History Repeats Itself

Authors Note: I'm very very excited about this story (and this chapter in particular) and many many thanks go out to my lover-ly and brilliant beta Shannon (She has left you all and additional note at the bottom!)

Chapter 9 Just an Illusion

Harry’s eyes lost their mirth all at once when the words ‘we have to talk’ escaped my lips.

“Why does that sound so sinister?” he asked, his voice bordered on playful but I could tell he was worried.

“This is important,” I warned. “And I’ve spent all day trying to figure out how to tell you.”

Harry’s eyes shone with understanding, as if something finally dawned on him. “That’s why you’ve been ducking out on me? Is it Voldemort?”

I winced at the name I couldn’t help it. Harry might know the fiend intimately enough to feel comfortable with calling him that, but I heard plenty of rumors about his first rise to power and refused to utter the name. “No,” I replied immediately, not wanting to give him the wrong impression. It would have been nice to pin it all on the Dark Lord, but it was mostly my own cowardice that got me into this mess.

Harry sighed, visibly relieved and beckoned me over to the sofa. “Then it can’t be too bad. Whatever it is, we’ll deal with it,” he replied confidently. His surety of words made my knees weak and my mouth dry; I wanted nothing more that to avoid disappointing him.

“We have to break up,” I blurted, apparently channeling Harry, and watched his face fall again.

A slew of emotions from hurt to anger to fear all passed through those brilliant green eyes and I braced myself for the onslaught of yelling, or crying or whatever else Harry had in his arsenal to throw at me.

What he actually did was the least expected response I could have imagined.

“Fine,” he muttered and got up, looking as if he was walking toward me, but instead passed me and went for the door .

“Fine?” I shouted. “Fine? That’s all you have to say? You don’t even want to know why? You’re just content to walk away and leave this all behind?”

I know my sudden lack of logical reasoning was inappropriate and unfounded, but I couldn’t seem to help myself. If our relationship was so important to Harry, then why wasn’t he putting up some form of protest? I spent days agonizing over this moment and all I get is ‘fine’?

“If it’s what you want, who am I to argue? I have no intentions of trying to worm my way into a relationship with someone who doesn’t love me,” Harry pointed out, more rationally than I had expected.

“But I do love you, I just told you that last night!” I shouted.

“And now you’re telling me you want to break up,” Harry added. “So which is it?”

“Why can’t it be both?” I asked, unsure of what I even wanted to say anymore. Of course I loved him, but sometimes love just wasn't enough to keep you alive.

“Because it can’t,” Harry replied, beginning to look like he was leaning more toward angry than neutral, which was fine with me as long as I got something. “So which is it?”

I sighed and closed the distance between us. “I love you,” I whispered and grabbed his hand.

Harry smiled at me then and it was just as it was when I had walked in, all warm and kissable. It was in that moment that I realized he had been manipulating me and my world spun slightly out of control. “You knew I wouldn’t just let you walk out that way?” I asked, but I already knew the answer.

“I had to see what was real,” he said with a shrug. “If you didn’t really care about me you would have let me walk, but if you did, you would have stopped me. I was just hoping that you stopped me,” he explained and pulled my dumbfounded form over to the sofa.

“I can’t believe I got tricked by a Gryffindor,” I muttered.

Harry laughed and kissed me lightly. “After all these years one would think you’d be used to it by now,” he teased.

I gave him my best withering scowl but Harry seemed unfazed.

“So what was all that breaking up nonsense all about?” Harry asked, curling against me.

“I got the letter,” I told him, pulling it from my robe pocket and handing it over to ease the confused look on his face.

“Oh,” he muttered after scanning the brief note in my father’s elegant handwriting. “You’re right. We have to break up.”

“What?” I asked, staring at him incredulously.

“You knew this was coming, you said so weeks ago. You can’t tell him no, and I won’t be your mistress… er… you know what I mean,” Harry grumbled as he got up and began pacing in front of the fire.

The flames licked upward as if spurned by his frustration and perhaps they were, but I could only gape at him. “I don’t believe this!” I shouted. “You just said it was one or the other. You just said that we would deal with whatever it is!”

“I don’t know how to deal with this, Draco!” he shouted frantically. “I know your father, I know what he’ll do to you if you refuse him, and I know what Voldemort will do to you if you give him even the slightest reason.”

I felt the blood run ice cold in my veins as Harry confirmed my worst fears. “But we have time,” I protested weakly. “The wedding isn’t until summer. We might think of something before then. You might kill the Dark Lord by then!”

