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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.

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Chapter Forty-Two—Descent on the Ministry

            “We have rights, too.”

            Draco had to smile at the way Harry hit the protesting men, two of the wizards who had accompanied Aurelius to the Manor, with Stunners. They had time for one protest, and then they sagged to the floor and landed with their heads drooping. They would have landed harder, but Draco cast a few charms that made their robes float out around them and hold them up. He thought Harry might appreciate it if they didn’t break their heads open and make the Ministry think they’d been beating up helpless prisoners.

            Harry straightened up and smiled at him. And Draco swallowed in the face of that, and glanced away.

            “I love you,” Harry said, voice as soft as though he was whispering prayers to himself in the privacy of his room.

            Draco turned and stretched out his hands, because he had to. Harry met him halfway, and they stood there kissing among the group of several Stunned Dark wizards.

            Draco moved back at last and shook his head at Harry when he tried to follow. “Remember,” he murmured. “We’ve got to get these blokes to the Ministry and make a presentation convincing enough that we know that they’re going to keep them under guard, even though we don’t have Aurelius to produce testimony for them.”

            Harry grinned again, his eyes as brilliant as miniature suns, and his cheeks not far behind. “Don’t worry. When I’m feeling sufficiently inspired, I can change minds so fast you wouldn’t believe it was me.” He bent down and began conjuring stretchers that would carry the Stunned men. Draco supposed it was a gesture to make them look better in the eyes of the public. It couldn’t hurt to show up being so kind to their supposed enemies that their other enemies would support and defend them, Draco reckoned.

            Harry stood up with a collection of floating stretchers behind him, and nodded. “I would usually do this in Auror robes, but I don’t need them now.” He closed his eyes and pressed his hand against his heart.

            “You’ve done something like this before?” Draco blinked at the stretchers, and wondered how he had missed hearing about it.

            “With prisoners whose money might be sufficient to get them out of Azkaban,” Harry murmured, eyes still closed. Then he opened one and fixed Draco with a sharp look. “Usually prisoners from the sort of pure-blood family I’ve married into, now.”

            “Then I’m glad the experience will stand you in good stead,” Draco said calmly, and just looked back. He couldn’t help what his father had done in the past, or the reputation his family had had before the war. Nor did he think Harry would really expect him to. What he would have taken as insults a while ago, he thought, was now just the way that Harry related to the world.

            Harry shut his eyes, nodded, and said, “Good. Now be quiet, while I work myself up into Threatening Auror Harry Potter. Without Auror robes, this time.”

            Draco raised his eyebrows, and stood in silence while Harry took a couple of deep breaths. He supposed that just as Harry had to think hard to come up with a good enough reason to use his magic when he was the one being threatened, he had to do the same when he was acting for a mostly personal cause.

            “What’s your inspiration?” he asked, when Harry opened his eyes and moved purposefully towards the door of the dungeon cell. Draco had to get out of his way to avoid being knocked over by the stretchers floating behind him. “The thought of what Aurelius suffered?”

            “No,” Harry said, and smiled over his shoulder at him. “The thought of what you did.”

            Draco was quiet as he followed Harry. He wanted to speak, but there was no word deep enough for what Harry had just revealed.

*

            Remember. You might as well swagger, not be modest. They never believed in your modesty anyway.

            They Flooed out into the middle of the Ministry Atrium, and Harry set himself to march straight ahead, ignoring the gapes and glances that followed him. Nobody tried to stop him, which was as it should be. They probably didn’t want to get involved, after his last performance in the middle of the Ministry, except from a safe distance.

            He reached the lifts, and wondered for a moment what he should do. Then he shook his head, snorted, and cast a spell that would compel all of the lifts to return to the Atrium.

            He heard startled cries and outraged shouts, but ignored them. There were plenty of people who would be outraged for all sorts of reasons in just a few minutes. If they started a little ahead of time, that was no concern of his.

            He heard a sharp clanging of metal, a brisk buzz of magic, and the sounds of the lifts settling into place before the doors opened. Harry stepped into the nearest with two of the stretchers bunching in behind him, and directed the rest of the stretchers into the rest of the lifts. Draco scrambled to catch up with him, and Harry moved one of the stretchers with him into a nearby lift so Draco could stand comfortably.

            If he could, that was. Draco was bent almost double, his hand clamped across his mouth, hysterical little giggles breaking free anyway. Harry touched him on the shoulder, and Draco straightened up and shook his head at him, hiccupping a bit.

            “I didn’t know that you could look like that,” Draco said finally. They were almost at the Department of Magical Law Enforcement, and he faced Harry with his eyes dancing and his mouth still quivering. Harry firmly bit his own lip and reminded himself that kissing Draco in public was not the best idea, if only because it might mean someone else would want to join in. “You didn’t care at all that some people were staring.”

