Part Eleven of 'The Long-Desired'
Title: The Long-Desired (11/13)
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Rating: R
Pairing: Harry/Draco
Warnings: Creature!fic,(vampire Draco), angst, violence, profanity, sex, bloodplay, past canon character death, dark (arguably insane) Harry. DH spoilers, but ignores epilogue.
Summary: Sequel to ‘Viper.’ Harry is more determined than ever to prevent Draco from taking Harry as his lover and Long-Desired, which Harry sees as slavery. Draco turns to Harry’s friends for help as Harry spirals down into self-destruction.
Author’s Notes: This is the third of the ‘Two Hunters’ series, which begins with ‘Mongoose and continues in Viper, and it will be the last one. Reading this one isn’t recommended if you haven’t read the others. It is also a dark story, and not very fluffy. This one will probably be between nine and thirteen parts long, updated irregularly.
Part One.
Thank you again for all the reviews!
“So he hasn’t said anything about reporting it to the Aurors yet?” Harry wished his voice didn’t sound so relieved, but, well, he was relieved that Ron seemed to believe him and wouldn’t make Harry defend his relationship with Malfoy to other people.
Hermione’s curls bounced as she shook her head. She was looking out of her own drawing room, which Harry also found a cause for relief. “No. He asked me a few questions, mostly to confirm what Malfoy said and what I’d seen when I interacted with you, I think. Then he went upstairs. When I joined him, he was already asleep, but he’d been rolling and tossing and staring at the ceiling for a long time, if the state of the bed was any indication.”
Harry let his breath out carefully. “Let him know he’s welcome at any time, and as long as he’s willing to talk reasonably, then I’m happy to see him.”
“You can’t really blame him for taking this so hard, can you?” Hermione asked wistfully. “After all, it’s not just Malfoy, it’s a vampire. Ron knows better than anyone else how much you hate them.” There was a slight undertone of accusation there, Harry thought. Maybe. Hermione had been less close to him than Ron these last few years.
At the moment, Harry was glad for that, however guilty he should feel, because it meant that Hermione came to the situation with a fresh perspective untainted by Harry’s grief for Ginny. “I can’t blame him,” he said. “I blamed him for trying to humiliate Draco. That goes beyond being upset that I might be under an enchantment and actually trying to hurt someone who hasn’t done him harm in years.”
“Yes, he told me about that,” Hermione said, but in a subdued voice. Harry thought she didn’t really want to condemn him or Ron if she could help it.
Because he was tired of putting his friends in difficult positions, he decided to let it go. “Well, like I said, as long as he gives up this notion that he has to fight Draco for me, he can come over anytime. But I do want to know right away if he’s planning to report me to the Aurors or anyone else for sheltering a vampire.”
Hermione gave him a little smile instead of nodding cheerfully and closing the Floo connection the way that Harry had suspected she would. He stared at her, and she murmured, “Did you realize that you’re calling him Draco?”
Harry flushed. “Am I?”
“Yes.” Hermione folded her arms and looked him over in a leisurely fashion, as though she were trying to see what other non-obvious changes might have happened to him. “And I know that you didn’t do that before. You seemed to clutch his last name as a talisman, as if that would keep him further away somehow.”
Harry squirmed. He didn’t know how to tell Hermione that his attitude had changed without sounding sentimental or more intimate than he could bring himself to be, even to her.
Luckily, Hermione seemed to sense that and take pity on him. She chuckled and sat backwards. “Just make sure that you’re getting enough to eat and enough rest,” she said. “I would hate to see you faint from loss of blood and then have to listen to Ron rant that he told us both so.”
“Me, too,” Harry said, realizing when he tried to shift back and sit up that he was rather dizzy. Draco was asleep on the bed right now, since it was early morning, and he wouldn’t care if Harry ate a meal without him. “Thanks, Hermione. For everything.”
“I’m happier than I can say that you’re turning away from what you would have become if you’d gone on hunting vampires,” Hermione said quietly, and shut the Floo connection before Harry could reply.
Harry didn’t know what he would have said, except that it would have run along the lines of It wasn’t the hunting that was the problem. It was seeing no purpose in life beyond the hunting.
He went to make himself a sandwich, which he followed with some soup, and then an apple that he’d had sitting in his kitchen for months under a preservation charm. As he munched the last bit of it, he blinked.
That food had tasted better than anything had in months. He didn’t know why that should be true, but he found himself running his tongue along his teeth to get the last crispness of the apple out. When he leaned back in his chair and looked out the window, he could see a wide beam of sunlight creeping through it and dust motes dancing in the beam. He hadn’t noticed things like that in months, either.
It’s sappy to say that accepting Draco’s companionship changed everything for me.
