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The Marriage of True Minds	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 55082 -:- Recommendations : 2 -:- Currently Reading : 2
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter, and I am making no money from this story.

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Chapter Forty-Eight—United, Not to Be Divided

            Harry opened his eyes to the strong smell of potions, which made him grimace for a moment. If he was back in St. Mungo’s, then word would get out, and someone would probably hit on the correct speculation about an inferno ritual, and then—

            Then he felt the contented hum of the bond, and smiled. Wherever he was, Draco was with him. That meant it couldn’t possibly be too bad.

            He turned his head, and found Draco asleep in the chair beside the bed. These were Draco’s rooms, he realized, and some of the tension flooded out of his muscles. Well, it made sense that Draco could brew potions to take care of the burns that the ritual would have given Harry as well as the potions to replenish his blood.

            He opened his mouth to speak, or tried to. His throat was so dry that all that came out was a croak.

            Draco woke so fast Harry reckoned he must have been dozing. Or perhaps the bond had something to do with it. He met Harry’s eyes and gave him a long, slow smile that made Harry’s stomach drop.

            Yeah, that’s the smile I want to see for the rest of my life.

            “Welcome back,” Draco said quietly. He had a glass of water in his hand, although Harry hadn’t seen him pick it up. Harry reached out eagerly, but Draco caught his hand and shook his head. Looking down, Harry saw his hands were bandaged. Yes, pain was twinging through him now, but the potions had done their work well enough that he honestly hadn’t realized how burned he was until now. Bandages swathed most portions of his body, it seemed, and when he stretched cautiously, they pulled and tugged all over his back.

            “You’ll have to be careful,” Draco warned him, holding the glass to his lips. “You’re much less burned than you should have been, because the fire was magical and you were exposed to the full power of it for only a minute. The rest of the time, our link or your own will protected you.”

            Harry grimaced. It made sense—at least, it made sense coming from the people who had designed the inferno ritual in the first place—that the fire would be largely harmless as long as he was fulfilling the ritual’s purpose, but turn on him when the fear began to consume him.

            “How are you?” he asked. “How is everyone?” The water was good, going down his throat, but he wanted news just as badly.

            “No one was burned,” Draco said, and put the glass down with a faint smile. “Though not for lack of trying, on my part. I would have jumped right through the flames when you began to scream if Granger hadn’t stopped me.”

            “Good,” Harry said, and laughed when Draco gave him a half-indignant look. “And there’s no sign of the beast?”

            “I was in your mind with you when you destroyed it,” Draco reminded him quietly. “I felt it die.” He hesitated. “We aren’t sure what the scars on your back are going to look like, though. The potions had to be smeared into them immediately, and the burns hid them.”

            Harry shook his head. “I can live with ordinary scars. It was the fact that they might have produced something that would eat me or other people that worried me.”

            Draco caught Harry’s hand and lifted it to his lips in silence. Harry leaned against him in similar silence and finished the water in small sips. Then Draco picked up a bowl of what looked like cold soup and began moving his spoon through it in fussy patterns.

            “Are Ron and Hermione staying here?” Harry asked. It seemed impossible that they would let themselves be forced out of Malfoy Manor, but on the other hand, it also seemed strange they weren’t in Draco’s rooms.

            “In another wing, yes.” Draco ducked his head, but his frown was still visible as he stirred the soup.

            Harry reached out and caught his wrist. “Tell me what happened,” he murmured. “I’ll hear equally biased versions of things from both you and them, I’m sure, but at least this way, I’ll hear both.”

            Draco met his eyes and sighed. “It wasn’t—it really wasn’t me. It was the bond. It reasserted itself about ten minutes after the end of the ritual and demanded that they stop touching you. I turned into a raging monster, and my mother was the only one to realize what was happening and with the control to interfere. She said that Granger and Weasley could stay, but they can’t visit you unless I’m here or nearby, and not for more than ten minutes in an hour.”

