Adult-FanFiction.org : Harry Potter

Ancient and Noble Houses	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 29877 -:- Recommendations : 2 -:- Currently Reading : 5
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I am making no money from this fanfic.

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Chapter Ten—Enter, Carrying a House-Elf

            Draco rolled over sleepily. He had thought someone was standing right beside him, peering down into his face, with a Lumos on their wand. But he had charmed his bed to shut its curtains tightly against someone entering and to let him know with an alarm if anyone did, so it couldn’t be that.

            Then he opened his eyes, and saw the figure that did loom over him and the traces of blood clinging to its face, and opened his mouth to scream.

            “Hush, Malfoy,” Potter’s voice said. Of course it was Potter’s voice, although with the dark twist to it that Draco was coming to associate with his transformed Black nature. “I don’t want you crying out.” He aimed his wand at Draco’s throat, and Draco felt the skin there tremble as he realized that he really couldn’t make any sound. He didn’t think Potter had cast a spell, but nevertheless, he was under orders.

            That made him want to groan, and be doubly frustrated that he couldn’t. Don’t tell me Potter has that bloody power over all members of the House of Black that Aunt Bella was always prattling on about?

            “I want you to tell me how to heal a house-elf,” Potter said, and then the limp bundle in his arms became recognizable. Draco didn’t think the blood on Potter’s face was his, either, or that of some unfortunate animal he’d made his meal. That was something, at least.

            But it was nothing compared to Draco’s frustration when he opened his mouth and discovered that his breath was still silent. He tapped his throat and gave Potter a harsh glance, even as he moved back so Potter could set the elf down on his bed, as he undoubtedly proposed to do. Draco was glad that some of the most stringent cleaning spells he knew were considered third-year and thus were still in reach of his wand.

            “Oh, right,” Potter said blankly, and waved one hand around. Draco felt no loosening of the constriction on his voice. He looked at Potter.

            Potter bent towards Draco, a flame like greasy oil in his eyes. Draco wanted to shrink. At this moment, Potter looked like one of the portraits of Blacks who had never made sense. Not much like Aunt Bella, but Draco thought longer hair would do it.

            “I don’t know how I did that,” Potter said, in a voice like wind and lightning. “You’re going to have to fight your way past it yourself.”

            Draco clutched his wand, and didn’t care that he might almost be in danger of snapping it. He didn’t deserve this humiliation. He had done so much less than other people in the war, all right, but that was less of evil as well as of good, and he was also of the blood of the Blacks—

            The constriction on his throat snapped. Draco drew in a grateful breath and decided to ignore, for the moment, that he didn’t know if the spell had gone away because Potter wanted him to speak or if Draco really had been able to call on the power of his ancestry for a brief second. He nodded to Potter and said, “How did he get injured?”

            Potter hesitated, and Draco knew the truth as though he had etched it on stone tablets. He stared at Potter, remembered how he had lost Draco’s father one of their house-elves, and shook his head slowly.

            “You can’t repair injuries that an elf inflicted on itself when its master ordered it to be punished,” he said. “It can’t be done. And house-elves are resilient. Most of them survive no matter what happens to them.”

            Potter stared at him with widened eyes. Then he folded one hand into a fist and slammed it into the pillow beside Draco’s head.

            Draco kept himself from flinching with an effort. It was a bleak kind of comfort to know that, no matter what Potter did, what laws of nature and blood and magic he ordered around, this was still something he couldn’t do anything about. “What I’m telling you is true.” He folded his legs under him and sneered at Potter. “Who knows more about having house-elves here? My mother did try to heal a few of the house-elves once, when my father had ordered them to punish themselves and she wanted them better to help in the garden. Nothing happened. And now I can’t use some of the spells that she did, anyway.” He lifted his half-useless wand, ignoring the thrum of power through the hawthorn wood when it felt Potter’s presence. “You’ve well and truly fucked yourself over, Potter.”

            Potter collapsed onto the bed, and sure enough, the blood ran down the house-elf’s side and soaked into Draco’s blankets. Draco was already forming one of the cleaning charm incantations in his mind when Potter sat up abruptly and said, “You know something about this. How do I escape from the house?”

            Draco blinked. “You don’t.”

            Potter snarled at him.

            “You don’t,” Draco said, wondering if this was going to be something else like the house-elf, where Potter refused to accept it at first and then gave in, or whether Draco would be unlucky enough to end up as a sacrifice to Potter’s stubbornness. “The house takes an heir who lives in it for an unbroken month after he comes of age. Or she, sometimes, but there haven’t been many female heirs in a long time. It couldn’t take my cousins Sirius and Regulus because they didn’t spend enough time there after they came of age. But if you were there this summer, then it has you. It won’t stop until it’s swallowed you.”

            “I don’t want it to swallow me.”

            Draco rolled his eyes. Yes, there was the familiar Harry Potter ignorance, the insistence that he was too special to give in to the commonplace fates that took over other people’s lives. Or maybe he thought that, since he’d already had one destiny, he couldn’t have another one.

            “Then go to Gringotts and apply for a formal process of disinheritance,” Draco said. “Say that you want to hold the Black fortune and property in trust for one of your children, or that you want to give it back to the only surviving Blacks.”

            Potter stared at him with his mouth open. Draco didn’t particularly enjoy being able to count all his teeth. “Will that work?”

            Draco would have liked to say it would, but he couldn’t move his tongue around the lie. Probably another example of the Black heir having power over all members of the Black bloodline. He grimaced. “No. The house has you now. It would work if you were the Black heir but hadn’t spent time living in the house. By the time that you complete the process, which is long and has a lot of paperwork, the house will have changed you to the point that you won’t be able to imagine giving it up.”

            Potter made a desperate noise and buried his head in his hands. Draco shifted his feet away from both Potter and the mass of the wounded house-elf. At least its injuries had closed and the cleaning charms Draco had to use would be less stringent than he’d been worried about; they might not even make holes in the sheets that he would then have to close with a Reparo.

            “You have to help me,” Potter said suddenly, lifting his head. “You know so much more about this than I do. You could help me escape.”

            Draco leaned forwards and spoke as slowly and loudly as he could. “Pot. Ter. There. Is. No. Escape.”

            “There must be.” Potter’s eyes burned with an even more familiar fanatical light than the last one Draco had seen in them, because this one might have come straight from Aunt Bella’s face. “You’re going to help me find it.” When Draco opened his mouth to refuse again, Potter added, “I know that you have to do it if I command you. But you can just think of it as blackmail. I’ll tell people that you’ve been casting spells that are illegal for you if you refuse.”

            Draco cast him a hopeless glance. Harry Potter’s testimony would be enough to condemn him as it had been to save him, he knew. And while he thought that this was hopeless and it would probably end up with Potter as another sacrifice to the Black house, at least pretending to help might guarantee that Draco would stay free of Azkaban. Either Potter’s luck would turn up after all, and they would find a way out, or Potter would turn into enough of a Black to have that feeling for family and approval of the Dark Arts that haunted all the heirs. He wouldn’t want to put Draco in prison then.

            “Fine,” Draco said shortly. “Meet me in the library tomorrow.”

            I should have known it would end up with me as a sacrifice to his stubbornness. Because since when does a Potter, or a Black, give in?

*

            moodysavage: The last thing Harry would do at this point is tell Hermione.

            ChaosLady: Well, sort of coming to his senses.

            SP777: Indeed.

            delia cerrano: Harry will be fighting it, but this story is pretty dark, and does get darker from here.
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Ancient and Noble Houses