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lomonaaeren) wrote2008-04-01 11:23 am
lomonaaeren) wrote2008-04-01 11:23 am
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Chapter Twelve of 'Changing of the Guard'- Overwhelmed
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Chapter Twelve—Overwhelmed
Harry lifted his head to do a quick, professional sweep around the room the moment he and Draco came out of the Apparition. Unusually, they had been able to Apparate right into the middle of Clothilde Castle, instead of having to walk in from outside. Harry wondered what kind of pure-blood witch would trust her guests to come through her wards like that.
Then he remembered Helena Clothilde’s reputation, and grimaced. Someone who wants excitement on a few nights of the year more than she wants safety. I do recall reading that she had tight wards up most of the time.
“All right?” Draco’s knuckles grazed along his left shoulder blade, a tickling touch that made Harry want to squirm and arch into it, or else step away. He held himself still enough to do neither and turned to smile at Draco instead. For whatever reason, Draco was still suspicious of him—and Harry could admit that it was probably because of the magic he’d shown off yesterday. Flinching away or acting skittish would increase the suspicion.
“Yes,” Harry said in Brian’s voice. “Just making sure that I know where all the exits are, so you can make a quick one if I manage to embarrass you with my dancing.”
Draco’s eyes narrowed a little. “But you won’t, will you?” he asked, and his voice had become one that reminded Harry of Narcissa’s, chill and soft as snowfall. His arm went out, his hand settling on the small of Harry’s back. He leaned nearer, probably intending to make Brian tremble with his breath brushing against the shell of his ear. “I’ve seen the way you can dance. After the Estival, don’t tell me that you won’t be able to manage a simple pavane.”
“Ah, but does Clothilde Castle favor the simple pavane?” Harry got his revenge by whispering into Draco’s ear in turn. And he did shiver, whilst Harry managed to look as if he remained calm and unaffected. “I had heard that the mistress sets many traps, and having a dance change in mid-step is one of them.”
Draco wrenched himself away, but left his hand in place, and stared directly into Harry’s eyes for a moment. Harry stared back calmly. He had been around enough Legilimens in the past few years to know in an instant when someone could read his mind, and Draco couldn’t. He was simply trying to yank the secrets out of Brian by the sheer force of his presence.
The competitive gleam in his gray eyes, which almost turned angry as he surveyed Brian, reassured Harry. There was already a distance between them. Whether the best happened and he managed to get Draco disowned in two weeks, or whether it was the worst and he simply had to vanish, discarding the Brian identity along the way, Draco was unlikely to press the matter further and try to find him.
“I’m starving,” he said, turning around to face the table on the far side of the room, behind a scene of milling pure-blood wizards, where the food waited. “Both for a taste of food and for the taste of opposition. Are you coming?”
*
Draco could not believe how angry he had become, and how quickly. Brian had really done nothing more than turn the game Draco was trying to play back on him, and then give him a quick-eyed glance of contempt that showed how little he relished such game-playing. But most of Draco’s partners were so eager for his attentions—at least by the time they came to this stage in a relationship—that that had never happened before.
I want him, Draco thought, stepping up so that he could walk beside Brian and leave no doubt in the minds of his observers that they were together. I want to conquer him, I want him to give himself to me, I want to know the truth of who he is, I want to make him tell me the truth, I want him to acknowledge me as his equal—
There were so many longings that Draco found his mind spinning as he tried to name them all. He had never felt such intense and variegated desire.
He did have to pause, then, and wonder whether Brian’s magic could have created such a desire in him. Could this be the extreme of sexual longing caused by enough power? Or could he have taught himself a spell that would seduce the person who was part of the family he probably hoped to get revenge on?
But Draco prided himself on not being simple to please. There was no one thing Brian could have focused the spell on to ensnare him, and so far as Draco knew, attraction spells were impossible to cast otherwise. They needed a scent, a lock of hair, a certain way of speaking, to begin the enchantment, and then the victim would convince himself he was falling in love after he had become attracted to that initial focus.
Falling in love? His father’s skeptical voice echoed through his head. This was Draco’s own tool of concentration, the one he used whenever he thought he was getting too far into a business transaction or a conversation and losing his composure. There’s no need to suspect yourself of that, and you know that Brian couldn’t simply have compelled you to fall in love with him. That’s not the way it works. Step back and look at the situation rationally. Don’t let your irritation at his coolness control you.
