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The Only True Lords	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 54578 -:- Recommendations : 4 -:- Currently Reading : 11
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I am making no money from this fanfic.

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Chapter Thirty-Eight—Pinned and Struggling
            How much time have I spent alone in my mind, thinking about the past, brooding on my memories, strengthening my Occlumency shields before an audience with the Dark Lord?
            The words echoed and drummed through Severus’s head like lightning running before thunder, but he continued breathing slowly, easily, and didn’t look up from the book in his lap. If someone came into the library, they would think that he was either reading intensely or asleep. Either way, Severus hoped, they would hesitate to disturb him.
            He had begun to think about the bond and its influence on his mind, and to loathe it. Neither his debt to Dumbledore nor the Mark that bound him to the Dark Lord had ever controlled him this way.
            On the other hand, he did not have to simply give in and go along with it like the tame bird that it seemed Miss Parkinson had become. He had the ability to control his thoughts, to keep them from being read. That should mean that he also had the ability to keep them from being influenced.
            Severus had engaged himself to try a particular tactic that he had read descriptions of many times but never attempted. He had never had a reason to use it. The tactic was for people who wanted to see their thoughts from the outside, and Severus had been content to spend his time in the middle of them. He knew that sometimes he was unfair or prejudiced, but did he not have reason? He was not interested in the outside view.
            But now, he wanted to distinguish between himself and the bond. So he waited until the rush of thoughts had passed through his head and slowed a bit, and until he was sitting so still that he could feel the beat of his heart rocking his body, as he swayed the tiniest bit back and forth.
            Now.
            He clapped down on his thoughts, catching them between two imagined panes of glass. They were as strong and thick as his Occlumency shields, and in reality, that was what they were, only turned inwards and made to reflect a purpose stronger than they had ever had to before. He pinned his thoughts the way he had sometimes seen insects pinned in Muggle collections of them, and he held them there, and he leaned over and looked down into their imaginary faces.
            He could see his emotions towards Potter as colored blobs, his desire for death as a dark and dancing shape that partnered its shadow effortlessly, and his hunger and other bodily yearnings as amorphous masses that he could sneer at and ignore. He studied them all from the outside, and saw no link to the bond. He frowned, wondering if the bond had so integrated itself with his mind that Miss Parkinson was correct and it was useless trying to tell the two entities apart anymore.
            If that was the case, then he would not notice when the madness of despair began to creep in.
            But at last Severus turned his attention from his pinned and struggling thoughts between the two panes of glass to the side, and saw something that had escaped his attention before. It was so bright that that seemed impossible, but then he knew how it had happened. His focus on his own thoughts and memories had been so intent that he had ignored everything outside the paired shields.
            Well, the tactic worked. If not quite as the books had intended. He was supposed to be able to flush bias out of his thoughts and concentrate with a cold and detached intelligence. Instead, he had flushed out the bond.
            It hung off to the side, so bright and coruscating that Severus blinked several times. It shone steadily silver, and strewn through it were bright blue and black sparks, and it led off into the distance. It thinned the further away it traveled. Severus thought that meant its connection to his mind grew more tenuous with distance.
            He turned and studied the bond, giving it the full benefit of his attention as he had not been able to before now. It hung in his mind and sparkled, and did nothing else. When Severus reached out and trailed a hand through the bond, it did nothing but feel cool on his fingers. Severus wondered idly if that was because he was distant from Potter right now and not under orders. It was neutral until stirred.
            Then he gasped sharply, because at the thought of Potter, the bond grew spikes and ripples that ran through his mind like the steel teeth of a trap. He pulled back and looked warily at it, noticing the length of time it took the spikes to subside.
            He nodded. I must free myself of this.
            His first thought had been to ask Potter to free him from the bond, the way he had Zabini, but Severus was doubtful about his chances to pass through his trial without Potter’s protection and aid. He might end up with a sentence in Azkaban anyway, but it would surely be shorter with Potter to protect him, and the public’s impression that the dangerous killer of Albus Dumbledore was tamed by his “submission” to the bond.
            Severus showed his teeth to no one as he imagined that, and then shook his head and focused on the bond again.
            If he could keep the protection of the bond but free himself from its more dubious effects, that would be ideal. And now that he saw it, he thought he could.
            Severus reached out, cautiously. Once again, the bond did not react when he merely touched it. It would light up at certain thoughts, he knew that now, and he used Occlumency to focus his mind on nothing but his desire to get rid of the bond, the way he had once used it to keep focused on his desire to serve the Dark Lord in Death Eater meetings.
