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The Only True Lords	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 54578 -:- Recommendations : 4 -:- Currently Reading : 11
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Chapter Twenty-Four—The Lioness
            Harry could feel the bond yanking against his control. It was fed by the posture he had assumed, his determination to get answers from Blaise for once instead of letting himself be put aside. It wanted to punish someone who was going against him, one of his vassals who was trying to push Harry around and hurt him, and it wanted to use fire.
            Harry raised a hand and curled his fingers in. The bond was right there, shining in his mind, and although Harry supposed he could have put his hand on his shield mark and achieved even stronger contact that way, he didn’t fancy having his palm burned right now.
            The bond coursed through his grasp. Harry tightened his hand further, and it shivered and spluttered to a stop.
            The immediate fit it tried to throw was a little amusing. But only a little.
            Harry tightened his hold. He was master here, not the bond. If the bond cared so much about his dignity as a Lord and his ability to resist threats, then it had to be flexible. Sometimes Harry couldn’t act like a Lord because it would make people suspicious. Sometimes he would have to wait to punish someone, or take vengeance. Attacking the instant that one of his vassals rebelled against him was stupid.
            There was a brief moment when he thought he could see the bond, a shining red and gold thread of fire that coiled through his palm and seared and seared and seared. But then it shivered and collapsed against him, and the sight of it vanished again.
            Harry breathed out carefully. He didn’t really care if he couldn’t see it right now, as long as he knew he had that option.
            And now he thought he knew why he hadn’t been able to find an answer about how to make the bond do what he wanted in the Black library. They’d thought the answer was too obvious to be written down—or they hadn’t written it down because they assumed anyone who read the books about Lordship bonds would already feel this way. Harry had to think of himself as a Lord, someone who could belong to that designation and had the right to command certain things of his vassals.
            Like tribute. And obedience.
            Harry slowly brought his hand down, and the fire faded away. He turned to face his attacking vassal, who did need some kind of punishment. But Harry would decide on what that was, and how much.
            He had really been in control all along. He had wanted to stop Blaise from striking at him back in the Forbidden Forest, and that was what had happened. If hurting him wasn’t exactly the way he had planned to do it, well, he should have been more specific.
            He knelt down next to Blaise, and rolled him over. He was limp, and came easily. He felt thin, and Harry remembered that he’d been in Hogwarts during the war. Well, he wouldn’t have eaten any better than Harry.
            Blaise was still breathing, and that was about all that could be said for him. His face was seamed with burns, and his arms, except where the bond mark glittered like true metal. Harry sighed. He didn’t want to look at Blaise’s legs, because he knew he would see the same.
            He gripped the bond again, weaving it around and around Blaise, and told it, I want him healed.
            There was another brief fit, but it crashed against and washed down the wall of Harry’s resistance. No, he was not going to let the bond do as it wanted. He had to be master? Then he would be master. He had failed in the holding cell to be transported to his vassals’ sides because he had still been shying away from and shirking his responsibility, not wanting to force anyone to do anything, even if it was by an intangible bond.
            Now he had changed, and he snarled his will down the bond, and it wrapped around Blaise again. The shield mark glittered until it was hard to look at, and the silvery light reached out and tentatively cocooned Blaise. Harry had to put his hand over his eyes. Just because he was Lord here didn’t mean he was immune to the effects of bright light.
            A second later, the cocoon gaped, and gasped, and was gone. Harry heard a sound like ringing silver coins as the magic expired. The shield mark on Blaise’s arm looked dim now, more tarnished than it had before.
            But the burns were healed, bar one on the cheek that Harry suspected might be beyond even the bond’s healing powers. Blaise’s face had been closest to him when the bond reacted with fire.
            In the silence, Harry plucked the knife from Blaise’s hand and threw it away into the corner of the kitchen. The little ringing noise that made seemed to wake the rest of his vassals from their watching trance.
            “I thought you’d killed him,” Pansy whispered.
