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Bonded Consort	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 33015 -:- Recommendations : 4 -:- Currently Reading : 5
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I am making no money from this story.

Chapter List
- 10
- 11
- 12
Thank you again for all the reviews!
Chapter Eleven—The Wrongness
“Forgive me,” Dumbledore was saying when Harry managed to shake the buzzing out of his ears and pay attention to the man again. “I didn’t want to put those monitoring spells on you. Yet it turned out to be a good thing I did.”
“Why did you have monitoring spells on me at all?” Harry asked, and he didn’t care that his eyes were narrowed with dislike. “I was a Squib!”
“I never thought you were precisely one. I thought you would have access to Voldemort’s magic if you lost control of yourself.”
“Then—you knew I could be trained. You knew I could use a wand.”
“Only at a terrible price.” Dumbledore was quiet, a lot less agitated than Harry felt, his hands folded in front of him as he stared at Harry. “Tell me, Harry, have you started having dreams yet? Memories? Has Voldemort started to whisper to you that what you really need to do is take over the wizarding world?”
“No. Because the magic isn’t his, it’s mine. And you knew that. You always knew it. You just didn’t want to admit it.”
Harry could feel the buzzing, the shaking, invade him. It wasn’t even his magic, he thought. It was just his anger, the anger he’d put aside again and again over the years and told himself wasn’t such a big deal. His parents were only being cautious, Dumbledore was only being cautious, if the Unspeakables who knew so much about magic told them Harry was dangerous then he was…
But now it was coming out. And M.H. reared up in front of him and hissed threateningly at Dumbledore, not in words but in what seemed to be shared rage. His tail coiled around Harry’s ankles.
Dumbledore looked at him and shook his head slightly. “So you have trained a deadly viper to attack, Harry? Tom did the same thing, once upon a time.”
Harry pulled himself back with a gasp and gritted his teeth as he said, “No. He’s not trained to attack, he wants to do it because he cares about me.” He reached down and put a hand on M.H.’s head, making sure he was looking at him so the words would come out in Parseltongue. “You need to hold back, all right? We’re not fighting right now. We’re just arguing.”
M.H., surprisingly, didn’t respond. He simply slithered out of the room. Harry blinked, but he supposed it was better than having the snake between them in case Dumbledore cast a spell. He turned and faced the man again.
“I did not wish to treat you this way, Harry,” Dumbledore was saying, his voice patient and emphatic. “But I have to because you essentially have the plague.”
“The plague.”
Dumbledore paid no attention to the flat tone that Harry spoke the words in. “Yes. You could be the source for a plague that would devastate the world—the resurrection of Voldemort. You don’t mean to be, any more than someone who carries the plague means to infect others. Yet it happens, and the patient must be quarantined for his own good.”
“What are you going to do to quarantine me?” Harry wished he hadn’t left his wand lying on the bedside table. He leaned forwards. “Do you dare tell me this is still Voldemort’s magic and not my own I’m feeling?”
“Yes. Because it is.” Dumbledore looked at him with kind, sad eyes. “Voldemort’s magic utterly extinguished your own. When you were born, you were one of the most powerful babies I ever felt. I think Lucius Malfoy could feel it, too, which was probably why he agreed to betroth his son to you. And because having a foot on both sides of the war wouldn’t hurt him. But after Voldemort vanished, that power was gone. It has to be his magic that’s inside you. I remember what yours felt like, Harry, the way you remember a favorite song. And this is not that.”
“Draco thinks I was probably a Light wizard before, and now I’m Dark. Can you feel Dark power the same way you did Light?”
Dumbledore blinked, but shook his head. “I cannot—”
“Then—”
“But it would still not matter. Whether I can or not, a wizard does not change like that for any reason. So it would still be Voldemort’s power, whether it extinguished yours or you absorbed it.”
Harry opened his mouth to speak again, but Draco’s low, furious voice sounded from behind him. “Don’t give him one more minute of your time, Harry. You’ve already done him a favor he’ll never deserve, arguing with him.” Draco’s arms slipped around his waist and he rested his mouth against Harry’s collarbone. “What do you want, old man?”
