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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 Forty-Four—Accidental or Not?
            Draco licked his lips and sat up a little straighter. Then he wondered if that would give a signal to the people watching him that he was the most worried about this next part of the trial, and he shouldn’t show weakness like that to his and Potter’s enemies.
            Then he decided that he didn’t give a fuck.
            Watching Potter and Changes in the first part of the trial had been exhilarating, even though they hadn’t really been doing anything, just standing there and talking. Not that Draco didn’t know that talking could be something. The Dark Lord had made threats that went from idle to less idle over the course of an evening, and he had taunted his enemies just before he had his snake eat them. Draco knew that his father had made great changes in the political world just by speaking to certain people in the Ministry. So he knew. He wasn’t ignorant, not really.
            But there was something different about the words that Potter and Changes spoke. They were fighting for themselves, instead of fighting for power. Draco thought the distinction was kind of silly when he came up with it, and he could only imagine what his father would say.
            But he kept thinking about it.
            He thought even more about it as the Wizengamot started talking about the bond, and examples of them in the past. They had a few magical theorists and experts on bonds who seemed legitimate; at least, Potter didn’t object to them the way he had Kislik. He just listened and watched, and Draco couldn’t really tell what he was thinking, from his smooth, blank face.
            Draco shivered a bit. He didn’t like the thought that Potter, of all people, might have learned how to conceal his emotions.
            Potter turned his head then, and caught Draco’s eye, just as the shield mark on his arm shimmered blue and silver.
            Draco didn’t swallow his tongue, but it was a near thing. He blinked dumbly back at Potter, a little awed that he had taken the risk of turning around, and probably revealing to everyone in the room exactly what he was thinking about, whether or not he wanted to.
            Potter only shrugged at him and faced the front again. Draco became aware that his own face was relaxed, his own jaw no longer clenched as tightly.
            If Potter looked like that, then maybe he was confident they could win, after all. Or else that he could win, and his vassals would necessarily share in his fate.
            Draco wondered if it would be such a bad thing to remain bound to Potter for a little while after the trials were done.
*
            Blaise could feel the dryness gathering on his tongue and lips. No one had yet looked at him, but they hadn’t called for witnesses yet, either. The Wizengamot had offered their own—dry—opinions and paraded their own—boring—experts across the floor instead. Even if he had a mind fully disengaged and ready to listen, Blaise wasn’t sure that he would have found anything worth listening to in their words.
            But then Ollondors, who seemed to be on Potter’s side, but who wasn’t a person of that great a consequence, asked, “Does anyone who saw the bond form want to testify?” and Blaise pumped his hand into the air as hard as he could. He probably looked like Granger.
            Several people gaped at him. Changes wasn’t one of them; she looked at Blaise with a narrow, considering gaze that made him glad he had survived his mother’s discipline. Changes might think she could frighten him, but she couldn’t. Blaise just sniffed at her and turned back to Ollondors.
            “One of Lord Potter’s vassals wishes to testify?” she asked, glancing back and forth between him and Potter as if for confirmation.
            “He’s not my vassal,” Potter said. “Not anymore. I manipulated the bond, after lots of concentration, so as to set him free.”
            “Why?” Ollondors scowled at Potter. Blaise ducked his head to hide a grin. She had probably wanted him to hide that information until they reached a place where she thought they would win, because now everyone would know that Potter was capable of freeing people and just wanted to hang onto them because he liked being a Lord and a slavemaster. It was like Potter was doing some of Blaise’s work for him.
            “I thought he would destroy himself if he remained under the bond,” Potter said simply. “And he wanted to be free.”
            Blaise frowned at him. Did Potter think he was getting sympathy points for that? The Wizengamot’s faces were blank and stiff, but Blaise thought he was sensitive to the atmosphere in the courtroom in a way that Potter wasn’t. No, he wasn’t going to get any points for that, not when he knew perfectly well that he could have released others, and was just holding back.
            “Are you going to testify for or against him?” Ollondors said finally, turning back to Blaise.
            “An inappropriate question to ask the young man, Madam,” said the white-haired wizard, Jenkyns, before Blaise could answer. “Why don’t we let him speak for himself, and see what he has to say?” He smiled at Blaise, and while the smile was as false as tarnished silver, Blaise still felt himself smile back. He knew how to handle people who wanted to use him. Potter had given him lots of practice. “That’s the point, isn’t it?”
            “Yes, it is,” Blaise said, and walked forwards to the podium they had standing ready for witnesses.
            Changes got out of the way, giving him a glare that had nothing on his mother’s. Blaise walked past her only looking out of the corner of his eye, but in the end his curiosity got the better of him, and he turned his head so he could see Potter fully.
