Consent
“Of course I care about you, sweetheart.”
The petname was strange and unfamiliar because Draco couldn’t remember anyone who called him ‘sweetheart’ even sarcastically. People always went for ‘darling’ or ‘dearest’ or ‘dickhead’ to keep the alliteration. But sweetheart sounded nice, he thought. Like the low, melodic voice that was winding through his hair actually knew his heart, and still thought it was good.
There were hands on his shoulders: always faceless, but always firm. Draco knew who they belonged to the same way he knew the recipe for Dreamless Sleep and the same way he knew his own name. Harry. Of course they were Harry’s hands. Who else touched him so confidently and so carelessly, like they didn’t need to see him to know the exact angles of his body?
“Why?”
He needed to know. Behind him, Draco heard the rustle of cloth and a rush of air that told him Harry had moved away. He wanted to whine at the loss or grab for more contact, but he knew better. Just like he knew not to open his eyes. Draco didn’t need to see. He wanted to see, of course, but the idea of actually opening his eyes hadn’t even occurred to him. Harry wanted his eyes closed, so they were closed.
There was nothing stopping him from looking—no blindfold, no lingering promise of consequences, and no darkness behind his eyelids that told him the lights had been turned out—but Draco didn’t entertain the thought for more than a second. Opening his eyes would mean ruining the game. It would mean giving up, admitting that he couldn’t stamp down his own paranoid curiosity long enough to let Harry do this. Draco was too desperate and too needy to risk losing this.
“Why?” Harry echoed him, his voice somewhere on the other side of the room.
It wasn’t said dangerously, though, or like a warning. Still, agitation pricked Draco’s skin like a thousand microneedles and he fought himself to hold position as he listened. Harry was moving around, doing something that involved cloth rubbing against cloth. The sound wasn’t off-putting, but Draco still found himself confused by it.
“I care about you because you’re interesting,” Harry answered, keeping his voice low so Draco had to strain to hear it. “And because it feels like I’ve known you for as long as I can remember.”
Footsteps. One, two, and then silence as Draco tracked the sound to his left. Harry was near the bed, standing still and being quiet but Draco thought he could hear soft, gentle breathing. He tensed his wrists, pressing ever-so-slightly against the rope circled there. It wasn’t too tight or too loose, but Draco liked to test it every now and then to remind himself of where he was and who he was with. Harry was there to his left, just a few steps away. He was safe.
“And because you’re amusing.”
Fuck! The voice, directly beside his right ear, made him jump. Draco could have sworn that Harry had been off to his left, fiddling with something near the bed. Was the man casting charms to throw his voice?
“And,” Directly in front of him this time. “Because you’re exactly as much of a git as I always thought you were, but you somehow made me like you all the same.
Harry must have cast a silencing charm on his feet or something. He wasn’t using spells to throw his voice—Draco would have felt the magic—which meant he’d either prepared beforehand for this or he was just that fucking sneaky. Both options sent a shiver of excitement down Draco’s spine. Anticipation coiled in his gut, fanning out over his skin and heating his face into a soft blush when he realized that he liked being at Harry’s mercy like this. It didn’t feel wrong to trust the Gryffindor, though, so Draco didn’t question it.
“I care because you can be incredibly sweet and thoughtful when you want to be,” A finger ghosted along the shell of his ear. “Because you’re full of attitude and sass,” The other ear then, and Draco shuddered. “And because you let me reduce you down to this.”
Because you let me.
Harry’s hand abruptly seized his hair. He yanked, pulling his head back at an angle that made Draco hope to hit the man’s stomach—but no, he hit nothing but air. Still, he knew intuitively that Harry was looking down at him with fierce, hungry eyes and that this angle always made his pupils flare with want. He swallowed hard, biting his lip unconsciously but then continuing when it made the hand tighten its grip.
“I care,” Harry continued, his voice a whisper of breath against Draco’s throat now. “Because you’re so prim and proper and composed all the time. But we both know what’s brewing just under the surface. You want to be here, like this, wrapped around my little finger and desperate for anything I’ll give you.”
