, but I knew it before then, in the back of my mind. My lust is reacting to your desire. This wouldn’t be a problem if you didn’t want me—”

Harry bowed his head. “I know. That’s what I meant when I said it was my fault—”

“Will you listen for once?” Draco chopped one hand down sharply. “I don’t mind that you want me. I mind that you won’t act on it. You still sit there and dither back and forth and say that you can’t be sure my feelings are real.”

“You can’t, either,” Harry said. “And now that we know more about this, how can we be sure that you ever felt any lust for me at all, rather than just a reflection of the curse or my own desires?”

“Then cure me,” Draco said, sounding as though he was speaking through choking exasperation. “And we can see.”

“I don’t know how yet!” Harry yelled. “And I’m afraid that I might hurt you again if I try to go too fast!”

“That’s a risk that I’m willing to take.” Draco prowled closer, his body tensed. Harry realized that he, himself, was flushed with something more than shame and anger, and had to fight not to close his eyes in humiliation. How he hated this. “You utter idiot. Of course I don’t want to suffer again, but this is causing me more suffering than the pain of the broken curse did!”

Harry winced. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what to say,” he said, which was utterly true. He would have liked the discovery about the curse better if he didn’t think it made him responsible for Draco’s emotions, he thought.

“I want you to stop apologizing,” Draco said. “I want you to take whatever information Granger can offer you, and work to cure me, and then we’ll see what happens next. Or you can fuck me now.” His eyes shone. He didn’t quite smile, but Harry could see the temptation to do so tugging at the corners of his mouth.

“I can’t do that,” Harry said, despite the way that his body jumped at the thought.

Draco laughed breathlessly, and if he sounded choked again, Harry knew it wasn’t with exasperation. “Of course not. Even though you want to so much I can taste it.”

“Those are—wrong desires,” Harry said. “Deviant.” He was almost babbling at that point. He was trying to fight his arousal, stop feeling ashamed of it, and stay calm all at once. He didn’t want to feel things that would trigger lust or jealousy in Draco.

Draco turned away with a snort and stalked out of the room. Harry wanted to stand there looking after him, but he knew it would only waste time. At least one part of Draco’s rant had struck home. It was time to end the stalemate between them in one way or another.

“Well?” he asked Hermione. “I presume that the Soul-Binding Curse has a cure, and that you think I can adapt that to cure Draco?”

Hermione’s eyes fluttered with what looked like discomfort. She had to clear her throat a time or two herself before she could continue. “Yes. Um. The cure is for both partners to reach a state of absolute calm—there are various ways to do that—so that the resonance of emotions between them lapses into stillness. Then the person the curse was originally cast on has to renounce the bond between them.”

Harry clenched his hands. “That would mean that Draco would have to renounce it.”

“Maybe not,” Hermione said, although her eyes were pained. “We could come up with a variation of the spell that would mean you could.”

Harry nodded at once. He knew it was the only way. If he did really want Draco, then he had to be able to give him his freedom. That would show that he meant it, and that he wasn’t so flattered by the thought of someone being dependent on him that he couldn’t give it up.

Besides, even if Draco managed to renounce him, Harry would never know if he had done it because his will was strong or because the link that the curse had forged between them meant Draco could feel Harry’s desire for it to be done.

And what he was most tired of was the uncertainty.

“Let’s do it,” he said, and bent over the book. Hermione, beaming, bent beside him.

*

“I’m ready, Draco.”

Draco turned around. He had expected the announcement; he hadn’t felt any alternations of lust and jealousy in the last few hours, which he thought now meant that Harry was calm and wasn’t feeling such churning emotions that Draco had no choice but to react to him.

He had spent the time sitting with his eyes closed, sorting through his feelings and trying to understand them. He felt impatience and disgust towards Harry right along with the lust and longing, yes, and the deeper, stronger feelings that Harry might hesitate to call love. But what made those emotions more legitimate than any other? One could argue that he felt all of those emotions in response to what Harry was feeling at the time, so the Draco he had been, the one who loathed Harry, only existed as a reflection of Harry’s expectations right now.

The Seekers of Justice had violated his integrity even more deeply than he realized.

It took his breath away with fear and fury, and he had gone on feeling that way until he realized that there was no way around it. If he was right about how deep the curse had gone and what it had done to him—and the spell he had cast on himself that showed the influence on his brain suggested he was—then he would have to live with the damage.

