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The Marriage of True Minds	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 55082 -:- Recommendations : 2 -:- Currently Reading : 2
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter, and I am making no money from this story.

Chapter List
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Chapter Nineteen—Hanged by the Same Rope

            A harsh tapping woke Harry. He yawned and stretched against the pillow beneath his cheek, and then froze as he realized that someone was right behind him, close enough that Harry could feel breath on his shoulder.

            The emotions that swept him were so violent that he didn’t know what they were at first. His hand was on his wand, and he would turn over and cast a spell that destroyed the intruder. That was all he knew, all he had to do. His muscles started to surge, he started to turn—

            And then he recognized something familiar in the pattern of the breathing, or the memories caught up with him, or the ring on his finger buzzed and jolted him out of the morning fuzziness. Harry honestly wasn’t sure which one it was. He only knew that he was in Draco’s bed, with Draco not far behind him. Draco hadn’t touched him except around the waist, hadn’t mocked his scars, hadn’t done anything but discuss the list of names with him and watch with half-lidded eyes as Harry ate.

            He hadn’t even asked questions that Harry hadn’t returned tenfold, Harry remembered as he dropped his hand into his lap and ran his fingers through his hair. That—silence about important things was a gift he wasn’t used to receiving. His friends showed they loved him by surrounding him with questions and knowledge, demanding to know this or that, every little aspect of his life.

            But Draco had gone quiet about the case after one question, and then—

            Harry couldn’t remember what had happened next, but it had obviously led to him falling asleep in Draco’s bed instead of going back to his own room. For the second time. Harry frowned at himself and turned his head, wondering if Draco would wake up and order him out. It was what Harry wanted right now.

            But Draco was still asleep, his eyes shut and his lips relaxed into an almost pouty expression. His hair was mussed in a way that caused Harry’s breath to catch in his throat, though a moment later he didn’t know why. Harry found that his hand had traveled out, and pulled it back, wincing. Draco didn’t seem to like a lot of touching from Harry unless it had to do with their hands or their rings. And he was particularly sensitive about hair, at least if the way he flinched whenever Harry ran his hands through his own was any indication.

            Harry edged towards the end of the bed. Draco remained asleep, despite the tapping that repeated itself and made Harry look around now.

            An owl hovered outside the nearest window, giving Harry a look that said it wasn’t used to waiting like this. Harry rolled his eyes. He recognized the barred pattern on the wings, and yes, it was used to waiting like this, because Hermione always sent around messages before anyone else was up.

            He opened the window, padding as quietly as he could across the floor. He still wore his trousers and pants, but he didn’t remember removing his shirt. He had to if he’d fallen asleep, of course. He could no longer bear the touch of cloth on his scars. But it was curious that he couldn’t remember when he’d done it.

            Perhaps Draco did it for you.

            That made Harry’s face burn more, not so much for what it would mean if Draco had touched him like that—he had touched Harry’s back before, when he helped take care of the suppurating scars—as for what it would make Ginny and Hermione and the rest of his friends think. Ginny’s hurt expression floated in his mind, along with Ron’s angry one and Hermione’s weary, knowing look. She would be the worst of all, since she would nod and say that of course Harry couldn’t fight the marriage bond if he wouldn’t hold true to the best way of magically challenging it that they had found.

            Then he shook his head, because Mercury, Hermione’s owl, was right in front of him, and he was quite insistent on having his message taken. Harry took it so that he wouldn’t wake Draco, and then managed to scrounge part of one of the uneaten sandwiches from the pocket of his Auror robes, which were hung over the back of a chair. Mercury hooted once and soared out the window, devouring the sandwich as he flew.

            Harry was left blinking. He reckoned that Hermione didn’t expect a response, then, which was unlike her. He shrugged, gave another glance over his shoulder to make sure that Draco didn’t wake up, and then opened the letter.

            It was short and to the point.

