Chapter Twenty-Eight of 'The Same Species as Shakespeare'- Give Me The Man
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Chapter Twenty-Eight-Give Me the Man
It was-later.
Draco had not tried to explain himself or done much more than lower his wand and reassure his father that he didn’t have any lasting wounds. He had repeated the same thing to Snape, with a more direct look that Harry suspected came from unfortunate experiences in the past when he had tried to lie to his Potions professor. He had seemed mildly astonished to see Ron there, but had ignored him after an initial staring contest.
He had not said a word to Harry.
He had gazed instead, and if Harry could have trusted the emotions that he saw appearing in his eyes, he would have immediately surrendered his hostility, reached out, embraced Draco, and leaned gratefully on his chest, like someone coming home. But he didn’t dare trust looks without words, not anymore. So he had nodded, and swallowed, and stared back for a little while, then turned away as if he had important things to talk to Ron about.
Ron thought they did, at least. The first thing he did was take Harry’s arm in a merciless grip so that he could mutter into his ear, “You’re never going back with him and forgiving him like that.”
“Not like that, no,” Harry said, turning his head to make sure he was whispering, too. Draco’s eyes seared the back of his head. No doubt he wondered what in the world they were conversing about. “He’s got some groveling to do before I forgive him.”
Ron groaned and tightened the hold of his hand again. Harry winced, but Ron didn’t let him go or move away. “And no more than that?”
“I think that’ll be sufficiently bad, for someone as proud as he is.” Harry smiled humorlessly, feeling a bit of the anger he’d felt when he first saw the Prophet articles bubbling back up. “Do you know how he hates to humble himself? He’ll go through the most intense gyrations to avoid admitting that he doesn’t know some obscure fact.”
“Then what makes you think he’ll agree to humble himself at all?”
That gave Harry pause. He had been thinking, he realized then, as if Draco’s joining him on an equal footing was inevitable, but how did he know it was? Perhaps Draco would still prefer his pride to Harry.
His eyes said he wouldn’t, but Harry needed words more than he needed eyes.
“You see what I mean,” Ron went on, leaning persuasively towards Harry. “You don’t really know him. It’s not that long since you started guarding him and getting to know him better, instead of just observing him from a distance. I want to protect you, Harry. And him,” he added, when Harry raised an eyebrow at him. “As long as the imposter isn’t caught, it’s still an open case.” He sighed gustily, expressing without words, Harry knew, the difficult position Snape’s potion had placed them in. “But I don’t want to see you get hurt again.”
Harry looked over his shoulder. Draco was staring openly now, resisting his father’s attempts to pry details about his kidnapping out of him. He even had a hand resting on Lucius’s shoulder, as if he had pushed him out of the way when he would have blocked Draco’s view of Harry.
And whilst Harry wasn’t inclined to put his trust in just looks anymore, he did know that those gaping eyes had a claim on him, and would have to be answered soon.
“I don’t think you can keep me from getting hurt,” he replied to Ron quietly, still never moving his eyes from Draco’s. He had never had a lover before whose face pulled at him with that kind of magnetic force, he thought absently, the way that he had never been aware of how anyone else walking into a room changed the currents of emotion and perception swirling around its occupants. Yes, he could say that was his obsession, but, like it or not, that obsession was where his feeling for Draco had begun, and he would have to deal with it no matter what their future relationship was like.
“Mate-“
Harry patted Ron’s shoulder in much the same way Draco had patted Lucius. “That’s just the way it is,” he said. “This is a matter for him and me to settle, not anyone else. That’s just the way it has to be.”
*
And now it was later, and they were back in Malfoy Manor, and Draco had been spirited away to the Potions lab by Snape, probably because Snape didn’t trust him after all, and Harry was sitting in the middle of his own bed in Draco’s rooms, staring at the bed from which Draco had been kidnapped. He didn’t know what Lucius and Ron had said to the other Aurors to get them to go away. He only knew that they’d done it, and he was grateful.
And now he could hear footsteps mounting the stairs towards him.
Harry took a deep breath and turned around. He kept sitting. If he had to face Draco on his feet to have any strength, then it was already too late for the kind of bond he wanted to have.
*
Draco had swallowed the potion that Severus offered him under protest. The imposter had cast Cruciatus on him, that was true, but it had been several hours ago. Draco was sure that he had the shaking under control, and he had some experience in healing from the nerve damage. Bellatrix had been too fond of the Unforgivable Curses for the good of anyone who had to share a house or blood with her.
