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An Image of Lethe	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 21751 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 3
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter and am not making any money from this story.

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Chapter Thirty-Four—On the Edge of Trust
            “I have made my decision,” said Narcissa so abruptly that Draco started and dropped his fork.
            He was having a private dinner with his parents in Narcissa’s room. The Death Eaters seemed the most cautious around his mother, since they knew, or believed they knew, that Lucius was in disfavor with the Dark Lord, and Draco’s position seemed to fluctuate in their minds based on Harry’s latest performance. But Narcissa had showed up out of nowhere, found the hidden manor on her own, and then stayed on with a welcome from the Dark Lord.
            So far as they knew. So far as they thought.
            Draco privately considered that they were on to something. Her words seemed to show up out of nowhere, at least, and had startled Lucius into also paying attention. Draco was amused in part of himself, at how poised and in-control his mother was even in a situation like this, how she could make them sit up and listen.
            But the rest of him was anxious. Because he didn’t know that his father would listen to his mother, not permanently.
            “You have a day to show me you have changed,” said Narcissa to Lucius. She folded her hands in front of her and looked at him with the kind of critical gaze Draco would have expected to see on judges in the Tri-Wizard Tournament. “Otherwise, I will leave and take Draco with me.”
            Draco held back the desire to say something about Harry and how he didn’t want to leave him. He would undermine his mother’s impact on his father if he did.
            Luckily, Lucius did it for him, with a sneer and a jibe. “Have you seen how close Draco and the boy playing the Dark Lord are, Narcissa? You’ll never get Draco out of this house. He’s completely changed his loyalty.”
            Great, Draco thought, and braced for the interrogation.
            To his astonishment, his mother didn’t even look at him. She considered Lucius for an ineffable moment more, and then shook her head. “Remarks like that indicate that you have not changed,” she said, and stood. “You have twenty-four hours from this moment.” And she conjured a golden clock with a simple movement of her wand. Draco blinked, impressed. He had never seen that spell before, and his mother had done it wordlessly.
            Narcissa nodded to the clock, which had elegantly curved numbers in black on the face. A loud tick sounded as a hand began to turn around the face. “The clock will show you the time, should you doubt it. Good-bye, Lucius.” She paused at the doorway that separated the small reading room from her actual bedroom, and added without looking back at him, “I hope it need not be forever.”
            The bedroom door shut behind her with a small final noise. Draco twisted around to look at his father, to see how he would take it.
            Lucius’s face was red. He raised a hand, brought it down on the table hard enough to make the plates jump, and then bent forwards and buried his head in his palms.
            Draco sat there, wondering what he should do, offer advice or wait in silence for his father to ask it. He only knew that leaving would be a mistake.
            Even knowing that his father was stubborn enough to spend an entire evening sitting there without looking at him, even thinking wistfully of the time he could be spending with Harry instead, he still knew that leaving would be a mistake.
            Lucius finally looked up at Draco and whispered, “What did I do to make your mother hate me? She was never this unforgiving before.”
            She also never had this provocation before. Again, though, Draco knew that would be a mistake. He simply bit his lip before responding, and then said carefully, “She was angry that you would sacrifice your life and sanity and everything about you to the promise sigil.”
            Lucius didn’t snap, though. He kept staring at the wall, and then he whispered, “But I explained that to her. She understood. She has to understand how important redeeming our family name is.”
            Draco bit his lip again, but this time he was also counting internally, to keep from snapping. “Did you think about what it would be like for her, to lose you? And she’s not a Malfoy by birth. She might want to see our family powerful and respected, but it’s not the name that matters so much.”
            Lucius now stared at him instead of the wall, as though Draco had said the wisest thing he’d ever heard. Or maybe that the wall had started talking, Draco thought wearily. He still found it hard to say how much his father saw him, as opposed to seeing what he wanted. “But you didn’t react the same way.”
            “I didn’t know what the promise sigil meant at first, and then I was trying to string you along so Harry could cure you.”
            Lucius folded his hands the way Narcissa had, but Draco had no illusion that he was as calm as Narcissa had been. “So you conspired against me. Despite bearing the Malfoy name the way I did, and that means you should understand what I was doing and have more of a stake in Malfoy redemption.”
            “If you’d had a safe plan to redeem our name, I would have gone along with that.” Draco reminded himself not to snap, not to jump. His father would take any excuse he could to dismiss Draco’s protests as “acting childish.” “But not this sacrifice that—I couldn’t even tell how you meant it to work. Maybe if Harry hadn’t had to pretend to be the Dark Lord, it would have. But now?”
