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The Name I'll Give to Thee	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 42129 -:- Recommendations : 2 -:- Currently Reading : 6
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I am making no money from this fanfic.

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Chapter Twenty-Six—Decisions Remade

            Harry appeared outside the Manor gates. He could have appeared inside the wards, but he thought he would give them a chance to chime and warn Draco he was coming. Draco might be in the middle of practice with his wand, or watching his mother, and this would give him extra time to decide where he wanted to meet Harry.

            Being considerate right now won’t matter that much when you tell him that Ron convinced you to do what he couldn’t.

            Harry grimaced. Ron had also approached him as his best friend rather than telling Harry that going into danger was wrong for him. And standing up to the Ministry the way Harry planned on doing would carry plenty of dangerous consequences of its own.

            He took one step forwards.

            And the air erupted around him.

            Harry had cast himself to the ground before he thought about what he was doing, Auror instincts kicking into high alert. The spell, whatever it was, hit the dirt beside him and created a dint the size of his skull. Harry hissed and rolled, and the next blow hit the dirt at his feet, sending pebbles flying. He felt a small scratch on his cheek begin to bleed and realized that he would be pouring blood if he stayed here.

            He didn’t intend to remain helpless in the face of an attack, though. He had always carried the attack to his enemies, and that wasn’t about to change now that he was perhaps on the verge of no longer being an Auror.

            He doubled up once more, as though he still didn’t know where the curses were coming from and was helpless in the face of them, and then sprang to his feet as the next curse bounded towards him. He whipped his head in the most likely direction, and saw a witch staring at him from a short distance away.

            Harry leaped into the air, casting three spells on himself in quick succession, and one towards the witch. The spells made him lighten and drift like thistledown, so that the last strike of the curse missed him. The wind sent him drifting sideways, but Harry muttered a Finite and dropped to the ground closer to the witch, exactly where he wanted to be.

            The curse he used on his attacker caused a net of sticky strands to boil out of the earth around her, snaring her hands and binding them together when she would have used her wand on him. She shrieked and cast a spell Harry didn’t know, but the very sound of the incantation made him wince.

            He found out what it did when the air in front of him boiled like the ground had to produce the net and a tiger came into being, stalking towards him. It trailed off into mist around the tail area, but he didn’t think that mattered when he could see the solid legs and long claws on the nearer end.

            Harry closed his eyes. He knew spells to defeat a conjuring like this, but he hadn’t used them in a long time. As he searched his memory for them, the tiger hissed, spat, and leaped.

            Harry used his spells again, and drifted aside from the first lunge, but the tiger landed on the spot and spun around lightly, far more lightly than Harry would have thought such a huge beast could move, and lashed out with the nearer paw.

            He began to bleed, dripping heavily from the place on his arm where the smallest claw had raked him, and that just pissed him off more. Harry opened his eyes and glared at the tiger. He didn’t remember the exact spell that he could have used to defeat it, but that didn’t mean he was helpless.

            “Commuto,” he said.

            And the tiger exploded.

*

            Draco gasped as a chain seemed to constrict around his lungs and yank him to his feet from the inside. He bolted up, staring around. What was going on? Had someone pierced the wards? The old ones hadn’t reacted like this when they were breached, but it was true that the new ones might be different.

            Then the places on his arms chewed by the mist during the demi-marriage ritual began to burn, and Draco knew what this was.

            A husband knows when his spouse is in danger…

            He turned and ran towards the top of the stairs, shouting for Affy and Ossy to take over the watch on his mother. He heard the pops as they obeyed, and then he could bend forwards and pay attention to the distance still separating him from Harry. He had ridiculously far to go before he would be able to get beyond the anti-Apparition wards.

            On the other hand, lowering them, right now, might be an even worse idea.

            Finally, he flung open the front door and ran out onto the grounds. The whirl of light beyond the gates told him where the battle was going on, at least. He shut his eyes and Apparated the distance.

