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Nature of the Beast	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 48976 -:- Recommendations : 3 -:- Currently Reading : 5
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I am making no money from this story.

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Chapter Thirty—Chains and Chances
            Draco stood there, lulled by the blinking of his own eyes to think that this wasn’t happening. His mother wasn’t sitting in front of him, looking at him with an excited, expectant gaze, and Draco didn’t have to think of a way to tell her that she had so violently misunderstood him.
            But she went on sitting and she went on looking, and Draco accepted that she wouldn’t accept it if he simply told her his mind had changed and he didn’t want a “normal” Veela bond anymore. He would have to explain.
            “I’m flattered you did all this work for me,” he said, and reached out to take her hands. “You said—this ritual was forgotten because people decided all Veela bonds were destined and—what? It would be folly to resist them?” His voice was dry and thin as paper, but his mother didn’t seem to notice.
            On the contrary, she beamed at him and nodded. “Yes. The bonds were once sometimes resisted and fought, you know. Apparently some people knew that the tie between them and another person was weak, or unflattering to them.” She laughed a little. “I wish we had retained that mindset. With it, we might have known at once that Potter wasn’t for you, and you should seek out someone else.”
            He is for me, Draco thought, with a vicious beat of his heart. If someone tried to take Harry away, he would rip their eyes out.
            “Draco? What’s wrong?”
            Yes, his hands had shifted almost to claws in his mother’s hold, and she gazed at him anxiously, not able to interpret his silence or the edge of agony he had taken on. Draco sighed and sat down beside her. He would have to pick his way carefully, not to hurt her feelings, but honestly, he thought she could recover from hurt feelings more easily than either he or Harry would recover from rejection.
            “I’m flattered you did all this work for me,” he repeated, and his mother wasn’t stupid. Already he saw the clouding in her eyes, the withdrawal back from him against the other arm of the couch. Draco held her glance anyway, and tried to show how much he loved her. “But Harry and I have changed. We’re growing closer. I understand him better now, and he’s accepted the bond. I don’t want to change him for another mate.”
            “I don’t understand,” said Narcissa, in the exquisitely polite voice of someone concealing her disappointment in a gift. “You don’t want a submissive mate? You don’t want someone who will place your every need and desire first?”
            Draco hesitated. That was the vision he had been raised with, the natural and shining one, and it was still attractive.
            But having to struggle with Harry had made Draco understand himself a little better. Yes, perhaps without Harry, that would have been the extent of what he wanted. Now, though, he wanted someone who could challenge him, fight with him, compromise with him. And he wanted Harry, with all the challenges of his past and his emotions flooding him like melting snow, and the tattered bond that was repairing itself.
            Draco tried to imagine touching someone else the way he touched Harry, kissing them, and recoiled. No faceless mate his mother could find for him would be better than Harry. Strange or not, that was the way it was.
            “I don’t want anyone else,” Draco finally said. “I’m at peace with my choice of mate. And I like him.” It might be a bit much to say that he loved Harry yet, although the boiling feeling in his chest did resemble it.
            “You could have anyone else you wanted,” Narcissa said.
            “Anyone else who was submissive and thought a bond with me was a gift,” said Draco, frowning. “Do you have candidates in mind? Because the only ones I can think of pale in comparison to Harry.” He was sure that his mother would want him to marry a pure-blood girl of one of the small number of families they knew, families similar to them both in status after the war and in wealth.
            And honestly, the only one Draco could think of was Daphne Greengrass. He shuddered and hissed at the thought.
            “I do not have a particular candidate in mind,” said his mother. Draco looked at her sharply. She had said the words with a little twist of her neck that he had learned to read, of necessity, in the days immediately after the war when she was talking about what had happened to most of the people they knew. The twist of her neck always meant she was trying, in some way, to soften the blow.
            “Mother,” Draco began, a hint of exasperation in his voice no matter how much he tried to hide it.
            “Her name is Camilla Hughes.”
            Draco had to search his mind for a moment before he found the name Hughes. They were pure-bloods, but they had gone to live abroad in Spain during the first war with the Dark Lord, and Draco knew none of their children had attended Hogwarts. Therefore, he couldn’t picture Camilla.
            But the name and the connection told him a lot, anyway. He was sure Camilla would be pale and soft and cold, and she would do whatever was necessary to please her Veela mate. She would probably be blond. Pliant. Draco could do what he liked with her in a way that he never could with Harry.
            And that’s not what I want.
            No, it wasn’t. Perhaps Draco would never know the exact moment that things had changed, but they had, and it was silly to go on pretending otherwise, just because he thought his mother would be disappointed if he didn’t.
            He faced Narcissa and shook his head a little. “I hope she finds a mate, and you find a way to make it up to her if you already promised me,” he said quietly. “But I’ve chosen the one I want to be with.”
