Thank you for the reviews! This is the second and last chapter.

Chapter Two

Harry woke with a start, and snapped his hand down on his wand. Malfoy was standing over his bed, his eyes glimmering in the faint light from the walls as he looked at Harry.

"Well, there's nothing wrong with your instincts," Malfoy muttered, and held out his hand. "Come on, it will be midnight in a minute."

"And you said there was no power from ambient magic to Dark Arts," Harry muttered, as he stood up and yanked on his robes from beside the bed. Malfoy had insisted they go to bed early. He hadn't mentioned anything about getting up in the middle of the night.

"Midnight is symbolically significant for you," Malfoy corrected. He'd stepped out into the middle of the outer room, but he seemed to have no problem standing there and watching Harry dress. "Because your perception of the Dark Arts associates them with literal darkness. Until we can get past that barrier, then we'll need to do the spells at times you think will make them more powerful."

Harry scowled. "I do not think that midnight is symbolically significant," he muttered, but he flung the covers back and followed Malfoy. He found him standing in the middle of a circle of what seemed to be obsidian, set so flush with the floor that it was perfectly smooth.

"Is that for you or me?" Harry asked, jerking his head at the circle.

"You're learning," Malfoy said, with a smile that Harry couldn't interpret. "It's for both of us. I enjoy it. You think black matters." He held out his hand.

Harry swallowed and stepped into the circle with Malfoy, clutching his hand hard when there was a sudden buzz of magic from the black rock. Malfoy only nodded as if he wasn't surprised by Harry's surprise.

"You knew not to touch the stones, at least," he said, and then faced the center of the circle. There was a symbol carved on the floor, but Harry had no time to see what it was before Malfoy moved his hand again and all the lights went out.

Harry stood in silence, in the darkness, feeling pressure land on his head. It was magic, he thought. He had sometimes felt the same thing when a curse was cast or he was in the presence of a dragon.

"You can feel it? Good. That's one skill I don't need to teach you."

"It feels like ordinary magic. You said I would be able to tell the difference between Dark Arts and—"

"Yes, when you've had some training. For now, shush."

Harry sealed his lips and stood there disobligingly, hearing Malfoy murmuring to himself. There was a sliding bead of wetness down the side of Harry's face at one point, and he tried to move, but Malfoy held him still with a grip on his elbow. "Only tears and blood I've saved up. They make a potent mixture."

"What magic are you trying to make happen?" Harry hissed back, wincing a little when the darkness around them seemed to object to being broken.

"A way to show you what the Dark Arts means."

Harry didn't have the time to retort. The world around them suddenly brightened, but Harry couldn't see the room, or the ritual circle they supposedly stood in the middle of, or anything but the scene that was in front of him.

It looked like Malfoy had somehow transported them outside. Harry saw a bright, soft garden in front of them, the grass and the trees both glowing with dew and sunlight. It seemed to be early morning. A woman in a set of white robes—no, wait, a white gown that looked like it was made of lace—was kneeling in front of an altar, her hands uplifted and clasped. There was a pale blue flower between her fingers. Harry didn't know what kind it was.

The woman breathed, her eyes shut, all of her concentration apparently bent on the flower. Harry wanted to stir, but he seemed to be nothing but a watching pair of eyes. He couldn't even glance to the side to see if Malfoy was still there.

The woman stood up, eyes still closed, and let the flower fall to the ground. Then she slashed her hand with what appeared to be one of her nails. Harry started. He watched as blood dripped from the cut and she moved her hand in a circle, so that the blood covered the altar.

There was a slight, sharp sound, and the altar quivered as if a mist had started rising from it. Harry cocked his head. There was a strange feeling in the air. Like an atmosphere. A metallic taste on his tongue, and even along his skin. He hadn't known his skin could taste anything, before this.

"You feel that?" Malfoy hissed.

The woman turned around and opened her eyes, and Harry gasped. She was Narcissa Malfoy, although much younger than Harry had ever seen her. But he couldn't mistake that pale hair or proud, haughty face.

"I did," he muttered as the vision faded away, and he found himself standing in the ritual circle again. He shook his head and glanced sideways at Malfoy. "What was she asking for?"

"It doesn't matter," Malfoy said. "What matters is that you need to have that feeling in mind when you're trying to determine if something is Dark magic or ambient magic."

"Does it always feel like that? It's never influenced by what someone's trying to do or whether they're using blood or something else?"

"An intelligent question, Harry." Malfoy nodded to him and stepped out of the circle. "Come. We'll discover the answer together."

Harry had to admit that he was losing track of the days and nights he had spent under Malfoy's tutelage.

