A Year's Temptation, Chapter Eleven--November (Part Two)
Draco opened his door himself the evening that Harry was due to arrive, and had to laugh at the hangdog look on his mate’s face. It was only partially caused by the raindrops clinging to his hair, courtesy of a sudden shower. “Kingsley more difficult to appease than you expected?” he teased, taking Harry’s cloak himself so that he had an excuse to touch him. Harry, wet or not, still radiated a warmth and strength that made Draco want to wrap himself around him.
“Yeah.” Harry tilted his head back and nestled the nape of his neck briefly into Draco’s hair. “I’m on parole, essentially, for six months. He couldn’t do much more than that, though, since I had the bad taste to actually capture someone whom the Ministry wanted pretty badly.” He twisted around so that he could kiss Draco, and Draco felt a frisson of even deeper warmth move through his belly. “It turns out that we have known Snape was alive, under different names,” Harry murmured into Draco’s mouth. “Kingsley knew any punishment he gave me would be all over the papers in a matter of minutes, and God forbid that we give the idea of a rift in the Auror Department to any outsiders. So I can work again, as long as I have the bodyguards with me most of the time, and as long as I understand that one more mess like that will result in my training new Aurors for the next ten years.” His voice slid into a gruff imitation of his superior’s on the last few words.
“It sounds like you need to forget,” Draco murmured back. “Dinner is ready, but the house-elves can keep it warm. Come to bed?”
Harry smiled up at him, eyes brilliant with more emotions than just lust. “Don’t mind if I do,” he breathed.
*
Harry was starting to wonder just how many ways he and Draco could be together in bed. He didn’t tend to separate the times he and Ginny had been together; they blurred into one great blob of satisfaction and cheer and giggling lust. Humor had always been a part of their sex. Ginny hadn’t been afraid to joke with him in bed, and that had been one of the things Harry best loved about her, the fact that she didn’t have much of a temptation to take herself seriously.
With Draco, it was different each time-more serious, but never simple, and each encounter stood out in his mind. There had been the urgency he’d felt the last time they made love, the simple animal glut of it, when his own orgasm and sharing pleasure with Draco had been equally important goals in his mind. There had been the heated rebellion of the time before that, as he tried to show both Draco and himself that Ginny couldn’t tell him what to do any more. There had been the time before that, when he simply yielded himself to Veela allure in hopeless weariness with everything else in his life.
And this time-
This time, there were more smiles than ever before. Draco touched him more gently, gaze fixed on his face, cupping his cheek as Harry sucked him off. He let his back arch more naturally, his eyes widen, gasps escape his mouth that Harry knew would have been shut up and imprisoned just a short time before. And Harry knew him now, and understood his body, including the way his muscles began to tremble just before he came. Harry sucked a little more strongly then, flicking his tongue delicately over the head of Draco’s cock. Much as he had learned to enjoy this, he’d already been at it for several minutes, and his jaw was starting to ache.
“Wait,” Draco croaked suddenly.
Harry stifled the flare of fear that he’d done something wrong. Draco wouldn’t be shy about telling him so; he’d already cursed Harry several times for using his teeth. He sat back and looked up at him.
Draco watched him in silence for long enough that Harry was tempted to squirm. He didn’t. He held his peace and his posture, kneeling naked on the fine carpet of Draco’s bedroom. Draco lay on the bed above him, his legs still hanging over the side and sprawled wide open, but his upper body propped high with his elbows now.
“I want to try something new,” Draco murmured, and reached for him. Harry rose to his feet hesitantly, watching in suspicion that he couldn’t hide even from himself.
“No penetration yet,” he said sharply. “I’m not ready.”
Draco grinned at him, and murmured, “Ah, but part of the point of this is to make you ready, to get you to enjoy it, isn’t it?” And before Harry could respond, he drew him down and started kissing him with force.
Harry made himself relax and kiss back. He trusted Draco not to push anything on him before he was ready.
He trusted Draco Malfoy.
Sometimes, when he thought about it, the oddness of his life truly galled him.
Draco rolled them over so Harry was beneath him, and Harry gave a small grunt of satisfaction. He wasn’t ready to admit it, yet, but he did enjoy Draco’s weight on top of him, sheltering him in warmth, surrounding him in heated skin until he found it hard to think about anything else. He grabbed Draco’s hair and tugged it several times, maneuvering his mouth back down for a more successful kiss.