But Severus had still dragged him to the lab the moment they returned to the Manor, and then stared at him, and then stared at him some more when Draco held the vial away from him and waved at the fumes rising from it, and then leaned near until his nose almost touched the tip of Draco’s when Draco continued to refuse it.
“Mr. Malfoy,” he said, in that voice that spoke Detention as a fluent second language, “you will take the potion standing up. Or you will take it Stupefied and lying in a bed. It is your choice.”
He still knew where to pause impressively, too, and make you fear for your life just hearing the words, Draco thought with grudging admiration as he swallowed the thick, sickly green potion. There were times that he would have given up many of his other achievements in order to do what Severus did with such natural ease.
But his gifts lay elsewhere, and as he climbed to his bedroom and the confrontation with Harry that he knew would happen there, all of them seemed to have deserted him.
Where’s the eloquence I thought could command him? Where’s the logic that I knew would bring him to his knees? And I thought I could smile and turn him upside down, but that won’t work on a man who could write me a letter like that.
For the first time, Draco felt a strong frisson of admiration move through him. Harry had a Slytherin’s cruelty and cunning in him-when he wanted to. Draco wondered idly if having a choice between weapons like that, rather than using one set all the time, argued a kind of superiority.
And then he stood in front of the bedroom door, and couldn’t put it off any longer. He knocked-rather strange considering it was his bedroom, but he was going with courtesy more than common sense right now-and entered.
Harry sat on his own bed, one leg drawn up beneath him in a sign of nervousness so open that Draco was surprised he showed it for a moment. And then he shook his head and told himself, again, that Harry didn’t spend his life in an atmosphere of intrigue and covert insults. Of course he would sit in a way that reflected his feelings, because he wanted to share and not conceal them.
Draco shut the door behind him. He didn’t realize his hand was shaking until he dropped it to his side, away from the knob, and then he clasped it behind him to conceal the tremor. That didn’t do any good. His arms were shaking, too, and his shoulders, and his other hand. He was terrified at the mere thought of fulfilling his promise to Faustine and telling Harry the truth. He swallowed, and excused the delay by telling himself it was a good thing he had; his throat was so dry he couldn’t have spoken.
“What is it? We can wait and talk about this later if you want.”
Harry’s voice was thick with reluctance, but the words were gentle. Draco stared at him. His eyes were direct, as always. What frightened Draco to the point that he wanted very badly to turn and run out the door was another challenge to be faced to Harry, less terrifying than what he must have experienced when Draco was kidnapped.
“We can,” Harry went on, a sharper tone in his voice now, as if he thought Draco’s staring meant Draco didn’t believe him. “I would like to hear about what happened to you whilst you were in the imposter’s clutches, and you probably want to tell someone. I can’t imagine that either Snape or your father make the ideal audience.” He smiled, and it had only a touch of tension to it, mostly visible in the edges of his mouth. “So we can talk about that first. If you want.”
It was the hesitance in his voice on those last words that decided Draco. Harry was treating him as if he were fragile, as if he had suffered unbounded torture at the man’s hands instead of a few Cruciatus Curses and other spells easily cured by Snape’s pain potion. And Draco had had enough of playing tormentor and victim.
I want to help protect him, for once.
“I actually think that would be harder to talk about,” he said, and then hesitated himself, because he wasn’t sure if he should move closer to Harry or sit on his own bed or stay where he was. In the end, after a shifting of his feet that, he told himself sharply, probably made him look like a small boy about to pee, he stood straight and looked at Harry’s chin. “I promised Faustine that I would tell you the truth when I saw you.”
“Faustine? What has she got to do with anything?”
Draco smiled, but he knew it was a strained smile and he didn’t try to continue it. Instead, still staring at Harry’s chin, he murmured, “I went to her for help in locating you after our-last meeting. She showed me a rather remarkable spell that forced me to live through the truth of the emotions haunting my mind, and taught me to know myself better. And she promised that if I didn’t tell you about what I learned when we next met, she’d do it for me.”
Harry laughed, a short bark of sound that Draco found himself wanting to hear again despite its harshness. At least it was a sign that Harry could still find him amusing. “And what were these truths?”
Draco’s hands were shaking again, and he found that he had to lower his gaze to them and away from Harry. “One was that I’d been obsessed with you much longer than you’d been obsessed with me,” he said carefully. “During the war-I fought the war for you.”
“What?”
It’s only understandable, not an insult, that he sounds so bewildered, Draco told himself, and beat back his automatic emotional reaction. “I wanted you to look at me,” he said. “Even if you scorned me, even if you thought I was an utterly intolerable little git, I wanted you to distinguish me from the rest of them. And I deluded myself into thinking that you were fighting to destroy me, rather than Voldemort.”
