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

Chapter List
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Chapter Thirty-One—Councils of the Heart
            “You think that you have prevented his mother from having any claim on him in the future?”
            Trust Snape to know the exact thing to say to make me doubt myself, Harry thought wryly, and resisted the urge to scrub his hand over his face. He sighed. “No. But I have it from Kreacher that she left the house, and I don’t think she would have done that if she thought there was any chance of reclaiming him right now.”
            Snape—Severus—stood up, his robes swinging around him. “Or unless she wanted to tear a wound in his heart, and knew this was the best way of doing so. I will go and check on him, and make sure that he is not tearing himself to death with his mother’s weapons.” He gave Harry a sharp look as he moved past.
            Harry sighed. “I should have thought of that, I know,” he called after Severus, ignoring the way Ron and Hermione bristled next to him. They hadn’t had time to realize yet, the way Harry had, how viciously Severus’s life had been changed by the bond. “Sorry.”
            Severus glanced back once at him, but continued climbing the stairs. At least Ron waited until he was out of sight before leaning close to Harry and muttering, “What a prick.”
            “Don’t say that where he can hear you, Weasley.”
            Harry started and turned around. He knew Pansy was the one who had sent Kreacher to him with the warning, but he had thought she would have gone to bed by now. She was sitting at the kitchen table instead, a cup in front of her that was no longer steaming. She eyed Harry sourly and stood up with a sigh, stretching.
            “I assume that everything has gone well, and Mrs. Zabini is officially out of the house?” she asked.
            “You just heard me say that,” Harry said, and wished that he knew what to make of the expression Pansy fixed on him. Was she upset that he’d snapped at her? But the bond didn’t twinge on his arm, and that was the only way he knew that he wasn’t ignoring the needs of one of his vassals right now.
            Pansy grunted and rubbed the back of her neck. “Yes, I heard you say that,” she said. “I wondered if you could feel it in the house, if you’re connected to the wards in that way.”
            “No,” Harry said. “Kreacher was the one who had to tell me that she was gone.” And he was sure that he’d just said that, too, and he could understand the way Hermione’s hand hovered over her wand. “Maybe if I had my wand back, then I would have the kind of connection to the wards that this needs.”
            Pansy just nodded wearily, without much interest, and glanced at Ron and Hermione. “Don’t make this harder for him than it has to be,” she said, and trudged up the stairs in Snape’s wake. Harry blinked. If it wasn’t so obvious from context that she had meant his friends were making it harder for Harry, then he would have called Pansy back to ask exactly who she was talking about.
            “Thanks,” he called after her, but she didn’t stop or turn, leaving him to wonder whether she had heard him or not, and whether she was offended that he hadn’t told her that earlier if she was. He sighed and touched his forehead, although the scar didn’t burn.
            “Sit. Down.”
            Now Hermione apparently was insulted. Harry glared at her as she walked him backwards and settled him into a seat at the table. “What?” he snapped. “How did I offend you without even saying anything?”
            Hermione flicked a glance at Ron that told him to make himself good and busy better than any other Harry had ever seen, which apparently was the cue for Ron to start waving his wand and clearing cobwebs from the ceiling. Harry snorted. Hermione turned back to him and took the impulse to laugh away, though, by saying, “You can’t keep focusing on them like this.”
            Harry held up his right arm, in case they had missed the big glaring shield-mark there. “I have to focus on them. That’s what a Lord does.”
            Hermione sighed and rubbed his arm for a second, which made Harry blink. Come to think of it, he didn’t think anyone but him had touched his mark since he got it—no, wait, Hermione had done it once before, when she was trying to figure out what kind of bond they had, and Kislik had traced it with her wand. But it still felt as strange as though someone had reached out and touched his scar.
            “I mean that you can’t focus on every nuance of their emotions and wonder if they’re upset or not,” Hermione said quietly. “I saw the way you looked at Snape. Parkinson, too. I know that Zabini probably needed you to do what you did, leave the choice up to him, but you’re acting as though you’re responsible for the emotional health of all the Slytherins. That’s not true. You have to focus on yourself, too.”
            “The Lordship bond seems to suggest that’s exactly what I am,” Harry pointed out. “It burns me if one of them is angry or sad and I don’t do anything about it.”
