Chapter Nine of 'Business Meetings'- Liar in the Lair
Chapter Eight.
Title: Business Meetings (9/15 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.
Thank you again for all the reviews!
Chapter Nine-Liar in the Lair
It was eleven at night on the third of the month. Draco did not often pay attention to clocks, but he had a silver one next to him now, and watched the bone-white pendulum swing back and forth, slicing the air into slivers, cutting time apart into small, manageable chunks. Not sunset, not sunrise, but names for all the hours in between.
Potter had not yet come.
As he thought that, he felt the tremor through the wards laid outside the mansion, wards that responded only to the blood of one the flock’s lord desired. Draco opened his mouth and held it still, made his lungs inflate with breath and then cool down again. The blood in his veins was sluggish, but stirred to the beat of his heart when he made the effort. With enough of that effort, he thought he could coax up a blush.
Not that Potter needed it, or would notice it if he came.
And here he was, striding into the room where Draco received him with an obnoxiously lifted head, halting when he caught Draco’s eye. Draco did not try to alter his expression, but Potter knew what he meant to convey. For a moment, he ducked his head, and his own cheeks changed color.
Draco sniffed, delicately expanding his nostrils so as to take in the air without offending Potter with his loudness. Dust. Heat. Blood, as always. And something softer and darker, creeping along the edges of Potter’s scent like mist.
Draco knew what it was. He did not expect to smell it here.
He held still, and Potter began an account of what vampire-related legislation the Ministry had passed in the last month. Draco knew of it already. He sat still, scenting and smelling and listening. Yes, there it was, in the irregularity in Potter’s breathing, in the way his muscles moved too often, in the eyes that rolled right and up without input from him and so swiftly a human would not have seen them.
Draco was not human. And in moments like this, for the sake of what he could do for and to Potter without being human, he rejoiced.
Potter ran down. He had not moved to the chair, Draco saw, and not tried to meet Draco’s eyes after the first few minutes of the recitation, despite the fact that he knew neither of them liked or believed in his submission. He stared at his boots, and the irregularity in his breathing became more pronounced.
Draco considered several ways of approaching the matter, all of the thoughts beating through his skull as the fragile as the twist of a butterfly’s wing. And he rejected them in the end, because there was no reason not to. “You are lying to me,” he said.
Potter jerked as if he would spill off his feet, and then came back up glaring. “I am not,” he said, words as hot as the blood. “Every word I told you about the legislation was the truth. You have your own spies to tell you if it wasn’t, anyway.”
“Not about that,” Draco said, and sniffed the air again, this time not caring if Potter saw him doing it. Perhaps that would mean he stopped lying, which would be an advantage. The fragile, drifting deception, and intent to deceive, which Draco had sensed before, had now increased to the point that it would have tainted Potter’s scent soon without any of his extraordinary efforts to discover it. Draco leaned back in his chair, tapped his fingers on the stone arm of the throne, and stared at Potter. “You thought you could lie to me?”
Potter’s teeth showed for a brief instant. Then he said, “What I found out does no good. You can’t use the knowledge.”
Draco stood. “Say that again,” he said. “With full belief.”
Potter watched him for a moment and then looked away again. At least he had ceased to drop his eyes. Draco watched the way his jugular and carotid moved with his neck, and stifled his hunger again. Long delay might make the appetite sweeter. “You could use the knowledge,” Potter said. “But not without risk.”
“I am a dominant vampire,” Draco began, taking the first step down from the throne.
He crouched there as Potter whirled back on him. In a moment, he knew what spring he would take to break Potter’s neck. Potter gripped his wand, and then pulled his hand back and shook his head with what looked like more than ordinary gloom.
“You told me what that means,” he said. “It makes you better with vampires. Not less vulnerable to peo-humans. The Ministry finds you moving with your flock, and they’ll have all the excuse they need to destroy you.”
“Tell me,” Draco said, and flickered his tongue out. As with snakes, this sometimes made the smells in the air more intense for him, and it was doing so now. Potter trembled on the edge of exhaustion, he thought. His head was bowed, his legs locked against the possibility, but he would tumble in the end.
Draco thought of catching him, and had to fight the temptation to retract the order to tell the truth, which might lead to truth, which might lead to Potter resting. He would very much like to catch Potter if he strained to keep upright and then fell.
But I can catch him in other ways. Ways that can wait.
“I-I found out who attacked me two months ago, when I came into your lair wounded,” Potter said. He seemed to make an effort to keep the words “bloody” or “bleeding” from his lips. He clenched his hands into fists in front of him and stared at Draco, his eyes two pools of phoenix fire. “But that’s it. The Ministry dropped the knowledge in front of me like a lure. They want me to use it. They want you to emerge from hiding and try to destroy this person. That means they’ll have an excuse to move on you.”
“I am not hiding,” Draco said.
“From your stronghold, then.” Potter still looked at him with those phoenix-fire eyes, but his mouth relaxed enough to form a smile. Draco wondered what those teeth would taste like against his fangs. “But they know that you-they know you find me an important enough ally to attack someone who attacks me. What I don’t know is how they found that out,” he added, and bowed his head to frown at his hands.
“They were able to send an assassin to the gates of what you call my stronghold without alerting me,” Draco pointed out dryly as he stood. “They have either vampire allies-who could smell my scent on you-or they keep you under close observation. I am inclined to suspect the latter, as any vampires who aided them, whether or not they were part of my flock, would know what I could do to them if I caught them.” He sauntered down the steps towards Potter, who looked up to watch him.