Draco resisted, though, and turned his head so that he could breathe into Harry’s ear. “Turn over.”
Harry froze.
“Not for that, I promise,” Draco said. He rubbed soothing circles on Harry’s shoulder. “I simply want to show you something. Something that should feel very good and ease your nerves, without requiring the full bonding as yet.”
Harry took a deep heft of a breath, reminded himself yet again that he trusted Draco-though God knew why-and rolled over. Draco lay down on top of him again, and Harry bucked in pleasure. For some reason, the same warmth and weight he enjoyed on top of his chest felt even better this way, with Draco’s elbows sliding sweat-slick along his ribs and his erection-
His erection butting up, gently rubbing, against Harry’s arse.
Just rubbing.
Harry thought he might understand what Draco wanted now. He gave a breathy groan, and then Draco gripped his hips, holding him in place, and heaved him up the bed so that just his head emerged from the cocoon of heat that gripped them both.
Draco began to thrust, gently at first, but picking up speed. Harry wondered for a moment why the pressure as well as the speed seemed to change, and then realized he was thrusting back against Draco, arching his shoulders and twisting his head in encouragement.
His face flamed. He might have stopped if he had been able to think clearly. But Draco’s cock pushed against him, again and again, and each time it did, it sent clear thought scattering. Harry dug his elbows into the mattress to give himself more purchase and once again pushed back, and pushed, and pushed.
Why shouldn’t he be uninhibited, if he liked? Why shouldn’t he act like a slut, if he wanted? It was not as though there was anyone else here to see him do this.
And from the sound of the moans and near-sobs in his ear, Draco certainly wasn’t complaining.
Harry raised himself a little further and snaked one hand under his body to get at his own cock; the pressure from the front wasn’t quite enough to get him off. And then one of Draco’s hands slid off his hip and underneath him, joining him in pulling, tugging, jerking.
Their motions sped up by some silent agreement that Harry didn’t remember making, and then Draco gasped and stiffened, a warm stream of liquid splattering Harry’s bollocks and arse. Harry hoped Draco didn’t realize it was that, more than the hands on his cock, that carried him over the edge a moment later. He dropped bonelessly to the bed when the pleasure ceased to wrack him, and tried to remind himself that dinner was waiting, so he couldn’t go to sleep. He had been hungry when he arrived, but his eyelids insisted on dropping anyway.
Draco kissed his shoulder. “I love you,” he murmured.
Harry managed to open his eyes, and he rolled over, trying not to care about the mess he’d just smeared across the sheets. Draco probably didn’t care, he reminded himself as he stared into his partner’s eyes. “God, I love you,” he said, and couldn’t help the note of wonder and surprise that crept into his voice. Once again, he was trying to think back on his perspective several months ago, when the mere prospect of doing anything more than jerk Malfoy off while avoiding eye contact would have disgusted him. Now, he couldn’t find his way back to that place; now, his love for Draco simply seemed natural.
*
Draco felt a shimmer of heat travel through his belly, and regretted that his body wouldn’t be up to another go so soon. He kissed Harry, lingeringly, then pulled back. “The house-elves will probably be upset if we stay away from dinner much longer,” he murmured.
Harry nodded and stood, looking around for his robes and his wand, probably to spell the come off him. Draco, who had his wand to hand, flicked it and removed the mess, but pulled Harry in to his side when he would have reached for clothes. “You don’t need them,” he said. “I’ve put wards up so that Pansy can’t enter the house, and no one else ever comes here without my permission.”
Harry blushed. “So you want us to eat naked?”
“Why not?” Draco pushed him gently back into the rumpled bed. “And we can have dinner in bed, too, if we’d like.”
“I just-“ Harry ran a hand through his hair. “That feels decadent, somehow.”
Draco laughed and folded his arms beneath his chin as he snapped his fingers to summon a house-elf. When one appeared, he gave it orders to bring the meal into the bedroom in manageable, limited portions, while Harry shielded himself with a sheet. Draco snickered when he looked at his mate again. “They don’t actually care about human nakedness, you know,” he had to point out. “We aren’t at all physically attractive to them.”
Harry scowled at him over the top of the sheet.
“And, yes, it’s decadent.” Draco picked up Harry’s right hand and began to kiss the fingers, watching the way Harry’s eyelids fluttered languidly as he licked down and in between them. “Think of it as something essential about me, something you can’t change. You’re the heroic Auror who rescues wizarding society from itself, and I’m the decadent aristocrat who does things like eat fifty Honeydukes chocolates a day if that’s what he wants.”