            Lucius scowled. “It would have worked if you had helped me. Your mother doesn’t see that you’ve given your loyalty to Potter above all things, does she?”
            She’s a fool if she doesn’t, and if she doesn’t have some plan to counter that. Probably a plan I won’t like, either. But Draco refused to think about that. “I didn’t understand your plan. You were going insane, Father. How should I have been able to cooperate when I was under spells that you’d cast on me and didn’t grasp it, anyway?”
            Lucius’s father was the color of old dust. “You could have trusted me.”
            “Trusted you. Not the thing inside you.” Draco met his father stare for iron stare. He would go on repeating this until Lucius got it. But he didn’t want to only repeat it, so he also added, “I’m willing to help you with the twenty-four deadline that Mother gave you. Sitting here and arguing with me about it doesn’t help, though.”
            Lucius hunched his shoulders. “You think my words and wants were obscure? What does ‘show me you’ve changed’ mean?”
            “It means,” said Draco, “that you show your focus is on her—and me—instead of whatever grandiose plans you’ve made in your head. Did you think about making another promise to another elemental force?”
            Lucius flinched with enough force that Draco sighed, but managed another sneer. “I never realized you had become so accomplished at Legilimency, Draco.”
            “I thought you might because you seem to regard it as the natural solution to any difficulty,” Draco muttered, and then shook his head. “Listen, Father. I can help you, but only if you are committed to it. Not fulminating in the back of your head about how you know better and things would turn out right if we only listened to you.”
            From the savage twitch of Lucius’s face, Draco had once again practiced mind-reading without Legilimency. Draco lifted his eyebrows at his father, and waited.
            At this point, he thought, he was settled on the notion of giving his father up if Lucius wouldn’t change his priorities. His mother had done all she could. Harry had performed a miracle. If Lucius stupidly took the life he’d been given back and sacrificed it on another altar, Draco was going to give up worrying about him.
            Not without a great deal of pain and regret, of course. But he didn’t think he could rescue someone who didn’t want to be rescued.
            Lucius finally looked at him and muttered, “Then teach me what you think would show her.”
            And wasn’t that an easy role? But Draco had come this far, and had volunteered for it rather than lose his father. He swallowed and nodded. “All right.”
*
            “My Lord. I must talk with you, my Lord.”
            Harry controlled his discomfort with seeing Fenrir Greyback crawling on his belly in front of him. Yes, Greyback was ridiculous in his devotion to the Dark Lord, but Harry had already used him when he set him to spy on Lucius. At least he wasn’t openly rebelling like Lucius had tried.
            “Yes, Fenrir.” Harry kept his voice mechanical, his eyes fixed on the far wall. His hand caressed the jewel-toned dragon that sat beside the throne. The dragon liked petting well enough, Harry thought, but it didn’t like keeping awake and looking menacing when any of the Death Eaters came into the room.
            It yawned now, and Greyback looked at the opalescent fangs with a level of respect that made Harry bite the inside of his cheek. The next instant, though, Greyback had turned to Harry and smushed his face against the floor.
            From there, he proceeded to say something Harry couldn’t understand because, well, his face was against the floor. Harry hissed in irritation, adding a hint of Parseltongue to it, and Greyback promptly sat up and spoke again, his tongue lapping around his teeth with a stupid amount of drool sliding down his face.
            “Do you want me to kill Light wizards to bring them to you? Light wizards who insult you? Can I do that?”
            Greyback’s eyes were big with a devotion that made Harry control his first reaction, which was to order him away. He sat back in his throne and slowly shook his head. “If you kill them, Greyback,” he said, and let his voice descend the scale in coldness until he hoped it sounded as if he was trying to freeze Greyback alive, “how will they acknowledge my ultimate triumph?”
            “Oh.” Greyback cocked his head to the side and spent a moment scratching at his ear with one hand. At least it wasn’t a foot, Harry thought, thankful for small mercies. “But then how are we going to capture them and assemble them?”
            Harry smiled, and was glad to find that Greyback whimpered and cowered in the face of that, so it at least must be sufficiently intimidating. “I leave that to you. My true servants will discover a way of obeying my will.”
            “My Lord!” Greyback sounded as though someone had stepped on him even as he prostrated himself flat on the ground again. “I am yours!”
            “Then go. And discover how to work my will. Cowering in front of me serves no true purpose. Obedience in action does.”
            Greyback added one more cower and whimper, apparently for effect, and then got up and ran out of the room. Harry looked after him, anticipating more Death Eaters waiting to say something to him. They had had more than enough murmurs to fill the air this morning when he was proceeding to the throne room.