“What you have not explained is why I should not emerge,” he murmured, and extended his tongue so that it nearly touched Potter’s ear. The scent of his skin there, if slightly sour from earwax, was still heady enough that it meant Draco needed the support of the steps. “Why should I not kill the one who tried to kill you?”
“Because it’s a trap,” Potter said, and began speaking with so much space between his words that Draco could have strangled him before he finished the sentence. “Have you heard of the word trap? It has four letters, and it rhymes with snap, which the Ministry would do to your neck if you ventured out.”
Draco laughed, not a sound but a breath, and watched Potter turn in response to it. His eyes had changed color, the green deepening as black spread through it. Draco looked closer, and saw the flecks of blue and grey and jade and hazel buried deep in the green, all the different shades that made it what it was. “They fear me enough to send you to the flock as negotiator, and you think they could destroy me?”
Potter grimaced. “If you react as thoughtlessly as you did two months ago when you tried to claim I was yours, then yes.”
Draco paused, and lowered the hand that he had started to move to rest on the nape of Potter’s neck. He did not retract it to his side, however, but kept it hovering near the small of Potter’s back. There might yet be a need for it. “That is what you fear, then?” he asked. “That I would attack because I consider you mine, and fall victim that way?”
Potter nodded. “I saw your eyes when you spoke to me that way,” he said. “They’re never human, but just then, they were animal. Malfoy.” He leaned forwards until his lips were near Draco’s. Draco waited, and it was the greatest feat of control he had managed since he became a dominant vampire. “You have to think about this. Your flock needs you. Not me. There’s no reason for you to help me hunt down the one who attacked me. I’ll handle him myself.”
Draco half-turned his head to the side, and his tongue touched Potter’s cheek. Potter tilted his head back in response, and Draco’s hand had started for his neck again, his fangs had started for the bared throat, before he remembered, and leashed himself.
“I cannot hunt him down as one friend for another?” Draco whispered, knowing Potter’s ears would pick up the reply no matter how softly he said it. They were too close for that not to happen. Potter’s heartbeat sang in his ears, he heard the nervous gulp, but he, also, would hear any words Potter chose to speak; they were too precious to lose. “You are not a vampire, not a member of my flock, not my lover. Not mine. But friendship is an equal bond, a claim that cannot be challenged or abandoned without pain. You would not allow me to hunt him down because you are my friend?”
Potter swallowed again and opened his eyes, looking as if he didn’t know when they had fallen shut. “No,” he said, and his voice was faint as ashes but flashed to fire in an instant as he stared at Draco. “And I’ll tell you why.”
Draco’s hand was a whisper-glide across his shoulder, not that Potter seemed to feel it. “I can hardly wait,” he breathed.
“Because my friends would leave him alive,” Potter said. “They would arrest him and bring him in. You would kill him.”
Draco smiled to control the rage that had risen up in him. He could smile in joy; he could snarl in rage. Either way, he needed his fangs bared at the moment. “Then don’t call us friends,” he suggested. “Call us those who will belong to each other in the future. Please, Potter. Allow me.” His words snapped in the air like manacles shutting.
Potter blinked at him for a moment, a drugged glaze in his eyes, and Draco understood something he had not before. Potter wanted to do that. Some part of him would have thrilled to the sight of blood and vengeance, would have heard that the man who had attacked him was dead of a vampire’s stroke across the throat and would have smiled and smiled.
But he would not allow himself to be that needy. In another moment, the desire was gone, and Potter merely lifted his eyebrows and shook his head.
Draco breathed in rage, breathed out acceptance. He touched Potter on the back of the neck, because he had to have something, and then murmured, “Very well. I will leave you to handle it. If you grant me two things.”
Potter watched him with wild-summer eyes, and said nothing.
“If you come to my house when you are in need of sanctuary,” Draco said. “And immediately on the day that the Ministry gets to be too much for you.”
He heard Potter’s lips straining around the subvocalized words, his urge to say that the Ministry would never be too much for him. But in the end, he was smart enough to hold them back and nod, waiting for the second request.
Draco leaned forwards and kissed him.
His fangs scraped against Potter’s lips, and did not cut, because Draco willed them not to. He scraped Potter’s tongue with his own, and felt the jump that poured through him when Draco did that, all the trained and shivering muscles locked in an instant and poised for action. Potter’s mouth was hot as Hell, his tongue slippery as Draco’s morals. Draco drew him closer and tasted copper and warmth and sunlight, lingering until he knew he would have to bite and claim if he stayed.
Then he drew back. Potter blinked after him, raising a hand to touch his mouth. The yearning in his eyes made Draco poise on the balls of his feet. If Potter beckoned him, he would be there in an instant.
But in the end, Potter chose to turn and walk away without sound or other motion.
Draco sighed and sat down on the last step leading up to his throne. His tongue had gathered one drop of blood from the inside of Potter’s mouth, from some not-quite-healed cut, and he held off until he could hear his stomach cramping.
Then he flicked his tongue back into his mouth, and tasted what to him was sweeter than orgasm.
I can wait. I must wait, knowing the reward.
But, Harry. Do not make me wait too long.
Chapter Ten.
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