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The Marriage of True Minds	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 55082 -:- Recommendations : 2 -:- Currently Reading : 2
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Chapter Thirteen—Separated by Steel

            Draco led Harry with him by the simple expedient of keeping one hand on his arm and one eye on the stairs, so that he knew when Harry was considering darting off and could block the possible exits. They had to speak about this. Things had changed enormously in the space of a few moments, and Draco’s ears were still ringing with the crumbling of his mental walls.

            He had sat down to dinner believing the situation would endure in dreary tedium for as long as it pleased his father. Lucius had finally ventured out of his lab, which meant he had given up on potions for binding them closer together, and also that his mother’s scolding had worn off. Draco had waited for the insults, but they hadn’t come. Perhaps Lucius was wary about testing the limits of Narcissa’s tolerance so soon after infuriating her.

            Draco hadn’t seen much of the spell that his father cast at him when he started to leave the room, for the rather simple reason that Harry’s body was in the way. But since the magic of the bond would permit no violence in the family, he knew it could be no ordinary curse.

            And then he saw the color of the rising wisps of smoke, and knew what it was.

            Lucius would have cast a spell that would allow him to literally cup Draco’s heart in his hands. He could speed it up or slow it down with a touch of his fingers to a designated artifact—probably the new ring that Draco had seen flashing on his finger during dinner—and as long as he didn’t stop the heartbeat and kill Draco, the bond wouldn’t consider it violence. It would have been an effective threat. Just one apparent heart attack or sleeping session during an important business meeting would have undermined Draco’s importance and competence in the eyes of several of the Muggles he dealt with. And it could have been even more damaging when he handled the wizarding end of the business.

            Harry had put himself in the way of the curse without recognizing it, Draco was fairly sure. His instincts would have hurled him out of the chair before he had time to see the telltale color of the wisps of smoke, and the spell was rare. Draco wouldn’t have been surprised if it had been left out of Auror training.

            So now they had the steel band to deal with, adding strength to both the rings and the marriage bond in a way that Draco doubted would please Potter.

            And they had the permission his father had given him by breaking their tacit truce with a spell that would have revealed something wrong to eyes outside the family’s. Draco had avoided many measures that would annoy his father because he wanted to keep the traditions of respect for his parents alive.

            The Heart-Holding Curse said clearer than words that his father had lost all equivalent respect for him.

            It was war.

*

            Harry glanced around the room that Malfoy and his mother had led him to and tried not to shiver. There wasn’t a color in it that held any warmth. Silver and white in the mirror about the mantle, silver and white in the unadorned marble of the fireplace and the tapestries that crowded the walls, and silver and white again in the carpets on the floors. The chairs held the colors of ice and polar bear fur. Harry felt as though he would smear dirt on them merely by sitting.

            But Malfoy didn’t seem to mind about that. He hauled Harry towards the fireplace—he still hadn’t let go of his hand, ever since he’d shown Harry the new band of metal in the rings—and indicated he should sit in one of the purer chairs. Harry pointedly pulled his hand away and took his seat.

            Malfoy sat immediately beside him instead of seeking one of the couches, watching him from the corner of an eye. Harry pulled his collar away from his throat. The intensity in the room was suffocating, and it didn’t help that Narcissa wore a similar expression on her face.

            Neither of them spoke while a house-elf came in and lit the fire. Harry reckoned it was up to him. “What does this mean?” he asked, holding up the ring. “And why did he try to hurt you?”

            “It’s called the Heart-Holding Curse,” Draco said, “and it would have allowed him to affect my heartbeat.” His eyes caught the firelight as he turned his face towards Harry. “You can imagine the consequences.”

            Harry grimaced. “Yeah.” He glanced at Narcissa, expecting her to take some part in the conversation, but her brow was furrowed and she apparently carried on some internal debate that she wasn’t going to allow anyone to share in. “All right. So what do we do about this?” He turned his hand over so that the ring caught the firelight.

