Chapter Eleven of 'Incandescence'- Illumination
Title: Incandescence (11/12 or 13)
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Warnings: Angst, profanity, manipulation. Takes place fairly far in the future after DH, but ignores the epilogue.
Rating: PG-13
Pairings: Harry/Draco, Ron/Hermione, Luna/Neville, Lucius/Narcissa.
Summary: Draco has become a successful writer by novelizing the lives of heroes from the war with Voldemort. He’s managed to charm the most difficult and reticent into talking to him. Now he thinks he’s ready for the ultimate challenge: persuading Harry Potter, who’s notoriously close-mouthed, to give him both the material and the permission for a novel based on him.
Author’s Notes: This is intended to be a fairly short novel, probably around 50,000 words (12 or 13 chapters), but I won’t rule out going longer.
Chapter One.
Thank you again for all the reviews!
Chapter Eleven-Illumination
“Now. I think you can talk to me now.”
The evening had been filled with a great deal of unnecessary nonsense, from Draco’s point of view. Potter had gone to the Ministry, dragging Draco along behind him, and explained in terribly earnest terms about how Yolanda Timpany had abused him, and abused Draco, and got killed when one of her own weapons destroyed her. Draco thought that he didn’t need to feel bad about it, as it wasn’t even a lie; obviously the weapon had failed to protect her from the dead. Potter didn’t need to tell the entire story with his eyes on the floor in a way that made the Head Auror looked at him with steadily increasing concern.
Nevertheless, they accepted his story, and then Potter took him to St. Mungo’s and tried to leave him with Mind-Healers. Draco had clamped his hand down on Potter’s shoulder, told him that if his mental injuries could wait until after Potter explained his “crime” that surely meant he was well enough to bear company, and then turned around and met the Mind-Healers with his best pathetic expression.
He never removed his hand.
So Potter stayed, and when Draco described what had happened in detail, Potter reached out and put a hand on his arm in return. That hand pressed down uncomfortably, fingers making dents in his skin, the longer the story went on.
Draco didn’t mind. He had made up his mind about certain things, things for which the press of those fingers was rather a promising sign than otherwise.
The Mind-Healers spent a few minutes tapping Draco’s skull with crystal wands and then staring at them. Draco stared at them, too, to show willing, but ended up looking away in boredom because he couldn’t see the subtle sparkling colors that apparently filled them and told the Healers what was wrong with his brain.
He preferred to spend the time looking at Potter, examining the shadows in the green eyes that came to him and then retired guiltily again, and watching how his grip, though it grew a little looser so as not to hurt Draco, never released.
Draco had an excellent idea of what he wanted, now, and a way to incorporate his earlier physical attraction to Potter, the sense of fascination he’d had with him from the moment of his dinner with Potter in the Fire-Room, his gratitude at being rescued, and his continuing curiosity. If Potter refused to go along with it, then Draco would accept that.
But I can be very persuasive, and I have learned that Potter is not immune to the Malfoy charm, he thought, and beamed to himself.
The smile caused Potter to turn his head and stare at him. Draco stared back, and a small, reluctant smile worked its way over Potter’s lips at last. He dropped his head until his nose rested in Draco’s hair and sighed.
Another good sign, Draco thought, reaching up to caress the back of Potter’s neck and ignoring the scandalized stare of a pair of Healers. They obviously hadn’t read Approaches to the Mark, his novel about Seamus Finnigan, or they would have known that this was far from the most daring thing Draco had done. The experimental narration in that book still scared Draco when he thought back on it.
Finally, the Healers told Draco that his mind had been hurt, but would heal without “blue scars” (whatever that meant. Draco ordinarily would have asked, but he usually had room for only one obsession at a time, and his mind was full of Potter right now). They gave him a few lists of words to memorize that apparently would help shuffle his memories back into order. Draco nodded to them graciously as he walked out of hospital. He thought that was more than they deserved for keeping him away from his conversation with Potter.
Potter shifted uneasily as they stood on the street in front of St. Mungo’s. “Um,” he said. “I reckon that I should let you go home now, and-”
“But what if something happens to me on the way there?” Draco turned his eyes towards Potter and fluttered his lashes. “What if Timpany had an associate, and he comes after me to avenge her death?”
Potter frowned at him. “How likely do you think that is to happen?”