            “Was something I did laughable?” Harry hadn’t thought so, but then, he tended to be a terrible judge of the way that other people reacted to him.

            Draco shook his head hard enough that his hair rustled around his ears. “No. That’s the point. You looked so cool, and comfortable, and they didn’t have the slightest clue what to do.” He reached out and squeezed Harry’s wrist. “Try to look more like that in the future. That’s what a proper Malfoy does: not give a shit about any of the forces they’re trying to make him acknowledge.”

            The lift door opened before Harry could retort with his own opinions of what a proper Malfoy did and did not do. Then they were stepping out onto the floor that contained the Department of Magical Law Enforcement, and Harry had to smile and nod. And then keep walking straight ahead, as the other lifts all arrived at the same time and the fleet of stretchers floated into the corridor behind him, darting here and there to get around the people waiting for the lifts like huge butterflies around flowers.

            Seen that way, Harry supposed it was kind of comic. But he tried to strangle his own mirth, because this really wasn’t the time for it.

            The Aurors around him all turned their heads and stared at him in stone-stricken silence. Harry wondered idly whether they were thinking about the last time they had confronted him and what had happened, or whether the stretchers confused them.

            Or whether they think that it’s my latest group of enemies occupying those stretchers.

            Harry smiled at that, but wiped the smile from his face when he saw the Head Auror’s office door ahead. Yes, that would have to be his destination. He drew himself up austerely as they neared the door—prompting another burst of giggles from Draco, although Harry thought he was the only one who really noticed them—and knocked sharply on it.

            There was a long silence from inside. Harry knew someone was there, but he was beginning to believe it might not be the Head Auror. The door would have flown open already if that was the case.

            Then a voice he knew from his last assault on the Ministry said, “Yes? Come in.”

            Harry was smiling as he opened the door, because that voice belonged to Eliot, and it was something to appear before her with a bevy of prisoners that he had helped to capture even though he was no longer officially an Auror. Better than some Aurors managed in weeks or months of working on cases, certainly.

            Eliot turned to face him, and stared. There was another woman with her, her partner, and they seemed to have been waiting for the Head Auror to come back from wherever he had gone. Harry nodded smartly to her and flipped off a salute, which made Eliot’s partner wince a little. She could recognize sarcasm, whatever Harry had to say for Eliot.

            “What are you doing here?” Eliot put one hand on her wand and one hand on her hip. “I thought you were resigning from the Aurors and the Ministry?”

            “Can’t a normal citizen still report the presence of dangerous criminals on his property?” Harry asked, widening his eyes. “Particularly dangerous criminals who were trying to drain someone else’s magic and absorb it?”

            Eliot’s partner turned to face him. “Who were they working for?” she asked. “And whose magic did they try to drain?”

            “A man named Aurelius Shepherd,” Harry said, glad for once that the man’s name wasn’t Malfoy. There were people who would figure out the connection, especially after the last speech he had made in the Atrium right before he quit, but it would get the case taken more seriously at first than it would have if he had come in claiming damages for a Malfoy. “Working for someone that they named as Brian Sontage.”

            Eliot hissed. “We’ve been trying to get some evidence that leads back to him for years,” she said, and her fingers curled and uncurled around her wand. “Why did you manage to do it?”

            “Because, even retired, he’s a better Auror than you,” Draco said from behind Harry, in a voice of simple confusion. “You mean you didn’t understand that?”

            Harry nudged Draco sharply with his elbow. “Shepherd pleaded guilty to some of the things he’d tried to do to me and my husband in exchange for having his enemies handled,” he said. “He was the one who put us onto Sontage’s track. But you’re the one who will have the pleasure of actually conducting the arrest and pursuing the case, so I don’t see why you’re upset.” He waved his wand, and long ropes sprang out from the stretchers, wrapping around the legs of the Head Auror’s desk to tether them there. “Have fun.”

            He started to turn away, aware that Eliot’s partner was staring at him in some respect, and Draco was standing close behind his back with arms folded and head bowed against the giggles that wanted to flood his throat. It was a good day.

            “Wait.”

            That was Eliot, and Harry sighed and turned back around. It had been fun confronting her with evidence that he was still a competent and effective Auror, but she was irritating enough that he didn’t want to spend a lot of time around her, either. “What?”

            “Where did you get the evidence?” Eliot gestured at the wizards on the stretchers. “Why did you Stun them and bring them here like this? Did they really attack you, or did you make that a convenient excuse for bringing them here?”

