[Note: This is a revised and generally cleaned-up version of the original fic. My apologies for the complete lack of new material, but there were a few inconsistencies in the fic I felt needed to be addressed.]
+Sed fugit interea, fugit inreparabile tempus+
(Vergil)
CHAPTER FIVE
Once he regained the power of speech, the first words out of Draco's mouth were, "Does Ron know you're here?"
Harry was distinctly pale in the dim light of Draco's room and pain had tightened his expression - still, though, a slight smile danced at the corners of his mouth. "He does," he said. "Why do you think it was just the two of you going to Hogsmeade? Well, three, counting me, but the rest of the Aurors would never have let me tag along and it would have been too difficult to stay hidden from them. It was hard enough keeping up with you as it was."
Draco's eyes involuntarily darted to Harry's injured leg. Harry caught the reflexive flickering and smiled, if the grim upward twitch of his lips could be called so. Wildly, Draco wondered if he should offer the man a seat, but in a moment of cold calculation decided /No... let him suffer./ If Harry was going to ask to sit down, though, he gave no sign of it. Instead, the sardonic smile remained fixed as he shifted himself so most of his weight was borne by his good leg, the injured one relaxed and dangling like that of a lame horse.
"What in God's name would be so important to you that you'd come gallivanting all the way out here?" Draco felt uneasiness creeping up in him; it had been six months since his last visitor, a Ministry lackey, had come to him, and that had been a brief, businesslike meeting in Draco's office. But this... this... This was Harry Potter, the real and painful fact of him, in his bedroom, staring at him with eyes too determined for pain. It was a scene cut right from his fantasies, Harry was, and now that he stood here, Draco had no idea what to do and hid behind his typical caustic demand.
"I told you I wanted to know why you saved my life," Harry said. "I think this is the third time I've said it, and the only answer I've gotten is that you saved me because of my 'annoying presence' or something like that. Once you give me a straight answer, I'll go."
/Or stay, if you'd like,/ Draco privately amended, allowing himself that momentary hope.
He couldn't keep looking at those green eyes. Draco straightened and turned away to pace the length of his bedroom, trying to keep a lid on his agitation. 'There's always a time when you find everything you thought was true about yourself is, at best, half-truth,' Severus said from the deep recesses of his memory. Draco could hear his mentor saying those words and see them on the pages of his diary. 'No matter how cold or how self-possessed you think you are, something will happen - depend upon it - that will drive you very nearly mad. It will come, Draco, if it hasn't yet.'
/So this is it./ Draco fought for calm, trying to ignore Severus' prophecy. /This is where I snap./
"There *are* no straight answers," he said.
"Really?"
"You of all people should know that." Draco took a steadying breath and forced himself to stand still. "And you also know that the real answer isn't the one you want to hear."
"They're also the ones that need to be heard," Harry said. Draco was briefly gratified to hear a slight quaver in his opponent's voice. "You of all people should know *that*."
Draco's eyes narrowed. "And what's that supposed to mean?"
"Oh, come on," Harry said impatiently. "Don't tell me *you've* never wondered why you got off with no formal indictment and house arrest, just because I asked for it."
"They excused me from trial," Draco said tightly, "on your word. They didn't acquit me - oh, no, they'd never do that. They'd be right to - I'm as guilty as any Death Eater they locked up in Azkaban. No, they shipped me back home on The Boy Who Lived's say-so, and let me tell you right now I'd much rather be in Azkaban. It can't possibly be worse than this."
"You should tell that to the people who ended up there," Harry said. "I'm sure that'll make them feel so much better."
Draco laughed, a bit unhinged at the crude, wild sound jolting out of his own throat. "Maybe I should - then they'll realize how easy they have it. Oh, you're not going to understand - I can see it. You spared my life, Potter, and that's what we're down to, isn't it? Both of us want to know why we're alive." Fury simmered along his veins and his thoughts wove erratically back and forth, evading his desperate grasps at coherence. "I don't believe in the crap Dumbledore shoveled into us about 'life debts' and all that. Why'd you save *me*?"
"Whether you believe it or not, it's true," Harry said. "Some things don't require belief to be real."
The utter simplicity and directness of the statement cut through Draco's confusion. /There are some things that exist because we believe them to exist - things like beauty, joy, love and hate - and there are those things that *are*./ The old cant about life debt had always seemed nauseatingly idealistic to Draco, who found the idea of forced reciprocity unnecessary; if someone wanted to be brave and altruistic, they might as well do it on their own time. But he remembered Severus' words on the subject, words spoken by a man who had found himself indebted to his longtime enemy: 'I hated it, every moment of my life, I hated being in James Potter's debt, but I felt it - even after he died and I was rid of him, I felt responsibility pressing on me. No, it wasn't responsibility, it was something stronger, something I couldn't ignore, and I hated it - and James - even more.'
Draco wondered if Severus had slipped and said James rather than the derisive 'Potter,' as he never called any of his enemies by their first names if he could possibly help it. And he also knew that Severus would never had done all he did if it wasn't for his debt to a man he hated as much in memory as in life. So it was true, then - there had been something owed between the two of them, but Harry at least had the plausible excuse of obligation. It stung a little, thinking that Harry had been acting solely out of wizardly duty and not another motive.
