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The Only True Lords	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 54573 -:- Recommendations : 4 -:- Currently Reading : 11
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Chapter Three—Flight

            “What do you mean, he’s gone?” That was Malfoy’s voice, tight and panicked, almost a throb behind Harry. Harry put a hand on his own arm without thinking about it. Something small and tight ached there, probably the dot that represented Malfoy. He shook his head. The shield on him didn’t seem to pick up emotions before, but this time it was doing it. He had no idea why. He would have to find out.

            But for now, he had to find Zabini.

            “Potter! What do you mean?”

            Harry gritted his teeth as that quicksilver feeling ran through him again, joined by a second strand. He wanted to protect Malfoy from the distress he was feeling, and he wanted to tell him to shut up and be a little respectful, and neither impulse was his. Sure, he would have told Malfoy to shut up on any ordinary day, but not because of that.

            “I mean, he’s out of the school,” Harry said, in a clipped tone, and cast a Privacy Charm around himself, because Malfoy was already whining about something else. He didn’t seem to understand that the more he whined, the less likely he was to get a good answer to his question.

            Alone inside the Charm—Ron and Hermione stared at him from outside it, but didn’t try to interrupt—Harry found he could focus. The shield mark heated under his palm, and the pinprick swelled up in the blackness behind his eyelids.

            A little green dot that marked Zabini was moving steadily away from the school. Harry blinked his eyes open when he realized where it was headed. He would have expected Zabini to be trying to get off the grounds as soon as possible so he could Apparate, but he was just as glad he hadn’t.

            “He’s going into the Forbidden Forest,” he snapped for anyone who cared to listen, then realized the Privacy Charm was still up and they couldn’t hear him. He lowered it, repeated himself, and started up the corridor.

            “Potter!”

            The bond tried to drag his feet to a halt. Harry opened his mouth in a silent snarl. He ruled here, not a bond, and it wasn’t going to make him abandon everything he wanted to do just to fulfill the stupid requirements of being a Lord.

            It felt like forcing his way through water, but he was able to do it. And then Zabini entered the perimeter of the Forbidden Forest, or so Harry thought from the thick cloud of darkness hovering in the back of his mind, and suddenly the force dissolved and Harry could move easily. Harry reckoned that the danger Zabini was in had just surpassed the distress Malfoy was feeling behind him.

            He ran. He could hear concerned shouting behind him, from Hermione and Ron about how he hadn’t had enough rest to fling himself back into battle and some of the Death Eaters had escaped, from Malfoy about how he hadn’t answered questions. Snape didn’t say a thing. Well, Harry hadn’t expected him to. From the way that another cloud of darkness appeared, swaying, when he focused on Snape, he reckoned that every moment he wasn’t around, Snape could still pretend that he was free.

            I will have to do something about that.

            But he also had to protect Zabini from walking down a werewolf’s gullet or something else equally idiotic. He sped up, shaking his head. What would Zabini have gone into the Forbidden Forest for? There were quicker ways of committing suicide, if he wanted to, and Harry would think a Slytherin would choose that. They were usually cowards about facing pain.

*

            Blaise paused and looked over his shoulder. Yes, the trees had closed in behind him, and the leaves he had stirred up with magic had settled over his trail. Blaise shut his eyes and exhaled, hard.

            Potter could still find me. But it doesn’t matter.

            Blaise had to move fast enough that that couldn’t happen. He opened his eyes and walked further on, further into the forest.

            The shadows around him trembled, inky and stalking him. Blaise ignored them. The thick pink line of his charm still blazed in front of him, leading him through hollows and over roots and around the edges of ponds that lay still on the surface but more than stagnant underneath. It would guide him to the creatures he wanted to find.

            Soon enough, he heard them, the quick thumps that suggested the beating of hooves. Blaise kept his eyes lowered, studying that trembling roseate line. He walked until he reached a clearing, ochre and golden still with fallen leaves from last season, and then turned around and spread his arms.

