Chapter Seven of 'Business Meetings'- Verbs
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Chapter Six.
Title: Business Meetings (7/15 or 16)
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this for fun and not profit.
Pairing: Harry/Draco, mentions of others
Rating: R
Warnings: Creature!fic, angst, violence, sex, ignores the epilogue.
Summary: Draco leads a powerful group of vampires. Harry is their Ministry-appointed negotiator. Cue a series of once-monthly meetings where Harry and Draco argue about the various virtues of attacking the Ministry versus holding back from doing so, and, eventually, other things.
Author's Notes: This is going to be a fic with very short chapters, probably close to 1000 words each. I'm not sure yet how long it will be, but probably 15 or 16 chapters.
Chapter One.
Chapter Seven-Verbs
Draco lifted his head. Then he paused. He had smelled a scent of blood, he was sure of it, through the nose of the vampire he had on guard at the door-
And, abruptly, there was a leash pulling tight in the back of his mind, as someone yanked against the chain that he had on the impulses and instincts of the flock. Draco straightened and put slack in the chain again without thought, but his fingers had twitched open. “Florent,” he said aloud. He didn’t need to, but he savored the sound as a counterpoint against the abrupt noise of accelerating footsteps. Florent was on his way to the front door.
Draco leaned back on the throne, shut his eyes, left a bit of his perceptions and senses guarding his body against any dominance challenge, and then sent the rest of his control speeding along the leashes that linked him to the other vampires, to Florent and the door guard this morning, Amelia.
Darkness came to him, flavored with starlight, and moonlight, and dust. And blood. Potter stood with one arm braced against the side of the doorway, his body swaying with small tremors that he was trying to control, his eyes filled with shattered light that made the moon and stars seem dim.
“It’s nothing,” he was saying. “Could you take a message to the Lord Malfoy and tell him that I’m here? On the third. As always.”
Draco watched through Amelia’s eyes, and tightened her chain again as a long, thin slice of dark red slid down Potter’s temple, from under the dark hair.
Nothing. Potter stood on the flock’s doorstep, bleeding from a recent attack-he still had his wand out, there was still the dusty-hot scent of his magic in the air-and he wanted Amelia, and Draco through her, to believe it was nothing.
Draco flowed upright. He concentrated on the stone of the chair arms under his palms, the darkness of the stone that was like the darkness of blood, the way that it crumbled and cracked under his touch but did not flake. He had built the throne to last. He had had it built. His mind hummed and sang with the pressure of controlling Amelia’s hunger, of Florent’s hunger as he smelled the blood, and their fear as Draco’s rage echoed up the links to them. They escorted Potter into the house, staying well back and with their fangs bared against any other vampire who approached them, rather than in search for the blood that still trickled under Potter’s battered and torn clothes.
Draco sat, and waited.
When Potter stepped into the throne room, he glanced around as though he believed Draco would be somewhere other than the throne. Then he saw him, and half-bowed his head. He tried to keep his lips apart as he straightened, to conceal the hiss that the movements cost him, but Draco saw, and heard, and smelled.
And would not tolerate.
“Who attacked you?” he asked.
“I don’t know the name, and they didn’t bother showing me their face,” Potter said, dry as the scent of his magic, as he turned towards the chair set out for him. Draco snapped his fingers, and Florent and Amelia hurtled like hounds towards the chair, dragging it forwards across the floor. Potter paused, then snapped a glance over his shoulder as sharp as the sound of Draco’s fingers.
“Thank you,” he said, having better sense than to argue against that, at least, and seated himself. Florent and Amelia hovered on either side of him until Draco twitched the chains in his mind and told them without words to go. Then they backed out of the room, heads twisted to the sides so Draco could reach their throats easily.
It was not their throats he wanted to reach.
“You will tell me what happened,” Draco said, and Potter paused in wiping stone grit out of his hair and raised an eyebrow.
“Yes, if you’d give me a chance to make myself presentable, then I will,” he said, and shook more grit out. Draco watched, although the subtlety of his senses had already detected the presence of another source of blood, and saw the moment when Potter’s expression twitched into nausea and he raised one hand as though to touch the side of his head, then snatched it back down.
“They drove you into the wall with the force of their attack,” Draco said. “They must have struck just as you appeared from the Apparition.”
“Of course, if you want to tell your own version, I’ll just sit here and listen to you.” Potter swung his legs over the arm of the chair in the poor human’s version of the gesture Draco favored and stared at him.
Yes. Listen to me. Draco placed the hunger for that in the same cupboard where he had confined his hunger for Potter’s blood, and the hunger of his followers. Most vampires could not have done that, but most vampires were not the leaders of flocks. He studied Potter and saw the purpling, bleeding bruise on the side of his head, the deep cut on the side of his neck, the way that he shifted his arse and back on the uncushioned chair.
“Tell me,” he said, and lowered his voice. Potter froze in mid-motion, then sighed and lowered his head.
“They struck at me when I was coming out of Apparition, like you said,” he mumbled, apparently having a constitutional dislike of raising his voice to a proper level. “They must have known exactly when and where I would arrive.” He grimaced. Draco watched the play of the small muscles in his face. “Not hard, when a dozen people watched me leave the Ministry.”
“That is not usual,” Draco said.
“You do want to help tell the story, don’t you?” Potter muttered.