            Potter gazed at him steadily. There was no flicker of regret or fear or anger in his eyes. There was nothing at all.
            Blaise found his breath coming short before he thought about it, and he nearly rubbed his right arm, where the shield mark had been. Potter had no right to look like that after destroying Blaise’s life and making Blaise’s mother think he was weak.
            Well, he would show Potter. Potter might think that he was so haughty and so high and mighty, but Blaise would show him.
            Blaise turned back and made sure to focus on Jenkyns, even though it was Ollondors who was asking him the questions. “Why did you want to be free of the bond?”
            “Because it was like slavery,” said Blaise, and made sure to widen his eyes and drop his head. That would make him look more innocent, his mother had told him. She had included that as part of his training even before he was Sorted into Slytherin, since she was certain he would be, and lots of people were prejudiced against Slytherins and wanted them to be guilty. “I didn’t have any will of my own.”
            “Can you describe the differences between it and an ordinary bond?” Ollondors sounded even stiffer.
            Blaise gave her a look of scorn. “I’ve never been under any other bond,” he said shortly. What did she think he was? Someone who went around kneeling to other people and begging them to take his freedom? “So no.”
            Ollondors opened her mouth to ask another question, and Jenkyns cut in. “How did the bond form, Mister—”
            “Zabini,” Blaise said, concealing his displeasure that they didn’t know who he was merely from the look of his face. It probably meant they hadn’t heard of his mother, and he knew she would hate that. “I was in the Great Hall, one of its victims. Of course I saw it form.”
            Jenkyns nodded, and Blaise knew he had someone who was as eager as he was to see Potter taken down. It didn’t matter if it was for the same reasons. For the first time since Potter had driven his mother out of Grimmauld Place, Blaise finally had an ally.
            “I saw it form,” Blaise whispered, and let his voice sink down into that rustling little mutter where people would have to listen. “And I saw the way it whirled up into the air and hung there, and I saw the way that Potter cast his spell. He waited until after the Dark Lord had launched the obedience curse. And have you considered that?” he added, staring innocently up at the Wizengamot. “That the bond was formed from an obedience curse? Even if other bonds don’t demand obedience of you or enslave your free will, this one could.”
            He could see mouths tightening and eyes widening all over the Wizengamot. Blaise smiled. They might think they were impenetrable and could fool him, but they were wrong. He had the upper hand.
            “That is, indeed, something to consider,” said Jenkyns gravely. “Please continue with your story.”
            “I felt the shield mark come into being on my arm, too,” Blaise said, and let himself bow his head and clutch his arm with one hand. “It hurt. I don’t think a normal bond mark should hurt that much. And this really isn’t a normal bond mark, you know. It’s a shield. It formed on all of us without asking, and Potter didn’t choose it.”
            “I thought the spell that Lord Potter raised against the Dark Lord’s curse was a Shield Charm,” said Ollondors.
            Blaise started and glanced at her. He hadn’t considered her once she had gone silent. But in the way her eyes fixed on him, he saw that he had been wrong to underestimate her. She was watching him, challenging him, and she didn’t intend to just let it go.
            “Of course it was,” Blaise said. “But he didn’t go around saying that was what he was going to create, and he didn’t ask us if it was what we wanted him to create, you know. He did nothing but make it. He didn’t ask any of us. This is a bond that commands obedience and it’s not one that we entered into willingly. He enslaved us. I ask you to see that.” He turned back to the Wizengamot and spread his hands appealingly.
            He didn’t know if it was going to work. They exchanged glances, and they were doubtful glances. Blaise held himself still, although inwardly he seethed. He didn’t know what he had said to inspire such lack of confidence. And they knew they couldn’t trust Potter, right? You couldn’t trust someone who defeated a Dark Lord and became a Lord himself in just a few minutes. It meant he had too much power.
            Blaise might not mean it the way the Wizengamot had meant it, but still he had thought he would have more allies here.
            “The problem is, Mr. Zabini,” Jenkyns said at last, and his voice dragged and rattled like a cart on stones, and made Blaise stiffen. “The problem is, what you describe sounds very much like an accidental bond.”
            Blaise shook his head. “Don’t you see? It doesn’t matter if it was! Potter meant to enslave us, and that makes it not accidental!”
            Jenkyns looked away, but Ollondors smiled at him. “Mr. Zabini, would you tell us why, in your opinion, Lord Potter wanted to enslave you, when he let you go?”
            “It was too hard for him to hold onto me,” Blaise said quickly. “Unlike some other people. And he didn’t want to deal with my mother, either.” His palms were sweaty. He wiped them on the sides of the podium. “I made it clear that it was slavery, and that I resented it. So he let me go.”
