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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
- 13
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Chapter Fourteen—Conflict at the Heart

Draco smiled a little as the third ledger settled beside him with a small thump. Yes, he had done this, and done it well. He was master of the Summoning Charm again. No house-elves need dance attendance on him at parties so that he could conceal his weakness beneath their skills. That meant he and Harry could attend parties outside Malfoy Manor now.

            Like the Ministry function he still hadn’t mentioned to Harry yet.

            Draco stood up with a little stretch and went to prepare himself for that battle. By now, Harry ought to be weary from his hours of studying heavy tomes and prepared for any distraction. Draco might need to use some arguments to convince him that the Ministry party was a good distraction, but he would win in the end.

            Harry has been compliant today. That’s a good thing.

            Of course, the compliance also made a worm of discontent squirm in his belly, because he couldn’t help suspecting the compliance. Somehow. It was an ungenerous impulse, and Draco hoped that he was never ungenerous, but…

            Harry didn’t understand duty the same way Draco did, even if he was learning to speak the right words. Perhaps Draco should advise his cousin-brother that Harry could say what he wanted in private. It would ease some of the tension that seemed to be gathering between them.

            Draco thought along those lines, as generous as he’d ever been and pleased with himself for taking Harry into the family so smoothly, right up until the point when he stepped into the study and found the books abandoned. There was a long claw-mark on the cover of one, which meant an owl had landed there, and a shred of feather. Draco smoothed it out while staring at the piece of paper that must have summoned Harry away.

            Come at once.

            No way to tell which of the Weasels had written it. But Draco had his guesses. Only a few of them had been injured by the explosion of Harry’s ritual to destroy the Dementor ghosts, after all, and it wouldn’t be hard to find them.

            Draco smiled. He was still the head of the family, and he didn’t count the Weasels as an audience in the same way that others would be. Perhaps it was time for Harry to hear what other sorts of words were permitted between demi-spouses in private.

*

            “I don’t know if I’ll survive.”

            Harry closed his eyes and kept his hand tightly clasped in George’s, not knowing what to do, what to say. He had been so sure everything would be all right, that the injuries he’d done to his chosen family were the sort that could be recovered from. Perhaps he’d had to believe that, ever since he saw the broken halves of the hawthorn wand dangling in Draco’s hand. He’d wanted to believe he could focus his energies on the Malfoys and repairing their wards and health and fortune, that George and Andromeda and Molly would be waiting for whatever time he could spare to them when he was done with that.

            Now…

            Harry turned George’s hand over and stared at it. The twin of another hand that was lost, that had been lost for seven years.

            That was what was going to kill George, the Healers in St. Mungo’s had told him. He had already lost a lot of interest in living when Fred died. With Harry’s help and Ron’s and Hermione’s, he’d climbed slowly back towards the sort of plateau where he could at least keep breathing, even if he did nothing else.

            But what Harry had drained from him was life-force, the strength that made life seem interesting, that made the struggle to draw breath in and out of his lungs something other than a mere struggle. George had woken up, but he hadn’t recovered the way the Healers had hoped he would, and today they’d told him why.

            George gave Harry a tranquil, exhausted smile, so wrong on his face.

            “It’s not as big a problem for me as you think it is,” he whispered, and his hand tightened on Harry’s in a way that made some of the ways he’d shaken hands in the past months seem weak. “I know you want me to live, but—well, I haven’t really wanted to, ever since I lost Fred. Part of me knows that that’s wrong and I should want to live, but…” He seemed to lose the thread for a minute, and his gaze shifted beyond Harry’s shoulder. Harry looked with him. George’s eyes were so intense that he really expected to see Fred’s ghost hovering against the wall of Shell Cottage.

            Nothing there. Harry swallowed again and turned to George.

            “You could live if I hadn’t taken that much magic from you,” he said. “You weren’t talking like this a fortnight ago.”

