Have Heart

The fourth toast to the memory of Great Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore and the defeat of the Dark Lord at the hand of his Boy Who Conquered, and Lucius Malfoy was looking for a way to slip away from the party. A dull pounding behind his temples had plagued him ever since Cornelius Fudge had broken into tears on his shoulder, bewailing the injustice of having been voted out of office, in favour of a woman, no less.

Lucius put his untouched glass of firewhiskey on a tray carried by a passing house-elf in Ministry livery and sneered at it with distaste. Employing elves instead of wizarding staff at official functions was just another tribute to the slipping standards of the Ministry. He was about to inch towards one of the exits, nodding and exchanging pleasantries along the way, when a hand on his arm stopped him.

"Mr Malfoy?"

Lucius suppressed the impulse to go for his wand, barely. Old habits were dying hard. He freed his sleeve.

"Mr Potter," he acknowledged in a tone of voice a few degrees colder even than the one he'd used with Fudge. It did not serve to send the brat scurrying off, as it had the ex-Minister. Instead, Potter cocked his head and raised an eyebrow in what looked like a conscious mockery of Lucius' mannerisms.

"May I have a word with you, Mr Malfoy?" he inquired politely.

Lucius sneered.

"You couldn't let your dazzling presence shine on those who are actually interested, Potter? I'm aware of your First Class Order of Merlin - you don't have to single me out to show it off."

Potter's lips quirked upward, undaunted, and he nodded towards a niche leading to one of the side doors to the Ministry Atrium, resplendent with its new-and-improved fountain. In the light of recent events, it still showed a house-elf, but had a Phoenix sitting on the wizard's shoulder in place of a goblin, and a Puffskein gazing adoringly up at the witch instead of a centaur. Lucius scowled, but moved towards the corner. When they were out of immediate eyeshot, Potter stopped.

"Well?" Lucius inquired.

The boy ran a hand through his multi-directional hair.

"First, I'd like to - express my condolences about your son - and your wife..."

"Don't bother!" Lucius snapped. "Draco was your enemy, and Narcissa-"

"I may not have liked them, Mr Malfoy," the boy replied, a touch more sharply than before, but not rising to the bait. "It doesn't mean I wanted them dead." He gave Lucius an offended look, and continued after seeming to believe him sufficiently cowed, "And I wanted to thank you for... for killing Bellatrix Lestrange."

"I didn't-"

"I know why you did it, and Merlin forbid you would have done it to avenge my godfather! I'm just glad that she's dead."

Lucius leaned against the wall and crossed his arms in front of his chest with a smirk.

"So the virtuous hero of the wizarding world delights in the deaths of his enemies - what would your dear departed mentor Dumbledore say if he could hear that?"

A touch of hurt flitted over the expressive features, combined with an expression Lucius couldn't quite make sense of. He didn't like it, though.

"Oh, no, don't try to defend yourself, Potter - a touch of good old-fashioned bloodthirstiness makes you seem refreshingly human, like the rest of us mere mortals."

He got a bitter snort in reply.

"Oh believe me, Mr Malfoy, I'm more human than most."

"I wouldn't disclose that quite so freely to the adoring public if I were you, Potter - they'd be sorely disappointed."

Potter cocked his head slightly, fixing Lucius with a thoughtful gaze.

"It hurts terribly, doesn't it?"

"What are you prattling about, Potter?"

"Losing the people you love. It makes you hurt so bad, and lashing out at others takes away a bit of the pain and makes them suffer instead of you." His mouth twisted into an ugly grimace. "I know. I've done it myself."

Cold fury spilled into Lucius' bloodstream.

"Don't you dare to patronise me, Potter!" he snapped. "I have left mangled bodies in Knockturn back alleys for less."

Potter actually seemed to be taken aback at that.

"I'm sorry, Mr Malfoy - Lucius. I did not mean to mock your loss." He shuffled uneasily, again running a hand through his barely-tamed mop with a sigh. "Merlin, this isn't at all going the way I had planned..."

Lucius sneered reflexively. "Yes, that would indeed describe your usual level of 'planning' - running headlong into danger with no thought about the consequences. And I wasn't aware we were on first-name basis, Mr Potter."

"I... I had hoped we might get there," the boy mumbled, his ears burning like a Weasley head.