            But there were none. Harry leaned back and stared at the ceiling as if contemplating eternity. Under his hand, the dragon shifted uncomfortably, then curled up and tucked its nose under its tail. Probably sleeping again, but Harry could wake it if he needed it.
            He was exhausted.
            He had spent time building castles in the air last night, convincing the Death Eaters that it was in their best interests to follow him, waving his arms around and pretending to be enchanted by the possibilities of evil. And now he was drained. He had barely got through his audience with Greyback. What would happen if someone else showed up?
            I want Draco to show up.
            Harry breathed out slowly and steadily. Well, what he wanted and what would happen weren’t always the same things. And he had come this far with the charade that had fooled most of the Death Eaters. He wasn’t going to give up on it when the end was in sight.
            But what was going to happen after that end? Would his friends be able to accept him back? Would he and Draco be lovers, or even friends, without the intense pressure of his playacting? Would the exposure to his reverse Lightfinder even work the way he intended it?
            Harry then sighed and reached down, tickling the dragon’s back until it stood up again. He lifted it, launched it from his fist like a falcon, and began walking down the corridor to his rooms.
            He had come too far to turn back. That was still true, no matter what problems Greyback or Lucius or Narcissa or Parkinson or anyone else brought to him.
            And it was time to experiment some more with the reverse Lightfinder and make sure that it would do what he wanted. Failure was not an option.
*
            “It’s all about making a good enough speech?”
            Draco sighed and rubbed his forehead. Yes, he did think it was imperative that his father be able to tell his mother that he had changed and mean it. But Lucius seemed to think it was another piece of political manipulation, and was smiling in a way that made Draco want to roll his eyes.
            “No,” he said. “It’s about meaning it. It’s about showing her that you choose me and her over the mad plans that you had to redeem the Malfoy name.”
            Lucius stared again at the parchment in front of him, where Draco was having him write down his ideas. “I was trying to show that I cared about you with my plan. Even if I died, you would be alive and in an honored position.”
            Draco hissed through his teeth. They were in Lucius’s rooms, as they had been last night until Draco went to sleep and most of this morning. It turned out that they hadn’t needed to go back to Narcissa’s rooms to fetch the clock. It had followed his father around, floating at his shoulder, and was now sitting there ticking away.
            Draco had tried to muffle the ticking with a charm. Nothing had worked.
            “We would be alive and in an honored position, maybe,” Draco agreed. “Never mind all the things that would have changed since Harry came into the picture, and not made your plan work.” He leaned forwards and braced his hands on either side of the table, staring into his father’s eyes. “But we would be in that position without you.”
            His father’s face changed, terribly. Draco winced, and then wondered a second later why he had thought of it as terrible. Lucius hadn’t turned pale or flinched the way he had last night, or even mouthed words. He had simply changed expression.
            “That matters to you,” Lucius whispered. “My life.”
            “Yes.” Draco met his eyes squarely.
            “But you wanted to change your own life.” Lucius was still whispering. “You didn’t want to live a life on the run, and that was why you went to Potter. How could you be content to know I was in Azkaban and you wouldn’t see me on a daily basis? Why were you allowed to change things, and I wasn’t?”
            Draco grimaced. He knew the answer, but he didn’t know if the words would convince his father. “Because I took a risk when I thought I could make a change for the better and it would keep me alive. I would have broken down and let the Aurors take me if I didn’t think that. You, though, made a trade. You didn’t think it would keep you alive. You traded your life and your sanity and everything for escape from prison and a plan that might or might not work.”
            “Ignis would have helped me turn the others in to the Ministry.”
            Draco snorted bitterly. “Would you even have been sane enough by that point to know if it did or not?” He then waited with the back of his neck prickling, but no salamander or other elemental creature appeared to scrape him to death with its claws. He exhaled, slowly, and focused on his father instead.
            “Would you?” he repeated. “And would you have had the satisfaction of knowing that your goals were fulfilled, if you were gone far enough to forget about your very identity?”
            Lucius shut his eyes. Draco decided to try one more strike, because he couldn’t be sure whether the ones he had made so far had gone home. “What would you feel if I had been the one to make that bargain? With an elemental force of magic or anything else?”
            “I wouldn’t want you to,” Lucius muttered, keeping his head stubbornly bowed.
            “Then imagine the feeling that you would have, and multiply it,” Draco said softly. “Because what you’re imagining is only imagination, and I had to watch you deteroriating right in front of me.”