            Harry’s hands tightened in front of him. Draco leaned against his back. Harry hissed between his teeth and straightened up. That reminded him, whether Draco was trying to calm him down or giving him support in the face of Eliot’s accusations. He was here for more than just himself. He represented more than just himself. He was here to drop off his family’s enemies and get them safely held in Azkaban, and while Eliot might not want to do that, he had a feeling her partner would.

            “Yes, I made up that story that you could easily prove false and accused them of a monstrous crime because I wanted to get random men whose names I don’t even know in trouble,” Harry snapped. “Perhaps you could put aside your suspicions for one moment and consider that I might be telling the truth?”

            Eliot blinked. Maybe the blunt words had got through to her. And Harry didn’t think it would matter if they hadn’t. Her partner would take his word for it and ensure that things got done.

            “I only wanted to know how you stumbled across so many people who were foolish enough to let you capture them,” Eliot said, and made a gesture that Harry might have interpreted as a peace offering if he was stupid.

            “It’s not as though he lost all his skills and abilities the minute he retired,” Draco said, his voice rigid as ice. “Why would you think that?”

            Eliot’s partner and Harry exchanged a glance before Harry thought about it. He might not have much in common with the Aurors anymore, but it was still true that he didn’t want to change a private quarrel into something the Ministry would be obliged to take notice of. She nodded a little at him, and Harry moved forwards and took Draco’s arm.

            “I think we should leave now,” Harry told him, quietly but firmly.

            Draco shook his elbow a little, his gaze still fixed on Eliot. Harry tightened his grip, and Draco turned and stared at him.

            “Sometimes I don’t understand you at all,” he said, and his voice seemed to vibrate in the back of his throat. “Don’t you care about things like this?”

            “Yes,” Harry said, because it seemed he had to. “I still do, but I did what you urged me to do and tried to put the Ministry behind me because serving and saving our family is more important.” He saw the way Draco’s eyes softened at the reference to their family, and smiled back, giving Draco’s arm a little shake and looking pointedly towards the office door again. “I think we should leave.”

            “Part of you will always regret leaving the Ministry,” said Eliot, in dark tones that she probably imagined made her sound like a seer. “Part of you knows that you can never find what you really want to do anywhere else.”

            “Maybe that impresses some people, but not us,” Draco told her, and then, to Harry’s relief, he did walk out of the office and back into the corridor. Harry offered an apologetic little grimace to Eliot’s partner and moved after him. He did sort of regret having to close the door behind him. He would have liked to hear what he was sure she would say to Eliot.

            “Ready to leave?” Harry asked Draco, raising his eyebrows a little when Draco shuffled his feet.

            Draco sighed. “It’s infuriating.”

            Harry leaned in to kiss him, not caring who saw. Draco’s hands came up and gripped his elbows in a grasp far different from the one Harry had used on him earlier in the office. Harry moaned into his mouth, and then pulled away with an effort and used his chin to point the way towards the lifts.

            “We should go,” he whispered. “Before we do something that you can’t finish here.”

            “Who says I wouldn’t finish it?” Draco asked, and seemed delighted with the slightly scandalized look on Harry’s face. He strolled towards the lifts, hands in his pockets and hum vibrating loudly enough in his throat to make it sound as if it was bouncing off the walls. Harry closed his eyes, laughed a little, and followed him.

*

            “I want something from you.”

            Harry turned and smiled at him. They had come back from the Ministry an hour ago, and since then, Harry had been in the library studying a pure-blood book that Draco thought was one of those he’d assigned to Harry all those weeks ago. Draco had practiced pointing the basilisk wand at various places in the room, Summoning books, lighting a fire and then extinguishing it again, casting household charms. He wanted to make sure that the wand could perform the most basic, everyday spells as well as more important magic.

            “What do you want?” Harry asked, and set the book aside, leaning forwards to fix his eyes on Draco.

            Draco wondered for a moment why no one had married Harry before this. Surely he couldn’t be the only one who found those green eyes so intoxicating when they were fixed on him. Surely he wasn’t the only one who felt sometimes as if he would kill for that attention.

            But perhaps no one else had received this level of care from Harry, at that. After all, Draco liked to think Harry was more intimate with him than he’d ever been even with his best friends.

            With that in mind, Draco felt free to sniff a little and say, “I want us to spend a normal evening together.”

            Harry blinked. “I was under the impression that this was a normal evening for us. Or might be, if we’d ever had one that didn’t collapse into needing to defend ourselves against former friends and new enemies.”

            Draco licked his lips. He knew what he wanted to say, or he had, until Harry phrased his objection like that. But he would go ahead with the words. At least he now trusted that Harry would never betray him by laughing at his weakness or gossiping about it with his friends.