Lucius stared at him in a mixture of disbelief and growing anger. Had the stupid child imbibed too much?

"What?" he snapped.

"What I wanted to say is that if you didn't want to spend the night alone tonight, I..." Potter paused and floundered. "... I would be honoured by your company."

"Are you... are you propositioning me, Potter?"

Malfoys didn't gape - it wasn't in the manual, but for once Lucius had to give his jaw a mental nudge to keep it from hanging open.

"I'm not asking for your hand in marriage, Mr Malfoy," Potter said defensively. "I'm just... oh bloody hell, I guess I'm just attracted to you."

Lucius' eyes ran over the young man's body almost against his will. His dress robes were atrocious: old-fashioned cut, mediocre quality of cloth. Perhaps what something like a Weasley would consider fancy, but woefully out of place at a fashionable Ministry occasion like this one. A miracle that none of those Ministry lackeys who fawned over their 'saviour' had ever bothered taking him to a decent robe shop.

The colour set off his eyes and hair, though.

"And since when... do you suffer from that unfortunate affliction, Mr Potter?" Lucius managed an almost natural drawl, no small feat considering the situation. He still could not quite believe what he'd been hearing.

The boy flushed even deeper. "I've been... thinking... about you ever since the Department of Mysteries," he confessed. "Of course I hated you then, but... I kept thinking." One corner of his mouth curled up for a moment. "You were the only unbiased person since the Sorting Hat who ever called me intelligent. And then when you came over to our side-"

"I did not come to your side, you foolish child!" Lucius snapped. "I sided with whoever was battling the Dark Lord. Your juvenile ideas of good and evil mean less than nothing to me."

The memory was still enough to constrict his throat. To think that Voldemort had believed he could sacrifice his only heir to win the allegiance of some vampire lord while Lucius was trapped in Azkaban, have his wife murdered by her own sister when she tried to interfere, and that Lucius would still keep faith with him... Only the Dark Lord could have been so incredibly arrogant. Or so incredibly stupid.

"I know." Potter nodded. "But you're not an enemy any longer. And if living through a war has taught me one thing, it's how quickly life can be over. That's why I wanted to ask, at least, so I won't have to regret not taking the chance when I had it."

Lucius shook his head. "And you really thought I would be swayed by your fame, or at least let you down kindly because of your great achievements and your recent loss of a mentor?"

To Lucius' surprise, Potter grinned at that with a considerable amount of self-depreciation.

"Oh, no, Mr Malfoy. I knew that if you weren't interested, you would not let me down kindly."

"So you're saying that a masochistic streak is yet another one of your perversions?"

"Well, if it was good enough for Godric Gryffindor and Salazar Slytherin... and then there's all the stories about Herpo the Foul and his harem that were not covered in Professor Binns' History of Magic lectures..." Potter blinked at him with a calculatedly innocent expression.

Lucius let one of his eyebrows wander up.

"My, who would have thought that the Boy Who Conquered earned his illustrious title for having been embroiled in sordid affairs at his tender age..." He watched in delight as Potter winced at the new catchphrase of the wizarding press, and Lucius' suggestive overtone.

"Why not?" Potter asked in quite a peculiar tone of voice. "There are quite a few people out there who pride themselves on having lured me into their beds." His mouth curved into a sardonic sneer that made Lucius wonder for a moment if Potter was trying to mock his own facial expressions again. But no, he sounded altogether too bitter for mockery.

"If you have scores of admirers beating down your door, why approach me?" Lucius knew that he really should deliver an immediate turn-down that would leave Potter bleeding, but he had to admit he was curious about how many more secrets he'd be able to get the young man to spill. And Potter did squirm rather amusingly.

Potter shrugged. "I'm not looking for an admirer."

"You haven't found one." Lucius smiled thinly, preparing for the death blow. "No, Mr Potter, I'll have you know that I've always limited myself to duelling with one wand only, and have no interest in changing that."

The boy's eyes widened slightly.

"What?" Lucius snapped. "If you're fantasising about Death Eater orgies with blood sacrifices and much ravishing of young male virgins, I'd advise you to keep away from the Sickle-dreadfuls."