            Harry glanced at her, and remembered in time not to let the full force of his commitment to being a Lord come through his gaze. It was the bond he’d had to convince, not Pansy, who from the beginning had been more supportive of him than he’d had any right to expect. “No. I commanded the bond to reverse the damage. It’s about accepting it, at least enough to make it do what I want, instead of fighting it.”
            He snapped his fingers, and Blaise’s body swayed into the air. It wasn’t a very steady progression, but Harry trusted the magic not to hurt Blaise, the way he had trusted the bond to imprison Draco and move him aside this morning instead of hurting him, and he didn’t think he should carry Blaise right now.
            “What are you going to do with him?” That was Draco, whispering as if he assumed he would earn Harry’s wrath for himself if he talked into a different tone of voice.
            This time, the bond was apparently in Harry’s face as he looked at Draco, who flinched and lowered his eyes. Harry sighed. Draco’s shield mark was already burning, from the way he rubbed it. Harry would do his best to keep that from happening, but his control wasn’t perfect, and both he and they would have to stop blaming him for that.
            “I’m going to take him to the library, and talk to him,” Harry said firmly. “He’s been acting like this for a reason, and I haven’t bothered to find out why. Either the bond has no effect on him, not the way it should, or it’s a murderous effect. And I’m his Lord. I’m responsible for what happens to him.”
            “You were not acting like his Lord.” Severus considered him from what he seemed to have judged to be a safe distance, the other side of the kitchen table. “Why now?”
            Harry swallowed. “Because I can’t make the bond do what I want by fighting it,” he said. “I can only take responsibility and hope that works. Maybe it’ll make me able to break the bond and free him—him, and the rest of you, whoever wants to be freed—and maybe it won’t, but either way, going on as we were is going to result in his death.”
            Severus nodded, eyes so hooded that Harry couldn’t tell what was going on in them. Maybe he could have if he concentrated on the bond, but right now, he was tired and the bond was tired, limp and catatonic between him and everyone else but Blaise.
            He needed to concentrate on Blaise until he figured out what to do about him. Or until he woke up and talked of his own free will.
            He floated Blaise in front of him down the corridor and into the first library he came to. He didn’t want to try going upstairs with his control so weak. Besides, Greg was probably still up there, and Harry didn’t want to boot him out.
            He laid Blaise on the couch, called Kreacher to bring some blankets and pillows to make it more comfortable, and settled in to wait. He supposed he could call on the bond to wake Blaise up, too, but frankly, he was just damn tired. A little rest of his own wouldn’t be a bad idea.
*
            “Did you see him?”
            That was Pansy, speaking in awed tones. Draco stared at her. What was she on about? Of course they had all seen what happened to Blaise, and the only miracle was that it wasn’t worse. Even if he had been surrounded by that silver cocoon that then cracked, Draco had seen a few burns left.
            It made him shiver and want to retreat. What if he displeased Potter like that, and he reacted with fire? It wasn’t like Draco was one of the ancient wizards who had chosen a bond with someone powerful, because he deemed the protection worth the risk of his protector getting angry with him.
            “Young Master Zabini does seem chastised,” Professor Snape said, his drawl at its most arrogant. “Though it is hard to tell when he is not awake.”
            But Pansy was shaking her head impatiently. Draco had seen her look like that right before she gave up trying to tutor Greg in Arithmancy. And Vincent, too, but Draco wasn’t going to think about Vince right now. “No. I meant our Lord. Did you see the way he looked? The look in his eyes?”
            “I didn’t see anything special about his eyes,” Draco said, and frowned when Pansy shook her head at him, too. Well, he hadn’t, and for Pansy to act as if that made him stupid was a little hard to bear.
            “They didn’t glow, or anything.” Pansy paced a single step, then flopped back into her chair at the table, as if disheartened that they hadn’t seen the same thing she’d noticed. “They just—he looked like a Lord. That’s the way I’ve seen my parents look sometimes, when they were thinking of a threat to the family.”
