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The Marriage of True Minds	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 55083 -:- 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 Fifteen—Ringed

            “I think it for the best.”

            That was all his mother said when Draco told her at breakfast the next morning that he had decided to part from Astoria. Draco watched her smile over the cup of tea. It was faint, as faint as an echo stirred by running one’s finger around the rim of a wineglass, but there.

            Draco laid his toast down, untasted except by the fingers that had pulled it apart. He had forgone his usual breakfast in bed in the hopes that his mother would have some comfort to give him. He should have known better. His mother had looked too cold the day he told her about Astoria’s manipulations.

            “It does mean that I have to choose someone else,” he said. “Court someone else. It might be as long as two years before I could be married, given that rumors will spread among some of the eligible women because of what resulted from my engagement to Astoria.”

            Narcissa sat down her cup exactly in the middle of her saucer and shook her head. “You overestimate the anxiety Astoria will have to expose you. Those who matter know that the Malfoys do not break off a betrothal for no reason, and I can conceive of no lie that will not show her in a bad light as well.” She gave Draco a smile that was like light glinting off the crests of waves, and therefore not to be trusted. But Draco could not have braced himself enough for her next words. “Besides, what is this talk of marriage in a year, in two years? You are already married.”

            “You know why that bond doesn’t matter, can’t be allowed to matter,” Draco said. He realized that his finger had strayed to his ring, and forced it to lie flat on the table. “I have to find a wife.”

            “Draco.” His mother did nothing but look at him, her frown faint but present. Draco flinched and stared at the side of the silver sugar bowl until it vanished, called back to the kitchens by an elf.

            He felt like one of the small cringing greyhounds Pansy’s mother used to keep. And he couldn’t retort, because his mother’s behavior was justified. He glanced at the ring again, where the steel and the platinum gleamed.

            It was too late to pretend that the bond meant nothing, even if the ultimate end to this connection was hidden down a tunnel of impenetrable darkness. He couldn’t pull back. Neither could Harry. If steel and platinum shone there now, the bond had already altered, and would alter them further.

            He wanted to know what had caused the scars on Harry’s back. One did not have such curiosity about someone too small to be worth notice. Nor did one have it about an enemy, unless one intended to use the wounds as a weak point. And Draco knew he would never do that. He would, rather, conceal the scars from the world that would tear, ravening, into a new weakness in their favorite hero.

            But there still remained problems that it seemed to him his mother was willfully ignoring with her focus on the marriage bond. “What about children?” he whispered. “What about traditions?”

            “You should read more on traditions other than the courting ones,” his mother said, and stood. “The books that have occupied your hand and your mind and your shelves of late are exclusively related to that, are they not?”

            “You know they are,” Draco said, and leaned back in his chair so that he could keep his gaze squarely on his mother. “Have been.”

            Narcissa gave him a grave smile for choosing the appropriate tense and glided to the door. Draco watched her. He had often compared the way she walked to Astoria walking, sometimes faulting his chosen bride, sometimes thinking there was little to spare between them, but now he wondered less about his mother’s grace and more about the control she must exercise over her body in order to have it in the first place.

            “Then find others,” his mother said. “Think about who stands beside you, who behind, who in front of.” She gave him a more brilliant smile this time, a smile like sunlight that he could trust, and left the room.

            Beside, behind, in front of.

            It had been Harry several times so far for each, of course. Draco frowned and tilted his head to consider the problem from this new angle. Yes, he could see why his mother welcomed Harry into the family. He could see why she would recommend living with the inevitable for the moment. She would welcome peace and politeness over the tempests that might otherwise have resulted.

            But marriage to Harry as a permanent solution? She had hinted delicately at it just now, and Draco did not understand why. No matter what books he read, it was still true that Harry could give him no children, and that Malfoy traditions on the necessity of children carrying the name and blood were inflexible.

            But his mother would not recommend books simply to have him flip the pages and smell the ink. Draco rose to his feet. He could read the books in the library, and look at the names on his list of eligible pure-blood women in the same room.

*

            Harry closed his eyes and breathed as shallowly as he could. Breathing any deeper than that would draw in the scent of the blood-stink all around the edges of the room.

            They had thought they knew where Ness’s killer was keeping his next victim, and that he would wait to murder her because he needed a proper alignment of the stars to achieve the magical effect he wanted. He and Ron had moved as soon as they had proper backup and the notice of several scouts as to what the building looked like on the inside.

            It had turned out that the killer was practical enough not to care about star alignments when there were Aurors coming at him.

            Harry forced himself to open his eyes and look. Ever since the darkness, it had become necessary for him to bear witness. He hadn’t seen, then, the damage that the beast did to his body, or what he ate and drank, or even what ate him. He would see this.

