lomonaaeren

Chapter One.

Title: Keep This Wolf (2/?)
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairing: Harry/Draco
Warnings: Creaturefic (Harry is a werewolf), violence, some gore, angst
Rating: R
Summary: Draco knows full well that he’s being set up. There is no other reason to pull an Unspeakable out of the Department of Mysteries and assign him to negotiate with a werewolf pack. But when he learns the werewolf leader is Harry Potter, Draco wonders if the setup isn’t a different kind than he anticipated.
Author’s Notes: A fic for enamoril, who asked for a story like my “Business Meetings,” where Draco is the leader of a group of vampires and Harry their Ministry-appointed negotiator, but reversed, with Draco as the negotiator and Harry as the werewolf. This story will be updated every Tuesday until it’s finished. The title comes from the poem “Wilderness” by Carl Sandburg:

THERE is a wolf in me … fangs pointed for tearing gashes … a red tongue for raw meat … and the hot lapping of blood—I keep this wolf because the wilderness gave it to me and the wilderness will not let it go.

Thank you for all the reviews!

Chapter Two—Command the Pack

Draco stepped away from the Apparition point and spent a moment studying the outer edges of the Forbidden Forest. It had been some time since he had been here, and he’d been uncertain whether the Forest’s physical appearance had been changed in any way by the werewolf pack living within it.

It didn’t look like it. The Forest was still looming and dark and full of greenery that both tempted Draco—because he knew how many exotic Potions ingredients could be obtained by someone willing to take a little risk—and made him wary—because of the werewolves, but also because of other things. He made sure that he had one hand on his wand before he moved closer to the Forest, and that his steps were silent.

Invisible Heldeson hadn’t needed to warn him against being seen by any of the villagers of Hogsmeade or the students wandering about. Draco moved swiftly and silently through the shadows of the trees, and in between them.

He did pause, once he was out of mortal sight, to touch a small crystal cube hanging from his belt. It began to glow when he tapped each of the four corners in a certain sequence, and Draco relaxed once he saw how strongly and steadily the light flooded through the crystal.

The Unspeakables had many artifacts in their possession: useless ones, mysterious ones, ones that wizards would give their hearts and souls for (and sometimes had, in the past), and Dark ones. Draco was an expert at taking those last, whenever an Auror raid or another of the Ministry’s activities seized some from their former owners, and extracting the Dark magic to replace it with useful magic of some kind. Most Dark artifacts weren’t actually that useful, no matter what their owners thought, unless one wanted to end up a combination of malformed, mutilated, decaying, dead, and insane.

This particular one would give him light that wouldn’t fail, unlike the Lumos on a wand knocked out of a wizard’s hand, and at the same time, flare when another being in the Forest sensed him and began to move towards him. It had taken Draco a long time to work out how to make the magic respond to the change in someone else’s mind, instead of his own. He was, he thought, justifiably proud of it.

Now he glided down the paths that led towards the heart of the Forest, not looking around as small scurryings accompanied him. Those were all of lesser creatures moving out of his path. The only ones worth paying attention to were the ones that the crystal flared for.

The silence of the Forest, minus those little scurryings and some motion of the leaves in the breeze, closed around him with stunning swiftness once he was a short distance inside. Less than a mile away were wizards living a life as normal as any among their kind in England, but here, one would never know it. Draco breathed in the scent of dirt and darkness and wild things, and found himself smiling.

He wouldn’t have chosen to come here on his own, and he wanted to find out the name of the Ministry official who had thought he would be “perfect” for this job. But he did miss the wind and the light when he was cooped up in the Department of Mysteries.

The darkness moved in front of him, at the same time as the crystal flared. Draco stopped, drawing in a breath of irritation that he didn’t allow himself to release. The crystal’s main weakness was that it wouldn’t alert him in time if someone was near when they sensed him and thought about moving towards him. Draco had been relying too much on the way that it should warn him early. It was his own fault that he’d been caught off-guard with it.

He looked at the woman who was confronting him. She was powerfully built, but neither that nor the streaks of grey in her hair told him that she was a werewolf. It was more in the way she held herself, as if she would run back into the woods rather than out of them. It wasn’t many normal wizards who would feel that the Forbidden Forest was the safe option.

Admittedly, the golden eyes and the snarl she flashed him a second later helped, too.

“Why are you here?” she demanded. “What is a wizard with a wand doing in our Forest?”

“Do the centaurs know that you claim the whole of it?” Draco murmured before he could stop himself, and for the pleasure of seeing her flush with confusion. He held back his smile. He might have already ruined the image of calm and collected diplomat he was trying to project, at least for one member of the pack, but he could avoid showing any more emotion. “I am Unspeakable Malfoy, from the Ministry, come to speak to Harry Potter.”

The woman had been hunched, apparently still on the verge of fleeing, but when he said that, she threw back her shoulders and took a deep breath. “Then you’ll convince him that he shouldn’t let Thornsberry into the pack?” she whispered.

