lomonaaeren | Chapter Five of 'A Potion Named Desire'- Variations on a Theme of Desire

Thanks again for all the reviews!

Chapter Five—Variations on a Theme of Desire

“You’re sure you know what you’re doing?”

Harry gave Hermione a wry smile and pushed the pillows up so she could lay her head on them more comfortably. “When have I ever?”

Her hand caught and squeezed his wrist hard enough to give him pause and make him meet her eyes. Hermione’s face was pale and her gaze so shadowed that Harry had the uncontrollable thought she looked like one of the dead he’d summoned back with the Resurrection Stone, but the strength behind the surface blazed through. “This is a dangerous potion, Harry,” she said lowly. “It could change the wizarding world as we know it.”

Harry checked his retort, which centered on the impossibility of his doing any such thing from his little London flat. For one thing, Hermione was still too weak for his anger. For another, he had changed the world by idle speculation before, even if that had been in Hogwarts’ library or a tent in the middle of a frozen forest. “I know,” he said. “But I don’t think we’ll have free rein the way Malfoy thinks we will. The Ministry is bound to get involved, and they can put a stop to this more effectively than I could. They’ll know the laws, the controls—“

“Or you could just convince him to make the potion less dangerous,” Hermione suggested. “Make it necessary to develop a specific variant for each client who comes to you, instead of creating one that works generally.”

“Hermione,” Harry said gently, brushing the hair back from her forehead, “do you think I could? Or that I’d be able to tell the truth even if he promised not to do it and then brewed the general potion under my nose?”

“Your magic is necessary for any potion he makes.” Hermione plucked at her sheets and didn’t look at him. “You—Harry, you could simply refuse to cooperate if he doesn’t restrict his brewing.”

Harry didn’t respond, save to fluff her pillows again.

“Harry.”

So it has to come to this, then. Harry leaned forwards and folded his arms, giving her a level glance. All his practice in controlling his temper since the war came in handy now, making his words calm and level, the truth, instead of angry. “I promised to turn over the marketing and the choice of how to make profits to him. I can’t go back on my word. And if I did, he might refuse to brew the potion for you.”

“You care more about me than the whole damn wizarding world,” Hermione whispered.

“Yes, that is in fact the case,” Harry said. He didn’t take his eyes off her.

“So you won’t—you won’t hold him back, just in case that means I might suffer.”

“Got it in one.”

“I wish Ron was here.”

At least that wish enabled Harry to wrap his arms around her and hold her close, nestling her head under his chin. “So do I,” he said, and then held and rocked her whilst she cried, his own face dry and implacable. His control over his temper had given him remarkable strength of will.

Why shouldn’t it have? Harry had learned what happened when he was weak.

*

Draco narrowed his eyes only slightly when he came into the drawing room of Potter’s flat, after having heard Potter’s voice call distractedly through the door, and encountered only Granger sitting on the couch. He laid down the book and the ingredients he’d brought on the table furthest away from her and bowed elaborately. “Granger,” he said. “To what do I owe the honor?”

“I want to convince you not to brew the potion in a form that can affect many people.” Granger folded her arms obstinately. “Harry said I could try, but he wouldn’t try himself, just in case you wouldn’t brew for me.”

Draco smiled slightly. Well. The ethics he had conquered by appealing to Harry’s heroism for the ungrateful masses would receive a more spirited defense from Granger, it seemed. He took a seat on the chair across from her and rested his elbows on his knees. Looking into her face, devastated though it was by loss and set by Gryffindor stubbornness, was easy enough; Granger had nothing on the pathetic addicts who begged at Draco’s door for just one more dose of Dreamless Sleep Potion or one of the numerous pain-killing draughts.

“You still want the potion for yourself, correct?” he asked.

Granger’s eyes glittered, as if she saw the trap Draco was setting for her but was prepared to meet it. “I do.”

“Then how can you deny other people the chance to experience what you will?” Draco spread his hands. “I’ve seen problems you can’t even imagine, Granger. Independent apothecaries often do. The thought that I could cure those problems—well, suffice it to say I’m not so selfish as to keep the cure to myself.”