            Harry nodded. “That’s fine, Draco. But we have to find some way to correct this stupid bond.” He swallowed another mouthful of soup and frowned. It was delicious, but his mind was running on the larger problems.

            Draco swore and put the bowl down. Harry blinked at him, and Draco scowled back. “She said this would happen,” Draco explained. Harry only blinked again, so he rolled his eyes and said, “Granger. That you would start thinking about ways to solve the next problem as soon as I mentioned it instead of relaxing.” He leaned forwards, cradling Harry’s burned cheeks carefully in his hands, and shook his head. “Don’t you ever stop thinking about other people and concentrate on yourself?”

            “The ritual was partially that,” Harry said quietly, nuzzling into Draco’s hands. “Although it also affected you and my friends, admittedly.”

            “Exactly.” Draco leaned his chin on top of Harry’s head and closed his eyes. “I’m going to ask you to do something hard right now, then.”

            “What’s that?”

            “Relax,” Draco exhaled into his face. “Lean back. Stop thinking about the ways that we can make the bond content or the ways that your friends and I aren’t getting along. Stop thinking about my father and my mother and the beast and the decay wizards and the lost kittens in trees and all the other ways that you’ll occupy your mind and your time for the rest of your life. Rest and let me take care of you.”

            Harry glanced down pointedly at his bandaged hands. “I think I have to do that anyway, don’t I?”

            Draco caught his eye, and there was no laughter in his gaze. “It’s harder than you might think, learning to relax and trust someone else,” he said quietly. “And I would rather that you did it because you made the commitment, than because you have no choice.”

            Harry understood then, and felt a distinct melting sensation in his chest. He reached up and managed to twine his clumsy fingers around Draco’s hair, pulling him down for a kiss. Draco didn’t resist, but his eyes were still wide and anxious when he sat up and examined Harry.

            “I’ll do this for you,” Harry said. “Of course I will. I chose you, didn’t I? Over the fear and the terror and death, even though there was a point when it would have seemed more peaceful to go into the flames. I suppose I can manage a bit of peace now, when I don’t have any enemies to fight.”

            Draco closed his eyes. Harry knew, now, what relief from desperation really looked like on someone’s face.

            “Thank you,” Draco said, and pressed Harry’s eyelids down. “Go to sleep.”

            Harry could have resisted—Draco had only asked him to relax, not to sleep, and he was still hungry—but the bond hummed in his ears in a reassuring way, and they had time, now. Time since the beast was destroyed, time since Ron and Hermione could reassure anyone who asked that he wasn’t being treated poorly.

            He slept.

*

            Draco pulled his hand back from Harry’s face and stared at him. He was covered in bandages, in most cases clutching potion to his burned skin, from almost head to foot. His hair was short and singed. If Draco pried away the bandages on his back, he wasn’t sure what he would see.

            Harry was still beautiful.

            You’re gone. That’s the end of your existence as an independent being. You’re bound to him, and you would still be if the rings and the bond disappeared tomorrow.

            Draco stood up with a smile. He was content with that, and although the words sounded as if Lucius had spoken them—a bitter Lucius with the smoke of hatred practically curling up from his mouth—it didn’t matter. Draco had earned a kind of freedom and love that Lucius had sacrificed, or might have, by the way he had alienated Narcissa.

            “He will recover?”

            Draco turned and beamed at his mother. She’d been invaluable in the last day: the one person he could trust to sit with Harry while he brewed the potions that would ease the burns, the one who had told Weasley and Granger they could stay and entertained them, the one who had been researching the cobalt band that had appeared on both rings. She moved forwards now and stared down at Harry with tenderness that Draco knew he would have envied not so long ago. Now, if he felt jealousy, it was for a different reason.

            “He will,” Draco said. “Although he does want to get permanently married so that the bond will stop bothering us.”

