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Bonded Consort	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 33015 -:- Recommendations : 4 -:- Currently Reading : 5
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I am making no money from this story.

Chapter List
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Thank you again for all the reviews!
Chapter Seventeen—The Wild Child
“Draco, I wish to know where you are now.”
Draco had awoken to find several owls sitting outside the house and glaring at him. His parents hadn’t been able to send him a message through the wards, but it did confirm that they had lost patience. So Draco had lowered the wards around the fireplace in the drawing room and decided to use that to Floo them.
Draco spent a few minutes straightening his sleeves. His father stared through the fire, seemingly impassive, but Draco knew him, and Lucius’s fingers would be curling at his sides, out of sight. Draco finished the adjusting and gave Lucius a bland smile. “Somewhere safe.”
“You failed to secure the consent of the Potters.”
“Did they write to you?” Draco asked, genuinely curious. He didn’t know if the Potters were even now persuading themselves that they weren’t at fault, or whether they would have reached out to Mother and Father and told them about Dahlia’s magic.
“They did. They told us what their daughter did. They also told us that your Harry has been disowned.”
Draco leaned forwards until his knuckles rested on the hearth. “Call him my betrothed if you can’t handle his name. But never put that weight of contempt behind the word again. Do you understand me, Father?”
“You—have fallen for him.”
“Yes. Isn’t that what happened to you and Mother, all those years ago? And your marriage was by contract, just as mine was arranged to be.”
Lucius was silent; Draco could sense his struggle. He had thought, for a while now, that his parents’ notions were incoherent. They wanted too many different things to subsume them all beneath a single smooth surface, whatever they said. It remained to be seen what divergent desire would win out this time.
Apparently, wanting to prove themselves right did. Lucius leaned forwards in response and said, “A Malfoy is always to be the one bestowing honor and favor. You are not to abase yourself to the one you choose, whether consort or spouse.”
“You were in the same house with him. You know he’s a powerful Dark wizard and a Parselmouth. I’m not abasing. I’ve chosen, and he’s chosen me. And that is an honor, Father. You won’t convince me otherwise.”
Lucius blinked several times. Draco wondered quietly if the cognitive dissonance—a Muggle concept he had learned about and found useful when it came to describing the Potter contract—had started yet. On the one hand, Draco was not behaving appropriately for a Malfoy. On the other hand, Mother had always said that he should try to treat Dahlia with respect, and chided him when he could not.
“You should have married Dahlia Potter.”
“Why?”
“The strength of her magic, to enchant her parents and perhaps several other people—”
Draco laughed, and Lucius flinched back. Draco got his voice under control, but he only barely managed to choke out, “And? You’d rather I risk getting myself enchanted than give up your precious contract? Where would the Malfoy pride be then?”
“Where it is if you refuse the contract and refuse to marry the person you should have?” His father’s voice was bitter enough that Draco knew it would be poison if he had actually tried to swallow it. “You will dishonor us, Draco, so thoroughly that our fortunes will suffer. Honorable pure-bloods will have nothing to do with us.”
“And what will they think of the Potters? So weak as to exile a son who wasn’t a Squib, and able to be taken advantage of by a daughter they never realized was enchanting them—”
“They will hardly spread that story abroad. But everyone will see that you are marrying the exiled son.”
“Bonding, Father. It’s called ‘bonding.’”
Lucius gave a snort of utter despair; Draco knew that because nothing except utter despair could have got his father to snort in the first place. “You should listen to me. The Potters are hardly going to spread that story.”
Draco smiled and said nothing. He was a little curious to see if his father could draw the obvious conclusion from his silence. Once Draco would have said that of course he could, without hesitating, but his parents had proved less perceptive and intelligent than he had once thought them.
“You are going to spread that story?”
“I am,” Draco said. “I think they deserve to suffer for turning their backs on the most wonderful child they have.”
Lucius shook his head, and shook it again. The only memory Draco had of his father looking the way he did now was when Draco was very young and had spat bathwater in Lucius’s ear.
“But—it will make you look just as bad. That you are breaking honor and the betrothal contract. That you intend to bond with a child who has been disowned. And you know disownment cannot be reversed.”
“Will it make me look bad, Father? Or will it make the Potters look appallingly bad, frightened, weak? They didn’t bother to recognize Harry’s potential for themselves. They blindly followed Dumbledore when he said that Harry must be the Dark Lord reborn. They gave up a child who had done nothing wrong, and someone who could have been a powerful heir of their line and even a link to the Dark families. They violated all the precepts that they’re always saying they follow. Tolerance and acceptance and forgiveness. They practiced none of those.”
Lucius spent a moment licking his lips. “You intend to bring them down.”
“I don’t know if this will utterly destroy them.” I only hope so. “I know that it’ll tarnish their reputation, and that’s what I want. I want them to suffer, Father. For what they did, for what they didn’t do, for being so stupid.” Draco paused. “Are you thinking that you might suffer, too, for linking yourself with them?”