            “All the metals have a different meaning,” Draco said. He took Harry’s hand again and held it in his, staring at the ring, ignoring the way that Harry tugged to free himself this time. “The platinum symbolizes our joined lives because of a life-debt.”

            “Then it should have been platinum again,” Harry said. He swallowed. The air in the room was hard to breathe, charged as if with lightning. “Since I did it again.”

            Draco glanced up at him, and his eyes were brilliant with reflected meanings Harry didn’t want to think about. He stared down at the carpet, but it was hard to avoid that lambent gaze. “No. The platinum only appears once, though it may grow stronger and thicker when new life-debts are contracted. The steel means something else.”

            “What, for Merlin’s sake?” Harry was starting to think that pure-bloods lived in suspense for the fun of it. He wondered what Draco’s reaction would be if Harry tried to get him to read a Muggle thriller and explained that it was how the rest of the world managed not to go around filled with the same feelings all the time.

            “That we have changed each other’s lives,” Draco said. “Intervened in something that would not have killed us, but would have caused us to make—certain decisions. If my father had succeeded in casting the Heart-Holding Curse, he would have added an extra subjection to him, one that I couldn’t escape simply by convincing him to dissolve the marriage bond. I have my freedom because of you.” He raised Harry’s hand further, tugging it towards him until Harry had to lean in or be dumped on the floor. “Thank you.”

            Harry tore his eyes away by force this time. If he went on looking at Malfoy too long, his heart would start thumping, and he’d get addicted to silence the way they were. “Welcome,” he muttered. “But—I don’t understand. That seems like an awfully strange thing for a twist of metal to symbolize.”

            “The same thing would have happened if Draco had saved your own freedom, or prevented you from making a momentous decision about your future,” Narcissa said, speaking for the first time since they’d entered the room. Harry looked at her, and frowned. Her face was pale, and her hands, clasped in front of her, made slow twisting motions like snakes in pain. “The steel is the steel of a sword blade, severing a life into two halves. It is an ultimately meaningful symbol, though perhaps without the deep associations given the other metals in the ring.”

            Harry shrugged, which was awkward when Draco still had possession of one of his arms. “Fine. I don’t see what platinum has to do with saving lives, either. And you don’t have to answer,” he added quickly, when he saw Narcissa opening her mouth.

            Her lips twitched, and she bowed her head. “Very well, Harry.” Her voice had a new tone on his name, but Harry didn’t want to think about that right now, so he was glad when she turned to her son and added, “What do you intend to do, Draco?”

            Draco’s eyes had a new light in them now, and he released Harry’s hand. Harry pulled it back into his lap and rubbed the fingers. He thought they might have gone slightly numb from the strength of Draco’s grip. They were certainly tingling in ways that they had no business tingling if they hadn’t been asleep.

            “We had already planned to spend money from the Malfoy vaults for Harry, in ways that annoyed Father,” Draco said. “I intend to go further than that now. We are going to spend a lot of money.” He smiled like a wolf. “And we are going to publicly let it be known that the gifts are for Harry, and that my father opposes them, and that, as head of the Malfoy family, I have made the decision to tell him to go hang.”

            “Oi!” Harry leaned in and caught Draco’s eye. “I didn’t agree to that.”

            “Oh, I plan to do other things as well, of course,” Draco assured him. “We can tell the truth of the marriage bond now. I did not before, because I did not want to embarrass the family. But my father forfeited his right to be in the family with his attack on the head of the line tonight. To embarrass him, as we will by telling the truth—that this marriage bond is no calculated, clever move of alliance, but the result of a childish tantrum—is my primary goal at the moment.” His eyes had that dangerous shine again.

            Harry opened his mouth and then shut it again. Far be it from him to argue against what Draco did to his father. Embarrass and hurt Lucius enough, and it might be possible to make him dissolve the stupid bond.

