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

Chapter List
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Chapter Thirty-Eight—Like a Dance

            They stopped in front of the room that held Aurelius, and Draco paused to take a deep breath. Harry squeezed his shoulder and smiled at him, reaching out to take the Veritaserum. “You know that you don’t have to do this,” he whispered. “I can go in alone.”

            “And ruin our carefully orchestrated plan?” Draco raised his chin and moved forwards to open the door. “Of course not.”

            They came in together, walking side-by-side. Although they hadn’t planned this, Aurelius was asleep, and he only jerked awake as their footsteps sounded on the dungeon floor, cowering away from them to the limit his chains would allow. A second later, he bowed his head and turned his face away. Draco was glad that his cousin had some sense of shame at his cowardice.

            Harry crouched down in front of Aurelius. “We can do this one of two ways,” he said. “You can tell us the truth and everything that you did to try to kill Draco and me.” Draco didn’t roll his eyes, but he wanted to. He knew that Harry was still hoping the assassination attempt on him at the Ministry would prove to be related to Aurelius and his incompetent wizards, while Draco thought that unlikely.

            “What’s the other option?” Aurelius’s voice sounded papery when he whispered like that. Draco had to study the wall in front of him to conceal his contempt.

            “That we use the Veritaserum,” Harry said, and brought the vial into view.

            “I want to use the Veritaserum,” Draco said, folding his arms and sneering at Aurelius. They had decided to play it with Harry as the more sympathetic one, the one that Aurelius might feel he could gain some shelter and protection from. He had unnerved Aurelius with his “Auror mind-reading abilities” the other day, but it was no use pretending that Draco liked his cousin.

            “Of course you do,” Harry said, with a little nod over his shoulder and a roll of his eyes at Aurelius to try and suggest—or so Draco hoped—that Draco was just a little too abrupt for him. “But we have to give him the choice.”

            “It’s still not really a choice,” Aurelius said, looking back and forth between them, and shaking his head. “You think—you think I’m going to spill my secrets to you like that, without some form of compensation?”

            Draco tapped Harry on the shoulder. It was the only way he had at the moment of saying, “I told you so.” He had told Harry that Aurelius was too self-centered to take their offered solution of keeping his dignity. The minute someone was nice to him, he thought that meant he was a wonderful, significant person after all, and he would demand more than he was worth.

            Harry nodded, but said to Aurelius, “You’re going to tell us the truth. The only thing that you get to choose is whether you do it with some dignity intact, or not.”

            Aurelius gaped at him. Harry was softening his words with a smile, but there could be no doubt he meant what he was saying. And Draco had to give his cousin credit for at least minimal intelligence.

            “You said—you said it was a choice.” Aurelius wrapped his arms around himself, making the chains clank. “A real one.”

            “Yes,” Harry said. “But not a choice between lying and telling the truth, or listening to us and treating us like peasants. You don’t have that much freedom. You were the one who tried to kill us, and destroy the Malfoy property, and hired people to kill me. After that, what made you think we were going to treat you like a king?” He sounded genuinely curious.

            Aurelius just gaped at him. Draco wished he could push at Harry’s shoulder and tell him to get over it, just let the question go. Aurelius had thought they would do that because he was stupid, and there was no real deeper reason.

            “Right,” Harry said, when some minutes had passed and Aurelius still gaped. “The Veritaserum it is.” Draco handed him the vial, and cast the spell that would shorten the chains and hold Aurelius in place so Harry could put the potion on his tongue.

            “But you said—you said I had a choice.” Aurelius was staring back and forth between them now, as though he assumed Draco would step up and take his part now that Harry had apparently changed his mind.

            “You did until you were so absurd about it and sat there keeping us waiting for an answer,” Harry said. “Besides, I don’t think we can trust someone like you to tell us the truth.” Draco nodded judiciously, and watched as Harry cast a spell that kept Aurelius’s head in place as he dripped the potion onto his tongue.

