Adult-FanFiction.org : Harry Potter

The Only True Lords	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 54573 -:- Recommendations : 4 -:- Currently Reading : 11
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I am making no money from this fanfic.

Chapter List
- 24
- 25
- 26
Thank you again for all the reviews!
Chapter Twenty-Five—Moving Very Fast
            Harry woke up with a gasp. He had actually spent a peaceful day yesterday afternoon and evening, with most of his vassals—except Greg—avoiding him and appearing for a few hours here and there. He had eaten dinner with Snape, talked to Draco a little about books in the library, and turned down Greg’s offer to stand guard outside his door. Greg appeared to think that Blaise would try to kill him again, now that he had tried twice.
            He’d also leaned into Harry’s bedroom just as Harry was getting ready to close the door, and punched a fist into one palm, looking wistfully at Harry. “You don’t want me to beat Zabini up?”
            “Did you call him Zabini when we were at Hogwarts?” Harry had to ask. He had a morbid fascination with how many friendships in Slytherin House he was breaking up. He had already noticed that the two green dots on the shield that represented Draco and Blaise had pulled as far apart as possible.
            “Yeah,” Greg said, and stared at him, waiting for what he seemed to think was the conclusion of a joke.
            Harry had dismissed him with a word of thanks and a weary wave, and Greg had shut the door and gone to bed. Harry waited until he was sure Greg was asleep. The contented thrumming of the bond through his dot really didn’t do anything more than deepen a little. Then again, Greg seemed happy most of the time.
            But now…
            Now, something was hammering at the wards as though a flight of dragons was out there, and desperate to get in.
            Harry turned to the bond, his only defense at the moment, and twisted his magic through and around his vassals. Greg was still asleep, maybe because he’d chosen a room that was pretty deep inside the house and insulated from the wards, but Draco and Snape were certainly awake, and Pansy was getting there. Blaise was awake, he thought, and not moving.
            Good. Harry wanted to be the one to face this danger first. Pulse pounding, he raced to his door and flung it open.
            Snape stood there, lifting one eyebrow and his stolen wand at the same time.
            Harry winced a little. “Yeah, well,” he muttered.
            “You will be most effective if you have someone at your side with a wand,” Snape murmured. That rebuke only, and nothing else, because another blow made the wards shudder as though a giant was thumping on the roof.
            Snape tilted his head back so that he was regarding the ceiling, and added, in a tone that hadn’t changed much in inflection, “I find myself wondering exactly who yearns to get in.”
            “Let’s go give them a nasty surprise,” Harry said, and pushed past Snape. Snape’s footsteps were right behind him on the stairs, and Harry heard a door open once, then close. Draco, from the feeling of the bond swaying in his mind like a spring breeze. He’d apparently decided to stay in his room.
            Wise. Harry kind of wished he could have decided the same. He was tired after reading old books all day. But while he thought the wards of Grimmauld Place might hold up against the intruders without help, he wasn’t sure.
            He looked out through one of the windows that faced the street, but couldn’t see anything. Then Snape said something softly behind him, a spell Harry had never learned, and one of the walls became transparent. Harry nearly yelped before he shot out a hand and realized the wall was still there, just easy to see through.
            “I would not expose us so,” Snape said.
            Harry winced. There was a little burn through the bond, and he reckoned Snape was—hurt. Hurt that Harry distrusted him, apparently.
            Harry didn’t have time for anything other than an apologetic smile right now; he was too busy looking for yet another sign of their enemy. Finally he located a flicker of motion in the corner of his eye, and looked up, as he should have before now, being a Quidditch player and all.
            Several brooms hovered above the streets, with just here and there a sparkle of charms meant to keep Muggles from noticing them. Harry stared, then shook his head. The Muggles wouldn’t wake to the noise of the wards shuddering, since they couldn’t feel magic and weren’t connected to them like Harry was, but they could wake up to spells being fired. Someone was taking an awful risk.
            Then one of the brooms swooped lower and a hood fell back, and Harry recognized Healer Kislik. Behind her was a thick, tall man who sat his broom as easily as if he rode plunging dragons all the time, and his attention fixed on the house with a brooding frown.
            “Potter!” Kislik called. “Come out, Potter, who calls himself a Lord and holds helpless slaves, and negotiate!”
            “Yeah, they’re pounding on the wards and they want me to negotiate,” Harry muttered, and drew back a second to think. He had no idea if the Ministry would respond fast enough to the attack, but they still had to be told, he decided. Otherwise, they might blame his vassals later for not saying enough, and that was not on.
            “Firecall the Ministry,” he said over his shoulder, where he could feel that Pansy had come down the stairs and was standing silently waiting for orders. “Whoever you can get through to, it doesn’t matter. Tell them to get Auror Stone and that Harry Potter is under attack.”