Harry shook his head and collapsed onto the sofa next to me, staring deep into my eyes. “You would prefer I get more attached to you than I already am and then have it all yanked away?”

“No!” I shouted, tears beginning to burn the corners of my eyes. “Dammit Harry, I love you!” I sobbed and pulled him into an awkward messy kiss, one that I really hoped wasn’t our last because I didn’t want that to be the kiss he remembered forever.

Harry’s body shook with his own tears and they mingled with mine on our robes until he pushed me flat to the coushions and straddled my waist. “You’re right. We’ll figure something out,” he promised and leaned down to kiss me again.

His lips were terribly urgent, as if his body was saying goodbye even though his words were not. He felt as if he were trying to memorize me, trying to burn every fiber of my being into his mind so he could keep it forever. Maybe he knew just as well as I did that there would be no keeping me.

My father would win. Voldemort would win. They always did.

But then Harry had been the only wizard to best them both, so maybe there was more of a possibility than I thought.

Hot kisses trailed down my chest before I even noticed Harry had opened my shirt. I felt like we should be talking more about what we were going to do, but Harry’s kips were insistent and I didn’t think I would have been able to deter him if I had wanted to, and I didn’t really want to.

I closed my eyes and drank in the sensations of him, his searing hot tongue against my chest, sharp teeth biting into my nipples and roaming hands grabbing my hips and arse. When I felt the tickle of his hair on my cheek I looked up to see him hovering over me, his green eyes glowing amber from the light of the fire.

“I want to make love to you,” he whispered, and I swallowed thickly in response. I knew it would come to that eventually, the next step in our physical relationship had been looming over both our heads for days now and it secretly terrified me just as much as it turned me on.

I loved Harry, I loved the idea of him inside me and I wanted to give him whatever he wanted, but I had no idea what to expect. It wasn’t like a hand job, or a blowjob where I could work the mechanics out easily enough by experience or logic.

“I’ve never,” I began to whisper, but he silenced me with a finger to my lips.

“I haven’t either,” he interrupted.

“But I thought,” I stammered, not wanting to recall our first argument where I found out Harry was not as pure at I had imagined him to be.

“I’ve done other things, but never that,” Harry replied in a faintly embarrassed whisper.

“Why not?” I asked, both genuinely curious as to how Harry’s mind worked and not wanting to know any details about his sexual history all at once.

“I was waiting for the right person… I think I was waiting for you,” he replied with a soft smile.

I sighed and smiled up into his shining face. “That better not be a line,” I teased and he stuck his tongue out at me playfully.

His face grew serious then and I wondered what was going on in that pretty head of his. “If you’re not ready, I understand,” he offered, and I knew from the look in his eyes that he was telling the truth. He wouldn’t fault me for a second if I turned him down.

“I could very well be rubbish,” I warned, smiling sheepishly.

“So could I,” Harry replied.

I rolled my eyes and swatted him lightly. “You’re Harry Potter, you’re good at everything.”

Harry sighed and fell to the coushions beside me. “I wish that were true,” he whispered. “Then I could just kill Voldemort, tell your father to sod off and keep you all to myself forever.”

“So then why don’t you,” I bargained, liking the sound of Harry’s fantasy future.

“Because I’m not the big hero everyone thinks I am,” he groaned. “I’m just lucky.”

I felt a fierceness flow through me unlike anything I had ever experienced before. “You are a hero,” I growled. “You’ve saved this school and all of the wizarding world countless times over the years. Not everything can be attributed to luck.”

Harry’s eyes went wide and he waved a hand defensively in front of my face. “Wow, sorry. I didn’t know it was such a touchy subject.”

I hadn’t either. “I just don’t like to hear you disparage the talents of the man I love,” I replied, now realizing that I felt the need to stick up for Harry, even to him.

Harry groaned and pulled me to him, ripping at my trousers and kissed me with a heat that I had never quite felt from him before. I felt his need well to the surface like a tangible thing and I wanted to run my tongue across it. “If you’re not ready, then take me,” he breathed, his voice a hot whisper across my skin. “I need you, Draco. I need you now.”

A movement shimmered beside us and I looked up to see a large bed taking shape in the corner. The room, as always, knew what we required and I lifted Harry from the sofa and carried him over to it, gently lowering him to the mattress so that his legs dangled over the edge.

With quick and practiced movements I divested him of his clothing so that we were both nude, and then fell to my knees in front of him so that I could look down the line of his body as I took him into my mouth.