            Only a slight narrowing of his mother’s eyes told of her real emotions. “You didn’t choose,” she said. “Destiny, or whatever name you want to give to the force that creates Veela bonds, decided for you. Does that seem like freedom to you?”
            Draco winced a little, but maintained his calm, stubborn gaze right into her eyes. “It didn’t once. Now it does.”
            “Because Potter has yielded a bit, and you want to fuck him,” said Narcissa, the words making Draco wince and rock back. He had never imagined curses like that coming out of her mouth. “Is that worth compromising your future happiness?”
            “Choosing anyone else would be compromising it,” said Draco. His hold on his temper was slipping a little. No matter how much he loved his mother, he couldn’t sit here and calmly listen to her insult his mate. He stood up and paced slowly back and forth, trying to relax his wings, which were snapping out to the sides. “No, I might not have been enthusiastic about having Harry bound to me at first, but I understand both the bond and him a lot better now. I can accept it.”
            “You should more than accept it,” said Narcissa. “You should rejoice in it. Camilla would.”
            “Can you be sure of that?” Draco asked softly, keeping his head turned away. “It was less than a fortnight ago that you started this research, if I go by when you started spending large amounts of time away from the house. How much time did you have to speak to her? To get to know her? To be so sure that she would please me?”
            “She is submissive and ready to be bound to a Veela,” said Narcissa, as if that was the only thing that mattered.
            Well, Draco would once have thought of it the same way. He had assumed the same things about Harry, and those had mattered a lot more to him than looks or their shared past or the personality Harry would bring into the bond.
            But he had—options now. That was the only way he could phrase it to himself. Why should he settle for anything less than the absolute best? And he knew that Camilla, as pretty as she might be, as pure-blood, as polite, wouldn’t give him the best. Harry would, if he could only convince his mother of that.
            Then Draco paused, and another thought raced softly through his mind and startled him into a new perspective.
            Why did he have to give his mother any convictions at all? This was his life she was talking about, and no matter how much she cared for him, she couldn’t live it in his place. Draco nodded and turned to her.
            “Don’t bring up Camilla again,” he said. “Please,” he added, when he saw her opening her mouth and knew she would probably be determined enough to simply keep going. “I appreciate you finding her. I hope she finds a dominant Veela to bond with. But I have my mate. That’s not going to change.”
            His mother didn’t argue back, the way he had thought she would. She only sat there with her hands folded in her lap and her eyes so distant and cold that Draco wondered if she had already dismissed him in her mind and gone hunting for some other distant goal.
            “Very well,” Narcissa said at last, and her voice crackled like burning paper. “If that is the way you wish to play the game.” She didn’t finish the sentence, but stood up and walked out of the room.
            Draco was left to stare after her, more than a little shaken, and wishing he knew what the hell she was thinking.
*
            “Mr. Potter. A word.”
            Harry turned around. Narcissa hadn’t sought him out for days and days now, and honestly, Harry had been disposed to regard that as a good thing. He knew she’d had a conversation with Draco the other day, but Draco had only turned his head away when Harry asked him what it was about. And Harry was learning how to be sensitive. He had pressed Draco’s hand and let him be.
            Narcissa, though, walked right up to him now, and her face was set in a peculiarly calm, business-like expression. She spread her hands wide and gave him the smallest of bows.
            All right, weird, but livable, Harry thought. He didn’t know the etiquette, though, so he nodded back instead of bowing. God knew that he had ended up in enough messes through not dealing with pure-bloods the way he was supposed to. He didn’t want to end up in a worse one by making a gesture that would make Narcissa think he was being more agreeable or generous than he felt.
            “I have come to you,” Narcissa announced, “because I think you care more about Draco’s happiness than he does.”
            “All right,” said Harry. He found himself looking around, expecting Draco to come flying into the room in a second. But Draco had said that he would be upstairs organizing a surprise for Harry, and begged him not to come up any sooner than his call. So Harry folded his arms and fixed his gaze on Narcissa and tried to act as he would when he was confronting a pure-blood who didn’t have anyone’s best political interests in mind except their own. “You have my attention.”
            “You know that he craves a mate who can give him everything,” said Narcissa, and her lips set in a flat line. “You have given him…much.” Harry could feel how that admission hurt her, almost wrenched out of her as though someone had caught it on a fishhook dangled down her throat. “But you cannot give him everything.”
            “What am I missing?” Harry felt as though he was falling into a pit that had opened up in the middle of his own stomach.
            “Perfect submission,” said Narcissa. “You know something of what he suffered during the war.” Harry nodded, half-unwillingly. Yes, he did, from his visions if nothing else. “He needs to be in control to make up for the times when he was not. And a mate who has never hurt him.” She cocked her head. “You have.”