Harry couldn’t help relaxing backwards. He had to admit that Draco’s arms around his waist had a lot to do with it, but the curdled expression on Dumbledore’s face helped, too.
*
Draco would probably have awakened because of the cold spot next to him anyway, but to have a bushmaster resolutely poking him in the groin made it faster. He sat up, shook hair from his eyes, and frowned at M.H. “Where’s Harry?”
A second later, he felt ridiculous; he was no Parselmouth. But M.H. started slithering away exactly as if he had understood, so Draco got up and followed. He wondered if he would find Harry brooding in the kitchen about some other way he had thought of for magic to mess up his life.
Harry was in the kitchen, all right. And confronting the man who had been Draco’s Headmaster for seven years.
Draco startled himself with how incandescent his anger was. He actually had to restrain his wand hand and breathe carefully, deeply, as he strode forwards and slid his arms around Harry. Harry made it easier by almost falling into him, and the soft hissing of his own breath smoothed out. Draco lowered his lips to rest against Harry’s collarbone and watched Dumbledore.
“I think you know what I want, Mr. Malfoy.” Dumbledore’s voice remained old and tired. Draco might have been more convinced of this if he hadn’t shown that mask before, often while punishing some Slytherin student for crimes a Gryffindor would have got away with. “To make sure Voldemort’s magic is contained and the peace we live in isn’t broken forever.”
“I can’t believe you don’t know what happened,” Draco said pleasantly. These were questions he thought now he should have asked the Potters, but he had been solely focused on finding Harry then. “You had a survivor who wasn’t a year old, correct? Ask Pettigrew.”
Dumbledore’s face became grim and concentrated. “I have. I have viewed his memories, spoken to him on many occasions, questioned him under Veritaserum. He does not know what happened because he is no more of a magical theorist than I am a prune.”
Draco was afraid for a second Harry would laugh. Laughter made you more comfortable with people and might prompt Harry to let Dumbledore have some control over him. But he didn’t, only leaning close to Draco and continuing to breathe in that soft way. Draco spoke the words they both needed to hear. “Then he saw, but he doesn’t understand.”
“He did not, but the Unspeakables I brought in did.” Dumbledore was looking at Harry with that faux tenderness again. It had to be false, Draco thought. No one condemned someone they truly cared for to the kind of life Harry had endured. “They confirmed that either Mr. Potter’s core was extinguished or he had absorbed Voldemort’s power. Either way, as I have said, it is impossible for a Light wizard of immense power to simply turn into a Dark wizard of equally great power.”
“That means it didn’t happen,” Draco said. “Or say that he absorbed Voldemort’s power. Why would it make him evil? Then the magic is his by right of conquest. Similar things have happened in my ancestral family line.”
“Voldemort would never be conquered in that way.”
“But you thought he would be,” Draco said, shaking his head. The more he tried to penetrate the tangles of Dumbledore’s reasoning, the more lost he became. “Otherwise you wouldn’t have thought Harry was the one who could possibly defeat him.”
“His influence on his sister showed that—”
“I don’t believe his influence on Dahlia is evil, or any of his doing, or even Voldemort’s,” Draco said loudly, because he had felt Harry tense in his arms again. “I think she’s doing it on purpose, for some reason of her own.”
“My dear boy, why would she? She went from a questioning, happy girl to one who was quiet and self-contained. There is no other reason for her to grow up that way—”
“Because we’re all naturally like we were as babies?” Draco stared at Dumbledore. “Are you listening to yourself? You’d rather blame a child for being evil and influencing another child than look at the obvious?”
“I do not think he meant to. It was a disease, like the plague, as I said.” He turned back to Harry. “I would give anything for this not to have happened.”
“For Harry not to have discovered his magic? For me not to have found him so I could help him get his life back?”