Draco stretched and leaped off the throne, coming down more slowly than gravity would have demanded at the foot of the dais. Potter froze, and a welcome new scent mixed with that of his blood and magic, a scent that had a flicker of subdued fire to it. Draco did not mind the subdued nature of it. This was a flame that he would stir to full burning soon enough.
“No,” he said, voice coming from near Potter’s ear as he threw it, though he still stood more than sixteen paces away. “Then what happened?”
“Whoever it was had Auror-level training.” Potter watched him, and his eyes had narrowed, his chin had lowered, and he had his wand comfortably in his lap. Draco felt his fangs extend. Potter was aware of him, ready to move, but that heated component to his scent hadn’t vanished-and need never, as far as Draco was concerned. “At the least. The spells came fast, but they weren’t as good at offense as I am at defense. One Blasting Curse that took me into the wall, as you said. I got a Shield Charm up in time to take most of the force of it, and then they tried with several Cutting Curses, a Leg-Breaker-which was misaimed at my waist, of all places, and shook me up a bit when I tried to block-and-” He fell silent.
Draco came closer. He thought he glided, but how he moved wasn’t important right now. He watched Potter instead, and the way that Potter’s lungs inflated, and the way his hands curled on the chair next to him, and the way that wand stayed still.
“You will tell me what happened,” Draco whispered. “You will not protect someone who tried to kill you.” Someone standing a few paces away might have heard the croon in his voice and thought those words to Potter were less than orders. Potter was not a few paces away.
He swallowed, and his eyes flickered to the side. Draco took another long, blurring stride closer, and then his palm cradled the side of Potter’s head.
“They tried to use the Cruciatus Curse on me,” Potter admitted. “A little bit of it got through. I wasn’t expecting that, and I had a shield in place, but not fast enough.”
Draco nodded. “And you think that the person who did this came from the Ministry.” Once again, he asked no questions. He did lean close enough that he could smell the precise mingling of Potter’s blood and sweat and skin-smell in his nostrils. His palm remained in place, supporting, binding, holding.
“Had to be,” Potter said, and the corner of his mouth lifted in a snarl that was impressive despite its lack of fangs. “I’ve done too well by interviewing Dyerson, getting him to admit that he suspected that potion he took which enthralled your vampire was a deliberate political move, and publicizing it. They underestimated how eager the papers always are to talk to me.” Now his teeth showed. “I soothed another confrontation between the Ministry and your flock, and took away their nice little pretext for attacking you. I’m doing this bloody job too well.”
“Yes,” Draco said, and he bent, his mouth so near the blood that his tongue could flicker out and taste it. And he would. In a moment. He saw no point, however, in securing the satiation of the hunger in his stomach without soothing all his other hungers at the same time. “And the job is doing you bloody.”
He felt Potter’s laughter through his hand. “That’s a good joke, Malfoy.”
“No jokes,” Draco said, and his voice was a croon, and that was very well, because there was no one else to hear it but those who needed to. “Your own employers tried to kill you. I know how hard it is for you to sit here without reaching out and touching me. I can feel the way your heartbeat shakes your body.”
“Wait a minute, Malfoy,” Potter began, and his body surged with a motion that did not become a rise to his feet because Draco did not allow it to.
“Does your heartbeat lie?” He extended his tongue and let it hover less than an eyelash’s blink from the bloody side of Potter’s throat, let himself feel the heat, let Potter feel the wetness. “Does the way that you trust me, that you offer me your throat without thinking, that you continue to protect me and do what you think is necessary to help me no matter what your employers say? Stay here.” He made it an order in the same way he had made the request to tell him about the attack an order. “You are mine.”
Potter’s backhand to the mouth broke both his fangs.
Draco snapped back to the throne in a series of leaps, hissing. The leashes in his mind trembled, but he held back the vampires. He ran his tongue along the bottom points of the fangs, and discovered that he had lost only the tips. Good. A dominant vampire could regrow his fangs, but it would have taken months if it was done closer to the top, while this would be the work of only a few nights.
He lifted his head and looked up at Potter, who had risen to his feet and showed no signs, now, of a curse meant to break bones or the most intense pain curse wizards had ever invented.
“Everything you said about my wanting to help you and trust you is true,” Potter said, and looked at Draco as from a mountain height. All else in his scent, even the blood, even the magic, had vanished behind a scent of dust. “Everything about the Ministry being a bunch of untrustworthy bastards. Everything about the way I offer my throat.” He paused. “Everything but the last.”
Draco was still.
“I offered you my throat, you said.” Potter’s heartbeat was fast and loud, but his eyes never closed, and his wand never wavered. “You should have learned to emphasize the verbs better, Lord Malfoy. I am never someone’s unless I give myself.”
Draco was still. If he was not, he would attack, because Potter issued a challenge now worse than Duncan when he had thought he could take the flock, worse than Yacinth the first moment Draco opened his eyes as a newly-created vampire and found him standing there. Composed, complete in himself, far from the creature of heedless heartbeat that Draco had thought he saw sitting in that chair.
“You can’t take that gift,” Potter finished, and turned on his heel. No sign of pain as he walked from the room. No sign of blood. His wounds had sealed themselves.
Draco was still. Then he lifted one hand, cradled in his lap rather than clutching the arm of his throne, and used his tongue to lick the small drop of blood he had managed to collect there from Potter’s wound before he was flung away.
The taste on his tongue was like seeing sunlight again.
Chapter Eight.