            Another person had died, the way he could have, suffering in agony, the way he had. At least he had been lucky enough to escape.

            Harry shut down, hard, the thoughts that tried to squirm into his mind when he was reminded of his escape, and began to circle the edge of the mess that had once been a human being.

            Blood drew an enormous circle, dripping in thick, messy runnels around the edges of it, as though the killer had simply scooped it out of the body and thrown it. That had been exactly what happened, as far as they could tell, but then again, it was somewhat hard to know for certain. The air was filled with a strange blend of Dark magic and a spell that was meant to disguise the killer’s signature. So far, the furiously working team behind Harry hadn’t managed to isolate the curse that had finished the job.

            Thicker, more viscous fluids, from the organs and the eyes of the victim, lay studded along the blood-circle. Harry stared at a dark brown splotch for a long moment before realizing what it was, and why it smelled so bad. He turned his head away and breathed carefully through his nose as he called for Auror Wilkinson, the one of the team who knew the most about the ways magic blended.

            Wilkinson stepped up to his side a moment later, a tall woman with enough dark hair to make a bear feel envious and calm grey eyes. “Yes, Auror? What is it?”

            “The brown,” Harry said, and glanced into her face. Looking at her eyes, which surveyed the scene with sadness but no excessive horror, calmed him, he found. “We’re looking for a curse that must at least strangle its victim, if the way the bowels let loose was any indication.”

            Wilkinson made a soft noise of acknowledgment and nodded. “That narrows it down,” she said, and squeezed Harry’s shoulder for a moment. “Thank you, Auror.” She moved back to her task, saying something that made the rest of the team turn around and listen, as eager as dogs on the hunt.

            I wonder if I found her calming because her eyes look so much like Draco’s.

            Harry clenched his hands. He couldn’t think of Malfoy at a moment like this, when he was on the job and had to figure out more things as fast as possible so that more people wouldn’t get killed. He scraped the ring until his finger bled and used the small, sharp pain to focus.

            It didn’t matter how much it hurt to look at the blood. It couldn’t have hurt as much as living—dying—through it.

            If there was one thing Harry knew how to do, it was suffer and endure.

*

            Draco had taken both lunch and dinner in the library. That mattered less than it would have otherwise, because his father was sulking in his rooms and Harry hadn’t come home yet. His mother would understand that he didn’t want to leave the books, and that of course he would chew carefully enough that no crumbs or stains got on the pages.

            Draco closed the last book he’d read and stared at the fire.

            Well. Apparently the tradition that said every Malfoy forced marriage had worked out down the years with either the breaking of the bond or the snatched partner submitting to the family and having children was wrong after all.

            Or, at least, glossed the edge cases over.

            It had turned out that many of the forced marriages resulted in compound arrangements. The head of the family hadn’t yielded, which meant the bond had to endure. But in cases where the Malfoy heir had married either a man or a female partner utterly unwilling to bear him children, he had found a woman who would, and conducted certain rituals of inheritance before the conception to ensure that the child would be born legitimate.

            At least, legitimate according to the ancestral magic and the heirlooms, such as the Manor, that needed to be transferred from one proper heir to another. And that was the only kind of legitimacy Draco knew.

            It made sense when he thought about it. If there were rituals that could make someone born to the blood, like Lucius, an outcast in the eyes of the magic, there should be an opposite, balanced set of rituals that would bring someone who had a taint or stain on them—bastardy, being born outside the blood—into the family.

            Draco stared unseeing at the books. The compound arrangement and the inheritance of a child conceived outside the marriage bed was the most common story.

            The second most common was when the female partner had submitted or the head of the family had yielded and let the Malfoy heir marry someone willingly. But there was a third, which had occurred at least two times, and resulted in the birth of Draco’s own great-great-grandfather and at least one of his cousins.

            The third story let the other partner in the forced marriage conceive a child with someone else, with rituals of disinheritance performed before the conception—to take away the blood traits that the child would otherwise inherit from non-Malfoy parents—and rituals of acceptance and welcome performed afterwards. The child would be born Malfoy as truly as if it had come from Malfoy blood, Malfoy seed or womb.

            Draco rubbed the back of his hand across his mouth, feeling the scrape of his ring against his lips. The world was wilder and stranger than he had ever guessed, and he was beginning to understand how much his perception of Malfoy inheritance and traditions had been controlled by what his father allowed him to learn.

            If that was the case, if he had to go beyond the walls that his father’s fear had raised, the chains that his father’s will had laid on him—

            Then I will have to reconsider whether I want to disrupt the marriage bond.

