Obsession and Her Trappings

(Pairing, summary, and ratings can be found in chapter one.)

*****

Chapter Seven

Draco 3— A Bit of Wicked at the Edges.

            Draco Malfoy spoke the first words, and he felt awful for even uttering them.  They clanged and they clashed, so very out of place here.  Though there had to have been a better way of putting forth the question (any question at all, really), he hadn't been able to find it.  He said this, instead, "What was that?"

            Harry turned his head.  "I think we—"

            "I know what we just did.  I was asking what it was."

            Although Draco himself didn't exactly know what he meant by that, Harry seemed to understand.  Harry rested a hand on his palm, his chin jutting out slightly, and blew out a puffing breath that became a million tiny crystals when it met the air.  "I don't know," he said.  "Do you?"

            Words came to his mind, trundled out from a part of him that had been trained to act with such efficiency that he marveled at his own brainwashing.  'Well, Potter, if I had known what in blazes this all meant, there is no way I would have asked for your opinion.'  A tight, erudite sentence, cold as a steel blade and sharp as a quick slash through an artery— a Malfoy sentence.  He felt the stars frowning at him, and shoved the comment aside.  Not now, he told those cankerous, cantankerous parts of him, parts of him that were spoiling for a good fight.  "No idea," he said and though it wasn't eloquent, it wasn't cutting either.  It would do.  Ask for what you want, even if you know you can't have it.  

            "Well?"

            Draco was supposed to say something.  Harry's eyes were upon him, the eyes of a cynic waiting to be shocked.  Tell me something I don't know, they said.  His eyes were green, and of course Draco had been aware that before, but tonight it seemed especially important.  Like absinthe, like bottles carrying messages, like so many other clichés he would not allow himself to mention.  He had nothing to say; nothing had ever prepared him for those eyes. 

            That hesitation was enough to allow a Malfoy remark to slip through.  "I'm not supposed to be here, you know," he found himself offering.  His words were quiet, but not timid; rather, they were dripping with elitism. The best kind of dirty aristocratic secret, one that was determined not to be kept.  Draco felt like clapping a hand to his mouth in the grotesque imitation of shock, but he knew it would be a false gesture.  Some part of him had wanted to say that; somewhere within him a beast had stirred.  Now he would have to ride out the ripples it had caused in this glassy night, and hope that he could withstand the stars' anger at his slip. 

            Harry's eyes flashed at that.  Defiant; that hadn't changed.  "No?"

            "Of course not."  Draco forced the words through, though they felt almost sickening.  He was retreating to his mask, then, slinking back to his cave of Slytherin darkness to handle this.  How pathetic.  He met Harry's gaze, drawing up centuries of family pride.  Otherwise, he didn't think that he could have looked Harry in the face. 

            With a perception he hadn't had before tonight, Draco read the boy seated next to him.  Harry's lips were slightly parted, and his tongue flitted out to lick his lower lip— perhaps to find some vestiges of Draco?  His fingers were flying, moving to clasp or unclasp his cloak, to draw swirls and circles in the snow on the arm of the bench.  His face, however, was taut; his jaw was tight and Draco knew that Harry was also fighting a protracted battle with bitter urges.  He wondered if that was what he looked like.  "There are other, more important things I should probably be doing right now." 

            "Like what?"

            "Oh, the usual."  Draco waved a lily-white hand, dipping deep into the Malfoy heritage, hoping that the plunge would not kill him.  "Tormenting the good, undermining the work of the valiant, tempting the doubting." 

            "Corrupting the innocent?" 

            Draco looked over at Harry, startled.  It took him a moment to recognize what he saw.  The battle had been fought, and someone had won.  He wondered who it had been, and the moment he saw the languid lines of that pose, he knew.  Harry Potter, sitting back on a bench behind the castle— lounging, actually.  Hair mussed and robes wrinkled, fairly humming with energy tonight.  Glowing.  Ask for what you want, even if you know you can't have it. 

            "Yeah," Draco said, the tide of his own fight turning at Harry's voice. "Something like that." 

            Harry raised a hand.  Funny how this boy, this strange, wonderful boy, had so much power over Draco.  How perfectly incredible, that the ebb and flow of his person was so controlled by him, the moon shifting the tides.  Draco hadn't even always been aware of it, either, that silver thread that Harry had tied to him long ago.  It was invisible, but there nonetheless.  Draco leaned close, having been beckoned. 