            George paused and thought. Harry clamped down on his fear that it took George that long to remember what he had been like.

            “I reckon that’s true,” George said at last, in the kind of tone that indicated he didn’t much care whether it was or not. “But it’s not all that important, Harry, honestly. I would have lived to please you. I’m dying because I have to, but also to please myself. It’s been sort of hard, these last few years, doing things because other people wanted me to. I’m going to enjoy the rest.” He smiled at Harry.

            Harry bit his tongue to keep from saying that he had married Malfoy for similar reasons. George didn’t want to hear about that now. He had called Harry here, as he’d explained after Harry walked in the door, to say good-bye.

            Except that he wouldn’t have to if I hadn’t been so stupid. The same way that Narcissa wouldn’t be dying if…

            And that made Harry think of something he should have thought about before. Narcissa was dying because he’d taken her life from her and piled a different kind of force on top of her. George hadn’t suffered the magical aging, but he didn’t have enough life-force left to keep his body functioning, either.

            They could live if Harry gave them some of his, though. Such a simple bargain.

            Maybe not for Narcissa. The Healer said other things about her that I’d have to listen to before I knew.

            But here was a chance for George, a shining chance, and Harry acted on it before he lost his nerve.

            “Would you want to live if you could?” he asked George simply. “If this hadn’t happened?”

            George paused again. Harry took the chance to roll his sleeve up and lay his wand against his pulse point. It was part of the preparations he and Ron and Hermione had gone through for the ritual that drove away the Dementor ghosts. Harry had studied that ritual and the way he had to go about it with an intensity that made all his concentration on the Malfoy books seem trivial. He still remembered the words, could recite the positions Ron and Hermione would have taken if they were there.

            Just as well that they aren’t. He didn’t think they would approve.

            But this was George’s choice, just like dying would have been. He was the one who had to make the decision, because he was the one Harry owed the debt to. A life-debt, yes, but chains that Harry could wear lightly, because he had chosen the Weasleys as his family and chosen to repay this.

            Something like joy danced through him when George mumbled, “Sometimes I have dreams about Fred. He’s telling me that it’s not time yet, that I still have a lot to do before I can join him. I have to live for two now, and do all those pranks and make all those things we never got around to.” He frowned and shook his head. “I had one last night. Maybe…I don’t know, Harry.” He looked down at his thin, nearly translucent wrists, and smiled. “But the decision’s been made for me.”

            “I don’t think it has,” Harry said, keeping his voice so gentle that George looked at him without suspicion, which was what he wanted. “If you allow me to repay the debt, to give you back what I took from you—”

            “You didn’t take Fred from me,” George interrupted, sitting up in the bed, “and if you’re going to go on about that, then I’m going to think that you’re the one who needs your head examined.”

            Harry grinned despite himself. “I know. I didn’t mean I could give you Fred back. I mean that I can give you life-force. I still know the steps from the first part of the ritual, when Ron and Hermione were drawing their own life-force towards me. I ought to be able to make a gift to you.”

            George stared at him with his lips parted. Harry nodded when he noticed the flame burning behind George’s eyes. He does want to live. He just didn’t think there was any way he could, and he was prepared to see the good side in dying.

            “You can’t do that,” George whispered. “You saved the world by hurting me—and it’s not like you meant to do it, anyway—”

            “I saved the world, but there are some prices that are still too high,” Harry said, and waited with his wand on his wrist, with the whole world spinning sweetly around him. It was like some of the moments in the ritual to get rid of the Dementor ghosts, but this time, he could feel how great the success would be, how much it would mean to him, instead of just the grueling labor of the work.

            George closed his eyes. “I think I’m selfish, but Fred doesn’t want me yet, and other people do,” he whispered. “I’m going to say yes.”

            Harry nodded. Then he laid his wand down and began to chant the first words of the ritual.