            “A wise choice.” His mother studied Harry with luminous eyes for a long moment, and Draco wasn’t sure what was going on behind them. Then she nodded and turned to Draco. “If you can stand to be away from him for a few minutes, your father wants to speak with you.”

“I have no father.” Draco snapped the words, although he made a habit of not snapping at his mother. She should have remembered Lucius’s terms of exile from the family. So far, she had seemed better at remembering them than Draco was himself.

“I call him that for a good reason,” Narcissa said, and took her seat beside Harry’s bed. Draco noticed he hadn’t given her permission to do that, but at this point, arguing about it would probably be close to suicide. He swallowed and walked out, ignoring the way the bond cinched around his waist. If it really was for only a few minutes, then he could bear it.

Lucius leaned against the railing around the top of the staircase that led up to Draco’s rooms, his face turned away. When he turned back and looked at him, Draco found himself pausing with his foot in the air, staring. Lucius had an expression of weariness, of sorrow, there that Draco couldn’t find an equivalent for in his memory.

“I understand if you don’t want to take me back into the family,” Lucius said. “But I wish you to listen.”

Draco snorted. “Still arrogant, I see.” He turned to march back into his rooms. He had been away from Harry for long enough, if all his father was going to do was repeat the same litany of threats and demands that he had before.

“Draco. Wait.”

The expression and the tone combined made Draco pause in mid-step again. Well, that and that his mother had thought it worthwhile to listen to Lucius. She left Draco free to disagree if he wanted to, of course. He turned around with his arms folded and his eyes rolling, so Lucius couldn’t have any illusions about what a huge favor Draco was doing him. “Fine. Talk.”

Lucius gave him a single, yearning look, then nodded. “I thought I was gaining power for the family,” he said. “By following the Dark Lord and maintaining my links with those in the Ministry who accepted, or pretended to accept, my contention that I was under the Imperius Curse in the first war. But I realize now the mistakes I made.”

“That you were stupid to accept a mark on your arm and kneel to someone else in the first place?” Draco drawled.

Lucius’s jaw clenched, but he went on. “That I was coming up with forms of power that were not transferable to anyone else in the family. My political contacts would die with me, or at least demand new prices from you because I was the one who had done them those favors, not you. And the Dark Lord…that was a net waiting to drop, as I saw eventually, not the linkage to prestige and grand ceremony that I had imagined it would be. I remained with him only because I saw nowhere else to go.”

Draco nodded unwillingly. He had, from Harry’s testimony during the trials as well as from other sources, learned the fact that his father had been searching for him during the battle at Hogwarts. He had wanted to find Draco and keep him safe more than he had wanted the power and favor from the Dark Lord Draco might have managed if he had captured Harry in the Room of Hidden Things.

Draco shivered now, thinking about that. Impossible to imagine such a relationship between him and Harry now, all too easy then. He had changed, and the changes had worked their way down to the level of his bones—or at least his prejudices, which he thought ran nearly as deep.

“After the war, I saw the folly I had made with the Dark Lord,” Lucius said. “But I thought the favors would remain with me, and that I could parley them into some form of stronger, more loyal power that I could pass onto you. The Wizengamot stripped me of the leadership of the family, though, which I didn’t expect.”

“I haven’t done so badly without you,” Draco said, mainly for the purpose of watching his father’s cheeks flare with color as if he’d been slapped.

“Yes,” Lucius admitted, words so slow that Draco had to concentrate to make them out. “I know. You managed on your own. But at the time, I went slightly mad. The only thing I could think was that you needed me, that while I’d made mistakes, I had all the experience. Then you didn’t give me some power, you didn’t give me Galleons, you didn’t take my advice. I’d gone from trying to use my power to correct the mistakes I made to having none at all.”

Draco ground his teeth. He turned away. He wanted to beat his hand against the railing, but he didn’t go that far, because there were still some things that Lucius wasn’t owed in the same way that Draco might owe him a fair hearing.

He understood.

He bloody well understood, because he would have felt the same way.