            She didn’t argue, the way Draco or Blaise certainly would have. She vanished, and Snape shifted behind Harry, drawing his attention back to him.
            “May I suggest a few spells?” Snape murmured.
            Harry nodded. “You’re the only one who has the strength to cast them right now, though. I don’t think I can convince the bond to mimic actual spell effects unless one of you is directly in danger, and I prefer not to risk that.”
            Snape paused as if he hadn’t expected that answer, but went on smoothly a second later. “We need to bring down their brooms, force them to fight on the ground.”
            “Can we do that without hurting them?” Harry looked out again. It looked as though Kislik and the others were flying in a similar formation to the one that the Order of the Phoenix had used, that time they brought Harry from Privet Drive to here. They stayed high, circling and dipping down to hurl their spells, but then soaring up again.
            They were circling…
            That might mean they had someone in the center, someone they were protecting.
            Snape spoke again before Harry could think about the implications of that. “Only you, Potter, would be concerned about hurting our enemies,” he said dryly.
            Harry glared at him. “I’m concerned about what the Ministry and the public will think,” he snapped. “If that’s being overly concerned about things, and worried where I shouldn’t be, then fine. I’ll worry.”
            Snape stared at him with his mouth open a little. Then he shut it and gave a tiny bow. “I apologize,” he said. “Restricting it to non-lethal spells, I still think that we can bring them down.”
            “Do it, then.” Harry stepped out of the way, and watched as Snape lifted his wand and made a tiny hole in the wards. Harry knew he needed to do that to get any magic at all beyond the line of the house’s defenses, but his spine still prickled and he felt an uncomfortable flush coming up his cheeks. The bond, and part of him, too, hated that his vassals were at all exposed by something like this.
            God, he wanted to be armed. Because his wand would make him feel better, because then he could do things like warm his blankets up without asking Snape or Kreacher to do it, but most of all because then he would be able to protect other people who couldn’t protect themselves.
            I have a saving-people thing, and a Lord thing, but most of all, I think this is just me. It’s just who I am.
            Harry half-smiled as he watched Snape aim his wand. That made him feel better, almost as good as having a wand would have. Maybe he could stop thinking about all the changes that the Lordship bond was supposedly making to his mind, and just go with the undeniable truth instead—that guarding people made him feel good. Kislik and all the other wizards who wanted to debate about Lords being evil ought to have fun with that philosophical problem.
            “Ventus,” Snape said, so gently that it sounded like a gentle spell, and Harry opened his mouth to ask how that was going to help get these people off their brooms.
            But the air above Kislik and her minions began to shimmer and dance, and then it exploded in a breeze, although they were far enough back from it that Harry could only see it because of the way Kislik’s hood and hair started blowing about. She snatched at her hood, and so did the other people, but the wind was forcing their brooms down. It howled, and Harry could almost see the flat pressure forming above them, driving their brooms nearer and nearer the ground.
            “That’s wonderful,” Harry said, and only realized how awed he sounded when Snape turned and stared at him.
            “Well, it is,” Harry said, because the bond was humming and he didn’t want to take the time to sort out the strangeness. He turned to watching Kislik and the rest.
            They were gathering themselves up, and none of them seemed hurt, to Harry’s vast relief. Kislik turned and gestured at the house, and they all turned and drew their wands. They were still standing in a circle, though, and didn’t move closer even when they began casting at the wards of the house.
            They’re protecting someone, Harry thought again, and this time, he was certain. Someone had come along who was important enough to coddle and keep safe. Harry didn’t know why they would want to come so close to battle, but perhaps they hadn’t known what it would be like, or had really wanted to see Harry defeated with their own eyes.
            Harry fell back to stand at Snape’s shoulder, although it made his mouth hurt to leave his vassal alone like that. He turned around when he heard footsteps behind him, but it was only Pansy, coming back from the fireplace.
            “I left a message with the Auror I think words as the undersecretary for the Department,” Pansy said grimly, shaking a strand of hair out of her mouth. “But I don’t know if she’ll actually take the message in for me, or not.”
            “We’ll do what we can,” Harry said, and turned to watch Snape again. He wondered if he should tell Snape to aim for the person in the center of the circle that the others were defending, but that still might end up with someone dead, and his vassals looking like violent Slytherins after all.
            Besides, Snape was doing well enough on his own.
            Snape moved smoothly through position after position, deflecting curses and shooting through holes in the wards that he sealed right after he used them, always moving to some new position so Kislik and her crew couldn’t fixate on him. He used hexes that would cripple and occupy people, but not curses. Harry suspected that was more because of public relations than because he didn’t want to, but he didn’t care. Snape was holding them at bay.
            No one on the other side had cast the spell to make the front of the house transparent, the way Snape had, Harry thought. He wondered if they didn’t know it, or if it was just hard when Stunners and Cutting Hexes and Despair Charms were flying past your head.