            Ollondors gave him the sweetest smile of all and looked around the Wizengamot as though she wanted to make sure she was the center of attention. “No further questions.”
            Blaise looked away from her to the rest of the members of the Wizengamot. There had to be someone here who wanted to hear what he had to say.
            But most of the people in sight avoided his eyes. Some coughed and did it, and some winced and did it. The vast majority simply looked straight ahead with a blank gaze that he was no longer included in.
            Blaise swallowed. His voice was stuck in his throat, the voice he could have used to fight what Ollondors was saying.
            “It wasn’t accidental,” he said loudly. “It couldn’t have been.”
            The Wizengamot members who were still allowing that he existed exchanged glances. Ollondors gave him a radiant smile of pity that Blaise couldn’t look at. He turned and faced Jenkyns again, with a silent demand.
            Jenkyns grimaced and met his eyes. “It sounds accidental,” he muttered. Maybe he wouldn’t dare do anything else with the way that Ollondors stared at him, Blaise thought, slowly beginning to be murderous. “He used a Shield Charm, and he didn’t consciously choose the shape of the mark that appeared on your arm. He took time to release you, which suggests that he took time to understand the bond enough to do so.”
            “Why can’t you understand that it was slavery?” Blaise snapped. “That it was rape of the will, if not the body?”
            “Because it doesn’t sound like that,” said Ollondors, and Blaise didn’t look at her, but it apparently didn’t matter, not when her voice was so full of pity, too. “Not when he let you go.”
            “He held me under his subjection before then.” Blaise hated how breathless his voice sounded, but this was true, and he didn’t know how to speak in a way that would make it not true, the way they apparently wanted him to speak. “He spent several days cooping me up in a house where I didn’t want to be, and he twice attacked me with magic! Don’t you care about that?” He twisted around when he caught a movement from the corner of his eye, and saw Jenkyns sitting up.
            “He attacked you?” Jenkyns had an almost hungry tone in his voice.
            At the moment, Blaise couldn’t have cared less that the tone wasn’t for him, it was for the possibility of putting Potter in prison. Yes, let them hate and curse Potter and want to get at him through Blaise, as long as they got at him.
            “Yes, he did,” said Blaise, glancing back and forth between the members of the Wizengamot, who looked a little more interested now. “He burned me so badly once that it was a miracle that I survived. And another time, it was more generalized magical pain that I had to spend time in the Hogwarts hospital wing recovering from.”
            Changes moved in a way that drew Blaise’s eye, reluctant though he was to give her any of his precious attention. “The bond would have punished him if he did,” she murmured. “It would have punished any Lord who acted so irresponsibly, no matter how much he had disliked his vassals before the bond began. What did you do?”
            Blaise went rigid with rage, and he knew it. He stared at her, wondering if magic would answer his wish and strike her down. He didn’t have his wand right now, so it would have to be magic of the will, the kind that was wrongly called accidental magic.
            So much in life wasn’t accidental, even though so many people thought it was. His mother was the one who had taught him that, along with why children couldn’t just fling magic they thought was “accidental” around and not expect to be punished for it.
            “I attacked him,” he said. “But I didn’t deserve—”
            “Did you try to kill him?”
            “I wanted the person who had enslaved me dead,” Blaise snapped. “Not an impulse that you can understand, I’m sure, given that you’ve never been under the slavery of a Lordship bond yourself.”
            “I only wanted to know the answer,” Changes murmured, and turned back to the Wizengamot. “I think that we’ve found proof as to why the bond was accidental, sirs, madams. Of course Lord Potter wouldn’t take someone under his vassalage who would try to kill him. Or if he didn’t realize, he would have released Mr. Zabini at once, instead of waiting until he could master the bond more particularly.”
            Blaise thought he said something, but possibly the thump of blood in his head only made him think he had. Either way, he watched as the Wizengamot turned against him, murmuring and nodding, and the vote was held.
            “Lord” Potter’s bond was judged accidental. He hadn’t meant to take any of them “under his wing,” as Ollondors put it. He hadn’t meant to harm them.
            Of course, because the bond is accidental, they’re going to judge all the results of it as accidental as well, Blaise thought. It was so hard to breathe. All the things he did to me. All the ways he twisted my mind. All the ways that he drove my mother away.
            “Mr. Zabini?”
            Blaise pulled himself back from the blackening spiral of thoughts that was threatening to devour him, and looked up at Ollondors. She was frowning slightly at him, as though she had spoken his name more than once and he hadn’t responded. Blaise didn’t give a fuck. She had decided against him, she and all the rest of the Wizengamot, and he knew that made them his enemies. Of course Potter’s popularity wasn’t good for anything, he thought. Good enough to win him an acquittal he never should have won, but not for anything else.
