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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.

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Chapter Sixteen—Party Politics

            Harry took one more second to adjust his dress robes in front of the mirror that Ossy had conjured for him, and then nodded. It was less than perfect. He still thought the robes, which were green, brought out too much of the colors in his eyes and made him look as though he’d just been startled by a mouse.

            But it was the color that Ossy insisted was right for him, and Harry knew something about politics, as he had showed Draco the other day. That meant he knew when to appease a house-elf and agree that something was perfect.

            “Right,” he said, flicking at the lace around the cuffs of his sleeves. At least Ossy had agreed that lace longer than the restrained kind Harry wore right now would probably droop in his wine and get in the way of making a good impression rather than add to it, so Harry could actually see his wrists. “We shouldn’t be long.”

            Then he stopped, blinking, as it occurred to him that he was trying to reassure a house-elf like it was his child. He shook his head and met Ossy’s eyes as Ossy lowered the mirror and peered at him.

            “Master Harry is being successful,” he said, and Harry knew that Ossy would have turned those words into a prophecy like the one that had made him meet Voldemort if he could.

            “Right,” Harry said, and nodded and smiled back at him, and waited until Ossy vanished to do something else before he shut his eyes and shook his head. Merlin, his life had changed in the course of a few strange days.

            He adjusted the hang of the lace again, and opened the door. Draco had said that he would meet Harry at the head of the grand staircase, even though they had no one to impress this time by sweeping down it. Affy and Ossy would both watch Narcissa tonight, spelling each other as necessary, and Draco had mastered all the spells he was going to master, with Harry’s help.

            And Harry had read all the books that he had time for, and the reminders of manners clashed in his head like cymbals, until he felt as though he should walk gingerly to avoid spilling them all.

            Draco gave him a considering look when Harry came up beside him, and Harry did his best not to stare in defiance, to keep his gaze and the tilt of his head relaxed. Draco’s hand trembled as if he wanted to reach out and pluck at Harry’s sleeve, but he pulled his grasp back at the last moment. Looking ahead distantly, he nodded.

            “You’ll do.”

            “Thank Ossy, not me,” Harry said, and held out his hand so that he could take Draco’s arm for the sweep down the stairs, which he had read in one of the books he was supposed to do. Draco was the head of the family and the one who had welcomed Harry, not the other way around. So he led. It would be the same in the dances at the Ministry party, except Harry had no qualms about being led there, considering his lack of dancing skills.

            Draco gaped at him. Harry raised his eyebrows. “What?” he asked. “It’s true that I don’t know much about clothes.” The Ministry had given up on that in despair, too, and learned it was just better to let Hermione dress him.

            “But that you don’t care,” Draco whispered, and reached out to set his arm in place, as steady as any arm of a couch. “I keep being reminded of how different you are from the people I grew up around.”

            “I’ll become like them,” Harry said, walking down the stairs in step with Draco. “As much as I can be.”

            Draco only shook his head and said nothing. Harry assumed he was envisioning disastrous outcomes at the party if someone happened to ask Harry about fashion, and said nothing, too, all through the Flooing. At least having a firm grip on Draco’s arm meant he was less likely to fall when he alighted.

*

            He really doesn’t care about looking nice, or about money. At all.

            Draco shook his head slowly as he escorted Harry through the Atrium, up to the lifts and the Ministry Department on the third floor that would have been transformed for this party. Of course he knew that Harry didn’t care about those things. His own surprise disgusted him.

            But it still surprised him that Harry didn’t care about developing some sort of sensibility for it. All right, so he didn’t want to attend the Ministry parties, and couldn’t care less about pure-blood goodwill until Draco had demanded his presence in the demi-marriage. But he could use the knowledge to fit in with the pure-blood criminals he hunted. Did his job not matter to him, either?

            Draco’s lips firmed.

            Not that being an Auror would be Harry’s job much longer—it was too dangerous for the Malfoy heir to be on the receiving end of curses. But Draco had yet to talk to him about that, either.

            He walked Harry briskly off the lift and into the middle of the swirling party, ignoring the people who turned to look at them when their names were announced. It was the people who turned to stare when they passed that mattered, the ones who heard Harry Malfoy and didn’t immediately connect it with Harry Potter.

            The ones who might not have heard the news yet, or who had thought it was a joke.

            Draco could see their eyes: stiffening Aurors, pure-blood wizards who had chosen the side of the Ministry rather than their own social circles after the war, high-ranking minions of other Departments. All of them stared in silence, and all of them knew some of the currents that would be set stirring anew, now that Harry Potter walked at Draco’s side and wore a different name. None of them would welcome the jouncing of what had been a familiar and comfortable world as long as they were dealing with the Boy-Who-Lived.