            Aurelius thrashed and wailed and tried to spit it back out, but Harry was an old hand at this, and Aurelius was more restrained right now than Robbs had been. In a few seconds, his head was drooping, and he had that idiot smile on his face that Veritaserum seemed to give some people.

            “Let’s start with simple questions,” Draco said, more than willing to ask the questions when it was of someone like this, someone whom he knew personally and who had tried to hurt him personally. “What’s your name?”

            “Aurelius Lucius Shepherd.”

            Draco rolled his eyes, but nodded when Harry looked at him. Of course it was. Aurelius couldn’t claim the Malfoy fortune by last name, and not even by blood unless everyone in the direct line was dead, but it made sense that his parents would try to curry favor with Lucius by giving their son his name.

            “What do you stand poised to inherit if I die and my heir dies?” Draco continued, patiently. He wanted to make sure that the Veritaserum hadn’t taken knowledge of inheritances and family relations from Aurelius, as sometimes happened.

            “Nothing.”

            Draco paused. Aurelius had made the same flat statement that Veritaserum always produced, the same way he had said his name, staring straight ahead and with an expression on his face that made Draco start expecting his jaw to dangle any minute. But as far as Draco knew, there was no way the information he had just spoken could be correct.

            “You were my father’s legal heir if something happened to me,” he said. “You are the only relative close enough to inherit.” He paused, but Aurelius said nothing, and then Draco realized he hadn’t phrased it as a question. Rolling his eyes, he said, “Why do you stand to inherit nothing?”

            “Because you’ve changed things,” Aurelius said, still staring at the wall of the cell, although sweat was popping out on his forehead, and Draco was sure he would have been screaming if he could have. Of course, if he’d had the choice, he wouldn’t have been speaking of this at all.

            “Tell me how,” Draco said, when a few more seconds had passed and it seemed obvious that Aurelius would never talk on his own.

            “You have an heir,” Aurelius whispered. “I was only your father’s legal heir if something happened to you—and yours while you had none. Now that you have one, that changes things. Now priority would go to whoever your heir designates as his heir. He can choose anyone he wants, and I get nothing.” He shut his eyes, and tears ran thickly down his cheeks.

            Draco blinked for a bit, and then turned and nodded at Harry. “Assuming that his compatriots knew this,” he said, trying not to sound surprised, “that’s another reason for killing you. They wanted you out of the running, just in case they couldn’t get their hands on that artifact.”

            “Ask him about his magic,” Harry said, his eyes as distant as a lizard’s. “I want to know whether he really has lost some of it in payment for a debt, the way he implied when I questioned him.”

            Draco frowned. “Why are you looking like that? Surely knowing that someone wanted you dead because you could designate someone else as your heir doesn’t upset you that much.”

            “No one should take someone else’s magic,” Harry said, folding his arms in the way that Draco imagined he might on a witness stand. “It doesn’t matter what they did, that’s just wrong.”

            “Even when the person they took it from has tried to kill both of us?” Draco asked. He suspected he knew what the answer would be, but he wanted to hear the full, absurd truth from Harry’s lips.

            Harry glared at him. “There are some things that are wrong no matter what.”

            “I reckon illegal use of Veritaserum isn’t one of them,” Draco muttered, gesturing at Aurelius despite himself. “Or we couldn’t do this.”

            Harry’s eyes flashed, once. Then he said, “There might be ways we can spare his life, doing this. But taking his magic in payment for a debt leaves him with nothing.”

            Draco sighed. More because it would make Harry happy than because he cared about Aurelius’s magic, he faced his cousin again and asked, “Is it true that someone started draining your magic in payment for a debt?”

            “It is.” A few more tears leaked down Aurelius’s cheeks. Harry winced, or so Draco noticed from the corner of his eye.

            Draco’s reserves of sympathy were exhausted for the moment, though, and he had more deserving targets for what was left. He shook his head and said, “Who did it? And why?”