*

            Draco swooped down outside Shell Cottage with a bang and a grumble. With the war long past, the locations of most places that wizards lived were a matter of public record, but Draco had still had to do the journey here on a broom, and he’d made the last flight through the high, cold air wondering if it wasn’t preferable to try Apparating and maybe Splinch himself.

            Why isn’t he at the joke shop? he thought as he strode towards the slightly open door of the place. That’s where Weasley would have the most comfortable bed.

            But maybe not, if the scene that he saw through the open door—and one beyond that, which opened into a bedroom—was any indication. Weasley looked as if he was about to go out, like a candleflame. Harry was bending over him with a look on his face that twisted Draco’s guts. It was so close to the way his face had looked in the memory of the Forbidden Forest, when he was marching to his death.

            That’s the way he looks at family, Draco remembered.

            Well, he couldn’t say Harry should look at him and his mum like that right now. It would take time, years of demi-marriage, for Harry to align his emotions with his duties, perhaps.

            But then he heard the words Harry was chanting. Veteran of lots of Dark Arts even if he couldn’t currently perform them, he knew what that spell was meant to do. Granted, most of the time it was in reverse, because wizards like the Dark Lord preferred to drain someone else and thus grow stronger, not give something of themselves to a family member—

            He shouldered in through the door, watching Weasley’s eyes widen as he regarded Draco, and seized Harry’s arm, ducking the immediate attempt at retaliation as Harry found himself pulled.

            “I’m the head of your family,” he snarled into Harry’s pale, upturned face. “And I say you can’t waste your life-force that way.”

            Harry looked at him, and then his eyes were as bright as stars.

            “Waste,” he said. He opened his mouth, shut it, and shook his head. His eyes continued their furious burning. “Waste,” he said again.

            “It would be,” Draco said, and drew Harry to his feet with a grip on his shoulders that he thought probably hurt him. But that was acceptable if it got Harry’s focus off the man lying in the bed, the man who was going to die anyway. “You can’t use it like that without my permission. It’s a resource just like your money, or your blood. It would cause you to die, and I won’t have you dying when we need your strength to survive,” he translated his words into ones that Harry might understand, while Harry did nothing but watch him with bright eyes and a sunken head.

            “George,” Harry said, not turning his gaze away from Draco but seeming to have faith that the wreck of a human in the bed would respond anyway, “do you think you could live without my life-force?”

            Silence, and a swallow. Draco didn’t bother looking at him. He didn’t think what the man answered would make much difference in the long run. Harry was the one he had to convince.

            “No,” Weasley whispered.

            “And do you want to live?” Harry extended his wrist towards the bed as though waving money tauntingly in front of Draco. In fact, Draco thought, tightening his pincer grip on Harry’s shoulders, watching him waste money would probably be easier to bear.

            “Yes.”

            “You see, then,” Harry said, inclining his head in a single, slow bow, while his shoulders tensed and rippled under Draco’s hands as he prepared to draw away. “It’s not a waste.”

            “It is,” Draco hissed, lowering his voice. Weasley might still be able to hear, but Draco wanted at least the pretense that this conversation was unheard, if Harry wouldn’t grant him the reality. “He can’t live without taking all of it. And that kills you. And that leaves us in the same position as we were before.”

            Harry raised his eyebrows. “Not the same one. You have money, now. The wards. A new wand. Your mother will heal.”

            “I don’t want you to die, either, Harry,” Weasley said. Draco saw movement from the corner of his eye, and knew that Weasley had pushed himself up on his pillow, though he still wasn’t important enough for Draco to look directly at. “You know that, right? You know…I don’t want you to die saving me. You’ve already done more than enough, saving the world twice and all that.”

            Harry was silent, his shoulders flexing and his lungs heaving in his chest as though he was desperate to expel all his air and give up his hold on life. Draco scanned him narrowly, studied the color of his eyes and the way he held his head.

            The posture was lower, crouched, as though Harry was preparing to fight him, but otherwise, he looked much as he had in the Forbidden Forest. And that wasn’t only the way he looked at family.