Harry blinked twice. Once he lifted his hand as if he would reach out and touch Draco’s shoulder, but then he let it fall again, with a small and helpless shake of his head. “But that’s exactly what I don’t understand,” he said.
“What?” Draco thought he had explained it all clearly enough. His face was flushed and stinging, and his hands still trembled. If he was feeling so humiliated, he must have explained it clearly.
“Why would you want me to look at you?” Harry whispered. “I was a half-blood, and so you would have been prejudiced against me before you met me. I was your rival, and that gave you an additional reason to hate me. And I never thought that you put as much stock in the Chosen One mystique as the rest of them did. There’s every reason for you to despise me from the beginning, instead of longing for my attention.”
Draco winced. He’s going to make me walk through the fire, isn’t he?
But the remembrance of what he had felt when he realized Harry had come to rescue him, more than the thought of Faustine’s revenge if he didn’t go through this, drove him to continue speaking.
“It was partially the Chosen One mystique,” he said slowly. “You were the only child I knew when I was one who had done something like that. I always found it unfair that adults were the heroes of most of the stories I heard and that all of them had power over me. I suppose part of me thought that if I could get close enough to you, you would teach me how you fought the adults and I would have power, too.”
Harry’s face closed off into a smooth and emotionless mask. “I see,” he said.
“But it was more than that,” Draco added quietly. Intense frustration filled his throat like the dryness of fear for a moment. I could tell the whole truth and still lose him because of the way he interprets things.
Or just because of the ugliness of that particular truth, announced a voice in his head that sounded a lot like the one he had heard whilst he examined the globe filled with his own thoughts that Faustine’s spell had created. You have to leave him free to react to this, rather than trying to tailor your words so that he’ll give you what you want.
Draco took a deep breath. The prize of that attention he had wanted all along awaited him if he did this right, and yes, it was worth the risk of exposing himself to an unsympathetic audience.
“I-I wanted you to look at me because you wanted to after I met you,” he said. “You were more than I’d been told. You obviously didn’t understand anything about the wizarding world. And you played great Quidditch for no reason. You were a rival in a natural way, a way that I couldn’t have had a rival among the pure-blood families I knew. They would have trained for years to defeat me, and if they did win, I could have promised myself I would learn the best training methods and beat them the next time. But you made it effortless, and that made me have to work harder.”
Harry leaned back against the pillows, looking faintly bemused. It was the traces of a brighter emotion at the corners of his eyes that made Draco soldier on.
“That obsession got worse when I realized I couldn’t defeat you, and whenever you got too involved in being an ordinary student or the Savior of the Wizarding World or a Gryffindor and ignored me completely. I wanted to matter to you, but I never had the feeling that I did when I wasn’t right in front of you.”
“You didn’t,” Harry said.
Draco closed his eyes. The words went into him like a knife into his abdomen. For a moment, he thought that the spells the imposter had cast on him had hurt less. “I see,” he said.
“You had an effect on me,” said Harry. “But it was mostly because of the way you tormented my friends. I would hear you in my head calling Hermione a Mudblood or Ron poor.” His tone changed, and Draco opened his eyes to see him frowning. “I never understood, later, why I started to find your voice enchanting.”
There it is. It was the reminder Draco needed, the proof positive that Harry had started to feel something for him in return. Without some notion of that return, he never would have risked speaking like this. He sucked noisily at the air entering his lungs and said, “And I deluded myself after the war, too. I thought that one defeat was all I needed, that I would be able to ignore you for good after I crumpled you and left you bleeding. But I need you more than that. I need you as a permanent part of my life.”
There was nothing to do after that but to shut his eyes and hold very still.
*
Harry stared at Draco. He knew his hand was clenched in the bedsheets. He tried to withdraw it, and couldn’t. Even a flexing of his fingers was beyond him.
What Draco had told him astonished him beyond measure.
That someone would want him because he was the Chosen One was familiar ground, and when Draco had said that that was one component in what he felt for Harry, Harry could feel the doors to his heart slamming shut. He couldn’t be with someone who was with him for wealth and fame. He had tried several times, most recently with Penelope. Sometimes he had seen the stars in her eyes, but as long as she loved him as well as all the advantages that came with dating the Savior of the Wizarding World, couldn’t he put up with that?
Well, no. He hadn’t been able to be what she wanted all the time, and she had gone to the papers. And Draco had done the same thing, Harry reminded himself against the leap of his soul that urged him to forgive Draco too quickly. He would remember that. It was a good thing always to know what one’s lover was capable of.
