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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.

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Thank you again for all the reviews!
Chapter Nineteen--Vengeance
"I'm so glad to see you again, Harry."
Beyond words, Harry simply blinked and clasped hands with Remus Lupin. His amber eyes were very wolf-like once Harry knew what he was looking for, but if he hadn't known the man was a werewolf, he would have put it down to a trick of the light. His sad smile and intense handshake mattered more anyway.
From the way he was fussing and muttering behind Harry, Draco might have disagreed, but Harry serenely ignored him, inasmuch as that was possible. He smiled at Remus and said, "Won't you sit down?"
"Thank you." Remus took a seat on the couch in Sirius's large home; Harry was still trying to get over how high the arched ceilings were and how much light the windows let in. Sirius had said something about it being deliberately different from his childhood home, and left it at that. "So, Harry. Your parents disowned you."
Harry sighed and sat down on the opposite-facing couch with Draco right beside him. "Yes."
"Even though they knew it was Dahlia's magic all this time?"
"Oh, no, they didn't know. James disowned me before Draco figured out it must have been Dahlia repressing her own personality and enchanting them."
Remus frowned and exchanged glances with Sirius that, for all Harry knew, might be communicating a lot more than it looked like. Then he nodded and said, "Did they seem upset when Draco figured it out?'
"You could call him Malfoy, like I do."
Everyone present ignored Sirius's mutter, although Harry felt Draco's shoulders tense where he leaned against him. He nodded. "They went off to discuss it, I think. I suppose it's possible I'll get a letter that says they're sorry and begs me to come back and see what we can do." He paused, tracing a finger down a crease in the couch. Draco was sitting very still behind him.
"And?" Remus's eyes were kind, but waiting.
Harry said it aloud for the first time to someone other than Draco. "I don't think I can ever forgive them for what they did, even if they realize they were totally in the wrong."
Remus nodded slowly. Harry wondered if he approved of the answer or not, but all he said was, "Okay. Then that's the angle we'll take in the story. That you were thrown out of the house and you have your own life now, and they gave up the chance to be part of that life."
Sirius snapped his fingers. "I like it."
"Don't make them sound so passive," Draco said, his hand migrating over to rest on the back of Harry's neck as though he needed to touch it to support himself. "So innocent. They didn't just give up the chance to be part of Harry's life, they tried to take the life he should have had away from him. And they were the ones who threw him out of the house. He wasn't just thrown by someone nameless."
"I never intended to say he was."
"You're talking as if he was."
"It's all right," Harry said hastily, before Draco and Remus could get into some strange pissing contest over him. "I knew what he meant."
Draco looked at him with eyes that might have seemed bright and careless if Harry hadn't known him better than that. "People are going to respect you. Not just because you're my bonded or because they didn't respect you in the past. Because you deserve it."
Harry tried to put words around the simmering feeling in his stomach, but Sirius interrupted before he could. "I thought you weren't bonded yet? Did you forget to invite me to something, Harry?"
Harry would never think his newfound family was more trouble than they were worth, but he did want to go sit on a wall by himself and think sometimes. He sighed, then said, "Draco's just using it as shorthand. We intend to bond. We're not bonded yet."
“Good,” Sirius said, sitting back with a nod. “Then there’s still the chance that you might come to your senses.”
Remus cast Sirius a warning look that he ignored. Remus sighed and focused on Draco. “What do you want this article to be like? I mean, the part about your bonding and the way you discovered Harry? Sirius told me what you did to James and Lily.” For a second, his eyes shone in a way that made it easy for Harry to imagine them gleaming from the edges of a dark forest. “But it’s illegal to do that, so we can’t put it in the article.”
“I’m perfectly fine with explaining that Dahlia Potter has no personality.” Draco grinned. “And why.”
“That doesn’t answer my question,” Remus said patiently. Harry thought that he would have made a great teacher. “How are you going to say that you found out about Harry?”
“From a friend,” Draco said. “That’s perfectly true. My friend Pansy Parkinson had heard the gossip, and so had Blaise Zabini. It’s never been a huge secret. It’s just old enough that not many people spoke of it because it wasn’t fresh anymore, and no one had mentioned it to me.”
“You think your parents deliberately kept mention of Harry away from you?”
“They would never have talked to me about it, because I might have started thinking that a Squib Potter child was a good reason to break the contract. Who was to say that one of my children might not have ended up a Squib, if I’d had them with Dahlia?” Draco reached out and gently took Harry’s hand again, smoothing his fingers up the bonding bracelet. “But they didn’t keep me away from people who knew.”
“What did they think you would do when you found out?”
Harry knew enough about the Malfoys to answer this one, even before Draco did. “His duty,” he whispered.
Draco inclined his head. “They thought I would keep the contract no matter what because they thought I had the same kind of honor they do.”
“Different kinds of honor?”
Harry had to admire the way Remus was asking. He would just ask a question and then listen and then ask another one. It was a gentle way to draw the story out of them.