            “You couldn’t guarantee that his perfect mate wouldn’t have been on the opposite side of the war,” Harry began, uneasiness rising.
            “I am not talking about that.” Narcissa seemed to rise and surge towards him without, in reality, moving at all. “I am talking about you flinging him into a certain library wall. After you became mates.”
            Harry tried to swallow, and found his throat soft and dry. He reached up, touched it, then dropped his hand back to his side. “Has Draco told you this?”
            “Not recently,” said Narcissa. “But I know his desires as he grew up, and people do not change so completely as to abandon all of those.” She turned her head to one side and kept Harry under observation like a bird. “And think of the way you have hurt him. Should someone who flings someone else around remain mated to them? Married to them?”
            No, Harry thought. His head was filled with the remembered aches of his own childhood, and his fervent wishes that someone would come and rescue him from the Dursleys. Of course, it wasn’t exactly the same thing, but it was similar enough, when he thought about it that way, to make him ill. I can’t…I can’t stay with Draco if I abused him.
            He had no justification for that little bout of lashing out at Draco, either. Draco hadn’t actively been trying to hurt or rape him, the thing Harry had feared as soon as he heard about the bond and understood the sexual nature of it. That meant Harry had been the abuser, the aggressor, there. He wondered why Draco hadn’t brought it up again, and then sighed. Of course. Draco thought they had no choice but to remain in the bond even when it was broken and tattered.
            “I have found a solution,” Narcissa whispered.
            It took Harry longer than usual to pull himself out of the darkness he had plunged into, so deep that it felt as if it was lapping over the exposed surfaces of his mind and icing them, and look at her. “What do you mean? I can’t change how I abused him.”
            “No.” Narcissa gave him a small smile that made Harry feel she was sympathetic to him, after all, at least a little. “But you can change things in the future so you never hurt him again.”
            Harry took a deep breath. “I think we’re on the track of that.” It made sense that Narcissa wouldn’t know since she wasn’t around much in the past few days. “I’ve—learned how to get along with him, and he’s accepting—”
            “Yes, victims often do.”
            Harry winced again. “I mean, he’s been accepting me as I am, learning about me,” he said. “It’s another means of ensuring that this never happens again.”
            Narcissa looked at him with the pity and understanding gone from her smile. “You understand nothing,” she whispered. “You don’t grasp how humiliating it would be for him to have to crawl back to the person who abused him and beg forgiveness?”
            “He’s not doing that,” Harry said, a little hotly. “I’m not doing that. We can—we can talk about it and go on, now. We have a good enough relationship to do that.”
            “And I am saying, my son should not have to have a relationship of any kind with someone who abused him.” Narcissa’s knuckles were white enough to make the simple silver rings she wore, a form of adornment Harry had barely noticed, stand out like scars on her fingers. “I don’t care what you might have worked out. Think of him, for once, and not yourself and your lost freedom.”
            “But we can’t change the bond anyway,” Harry snapped. “We have to live with it as best we can.”
            “That is what I am telling you.” Narcissa laid almost the same emphasis on every word, standing tall and staring down at him. “I have found a means of changing the bond. Making someone else the submissive partner. Freeing the unsuitable one to live his own life.” She curled her lip a little. “Is that what you want?”
            Harry, astonishingly, found that it wasn’t. His first impulse was to say he wanted to stay with Draco, to see what the bond flourishing between them could become. Now that he had his curiosity and passion and anger back, that sounded like a preferable fate to going his own way alone, and maybe sinking back into the dullness that had been his political life before the bond.
            But this wasn’t about what he wanted, as Narcissa had pointed out. It really was about what was best for Draco. What if he was prolonging Draco’s agony by staying in this bond? Or what if—
            Harry’s breath caught. Yes, he saw. Draco would say that he wanted Harry to stay no matter what, because the Veela’s longing for its mate was so strong. He wouldn’t think about the abuse, or Harry’s mood swings, or the way Harry had come so close to letting Draco fuck him and then lashed out. Harry’s happiness was the thing that mattered to him, so strongly that he would ignore the fact that he was miserable.
            Harry could only guard Draco’s happiness by an equal regard in the opposite direction, because Draco wouldn’t help himself.
            “Yes,” said Narcissa, who had followed his thoughts so easily that Harry had to wonder if she was a Legilimens herself. “You understand now.” She bowed her head. “I have found someone who would consider it an honor. Who would never hurt Draco, because she is properly submissive and not as strong magically as he is. Someone who could give him children. Will you listen to me?”
            Harry burned with reluctance. He wanted to stay with Draco. He wanted to see what happened next. It might be better than any of the options he had imagined.
            But…
            He had to do what was best for his mate, didn’t he? Not just what he wanted.
            “I’m listening,” he said.
*
SP777: Yes, lots of trouble coming.
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Nature of the Beast