Lucius had had the odd mistress during Narcissa's pregnancy, and a short, inappropriate affair with Mirabelle Delacour, a half-Veela who had accompanied a delegation from the French Ministry of Magic as an incentive to sway the members of the Department for International Magical Cooperation to broaden their minds about wand core standards. But the idea of men - including young men - had just never tempted him. Yes, he'd been aware that Evan Rosier and Severus Snape had shown him some well-hidden interest in his younger years. But being engaged, and later married, to one of the celebrated beauties of the wizarding world, especially one with a spectacularly volatile family, was a marked disincentive to stray, even with women.

Not that he'd have had much time for indiscretions. Consolidating his fortune and reputation, furthering the cause of the Dark Lord when he was in ascension and repairing the damage to his name after his fall, had kept Lucius far too busy for romantic entanglements.

"No, Potter," Lucius emphasised, "I am most certainly not interested."

Now if that slender, dark-haired shape were a young woman, and one of reasonable parentage... there was the renewed issue of an heir to consider, after all.

"I apologise beforehand for this," Potter said calmly. He put a hand to Lucius' cheek, and rose on tiptoes before he could flinch away. "You can kill me afterwards," he added before very gently putting his lips against Lucius'.

Potter kissed with his eyes closed, the stupid little fool, as if he was in any way safe forcing his attentions on a disinterested former enemy. Without the famous glasses, his face seemed very pale, and the black curves of his lashes very dark in comparison. Lucius grabbed the boy's shoulders to wrench him off, and then kept his hands there for a moment. After all, the child was possibly deluded, driven to this extreme by grief or misdirected gratitude.

While he'd never actively contemplated kissing another male, he would have expected Potter's lips to be rough, but they were quite soft, and had a clear, pleasant taste about them. Weird - he'd not have pegged the boy as one to go for Gillywater. Not as soft as Narcissa's, of course, but then his wife had known - and regularly applied - every cosmetic charm known to witchkind. Not pleasant, definitely not. But... bearable.

At last the young man pulled back, looking up at Lucius with hooded, unfathomable eyes.

"You'll find that I'm not about to swoon in your arms, Potter," Lucius snarled. "One rarely does when forcibly accosted by a young fool too blinkered by his own sense of importance to take no for an answer."

The boy bowed his head, as if conceding defeat in a Wizard's Duel, and reached for Lucius' hand with such a degree of natural grace that Lucius let him have it without even noticing. Potter had played Quidditch just like that, he remembered, moving as if he had been born for the sole purpose of being airborne...

Potter turned the stolen hand palm-up, gentled his thumb over the pulse point of Lucius' wrist, and then quickly touched dry lips to the spot.

"Just in case you might change your mind," he murmured softly before releasing the hand again.

He made no move when Lucius whipped around, eyes blazing, threw open the panelled door to the side exit, and stormed from the hall.

Lucius crossed the Atrium without a glance at the shiny Fountain of Magical Brethren with Pets, or at the handful of lingering security trolls picking their noses in front of the golden gates.

He finally stopped, several streets away from the Ministry building, with cold sweat on his face and a bone-dry mouth.

Why should he get so worked up over that little, overblown Gryffindor... slut, who hadn't only dared to accost him, but even had the nerve to force intimacies on him without his permission! Seething with rage, he listened to his own frantic heartbeat, which had nothing whatsoever to do with the lingering imprint of Potter's lips.

The damnable little creature was not worth the effort of returning to the party, dragging it off and hexing it into a painful stupor in a back alley. And even less would Lucius ever consider returning to the party, finding the boy and abandoning himself to whatever those slender, rough fingers and that strangely soft mouth could come up with.

Instead, he cursed viciously enough to produce a slight bristling of fur in a passing stray Kneazle, and Disapparated with an angry *pop*.

It had certainly turned out to be one of those nights that would be hard to redeem even with too much Old Ogden's and the dismemberment of a forward house-elf.

Lucius reappeared in Malfoy Manor's vast main gallery, and cursed again, this time catching looks from a wall-ful of painted ancestors that were no less offended than that of the alley Kneazle.

He would not give himself over to weak self-indulgence just because it had been a trying day.

He was a Malfoy.

And most of all, Lucius swore as he strode through the echoing corridors where the house-elves flitted frantically behind statues and pillars to stay out of sight, he would not think of Harry Potter!

~ finis ~