It was true. The honesty and the brutality of that statement made his blush deepen, but it was true. He arched back into the hand, seeking more contact.
“I care, sweetheart,” Again that petname, almost managing to distract him from the finger trailing along his collarbone. “Because you drive me insane with want.”
Everything was heightened. Draco was hyper aware of his own heartbeat thudding in his ears, the feather-light touch of Harry’s fingers, and the contrast of that harsh hand in his hair. He sank into the sensation, barely managing to stay upright.
“Because you’re gorgeous,”
A palm over his heart.
“Because I love making you look like this: all strung out and desperate.”
Fingers ghosting over his neck.
“Because I know you want me.”
Whole hand blanketing his throat, still just barely touching.
“Because you need me.”
The hand squeezed just right, putting pressure on the arteries to either side of Draco’s windpipe and making his head swim.
“Because you trust me.”
A harder squeeze. Draco’s entire body dipped and then he was weightless, anchored only by Harry’s hand.
“Because it’s pathetic.”
Wait, what?
“Because you’re strong.”
Harry released, letting him gasp in air like a drowning man even though he’d been able to breathe the whole time. The rush of oxygen made his skin feel bubbly and warm.
“But still not stronger than me.”
The hand squeezed again. Draco was confused but every aspect of his existence narrowed down to that touch and he couldn’t fight through the haze enough to think.
“Because you put yourself in my hands. You surrendered to my mercy.”
Even harder. It wasn’t good anymore—the pressure had shifted entirely onto his windpipe and he felt it straining. Collapsing. He couldn’t breathe. The rope around his wrists were suddenly the most restrictive thing Draco had ever experienced and panic surged into his chest.
“Because I can do anything I want to you,” Draco tried to kick or struggle, but the hand around his throat had turned to steel. “And because there’s nothing you can do about it, sweetheart.”
Draco sucked in a huge, burning gasp of air and jolted off the couch. He didn’t realize he was standing until the headrush hit him and forced him down to the floor, sitting cross-legged and trying to remember how to breathe. The air was thin, somehow, and his lungs strained against the cold. Everything burned, even oxygen.
Where the hell had that dream come from?
Harry was trying very, very hard to focus on the task in front of him and to keep his expression neutral in front of Aidan. The psychoanalyst could tell something was up, but Harry wasn’t eager to explain. He had no idea if Aidan would be the jealous type but, given the man’s history of being unable to share and his downright threatening curiosity towards the blond, Harry did not want to take the chance.
They had a crime scene to investigate.
If anyone asked, Harry was definitely not avoiding their most recent crime scene—dubbed ‘the Ariana scene’ after Draco had identified her—he was just… delegating. That was it. Yes, people had given him strange looks when he’d assigned it to one of the other Auror pairs but he just wanted to make sure the junior Aurors got as much field experience as possible, right? And yes, Aidan had latched onto that tiny irregularity.
No one had to know that the thought of going back there or of looking at the body of Draco’s dead friend made him physically sick. He’d almost spat out his coffee when it had been suggested. Aidan had noticed. But that was okay, Harry rationalized, as long as no one knew why it affected him. None of them knew what had happened the night before, and none of them needed to know that Harry’s protective, worrying instincts were in overdrive. He couldn’t look at Ariana without thinking that it could have been Draco.
Harry was focusing entirely on work, because he didn’t not have the current mental capacity to imagine Draco asleep on that couch and how good it would feel to run his fingers through that soft hair, watching those eyes blink open and—
No. He was focusing on work. Which was why he was currently pouring over pictures of one of the earlier crime scenes. Antonina Lang had been found dead in her car in a Muggle parking garage downtown when the parking attendant had done his morning rounds before opening the lot. The car had been found still running. A garden hose had been connected from the exhaust pipe to the only cracked window, the rest of the crack sealed with duct tape from the inside.
Harry had thought it was an odd place to choose to commit suicide, as had the original investigators which was why it’d been added to the list of ‘maybe’s. Why a public parking lot? An open air one at that, when a garage or enclosed space would have been far more effective. They’d estimated the time of death to be around midnight. Cause of death had been deemed carbon monoxide poisoning. The whole thing seemed fairly straight forward and, since the car had been locked and the crack had been taped both from the inside with no signs of a struggle, it seemed like suicide was the likely conclusion. There was only one problem:
It was an electric car.