            Draco laid his hands flat on his knees and stared into the fire. Conflicting impulses fought for control of him, a dusty, nasty battle that he always hated when it started. On the one hand, he had told Astoria that he wanted an equal partner, and Harry might well be that for him. And if the idea of children could be addressed as easily by looking to the traditions and creatively interpreting them, Draco might find answers there for his other problems with staying married to Harry as well.

            But on the other, he had also told Astoria that he wanted no one to have control of him. That remained true. He had tolerated it when he was a child, but as the head of the Malfoy line, he must have his independence, his ability to say no if that was what he wanted.

            And this marriage bond is a means of control.

            Draco looked down at the ring again. The steel shone like the silver, the platinum like the fire itself. Draco stared at them and soberly considered, for the first time, that the ring might already have acquired enough strength to be a permanent chain on them, whether or not he changed his mind about Harry’s qualities.

            Steel is one of the strongest bands, the book he had just been reading about forced marriages chattered away in the back of his head. The kinds of decisions that change destinies and lives are represented by steel.

            And Harry had taken the chance that he would become submissive to his father again away. Draco had the freedom to break off the betrothal to Astoria, to contemplate whether liberty or satisfaction meant more to him, to sit here dreaming of what life might be like with a more stubborn and independent spouse at his side.

            This is…strange.

            It was, and oddly enough, although it was his usual tactic, Draco didn’t think he would get far trying to reason through this by himself. He rose to his feet with a frown and went to find Harry.

*

            Harry ran his hands through his hair and stared at them again. Although he’d spent ten minutes in one of the less expensive downstairs bathrooms in the Manor, and the blood was entirely gone from around his knuckles and under his fingernails, he was sure that he could feel the stain.

            If he had moved faster, if he had known the killer was ruthless—he should have assumed that rather than just thinking that he would be the kind of mystical idiot it was easy to defeat—if he had set up wards that would prevent the specific kind of Dark magic the killer had worked with. (Except that they still didn’t know exactly what kind that was, although Auror Wilkinson and her team had worked over the site for hours). If, if, if.

            Harry roughly shook his head. He couldn’t keep on thinking like this. It was one of the first things they had taught him in the Aurors, that to spend too much time looking back and obsessing over one’s failures meant that you couldn’t study the future and prevent other failures. Ultimately, the dead could only be avenged; the living could be protected. That training had stood him in good stead when it came to forgetting and ignoring his missing three months.

            Harry stepped out of the bathroom and watched the softly glowing torches in the walls snuff out behind him. He shook his head again. “How much magic do they use to keep things like that going?” he muttered.

            “Less than I can tell you’ve used today.”

            Harry spun around. Draco was leaning on the wall outside the bathroom, watching him with a kind of motionless intensity that made Harry think about his mother and about Voldemort. Harry would have reached down and touched his wand, but that was a bit silly. He cleared his throat. “You can feel that I’ve used a lot of magic?” he asked, because it was usually only Ron, his partner, who could tell that.

            “Yes.” Draco held up his left hand, so the ring shone. “It’s one of the things that indicates the bond is tying us together more closely.”

            Harry nodded with a grimace. “Look, I’ve been thinking about that. I know it must have felt I was—avoiding you for the last few days, but it’s for the best. We have to try to get further apart, or the bond will change our emotions and our desires. I don’t want that to happen.”

            “Because you want to be free of the bond and to marry Weasley,” Draco said, in a voice that, for some reason, was flat.

            “Er, yes.” Harry pushed his hand through his hair again. He thought he would have preferred the venom that Draco usually showed when talking about the Weasleys to the hardness his eyes had taken on. And the way he looked, as though Harry had committed some massive betrayal by wanting to marry a woman. “So we should stay as far apart from each other as possible, right? Sorry for not telling you that last night, but you looked like you had a bad day and I didn’t want to interrupt.”

            “You saw me last night?” Draco’s eyebrows rose.

            “Er,” Harry said. “Shit.” He sighed. “Yeah, I did. When I came home, I saw you sitting there with a list of some kind in your hand, and I thought about coming in to talk, but—the bond, you know?” He shrugged.

            “No, I don’t know.” Draco’s voice had taken on a tone that was far too sweet. “The bond should have made you want to come closer to me, not keep away.”

            Harry winced. He’s going to make me sweat it. Well, maybe that was all he deserved, after ignoring him last night when he could have gone in and eased at least some of the pain Draco was feeling.

            But that was where he got confused, because shouldn’t he stay away from Draco? Wasn’t that the right thing to do, if he was going to work up to the magical challenge to the bond Hermione had talked about? If he was going to marry Ginny? If he was going to stop the pining Ron seemed to think she was doing in the meantime?