After the war, the only thing that had let him do as well as he had was the sense of a future to provide for. Children who would come. A wife he would marry. A mother he wanted to make proud. A father he had to placate and try to dance around, which was why he had answered softly for as long as he did. Traditions to uphold.

If someone had stripped that from him, perhaps by taking the Malfoy money and property away completely instead of handing it to someone else in the family, then he would have been lost. Adrift. Bereft. He would have reacted much like Lucius had, lashing out at the people he presumed had rendered him helpless.

He still thought he wouldn’t have gone as far as Lucius did, trying to bind someone else in forced marriage. He wouldn’t have wanted to add someone to the family that way, because they would have dragged the Malfoys down with them, likely, instead of empowering them. But…

The link between them pulsed and shone with that understanding he couldn’t get rid of. And he knew, now, why his mother had wanted him to hear Lucius out, and perhaps take him back into the family. Even if he had known this two days ago, Lucius would have been powerless to admit it. That he could say it now proved he had learned his lessons.

“I still don’t know if I can take you back,” he told Lucius.

Lucius nodded, his emotions gone again behind the smooth mask that Draco hated but knew he had imitated himself too many times to count. “You must think,” he said. “Can I add more to the family than I take away from it?”

Draco bit his lip savagely and shook his head. “There are other factors going into this,” he said. “Factors that you don’t know and won’t think about, no matter how much I want you to.”

Lucius only inclined his head instead of answering. Then he turned away and walked back down the corridor. Draco stood there, staring after him, and realized that he was panting as though he had run a long distance, or made a confession to a family member filled with painful and difficult things to admit.

Some of that is the bond, he managed to tell himself as he turned around and reentered the room where Harry waited for him. It doesn’t like me being away from him, and especially not with the man who made this so hard for us in the first place.

But much of it also was—and he knew this no matter how hard it would be to speak aloud—that he had to admit that he would be breaking with another tradition if he took Lucius back, and he was not sure whether he had passed the point where that would be unremarkable—

Or the final betrayal.

*

“I can’t believe you did that.”

“Wow, Hermione, I love you, too,” Harry said, leaning up so that he could hug Hermione. A charm that Narcissa had taught them would keep a thin layer of air between his skin and the skin of anyone he touched, so he would manage not to disturb the bandages.

Hermione pulled back and glared into his eyes, shaking her head. “You just—you really don’t see any difference between the inferno ritual the way it’s supposed to be performed and what happened when you started participating in it?”

Harry would have stifled a laugh if he could, but one broke out of him. “So you’re angry because I ignored your theories about the way the inferno ritual was supposed to work with a person?”

“She always gets angry about things like that, mate,” Ron said, and leaned in to hug him, too. “And if you had done exactly as you were supposed to and things still went wrong, then she would have hit you with questions until she figured out the problem, and then she would have wanted you to do it again.”

Hermione glared at Ron. He seemed unaffected, pulling back so he could study Harry’s face. “We all thought you were gone,” he said quietly. “You have no idea what it was like to hear you scream.”

“I know a little of it.” Harry had awakened with memories of Draco’s pain and fear in his head, thanks to the mental link that Draco had established between them during the ritual. “But—I have to thank you for what you did. And yes, Hermione, that does include you,” he added, which made Hermione’s cheeks turn pink. “Draco told me about the way you kept him safe and protected him. Thank you.”

“The idiot wanted to jump through flames,” Hermione said flatly. “Even if the magic of the ritual had let him reach you, he didn’t have any protection against being burned to death. Why does no one except me think of these things?”

“Because you’re the only intelligent one in the room. Clearly.”

It was Draco, with a smile on his face but with eyes and voice like ice, and Harry coughed warningly. Hermione stood back from him. Ron retreated a few steps and then stood still, as if he wanted to see how much the bond, or perhaps Draco, would object to that. Draco moved past him as if he wasn’t there, and then looked back with a patient expression and wide eyes when Ron staggered from his push.