            Harry, I really don’t think you can break the marriage bond if you keep depending on the Malfoys for help this way. Ron said that you wouldn’t come over last night and why, but I went to your office after midnight and you were gone. That means that you must have gone back to the Manor. I know that you need to spend a certain amount of time there so the bond doesn’t react, but you also really needed friends around last night. If you went to Malfoy for soothing instead, I’m afraid of what might happen.

            Harry felt his face burn. Hermione knew him way too well. Yes, he would have liked to talk with his friends last night, but he couldn’t leave the case—

            Does that mean you immediately had to fall in to talking with Draco when you came back here? You could have called Juli so you could eat something and then went to bed.

            And then Harry paused and blinked, because he hadn’t talked about the case to Draco. And he hadn’t had the chance to ask Juli for food and to be left alone before she grabbed his hand and brought him to Draco. So all the things he’d been chiding himself for weren’t—weren’t real, actually. Or at least they weren’t real in the same way that Hermione was imagining them. Harry didn’t think she would say sleeping beside Draco and letting himself be so vulnerable that he couldn’t remember Draco removing his shirt was a good idea, either.

            Harry bowed his head. The faces of his friends circled through his mind again, and he drew a deep, painful breath.

            It was still true that he didn’t love Draco. It was still true that he didn’t want to stay in the marriage bond with him; he wanted to marry Ginny and have a family with her. It was still true that he valued his friends and wanted to keep those friendships alive, not simply vanish into the Malfoy family as if he had never been anywhere else.

            But it was also true that he couldn’t hurt Draco for the sake of not hurting his friends. Ron was mature enough now not to hate and resent Draco the way he had in the past. Hermione made accurate guesses, but not that accurate. She didn’t know exactly what kind of company and rest Harry had needed last night. Draco, incredibly, had.

            And Ginny was stronger than Ron gave her credit for, than Harry gave her credit for. She could put up with Harry getting close to Draco when it wasn’t remotely the same kind of relationship that she had with Harry. Above all else, she was compassionate; Harry could still remember the way she had helped tend to the wounded after the Battle of Hogwarts and flinched when she looked at those injuries, but never let that interfere with the steady motion of her hands as she flicked her wand or tied bandages. She was so much braver and had more integrity than they thought, his Ginny.

            He had two lives now. Two families. If the method of magically challenging the bond that Hermione had found required him to hurt Draco by separating himself from him, then Harry couldn’t do it. He would have to write back to her and explain that, then ask her to tell him about one of the other methods.

            He glanced over his shoulder, and jumped when he realized that Draco’s eyes were open, and sleepily fastened on him. “Good morning,” Draco said, arching his head back and stretching his arms as if he were working out the kinks that might have mysteriously popped up in them while he was sleeping. “Did you want some breakfast?”

            That made Harry look up to check the time on the clock; somehow, that hadn’t been the first thing that occurred to him when he woke up, although it should have because he had no idea how long he’d slept. He swore when he realized that it was almost nine. “I have to go to work,” he said, and turned around to pick up his shirt.

            “No, you don’t,” Draco said, and there was the sound of him edging across the bed.

            “Yeah, I kind of do,” Harry said, rolling his eyes. He could feel affection for Draco without thinking he was perfect, and those words had reminded him of all the many, many things that Draco didn’t understand, like working for a living. “I left notes about the runes drawn in blood that they’ll want explained. I tried to write down as much as I could, but I was worried about getting back here before the pain of the bond started.”

            “Were you?” And Draco was standing behind him, not touching him, just watching him. Harry shivered, a bit wary of how not wary he was feeling. It was like it was perfectly all right for Draco to stand there, and not even the instincts he had acquired in the darkness would protest. “That was sweet of you, to worry about me.”

            “Of course I do,” Harry said, turning around and shaking his head. “We disagree, but the way you described the pain of the bond…no one deserves that.”

            Draco gave him a sleepy smile. He still hadn’t fixed his hair. “Come to breakfast,” he said. “Mother will ensure that it’s ready.”

            “I have to go to work,” Harry explained, and slid the shirt over his head.