Draco sighed and stepped towards him, fastening his hand on the back of Potter’s neck again. “I’m trying to create a mood here, Potter,” he explained patiently. “I do it well in print, and I’m practicing my skills with words in the open air. The least you could do would be not to shatter it. Particularly when it gives you a chance to relax from being Sterner Wizard the Son of Stern.”
A quiver ran through Potter’s muscles, and he slowly brought his arms up and folded them around Draco’s shoulders. “It would be easier to adopt the mood,” he muttered, “if I knew when you would wake up and back away from me in horror.”
Draco gripped one of his eyelids and flipped it up and down. “Awake,” he said. “Eager to adopt the mood. Why would I back away from you in horror?” He made sure to keep his voice soothing as he slid his hands down from Potter’s neck to his shoulders. He could feel his angry, or fearful, tremors more easily that way. “So far as I can see, you’ve saved my life from a woman who would have murdered me. I can’t pretend that I was eager to find out what her weapon did, either. You gave me much, and robbed me of nothing, not even inspiration for a story.”
Potter glanced around the streets. “Not here,” he said. “I’m not eager for more people to find out my secret.”
Draco nodded. “Then come back to my tower.”
Potter fixed him with an uncertain look. “Are you sure you’re not tired? You’ve had a lot of excitement, and-”
“I’m neither a child nor one of the maidens in distress that I sometimes write about.” Draco made sure to fill his voice with steel. It seemed as though Potter needed some for the stiffening of his own spine. “I can listen to any horrible tale that you care to tell me, Potter.”
“All right.”
Potter’s voice and eyes had both grown heavy with shadow. He made a gesture in front of him as though Draco should Apparate to the tower on his own. Draco smiled, wiser than that, and kept a grasp on him, which made Potter peer at him as if he were trying to see the damage in his mind that the Healers had failed to spot.
You’re not getting free that easily, Draco thought, and led the way.
*
Potter looked out of place in Draco’s tower the way he hadn’t looked during his first visit. He kept his head ducked as he toyed with the new package of proofs for Golden Stories on the table between Draco’s couch and chair. (Angela hadn’t agreed with most of Draco’s changes and demanded that he make them over again). Draco asked him if he wanted tea and received a mumble in return, which was enough of an answer for him to start brewing. He added several small packets of spices that would make the tea smell sweet without altering the taste to the water, and had the satisfaction of seeing Potter lift his head and smile a little.
“So,” Draco said, when he handed over the cup and settled opposite Potter, his hands folded peacefully around his own cup. “I’ve let you sit here in silence and brood long enough to find the words. Tell me why you think I should be running the other way, gasping hard enough to tear my throat, looking back over my shoulder.”
“Sometimes I think I should read more books, if it would teach me to have a vocabulary like yours,” Potter said softly, and sipped his tea. Almost at once, the quiver in his muscles vanished. Draco concealed his smile behind the lip of his cup. The spices didn’t alter the taste, but they might have other effects.
“There are many advantages to reading books, and that’s only one of them.” Draco looked ostentatiously at his hands. “No itching yet. The spell thinks I won, or it’s dissipated because the bet couldn’t be kept in the first place, as I told you. Now. Talk.”
Potter nodded shallowly. Then he said, “Isn’t it obvious? I can walk through the world of the dead. I can command them, as long as I do it only in the presence of someone who’s probably going to die anyway. Bringing them into the daylight world is-impossible, and I wouldn’t want to do it. Too contradictory.” He shook himself like a cat submerged in ice water. “I can’t imagine why you would want to be around me.”
Draco set his cup down on the table and leaned forwards. “Listen to me, Potter.”
Potter looked up. There was carefully concealed fear and relief in his eyes at the same moment. Draco knew he was anticipating being rejected and, while he would resent it, it meant that he wouldn’t have to deal with Draco reacting in a different way from the one he’d always imagined.
“Those talents of yours saved my life,” Draco said. “I don’t think Timpany a great loss. I don’t think you would ever misuse them, because you’re too ridiculously noble. I don’t blame you for lying to me about them before; you could hardly have known that I would accept the truth with this level of enthusiasm. So. Explain to me why I should run the other way, gasping hard enough to tear my throat-”
“The metaphor loses force when you repeat it twice,” Potter snapped, and his hand clenched down hard on his teacup.
Draco applauded. “Wonderful! We’ll make a literary critic of you yet, if not a writer.” He raised an eyebrow. “And that’s an end of the silly diversions, I hope. The truth, now.”