            He arrived in the middle of what looked like a rain of orange fur, and immediately located the witch who had attacked Harry, bound in a sticky web that grew over her shoulders and mouth now. Her hands were still on her wand, though, actually bound there by the strands of the web, and she was still struggling to move it in some spell that wouldn’t require a lot of different swishes.

            Draco Stunned her, efficiently. This one, he intended to get some answers out of.

            That done, he fell back a step and looked around. There didn’t seem to be any other attackers, and the orange rain had stopped. Harry, cradling his bleeding arm, stood in the middle of the grass and stared at Draco.

            “What?” Draco snapped.

            “You just Apparated here,” Harry whispered. “And you cast a Stunner. Is that something you were practicing with the basilisk wand today? I know you couldn’t do those spells just a short while ago.”

            Draco started and stared down at the wand in his hands. He hadn’t thought of it, had only reached for the power and cast the spell and demanded that it be there to fill him. The power had felt no different than if it had come from the hawthorn wand. Perhaps he had flown a bit farther in the Apparition, had Stunned the woman with more force than normal, but it wasn’t the kind of thing he could remember until he turned his mind to it.

            “I didn’t practice it,” he said. “But I was talking to the wand about the choices it had as my wand.” He cast a defensive look at Harry, but he was gravely listening, not laughing because Draco had talked to a piece of wood. “And Mother woke up.”

            Harry immediately beamed at him. “That’s wonderful. What did she say?” He shifted, reaching out towards Draco, and then swayed as blood began to drip from his wound to the ground.

            “Idiot!” Draco snapped at him, and laid the basilisk wand against the wound, this time focusing on what he wanted without thinking of a particular spell. He was curious to see what the power would do when he was paying attention to it.

            The basilisk wand shimmered with a thread of gold along the wood, and then Harry gasped and jerked his arm away. The bleeding had stopped, Draco saw, and there was a long series of scabs along the surface of the injury, as though it had spent some days healing. Harry blinked at him, and Draco blinked back.

            “Impressive,” Harry said, and then nodded to the woman. “She conjured a tiger construct to fight me. That was what lashed out and gave me the wound.”

            Draco frowned at him. “I only came because I felt the demi-marriage ritual telling me you were in danger. You could have died. Why didn’t you bind her more efficiently, or at least Stun her?”

            “I thought the web would be enough.” Harry ran his hand through his hair, then winced. His arm must still hurt, even if Draco had done the major work of healing for him. “She managed to cast the spell that created the tiger after that, though. And then I cast a spell that would have turned the tiger into something else if it was a real animal, but constructs and conjurations can’t stand up to that kind of thing, being treated as real. So it exploded.”

            Draco realized what the orange rain falling around him was then, and grimaced. It was all he could do to keep from swatting at his clothes to get it off him. “Good,” he said, a little stiffly, and turned to consider their captive. “I’ll want to think later about why the basilisk wand started responding so much better, but we have someone to question, don’t we?”

            From the vicious gleam in Harry’s eyes, he absolutely agreed.

*

            The witch took a long time to wake up. Harry sat by the bed where Draco had placed her, on the small stool that Draco had thought appropriate for interrogation room furniture, and examined his arm.

            Yes, the basilisk wand had healed it completely. Harry shook his head wonderingly. Draco was a much more powerful wizard than Harry had thought he was, or he was connecting with this wand at a deeper and more fundamental level than he had with his hawthorn wand.

            Don’t think like that.

            Harry shifted uneasily. Yes, he didn’t want to think like that. He didn’t want to think that what he had done to Draco and his mother had had good consequences. He knew that Draco and Narcissa would have preferred to live their lives as they had been, without the connection of the life-debts, without the way that Harry had changed them.

            Harry might be happy, sometimes, to be part of this demi-marriage and part of the Malfoy family, and he knew Draco was grateful for his protection and some of the things he had done. But that was a far cry from assuming that Draco was happy Harry had shattered his wand, his wards, his mother’s health.