            Then Kislik leaned over and said something to the hooded figure in the center of the circle, and it nodded. Kislik turned around again. She hadn’t bothered to pull her hood up, and Harry could see every inch and angle of her face. She looked grim, and desperate.
            She lifted her wand and started to intone a spell that Harry didn’t recognize. But Pansy’s hand clutched his arm suddenly, and drew his attention away from Kislik.
            “You have to stop her.” Pansy’s voice was thin and high, so much so that it took Harry a minute to realize what she was saying, and how urgent it sounded. “She’s going to use Healing magic backwards! You can’t let her do that.”
            Harry hesitated a second. He didn’t know if Snape had heard or not. He was still aiming his wand through a hole in the wards, but Harry didn’t think he was aiming it specifically at Kislik.
            And really, Snape had handled the whole battle so far. Harry ought to do something to show that he was worthy of the title of Lord.
            Harry stepped forwards and laid his hand on the transparent wall. Kislik and the rest couldn’t see him, of course, but he thought they could hear him well enough. He pitched his voice into a shout.
            “What the fuck are you doing?”
            Kislik faltered in the middle of her spell, and stared at the house. The hooded figures behind her gave her an urgent shove forwards, but she shook her head and didn’t move, maybe because she had recognized the voice.
            Harry heard Pansy clap her hand to her forehead behind him. He didn’t turn around and ask her what she was doing that for, but it was hard.
            What? She wanted me to stop her, and I stopped her.
            Snape was watching him out of the corner of his eye. Harry ignored him and spoke on. He had a few things that he wanted to say to Kislik, anyway. He hoped that she would listen instead of striking immediately again.
            “You come here, and you threaten my vassals, and you threaten me. You were probably part of that kidnapping attempt, too, weren’t you? What, is one of those people with you the one who owned the cellar where my vassals were imprisoned?”
            It was a totally random guess, but the figure behind Kislik, the one they were all protecting, took a step backwards. Harry smiled, and he was glad that it felt cruel and nasty and much worse compared to any smile he’d ever given before. Good. He wanted to disrupt them and trample them. Make them suffer the way his vassals had suffered.
            Without actually killing them, of course. Part of him would like to, but that would make them too monstrous in the eyes of the Ministry.
            “I haven’t done anything yet,” Harry said. “And you’re doing stupid things. What do you think is going to happen to my vassals if you collapse the roof on their heads? Will they miraculously survive and I won’t, because I’m an evil Lord but they’re innocent?”
            There was a long, dead silence, except for the hooded figure whispering furiously to some of the other people with Kislik. Then Kislik stepped forwards and said, “I told you we were part of the Freedom Fighters. I told you what we struggle for. I told you that we would never back down, and never give in.”
            Harry rolled his eyes. “Then you were behind the kidnapping, right? You took my vassals to that cellar because it was warded in a way that prevented the Lordship bond from working.” Harry nodded, seeing it now. “You used the Wizengamot lackeys because they wanted to get rid of my vassals for a different reason, and because they could take the blame and keep the heat off you. But you never counted on me coming to rescue them the way I did. You probably wanted to keep us isolated from each other so that you could work on me to let them go.”
            There was a deep silence around him, one that seemed to be coming from inside the house as well as outside it. Harry looked around, touching his shield mark as it tingled, and saw both Snape and Pansy staring at him.
            “What?” Harry asked. “It’s pretty obvious.” He turned back to Kislik and her crew, but added over his shoulder, “I didn’t figure it out before, but I have all the pieces in front of me now, so I can do that. You’re not the only smart ones here, you know.”
*
            Severus shook his head, but was not sure what he could say. What Miss Parkinson had said yesterday had seemed absurd to him—then. That Potter could be any kind of Lord, except the accidental kind that the bond had already made him, was far-fetched.
            But now…
            Potter was answering back to the Healer and the others, who called themselves Freedom Fighters while not having any way of achieving the freedom they fought for, as if he was to the manor born. He sounded as though having a little knowledge had empowered him to do anything else. He scolded these enemies, mocked them, and told them off for having dared to try to harm “his vassals.” He even sounded possessive.
            Severus did not trust it.
            The boy had fought the bond, resisted it, as much as any of them had, and only used it to his advantage to resist murderous attacks on him. If he’d had a wand, Severus thought, he might not have found even that amount of kinship with it. He would have attacked Zabini instead, and turned Draco’s punch back on him.
            But Severus watched as Potter fenced with the Healer and her kind, yelling words that called them not real Healers, said they didn’t care about any lives but the ones that would yield to them, and accusing them of idiocy, and it did sound exactly like some of the Lords in the fairy stories his mother had told him.
            “Professor Snape?”