            “The one who suggested it is named Brian Sontage,” Aurelius said, and it was eerie to hear him state what Draco was sure he would have liked to have shouted with hatred in that monotone. “The ones who helped him came with me. Geoffrey Chambers, Allen Richards, Nero Irons—”

            Draco cut off his recitation. A list of names without context meant little to him. “Tell me why they decided that only your magic would suffice for the payment.”

            “I owed them so much that there was no way I could pay it all back even if I inherited the Malfoy property. They decided an artifact could pay it off, and they would rather have that than money.” Aurelius’s hands tried to close into fists for a moment, and then fell helpless and useless back at his sides.

            Draco shook his head. “How did you come to owe them so much money?” Yes, his cousin was stupid and careless, but Draco had heard murmurings of Sontage’s name before. He was the sort of man you didn’t cross. Aurelius, he had always thought, would have been smart enough to stop when he began to owe him vast amounts. Draco had had that much respect for Aurelius’s intelligence.

            “I gambled,” Aurelius whispered. “I gambled on dragon fights—” Harry started and snapped to attention; Draco reckoned he must not have known that some people made money fighting dragons in rut against each other “—and I tried to raise money on my name and future prospects because I wanted a better house. Better clothes. A younger wife. A better life.”

            And the gambling had been one symptom of that, Draco thought. Aurelius didn’t have the money to support the life that he thought the Malfoy heir was entitled to, but he had tried to live it anyway.

            “Is there any way to give you your magic back?” Harry asked abruptly. Draco reckoned that was the only thing he was really interested in, revelations of brand-new illegal activity he’d never known existed aside.

            Aurelius stared at him with wet eyes, and said, “No. Sontage absorbed it, and what he didn’t take, the others he assigned to drain me took. They would have used some of it to power the ritual that was supposed to give me control of the Malfoy wards. But they let me know I would always be as weak as I am now.”

            Harry just nodded and looked into the distance, saying nothing. Draco ignored the urge to reach over and grip his arm. He knew Harry wouldn’t respond the way Draco wanted right now, and that could be worse than useless, leaving them vulnerable to Aurelius’s knowing eyes. (Well, not knowing right now. But Veritaserum had no negative effect on the memory as far as Draco knew).

            “I want to know what you planned to do with me, if you managed to succeed in taking control of the Malfoy wards,” Draco said, putting his attention back where it should be, on the interrogation.

            Aurelius struggled for a minute, but his tongue flapped at last. “We would kill you. You wouldn’t be in the way.”

            “That’s one method of making sure of that, yes,” Draco said dryly, while his heart hammered for a moment and then stuttered to a stop. It was still chilling to hear his cousin speak so coldly of his death—although some of the coldness probably came from the Veritaserum. Draco didn’t think Aurelius was any braver than he was.

            “Do you hate Draco?” Harry asked. “Do you hate me?”

            Draco blinked at him. Trust Harry to ask the oddest questions. Whether or not Aurelius hated them was irrelevant. He had still done what he could to kill them, and his emotion wouldn’t have mattered if the blows had landed.

            “I’m afraid of you,” Aurelius whispered. “I resent you for taking the place that could have been mine. I resent Draco for inheriting the property that could have been mine. I hate you for doing that.” For a few seconds, he seemed to struggle with his tongue, as though he didn’t want to admit whatever came next, but the Veritaserum was relentless. “I hate you as much as you can hate someone you’re afraid of.”

            “Which is a lot,” Harry noted, his eyes distant again, and Draco remembered that he had probably experienced hatred of the Dark Lord. And perhaps the Dark Lord’s fear, too. Draco remembered Harry saying something about a mind link between the two of them. “What would you do if we let you go?”

            A laugh wrenched itself out of Aurelius’s mouth. “Die,” he said. “Sontage and the others would never stop trying to use me for my connection to the artifact and the wards, and they would never forgive my debts. If there was some way that they discovered I was useless, they would kill me.”