            His life.

            Harry started and glanced up as Draco came in with a candle. He carried it, instead of floating it along behind him, the way Harry had been sure he would now that he was in control of his magic again. Perhaps Draco thought it better not to take chances.

            “She isn’t awake yet?” Draco set the candle down on the table and shook his head. “Ridiculous. Or…” He paused and looked more closely, then nodded. “Feigning sleep,” he whispered to Harry. “I should have known. She’s hoping to spy on us that way, and learn some of our secrets. Well.” He leaned in towards the witch’s face—Harry noticed the way her breathing sped up a little despite what he thought was a deep struggle to keep from showing it—and clapped his hands.

            The witch flinched backwards into the pillow, and then her eyes opened. She looked down as though surprised to find herself bound hand and foot to the sides of the bed, with thick chains that were no mere conjuring or illusion; Draco had had Harry call them into being. She looked back up at them, without expression.

            “You don’t intend to tell us anything, I know,” Draco said, with a gentleness that made Harry blink. Of course, he could hear the menace under the softness, and he was sure the witch could, too. But Harry had assumed he would be taking the lead in the interrogation because he had Auror training in doing so. Perhaps he was here to restrain Draco instead.

            “What you intend doesn’t matter,” Draco continued, and reached into his pocket. The way the witch watched him, she was probably expecting him to come out with a knife, but Draco held up a potions vial instead.

            Harry didn’t understand the green color the witch had turned until Draco looked at him, and the angle of his hand changed. Then Harry could make out the color of the potion in the firelight. It was Veritaserum.

            “Yes, I’ve brewed it, and yes, it works,” Draco said, although the cautious way he said the first words made Harry wonder if he wasn’t lying. At least he seemed to think that he had reasons to trust the potion, and that was good enough for Harry. “You won’t be able to avoid having us put this on your tongue, with the position you’re in. Do you want to tell us the truth before then?”

            The witch’s eyes had widened to the point that Harry thought they must hurt. Her breathing had begun to rasp in and out of her throat, and he thought the same thing about that. But after a moment, she turned her head to the side and shut her eyes—probably the only gesture of rejection she could make right now.

            “If you want it to be that way,” Draco said, and put the Veritaserum down on a table behind him. His gaze didn’t move from the woman as he clasped his hands together behind his back. Harry was sure that he was the only one who saw the way those hands were shaking. “It doesn’t need to be. I’ll offer you one more chance.”

            He hates this, Harry realized abruptly. And there’s no reason that he wouldn’t hate it, is there? He was Voldemort’s torturer because Voldemort forced him to be, and those memories must be welling up in him right now.

            That thought brought Harry to his feet. He could play the role of interrogator more naturally here, since he had the Auror training to do so and he was the one the witch had attacked. He stepped to Draco, picking up the Veritaserum as he did so, and tried to ignore the thought of what the other Aurors would say if they ever heard about this. He had already decided that what they thought didn’t matter, hadn’t he?

            “Last chance,” he told the prisoner. “I mean it. Not his last chance. Mine.”

            The witch looked up at him once more, eyes dull in a way that made Harry’s stomach want to turn inside out. But he remembered that she had looked more alert when she was working to kill him—and she certainly wouldn’t have wept if his eyes had lost every spark of life.

            He stepped towards her, drawing the stopper out of the vial. As he had thought might be the case, there was a small glass prod underneath it that captured a few drops of the potion and was meant for laying them on the tongue.

            She struggled against him, of course. But Harry had had some practice at this, mostly from forcing healing potions down the throats of people who had been put under the Imperius Curse not to want them. Veritaserum was a little more tricky, but he got at least three drops, and probably more, on her tongue at last, mostly by kneeling on her arms.

            Draco was staring at him, Harry saw as he straightened up, in a way that said he hadn’t known those things about Harry. Harry turned his back. They didn’t need to get along all the time, only well enough to have a working marriage.

