Alluring Lullaby

Authors Note: Many thanks to my brilliant beta, Shannon! She helped me decide on a title for this chapter! I know a lot of you felt that Draco wasn't ready for Harry and I whole heartedly agreed, so now, it is the mission of this story to MAKE Draco worthy of Harry's love. It was always meant to take on this note, and I now give you the beginning of that transformation.

Chapter 9

The regret that assaulted Draco’s mind and heart was not immediate; rather it took days to find him, but when it did, it was a sudden and vicious thing.

He spent the first few days after Harry’s flight grumbling about the audacity of the water sprite to trick him so, to think that he could sleep with both him and his father and expect leniency. He spent a few days afterward wondering if he might be mistaken in part by what he saw the night Harry had fled and at the end of the week confronted his father directly.

Draco found him standing in the garden watching the forest edge. Lucius had spent most evenings there. As the sun dipped over the trees creating a twinkling pink and lavender luminescence over the foliage, he would stare until the world was cast into twilight and then he would retire without a word to his wife or son.

“Father,” Draco asked softly, trying to pull him out of his thoughts without startling him.

“He said it was you,” his father whispered as if sleepwalking. It made no sense to Draco until he elaborated. “He said he was here for you and not me. I can’t believe that, after all these years of pining after him…I just can’t believe that.”

“Father, you didn’t?” Draco whispered, suddenly understanding what his father had done and clutching his chest in sudden agony at the loss of Harry over such a ridiculous misunderstanding.

Lucius turned then and looked as though he was seeing Draco for the first time. “Don’t worry my son. I drove him away. I told him that if he didn’t want me than he couldn’t have you.”

“I love him!” Draco shouted, falling to his knees. “I thought he was sleeping with both of us, and I told him to leave and never come back! But it was you, this whole time I was angry with him and it should have been you!”

“Both of us?” his father asked and Draco was dimly aware of the violent spark roiling through his father’s eyes. “You’ve bedded the Nix?”

Draco’s answer came in the form of a sob and a nod, as he could not seem to get his vocal cords to work.

His father rounded on him, slapping Draco across the face and sending the smaller boy reeling to the pavement. “He was mine!” the man shouted in a crazed howl and raised his hand to strike again.

He closed his eyes and prepared himself for Lucius’s blow, bracing his body against a large plaster column, but the pain never came and when he opened his eyes, he found a thin veil of light stilling his father’s movements.

With a quick glance around he saw his mother, her wand raised and pointed at Lucius’s chest and a fierce look in her eyes. “You will not touch my son,” she told him firmly and through gritted teeth.

“He is our son,” Lucius spat.

“The moment you chose to strike him he ceased to be yours,” Narcissa countered. “I will kill you if you touch him even once more.”

Draco’s eyes widened to match those of his fathers. Both seemed reluctant at first to believe her words until they saw the piercing determination in her eyes.

“You wouldn’t,” Lucius challenged stupidly.

His mother’s eyes narrowed in concentration and anger and though Draco couldn’t tell what spell she was using against his father, he knew it must have been potent, because he began to whimper for her to stop, and Draco had never heard his father beg. Not ever.

“You will leave the manor and you will never come back,” she growled and Lucius nodded at once, looking as if he would fall to his knees if his wife’s spell hadn’t held him erect.

When she released him, Lucius did fall, his knees and palms scrapping roughly on the stone path. Narcissa held her hand out to Draco, who took it and watched his mother’s face with awe, while she led him from the garden and up to his room.

She sat with him, Draco curled under the covers of his bed and Narcissa sitting demurely on the edge of it, until the shock of his father attacking him wore away and his original panic over losing Harry resurfaced. He sobbed into his pillow while his mother stroked his back and part of him knew the world as he knew it was over.

Harry was gone, his father was banished and crazy and he had broken his engagement to Pansy all in the span of a week. He had ruined his own life and his own future with his ignorance and hotheaded nature.

“You sent Pansy away for that boy, didn’t you?” she asked softly once Draco’s shaking had decreased.

Draco only nodded and Narcissa clucked her tongue. “You could have told me,” she noted. “I only ever want your happiness my son, and if that means I give you up to a woodland faerie instead of your arranged match than so be it.”

Draco’s eyes widened and he looked up into his mother’s soft loving eyes. “You knew about him?”

Narcissa chuckled and smoothed her son’s hair as she spoke. “I recognized him almost at once as the same boy who came to me years ago and told me of my potential marriage to Lucius. I would never have agreed to wed that arrogant brute, but he promised me that I would have a beautiful and perfect baby boy, and he fulfilled his promise by giving me you.”

A flood of conflict filled him at his mother’s words. Knowing she would love him no matter what helped him immensely, but knowing that Harry, his Harry, had played some instrumental role in his very creation made him feel like weeping all over again. “And father?” Draco asked, not sure he could imagine his mother staying all alone in the sterile marble home that was Malfoy Manor.

“I can manage just fine without him. He was rarely a presence in my life as it was. My gardens will keep me happy, and my sisters and friends will visit often now that Lucius is gone,” she mused.

“Do you really think he’ll leave?” Draco asked, concerned as much for her safety as for his own.

“He already has. I’ve put a tracking spell on him; I’ll know where he is at all times. He has always underestimated me, but tonight I showed him what both a Black and a mother can do,” she said, her voice sounding slightly fiercer at the final words.

He had always known his mother was powerful. Draco had never spent too many days of his life with illness because his mother would heal him thoroughly and with ease every time, but even he had thought little about what other magic his mother might have up her silken sleeve. “What did you do to him?” Draco asked at last, very curious as to what spell his mother used to drive Lucius to a whimpering mass.