Lucius tapped his fingers on something Draco couldn’t see from his position in the flames, and held his silence. But Draco had learned how to do the same thing literally at his father’s knee, and sometimes turned over it. He waited, and Lucius finally shook his head, slowly.
“We wanted to honor the contract. We believed we had done the wrong thing when they characterized your bonded as a Squib, because their family lost the prestige of housing the Dark Lord’s destroyer. But we always intended to honor the contract.”
“Why?”
“Because that is what we are.” Lucius sometimes acted more polished and aloof than he actually was, but Draco thought that act wasn’t one half as effective as the natural way he sometimes stiffened, like right now, his face glittering like a metal mask. “Honorable pure-bloods, who follow the traditions regardless of whether other people follow them. That is the reputation you are trying to damage.”
Draco leaned forwards, his hands braced on the hearth. “What would make us look better right now? Honoring the letter of the contract, and insisting that I marry a Potter who’s been lying all her life and who’s a Light witch besides? Or honoring the spirit, and bonding me to the powerful child you originally contracted for? The one who not only defeated the Dark Lord, but conquered his magic?”
Lucius vanished behind one of his impenetrable masks that meant not even Draco could tell what he was thinking. Draco tapped his fingers on the hearth again, and waited.
“You intend to say that.”
“Yes.”
“You have proof of that.”
“Yes.”
Lucius still spent time looking past Draco at some feature of the room he probably couldn’t see from the positioning of his head within the flames. Draco held his impatience in check; he had to accept that it was probably difficult for his father to adjust from one kind of honor to another.
“It would be wonderful if it could be done,” Lucius said softly, and then refocused on Draco as tightly as a grip on a broom. “But there remains the problem of what other pure-bloods would say about our reputation.”
“I intend to rehabilitate our reputation. I’m the one who found Harry and brought him home. I’m the one who thought to look for him in the first place. The younger generation of Malfoys—”
“Could be seen as degenerate.”
“Is, in fact, in the first stages of creating a new kind of honor,” Draco said. “Honoring the boy who still has some renown in Britain, you know, as the destroyer of Voldemort. Following the spirit and the letter of the old contract, the one made before I was betrothed to Dahlia.” He leaned forwards so far that he was honestly afraid of falling into the fire, but he had to make this point. “If contracts can be changed once, they can again.”
“That was a mutually-agreed upon change. I doubt the Potters would agree to this one.”
Draco smiled. “Contact them after our story has appeared and ask.”
Lucius frowned harder. Then he said, “We did not teach you to use these kinds of tactics with pure-bloods.”
“But you taught me to use them.” Draco could only shrug in the face of his father’s chiding look. “To value what I wanted, and go after it at all costs, and fight for it. Even to value the kind of love that can spring unexpectedly. I know you told me at least once that you were prepared to endure your marriage.”
His father closed his eyes for a second. Then he said, “Yes. That is true.”
And Draco would never get more explicit permission than that, probably, but he didn’t need it. He inclined his head, making sure his expression was more calm than gloating, and said, “Thank you, Father. I promise that we won’t embarrass you.”
“More than the notion of you not marrying Dahlia Potter embarrasses us already?”
“You know the article is coming out. It’s your choice how to respond. I think the reporters will be more interested in questioning me and Harry and the Potters than you or Mother anyway.”
Lucius only gazed into Draco’s face for a long, silent moment. Then he nodded and said, “I hope that you have found someone to love, Draco. Even if you went about it in an inconvenient—dishonorable—way.”
Perhaps as close to be a blessing as we’ll get, too. Draco nodded. “Thank you, Father.”
Lucius was gone from the Floo without a farewell. Draco leaned back so Harry could put his hand on his shoulder, and tilted his head until he was looking at Harry upside-down.
“Would he really have refused to speak if he knew I was in the room listening?”
“Father needs delicate handling, sometimes. I wasn’t ready to assume that your presence was something he could ignore.”
Harry only nodded, thoughtfully, as though saying that he understood but didn’t agree. Draco reached out, smiling, and scooped his hands up, kissing the backs of them.
“Ready to meet your godfather?”
“He did answer your owl?”
“With a Howler. The charms on the house keep anyone from hearing the screaming who’s not actually in the room where it explodes,” Draco explained. He didn’t explain that he’d practically run from the bedroom into the bathroom so Black’s cursing wouldn’t wake Harry up, but from the narrowing of his eyes and the tightening of his hands on Draco’s, Harry had figured it out. “After all the swearing and the accusing me of being in this to sacrifice you in a ritual to resurrect Voldemort—”
Harry choked.
“—he said that he and your parents haven’t been close for a long time, he always disagreed about the way they treated you, and he wants to meet us for lunch in Diagon Alley in…about forty-five minutes.”
Harry glanced at the clock and swallowed. Then he shook his head. “This is ridiculous. I haven’t even been wearing formal robes for most of my life, and now I’m wondering if I need to dress up to meet my godfather.”
“There are some Blacks that would have been true of, but don’t bother for this one. He wouldn’t appreciate it.”
*
“Harry!”