            He slid easily under the flat plane of the bond, winding his way in among the stars, and studied the way it looped around his thoughts. Like links of a chain, he thought, except not as sturdy. The silver light it was made of looked fragile, in fact, until one touched it. Then it was more like water, which yielded in small amounts but exerted incredible amounts of pressure when one tried to fight back against it.
            Severus wondered if there was something to the comparison. Water came pouring in through any gap, pressed on doors, shattered windows, insisted on caging people who tried to swim through it with barely tangible force. What would happen if he opened another place in his mind for the bond to flow?
            He closed his eyes and tilted his head back, or he did in his mind, and he knew that his physical body would be echoing the movements as well. The bond quivered, still right there, still ready to overwhelm him in a second if he did something that it didn’t like. Severus gave a grim smile and opened up memories he hadn’t touched in years.
            They were memories of the tiny, cramped house at Spinner’s End as it had been in the years when his parents lived with him there. Merely moving the curtain aside from the memories made pain tear through Severus like the tail of a comet. But he could not be deterred. He went on moving it back, and into the gap, pain poured.
            And the bond followed.
            Severus gasped. He had not been certain it would work. But the bond responded to strong emotions, as he remembered a moment later, and in the meantime, it had the compulsion to soothe anxiety and pain on his part. When he had felt suicidal—earlier—then it had tried to prevent him from dying by reporting his emotions. Now he was feeling a different kind of agony, but the bond only knew how intense it was, not the source.
            That gave him another idea. With a vicious smile that only a few people, none of them alive, would have recognized, he ripped open more memories of the times when he had knelt at the Dark Lord’s feet.
            The bond recognized kinship in Severus’s past thoughts about the Dark Mark, his deep resentment that he had been bound to follow someone like the Dark Lord. It flooded that part of his mind, too, trying to put him to sleep, trying to heal and soothe him.
            Severus, watching it, snorted. He could not believe that he had not known the extent to which the bond’s weight on his mind was distorting his thoughts. It ought to have been obvious to someone skilled as he was, not only in Occlumency and Legilimency, but in the art of watching for self-betrayal.
            But he knew now, and he would not succumb to the charm of having someone to understand him again. Potter was his Lord, better morally but not so different from the Dark Lord and Dumbledore.
            The bond surged and crashed against him again at the thought of Potter, but Severus had redistributed its weight in his mind, and it had no ability to crush his independence flat again. He shut his eyes and rose to the surface of his mind.
            He opened his eyes in the library, and watched the crackling of the fire for a second.
            This way, he would have the best of both worlds. The political protection of the bond while he needed it, and the freedom of his thoughts in the meantime, so that he was something other than Potter’s mindless minion.
            It was possible that he would need to tend and maintain his freedom, pruning the bond back, more than once. But if it meant he would live free…
            There was no price for that not worth paying.
*
            “This is only a formality, is it not?”
            Harry kept his mouth set, so that the temptation to grin wouldn’t get the better of him. He honestly didn’t think it would be a good idea to do that in front of Lucius. He might decide that was a sign that Harry was weak or charmed by him, and press for something other than the concessions Harry had already given him.
            But he did want to grin anyway, because Lucius was so whiny.
            “Yes,” Harry said quietly. “I’ll fight for Draco. For Narcissa, if there’s opposition to her as harsh as there will be to you. But I do want you to accept that I won’t be able to get you away from Azkaban. And I don’t want you to—I don’t know, accuse me of something that will play into the hands of people who distrust me and this bond. I want you to know that I am fighting to help you.” He leaned forwards. “Don’t undermine me.”
            Lucius looked at him with eyes that weren’t trying to appear innocent, since he must know better than that, but were fairly wide. “Do you think I could actually undermine the hero of the wizarding world?”
            I think that you would try, you old bastard. But Harry kept that to himself, too. The truce with Draco, which was what mattered most to him in his interactions with the Malfoys since Draco was actually his vassal, would have a harder chance of surviving if Harry let his real opinion of Lucius out.
            “You might be able to,” Harry said. “With everything in such a fragile state right now, with the Wizengamot afraid of what I might do with the political power of my name and the Freedom Fighters and the other people uncertain of the bond, someone putting pressure in the right place could destroy me.”
            Lucius sat up and clasped his hands on the table in front of him. “At least you recognize that.”
