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Nature of the Beast	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 48977 -:- Recommendations : 3 -:- Currently Reading : 5
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I am making no money from this story.

Chapter List
- 13
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- 15
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Chapter Fourteen—Daphne and Draco
            Harry nodded to the fireplace and stood up. “I’ll be right over, Hermione. The strategy meeting is in the Leaky Cauldron, right?”
            “It is.” Hermione’s expression was resigned as she watched Harry gather up the books and parchments he’d need to bring with him. Harry didn’t think it was for the books and parchments themselves, but the table he picked them up from. “You’re really doing it?”
            “Of course I plan to work on showing the pure-bloods that a bunch of their cherished families come from Muggleborns,” Harry said, halting and staring at her. “Why else would I have spent all this time researching genealogies?”
            “Not that. You’re staying with Malfoy. You’re making this bond work, the way Ron says you have to.”
            Harry snorted a little. “How much of this is about me making the bond work, and how much of it this is the argument you want to win with Ron?”
            From the way Hermione flushed, he knew he had scored a hit, but she still faced him with glittering eyes and cheeks. “You know that I’d help you fight it. That you shouldn’t have to spend the rest of your days bound to him. And I would win.”
            “Win against what? Me? Him? The pure-bloods?” Harry shook his head. “I did get a few letters over the weekend congratulating me on the bond, you know. I think Malfoy is right that this’ll do a bit of good with some of the stodgy traditionalists. They think I’m more bound into their world now.”
            “You shouldn’t have to give up your freedom for the peace effort!” If Hermione had had a desk in front of her, Harry thought, she would have pounded a fist on it.
Harry rolled his eyes, and he didn’t care that she could see him doing it. Something like that would have hurt Malfoy if he had seen Harry doing it, but his friendship with Hermione could survive such a minor challenge. “I already have. If you want to see it that way. I personally don’t, because I chose to make the sacrifice. No one forced me to.” He drew in his breath to ask another question about the meeting, but Hermione pushed on.
            “You shouldn’t have to give up your freedom for him, either,” Hermione whispered, and Harry knew they had come to the heart of the matter.
            Harry shrugged as much as he could without disturbing the books in his arms. “I don’t know what you want me to say, Hermione. Part of this is because Malfoy would die if I left him. I don’t want that to happen. Part of this is because it was easier than staging some massive rebellion that would probably also have left Malfoy dead.”
            “But how much of this is for you? Does the bond give you anything, or just another burden to deal with?”
            Harry smiled gently at her. “Malfoy’s not that horrible, you know. Not as horrible as I thought he would be. I assumed he would make me crawl at his feet, and I would have struck back at him for that.”
“I’m glad there’s some kind of limit to your tolerance.”
Harry looked at her, and thought of many things that he could say. But they would have been upsetting to him and to her, and he didn’t need an argument before the strategy meeting. “Anyway. Tell me if the Greengrasses are going to be there.”
Hermione’s eyes widened as if he had asked her whether she still revered Dumbledore. “Of course they are! They’re an integral part of bringing together the pure-bloods who would listen to you about having Muggleborn heritage in the first place.”
Harry shook his head marginally. “Then I need to make sure that Daphne doesn’t approach me.” He wondered if she would listen, though. He hadn’t had any clue about her feelings until she revealed them, but since then, she’d been fairly persistent.
In fact, the only thing that had made her back off was…
Harry nodded, his mind made up. “I’m going to ask Draco to come with me.”
“You’re mad,” said Hermione, checking his face as if she would find a sign of fever there. “You are, aren’t you? The burden of carrying the whole peace process on your back has finally driven you mad, and you’re lashing out without any notion of a formed plan.”
Harry squinted at her in irritation. “Look, Daphne is pure-blood and knows about all these rules and roles and rituals that I don’t, and she still somehow decided it was a brilliant idea to come up to me and piss Draco off. I don’t think she’ll stop because I’m alone at one meeting. And I don’t want to come home to questioning so intense that—”
He cut himself off, because Hermione looked honestly stricken, the way she had when she remembered a meeting they almost didn’t attend last week. “What is it?”
“You called Malfoy Manor home,” Hermione whispered, and raised one hand as if she could fend off Harry from coming any closer.
“For fuck’s sake,” said Harry. “Not you, too. I know that a bunch of people are watching my every move and judging it, and Malfoy’s mother is one of them. And the Greengrasses probably are now, and the people we’re meeting with definitely are. I thought I could count on you not to analyze my every little movement and tell me why it’s wrong, Hermione.”
“I didn’t mean to do that,” said Hermione, looking chastened. “But I think it would be best if you didn’t bring Malfoy to this meeting, Harry.”
“And I think it would be for the best if you did.”