Now, though, Harry waited quietly, still in that crooked and awkward position that was vaguely painful for Draco to witness. Masking his internal struggle as best he could, Draco waved a hand in the general direction of his desk and muttered a command for Harry to take a seat. Mercifully, Harry did, sighing a bit as tendons again made that horrible pulling sound.
"I felt it," Harry was saying earnestly now, as if picking up on Draco's thoughts. His expression was curiously open and undefeated, so typically Harry that it hurt Draco to look at him. "It's not like... It wasn't like anything I'd ever felt before. Each day leading up to your trial got worse and worse, until it got to the point that I knew if I didn't do something I'd go insane. If you'd died, I don't know what I would have done."
"Pine away with anguish?"
"It felt that way, yes."
That was almost too much to be borne, that honest answer to his sarcastic question. Draco stepped closer, trying to loom a little, but the determination in Harry's eyes said he was not intimidated. "If I hadn't saved you," Draco said quietly, pitching his voice so that Harry had to lean forward a little to catch his words - lean in enough so Draco could smell the sweat and scent of him - "If I hadn't saved you, but you'd still gotten away from our little meeting alive, would you have spoken up for me against the Ministry?"
"No," Harry said. "I wouldn't have."
"A good answer."
"But I'm answering that on the assumption that, at that point, I would have absolutely no idea of the person you might eventually become," Harry continued, overriding Draco's satisfaction. "I would have made that decision without having found Snape's diaries or having the opportunity to contact you and see you for myself."
"Explain." Draco did not move. Harry remained unaffected.
"If you were half as bad as you think you are," Harry said, voice lowering in imitation of Draco's, "you would never have come when Ron asked. You wouldn't treasure Snape's diaries like you do - he would have been just another casualty Dumbledore's side would have to take, am I right?" He paused, and evidently saw Draco's reluctant agreement in his eyes, then continued, "and you wouldn't have told me what you did about living here - you wouldn't be miserable because here would be the perfect opportunity to think about revenge. You wouldn't even miss your parents.
"So, back then, if I knew what I know now, yes, I would have saved you."
Draco felt his eyes slipping shut as if by not seeing Harry he could somehow not hear the words he spoke. /If I knew what I know now, yes, I would have saved you./ Something within him, small and tight and greedy, wanted to hear those words again, because those words brought so much pain with them, and pleasure too, and Draco Malfoy rarely ever experienced one without the other. Pain because what Harry said was, at some fundamental level, very true - Ron had said it too: He was not Evil. He missed his parents like any normal person who'd loved his parents would miss them. He hated his endless confinement to misery but knew he deserved it.
'The one thing of which evil is incapable of being is fully self-aware,' Severus had written near the very end of the third year, one of the most recent things Draco had read. 'It can't experience the sensation of guilt in its fullest capacity - oh, a true Death Eater knows he's guilty of his crimes, an evil one will rejoice in being guilty, but isn't pain concomitant with guilt? Pain, misery, the pangs of conscience - I felt them more than I care to admit here. Evil can't experience that - it cares nothing for that which does not feed its appetite for the degradation of *others.*'
Harry was watching him closely, with those green eyes that missed nothing. Draco felt the terrific pressure of that gaze, wanted to crumble under it, forced himself to meet his opponent's face. /The only way I can think of this is how I've always thought of our little go-rounds - a battle./ But he had come to the point where concession was becoming so dangerously close. He had agreed, albeit privately, with Harry, reluctantly because Draco Malfoy never gave in without a fight and clung even to his badness with tenacity.
And once he agreed with Harry... what would happen then? His mind, such as it was, could not even conceive of it.
"You know what I'm saying is true," Harry pressed, his voice still soft, the words faintly cajoling. "You know it, Draco."
He... he... He couldn't know this. Desperately, backed into a corner, he shook his head in mute denial.
"You know it," Harry repeated, leaning a bit more closely now. "I can tell."
"What do you know?" Oh, God, he couldn't speak. He couldn't even see - but yet he could see those two piercing, demanding green eyes, see the way Harry's body leaned into his, evoking a response from his own, however unwilling, all of him a promise.
/This is what you can be,/ Harry said. /This is what you can have. You *know* it, Draco./
"What do you want me to say?" It was supposed to be a demand, but by the time it had squeezed past the constriction in Draco's throat it had become a plea. "What is it, Harry?" A terrific knot released inside him and more questions/statements came pouring out like water through floodgates. "Do you want me to admit you're right and just... just freaking change into this bloody angel figure? Do you want me to admit that I miss my parents and all my friends who either got killed or locked up? Do you want me to say that I saved you because I couldn't even begin to think of what it would be like if you were dead?
"And isn't *that* just bloody brilliant?" He paused and drew a breath, regaining some of his composure, feeling it flow into him like cold water, or like ice. "What would you say to that, Potter?"
"I'd say..." Harry blinked and his voice shook, but he went on. "I'd say I'd want to know more."
"Oh?" Draco turned, unable to stand that endless gaze. He felt it so keenly, though, pressing against his back silent and demanding. He felt, too, everything begin to crumble, all the certainties that had mortared his life together had loosened. The whole edifice was cracking, falling apart like a ruin, he was breaking up, shedding, sloughing layers of himself away. "Could you really stand to hear a confessed Death Eater say that he couldn't live without knowing you were alive? That he couldn't bring himself to kill you because... because..." /Stop asking questions! You know the answers, Draco. Admit that you do and be done with it./
"I couldn't kill you," he whispered brokenly. "I never could."