From the way Draco raised his eyebrows, he had figured out the tactic, but was willing to go along with it. “Yes. I told my father that they could have the kind of pure-blood honor that wasn’t worth throwing everything else away for, or the kind that’s worth defending.”
“I don’t remember you putting it like that.”
“It was what I meant.”
Harry rested his forehead on Draco’s shoulder, but this time, it was at least partially to hide a smile.
“The kind of pure-blood honor that James and Lily thought your parents had,” Remus murmured. “The kind that they probably intended you to have when they changed Harry’s name to Dahlia’s on the contract.”
Draco nodded in silence. Harry was the one who had to step in. “Do you think you can write the story well enough to infuriate people and make my old family look bad, Remus?”
“That, I’m certain of.” Remus shifted around on the couch and traded glances with Sirius. “But there’s something else we need to be aware of, because the Potters aren’t the only people the article will infuriate.”
“Dumbledore,” Sirius said, in the way that he might growl when he was in his Animagus form.
“Yes,” said Remus. “I don’t suppose you care to tell me what he said about you and this influence you supposedly had over Dahlia, Harry?”
“I can do better than that,” Harry said. “I don’t remember him visiting much at all in my childhood, but he visited me and Draco when we were still in New York. He gave me the same old story about how my magic had belonged to Voldemort and I couldn’t use it because that would mean being evil.”
Remus leaned slowly forwards. “You think he’ll oppose your return to Britain?”
“He hasn’t done much about it so far,” Draco pointed out in a mild voice, although the way his arm squeezed around Harry’s ribs told Harry a lot about what he was really feeling. “He seems to have the impression that we’ll do what we’re told. I don’t know why. Maybe because most other people do what they’re told when he speaks to them.”
“I’m surprised he didn’t try to prepare James and Lily against you.”
“Like they would have listened,” Sirius interrupted with a contemptuous snort. “You know they already thought Harry was evil and they were right to exile him when he was ten bloody years old. Dumbledore could have warned them that Harry and Malfoy here were about to cut their precious daughter out of her precious marriage, and they would just have been confident that they could stop him. Or that no one in his right mind wouldn’t want to marry Dahlia."
“Perhaps you’re right. Although it makes me wonder what they’re feeling right now, now that they know it was Dahlia who poisoned their minds.”
A flap of Sirius’s hand dismissed the Potters and everything they might be feeling. “Who cares? What matters is what we’re going to say in the article.”
Remus took out some parchment and ink and started writing. Now and then he paused to stare into space. Harry didn’t interrupt, and neither did Draco. Harry thought it was seeing even Sirius get quiet and attentive that made Draco decide he couldn’t.
Remus finally turned the parchment around so Harry could look at what he’d written. “Would something like this do, do you think? It might even cause some of the more fanatical to doubt Dumbledore.”
Harry began to read, and in seconds his face hurt from grinning. “That’s perfect.”
“Good.” Remus grinned back at him. “Then I have some more questions, to make sure this story has that perfect ring of authenticity and getting under people’s skin.”
*
“It’s on the front page of the Prophet,” Draco took delight in telling Harry when Harry stumbled into the kitchen, yawning and in search of tea, the next morning.
Harry stared before he shook his head and sat down at his place, reaching for the plate of scones standing ready. “It is? But I thought Remus said they didn’t usually publish his articles because he’s a werewolf.”
“The prospect must have been too tempting.” Draco glanced at the photograph again and held out the paper. “I can see why.”
Harry smiled goofily at the picture. Draco moved around to the side, wanting to see both the paper and the expression on Harry’s face while he looked at it.
They’d recreated the pose that they’d held in the Potters’ house when they were confronting James and Lily. Draco had his arms around Harry’s waist and his chin resting on Harry’s shoulder. Harry stood with his wand held in front of him, sparking and glowing. That ought to put to rest the notion that he was a Squib, Draco thought with vicious satisfaction.
Underneath, the headline said, SCANDAL OF THE CENTURY! PURE-BLOOD FAMILY EXILES HEIR AS ‘SQUIB.’
Lupin had done a good job, Draco had to admit. He’d thought the werewolf would put the Potters’ name in the headline, but there was really no reason to do that, not when the demand for knowledge would make people eager to read further.
And the article itself began innocently, and then turned sideways to swipe all Potters involved.
Eighteen years ago, as we all know, Harry Potter—called that at the time—somehow defeated He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named. What no one knew was how he did it. And then we heard rumors that the Potters had exiled their baby boy, claiming he was a Squib, but everyone seemed content just to forget about it.
We should never have forgotten. One brave young man, Draco Malfoy, learned he was supposed to bond the firstborn Potter heir and sought him ought, certain that someone who had defeated You-Know-Who could never be a Squib.
“And I was right,” Mr. Malfoy told me in a special interview. “He took the Dark Lord’s magic by right of conquest.”