So there are some werewolves who don’t support Potter’s mad notion to recruit Thornsberry? Interesting. Draco didn’t know much about the internal workings of werewolf packs, but he had had the impression that they closely followed their leader. And in the case of the leader being the Great Harry Potter, it seemed even more likely they would cling to his shadow. Internal opposition might make Draco’s task easier.

“I certainly intend to,” he said. No sense lying, when the pack would find out his mission soon enough. “Can you take me to him? And introduce yourself, so I don’t find myself doing you a discourtesy by thinking of you only as a werewolf?”

The woman hesitated, staring suspiciously at him, but bland courtesy was a mask Draco had perfected the year after the war. Still slowly, she nodded, and said, “My name is Sarah Woolwine. And you’re different from what I expected when I heard the Ministry was supposed to send us a representative. I thought it would be someone from the Collarers, not an Unspeakable.”

Draco nearly asked what she meant by “Collarers,” but then decided it was obvious. The Department for the Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures would hold a special place in werewolf minds. “Thank you, Sarah,” he said gravely. “Can you take me to him?”

“I didn’t give you permission to call me by my first name,” she said, and her teeth flashed at him.

“Thank you, Miss Woolwine,” Draco said, without turning a hair. He respected the abilities of werewolves, but he found it hard to take implicit danger all that seriously after the amount of serious, explicit things with teeth or Dark magic he had seen coming at him in his line of work. “Will you take me to him?”

Woolwine spent a few minutes considering him, as though to decide whether his non-apology was sufficiently groveling, and then sniffed and set off. She dodged down narrow paths as though she hoped that would lose him. Draco followed behind her perfectly well, though. Maybe she was quiet in wolf form, but she couldn’t be completely silent as a human, and the trailing red robes she wore, still edged with gold, caught and flashed in the light of his crystal.

The Forest opened up as they went down the path, and Draco caught sight of others, well-used, leading off from the main one they were on. Now and then he could see clearings, with the edges of thatched roofs, and sometimes piled rocks that looked like the entrances to caves. Or there might be a fence or a Shield Charm humming around a vegetable garden, with the tops of carrots and potatoes visible. Draco almost smiled. He could imagine that the pests one would have to keep out of a garden in the Forbidden Forest would be formidable indeed.

The crystal flashed again and again, warning him of sentient beings looking at him and making their minds up about him, until Draco tapped his wand against it and commanded it to stop shining. It was getting to be nothing more than a distraction now.

The path spilled, finally, into a larger clearing than Draco had known existed in the Forest; he had thought the trees would always move to claim so much open space as soon as they could. The floor looked like it was made of tightly packed dirt, and no wonder, if as many people as were in at the moment were always walking over it and through it. Simple chairs were set up here and there, along with vine hammocks, and dozens of pairs of eyes turned to Draco as he stepped across the edge of the clearing.

In the center, or a little off from center, on a chair no bigger than the rest, sat Harry Potter. He stood up with he saw Draco, nodding familiarly to him. “Malfoy.”

Draco stared. He knew that he was being silly, and neglecting his duties as a diplomat. He should have been able to move past the first few seconds of shock, bow smoothly but without making it seem as if Potter was the one in command here, and then go straight ahead into the next important piece of business: telling Potter why he was here.

But he found it impossible to keep his mouth from going dry, or his eyes from fastening on Potter’s face and form.

Potter wasn’t any taller than he had been, and it was probably pure werewolf magic rather than confidence, but he seemed to have settled into his skin far better than when Draco had last seen him, after the Death Eater trials. His muscles flowed more smoothly than they should; he came towards Draco with his hand extended, and even the hand seemed broader. The lines on his bloody palm seemed longer, more deeply carved. And his hair shimmered with a kind of dark aura echoed in the way that his green eyes flared as he locked them on Draco. Those were definitely darker. Draco had assumed amber would taint them, the way it did the eyes of most werewolves, but then, wolves could have green eyes as well. This had just made them more noticeable.

“Malfoy?”

Potter’s voice was low, questioning, but Draco knew all about werewolves’ enhanced senses, and assumed that the ones around them could probably hear the amusement in Potter’s tone. Draco bristled and shook hands quickly, then spent a moment in that precise bow after all. He didn’t do it because he wanted to show respect to Potter, exactly, but because he needed some time to recover from his own attack of emotion.

He had to remember who he was and why he was here. The Ministry had done this probably as some sort of revenge against Potter and some sort of attempt to weaken the Unspeakables. Draco’s work kept him out of most Department politics, but the matter of the ownership of some artifacts could become a political issue. Draco had to go along with what they wanted for now, and show himself obedient and unthreatening and docile to their purposes, until he could figure it out, and strike back.

Falling over his own feet around Potter was not an element of that.

“Unspeakable Malfoy, please,” Draco said at last, raising his head. “I struggled for the title, and I find that I don’t like to relinquish it.”