            That doesn’t look like just agreeing. Harry leaned back and held Lucius’s eyes, waiting for the proposal. Because of course there would be some sort of proposal. It wasn’t Lucius unless he was going to do something like that.
            “But have you considered what pressure in the right place could do?” Lucius asked, his voice low and confidential. Harry could see why he had charmed people in the past. It was the sort of thing Lucius would never manage to do with him, but still. He could see why it had worked. “If it could grant you the kind of allegiance you’ve never dreamed of.”
            Harry shook his head. “It’s the kind of thing that might be nice to dream about, but you can’t help me like that. Your name is too tarnished.”
            And there was what Lucius had done to Ginny, and Dobby, and tried to do to Harry himself. But bringing that up would be like bringing up the insults and fighting Harry and Draco had done in the past. It could do nothing right now except weaken the sort of internal peace Harry was trying to establish.
            “I know,” Lucius said. “But I still know people who can. I still have two or three favors I could call in. The sort of favors that don’t change with the changing times, because if they did, then the people who owe them would render themselves vulnerable to the most exquisite kind of blackmail. I could tell them I want them to help you. They would probably be happy to. Helping you at the moment makes more political sense than helping me.”
            Harry frankly stared at him. “If you have power like that, why aren’t you trying to use it to help you out of the trial?”
            Lucius closed his lips, and they had a mild staring contest until Lucius seemed to make the decision to throw the dice on the table. “Because they are my last resort,” he said. “I did not want to use them until I was in the midst of the trial, and even then, only if the Wizengamot seemed as if it might vote for the Kiss instead of Azkaban. I am harder than my wife and son think I am. I can survive a prison term. But I do not want to die.”
            Harry frowned at him. He couldn’t really dispute that last statement, since it wasn’t like Harry wanted to die, either. But the difference between him and Lucius was that he had been willing to do it when it mattered.
            “I do not know how much you know about pure-blood families, and the way we act,” Lucius continued abruptly, throwing Harry off-stride just as he was about to say something cutting. “There is another reason that I did not call in these favors before now, and Draco is rather strongly concerned in it.”
            “I only really know what Draco bragged about at school, and what Dobby told me,” Harry said.
            Lucius gave him a wounded look that Harry ignored. “What about pure-blood families?” he added, turning around to accept a cup of tea from Kreacher. Kreacher put one down in front of Lucius, too, but with a mutter about “evil masters” that made a muscle twitch at the corner of Lucius’s eye.
            “What matters most is carrying the family name forwards,” Lucius said. “That is why we must have children. That is why Draco will have children, in his time.” He gave Harry a pointed look.
            “The last thing I want to forbid is him getting married,” Harry said. “When the trials are done I can release him from the bond, for that matter.” The thought made him feel as if he had a toothache, but he resolutely pushed ahead. “What is this really about?”
            “I have come to realize that my time as head of the Malfoy family is almost done.” Lucius seemed to be admiring the china the cups were made from. Maybe it was expensive china. That was something Harry knew next to nothing about. “Draco is the one who must take over and carry on from here. He is the future. It is one reason I was so willing to give you the blood that you needed to find him.”
            “Thank you for doing that,” Harry said. It couldn’t hurt to be polite. “But you mean that you’re willing to give me those favors because you want to help Draco?”
            Lucius looked up and nodded. “I am going to prison. I have hope that Narcissa will remain free, but she is not a Malfoy by blood and could continue the family line only in name. Draco must stay free.”
            “So you want to use those favors to help him, and not yourself.” Harry nodded thoughtfully. It fit with what Lucius had been willing to do for Draco so far, the way he’d begged for Draco’s life during the final battle and the resignation he’d displayed since Draco’s crazy plans hadn’t worked out.
            If that plan with the Amortentia had worked, Harry thought, Lucius would have gone along with it. He did still want both his freedom and Draco’s. He had only given in because he thought there was no way he could have both.
            But as long as he had Lucius cornered and actually admitting things, Harry thought, then he could admire the small part of Lucius that was admirable. He fixed on him again and asked, “And those people who owe you favors would be willing to give you any kind of favor that you asked? They wouldn’t be looking for a way to get out of this, or try to pay you instead of Draco?”
            “I have explained why they cannot.” Lucius’s eyes were bright and cold. “Will you listen to me explain what I intend to do?”
            Harry restrained his anger. Lucius wasn’t a vassal—most emphatically wasn’t a vassal of his—and Harry had the upper hand, here. He could cut off the conversation and walk away if that was what he wanted. He nodded and leaned back, sipping his cup of tea and sighing as the warmth flooded his mouth while he waited.