            The hoofbeats slowed, and Blaise could see the shadows of heads from the edges of the clearing, bending past tree trunks to watch him. Blaise kept his arms spread. He didn’t drop his wand yet, although his mother had advised it when dealing with centaurs. Blaise knew that there were probably going to be some complications, and he didn’t want to die if he didn’t manage to bargain them into taking his mark away.

            “I come to offer a deal,” he said calmly. “Any enchantments you want, in exchange for removing one.”

            There was another long silence, before the first centaur chose to reveal himself. He was a thick-bodied one, with gleaming black flanks and a long, flicking dark tail that he swished back and forth as though he was dusting the earth with it. Or removing his own footprints, Blaise thought, staring him in the eyes. The centaur reared his head back and shook the cross between a hair and a mane, glossy, blackberry-colored curls, that spilled down almost to his back.

            “What makes you think we can remove this enchantment?” he asked. Blaise could hear hooves closing in from other sides, but he didn’t remove his eyes from the one in front of him. That he had chosen to open with talk of a bargain meant he was at least considering Blaise’s offer. That made it worthwhile for Blaise to pay attention to him.

            “Because it is on the skin,” Blaise said. “And there was a time when centaurs were renowned as healers.”

            He let his doubt creep into his voice, and someone snorted from behind him. A roan centaur with golden hair trotted around him and up to the black one, considering the shield. Blaise had spread his arms partially because it was the ritual gesture his mother had taught him to use, but it also had the advantage of letting them see the shield mark. Obligingly, Blaise lifted his arm higher and further.

            “We can remove this one,” said the roan centaur to the black one. “But why should we? He is a young wizard and arrogant like all the rest.”

            “I am a slave against my will,” Blaise said. He didn’t know why they’d called attention to his age, but he didn’t plan to focus on it. His mother had warned him ahead of time that he wouldn’t understand everything the centaurs said, and he shouldn’t expect to. He should focus on what was important, keep moving forwards. “That makes me desperate. You might have mistaken that for arrogance, honored sirs.”

            He used the honorific on purpose, and bowed. It was a bit of a gamble, but centaurs hated not being treated as politely as wizards. This might help.

            The roan centaur looked at the first one. Blaise noted that his eyes were as golden as molten coins, and his hoof had stopped pawing the ground so hard.

            “You will do it?” the black one asked what appeared to be thin air, since he was looking over the roan’s head.

            The roan nodded, his hair flapping. “We have not claimed a favor from a wizard in a long time,” he said, and turned back to Blaise. “This one is young. Who knows what enchantments he might know that we have not heard of?”

            “I will cast whatever spell you want me to,” Blaise said, meeting his eyes unblinking. “If I don’t know it, then I’ll go and research it, and leave my wand here as insurance that I will come back.”

            The black one inclined his head once, and faded away into the shadows. The roan trotted up to Blaise, his hoof scraping so hard that he carved a shallow trough in the dirt when he stopped in front of Blaise. “I will kneel down to study the mark,” he said. “Do not move. I must be undisturbed for the initial examination.”

            Blaise nodded. The centaur knelt, his forelegs folding neatly beneath him. This close, Blaise could see more clearly how big he was; he still had to bend his head a little to study the mark on Blaise’s arm. Blaise could see the glossy muscles shivering under the skin, too, and smell the distinct scents of stallion and sweat.

            The centaur snorted and turned his head to meet Blaise’s eyes. “This is a Lord marking. How can you not have agreed to it?”

            Blaise smiled tightly. He was glad that he had stayed up to discuss it with Pansy last night before going to bed, because she had been the one to give him the details he’d need to convince the centaur now. “The bond was the result of an accident, when a spell that was meant to enslave someone combined with a Shield Charm cast by Harry Potter. I was merely in the way.”

            “You are his vassal?” The centaur scrambled back to all fours and took a slow step back from him, glaring as though Blaise had lied to him on purpose. “The one who brought down the dark star and restored the supernova?”

            Centaurs are obsessed with the heavens and astronomy, his mother’s cool voice said in the back of his head. Blaise kept from curling his lip with that reminder, but it was frustrating, when the terms of the bargain so far had kept the creatures reasonable and from exploding into meaningless star-talk. “I don’t know what that means,” he said, as calmly as he could. “But it was an accident, not a true Lord-bond, and I want it gone.”