“I’m sorry, you were standing there?”

“That’s enough,” Harry said, and sat up, leaning against Draco so that he could feel the reassurance of the bond. “I plan to marry you, Draco, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to simply abandon my old friends. You know the jealousy the bond causes won’t last forever, and you’ll regret it if you let it turn you against my friends.”

“Will you be the one to make sure I regret it?” Draco bent down towards him, eyelashes fluttering outrageously. “Because I think I could enjoy that.”

Harry shook his head, although he couldn’t keep back a smile, which caused a snort from Hermione. “Stop it,” he told Draco. “I think you can stop flirting for five seconds so that I can enjoy my friends’ company, too.”

Draco sighed, but settled for caressing Harry’s hair instead of responding, which Harry decided was tacit agreement. “We’re together now,” he told Ron and Hermione, Ron’s skeptical glance and Hermione’s cool one. “The bond influenced us at first, I’m sure, but the ending of the forced marriage meant that the bands that influenced us the most and demanded that we live together are gone. When we marry again, we’ll confirm our choices, and our choice of each other. I know that you don’t always like Draco—neither do I—but I do ask that you tolerate him.”

“Meanwhile,” Draco murmured, “I can offer Harry a mother-in-law who will actually welcome him and not tell him that he made a horrible decision in marrying me when he’s tired of dealing with you lot.”

“And you, too,” Harry said, turning and staring at Draco. Draco gave him a betrayed expression for it, but Harry didn’t let up. “You keep telling me how understanding and tolerant you are. Well, then act like it. Don’t torment my friends for your own amusement, and let me stay friends with them. Accept that this aspect of the bond won’t last forever and we’ll have to deal with other people and have our own lives soon.”

Draco closed his jaw to hold back the words Harry knew he wanted to speak, and his eyes looked thoughtful for a moment. Well, that was fine. Harry had dealt with worse. He eyed Draco meaningfully for a moment longer, and Draco finally nodded.

“You’re invited to the wedding, by the way,” he added, when he realized that Hermione and Ron might not have been told. “Just in case someone shreds the owl when it goes out, or forgets to send it.”

“Are you sure that you should get married when you have that unknown cobalt band in the ring?” Hermione studied Harry’s hand, refusing to look at Draco. “I don’t know what effect it might have on the various ceremonies, but it could be tremendous.”

“The effect would always be unknown, since nothing like this has ever happened before,” Harry said firmly. “That doesn’t mean we’re going to hold back any longer. The important thing is to get the bond settled.”

Draco cleared his throat.

“And get married for the sake of it, of course,” Harry said, and gave Draco a look of the kind that he had been avoiding when his friends were around. Sure enough, it made Hermione cough and Ron turn away with a red face. But, well, they would learn to put up with it. If they were too loud and obnoxious, then Harry would just remind them of how much he’d put up with when they were newly married.

The look Draco gave him back was worth everything.

*

unneeded: Thank you! But I seriously doubt they are re-hitched, as you put it, because the bond is still trying to tie them close to each other.

Night the Storyteller: Yes, that’s the sense I get of Harry as well, but in this story, he has learned ways to value himself.

Erin_49: Thanks! Draco was able to pass the circle with the mental linkage, but the protective energies that he’d raised, with the spiral and his dedications to the elements, kept him from crossing the circle physically. Plus, as Hermione pointed out here, there’s still the problem of fire itself that he wouldn’t have a defense against.

luvdreams: Thanks for reviewing.

SP777: Thanks! This story is one that I’ve wanted to write for a long time. The problem is that it takes a while for me to come up with new twists on the theme, or I would write more of these.

Eve: I appreciate any reviews, no matter their content.

Polka dot: No, but he is badly burned, and it’ll take him a while to recover.

Mya Malfoy: Thank you.

Lumcer: Yes, it’s pretty close to the end. But I don’t want to give a chapter number just yet since it might turn out not to be accurate.
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The Marriage of True Minds