Chapter Seventeen of 'The House That Lovers Built'- Things Once Shared
Chapter Sixteen.
Title: The House That Lovers Built (17/18)
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairings: Harry/Draco, Ron/Hermione mentioned
Warnings: Angst, violence, forced bonding (of a sort), hurt/comfort.
Rating: R
Summary: A planned Auror raid on a notorious Potions brewer goes wrong. Badly wrong. To the point of Harry-ending-up-trapped-in-a-magical-house-with-Draco-Malfoy wrong. And the secret to leaving is going to be something that Harry might not have the strength to face.
Author’s Notes: This is a hurt/comfort fic for both characters in some ways. The forced bonding is more related to the house than to a typical bond. And, finally, I’ve been wanting to write this fic for a long time. It will update every Monday, and probably be somewhere between ten and twelve chapters long.
Chapter One.
Thank you again for all the reviews!
Chapter Seventeen-Things Once Shared
Eating breakfast with Draco was different than Harry had imagined it would be, after the house. Draco woke up before he did, but when Harry opened his eyes, Draco was sitting up in the bed beside him, doing nothing but tracing one finger over Harry’s face, lingering each time he passed on the scar. Harry sneezed, and Draco took his hand away and smiled at him.
“I’m sorry, did I irritate the sleeping prince?” he murmured.
Harry shook his head and sat up. “I’m surprised I managed to sleep as long as I did, with you doing that,” he answered around a yawn. “Give me a few minutes to take a shower, and I can go down and get breakfast ready.”
“Oh, I already did that,” Draco answered, leaping off the bed.
He was trying desperately to act casual, bending down to pick up Harry’s shirt from the floor, but Harry could hear the intensity in his voice, and knew how much it meant to him. He blinked and held still for a minute, until he was sure he would say the right thing. Then he said, “Well, thank you. What did you make?”
Draco glanced over his shoulder. “Toast and eggs. It’s about all that I know how to make. It’s what I have for breakfast every morning,” he added, as though he thought Harry would wonder how he managed without house-elves.
Harry did wonder, but to have Draco make him breakfast was still so strange and new that he reached out and took Draco’s hand, kissing the back of it. Draco stared at him, blushing until Harry thought his face might explode. Harry looked away and gave Draco a minute to recover while he Summoned his morning robes. “Good, I’m starving,” he said.
Draco leaned around to the side as though he wanted to make out how thin Harry was under the robes. Harry tweaked him on the arm and stood up, tugging the robes shut. “Not literally,” he said.
“Good,” Draco said simply, and Harry remembered what they’d discussed last night. No, jokes about starving in front of Draco probably weren’t going to be fun for him, not when he had Harry’s relatives in mind. “Well, then. I also managed to find the tea, although I didn’t know how to make it so you would like it.”
“No one else can get tea right for me,” Harry said comfortably as they left the bedroom and headed for the kitchen. “Even the Healers that were taking care of me after that severed arm I had last year couldn’t get it right, and I told them again and again.”
“Severed arm?”
Harry reached out and touched Draco’s shoulder, turning him gently around. Draco held his eyes as he pivoted on his heel, and there was apprehension in his face, but also something like scolding. Harry sighed. “My job is dangerous,” he said. “But I should still have said nearly severed arm. They’re fine, as you noticed.” He swung his arms back and forth.
“I didn’t notice a scar on your shoulder where they had to attach it again,” Draco said, his fingers twitching as if he wanted to push Harry’s robes out of the way and check.
“That’s why I should have been more specific,” Harry said. “It really wasn’t that bad. All right, it was painful,” he corrected himself, when Draco gave him a sharp look. “But not worse than that, and they got to me in time to prevent the arm from falling off.”
“I’m glad,” Draco said simply, and then closed his eyes and shook his head. “I think worry over you is going to kill me faster than your friends or any of the other things I’ve thought of,” he muttered.
“I really am sorry about that,” Harry said, taking Draco’s hand and squeezing it. He was wondering why he hadn’t foreseen this, but then, that was probably one thing he’d missed out on by not having a regular lover. He had friends to mourn him and worry about him when something like the Arm-Severing Curse happened to him. He had Healers. He had other Aurors. But in the end, he went home when he was feeling better, and no one was there to hang over him or gainsay him.
There’s compromises that we’ll both have to learn to make.
“I know,” Draco said, sighing. Then he laughed and tugged on Harry’s arm. “We’re the only pair I’ve ever heard of who stand here chatting about things that happened years ago while our breakfast gets cold. Come on.”
Harry thought of mentioning that the Arm-Severing Curse had been just a few months ago, but didn’t. His life was different now, and he thought he was going to enjoy seeing how different it could get.
*
“You realize that some people aren’t going to trust you so easily again, mate?”