“Ugh, that’s it, that’s the end of our match,” Harry declared dramatically, withdrawing his hand as the elf reappeared with trays of soup. “We’ll never be compatible enough. The most I can eat is forty.”
Draco laughed at him, and watched in interest as Harry very obviously attempted to conceal another erection. “But I’ve always wanted a lover with your stamina,” he murmured. “Do you want to wait on the meal?”
“No,” Harry said, and picked up his spoon, sipping his soup in a large and obvious slurp that made Draco shudder. “I have to keep up my energy, you know.” He grinned at Draco and then licked his lips.
Draco attended to his own soup with a will at the reminder, telling himself sternly that he could throw Harry down and have his way with him in a little while.
*
“What’s that?”
Harry turned his head to grin at Melinda. They’d had something of the closeness of co-conspirators ever since she managed to impersonate him successfully; Kingsley was convinced that Harry had simply used an illusion or a Confundus charm to convince the Aurors that he was still in the same place when he’d actually escaped, rather than using someone to impersonate him, and Melinda seemed to enjoy the thrill so much that she didn’t mind he’d lied about meeting Ginny. “A gift from Draco,” he said, and held it up so that she could admire it.
“It’s very…silver,” Melinda said diplomatically. She seemed to have lost her awe of him at last, and Harry liked her better for it. Her cheeks remained flushed, though, since she was Hestia’s cousin, and pink cheeks seemed to run in the family. Now her frizzy black hair bobbed as she examined the gift Draco had sent by owl post that morning with a slight frown. “What does it do?”
“I have not the slightest idea,” Harry said, and set it in the middle of the desk. “The prat didn’t include a note with it.”
The silver thing seemed like a machine, with a number of curving pipes that flowed into one another and small knobs that could be twisted. Harry twisted one of them. A small gush of steam rose from another part of the machine, and several tempting clicks echoed from inside it. Then a tinny music began to rise up from the center of it. Harry leaned closer, but he didn’t recognize the tune.
“I know that one,” said Melinda, looking surprised. “I heard one of the mothers we rescued not long ago singing it to her baby.”
“A lullaby?” Harry muttered.
Just then, probably as the result of a time-delayed spell, a note materialized in thin air over the largest tube and drifted downwards. Harry caught it and read it, at the same time absently catching the white Veela feather Draco had included with it. It rubbed gently against his skin, warm and sweet-smelling.
Harry:
I know that you don’t rest well some nights, especially when I’m not there to comfort you and hold you and soothe you to sleep. So I sent you this machine that always soothed me when I was a baby. The music is a lullaby that my mother used to sing to me. I would demand to hear it twenty times a night, so she finally enchanted this thing-one of the Malfoy family heirlooms that was terribly expensive but not terribly useful-to sing it for her.
Don’t worry about what the other knobs and tubes are for. Most of them don’t do anything. Once you figure out how to make it sing-as you should have if this note appears, though it might also appear to help you if you’re completely backwards and stupid about it all-then you’ve learned its major purpose.
Consider it a permanent gift.
Love,
Draco.
The song had stopped in the meanwhile. Harry twisted the knob to start it again. He didn’t know what Narcissa Malfoy’s voice had sounded like when she sang; he didn’t know, therefore, if the music was actually a good approximation.
He didn’t care.
“You’re grinning like a fool,” Melinda informed him gently.
“Don’t care,” Harry said simply, and listened until the song ran out before he returned to work. Draco had told him he intended to enter a period of intense courting once Harry was no longer in danger from Snape.
Harry intended to keep up with him as best he could.
*
Draco regarded the envelope from Harry curiously. It felt a little thicker than normal, but he couldn’t make out more from the outside than that the unusual thing inside it was square. He slit the envelope open and shook it into his hand, already nearly dying of curiosity.
It was a photograph, a wizarding one. In it, a red-haired woman and a black-haired man whom Draco knew at once must be Harry’s parents stood holding a green-eyed baby. Harry gaped at the camera, stretching his arms, struggling to be let out of his mother’s arms as if he knew instinctively that it wouldn’t hurt him.
Draco swallowed a lump in his throat and looked at the letter. It was very simple.
I know that you’ll take good care of this for me, love.