            “You’re going to wear the same shirt two days in a row?” Draco sounded more horrified than Harry had ever heard him sound about anything, excluding perhaps the time Lucius was in Azkaban. He pulled hard at Harry’s shirt collar; it took an effort for Harry to keep his hands at his sides so that he wouldn’t swat. Draco hadn’t actually touched the scars, but it had been close. “Disgusting.”

            “Sometimes,” Harry said, turning around and adopting both a solemn expression and tone of voice, “on cases where I’m in the field or in disguise for a long time, I wear the same robes for a week in a row.”

            Draco’s nose wrinkled. “All those Daily Prophet articles that said you were mad seemed to have no basis in reality. Now I know they do.”

            Harry laughed and punched him in the shoulder. Draco reached up and caught his hand briefly, pressing the ring. “Fine,” he said. “If you have to go, go. But promise me that you’ll get something to eat.”

            “Sandwiches in the office,” Harry said. “And I promise that I’ll remember to eat more of them this time than I did last night. Although, really, I’ve been eating more and better ever since I came here. If I don’t watch out, then I might start getting decadent. And no one wants that.”

            Draco’s eyes glinted at him. “Define ‘no one.’”

            Harry laughed. “What, you need a dictionary for simple words now?” And he cast a spell that would smooth some of the wrinkles out of his shirt and took a run for the door, trying not to think of the showers that opened off his bedroom or the gracious breakfast that doubtless was spread out over the dining room table below, fluffy scones and delicate white chocolate biscuits and steaming tea and—

            You’re bad at keeping your mind where it belongs, Harry thought in irritation with himself, and pictured the runes in blood. That effectively brought his thoughts back to work and killed his appetite, and he Apparated the moment he was beyond the Manor wards.

*

            Draco stretched out a hand in a shrug to an invisible audience. I tried to keep him here. I did my best.

            But he had to admit, the triumph of last night, when he had watched Harry’s head sag in drowsiness, his eyelids flutter shut, and his muscles remain limp and smooth and quiet when Draco removed his shirt, was still too much with him to make him care that he’d lost this argument with Harry about going to work.

            Draco rose and dressed more fully, shaking his head when his usual breakfast appeared. “Tell Mother that I’ll join her in the dining room,” he said, and the elves bowed and vanished, taking the food away. Draco wondered for a moment where the food went, if the elves ate it or made it into something else or simply banished it from existence.

            Then he snorted. That was the kind of thought he never used to have before Harry came into his life, and it wasn’t the kind of thought that he needed, now.

            He and his mother made light conversation while they ate, and Draco knew he wasn’t imagining the way her eyes shone when she looked at him, or the way her lashes lowered when he tried to catch her out in the stare. Well, if it was a triumph for Draco, it was also a triumph for her. He wouldn’t have tried to handle Harry with that kind of gentleness at all if not for her advice.

            Harry trusted him enough to sleep beside him. He helped Draco without more than a request on Draco’s part, without needing the strenuous bribes that even Draco’s friends sometimes did. He asked him questions because he genuinely wanted to understand what Draco believed about such matters as the Dark Lord’s politics. What Draco thought mattered to him.

            Of course, Draco would also need to write a letter to Laura d’Alveda, and he knew that the marriage bond with Harry might not work out the way he wanted it to, even after everything he’d tried, even after it all. But he would accept what he had for right now, and work his way forwards. As he had told himself before, winning Harry was something he wanted to do, but it certainly wasn’t the only application of his mother’s advice.

            He was whistling when he Apparated to the first business meeting of the day, carefully balancing Malfoy control of a Muggle firm.

*

            “Well done, Auror Potter.” Wilkinson kept her head bowed as she worked, her fingers flying over the notes that Harry had prepared and starting to draw up a chart. “We’ll work on possible complications and combinations of these runes, and get an answer much faster than we would have otherwise.”

            Ron grinned at him, and punched him on the shoulder. Harry punched back. They were sitting in one of the rooms that the Ministry usually kept to entertain visiting dignitaries, because it was the only one nearby big enough for all the Aurors who had been called in to work on the Ness case. Ron and Harry, as well as Wilkinson’s team, had chairs at the largest table, with the original photographs and Harry’s notes on the runes. The others worked with copies all around the room, silent and intent.