So Draco stepped back and looked at the situation rationally as he kissed the hands of a few witches in passing and fetched himself one of Clothilde’s exquisite chocolate confections from the food table. And he saw a man whom he wanted and wanted to want him back. That was probably the simplest of his desires.
Draco smiled wryly into the chocolate as he watched Brian leaning on the table and entertaining the small talk of a young wall-eyed wizard, one of the Greengrass family, who probably thought he was wildly courageous for approaching Brian. What is the way to make him want you back?
Make yourself irresistible, in all aspects. You know he admires courage.
Draco dusted crumbs from his hand, a slight movement that brought the attention of the conversational partners to him. He stepped forwards and bowed to the young wizard. “Care to dance?” he asked, in a voice of normal volume that nevertheless caused a perceptible drop in noise around him.
The young wizard promptly went pale and looked as if he would sick up. He backed away a little from Brian, gaping. “I—“ he said, and then snapped, “No! I’m not gay!”
“Excuse me,” Draco said, smiling at the young man. “An easy mistake to make.”
An undercurrent of laughter moved through the watchers as the youngster fled. Though they had to disapprove of the sexual choices Draco had made, they could admire the cool dismissal Draco had just affected—never outright saying that he thought the young wizard was gay for talking so intimately to his partner, but implying it. And he had shown that he was not afraid to refer to the scandal that had filled the Daily Prophet to brimming for the past few days.
For Draco, though, the best reward was to turn around and see Brian’s eyes fixed on him for just a moment with surprise and admiration. Then he blinked and the emotions were swallowed into that intense blue, but they had been there. Draco felt a stirring of interest, and he gave Brian a slow smile that briefly caused the other man to stare even harder.
Brief is still a beginning.
Draco put out an arm, and made sure his own look was so direct that Brian couldn’t take it as anything but a challenge. “Care to dance?” he asked softly.
Brian tilted his head to the music, and a moment later his eyes narrowed for a fraction of a second. This dance was one that, unlike the Estival, required one partner to lead. Draco, as the one extending the invitation, was the one who would play that role. If Brian refused out of fear of being seen as a woman, he would lose the challenge as much as if he stepped on Draco’s foot with every turn.
Brian squared his shoulders and lifted his chin. Draco felt a curl of lazy delight travel through him. Brian held out his hand in return. “Of course,” he said. “What else are we here for?” And that comment made a few of the people near him scowl, since, after all, he had just dismissed them as being uninteresting to talk to.
Draco drew Brian near with an arm around his waist again, and pulled him out onto the floor. They found their place in the dance without pause: this was one that Draco had known all his life, and Brian seemed to have studied it extensively.
Brian moved in Draco’s arms without looking away from his face, quite unlike the demure, blushing demeanor most young pure-blood witches would have been taught to exhibit. All the same, he let his body flow where Draco directed, stepped when Draco turned him, and made no attempt to claim the lead. Draco had to hold back a harsh, panting breath when Brian even fully completed the step that made his neck arch back so his head rested on Draco’s shoulder.
The thought of all that power surrendering quietly to him—even though he knew Brian was doing this under protest and so as not to cause a scene—made his head swim. Draco turned his face to the side and flicked his tongue against the skin just under Brian’s ear, hidden from their audience, in revenge. Brian shuddered, and moved into the next step with just a bit more force than necessary.
Draco was enchanted, but, having achieved some of what he wanted, wasn’t so caught up in the dance that he didn’t notice one of Helena Clothilde’s dependents angling towards them with her partner, meaning to trip them up. He was in a position to keep his balance no matter what happened, so he kept dancing, wondering how Brian would handle it.
*
Harry had never had much of a tendency to connect dancing with sex, but he was fast coming to see why other people might. Those people had obviously all danced with Draco Malfoy.
I should be grateful that he didn’t touch me more often during the Estival.
He wasn’t completely blind to the effects of the people moving around him, however—that would have been stupid, when he was trying to put some distance between Brian and Draco—and so he saw the witch who was moving as if she would trip Brian up, step on his foot, or snag the hem of his robe. Harry snarled inwardly. At the moment, with his body humming and his skin sparking, he wasn’t in the mood either to confront or to politely ignore her.
He took the next step a little faster than normal, causing Draco’s hands to briefly slip from their positions on his shoulder and waist. That allowed Harry to reach out with one leg as the witch turned her back on him, thanks to the dance, and step on the hem of her robe, so deftly that someone would have to be looking in exactly the right direction to know he was to blame. And the bodies all over the floor made “exactly the right direction” already crowded with dancers.