            But…

            “Your father—you’re really going to cut your father out of the family?” he asked in a daze. He knew now what had made Narcissa look so pensive, but he would have given up the knowledge gladly for some means of understanding what Draco was thinking.

            Draco inclined his head. “Why shouldn’t I? He is no longer the head of the family. He exercised the one right left to him by tying us in a forced marriage, and as long as I played the role of obedient son, he had the right to do that, the one right the Wizengamot left him. But then he attacked again, and this time he got caught. I did not change my role. I violated none of the tenets that tie us together. He has, and while I forgave him for the first time because he honored the letter if not the spirit that binds us, this time I need not. And I will make him suffer.”

            Harry winced. That’s the real reason I’ll never fit in with the Malfoys, he thought. Not the rich decorations and the house-elves and all the rest of it. I can ignore that, or get used to it. It’s because they’re too cold, and they live too much inside the rules. I could never abandon someone who was related to me that way, no matter how much trouble they caused.

            He sought for something else to distract himself from his own uncomfortable thoughts, which could lead to him either despise or pity Draco if he wasn’t careful, and said, “Um. If the bond prohibits violence between members of the family, does that mean that he can attack us now that he’s cut out of it?”

            “You need not worry,” Draco said. “I do not intend to perform the rituals of disinheritance that would affect the magic. I will treat him as an outcast socially and financially, exercising the right of not listening to him that I have technically had since the Wizengamot gave me the vaults and the property.” Harry didn’t think there was a single tooth in his head left hidden by his grin. “That will embarrass him more than a ritual could. He can always tell himself that he was right if I went far enough to disown him. This way, he can stay in the house—he’ll have to, he doesn’t have anywhere else to go—and see the life of the family going on without him, and have to realize that he cheated himself out of it.”

            Harry couldn’t help the words that rose to his lips then. “And you don’t think that you’ll ever regret it? You’ll never forgive him?”

*

            Draco turned and stared at him. Harry avoided his eyes at once, staring down at the floor and tugging on the ring as though he wished he could rip it right off his finger. Impossible as long as Lucius didn’t change his mind, of course.

            “You don’t understand how great an offense this is,” Draco said. He hardly stopped himself from turning it into a question. “It was committed against you as much as against us. You are the one who had to stop it, to defend yourself and me from a spell that he should never have cast in the first place. You’re as much a victim of the marriage bond as I am.”

            Harry fidgeted with the ring again, hard enough to scrape his finger and draw a thin line of blood. Draco wondered what he really found more disturbing, the sight of that wound or that Harry didn’t flinch at it. He reached out and grasped Harry’s hand, forcibly stilling it.

            “I know,” Harry said. “But I don’t want—I don’t have the same perceptions of family that you do, Draco. You know that.” Draco blinked, partially in response to the words and partially to the sound of his name on Harry’s lips. Unexpectedly casual, as if Harry had been calling him that in his head for a while. “I just think that you need your father more than you need to antagonize him.”

            Draco tilted his head at his mother. He thought this a question Narcissa was more competent to answer than he was.

            “Not when he is like this.” His mother leaned forwards gravely, hands clasped on her knees. She had grief wound through the back of her voice like a subtle silver thread in a tapestry, but her words were clear. “He has become so frantic for money and prestige that he would try to control his own son and disregard the feelings of his wife.” Draco winced for her, as she would not for herself. He knew what lay behind all those words, as Harry could not. “It is for the best that we hold off and give him a chance to recover himself.”

            Harry frowned and turned away. “But you would let him back in the family if he did change?”

            Draco shifted his shoulders. “The question has never arisen. The relatives cast out of the Malfoy family before either left the house and went elsewhere—not an option for my father, since he has no resources of his own—or accepted their marginal status. They didn’t change their minds. They didn’t regret their actions.”

            Harry turned to gape at him. Draco frowned. It didn’t make him attractive. “What, never? Weren’t they human?”