            It’s the way he looks at death. It doesn’t frighten him. In fact, maybe he was even disappointed that he didn’t get to die confronting the Dark Lord in the pursuit of a high and noble duty.

            Draco felt the sluggish horror creeping through him. Harry did know what duty meant. He had a certain desire to save his friends.

            And he would be perfectly willing to die for them.

            Draco wanted to shake Harry, hard. But that would break the fragile mood that seemed to settle over the room as the expression on Harry’s face shifted and changed. So he kept silent, hands still tightening. He could always reserve the shaking as an option for later.

*

            Yeah, that was kind of stupid, using the spell that would have poured all my life-force into the ritual to save George and not left me fit to stand up afterwards. I could have died. George shouldn’t have to see that.

            Harry glanced up at Draco, and although he hadn’t wanted him here, well, he was here now.

            And Draco shouldn’t have to see me die, either.

            “I’ll die if I give George all my life-force,” he said. “What if I only give him some? That means he can have some time to recover, and it won’t kill me.” He faced the bed again. Draco’s face was so strange by this point that he couldn’t read it, but it looked as if he was thinking about more than how Harry’s death would weaken the family. Harry didn’t know if he should be flattered by that or not, so he was going to focus on the one person in the room whose expressions he couldn’t doubt. “George?”

            George blinked and swallowed. This was hard for him, Harry knew, but he kept himself upright when he would probably rather have collapsed. Harry reached out for him, and then winced as Draco’s grip on his shoulder pulled his arm up short.

            “Yes, that might work,” George said.

            “And that has half of my ‘resources’ left for you to work with,” Harry told Draco.

            Draco still said nothing, but a moment later, he released Harry. Harry sat in the chair next to George’s bed again, and picked up his wrist, absurdly glad that both Bill and Fleur were out today with their children. George had told them Harry was coming over to stay with him, and they hadn’t questioned it.

            He opened his mouth to continue the spell, and then rolled his eyes at himself and turned to Draco.

            “Do you know the way to change the spell so that it only takes half the life-force instead of the whole thing?” he asked. “I only know the variation we came up with to defeat the Dementor ghosts.”

*

            It would have been easy to refuse, perhaps, and make Harry concede to not saving Weasley after all. Draco had to accept that the Weasleys were Harry’s friends, but he didn’t like the thought of a Malfoy being in debt to them. Weasley’s death would solve that problem.

            And turn Harry against him forever. Draco pictured living the next five years with his heir silent and furious and hating him, and winced.

            “I know one variation,” he said. “You have to go slowly, though, and listen carefully to the words. A mispronunciation might do something to him that would make what happened to my mother look mild.”

            Harry faced him and listened as Draco taught him the words of the spell, his attention so focused that Draco sometimes winced in the face of it. If Harry saw the winces, however, he had obviously decided that it wasn’t his place to ask. He listened, instead, and absorbed, and Draco found himself wondering how he could make Harry pay attention to his books like this.

            Work with him?

            No, it would have to be some other solution. Draco already knew everything that the books contained, after all.

            Nevertheless, the thought lingered in his mind, as did that hour or so they spent chanting in the cottage, Weasley watching them from the background with fear and hope mixed on his face as intricately as the ingredients of a Draught of Peace. An odd place and time, with an odd shape, but it might give shape to the future.

            Finally, Harry could run through the spell on his own without messing up a single word. Draco still made him do it six times before he reluctantly nodded permission.

            Harry turned to Weasley’s bed, and his face shone. The glow in his eyes seemed to have come out and infected the whole of his skin, and he took Weasley’s hand and bared his own wrist, laying his wand above his pulse, as though he was going to give Weasley his light along with his life.

            Draco stood back and watched. At least he had some sense of the problem now, and what he would need to do. He wanted Harry to look like that, as radiant, when he was talking or thinking about his duty to the Malfoy family.