Potter at least spared the teacup, pushing it away from him across the table with a force that sent tea slopping onto the wood. “Malfoy,” he said between clenched teeth, “I’m marked out as different. Always have been.” A savage jerk on his fringe moved it aside so that Draco could see the scar, which he raised an eyebrow at, unsure why it should move him in the way Potter apparently assumed it should. “It was one thing when I had a Dark Lord after me and the hope that someday I could kill him. If I could kill him, then one day it wouldn’t be dangerous to be my friend anymore. Things could change. Dumbledore said once that I had a prophecy haunting me, and-and I did, but the prophecy only predicted things up to a certain point. After that, I could live my life free of the bloody thing.
“But this isn’t ever going to go away. I tried to ignore it, and all that happens is that I keep seeing the shadows and the world of the dead, and sometimes I hear the voices of the dead calling to me. I’m haunted, trailed, hounded by death. I stink of it.” He leaped to his feet and paced once around the room, promptly banging his shins into the small tables that Draco had used to decorate the sections of floor he normally didn’t use. He swore and rubbed them, then turned his head over his shoulder to glare at Draco. “How can you want to be around someone who-who’ll look at your shadow someday and see death coming for you?”
Draco rose to his feet and crossed the distance between them. Really, he thought, as he took Potter’s shoulders between his hands again and stared earnestly into his eyes, I ought to receive a special wage as the official Calmer-Down of Harry Potter. Potter was already relaxing again, breathing more softly and in a sane manner, studying him with wary eyes.
“First of all,” Draco said, “I’ve smelled you at close quarters several times now, and you smell fine to me.” He sniffed delicately. “Perhaps a different scent would be advisable to cover the smell of sweat, but I’ll concede that it does make you more manly.”
Potter stared at him, mouth and eyes both wide. A few times, a faint spluttering sound worked its way up his throat, as though he were trying to figure out a way to respond, but each time it died.
“Second of all,” Draco said, “it doesn’t matter that you have some unusual talents. They don’t frighten me. I told you that I don’t think you’ll ever misuse them. Yes, of course they mark you out, but that makes you all the more fascinating to me. And the scar came first.” He reached up and traced a finger over it. Potter jolted as though Draco had cast a lightning bolt at him through his fingernail. Draco smiled up at him, wondering how many people had ever touched it. “If dating an unusual man bothered me, then I wouldn’t have chosen you at all, since I knew about that before I knew about your remarkable death-defying powers.”
“You make horrible puns-” Potter said, and then stopped and continued in a flatter voice, “Dating.”
“Yes.” Draco closed his hand still on Potter’s shoulder down as an undeniable pressure and traced the line of the scar in reverse this time. “I wondered why I was feeling attracted to you before, almost mesmerized. Now I know. I’d like to date you. I’d like to know you better, and not because I want you to be a character in my novels. I want-I want you in-in many senses.” His words faltered because Potter had continued to stare at him with an incredulous expression, and Draco had to wonder, for the first time, if the Malfoy charm was not going to be enough for this. “Your gifts are another facet of you that I want to learn to understand, not some horrible deformity that’s going to hold me away from you or keep us from having sex.” He thought back on Potter’s earlier words, and added, “Don’t tell me that you weren’t meditating a longer association between us. You said that you feared looking at me someday and seeing that I was going to die. What does that imply, but that you would stay around me for a long time?”
Potter closed his eyes. His voice was a whisper. “It’s been fourteen years since I started hoping that someone would be able to stay with me despite this. I can’t lie about it, and yet I know that it would drive everyone away with its strangeness in the end. Don’t make me hope, Draco. It’s cruel.”
“I can be cruel if that’s warranted.” Draco pressed his lips to Potter’s collarbone and slowly trailed them sideways, interrupting his own words by necessity. He thought it worth the sacrifice when Potter gave a muffled shiver and a quiet moan. “Really,” Draco added when he lifted his head, “I should be the one who’s worried here. You’re possessed of all sorts of beauties that you could use to attract any partner you desired-if you didn’t undervalue them enough to scare all your courtiers away. I should be the one fearing that you would only want to stay with me because I like you.”
In a moment, Potter’s hands shot out and cradled Draco’s face. Draco blinked. He had hoped something like that would happen, but Potter had moved with bewildering Auror swiftness, so he had hardly seen the touch coming.
