Chapter Thirteen of 'A Series of Malfoy Events'- Where the Heart Is
Chapter Twelve.
Title: A Series of Malfoy Events (13/?)
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairing: Harry/Draco, others mentioned
Rating: R
Warnings: Light angst, brief violence, rather crack-ish humor
Summary: Harry saves Draco’s life. That should be the end of it. Except it isn’t, because Draco keeps coming up with crazy things-and Harry goes along with it because he can’t wait to see what Draco’s going to come up with next.
Author’s Notes: I don’t yet know how long this story will be. It will be largely fluffy, and updated every Thursday.
Chapter One.
Thank you again for all the reviews!
Chapter Thirteen-Where the Heart Is
Harry staggered away from the place the Portkey had dropped him, only pausing after a minute to look around. He’d thought he would go straight back to the dining room Malfoy had expended so much effort on yesterday.
But he hadn’t. Instead, he stood in a large, bare room. Harry might have thought it was a dungeon except that most dungeons didn’t have a giant ebony statue of a trumpeting elephant rearing on its haunches in the center. The elephant’s head and trunk were tilted back as if it was meant to be spraying water in the middle of a fountain.
“Impressive,” Harry said aloud, and moved over to rap lightly on the elephant with his knuckles. Maybe it wasn’t ebony, at that. Maybe it was onyx. Harry wondered idly if Malfoy had interests in an onyx mine that he’d never heard of, to create a statue like this. “An elephant is one animal that I never thought to compare you to.”
A torch flared off to the side. Harry turned in that direction, and abruptly all the other torches on the walls lit up in a racing circle, the flames dancing rapidly from sconce to sconce until Harry could see much more of the room.
“You’ve got to teach me that spell,” Harry said admiringly.
“You have to understand that I’m serious,” Malfoy said, appearing from around the other side of the statue. He paused to pose. Harry didn’t know why. Who finds it handsome to be standing next to an elephant? “You can’t break off the engagement.”
“You said something about the consent of both people being necessary if I wanted to,” Harry pointed out peacefully. His heart felt as though it filled his whole chest, and he found he was grinning. He sidled a step closer to Malfoy, who turned his eyes into slits, because he apparently also thought that was attractive. “That just means I need to persuade you to do it.”
“I will never,” Malfoy breathed.
Harry shook his head. “You know, you were the one who made it clear that you didn’t care a Knut for what the papers thought at the Crocodiles’ party. I’m learning from you. Live up to the courage of your own convictions and stop caring that they’ll say I jilted you.”
Malfoy looked at him with an absolutely blank expression on his face. At first Harry thought he was simply trying to guard his emotions, and then he realized, with a peculiar tremble behind his eyes, what it really was.
“That was never part of it, was it?” Harry asked, a little dazed. “You were never worried about public perception of our engagement ending.”
“Why would I? Everything I do is right.”
Harry wanted to laugh, to howl, to seize Malfoy’s head and pound it into the elephant statue. Maybe that would break open his stubborn skull and bring some light in flooding in.
Then again, Harry didn’t know anything about how hard onyx was. It was possible that the statue would crack instead, and Malfoy would probably just sue Harry for the cost to replace it.
“Fine,” Harry said. “If it’s not about the bad publicity, what is it that makes you not want to let me go?”
“You.”
“Yes, I understand,” Harry said, thinking he had it figured out now. Well, pretty positive. If he didn’t, then he-well, the possibility made something that felt like the thrumming of bees’ wings flood him, but he couldn’t believe he was right. “You think that I’m going to succumb to your charm and do what you want any day now. Well, I’m not.”
“Why not? Everyone else does.”
“We had a discussion about this,” Harry murmured. “I’m not gay or bisexual, and your personality puts me off.”
Malfoy dropped the last remnants of his pose and frowned at Harry. “What in the world? I’m someone who can give you whatever you want, and you like teasing me, and you were attracted to me enough to almost come in my hands. So what aspects of me could possibly displease you?”
“Well, your inability to listen to my words is one of those things,” Harry said dryly. “And your personality isn’t your wealth or my liking for teasing you or your attractiveness.”
“Then tell me what it is.”
Malfoy sounded oddly fascinated. Harry wondered if he was the first one of Malfoy’s lovers to tell him the truth, if only because the others would have wanted to stay with Malfoy for the money and notoriety.
The thought of that reminded Harry of what he was really here for. He straightened up. “Did you write letters to your former lovers demanding that they get together and attack you?” he asked.
“No.”
Harry rolled his eyes. Malfoy had been eating Harry up with his eyes when he said that, and it was hard to tell if he was sincere. “Well, then, did you tell Jessica Cassel to send me a ring that could have melted my finger off? Or a spell that would have blown me up if I’d opened the package it was attached to?”
Malfoy went so still that Harry had his answer before Malfoy spoke. No. For the first time, Harry thought he was seeing a look of naked shock among all those armored expressions, and he nodded slowly. Even if Malfoy was involved in some other way, he wasn’t involved in this.
“I nearly didn’t touch your ring, you know,” he said confidingly, and held up the ring to show Malfoy. “I thought it would be another one like that.”
