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The Name I'll Give to Thee	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 42129 -:- Recommendations : 2 -:- Currently Reading : 6
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I am making no money from this fanfic.

Chapter List
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Chapter Twelve—All This News

            Harry woke to a sizzling sound that made him reach for his wand.

            Then he reminded himself that there should be nothing in the Manor that could harm him. Draco wasn’t practiced with the basilisk wand yet, Narcissa wasn’t casting spells yet, and the house-elves wouldn’t hurt him now that he was part of the family. So he sat up and eyed the wards beyond the window, from which the sound had come, and let himself grope for his glasses before his wand.

            An owl was flying persistently alongside the wards, a large bird with a smoking red envelope clutched in its feet. Harry scowled, and then smiled as it swerved close again and the wards lashed out to burn the Howler it carried. For once, he was glad of those ancient Malfoys’ paranoia. He would have been enraged if he’d woken up to the sound of a voice bellowing in his ear.

            Probably from people angry about the marriage announcement, he thought, and yawned, and got up, and went to the bathroom, for a quick shower. He chose cold water, though. He thought he’d need the bracing effect to face what was coming.

            By the time he got out of the bathroom, the number of owls beyond the window was five, and since one carried two Howlers, there were actually six messages of outrage. Harry leaned on the bed and watched them as he dressed.

            “You needn’t worry. There’s no way the wards will let them pass.”

            This time, Harry did turn with his wand in his hand and a curse on his lips before he remembered, and let his hand fall. Draco looked at him with an expression of cool disinterest before stepping over to the window to examine the owls. The birds chattered harshly at the sight of him, perhaps recognizing the owner of the wards.

            “Thank you,” Harry said to him, and hastily yanked his trousers up to his waist. He hadn’t minded Draco looking at him naked two days ago, but this wasn’t two days ago. “Is there a newspaper article about it yet?”

            Draco was trying for a smile in his eyes if not his mouth when he turned around, but he failed at both. “That vain, to want to see your face on the front page?”

            “Of course I am,” Harry said, and put his hand over his heart. “For the first time, I’ll know that the picture they have of me is wrong because it’s just wrong, and not because they added glamours to it to make me look more dangerous or older than I really am!”

            Draco blinked. “What do you mean?”

            Harry opened his mouth, then closed it and looked at him carefully. No, it seemed Draco really didn’t understand what he meant. “They don’t have a picture of me since I changed,” he said, pointing to the dragon scar on his forehead. “So the photograph would have to be wrong.”

            “I don’t understand why they would alter it, is what I was talking about,” Draco said, and rapped a fist against the nearest post of the bed in a way that made Harry jump and want to reach for his wand again, for all the good that would have done. “You look handsome enough for them, and everyone knows your age. What good would it do?”

            Harry shrugged. “It sells papers.”

*

            Draco shook his head slowly. He hadn’t thought the Prophet would bother altering photographs. The lies spread by Rita Skeeter’s quill were vicious enough, and were much harder to prove false. Besides, thousands of different pictures of Harry must exist. They could just pick whichever one looked worst or most heroic, depending on what they were going for.

            But there was a reason he had never been interested in magical photography, because it was easier to lie with words, and so his father had taught him. He put the matter aside. “You do know that you should do an interview as soon as possible?”

            He could hear the grinding of Harry’s teeth, but the important thing was the nod Harry gave next, and not any little incidental noises that he made along the way. “Does it have to be with Skeeter?”

            “Yes,” Draco snapped. “She’s the most prestigious reporter the Prophet has.”

            Harry said, “All right. But I want you there with me, so that I can have someone else making sure she writes down the truth, not whatever her Quick-Quotes Quill suggested she write this time.”

            Draco rolled his eyes. “I have other things to do.”

            “Like what?”

            Draco did some more staring, but Harry seemed to have passed the point where that could intimidate him. He stared back, and Draco remembered that they functioned best as a team, not a pair of horses silently struggling to pull the wagon in different directions.

            He dropped his arms and sighed. “Talking with the Healer you found about my mother. Practicing my spells. I can’t be with you every minute of the day.”