Harry sat there silent, still leaning forward with a terrible sort of tension in his upper body. Draco turned to see that, to see the painful honesty shining in those green eyes, honesty and gratification - no malicious triumph on hearing such a confession, no horror at hearing it, either, both of which were reactions Draco knew he could deal with. But this... this pure, simple pleasure accepted, not without complications, but accepted as one would accept a gift given freely... How to deal with that?
Again, that little, greedy something fastened on that look and devoured it, and there was pain - pain because Draco knew he didn't deserve it, pleasure because it was Harry, because the rightness of his own words, the need for them to be spoken, had relieved him somewhat.
"Thank you," Harry said, the words unexpectedly subdued in the heavy silence.
"Why?" Draco asked. "Why wouldn't you let this go?"
"Because of what I saw that night," Harry said. He straightened a bit but still did not break his gaze. There was no demand in his eyes now, no, nothing but that shining, brutal honesty. "I saw... God, I sound like Trelawney... I saw something in you. I couldn't let myself believe it at the time - it was just too crazy, even though things were crazy enough as it was - but I *saw* it." He shook his head ruefully. "Ron used to harass me about it all the time, but the more he ragged on me, the more I thought about it, and by the time the war ended and you were facing your indictment, I knew I couldn't let the Ministry have you. It wasn't just the life-debt thing... it was something else. It was believing, I guess, that you were something... something else."
"Something else?" Draco echoed, slightly amused. "Could you clarify that a bit?"
"I'm not sure if I could," Harry said. "Ron could do it better... He said once, seventh year I think it was, that the more he couldn't stand Hermione, the more he wanted to understand her."
"Ronald Weasley said that?" Draco asked. "Are we talking about the same Ron Weasley here?"
Harry laughed. "That was my reaction exactly when he said that - I wanted to know where he had the real Ron Weasley locked up, but he just gave me this look - you know *the* look - and said I could laugh all I wanted, but it was true. So I watched them for awhile, and I decided that he did have a point; it was like, whenever he drove Hermione up the wall with his slacking off or rule-breaking or whatever, her reactions told him something different every time. Or something like that. It only makes sense to Ron."
"That's the way it is with many things, I understand."
"Very true." Harry grinned and shook his head, and for an abrupt moment, the classmate and avowed enemy was back, so truly and powerfully Draco was staggered - the unreserved smile, the flashing, passionate expression that said nothing of what Harry experienced was halfway or somehow impure. No - joy, guilt, hatred, love... it was all undiluted, more or less. "But it... it does make sense in a way. You learn just as much from the people who annoy you as much as the people you can tolerate. Maybe more, if you're smart about it. Ron just figured it out before I did. After he told me that, I started thinking about all our fights - I think I remember most of them - and about that night... and I sort of, well, realized things."
"What'd you realize?" Draco couldn't stand it, being sprawled, pinned and twisting in Harry's gaze. He never could.
"I didn't hate you," Harry said at last, mercifully looking away. "I've said it before. You weren't the obnoxious kid I knew at Hogwarts, and you weren't the evil, conscienceless being Fudge kept telling me you were. But I didn't know what you were, or what to think of you until I could see you again and... and talk to you about stuff, so I could figure out how I felt."
"I always hated you." Draco winced at his words, but felt compelled to say them in the honesty of the moment. "Really, I couldn't stand you - ever since I was old enough to know your name and what it meant, I hated your guts. All through school I hated you, but things started changing. The war, I guess, and seeing that things weren't as simple as black and white." He thought about that, how Severus' words had just now come back to haunt him, so bitterly prophetic, so wrenchingly, terribly true. /'... we see what we want, and keep seeing it until something happens to make us see what *is*.'/
"And now what do you think?"
Draco shook his head. "I can't think," he answered, "but I know I don't hate you. I don't... I can't even resent you." That was true as well, although resentment came very naturally to him.
Unexpectedly, Harry's entire body loosened, as if tension were flooding out of it. His head tipped back, tendons in his neck stretching to stand out sharply through pale skin, and a sigh shook his slender frame. For a long moment he sat like that, unmoving, before he blinked, leaned forward again, and once more fixed his gaze on Draco - but where it had been piercing and painful to meet, it was now clear and simple, friendly, undemanding.
"If you knew how long I've waited - no, hoped, really - to hear you say something like that..." Harry shook his head. "When we'd found the diaries and decided to ask you to come, I think Ron had to keep me from throwing myself out a window... I didn't know what I'd do if I saw you. When I saw you. I only had my guesses to go on, and Hermione would be the first to tell you they're rarely helpful. I sort of... well, don't kill me... but I followed along a couple times when Ron took you back and forth between your room and the Great Hall, and I listened enough to figure out that I wasn't wrong. Or at least, I wasn't too far wrong."
Draco was dimly aware he should be furious over Harry's issue with respecting the privacy of others, but anger seemed terrifically petty at the moment. Instead he was caught in the realization, the pleasure that Harry had *hoped* for him, had believed against all evidence and prior inclination, that he, Draco Malfoy, was not wholly evil and could be something different, something far different from what even he himself thought he could be.