            “If you are bound to the one who brought down the dark star, then we cannot,” said the centaur, and looked over his shoulder into the woods as though hoping that someone would show up and rescue him from having to keep his side of the bargain. “You cannot think that a Lord-bond would be so easy to end as that, whether it was an accident or not.”

            Blaise sneered and raised his eyebrows. “I don’t see why not. It’s not who he is that matters. It’s this bond.” He shook his arm again so that the centaur would look at it. “You couldn’t tell who had made it until I told you. That makes it no different from any other. You could still heal me.”

            “It would not be healing, to remove that.” The centaur was scraping another groove in the ground, but with his left hind hoof now, smearing his legs with dirt. “It would be condemnation.”

            Blaise glared, but then his arm jerked to the side, and he gritted his teeth. Yes, Potter was coming. That pull pointed back into the forest. Potter didn’t have to use the charm that Blaise did to find the centaurs; he just followed the tug of the bond. Probably only the obstacles that Blaise had avoided but which Potter had crashed through had delayed him even this long.

            “I’ll cast whatever enchantment you want,” Blaise said, catching the roan’s eye again. “Kill a wizard for you. Be among the ones who are fighting for your rights in the Ministry. Be whatever you want. Just take it off me.”

            “Why are you so desperate to escape something that could protect you?” The centaur studied him with deep, liquid eyes, hoof still scraping. “You must know that the black star would have taken you otherwise.”

            “I’d like to know that, too.”

            Blaise turned his head. He wanted to bite his tongue, or strike at Potter. But the shield on his arm flared to life at that, and he stood there trying not to cry out instead. Which was not the way he had wanted to confront someone who now legally owned him.

            Potter stood against the big tree at the very edge of the clearing, the one with bronze leaves piled around its base. His hair was as dark as the star the centaur had been going on about, his eyes as verdant a green as the Forest would turn in a few weeks. And he moved a step forwards with his hand cradling his own right arm.

            “I knew where you had gone,” he said quietly. “I just didn’t know why.”

            The centaur had faded back into the shadows. Blaise didn’t bother looking after him. For the first time in his life, his mother’s teachings had failed him. She had told him centaurs were hungry for recognition from wizards after years of being ignored and despised; it was the best and easiest way to get one of them to help him.

            Obviously, it’s different when you’re Potter’s plaything.

            “I wanted to get rid of this,” Blaise said. He didn’t listen to his own voice, for the first time in a long time, didn’t care whether it was respectful or cautious or prideful. He just watched Potter, who watched him back. “I don’t want to be a slave. I had the impression you didn’t want to be a Lord, either. Isn’t equality important to you?” He didn’t give a shit about sounding as if he were begging, which he knew his mother would have condemned him for. If it could free him, he would play on Potter’s Gryffindor sympathies.

            “It is,” Potter said. “But Hermione’s assured me that there’s no way to break this.”

            “Obviously, your friend is the most brilliant witch in creation,” Blaise said. He didn’t fold his arms, didn’t touch the right one, even though the burning had shifted to an incandescent pain. It didn’t matter. It couldn’t matter, or he would begin his fall from control of his own mind right here. He knew it was happening because the Lord bonds ran on loyalty, and every thought he had at the moment was disloyal. But so what? If he succeeded, it wouldn’t matter. “The centaurs are healers. This is essentially a skin infection. If they can remove it, we could be free.”

            He didn’t miss the way Potter’s breath caught, or how he leaned forwards. Blaise smiled. “You like the sound of that,” he murmured.

            “Hell yes.” But then Potter turned his head and frowned into the woods. “The centaur didn’t seem to think he could treat you. Why was that?”

            “Because it’s you,” Blaise said. “And there was some nonsense about dark stars and what you supposedly saved me from. But if we can find another one, one who doesn’t care about that, isn’t it worth trying?”

