Threatening To Love You.

Title: Heartbreak Is All Around.
Author: Pekeleke
Pairing(s): Draco Malfoy/Harry Potter.
Rating: M
Challenge: Written for the adventdrabbles 2021. Prompt #16: German Christmas Market.
Word Count: 944
Warnings: Explicit Language. Dramatic Draco. Humor.
Disclaimer: The characters, setting, and the HP franchise are owned by JKR and not me. I make no profit from writing this piece of fanfiction.
A/N: Unbeated. Ch 15 of my Christmas Series: Threatening To Love You.
Summary: “Draco is heartbroken. He’s been heartbroken many times before and has managed to survive every single one of those ordeals, but he’d been so careful recently that he’s out of practice dealing with this type of nasty trick.”

Heartbreak Is All Around.

Draco is heartbroken. He’s been heartbroken many times before and has managed to survive every single one of those ordeals, but he’d been so careful recently that he’s out of practice dealing with this type of nasty trick. Draco acknowledges he has a slight tendency toward the dramatic, that he’s a suspicious, self-sabotaging soul when it comes to relationships. Still, he’s perfectly justified in walking out on Potter.

Potter lied to him. He’d sent that awful death threat and then told him he’d opened an investigation based on a report that was never even filed. Potter’s Weasel aided him with the cover-up. Draco can get them fired over this. And he might. If he ever stops mopping inside his Manor like a wounded Victorian heroine.

When confronted, Potter had paled like a ghost and descended into incoherency. He’d muttered something incomprehensible about dragon-taming studs and delicate flowers. Claimed to have taken the wrong brother’s advice and then been too cowardly to come clean. The explanation sounded panicked and implausible to Draco, so he’d sneered something nasty about Potter’s immature need to cling to their old schoolyard rivalry and Apparated away.

Potter had tried to follow him home, the fiend. But the moment Draco decided the savior wished him ill, the Manor’s wards rejected the Gryffindor’s attempts to bypass them. Potter’s owls aren’t reaching him either, even though Draco can see them circle the property. Draco’s Floo connection is now inaccessible to Potter, Granger, and everyone named Weasley or even remotely related to that family. What’s more, Draco isn’t in the mood to be bothered at work, so he walks into his father’s library, the one the Aurors had been certain existed but never managed to find, and digs out a tome so old that both its title and author have disappeared from most listings naming reputable compendiums of The Dark Arts. Hiding a wizard from another isn’t usually hard. But doing so while the threatened party must remain in the immediate vicinity of the person he wishes to avoid is trickier. Draco’s book offers a simple yet elegant solution in the shape of a modified Fidelius Charm, anchored by the kind of power most wizards have no regular access to: house-elf magic.

Prippy is eager to help her beloved master ‘escape that dreadful baker, Harry Potter.’ She agrees to imbue the spell with her natural ability to move around wizards unseen. Thus, two days after Christmas, Draco returns to work fully confident that Potter doesn’t stand a chance in hell when it comes to laying those lying green eyes on him.

It turns out that although Potter himself can’t see him. Weasley can. Potter’s obnoxious owls can. And, even worse, Potter’s gorgeous stag Patronus can reach him and speak to him in Potter’s mournful voice. Potter’s allies, human, animal, and magical, are so determined to plead his case that Draco is frothing at the mouth by lunchtime. Concentrating on his work becomes an uphill battle. Draco has refused to accept fifteen apology letters from fifteen increasingly distraught owls and heard no less than eleven versions of the disturbingly plausible sob-story featuring a lovelorn Potter who sought advice from Weasley’s older brothers because Draco is a ‘fucking oblivious twit who can’t tell when a perfectly fit bloke is gagging to ream him in every shadowy corner of the ministry building. For years. For freaking years, Malfoy.’

Draco hadn’t taken the insults from Potter’s cronies kindly, so he’d banned them all from entering his department and started sending Juliet out to deal with other ministry employees. Draco sends the rest of his team down to dismantle the German Christmas Market they’d set up in the atrium, trusting them to place the pedestals for the New Year’s Ball ice sculptures according to his exact specifications. He locks himself inside his office, Potter’s contrite-eyed Patronus his only company, and concentrates on etching the last dozen glass orbs. At the end of the workday, the stag tries to follow him home but dissolves upon contact with the Manor’s wards, leaving Draco strangely bereft.

For the first time since the night he’d found that crumpled draft on Harry’s floor, Draco wonders if he’s making a mistake. He ignores the voice in the back of his mind cautioning him against Harry’s lying and, Accioing Harry’s original threatening letter, reads it from the perspective of a playboy dragon-tamer who believes himself Merlin’s gift to gay men:

Malfoy,

I’m going to kill you. Slowly. I’ll do it by sucking your cock so violently you’ll pass out. You’ll fall limp at my feet, gorgeous and in disarray, cock all mangled and bruised, maybe even a little out of joint.

You’d like that, don’t you? I think I’d like that too. Very much.

Draco chuckles despite himself. Charley Weasley must be hotter than fucking volcanoes if he manages to get laid despite lines as bad as these. Draco can’t understand why Harry bothered to follow such crappy advice, though. He should have known this kind of shite wouldn’t work on Draco.

“He was desperate, Malfoy. Harry has been madly in love with you since you posed for that pet charity calendar with your crups six years ago,” Draco remembers Weasley’s simple explanation word for word, and it sounds so bumbling, so Harry, that just enough of Draco’s suspicions give into hope. Draco wants to believe that Harry loves him. He really, desperately, wants to have faith in the Gryffindor. Draco’s father would say it’s madness to risk one’s heart on someone so inept at wooing, but Lucius had sold his soul to a heartless sweet-talker peddling power. Draco wants something else entirely. Something worth the risk.