            “He can’t be my parents,” Draco snapped, his hostility flaring up again. Maybe he could get along all right with Potter over a few things, but if Potter attempted to take his father’s place, then Draco would snap.
            “That’s not what I meant.” Pansy was quiet, and Draco thought she probably wanted to abandon the conversation, but then she sat up. “Look. What made some of the old wizarding families want to give up their freedom for the sake of protection?”
            “Weakness,” Draco said at once. It was the answer anyone familiar with the history of Lordship bonds could give. “They couldn’t stand on their own, so they found someone who could, and clung to them.”
            Pansy sighed. “Yes, but it was more than that. Some of them made bargains for a different kind of freedom, or became vassals because it would place them in a situation that was restricted but still better than what they’d been living under. And sometimes someone just wanted to be close to a powerful wizard.”
            “To manipulate them?” Draco frowned. He didn’t know what she was getting at.
            “To be the presence of power and honor,” Pansy said. “That’s what one of the stories my mother told me said. To be able to catch their breaths, and admire beauty instead of having to steal it for themselves.” She shrugged. “The way Potter’s eyes looked just now, it reminded me of that story.”
            Draco said nothing. Professor Snape said nothing. From the look on Professor Snape’s face, Draco thought he was just barely restraining a sneer of contempt, and that only because the bond might punish him if he didn’t.
            Draco, though…
            If that was real, he wondered what those old wizards had felt for their families. Draco had always been taught that his family was the most important thing, the center of his world, and if he didn’t fight for and defend the Malfoys, then he was nothing. Blood traitors were even worse; they had abandoned their whole culture, or sometimes their obligation to produce children for the family, by tolerating Muggles and marrying Muggleborns.
            But if the kind of beauty Pansy was talking about was real, then Draco could see why they would abandon their families for their Lords. Something like that, something as grand as that, would be worth following.
            But only if it was real, Draco told himself again, and rubbed the silvery shield mark. It felt metallic against his fingers right now, not warm. He had no idea what that meant. He had no idea about this bond, or what it really meant, or where it was really going.
            And he didn’t believe that Potter could simply become a Lord, or decide to be one, overnight. That did not happen.
*
            Blaise stirred slowly. He knew he would feel pain, and grimaced when his cheek scorched at him. But he knew, at the same time, that it was a lot less than he should have felt. He reached his hand up to investigate the matter.
            A hand caught his. Blaise froze. He knew the touch of everyone he allowed to touch him, and that wasn’t one of them. Besides, the bond mark on his arm almost sang in response, and that narrowed the possibilities down to one.
            “That was the one mark I couldn’t heal,” Potter’s voice said, quietly. “I think it’ll heal on its own if you leave it alone. But I’ll ask Severus to make some burn paste as soon as possible, so that you can heal faster.”
            Blaise dropped his hand back to the couch with exquisite slowness. Yes, he had attacked Potter, and there had been the rush of pain up through his shield mark that had consumed him, faster this time. More this time than the magic that had almost killed him in the Forest. Blaise shuddered and wrapped his arms around himself.
            He should be dead. And he knew that Potter couldn’t cast ordinary healing spells, one of the facts that had been in the papers about him during the war as part of a list of traits to help people identify him. Besides, Potter didn’t have a wand, anyway.
            “How did you heal me?” he asked, without opening his eyes.
            Potter was silent for a long time. Blaise listened to the crackle of the fire that must be lit in a nearby hearth, and found it orange in his mind. Potter, when he finally spoke, had an old, dusty blue tone in his voice.
            “I was trying to manipulate the bond, or find a way to do it, that would keep Greg as my vassal but free you. And then you were burned, and I knew I didn’t want you to die. So I took control of the bond. I probably could have done it all along, but I had to want to do it.” Blaise heard him pause. “I had to want to do it more than I wanted to stay free of the responsibility.”
            Blaise nodded against the couch. He didn’t want to say anything. He didn’t want to acknowledge that Potter was the reason he was still alive, this time, and not just the reason he hurt. No, the reason he didn’t hurt.