But, as he got a cup of tea and sipped at it thoughtfully, he thought it might be able to change the small things. He hadn’t paid attention to his food most of the time when he was hunting; meals were times free from work that he could use for thinking about the next hunt. He hadn’t bothered to look at the sunlight because there were Dark wizards or vampires or weapons or tomorrows to think about instead. Now he didn’t have a job to go to for the moment, and he could lean back and enjoy the advantages that Draco had brought him.
Harry ran his tongue along his teeth again and smiled wryly.
Strange that it took a vampire to remind me of living.
*
Draco woke slowly. This time, there was no immediate danger to him or his Long-Desired to make him spring to his feet. He rolled on his back, fluttered his eyes open, and looked up at the ceiling in sleepy dissatisfaction.
Harry wasn’t beside him.
Again, Draco wasn’t alarmed. He took a deep breath, and the scent of his Long-Desired flowed from elsewhere in the house. Draco stood up, smoothed out wrinkles in his sleeves, made an absent mental note to talk to Harry about getting him some new clothes, and then padded into the drawing room.
Harry was standing in the center of the room, frowning at a piece of parchment in his hand. When he heard Draco’s footsteps, he stiffened once, then glanced over his shoulder with a smile of welcome. “Are you just going to stand there, or come in?” he asked.
“I was admiring you,” Draco said quietly. “I haven’t often seen you in the light of sunset.” Harry had drawn the curtains of his bedroom tight so that no sunshine could reach Draco while he slept. The radiance, which Draco was careful to avoid as he made his way across the room, picked out threads of bright copper in the undertone of Harry’s hair, reminding Draco that his mother had been red-haired. It also burnished his skin and made his green eyes shine compellingly, but Draco wasn’t sure he should tell Harry that. It would probably give him a superiority complex. He caressed Harry’s cheek, then pulled his head to the side so that he could see his puncture wounds. “What were you doing?” he asked, voice breathy as he lowered his head so that he could bring his fangs into play again.
“Considering a list of offers I received some time ago, when I was still an Auror.” Harry swallowed, his voice also sounding half-strangled. Draco sniffed, but smelled no pain. He wouldn’t have kept bending Harry’s neck this way if he had. “Some people wanted me to teach them in a private Defense Against the Dark Arts class. I thought I might want to do that again while I wasn’t being an Auror.”
“And do you?” Draco licked the nearest puncture wound. Harry made a breathless noise. Draco listened, just to make sure the air was still moving steadily in and out of his lungs, and then smirked. It was all right, because at this angle Harry couldn’t see him.
“No,” Harry said, his voice slow and thick. He coughed and continued hurriedly, as if he thought that Draco would be ashamed by this evidence of his power over his Long-Desired. “I liked teaching Dumbledore’s Army when we were at Hogwarts. I tried to imagine starting that over again. But there was something different then. I liked teaching it because I wasn’t supposed to be doing it, I think.”
That startled Draco into laughing. He pulled back, because in this mood he would pierce the wrong part of Harry’s throat and take too much blood, and he never wanted to hurt his Long-Desired without premeditation. He laid the back of his hand along Harry’s forehead for the pleasure of feeling the scar and smiled at him. “What a surprise.”
Harry blushed, and that caused a different kind of pleasant heat against Draco’s hand. “So that’s out,” he said. “Maybe it isn’t even the fact that I would be doing it legitimately and with no one forbidding me this time. Maybe it’s that I’ve changed so much since I last tried to teach a class like that.” He hesitated, eyes fixing Draco’s. Draco stared back. Harry’s scent was hazy with confusion and didn’t tell Draco what kind of problem he was having.
“I’ve hunted,” Harry whispered. “I’ve been a murderer. And even though I regret doing it, that’s because I almost went mad and pushed my friends away and did my best to kill you. Not because I did the murders. Does that make sense? I don’t wish Caspar and the Collector were alive again.”
“Of course not,” Draco said. “If Caspar was still alive, then I would be his slave and not a master vampire. If I weren’t truly dead, because Caspar would have destroyed me for opposing him.”
Harry gave him a strained smile. “But what about the Collector? She wasn’t your master. Do you wish she was still alive?”
Draco wondered if Harry expected him to reply like a mortal. He couldn’t. He was so empty of those emotions that would have enabled him to that the words wouldn’t come.
“She’s dead prey,” he said at last. “And she would have killed you, if she could. No, I don’t regret dead prey, or dead enemies.”
Harry closed his eyes as if he wanted to hold back tears or anger, but he was smiling. He leaned forwards, so that Draco had to move the hand he had on Harry’s forehead, and leaned his brow against Draco’s. Draco held him and sniffed happiness, but still couldn’t understand. He waited for Harry to speak.
“I feel the same way,” Harry whispered. “I was feeling bad for that, that I didn’t want to go back and resurrect all my victims, that I still dream about hunting someday when I have myself under more control. I think that someone who was really moral, like Hermione, would regret it.”