            The witch was now struggling to spit out the Veritaserum. Harry took her throat in a light hand and massaged, and massaged again, until she swallowed, glaring at him all the while.

            That glare didn’t last long. Her head sagged to the side, and her eyes got that glaze in them that everyone who took Veritaserum had.

            Harry nodded. “What’s your name?”

            “Madeline Robbs.” The witch’s voice was low, passionless. Harry glanced once at Draco, and saw him nod confirmation that the Veritaserum was working, although his face was still averted. Well, with his background, I wouldn’t want to watch someone else torture a helpless victim, either, Harry thought.

            “Why did you come here?” Harry asked.

            “I was hired to kill you.”

            Harry nodded, slowly, stepping in front of her so that she would make eye contact with him and not Draco. “Me. Not Draco Malfoy, the heir to the Malfoy name and fortune? Me?”

            Draco’s hand landed solidly in the middle of his back, but Harry wasn’t sure why and didn’t dare take his eyes from Robbs’s to glance around. If Draco had something to say, then he could say it.

            But he remained silent, and the moment passed, and Harry could go on questioning Robbs without worrying too much about it.

            “You,” Robbs confirmed. “They wanted you dead because you stand in the way of someone else succeeding to the Malfoy title.”

            Harry swallowed. “Who is they? Who hired you?”

            Robbs’s head moved oddly for a moment, and Harry’s fear that her employers might have put a curse on her to keep her from speaking the truth soared. He had known those curses to kill, and while he could reverse some of them if he moved quickly enough, that depended on knowing which spell it was. Not to mention that the countercurse sometimes damaged the victim’s brain permanently.

            But Robbs’s eyes and ears didn’t explode. Instead, she replied after a moment, as if searching for the answer in her own brain, “One of them is named Aurelius Shepherd.”

            Draco hissed behind him. Harry nodded. “And what about the others? Or did you not know?”

            “The others kept their faces hidden,” Robbs said. “They met me in a small, bleak room that I was only given the Apparition coordinates to once; when I tried to return to discuss a higher payment, there was nothing there, only a small house with dirt on the windowsills and a broken door that did not look as though anyone had lived there in years. But there were three of them. Shepherd was the one who paid me and showed his face, to ensure that I could trust them.”

            Draco hissed again, but although he obviously knew Shepherd, or at least some reason for that name to be significant to him, he still didn’t interrupt. Harry was the one who had to keep pushing ahead. “How much did they pay you?”

            “Two hundred Galleons.”

            “I suppose I should be glad they decided not to sell my life cheaply,” Harry said dryly. He had heard higher assassins’ fees, but not often. “And why did you accept the offer? Have you killed in the past?”

            “No. I was desperate.” Strange to hear the words in that soft, uninterested voice the Veritaserum seemed naturally to inflict on people. Harry had been under the truth potion several times, but he didn’t remember speaking like that; his voice seemed to have him to just give the only possible answers. “I had cousins who were Death Eaters, and the Ministry did not want to hear that I did not know anything about that.”

            Harry nodded. As he’d thought, Draco’s enemies would find their best assassins and adherents in the former Death Eaters, who would probably resent that Draco and his mother had managed to escape the taint of accusation and being sent to prison. “And why did Shepherd think that me being dead would open the way to him succeeding to the Malfoy estates?”

            “I do not know.”

            Harry heard a ripple or waver in her tone, and remembered that Veritaserum usually compelled literal answers to questions, so it wouldn’t do much good to ask that again if she really didn’t know. But he could push on a different matter. “You have your suspicions, don’t you? What were they?”

            “He said something about a demi-marriage when he thought I did not hear. I know what demi-marriages are. I know you made one.” Robbs also didn’t sound as though she wanted to use contractions. “I think that he thinks he could step into your place and demi-marry the current head of the Malfoy line.”

            Harry swallowed again, and this time he had to turn to Draco, partially because Draco was almost shoving him out of the way and he didn’t have much choice, but also because he wanted to see his face.

