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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
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter, and I am making no money from this story.

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Chapter Fourteen—A Distance Greater Than Rooms

            “You will not refuse to hear me.”

            His mother’s voice was soft and certain. Draco made sure the Disillusionment Charm was wrapped more firmly around himself than it had ever been—he added an extra layer to it and a spell that should renew it if it began to fade—before he followed her through the door of his father’s sitting room.

            Lucius sat in a chair on the opposite side of the room, staring out the window that reflected an imaginary view of mountains gone purple with distance, no snow showing on their peaks. Draco had still been young when he realized that his father looked this way when he wanted others to think he was pensive, rather than when he actually was. Draco snorted safely behind the protection of the charm. His father had far more style and show than significance at the bottom of him.

            As you do? Harry seemed to think so.

            Draco found himself tapping one hand on a wall before he thought about it, a babyish gesture he had once believed would ward off bad luck. But it was foolish here, with his parents liable to notice. Luckily, Lucius was too caught up in his petulance and his mother was too caught up in her focus on him.

            She would not be pleased if she knew that he was here. But Draco had been unable to stay away, even if she meant it as a private conversation. He had to see what happened when she disciplined his father, if there was a chance that Draco could reclaim him despite the proud tradition of absolutism he had recited to Harry.

            “I won’t refuse,” Lucius said, when enough time had passed that Draco wondered why his mother’s legs didn’t tremble. “But there isn’t a word you can say that will alter my stance. That ignorant pup is going to put me out of the family for this, and you needn’t pretend that you’re going to object to that. The way I can feel you smirking at my back right now, you’ll applaud it.”

            “I came to congratulate you,” Narcissa said serenely.

            Lucius swung around to stare at her, and Draco felt his jaw drop. He was doubly glad for the charm then, since it prevented the loss of his dignity as well as his mother noticing his presence.

            “I do beg your pardon,” Lucius said, in tones that made it clear he didn’t.

            “You achieved the greatest victory for the family on the day that you exiled yourself from it.” Narcissa touched her fingers together and stared at the mountains in turn. Draco wondered what she saw in them. “When Harry defended Draco’s freedom, it caused steel to appear in the marriage ring.” She turned back to Lucius, and her smile was almost gentle, in the way that death might be gentle for a mouse the owl swooped on. “I think you know what that means.”

            “Potter would never be that foolish,” Lucius said, but there was so much doubt behind his words they were scarcely more than a breath.

            “What makes you think that he knew what it meant?” Narcissa queried, her eyebrows rising. “He reacted on instinct, and he didn’t know that steel could enter the rings until we explained it to him. Even then, he found the symbolism odd.” Her voice gentled further. Draco would have backed away by now, but his father simply sat still, stunned and perplexed by her news, staring at her. “He and Draco will have a hard time being parted now. Harry has defended Draco’s life and his freedom. One could say, his sanity and his power. I suppose the magic in the marriage rings does not agree with me, or the bronze and the iron would have appeared by now. But they are coming.”

            “Why are you telling me this?” Lucius whispered. Draco wondered that, too. He had counted on meeting his father in some distant corridor, bowing to him, and making sure that the sunlight flashed from the steel to let him know what had happened.

            “Because this is what you did for the family,” Narcissa said. “You chose better than Draco would have chosen for himself. You chose someone who defends your son out of sheer disinterested compassion and goodness, not someone who serves us for his part in the dream of wealth and glory.”

            Draco had to brace a hand on the wall this time, and not because he wanted to ward off bad luck. If his mother was right…if she saw that much in Potter…

            “Potter has his own ambitions,” Lucius said. “If he protected Draco, it came from fear of what would happen to him if Draco died or was controlled and the marriage bond severed.” He pushed himself off the chair, but didn’t yet walk back and forth, staring at his wife instead. Draco knew he could never understand all the emotions their silent communion throbbed with.

            “Call him Harry,” Narcissa said, and her voice made Lucius flinch. “You were the one who took the right to his other name from him.”

            “Potter is—he is not the kind of man you imagine,” Lucius continued stubbornly. “He can’t be. You don’t see his motive now, Narcissa, but you will. He may seem simple, compassionate, and naïve, but he would have died years ago if he really was as much like that as he portrays himself.”

            “He would need only a fraction of that honor he carries about with him to make him the best choice for our family,” Narcissa said. “And he brought two vaults with him when he married into the family. And he calls Draco by his first name, now, and he lets Draco touch him in the way that only one spouse should touch another. I congratulate you, deeply and truly, on what you’ve achieved.” She made a sweeping curtsey that sent her skirts rustling along the floor. “He is for us and of us. Although Draco must exile you, and I doubt he will forgive you, we have a new member to console us for your loss.” She turned around and walked gracefully to the door, her footsteps not making a sound now.