            “What would you do if you had a way to survive?” Harry asked, and stood up. Draco almost choked when he felt the whirlwind stirring around him. This was the power he had tried to make Harry summon in the lab, and which Harry had refused to pull up. But he would for the sake of Aurelius? Draco tried not to choke too badly on his own bile. “Somewhere you could go that was your own, somewhere you could stay where they wouldn’t find you?”

            Aurelius said something, the words pulled from him, but Draco didn’t hear it. He had already stood and moved over to Harry, taking his wrist in a clenching grip that he knew had to hurt. Harry just looked at him, and then his eyes flicked away in clear dismissal.

            “You won’t do this,” Draco said, his voice as low and impressive as he could make it. “You won’t create a shelter for him like the one you made for my father.”

            “Why not?” Harry countered. “If we could come up with a way that meant we didn’t have to kill him, but also that he would leave us alone, and in the meantime his enemies—our enemies—wouldn’t use him against us, why shouldn’t I do this?”

            “You only wanted to use your magic to protect members of the family,” Draco said.

            Harry smiled, and leaned around Draco to look at Aurelius.

            “Members of the family you like,” Draco said desperately, while feeling as though he stood on the lip of a whirlpool.

            “This is a way of protecting us,” Harry said, looking at Draco as indifferently as though Draco was being the unreasonable one. “By keeping you from having to kill, and making sure that Aurelius can never be used against us again.”

            “I would rather have him dead than have you waste your magic on him,” Draco said. He wondered if he could even explain the clawing despair that was rising up from the middle of his gut. “You won’t—you won’t use your magic for yourself, but you’ll waste it on him? You’ll use something beautiful and wonderful on that piece of rubbish?”

            Harry stared at him, his lips parted and his eyes full of wonder, as though he couldn’t understand how Draco had come to that particular conclusion. Then he shook his head, and his eyes went distant again.

            “I’m using my magic to keep us both safe,” he said. “If Aurelius is locked away from us, then we don’t have to kill him. And it solves the problem of what to do about him. Don’t pretend that you haven’t been worrying about that as much as I have.”

            “I worry about you more,” Draco said, ignoring the little gulping noise Aurelius made behind him. Yes, Veritaserum didn’t impair the memory, but Aurelius wasn’t going to be in a position, one way or the other, to use this knowledge against them later. “I’ll worry about you if I bloody well want to. And I want you to use your magic because it benefits you and gives you pleasure, not because you’re fixated on trying to solve all my problems.”

            Harry gave him a soft smile this time, and reached out to lay his hand over Draco’s. “Solving your problems, protecting you, making you happy, gives me pleasure,” he said quietly. “I wonder that you can think it doesn’t.”

            “I want you to be bloody selfish, then,” Draco said. “Phrase it that way. Do something for yourself, just for yourself, not because it’ll help someone.”

            Harry shook his head a little, eyes sparking. “You’re asking me to do something you must know I can’t do.”

            “Being selfish is the most natural thing in the world,” Draco snapped.

            “Maybe for you.”

            Draco smiled. No, he wasn’t looking forward to the nasty argument that he suspected he and Harry were going to have, but it would distract Harry’s attention from this absurd project of protecting Aurelius, and that was all Draco wanted. “If you think about it, and if you think about the things we’ve gone through,” he began, ready to use Hogwarts memories as weapons against Harry if he had to.

            The look on Harry’s face stopped him. Harry stepped away from Draco and paced for a moment with his hands behind his back. Draco stood there with his arms folded, glad that he wasn’t facing Aurelius right now. It would have made him look foolish.

            “No,” Harry said, turning back around. “This is a solution to a problem that didn’t have one. If we can prove the connection with Sontage, then we can turn the other people who attacked us over to the Ministry with the assurance that they’ll do something about them. Draining magic and using it for yourself is a crime in every country. They may not like me, they may not like you, but they’ll arrest them. And that gets rid of the problem of what to do about them.”