            Draco crouched down in front of Robbs, and his eyes were wide and his breathing so hurried that Harry put a hand on his shoulder in concern. Draco shrugged a little against him, never looking away from Robbs. “Did you notice a family resemblance between Shepherd and me?” he asked harshly.

            Robbs didn’t laugh at the question as Harry suspected she would have under normal circumstances; Veritaserum really did repress the emotions. She considered Draco with a dispassionate eye instead, and then nodded. “Yes. You both have blond hair and a chin that sticks out. And you both look as though you wish you had inherited the universe.”

            Draco closed his eyes and leaned back. Harry rubbed the middle of his back the way Draco had his when Robbs first mentioned Shepherd’s name, and asked, “Who is he?”

            Robbs obviously thought the question directed at her, and said, “I do not know.”

            “My fourth cousin,” Draco whispered. “His ancestor was a Malfoy woman several generations back who married a half-blood man named Shepherd. We never kept up the connection, but it’s possible that Shepherd has worked out he’s my nearest blood relative and thinks that he should have been the one I turned to in the demi-marriage.”

            “You could have,” Harry said, a bit bewildered that someone as traditional as Draco would have chosen Harry when he had a blood relative available. Hadn’t Draco said there were none? Or had he thought that Shepherd wasn’t near enough to count?

            Draco stared at him. Then he said, “Oh, I see. You’re thinking in terms of blood. But Shepherd wouldn’t do. I wanted to marry for power and money, and that was part of the reason I chose you.”

            Harry smiled a little. Ron and Hermione might not believe it, but he found the terms almost endearing, now that he knew more about Draco. “All right. Do you think Shepherd is really that angry that you passed him over?”

            Draco snorted. “He has to know how little money or power I had left until you married me. No, he was perfectly content to wait. He probably thought that I would divorce you as soon as I was in a better position and retain control of your vaults and the magic you left behind through some complicated arrangement. But I would think that the way we work together in public probably made him nervous—the same way it did Blaise. Now he thinks he can kill you and I’ll have to take someone else as a partner, and he’ll step comfortably into that place as blood kin.”

            “That’s ridiculous,” Harry muttered.

            “It’s the way that a lot of pure-bloods thought until recently.” Draco’s gaze on him sharpened. “The way I probably would still think, except that I learned better when someone took the time to teach me.”

            Harry laid a hand on his arm and squeezed for a moment, then glanced at Robbs. “What do you think we should do with her? Obliviate her?”

            Draco’s smile vanished at once, and he turned back to Robbs. “Nothing with her yet. There are more questions I have to ask her, especially concerning that attack with the dragon. I want to know whether Shepherd is really well-connected enough to try that. If he is, he probably wouldn’t need my money. But then, I’m also surprised he would have enough money to pay that much in an assassin’s fee.”

            Harry nodded, then hesitated. There was something he felt he had to say.

            “You know…” he began, and Draco looked back at him again. “If you did want to divorce me and marry someone better-suited to the position—”

            “Shut up, Malfoy,” Draco said, eyes burning with a savage light. “I know exactly what I want, and you’re it.”

            Harry had to shut his eyes for a few seconds when Draco began questioning Robbs, and not for any of the reasons he would have thought he’d have to.

*

            jujukitty: Thank you! Draco might not have such a tantrum, now.

            delia cerrano: Harry has not the least idea of this being a sexual marriage, only a working one, so no wonder he discounts his feelings. And Draco pissed him off by talking about how much danger he was in—not as if he cared for Harry himself, but that the family’s succession was in danger that way. I think Harry does have reason to be pissed off.

            SP777: It will depend on the Ministry’s reaction to Harry’s announcement.

            CareLessLover: Thank you for letting me know that you like the story that much!

Seiren: Thank you!

unneeded: And now he has even more reasons to burst out about!

Nightlo: Yes, and arguably this is more.

monkey lady: He probably will.
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The Name I'll Give to Thee