No one else had really brought it up until a Muggleborn crime scene tech had made a report on it, but Harry had become obsessive over that detail. They’d written it off in earlier reports because it was technically a hybrid car, meaning that it had an engine and a very small gas tank as well as an exhaust pipe. Theoretically, it could be forced to switch to the gas engine which would then produce carbon monoxide.
But cars went through emissions testing now, and this particular model produced very little carbon monoxide due to the catalytic converter in the engine. Harry had had to google what that was, but apparently it greatly reduced carbon monoxide production by creating carbon dioxide instead. Fascinating. If it had been damaged, that would have easily explained how the concentration of carbon monoxide in the car had gotten high enough to prove fatal.
But it wasn’t damaged. The converter was in pristine condition, according to their lab techs. It was possible, still, that the car had been forcibly switched to gasoline and had produced enough gas over however long it’d been left running—and the fuel tank was empty, which supported that. However, more googling had confirmed that this particular model did not have a way for the driver to manually switch to gasoline, either, meaning the battery would have had to be almost completely dead for the car to make the switch.
Still plausible, right? Perhaps Antonina Lang had been cold and merely trying to let the car warm up before driving home, but had fallen asleep or something? Maybe she’d already had a low charge and had purposefully waited it out just to use the gasoline and get the fumes?
Except the car’s battery was still almost fully charged.
None of this made any sense. Harry had confirmed all of these points with various people involved in the case, and had asked the medical examiner to triple check for signs of distress prior to death even if they weren’t admissible in court. There had been none, though, and all evidence indicated that Antonina Lang had willingly gotten into the car. The tape on the inside of the window had her fingerprints—and her fingerprints only—and the keys had been locked inside with her.
After about twenty minutes of being lectured on the unreliability and often uninterpretable qualities of chemical detection in post-mortem blood draws, Harry had finally gotten the answer he’d been looking for. There was no excess adrenaline in her system. Antonina Lang hadn’t been excessively afraid prior to, or during her death. He agreed that he wouldn’t consider it evidence just to appease the nitpicky lab tech, but internally he’d stored it as another check in the column of things supporting a suicide verdict.
None of this made any sense.
The night before came rushing back to Draco like a stray bludger and— oh.
Oh no.
Draco had made a grave mistake. The second he managed to force his head up out of his fetal position on the floor and his eyes landed on the dull sunlight fighting its way into his living room, he knew that he had fucked up. His body was heavy and sore—its usual tension felt difficult to maintain. This was not good. He let his eyes drift over to the couch, unwittingly forcing the memory closer to the surface of his brain, and let the anxiety wash over him. Fighting would only make it worse.
Merlin’s fucking balls he was so stupid!
It was a workday. Draco internalized that knowledge and the thought of Kaiser’s smug, irritated face greeting him with a write-up if he came in late. Asshole. Not even a vacation had been enough to lift his supervisor’s mood and Draco doubted that being back at work would improve it either. It’d been nice having Sal as a supervisor, though, because Sal just ignored him. Draco could be shockingly productive when left to his own devices. Or when Aurors didn’t show up and demand all of his time.
He hauled himself to his feet, this time much more careful about how quickly he moved, and set about getting dressed for the day. This was the easy part. His potioneer robes, his shoes, his coat, and his bag—all exactly where he usually left them. A clear, memorized routine. He ate quick oats for breakfast, though he couldn’t remember when he’d found time to go to the store and replace the empty canister he’d had in his cupboard, and it wasn’t until he was washing his bowl that he realized he didn’t recognize it.
Moving to the cupboard, Draco saw that each of his singular white dishes now had an identical black counterpart. Bowl, plate, cup, mug—even bloody silverware. Had Harry... bought him things? No, he wouldn’t have had time or even known that Draco needed anything before he’d shown up, which meant that Harry had either conjured or created them.