He cried out for me, and I imagined it was all for me simply because he knew that I liked it when he was vocal. Harry’s moans and sharp intakes of breaths echoed in my ears as I ran his tongue up and down the length of Harry’s cock. I felt Harry’s fingers press into my skull and pull lightly on his hair as his body started to tighten and I prepared for Harry’s release just in time for the warm liquid to coat my tongue and throat.

Harry was breathing heavily as he looked up at me, his green eyes still glazed over with lust. “Are you sure?” I asked him, my whole body was shaking from fear and anticipation.

“Please,” he moaned. “Please make love to me, Draco.”

I bit roughly into his thigh before I shifted above him and pressed lightly against his entrance. “Er…” I began, confused as to what I should do, and Harry grinned. With a flick of his wand I felt a warm slick liquid cover my erection.

I ran my fingers through it and dipped one slowly into his arse, watching his body writhe and his eyelids flutter. He seemed to be enjoying it quite a fair bit, so I added a second finger and his eyes took on a slightly squinted expression, but when he urged me forward with his hips I added a third finger.

When he stopped feeling so insanely tight I might break him, I withdrew my fingers altogether, smirking at Harry’s whimpering protests and slowly replaced them with my throbbing cock. I was only a few inches in when his whimpers of pleasure turned into something pained.

“I’m hurting you!” I exclaimed and tried to pull out, but was kept inside of him by the firm lock that Harry’s legs had around my waist.

“It’s fine. It’s fine,” he hissed, and clearly it wasn’t fine.

“What does it feel like?” I asked, knowing I could barely keep myself from thrusting through him he felt so good, but I doubted it was the same on his end.

“It feels like you,” he replied with a cheeky grin and at my perplexed face he continued. “Impossibly hard to take at first, but eventually it grows on you.”

I scowled down into his smirking face and drove myself further inside of him, relishing in the way his eyes rolled back into his head and his back arched as he tried to impale himself even deeper.

I let him ride me, not wanting to hurt him by being to rough, and not wanting to withhold what he wanted, so I just let him take it, realizing at once that whatever Harry ever wanted from me he could have. I would stand and defy both my father and the Dark Lord at once if he asked it of me.

Maybe that was just the sex talking, but I didn’t think so.

I was a changed man. Changed by Harry and irrevocably his forever.

His body began to tighten around me and it was so startlingly pleasurable that I screamed out, I called his name as my orgasm took me and filled him with my seed.

With a shuddering sigh I collapsed on top of him, letting myself remain locked in his embrace as long as he offered it. “I love you,” he whispered in my ear and I kissed him, long and hot and rough.

“I love you, too,” I replied when we broke apart.

Harry pulled me down into the bed and we fell asleep almost instantly, silently deciding to stay the night together in the Room of Requirement instead of going back to our separate dorms.

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When I woke up, the bed beside me was cold. Harry must have left and been gone for a while. I scanned the room quickly and saw nothing but an empty sofa and a fireplace filled with dying embers.

A million questions ran through my mind. What happened? Was it something I did? Could he have been summoned away somehow? Was he regretting what we did? I couldn’t think of anything to have made him just leave without at least waking me to say goodbye.

Unless leaving was his goodbye…

I reluctantly removed myself from the warmth of the bed and trudged to the sofa where we had left our clothes. As I suspected, Harry’s were missing. I dressed quickly; unsure of what time it was and stuffed my father’s letter back into my pocket before making a hasty retreat.

Lucky for me it was still early so almost everyone was sleeping. The ones who were awake paid little attention to a seventh year Slytherin walking into their own common room. I got no more than twenty steps into the room when a firm hand started guiding me to my dorm and I looked over to see Shannon’s expectant gaze.

As soon as the door shut behind us she lit into me. “So is it a good sign or a bad sign that you didn’t come back last night?”

I sighed and flopped onto my bed. “If you had asked last night I would have said a good thing, but now I don’t know,” I told her honestly.

“How could you not know? Did you break up with him or not?” she asked, her hands placed firmly on her hips.

“I did, but then he made me take it back and then I showed him father’s letter and he broke up with me and I made him take it back and then we had sex and we slept together in the room,” I offered her as the edited version of our evening.

She squealed, a high-pitched noise I had only heard at a Weird Sisters concert and she began shaking my shoulders. “Draco, that’s great news! How could that be bad?”

“He was gone when I woke up,” I muttered. “Had been for a while judging from the temperature of the bed.”

“Oh,” she sighed, sinking to the bed beside me like someone had let all the air out of her balloon. “Maybe there was a good reason?” she offered weakly and I nodded.

