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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 Twenty-Eight—Forgiveness
“I can’t find any spells on it,” Harry said, shaking his head as he spun his wand and watched Dahlia’s letter follow the motion in the air in front of him.
Draco grimaced from his chair. “I know. I think it might really be an apology. But she’s mad if she thinks I’m going to respond to it.”
“It wouldn’t be a good thing even if you wanted to,” Harry said, and incinerated the letter with a careless incantation. He noticed Draco’s smug smile from the corner of his eye. Draco seemed to react like that every time Harry successfully demonstrated magic. “She’s still convinced she’s in love with you. It would just give her false hope.”
“Yes, yes, worry all about your ex-sister and not enough about me.”
“Fine.” Harry turned around and draped himself over Draco’s lap, gazing up at him soulfully. “I’m so glad that you didn’t get tricked into writing back to Dahlia. I’m so happy you’re with me. I’m so happy that you’re going to bond with me. It’s so wonderful—”
That was the point when Draco kissed him, and Harry had to shut up because he couldn’t laugh through one of Draco’s kisses. He groaned and pushed himself closer, feeling Draco’s hands raking through his hair. He had to shift himself some more so they would be perfectly aligned to feel each other—
“Not looking! Not looking!”
Harry shot up and reached for his wand before he recognized Sirius’s voice. He let out an exasperated huff of breath and dropped his cheek against Draco’s shoulder. Draco looked more than disgruntled for a minute. Then he shut his eyes and forced his emotions behind those shields that Harry thought his parents had taught him.
“Are all the sights that could scar innocent eyes taken care of now?” Sirius asked in a loud whisper, from around the corner of the library doorway.
“Yes,” Draco said, and repositioned Harry on the chair with a grunt, so that they were both sitting mostly upright. “Come in, Black.”
Sirius stepped in, grinning. “Just wanted to tell you that there’s a tailor waiting for you to take your measurements, Harry. You know, for your fancy bonding robes that are definitely not going to be itchy.”
Harry groaned for a different reason this time. “I thought it was going to take a few days? And Narcissa said that he would come to Malfoy Manor. I thought I’d be fitted there.”
“Merlin knows what horrors Narcissa would convince you to dress up in, if she had you all to herself,” said Sirius briskly. “And anyway, it’s the father’s place to pay for the robes in a bonding like this. Thought I’d get to see what they looked like, too.” Sirius stepped in and placed his hands on Harry’s shoulders, staring at him as if he wasn’t sitting in Draco’s lap. For Sirius, he might not be, Harry had to acknowledge.
“God, I failed you for so many years,” Sirius whispered. “And now you’re back in the wizarding world, and you’re a Black, and you’re getting bonded.” He looked solemn for approximately two seconds, and then he flung his arms around Harry and howled like a dog, “My little boy is getting bonded!”
“Black, off,” Draco, and pushed at them both. Harry, laughing, managed to slide to the right and then stand up with Sirius’s arms still wrapped around him. Draco was scowling at both of them, probably because Sirius was taking Harry away and Harry was going along with it. “You’re ridiculous.”
“No, you’re ridiculous.”
“As much as I hate to interrupt this extremely mature discussion,” Harry said, “I suppose we can’t keep the tailor waiting.”
“No,” Sirius agreed, and reached out to grasp his arm. Draco watched them go for all of five seconds before he sighed and heaved himself off the chair.
“And of course I want to make sure that my betrothed’s bonding robes look nice and fit well,” he muttered as he followed them.
Harry glanced back at him, and smiled. There was a burning look in Draco’s eyes that made it clear he would rather see what Harry looked like with his bonding robes off, but he was making this incredible sacrifice for the good of everyone.
I like my life, Harry thought, and graciously permitted both Sirius and Draco to hand him over to the tailor for what seemed like it would be hours of work.
*
Draco leaned back in his chair, studying the tailor as he stepped around Harry, pinning and muttering. More pins hovered in the air above his head, ready to be grabbed, and swatches of fabric and measuring tapes and buttons and threads and needles joined the whirl just a little higher on. Black had lasted all of ten minutes before he made a few off-color comments and then marched out, calling over his shoulder to let him know when the robes were done.
Harry looked as if he was enduring this with forced patience at best, but the point was, he was there. He was getting ready for his bonding. He had robes of enormously expensive silken cloth sliding over his shoulders and body.
He was in the world he always should have belonged in, at long last.
Draco let his eyes run lazily up and down Harry’s shoulders, the way he stood, his folded arms, his tumbling hair. It might be Draco’s imagination rather than any trick of magic, but he already thought Harry looked more like a Black than a Potter. His hair was certainly dark enough, he had those green eyes that weren’t a trait of either family but uniquely bright and his own—
(Yes, his mother had had them. But his mother was no longer his mother. So).
