Adult-FanFiction.org : Harry Potter

The Marriage of True Minds	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 55101 -:- Recommendations : 2 -:- Currently Reading : 2
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter, and I am making no money from this story.

Chapter List
- 16
- 17
- 18
Thank you again for all the reviews!

Chapter Seventeen—Divisions Written in Blood

            “God.” Ron’s voice was low and uncertain. “I’ve never seen him this bad.”

            Harry smiled to himself. The smile wasn’t particularly humorous, but then again, Ron couldn’t see it; he had his back turned to speak into the Floo connection, and Harry was bent over his desk, looking at the notes that had come back from Wilkinson’s team.

            You only think that you’ve never seen me this bad because you weren’t there in the first moments after I escaped the beast.

            But thinking about that escape wasn’t good for either him or anyone else in the immediate vicinity, so Harry turned his mind and his focus back to the notes. Ron continued to speak to Hermione in hushed tones. Harry didn’t mind that. A conversation he couldn’t listen in on was better for his concentration, anyway.

            “No,” Ron said. “No, I don’t think so.” Then he paused and sighed. “Yes, I’ll ask him, but you know how he gets on cases like this, Hermione.”

            That told Harry what would happen long before Ron shut down the Floo connection and came over to tap him on the shoulder. By then, though, he was deep in consideration of what it might mean that the blood from the Ness crime scene, as well as from the latest murder, was arranged with long fingers reaching outside the standard magical circle. They had all assumed that the formation of that kind of symbol at the last murder was an accident, that the killer had hurried through his preparations and hadn’t managed to complete them all when the Aurors attacked. But Harry was starting to think that they’d been fools, as they sometimes were. The photographs were simply too similar.

            “Mate,” Ron murmured. “What do you say we get out of here and go home to have dinner? Not the Burrow, I think it’d be too noisy, but Hermione would like to see you. She might even have some insight on the case,” he added brightly, playing his best hand.

            Harry smiled at him. “I appreciate it, but I need to spend some time with the Malfoys tonight.” Ron pulled a face. Harry rolled his eyes back. “Yeah, I know, but otherwise the bond will start pulling at me and probably hurt me. I can’t afford the time that I would lose when I was recovering from that.”

            “You have plenty of time to eat some dinner with us and then go back to the Manor later.” Ron cocked his head as though he didn’t understand.

            Harry waited a minute, but Ron didn’t back off or look away and nod, the way he would have if he was silently conceding what both of them knew to be true. That meant an argument. Harry sighed and braced himself. “Ron. You know as well as I do that I plan to stay here and keep working on the case until the last possible second before I have to go home—”

            Ron cleared his throat gently.

            Harry nodded. “Sorry. Until I have to go back to the Manor. I can eat here. You know that I bring along sandwiches sometimes, and I’ve got a lot better with my Preserving Charms since that time I left a cheese sandwich in your desk for a week.”

            Ron snickered in spite of himself. “There was a new lifeform growing on it by the time we found it, mate. Even the Unspeakables hadn’t seen anything like that before.” Then, just as Harry was hoping that he would be distracted along the happier path of amusement, he sobered up and shook his head. “You know that I can’t just leave you here, mate. Hermione would have my head.”

            “I have to work on this.”

            Ron leaned back on the wall, grinning at Harry slightly. Harry ground his teeth. When Ron got like that, he could argue for hours and show no sign of tiring. Harry thought it was the worst of the bad habits he had got from Hermione. “How do you know that you’re going to be the one who solves it? It could just as easily be some other Auror, don’t you think?”

            “If no one works on it, then of course it’s not going to get solved,” Harry said. “I want to find out who this bastard is, before he kills again.”

            “But it doesn’t have to be you who finds that out.”

            Harry half-closed his eyes and reminded himself that Ron was a good Auror, one of the best. If he hadn’t been, then he would have given up on the career long ago, because he had the extra problems that being the notorious Harry Potter’s partner brought along as well as the normal load of cases and nightmares from the cases, and those people who thought they could get to him because he was Harry’s friend. Not to mention what he had put up with after Harry came back from the darkness.

            But that didn’t mean that he was right. Harry was also a good Auror, and he was the one who often woke up in the middle of the night with the pieces in his head connecting just right, the one who would have the final insight needed to finish the case.

            “I can’t,” he said. “I want to, Ron. But this—this is deliberate. I don’t think that what he did with that last victim was an accident. It was deliberate, the patterning of the blood, and the spells that Wilkinson and her team located at the scene—”

            “They still don’t think that they identified the magical signature,” Ron interrupted, as if he had thought Harry would miss that fact in his report.