            “Of course,” Draco said impatiently. He had thought that Harry had grown beyond some of his more childish perceptions where other people were concerned. “But reared in a different culture from you, part of a different tradition. They knew that begging for admittance back into the family would probably be fruitless, and therefore they didn’t want to chance it.”

            Harry shook his head, which Draco wasn’t about to mistake for a motion of agreement. “They preferred exile to a moment of embarrassment?”

            “Humiliation,” his mother said gently. “Not the same thing.”

            “Don’t you have traces of that?” Draco asked, because the steel band in the ring kept catching his eye, and it annoyed him that Harry would try to exile himself to a place of good sense and righteous horror outside the family that he belonged to. “You went through intense pain, you came near death, rather than confess the secret of the scars on your back to anyone.”

            “We aren’t talking about that,” Harry said, with a pleasant smile that didn’t hide the burn in his eyes. “I just want to know—Draco, I care about how happy you are. And I don’t think turning your back on your father will make you happy, not to mention it’ll lessen our chances of ever getting out of the marriage bond.”

            “I would rather be unhappy than let my father control my life,” Draco said.

            “But no one said you had to.” Harry leaned forwards, eyes fastened on his face, and Draco felt a prickle down his spine. Had Harry forgotten that his mother was here, listening to every word? Draco certainly hadn’t. “That isn’t the alternative. You could promise to forgive him if he removes the marriage bond.” Harry ended the statement on a rising, pleased tone, as if he imagined that he had found a solution to the problem of their being tied together.

            “And then he would be back in a position where he could once more exert control, and perhaps begin the marriage bond again immediately,” Draco snapped. “Or he might use it on someone else, and this time bind me to a fool or a person intent on bringing down the family. I think my father, if he saw the chance, would destroy the family rather than let another rule it. That has nearly happened before, and often.”

            Harry shook his head. “Okay, fine, I knew it couldn’t be that easy,” he said, though with a downwards turn of his lips that said he really had expected it to be that easy, that he had found some solution no one had seen before. “But—no forgiveness? Either?”

            Draco clasped Harry’s hand again, turning it so that he could see the ring. “Why do you care so much about my happiness?” he asked. “Yes, we’re trying to get along, but that doesn’t mean you need to worry about my father and I getting along.”

*

            Harry shook his head a second time. Draco kept looking at the rings, as if the platinum and steel bands drew his attention as much as they did Harry’s. How could he glance at them constantly and yet not know the answer to his questions?

            “Because we’re bound by more than the marriage bond now,” he said. “I’ve saved your life, and your freedom. Excuse me for caring about someone I’ve done that for.”

            Draco’s eyes shifted to his, burning. Harry sighed. The burn was anger, and they were separated as much as they were tied. He pulled his hand free and rose to his feet, pacing back and forth. Narcissa raised her eyebrow at him, but at the moment, Harry could care less if his action was unbecoming of a Malfoy. He had to work out some of the energy, or he’d snap at Draco and add to his unhappiness.

            “Family matters,” he said. “A lot. It always has, to me. I just don’t want to see you tear your family apart because you’re stubborn.”

            “I’m stubborn,” Draco said, and turned his head to the side, the curve of his neck conveying volumes without words.

            “Fine. Both of you are stubborn,” Harry said. “Happy?”

            Draco smoothed his lips down into a tempered smile. “You were the one who diagnosed me as not being that, I believe.”

            Harry sighed in disgust. “Look. What Lucius did to you—to us—is stupid and tiresome and something I want gone. But there has to be something you can do besides make him more hopeless and frantic and desperate. What he feels now is nothing compared to what he’ll do when he realizes that you’ve cut him out of everything.”

            “You have disregarded one factor you should have remembered.”

            It took Harry a moment to realize that it was Narcissa who’d spoken. He turned to her and blinked.

            She was on her feet, although she stood in one place instead of pacing as he did. Harry knew better than to think that meant she was harmless, though, or calm. He could sense the coiled energy flowing through her muscles as she watched him. Her hands were clasped in front of her, and if he had been in a situation where he’d been hunting her, he would have kept an eye on them. It was difficult to look away from them, anyway, even reminding himself that she wasn’t an enemy.