For a moment, Potter assessed him in a way that made Draco think he would refuse. Then he nodded, and said, “Fine. You can call me Potter or Harry, I don’t care. I don’t have any formal title,” he added, turning around to face his pack again, but evidently catching the question in Draco’s eyes.

Draco watched the way the werewolves straightened to attention or sucked in their stomachs as Potter’s eyes swept across them, and wanted to snort. Of course. You’re just innocent of all power and all ambitions, aren’t you?

Potter glanced back at him with a spark in his eyes that made Draco tighten his Occlumency shields immediately. No one had said that Harry Potter had become good at Legilimency—he had been terrible, the last time Draco knew anything about it—but on the other hand, no one had talked about the sheer power that had settled into his skin, either.

“Coming?” Potter asked calmly.

“Did you want to meet with me immediately?” Draco knew how to make his voice neutral, even after a shock like this. It had taken him a few minutes longer than it should have, and he hoped that information didn’t make its way back to Invisible Heldeson, who was more likely to demote him if it did. “Or did you want me to introduce myself to the pack and then come back tomorrow?”

“I hadn’t thought you would be leaving,” said Potter, with a long, languorous blink. “Not until tomorrow and after the feast we plan to throw you in welcome, anyway. You have quarters here that you can use. They’re guest quarters.”

Draco crossed the distance between him and Potter with business-like strides. Potter just looked at him, watching him come. Those eyes made Draco wonder if Potter had got used to assessing threats in a new way since he’d become a werewolf.

Of course he has. I need to stop speculating and deal with what’s in front of me.

“I would be glad to be treated as a guest,” Draco said, and let his voice lilt up with the question.

Potter smiled at him. The effect of that smile was something no one had described, either. Luckily, Draco knew how to resist facial expressions better than he did the aura of power around Potter. His father had used them as manipulation all the time, and most of the Unspeakables weren’t above during the same thing. “Of course you will be. It’s not your fault that you’re here, is it? You didn’t make the decision.”

“I shouldn’t be surprised that you have spies inside the Ministry,” said Draco, shaking his head, although he did wonder who Potter had managed to sneak into the Department of Mysteries, of all places.

Potter snorted, and his eyes shone. “Keep thinking that, if that’s what you want to, Malfoy.” And he swept ahead, leaving Draco to stare at his back for a second before he caught up.

“I didn’t realize how much of the Forest you’ve taken over,” Draco said, as they reached the edge of the clearing and werewolves parted around them like a stream around a rock. Now he could the see the side of one of those little cottages. That was presumably the guest quarters Potter had been talking about. “Your pack is larger than I thought it was. Are you sure that you can afford to support another one?”

“No talking about business just yet, Malfoy.” Potter pointed around the trunk of a large tree. “You’ll find the guest quarters there. Not big, but it has a bed, a writing desk with parchment and ink in the drawers, candles, a spell-protected toilet, and a warded trunk for any belongings you care to put down.” He studied Draco a minute, eyes running up and down his body in a way that made Draco want to twitch. “You didn’t bring much.”

“I wasn’t planning on an extended stay,” Draco said. “And why should business wait, Potter? You know what I’ve come to discuss, but I don’t know your arguments in favor of taking Thornsberry into your pack yet. Surely we should speak?”

“Pleasure comes before business, of course,” said Potter, and winked at Draco—bloody winked at him!—while nodding again at the house. “Take the chance to refresh yourself; there’s some water in there, too. Or write an owl to your employers and let them know you’ve arrived safely, if you want. I’ve got to go oversee the preparations for the feast.” Then he strutted off, accompanied by an escort of werewolves.

Draco stared after Potter for a second. Then he remembered who might be watching, snapped his head straight up, and stalked into the house instead. It was as Potter had indicated, except that there were more blankets on the bed and more luxuries altogether than Draco had thought there would be.

He sat down, cast some spells that would prevent anyone from spying into the house or eavesdropping while he was there, and then began, very carefully, to consider which of his actions or gestures might have been responsible for weakening him so much in Potter’s eyes.

*

Harry hid his smile as he went to talk with Woolwine and some of the other wolves who thought that Malfoy being here meant he should immediately give up. And then he had the feast to arrange, of course.

He had expected Malfoy to be pompous and angry and cold, which he still was. But he hadn’t expected the way that he moved, or the start he visibly gave when he saw Harry for the first time, or the magic that crackled around him and reached out to Harry’s own when they shook hands—although Harry thought Malfoy didn’t feel that as much. And he hadn’t realized that Malfoy evidently lacked some information on werewolf noses: that they could smell most emotions.

This was going to be hard and complicated, and the Ministry was interfering in what didn’t concern them again. Thornsberry had served his sentence. He ought to be left alone once he was out, and if Harry’s pack wanted to take him in, that was Harry’s business.

But this was also going to be fun.