            Harry nodded in an accepting way, and said, “I have other things to do, too. I’ll arrange the interview for early this afternoon, and then I’m going to the Burrow. It’s time that I saw what repairs I’ll have to make there.”

            Draco blinked again. He had managed to forget about the Weasleys, because none of them had intruded themselves into his life since the demi-marriage. For all he knew, some of the owls swirling uselessly beyond the balcony might have Howlers from them, and that would be all to the good, if they pushed Harry further away from them. A Malfoy shouldn’t be wasting as much time on blood-traitors as Harry would otherwise waste, anyway.

            “Remember that I’m the head of the family, and I have control of the money you’d want to spend on repairs,” he said.

            Harry half-lowered his head and changed the angle of his body a bit, and just like that, a cloud of threat was brewing in the room with them. Draco held Harry’s eyes and refused to reach for the basilisk wand. They both knew that it wouldn’t do him that much good, anyway.

            “I’ll remember that,” Harry whispered. “Oh, I will. I can’t forget.”

            “I didn’t mean I wouldn’t give you any money, ever,” Draco snapped, unnerved and starting to think that he should have insisted on a list of what Harry would demand money for right at the start of the demi-marriage. “Just that it would have to be for something more important than fixing the Weasley hovel.”

            From the faint, empty smile on Harry’s face, that statement didn’t improve the situation. “I’ll remember that,” he repeated, and then walked towards the door of the room.

            “Where are you going to get the money, then?” Draco challenged him. He was picturing Harry giving interviews for money, but that suspicion blew apart as Harry turned and glanced remotely back at him. No, Harry still hated publicity too much. Never mind that he would have to appear in public more often as the new Malfoy spouse and Draco’s heir. “I don’t want to hear that you did something that would be beneath a Malfoy.”

            Harry gave an eager little sound that reminded Draco too much of a tiger getting ready to spring on prey. “I had Hermione study the terms of the demi-marriage more carefully than you might have known,” he said. “I gave you the Potter vaults. I didn’t give you my personal one. That has nothing to do with a blending of families, and so it’s not legally required by the terms of the demi-marriage. My personal vault has all my Auror money from the last several years in it. That’s what I’ll be using.”

            He left, ghosting out of the corridor like a lion. Draco moved to the window and tapped the glass, changing the angle of it, so that it looked out over the front of the grounds instead of the back. Harry glided out onto them a moment later and then vanished, the anti-Apparition wards tuned to him now, permitting it.

            That could have gone better.

*

            “Harry? You need to stop shaking, mate, or you’re going to knock what’s left of the Burrow down.”

            Harry closed his eyes and nodded, moving his wand in a circle so that the pieces of rubble he’d lifted with it would float to a stop instead of continuing to move. Then he sat down on a piece of what had been a tumbled wall and put his head in his hands, breathing slowly and steadily, letting his lungs contract and expand in a way that made sense to him.

            Ron put his hand on his shoulder.

            Harry turned towards him, but didn’t look up. Ron would probably demand the details of what Draco had said to make him so upset, and Harry didn’t think he would explain them well if he tried.

            It was just—

            He knew. He should have known, anyway. They were a team when they were facing pure-bloods or other people Draco saw as a threat to the sanctity and safety of his family. Like the dragon, for example. They were great together in immediately threatening situations.

            But none of that changed Draco’s contempt for the Weasleys, the one family Harry had ever had that he’d chosen. He had been stupid to expect that Draco would greet the news he’d chosen to help the Weasleys with happiness.

            “I don’t think this demi-marriage is worth it, mate, not if it leaves you feeling like this.”

            Harry took a deep breath and lifted his head. He had accomplished things today, he reminded himself. When he’d Apparated away from the Manor this morning, he’d gone to Skeeter and set up the interview with her, then sat there and endured a kind of pre-interview while she smiled and simpered at him and asked all sorts of insinuating questions about marriage beds and the difficulties of filling them. And he hadn’t killed her, and if his replies had been a little bit clipped, Draco couldn’t expect miracles overnight.