            Potter stared at him for a little while longer. Well, squinted, really. Blaise stood there even though he wanted to touch his arm, or at least put some distance between them. He had never paid that much attention to Potter; Draco was the one who couldn’t stop talking about how Potter was plotting against them and had to be humiliated. But he could see how the seeds of frustration could grow up into hatred. Potter wasn’t doing anything. Blaise had thought the good thing about Gryffindors was how quickly they made a decision when finally pushed into it.

            “You don’t know anything about the cure,” Potter said. “I do want to be free of this, if there’s a way. But both Hermione and Snape seem to think there isn’t. I think we ought to go back to the school and talk about it with them.”

            “Your precious Mudblood friend isn’t part of this bond,” Blaise said.

            He gasped in the next moment, because the pain of the shield mark was so severe that he could no longer keep his hand off it. He stared at Potter as he did it, though. Because, really, what was disloyal about that? None of the Lord bonds Blaise was familiar with included disparaging remarks about the Lord’s associates under the name of treachery.

            But Potter turned away instead of hitting him, or making a smirking remark about punishment the way Blaise would have thought he would if he had started to learn about Lord bonds. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s go back to the school. If the centaurs are a viable option, Snape can tell us that.”

            Blaise stood in place and shook his head, despising the quivering impulse in his legs that wanted to obey Potter. He might want to, with that particular corrupted corner of his being, but he was not going to, and sooner or later his body would learn that. He had yielded, foolishly so far, under the impression that Potter’s longing for freedom was greater than his need to yield to authority. It seemed Blaise had been wrong, even if the authority in question was Snape.

            “You aren’t going to be a good Lord,” Blaise said. “When you can’t make up your mind without resorting to other people’s opinions? That’s not what a Lord does.”

            Potter stopped and turned to glance back at him slowly, his eyes round and alien. Blaise wondered if it was his imagination that the shadows in the Forest around them were darker, and decided it was. He wouldn’t let it be anything else.

            “But I don’t want to be a good Lord in the sense you mean,” Potter said. “I don’t want to be an—an autocrat.” He said the word like it was one he’d fetched up from the dusty pages of a book somewhere. Blaise snorted. Potter glared at him some more, and gave his head a sharp little jerk that made him look like he was the one collared and bound to a horrible fate. “I want—I want to listen to other people and rule that way. If I have to.”

            Blaise paused. The shadows kept growing darker, but the burn in his mark had once again retreated to a manageable level.

            It had never occurred to him that this might be a possible escape, that Potter was simply too weak to hold him. Normally, a vassal couldn’t attack a Lord because the Lord was stronger, magically and every other way.

            But this wasn’t a normal circumstance, was it? Blaise could hear his mother’s voice crooning in the back of his mind, urging him to pay attention.

            Potter didn’t even defeat the Dark Lord by virtue of greater magical power, the way he should have if he wanted to claim anyone else’s allegiance. He did it by accident. If Draco hadn’t disarmed the Headmaster, if Potter hadn’t disarmed Draco, if the Elder Wand hadn’t happened to come into the Dark Lord’s hand the way it did…

            Blaise’s hand shook a little as he rested it on his wand. The pain flared again, but dimly, as if the bond didn’t really understand what he was doing.

            No, Potter’s the one who doesn’t understand. Potter still stood there, staring at him, blinking a little. Each time he did, he seemed to shade those disturbing green eyes for a second longer.

            Blaise half-crouched and stared over Potter’s shoulder. It was the oldest deception of all, but Potter fell for it, like the stupid Gryffindor he was. Potter whirled around, drawing his own wand in a graceful motion that Blaise would have admired if he was another Slytherin.

            Blaise struck, with a nonverbal incantation that his mother had made him practice again and again until he could do it. Not a powerful spell, or you wouldn’t think so from hearing its name, the Stopping Charm. No muss, no fuss, no cleft flesh and blood flying everywhere. The most common use for the Stopping Charm was to halt small moving parts, like a clock’s pendulum, so they could be repaired or set going anew.

            But applied to a small valve in the heart—

            Potter spun to face him, throwing one hand out as though he was defending himself against Blaise but was too lazy to summon a Shield Charm.