But Draco had also said that he wanted Harry’s attention for other reasons, and that he even felt Harry was above him in some undefined way. That he wanted to be part of his life, and couldn’t stand it when he wasn’t. That his feelings had a tinge of worship to them-well, he hadn’t said that, but Harry knew he felt it, because he felt the same sort of things himself.
No one had ever said anything like that to him. Harry knew he had that kind of camaraderie and love from Ron and Hermione, but he had resigned himself to not having it in a physical relationship. And he had always thought that he would care more for Draco than Draco would care for him. It was why he had accepted being a bodyguard. At least that was a chance to be close.
I need you as a permanent part of my life.
Some long-denied part of Harry, some selfish and love-craving part that he had tried to bury after his childhood and adolescence, had waited all his life for someone to say those words. He wanted to be needed, to be longed for, and not just to do the needing or longing.
Can you trust him?
Harry sat still for long moments and regarded Draco. Draco had his eyes shut. His pulse throbbed visibly in his throat. If he could trust him at all, Harry thought idly, it must be now, when he had left himself vulnerable with such a confession.
Or an assumed confession. Harry had thought he could trust Draco when Draco took him to that place of pure magic, tied him up, and made love to him without harming him. The harm had come later, and it had all been planned. Perhaps Draco regretted making those comments to Rita Skeeter, but he had still done it.
How was Harry to come to terms with that?
He sighed as he realized that he couldn’t, not all at once. It would take weeks of thinking and deciding which were Draco’s crimes and which were the crimes Harry had accused him of and which were the ones he had dreamed of committing but hadn’t actually done. And Draco needed an answer now.
It would have to be a test. He would have to watch Draco closely and wait for the moment that was sufficient to prove him to Harry.
If I were strong, Harry thought, eyeing Draco, I would tell him that I needed more time and then watch him from a distance. If he turned to someone else or did something stupid again, at least I wouldn’t be as hurt about it as I would be if it happened right in front of me.
But he wasn’t that strong. The selfish part of him had reached out to clutch Draco the moment that he said he needed Harry. Harry needed someone who needed him like that.
Obsession, he thought with a faint smile, remembering the way that Ron had talked about the woman he’d seen in Diagon Alley. It grows around you and the person you obsess about and never lets you go, not completely. I think that Draco and I are just lucky that our obsessions grew together and twined around each other. Otherwise, I might die of the strangling vine, and he probably would, too-though mine would be despair and his would be jealousy.
Harry opened his eyes and looked straight at Draco. This isn’t the perfect marriage that I used to dream about. But it’s not the shattered thing that I thought was all that was left to us, either. It might be stronger for the imperfections.
“I need you as well,” he said.
Draco seemed to exhale for the first time since he’d spoken his own words, and his face flushed with color.
“But,” Harry said, lifting a hand and holding it towards him, “I can’t forget what you did that fast. I’ll watch you. I’ll want an apology for your going to the papers the way you did. And if I even think that you’re about to do it again-“
He was startled when Draco’s hands closed on his shoulders and Draco’s mouth closed on his lips. In his experience of him, both seen and felt, Draco didn’t kiss this way: wildly and yearning, as if he thought Harry would fade from sight in the next moment. But now he was, and his tongue was sliding into Harry’s mouth and tracing a burning path across his gums and teeth, and Harry raised his arms and wrapped them around Draco’s shoulders in part because there was no other way to control the emotions inside himself.
“I want you,” Draco said hoarsely when he pulled away again. “I need you. And you insult me by thinking that I would go to the papers again?”
Harry grinned, and licked a bit of blood that had sprung from a tooth cutting into his lip. “That isn’t the same thing as an apology, you know.”
Draco looked briefly outraged for a moment. Then he dropped to one knee, sighed heavily, and extended his arms to the sides like a Muggle actor imploring his ladylove to accept him.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
And his tone was playful, but his eyes weren’t, and that was the reason Harry reached out and put his hands on his shoulders again.
“We’ll try,” he said. “For now. I don’t promise to forgive you just yet.” He swallowed against the memory of old anger surging up his throat like bile. “And I reckon that you haven’t forgiven me that letter yet, either.”
“Not-exactly,” said Draco, delicately. He tilted his head down for a moment, and Harry wondered what emotion he was hiding.
When he looked up, his eyes were aflame with joy.
He kissed Draco as delicately this time, fitting his hands around Draco’s skull and jaw, finding the most natural places for them.
It might not work. But all we can do is try.
We don’t have a choice but to try, as grown together as we are.
Chapter 29.