“Why would she do that?” Malfoy whispered. “We parted on good terms. She would have no reason to harm you.”
“Neither would most of the other people I captured the other day.” Harry folded his arms. “So what’s going on? She was the only one I knew who wasn’t there, but there might have been others missing. This is why we really need your cooperation to tell who I captured and what your relationships with them were.”
Malfoy paused with his eyes so distant that Harry thought he was considering reality at last. Or just letting it into his life. The way Harry saw it, reality was all around Malfoy, but it was an open question whether he would let it intrude.
Then Malfoy’s eyes snapped over to focus on him again, and he said, “Ah. I understand. You were the one who sent those letters to the others.”
Harry felt his mouth open, but he couldn’t say anything. The stupidity had strangled him.
Malfoy nodded once, then flew off into the clouds along his rambling track. “Yes, yes, I see. How interesting. Well. I didn’t expect you to get organized that quickly, or decide that you wanted to date me that much. But it seems you were overcome by the thought of being my fiancé and couldn’t stand any competition. And now you’re making up insane stories about Jessica and rings and packages.” He gave Harry an indulgent smile. “It’s one thing to take that out on people by arresting them, but you shouldn’t try to smear Jessica’s reputation. She’s a good Chaser, and our team needs her.”
He stepped up and wagged one finger at Harry. “And when we’re married, I’m not going to tolerate any pranks like that. I can barely tolerate them now. I think you should make a public apology and then tell Jessica that you won’t go after her. Oh, and tell anyone at the Ministry whom you informed of this that you made a mistake.”
Harry entered a serene state. He wasn’t responsible for his actions. Malfoy was an idiot. It was deliberate provocation.
No one sane could blame him.
The next time he really registered what was going on around him again, he had grabbed Malfoy around the neck and was shaking him back and forth. His head would have banged against a wall if there was any near enough. As it was, he wasn’t in danger of cracking his skull. A pity. Harry thought a crack needed to be there to let light in.
Then he glanced around, thought of a way to do it if onyx was hard enough, and hauled Malfoy over to the elephant statue.
“Potter! What are you doing?”
It was the shriek that brought him out of his daze. It sounded so much like the prissy boy from Hogwarts, who had been many things, but never mental.
“Well,” Harry said slowly, “I was about to beat your head to a bloody pulp on this statue.” He glanced back and forth from the statue to Malfoy, then shook his head. “But it would probably be useless. All I’d get is cracks in the statue, and you’d sue me for destroying an expensive piece of art.”
Malfoy breathed carefully, watching him. He tried to shift away from Harry, but Harry wrapped an arm around his shoulders and leaned closer to him.
“What’s the matter,” he whispered, “lover?”
Malfoy blinked and stared and blinked. Then he said abruptly, “I had no idea that Jessica was going to send you that ring.”
Harry let him go. He was almost disappointed when he thought of the warmth Malfoy’s skin had given his arm and how wonderful it had been-in a strange way-to hold him close, but sanity was better than sex.
If I could convince my dick of that, it would be fabulous.
“I did send a few notes at first, encouraging people to compete for my attentions.” Malfoy was pacing back and forth now, his robe swishing around his feet, frowning. “I wanted a fiancé, but no matter how I thought about it, I couldn’t choose one of my former lovers as better than the others. I wanted to see who was best about obeying my wishes.”
Harry blinked once. “By trying to kill you?”
“No,” Malfoy said. “By seeing who was best about obeying my wishes.”
Harry understood this time, although he wished he didn’t. “So you wanted to see who would let you die when you started falling from your broom?”
Malfoy smiled at him.
Harry’s head really, really hurt. So did his hands, but that problem he could at least solve by opening his clenched fists. He had no idea what he was going to do about the other one.
“So,” said Harry, starting to pace around the enormous room because at least that didn’t make his head hurt, “you set this up in part to see who would let you die, or might let you die, and thus would make you the best mate?”
“Yes.” Malfoy turned his head and looked at Harry with eyes like limpid pools. “Until you interfered, of course, and I had to do something, or otherwise my challenge would have been pointless.”
“Who was the one who hexed your broom?”
“Oh, Jessica, of course.”
“Malfoy.” Harry halted and turned slowly to face him, because turning fast would only make him hurt more. “Has it ever occurred to you that there’s something wrong with you?”
“Certain people have told me that,” said Malfoy, after thinking about it with obvious reluctance. “I can’t say it’s something that would have occurred on its own, though.”
“But there is.” Harry went up to him and put a friendly, gentle hand on his shoulder. Malfoy didn’t shy away, which probably meant there wasn’t extensive bruising. “You wanted to die rather than tell someone that-”
When Harry put it like that, though, he floundered. Rather than go to the Aurors and tell someone that he’d deliberately incited one of his teammates to hex his broom and possibly kill him? When Harry put it like that, it was so mental that Malfoy would have had to already suspect his own craziness to do that.
Harry put his head in his hands.
Soft footsteps padded up to him, and Harry looked up to find Malfoy stretching out his hand. His face was filled with tender compassion, which was possibly one of the most terrifying things Harry had ever seen. Voldemort might be up there, too.