'Evil doesn't hope for redemption,' Severus had also said. 'It hopes for nothing. When you read these words, Draco, I hope you'll realize how true they are. It took me many years to come to this realization, though, and by that time, I had suffered much. I hated James for dying and foisting his son on me, for making me transform into a decent human being - or one who played at decency. He made me realize that I wasn't evil, because evil would kill his child because it *was* his. It wouldn't do like I did and watch out for him. So I couldn't be evil... what could I be? I believe I have never satisfactorily answered that question, but I do know that I am not so incontrovertibly evil as I'd once thought; believing we are something absolute, whether absolute good or absolute evil, strikes me as being true arrogance, as if saying that we're gods and cannot be changed.'
He waited quietly for a moment, wondering why there wasn't a sudden flash of revelation coming over him. At such moments, when lives were supposed to change, he thought there was supposed to be something dramatic - fireworks, weeping and wailing, laughter, orgasm. Whatever. But silently as Draco waited and waited for it to come, he realized that there wasn't going to be a tidal wave that would take him up, sweep him away and spit back a newly cleaned and baptized Draco Malfoy.
Instead, it came quietly, very quietly, and it softly stole over him like the realization of growing warmth.
/Nothing,/ the small voice whispered. /It was all nothing, what you thought of yourself - nothing more, really, than air. Less than that. And what you are *now*... let Harry tell you. He knows./
"I... Thank you, Harry," Draco said, unable to say much more.
Harry blinked. "Don't mention it," he said, a smile tugging at the corners of his lips. He stood slowly, wincing a bit, and Draco was almost startled to see that his leg was still injured - so much had changed in the course of a minute, surely that must have changed as well (or maybe he had simply forgotten for a moment.) He stayed where he was, watching but trying not to appear concerned as Harry straightened and gingerly shook his leg out.
They stood, the two men, for a long moment. Awkwardness poked at Draco, who wondered wildly what to say - offer refreshments? Ask Harry if he needed anything? Hug him? Kiss him? Part of him wished desperately to do the last two of those options - and a bit more - but it had been so long since he had done either of those things and he wasn't sure he could do them yet as they should be done: properly, without a trace of expectation or revulsion. He remembered his mother hugging him and pushing his hair out of his eyes, the only person to ever do that. But he had been very young then, and as he'd gotten older, her displays of affection had mysteriously vanished.
Once again, Harry was watching him, and he fidgeted for a moment before saying, "I don't know what to do."
"Neither do I," Harry said. His gaze slowly drifted out to the window and the sky beyond it, which had edged toward late morning. Late morning only? Surely, Draco thought, they'd been in his bedroom for ages. "I came here," Harry continued, "not expecting anything - just hoping, really. I should be going."
"You're welcome to stay," Draco said quickly, pained at hearing Harry's words.
The morning light glinted in Harry's eyes, making them prismatic. Everything flashed in them, a dizzying swirl of light and emotion. "Thank you." The words were simple but richly felt, and Draco found his own pain easing. "I really do need to get going, though - I need to finish preparing a test to torture the fifth-year Ravenclaws."
"Come back, then," Draco said. He took one step forward, then two, three, four, enough to bring him to stand before Harry, who did not move. "Any time. You're always... that is to say, you're welcome here."
"I will." Harry's mouth worked soundlessly for a moment. He half-closed his eyes, shook his head and mouthed something, as if debating with some private voice, then finally sighed and held out his hand. Draco took it automatically, savoring the warm, slightly moist skin against his own. /This is how it's supposed to be,/ he thought with deep satisfaction. /This is how I want it, and this is how it *will* be./
Their hands dropped after a time, only when it became a bit too strange to be touching for so long. Harry blinked as if coming to, opened his mouth to say something before Draco broke in with "The Ministry has the manor blocked against Apparition, and I don't think Ron left the Portkey, so I don't know... Maybe one of the house-elves could fix up the horseless carriage thing and take you out a few miles so you can Apparate back to Hogwarts or something."
"Oh, there's no need," Harry assured him. "I need to stretch a bit - if you just open up that window there, that'd be great, thanks."
/Idiot. He's an Animagus./ Draco wondered if his new self was going to be so forgetful, and he smiled ruefully at the prospect of being a New and Improved Draco Malfoy. /No... not new,/ he decided after a moment, /and maybe not even improved. Just different./ He brushed past Harry, moving a bit closer than propriety suggested, and tripped the latch to push the window wide open. The fresh coolness of a late morning breeze wafted through to them, rich with the smells of grass and leaves and sun.
Harry seemed to expand in the pool of sunlight, even as he bent to gather the Invisibility Cloak into a neat package fastened by the ties that would hold it together at the throat. He straightened and sunlight flashed in his black hair, making it shine like obsidian except where white touched it, and then it was like snow, or silver. He half-turned and smiled at Draco, said, "I'll owl you soon" and then his form twisted, condensed, flowed into the streamlined shape of a dark hawk that, with one powerful sweep of its wings, soared out the bedroom window and was gone.
Gone. Draco stood there for a day, a day in which the sun did not move. /Gone,/ he thought to himself, tasting the word as if for the first time, realizing that 'gone' did not mean, as it always had, 'forever.'