The little witch squeaked as she suddenly tripped, one of her delicate shoes tangling with her robes. There was a great deal of floundering momentum, which caught up her partner as well as her, to Harry’s vicious delight, and it ended up with both of them on the floor, breathless, the witch’s robe ripped beyond repair. A round of smiles worse than open laughter traveled the faces of the guests, and the witch stood up again with her cheeks flaming, no longer interested in hindering Harry.
“Well,” Draco said suddenly into his ear. Harry stiffened. Of course they had kept moving as the dance required, but Draco was stepping a little closer than he needed to right now, his hands sliding up and down Harry’s flanks, his fingertips questing gently for his ribs under the cloth, his chest and hips cupping Harry’s back and arse as if made for them. “I hadn’t thought you had quite that Slytherin streak under the Gryffindor one. You give me more and more surprises all the time.” His arms tightened. “And they make you all the more interesting.”
Harry shuddered in spite of himself, the skin under his ribs twitching. He was sensitive there—not quite ticklish, but prone to excitement when someone touched him, which had been a wonderful discovery when he first started having sex with other men.
But it’s not a response that belongs on Brian, Harry reminded himself. He has his own sexual kinks, and those are the ones you need to play out, even if it’s only acting now, and not becoming the person who feels those things.
He took advantage of the next step of the dance to swing himself out wide and away from Draco, though not enough to break the flow of the pattern, even as Draco had come close to him but still within the rules. He lowered his eyes to the floor and said softly, “Please, no false compliments from you. Anyone could have seen what she was doing.” He raised his gaze abruptly, and caught Draco off-guard, blinking, as he had intended. “Just as anyone can see what you are,” he whispered harshly, hoping to recall Draco to a sense of the intensely interested audience around them. He couldn’t try to seduce Brian on the dance floor, no matter how much he wanted to, because they were there to show off for other people, not to snog each other.
*
Draco was as close as he ever had been to saying, “Fuck it!” to the public display he was trying to create and finding a nice, private place to finish what built higher between him and Brian with every movement.
But he was still showing off. And he thought he had a new tactic to try, since the dance was ending.
“You’re right, of course,” he said, and clasped Brian’s hand for the final bow. “Allow me to proceed with a little more subtlety.”
And he went towards the food table. Behind him, he could feel Brian hesitate, but he followed almost at once, probably worried about ruining their new joint reputation by seeming to participate in a lovers’ quarrel.
Draco had already seen the woman he wanted standing not far from the table, sipping a glass of wine and talking with her sister. At least, she had been talking with her sister. Now Alice Moonstone faced Draco with a raised eyebrow, whilst Marigold faded desperately into the background.
“What do you want?” she asked in a low tone, even as she painted a welcoming smile on her face. “I know that you’re strutting and showing off for him, not me.”
“At the moment,” Draco said softly, leaning one elbow on the table and smiling down at her, “he’s being rather unreasonable. Expecting things of me that I can’t give, considering we’re in public.” Alice blushed; Draco let her. He was sure she was the right choice for this stage of the game. She understood, much more than her sister did, and she was pretty and the right age. “I wanted to talk to someone I knew wouldn’t look at me as if I were covered with maggots, and who has some idea of the risk I’m running.”
Alice frowned. “He doesn’t know the risk you’re running? But how could he not, if he’s paid any attention at all to the newspapers in the past few days?”
“He’s an outsider to pure-blood society,” Draco murmured, bending closer to her. She was wearing some sort of perfume that smelled good. If she had been male and half as exasperating as Brian—all right, if she had been Brian—he might have been interested. “He doesn’t really understand these things as well as he thinks he does. To him, it’s all sort of a grand joke.”
And Alice did what he had hoped she would do, and leaned around Draco to frown at Brian. Then Draco leaned closer to her and turned his head so that it would look as if he were kissing her ear. Alice, no fool, blushed at once and yanked away, but the damage had been done. The silent interest in the room soared to new heights as everyone waited breathlessly to see what Brian would do.
Draco was rather wondering that himself. This was a ploy to get the man jealous, because he suspected that jealousy would draw on both all that lovely Gryffindor rage and all that delicious Slytherin cunning, and result in an explosion. But he wasn’t sure. If Brian’s coolness prevailed…
From the expression on Brian’s face, it wasn’t about to.
*
Harry snarled before he could stop himself. The elderly matron who had been walking towards him froze at the sound, and then tried to walk away again without making it obvious why she had done so. Harry himself had taken several steps forwards before he really realized what he was doing and how his actions would be interpreted.