There was no change of light or darkness in the rooms. Malfoy simply said when they should sleep, when it was midnight in the world outside and when it was noon, or time for breakfast, or time to wake up. Harry adapted. He'd worked strange schedules before, when he was on some cases.

If he could think of this as another kind of case, then he thought he would adapt best. He was here to finish something distasteful to him. It was the same with tracking down someone who had murdered another wizard, or disrupting a Dark magic ritual—

Wait. No. He couldn't think that way anymore. Harry shook his head a little and looked up from where he was brewing a potion that had his own tears as the primary ingredient. Malfoy had taught him a spell that made him cry often enough to fill the cauldron.

"Is something wrong, Harry?"

Malfoy looked at him from across the room, holding a glass of wine to his lips. For some reason, he was wearing his Starling robes again, the dark blue ones with the silver stars of light against the darkness. Harry looked at him and licked his lips, then turned back to the potion.

"No, Draco," he said softly.

As long as he could call the man "Draco" outside his head and "Malfoy" within, then Harry was positive he was still holding on to some essential truth.

Harry learned.

He learned the few Dark Arts spells that actually had incantations, mostly ones that were meant to open a wound or cause someone to cry, like the one for the potion Malfoy had taught him, or strengthen the will. They were about gathering the raw ingredients that one needed for Dark magic, Malfoy said dismissively, flicking his fingers as Harry watched blood well from his leg. Not as important as the pure will.

And that will, Malfoy made Harry demonstrate again and again. He had to throw off the Imperius Curse when Malfoy cast it. He had to stand in the ritual circle while Malfoy lit the stones with fire and circled him, chanting. Apparently fire and chanting were some of the ways that Malfoy built up his own confidence, the symbolic things he felt were significant.

Harry couldn't say that he noticed the promised increase in his will at all. But if Malfoy needed that to feel comfortable teaching him, then Harry would accept it.

Harry learned what inheritance rituals were (all about making sure that no one could successfully challenge your will in or out of court), what soul-growth rituals were (about atoning after you'd murdered someone), what creation rituals were (about pulling a shape from your imagination into the world and then giving it enough power to stay there instead of come unshaped like a Transfiguration). He could feel Malfoy smiling every time he correctly answered questions or wrote essays about them.

Because Malfoy actually did assign essays, exactly as if he were a professor at Hogwarts.

And Harry supposed his own view of magic was softening a little bit. There was nothing terrible about blood magic, at least if you were using it to make sure your children couldn't fight over your inheritance, and Voldemort could have used something like the soul-growth ritual.

He told Malfoy that, because he thought it would impress him, his own changing view of Dark magic. Malfoy stirred the potion he was making with one finger, feeding it skin, apparently. His eyes locked on Harry.

"You know," he said. "But you don't believe. Not yet."

"I believe that it isn't wrong, Malf—Draco," Harry said, and cursed himself a little as he watched Malfoy's eyebrows go up. He hadn't slipped up on his name before. "I don't know what else I can say to convince you! I know what it feels like, and I can see that it's silly to arrest wizards who are using their own blood for potions or witches who are conducting their own rituals, and I won't make a mistake like I did with the Sunderstars again—"

"You're still not calling me by my first name," Malfoy said calmly. "Not all the time, not in your own mind. And that's the important one, you know. The biggest test. You obey me when I tell you to do something. I don't want obedience. I want acceptance."

His eyes shone like the blue-black crystal he had used to test Harry. Harry swallowed a few times, and finally managed to say, "I don't know what the difference between them is, at least when it comes to your teaching."

"There's one kind of Dark magic we haven't covered," Malfoy said, disregarding that in a way Harry thought he shouldn't. "The kind two people can raise together."

"But I thought we did. We talked about brewing potions together, and you showed me some of the rituals that—"

"Not that kind." Malfoy paused to take the potion off the flame and set it carefully out of harm's way on the edge of the little half-wall that cut the kitchen off from the rest of his rooms. Then he strode towards Harry and stopped a few feet away. "The kind that comes from the mingling of two bodies."

Harry felt as though someone had moved the flame from beneath Malfoy's cauldron to his cheeks. He coughed. "You're talking about sex magic."

"Yes. I told you that was a subset of the Dark Arts."

"Yes, but—that's not the same as saying that I should practice it!"

"I think you need to," Malfoy said, unswerving. "If you could have accepted me and called me by my first name without it, I wouldn't suggest a sex ritual. But it's perfectly obvious that you can't. So. Come here, Harry."

