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A Mitigating Circumstance - part 2/8ish)
A Mitigating Circumstance (part 2/8ish)
Pairing: Harry/Draco and implied Harry/Ginny
Rating: NC-17
Summary: Someone is hunting down and killing former Death Eaters, one by one, and it is only a matter of time before he (or she!) gets to Lucius and Draco.

Go HERE for Part One

The Manor’s interior was even more bleak than its exterior, and the presence of a smirking, slouching Draco Malfoy did nothing to enhance its charms.

“Potter,” he said with an exaggerated drawl the instant Harry, Lucius and Dawlish stepped through the front doors into the two-storey hall. “What a lovely surprise.” Pushing himself up off the wide stone staircase where he’d been sprawled with his legs indecorously spread, Draco seemed less like he was walking than he was dripping slowly, like honey from a spoon, down each step. Harry watched him approach with the usual feeling of trepidation. Even though it was only about six o’clock in the evening, Draco seemed to be clad in an outfit resembling pyjamas. The silk clung intimately to his body, especially his crotch. Clearly, he wasn’t wearing pants. As though he were hypnotised, Harry found himself following the pendulous sway of Draco’s prick beneath the thin barrier of cloth. If it weren’t so preposterous, he would've sworn that Draco was half hard. As he walked, one indolent step after the other, the ladies’ robes Draco was wearing trailed behind him like the lowered tail of a peacock.

“I’m hardly a surprise, lovely or otherwise” Harry said. “You and your father have known we were coming since yesterday.”

Draco grinned lazily. “Touché.”

The smile Lucius directed at his son was as thin as watered down milk.

“Draco fancies himself a fencer these days,” he said tightly. “No doubt he will try to entice you into sparring with him.”

Dawlish laughed loudly and uncomfortably. “One of the few sports engaged in by both Muggles and wizards. Wish I’d studied it myself when I was at Hogwarts. Too wrapped up in Quidditch, I reckon. Not that I couldn’t have done both, but well, you know what it’s like when you’re a teenager . . .”

He fell mercifully silent when Draco pushed up his sleeve and scratched absently, but conspicuously, at the Mark on his forearm. Lucius’s expression grew even thinner, and Harry cleared his throat.

“Where do you want us?” he asked in his most businesslike tone.

“I’ll show you,” said Draco. “Father can accompany the Auror.”

“I’m an Auror,” Harry found himself saying as he followed Draco back up the stairs.

“So I’ve heard,” Draco replied, just saucily enough to be provoking, but not so much as to justify a rebuke.

“What have you been doing these past two and a half years, then?” Harry asked. “Besides playing with swords and dressing up in your mother’s clothes . . .”

He stopped abruptly in the middle of the long hall and clamped his hand over his mouth.

“That,” he said after a uncomfortable moment during which Draco simply stared at him expressionlessly, “was very inappropriate.”

They stood eying one another warily for what felt like forever, and as they did, Harry had the opportunity to notice that Draco was wearing lipstick – or at least had been recently. He swallowed around something that felt almost like revulsion but was more like curiosity. Draco had definitely grown . . . eccentric since Harry had last seen him.

“Let’s set the ground rules now, shall we?” said Draco, suddenly closer to Harry than he’d been the moment before. “No mention of mothers, save in mutual sympathy, and no casting of aspersions on one another’s sexuality . . .”

Harry felt his eyes bug out ever so slightly.

“But I’m straight!”

“Exactly. A fact for which I promise not to mock you mercilessly.”

Harry shook his head. “Why would you mock me for being straight?”

Draco cocked his head and smiled.

“Probably for the same reason you just mocked me for being gay.”

Harry frowned. “I didn’t mock you, I just said . . . oh.”

Draco’s smile gave way to a theatrical eye roll.

“All’s forgiven, Potter. You didn’t know. Now you do.” He turned away and started down the hallway again, but Harry grabbed his arm, the silk of his robes slipping through his fingers like lukewarm water.

“I am sorry,” he said. “About your Mum, I mean. I never got to say it at the time. It was my last term at Hogwarts. I . . . I should’ve sent an owl or something, but then I just . . .”

“Potter?”

“What?”

“Shut it. You sound like that buffoon Auror you brought with you.”

Harry simply nodded.

“Yeah,” he said. “I reckon I do.”




He couldn’t have been asleep for long, when Harry was startled out of a dream by an urgent knock at his bedroom door. He propped himself up on his elbows in the vast unfamiliar bed and asked the grandfather clock in the corner for the time. Only after he’d stared at its mute face for a long uncomprehending minute did he remember where he was.

“Who is it?” he grumbled. “And what time is it?”

“It’s Dawlish, and it’s two o’clock in the morning,” came the half-whispered answer.