Narcissa sighed and shook her head, smoothing out Draco’s blankets as she stood up. “I’d rather you not worry over it. It was a fitting punishment for Lord Malfoy and he will not be returning for more, I assure you.”

Draco nodded, knowing he would get no more out of his mother that night. “I love you,” he whispered and Narcissa smiled warmly and kissed her son’s forehead.

“I love you too, Draco and I always will,” she replied before gliding to the door. “Try and get some sleep and tomorrow you can go after your love.”

The lights flicked off with a wave of her wand and Draco shut his eyes, but it was no use. Sleep would never come to him, as he was too distressed for slumber to find him.

He reluctantly removed himself from the warmth of his bed and went to the window, looking for a bright blue bird, or even some other incarnation that could have been his Nix, but he saw nothing and no one in the darkness below.

His heart clenched painfully as he thought of Harry in his glade without him. No word from him in days and the manner with which he was driven away made Draco wonder if he would ever see him again, but he quickly shook the thoughts away and resolved to go into the forest in search for his love at dawn’s first light.

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Harry wept.

He let the tears of sorrow and regret fall from his face and soak the rich black soil under his feet. Where each drop of salty water landed, a single thorny vine appeared until there was a wall around the Nix’s glade as thick as the wall around his heart.

He had been wrong to think that Draco could be meant for him, wrong to think that his own interference in the Malfoy’s lives could have manufactured a human that would be his perfect companion. It had seemed that way for a brief moment but quickly fell apart all around him and he was just happy that the forest had accepted him back with open arms.

The forest would never leave him and he would have to be content to have Mother Nature as his one true companion. He tried not to doubt his love for Draco, tried not to imagine it as falsities brought on by the sheer loneliness of his existence, but nearly failed.

He started to think that loneliness was the only thing that drove him to Draco’s bed, but then he realized that before Draco, he didn’t know loneliness, and it was only now that he felt the very human emotion coursing through his veins.

Only now that Draco had driven him away did he feel truly lonely.

He had fallen like a spooked deer into a trap. He had fallen for Draco’s face and then his heart and then had it yanked out from under him like a magician’s trick. Now you see it, now you don’t.

The wall was there to protect him from falling again. To ensure that some distant Malfoy heir, no doubt a product of Draco and that dreadful Pansy girl, would not stumble into his glade the way Draco had, and also to protect him from Draco’s own fickle nature.

Draco had once called him that, his fickle faerie, but it was Draco who couldn’t make up his mind, Draco who cast a spell on his heart and then threw it out the open window and Draco who would have to suffer the consequences.

That wasn’t entirely true though, as Harry suffered as well, but he knew it would pass. It would have to. Humans always said that time heals all things, and what did the Nix have if not time?

Maybe in ten years he would forget, or fifty or a hundred. Though he hoped it would not take more than that to forget Draco’s pale and perfect face and his pouting pink lips or the way he screamed his name when his orgasm exploded through him.

Name.

The name ‘Harry Potter’ given to him by the glowing child back when his devotion seemed true could not be used anymore. Part of him wished he could use his own magic to ease the memory from his mind, the same way he had done to Lucius.

It was difficult even being in his own glade, with the wind whipping his hair and the cool water like a sweet kiss on his skin, even these things, his things, were touched by memories of Draco.

The entire season was marred by the child’s presence and disappearance.

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Draco stumbled through the forest, unable to even wait until dawn, and he found the path more treacherous than ever before.

Every turn he made seemed to look different than it should, paths which had been clear of underbrush just a moment before, suddenly stood overgrown and impossible to traverse in the next glance.

The ground seemed to relish in tripping him, making him sprawl face first in the dirt and mud repeatedly as he made his slow journey through the wood.

By lunchtime he had taken eight different paths and each one – after scraping him with branches and bruising him with stones – managed to lead him back to his own garden and nowhere near the center of the wood where he wanted to go.

It was as if the forest didn’t want him there and kept maneuvering him away.

He took a break at his mother’s insistence, only enough time to eat a bowl of soup and a scrap of bread, and then continued his mission unsuccessfully until nightfall.

On his final try that night he called out desperately, his voice ringing out across the trees. “Harry, please! I love you, please come back!” he cried and the forest wavered slightly and two different paths presented themselves before him.

Draco tilted his head to the side in question and saw a third path grow up in front of him like a mirage and felt a cool breeze on the back of his neck form a single word against his ear. “Choose,” it whispered, like the barest of breaths.

The far right path was darker than the rest and heavy with prickling underbrush. The middle path was fragrant, warm and seemingly straight, and then the far left path was filled with glittering moonlight, but blocked at several points by jagged and ominous branches.

Taking a deep breath he took a step toward the center path and feeling sure of himself, he continued along it, never pausing to smell the brilliant and colorful flowers that lined the trail.

After several minutes he thought for certain he had chosen correctly and that any moment the Nix’s glade would appear but he groaned as his garden came into view instead and he collapsed into the cool grass of his lawn, silent sobs wracking his body.

Draco barely felt his mother lift him from the grass, didn’t acknowledge her wipe away his tears and hardly registered being placed in his own bed for the night.

His body growled at him for not being able to locate Harry, his heart cried out at him for hurting it so thoroughly and his brain chastised him for choosing the wrong path.

Sleep eluded him once again as he thought of his Nix, his beautiful and luminescent skin, his flowing black hair and his fierce green eyes. He thought of the way it felt to be held in Harry’s arms, strong and lasting. He thought of Harry’s lips and the soft yet firm way they would feel against his own.

He sighed and whispered Harry’s name into the night, knowing he would get no answer.

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Authors Note: I know, it's sad, but have faith in me dear readers. Please check out my yahoo group and my other story Poppet, and accept a Narcissa Action Figure, complete with Lucius battling wand arm.