            “I will summon them to come before the Wizengamot and testify as to other things they saw Draco do during the war,” Lucius said. “Things that benefited your side. What he suffered. The noble side of him that never wanted to do the things I would have asked him to do.”
            Such as identify me at the Manor, Harry completed the sentence in his head. “What good will that do? The Wizengamot will test everyone with Veritaserum.”
            Lucius sighed. “Legally, those they ask to take it can still refuse, Mr. Potter. I would suggest strongly that you do. And in the meantime, you will have two or three prominent citizens on your side, known to members of the Wizengamot, and thrilled to pay off the favors I’ve held over their heads for so long. The Wizengamot is unlikely to question them. If they were testifying for someone like Bellatrix Lestrange, it would be a different story. But Draco? The Wizengamot doesn’t care about him. They’ll leave him alone.”
            “So you’ll defend him with lies,” Harry said, not sure why he was talking that way.
            Lucius gave him a look that wouldn’t have been out of place from Professor McGonagall receiving an awful essay. “Yes, Potter, I will,” he said slowly. “You hardly thought that truth and nobility would carry the day in this trial?”
            “I wasn’t going to outright lie.”
            “You would be very bad at it if you did.” Now Lucius was regarding him with a more tolerant eye. “No one would expect you to,” he continued, in a tone that Harry thought he meant to be kindly. “This is only the minimum that someone could expect from you, that you would protect your vassals with any means at your disposal. And if you don’t need to spend as much time and thought on Draco’s defense, that will free you up to think more about the others.”
            Harry grimaced. It was true that he hadn’t thought much about how he would defend the others. Snape would be particularly hard, even with the memories of the Unbreakable Vow he had made to Dumbledore.
            He couldn’t really afford to spend all his time on Draco, he thought. He had already let the Malfoys consume more of his time and attention than he wanted.
            “I want you to use all your favors to keep Draco free,” he said abruptly. “No use keeping anything back for yourself to have comforts in prison, wouldn’t you agree?”
            “If she remains free, Narcissa will see that I survive Azkaban,” Lucius said simply. “And, of course, I cannot help it that someone might do something to help me for a bribe or the sake of the admiration provoked by the Malfoy name.”
            Harry stared at him. “You think there’s any left?”
            “I said there may be. There were more who came to my aid during my trial after the first war than I would have thought.” Lucius just sat there and regarded him calmly. “Really, Mr. Potter, what does it matter? We are both getting what you want. You, the ability to protect Draco and a tame Lucius Malfoy. Me, the freedom of the one person who can carry my family name forwards. It is useless to tangle further.”
            The more Harry thought about it, the more he agreed. It was true that he could never know if someone who tried to help Lucius in the future was doing it because of some hidden favor that Lucius hadn’t told Harry about or because they wanted a favor at a later time. Or because they’d been bribed with Malfoy heirlooms, for that matter. There was too much going on that Harry couldn’t control.
            Concentrate on what you can. Concentrate on your vassals and the bond.
            “All right,” Harry said, standing with a nod to Lucius. “If you’ll give me the names of these people who owe you favors, then I’ll make sure that Kreacher delivers letters to them telling them what you expect.” He paused. “I’ll want to read the letters before they go out, of course.”
            “Of course.” Lucius waited until Harry had moved to the kitchen doorway to speak again. “Mr. Potter.”
            Harry turned around and regarded him. Lucius was sitting up and leaning on the table now, elbows on the surface in a way that Harry would have thought he’d regard as bad manners, eyes not moving from Harry.
            “I know that the bond is affecting Draco, and that may be the reason he’s so agreeable and ready to follow you,” Lucius told him softly. “All I ask is that you do not try to change him. Let the effects of the bond proceed naturally, the way you will the effort for his defense. Do not bear down on him and crush his personality.”

            Harry threw up his hands. “You think I enjoy having people this obedient to me? I don’t! The bond does things sometimes, and I don’t even know why!”
            Lucius relaxed. “Then you will not try to control him that directly. That is good.” His eyes sparked for a second. “Even if Draco’s main defense comes from your ignorance rather than you not wishing to change him.”
            Muttering, Harry stomped out of the room. Even when he was yielding and going along with most of what Harry wanted, Lucius Malfoy was still a bastard.
*
polka dot: He is. It’s only been a short time since Harry freed him, and he’s still shaky.
SP777: Yeah, the best he can hope for right now is privacy within the house.
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The Only True Lords