[continued in 'The Metamorphosis of Narcissus']
+Sed fugit interea, fugit inreparabile tempus+
(Vergil)
CHAPTER FIVE
Once he regained the power of speech, the first words out of Draco's mouth were, "Does Ron know you're here?"
Harry was distinctly pale in the dim light of Draco's room and pain had tightened his expression - still, though, a slight smile danced at the corners of his mouth. "He does," he said. "Why do you think it was just the two of you going to Hogsmeade? Well, three, counting me, but the rest of the Aurors would never have let me tag along and it would have been too difficult to stay hidden from them. It was hard enough keeping up with you as it was."
Draco's eyes involuntarily darted to Harry's injured leg. Harry caught the reflexive flickering and smiled, if the grim upward twitch of his lips could be called so. Wildly, Draco wondered if he should offer the man a seat, but in a moment of cold calculation decided /No... let him suffer./ If Harry was going to ask to sit down, though, he gave no sign of it. Instead, the sardonic smile remained fixed as he shifted himself so most of his weight was borne by his good leg, the injured one relaxed and dangling like that of a lame horse.
"What in God's name would be so important to you that you'd come gallivanting all the way out here?" Draco felt uneasiness creeping up in him; it had been six months since his last visitor, a Ministry lackey, had come to him, and that had been a brief, businesslike meeting in Draco's office. But this... this... This was Harry Potter, the real and painful fact of him, in his bedroom, staring at him with eyes too determined for pain. It was a scene cut right from his fantasies, Harry was, and now that he stood here, Draco had no idea what to do and hid behind his typical caustic demand.
"I told you I wanted to know why you saved my life," Harry said. "I think this is the third time I've said it, and the only answer I've gotten is that you saved me because of my 'annoying presence' or something like that. Once you give me a straight answer, I'll go."
/Or stay, if you'd like,/ Draco privately amended, allowing himself that momentary hope.
He couldn't keep looking at those green eyes. Draco straightened and turned away to pace the length of his bedroom, trying to keep a lid on his agitation. 'There's always a time when you find everything you thought was true about yourself is, at best, half-truth,' Severus said from the deep recesses of his memory. Draco could hear his mentor saying those words and see them on the pages of his diary. 'No matter how cold or how self-possessed you think you are, something will happen - depend upon it - that will drive you very nearly mad. It will come, Draco, if it hasn't yet.'
/So this is it./ Draco fought for calm, trying to ignore Severus' prophecy. /This is where I snap./
"There *are* no straight answers," he said.
"Really?"
"You of all people should know that." Draco took a steadying breath and forced himself to stand still. "And you also know that the real answer isn't the one you want to hear."
"They're also the ones that need to be heard," Harry said. Draco was briefly gratified to hear a slight quaver in his opponent's voice. "You of all people should know *that*."
Draco's eyes narrowed. "And what's that supposed to mean?"
"Oh, come on," Harry said impatiently. "Don't tell me *you've* never wondered why you got off with no formal indictment and house arrest, just because I asked for it."
"They excused me from trial," Draco said tightly, "on your word. They didn't acquit me - oh, no, they'd never do that. They'd be right to - I'm as guilty as any Death Eater they locked up in Azkaban. No, they shipped me back home on The Boy Who Lived's say-so, and let me tell you right now I'd much rather be in Azkaban. It can't possibly be worse than this."
"You should tell that to the people who ended up there," Harry said. "I'm sure that'll make them feel so much better."
Draco laughed, a bit unhinged at the crude, wild sound jolting out of his own throat. "Maybe I should - then they'll realize how easy they have it. Oh, you're not going to understand - I can see it. You spared my life, Potter, and that's what we're down to, isn't it? Both of us want to know why we're alive." Fury simmered along his veins and his thoughts wove erratically back and forth, evading his desperate grasps at coherence. "I don't believe in the crap Dumbledore shoveled into us about 'life debts' and all that. Why'd you save *me*?"
"Whether you believe it or not, it's true," Harry said. "Some things don't require belief to be real."
The utter simplicity and directness of the statement cut through Draco's confusion. /There are some things that exist because we believe them to exist - things like beauty, joy, love and hate - and there are those things that *are*./ The old cant about life debt had always seemed nauseatingly idealistic to Draco, who found the idea of forced reciprocity unnecessary; if someone wanted to be brave and altruistic, they might as well do it on their own time. But he remembered Severus' words on the subject, words spoken by a man who had found himself indebted to his longtime enemy: 'I hated it, every moment of my life, I hated being in James Potter's debt, but I felt it - even after he died and I was rid of him, I felt responsibility pressing on me. No, it wasn't responsibility, it was something stronger, something I couldn't ignore, and I hated it - and James - even more.'
Draco wondered if Severus had slipped and said James rather than the derisive 'Potter,' as he never called any of his enemies by their first names if he could possibly help it. And he also knew that Severus would never had done all he did if it wasn't for his debt to a man he hated as much in memory as in life. So it was true, then - there had been something owed between the two of them, but Harry at least had the plausible excuse of obligation. It stung a little, thinking that Harry had been acting solely out of wizardly duty and not another motive.