“How could you even think that?” Potter whispered, leaning in near enough that Draco felt his eyes water trying to keep his gaze steady. “Of course I want to be with you for other reasons. The way you faced Timpany was one of the bravest things I’ve seen in my life. Your conversation through the crystal was-dazzling, if hard to follow. You have an irreverence that I can’t help but admire. I’ve got accustomed to thinking of myself as someone anyone will bow to and strive to please. When you obviously didn’t care a thing about that and kept pursuing me to get the story out of me anyway, part of me was charmed. Though other parts of me hated it, of course.” He gave Draco a reluctant smile and reached up to stroke his hair. “And I’ve never thought you were ugly. At least, not since I saw a publicity photo when your first novel came out and realized that you’d lost most of the pointiness you had in school.”
Draco recovered his breath in a blast of indignation to say, “I was never pointy.”
Potter gave him a gentler smile than before. “Whatever you say, Draco.”
“Although I will accept the encomiums of brave and clever, and even irreverent if I must,” Draco added, brushing briefly at his face to remove any flakes of skin that Harry might have left on his cheeks. He was handsome, Draco would say that for him, but handsome didn’t always translate to having clean hands. “And now, is that enough to convince you that your markings won’t send me scuttling away?”
Harry hesitated, his eyes bright forest-green again. “Maybe,” he said at last. “I’ve thought for years that I could never have a permanent relationship with anyone because of what the Hallows did to me. And I’m still wondering if I’m giving you too much of a chance because you’re the first person who isn’t afraid of me. Am I attracted to you honestly, or making up reasons to be?” He shook his head. “Give me time to get used to the idea and that you won’t run the moment something happens that surprises you.”
“Someone else ran away the moment something happened that surprised them, didn’t they?” Draco asked quietly.
Harry looked away, his mouth tightening. “Yeah.”
“Who?” Actually, Draco was sure of who it would be, but he wanted to hear confirmation from Harry’s lips. He wanted to hear many things from those lips, and the moan he had got when he kissed Harry was only the beginning.
Harry shook his head. “I’m not going to tell you that. You would only crow about it, and couldn’t possibly be polite to this person when you saw them in the future.”
Draco shrugged. “Very well, then.” Actually, Harry’s assurance that they would meet someday only made Draco surer of his guess that it had been Ginny Weasley who did a runner. A Weasley wouldn’t have the wit to appreciate what a rare treasure Harry was, Draco mused, reaching up to brush the side of Harry’s cheek with his hand.
Harry caught the hand and stood staring at him as if Draco was a marvel of perfect beauty, which made Draco have to turn his eyes away. He could feel his cheeks stinging with his blush, which was an-unusual occurrence. But then, Harry Potter saying all those pleasant things about Draco was an unusual occurrence as well.
I shall have to make sure that it becomes more common, Draco decided, and looked up into Harry’s eyes. “I hope that you can learn to live with someone who’s a writer, and sees people in terms of characters,” he said.
“That would depend on whether or not you see me as a character.” Harry’s voice was reserved, his eyes glancing aside again, and Draco remembered that he’d dealt with writers in less than congenial relationships to him all his life.
“The hero’s reward, perhaps?” Draco picked up Harry’s free hand and rubbed the knuckles against his lips, because he wanted to and because he could only imagine, and would soon know, all the marvelous things those hands had done. “Let me assure you that I’m no hero.”
“Even if you picture me as a protagonist,” Harry said, and faced him suddenly, a fierce light burning in his eyes. “I’m more than a character for your books, Draco, just as you’re not limited to the villain or the rival I pictured when we were boys. I have to-I have to know that I’m more to you than that, that your imagination can’t always encompass me, or this won’t work.”
Draco had to smile as he looked at him. Harry had admitted that he’d been forced to give up hopes of a relationship with most people, and now he had found someone who could offer that to him. But he would challenge even that person, and reject the possible relationship, if they tried to force him to live in confines that his principles couldn’t tolerate. It was shining, and brilliant, and mad.
“I assure you,” Draco said, “that I have no trouble assuming I’ll never understand some of the things you do, and if I try to put you into a character, one of those actions is sure to come along and shatter the mirror I’m trying to hang.”
Harry smiled at that, and oh the smile was shining and brilliant and mad too, and he murmured, “Then we can begin trying and see if this might work out,” and then he lowered his head.
Draco kissed him, glad to hear that that mouth could produce other things than moans and noble self-denial when it tried, and drew back to add, “But don’t assume that this counts as the evening of conversation you promised me. I still have far too many things I want to know about you.”
Among the things that Harry’s mouth could produce, Draco learned a moment later, was a current of laughter as rich and warm and soft as a river of sunlight.
Chapter Twelve