“Thank Merlin you are not Granger.” Draco tightened his hold on Harry just thinking about it. “I would never have persuaded her to stay with me without a thrall unless I somehow appealed to her compassion for magical creatures. And I wish to be seen as more than that.” That last aspiration was not something he could have confessed to Harry if he had been like Granger, either. People like her would think it meant he had a mortal heart.
Harry flattened his hand against Draco’s chest and listened to his sluggish heartbeat for a moment. Then he said, “This is what I need.”
“Yes,” Draco said, with a small sigh. He had known that already from Harry’s scent and his behavior last night, but apparently one of the few mortal traits he still retained was a fondness for being comforted by a direct statement.
“You are what I need,” Harry said.
“Yes,” Draco hissed, and once again allowed himself to look at the puncture wounds with a sense of pride and possession.
“Because I’m scarred, and changed, and distant from the rest of humanity,” Harry went on, dragging a hand down Draco’s face and seeming thrilled when the sharp points of the fangs pricked his thumb, “even if not in the same way you are.”
Draco laughed quietly. “If you were changed in the same way as I am, I would never have felt interest in the first place.” He let his head fall forwards until he was almost slumped on Harry’s shoulder, and wound his fingers more tightly into the cloth of his robes. He wondered if they would grow together if they stood like that long enough, melding and blending one into the other, until they were a single creature of magic and blood and beauty like nothing the world had ever seen, both alive and undead.
Then he blinked. That was not the kind of thought that had come to him when he was Caspar’s slave, when he thought about the pleasure of his master first and survival next, and it was not the kind of thought he would have had as a mortal. Harry seemed to teach him new things even as Draco taught him in return.
“That’s true, even if you are amazingly literal,” Harry said. Draco wanted to ask him what he meant, but Harry’s hand was stroking his back and he forgot the question. “Well, I’ve decided that I need to acknowledge that change and not try to pretend that the years hunting vampires never happened. I want to hire myself out as a Dark creature hunter. When it isn’t vampires, I think I can use my cleverness without being consumed by my hatred, the way I was against your kind.”
Draco hissed in delight. “Yes,” he said, “I could help you with that. I could taste the blood of different creatures.”
Harry stirred in his arms and pulled back to stare at him. “I thought my blood was enough for you.”
“It is,” Draco said mildly, “but you can’t keep feeding me all the time without a rest, or not even Blood-Replenishing Potions will restore you.” He paused and sniffed one more time, which should have told him if any of the distinctive-smelling ingredients of that potion had been in the house. He didn’t smell anything, and arched an eyebrow. “And you haven’t brewed that potion at all, have you?”
Harry scowled at his shoes.
“It’ll give me a chance to drink,” Draco said, “without draining you dry. It’ll let us practice in various ways with the magic that I’m drawing from you. We haven’t explored half the limitations and possibilities of what it can do yet, you know. It will let us spend time together at night, since that is when most Dark creatures are awake.”
Harry blinked and tried to say something, but the words seemed to fail in the thickness of his throat. Finally he murmured, “You don’t have to come with me on the hunts, you know. I want you to, but you might be bored.”
“We had this discussion before,” Draco said patiently, though he felt a lash of irritation that Harry didn’t seem to retain the words that Draco went to such effort to pour into his head. “I think you would be the one bored far more easily. I could sit in a room and look at you by the hour, Harry. That would content me. But I do not think it would content you.”
Harry flushed.
“Hunting together sounds like the perfect compromise, for the reasons I have just listed.” Draco flicked his tongue out and licked Harry’s ear, then made his way down to the puncture wounds. Harry groaned and suddenly traveled several shaky steps backwards to slump against the wall. Draco pursued him, licking hungrily at the wounds now. “Don’t try to tell me that you really want to do something else more. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have been the one to raise the idea.”
Harry said something breathless that sounded like a protest, but Draco had no more time for silliness like that. He bit down, and the hot, lovely, complicated bouquet filled his mouth.
*
This time, Harry held onto his mind when the pleasure tried to steal it from him. He kept one hand on Draco’s shoulder, but he clenched his other one into a fist and drove his nails again and again into his palm. That made him blink and shake his head as the pain stung. The haze that tried to cloud his mind continually withdrew. Harry came to the end of the process, when Draco pulled back and licked his neck, still hard and panting, though he thought Draco had tried his best to make him orgasm.
Harry wanted to do something different this time.
“Wait,” he said, when Draco reached down for his erection. His voice was hoarse. He licked his lips and repeated the word. Luckily, Draco listened to him, though he tilted his head as he waited. His jaw looked more snake-like than usual, perhaps because he had unhinged it slightly to feed. In his eyes was a cat’s curiosity that anyone human would prefer to do something other than play and sleep and eat.
But Harry did.