Harry.
No mention of trust or confidence. Apparently, Harry’s trust was so deep that he saw no need to refer to it directly.
Draco propped the photograph up on the mantle and sat back to watch it, trying to ease the delightful shivers that gushed up and down his arms and seemed to meet in his belly. When a message from the private Healer that he’d hired to look after Pansy arrived, he answered it as swiftly as he could, in irritation, and then returned to staring at the picture.
He wished he could have met James and Lily Potter. As it was, the most he could do was murmur, “I’ll take care of him. I promise.”
It occurred to him, about an hour later, that he might, just possibly, be in danger of becoming sentimental.
*
“You don’t really need to watch him anymore. I’ll escort him home.”
Harry’s Auror escort-consisting of Tallow and Selene, again-only had time to blink before Draco had gently but firmly taken Harry’s arm and Apparated them away. Harry relaxed, leaning into the Side-Along Apparition despite the fact that it made his stomach feel as if it had turned inside out, and glanced around curiously as they landed with a bump in a familiar room.
“The Phoenix’s Nest again?” he asked, mildly impressed. “Draco, you shouldn’t have.”
“Well,” Draco said, and guided him towards the table, where he pulled his chair out for him as if Harry were a girl, “we never did get to finish the last meal we had here, due to Severus’s unfortunate interruption, so I wanted you to see that I do know how to treat a bloke.”
Harry considered glaring and refusing the courtesy, but Draco’s eyes were shining, and if the appreciative gaze on Harry’s face was any indication, he really didn’t want a woman to be here with him. So Harry sat down, let Draco push the chair in, and didn’t even object to the napkin that Draco tucked into his collar before retreating to his seat on the opposite side of the table.
He did object when the food arrived.
“Oysters?” Harry shoved his plate away from him. “Oysters should stay on the bottom of the sea where they belong and stop polluting the tables of decent people.”
“Hmmm.” Draco picked up the nearest oyster and waved his wand at it, casting a spell that Harry assumed was nonverbal, since he prided himself on his hearing. The oyster’s shell neatly opened, what was inside slid out, and Draco caught and ate it, merrily ignoring Harry’s disgusted glance. “It’s really very good.” He glanced up, and though he was smiling, it didn’t reach his eyes. “Certainly much better than the food I had to eat after I refused to kill in the Dark Lord’s service and he imprisoned me.”
Harry’s eyes widened. Then he picked up the next oyster and cast a spell that weakened the shell and allowed him to pry it open. Not nearly as elegant as Draco’s solution, of course, since he still had to scoop out the meat inside, but it was important to show that he took this seriously.
“Hmmm,” Draco said again, and smiled at him, a smile rich with promises for later. Then his face cleared and his eyes turned inwards. “I don’t think you knew that, did you? That I was little more than a disappointment to the Dark Lord, who ignored me after Severus lied and bargained to spare my life. But one day, he decided he’d had enough of me. I was to kill one of my schoolmates, who would be an easier target than Albus Dumbledore and someone more on my level. Supposedly an easier task.” Draco licked his lips. “He couldn’t have found anything harder.”
Harry, who had been forced to kill two of his own Gryffindor schoolmates who’d turned traitor, reached out and clasped his hand. Draco turned it upwards, meeting Harry palm to palm and entwining their fingers.
“It was Mandy Brocklehurst, from Ravenclaw,” he said distantly. “The Dark Lord pretended it was a mercy, not to have me kill someone from Slytherin. He made me spend an hour talking to her before I tried, and then I was supposed to pick up my wand and speak the Killing Curse. That was supposedly a mercy, too, that he wouldn’t make me torture her first, or kill her with some nastier spell.
“I looked into her eyes, and that was the moment I knew I wasn’t a killer. Maybe I could have excused it with Dumbledore, due to shock and excitement, but I’d had all the time in the world to prepare, I could take all the time to kill her I liked, and I still couldn’t do it.”
Harry wanted to apologize, again, for forcing Draco into killing when Snape and Mulciber had attacked them, but he held his tongue. He sensed Draco simply wanted to tell this story, without interruptions.
“I threw down my wand and simply knelt there. I thought I’d die. But evidently the Dark Lord believed he could still use me as a bargaining chip with my father. So he simply tortured me.”