Harry kept his eyes on the report in front of him, on a case that two other Aurors had handled while he was stuck in the house with Draco. “Because I was trapped with Draco?” he muttered, shaking his head and laying the report aside. He didn’t know why they’d sent it to him. He hadn’t handled the case, it was done, and it was the sort of case he could have solved in an hour anyway. It had only taken the other team two. “Or because I’m sleeping with him now?”
There was so much silence across the desks that Harry finally looked up. Ron was staring at him with his hand frozen above his cup, his jaw hanging. Harry shook his head. “You know Hermione tells you that you’ll catch flies if you do that, and she doesn’t want to kiss someone with fly-breath,” he advised Ron.
Ron snapped his jaw shut and leaned back with his hand over his eyes. “I think I preferred you when you didn’t have a lover, if this is the way you act,” he muttered. “Mate, you-you’re sleeping with him now?”
“Yes,” Harry said. “It’s a decision that we both made.”
“Listen, mate.” Ron didn’t look at him, as though he was afraid of what he would see in Harry’s eyes if he did. “I’m not like Hermione. I don’t think that he raped you. But are you sure this is the best idea? Your past, and I’m not just talking about Hogwarts. The way that he hates us. The way that we hate him.”
“You got along well enough at dinner last night,” Harry pointed out, and flipped to the next page of the report. His hands were slick and cold, and he had to keep swallowing, but he was determined not to show that to Ron.
“He stayed, didn’t he?” Ron asked in a resigned tone. “And why am I asking about this when I don’t want to know?”
Harry laughed in spite of himself. “Yes, he stayed. I asked him to. We had things to talk about.”
“And-” Ron closed his eyes and shook his head. “No, I’m not going to say that. Nothing good is going to come out of my saying that.”
Harry toasted him with his uplifted folder. “Good for you, to know that and to refrain from saying it. People can change, you know. I remember a time when you would have blurted out anything that occurred to you, just because it occurred to you.”
Ron watched him for a while. Harry turned to the next page of the report. His breathing had calmed down, and his hands were no longer so slick that he might have to wipe them off on his robes. The worst moment was past.
“That was a reminder that Malfoy could change, right?” Ron asked. “I just want to make it clear, so I don’t do something that offends you, like refer to him as the right little git he used to be.”
Harry sighed and leaned his chin on his hand. “What do you want me to say, Ron? That he’s changed? Because he has. I could never sleep with someone who couldn’t keep himself from insulting Hermione, the way he was in school. And I would never sleep with someone who I thought despised me for my blood. I don’t think he does, although it’s hard to tell until he says it. And maybe it’s more that he wants me so much that he doesn’t care who my parents were.”
Ron winced and held his hands up. “Another thing I didn’t need to know, mate.”
Harry smiled at him. “Sorry. You’re right. It’s just a complicated solution, and I know that some people are going to be against us because of it, and that some of the people who were on his side of the war might be against us, too. That just isn’t enough reason for me to walk away from him. I don’t know if that reason exists, unless he supplies it.”
Ron nodded and sighed. “There are more people with reason to hate him than you suppose, though,” he said. “There are Hit Wizards who’ve investigated him again and again, because they thought he was selling illegal potions. But he either took enough care to keep the ingredients out of the way or they were incompetent, because they couldn’t find anything.”
Harry winced a little. He had all the proof he needed to arrest Draco, if he took Draco’s freely-confessed secrets as a confession.
But he wouldn’t. That was the way it was. Draco wasn’t on the same level as Ron and Hermione to him, not yet anyway, but Harry would listen to the story if he caught Ron with illegal Potions ingredients. Or maybe Hermione, because it was more likely to happen with her. Since Hogwarts, she would break rules a lot more willingly in pursuit of what she saw as the greatest good.
“Let’s stop talking about it,” Ron said, standing up. “Let’s talk about something else, like this case Winthrop and Daffodil buggered up.”
Harry snorted. “How did they manage that, when they knew exactly where the delivery would be and who was making it?” he asked, and just like that, the moment slid past and their friendship was safe for another day.
*
Objections to his relationship with Draco did start sooner than Harry had anticipated, and from unexpected sources.
Someone bumped into him when he was walking back to his office with a cup of tea. Harry was a lot more graceful than he had been at Hogwarts, and a quick dancing step sideways saved him from spilling. He turned around to see who it had been, and whether it might have been deliberate.
The other Auror was a tall man Harry knew slightly, with dark eyes and hair and a silly little moustache plastered across his lip. Harry thought he knew what it was there for, to make the Auror look more handsome and manly, but he believed Draco’s face, which was entirely clean-shaven, got the same look without the same amount of effort.
“Pardon you,” Harry said, when the Auror only stood there and watched him, and said nothing.