Draco knew he was vibrating with rage, and he could feel Harry put a cautious hand on his arm, probably because he thought Draco was going to explode. But at the moment, Draco found it hard to care. Dumbledore was such a hypocrite, to enjoy the life his magic could give him and want to deprive Harry of it. And he had let the Potters exile Harry, and him speak to a bushmaster for years, without doing anything about it. If he really wanted to keep Voldemort’s magic quarantined, he was doing a piss-poor job of it.
*
Harry gently stroked Draco’s arm. He thought Draco might actually be more upset about what Dumbledore had said than Harry was, mainly because Harry was used to this kind of treatment, while Draco seemed astonished and angry that anyone should try it on him.
But Harry had thought of something, and it surprised him that he’d never thought of it before. He spoke out of the corner of his mouth to M.H. “Get my wand off the bedside table.”
M.H. immediately slithered out of the room and Dumbledore didn’t react except to frown, probably at the Parseltongue, so Harry knew he’d successfully kept it a secret for right now. He lifted his head and stared Dumbledore down as best he could. “Why did you just let me leave if you had to keep an eye on me?”
“I thought the monitoring charms would be enough.” Dumbledore stared at him with desperate sadness, but Harry thought about how good the magic and the wand and Draco had felt, and was unmoved. That was the kind of thing Dumbledore had worked to keep Harry from having. “I never imagined that someone would be reckless enough to come and awaken you.”
Draco rolled his eyes. Harry didn’t turn to see him doing it, but he could feel him doing it. “You’re ridiculous, old man. Any wizard could have noticed that he wasn’t a Squib eventually and might have become interested in training him.”
“No one in Harry’s home could feel him—”
“Because they were all Light wizards,” Draco said, with an air of patience that made Harry want to laugh. “What would have happened if an American Dark wizard found him, and decided to use Harry’s power for himself? He wouldn’t necessarily know anything about what happened, especially since Harry isn’t as famous over here. You supposedly wanted to keep him protected, but you took all these risks.”
Dumbledore blinked and pushed his glasses up his nose. “I did not think Harry could achieve even rudimentary mastery over Voldemort’s magic. There should have been no danger like this.”
And Harry knew something else, and he felt his lips part even as M.H. slithered up behind him with his wand pressed against Harry’s leg. Harry didn’t bend down to take it yet. M.H., who could be patient when there was either food or an enemy involved, simply held still.
“You—you sent me away so you wouldn’t have to look at your mistake,” Harry whispered. He was sure that was it, so sure that his lips tingled. “You didn’t want to worry about whether you were wrong. You didn’t want to see me growing up without magic.”
“You know that Squibs are usually introduced to the Muggle world at an early age, Harry—”
“But they still get to grow up with their parents, most of the time,” Draco cut in. “And you never really thought Harry was a Squib. Not an ordinary one. Yet you go ahead and do this to him, as if nothing really mattered except your own desires.” Draco shook his head in wonder. “Harry’s right. You couldn’t stand seeing him all the time and wondering if maybe you were mistaken, so you persuaded the Potters to send him off.”
“If you could listen,” Dumbledore whispered, but he seemed to have no real expectation that they would listen.
“I want to know what you were thinking.” Draco’s voice was rough, and Dumbledore was focusing entirely on him. Harry managed to bend down and take his wand from M.H.’s mouth without him noticing. “Why have his parents send him off without any money? Do you know the kind of life he was living here? He couldn’t afford new clothes, he didn’t go into the wizarding section because it was too expensive, he was eating shitty food—”
“The Potters not unnecessarily wanted to reserve their inheritance for their magical children.”
Harry laughed. He didn’t recognize the sound, which was probably the reason Dumbledore looked at him and Draco’s arms tightened. “Well, I’m magical now. Doesn’t that mean I should get a quarter share of the vaults in their wills?”
“I am surprised you don’t know the history of your own family,” Dumbledore said mildly, although his eyes glittered like nails. “No Potter child who goes Dark is left anything of the sort.”
“When did I ever have a chance to learn that history?” Harry spat, and then he really did think this had gone on long enough. He lifted his wand and pointed it straight at Dumbledore.