            Harry slashed his head down. “I know. I was talking about the other spells. Do you know what she must have suffered as she died, Ron? I know a little of that kind of pain.” He softened his voice when he saw the way his friend was staring at him. “I promise that I won’t go off without backup, and I’ll tell you when I’m getting close to solving it. But the last time, we obeyed the rules, and we cost her her life. If we had moved faster, or at least more silently, we could have saved her.”

            “And maybe got ourselves killed, too,” Ron muttered, but Harry could see that the words had shaken him. He hesitated. “I can’t work the way you do, Harry. I need my distance from the case,” he said, almost defensively.

            Harry smiled gently at him. “And you think I would despise you for that?”

            “I just meant that I have to go home and have dinner, and not just because I’d upset Hermione if I don’t.” Ron glanced away. “I’m no good to you like this.”

            Harry pressed Ron’s shoulder. “I know. Go and do what you need to do. I’ll be all right.”

            “That’s what you said on the Ammar case,” Ron muttered, but he squeezed back and stepped towards the fireplace. It wasn’t everyone who got a private fireplace in their own office, but Harry had insisted on one after the darkness, both as a source of light and as a back door to escape through if the wizards who had kidnapped him came after him again. Ron picked up a pinch of Floo powder, then hesitated one more time.

            “I’ll go to bed at a reasonable time, contact you if I come up with anything, and eat all the sandwiches,” Harry said promptly.

            Ron grinned then, although it didn’t reach his eyes, and left. Harry turned and bent over the notes once again.

            Only the last part of his statement to Ron had been a lie. He wasn’t troubled by much that he saw at the crimes scenes anymore, but the thought of eating when this much blood was spread around, and deliberately…

            It would have felt like mocking the victim’s last moments on this earth, and that was something Harry never did, at least not willingly or knowingly.

            He fell smoothly back into the mental motions that made the most sense to him, worming out the answers and tracking them down to conclusions that the other Aurors would actually listen to. He couldn’t expect them to be in his head or his soul, and listen to the “feelings” that were often all he started with.

*

            “Where is Harry, dear?”

            Draco looked up swiftly from the meal of stuffed and roasted swan in front of him, opening his mouth to ask why his mother thought he would know the answer to that question, if she didn’t.

            Then he saw the even way she was looking at him, and shut his mouth with a little grimace. Right. She would think that he knew because she wasn’t stupid.

            “I don’t know,” he admitted, and he hated having to say it. “I had a talk with him last night that I hoped would clear up matters between us, and at least make him consider remaining in the marriage.” He shifted a piece of the swan’s breast around on the plate with his fork, keeping his head bowed. He also hated thinking about the feeling of helplessness that had come over him at the end of that conversation.

            “Draco?”

            “It’s just—he wouldn’t even consider it, Mother,” Draco whispered. “Do you think I’m that unattractive? That incapable of winning someone’s attention, of holding it?”

            Narcissa laughed quietly. “Draco. That sounds similar to the whining that you did when you were a student, saying that you were stupid and would never understand Arithmancy. You either wanted me to do your homework for you or you wanted to be reassured that you were intelligent. At no time did you ever believe what you said.”

            Draco winced. There were disadvantages to living with someone who had known you from the time you were in nappies. He wondered if Harry ever found not having parents to be an advantage.

            Then he thrust the idea impatiently aside and leaned forwards so that he could meet his mother’s eyes. “Why did Harry decide that he was incapable of staying with me, then?”

            “What were his objections?” His mother leaned back with a glass of some watery, cool drink in her hand, as committed to thinking about this objectively as she was with everything else.

            Draco grimaced, but he was the one who had begun the subject. “That he wanted to marry and have children, not just have children outside of marriage. That he wanted to live with someone he could love. That he didn’t feel enough for me to preserve the relationship of marriage, and that he had—that he couldn’t think of it as a business negotiation, the way that I tried to open it.”

            “Those are legitimate objections,” Narcissa said.

            Draco shook his head. “Then why did you send me to look up the traditions about forced marriages yesterday? I thought what you wanted me to see was that there was more than one way of having children, and that I should remember that rather than thinking that I needed to marry a pure-blood wife to make it happen.”

            His mother sighed a little. “That is the first of many steps, many reasons, that might make Harry accept this bond in the end, Draco. But did you honestly think that things would be settled so easily? I grant that Harry is more reasonable on the subject of the bond than I thought to find him, but that is a long way from thinking as we do about it.”

            “I tried to explain about the steel. I don’t think he got that, either. He said that he made decisions like that all the time, and that he’d saved my life so often that the platinum band didn’t impress him, either.”

            His mother inclined her head, hair shining like a glacier around her. “Then you must find some other way to court him.”

            “What, for God’s sake?” Draco shook his head and leaned back with his own drink. As he watched moodily, the house-elves vanished the uneaten swan—the majority of it—from his plate. “I’ve offered him everything I can think of, all I have to offer.”