Draco used his free hand to undo the sleeve of the hand Harry held. Harry looked down and saw an old scar tracing steadily up his skin, along the vein. He’d seen it when they made love, but assumed, without thinking about it, that it was an old Quidditch wound; he had a few like it himself where splinters had dug in.
“He made me bleed nearly to death numerous times,” Draco said softly, “and cast a spell that kept me conscious and watching. That’s where I learned to live with helplessness, I think, and why I managed to put up with being a Veela so much better than you did at first.” He smiled humorlessly at Harry. “Do you know what it’s like to see death coming for you, and know you can’t do a thing about it? I learned.”
“I had no idea,” Harry breathed. He wished there was something he could do to make up for the pain Draco had suffered. If the bastard had been in front of him, he would have murdered Voldemort all over again, with a brand new hatred in his heart. “I knew-I knew you weren’t there when I killed him. I just assumed you’d spent the entire war under Snape’s protection.”
“Not quite,” Draco said softly. “Most of the beginning. I was with Avery in the few days before the end, when he finally grew bored with me and gave me back to Severus.” He hesitated, then added, “I was scheduled to be executed the day after you stopped him.”
Harry kissed Draco’s palm, unable to say anything. They sat in silence until Draco delicately flexed his fingers, coughed to attract Harry’s attention, and sat back again.
“Now,” he said, “you know what would make me feel better?”
Harry leaned towards him with eager eyes.
“If you ate an oyster,” Draco said, and his face lit with an expression of humor that showed the old wound had mostly healed, “smiling like you mean it.”
*
Draco had known the confession was coming. Harry had spent the past several days peering at him earnestly and then looking away whenever he caught Draco’s eye, as though he hardly dared contemplate what he was contemplating face-to-face.
Harry had an innate sense of fairness, Draco knew. He could hardly let someone confess an intimate secret to him and believe that he shouldn’t confess something in return-at least, not someone who had treated him decently.
Draco had told the story because he truly wanted to tell it, but also because he had known he was likely to get a story from Harry in return. There was nothing wrong with having multiple motives, he told his conscience whenever it started to agitate about things.
It was still the last day of November before Harry gave in and told him, though. They were sitting on the couch in front of the greatest fireplace in Malfoy Manor, beneath a series of family portraits turned to the wall. Most of them had started jeering when they saw Harry was male, and the rest when they had learned that he was a halfblood. Draco could still hear their muffled voices, but he ignored them. There was no reason that he should have to put up with his ancestors taunting his partner.
Now Harry, who’d been lying with his head on Draco’s shoulder and one arm around him, stirred. Draco let him go, let him sit up, let him turn and take Draco’s hands and stare intently into his face, and all the while tried to act as if he didn’t know what was coming.
“I have something to tell you,” Harry began.
As it turned out, he really didn’t know what was coming.
Harry quietly and hesitantly told him what his childhood with the Dursleys had really been like. Now and then he hastened to inform Draco that they’d never beaten him, never tortured him, never thrown him out of the house into cold and wintry weather to fend for himself. No, it had been mostly neglect. And insults, and forcing him to sleep in a cupboard and constantly compare himself to their son Dudley, and a persistent starvation that Harry tried to leave out of the story but which crept in anyway when he referred to food now and then.
Draco listened in silence, as Harry had done him the courtesy of doing, and then lifted Harry’s hands to his mouth and kissed them on the wrists when he had finished. He could feel Harry’s pulse going very fast beneath his lips. He rearranged them on the couch so that Harry was lying fully on his back and Draco was on top of him. It hadn’t escaped him that that position relaxed Harry and made his face open up, though he knew Harry didn’t want to show it. They would be equals in the bedroom once the needs of the bonding had passed, but Draco didn’t think he’d ever tire of showing Harry that he was not only loved, he would be thoroughly pampered and taken care of.
“Thank you,” he said quietly. “Thank you for trusting me this much.”
Harry ran a hand through his hair, and Draco closed his eyes and purred, one of the few remnants of the Veela left to him. “Of course I trust you, Draco.” He sounded faintly surprised.
“I mean,” said Draco, opening his eyes, “that you both trusted me with one of the most painful parts of your life, and trusted that I wouldn’t hunt them down and kill them when I heard.”
Harry’s smile opened up another world of emotions for Draco, and he leaned down and kissed him thoroughly, giving them both something else to think about.
But not to forget. Draco never intended that either of them forget anything they learned in this courting phase.
After all, this was one of the reasons that what they were building together would last.