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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
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I am making no money from this fanfic.

Chapter List
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Chapter Thirty—Challenges to Strength
            Blaise stared at Potter from beneath lowered eyelids. If his mother turned around and looked at him, he had to show her the proper deference, while not cowering. He had only found one expression that really worked for that, in all the years she had spent training him.
            She had told him there was more than one, but he would have to discover it for himself. And so far, he had not earned the privilege of more instruction than that.
            What was Potter doing? Even if he didn’t know the reputation that Blaise’s mother had for killing her husbands and establishing herself as a dangerous pure-blood witch, he’d heard Blaise talk about her. And her magic was hanging around her in the kind of visible aura that always made Blaise think of silver lines glowing in the dark of caves. Potter ought to know that he wouldn’t get away with this.
            Yet there he stood, with his friends behind him to provide the kind of honor guard that Greg could never be, and even a slight smile on his face, as if this was some meeting that he had invited Blaise’s mother to.
            Blaise didn’t let his mother see it—he was not stupid, whatever she thought about his weakness—but he made sure that his foot was set behind him in a fold of carpet, pivoted to let him turn and run out of the room right away. It was impossible that this kind of confrontation could endure for long. He knew that Potter would lose soon. Blaise wanted to be out of the line of fire, in case the bond hurt him when his mother started taking Potter apart.
            And yet…
            His mother had taught him there was no confidence without power. It was easy to see when someone was bluffing, and that meant there was no true confidence there. Blaise had learned the telltales of lies and bluffs, so well that even his mother had praised his mastery of them, and that with no grudging praise.
            So it made him wonder where Potter got the true pride that surrounded him now, the careless discarding of consequences. He shone, and Blaise couldn’t find the point of weakness that his mother would use to begin the attack just by looking at him.
            On the other hand, Blaise reminded himself as the shield mark on his arm twinged, that was probably the bond influencing him. And he wasn’t his mother, a fact he had proven over and over again. He was shamefully lacking in guile. If he hadn’t been, she wouldn’t have had to spend so much time training him.
            So he waited, unsure of the outcome of the contest, his heart beating so hard that it overruled the frenetic pulse in the shield mark.
*
            Mrs. Zabini was taking a long time to respond to his taunt, Harry thought. He didn’t think that was because she didn’t know how to respond. Probably, she wanted to force Harry into making some kind of false move, or she wanted to see what the long silence would do to Blaise.
            Probably the latter, Harry thought. His own mind hardened and cooled, resembling the metal that the shield mark looked like right now. He hated people who were so sadistic, who would stand there and test you and test you, and then act like it was your own fault when you broke under the pressure.
            Snape used to be like that in school. Malfoy. Voldemort, in his more taunting moods. And Aunt Petunia, sometimes.
            Harry didn’t have to move. Right now, the tension wasn’t unbearable for him or his friends, and he knew, by the soft pulsing of the shield mark, that it wasn’t for Blaise, either. So he waited, and at last Mrs. Zabini decided that it was time to stop trying to earn the Most Beautiful Statue Award, and spoke.
            “You know nothing of the subtleties of Lordship,” she said, in a voice that she made just this edge of sorrowful. “Unless the family of the one to be bonded agrees, no one can give himself to a Lord or Lady. Blood allegiance comes first, not the chosen allegiance.”
            “That can’t be true all the time,” Harry said, and he didn’t need the way Hermione shook her head behind him or Greg shook his head behind Mrs. Zabini to tell him so. “For one thing, that means that accidental bonds like the one that I have with Blaise would be impossible. And yet no one seems to doubt that this is a true bond. They might want it to go away, but they accept it as real.”
            Mrs. Zabini swayed a step closer to him. Harry stared at him. Was this the kind of thing she did to seduce men and make them pay attention to her? If so, he thought her technique needed work. It wouldn’t be effective on many people who weren’t already dazed by lust.
            Mrs. Zabini slowly drew her wand and aimed it at him. Harry looked back at her, still. He trusted Ron and Hermione to raise a Shield Charm before any hex could land on him. They might not be up to offensive magic, but Harry thought he’d trained them pretty well in Defense.
            “I’ve come to claim my son back,” Mrs. Zabini said back, her voice deepening, dimming. “I would prefer not to hurt you, in case you direct the pain down through the bond and harm my son. But I will have him.”
            Harry chuckled a little. “That you think I would do that tells me how little you know about me. And isn’t the person who knows less the one who’s always at a disadvantage in any conflict?”
            Mrs. Zabini didn’t smile the way Harry had half thought she would. “I know nothing about you,” she said. “I would have said that someone like you wouldn’t ever become a Lord, even accidentally. That’s the Gryffindor touch, isn’t it? Freedom for all, and the chance to make your own decisions?” She paused. “Unless you are a Slytherin or a Dark wizard. Then they can cage you up and forget about you.”