But he had to acknowledge, finally, that trying to kill Potter wouldn’t work. He had done it twice. He probably wouldn’t survive a third time. Potter wouldn’t want Blaise to live then, he couldn’t, and it sounded as though Potter’s unconscious desires influenced the bond much more than his conscious wishes.
Blaise had to make Potter sympathetic to him—both so that he could survive and so that he had the chance of getting out of the bond. Potter hadn’t had to heal him. He hadn’t had to listen. He was offering the opportunity to do it now.
Blaise swallowed and sat up. “Do you want to know why I want out of the bond so badly?” he asked.
Potter’s nod was choppy but decisive. “The others don’t like it, and I know that some of them were pretty desperate at first, but they’ve adapted better than you have. So have I. I thought the bond was supposed to readjust memories and do anything else that it needed to make itself acceptable to its victims.”
            Blaise curled his lip. “Victims. A cute way to put it.”
            “But accurate where you’re concerned.” Potter brushed his fingers over the silver shield mark on his arm, but never took his eyes from Blaise. “It would be, wouldn’t it? You never wanted something like this to happen, you never expected it, and you would rather take the chance with the Ministry arresting you than stay with me a minute longer.”
            Blaise forced his shoulders to relax. Potter wasn’t reading his mind. Blaise never would have been able to attack him if he could. He was reading Blaise’s emotions through the bond instead, and since Blaise hadn’t been shy about speaking his opinions, Potter could attach them easily to his words.
            “Yes,” he said. “Listen.”
            Potter nodded once, his hand still on his shield mark. Blaise didn’t think he was going to use it to inflict pain, or even to remind Blaise who was Lord here and who was vassal. He wanted to touch it and remind himself what responsibilities he had here, what it meant that he and Blaise were bound in this stupid relationship.
            As long as it lasted. Blaise tried to keep his skin from crawling at the thought, and looked into the fire. It made an easier audience to address than Potter did.
            “My mother knew that I would need strength,” he said. “She told me that I couldn’t ever be seen as weak. I’m not from a prominent pure-blood family. I carry my father’s name, but my mother’s had a string of other husbands, all of whom thought they could take advantage of the fact that she was a bastard daughter of a pure-blood Italian Lord who never acknowledged her.”
            “A Lord like me?” Potter’s voice was soft. Blaise found it hard to tell if it was incredulous. The mark on his arm remained tarnished and dull.
            “Yes,” Blaise said, and kept staring into the fire. He thought he might see pity on Potter’s face if he looked up, and at that point, he wouldn’t be held responsible for what he chose to do if he saw that. “He was too preoccupied with his vassals to care about her. But she was pure-blood, and she chose to climb to the top of the ranks with her magic and her poisons and her skills in seduction. She wanted to spare me some of the work. If I was strong from the beginning, she taught me, or even if I only looked strong, then no one would challenge me.”
            “Did you follow Draco because of that?” Potter asked quietly. “Because he was the stronger, and it was no use trying to challenge him? Or was him not being as strong as he should be part of the reason you always seemed to stand apart from him?”
            Blaise stared at Potter. He couldn’t help it, even though staring was both hard for him right now and probably impolite. He hadn’t thought that someone so involved in both Gryffindor and saving the world had noticed any of the internal politics of other Houses.
            “Did the bond tell you that?” he finally asked, falling back on the most likely scenario.
            “I don’t think so,” Potter said simply, leaning back and studying Blaise. His fingers remained resting on the shield mark, even though he had shifted his other hand to lie on his knee. He looked very plain, and stronger than Blaise remembered. “I think it’s just reminding me of things I saw but didn’t understand at the time.” He paused, then urged in a low voice, “So which one was it?”
            Blaise returned to the fire. Yes, some things were too strange to talk about while staring into someone’s eyes. “Draco’s family was too strong for me to challenge directly, and a challenge that I failed would make me look worse than pretending to defer to him. So I did what had to be done when I couldn’t escape being noticed, and established myself as independent the rest of the time.