            “Not your reading that kind of book,” he said, standing up and moving across the room to Harry, holding out his hand to take his wrist. Harry let him do it, and didn’t even try to retain the place he had been marking with his finger in his book. Draco kissed the back of Harry’s fingers and spread them out so that he could tease with his own fingernail at the webs between them. “But you coming with me and eating dinner and talking. That was the kind of thing I meant. A normal evening, the kind other couples share.”

            Harry’s smile could have turned night to day. “I’d love to.”

*

            Ossy was standing with his arms folded when they made their way into the dining room. Harry paused and eyed him, wondering if he had forgotten to conduct some rite in propitiation of house-elves, or if Draco had. Ossy’s ears were standing up and practically quivering, or at least the hairs that edged them were.

            “Master Harry and Master Draco Malfoy is sitting down to dinner,” Ossy announced, staring into the distance, past them rather than at their faces. “They are eating their entire meal. They are being eating. They are being eating dessert.” He swung around and stared up at Harry, his nose so high that Harry could make out more about house-elf nostrils than he had ever wanted to know. “There is being nothing interrupting them.”

            Harry opened his mouth to defend them, but Draco caught his hand and eye at the same time, and shook his head. Harry nodded back in understanding. It looked like they weren’t the only people in the house who wanted a normal evening.

            When he sat down in the seat beside Draco, instead of across the table from him, Ossy nodded stiffly and then clapped his hands. The plates began to appear on the table. Harry blinked at the glistening mounds of fruit and scones and cakes and potatoes and fish and chicken and something that he sincerely hoped wasn’t the entire roast boar with an apple in its mouth that it looked like. “We can’t eat all this,” he began.

            Ossy turned around and stared at him so fiercely that Harry winced a little.

            “Um. We’ll manage, somehow,” Harry said, and began reaching for his fork and spoon, while Ossy coated the end of the table with enormous platters of pies and chocolates and glasses of fizzy drinks.

            Draco caught his wrist again. Harry met his eyes, truly afraid of what he would say about house-elves and the rites needed to propitiate them.

            “Let me feed you,” Draco whispered. “It’s something that pure-blood spouses do, and when the demi-marriages were closer, it’s something they would do on the first night. We didn’t get to do that.” He tightened his grip and shook his head when Harry opened his mouth. “No. I don’t blame anyone for that. I don’t—want to blame anyone right now. But I would very much like to feed you. Can I?”

            Harry swallowed and nodded. “Although will Ossy let you? Or will he murder you for not eating yourself?”

            A smile passed over Draco’s face that made Harry’s throat dry and seem to close. Draco leaned back, almost lounging, and picked up his fork. “We’ll alternate bites, how about that?” he murmured.

            Harry had never known what people meant when they talked about someone’s voice being sex. Now he did. He opened his mouth, feeling hypnotized by the way that Draco dipped his fork into the whole roast chicken in front of him and unfailingly pulled loose a tender, spicy morsel of meat.

            True to his word, Draco fed him and then fed himself, one bite at a time, with a care and a gentleness that Harry swallowed just as much as he did the food. Draco’s eyes blazed, and the dinner was long and slow, and Ossy gave them two full plates for every empty or bone-covered one that he took away.

            Harry kept opening his mouth. He didn’t feel hunger often, probably a consequence of the way he’d grown up, but this, this, made him burn and shift in his seat. Draco noted the way he did, and his face warmed and shone. Harry wanted to flinch, sometimes, but then he didn’t, because Draco would be bringing the next forkful up, and he couldn’t move his head without being poked in the eye.

            And Draco was there, and the food, and the steady, growing fire that affected both of them, if the way Harry saw Draco reach down to adjust himself was any indication.

            And then, finally, Harry knew he would vomit if he ate something else, and he leaned back and shook his head. Ossy appeared beside his chair. Harry turned his head slowly, in dread, because there was no way that he could eat more, but he suspected Ossy would insist that he try.

            To his relief, Ossy examined him, and nodded a little. Harry sighed and pushed his chair back.

            But Draco caught his hand before he could go far. Harry looked at him, and saw Draco’s smile deepen and shine, his eyes glowing with flames that didn’t come from any reflections of the candles around them.

            “Finally,” he whispered, his voice so thick that Harry moved forwards without thinking, and around the table, and into Draco’s arms.

            They had a time getting up the stairs, so closely were they entwined.

*

            Delia cerrano: He does. If Lucius could be freed without consequences, Draco would be all for it, but he knows that can’t happen.

            Diana: Here you go!

            SP777: I don’t think they’ll have any trouble reconciling. ;)
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The Name I'll Give to Thee