The voice turned heads all down the alley; it was a huge bellow with more than a hint of a bark to it. Harry found himself standing closer to Draco than he’d meant to. Then again, a loud-voiced, tall man with a wild glint in his eyes, who you didn’t remember at all, striding down the alley and sweeping you up into his arms would have that effect on a lot of people.
At least, I think it would, Harry decided, a little dizzy with lack of air when Sirius finally released him. God, I hope I don’t say anything stupid.
“Your eyes are brighter than Lily’s ever were, and your hair is messier than James’s,” said Sirius, with a fierce grin. “Good.”
“Er, okay,” Harry echoed back. He knew his resemblance to his parents, but he didn’t understand where Sirius was coming from by mentioning it.
Sirius laughed and swung an arm around his shoulders, nodding to Draco with a slight crunch of his teeth that Harry hoped didn’t mean they were going to get into a fight. “Come on. I know a great place to eat. I did the owner a favor and he lets me eat there for free. And I’ll pay for your food.”
“Not much of a friend, if he makes others pay,” Harry thought he heard Draco mutter, but either Sirius didn’t hear it or he chose to ignore it. Harry found himself parading down the middle of Diagon Alley more or less against his will.
Sirius had a way of making people get out of his path, though. He simply elbowed people, or trampled on their feet, or walked straight ahead as if they weren’t there and made them dodge, or snapped an insult that seemed to fit into the flow of the stories he was sharing about Hogwarts, stories of pranks and the Marauders sneaking around the school. Harry smiled now and then, but the burning questions lodged in the back of his mind gave off more heat and light than any stories of James Potter’s childhood could.
Did you really always disapprove? Why didn’t you come find me? What made you decide that it was okay to send Draco a Howler but also want to meet me?
They ended up in a pub at the corner of Diagon Alley and a darker one that Draco frowned at. It had a sign above it so dingy that Harry couldn’t read it, only see a snaking, curving line that looked like a dragon’s tail. And then Sirius hustled him inside and howled for someone named “Marcos,” and Harry barely had a chance to breathe or look around before someone else came roaring forwards.
“Sirius! When did you decide to drag your lazy fucking self out of bed and grace my fine establishment?”
Marcos was taller than Sirius, with a black beard that looked as if he was longer than he was tall—odd in contrast to his ash-grey hair. He gave Harry and Draco a casual glance, nodded, and slapped Sirius on the back hard enough to nearly knock him face-first into one of the small, round tables. Sirius came up laughing, luckily.
“When I learned that I had a godson who wasn’t a Squib, and who came back!”
Marcos spun around easily on one heel to stare at Harry. “This the kid?”
“Yep. He has magic, he’s been disowned by Lily and James, and he’s engaged to be bonded to one of those rubbish Malfoys,” said Sirius cheerfully. “So. Can we have lunch?”
“All of you for free!” Marcos roared, and clapped his hands. A noise like a gong came from somewhere behind a door that looked, to Harry, as if fire and acid had scarred it. “Now that you’re here, kid, Sirius will stop moaning on and on about how he failed you and he should have done something else to help you. And sobbing maudlin tears and drinking the kind of whisky that makes him vomit all over my tables. That’s worth a free lunch.”
Harry found himself sitting down much the same way he’d found himself walking down Diagon Alley, and Draco barely managed to sit down in a chair next to him before Sirius took it. Sirius only shrugged as if that didn't matter and leaned forwards, eyes fastened eagerly on Harry.
“So. You want to know where I was all those years.”
“Yes. Um—that would be a good beginning.”
Sirius nodded. “James and I started drifting apart not long after his marriage, really. He wanted to marry Lils and settle down and have kids, fine. But he got all pure-blood about it. That betrothal contract, honestly. He had no idea what his kid would be like or what the Malfoy kid would be like! At least you look like you’ve got all your eyes and limbs in the right places,” he said as an aside to Draco. “And he got all stuffy when I questioned him. And he kept insisting that society and reputation and all that shit was important. I lost my best friend to adulthood.” Sirius shook his head sadly.
“So what happened when you thought I was a Squib?”
“I thought they would find a Muggle couple to adopt you,” said Sirius baldly. “That’s what my family would have done—well, okay, a variation of what my family would have done, which was dump the Squib child on a doorstep last generation and leave them to die of exposure the one before and use the Killing Curse before that.”
Harry flinched. Sirius sighed. “Look—I’m coming on a little strong, I reckon. You don’t remember me at all?”
Harry shook his head. He had a few dim memories from early childhood that might be Sirius, but he couldn’t be certain they were. He had tried to forget those things so hard the forgetfulness had more or less taken.
“Well. Then we’ll talk at a slower pace, and you can find everything out from the beginning.” Sirius sat up and smiled. “And we’ll eat. What do you want for lunch?”
*
phoenix-rob: Thank you! At the moment, Lucius isn't poised to take any action against the Potters; he's leaving that up to Draco. He would only do it if James or Lily or their children insulted him personally.
Sirius will, because he's never forgiven James for becoming posh and stuffy.
Jan: Thanks! Draco thinks Sirius can give them some inside dirt, so to speak.
Velicol: Thank you!
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Bonded Consort