“But I only plan to take it as a temporary solution, and most of them won’t.” Granger had Gryffindor earnestness in her eyes, which stood less than a zero chance of converting Draco, but he thought her intellectual arguments might be interesting. She gestured as if snatching hope from the air with a curved palm. “What are the solutions to our problems worth, if we don’t struggle for them? We’ll lose half the beauty, and all the joy, of triumph with a potion like this. People who take it won’t have overcome their personal weaknesses. They won’t know themselves better. They’ll just have bought a magical panacea.”

“Not quite a panacea,” Draco said. “Potter tells me that this potion cures only the thing you most loathe about yourself. I imagine some people taking it will be in for a surprise; they’ll think that they’re changing their looks, for example, and then it will turn out that they’ve always loathed their cowardice most, and that’s gone, instead.”

“But still.” Granger drummed a hand on her knee with a force Draco was surprised she could command. “Can you tell me that it won’t affect the outcome of people’s struggles? That it won’t cheapen them?”

Draco arched an eyebrow. “Tell me, Granger, do you think that the widespread joy after the Dark Lord’s defeat was cheapened because Potter was the one who killed him? Should everyone involved have done it themselves, striven to take his place?”

Granger gave a negative little jerk of her head. “That was different. There was a prophecy involved. No one but Harry could have done what he did. It was enough for other people if they did their part in the larger war.”

“A bad comparison, then.” Draco smiled a bit. “My mistake. Do you think Potter’s joy was cheapened because he used the Deathly Hallows, and, in part, my own wand in the victory? Should he have done it with his own, incompatible wand? Should he have really bounced the Killing Curse off his forehead because of his own enormous power and not his mother’s love, as I understand was the case? How far will you go, how much help will you proscribe, before you allow someone else to enjoy one of your truly moral victories?”

“That isn’t the same thing.” Granger’s voice was very soft. “You’re trying to confuse me.”

Bang on, Draco thought cheerfully.

“But it isn’t the same thing. Everyone involved had suffered before Voldemort died.” Draco had to admit he admired the way she spoke, without hesitation, the name he couldn’t bring himself to utter even now. “Harry had suffered most of all—“

Draco snorted.

“He suffered the most for Voldemort’s defeat,” Granger corrected herself, “since it was all on him. I’ll grant you that other people suffered more pain and trauma.” She drew a deep breath. “And if there—if there had been a potion, or a spell, or a simple curse that would have taken care of Voldemort all along—that would have cheapened things enormously. Don’t you understand? Ron and I—“ She shut her eyes and counted her breaths for a long moment, something Draco was willing to allow. “We thought Harry did have some kind of special power of his own, not love but magic. Harry scolded us for thinking that. And he was right. It was for the best that he relied on the simple things and simple help in order to defeat Voldemort. It was right.”

Draco applauded politely. “Very pretty, Granger. However, all of that is based on the view that suffering ennobles someone. It does not. Pain is pain. I’ve seen people become saints under it, but they’re the rare ones. I’ve seen pain twist far more people, and twist the ones taking care of them, as they try helplessly not to resent their relatives or friends and can’t. You’re just lucky that Potter is one of the people who can bear up under it, and even then, I’m sure you’ve cost him some headaches since your Weasley died.”

“Harry’s retreated from a position of judgment,” Granger said, her voice bright with disapproval. “He doesn’t think he has the right to say what good or evil is anymore.”

Draco paused, but decided not to question her on the matter. She probably didn’t realize the value of what she’d just revealed, which Draco was sure had something to do with Potter’s reasons for taking the potion. If he didn’t draw attention to Granger’s words, she might say more.

“Regardless,” Draco continued, “the people who believe that everyone else should fight with and overcome their problems tend not to be the people who have those problems. The ones who say that it’s perfectly possible to lose weight are already skinny. The braggarts who claim that torture wouldn’t break them have never endured torture in their lives.” For a moment, memories tried to intrude. Draco whipped them back into place. “The pretty people chide the ugly ones for caring about looks. I simply want to offer everyone a fair chance to correct their problems, if they want to. The Gryffindors like you can refrain.”