Draco reached his hand out, hesitantly pressing his palm to the black plate. It thrummed with a low, resonating frequency of magic that Draco was quickly becoming far too familiar with. Transfigured, then. As much as Draco enjoyed having that constant presence of Harry’s magic in his apartment (which he would definitely not use as a comfort item, of course), his pride stung. Harry had seen his sad excuse for a kitchen and had pity-transfigured him more dishes.
The idea of Harry pitying him burned beneath Draco’s skin. His cheeks flushed a bright, humiliated red and he dug his nails into his palms to ground himself through the flood of shame that accompanied it. He’d never done well with pity—Malfoys were not pitied, they were feared dammit! But pity from the fucking boy who lived was even worse.
From Harry, what might have been seen as a quest to ease one’s own guilty conscience became the most arrogant and cutting display of superiority that Draco could ever imagine. Harry thought he was better than Draco. He was better, Draco’s brain argued, because Potter didn’t have to scrounge and save just to have food in his cupboards and Potter sure as hell lived somewhere nicer than this place. Probably in a penthouse somewhere, basking in all the riches that went to the savior of the bloody world.
Insufferable, perfect fucking Potter.
Now, what does that belief say about you? Draco did not welcome his Mind Healer’s voice in his head, but his own conscience had begun to sound remarkably like the woman so he couldn’t ignore it. Elle always pushed him to turn things back on himself. If he was frustrated with a potion or slipping into bad habits again, what did he make that mean about himself?
Failure, his brain answered. Can’t even manage to eat on time. Pathetic.
Perfect Potter and his perfect life didn’t say anything about Draco, though. The man had a perfect job that he seemed to be handmade to do—doesn’t have to beg for shitty contracts—and a perfect group of loyal friends—didn’t get himself legally barred from contacting them—and probably a perfect partner too.
No, that wasn’t right. Potter had said things didn’t work out with the Weaselette and that he wasn’t currently in a relationship. Why did Draco remember that so clearly?
Nope, Draco shook his head and grabbed his keys, now was not the time for a breakdown or for quality soul-searching. Now was time for work. To distract himself as he walked to his typical floo point, Draco began rehashing the research he’d been doing into monkshood and the properties that he could attempt to isolate.
It contained multiple alkaloids (though Draco was still unclear what that meant, exactly) and he’d considered trying to manufacture a test of some kind to see if his patient was allergic to each of them, or only some. Things like strychnine would be easy to find, but fatal to get wrong. Muggles had managed to isolate a lot of the components that were biologically found in monkshood, which gave Draco hope that he would be able to find a substitute and somehow infuse the correct magical properties.
But everything—everything, Snape had insisted—came with its own magic. The likelihood of finding a suitable biological substitute that also had the correct magical properties was admittedly low. Meddling with those magical properties was going to be even harder, especially because none of them could truly be changed on a fundamental level. Which left Draco with the task of creating an equation of sorts.
That was how he viewed this experiment. He’d made countless lists and charts, but it always came back to a mathematical equation in his mind. He didn’t know what went on the left side of that equals sign, but he knew what needed to be on the right (theoretically), meaning he just had to make the two sides equal. Surely, he would be able to find the right combination of things. With enough isolating, cancelling out, calculating, and trial and error, Draco would be able to get the final product he was looking for.
And if he was sort of doing this just to prove to Harry that he could? Well, that was between him and his cauldrons.
Harry managed to make it until lunch without thinking about the blond potioneer more than once or twice. He was rather proud of himself and he watched Aidan disappear towards the floo network as he finished gathering the rest of the files they would return to after lunch. That sense of pride, though, disappeared when Andrea walked into his office.
“Good afternoon.”
It was ridiculously formal compared to their usual interactions, but Harry couldn’t get a read on the Gatherer’s general emotional state yet so he wasn’t going to press any buttons. This could be her deciding to come to him, or it could be an errand for Draco. Either way, he spelled the door shut and locked it with a wave of his hand. Gesturing for Andrea to sit, he took his own seat.
“It’s been a busy day so I hope you don’t mind me eating while we chat.”