The Auror shook his head. “You want me to pardon someone who’s defending a former Death Eater?” he asked loudly, and Harry saw heads turn around the corridor. It was the time in the morning when the most people came out for tea or to chat; the man had chosen his audience well. “I don’t think that’s going to happen.”
Harry smiled at him. “I didn’t actually say that, if you noticed. I asked you to pardon yourself, for being careless and clumsy enough to bump into me in the middle of a wide corridor. Now that that’s settled, I can go back to my office, and you can go back to your-work.” He turned away, bracing himself for another bump.
That didn’t happen, but another few Aurors crossed his path and paused to look critically at him. “Is it true that you defended Draco Malfoy to the Wizengamot?” asked Leopold Winthrop, one of the two Aurors who had buggered up the case Harry and Ron had been discussing.
“He didn’t have anything to do with the situation we were caught in,” Harry said. “He didn’t cause it. He didn’t trap me. That was the truth.”
“But now you’re associating with him,” said Harry’s initial accuser, stepping up behind him. Harry’s skin crawled at the notion of being trapped, but he stood still, because striking out was what they wanted, so that they would have the chance to accuse him of something more substantial. “This Malfoy. Someone said you invited him over to your house for dinner. Heard your mate Weasley talking about that. Is that true?”
Harry twisted his head to look back at him, and finally remembered the man’s name, Iverson. “Of course he was talking about it,” he said. “Best mates talk about things like that with their best mates, not that you would know from personal experience, Iverson.”
Winthrop’s partner snickered, and Winthrop frowned at her. Some of the other Aurors in the corridor began to wander away, probably because Harry wasn’t providing the spectacle they wanted, and Iverson stepped forwards and tried again, “lowering” his voice to a whisper that only people with their office doors shut a mile away wouldn’t hear.
“I meant the part about your eating with a Death Eater, Auror Potter. I meant the part about you sleeping with someone like him.”
Harry knew it was only a lucky guess, but he also knew that he wasn’t a good liar. He turned to face Iverson fully, and clucked his tongue. “Is that what all this is about?” he asked. “Jealousy? I should have guessed. Don’t worry, Iverson. I’m sure your prince will come someday and rescue you from the monotony of an empty bed.”
More people laughed. Iverson’s face was so red that he looked as if he would like to punch Harry in the nose. Harry stared levelly at him. He knew as well as Iverson that the first person to make this confrontation violent lost it.
Iverson mastered himself with a long breath and a faint smile. “Don’t you think someone would find it interesting, their Chosen One sleeping with a Death Eater?”
“Most of the people who would are right here,” Harry said, turning his teacup in a circle to indicate their audience. “And it’s true you’re a bit desperate, Iverson, but still. You don’t need to excite yourself like this in front of watchers.”
Iverson’s face was by now red enough to rival Ron’s hair. “I mean,” he said, through clenched teeth, “that someone might think it’s a bit unprofessional for an Auror.”
Harry sighed. No, he wasn’t a good liar, but he could use his courage to fight against the temptation to give way to fear. Show fear, and they would be on him in seconds, deciding that Iverson’s insinuations were more to their taste than Harry’s jokes. “He was a former Death Eater, that’s true. Someone who was accused, and then cleared by the Wizengamot. And someone who saved my life during the war.”
Iverson narrowed his eyes. “That’s not the way I’ve heard that tale told.”
“And we all know your sources are impeccable,” Harry drawled quietly, holding Iverson’s eyes, and saw him flinch for the first time.
“Are you sleeping with him or not?” Iverson demanded, leaning forwards. Most of the Aurors in the corridor seemed to hold their breaths.
“I’ll tell you this,” Harry said, and lowered his voice, glancing from face to face so that he could draw them all into the circle. “I’m not fucking him on the job, or fucking him on my desk, or paying more attention to my rows with him than to my fucking job.”
And faces around him turned red, because most of those around him had been guilty of one of those. It was the biggest peril of having an affair with another Auror. During the years that Harry had held himself back and taken no lover, he had avoided all those entanglements, and his eyes found glance after glance that darted down and away from him, or saw face after face that blushed.
“Lucas,” said someone else, coming forwards to put an arm around Iverson’s shoulders. “Maybe-maybe it’s okay. Potter’s a big boy. He can choose who he’s sleeping with, and it doesn’t reflect on the Ministry.”
Unlike most of the things other people here have done, Harry knew were the unspoken words lurking behind the spoken ones, and he smiled at the man who spoke. The man dipped his head back cautiously, blinking a little.
“I want to know what he means, doing this, when there are so many other people who would get in trouble with it,” Iverson said, and shook the restraining arm off. “Why does he get to get away with it?”
Harry raised his eyebrows. “Ah. So it is jealousy, but not in the direction I suspected. What former Death Eater did you sleep with that someone made a fuss about, Iverson?’