And then, of course, he had to go with the game, though he scolded himself for feeling Harry’s jealousy instead of Brian’s. But maybe Brian would feel this way, if only to keep up the pretense that he and Draco had been lovers for months…
Harry himself was beginning to feel overwhelmed by the tangles of deceptions and false personalities and personas here. But he’d made his move, mistaken or not, and he could think of no way to back out without making himself, and by extension, Draco, look foolish. And that wasn’t possible when he had to get Draco disowned as fast as possible. Any false step could take more time than they had.
Damn it.
So he gave in to his natural instincts, and felt more like an actor than ever doing so as he stepped up beside the young witch and scowled at her. “I suppose you don’t realize how long we’ve been dating?” he asked, so that everyone in sight could hear.
The witch blushed again, but her chin came up. She was going to give him something of a fight, then. Good. Harry was glad. That would make this look more real.
It had nothing to do with wanting to make her look bad for flirting with Draco, Harry told himself. He didn’t want to do that, and anyway, Draco had done all the flirting and he knew it.
“He simply told me you didn’t understand him,” the witch said. “I think a man is to be excused going to another person to complain about that, when his partner won’t listen.”
She had defenses of her own, of course. Implicit in the way she’d phrased her response was the comparison of Harry to a nagging wife. And now a bolt of real anger tore through him, as the jealousy had been real a moment ago (and probably still was, said that voice in the back of his mind that always kept track of what Harry was thinking and feeling, no matter what persona he’d played). Draco had compelled him to accept the woman’s part in the dance, too. Harry didn’t like this. He was the one who was supposed to be in control here, the one with the real knowledge of what was happening, the Manager of Metamorphosis and thus the one in control of a hundred extra lives.
He wasn’t a wife. He didn’t fit any of the stereotypes of gay men. And from the way Draco was raising his eyebrow at Harry right now, he was interested in seeing Brian prove that.
Harry lunged forwards and wrapped his arms around Draco, dragging him closer. Draco had time for a startled gasp—not loud enough to reach the ears of anyone else, of course, because he wouldn’t betray his surprise to them like that—before Harry fastened their mouths together as Draco had done at his birthday party.
With Harry’s anger and jealousy behind the kiss, it was more thorough than it had been before, and thus more knee-weakening, and thus more real. Harry could feel sharp tingles passing through him as he twined his tongue around Draco’s, and when he began to thrust his tongue sharply into Draco’s palate and cheeks and against his teeth, there could be no doubt of what he was asking for, mimicking, hinting at. Draco’s hips surged forwards and pressed against Harry’s, letting him feel his growing erection.
Harry felt smug for just a moment, glad that he had asserted his control again and that Draco was reacting as strongly as he was.
And then his magic rose, following the anger as it often did, as it had the other day when he made Lucius’s hair flutter back, and flowed into the kiss. And Draco’s magic rose in response—something that had never happened before for Harry, with any partner.
Suddenly a pulse of power as irresistible as an electrical current joined them together, flowing directly through their mouths, across their tongues, down their throats. Harry gasped, staggering, and then groaned as pleasure gripped his body and shook him like a wet sheet. His mind was expanding at the edges, filled with glimpses of Draco’s emotions, flooding them over and encompassing them into his own. It wasn’t quite a telepathic or an empathic link, but it was very close.
Draco made a hungry noise at the same moment, and his arms tightened around Harry’s shoulders and waist. Harry felt his surprise and wonder at the exchange, his amusement as he confirmed Harry’s jealousy was real, and then the pleasure that took him like the tide.
And the pleasure fed back into Harry’s own, and multiplied. Their magic was not simply doubled, but squared, and with it the effects. Harry was whimpering steadily now, uncaring about their audience, his fingers digging into and stroking across warm skin; his hand had got beneath Draco’s robes somehow. So cool on the outside, he thought dizzily, but so melting soft beneath, and hard, smooth skin across hard bone, and—
Emotion, sensation, obliterated thought. He couldn’t stay here any longer. He could barely maintain a hold on himself so he didn’t throw Draco down in the middle of the dance floor. He tightened his arms around Draco and Apparated.
*
Draco gasped as he jolted down, mainly because it separated his mouth from Brian’s for a moment. Dazed, he looked around and realized they were in the middle of a quiet, dark room, but still with the gray stone of Clothilde Castle’s walls encompassing them. Brian had Apparated them sight unseen to the first destination that would serve—another sign of his extraordinary power. Most wizards needed the sight or at least an extended description of their destinations to arrive there without Splinching.