            You don’t get to deal with him now. Draco realized there was a pleasure all its own in confounding expectations like this, one he hadn’t been able to afford when he was still a Malfoy in peril dealing with a Ministry that had little reason to tolerate him. But all the reason he could want was walking at his side, utterly oblivious of the way most of the power in this room could rotate around him if he tried.

            Then Draco saw the way Harry looked at one of the women who had come simpering up to them to offer congratulations on their wedding, and revised his estimate again.

            Not oblivious. He truly doesn’t care.

            Draco shook his head. Harry should start caring. That carelessness had worked so far because the scar on his forehead and the killing he’d done gave him a power that no one else could touch. Easy enough for the eagle not to care about the land he was flying over when no one had the power to clip his wings.

            But the witch trying to babble to them had already seen Harry’s changed scar, and Draco saw both her paling face and her avid stare. She retreated almost at once to a group of women that included Pansy Parkinson’s mother, and began whispering. Draco saw them turn their heads all at once, coordinated like a pride of lionesses hunting.

            Harry turned his head and showed his teeth. The glamour they had chosen kept his face from showing more emotion than that, though this close, Draco could see beneath it and make out the tightly-reined disgust.

            He knows. Sometimes, he knows.

            Maybe, then, Draco thought, as he accepted a glass of champagne from one of the circulating servants and nodded pleasantly to Blaise Zabini as he stepped up to them, it was less a matter of teaching Harry new things than teaching him to care. And Draco could learn to do that, could learn what Harry wanted and give it to him.

            I’m a Malfoy. There’s nothing I can’t have, if I want it. Time to remind Harry of that, too.

*

            Harry nodded to the man who had approached them, a handsome black man with bright, inquiring eyes who looked first at Draco, and then at him, as if Harry was unimportant next to Draco. Well, if the man was the boy from Slytherin that Harry half-remembered, that made sense. The man had been friends with Draco in Hogwarts, when Harry was mostly some annoying kid who inconvenienced the Dark Lord every now and then.

            “Blaise Zabini,” Draco said, turning to present the man to Harry with his hand on Zabini’s wrist and his other hand resting, still lightly but pressing down harder than it had, on Harry’s arm. Harry nodded. They had discussed signals like this before they came. This particular one meant it was a genuine introduction, and Harry was to behave himself, instead of taunting one of Draco’s political enemies.

            One of my political enemies, now, too, if they hate everyone who wears the name of Malfoy.

            Zabini let his eyebrows creep up as he shook Harry’s hand. Harry stared back in a calm, controlled way. If Zabini was that close to Draco, he probably either knew or guessed the truth of the demi-marriage. Harry didn’t care about hiding from him.

            Maybe he wasn’t as close as Harry had thought, though, because after the handshake, Zabini stepped back and bowed to Draco. “Never let me say that my desire does not endure,” he murmured, and walked away.

            Draco went still beside Harry. Harry leaned against him and sipped from his glass of champagne, giving a loud and fake laugh for the benefit of anyone watching when Draco glared at him. “Why did he say that?” he murmured, with his mouth concealed by the rim of the glass.

            Draco shook his head. “It’s a quotation from a poet that Blaise used to be fond of. But he used to say it when he lost a chess game. He meant he would always want to win, even if he was playing me or Pansy. Now…I don’t know.”

            Harry shrugged. Maybe Zabini was part of whatever hidden game existed against the Malfoys, but he didn’t think so. Probably they had blocked some political plan of his, or future plan of his, by the demi-marriage. Pure-bloods seemed to have all sorts of things like that, and it just had to be lived with.

            “Do you want to dance?” he asked Draco, pitching his voice loud enough for everyone to hear, while he took the glass away from Draco and put it on a table nearby. Another man who’d been aiming to set his drink down there glared in outrage. Harry gave him the kind of scowl he practiced on criminals who wouldn’t confess, and the man hastily retreated.

            “There isn’t much space,” Draco said, looking ahead down the center of the room

            Harry looked, too. Ordinarily, this must be a fairly large meeting room, but they had moved out all the tables, chairs, and maybe desks and cubicles, that normally occupied it. A glamour of blue and white occupied the walls, and clouds of shifting shapes drifted by, now and then suggesting fish in the sea, now actual clouds in the heavens. There was a narrow strip of uncarpeted floor that they could use to dance, but most of the space was filled with chattering clumps of people, loud laughter, and their waving arms and glasses that seemed to need their own personal boundaries.

            “I know,” Harry said, and took his hand. “We don’t need much space for the kind of dancing I have in mind.”

            That got heads turning. Good. They hadn’t discussed this part of the evening, since Draco would respond more naturally if he didn’t know exactly what Harry intended.

            Draco glared at him, sure enough, and stepped like a nervous gazelle when Harry reached for him. “What do you mean?”

            God, he really was high-strung, Harry thought, watching him, watching his pulse flutter and the flame in him seem to blast and blaze through his eyes. But beautiful, in a way.