            Harry felt his happiness fade as he picked up the photograph of the latest scene and stared at it again. Yeah, sure, he had figured something out—the first step. That didn’t mean they knew who the killer was yet, or when he would strike again, or even what he wanted.

            His mouth setting hard and cold, Harry put the photograph down and leaned back over his notes. There was a question he’d meant to ask Wilkinson, he knew. He’d got distracted from it last night as he labored over the runes and the secrets contained in them, but he did want to know what in the hell—

            Ah, yes. There.

            “How many different scents would you say were at the scene, Auror Wilkinson?” he asked aloud.

            Wilkinson took a moment to lift her head from the papers she was studying, a state of intense concentration that Harry knew well. When she heard what he was saying, her own mouth set. “The scent of blood was the most intense, of course, Auror Potter,” she said.

            Harry nodded. “But anything else under that?”

            Wilkinson frowned. “We did not bring in hounds that could sort through the different smells, and we cleaned the scene up when we had finished inspecting it.”

            “Anything at all,” Harry said, and then sighed. He didn’t want to prejudice their conclusions, but he had to know. “Do you recall, or does anyone on your team recall, smelling something like decay? Rotting fruit? Rotting greenery?”

            Wilkinson shook her head, but one of the young women behind her sat up and stared at Harry as though he had pricked her with a needle. Harry felt his chest tighten. Ron leaned in behind him, offering protective shelter. Harry resisted the urge to sit back against him and instead smiled at the woman, who was probably just out of training if her age was anything to go by. “What did you smell?”

            The woman glanced once at Wilkinson, then whispered, “Fruit. It smelled like—crushed apples. My parents lived next to an orchard. I know that I’m never going to forget that smell.”

            Harry nodded, and it was an effort to keep his smile up. But he did, because letting someone this young know that the Great Auror Harry Potter was frightened could only be a bad idea. “Thank you, Auror—”

            This time, the way the young woman flushed was apparently out of gratitude that he cared enough to ask her name. “Perry, sir.”

            “Thank you, Auror Perry.” Harry turned back to his own notes and glanced at Ron. Ron was gazing at him, calm and steady, but with his freckles standing out against pale skin. Harry made a little motion, and Ron rose and followed him out of the room. After three years of training and three years of regular work together as partners, they knew each other too well to miss a signal like that.

            Ron slammed a fist into the wall of the corridor the moment he thought they were beyond the ears of the others. “Damn it,” he said. “You think they were there to send a message of some sort to you, mate?”

            Harry shook his head. “No, although they probably knew that I would be one of the Aurors investigating the case. Those runes…I think they’re trying to resurrect the beast that they wanted to sacrifice me to, Ron. Or at least summon another one like it. I never did determine what kind it was, whether they’d bred it or called it from somewhere else or what.” He did his best to tamp down on a shiver. He wouldn’t get hysterical in front of Ron. Ron had enough to worry about without that.

            Ron swore again. “Do you think—do you think that you ought to get off this case, then?” he asked, eyes dark as he took a step towards Harry. “Back away before they try to grab you again?”

            “Of course not,” Harry snapped, a little surprised that Ron would suggest it. “Those victims they might grab, and that I might be able to help, are a lot more important than my peace of mind.”

            “Not to me.”

            Harry gave a little wince. They didn’t often talk about their friendship, about the way that they thought of each other. After so many years, it was just there, deep and enduring, and Harry knew that Ron could depend on him for everything he needed and that he could likewise depend on Ron. But he had always taken it for granted that there were things that mattered more to Ron, like Hermione and his family and his duty as an Auror, fighting Dark wizards and protecting the innocent.

            Now, to watch Ron staring at him like that…Harry turned away, scratching the back of his neck. He snatched his hand back before he could start scratching the scars, though. He had done that once, right after he’d returned. It wasn’t a good idea.

            “No,” he said quietly. “I might let them know that something is wrong if I get off this case. We can’t let them know what we’ve figured out.”