            Lucius rubbed his forehead. For long moments, the loudest sound in the room was the ticking of his mother’s clock. Draco glared at it. It was honestly one of the most exasperating spells he had ever seen, which meant he would have to ask his mother in more detail how she’d managed to cast it. He looked forward to the day he could leave a clock like that in her rooms and walk out.
            “If I must think about you succumbing to such a thing,” Lucius whispered at last, “I would want to be sure that it was for a worthy goal.”
            Draco bit his lip again, then asked in the calmest voice he could muster, “And would that mean I could choose anything I thought was worthy? Or would you still have opinions about it?”
            Lucius sat a long, long time in silence. Then he asked, “Do you think your mother would ever do something like this? Sacrifice her life to bring our family back to power?”
            “No,” said Draco, and was amazed to find how easily the words came to him. Maybe it was because he had thought about the details of his father’s plan and about his mother so much in the past few days, and about Harry. “But she took a risk when she thought that my life would be safer. She lied to the Dark Lord for Harry, told him that Harry was dead. I think she would always make sacrifices. But not for something like our family’s reputation.”
            Lucius sat up as if someone had told him he was going to be executed tomorrow. Or maybe when the clock finished ticking, Draco thought. He sneaked a glance at it. It was only two hours until the deadline.
            “So she wants to know that I care about the same things,” Lucius whispered. “Your health and hers, more than the reputation of our family.”
            “And your health, too,” Draco said, unable to wait for his father to reach the conclusion on his own, although he thought Lucius might have been heading in that direction. “That was what infuriated her the most, I think. You were ready to give everything up, including your health and your life. And what would have happened if you’d succeeded?” He hesitated, then added, “Another thing you couldn’t have done was say goodbye. I don’t think it would have let you.”
            Lucius closed his eyes, then opened them again. Then he said, “I refuse to apologize for my priorities in the past.”
            Draco threw up his hands. “Then—”
            “But perhaps I can change them for the future.” Lucius slowly opened his hands on his knees. “I hope she’ll give me the chance to prove I can.”
            “Then what proof do you intend to offer her?” Draco took another quick glance at the clock, even though he knew it wouldn’t have changed much.
            “Telling her.” Lucius only shook his head when Draco looked back at him, mouth already open in a protest. “You can tell me a lot of things, Draco. You’ve already given me some insights that might have taken me—days to attain.” From his grimace, like biting into a sour apple, it had cost him some pride to admit that. “But you cannot tell me what other proof I can give her that would be acceptable.”
            Draco simply swallowed and leaned back to think about that. He ought to have been able to tell him, he thought. He was the one who had advised his father so far, the one who was going to keep him from making other stupid mistakes.
            But if Lucius had made his decision, then Draco had to respect it. He nodded once. “When are you going to tell her?”
            “When the clock runs out,” Lucius said, and settled back in his chair to watch it, as if the ticking gratified him now.
            Draco gnawed his lip hard, as he thought about what a bastard his father could be in his own special way. But he managed the feat of staying silent.
*
            “What do you have to say for yourself, Lucius?”
            Draco blinked. His mother had swept through the door at exactly the moment the clock gave a small chime and faded from view. He wondered how she had done it, and his conclusion, once again, was that he had to get her to teach him that spell.
            “I have this to say,” said his father, and stood and performed a small bow to his mother. Draco saw her blink, and her eyes soften. That was something, then. “You were right. I was treating your lives as important, by my lights.” Narcissa’s lips tightened. “But I was treating your reputation as even more so. And I have come to realize that we hold different priorities.”

            For an instant, Narcissa tensed like a marble statue, and Draco knew he should leave the room. But even moving might bring their attention back to him. He hesitated.
            Lucius leaned in. “And that my priorities must change to match yours.”
            His mother lowered her eyes. When she looked up again, Draco was astonished to note that her eyelids were trembling.
            She would have left and taken me with her, or tried to take me with her. Just like she threatened. But it would have cost her more than I’d guessed.
            “Thank you,” said Narcissa simply, and put her hand out. Lucius took it. Then they stood there looking at each other.
            They had connected, Draco thought. Rebuilt their bond. Just like that. It was stronger than stone.
            He hoped that, someday, he would have a relationship like that with Harry.
            When he got over both the respectful silence he was feeling for his parents right now and the sick wave of longing for Harry’s presence, he would go and seek him out.
*
SP777: Thanks! I think Lucius will no longer be a problem, although the dragon sometimes might be.
moon: Thanks! And I think I can write even when I’m not “inspired,” particularly, but it’s hard to write when I’m really upset.
ChaosLady: Thank you!
moodysavage: Harry’s enforcing it with orders that seem appropriately Voldemort-like, as here.
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An Image of Lethe