            Hermione’s mouth thinned a little. “There was something I found in a book yesterday,” she said. “It was one of the reasons we didn’t come until today. I couldn’t believe what I was reading, and I couldn’t take the book from…where I found it.”
            Harry eyed her. Hermione turned a little red, but kept her steady grip on his hand and arm. Harry snorted despite himself. He was willing to bet ten Galleons that the “place” was the Restricted Section of Hogwarts library, which probably no one had the time or inclination to monitor right now. “You learned something about the bond?” he asked. “Something from a Dark Arts book?”
            “It’s not all Dark,” Hermione said, but nodded and kept going when Harry made an impatient little motion with his hand. The last thing he wanted was for Hermione to get on some tangent about a book and not come back to the main subject. “What I did read suggested that the bond isn’t functioning the way it should, and that’s probably due to the way it formed, accidentally, and the intense impulse you had to protect them. Maybe even your connection to Voldemort. Bonds usually connect Lords and vassals, but not as closely as they do in your case. They don’t punish the Lord if he doesn’t spend his entire day worrying about his vassals. It’s a connection that actually allows both of them to stay sane.”
            “That’s what mine is doing, too,” Harry snapped. “Unless you think that Blaise’s case is typical, and it would have been better to ignore him.” He looked up the stairs, wondering what Blaise and Snape were doing right now. Maybe he should be with them. He had left mostly because he had assumed that he was the last thing Blaise would want to look at right now.
            “But what about you?” Ron asked, suddenly coming back into the conversation. Hermione looked at him sidelong, but whatever reason she had for not wanting him to speak earlier seemed to have expired, as far as Ron was concerned. “How can you stay sane when you have to spend all your time worrying about them and whatever bloody stupid thing they’re going to do next?”
            “They’re not bloody stupid,” Harry muttered, but his attention was on the bond mark, which twanged and sent a few stinging arrows up his arm until he said those words.
            “Really?” Ron folded his arms. “Because so far we’ve seen Zabini calling up his mother, and Snape blaming you like always, and—well, Goyle and Parkinson have been okay, I grant you, and we haven’t seen Malfoy. But you said that he blamed you for his parents until he saw they were alive and well. They don’t give you any rest. They always want something. If you wear yourself out serving them, how is that different than you wearing yourself out serving the wizarding world?”
            Harry looked from one of his friends’ faces to the other. Hermione was nodding, her eyes crinkled along the corners the way they got when she was telling him to do his own homework and being stern about not letting him copy from her. “That’s what I would have said, what the book said. The normal bonds, the chosen ones, focus on give and take. They don’t force the Lord to attend to his vassals’ every need, every hour of the day.”
            “Well, they don’t have anyone else right now,” Harry said. “And Blaise has been abused. You saw that.”
            “I don’t really care what they need,” Ron told him, his eyes so pained that Harry finally understood what a great effort Ron had been making to hold himself back from attacking the Slytherins—either verbally or otherwise. “They can’t have it if they kill you along the way.”
            “Part of that is the Freedom Fighters, too,” Harry reminded them, crossing his arms. “I wouldn’t be so bloody exhausted if they would stop attacking.”
            Ron and Hermione exchanged a smile that was more Slytherin than they would have been happy to hear about right now. Harry chose to take it as a good omen. “What? Did you find out something about them?”
            “We found out something about Healer Kislik,” Hermione said. “And how she treated her last few patients in St. Mungo’s. She doesn’t work for them anymore, you know, no matter what she said. She’s an ‘independent’ Healer. And once we start telling the public about her and the Freedom Fighters, then she’ll be restricted. She might not care, but at least the Aurors are going to be looking for her, and any people with her won’t be able to move around as freely, either.”
            Harry leaned back and laughed. It felt like the first time he had done that in something other than sarcasm or despair for years. “You two are brilliant, you know that?”
            Ron coughed and rubbed his nails on his shirt. “We try.”
            “But in the meantime,” Hermione said, snapping back from her triumph with what Harry felt was unfair quickness, “we have to make sure that the bond doesn’t hurt you in the attempt to make you live up to the same level of intense protectiveness that you felt during the moment when Voldemort cast that curse. It wants you to do it all the time. No human being can sustain that.”