—and he didn’t have the same stance or face shape or anything that the rest of the Potter children did. He’d started wearing his hair longer, so it had lost James’s messiness. And his nose was a little like Black’s, wasn’t it?
Draco shook his head. He knew he was being ridiculous, as Black had accused him. All the pure-blood families were interrelated at some level, so a Black nose could also be a Potter nose and vice versa.
But the point was, Harry was now a Black and going to be married as a member of that family. Draco had broken free of the contract after doing everyone he could to honor the letter of it. He had found a consort who was more powerful than any other Potter child.
“I can sense your smugness from here,” Harry muttered, and turned in yet another direction so that the tailor could pin the robes on him in another way. “Just so you know.”
Draco smiled. He had reason to be smug. No one else in the whole world was going to be bonded to Harry Black.
*
I just want to know if you can forgive your sister—
Harry snorted and crumpled the letter into a ball, then tossed it into the air. He remembered to burn it before M.H. could get hold of it. M.H. was prone to eating anything small that moved towards him, and he wouldn’t listen to any of Harry’s reasoning about how ink and paper were bad for bushmasters.
Scratch me, M.H. demanded, and eased up alongside his chair, turning his head. Harry did, scratching hard so that the loosening skin would tear off. M.H. took forever to shed his skin, longer than a wild snake. Harry had pointed out that wild ones did this all the time, and had received the unanswerable comment that they didn’t have humans to scratch them.
Feed me a pig.
There aren’t any pigs around here, Harry hissed back in Parseltongue, and caught a movement out of the corner of his eye. He looked up to see Sirius standing there and scowling. Harry raised his eyebrows in response. “Something wrong?” Draco was at Malfoy Manor enlarging the garden where they would get married—although Harry didn’t know why it needed enlarging, as huge as the Manor’s grounds were—so he couldn’t have been the one to annoy Sirius.
“Your former father is standing outside waiting to speak to you,” Sirius said, and rolled his eyes. “He’s said that I’m keeping you from him and he wants to establish a relationship with you.”
“He just sent me a letter urging me to forgive Dahlia. I don’t want to talk to him.”
Sirius’s eyes brightened. “Then I can make the wards kick him out with a clear conscience!” He turned and ran up the corridor, aiming not for the front door, as Harry would have thought, but for the stairs. Curious, Harry followed him. He caught up with Sirius near a small window where he was making sharp passes with his wand in the air and muttering something in what sounded like French.
James was in the garden, waving his arms and shouting. Sirius finished the last incantation, and suddenly the wards flared as lines in the air. They curled around James and lifted him up and out of the garden, over the fence, and onto the Muggle pavement. Harry laughed. He couldn’t help himself.
“Harry!”
Harry turned to Sirius. “Can you conjure a Patronus and tell him that I don’t want to see him unless he’s going to talk about something other than Dahlia?” He would have liked to send one himself, but he hadn’t mastered the charm yet. Draco was giving him plenty of happy memories to practice with, of course.
“Yep.” Sirius whipped out his wand and concentrated hard, and a second later a silvery dog was prancing around the room. It flopped down in front of Harry and panted at him. Harry smiled at it.
“I don’t want to see you until you stop telling me to forgive Dahlia,” he said clearly, and the dog stood up and flashed through the wall. Harry looked out the window and saw it arrive by James’s side a second later. James stared down at it. Harry couldn’t hear what it was saying from this distance, but he knew it would deliver the message safely.
James turned and glared up. Then he drew his wand and touched it to his throat. When he spoke again, he’d obviously cast the Sonorus Charm.
“Harry, we miss you. And since the time she tried to take over Draco with her magic, Dahlia’s done nothing but weep. The Mind-Healers we’ve paid for can’t help her. They say nothing can help her but being forgiven.”
Harry rolled his eyes. “It’s very sad that the little mind-rapist is crying,” he muttered.
Sirius looked at him consideringly. “You don’t mean that.”
“No, I suppose I don’t.” Harry sighed. He didn’t want Dahlia to be miserable for the rest of her life, but miserable for long enough that he could feel like she’d paid the penalty for trying to take Draco’s love away from him. And he noticed that neither James nor Lily had said anything about ways to make sure that she didn’t use her wandless Imperius Curse on anyone again.
James cleared his throat beyond the window. “We’re worried about her. We’re trying. It’s—hard to wake up from that kind of control and realize we have no idea who our daughter really is. And I don’t know that she knows who she is, either. She doesn’t understand when we try to explain some fairly basic things to her. She doesn’t want to go back to Hogwarts in the autumn. She doesn’t want to eat or drink or do anything normal.”
Harry rolled his eyes and turned to Sirius. “Another Patronus?”
Sirius had the silvery dog conjured again in a minute. From the way he grinned and looked out the window, he was using the memory of James’s discomfort to create it, not that Harry could really blame him.