Harry threw aside the heavy brocaded bedspread and reached for his glasses. Other than the clock and the enormous ornately carved mahogany bed, the room contained no other furnishing, not even a carpet or an armoire. When Draco had shown it to him, he’d alluded to the room’s spartan accommodations by suggesting that Harry transfigure his suitcase into a wardrobe. It had taken Harry three attempts in the leaden magic-free atmosphere, but at last he’d succeeded. The result was hardly elegant, but at least it was functional. Finding it now with the aid of the moonlight slipping through the bare curtainless windows, Harry pulled open its doors and rummaged about for a bathrobe.

“Tonight, Potter,” Dawlish growled.

“Keep your knickers on,” Harry growled back, slamming the suitcase-cum-wardrobe door closed and pulling on his robe over his pyjamas. After two failed attempts to Accio his wand from beneath his pillow, he stalked back to the bed to retrieve it.

“What?” he hissed at Dawlish’s doughy moon-shaped face, made even more moon-like by the fact he was wearing a dark bathrobe and his head with its wispy blond hair thus seemed to float, disembodied, in the dimly lit hallway.

“It’s Yaxley,” Dawlish whispered. “Someone’s topped him.”

Perhaps it was because he was still half-asleep, or maybe it was because he’d been permanently scarred by Draco’s earlier reference to his sexuality, but the first thing that leapt into Harry’s mind was the image of the hirsute, rotund Yaxley bent over a table in nothing but a pair of leather chaps.

“Dear Merlin!” Harry shrieked. “That’s . . . that’s horrible!”

Dawlish looked taken aback.

“Did . . . did you know him?” he asked.

Realising his mistake, Harry dropped his face into his hands and gave it a good, circulation-stimulating scrub. “Er, no. I mean, well, whether or not I knew him, it’s still horrible that he was murdered.”

Dawlish gave him another strange look.

“Potter,” he said deliberately, as though speaking to a child or to someone who was very very slow. “Yaxley was a Death Eater. Death Eaters are murderers. Murderers deserve to die. What makes that so hard to understand?”

“Merlin!” Harry hissed, opening the door, grabbing Dawlish’s arm and dragging him into his bedroom. “Do you realise what you’re saying? Do you realise whose house we’re standing in? In our pyjamas no less? Lucius Malfoy’s. Voldemort’s right-hand man and strategist. The lord god king of Death Eaters . . .”

“And the same goes for him,” snarled Dawlish. “Murdering bastards, all. I don’t care how fancy his table manners were tonight . . .”

“Do. You. Want. To. Die?” asked Harry, adopting Dawlish’s own patronising inflections. “Simple question, Dawlish. Do you want to keep living, or do you want to die? Because Lucius can – and will – kill you. Weren’t you listening to Robards when we were in his office the other day? Didn’t you read any of those documents he gave us? Haven’t you been paying attention since we arrived in this house? Lucius Malfoy has had everything taken from him: his magic, his titles, his artifacts, his money, his books, and even most of his furniture. The man lives on a paltry Ministry stipend and has to submit to a strip-search and body-cavity examination every other week. His wife is dead, his son stripped of his Hogwarts certificates, and he has to eat tinned Muggle food warmed on a propane camp stove because this house isn’t hooked up to the electrical grid. Lucius is a dangerous man, Dawlish. He always has been, but he’s even more so now. I would not jab at him like a tiger in the zoo. You are a fool if you think he wouldn’t still kill to defend himself – or his son . . .”

“And what of him?” Dawlish hissed. “He’s Marked like the rest of them. Parading about like some exiled prince . . .”

“Draco,” said Harry, “is the last jewel in his father’s crown. I may not know half of the things you know about being an Auror, but I know the Malfoys. Practically got my fucking degree in the Malfoys, and if you think for one second that you were assigned to them because of your status as a senior Auror, then think again. You really mustn’t have been listening to Robards because then you might have heard that it is me – not you – who is the point man for this assignment, and I suggest that you don’t forget that the next time you go shooting your mouth off like you did over dinner tonight and then fail to shut it when I kick you under the table!”

Harry ceased the tirade that had been growing in his head since they’d arrived, and they stood staring at each other for a long moment, chests heaving, before Harry, feeling suddenly self-conscious, cleared his throat and said, “Right, so Yaxley. What happened?”

Dawlish unrolled the scroll that he had clutched in his hand. “All it says is: Yaxley. Death Eater. Found deceased. Suspected time of death, 1600 hrs.”

“So, he must’ve been killed before Spence arrived at his house. Does it say anything about how he died?”

“Severed jugular. Like the other three.”

“Well, fuck,” said Harry. “Did Robards say what he wanted us to do, if anything?”

Dawlish thrust the scroll into Harry’s hand and turned to leave. “Wouldn’t know, would I?” he said sourly. “Seeing as I’m not – how did you put it? – the point man for this assignment.”

He strode through the door without bothering to close it, leaving Harry feeling, for the second time that night, like a complete and utter cad.





“Late riser, Potter?”