“I know that you didn’t sign up for this,” Malfoy whispered. “I know you didn’t expect me to have so many lovers to choose from, and you didn’t expect Jessica to hex my broom, and you didn’t know you would make yourself a target for people who were jealous of your position as my fiancé.”
Harry sighed a little. “You said that you didn’t send those letters to your lovers. And you said Jessica didn’t send the package and the ring to me. But the Magical Theory Department was able to pull her name from those things via a spell. That sounds serious to me. Maybe she’s been doing things behind your back, things you don’t know about. I need to talk to her, though.”
“You can’t arrest her for hexing me. It was with my knowledge and consent.”
Your crazy consent. Harry wondered idly if he could make a case for Malfoy not being legally competent to make up his own mind. “But I can arrest her for trying to kill me. Unless that was with your knowledge and consent, too?”
“It wasn’t her.”
Harry gave him a small, nasty smile. “I certainly didn’t do it to myself. Was it you?”
“No.”
Malfoy sounded as though he had never said something more sincere in his life. Then again, he’d sounded like that at several points. Harry shook his head. “Maybe she got more jealous once you started dating me. Did you ever propose to anyone else?”
Malfoy drew his head back long enough to give Harry an offended look. “Don’t you know?”
“Um, no. I had better things to do with my time prior to this than following the gossip columns in the paper.” Especially the ones that were likely to be half about him, Harry thought.
“You were the first one I proposed to,” said Malfoy, and his voice had gone cool. He turned away from Harry to rest one hand on the elephant statue. “You were the first one I thought worthy of my reaction.”
“Your reaction,” Harry echoed. Honestly, this gets weirder and fucking weirder.
“Yes,” said Malfoy, and tossed his hair a little over his shoulder. “I wanted to see what you would do, and then I would see what I would do. It was new ground. Exciting. You were the perfect combination of someone I already knew and a stranger-someone who was strange to me because of his reactions and his heroic tendencies. The others had too much on one side or the other. I see that now. It’s why I couldn’t stay together with Pansy. I knew her too well. And Antonius was too unfamiliar, to the point that I could never understand what I was thinking.”
That seems to be a fairly common problem.
“But you.” Malfoy spun around and gave Harry a warm smile. “You were the perfect combination. If you reacted, it would be in an interesting way. I did enjoy that little chase-dance we had around the Crocodiles’ party. Didn’t you?”
“It was fun to thwart you,” Harry said, reckoning he could be honest.
“Yes, you see?”
“No.”
Malfoy continued prattling on, evidently not having heard him. “You were the one who would push me and pull me and keep me guessing, but also be familiar enough to me that I knew I could rile you up. Some of the people I dated turned out to be calm all the time. It was boring.” Malfoy rolled his eyes. “But you were different.” He turned and gave Harry a winsome little smile. “Thanks for being interesting.”
“You’re welcome,” Harry said automatically, then sighed. Malfoy was no nearer acting sane, he decided. “You won’t tell me who sent the other letters to your lovers, telling them to gather and attack the house?”
“I don’t know who it was.” Malfoy sounded perfectly indifferent now. “It might have been Jessica. It wasn’t me.”
Harry nodded. He was starting to believe that. Malfoy had probably told Jessica about his plans, and she had carried them further and decided that eliminating Harry was the best thing to do.
Harry would still like to ask her why, but several Aurors would be on their way to arrest her by now. He’d probably hear the “why” soon enough.
“Harry?”
Malfoy was standing right in front of him again, and still wore that winsome smile. Harry controlled the impulse to snap, and muttered, “What?”
“Do you see?” Malfoy whispered. “You’re the rarest combination, and you’re also the only one of my lovers who probably understands me by this point. And the strongest of them. You wouldn’t blindly give in and do what I told you. You wouldn’t hex my broom, because you don’t believe in it.”
Harry stared at him. “But I thought you were telling people to hold back because you wanted to see which one would be the most obedient.”
“I was.” Malfoy looked as if he didn’t understand why Harry was telling him that.
“But you wanted…” Harry shook his head again. “You want me to be disobedient?”
“Only up to a point, of course.” Malfoy winked at him. “When we’re in bed, I expect you to be obedient for at least a little while, because you need to learn how to make me feel good. But after a while, I suspect you’ll surprise me even there.”
He leaned nearer and muttered, “I changed my standards because of you, Harry Potter. Don’t make me regret it.”
Harry didn’t even have time to retort before Malfoy’s mouth was on his, his fingers winding into Harry’s hair, and Harry found himself up against the wall of the Manor without much chance to do anything about it.
Oh, no. This isn’t going to happen again, Harry thought, and Stunned Malfoy.
He cradled his head so that it wouldn’t bang on the floor, and then cast a Lightening Charm and scooped Malfoy up into his arms. He had questions to ask him, and maybe putting him to bed would convince him Harry was “obedient” or whatever he needed to think before he’d answer.
Harry hesitated only long enough to shake his head at the elephant statue before he left the room.
Chapter Fourteen.
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