He pulled out the lunch he’d packed that morning, which Andrea raised an eyebrow at before evidently deciding it wasn’t worth commenting. Maybe Harry had woken up obscenely early, full of adrenaline from the night before. And maybe, operating on less than four hours of sleep, Harry had decided that the most productive use of his morning time was to pack an extensive lunch for himself so he wouldn’t have to risk running into Aidan in the Ministry food court/atrium. It had seemed perfectly rational at the time, and he appreciated having the food immediately on hand.
Andrea still hadn’t said a word, so Harry unwrapped the sandwich he’d made that morning and began taking slow bites. He watched her face, half looking for anger and half trying to see whether she was focusing on anything in particular, or if she was focused at all. She didn’t seem to be, but her body language was all out of whack so Harry couldn’t really tell.
“I’ve become privy to some… sensitive information.”
Harry didn’t ask what that information was, even if he was incredibly curious. Andrea was told things by very powerful people specifically because she always kept her mouth shut—that was even how Harry sometimes justified leaking her information. Usually, the Gatherer was content to just know things or maybe hint at them. Not this time though, evidently.
“I can’t tell it to you, as I’m sure you know, but it has… altered my perspective on things. I am aware that I have been unfair to you, and I’m sorry.” Harry nodded, though it sounded like those two words were more of a formality than anything else. “Regardless, I am working to set a few things in motion.”
“Alright.”
He didn’t ask what that had to do with him or why she’d been so angry lately. It wouldn’t help the situation and would likely only remind her that she was still angry, not to mention the frustration of not being able to tell him why. Instead, he kept his mouth shut and took another bite of sandwich. If he waited, she would talk. Harry could be patient and he kept reminding himself that this was Andrea—one of his closest friends outside of Ron and Hermione—so she wasn’t doing this without a reason.
“I want you to back off with Draco.”
Immediately, Harry’s gut seized. He put down the sandwich, forced himself to inhale, then exhale, and pushed back the surge of indignation in his chest. His brain kept going without his permission though, demanding to know who Andrea was to stand between him and Draco or why she suddenly seemed to have lost all faith in him.
“Why.”
It wasn’t a question. Harry was working very hard to keep his voice level and his heart rate calm, but the reality of her request was setting in. His body viscerally rejected the idea of putting any distance between him and the blond. He wanted less distance, actually, and he wanted to argue with Andrea that Draco was a grown ass adult and could do what he pleased so, as long as Draco agreed, Harry could get as close to him as he wanted.
“You’re taking advantage of him.”
“Ex-fucking-cuse me?”
Andrea sighed, but Harry was in full reactionary mode by now and there was no stopping it. Who the hell was Andrea to suggest that?! She’d been the one before to insist that Harry hadn’t crossed a line and she’d even told him not to beat himself up about it! And now she was accusing him of taking advantage of Draco?!
“Take a breath, Potter, I’m not suggesting that you sexually assaulted him or anything.”
“I would fucking hope not!”
She shot him a glare, but continued.
“I’m not saying it’s entirely your fault, either. You don’t know the whole situation—you wouldn’t, unless he’d told you—and I’m not even sure that he understands the severity of what’s happening. There’s a lot that I can’t tell you, which I know will piss you off, but you need to back off, Harry.”
“With all due respect, Andrea, he’s an adult and I think he has more of a right to make that decision than you do.”
There was fire in his tone and his hands clenched into fists beneath his desk. Pure anger and hurt were fueling his body now because how dare she suggest such a thing? Andrea sighed, rolling her wand against her palm.
“You don’t know the full situation, Harry—” Again with the fucking ‘whole situation’ thing! “He can’t consent right now. Not truly.”
Harry paused, studying the Gatherer’s face with dangerous intensity. Consent was not the kind of thing that either of them joked about and, as far as Harry knew, it was also never something they’d disagreed on either. A small, sinewy knot was forming itself in the pit of his stomach. If Andrea said, from whatever special knowledge she now had, that he was taking advantage of the blond, then that meant Harry would likely agree if given the same information. He wanted to argue and ignore this—he didn’t want to give up Draco—but he tempered that childish, selfish petulance. Andrea continued to fiddle with her wand.