            Well. Beautiful in that I know he can be more than this, that he can survive a war that terrifies him, and being the Dark Lord’s torturer, and I want to help him be more than that boy was.

            “This,” Harry said, and took Draco in his arms, pacing forwards so that they were in the middle of the cleared space. It got bigger fast, as other people pressed themselves up against the walls to avoid bumping into them. Harry looked at avid eyes and flushed faces, and sneered. He was sure that these other people probably didn’t want to sully themselves by touching a Savior who had married a Malfoy, or else by touching someone who was descended from a Muggleborn, but they wouldn’t go elsewhere and not watch. That told him everything about them he needed to know.

            “Like this,” Harry whispered to Draco, staring into his eyes, willing him to remember what they had agreed on. They were quarreling, of course. So Draco could break away after a while, and show everyone how disgusted Harry’s touch made him. Harry kept his arms wrapped around Draco’s waist and closed his eyes, hiding from his own embarrassment by not meeting those gazes.

            They swayed, to no music. Harry kept his hands still, though, remembering the way Draco had reacted the last time Harry tried to touch him below the waist. He leaned in, and smelled Draco’s hair, and tried to act like a lover afraid of being rejected.

            It was—hard to act that way. Since the war, he’d had all too many people eager to show him that they wanted him. He could have them for the taking.

            But he didn’t want any of them. He felt Draco tensing in his arms, and wondered if Draco was in the same position.

            I’m sorry, Harry tried to say, by slowing the “dance” a little and stepping further away so that Draco could break the hold more easily. They had agreed on this, though, that Harry would act like someone trying to make the best of his unexpected marriage—the way that other people would expect him to act, in fact—and Draco would be the one to push him away. That would give the prejudiced people someone to approach, as they tried to commiserate with Draco over marrying a Mudblood, and the people who hated Malfoys a chance to approach Harry and try to lure him into “revenge” plots against Draco.

            Somewhere in the middle of those two groups, Harry thought, they would find their enemy.

            But Draco appeared to have lost track of their plan. He just stood there, matching Harry’s movements, with his eyes shut and his cheeks flushed. Harry gazed down at him in bewilderment, and decided to try the tactic that had worked once before. He slid his hand down, and cupped Draco’s arse.

*

            This near, Draco could feel something he had not felt before, something he hadn’t taken into account during their plans. Of course, he had been in close quarters with Harry for days, and he should have been able to feel it before now if he was going to.

            Harry’s magic.

            It was there, burning beneath the surface of his skin, but not tangible above it. Draco had felt it before, from powerful wizards like the Dark Lord, from several feet away. So that meant Harry wasn’t as strong as he had thought.

            Draco tried to use those thoughts the way he would have used them before this, to tell himself that he had done wrong with the demi-marriage after all, in marrying someone who wasn’t as strong as his family would need. But when he was this close, and concentrating on Harry instead of the exquisite humiliation of trying to teach him to dance…

            The magic wasn’t the strongest he had ever felt, but it was the most comforting.

            Draco closed his eyes so that he couldn’t see the expression on Harry’s face, but that only made his father’s face, the expression he would wear if he could hear Draco saying that, float into prominence. Malfoys had comfort, of course they did, the best food and the softest beds and wards that would protect them from any and all enemies, so what did they need of comfort from a Mudblood’s magic?

            But it was there, the warmth beneath his cheek, blazing and shifting, restrained as a hearthfire built by Ossy. Harry could have lashed out with that magic if he wanted to, could have made it sharp and spiky and hard to manage, but he hadn’t, and Draco knew what that implied about Harry’s thoughts concerning him, as well.

            Harry wanted to protect him.

            And he was touching Draco’s arse.

            Draco’s hands clenched down into cloth and skin and flesh at the thought—he felt Harry wince—and then he spun away from him and glared at him.

            Harry’s eyebrows rose for a moment, but then he seemed to remember the plan they were there to enact, the plan that Draco had let himself shamefully forget up to now. He nodded and turned his back, his arms folded and his spine so stiff that Draco thought for a moment he would break his shoulder blades.

            “Fine,” Harry said, as though responding to a conversation too soft-voiced for the others to make out. “If you want to be that way.” And he stalked off in the direction of the drinks table, his heels audibly striking the floor.

            Draco stood there for a moment, his face flaming. For all that they had planned it, or Harry thought they had, it was uncomfortable to be the target of so many gazes.

            Then the first people started coming forwards, Blaise among them, and pressing champagne into his hands, and murmuring gentle, understanding words about how hard it must be to be married to a Mudblood, and Draco remembered his part and smiled bravely at them, lifting the champagne to his lips.

*

            Harry stared down at the drink in his hands without seeing it. Someone had offered him a plate of food, but Harry had curtly refused. He would probably fling it at someone if he held it, or at least drop it all over his robes and embarrass himself, and that wasn’t the kind of embarrassment he wanted to project.