From the wary way Dumbledore straightened, without touching his wand in return, Harry knew his guess had been return.
“You thought I was the most powerful baby you’d ever seen,” Harry said softly, eyes locked with Dumbledore’s. “And even if Voldemort’s magic replaced mine, that means I had to be equal to him. Exactly equal, or that wouldn’t have happened. Are you really going to challenge me, here, now?”
“I am asking you to think about the innocent people your magic would affect if you awaken Voldemort again.” Dumbledore actually dropped to one knee and spread his hands, still not reaching for his wand. “Not about me. Not about your parents. Not to forgive us. But to think about how many more Dahlias you will create if you awaken like this.”
Those words would have reached him a lifetime ago. Harry knew it with one part of his mind. But that part no longer wielded any influence over his actions.
“You have no proof,” Harry said. “All you know is that her behavior changed, and you think that I was responsible. You don’t know if it was accidental magic from Lilac, or some charm somebody performed, or even Dahlia’s decision. You have no idea. I was there to be blamed, and so you blamed me.”
“Voldemort was skilled with the Imperius Curse. We can’t take the chance—”
“So now it’s not even a plague, it’s an imagined plague that might hurt people,” Draco sneered.
Dumbledore looked at them again. Harry thought he was being as appealing as he knew how. “Would you risk even an imagined plague breaking out in Britain?”
“It doesn’t matter if it’s over here, of course,” Harry said. “Not these Squibs or Muggles or wizards.”
Again Dumbledore looked as though he was about to say something. Then his lips pinched into a thin line. “While you didn’t use his magic, I didn’t have to worry about them. Now I do. I want you to understand what price the world may pay for you having a wand, Harry.”
“It’s going to pay the price of me being awake and willing to use magic. And my parents are going to pay the price of casting me aside.”
Dumbledore surged to his feet. “If you attack Lily and James, your brother and sisters—”
“The brother I’ve never seen? The sisters you think I influenced? The parents who cast me aside?” Harry almost screamed the last words, and had to step back against Draco for a minute, to calm himself. “No, Headmaster, I’m not going to attack them.”
There was a strained moment when Harry could feel how eager Dumbledore was to ask, but also not to oblige him.
“I am going to ignore them,” Harry said softly. “And not forgive them. And come back to Britain if I so choose, as the Malfoy consort. None of you are going to make me rethink my decisions again.”
He held out the wand towards Dumbledore. “Now, get out of my house.”
Dumbledore didn’t say anything else, perhaps because he knew it would be no use. He simply turned and Apparated.
Harry stood, breath rasping in his throat. He had maybe a moment to do that and wonder if Dumbledore would come back before he found himself spun around and kissed.
Draco’s tongue plunged into his mouth and made Harry feel as if he was drowning. Then he changed the kiss a little, and Harry was burning. He held out his arms to clasp them around Draco’s neck, and Draco shifted closer and covered him, and he was as hot as though he was beneath a mountain of piled covers.
So good, so good.
They broke apart at last, and Draco said, as if he was carving the words into stone, “I will support you in whatever you decide to do.”
“Good,” Harry said, leaning against him. “No matter what I ask?”
“No matter,” Draco whispered, his eyes burning.
“No matter what it might cost you with your parents?”
“No matter.”
“Then,” said Harry, and paused dramatically.
Draco held his breath.
“Support me in going back to bed, and getting another hour’s sleep.”
*
Jan: Right now, Draco doesn't think there's anything Dumbledore could do to ruin his plans. He's ready for things to be known if they get to be.
Phoenix-Rob: Thanks! Dumbledore does feel partially responsible for Harry, but like Harry says, a big part of it is that he couldn't stand to be confronted with the evidence of his mistake if it was one.
Thunderbird: Thank you! He didn't have a Trace on Harry in the sense of a wand Trace, but he did have those charms he talks about.
SP777: Sorry I can't help with the login situation! But thanks for reviewing.
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Bonded Consort