What this means, for those who might not know due to ignorance or isolation, is that You-Know-Who’s magic has been absorbed completely by Harry. His Light magic was equally strong—probably the only reason he was able to survive the absorption.
“My Light magic was replaced by Voldemort’s Dark magic,” Harry told me during the same interview. “I’m sad about it on one level, but on the other hand, I can’t remember what being a Light wizard was like. I am what I am now.”
You may have noticed that I have called Harry by only his first name in the last few paragraphs. That is because the Potters have disowned him. Doubtless it was a well-thought-out decision.
Or perhaps not, given that both Harry and Mr. Malfoy have told me that they exiled their firstborn without giving him adequate money to live on.
“I think they thought the Squib they chose as my mentor would take care of me,” Harry said. “But that was a little difficult when she died.”
Luckily, Harry managed to forge a sort of existence in Muggle New York City. But it was a hardscrabble one, if Mr. Malfoy can be believed, made possible only because Harry knew a few Squibs and wizards who could help him.
“Here he is, at nineteen, having lived on his own for years since his mentor died, at a time when most British wizards are still in Hogwarts,” Mr. Malfoy said. His voice vibrated with indignation. “All because certain people were too worried by his apparent transformation into a Dark wizard to really study him and realize what his transformation meant. They would rather think he was a Squib than spend the time it would have taken.”
Mr. Malfoy admits that he admires Harry’s independent spirit, and it was one of the things that made him decide to bond with the former Potter heir. But he is still upset that one of the prominent pure-blood families of Britain cast one of their own out.
“We’re trained to abide by honor,” he said. “We have to keep our word once we give it. We have to abide by the contracts we make. But they already changed the contract once. They were going to give Harry to me in bonding, and then they changed it to the secondborn child, even before she was born. They didn’t know if she would be powerful in magic! They didn’t know if she would be a good match for me! But they did it anyway.”
The outrage is all the worse when considering one of the reasons the Potters exiled Harry.
“They thought I influenced my sister Dahlia,” Harry said, sitting on the couch in his godfather Sirius Black’s home. Mr. Black has offered to give Harry a home if he needs it—though with his bonding into the prestigious Malfoy family already near, that might not be for long. “They thought it was Voldemort, really. His magic, which I didn’t control. That was how they could tell me that I was a Squib in spite of having magic. It was evil and not really part of me.”
Mr. Malfoy dropped a hand on Harry’s shoulder as he spoke that, and Harry looked up with a quick smile. Mr. Malfoy had no smile on his face.
“But we figured out what had really happened to make Dahlia into a mindless maiden,” he said. “It was her own magic. She wanted to be perfect so much that she wiped out her own personality. And she made her parents adore her to an unreasonable extent. It was one of the reasons they chose her over their other child.”
He squeezed Harry’s shoulder. “But they made their final choice and their final mistake. If they can’t see the wonderful when it’s dropped in front of them…”
This reporter tends to agree. Who sends their own child out into the world with no money? Who exiles their child at ten? Squibs are commonly sent away either younger, so that they can fully adapt to the Muggle world without remembering the wizarding one, or older, so they have more of a chance of surviving on their own.
It seems that the Potters aren’t as perfect as we tended to believe.
But—perhaps—it isn’t entirely their fault. Albus Dumbledore himself, along with the Unspeakables, told the Potters that Harry was a Squib and the only magic he was capable of was the evil influencing of his sister.
Which makes you have to wonder: how is it that a nineteen-year-old Malfoy, who had never met the young man he was destined to bond with at one point, could figure out the truth of Harry overcoming You-Know-Who’s magic and remaining a wizard, when the great Albus Dumbledore could not?
You do have to wonder.
Harry finished reading and looked up with a grin. “Did you read the whole thing?”
“Three times now,” Draco said contentedly. Other than an actual rant filled with words that Lupin probably wouldn’t be allowed to use in a newspaper anyway, it was the most satisfying result he could imagine.
“I wonder,” Harry murmured as he put the paper down, “what their response is going to be?”
Draco started to reply, but the Floo flared then, and Black’s eager voice announced, “Twenty-four.”
“Twenty-four what?” Draco asked, resigned to the fact that he would have to be the one to provide the context.
“Twenty-four Howlers James and Lily have got so far!” Black gave a howl that convinced Draco his Animagus form must be a dog. It didn’t sound like a wolf’s. “I have a little monitoring spell on their house that I haven’t used for a long time. But this seemed like the proper time to reactivate it, don’t you agree?”
Harry grinned. “What about Dumbledore?”
“My spell saw an owl leave and fly in the direction of Hogwarts. Want to come over and help me watch for when he comes?”
Draco had to smile at the way Harry scrambled out of the chair, although he did make Harry take along his uneaten breakfast before they went through the flames to Black’s house.
And some part of him, the part of him that had been afraid Harry would forgive the Potters after all in his desperate desire for a family, relaxed.
*
Jan: Hope it was satisfying!
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