            “It—I’ve always been strong, Potter.” He could remember that, remember the way his mother looked at him, her approving little nod when Blaise told her what he had done at Hogwarts. “I’ve always been stronger than anyone else noticed or knew about. But it was a quiet strength, and the only one who needed to approve of it was my mother. I would have had my own life when the war ended. I went along with the Death Eaters and pretended to do what they wanted.”
            “So you wouldn’t be noticed or cursed,” Potter whispered. “Because what mattered was the future and what you would be able to do in it, not what you believed right then or some kind of heroic last stand.”
            Blaise snapped his mouth shut. His cheeks burned. He rubbed at them, and was just glad that it wasn’t the shield mark.
            “Other people did that, too,” Potter said, and his voice was still softer. “I think Pansy did, and Draco talked a good game but he was scared out of his mind. What makes it so different for you? Why could they acclimate to the bond, but you can’t?”
            Blaise had to laugh. “You think that Draco’s acclimated to the bond?”
            “He’s been doing better than you have.”
            Blaise had to nod, and then he shut his eyes. This next thing was going to be the hardest thing to confess. He would have to do the best he could and hope that was enough.
            It probably would be, for Potter. It was himself that Blaise dreaded, and all the memories of his mother’s voice that circled in his head. Over the years, he had disappointed her enough that he knew what she would say about every aspect of every situation. And he knew—he knew what she would say about this.
            He grimaced and forced the words out between his teeth. His mother wasn’t here to shield him, as she had warned him time and again that she wouldn’t be. He was on his own.
            “His parents asked for your protection, and decided that it was all right for Draco to follow you. My mother didn’t. She’ll be—disappointed in me. She’ll be upset that I was so weak as to get bonded in the first place and not get out of it, and then she’ll be angry because I tried to kill you and failed.”
            “She would want you to go along with me?” Potter sounded baffled.
            Blaise opened his eyes and shook his head. “No, she would want me free. She doesn’t like Lords any more than I do—she has more reason.” Potter nodded instead of arguing with that, luckily. “She would think that I should have killed you, but found a way to do it that worked. That I should have been strong, and not got caught. That I can’t be weak.”
            Now. There it was, out of him, the whole stinking mess, the pus from the wound. Blaise sat there and wondered what Potter would say in response.
            “You’re not weak.”
            Blaise opened his eyes again. “You have a different definition of weakness than I do,” he blurted, before he could take it back. His mother’s voice sighed in the back of his head. Blaise. Keep calm. Retort only with words that will actually hurt, not with ones that could make you bleed to death. I did not raise a son who would do that.
            “I suspect that’s true,” Potter said. “But I mean that you couldn’t escape from this bond any more than I could. I’m more magically powerful than you are right now, and empowered by law to take care of you. And I’ll free you as soon as I can, as soon as I manage to make the bond—flex around you, instead of reacting to my emotions, or be so stiff that feeling responsible for other people means that I have to be responsible for you, too. If your mother comes to you, or firecalls you, or owls you, then I’ll tell her so, too. And I’ll keep you safe from her if you want me to do that.”
            Blaise opened his mouth, and then stood up and stalked away from the library. Potter had done a good enough job of healing him that his muscles didn’t even feel stiff.
            He was shaking, and if he stayed in the library a moment longer, he knew he would cry out that Potter didn’t understand, that Blaise would never want or need protection from his own mother, because everything she did to and for him was just trying to provide him with the ability to stand on his own—
            Or he would weep, and start thinking that Potter was right.
            And Blaise wasn’t sure which one would be worse.
*
            Genuka: Not quite. If the bond can cause pain, it makes sense that it can also reverse it.
            polka dot: That amused me more than it should have.
            delia cerrano: He has to, now that Pansy has brought up Harry’s Lord-like aspect and seems willing to go along with him.
            SP777: Harry will free him if he can, but he can’t really justify getting rid of him any ther way.
            I’ve been fine, and I still have my bird; he’s fine, although rather loud at the moment.
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The Only True Lords