Title: The Mirror part 2
Author: Bell Pie >toggledog@yahoo.com>
Pairing: Harry/Draco, Draco/Lucius
Rating: R
Author's Notes: Thanks to all who reviewed. This is difficult to write as I am trying to keep it as realistic as possible. More AN at bottom.


He kneels before me, lifts a finger under my chin to lift my head up.

"What have you done?"

He doesn't sound angry, merely concerned, shocked, saddened. I can't answer. He takes out his wand and presses it against the bruises.

"Why did you do this?" He asks as he dissolves the physical pain and marring with his wand.

As he always does.

But he rarely leaves marks.

"Do I exist? Do you?"

He touches my cheek with his hand. "You feel this, don't you? Touch exists."

He leans forward, places his lips on my own, tongue entering my mouth. This has happened so often it no longer affects me. I am totally numbed by it. I don't even feel his hands under my robes, stroking, touching.

"Taste exists." He says, when we release. "We both exist. Because we both felt that."

He stands, dusts down his robes, slicks back his hair. His demeanor has changed. I sense this from his sudden, almost regal bearing.

"Don't be so silly, Draco. We must leave now."

I don't move. I look up sullenly to him.

"If you insist on acting as a child, you can find your own way back to the Manor."

I watch my father leave the room in long, graceful strides, the man who will initiate me to be a Death Eater on my eighteenth birthday, who claims the privilege of being right hand man to our Dark Lord and who has raped me more times than I care to remember.

I place my head in my hands.

Don't cry. Don't cry. Malfoys don't cry.

The hand on my shoulder makes me jump and I cry out.

"I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I didn't know. I didn't know."

It's Harry. I turn to face him.

"You don't exist."

"I have an invisibility cloak."

I find myself touching his cheek. Real. This is truth.

"I saw it. I saw everything."

Of course. I turn away. He takes a deep breath.

"I saw him kissing you. And..."

No. Please don't. Don't say it. Maybe if I distract him, he won't.

He reciprocates the kiss a little, then pushes me back.

"Draco. This is important." He grabs my hands and clasps them in his own. I bite down the sudden urge to make a bitchy comment. Anything to make him shut up.

"Does he ever... do more than kiss you?"

Of course. And why not? I'm a dirty slut. I've slept with half the bloody school. Now I am crying. I've broken my oath to never cry, once more. I am pathetic.

It is as though every ocean on this planet has converged behind my tear ducts. I cannot possibly stop. Harry holds me. He wraps his arms around me and whispers words of comfort.

"I love you."

That ceases me. I look up into his face.

"Why?"

"I don't know. I just... I can't stand to be away from you. I can't explain it."

"But how could you say that?"

I'm a bastard. A slut. I don't deserve this.

He smiles, strokes softly down my cheek. I allow it. "Because there is more to you than your exterior."

I want to tell him that it's reciprocated. But I can't. It's too much. The intensity of the entire situation is too overwhelming.

"I can tell you one thing. you're not going back to that bastard."

"Oh, what then, Harry?" I can feel a little of my old self returning. "Come and live with your pathetic muggles? Or maybe throw away all my pride and live in the rubble that is Black and Lupin's house?"

Harry is silent a moment. "I don't know. I'll figure something out."

"It doesn't matter."

Now he looks at me. His eyes spouting vicious green lava.

"How long has it been happening?"

I shrug. "I don't know." I am rather uncomfortable talking about this. "I think I was eleven."

Harry utters a string of inventive abuses I would never expect from his pretty mouth.

I don't like him to talk about Lucius that way. He is my father.

No, he is not. He forfeited that right six years ago, in the back of our coach, on the way to the Malfoy Manor from Platform 9 3/4.

I suddenly feel so utterly heavy. It is as though all of the problems of the past six years have been heaped onto my shoulders. I find myself leaning into his chest.

Footsteps behind us signal the curator stepping in to signal the closing of the museum for the day.

tbc...

AN

For anyone who's also reading 'Rumours' the new URL is http://www.oocities.org/dracorapture, with final chapter up soon.