Iverson turned red and dark with hatred, and Harry nodded. Another lucky guess, but for him this time. “It’s all right,” he said. “I would have stuck up for you if I’d known at the time.” And he turned around, walking away, straight and noble.
Iverson said something else behind him, but Harry could already tell from the tone of his voice that it wasn’t the kind of something he needed to pay attention to. He thought he might have strutted, himself, but that was down to a mix of perception and rumor, and he couldn’t do anything about the people who might think him arrogant.
Except fend them off, and defend my relationship with Draco.
That was what he had done, wasn’t it? Harry blinked down the corridor. He had been so occupied with trying to make Iverson regret attacking him in the first place that he hadn’t considered his purpose. Or what Draco might think of it.
Or what certain people up the ladder in the Ministry hierarchy might, when they heard of it.
Harry clenched his jaw. He had given years of loyal service to the Ministry. He had given years of service to the wizarding world before that, if you counted the times that he’d fought Voldemort in Hogwarts-and he was disposed to, if it came down to a struggle about whether he had to give up his job or Draco. He never had before. The people who cared for his fame were not the ones he wanted to associate with.
But as he would do things for his friends that he wouldn’t do for himself, he would do things for Draco that went against the grain.
I’ve never had a lover that I wanted to protect so badly before. I’ve never had someone who meant-like this to me.
Harry had to smile when he thought of what Draco would say if he could hear those stumbling words. No doubt that Harry needed lessons in eloquence.
But the emotion was deep and true, at least, and it was a pleasure to know something for certain.
*
“I got this owl today.”
Harry looked up from the report he’d been writing, from the comfort of his own home for once instead of in the office. He had left the wards off the Floo so that Draco could get through without needing an invitation, but he hadn’t expected Draco to take up the silent offer so soon. “What is it?” he asked, putting his report aside.
Draco stepped out of the fireplace with no soot on his robes-Harry had to get Draco to tell him how he did that-and held out what Harry thought at first was a Howler. Then he recognized the white glow to the paper, and grimaced. It was worse, a Chider, a letter that spoke horrible words in a tone of sweet reason. He took it and spread it out, making a woman’s gentle voice start up.
“Certain people are spreading the rumor that you’re dating Harry Potter. I know that can’t be true, because a hero would never associate with a piece of Death Eater rubbish like you, and so you must be spreading the rumor for your own personal gain. I advise you to stop.” There was a pause, as though the speaker was considering her next words, and then she added, “Now.” And the Chider curled up into a scroll again. Unlike Howlers, they didn’t explode, so you could read them more than once.
Probably because the people who send them think their words are precious enough to deserve that, Harry thought, shaking his head, and reached out a hand to Draco without thinking. Draco took it. Harry could feel his hand shaking, and he drew Draco down onto the couch beside him with a tug.
“Is it just the words?” Harry whispered into Draco’s ear, curling an arm around his waist. “Or that someone sent you that at all, and thought she had the right to tell you what to do?”
Draco shut his eyes and nodded. “It’s both, but mostly-they’re trying to drive me away from you. They’re going to succeed, aren’t they?”
“Not unless you let them,” Harry said. He hadn’t intended to tell Draco about Iverson so soon, because he had thought that might upset Draco more than it was worth, but maybe it would help him now. “Because another Auror told me today that I shouldn’t be associating with a former Death Eater and heavily implied I would go Dark because of it, and I told him off.”
Draco stared at him. Harry reached up and framed his face with his hands, shaking his head gently back and forth. “You didn’t really believe me when I said that I was willing to try this, did you?” Harry whispered. “That I could want it, even if I didn’t know we would stay together forever?”
Draco shut his eyes and leaned forwards to rest his chin on Harry’s shoulder. “I thought that you would want it up until someone questioned you about it,” he whispered. “And then you would decide your peace of mind was worth more than me.”
Harry laughed. “I’m never going to content them no matter what I do. If it wasn’t this, it would be something else. Last year I had people trying to get me to date another Auror, because they told me it would be ‘weird’ if I didn’t. They think my private life is their public property. It doesn’t matter, Draco. I’ll stand up to them, and if that helps you resist the words of pieces of shit who send you Chiders-”
Draco kissed him so strongly that it almost flung Harry onto his back, and Harry had to hold onto Draco’s shoulders. Then he returned the kiss, and Draco cursed and muttered into his mouth. Harry stroked his hair, curling his fingers hard through it to give Draco something else to think about.
“Wanted it,” seemed to be the most frequent thing Draco was whispering. “Didn’t know if you wanted me, too.”
“Now you believe,” Harry said, and held him closer still.
Draco pulled back so their eyes could meet. “I do,” he said, and kissed Harry more gently this time, but more searing, more permanent.
Harry shut his eyes. Yeah, I could get used to this.
Chapter Eighteen.
This entry was originally posted at http://lomonaaeren.dreamwidth.org/522557.html. Comment wherever you like.