“But you’ll still charge them money.”

“Oh, yes, of course.”

“So much for an equal chance.”

“It’s compensation for the time and effort and ingredients I’ll put into the potion. And my reward for being such a good person,” Draco said modestly.

Granger growled under her breath, but Potter’s voice sounded from the doorway. “I don’t think you’ll convince him, Hermione. And since you need this potion, and I won’t be convinced, and you won’t stop arguing, then it’s best if we just get on with the brewing.” He nodded to Draco.

Draco had already stood and moved to fetch the ingredients and Snape’s book, enlivened by the challenge to his view of things.

*

Harry shut the door of his bedroom behind him and turned around. Malfoy raised an eyebrow at him with a half-smile.

“Making sure Granger doesn’t intrude?” he asked.

“Oh, she wouldn’t,” Harry said, and took a deep breath. He had to calm his nervousness. He had spent a good deal of effort to ensure that he was more balanced than this. “She’s too tired, and she knows better anyway. Just making sure that I don’t torment her with my inferior brewing skills.” He met Malfoy’s eyes, and decided some honesty wouldn’t go amiss. What’s the worst he can do? Laugh at me? Better that than we make a mistake in brewing the potion because he thinks I can do things I can’t. “The way I reckon I’ll torment you.”

He received a calm, blank face in response. Then Malfoy turned and thoughtfully rearranged the dragon scales and the coils of copper he’d brought along before responding.

“You’ll have to get over that, you know,” he said. “Your brewing skills are excellent.”

Harry sighed. “For this potion,” he emphasized carefully. “The variant I’m using now, the only one that exists, the one tuned to me. And they’re only that way because of long practice. I still don’t see how you can expect me to help you with the other variants.”

Malfoy turned to look at him again, arms folded in front of him. “Potter, no one who is hopeless at Potions-making shows that deft touch you showed me last week.” He lifted a hand. “No, hear me out. It’s more than just remembering how many times to stir and when you add the lavender petals. The best brewers are unconsciously competent, uniting an instinct for grace and beauty and speed to mastery of the mechanical things.”

“But I’m not an artist.” Harry knew his face was burning. “You are. That’s why I chose to invite you into this.”

A soft smile crossed Malfoy’s face. Harry stared. He felt he could have met Malfoy in the street wearing that smile and honestly not known the man.

“I know that,” Malfoy said. “But it’s going to be a pleasure working with you because you’re not completely hopeless. By the time we finish this brewing, Potter, you’ll be competent in at least two potions, the Desire potion and your own, and I’ll have managed to impart a good deal of general theory as well. See if I don’t.” He gave a small nod and faced the ingredients again. “Come here.”

His skin tingling with odd sensations, his nerves thrilling, Harry moved up beside Malfoy. The other man’s breath brushed his skin as they leaned close together. Harry was grateful to realize he wasn’t that uncomfortable with the position, and what discomfort remained was because of Malfoy’s one-time status as his enemy. He really did have better control of himself.

But not enough control to risk letting the potion run out, he told himself sternly. He would have to brew more tomorrow, just in case. What happened if he dropped a vial? Or accidentally swept the whole cabinet clean with an awkward motion of his arm, as had happened once? He’d be up all night feverishly brewing, and he didn’t want the tiredness that would result from that when he was taking care of Hermione.

“Now,” Malfoy continued, voice low, “I’ve made my first decisions about substitutions for the ingredients. I noticed that you used a scale from a Hungarian Horntail. Have you ever used anything else?”

Harry frowned. “No, of course not. Hermione said it was better to choose a piece of a magical animal’s body that you had a close connection to, if possible. And since I faced that kind of dragon in the Triwizard Tournament…” He shrugged.

“Ah.” Malfoy sounded pleased. “I thought I’d read the original recipe correctly.”

“Only thought?”

“Prat.” The response was purely automatic; Malfoy’s face was closed, austere, and distant, his eyes hazed. He was seeing Malfoy the artist now, Harry was certain. His hands flicked as sharp and precise as insects’ wings as he reached out to the dragon scale he’d brought. It had an iridescent sheen—Antipodean Opaleye, Harry thought. Definitely not Horntail. “This substitute should come off without harm in the initial experiment. The trick is in finding a magical animal that as many people as possible feel a strong connection to, so we can create a general variant.”