            Narcissa smiled at him then, and Draco caught his breath, because there was such sunlight in her smile as he had never seen before, and simply being near it warmed him. “Oh, Draco, I don’t believe that. If my son offered everything he was and had and was capable of being to any marriage partner, even Harry Potter, they would fall down for him.”

            Draco couldn’t help the smile that crept over his face in return. “All right, all right,” he said. “I might have made a mistake in my choice of words. But, Mother, I honestly don’t see what else I can do.”

            His mother stood up and came to his end of the table. Draco hadn’t had the chance to react and rise out of courtesy when she kissed his cheek.

            “You lead the family by example,” she said. “Lead Harry to us in the same way. Act as normally as you can. Speak to him about the marriage bond when you need to. Accept his help when he wants to give it, and offer yours when it seems as if he could use it. Show him that you are what he can desire.”

            Draco considered. His mother was right, of course, he thought, his heart already slowing from its frustrated speed. Of course he could offer his good qualities up on a silver platter without trying; his very existence in the last few years had embodied the Malfoy family traditions, the best and strongest of them. And of course Harry would have no choice but to be drawn to him when he saw Draco like that.

            Draco knew now that he would gain nothing from direct competition with Ginny Weasley, because Harry refused to judge such a competition fairly. His early prejudice in favor of the Weasleys would prejudice, as well, all the attempts that Draco might make to detach Harry from them.

            No, he would be himself as hard as he could. And if that did not win Harry, then Harry was worth less than Draco had thought he was.

            He looked up, about to thank his mother, and paused. Narcissa was smiling at him, of course, but there was an extra brightness in her eyes that he would have said could only really come from smugness.

            “Are you all right?” he asked warily.

            “Of course.” Narcissa raised an eyebrow at him, a graceful motion of the kind that had made Draco feel ashamed as a child, whether he really had done something wrong by the code his parents taught him or not. It had the same effect now. “I am speaking to my son about my son-in-law. Why would I not be?”

            “Of course,” Draco repeated back, and then left the room, stifling the temptation to look over his shoulder. He could believe many things of his mother, but not that she would betray him. She always acted for the good of the family.

            He returned to the library and began to work through the list of names that Harry had offered to help him choose a bride from, marking small notes beside them to divide them into categories. That would be useful both for Harry’s information about them and for Draco’s own, in case this never worked out for him.

            He became absorbed in his work when he thought about doing it for its own sake, and the sharp chime of the clock from the mantle caught him by surprise. Draco leaned back and stared at it, a silver bird soaring in back-and-forth flight across a background of stars, and realized then that it was midnight.

            And Harry had not come home.

*

            There. There it was. It had to be.

            Harry leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. The images were blurring and dancing in front of them by now; he’d spent too many hours staring at both photographs and sheets of paper covered with writing. His head hurt. He waited until the ache had stopped, and then a little more. He would make no mistakes about this.

            When he looked again, though, he saw that he had been right, and clapped his hands softly in front of him.

            The blood patterns in the circle had fooled Auror Wikinson’s team, first because they had assumed the splatters were random, and second because the automatic tests they had run to see if the circles could be composed of common runes had found nothing. Neither had Harry, when he looked through the books of the well-known patterns. But he knew he had seen something, and so he kept patiently, doggedly, hunting.

            Now he knew. The pattern wasn’t a series of runes, and it wasn’t even one great rune, as Harry had thought. It was that last insight which had led him to the answer, but it wasn’t right in and of itself.

            The circle of blood and thicker fluids, including what Ron tended to call “belly Jelly” when there was no one around to stop him, was made of two runes, superimposed over one another.

            Harry smiled, though he was well-aware that the smile was more like a snarl. The first rune, the base, was the one that summoned a creature and got its attention. The second was the binding, turned just a little north of true so that it was even more difficult to recognize than simply sketching it in blood and putting in on top of the summoning rune had made it.

            The summoning was for a magical creature. Harry had seen it often before. Any number of people who worked with magical creatures often carried it carved on tokens or about their necks, as extra protection against the beasts or beings they were trying to communicate with, register, or keep under control.

            But the binding….

            The binding was for a ghost.

            That made him wonder what in the world it could mean. Did the killer intend to summon the ghost of a magical creature? To bind people’s spirits into magical creature bodies? To somehow mingle ghost and living flesh?

            Harry shuddered as he thought about that last part. He could easily imagine the creatures created becoming worse than Inferi if that happened.

            He rubbed his eyes and yawned. His stomach rumbled. Harry frowned and touched it for a second. Hadn’t he eaten, and just an hour or so ago? He could have sworn that he had. Perhaps he was just more hungry than usual since his mind had been working so hard.