            "Because I think you're doing a pretty good job on the corruption front, at least."  Harry's eyes were so wide that he almost appeared frightened.  He was so young; Draco was months older, and those months were suddenly so heavy, so important.  What a young boy he was, with eyes like those proud pine forests just below the timberline and hair like the night enveloping a tiny town.  Incredible.

            He had the urge to protect Harry, which was strange— there had never been any protection in him before.  The Malfoys had been Darwinists before muggles had come up with a name for it; those who were not suited for survival should not be allowed to do so.  His lineage demanded perfection! cried the hollow voices of those defeated elements.  Draco Malfoy had never been given protection, and it seemed strange to think of providing it now, to someone who had never really needed it from anyone.  There it was, though; he could do nothing to change it.

            Harry smiled, and Draco felt a laugh rushing out of him, dancing over his tongue and into this moment.  He closed his eyes and ears to his family, to the icy blue blood that was slowly corroding his veins.  Perhaps they would be back tomorrow, clawing at his conscious as ever.  He doubted it; he felt like he could silence a thousand dark voices if only Harry would continue to look at him in the way he had done tonight.  Ask for what you want, even if you know you can't have it. 

            "Were you really all that innocent before?"  A silly question.

            "I'm not sure," Harry replied in a whisper.  "I can't tell what I was before tonight." 

            "Do you feel that I've thoroughly debauched you, then?"

            "No."  Another smile, but... different.  This one came with a bit of wicked at the edges, a spattering of mischief.  "Not yet."

            Draco had to kiss him, then, had to lightly press his own lips to those ruby ones.  Feel them, see if they were really there, if any of this had happened.  Touch the surface of the lake to see if this image would blur and disappear, leaving a lonely boy alone in the snow.  And if it didn't....

            Harry was still there, and Draco wished he knew whom to thank for that.  Moments like this could not be coincidental; everything worth remembering was premeditated.  He had learned that early, learned to spot the whispered plans at work, to expect elaborate plots and abstruse schemes.  And if anyone were responsible for this all, it was the stars, which now were watching with munificent affection.  Of course they had had a hand in it; for all he knew, the star charts that they were now ignoring could have been blueprints for the entire scheme.  But where did that sentence fit in; how had Harry known?  Ask for what you want, even if you know you can't have it. 

            "Draco?"  That voice wasn't right at all.  It was tremulous, speaking of doubt just as Draco had managed to set aside his.  What was it?  The other shoe, balanced precipitously, ready to fall and smash their night?  He should have seen it coming, then. 

            He held out hope like a child holding birdseed in a cupped hand.  "Yes, Harry?"

            "Maybe you could try to corrupt me again?  It might work better the next time around, seeing as I'm already partially debauched."  This was not the

renunciation Draco was expecting, the disgust finally breaching the last wall and crashing everything.  Instead, he heard a question, an answer, his very salvation. 

            Draco gave another kiss, this time to Harry's temple.  He held his lips there, and felt Harry's pulse, fluttering like his eyelashes.  This was a life he felt beneath him, the beating of a real person, beautiful in its very existence.  The voices had been seductive, swathed in night and that thrill of darkness, but they had lied; they had never told him about this.  The little sounds a person made if you sat close beside them and listened, the quiet stirrings of a real soul beneath your lips— he had never heard about any of this before.

            And yet, how easy it would be to hurt this boy, who for so long Draco had heard was unassailable!  If Draco's kisses were a little more biting, his hands that groped turned into hands that pummeled, his wand retrieved from a pocket in his robes— how incredibly simple a procedure.  To not stop when the line between agony and ecstasy was crossed, to continue touching and probing until this fragile being that sat beside him was raped of all his secrets.  Draco wondered how much of a fight he'd put up….

            He gasped, and the darkness pulled back.  Such terrible paths he had just been wandering!  Would he never be saved from this undertow?  Fuck this shit, he thought; I refuse to let whatever crap my father and his friends have been stuffing into me dictate who I am.  Ask for what you want, even if you know you can't have it. 

            And who Draco (just Draco for the moment) was right now seemed to be dictated by Harry Potter, who now looked at him, confused as to what had made Draco start so.

            Draco pushed it away, shifted a bit to whisper in Harry's ear.  "You can count on that."

            And he knew that the stars, at least, would approve.

*****

(end part seven)

Note:  Thanks to everyone reading this so far.  I'm so glad you've tuned in again.  And if you like what you read, tell your friends!
                -EH