            “Narcissa.”

            His father’s voice was the first thing that made Draco feel ashamed about seeing this. His eyes watered, and he turned away. Although he still couldn’t prevent himself from listening, at least he could keep from looking at his father’s face.

            “You can’t mean this,” Lucius said. “You can’t mean that Draco will be content with Potter—Harry, if you insist—instead of the Greengrass girl he chose. He wants children. He wants someone pure-blooded, someone who will follow the traditions of our family and her own. You cannot convince me that he does not.”

            Narcissa said nothing for long enough that Draco thought she was certain to agree. She would be mad if she didn’t. Then she said, in a voice that was so low it teased along the edges of sound, “And what makes you think that those are the things that Draco values the most in the world?”

            “Because I raised him,” Lucius said, voice nothing at the moment but the sound of bafflement.

            “And so did I.”

            The tone was enough to make Draco glance up again, abandoning his counting of the patterns in the wood and marble of the walls. Narcissa smiled like a wolf at her husband, and Draco thought of the Black portraits that hung in his mother’s wing. Half of them depicted ancestors who were mad or twisted by their use of Dark magic, and the other half had smiles like this, at least some of the time Draco had passed them. He knew that his mother’s “Black traditions” he had turned his back on had something to do with it.

            If he had chosen his loyalties differently, he might have smiled like that.

            But his loyalties were what they were, and that meant he followed his mother in silent bewilderment. Of course he wanted children and a pure-blood wife and to follow the traditions. If he hadn’t, then he would have yielded to the stubborn misery he could see in Harry’s eyes and explained that he would let Lucius back into the family, that he would find some way to forgive him for the unforgivable.

            If he was what his mother had proclaimed he was—weak—he would have explained his pain to Harry instead of burying it in the answers that had to come out of his mouth, and holding to tradition because it had a regularity that would protect him.

            But he wasn’t weak. He wasn’t a Black. He had chosen his loyalties, and that was all there was to it. His mother might not like it, but she was badly mistaken in her characterization of him if she thought that he would change his mind. She and Harry both, Draco thought, believed not only in his weakness but that it was a good thing.

            It wasn’t until he reached his room that he remembered something else his mother had said, something he should have questioned earlier. She had congratulated his father—

            But of course most of what she said must be sarcasm, designed to catch his father off-balance and grant her some measure of control in the situation—

            On choosing better for Draco than Draco had. She had indicated Harry as a better choice than Astoria.

            Of course it was sarcasm, Draco reassured himself again as he sat on his bed and extended his foot to let a house-elf take his boots. She had wielded a generality—that Lucius’s taste and choices were bad—against a generality—that he might actually have granted Draco a measure of independence by doing something he had thought would impede him. If Lucius had chosen someone else for the bond, if Draco had chosen someone other than Astoria, she would have said the same thing. It was her chosen tactic to make Lucius surrender.

            But as he lay down and drew the covers over him, Draco couldn’t escape the disconcerting feeling that his mother had been speaking in specifics.

            It would have been much better if he knew why.

*

            “I think that we might have a lead on the Ness case,” Ron said when Harry walked into the office the next morning. “I heard—”

            Then he looked at Harry, and his expression congealed. “I’ll kill him,” he said quietly.

            Harry blinked at him. “Who? Ness? He’s already dead. We’re trying to catch the person who did it, remember?” Ron got like this sometimes, loopy and forgetful, though usually it was after a night of thoroughly shagging Hermione. Harry firmly put the image that resulted out of his head and waited for his best mate to come back to normal.

            “No,” Ron said, and stepped right up into his space, reaching out to put his hand on Harry’s shoulder. Harry started and flinched, ducking his head, and Ron paused, then drew his hand back with a murmured apology so that his fingers rested a few inches away from the invisible scars. “Malfoy. He did something, didn’t he? You never come in looking like that unless someone close to you has hurt you, and I know that all of us weren’t with you last night.”

            Harry blinked again. “But Malfoy and I aren’t close,” he said.

            “You’re getting there,” Ron said grimly. “It’s impossible to spend that much time around a person and not start understanding them a little better unless you’re a sociopath, and with you, you start trying to like the bastards, too. So Malfoy hurt you. How? If he forbade you to see Ginny or something—”

            “No.” Harry reached up and squeezed Ron’s hand, using the gesture as an excuse to move his hand away from his shoulder. It was nothing personal, just that if Ron kept touching him there he was going to strike out, and he didn’t want to do that. “Something nasty happened between him and his father last night, and I let it spill over onto me.” That was as close as he thought he could come to describing what had happened without betraying Draco’s confidence, and he didn’t want to do that.