            Severus started and turned around. Draco might have been there for a long time, but, far-gone in first battle rage and then listening to Potter’s speech, Severus had not noticed him. He shook his head and came over to put a hand on Draco’s shoulder, drawing him back and away. If Draco took it into his head to attack Potter at the moment, Severus would not answer for what would happen.
            “What’s going on?” Draco whispered, crowding close to him.
            “The Healer who wanted to end the bond in Hogwarts is here,” Severus murmured in response. “She and her followers tried to pull the house down on our heads. I suppose that she was behind the kidnapping from the Ministry holding cells as well, or someone they serve was.”
            “Oh.” Draco nibbled his lip, watching the transparent front of the house with big eyes. Severus had been prepared to explain the spell that made it possible to see out, and to say that they were perfectly safe, with no disruptions of the wards, but Draco didn’t seem to need the explanation. He leaned on Severus’s side, as he had sometimes when he was younger and needed reassurance that he was still a good person despite professors telling him otherwise, and watched.
            Finally, the Healer seemed to get tired of Potter’s insults, or at least of not responding to them. Severus heard her pick up the chant again, the spell that he knew was reversed Healing magic, and could cause a heart attack, or the hardening of the blood, instead of stopping it. He grimaced and forced himself away from Draco. He was still the only one of them who had a wand, the only one who could face this.
            “Wait.”
            The force in the word seemed to flow out from the shield mark on Severus’s arm, and force his muscles to fall still. He scowled. He hated the thought that Potter could so easily control him. The others, perhaps, the ones who needed to be controlled, but not him.
            But Potter had his eyes closed, his hands extended in front of him. And he was murmuring, as though he thought he could perform wandless magic.
            Severus shook his head. If Potter had had such wandless ability, he would have showed it before now, given the pressures that had been on him. Severus surged up beside him. Reverse Healing magic could potentially pass the wards. He had to stop it.
            Then Potter pushed outwards with his hands, and at the same moment, Severus felt the bond ripple and flow.
            It seemed as though Potter was struggling with something. He bit his lip, and sweat formed on his brow as he pushed and prodded. His hands kept moving, apparently feeling along an invisible wall of their own making. Now and then, Potter opened his mouth and moved his jaw in silent talk with some interlocutor Severus could not see.
            Severus turned his attention out to the Healer and her companions. They were stepping back from the house, their mouths moving, but Severus couldn’t hear them under the sudden pressure and ringing in his ears. He opened his own mouth, but he wasn’t sure that any sound would come out. The air seemed to buck and twitch between his lips, and the shield mark on his arm was the most present part of his body. It didn’t burn, but it was there. He knew it. He couldn’t treat it as a normal part of his arm anymore.
            That made him wary, because since when had he treated it like a normal part of himself?
            And then Potter finished pushing, and collapsed to the floor. Severus took a sharp step forwards, but it seemed that Potter wasn’t unconscious. He was breathing deeply, evenly, and he lifted his head a second later and made another pushing gesture with his hands at the front of the house.
            Then Severus felt it—something else settling into place behind the wards, strengthening them, and repairing even the slight holes he had made to cast his spells through.
            Severus whipped around, staring. He saw the transparent spell he had cast rippling, before it vanished and the façade of the house was there before them again, as though it had never departed. Severus put out a hand, wondering if the wall would feel spongy, the way it had looked to his hand for a second, and yield beneath his fingertips. Nothing happened, though. The sponginess was nonexistent. Severus shook his head and turned back to Potter, tilting the boy’s head up so that he could see him more clearly.
            “What did you do?” he demanded. The shield mark on his arm had stopped ringing, but he still knew it was there.
            Potter gave him a tired smile and yawned at him. Yawned at him! Severus could feel his anger building up, but Potter laid his head down and shut his eyes instead of standing up and responding the way he should.
            “I did what I should have done when we first came here,” Potter murmured. “I joined the bond to the wards. As long as you’re inside them, you can’t be harmed or taken anywhere. I was trying to make the bond protect the house, and it wouldn’t do that, because the house isn’t part of the Lordship bond. But I can put it right behind the walls, and make it a shield-bubble around you. So you’re safe now.”
            He shut his eyes tighter. “And now I’m going to take a nap.”
            Severus looked up. Draco and Pansy were both staring at him and Potter with wide eyes. Pansy shook her head a little. “Is he real?” she asked. “Is he allowed to be real?”
            Severus was spared the need to answer by the whoosh of fire in the drawing room hearth—the Aurors, come too late to help, as they always were.
            But his hands shook as he stooped over the body of his Lord, and he was not ashamed to admit it.
*
            BAFan: Thanks! As for Harry learning things, Severus is starting to realize that, but it’s going to take a while.
And the reaction of Blaise’s mother is one of the things I’m most looking forward to writing.
delia cerrano: No, he never did.
Genuka: Who is? Blaise?
SP777: Does Pansy also have more sense than Harry? ;)
- 24
- 25
- 26
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 Only True Lords