Now, though, Harry waited quietly, still in that crooked and awkward position that was vaguely painful for Draco to witness. Masking his internal struggle as best he could, Draco waved a hand in the general direction of his desk and muttered a command for Harry to take a seat. Mercifully, Harry did, sighing a bit as tendons again made that horrible pulling sound.
"I felt it," Harry was saying earnestly now, as if picking up on Draco's thoughts. His expression was curiously open and undefeated, so typically Harry that it hurt Draco to look at him. "It's not like... It wasn't like anything I'd ever felt before. Each day leading up to your trial got worse and worse, until it got to the point that I knew if I didn't do something I'd go insane. If you'd died, I don't know what I would have done."
"Pine away with anguish?"
"It felt that way, yes."
That was almost too much to be borne, that honest answer to his sarcastic question. Draco stepped closer, trying to loom a little, but the determination in Harry's eyes said he was not intimidated. "If I hadn't saved you," Draco said quietly, pitching his voice so that Harry had to lean forward a little to catch his words - lean in enough so Draco could smell the sweat and scent of him - "If I hadn't saved you, but you'd still gotten away from our little meeting alive, would you have spoken up for me against the Ministry?"
"No," Harry said. "I wouldn't have."
"A good answer."
"But I'm answering that on the assumption that, at that point, I would have absolutely no idea of the person you might eventually become," Harry continued, overriding Draco's satisfaction. "I would have made that decision without having found Snape's diaries or having the opportunity to contact you and see you for myself."
"Explain." Draco did not move. Harry remained unaffected.
"If you were half as bad as you think you are," Harry said, voice lowering in imitation of Draco's, "you would never have come when Ron asked. You wouldn't treasure Snape's diaries like you do - he would have been just another casualty Dumbledore's side would have to take, am I right?" He paused, and evidently saw Draco's reluctant agreement in his eyes, then continued, "and you wouldn't have told me what you did about living here - you wouldn't be miserable because here would be the perfect opportunity to think about revenge. You wouldn't even miss your parents.
"So, back then, if I knew what I know now, yes, I would have saved you."
Draco felt his eyes slipping shut as if by not seeing Harry he could somehow not hear the words he spoke. /If I knew what I know now, yes, I would have saved you./ Something within him, small and tight and greedy, wanted to hear those words again, because those words brought so much pain with them, and pleasure too, and Draco Malfoy rarely ever experienced one without the other. Pain because what Harry said was, at some fundamental level, very true - Ron had said it too: He was not Evil. He missed his parents like any normal person who'd loved his parents would miss them. He hated his endless confinement to misery but knew he deserved it.
'The one thing of which evil is incapable of being is fully self-aware,' Severus had written near the very end of the third year, one of the most recent things Draco had read. 'It can't experience the sensation of guilt in its fullest capacity - oh, a true Death Eater knows he's guilty of his crimes, an evil one will rejoice in being guilty, but isn't pain concomitant with guilt? Pain, misery, the pangs of conscience - I felt them more than I care to admit here. Evil can't experience that - it cares nothing for that which does not feed its appetite for the degradation of *others.*'
Harry was watching him closely, with those green eyes that missed nothing. Draco felt the terrific pressure of that gaze, wanted to crumble under it, forced himself to meet his opponent's face. /The only way I can think of this is how I've always thought of our little go-rounds - a battle./ But he had come to the point where concession was becoming so dangerously close. He had agreed, albeit privately, with Harry, reluctantly because Draco Malfoy never gave in without a fight and clung even to his badness with tenacity.
And once he agreed with Harry... what would happen then? His mind, such as it was, could not even conceive of it.
"You know what I'm saying is true," Harry pressed, his voice still soft, the words faintly cajoling. "You know it, Draco."
He... he... He couldn't know this. Desperately, backed into a corner, he shook his head in mute denial.
"You know it," Harry repeated, leaning a bit more closely now. "I can tell."
"What do you know?" Oh, God, he couldn't speak. He couldn't even see - but yet he could see those two piercing, demanding green eyes, see the way Harry's body leaned into his, evoking a response from his own, however unwilling, all of him a promise.
/This is what you can be,/ Harry said. /This is what you can have. You *know* it, Draco./
"What do you want me to say?" It was supposed to be a demand, but by the time it had squeezed past the constriction in Draco's throat it had become a plea. "What is it, Harry?" A terrific knot released inside him and more questions/statements came pouring out like water through floodgates. "Do you want me to admit you're right and just... just freaking change into this bloody angel figure? Do you want me to admit that I miss my parents and all my friends who either got killed or locked up? Do you want me to say that I saved you because I couldn't even begin to think of what it would be like if you were dead?
"And isn't *that* just bloody brilliant?" He paused and drew a breath, regaining some of his composure, feeling it flow into him like cold water, or like ice. "What would you say to that, Potter?"
"I'd say..." Harry blinked and his voice shook, but he went on. "I'd say I'd want to know more."
"Oh?" Draco turned, unable to stand that endless gaze. He felt it so keenly, though, pressing against his back silent and demanding. He felt, too, everything begin to crumble, all the certainties that had mortared his life together had loosened. The whole edifice was cracking, falling apart like a ruin, he was breaking up, shedding, sloughing layers of himself away. "Could you really stand to hear a confessed Death Eater say that he couldn't live without knowing you were alive? That he couldn't bring himself to kill you because... because..." /Stop asking questions! You know the answers, Draco. Admit that you do and be done with it./
"I couldn't kill you," he whispered brokenly. "I never could."