            Although if I did, he might cast me out of the family and never forgive me. That would solve a few of my problems.

            “You’re right,” he continued, sitting down behind his desk and reminding himself what his best friend looked like again. “I was getting too close. We share some things, and that can’t be helped, but I’m not going to spend any more time around him as long as I can help it. Spend my nights at the Manor, and that’s all. Can you ‘arrange’ to have me invited over to your house or your mum’s for the next few evenings?”

            Ron gave him a sly grin. Harry found himself mentally comparing it to Draco’s sly grin, and then shook away the comparison in irritation. He didn’t even want to think of his two families in the same breath if he could help it.

            I do not have two families. I have one and one that I belong to by accident.

            “We’d like nothing better,” Ron said cheerfully. Then he cast Harry a stern glance. “Ginny’s doing her pining thing, you know.”

            Harry mentally tried to fit “Ginny” and “pining” in the same sentence, then shook his head. “Don’t know what you mean, mate.”

            “The part where’s trying to pretend she doesn’t miss you, and keeps staring out the window and talking about how early marriage isn’t such a good idea after all,” Ron said promptly. Then his voice softened. “I know you’ve been busy with the case and trying to recover from your induction into the Den of Evil, mate. I know. But it really would help if you came over for dinner tonight.”

            Harry nodded. “Absolutely planning to.” Then he looked down at the folder in front of him and flipped it open. At the moment, the Ness case, disgusting complications and all, sounded easier to deal with than Ginny. “What’s your lead?”

*

            “Did you receive the invitation from my mother for tea?” Draco asked Astoria. He was studying the photograph of the dress she’d selected, and frowning. The woman in the picture was beautiful, of course, one of the Rosier daughters who had married into the Malfoy family, but the way she turned back and forth made it obvious that the dress’s skirt was too wide and poison-green rather than the delicate shade of emerald green it had first looked like.

            “I did. I refused it.”

            All the muscles in Draco’s neck stiffened, but he kept his eyes on the dress, as if memorizing a catalogue of its deficiencies to present to his bride. Then he leaned back in his chair and fixed her with an even look.

            “She had something particular to say to you,” he murmured.

            Astoria sat across the table from him, her poise as perfect as always. Today she wore a sheer white gown that made her look as if she was clothed in icebergs. One hand held a cup of tea, but she hadn’t brought it to her lips in a few minutes. Her eyes were gentle and straightforward and so utterly false that Draco thought she would have choked on Veritaserum.

            “I know what she wished to say to me,” Astoria murmured back, voice calm and cold as the water off a glacier. “I don’t wish to hear it. Any mutually agreeable communication can be made by owl.”

            Draco didn’t let himself shift back in the chair, because that would be a sign of weakness and one he didn’t want to reveal. He wished, briefly, that he was back in the Manor and had had the chance to speak with his mother anew before this happened. He had confidence in his own strategy-building abilities, less when he had to improvise.

            “Astoria,” he said.

            “You place the comfort and trust of your family before mine.”

            “Well, of course,” Draco said, giving her a slow, burning look. She had attacked first, which he hadn’t anticipated, but on the other hand, her attack was utter nonsense. “My first loyalty lies with them. You seemed certain and content it would be so, when you trusted my commitment to traditions the other day.”

            “But I will be part of your family. Or so I thought.” Astoria lowered her eyes and let her fingers play lightly over her gown, as though she actually was the modest maiden Draco had chosen. On the other hand, would modesty by itself have attracted him? It usually implied naiveté, and he could not use a bride who wandered through the glades of pure-blood tradition like a fawn in its first year of life. “Your loyalties should include me. If I wish to conduct a certain conversation with written words instead of spoken ones, then you should oblige me.”

            “Indulge you, rather,” Draco corrected. “My mother would not ask for an indulgence like this.”

            “And your father?” Astoria’s smile curdled as she met his eyes. “Your husband?”

            “My father might,” Draco said. “I had no idea you wished me to place you in the same category as him.”

            Astoria flung her head up, and then seemed to wish she hadn’t done that. Her chin came down again, but the sharp tremors that cut through her body said that Draco’s words had done their bladed work. Draco watched her, and said nothing, and smiled.

            “You place your mother above me,” Astoria whispered.

            “I have known her longer. We share the same blood.”

            “That—is not—” Astoria seemed uncertain of how to go on. She bowed her head for a moment, and then moved the attack in a new direction, one Draco had not anticipated. “Your husband influences you in this.”