            Harry yawned a little. “You’re forgetting something,” he said. “I’ve already done a lot to ensure that your son and others can stay free. Calling me a thoughtless Gryffindor and insinuating I wouldn’t do anything to help my vassals doesn’t work with me anymore.”
            Mrs. Zabini’s face hardened into a mask. She put her wand away and took a step off to the side, as though the view would be better from that side. Harry turned with her, wondering what she thought she would accomplish by moving that way.
            He realized it in a moment. Though the motion had probably only been to get herself into a better position and make herself literally look better, not because it would add much to her words.
            “You don’t appreciate what a rare treasure you have in Blaise,” Mrs. Zabini murmured. “How can you? You did not grow up around pure-bloods, and the ones you’ve met have received no classic training. No education in ways that would let them take care of themselves. No lessons in grace and deportment. True grace, not the false repression of emotion and creation of a stone façade that one sees in people like the Malfoys.”
            “Let me guess,” Harry said, and he couldn’t help smiling, although the small, crushed state of Blaise next to him limited his amusement a little. “You’re offering me lessons so that I can measure up to your standards.”
            “I’m saying that you do not appreciate a treasure when you see one,” Mrs. Zabini retorted, with no sound of impatience in her voice. “You will never admire what you see in Blaise. You will direct and spend your efforts in other channels, caring for the ones who are more obviously needy. And Blaise will never reach his potential because you will not spare him from the bond. I find that…a concern. A waste.”
            Blaise hunched some more, but Harry didn’t need the tingling and trembling of the green dot on his shield mark to tell him the real impact that Mrs. Zabini’s words were having. She was praising Blaise where she had been tearing him down recently, offering him a way to achieve what he most wanted, and telling him that he would never find it with Harry.
            She was more skilled as a manipulator and abuser than Aunt Petunia had ever been, maybe more skilled than Snape. Harry could find that admirable, in a cold way.
            But not when she was hurting one of his vassals.
            “I know that you don’t value him the way you should,” he said, and felt Mrs. Zabini’s gaze move to him as slowly as a lizard’s. “I know that you tell him he’s weak and defenseless when he’s not. He almost killed himself trying to get away from me, rebelling against me, because he was so worried about what you would think. You haven’t taught him to preserve his life, or to wait for the right moment and then strike, or to bargain, the way that I think most of my other vassals have learned. You’ve taught him that he’s worth nothing if he isn’t strong and independent all the time. And how can anyone be that way?”
            Mrs. Zabini rubbed a finger along the black ring she wore. Harry made a mental note not to get too close to her hand. He didn’t know what the ring did, but it looked too much like the Resurrection Stone for comfort.
            “I am that way,” Mrs. Zabini said, in a tone so deep and distant that Harry, once again, might have been impressed if he was watching her use it on someone else. “I demand no less from my son and heir.”
            “You were always that way?” Harry raised his eyebrows. “When you were a child? When someone ignored you? When you were learning? When you cared for Blaise as a child?” He shook his head. “You can’t have been. You would have died in disgust at your own weakness before now.”
            He turned to Blaise, ignoring the way that Mrs. Zabini had gone coiled and still. “Did she manage to convince you of that? She shouldn’t have.” He paused when he noted the stricken expression on Blaise’s face, and softened his voice. He could almost feel Ron and Hermione pressing against him now, although they still stood a little distance behind, and they reminded him of how lucky he had been. He’d had a hard childhood, sure, but he had them, too. And he would have been nothing without them. Blaise had had no one but his mother to pour poison into his ears. Harry couldn’t blame him for believing it. “She must have been helpless when she was an infant. And if she hates weakness that much, there was a time when she knew what it was. No one hates something that much unless they do know.”
            Blaise stared at him, his breathing soundless, his hands still at his sides.
            Mrs. Zabini uncoiled.
            And it wasn’t him she reached for. It was Blaise, the black ring glinting on her finger as she brought it around.
            Harry didn’t plan the way he reacted. He swung his arm forwards, and it duplicated the arc of Mrs. Zabini’s hand, and even though he was nowhere near as close to Blaise, his shield mark flared, and he spoke in a voice that made the house shake.
            “Protect him.”
            The bond snapped taut between him and Blaise, and a shield formed in front of Blaise, blue instead of silver, but otherwise a perfect duplicate of the one that Harry and Blaise had on their arms. It rang like a gong as it deflected the arc of Mrs. Zabini’s hand. It shimmered, transparent, and revealed Blaise’s shocked face and Mrs. Zabini’s extremely fierce and focused one. It had ripples running through it as if another blow would crack it, and for all Harry knew, it would.
            But it held. It defended. It protected Harry’s vassal.