Harry stood where he was, and shook his head. "This is crazy, Mal—"

"You don't understand Dark Arts," Malfoy said, his voice as soft as his mother's face in the ritual image he'd shown Harry. "If you did, then you wouldn't be this bloody hard to convince. And all I have to do is go back to Madam Kellen and tell her that you don't understand, and what is she going to do?"

That much was perfectly obvious to Harry. He ground his teeth. "Not let me have my job back."

"That's right." Malfoy's smile was smug as he extended his hand yet again. "Come here. I promise that it's not going to be what you think," he added, as Harry still hesitated. "It'll take place in your head, be a feeling, like the one you got when you watched my mother perform that ritual. But it'll feel real, and right. And if that doesn't persuade you to trust me, then nothing will."

Harry swallowed and slowly moved towards Malfoy. He'd used George's Daydream Charms, he argued to himself as he took Malfoy's hand; this wasn't going to be any different, surely.

And anyway, he was only here so he could get his job back. What he did down here didn't have to matter, except that now he would recognize Dark magic when he saw it.

Malfoy turned him around so that Harry's back was to his chest, and breathed into his ear, "Concentrate on me. Summon up all that will I know you have, even though you don't like showing it to me half the time." He brushed his head across Harry's forehead at the same moment as the rest of the room disappeared into darkness again. "Think of me, Harry."

Harry swallowed and raised his will the way Malfoy had taught him, soaring up and around himself, cloaking them both. The darkness ceased to bother him. The sensation of the floor beneath his feet vanished. He was drifting in the darkness with Malfoy, and the only thing that mattered was Malfoy's tickling hair against his cheek, and the arms wrapped around him, and the hand that roamed gently up and down his thigh.

"Call me Draco."

Malfoy's voice was everywhere, echoing in the darkness. Harry tilted his head back a little further, to get more hair, and said, "Draco."

"Mean it. Say it in your head. Say it aloud. Come to believe in what I am and what I could be."

Harry didn't have the slightest idea what he meant, and really did want to say that. But instead, he took a deep, restrained breath, and managed to murmur, "Draco." At the same time, he decided that he would think of Draco's arms around him, and Draco's hair almost falling into his mouth, and Draco made a soft sound and tightened his grasp.

"That's it. I can feel it. Can't you feel it?"

Harry could. But this was wholly unlike the Dark Arts he'd learned how to feel. It was a silken, stretching cocoon of warmth, slipping around him and overwhelming him, making it hard to breathe.

"Yes," said Draco into his ear, and Harry's breathing became raspy and hoarse as he felt the warmth settle more into him. "I want you to picture a bedroom, and bring it to life. Can you do it? Not the one we have here. Not the one you have at your house. I want you to imagine a new one."

Harry reached out to the magic, the power of imagination, that hovered around him. Them. It was around him and Draco both. He conjured it with the power of his will, and the darkness bent and twisted and flowed away. Instead, they were in a bright space with green walls and a bed in front of them that had green curtains all around it.

"I might have known you were a secret Slytherin at heart," Draco murmured into his ear. "How soft are the sheets? You can feel them, Harry. You know."

Harry reached out and trailed his hand down the sheets, still expecting to touch nothing until his hand actually collided with the fabric. He gasped. "Silk. Or what I think silk would feel like. I've—never had silken sheets."

"Then I'm glad that I could introduce you to them." Draco's voice drifted around him, present and not present, but touching the bed delicately. Harry watched as the carved wooden sides of it grew deeper, like the sides of a sleigh, looming over the sheets. "And you can see me there, can't you?"

Harry stared, and blinked. Yes. Draco was there. He formed, lying on the sheets. And he was naked. His body was covered with the small silver scars from the Sectumsempra curse Harry had cast on him long ago, and his hands shaped and lifted his cock, and Harry felt his mouth water as he saw the length and pinkness of it.

"I can see you," he whispered.

"Keeping in mind that this is will and imagination and desire," Draco said into his ear, "come over there and sit down on me."

"I—I've never done something like this before. I'm not ready—"

"If you imagine yourself ready, you are."

Harry swallowed, and pulled in his will again, imagining the sensations as hard as he could. He knew he would have to be slick and relaxed and open, and probably soaked in oil or some other potion. But he'd never been like that before. Could he imagine it?

You can do anything that you will yourself to do, Draco's voice said in his head, hissing.

And because of that, because he refused to allow himself to be defeated by imagining sex, of all things, Harry did imagine it. In his head, he was confident, and proud, and just as hard as Draco, and ready to take him in. He willed the mental incarnation of himself to stride over and sit down on Draco's cock.