            “It’s worth it,” he said, looking up at Ron and using the words to teach himself, as well as Ron, what he was really thinking about this. “If you think about it, it’s been worth it all along. I didn’t enter this demi-marriage for love. Perish the thought,” he added. “You ought to see Draco’s face if I even hint at some kind of attraction.” The way he had moved his hands during the dance, and the way Draco had silently but firmly set him straight again, was the prime example, but he could live without telling Ron about that, and Ron would thank him for not saying anything.

            If he ever said anything about it. Which he wouldn’t.

            “You entered it to help people,” Ron said, and knelt down in front of Harry. “The same way that you’re here because you want to help people.”

            “The cases aren’t comparable,” Harry said flatly, and looked around at the destroyed Burrow. Rebuilding it wouldn’t put it back together way it had been, but Molly was insistent. She wanted the same building, as nearly as possible, on the same site, and he couldn’t blame her. The connection to the past was important to her, had been even more important since the war. “I would have chosen to help you no matter what, and did what I did because I wanted to. I married Malfoy because it would give me a few things I wanted, and because it was my duty.”

            He hadn’t known the words would cut Ron, that his friend would flinch in front of him as though Harry had stabbed a knife through his body. Harry immediately reached out to him, but Ron shook his head. “I didn’t know you saw it that way,” he whispered. “I would have fought harder if I realized that. It’ll be miserable if you can’t even get along with him.” He tried to smile. “And you’re not a pure-blood or a Malfoy by birth. There’s no reason that you should have to think of this as your bloody duty.”

            “No reason for it, except that I do,” Harry said, and took Ron’s hand. “Yeah, it’s kind of miserable, but I walked into it with my eyes open. Not with my heart engaged, the way it is with you lot. Never, ever the same.”

            Ron squeezed back, hard enough that Harry felt as if he would turn Harry’s knuckles to powder, and then stood up. “Well, let’s get moving again,” he said. “You know that Mum promised to have that steak and kidney pie for lunch if we do, and I know I’m not missing that.”

            Harry smiled, and climbed back to his feet. This time, using his wand to pick up and shift the rubble was easier.

            This is the way it is. This is the way that I’ll live from now on. And it has its own rewards, and the demi-marriage itself will only last five years. Then, I’ll be free to go, with only my name remaining the same as it was.

            He had endured ten years with the Dursleys, more if you counted the summers. Five years was nothing.

*

            “How is she?”

            Draco started. He hadn’t heard Harry enter the room, but he supposed he wouldn’t, when he was so occupied with watching his mother’s every breath.

            “Healer Bowman was hopeful,” Draco said. “But he did say that if he didn’t manage to reverse the damage soon, then she would probably die.”

            There was more silence, enough that Draco thought Harry might have opened the door again and simply gone away. But the next moment, a hand closed on his shoulder, rubbing back and forth as though he was a child who needed soothing. Draco jerked away from it and stood, gesturing to the chair.

            “It’s only fair that you have a chance to sit a watch,” he said.

            Harry nodded at him and sat down. Draco lingered to stare at him, but Harry didn’t seem surprised or uncertain. He simply leaned forwards, placed his elbows on his knees and his chin on his hands, and watched Narcissa.

            Of course, he would probably do this kind of thing all the time when he’s conducting an ambush in the Aurors, Draco thought, and then frowned. That was another thing they hadn’t talked about, Harry’s career. Draco didn’t need his heir putting himself in danger all the time, and he would try to manage it so Harry would understand why things needed to be this way.

            After the argument this morning, though, Draco would as soon leave all touchy subjects between them alone until he was convinced that they were necessary to talk about.

            “Fine,” he said. “Just don’t fall asleep. Healer Bowman says she needs to be watched every moment, and Affy’s tired.”

            Harry nodded, but said nothing. Draco left the room, still frowning and wondering why he felt as though Harry should have answered. It was probably good sense that had kept him quiet, or the desire to avoid another argument as much as Draco wanted to.