            Mrs. Zabini turned back towards him as if she had planned this, her eyes focused on Harry’s face. She had her hand with the black ring still down at her side, and she rubbed her finger now and then on the band of the ring as if it was about to crack and release a spirit that would help her get past Harry’s shield. She hadn’t made a move to attack it yet, though, Harry noticed. He heard his own breathing as a rasp. He didn’t take his eyes from his enemy.
            “The capabilities of the bond are fascinating,” Mrs. Zabini murmured. “But I do not require to be convinced of them. I know what they can do. I grew up with a father who was a Lord. I require that you release my son to me.”
            “I require that you realize the bond is still there, and I don’t know how to release him yet,” Harry said. “And I think that he should stay with me throughout the Death Eater trials, anyway. Until then, there’s no saying that someone might not accuse him and get him tried.”
            “My son is not a Death Eater.”
            Harry sighed. “I know that, but most of the public doesn’t right now.” He nodded to the pamphlet that Ron and Hermione had brought and that he’d left lying on the bed. “If I let Blaise go, he could be hurt by someone who doesn’t dare try to do that right now because it would mean angering me and going up against the bond. Yes, maybe he would be all right. But I’m not willing to take that chance.”
            Mrs. Zabini looked back and forth between him and Blaise as though watching a tennis match. Her eyes were half-narrowed. Harry didn’t know what she might try next. He couldn’t have predicted that move with the ring against Blaise.
            He waited, and hoped.
            Mrs. Zabini sighed delicately and turned to face Blaise. “Do you want to stay with Potter?” she asked. “If you wish to do so, I will not contradict you. I only wish to remind you of the probable origin of that desire.”
            Blaise shivered again. He couldn’t remove his eyes from his mother’s face, and Harry didn’t blame him. The way Mrs. Zabini manipulated was unnerving. If one tactic failed, she moved on to the next one, like a predator chasing down prey. If something could tire her and make her back off, Harry hadn’t found it yet.
            For now, he could only bite his lip and be silent. Mrs. Zabini sounded as if she was offering Blaise a choice, and while she really wasn’t, Harry would sound bad if he opposed it.
            Besides, this was the thing that Blaise claimed to want. That Harry couldn’t release him from the bond right now, and thought it would be a poor idea if he could, was really beside the point. Blaise still had to make the choice.
            Blaise stood there, and shivered.
*
            The shiver seemed to cut to the heart of him, and Blaise shuddered under it, under the gaze of his mother. And even under the gaze of Potter, who had only seemed threatening before now when he was actually wielding the magic of the bond against Blaise.
            The probable origin of that desire.
            His mother meant the bond would be influencing him, and the desire of being weak and protected, if he remained with Potter. Of course it would be, Blaise thought. He had already changed a lot, or he wouldn’t have let pain and the threats of death stop him, not if he was the actual son his mother had struggled to raise. He would have broken free and stood in triumph on the heights.
            Even if they were the heights of death, at least he would have been free.
            Now, he had to make a choice with his mum watching him. Blaise had never done that. He had listened to her encouragement, learned from her lessons, watched her retreating back when he made a mistake and she left him alone to think about what he’d done. But this was new, and his hands twisted in on themselves. He felt as if he had frostbite.
            Potter was the one who had forced the choice, he thought resentfully. If he had left well enough alone, then Blaise would have been able to leave with his mother. She could free him from the bond. She had to know some way. She had studied the magic of struggle and freedom for longer than Blaise had been alive, determined never to be enslaved herself. If he had let her touch him with the ring—
            Blaise shuddered and clutched at his head. It felt as though someone was speaking to him, some voice of a person he didn’t know. He had never had that sensation before. It was either the bond, or he was going mad and weak, the way his mother had confirmed.
            The voice was saying, Potter isn’t the one who forced the choice. She’s the one that told you you had to choose. And she wouldn’t have broken the bond if she touched you with that ring.
            Blaise shuddered fretfully and wrapped his arms around himself. No, he didn’t know that. She could have done anything if she had touched him with that ring. He didn’t know. He couldn’t say. He didn’t know how to choose.
            The voice vanished. If it had been his own madness, Blaise realized, he was sane again, and free to make the right choice. Free to go with his mother and make sure that she freed him.
            He stared down at the shield mark on his arm. It was there, outlined in blue and silver, and it looked as if it would always be there. Maybe the centaurs could have removed it, but that path had been closed to him by their fear of Potter.
            Could his mother remove it?
            Blaise shivered. If he was honest with himself—and his mother had always said that he shouldn’t be anything else—then he knew that he didn’t know that, either.
            He looked up. His mother still watched him, her face unchanging. Blaise knew that his refusal wouldn’t touch her, wouldn’t change her, either. She would only say that he was weak, and she had always known it, and walk away.
            And that wouldn’t distress her? She wouldn’t regret the time she had spent raising a weak son and heir, one who isn’t worthy of being her heir after all?