“But,” Harry said quietly, “the potion for Hermione comes first.”

Malfoy cocked his head at him. His mouth quirked in an abstracted smile. “Of course,” he said. “Has she decided on what magical animal she feels the strongest connection to?”

“The phoenix.” Harry shrugged. “She admired Fawkes, Dumbledore’s phoenix.”

“Phoenix feathers are hardly common.”

“I’ll pay for them, Malfoy.” Harry waited for the gray eyes to meet his this time. “Money is no object at all.”

“That’s true, isn’t it?” Malfoy ran a slender, graceful hand through his hair, and then reached out again. It was odd, Harry thought, how just watching the other wizard’s hands increased Harry’s confidence in him. They looked meant for graceful labor instead of hard, as if he were a painter or piano-player. “I do keep forgetting. Well. The Antipodean Opaleye scale goes into the first draught, since that’s what we have here. And then we’ll substitute the copper for the silver—“

“Why?” Harry demanded. “I know that silver represents the moon in alchemy, and that calls a lunar influence to the potion that counteracts the solar influence of the widdershins stirring. I hardly think we can replace it without making the whole thing into worthless sludge.”

*

Draco started. It was one thing to say that Potter was competent in the brewing itself, another to realize that he had memorized, if only by rote, the magical theory that justified the choice of his original ingredients.

A frisson slid along his spine. He had worked alone for so long—even though taking on apprentices would have been a source of income and free help, he had always refused them—that he had expected company to be necessary but tedious. Any enjoyment would come only from watching Potter’s displays of magic. But this—well, it wasn’t Snape, but it was someone he could justify and explain his choices to.

“That’s true,” he said. “But I don’t think the widdershins stirring is actually necessary.”

Potter leaned a hip on the table and frowned at him, arms crossed. “I don’t buy that,” he said. “The whole potion failed for a month before Hermione thought of it. The potion is too—what did she say? It violates Morgana’s Strangeness Constant. Too many Transfigured and melted ingredients. It needed something common and earthly, and imitating the track of the sun in the stirring provides that.”

Draco resisted the temptation to stretch luxuriously. Oh, yes, he could get used to this.

“And this potion won’t violate Morgana’s Strangeness Constant,” he said easily. “The Antipodean Opaleye scale and the copper together will ground the potion.”

“Why?” Potter chewed the inside of his cheek. “What does copper represent in alchemy? I know that Hermione told me once, when we considered using it in one of the original brewings, but I can’t remember—“

“Copper represents Venus—“

“That doesn’t sound any more earthly than the moon!”

“Ah,” Draco said, drawing the sound out, “but Venus is much more of a balance with the earth. The moon is smaller. And it matters, as well, that the Antipodean Opaleye scale comes from a dragon which commonly lives on the other side of the world from Britain.”

“But Hungarian Horntails don’t live in Britain, either.” Potter’s frown was pronounced, and he had started to pick at his teeth with his thumbnail, which Draco considered a highly unattractive habit.

“The symbolism is more important—the greater distance,” Draco said. “You have one ingredient symbolizing a planet that’s closer in size to Earth and one ‘weighing’ down Earth from the other side.” He smirked a little at Potter’s confused expression. “It matters where the potion is being brewed,” he added considerately. “Believe me, Potter, I thought very carefully about this before I decided to change these two particular ingredients.”

“And then you won’t need the widdershins stirring at all?” Potter’s eyes were bright, and at least he had removed his thumb from his mouth. He was leaning forwards to peer at the table as if he could already see the completed potion with the new ingredients shimmering there.

“Exactly.” Draco controlled the impulse to pat him on the head and tell him he was a good boy, but barely. “The widdershins stirring would add a solar influence that’s not needed, now. This potion is going to be nearly all of the Earth. That’s a very good thing, since it’s meant to apply to so many people. The symbolism of the Earth ties us to the planet, and that’s a connection we share with all our potential customers—“

“It’s for Hermione.”