            “You may sit down now.”
            Blaise turned and plodded back to his chair. He felt as if his feet were carrying his heart along with them, and that he was scraping the floor with it. His breathing was soft and heavy, too, and when he collapsed back into his chair, he might have been one of those Wizengamot members, staring so blankly ahead of him.
            He didn’t know what to do now.
*
            Severus swallowed back both curse and praise. He could have told the idiot Potter that Zabini was like a sword rattling around in a loose sheath, and should be put away somewhere before he cut someone.
            But the crisis had passed, and if it was due to the good efforts of their barrister and Ollondors instead of Potter himself, well, Severus did not much care to owe his deliverance to Potter, anyway. He could put up with this well enough.
            “Is there any other witness that you wish to speak to?” Changes had moved a little away from Potter, as if she wanted to show that even Lords who already had Shields needed more of them, and folded her hands into her sleeves. She looked cool and calm. No one would ever have believed that she had thought it possible they would lose the case.
            Severus sneered under his breath. He could have given her some advice that would at least have kept Zabini at bay and made the issue of the case come out that much sooner. But no one had thought to speak to him, and Severus was not one to put himself forward, not when he had done so much already to escape the bond.
            “We wish to speak to everyone who saw the bond form,” said the Carrow woman. Severus looked at her for a moment, and then turned away. She knew she had lost already, and was only fighting to keep others from realizing it. He need expend no energy on struggling against her.
            “Then you would have to interview all the vassals, and many of the students and their parents who were in the Hogwarts Great Hall,” said Changes, in a dry voice that Severus would have been better able to bear if she had only asked his advice. “There were dozens of witnesses, and they saw it from all sorts of angles. They would give you tales like the ones you wish for, but it would take months to get through them all.”
            Carrow peered down at Changes like a vulture about to swoop. “I suppose you think that you know what we want to hear?”
            “I know that some people wish to condemn Lord Potter for forming an accidental bond.” Changes gave her a faint, acid smile. “We just heard from one of them. But I believe that his friends wish to testify—and one of them, Hermione Granger, insists on Veritaserum.”
            Severus sighed. Of course she did.
            Changes’s tactic had the desired effect, and the Wizengamot who still opposed Potter fell over themselves asking to hear Granger. She came into the courtroom, gave the Wizengamot a look of general contempt, and then sat down in the chair offered to her and took the three drops of Veritaserum with ceremonious efficiency.
            Severus knew he would be able to let his mind drift during the testimony, and that was exactly what happened. Granger testified the way everyone sane wanted her to, with perfect fidelity and boring truth. She didn’t develop the expression of impatience that Severus knew she would have worn without the potion, but that was all to the good. Now, no one could accuse her of mocking the Wizengamot.
            Weasley came in after her, and although he refused the Veritaserum, he told the same truth. The Wizengamot had no choice but to admit that the bond was accidental.
            Severus rolled his eyes. He no longer cared who saw him. What other conclusion did they think they could come to? Surely it must have been obvious to those with some experience in Lordship bonds, as opposed to those with some experience in stupid politics, that the bond was accidental.
            And if they had charged Harry Potter, what would have happened? Some people would have gone along for the sake of the scandal and the interest it excited, but more would have been displeased, and an unhappy populace was a recipe for disaster at the moment, with how unstable the wizarding world was.
            Then Severus realized what he was thinking and stopped, appalled at himself.
            What did he care about the long-term consequences of Potter’s behavior, and whether they arrested him or not? He was thinking as though he was Potter’s real Shield, as though he would remain in this bond for one moment longer than he had to, as though his fate was tied to Potter’s beyond the trial.
            This was another sign of how the bond was corrupting his mind, and creeping through even the careful shields he had established to make sure such a thing could not happen.
            So while the Wizengamot held their debate on Potter’s innocence of this charge that was not a debate at all, Severus stared off into the distance and rebuilt his Occlumency shields. He did not let himself stiffen when the Wizengamot rose to their feet and Ollondors announced their decision.
            “On the charge of knowingly forming a bond and taking unwilling vassals into captivity, we find Lord Harry Potter innocent.”
            There was a sound from Mr. Zabini before he could stop himself. Severus grimaced. He foresaw another responsibility that would come his way that night, because of course no one else would think of stepping into his place and comforting Mr. Zabini.
            He stopped thinking like that when he realized that Ollondors had turned to him.
            “And tomorrow,” she said, “will be the trial of Severus Snape.”
*
SP777: I think Harry’s been doing pretty well as a Lord so far.
Nothing Like the Sun is still percolating away on the backburner.
Virginia: No, I wouldn’t end it yet! Definitely not. The trials will be a long arc.
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The Only True Lords