Harry sat there silent, still leaning forward with a terrible sort of tension in his upper body. Draco turned to see that, to see the painful honesty shining in those green eyes, honesty and gratification - no malicious triumph on hearing such a confession, no horror at hearing it, either, both of which were reactions Draco knew he could deal with. But this... this pure, simple pleasure accepted, not without complications, but accepted as one would accept a gift given freely... How to deal with that?
Again, that little, greedy something fastened on that look and devoured it, and there was pain - pain because Draco knew he didn't deserve it, pleasure because it was Harry, because the rightness of his own words, the need for them to be spoken, had relieved him somewhat.
"Thank you," Harry said, the words unexpectedly subdued in the heavy silence.
"Why?" Draco asked. "Why wouldn't you let this go?"
"Because of what I saw that night," Harry said. He straightened a bit but still did not break his gaze. There was no demand in his eyes now, no, nothing but that shining, brutal honesty. "I saw... God, I sound like Trelawney... I saw something in you. I couldn't let myself believe it at the time - it was just too crazy, even though things were crazy enough as it was - but I *saw* it." He shook his head ruefully. "Ron used to harass me about it all the time, but the more he ragged on me, the more I thought about it, and by the time the war ended and you were facing your indictment, I knew I couldn't let the Ministry have you. It wasn't just the life-debt thing... it was something else. It was believing, I guess, that you were something... something else."
"Something else?" Draco echoed, slightly amused. "Could you clarify that a bit?"
"I'm not sure if I could," Harry said. "Ron could do it better... He said once, seventh year I think it was, that the more he couldn't stand Hermione, the more he wanted to understand her."
"Ronald Weasley said that?" Draco asked. "Are we talking about the same Ron Weasley here?"
Harry laughed. "That was my reaction exactly when he said that - I wanted to know where he had the real Ron Weasley locked up, but he just gave me this look - you know *the* look - and said I could laugh all I wanted, but it was true. So I watched them for awhile, and I decided that he did have a point; it was like, whenever he drove Hermione up the wall with his slacking off or rule-breaking or whatever, her reactions told him something different every time. Or something like that. It only makes sense to Ron."
"That's the way it is with many things, I understand."
"Very true." Harry grinned and shook his head, and for an abrupt moment, the classmate and avowed enemy was back, so truly and powerfully Draco was staggered - the unreserved smile, the flashing, passionate expression that said nothing of what Harry experienced was halfway or somehow impure. No - joy, guilt, hatred, love... it was all undiluted, more or less. "But it... it does make sense in a way. You learn just as much from the people who annoy you as much as the people you can tolerate. Maybe more, if you're smart about it. Ron just figured it out before I did. After he told me that, I started thinking about all our fights - I think I remember most of them - and about that night... and I sort of, well, realized things."
"What'd you realize?" Draco couldn't stand it, being sprawled, pinned and twisting in Harry's gaze. He never could.
"I didn't hate you," Harry said at last, mercifully looking away. "I've said it before. You weren't the obnoxious kid I knew at Hogwarts, and you weren't the evil, conscienceless being Fudge kept telling me you were. But I didn't know what you were, or what to think of you until I could see you again and... and talk to you about stuff, so I could figure out how I felt."
"I always hated you." Draco winced at his words, but felt compelled to say them in the honesty of the moment. "Really, I couldn't stand you - ever since I was old enough to know your name and what it meant, I hated your guts. All through school I hated you, but things started changing. The war, I guess, and seeing that things weren't as simple as black and white." He thought about that, how Severus' words had just now come back to haunt him, so bitterly prophetic, so wrenchingly, terribly true. /'... we see what we want, and keep seeing it until something happens to make us see what *is*.'/
"And now what do you think?"
Draco shook his head. "I can't think," he answered, "but I know I don't hate you. I don't... I can't even resent you." That was true as well, although resentment came very naturally to him.
Unexpectedly, Harry's entire body loosened, as if tension were flooding out of it. His head tipped back, tendons in his neck stretching to stand out sharply through pale skin, and a sigh shook his slender frame. For a long moment he sat like that, unmoving, before he blinked, leaned forward again, and once more fixed his gaze on Draco - but where it had been piercing and painful to meet, it was now clear and simple, friendly, undemanding.
"If you knew how long I've waited - no, hoped, really - to hear you say something like that..." Harry shook his head. "When we'd found the diaries and decided to ask you to come, I think Ron had to keep me from throwing myself out a window... I didn't know what I'd do if I saw you. When I saw you. I only had my guesses to go on, and Hermione would be the first to tell you they're rarely helpful. I sort of... well, don't kill me... but I followed along a couple times when Ron took you back and forth between your room and the Great Hall, and I listened enough to figure out that I wasn't wrong. Or at least, I wasn't too far wrong."
Draco was dimly aware he should be furious over Harry's issue with respecting the privacy of others, but anger seemed terrifically petty at the moment. Instead he was caught in the realization, the pleasure that Harry had *hoped* for him, had believed against all evidence and prior inclination, that he, Draco Malfoy, was not wholly evil and could be something different, something far different from what even he himself thought he could be.