            Then he drew out the watch that Mrs. Weasley had given him for his seventeenth birthday and realized it was nearly midnight.

            Harry started to his feet, the tatters of tiredness blowing away, along with his determination to figure out what the runes did before he left. How much time was it necessary to spend in the Manor tonight? He could already have started hurting Draco as the bond reacted to his absence from the family home. Sure, he wasn’t feeling pain yet, but Draco seemed more devoted to the bond than he did (not to mention more committed to letting it control his life). It might affect them differently.

            Harry scribbled a few notes about the runes and marked the pages in the book he’d been using where they could be found, then tossed the file on Ron’s desk and set out briskly for the lifts. He winced as he ran, wondering if Draco or Narcissa had been worried when they found out that he hadn’t come home yet. He could have sent them an owl explaining where he was, at least.

            Yes, if you had thought of it. And you’re not supposed to be thinking of it. You’re supposed to be thinking of your job, the way that you were all this afternoon. Loyalty to him is treachery to Ginny, and you know it.

            Harry cursed under his breath as he jumped into the nearest lift and jabbed a button. Yes, he wanted to marry Ginny. He was more certain of that every time he thought about Draco’s complete lack of understanding that Harry wanted love in his marriage.

            But that didn’t mean that he wanted to hurt Draco, either. What he couldn’t live with for long was this sensation that he was caught and struggling between different actions, both of them equally valuable to different people. As he had told Draco, he could never have a spouse and a girlfriend on the side, the mother of his children. He wanted to marry the mother of his children.

            Such a mess, Harry thought, and hit the lift button again as he thought he felt the first faint stirring of pain in his belly.

*

            Draco had done all he could, he admitted to himself. He had told the house-elves to alert him the minute they heard something from Harry. He had touched the ring and realized that it looked and felt no different from the last time he touched it, without the discreet buzzing that some of the traditions said happened if the forced spouse was in danger. He had made a resolve to cast a locator charm on Harry’s cloak the next time he went out. He had sat still for some minutes, his arms folded as he “listened” to his body, and he was sure that he felt no pain as yet, which meant the marriage bond didn’t consider that Harry had stayed away willfully from the home he shared with his husband and had to be punished.

            All that, and he still felt his blood stirring with anxiety. It was with more than faint relief that he heard one of the house-elves pop into the room, and turned around.

            The house-elf was Juli, and she had brought Harry with her, rather than simply waiting for him to hang his cloak up and climb the stairs. Draco could see why when he looked into Harry’s face. His eyes were bloodshot, his skin almost grey, and he looked as though someone had locked him up in a closet and beaten him.

            “What’s the matter?” Draco asked, stepping delicately closer in a way that he hoped Harry wouldn’t think of as offensively concerned. “What happened?”

            “I stayed late working a case and lost track of what time it was,” Harry said, ducking his head and running his hand through his hair. Draco had already noticed the different ways he had of doing that. This was the motion that urged his fringe even further over his scar and his eyes, as if he was hiding. “Sorry about that.”

            Draco opened his mouth, the vicious, cold words already shaping themselves into icicles on his tongue. He could—

            He could speak now, vent his real feelings, and make Harry stare up at him with defiant eyes and decide not to apologize again. Or, worse, take back this apology and note that it was useless to say he was sorry.

            Yes, he could do that.

            Or he could show his better nature, all the things that would make him feel good about himself and potentially attract Harry at the same time.

            “It’s all right,” he murmured, coming a step closer so he could wrap his arm around Harry’s shoulders and support him. Harry shifted at once so that his arm settled in a different place without shrugging it off, and Draco didn’t know why until he remembered the scars. Harry wasn’t going to let him touch them. He fought back what he could have said about that, too, and continued, “I was concerned. You look much worse than you should have if you simply stayed late to work a case.”

            “I got caught up in it,” Harry said, shrugging. His eyes flashed and his face closed. “It’s a bad one.”

            That closing told Draco that it was better not to push. “I see,” he said. “Would you like to come to my room for a late-night snack, then?”

            Harry blinked at him. “My room’s closer.”

            “And more private, for you,” Draco said. He spoke softly, holding Harry’s eyes, making him come to the right conclusion himself: that Draco respected the protective spells he had put up and the need for a sanctuary of his own.

            Harry cleared his throat uncertainly and looked aside, ducking his head a bit again. “All right.”

            Draco smiled. This was the right way to fight a war, without the person on the other side knowing that it had begun until they found themselves surrounded and conquered.

            And if Harry never does agree to stay in the bond with me, it’s still excellent training for later in life.

*

            Review responses can be found at http://lomonaaerenrr.livejournal.com/32344.html
- 16
- 17
- 18
You need to be logged in to leave a review for this story.You need to be logged in to leave a review for this story.
Report Story

The Marriage of True Minds