“He can’t give any true consent,” she repeated. “At least not right now. There’s… an imbalance.”
Harry swallowed hard. A horrid, acrid mix of guilt and anger was brewing in his stomach. Was Andrea implying that he would use his position as an Auror to force Draco to… what? Be emotionally vulnerable with him?
“An imbalance?” he echoed, his voice frigid. “What the hell does that mean?”
Andrea winced. She looked vaguely guilty, but Harry barely noticed it over the roar of his own emotions. Did Andrea think he was intentionally manipulating Draco? Was he? He hadn’t thought he was and he wouldn’t have done anything if he’d thought that Draco had any kind of disadvantage. Aside from money, maybe, or public opinion Harry couldn’t think of anything that would qualify as an ‘imbalance’ between them. Unless…
“Does this have to do with why he never uses his wand?”
Andrea didn’t say anything, but her silence was loud enough. She’d assumed he didn’t know. She hadn’t been there at the crime scene when Draco had used his wand and, as far as Harry knew, the blond hadn’t told her about that.
But Harry did know. Granted, he didn’t know why or what exactly was going on because Draco did occasionally use his wand, but he’d known that something was off. He’d known that Draco wasn’t using his magic very often, for some reason. If Draco couldn’t—Merlin, he’d even asked why Draco hadn’t used his own wand and the blond had merely said: ‘can’t’. Harry hadn’t really put that much thought into it at the time but…
Fuck.
Draco, to some extent at least, couldn’t use his wand/his magic. And Harry could. If that wasn’t a glaring power imbalance, then what was? A wave of disgust and self-loathing hit him. He wanted to throw up. Harry had never considered himself to be the kind of person who would abuse a power imbalance like that. Andrea was right and he knew it, because it was the same reason neither of them could ever do scenes with people who had Ministry jobs and the same reason age could be so important when looking at play partners.
Unbalanced consent wasn’t consent.
Even if Draco didn’t explicitly think to himself: ‘ah, if I say no to Harry, I’ll lose my job’ or, more accurately, ‘if I say no to Harry, Harry can hurt me and I can’t defend myself’—that truth was still there. He could hurt Draco. If the blond couldn’t use magic to defend himself, then Harry had infinitely more power—even if he would never use it, but especially if Draco thought there was a chance that he might.
Draco, who was the same person that Harry had cursed and left to bleed out on the bathroom floor in Sixth Year.
Harry felt sick. His robes were hot and scratchy suddenly and he was disgusted with himself.
“Don’t look at me like that, Harry. I’m not saying you’re a bad person or even that it was intentional. If you knew about the issue, then… Well, regardless, I needed you to understand how serious I am and that you need to put whatever you’re doing with Draco on pause. Maybe not forever, but at least for now. You will back off, Potter.”
It wasn’t a question, but Harry still nodded. Continuing to push things with Draco when the blond was in such a vulnerable position would be wrong on so many levels. Not only would it likely hurt Draco in the end, but it would cause Andrea to lose all respect for him—if she even still had any.
Something young and emotional in him wanted to cry. He didn’t want to back off, he didn’t want to lose Draco, and he was pretty sure that Draco didn’t want to lose him either. Though, maybe Harry had misread the entire situation. What if Draco was just bantering with him out of fear of getting on Harry’s bad side? Or of losing a contract he clearly needed the money from? Again, Harry wanted to throw up.
“Thanks for stopping by,” he forced out, but he couldn’t quite bring himself to thank her for finally telling him what was going on. “I should be getting back to work.”
Andrea nodded, leaving without another word but shooting him a strange, meaningful glance over her shoulder on the way out.
Harry was no longer hungry. He left the rest of his intricate lunch in its bag and decided he’d taken a break for long enough. Jaw clenched, he made his way back to the conference room. A distraction would be the only thing that could keep him from imploding into an emotional mess right there on the third floor of the Ministry. Distraction was good.
Trying to remember how to breathe, Harry opened the next case file.