Harry cleared his throat and said, “Tell my former father that, while I feel sorry for Dahlia, I’m not going to forgive her until I see that she’s getting either training or restraint to deal with her magic. And find better Mind-Healers.”
James’s head drooped after the dog appeared beside him and repeated that. Then he turned and drooped away up the pavement.
Harry shook his head. He hoped that Dahlia did heal from the problems she was having and learn to move forwards again—and restrain her magic. But he wasn’t going to spend his time forgiving her and watching over her and hoping she would do that.
He’d already given up nine years of his life to her and his parents’ fears and Dumbledore’s paranoia. That was enough.
*
“They do look very nice.”
Draco smiled, knowing that that restrained praise from his mother was worth more than pages on pages of effusiveness from someone else. From the faint smile Harry gave her as he stepped down off the small pedestal he’d stood on to show his bonding robes off, he knew it.
The robes were deep blue silk, the color of water reflecting a summer sky, and they swirled around Harry as he moved. He had a cloak draped over his shoulders with a hood; it looked like part of the robe until you saw it from the back. The cloak had the Black family crest stitched into it. Draco would remove it when Harry bonded with him and replace it with one that had the Malfoy coat of arms. But they would keep the Black hood, because at least one of their children would take Harry’s last name.
Draco didn’t care which one, as long as there were children with the Malfoy name, too.
“I have the flowers arranged,” Narcissa said, counting things off on her fingers. “The food. But the guest list…” She frowned and glanced sideways at Draco. “Your father felt that we should invite Harry’s first family.”
“No.”
Draco smiled a second later. The denial had exploded out of him and Harry at the same time. He put his arm around Harry’s shoulders and turned calmly to face his mother.
“I never intended to invite Dahlia,” Narcissa said, shaking her head a little as if she wondered how they could accuse her of such a thing. “Your father’s thought was his former parents, perhaps his younger siblings.”
“My former parents are still too invested in making Dahlia my problem,” Harry said darkly. “But—I’d like Lilac and Eric there, if they want to come. Can we invite them without James and Lily?”
“Why would we not be able to?” Narcissa asked, pursing her lips. “Lilac is older than eleven, and someone who possesses her own wand is old enough to make her own decisions about attending bonding ceremonies. And she can supervise her younger brother.”
“I don’t know much about etiquette,” said Harry. Draco and Narcissa gave each other simultaneous looks over his head; it was the fiftieth or sixtieth time he’d said that since they started planning the bonding. “I had no idea about the wand thing, for instance. I don’t want to offend you when you—” He floundered.
“You have the right to ask for guests that you want,” Draco said soothingly, and rubbed Harry’s back. He didn’t think it would be any problem to include the younger Potters in the plans, as long as Lilac did keep an eye on Eric. The last thing he wanted was for a child to run through the ceremony and shake the petals off the flowers and disrupt everything.
“All right, then. My brother and sister. My real sister,” Harry added, and studied them both. Draco nodded reassuringly at him. Narcissa glided away, perhaps to make changes to the guest list or to let Father know his suggestion had been rejected.
“Okay.” Harry took a deep breath and then reached behind him to scratch his neck, beneath the hood of the cloak. Draco felt a smile tug at his lips. At least the tailor had made the silk strong enough that unexpected scratching wouldn’t rip it. “I sometimes think that I’m going to wake up any second and it’ll all be a dream, you know? That there’s no way I’m a wizard and getting bonded to the love of my life.”
Draco gave him a kiss for that last statement, and said, “I know what you mean. But it’s real. I have as many motives to want it to be real as you do,” he added, pulling Harry’s arm into his and starting to walk him over the darkening gardens towards the grove where they would stand for their bonding tomorrow. “Otherwise, I would find myself being married to Dahlia. Someone who would try to control me with her magic if I had found out the truth. Someone with no personality if I hadn’t.”
Harry cocked his head. “I told you all the details about James coming and asking me to forgive her.”
“Yes,” Draco said, not understanding.
“All of them. And you—you don’t think I should?”
Draco turned him around. Harry looked up at him calmly, trustingly, but with that spark of uncertainty in the back of his eyes that Draco knew would never really disappear until they had successfully bonded.
“If you wanted to,” Draco said quietly, “I would find a way to live with it. I’m never going to forgive her, but I could just leave the house when she came to visit, not accompany you on your visits, and so on. If you ever do forgive her, that’s what I’ll do.”
“But you don’t think that I’m horrible if I don’t?”
“I think you’re sane.”
Harry’s smile broke loose, and he leaned against Draco’s side. “Let’s go into the grove again. I’d like to see how the banners hang.”
Draco looped his arm around Harry’s shoulders, and went with him.
*
Jan: Thank you!
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