He was coming back to reality thanks to Draco’s kisses and bites. But he wondered who would drag Draco with him. Draco said that he only wanted to sit in a room and look at Harry. His world should be wider than that. He should have other anticipations than the blood, other thoughts than making Harry happy.
Harry readily admitted that the first thing he wanted to do wasn’t guaranteed to carry Draco’s mind much beyond the blood. But it might be a start, and if it could encourage Draco to think about his own pleasure and his right to that pleasure as well as Harry’s, then it would accomplish one of Harry’s main goals.
“All right,” Harry whispered at last, and sank to his knees.
When he looked up, Draco’s eyes were full of wild, stormy light, as though he had just stepped through a door into another world and was trying to understand what had happened. He reached out with one faltering hand and grasped Harry’s shoulder. Then he shook his head and pulled the hand back. Harry wondered idly for a moment, as he undid the trousers Draco wore, which smelled of dust and must, whether his skin had burned him.
“You don’t have to,” Draco whispered, but the longing behind his words rendered them little more than puffs of dust from his clothes.
“I want to,” Harry said, just as softly, and then lowered his head and actually looked at Draco’s erection for the first time.
Pale, much paler than his own. Of course, Draco needed to use the blood for other things than to flush his skin down there. Harry swallowed, and wondered if it would taste differently than a mortal one.
Not that it much mattered, since he’d never tasted a mortal one.
Harry shivered and crushed down the urge to laugh as he leaned forwards and folded his lips around the head of Draco’s cock. That’s one good thing about this. The sheer effort it took me to accept a vampire as my lover got rid of any qualms I might have had about accepting a male.
He licked and lapped hesitantly. The erection was dry and like stone in his throat at first. It was only as his own saliva started flowing that his mouth could move easily. When he reached back to roll Draco’s balls in his fingers, he found them cool; the blood was moving more easily beneath Draco’s skin, but not enough to make much of a temperature difference.
More encouraging than anything else was the soft sighs Draco had begun to give above him.
Involuntary sounds that deepened as they went on, they reminded Harry of the way that vampires sounded when they fed on a chosen mortal after months of starvation. He had once had to witness that, on one of his first hunts, chained at the back of a nest as a woman was devoured, and he had seen-
The images of blood and death did not belong here. He put them aside and listened to the sigs that were for him, and not for some nameless victim. He knew without asking that Draco would have wanted no one else to do this for him, no matter how frustrated he became waiting for Harry to come around. Sex was not a need for vampires in the same way it was for humans.
He sucked, and the erection shifted in his mouth, and Draco moaned. He ran his tongue up the side, along the vein, and Draco bucked, teaching Harry for the first time how it felt when something large and blunt shoved against his teeth. He choked, but Draco didn’t seem to notice, and Harry moved cautiously back into position and sucked again.
He knew that sometimes men came in other men’s mouths without warning them first, but there was no way that he could have missed Draco’s sudden, strange stillness, almost as extreme as the stillness that he had when he first died in the morning. Harry relaxed his jaw and eased his head back, hoping he could catch most of it.
He didn’t catch half of it. Semen cascaded along his tongue and ran promptly out of his mouth, along his jaw. Draco’s cock trembled and flopped in the oddest ways. Harry gave up on swallowing and concentrated on arranging his mouth in such a way that Draco could feel pleasure even as he trembled out the last shocks of his orgasm.
When Harry leaned back on his knees and stared up at Draco, he decided that he had accomplished that part of his mission. Draco’s face was soft and helpless, almost human. With his fangs folded back, he looked particularly so. Perhaps only the blood around his mouth and the extreme pallor of his skin would have struck an observer who didn’t know what he was as strange.
Then Draco’s eyes opened.
And Harry found himself borne to the ground with inhuman strength, his neck suckled and his pants pried open at the same time. Draco snarled in his ear as he spat in his hand and twisted his fingers around Harry’s erection.
“I would suck you, but right now I’m too excited to fold my teeth back. I want to suck you. I want to fuck you. I want to feel your cock moving inside me, so tight and so quick that it hurts and my body dying won’t let me escape the feeling of it. I want to make you come and drape me with it, so that I’m looking up at you between curtains of it, spilling out of my mouth and down my cheeks as I swallow more. I want to suck you until my jaw aches and my tongue’s forgotten the taste of blood. I want to fuck you, fuck you, fuck you…”
His fingers made a frenzied movement, and Harry arched and shouted and cried as he came, his body shuddering so deeply that he thought he’d torn a muscle for a moment. Draco sighed deeply and buried his nose in Harry’s neck, sniffing at it, marking it, biting it.
“Oh, yes,” he whispered.
Harry rolled his head towards him, when he could move, and wrapped an arm around Draco’s neck.
If he has to focus on me so exclusively, he thought, I can’t say I can complain about the results.
Part Twelve.