On the other hand, Draco thought, as he reached out to tangle his hands in Brian’s hair, maybe we Splinched our common sense.
Brian was falling to his knees. He snapped his fingers, and Draco’s clothes vanished from below the waist, leaving the neatly severed upper part of his robes to dangle on his chest. Draco whooshed out his breath, trying to be angry, but he couldn’t really be so, and Brian gave him a slow, predatory smile and a wink that showed he knew it.
Then their magic reconnected across the space between them, enclosing them in a wall of golden sparks, and urgency took them again. Brian reached out and grasped Draco’s erection, closing his eyes and opening his mouth. The expression of bliss on his face reminded Draco of someone about to take a bit of the most delicious dinner they’d ever tasted.
Incoherent amusement came back to him. Brian wouldn’t bite, he was saying, and then his mouth closed around Draco.
And Draco was lost.
He threw his head back as Brian sucked, the muscles of his throat rippling, pulling, demanding a response. Once again Brian’s magic was traveling through his mouth and his tongue, but this time it went straight into Draco’s cock, spreading out to engulf his balls. Draco bucked his hips off the wall. He could no more have kept them still than he could have made the earth stop turning, and normally he prided himself on his control when he was getting a blowjob.
But this was hardly normal.
He tangled his hands into Brian’s hair and directed his head back and forth, because he had to be touching him. From the moan he received, vibrating directly into his groin, Brian liked being guided like this. And then he swallowed, licked twice around the tip of Draco’s erection, swallowed again, and cupped Draco’s balls, rolling them.
More magic rose from his palm. More magic soared across Draco’s mind. The very human heat and wetness of Brian’s mouth concentrated down to what felt like a single point. He was sobbing for breath, trying to swim against the roaring tide of power and silky hair and silky skin and teasing, the magic was teasing him, as Brian’s finger swiped gently up towards his cleft.
Draco twisted like a fish in the talons of an eagle, and the inevitability of his orgasm was the best thing he had ever felt in his life—
Surpassed only by the orgasm itself a moment later, which seized and wrung and broke him, leaving him shocked half-unconscious by pleasure.
*
Harry had wanted to shove one hand down his own pants to take care of himself, but he couldn’t take his hands away from Draco’s crotch. He wanted to draw back a little, regain his sense of autonomy, concentrate on his partner’s pleasure and not his own the way he always did, but he couldn’t get any distance. He wanted to do something more sophisticated than just suck a few times, but he couldn’t control the sloppy, eager way his mouth moved.
And then, when he made Draco come, he came himself, untouched.
Harry cried out hoarsely, his throat clamping down around Draco’s erection, his body shuddering again and again as his hips pumped. He still couldn’t take his hands from Draco’s body, and he felt spectacularly unbalanced, both mentally and physically, as pleasure blinded him and ravished him away from his hold on composure. He whimpered continuously as he came, the magic drawing out his pleasure.
He had never felt so good in his life.
A moment later, when the magic began lazily to untwine from between him and Draco, having given them all the intense emotional sharing it wanted for the moment, he had never been so terrified.
He liked having his head taken and guided that way when he was giving someone else a blowjob. Brian didn’t. But Harry hadn’t even been like himself when he’d simply given in and given himself up to the sensations. He didn’t do that. There was always a distance between him and his partners. There had to be, or Harry might get caught up in the sex and do something he couldn’t afford as either the person he was playing or himself.
He withdrew his hands from Draco at last, shaking. He wanted to flee, but his muscles were full of languor, and his magic was still ebbing and flowing back and forth like a tide whose moon had disappeared. He shuddered, licking his lips. He had swallowed Draco’s ejaculation without even noticing.
Draco seized his arm, and pulled him to his feet.
Harry looked up, thinking that perhaps Draco had found the experience frightening, too, and was about to reassure him it wouldn’t happen again.
Instead, he found himself thoroughly, expertly, insistently, gently kissed. One of Draco’s hands was cupping his chin. The other urged his head back and rubbed the skin just beneath his ear, the place that had made Harry shiver before. Now, before he knew what he was doing, he opened his mouth and offered Draco more.
It was impossible not to do that, not with what they’d just shared. It would have gone against Harry’s every instinct as a Gryffindor and as a person to refuse to be open to Draco after that.
But the fear still remained, and it increased when Draco leaned towards his ear and whispered, “You were really with me this time. Thank you.”
And Harry understood that he might have more of a problem on his hands than Narcissa’s knowledge of Brian’s identity.
Chapter 13.
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