And he did. He was seeing it from outside, as if he was once again a watching pair of eyes, and he watched himself—surely he wasn't that tall, with hair that dark—walk over and sink down onto Draco.

Draco's eyes rolled back in his head, which was pleasing.

"You have no idea," Draco said.

But Harry thought his voice was too strong and normal, so he imagined that he was bobbing along on top of Draco, and that that shut him up. And it did. Draco's eyes were clouding, glazing with passion, as Harry rode him.

As he had imagined the sensations of himself open and loose and soaking, Harry imagined the sensations of pleasure. They weren't there, but they were, if they imagined they were. That was what Draco had taught him. That was the power of it. He watched his own head tossing back, and his body riding the furious waves of thrusting, and making Draco's body move in its own rhythm.

And the pleasure was there, all around them, heating up the darkness, curling and striking with claws that wrenched an orgasm out of both of them. Harry saw Draco shudder and jerk, he saw himself bend down with hands placed flat on the bed to brace himself, and he heard them both shout, distant and faint, but as loud as they needed to be.

In the aftermath, as the bed and the images of themselves faded and wavered and grew hazy, Harry floated there, breathing. He felt that piercing tickle of the Dark Arts on his skin and his tongue again. He wondered what they'd created, other than a picture that had gone.

"Do you trust me now?" Draco whispered to him.

Harry swallowed. They had made that together, and if Draco ever tried to tease Harry about it, he would implicate himself, too. Same thing if he ever tried to brag to someone else that he had tricked the Harry Potter.

And…they had made that together.

"Yes," he whispered back.

Abruptly they were out of the darkness, and once again in the light of the rooms. Harry blinked and turned around to find that Draco was bowing his head to him.

"I've taught you as much as I can about the Dark Arts," he said. "I can tell Madam Kellen that she's welcome to give you your job back, and that I'm sure you'll never disrupt another inheritance ritual, or any other kind of Dark ritual, without permission."

His arms were at his sides. He could walk away, Harry knew. In fact, Draco was already turning to go back to the potion he'd set aside to invite Harry into the darkness.

But no one had ever done that for Harry. He'd had sex, but never with a man. Never in his mind. Never in a way that left him with flesh-deep certainty that the other person had been so involved with it, that if Draco hadn't been there with him and imagining things in exactly that way, it would have failed.

"I'd like to stay a little longer."

Draco paused and looked over his shoulder, face bone-smooth with amusement. "What did I tell you, Harry? Have a little faith in me. When I said that I've taught you as much about the Dark Arts as I can, I meant it."

"I know that," Harry said. "But—you didn't say anything about what else we can learn together."

Draco paused, his eyebrows rising higher and higher. Then he said, "It's not all going to be as wild as that was. Or as pleasant. I can assure you of that. I can't even promise that an Auror and a Starling are going to be able to spend a lot of time together."

Harry just nodded. "I know that. But you also told me that the Dark Arts weren't easy, and—you said something the other day about Dark Arts being banned by the Ministry because of fear and weakness. I want to—change that. I think this is something that Muggleborns, and other wizards who never heard of it, ought to have a chance to know about. I think you should be honored, not forced to live in the Department of Mysteries and not have them acknowledge your existence. I think—listen."

His mouth was very dry. But Draco stood still and watched him attentively, and that gave Harry the courage to go on.

"Madam Kellen gave us Auror trainees a lecture, once, when we were first being accepted by the Ministry and inducted into our duties. She said that we were justice's voice, that we had to be the ones to speak for criminals' victims and magical creatures and others who couldn't speak for themselves. Now I know that my voice was saying the wrong thing at least half the time. Or maybe more. I talked a lot about Dark Arts without understanding what they were. Will you—give me the chance to speak up and do justice for you and yours?"

Draco was gaping at him now. Harry had to admit it felt good to startle his teacher. He stood there and looked Draco in the eye, and Draco slowly closed his mouth and began to smile. It was the first wide, genuine smile that Harry thought he'd ever seen from him.

"It won't be easy."

"Because that's ever stopped me." Harry grinned back. "Have a little faith in me, Draco."

Draco dipped his head and came up to wrap an arm around his neck and kiss him for the first time. It was clashing teeth and dipping tongues and wet lips and pleasure that wasn't in his imagination, and Harry enjoyed it very much.

"I think," Draco said, stepping back at last, "that we could use a little time before we go talk to Madam Kellen about this. I can finish my potion. We can—imagine possibilities, if you will. They'll take a lot of work to envision." He gave Harry a long, slow, pointed look.

"I can just imagine that they will," Harry said. "I'm looking forward to it."

The End.