            “I have some influence over my husband,” Narcissa said. “I have not exercised it so far because I wanted to leave him his pride, and because, yes, conflict is unbecoming in a family such as ours. But I can use it now.”

            “So that means that you think you can make him ask for Draco’s forgiveness?”

            Narcissa sighed and shook her head. “I can make him rue the day. And if Draco decides to let him back into the family someday—”

            “I won’t.”

            Narcissa turned her head, and her gaze passed over Draco in a way that made him recoil against the back of the chair. Harry cocked his head. He had a feeling that he had missed something major there, but then again, since he was mostly outside the family anyway, whatever Draco thought, he shouldn’t have expected to understand everything happening around him.

            “I come from the Blacks,” she said. “That is a fact your father has reminded me of more than once, when he was angry at me. He meant it to signify that I did not understand all the traditions of the Malfoy blood. And you are a fool, Draco, if you think you know all the traditions of my family. You chose not to.” Her voice softened a bit, though the words she spoke next didn’t sound much softer to Harry than plate armor. “You chose your loyalty long ago.”

            Draco swallowed and blinked, then nodded. “All right, Mother. I give you permission, as the head of the family, to do what you can with him.”

            Narcissa’s smile was sweet and edged. “Thank you.” She turned her head away and left the room.

            Harry waited, but Draco simply sat there, staring into the fire, twisting the ring on one finger. He cleared his throat. “So that’s it? You cut your father out of any power and influence, and you set your mother on him? And you spend some money?” He felt a bubbling, boiling feeling behind his forehead, and he gritted his teeth. He wanted to do something about the marriage bond now, but he knew he couldn’t. He recognized the feeling, besides. It had got him into trouble more than once when it came to situations where he needed patience, not simply courage. “And tell the public the bond is false?”

            “Those first three actions are more than enough,” Draco said. “I think telling the truth would complicate our lives unnecessarily with the press at the moment, so on that I will wait.” He looked at Harry, and his eyes glinted like his mother’s smile had. “It will hurt him in ways that you have no conceptions of, since you don’t understand our family.”

            “Yeah,” Harry snapped back. “And I’m glad of that.”

            Draco rose fluidly to his feet and moved forwards. Harry turned so that he had his side to the door, defeating both Draco’s clasp for his hand and the secondary grab that he made for Harry’s arm.

            “Harry, Harry, Harry,” Draco murmured, voice like a flowing river. “You should understand something better that you are a part of for the foreseeable future. You yourself claimed that you were part of it enough to care about my happiness.”

            “Yeah,” Harry said again. “But from what I’ve seen, you don’t care about happiness, your own or your father’s or your mother’s. That means that you won’t care about mine.”

            Draco frowned slightly, as though confronted with an alien language he had to translate into English. “You were the one claiming we were tied—”

‘

            “By the rings,” Harry said. “By the secrets that we’ve already shared with one another. Nothing else. Nothing more. We can’t share with one another, since if there’s one thing this conversation has showed, it’s that we care about entirely different things.” He was shaking, and he didn’t know why.

            “Harry,” Draco said, and stepped to the side as though he meant to circle behind him.

            Harry stiffened and hissed at him—not Parseltongue, merely a breath of hateful sound—and Draco stopped, his face softening. “My apologies. I forgot how much you hate to have anyone near your back.”

            Harry nodded and left the room. He didn’t know what he would say if he stayed there, but he had the feeling he would regret it later. He really didn’t want to hurt Draco.

            On the other hand, at the moment, he really didn’t want to be close to him, either.

            The end of this marriage bond can’t come soon enough, he thought, as he sealed the protective spells on his room behind him and flopped onto his bed on his stomach, staring out the window. I’ve been in a lot more pain, but never a situation where I felt I was cracking eggshells all around me.

*

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The Marriage of True Minds