Harry froze, his wand hand instinctively reaching for the waistband of his trousers and his eyes scanning the strange room he’d wandered into in his search for the kitchens.

“Draco?” he called.

“In the flesh,” came the reply, and Harry watched as Draco stepped out from behind an enormous palm tree. And indeed it was true. Draco was clad in nothing but the pair of revealing pyjama bottoms he’d worn the night before. From around his neck hung a three-strand diamond necklace. Its stones glittered against his flushed skin like bits of ice caught in the sun. But despite the wintery analogies the gems called to mind, Draco was clearly anything but cold. Sweat slicked his chest and darkened the curls trailing down from his navel and disappearing into clinging black silk.

“Er,” said Harry. “This isn’t the kitchen.”

“Indeed, it is not,” said Draco, reclining on a wicker chaise lounge and tucking his hands behind his head to reveal a shockingly intimate glimpse of the hair beneath his arms. “But if it’s food that you’re looking for, this place is as good as any,” he continued, gesturing with a magnanimous wave of his hand. “Here, have a pummelo.”

“A what?”

“A pummelo. Like grapefruit, only sweeter. No? Then how about a piece of mamey sapote?”

“I think I’ll pass,” Harry replied. “The second thing sounds vaguely cannibalistic.”

Draco reached for the plate on the small brass table beside him and lifted a piece of fleshy, melon-coloured fruit to his mouth.

“Mmmm,” he said in exaggerated enjoyment, holding his hand beneath his chin to catch the juice before it dribbled down his chest. “Despite what you . . .” he continued between bites, “. . . may have heard . . . we are not . . . mmmmm . . . cannibals.”

“Joke, Malfoy,”

Draco smirked and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

“Same here, Potter. Are you sure I can’t interest you in anything? A bit of papaya, perhaps.”

Harry nodded, relenting, and made his way to sit near Draco’s feet. “Papaya at least I’ve heard of. Do all these fruits come from here?” he asked, glancing around the large glass-walled room with its dense, lush Amazonian growth.

Draco had taken another bite of the fleshy fruit and didn’t answer at first beyond a nod that caused him to drip even more juice down his front. Harry watched as it pooled briefly in the scintillating strands before mingling with sweat and continuing its slow sticky trek to the damp waistband of Draco’s pyjama bottoms.

“Yes,” he said at last. “This is our conservatory. Pity you didn’t have a chance to visit it when you were last here. It was far grander then than it is now.”

Harry had been on the verge of taking a bite of the papaya Draco had given him. Slowly he lowered his hand to his lap.

“The last time I was here,” he said evenly. “I and my friends were Voldemort’s captives. I expected to die here, not to be taken on a grand tour.

Draco’s face darkened. He set his own piece of fruit back on its plate and sat up straighter, losing as he did so, much of his exaggerated insouciance. They sat motionless, watching one another intently, like two young male lions vying for a kill. The necklace around Draco’s neck glittered in the morning sunlight filtering down through the leafy branches from the glass ceiling above.

“Where did you get that?” Harry asked.

Draco raised a hand to his throat.

“If I tell you the truth,” he said, “will you tell my father?”

Harry pondered the question for a long moment. Draco was testing him. That much, at least, was clear. But why and to what purpose? Realising belatedly that the conservatory was as hot and steamy as a jungle, Harry felt a bead of sweat trickle over his scalp and down his temple until it fell, with a fat, almost audible plop on his shoulder. When he glanced down, he suddenly realised that his white shirt had become virtually transparent with perspiration. He looked back up at Draco’s face and saw in his eyes nothing but sullen pride, loneliness and a yawning chasm of desire, so vast it seemed something into which a person could fall and never stop falling. Clearly, Draco wanted something from him. The question was merely what. Harry let his eyes drop briefly to Draco’s lap and watched the sweat-darkened silk move as the cock beneath it twitched. But, really, could that be all? Just sex?

Harry returned his eyes to Draco’s own.

“No,” he said. “I promise.”

Draco smiled as though they’d just agreed on something. It made Harry very nervous for a moment, but he quashed his anxiety with a quick reminder of their respective places.

“On one condition,” he added.

Draco arched an eyebrow, feigning disinterest too late.

“Never ever again make light of Voldemort and what he tried to do.”

“Or?”

But Harry merely shrugged, refusing to take the bait.

“Think of the worst thing I could do to you, Draco. Whatever it is, that's what you’ll get.”

“And if I’m good?”

Harry watched as Draco relaxed back against the linen cushions behind him and pushed his hand into his pyjama bottoms, revealing as he did so the base of an erection so swollen with blood that it looked as purple and as ripe and as dangerous as the split pomegranate gaping like a mouth on the plate beside him. With his other hand, Draco took another bite of his strange exotic fruit, closing his eyes as he did so.

“Oh, Potter,” he murmured, licking his lips. “You have no idea what you’re missing.”



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