            Damn, Draco.

            Harry had been watching Draco’s face at the end. Not hard to do, when Draco hadn’t reacted the way he was supposed to and Harry had started worrying that someone had drugged or enchanted him into a state of non-responsiveness without Harry noticing.

            His lips had been parted, the flush on his cheeks as gentle as Harry had seen it during the demi-wedding ceremony. His hands had curled into Harry’s shirt without gripping, reminding Harry of the way that victims he managed to rescue sometimes nestled close to Harry when he freed them.

            And then his sudden, violent reaction.

            Harry shrugged. Probably, Draco had been lulled by the dancing into a bit of forgetfulness, and had reacted out of genuine embarrassment at the end. Harry wouldn’t have done that, but he and Draco weren’t the same person.

            I wouldn’t want to be.

            He paused with the glass’s rim resting against his lips. No, he wouldn’t want to be Draco, but he hadn’t thought that because he disdained the pure-blood Malfoys and all they stood for, as he ordinarily would. He had thought that because—

            “That was vicious.”

            Harry put the thought away in a safe place for later and turned around. Behind him was a tall, stately witch with a face that looked mildly familiar. She smiled a little and said, “Angelina Bulstrode.”

            Right. Millicent’s mother. Harry remembered that Draco said she had married a Squib, or a Muggleborn—one of the two. He wondered if she was resentful enough of the Malfoys to want to destroy them.

            “The way I danced with him?” Harry nodded to her. “Perhaps I should accept that as a compliment, but I find it hard to do.” He didn’t think he needed to work to put bewilderment and anger in his voice.

            Bulstrode laughed softly, and moved a step closer. There was a necklace of pearls gleaming above her dress, and Harry found himself looking at it instead of into her eyes. Her gaze had a peculiar, penetrating sharpness to it, and he was sure that she was a Legilimens. He’d had enough of his thoughts being read.

            “No,” she said. “The way he pushed you away. He certainly seemed to be enjoying himself up until then.” She cocked her head and examined him from head to foot, as though expecting some flaw hidden under his clothes. “What do you think prompted that?”

            “I could tell you,” Harry said, with a negligent little gesture of his hand that he tried to exaggerate so she would think he was more drunk than he really was, “but you wouldn’t believe me.”

            “I would find it hard not to believe anything you tell me.”

            The declaration sounded bald and loud and sympathetic. Harry reminded himself that it wasn’t, and stopped his jaw from dropping open before he could gape at her.

            Instead, he gave a little snort and turned away, nursing his drink. “I bet you say that,” he muttered, “but you don’t mean it.”

            Bulstrode put a hand on his arm, and Harry had to stop himself from flinching. She was a Legilimens, yes, but that was no reason for her hand to feel sharper and more piercing than an ordinary touch, too. It wasn’t as though she even had very long nails. “I meant what I said,” she said, voice lowered and words a little more serious. “Whatever you told me, I would believe. I have known the Malfoys for a very long time, and they are an—uncomfortable family to be around.”

            “Then I would be uncomfortable for you, too,” Harry replied gently, pulling away. “Because I’m part of the family now.”

            Bulstrode’s mouth fell open, and she stared at him as if she couldn’t believe what he was saying. “But surely—you don’t mean—”

            “I do mean,” Harry said, bowing to her, a little amused that she couldn’t seem to stop silently spluttering. “I was forced to take the name Malfoy when I married into the family, and thus I’m among your acquaintances now.” He paused, staring at her, hoping the glamour would aid his features in forming the proper mask. “Or am I among your enemies?”

            “Of course not.” Bulstrode took a step back, and then seemed to calm. Her prickling hand came to rest on her pearl necklace instead. “Excuse me,” she added. “I remembered something that I wanted to do.” And she turned away and faded back into the party with none of the ease she’d used to approach him.

            Harry glanced around, but it seemed as though no one else wanted to come up to him right now, either. He sipped more at his wine and wondered where Draco was. He couldn’t see him mingling, supposedly the most important thing at these parties.

*

            Draco leaned against the sink in the bathroom and shut his eyes. He felt as though his secret was painted on his forehead for anyone to see, in blazing letters that would glow in the night like that awful paint one of his ancestors had used in his mother’s rooms.

            But what secret?

            That I like Harry’s magic, that I find him comfortable?

            Draco shuddered a little. Well, at a party like this, when they were trying to pull off the impression that they were quarreling, something like that could well be a problem, yes.

            He reached up to smooth his hair, and caught a glimpse of a blurred shadow in the mirror a moment before someone stabbed him in the back.

*

            unneeded: Both of them do have preconceptions, yes.

            But as for plans, they've probably just been thrown out the window.

            polka dot: Draco might.
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The Name I'll Give to Thee