            He took a long shower—his muscles had tensed up as he listened to Healer Bowman explain about Narcissa’s condition—and then settled down to a sumptuous lunch that Ossy shoved at him. In the end, he couldn’t swallow more than a few bites of the steak, the thick salad, or the slender mint dessert Ossy had saved until the end. His mind was too full of the words that Healer Bowman had entrusted him with.

            “The magic still lingers in her body.”

            Draco hadn’t known that. He had thought the problem was a lack of magic, that Harry had pulled so sharply on her life-force when he raised the spell to fight the Dementor ghosts that it had left her incapable of living the way she had been. A lack of life-force would lead to magical aging and imminent death. It had made sense to him.

            But Healer Bowman had explained it was more like a spell, instead, that she could die from curses and she could die from this. Harry had not only taken life-force; he had paid back something very like death force instead. It had fallen on top of his mother like a collapsing house, and of course she had taken damage from it.

            She’s lucky that she’s not dead. Healer Bowman had said that, too, though not so bluntly. He had wanted to spare Draco’s feelings.

            Nothing could.

            Draco put his hands over his eyes and sat like that until Ossy popped up in the dining room and stared at him. Then he roused again to eat, reminding himself that he had a duty to live, whether or not he felt like it, and he needed to be strong to continue the legacy of his family.

            “Master Draco.”

            Ossy’s voice interrupted him so gently that Draco knew it was bad news. He turned around. “Mistress Narcissa is alive?” he asked, wincing as he heard his voice, like he was speaking in a mausoleum. Honestly. His father had taught him never to be weak in front of anyone, and that included house-elves.

            On the other hand, at least house-elves, bound to the family as they were, wouldn’t be able to tell these secrets to anyone else. Draco watched as Ossy shook his head and pointed towards the fireplace. “Mistress Rita Skeeter is shrilling.”

            Draco turned around, wondering how he hadn’t heard that, either. Perhaps he should go to a different Healer and have his ears checked. The Malfoys couldn’t afford a deaf leader at the moment, either.

            But then he saw the odd way that Skeeter’s face seemed to project from the fireplace, and relaxed a little. She must have opened the Floo call in another room, and Ossy had used his deep bond with the house and the wards to move her to this hearth instead, so he wouldn’t inconvenience his master by making him get up.

            “Yes?” Draco asked, reaching for a bit more of the dessert and chewing it casually, as well as swallowing a little of the sweet wine. “Was there something you wished to discuss with me, Madam Skeeter?”

            Skeeter’s smile faltered a little. Draco was glad of that. Harry couldn’t have done too badly in his interview, if Skeeter had hoped to find weaknesses in him instead of simply retelling Harry’s.

            She pulled the smile back onto her face by main force a few seconds later, and cooed, “It must be wonderful for you to have a husband by your side to help you bear the burdens, now that your mother and father are—gone.”

            “You’re a little in advance of the news there, Madam Skeeter,” Draco said, and lifted his wineglass. “One of your best points, but likely to cost you this time, at least if you publish it as an article. My mother is still alive, and we have a Healer that we’re hopeful can cure her.” He paused, watching the always-amusing struggle between Skeeter’s chagrin at having got a fact wrong in a way that wouldn’t let her torment someone and her glee at being in possession of a new rumor. Then he added, “But it is pleasant having a husband, yes.”

            “Pleasant in all ways?” Skeeter asked, lowering her voice, and honestly, she made some of Blaise’s innuendos look clean.

            Draco gave her a faint, fake smile, so well-crafted that she would never be able to tell the difference. “Ah, that would be telling, and I don’t think that even a tell-all should absolutely live up to its name, do you?”

            Skeeter patted her hair as though Draco had just handed her some compliment, and then cocked her head. “I think you ought to know that your influence is already evident. He’s cleaned up nicely. Managed to be civil, which I don’t think is something he’d ever learned.” She sniffed. “And lovely manners.”

            Draco nodded. “Good.” Harry was acting like a pure-blood should in public, then. He must have shared a meal with Skeeter, and Draco hadn’t had to listen to him yell about it. That was all to the good.