He could ignore it, he could despise it, he could decide that he was going to live as his own person the way he had when he came back to Harry, but he couldn’t change it.

There are some things there’s no recovery from.

He was thinking of what Lucius would say to that, and whether he would agree—Draco doubted it, since his father never wanted to think that there was something in the world that he couldn’t control—when Harry entered the kitchen and made his announcement. Draco turned around with a bland expression on his face. He didn’t know if he was welcoming, but then, he hadn’t particularly tried to be.

Granger hovered near the doorframe while Harry leaned forwards and stared into Draco’s eyes. Draco looked back, reflecting idly that he had never noticed before this how deep a green Harry’s eyes were.

“We have to become calm,” Harry whispered. “There’s a spell I can cast that will get us to that state. Do you trust me to cast it?”

“What a stupid question,” Draco whispered back, his tone not stinging because of the languid dreaminess that had overtaken him. “Would I be standing here and letting you cast spells on me if I didn’t trust you?”

“Perhaps I’m not the person best-suited to answer that,” Harry said, with a small grimace and shake of his head. Draco tensed as his eyes focused on Harry’s lips and the lust dried his mouth out. Harry seemed to realize his mistake and raised his wand. “Lente.”

Draco took a deep breath as the spell reached into his brain and flooded his thoughts with shining tendrils of tranquility. When he closed his eyes, he could see the flickers of purple and green dancing on the back of his eyelids. He had had this spell cast on him when he was younger, and it always produced that same effect. It was quicker and more effective than a Calming Draught, which only touched the body. This reached into the mind.

Harry reached out and put a hand on his shoulder. Draco heard a second whisper of the spell, presumably repeated on himself.

“It makes sense now,” Harry whispered then. “Maybe it won’t be the ultimate cure, since I know Nova Cupiditas is different from the Soul-Binding Curse. But it makes sense. Everything I’ve done since I first learned you were a victim of the Seekers of Justice has bound us closer together. I needed to do research, and I needed you in the house while I did it. I stayed calm when you kissed me, and while that kept you docile at first, it also meant that you decided I liked it and gave you hope—and that got me addicted. You became more insistent when I got more agitated, like when I was trying to get you to stop killing and torture. You calmed down when I calmed down. I’ve made excuses to see you since then. I didn’t need to speak with you face-to-face when I wanted to tell you about the promise that I made to Kingsley in return for your immunity from prosecution.”

“I appreciated that you did,” Draco said, because he didn’t want Harry thinking that he could simply dispense with that. He opened one eye and glared as hard as he could, so that Harry wouldn’t get the wrong idea.

Harry blinked at him and looked thoughtful for a moment. Then he nodded. The slow beat of his heart was in Draco’s ears. He reached out and laid his hand on Harry’s chest to feel it better. For some reason, it didn’t change. For some reason, that disappointed Draco.

“I once thought the cure would be for me to fall in love with you,” Harry whispered. “Answering your false love with my true one. Isn’t that mad? It wouldn’t have made the love that the curse had given you any less false.” His voice turned sad. “As it is, I think I should have realized this particular truth a long time ago.”

“Harry.” Granger’s voice was anxious, and distant.

Draco didn’t have to listen to her if he didn’t want to, and he chose not to. He focused on Harry’s voice instead, and the slow beat of that heart beneath his hand, and the way that Harry took several deep breaths before he said, “I wanted you near. I can admit that now. I thought I wouldn’t be attracted to you, but I was, and I liked the way you depended on me. And I wanted to maintain that connection during the natural time for you to walk away from me.”

Draco shook his head. He knew that was wrong, but not why. His tongue and his common sense were all tangled up.

Harry leaned forwards. Draco forced his eyes open and found that Harry’s face was hovering a scant inch away from his.

“I can let you go,” Harry whispered.

“Stronger!” Granger urged from somewhere far away.

“I can renounce you,” Harry continued.

“Stronger!”

“I don’t know if I love you, but it’s bloody close to that.”

“Stronger!”

Harry’s hand rose through thick water, in slow motion. Draco watched it in wonder and dread, or at least the muted version of those emotions that was all he could feel when he was caught somewhere behind that screen the calming spell provided.

“I do renounce you,” Harry whispered. “Be free.”

A whirlwind took Draco.