            Draco shook his head. “He refused most emphatically last night to have anything to do with how I run the family.”

            “He influences you without your knowledge.” Astoria’s eyes, cutting to him now, had a trapped gleam in them that reminded Draco of the eyes of a tiger in a cage. Or how his father had looked after Harry defeated the Heart-Holding Curse.

            Or how Harry had looked, when he realized Draco had seen his scars.

            Draco took a long, deliberate moment, gazing at Astoria, to categorize the differences in her eyes from Harry’s, and then put all thought of his husband from his head. Harry did not influence how he dealt with Astoria. He could not. He had shown that he hadn’t the least concept of subtlety, let alone the way Draco had to put personal happiness, indeed all personal emotions, aside when dealing with other pure-bloods.

            Don’t think of him. He wouldn’t think of you.

            “I know myself,” he said. “I know my father. I thought I knew you, but I believe now that was an illusion based on partial knowledge and the desire to see more than what lay there behind your mask.”

            Only Astoria’s breathing disturbed her stillness. “Say what you mean, then,” she murmured. “If you are changing your mind, if you do not wish to marry me, then say it.”

            She did it again! Draco was furious with himself that he failed continually to cut off her tactic of direct confrontation. She constantly changed the terms of their discourse, and he fell for it. He had no answer, and each silent, scrambling moment that passed without one increased the iced-over edge of triumph in Astoria’s eyes.

            Meet directness with directness. The Gryffindor way that Harry would undoubtedly prefer. He might have something to teach you after all.

            Draco leaned back in his chair and brought his fingertips together gently. “Everyone is allowed a certain number of errors in a lifetime,” he said. “I flatter myself that I have committed fewer than most, for my age.”

            Astoria’s brow wrinkled as she stared at him. She immediately smoothed it flat again, of course, but Draco had seen the change and had to hold back his own smile. “Say what you mean,” she repeated.

            “I have made a mistake in choosing you as my betrothed.” Draco stood and inclined his head. “I will return the marks of favor you gave me, my lady, including all your letters. You need not fear I will keep one. I have no desire to make another mistake.”

            Astoria started to her feet, and then flushed a delicate crimson from neck to brow, like an ivory rose crossed with a pink one. “Draco,” she said. “Wait.”

            “Lady.” Draco let his smile grow sharper, his eyes grow more distant. “I will let no one have a measure of control over me. I sought a partnership, and you showed me a harness. Step out of my way.”

            Astoria’s hands twisted together, clenching back and forth. Draco watched her to see if she would say anything else, but she remained mute, lips pressed together in a way that couldn’t distract him from the blank hopelessness in her eyes.

            Draco bowed low, and went.

            He had the oddest sensation as he walked out of the Greengrass home, planning to Apparate rather than Floo so that Astoria would not have the chance to have an unfortunate moment. It was as though he had unwound a chain from his neck that had clasped him too tightly, cutting into his collarbone and skin.

            He did not know what it meant. He only knew his determination, to spend a few days seeking to understand himself and what he wanted, and then to begin a search for another bride.

*

            Harry stepped back into the Manor that night with a small smile. He’d had a lovely evening at the Weasleys’. He’d spoken with Ginny, he’d played the guitar—badly—and he and Bill and Fleur’s children had played a game that seemed to have as its sole rules that you ran around the room and shrieked. Harry had rolled over with Victoire sitting on his chest and Dominique pulling on his hair, and the contentment that had struck him was like an ocean wave of pure happiness.

            Yes. Children like this, a family life like this—this is what I want.

            He stepped through the door, gave his cloak to Juli when she popped up, and then hesitated. A small door he hadn’t noticed until now stood off to the side, open. Harry stole up to it and peered through the crack.

            Malfoy sat on a stool facing the fire, his head bowed. He had one hand smoothing up and down his knee as though he had to gentle himself, and his other hand held a parchment. From the single lines on the parchment, Harry thought they might be names. He wasn’t sure, though, and he couldn’t see much of Malfoy’s expression from here. He hesitated.

            You’re calling him Malfoy instead of Draco again.

            Well, wasn’t that the way it should be? The marriage bond hadn’t stolen his last name. And their conversation last night had proven that Harry didn’t understand much of anything at all. He didn’t fit in with the Malfoy traditions, he didn’t know how to speak to them or say what they wanted to hear, and he cared too much about different things.

            The impulse he’d had, to go into the room and ask Malfoy what was wrong, died stillborn. Harry turned away and climbed the stairs.

            Ginny would be proud of you.

            It didn’t even take him more than an hour to fall asleep.

*

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The Marriage of True Minds