            And then Blaise’s right arm was on fire, he was screaming, the pain flashed through him and blinded his brain, and he writhed on the ground, all colors and voices and consequences gone into the white burning.

*

            Shit. Shit! I didn’t mean to do that!

            But Harry, as he ran to Zabini’s side, knew that he had done at least part of it. He had seen Zabini aiming his wand at him, had felt a quiver in his chest that made his heart beat faster than normal, and had thought, first and foremost, of stopping the treacherous little shit.

            And he had been able to. Because he had the bond, and when he had imagined Zabini in pain, the way he used to imagine Dudley and Malfoy and Snape…

            This time, he had the ability to actually make them suffer. And if he did that around Malfoy and Snape, they would suffer the same thing, the same punishment. It was worse than what the Dursleys had done to him.

            Shit.

            Harry dropped to the ground beside Zabini. He was screaming, or he had been, but the sound had trailed off now, and the only noise coming out of him was a thin, faint whistle, as though his vocal cords were straining to produce more, and couldn’t. His heels hit the ground, and then his legs straightened out so they simply hung in the air, too far off the earth even to give off that basic signal of pain.

            “Fuck, stop,” Harry yelled straight into his face. Nothing happened. Zabini continued to act as though his arm was burning up, and Harry shook him and slapped him and yelled some more, words he couldn’t remember later, but it didn’t stop. Harry shut his eyes and tried to concentrate through the whistling to remember what Hermione and Snape had said about Lord bonds, to see if it would give him some sort of clue.

            It didn’t. Or it didn’t seem to. They had just said that he had the power to punish, and that somehow everyone would know and agree that it was appropriate. Not Zabini, Harry thought, flinching as he touched Zabini’s arm and felt the muscles, like ridged marble. No one had told him how to stop the punishment.

            Then a simple idea hit him, and because nothing else had worked, he tried it.

            “I forgive you,” he whispered, and tried to put as much true feeling behind that as he could, not just horror at Zabini being hurt, because horror had done nothing so far to stop this stupid thing.

            Zabini’s limbs dropped back to the earth. He lay there panting, for a second, and then he opened his eyes and stared at Harry. He had the glazed look Harry remembered seeing on Ron’s face after Ron had been attacked by the flying brains in the Department of Mysteries. Probably in shock.

            Then he passed out.

            Harry knelt there, still staring at him, and then swallowed and stood up. He had caused this, and that meant he had to make up for it somehow. He lifted Zabini into the air with the gentlest spell he knew, and created a stretcher beneath him. It was a difficult charm, but he’d seen Madam Pomfrey use it before, and it seemed to come easier when he concentrated, so maybe the Lord bond was good at something besides hurting people.

            Then he turned and started guiding the stretcher back to the castle, making sure that it went around trees instead of crashing into them.

            He didn’t like this, he thought with every step. He didn’t like, most of all, the gentle warmth that had settled into his own shield mark, as though he had done something comforting instead of burning Zabini’s arm off.

            They might all have to live with it, although maybe the centaurs were an option. But Harry had to find some way to control his temper. They would all suffer if he didn’t.

*

            pittwitch; Thanks. Technically, Harry does have the greater power, but his own conscience also restricts him.

            Anna: Thanks! Hope this chapter was a great reward.

            delia cerrano: Harry doesn’t realize it yet, but the rules are a little different for him because the bond was formed accidentally. Blaise noted one difference when the bond hurt him for insulting Hermione. He’s going to have to work out the rules and figure out what he can do and what he can’t.

            ChrisF.: But this isn’t exactly a bond that is comparable to the British monarchy, especially since the British monarchy has little power now compared to what it had in, say, Elizabeth I’s time. Harry is going to have to learn the rules by trial and error.

            Rainbow12004: Thank you!

            SP777: Yes, a long road. At the moment, Harry has good intentions, but little to no control.

            heartstar: No, he did just leave. It didn’t occur to me that anyone would take it another way, or I would have clarified.

            Nathoca Malfoy: Thank you! Usually, it’ll be about four or five days between updates.

            Jien: Thank you!
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The Only True Lords