'Evil doesn't hope for redemption,' Severus had also said. 'It hopes for nothing. When you read these words, Draco, I hope you'll realize how true they are. It took me many years to come to this realization, though, and by that time, I had suffered much. I hated James for dying and foisting his son on me, for making me transform into a decent human being - or one who played at decency. He made me realize that I wasn't evil, because evil would kill his child because it *was* his. It wouldn't do like I did and watch out for him. So I couldn't be evil... what could I be? I believe I have never satisfactorily answered that question, but I do know that I am not so incontrovertibly evil as I'd once thought; believing we are something absolute, whether absolute good or absolute evil, strikes me as being true arrogance, as if saying that we're gods and cannot be changed.'
He waited quietly for a moment, wondering why there wasn't a sudden flash of revelation coming over him. At such moments, when lives were supposed to change, he thought there was supposed to be something dramatic - fireworks, weeping and wailing, laughter, orgasm. Whatever. But silently as Draco waited and waited for it to come, he realized that there wasn't going to be a tidal wave that would take him up, sweep him away and spit back a newly cleaned and baptized Draco Malfoy.
Instead, it came quietly, very quietly, and it softly stole over him like the realization of growing warmth.
/Nothing,/ the small voice whispered. /It was all nothing, what you thought of yourself - nothing more, really, than air. Less than that. And what you are *now*... let Harry tell you. He knows./
"I... Thank you, Harry," Draco said, unable to say much more.
Harry blinked. "Don't mention it," he said, a smile tugging at the corners of his lips. He stood slowly, wincing a bit, and Draco was almost startled to see that his leg was still injured - so much had changed in the course of a minute, surely that must have changed as well (or maybe he had simply forgotten for a moment.) He stayed where he was, watching but trying not to appear concerned as Harry straightened and gingerly shook his leg out.
They stood, the two men, for a long moment. Awkwardness poked at Draco, who wondered wildly what to say - offer refreshments? Ask Harry if he needed anything? Hug him? Kiss him? Part of him wished desperately to do the last two of those options - and a bit more - but it had been so long since he had done either of those things and he wasn't sure he could do them yet as they should be done: properly, without a trace of expectation or revulsion. He remembered his mother hugging him and pushing his hair out of his eyes, the only person to ever do that. But he had been very young then, and as he'd gotten older, her displays of affection had mysteriously vanished.
Once again, Harry was watching him, and he fidgeted for a moment before saying, "I don't know what to do."
"Neither do I," Harry said. His gaze slowly drifted out to the window and the sky beyond it, which had edged toward late morning. Late morning only? Surely, Draco thought, they'd been in his bedroom for ages. "I came here," Harry continued, "not expecting anything - just hoping, really. I should be going."
"You're welcome to stay," Draco said quickly, pained at hearing Harry's words.
The morning light glinted in Harry's eyes, making them prismatic. Everything flashed in them, a dizzying swirl of light and emotion. "Thank you." The words were simple but richly felt, and Draco found his own pain easing. "I really do need to get going, though - I need to finish preparing a test to torture the fifth-year Ravenclaws."
"Come back, then," Draco said. He took one step forward, then two, three, four, enough to bring him to stand before Harry, who did not move. "Any time. You're always... that is to say, you're welcome here."
"I will." Harry's mouth worked soundlessly for a moment. He half-closed his eyes, shook his head and mouthed something, as if debating with some private voice, then finally sighed and held out his hand. Draco took it automatically, savoring the warm, slightly moist skin against his own. /This is how it's supposed to be,/ he thought with deep satisfaction. /This is how I want it, and this is how it *will* be./
Their hands dropped after a time, only when it became a bit too strange to be touching for so long. Harry blinked as if coming to, opened his mouth to say something before Draco broke in with "The Ministry has the manor blocked against Apparition, and I don't think Ron left the Portkey, so I don't know... Maybe one of the house-elves could fix up the horseless carriage thing and take you out a few miles so you can Apparate back to Hogwarts or something."
"Oh, there's no need," Harry assured him. "I need to stretch a bit - if you just open up that window there, that'd be great, thanks."
/Idiot. He's an Animagus./ Draco wondered if his new self was going to be so forgetful, and he smiled ruefully at the prospect of being a New and Improved Draco Malfoy. /No... not new,/ he decided after a moment, /and maybe not even improved. Just different./ He brushed past Harry, moving a bit closer than propriety suggested, and tripped the latch to push the window wide open. The fresh coolness of a late morning breeze wafted through to them, rich with the smells of grass and leaves and sun.
Harry seemed to expand in the pool of sunlight, even as he bent to gather the Invisibility Cloak into a neat package fastened by the ties that would hold it together at the throat. He straightened and sunlight flashed in his black hair, making it shine like obsidian except where white touched it, and then it was like snow, or silver. He half-turned and smiled at Draco, said, "I'll owl you soon" and then his form twisted, condensed, flowed into the streamlined shape of a dark hawk that, with one powerful sweep of its wings, soared out the bedroom window and was gone.
Gone. Draco stood there for a day, a day in which the sun did not move. /Gone,/ he thought to himself, tasting the word as if for the first time, realizing that 'gone' did not mean, as it always had, 'forever.'
[continued in 'The Metamorphosis of Narcissus']