            Harry cocked his head. “You think that’s what’s wrong with it?”
            Hermione nodded. “Like I said, most of the bonds I read about are chosen and agreed on between the vassals and the Lord. They even agree about what shape the mark will be. This mark is just shaped like a shield—you and the vassals didn’t agree on that. It comes from your Shield Charm and your attempt to protect them. Which is fine, but it’s kind of like accidental magic; it’s supposed to happen in this big burst. Not keep going, all the time. That’s what the bond has done.”
            “I still don’t want to end the bond,” Harry said firmly. “They need me, and I need them, and if we do that, Kislik wins.”
            “You can’t do that anyway,” Ron said. “Unless you manage to convince the bond that both you and a single vassal agree that you don’t need the bond anymore. Otherwise, the Lord probably dies, the way that that other Lord and Lady Kislik worked with did.”
            Hermione nodded. “But you can change the bond so that it doesn’t drain you so much. I think you were doing that already, when you talked about how you changed it so that it healed Zabini.”
            Harry sighed. “Okay, but how do I do that? That’s what we’re already looking up in the books, and I haven’t found a particular technique yet.”
            “The books I read don’t give a technique,” Hermione said, and settled into lecture mode. “They say that you have to be in a certain frame of mind, and then concentrate until you find that you can reach out and manipulate the bond like it was a physical object. From what I read, it’s a little like Occlumency. Everyone has to find their particular comfortable threshold and work out from there.”
            “If it’s like Occlumency, I’ll be terrible at it,” Harry muttered, and slouched back against his chair, his arms folded, sulking and knowing he was sulking. But if he was terrible at one thing that required concentration, then he was going to be terrible at the other one.
            “You were terrible at Occlumency because Snape was a bastard who wanted to hurt you more than he wanted to teach you,” Ron began.
            Hermione and Harry scowled at him at the same time, and Ron threw up his hands. “Fine, fine, the bond, right. But it really does seem that what you really need is a space of uninterrupted time when you can relax and think of the bond and nothing else. Maybe that’s why you haven’t achieved much so far except in those sudden bursts of will. Everyone keeps interrupting you when you settle in.”
            Harry nibbled his lip, then nodded slowly. Mrs. Zabini interrupted his time with his friends, Blaise’s punishment interrupted getting to know his vassals better, the Freedom Fighters interrupted his sleep. And when he was resting, something else important would happen, like the Malfoys coming into the house. Then Harry would feel guilty that he hadn’t been awake to attend to it.
            But he couldn’t be awake all the time, and he wondered if his natural guilt was being “helped along” by the bond.
            “You would be able to protect me and keep me safe for a little while so I could do it?” he asked, glancing back and forth from Ron to Hermione.
            Ron grinned at him. “What are friends for?”
            Harry closed his eyes and swallowed. “Thanks. I suppose that we’d better get started on it as soon as we can, then.”
            “Oh, no you don’t, Harry James Potter,” Hermione said, so fiercely that even Ron looked impressed. “You’re going to have a good, normal night’s sleep first, and then a big meal in the morning. You can’t do this properly if you’re distracted by tiredness and hunger.”
            “But I slept most of the day today!” Harry said. “And I had a lot to eat right before you got here!”
            He stopped, hearing that he was whining. Hermione leaned forwards and tapped him on the nose. “Yes, but neither of those was normal,” she said kindly. “I think that you need to be on as normal a schedule as possible in order to confront the bond. You don’t want any distractions. And we’ll handle problems from your vassals that come up, and report to them to you if we really need to,” she added.
            Harry closed his eyes. It sounded like he really needed to do this in order to control the bond and eventually give everyone what they wanted from it, and he trusted no one more than his friends to protect him.
            But he did worry about what would happen if he had to retreat from contact for several hours. Could he trust his vassals to act fairly towards his friends? And vice versa?
            “We’re the ones who have wands,” Hermione said, making him open his eyes and look at her. “If they attacked us, they’d be the ones who were sorry.”
            “Snape has a wand, too,” Harry told her, but only shook his head when she looked a question at him. “It’s not that I’m worried about. It’s about you insulting each other and pulling on the bond to the point that I have to come out of the room and interfere. I really need you not to do that.”
            Hermione laughed and leaned back. “Is that all? We looked up charms for that, too. It’s a charm that depends on voice tone. It’ll let neutral or cheerful or fearful words through, but it charms everyone who has an angry or sarcastic tone to sound like they’re giving us compliments.”
            Harry gaped at her, then at Ron, who was giving Hermione a besotted smile. “Isn’t she awesome?” Ron added, when he saw Harry looking at him.
            “She is,” Harry said, and gave Hermione a little salute, which made her blush even though Ron’s words hadn’t. She stood up and tapped the edge of the table with her fingers, looking as though she would have liked some papers to shuffle so that she could keep her hands busy. Then she shook her head and clasped her hands behind her back.
            “Let’s get you to bed, so that you have the time and energy to do this tomorrow,” she said.
            Harry nodded and started to speak, but a sharp twinge from the shield mark made him wince and clap his hand over it. Hermione opened her mouth, probably to ask if it was Blaise, but Harry already knew it wasn’t. It had come from much closer than the bedroom, and he knew that he probably would have felt Blaise leave that room long before.
            When he turned around, Malfoy—Draco—was standing in the entrance of the kitchen, with his head bowed. Harry looked carefully out into the corridor, and saw Ron doing the same, but it seemed his parents really weren’t with him.
            “Can we talk?” Draco whispered.
            Harry hesitated once. “If this is about that pamphlet that someone published, I don’t know where that came from any more than you do,” he said. “I think it was probably just the fact that your parents came here, and maybe someone has heard that protection was doubled on their cells, too.” He didn’t trust all of Stone’s Aurors the way he was willing to trust Stone herself.
            “It’s not about that.” Draco ducked his head further as Harry looked at him, and Harry sighed, recognizing the courage that it must have taken to come here in the first place. “Please? I really do have—a lot to say to you.”
            “If it’s insults, you can just keep it to yourself,” Ron snapped, and nodded to Harry. “We can have Hermione cast that spell she found on you, too, you know.”
            “That might not even be possible with the bond,” Harry said absently, his eyes still locked on Draco. Draco was ducking his head and looking as penitent as Harry had ever seen him. And he even thought this was real, rather than the false kind he would show if a professor had caught him doing something in Hogwarts. “I think this is important. Please, you lot? Can you give us a while?” He looked meaningfully at Hermione, who he thought would be more neutral about a Malfoy than Ron would.
            Hermione looked him straight in the eye. “You know it’s almost midnight, and we discussed the importance of you getting a good night’s sleep.”
            Harry had to smile. “I don’t have to get up early for classes tomorrow. Please? It’ll be fine,” he added quietly, when Hermione still hesitated. “I’ll walk away if he starts insulting me.”
            “I won’t.” Draco’s voice was so subdued that Harry scarcely recognized it. It made Hermione blink, too, he was pleased to note. He trusted her perceptions more than his right now. “I just—I need to talk to you. Please.”
            Harry nodded once. For Draco to beg, and in front of his friends, too, made it more likely to be something urgent. “We’ll take half an hour, no more than that. Can you go and find me another bedroom I can move into? Please,” he added himself, when his friends still hesitated. Harry understood why they were reluctant to leave him alone.
            But this time, he thought, it was his own brain and experience of Draco, and not the bond, telling him that things would be all right. He just sat there patiently waiting for Ron and Hermione to realize that, and Hermione finally nodded.
            “Fine,” she said. “We’ll even ward the room for you. But a half-hour is all you get.”
            She spoke more to Draco than Harry on those last words, Harry saw, and Draco ducked his head further and nodded, as though he was afraid even to look Hermione in the eye. Harry hoped it wasn’t real fear, just the need to do whatever they wanted so they would leave him alone to talk with Harry. Harry didn’t want any of his vassals to live in constant terror.
            Ron and Hermione walked through the kitchen doorway, and a moment later, a complicated sizzle of spells came from beyond it. Harry watched as the wards strung across the space, wards that would prevent eavesdropping and anyone else from coming in, as well as a few that he didn’t recognize and Hermione had probably looked up along with the information on the bond.
            Then he turned around and stood up, pulling out a chair for Draco. “Sit down before you fall down,” he said. “What did you want to talk about?”
*
            Draco hadn’t known this would be hard.
            Well, it had been hard to gather up his courage and come downstairs, of course it had been. But he had thought that would be the most difficult step. Once he saw Potter, the words he had to speak would come pouring out of his heart. Why wouldn’t they? He was the one who had been wronged. If Potter had simply taken Draco to see his parents when they were in the Ministry, then Draco’s anxiety would have been assuaged, and he wouldn’t been tempted to join Blaise in his conspiracy plans.
            He wouldn’t have punched Potter, either. All of this stemmed from the single act of Potter not being human, maybe because he didn’t have parents himself and didn’t understand how intense Draco’s anxiety would be over them.
            But now, with the way that Potter watched him, his eyes and face locked shut even as he waited to answer what he seemed to assume would be a plea for help, Draco wavered. He had come to apologize. It was so hard. All he had to do was be in Potter’s presence, and he started remembering all the awful things that Potter had done to him.
            And you did to him?
            Draco scowled. He didn’t want to remember that part, no. He had come this far because his parents had told him to come, not because he thought it was a good idea. And then he had heard Potter and his friends talking about what Potter needed was some peace and quiet, and he had kept himself from bursting in with an effort. What about what Draco needed? Hadn’t everyone waited while Potter took his day-long nap, even if they had really needed to talk to him?
            “What is it?” Potter repeated, and his face had withdrawn even further when Draco glanced up at him, although Draco didn’t know how that was possible.
            He does think that I’m just here to complain, Draco realized abruptly. He doesn’t expect an apology.
            That thought finally made Draco take a deep breath and stand. “Potter,” he said, and his voice croaked a little as he held out his hand. “Can we start over?”
            Potter blinked at his hand, then at him, the movements slow and exaggerated. Draco winced again. Potter was really going to make Draco pay for this, wasn’t he?
            “I thought we already had,” Potter said. “When you came and talked to me with your parents. You made it clear that you weren’t going to continue plotting against me, and that was really the only thing you’d done that made me resent you.” He paused, examining Draco. “What else do we have to talk about?”
            “I want to really start over,” Draco said. “Whether you take my parents as vassals or not. Whether you care about me or not. I want to be more than Lord and vassal, because the other vassals also cause you trouble, like Blaise, or snipe at you, like Professor Snape.” Potter frowned and opened his mouth, probably to defend Greg and Pansy, but Draco rushed on before they could get distracted from the main subject. “I want to be your friend. If you’ll have me.”
            Potter continued to peer at him longer than Draco had expected. His hand began to tremble, and he knew he looked stupid, standing there like that with it out. But no one else would come into the room and see him thanks to the wards, so he waited.
            “What can you have to gain from my friendship?” Potter asked at last, his voice gentle. “My protection, yes, I understand why you want that. And why you want to have a more peaceful relationship with me. But why friendship? Why, Draco?”
            Draco shut his eyes, feeling swift tears spring up under them. Those tears frustrated him, so much. But he held firm and took a deep and noisy breath, finally opening his eyes again to look as straight as he could at Potter’s—Harry’s—eyes.
            “Because I’ve wanted it for a long time,” he said. “And this is the first time in years that I think you might give it to me. I always wanted it from you willingly, you know. I dare say that it doesn’t seem that way, but it really was. I wanted—so many things.” His hand trembled again, but he closed it into a fist, and that stopped. “Will you give it to me now?”
            Harry studied him for one more moment, and Draco wondered if he could sense the other reason: that healing some of those old wounds might help Draco settle more comfortably in the bond. And, well, Draco wanted them healed.
            Then Harry smiled, the same smile that had nearly taken Draco’s feet from beneath him earlier, and extended his own hand. “You have it,” he said. “Or my best try at it. I don’t know how good I’ll be at it, at first.”
            “That’s all right,” Draco said, and blinked, fast, to keep his eyes from welling.
            They also stood there for a stupidly long time with their hands clasped, but Draco remembered the wards, and had room for a flash of regret when Harry let go.
*
SP777: Blaise still wants free of the bond, but he does trust Harry to stand with him, even if he despises him for doing so.
Genuka: She would disagree.
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The Only True Lords