            “Tell me what you see at the end of this,” Draco said, folding his arms even tighter and glaring at Harry as hard as he could. He saw no reason to hide his dislike for this plan.

            “I see your cousin safe, and avenged,” Harry said. “And I see us free to move forwards with other plans, like finding out who stabbed you at the Ministry.”

            There was a babble from Aurelius about how he’d had nothing to do with that. Draco ignored him with less effort than he would have thought it would take him. “You realize that I want to kill him?” he whispered.

            “No, you don’t,” Harry said, and gave Draco the sort of smile that made him want to hit his husband. “You want the problem to be solved, the mystery to be solved. I have a method that would do that, and you hate that it’ll benefit some people, or not hurt them as much as you wanted to. But you don’t want to kill him.”

            “Sometimes I wish that you weren’t present at so many of the important moments in my life,” Draco mumbled. “If you hadn’t seen me lower my wand that time, you’d probably believe I can kill people.”

            Harry leaned in and kissed him. After a moment of struggle, because he couldn’t forget that Aurelius was behind them and watching, Draco gave in and kissed him back. He could feel the determination that pulsed through Harry, and knew that he would make this about them and not about Aurelius, one way or the other.

            “I know you now,” Harry said, pulling back and shaking his head. “Even if I didn’t know it years ago, I would know now you can’t kill.”

            Draco grunted a little, not willing to concede it yet. “All right, but how are you going to make a place for Aurelius that’s as safe as the one that you made for my father? He still needs people to feed him. I don’t want to be responsible for Aurelius for years.”

            “But you’d prefer that to either killing him, or letting him go free, with the possibility someone else might find him and use him against you,” Harry countered.

            Draco tried to do some more glaring. Harry just stood there and looked back at him, and Draco finally flung up his hands. “All right, say your solution is the best one. I don’t want to spare a lot of money towards taking care of him. We only just recovered from a rather spectacular expenditure, remember.”

            “Of power, not money.”

            “My wand—”

            “Didn’t cost that much.” Harry leaned one hip against the wall and watched Draco. “We need to do other things, Draco. Face up to the fact that your mother is probably going to demand more of me. Accept we can’t solve every problem the way you’d like. Find the person who stabbed you at the Ministry.”

            “You’re going to tell me next that you have a way to solve that problem, too,” Draco muttered, lowering his head and scraping at the ground with a foot.

            “I have an idea,” Harry responded. “Who knows if it’ll work. But we need to make a decision, now, and then turn Shepherd’s fellow warlocks over to the Aurors and put Shepherd himself in a safe place.”

            “That would only happen if I made the decision that you wanted,” Draco said, and did some more glaring.

            All Harry did was raise his eyebrows and look calmly back. Draco turned away, biting his lip, and already knowing he would give in. He didn’t have any better plans, and for all that Aurelius was a bastard who should have known better than to ever come after Draco’s demi-husband or his property or Draco himself, Draco still didn’t want to kill him.

            But that meant they had something else to deal with.

            “I don’t ever want him as my heir,” he told the wall harshly, keeping his head turned to the side so he wouldn’t need to meet Harry’s eyes. “But we need to discuss who, beyond you, is going to be my heir.”

            “All right.”

            Draco gaped at Harry for a second, and then shook his head and reached out to take his hands.

            Never challenge Gryffindors to a contest of courage. You’ll always lose, no matter how much they might not want to face it.

*

            Seiren: Thanks! Sympathy for the Predators has only one more chapter, so it ought to be finished soon.

            Makoto_Sagara: Harry has his suspicions about who stabbed Draco. Now to see if he’s right.

            Diana: Here you are.

            delia cerrano: Well, they also needed to settle Aurelius and his compatriots. They can’t just hold them prisoner there forever.

            Rina: Thanks. I think this Harry especially would be reluctant to use his full power in a lot of situations, because he’s seen what happens when he does—taking Narcissa’s life-force, shattering the wards, and so on.
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The Name I'll Give to Thee