Harry jumped a little, even though he had heard the door open and Malfoy walk into the room behind him. Hermione really flinched, of course, seeing Malfoy unexpectedly drape his arms around Harry’s shoulders, followed a moment later by his wings. Harry arched his head out of that warm cocoon so he could see Hermione and go on speaking to her. “Like I said, Daphne won’t back off, and it has to be for political reasons. Maybe this will teach her to keep her mind on the job in front of her.”
Hermione looked a little devastated. “I know that she only wants the best for you, Harry.”
“Wanting to marry my mate or have the Boy-Who-Lived at her side isn’t what’s best for Harry,” Malfoy said.
Harry knew that he and Hermione would get into it any second, so he jumped in. “She might believe that, Hermione. Maybe it would have been for the best before I knew about being Malfoy’s mate.” Malfoy tightened his hold on Harry, but said nothing. Harry smiled at him to reward him for his self-restraint, and went on, “But now, she could jeopardize a large part of the peace process for her own reasons. I won’t have it.”
“Is all you think about the peace process?” Hermione asked, looking as if she pitied him.
“Yes,” said Malfoy, and gave a quick, complaining huff to the back of Harry’s neck that made the hairs there stand up.
Hermione gave Malfoy another unfriendly look, probably because she didn’t want to agree with him, and Harry rolled his eyes and gave up on being subtle. “You can disagree or disparage each other later. Right now, we have a meeting to get to.”
“We do,” said Malfoy, and gave him a small pinch on the side while Hermione was still shuffling around and muttering what sounded like complaints to herself. “Tell me, would you have brought me with you if your friend hadn’t told you about Daphne?”
“I don’t know,” Harry had to say. “But I’m the one who asked if they were going to be there, so your question is irrelevant.”
Malfoy frowned as if he didn’t think it was, but Hermione asked him a question about precedent then, and Harry was glad to turn around and tell her what he had found when he looked up means of informing pure-blood families about their Squib and Muggleborn relatives. He could swear that dealing with everyone’s bloody families was less exhausting than this mate business.
He wanted…he wanted a peaceful personal life, if he could get it, along with peace in the larger wizarding world.
He just wasn’t sure if he could get that if he did both what Malfoy wanted and what he wanted.
*
Draco looked around the room with a faint sneer. It was a room on the first floor of the Leaky Cauldron, magically enhanced with wizardspace for the meeting. It had the typical dark, smoke-stained walls and sooty fireplace of the Leaky, though. Draco wondered morbidly for a moment if this was one reason that Harry didn’t seem to care much about all the beauty and space available to him at the Manor, because he had lived and worked in places like this for most of his life.
What was his life in the Muggle world like?
Draco burned to know. Ever since Aloren had said that the wounds preventing the bond from taking were old, he had thought they had to come from Harry’s life before Hogwarts. It wasn’t as though either of them was that old in the first place.
But for now, he knew he wouldn’t get an answer, so he settled for watching Harry speak to and greet the guests.
And once the guests started arriving, they kept arriving. Draco could feel his eyebrows creeping up his face as he watched them. He knew that relatively few pure-blood families would welcome the revelations that Harry and Granger seemed likely to spring at this meeting.
It made him wonder if some people were here for different, less idealistic reasons, and when he saw the Maundys—a family so fussy that they wouldn’t even send their children to a wizarding school, instead keeping them at home and educating them themselves—he was sure of it. He drifted towards Harry and touched his shoulder with a wing.
Harry turned around from speaking with Weasley to blink at him. Weasley looked back and forth between them, as if he was as eager as Draco for a sign that they were bonded.
What has my life come to, when my greatest ally is a Weasley?
Draco didn’t ask the question aloud, because no one had a satisfactory answer. Instead, he nodded to Harry and murmured, “Who invited Tamara Maundy and her brood? You’ll have your meeting livened up, sure, but you can have peace without boredom.”
Harry glanced around, and Draco thought for a second he would have to point the Maundys out. But then Harry saw them, and relaxed a little. “Oh, them. She owled me and said that the issues of blood politics and purity were important to her family, and they were interested in knowing about their inheritance and ancestors.”
“I bet they bloody well are,” Draco muttered, his eyes on the tall woman who must be Tamara, surrounded by her four children. All of them had the iron-grey hair that was the mark of the Maundy line. They swept by Harry without a single glance, but stopped to speak to Granger, and Draco had to smile.
“What is it, Malfoy? You look like you’re swallowing broken glass.”
It was Weasley who spoke, and Draco nodded to him. There were certain things they both knew and inclinations they both shared, he thought—not because they wanted to share them, but because that was the sort of thing you had to know, if you were surviving in the pure-blood world of wizarding Britain. “You know the probable reason the Maundys are here, right?”
Weasley hesitated, then shrugged. “They’re speaking to Hermione. They can’t be that bad.”
Indeed, Draco had noticed that most of the pure-bloods in the room still ignored Granger. But Tamara was winning her over, that was obvious, with her overawing manner. Never mind that she didn’t smile and took care to keep a small but obvious amount of space between her and Granger.