            Blaise shivered. It was—there was something difficult in the back of his throat and the back of his mind. He cleared the one roughly, hoping that it would help him with the blockage in the other.
            She would be distressed because she hadn’t raised him in the right way, and he was choosing weakness over freedom. She would be angry that she had wasted her time with him, and she would turn her back on him and cut him out of her life. She would have to begin the search over again for someone to impart her lessons to, and she would be almost eighteen years behind, since she had thought she could trust the child she bore.
            But she wouldn’t feel distress about him. She wouldn’t feel what Blaise knew Narcissa Malfoy would feel if for some reason she was forced to walk away from Draco.
            That realization seared him and made him cold inside, and then made him impatient with himself. He had always known the truth, hadn’t he? His mother had reared him in strength. That included the strength to face the harsh reality, or reality in general, whether it was harsh or sweet. If he was weak, he was no use to her, and he couldn’t expect her to mourn someone who had no value to her plans.
            But—if he was weak, if he was flawed, if he had failed her anyway—
            Then it stood to reason that he would want those things weak people wanted. And one of them was a mother who cared about him as more than an heir, or a potion she had botched in the brewing of.
            Blaise stared up at his mother. She gazed back at him, and her eyes were as cold as any mountain slope. She didn’t turn away, though. She didn’t truly know what choice he would make. He still had the weapon of uncertainty.
            Blaise closed his eyes. He made the choice as much for his mother as for himself, knowing that she wouldn’t want to be burdened with someone as pathetic as he was, and knowing all the time that she would also think him pathetic for caring about what she thought. He shifted closer to Potter.
            “That is a powerful bond, that can so alter my son as to steal him from me.”
            Blaise flinched again, and opened his eyes. His mother was watching him with that absolute lack of expression that made him want to curl up and die. But if he did that, then he would never earn her respect, and he stood no chance of coming back to her when the bond was finished and he could please her.
            “I know I’m weak,” he whispered to her. “But please, listen. I’m doing this for you, so that you don’t have to be burdened with someone like me. I’ll finish it soon. I’ll be free of the bond, and also able to come back to you. If you still want me,” he added, his voice trailing off, because his mother was poised with one hand on her hip and her hand with the black ring on it held to her lips.
            “Why would I want someone like that to stand at my side?” his mother asked. “And that was what I was training you for.”
            She’d never said that before, never admitted that someday he might have held that important position. Blaise felt his throat jump. He didn’t know what he could say. He stretched out a hand, but his mother avoided it without seeming to notice him, and nodded distantly to Potter.
            “I hope you are happy with your stolen prize,” she said. “Keep in mind that a blade that has snapped in one hand may injure the grip of another.”
            And she turned and walked out of his life.
            Blaise watched her go. He knew that he could run after her and throw himself at her feet, and in the end, she would take him back—not because she pitied him or truly believed that he was strong, but because she wouldn’t want to lose her investment of time and education. And perhaps, in the end, he could show her that he really did want to serve her and love her and do as she said.
            But something held him back. It might have been the bond. It might have been a continuing commitment to the idea that she didn’t deserve to be burdened with someone like him.
            It might have been his simple realization that he wanted something more for himself.
            She walked down the stairs, and Potter put an arm around his shoulders. Blaise turned and stared at him and his friends. He thought they would say something stupid, something that would make the situation worse. They were Gryffindors. They could hardly help it.
            Instead, Potter walked him backwards to the bed and said, “Here. Rest. I’ll sleep somewhere else for tonight.”
            “Wait!” Blaise sat up, his heart pounding furiously. “I can’t—I can’t just take your bed from you—”
            Potter let his eyebrows rise. “You haven’t cared much about what I thought as a Lord before this,” he said. “Don’t start now, when it’s inconvenient.”
            And he walked out of the room, taking his friends and Greg with him, and shut the door gently behind him.
            Blaise lay back down on the bed. He shut his eyes. He turned his face away from the door.
            He didn’t try to stop the tears when they came, because he was already weak.
*
Kain: The Freedom Fighters really only fight Lords. As far as they were concerned, other people were fighting for Muggleborns, but too many people accept Lordship bonds to fight them.
The biggest problem with the Slytherin students is the public perception, I agree. But Harry is planning ways to manipulate that so that he can say, “Look! At least these two didn’t have Dark Marks!”
Those images are cute.
goldfish: Thanks! I think Harry saved Blaise here, and that’s the important thing. I don’t know if anything could put Mrs. Zabini in her place.
polka dot: I assume the same place the house-elves at Hogwarts do. We never see deliveries to Hogwarts or talk about someone buying food for them. I assume that the house-elves probably go out and buy it, or acquire it other ways.
karisma: Thank you!
SP777: Thanks! No, Mrs. Zabini is nothing like my mother.
Genuka: Exactly.
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The Only True Lords