            Ron nodded. “That’s not going to be difficult,” he murmured. Harry nodded back. There were some good consequences, beyond preventing a general panic, of the Ministry’s decision to keep the news of his disappearance quiet. “All right. But I want you to come and talk to me the moment something changes, all right? I want to be sure that you’re safe—Harry!”

            Harry whirled. There were reaching green tendrils everywhere around him, and if there had been a wizard to cast them, their shape was absolutely hidden in the jungle they’d summoned. Harry dived to the floor and reached for his wand.

            He was too late. One tendril snatched his wand away from him, one wrapped around his waist, and he felt the tug of a Portkey. Ron was shouting behind him, but the sound of his voice was already fading.

            Then Harry lost everything to the darkness that closed in on him as he landed with a bump on stone. He took a wild glance around the room. No windows, no fires, no lamps on the walls, no torches, no fairy lights.

            No light.

            The scream that welled out of his throat in the next moment barely sounded human.

*

            Draco knew better than to reveal that he was awake. Whatever had snatched him had done it the moment he stepped out of his meeting for a little light lunch. He’d had time to smell decay, and then someone had struck him on the skull. He’d become woozy, but not dropped unconscious, and so he’d felt himself slung over a shoulder, his wand taken, and the snap and crack of someone Apparating.

            The captor had landed among other captors. The one carrying him laid him down, but didn’t try to bind him, which meant Draco didn’t have to risk moving yet. He sniffed up more decay, and remained still, listening.

            “I’m sure it will work this time,” someone was insisting, in shrill tones that would have made Draco mark him down as a person who was never to be trusted with important secrets of any kind.

            “That’s what you said last time, too.” This voice was an older woman’s, Draco thought, weary and with a husky rasp to it as if she had spent long years smoking. “And what you said the time before that, when we actually had Potter and then managed to lose him and everything we’d accomplished up to that point.”

            Harry. Draco had to keep his finger from rubbing along the marriage ring. He hadn’t realized how often he’d taken to caressing the symbol of his forced bond when he thought of Harry.

            “Simeon was a fool.” A third wizard, and his voice seemed to emerge from deep in his chest. Draco estimated him as the one standing closest, and thus probably the one who had brought Draco here in the first place. “He lost his life because of it. If we are careful, then we can achieve that which we strove for in the first place.”

            “Very well.” Although Draco didn’t dare open his eyes, he could imagine perfectly the long-suffering swipe that the woman would make at the air. “Fine. But you’re in charge of guarding him this time, and making sure that we manage to subdue him, not simply take him captive and then let him kill us.”

            Draco thought that one of the two wizards started to make a response. He listened eagerly. He was close to being able to use the echoes of their voices to estimate the size of the room.

            Piercing screams, inhuman in their intensity, sounded from not far away. Draco couldn’t keep himself from jerking in surprise, but from the inhalations around him and the way that robes rustled, he thought all his captors had turned to face the sound and hadn’t noticed him move.

            Draco opened his eyes.

            He was looking down a narrow aisle between long stone seats that might have been benches from Hogwarts’s Great Hall. The room was lit only by torches on the walls, and looked to be made entirely of rock. At the far end, in the direction Draco was staring, an open doorway stood, leading only into darkness.

            From there, the screams came.

            Draco jerked like a fish on a line as he realized what they must be. Harry. They put him in darkness, and left him there. Mother did say that he had to have light to sleep.

            He started to summon his wand to him. He had practiced enough wandless magic to do that, and—

            And then the darkness reached out ropy red and black tendrils in his direction, and the wizards in front of him began to melt, and everything went to hell.

*

            unneeded: I do think it’s a bit weird to Harry, but Draco just thinks of it as one more damn thing he has to do.

            MrE-Quecky: Thank you!

            Erin_49: Thank you! Draco has the same high hopes.

            Night the Storyteller: Harry can’t control all his emotions, but he thinks that snatching back the ones he notices is a good idea.

            SP777: He may not have a choice, after the events of this chapter.

            I don’t know exactly what was in the drink. It just sounded like something the house-elves would serve.
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The Marriage of True Minds