“You really are extraordinarily stubborn about this,” Draco muttered. “Why couldn’t we develop a general variation that will benefit many people, Potter? Among those people would be Granger.”

Potter blinked and scowled. “I suppose that I never thought of that.” The scowl said he thought he should have.

Because he knew of his own failure, Draco refrained from most of the cutting remarks he wanted to make. “You don’t need to worry about someone mistaking you for a master brewer and demanding that you concoct them an impossible potion just yet, Potter,” he said, and turned to the table himself. “Shall we begin?”

*

Harry was tightly-strung at first, expecting at every moment that he would forget some vital spell or get distracted by one of the two substitutes Draco had chosen. But gradually he settled into the rhythm of things, and it hardly required any more effort to blend the Transfigured daisy petals with the copper than it had to blend them with the silver.

It was when he put the Antipodean Opaleye scale in the potion that everything went to hell.

The only warning Harry received was the potion turning a light, misty blue instead of the blue-black it should have been at that precise moment in time, but that was enough. He was on the ground in a moment, casting the Shield Charm he had never dared to cast before, given the silver that had been present in the potion then, and dragging Malfoy flat with him.

The Shield Charm was just barely strong enough. The potion sizzled and painted the walls in burning gouts, starting small fires where it landed. Harry cast Aguamenti steadily from beneath the shield, beyond grateful when he noticed Malfoy doing the same thing. At least he hadn’t decided that it didn’t matter if Harry’s flat burned down.

The cauldron wasn’t empty yet, unfortunately. One burst of potion rose like a firework, rotating through flashes of blue and gold and silver, and barreled straight for Malfoy’s outstretched wand hand.

Harry reacted without thought—though he reckoned later he must have thought it through, or he would simply have knocked Malfoy’s hand away and put his in its place. Instead, he aimed his wand and bellowed, “Phantasma temporale!”

Malfoy’s hand turned thin and gray and sideways to the world, the hand of a ghost, along with his wand. The potion shot straight through without stopping or harming him, and spattered on the floorboards. Harry yanked him out of the way and cast a spell that had originally been meant to contain acid spills, successfully preventing that gout from igniting or eating through the floor.

Then, finally, the cauldron calmed.

Harry turned around with a sigh. Malfoy’s hand had returned to normal already, and so had his wand; the Temporary Ghost Charm had its name for a reason. Harry gave him a small smile. “Sorry about that. Do you think we need to add the copper and the Antipodean Opaleye scale at the same time?”

Malfoy opened his mouth. Malfoy closed his mouth. Malfoy blinked. Harry put it down to his near-death experience, and waited patiently.

*

Draco knew it wasn’t the appropriate or wished-for response, but he felt a surge of excitement anyway. It wasn’t that he particularly liked danger; he just liked the confirmation that Potter was dedicated to saving him from it, and that his magic and quick wits weren’t restricted to one brewing process, whatever he thought.

“Yes,” he said. “That’s exactly the solution I would have suggested. What made you think of it?” He was interested to see if Potter knew all the symbolic answers.

“Well, they didn’t do so well when going into the cauldron one after another,” Potter said dryly, gesturing about at the mess, “and everything was fine until then, so they should probably go in at the same time.”

All right, no symbolic answers. But Draco’s excitement refused to die. If one of them knew the theory, and one of them had a grounding in common sense of the “maybe this will work” variety, that would be enough.

“Shall we try it?” he asked, and extended his hand to be helped up from the ground, the hand Potter had saved from burning or worse.

Potter grasped it and hauled him up with no idea of the significance the gesture had to Draco.

One of us knowing that significance as well is perfectly fine.

Chapter 6.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

lunasky3.livejournal.com

i love how they're both so excited about this :D great chapter!
(question. why do you always make the secrets do easy to guess? ive been right about most all of them from your other fics, and i'm sure i've guessed what the potion does for Harry and what the incident was... just wondering)

From:

Chapter Five of 'A Potion Named Desire'- Variations on a Theme of Desire

Page Summary

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags