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The Name I'll Give to Thee	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 42129 -:- Recommendations : 2 -:- Currently Reading : 6
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Chapter Thirty-Two--An Heirloom

            "I suppose some people would call it powerful," Draco said, and touched the torch beside the door of the vault. At once all the torches on all the walls lit, casting flickering blue light around the room. "But my family hasn't had much use for it in the last few decades, when we made our political power by bribery."

            "Why?" Harry ducked under his arm and stood looking around the vault. Draco saw more curiosity than possessiveness in his eyes; he looked as though he was probably thinking of the vault as belonging to another family, not one he was part of. "If it's powerful--"

            "It kills," Draco interrupted. "That's all it does. I can see why my enemies might want it, but it became unacceptable to use in a pure-blood world with lots of bans on murder."

            Harry started and turned around. After a moment, he nodded. "I see. So where is this, and why is it so important?"

            Draco led his way through the shelves and casks and trunks of the vault. His father had believed in organization, and treasures that would have been displayed openly in his grandfather's time had retreated behind walls of wood and steel. Harry followed him, glancing around at the polished stone of the walls and floor.

            "What?" Draco added after a moment, catching his stare and making Harry look at him with his own steady glare, instead of permitting him to look away.

            "I just wondered why you didn't sell some of the artifacts in here rather than marrying me for my money." Harry shrugged with one shoulder, his face blank from what seemed like the pressure of conflicting emotions rather than because he didn't want Draco to know what he was feeling. "I mean--that would have spared you from marrying someone you despised at the time, and leave you open for an alliance with someone else."

            Draco sighed. "It's not exactly a treasure vault. These heirlooms can't be sold, for the most part. They're attuned to the family, and someone who's not a Malfoy can't use them. And as for selling them to relatives, Aurelius is my closest relative, and you know he doesn't have the money to afford them."

            "Not even collectors might want them?" Harry was staring at the shut wooden lid of a trunk as though wondering what hid inside.

            Draco stopped walking, and Harry stopped walking perforce, since he would have bumped into Draco otherwise. Draco turned around and held his eyes. "It distresses me when you talk about yourself this way, you know," he said.

            "What way?" Harry blinked at him.

            "As though you were a block on what I wanted to do with my life," Draco said, deciding that bluntness was the best way to work with this new-minted Malfoy. There hadn't been a Malfoy with a gift for bluntness since his Great-great-aunt Lucretia, but from the way Harry had handled Blaise, Draco knew his talents lay in that direction. "As though it would have been so much easier for me to sell my family's heirlooms than marry you, as if this is a huge imposition and something I'm secretly longing to be free of."

            Harry licked his lips. "I just thought--I was asking why you didn't do certain things, that was all. It seemed that you came to me and asked me to be your demi-husband in the first throes of grief. Maybe that wasn't the best thing you could have done. The best thing for your family, I mean."

            "You brought me strength," Draco said, wondering if that was what Harry didn't understand. "Strength, magic, power, is and always has been more valuable than money. Of course, I needed the money to buy a new wand and hire Healers for Mother. But your magic is worth more than that."

            "And the heirlooms are a source of strength, too." Harry nodded thoughtfully. "I see." He turned his back as if he would move away among the trunks and boxes.

            Draco caught his arm. "You understand what I'm saying? That the strength that you used to confront Blaise and stand up to the Ministry is what's most valuable about you?"

            "That kind of strength, sure," Harry said, and his arm seemed to go almost limp in Draco's grip. "What concerned me was that you were talking about magic, and you know I'm not that powerful."

            Draco narrowed his eyes, but didn't see the point in challenging Harry's delusion right now. Still, someday he would. He let go of Harry's arm and stepped back instead. "All right. Look in that cabinet that stands near the back of the room, on the left."

            Harry walked slowly towards it. The dark glass in the wooden panels of the cabinet seemed to concern him. He glanced over his shoulder at Draco, who nodded patiently. Harry reached out and laid his hand on the lock of the cabinet as though expecting sparks to leap out and shock him.

            Nothing of the sort happened, of course. Draco would never have risked his husband that way. Instead, the lock clicked open and hung awkwardly by one side. Harry pushed it out of the way and bent down so that he was looking through the small gap the door had made as it swung open with the weight of the lock.

            He started back and whipped around to stare at Draco. "That can't be what it looks like," he whispered.

            Draco moved forwards to stand beside him, and reached out to pick up the delicate figurine that stood on the highest shelf in the cabinet. It thrummed, as always. Draco knew it was the magic it possessed that made it seem to do so, but it felt like blood running through veins. He traced his fingers over the scales and held it out to Harry.

            "Surely only someone Malfoy by blood can touch it?" Harry whispered. "Otherwise, what did they need Shepherd for?"

            "Someone who's a part of the Malfoy family can touch it," Draco corrected. "Blaise would have been able to, if he married me. My mother could. It's all right, Harry. You're enough of a Malfoy for this."

            Harry parted his lips and reached out to accept the dragon. The figurine wasn't a close match for any living species, but Draco had always thought it resembled the Peruvian Vipertooth the most, with long, delicate fangs sticking out from its upper jaw. Its color was a strange mixture of grey and white; it was made of crystals that turned a smoky shade as the body coiled down from the slender neck to the lifted haunches. The dragon lay with its neck turned back over its body, mouth open, throat flexed in a way that Draco knew meant a living dragon would have breathed fire.

            "And this does what it looks like it does?" Harry still held the dragon gingerly, though now more as if he might drop and shatter it than as if he was afraid it would come to life in his hands. "Summons a dragon to your aid?"

            "Summons a dragon that kills who you tell it to kill," Draco said. "I don't know if the enchantment was there already when my ancestors acquired the dragon or if it was something they cast to try and limit its power." Harry opened his mouth, but Draco pushed on. "They might want to limit its power because they wanted to show that they were being good sports, that they respected the Ministry's laws about figurines like these, that they didn't want too much power--any and all of those."

            "I'm surprised you didn't run for it when their dragon attacked the Manor."

            "There wasn't time," Draco said. "Even if there had been, this dragon only kills human enemies. Not dragons, not house-elves, not peacocks." That last statement at least drew a small smile from Harry. "I can make an educated guess about why my enemies want it. But it's useless to me."

            Harry looked up, his eyes intense. "That's right," he whispered. "You couldn't--even in the worst moments of your life, you couldn't bring yourself to kill someone, any more than you could bring yourself to torture them."

            Draco straightened his back. He didn't understand the tone in Harry's voice, but he could answer it. "Yes, you can call me a coward if you want. I'm used to hearing that by now."

            "That was the thing furthest from my mind," Harry told him with a faint smile, and handed the dragon back to him. "I was going to call you someone who's too moral to have any use for this thing, but you can cling to the familiar label, if you want."

            "Not moral, exactly," Draco said, and placed the dragon in its cabinet again. He kept his face half-turned away from Harry, because he thought it would be embarrassing if Harry saw his expression right now. "Fear was a large part of it."

            "But you held on through it, and made the right decisions."

            Draco let go and smiled in spite of himself. "If you're so determined to praise me, then who am I to resist?" He lifted his arm, looped it around Harry's neck, and drew down Harry's face so he could kiss him. Harry went with only a small protest, quickly muffled against Draco's mouth, and forgotten as their tongues worked each other.

            Harry pulled back at last, touched his lips with the back of his hand as though astonished to feel the wetness there, and then shook his head. "Who would have known about the dragon? Outside your family, I mean? Did Aurelius tell them, could he have told them, or would they have approached him and started asking on their own?"

            Draco sighed a bit that that was all he would get, but he had to admit that a dungeon treasure vault wasn't the most romantic place in the house. "They could have known, but so could Aurelius," he responded, locking the cabinet again. "The dragon is fairly famous. The last time it was used was in the nineteenth century."

            Harry nodded, his eyes bright and distant and inwards-looking. "You're sure this is what they would have wanted, instead of something else? It just seems that we've had wrong theories so far, and I don't want to again."

            "I'm sure," Draco said, and quelled the impulse to reach up and touch Harry's face, to bring him out of his thinking daze. "This is the only weapon that's powerful enough to kill so many people at once that they would have needed Aurelius to reach. The others are more--more stealable."

            Harry grinned at him. "I don't think that's a word."

            "It's one now," Draco said haughtily, and turned his back. "Come on. We have a lot of people locked up in the dungeons now--Robbs, Blaise, Aurelius, and those people he had with him. We have to decide what to do with them."

            "I'd recommend Obliviating Robbs and dropping her someplace in another country," Harry said shortly. "She was guilty of trying to kill me, but she only did it for money and she shouldn't be a danger to us again. I would recommend taking her to the Ministry, but God knows that they probably wouldn't actually do anything."

            Draco nodded, silently proud that Harry had learned that much distrust, so fast, of the place where he used to work. "I want a certain, specific revenge on Blaise. Will you leave me to take it?"

            Harry frowned at him. "Can you? I just wondered, when you worried about interrogating Robbs--"

            "I can do this much," Draco said, and winced a little when he heard the frosty tone his voice had assumed. "Sorry. But the kind of revenge I have in mind is one that's private, not torture, and which Blaise will remember for a very long time."

            "Will it be enough to keep him from trying to retaliate at you and the family?"

            "Yes." Draco smiled, content. He had wondered if he could cast the necessary spells with his new wand, but after how well the basilisk wand had obeyed him during the attack, he no longer really worried. "I do think that you should stay out of the way and not ask about details, though. He might be humiliated enough to retaliate at you if he thinks you know."

            Harry blinked, but said, "All right. And Aurelius and the rest of them?"

            "That's harder," Draco admitted. "I don't want to kill my cousin. I'm not sure I could, as you so eloquently pointed out earlier."

            "I could kill him for you if it was necessary, like in the middle of battle." Harry folded his arms and leaned against the wall of the vault. "But otherwise, I'd be reluctant. Maybe you'll need him as an heir, someday, if I die."

            Draco said, "You won't, as long as you don't insist on taking ridiculous chances." He moved on before Harry could say anything about how the chances he took weren't that ridiculous. "I do think that Aurelius needs a long stretch away from anyone who could find him and use him against us again. A Memory Charm and dropping him off in another country, the way you suggested with Robbs, should work."

            Harry nodded. "Fine. The others?"

            "The others," Draco said, rolling his wand between his hands, "need intimidation. I'm going to leave that up to you, and I don't care how you do it."

            "All right," Harry said quietly. A moment later, his face caught in a struggle as though he had almost decided against it, he reached out and squeezed Draco's shoulder. "We do make a good team, don't we?"

            Draco kissed his cheek. "The best."

*

            “What are you going to do with me?"

            Robbs's question was subdued. Harry didn't look at her as he moved around the room, glancing carefully at the torch brackets and the stones in the walls. He wanted to make sure that he didn't accidentally take her somewhere that would look like the last room at the Manor she had stayed in. Such accidents sometimes triggered someone to force their way past the blocks on their memories. Harry wanted these problems to go away, leave them alone, and stop being problems.

            "Take you somewhere else," Harry said, not looking at her. "We're not going to kill you, but we can't exactly have someone who would take money to assassinate us striking at our backs, either."

            "I told you. I only took money to kill you, not Malfoy. He could set me free and be perfectly satisfied that I would never come back."

            Harry rolled his eyes, keeping his face turned away. He had never subscribed to the theory that only stupid people did things like becoming hired assassins, because he'd hunted Dark wizards who could lay a devious plot. But they did seem to come out with some of the stupidest statements.

            "You took money to kill me out of desperation. If you get poor and desperate again, then the same thing might happen to my husband." Harry turned around and shook his head at her. "You took money to kill someone who a big part of the wizarding world still reveres. My husband's family is despised by a lot of people, and some of them wouldn't mourn if every Malfoy died tomorrow. I think it's more likely that they would approach you about him than me."

            Robbs sat up in her bonds. "But I won't do it again. What do you want me to do, swear an Unbreakable Vow?"

            It was an alternative Harry hadn't considered. But he'd had enough of Vows like that, considering what happened to both Snape and Dumbledore. "No," he said shortly. "You'll keep your life. That's more than you deserve, considering I could have killed you in battle and you used Dark magic to try and murder me."

            "I was desperate."

            "I don't fucking care," Harry said, and discovered a certain sense of freedom in saying it. Now that he was no longer being forced to act as the Ministry's conscience, it seemed he didn't have to care as much about the sob stories people were always telling him. "Lots of people are, and don't try to murder me."

            "You only care about yourself?" Robbs had stopped struggling and was watching him with a hawk's eye. "Not other people anymore? Even your critics say that you're more compassionate than that."

            She tried to murder you, Draco's voice sneered in Harry's head, and he nodded in response to that and not what Robbs had said. "I'm sure they do. Because that lets them play me for a sucker, the way you're trying."

            Robbs opened her mouth to frame another denial, but Harry had had enough of a conversation so pointless. He thought he had memorized the room thoroughly, and he already had the location of an Apparition point in mind, a small mountainside in France where he had once located a buried body on a case.

            "Obliviate."

            The Memory Charm always felt weird leaving his wand, like a cold trickle of wriggling water, but it functioned as it was supposed to. When it hit Robbs, her face went slack, and she breathed at him, blinking slowly.

            "You started drinking a fortnight ago," Harry told her calmly. "You don't remember much other than that. You know you had some money, but you spent it somewhere. Now you're in France and you want to stay a while before you go home, because you've already lost a lot, you might as well experience some more."

            Robbs nodded dreamily. Harry cut her bonds, picked her up by her arm, and Apparated. The wards opened to permit him passage, as he had envisioned, and a moment later they did stand on the hillside in France.

            It was soft and sunlit here, although a cool wind seemed to promise rain. Robbs stood up and blinked around as though she had no idea where to go next. Well, that would be consistent with the story Harry had told her.

            Harry cast the wand at her feet and Apparated away. He wondered, as he went, what Draco was doing with Blaise. He almost wished he could watch, but Draco had been serious about needing privacy.

*

            "Draco."

            Blaise sounded hoarse. Draco discounted that. Blaise was the one who had taught them tricks like moving their stomachs in a certain way so they would vomit and could "legitimately" skive off class. Making his voice hoarse so that he would sound like he hadn't had a drink in hours wasn't beyond him.

            He took a chair across from the small cage in which Blaise sat and laid a hand for a moment over the Malfoy crest done in silver on his white shirt. It seemed to give Harry additional confidence and assurance that he was a Malfoy, and Draco sat there for a minute or so, drawing on it, reminding himself that he was the head of an ancient family that had always survived the challenges thrown at it. It would survive this one.

            In the end, he felt ready to raise his eyes and face his old friend. Blaise's cage was made of thin silver bars and fairly roomy, but at any attempt to use magic or physical force on them, the bars would contract. Blaise had a small bed, a chamberpot, and a few fairy tale books in the prison. Twice a day, Ossy brought him food. That had been all the luxury Draco had felt like affording him.

            "You wanted a pure-blood family to establish yourself," Draco told him. "You should have done your research more carefully and found out what was lacking in mine. I didn't have the money or the power to repair my own wards without Harry."

            "I would have married you after you had it," Blaise said. "All Potter had to do was stop getting in the way."

            "Malfoy," Draco said. "His name is Malfoy now." He felt each little slip-up and mistake Blaise made piling on his resolve like stones. They were weighting the balance, tilting the scale towards a harsher revenge.

            Blaise shrugged. "He's a Mudblood. I can never think of him like that."

            "We marry for power," Draco said, as delicately as he could. "Blood is important, but it only became overriding for pure-bloods in the last few generations when most of them were wealthy enough and strong enough not to need the most magical candidates they could find. Don't you remember your childhood history lessons?"

            Blaise looked at him with shiny, crocodile eyes. "My mother had more important things to teach me."

            Draco nodded. He had suspected that. And that made the decision to go ahead with his vengeance easier than any other he'd ever made. He rose to his feet in a leisurely way and reached for the buttons of his shirt.

            "What are you--" Blaise fell silent as Draco began to strip. He made sure his shirt revealed all the pale skin that he normally hid, even the silvery scars. Blaise stared, and Draco cast the first spell of the curse. Slowly, Blaise's hands crept up to grip the bars of the cage, ignoring the way they vibrated in warning.

            Draco touched his heart and cast the second part of the curse. Blaise winced as it hit him, but he was too occupied in staring at Draco to really remark on it.

            The third part of the curse had to be spoken aloud, since Draco didn't want to risk it going wrong by trying to cast it nonverbally. "Cruor nefas," he whispered, and the black halo appeared around Blaise, winking out in a second.

            Blaise gasped aloud and reeled back from the bars of the cage. Now, too late, he was paying attention. "What did you do?" he demanded.

            "Inflicted you with the Blood-Turning Curse," Draco said, and smiled at him. "Since it leaves no physical marks and doesn't compel the will, it's not technically considered Dark magic, you know."

            Blaise stared at him without expression, but Draco had become an expert in reading him years ago, and could make out the way his nostrils were widening along with his eyes, the way his hands clenched in front of him. The Blood-Turning Curse would give the victim a longing to possess the caster of the curse, a pining that could never be fulfilled because of the second part. That ensured that any move to hurt the caster would begin to drain the victim's magic.

            But the curse was named after the third part, which gave the victim the silent but irrational conviction that he was no longer pure-blood. Like the pining after the caster, it wasn't something he had to listen to, but it was something he had to feel, and the doubt would murmur in the back of his thoughts, night and day.

            "My mother could destroy you for this," Blaise whispered.

            "The Blood-Turning Curse covers harm inflicted by second parties as well," Draco said lightly, and threw Blaise's wand through the bars, at the same time dissolving the cage. "Get out of here."

            "There are counters to that curse," Blaise hissed, even as he snatched up his wand and began to sidle towards the door as though he distrusted his hands if he came near Draco.

            "I wish you luck in finding one when no one has for six hundred years," Draco said politely, and waited until the door closed behind Blaise before he shut his eyes and slumped against the wall.

            Hard to do, for someone who disliked torture as much as he did. But the only way he could think of to safeguard them from Blaise in the future, and satisfying in a cold place in his heart, one that seemed to have started existing since Harry came into the family.

            I would do much for him that I would not do for myself.



*

            delia cerrano: Draco thinks that he’s shown it plenty!

            SP777: He would be happiest if Harry found a way to approach it without so much danger.

            CareLessLover: Arguably both.

            moodysavage: Harry himself would say that he has little power but uses it well, when it’s most appropriate.

            Diana: Thanks.

            Seiren: Thanks. I hope you liked this chapter!

            polka dot: Oh, yes, not that Shepherd knows that.

            unneeded: The artifact has enough protections, being underground, that the dragon wouldn’t have destroyed it.

            They’re trying, at least.
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The Name I'll Give to Thee