“They’re here because they do want to know about the Muggleborns or Squibs in their line,” said Draco, lowering his voice. There were certain things that one didn’t say all that loud around a family as dangerous as the Maundys. “So they can burn the books that mention them if they’re ancestors, and make sure that the people who know about them—or who are them, if there are any descendants still alive—die fairly soon. Of an untraceable tragic accident, of course. They all are. Always.”
Harry turned around and stared at him, gravely. But at least he didn’t say that Draco was making it up, which was more grace than Draco had thought he might get. Instead, he nodded, and turned around and surveyed the Maundys with more interest.
“Hermione looks charmed by them,” he observed.
Draco held back his sneer with effort. “They’re working to be charming. It wouldn’t help them if everyone thought that they were snobbish. They can show people the good side of that much money and power when they want.”
Harry looked distant. Draco took a close look at him, wondering if he had said something that made him doubt his peace process again, but bit his tongue on the impulse to apologize. If Harry really wanted this to work, then he would have to take the truth into account.
“I’ll remember that,” said Harry, and nodded to Draco. “Thanks, Malfoy.”
Draco couldn’t help the way he stretched his wings or the croon that warbled out of his throat. Harry didn’t flinch at that, just blinked, and Weasley’s face was doing an odd thing where he looked as if he wanted at the same time to support their bond and to be elsewhere while they were enacting it.
“Harry. I have something to say to you.”
Draco hissed and turned around. Daphne was standing in front of them, her eyes sliding away from Draco as if he didn’t exist. She focused her gaze on Harry, and it was obvious that she wasn’t going to give up any time soon.
“Then say it,” said Harry.
For a moment, Draco thought he could give thanks for Harry’s absolute ice-smooth demeanor. He wasn’t giving anything away to Draco and Draco hated that, but on the other hand, he could outface his “suitors” without giving them any encouragement, either.
“I want to speak to you alone,” said Daphne, and her hands trembled a little before she put them behind her back and bowed her head. “I need to apologize for my previous behavior.”
Draco started to lift his wings and speak. Harry would be fooled by this because he needed the Greengrasses for his peace process, and—
But Harry only said, “I don’t see any reason that you can’t offer an apology in front of other people. I’m sure I can take it, and so can they.”
Daphne lifted her head and locked her eyes with Harry’s. Draco felt a moment of breathless hatred for her, and didn’t know whether the emotion would be as strong with anyone who wanted to claim Harry, or if it was especially strong here because Daphne had got close to Harry by pretending to be a purely political ally.
How dare you exploit the thing that matters most to him, you stupid, stupid…
But Draco choked back his natural reaction, though in most contexts the pure-bloods would have expected it and even encouraged it from him. He reminded himself that in this case, his mate was capable of defending himself, and he held back, if barely, hovering on the edge.
He shouldn’t have to defend himself. He deserves someone who will follow him around and cherish his every word and—
“You’re not sorry, are you?”
Harry’s voice was so weary. Draco blinked and looked at him, breaking his intense if one-sided staring contest with Daphne. That wasn’t the emotion he had expected to hear.
“I don’t know what you mean.” Daphne tilted her head and let her blond hair slide down her neck. Draco, who knew exactly how she was displaying herself to advantage because she used to do it in the Slytherin common room, nearly snarled himself to death.
Harry didn’t react to the sound. “You would have apologized,” he said. “Or given me a better reason for not wanting to speak in public. Even saying that it was embarrassing would have done.”
Daphne’s lips parted a little. Draco hoped, viciously, that she was blaming herself for not having thought of that tactic.
“But instead, you just stood there and waited for me to give in.” Harry shook his head. “It doesn’t matter. You’re like everyone else who has some kind of desire for me that uses me. No different than the rest. No worse.” He paused as if he was gathering his breath. “No better.”
Draco stood silent, staring at Harry’s back. He could hear Daphne spluttering a denial, but he was no longer interested in her. He only cared about Harry.
He doesn’t want to be wanted?
Maybe he doesn’t, when the people who want him to do one thing are just as likely to turn their backs on him next time. Maybe he isn’t used to being wanted for who he is, instead of what he can do.
“I never meant,” said Daphne.
“I know you didn’t,” said Harry, which almost made Draco snarl again. “But that’s what happened. Excuse me.” He brushed past her without touching and without a backward glance, and walked to the table.
Draco followed, both because he wanted to flap his wings and crow at Daphne’s dismissal and moving gave him something else to focus on, and because he could more easily lift his wings to shade Harry. Several people in the room had paid attention, after all, to their little scene.
One of them was Tamara Maundy.
I won’t let you hurt him. I won’t.
*
SP777: Harry might want something from Draco, too, but so far, he really doesn’t know what it is.
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Nature of the Beast