“Maybe.”

It seemed to matter fairly little what his reasoning was though, and clearly Shannon agree. You just don't bail on someone after having sex for the first time.

It wasn’t until I reached in my pocket to reread the letter from my father- something I did on a fairly regular basis these days – that I found out why Harry had left me that morning.

He wasn’t called away on some higher wartime duty, or wanting to make sure Hermione and Ron wouldn’t see him sneaking back into the Gryffindor common room, or even because I snored -thought I don't-, no he was leaving the room because he was leaving me.

I read his note over and over, maybe a dozen times or more before I handed it silently over to Shannon, who sobbed after just the first line and proceeded to try and comfort me with a hug. I let her hug me, but I felt nothing really.

My entire body was numb from the shock of losing Harry. “Read it out loud,” I whispered and she shook her head against my chest. “Read it out loud,” I repeated, a little angrier than before. “It will help make it real.”

She sniffed and rubbed at her nose before holding the paper up and pushing her glasses back into place. “My dearest Draco,” she began, and her sniffling increased. “I love you more than words on paper could ever get right. You mean more to me than my own beating heart, and that’s why I have to leave you. We might have been all wrong from the start, but that matters little after we’ve shared so much,” she read aloud through stifled sobs.

“Keep reading,” I prodded.

“Every night I dream of you, and what was once carefree fantasies has morphed into prophecies of your death. I’ve never put much stock in divination, but it cannot be denied that I have a price on my head and that there are people, people close to you, that will do anything to collect it. Every minute you stay with me puts you in more danger. Everyone I love could die just because I love them, and I will never place that fate upon your head,” she continued and let the note fall from her hands.

“That wasn’t the end. Finish it,” I pleaded, my own tears making it impossible to see.

She sighed and picked the note back up. “I refuse to be the one that gets you hurt or killed and I can’t be the one to tear you away from your family. I know what it’s like to have no parents to call my own, and I wouldn’t wish that fate on you either. So marry the girl. The marriage will keep you safe, and who knows, she might even make you happy. Close your mind off to Voldemort until I kill him, and I promise I will do that final thing for you even if he takes me down with him. As for me, don’t worry. I’m joining the Order fulltime and leaving school, so you won’t have to see me again. Hermione and Ron still know nothing, so they should continue to leave you alone. You will always have my heart, Draco. Always. Love, H.J.P.,” she finished and fell on me once more.

“He’s gone,” I whispered, still finding it impossible to believe and nearly choked on the words. After all the time I spent thinking it was best to break up, he had changed my mind with a look and a word. Now here he was, breaking things off, and leaving no less. At least when I was going to break up with him I was planning to stay near, so that we could get back together if we deemed it right. He took my idea and went too far with it, after convincing me that the idea was wrong at the start.

Now here he was, off to fight the battles that happened to our families outside of this sheltered school, and to fight Voldemort, maybe even die by Voldemort’s hand and he couldn’t even look me in the eye and say goodbye!

Coward. Liar. Thief.

I ripped the pillow I hadn’t even known I was clutching in half and threw it down, before taking one hand and swiping it along the surface of my nightstand, causing a number of glittering objects to shatter and crash to the ground startling Shannon. One of the objects was the time turner. I stared at it for a long moment and thought of using it to go back to make Harry stay, but I couldn’t. If he wanted to leave me, I couldn’t make him stay. If he was able to look at me, sleeping peacefully in his arms, and want to give me up, than he was never really mine to start with.

That, and the time turner looked broken.

I took a deep breath and stood up, startling Shannon once again and she tried to take my hand, but I shook her off. It was time to be Draco Malfoy, pureblood wizard and heir to the Malfoy name and fortune again, not some sadistic hero's plaything.

A glance in the mirror showed the old Draco, worn and beaten, and I couldn't have that. With a quick and graceful movement I smoothed out my collar and ran nimble fingers through my hair before leaving my room without a word and headed for the Great Hall for breakfast.

I was famished.

Beta’s Notes: Hey, guys, this is Shannon (the real one). I just wanted to say thank you so much to everyone who said such nice things about my character, whom Dig gave my name and characteristics to. When I requested History Repeats Itself I thought being a character would be fun, yet I had no idea that I would be part of the main plot, and that made me incredibly nervous, so thank you soooo much for alleviating my fears! :D I love you all!

Authors Note: Yes, yes. I know it's sad, but I like sad. It was still good right? lol. Broken time turners and sweet Dear John letters to all who review.