            How?

            That was what he didn’t know, yet. But Draco would figure it out, and he would make sure that he knew how to hang onto it when he had it.

            Yes, he could make do with a husband and heir who served the family reluctantly, as long as he behaved acceptably in public and learned what he was supposed to and did his part in watching Narcissa. But he would rather have one who understood duty in all its manifestations, and this looked like a Harry who would.

*

            Harry closed his eyes, and let the life-force drain gently, slowly, out of him. He would feel exhausted for a few days, or at least so Draco had told him, but he could recover from that the same way he had from using his magic in the first place to banish the ghosts. And Draco wouldn’t demand anything too strenuous of him.

            Meanwhile, George would live.

            That was worth nearly any price.

            When he opened his eyes, he could see a faint light settling around George’s face and shoulders, and then melting like foxfire, heading into his skin. George shook, and his eyes opened slowly. Harry thought he could see the color in them coming back, as if George was transforming from a doll into a living man.

            “Feel better?” Harry asked gently.

            George swallowed and nodded again. His hand came down on Harry’s wrist, and gripped it hard enough that Harry winced and thought he’d have a matching bruise there for the ones Draco had left on his shoulders. “You saved my life,” George whispered. “Whatever horrible things you think you did to me when you pulled on me, you paid it back.”

            Harry held his hand silently for a few minutes, and murmured nonsense for a few minutes more, while George closed his eyes and sat there, picking up life.

            Then Harry heard the cracks of Apparition outside, and started. That meant Bill and Fleur were back, and he didn’t think he wanted to face them right now. A glance at Draco showed that he didn’t want to, either.

            “Yeah, go on, get out of here,” George said, and smiled at Harry. “I’ll explain to them.” He lay back on the pillows and held his hands up in front of his face, turning them back and forth to examine the palms. “I can do anything, now.”

            Harry briefly gripped George’s shoulder and took Draco’s arm, Apparating them out past the cottage’s wards, which he could come and go through the same way he could through the Manor’s. Draco pulled away from him the moment they landed outside their front door and turned to him with a slightly chilly face.

            “I want you to talk to me before you do something like that again,” he said.

            Harry blinked. Draco’s face at the moment looked startlingly like the face his younger self had worn in the memory Harry had seen: terrified and hating himself for it. Was he thinking about what would have happened if Harry had died? How all the trouble he had gone through so far would have been for nothing?

            “Yeah, I will,” Harry said. “Sorry. I wasn’t thinking.”

            “Start thinking,” Draco said, and swept away.

            Harry followed him, still silent, and thoughtful for himself whether or not Draco was going to talk to him. He didn’t think Draco was concerned for him the same way that he was for his mum. That was a special relationship, a closer one, and Draco would value her as a person as well as a symbol of his family’s strength.

            But Harry was his brother-cousin-husband-son right now, in a weird way, and the only member of the family who could wield a wand with any regularity, the only one who could protect Narcissa if Draco was gone, and one half of the team that had to make them look good in public.

            Harry straightened his shoulders.

            If we’re only good together in threatening situations, then maybe I should just think of us as being under siege all the time. That ought to make it easier to think of doing my duty to them as well as to my friends.

            Draco doesn’t like me, but he does have to be careful of me. I should do the same for him.

*

            unneeded: Yes, Teddy and Andromeda are around.

            The idea is that Harry will still be part of the family even after the divorce, because he’ll keep the Malfoy name, so the vaults remain his property along with Draco’s.

            Yes, that’s exactly the way Harry wants to divide his life.

            SP777: He was Apparating to where he knew George was, so even if it was a trick, he would have wanted to go because George could be in danger or a hostage.

            delia cerrano: Draco is less focused on that than Harry; he does think in terms of them sharing a house. But he expects that Harry will leave him alone to practice his magic and so on.
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The Name I'll Give to Thee