            One less worry. Harry was doing what he should, doing his duty.

            Thus, it made no sense for the worry in Draco’s belly to sharpen, as though Harry was sneaking around behind his back setting fires and promising Malfoy money to fix them. He had done nothing so far to disgrace the Malfoy name.

            Yet. It’s early days.

            After a few more meaningless insults traded back and forth with Skeeter, she realized that he wouldn’t give her anything else and wouldn’t respond to her hints about Harry, and shut down the Floo call with a farewell that he could have taken exception to if he wanted to. Draco didn’t. He hesitated, then stood up and walked back towards his mother’s room. He had to know if Harry was still awake and watching, or if he’d given up and abandoned Narcissa, the way that Draco thought he might have.

            But if he went back into the room, he’d probably provoke another argument. He paused with his hand on the knob.

            “Ossy,” he said, not loudly. It didn’t matter. Ossy popped up beside him and made a deep bow immediately, peering up at him with intelligent eyes.

            “Please go into the room and make sure that Harry is still awake and watching Mistress Narcissa.” He would ordinarily have called him “Master Harry” when he was talking to a house-elf, but even starting to pronounce the words made acid flood his mouth. It would have to be this way.

            Ossy bowed and popped out again. Draco stood there with his hand on the knob and studied the faceted crystal of it, the gold edging under the facets, the way that the lights gleaming from the ceiling reflected from it. He got lost enough in the contemplation to almost jump when Ossy appeared again.

            “Master Harry is being staring,” Ossy said. “And awake.”

            Draco raised his eyebrows. “Being staring?” He was used to the way house-elves talked, and that didn’t simply mean Harry was staring at Narcissa.

            Ossy started to speak, stopped, and then said, “He is watching hers. He is not being moving. He is—still.”

            Draco thought about it, then nodded again, deciding that was acceptable. Another tactic that Harry had probably learned in waiting for an ambush. “I’ll be in the study, and then I’m going to bed. Tell Harry he can go to bed and wake Affy in another six hours or so.”

            “Ossy is doing that,” Ossy said, and vanished again, probably back to the dining room, to stare disapprovingly at the lunch Draco hadn’t finished. Draco turned down the corridor to his study, his hand resting on the basilisk wand.

            He would master that bloody wand if it took him a year. And it would take less than that, because he was a Malfoy.

*

            It wasn’t so bad, being here, watching her. In fact, it was the simplest thing Malfoy had asked him to do, and that made it something like a gift for Harry. No possible way to miss this up. Watch and see if she breathed, and if she didn’t breathe, yell for a house-elf. Perfect.

            Harry watched.

            Narcissa’s chest moved faintly up and down, but once he had trained himself on what to look for, he always saw it. Her hair stirred by her mouth when she blew her breath out. When he trained his eyes to that, there were other things to look for, like how the strands beside those trembled, too.

            Harry watched.

            Signs of heart attack were something he knew well; there were numerous curses designed to mimic that, and lots of Dark wizards liked to use them. All he had to do was keep an eye on her color, an eye on her hands, which lay on the green sheets like ivory sculptures, and an eye on the charm throbbing in the air beside him, which beat in time with her heart.

            Harry watched.

            She was old, and it was because of him. She might die, and it was because of him. There was a Healer who could help her, and that was because of him. The Malfoy vaults would have the money to hire the best care for her that they could, and that was because of him.

            Harry watched.

*

            js: Thank you! That’s a skill I’ve practiced a lot to get as good as I am at it.

            SP777: He’ll have to dance, as a Malfoy spouse.

            Do you mean one just from Draco’s POV? Because I’ve been switching back and forth since the third chapter…

            unneeded: Both of them need to be more open and communicative. It’s just that, at the moment, the things Draco assumes could have more potentially disastrous public effects.

            delia cerrano: It’ll probably be a while before the getting-closer starts happening. As for Daphne, she wanted to see what the reaction would be.

            disgruntledfairy: Thank you! I’m horrible at dancing myself, so in this I’m drawing off personal experience.
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The Name I'll Give to Thee