            Draco had moved, he saw when he looked up from the mental swirl consuming him. He stood right in front of Harry, and a deep, relaxed smile stretched his lips. His hand rested on the doorway of the bathroom, beside Harry’s head. He leaned in close, and Harry could see the depths of blue-grey in his eyes. He decided that he hadn’t been mistaken with his earlier thought, and that he had liked looking into Wilkinson’s eyes because they did remind him of Draco’s.

            “I don’t think you can do that,” Draco said. His voice was low, friendly, and comfortable. “I think you’re too compassionate and decent to stay away from me. Aren’t you.”

            “Damn it,” Harry said, and his confusion gave him strength to fold his arms and glare back at Draco. “What do you want? You ought to be cheering me on if you really want to be free of the bond.”

            “That’s the matter we have to deal with,” Draco said, and took his hand and turned it over. He didn’t lock their rings, but Harry saw a literal spark of magic leap between them. “I am no longer sure I want to.”

            “You’re mad,” Harry said, and pulled his hand free. Draco just watched him do it, patiently, as if to say that he could touch Harry again whenever he wanted to. “If you want to marry Astoria—”

            “I broke off my engagement with Astoria.”

            Harry stared at him. Draco raised his eyebrows and managed to look sorrowful and smug both at once, which convinced Harry the sorrow was feigned.

            “Like I said,” Harry repeated a minute later. “Mad.”

            “Astoria was trying to control me,” Draco said, utterly unruffled. He moved a step closer. Harry retreated a step in consequence, and clenched his teeth. He didn’t like looking like a coward, but staying close to Draco right now was the worse idea. “I don’t like people who do that.”

            “Then you shouldn’t like the marriage bond,” Harry retorted smartly, “since your father set it up to control you. You should join me in breaking free of it as soon as we can.”

            Draco shrugged. “It’s true that was his original purpose, but I doubt that the bond is functioning the way he wanted it to anymore. The steel is significant, Harry. My whole life would have changed, been different, if you hadn’t interfered in the Heart-Holding Curse. That’s what it means.”

            “But can you know that you want to change your life again?” Harry asked, half-desperate, since Draco wasn’t smiling now and didn’t seem inclined to step away, either physically or from his demands. “Can you know that you want to spend it with me?”

            “That’s why I’d like to talk to you,” Draco said. “There are possibilities for having children that I hadn’t known until I read some of the books. There are ways and ways of living with this bond, and I don’t think the one we’ve been pursuing so far is the best one.” He lowered his voice, until it was a whisper that Harry had to lean in to hear. “And my mother thinks you a better choice than Astoria. That weighs a lot with me.”

            Harry shook his head with a frown. “It doesn’t change my mind, or make me less willing to marry Ginny.”

            “That must be nice,” Draco said.

            “What must be?” Harry had already learned to be wary whenever Draco’s eyes acquired silver sparks like that.

            “To never have doubts. To be utterly and absolutely sure that the woman you’ve decided to marry is the only one for you.”

            Harry rolled his eyes. “Of course I have some doubts. Sometimes.”

            “You know,” Draco said, in a calm tone, “I’ve heard you refer a lot to Ginny Weasley as the woman you want to marry.”

            “So? It’s true.”

            “You almost never refer to her as the woman you love.”

            Harry narrowed his eyes, but he didn’t think it concealed the way the bottom dropped out of his stomach, and from the way Draco narrowed his eyes back, he doubted it did for Draco, either. Draco held out an arm and let the steel of their rings shine side by side.

            “This marks an alteration,” Draco said. His voice had changed again, but Harry was utterly unable to define the emotion that filled it this time. “I don’t blame you for not knowing the symbolism, or not entirely understanding it.” Harry indignantly opened his mouth to complain that he would understand if the Malfoys would just explain themselves better, but Draco overrode him. “But even you know that you’re feeling more pity and understanding and anxiety for my happiness towards me than you used to. For Merlin’s sake, you were worried about what punishment I gave my father because you were worried about the effect on me.” Draco’s eyes met his; Draco’s hand clamped on my shoulder. “If you don’t think the same way I’m starting to about the bond, you know we should at least talk.”

            That was what got to him, Harry thought later, the way Draco used we instead of I and you in demands. He sighed and nodded, mind flickering over the guilt he’d felt about avoiding Draco last night, the way he had looked at Wilkinson’s eyes, the steel in the ring.

            “All right. Fine. Just remember that you may not convince me.”

            “I look forward to trying,” Draco said, with a dazzling smile, and turned around to lead the way.

*

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The Marriage of True Minds