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Ancient and Noble Houses	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 29877 -:- Recommendations : 2 -:- Currently Reading : 5
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Chapter Forty-Nine--Into the Light
            "What is Master Black doing on the floor?" Kreacher's voice, far from being shrill, was so quiet that Harry winced.
            Draco's hand covered his for a moment, and then he pulled back and turned to face Kreacher with an expression that Harry had to admire, no matter how much he knew it would have driven him mad the year before. It was haughty and aristocratic, so tight that Kreacher could probably break his head on it, and pale with anger rather than fear.
            "Have you any right to ask that?" Draco's voice lowered and gathered emphasis until Harry was surprised to realize that Draco was still on the floor with him, instead of on his feet and confronting the elf. "You aren't your master's ally or servant. Not when you knew that coming in here might kill him. Not when you sent him into the garden to commit a murder."
            Kreacher's ears stood straight up on his head, and he stared at Draco as if he had never seen him before. "Master Black is knowing the consequences of being the Black heir," he muttered. "It is impossible not to be knowing the consequences."
            "He knew that he would come here and see his soul," Draco said with deceptive mildness. "But he didn't know that the house would choose him, or what it would mean. He wasn't raised in the wizarding world."
            "That is not being Kreacher's fault!" Kreacher threw up his hands.
            "If someone is going to be to blamed, it's going to be you." Draco's voice lowered to an ominous hiss. "You were the only one who knew the full truth. You're the one who's going to take the blame."
            Harry started. He had been so busy listening to the argument between Draco and Kreacher, which he had to admit was pretty entertaining, that he hadn't noticed Draco was maneuvering them closer and closer to the door. Kreacher seemed not to notice, either, but he had more excuse, since he was involved in the actual argument.
            Draco shot Harry a smoldering glance. Harry blinked and then nodded. They were close enough now that they could probably dart through the door once Kreacher's attention was distracted.
            Draco's hands closed around his forearm. Harry nodded one more time, and whirled to his feet, dashing for the door around the side of Kreacher, trusting that Draco would follow.
            Kreacher spun towards him, shrieking with rage. His hands closed over the silver necklace he had bound around Harry's neck, and he yanked backwards so viciously that Harry went flying off his feet.
            "Master Black is not to be leaving the Black house without an heir!" Kreacher yelled it into Harry's ear, clinging and pulling on the necklace until Harry couldn't breathe. "Master Black is becoming the next Black. And--"
            Hands grabbed Harry's legs from outside the room and yanked, too. For a second, Harry thought he would tear in half, or at least his windpipe would, from the hellish pressure on it.
            Then someone kicked Kreacher from the back, and Harry was free. He reared his head back long enough to take a breath and tear the necklace from his throat and revel in the fact that his heart was still pounding, and then flung himself into his friends' welcoming arms.
            He turned back in time to see Kreacher whirl on Draco, his hands out and forming claws, his eyes and mouth so wide that he looked as if he would swallow Draco. Draco was lifting his wand, but Harry didn't know if he would raise it to a defensive position in time.
            The black tide that rose inside Harry had nothing to do with the house, and everything to do with him. He raised his own wand.
            "Vincere!" Harry shouted, and swept his wand down in a line so precise that he heard Ron whistle low in admiration behind him.

            If the house hadn't given him the rage, it had given him the spell. Harry couldn't remember knowing it before, but it swept out from him and enveloped Kreacher in the midst of a cold black cone.
            Kreacher shrieked again, but this time it didn't sound like he was about to devour Draco. His hands locked off to the sides, his head tilted back, and the sound coming from his throat grew smaller, a mouse's shrill squeak.
            Harry blinked, and blinked again. Kreacher was actually shrinking. Harry hadn't known that it was possible with any spell; he supposed he had only known the spell in the same way that he had known the Legilimency necessary to read Draco's mind weeks ago. He grimaced a little about what Hermione would say if he told her he had used another spell he didn't know the origin or the meaning of.
            When Kreacher was the size of an actual mouse, the shrinking stopped. Harry gestured vaguely towards his friends, and Hermione cast a spell that clapped a glass jar down over Kreacher.
            Harry exhaled in relief and turned back towards Draco.
            Draco was looking at him like...
            In a way that Harry immediately wished wasn't in front of his friends, because he didn't want them to see it. A look that private should be reserved for him alone.

            "Are you all right, Harry?" Hermione was fussing over him, her hands stroking the sides of Harry's neck in a way that made Draco's eyes shift to her and light up without much of a friendly gleam. Harry blushed and stood up, brushing off Hermione's hands when she would have reached for him again.
            "I'm fine," he said. "And I'm naked. Can someone get me some clothes, please? And help Draco out of there?"
            Ron, who seemed to have been coping with the fact of Harry's nakedness just fine up until now, suddenly flushed violently and tried to wrap Harry in the Invisibility Cloak. Harry reckoned that was the best he was going to get for right now, especially since all the clothes in the house had probably been worn by a dead Black, and wrapped the Cloak around himself, leaving only his head visible. Ron looked vastly relieved.
            Harry turned to Draco. Hermione had her hand extended to help him, but Draco had disdained it, and walked out of the ordeal room on his own. His eyes were still on Harry, and that same deep smolder was in them. This time, Harry knew it wasn't any need to fool Kreacher or communicate the plan to him without speaking that made them do that.
            "Thank you," Harry told him. "You saved my life." It was all he could say, in front of Ron and Hermione. He tried to make sure that his eyes contained all that he couldn't say, though, and Draco smiled and reached out, clasping his wrist and squeezing it.
            "Take Kreacher with us," he told Hermione, who was looking at the glass jar with Kreacher under it with warring expressions on her face. "I have a theory about what part he played in this."
            Hermione looked at Draco warily, as if thinking that he would try to execute Kreacher right there, but nodded and picked up the glass jar, following after them. As they moved through the corridors of the house, Harry took deep breaths. He didn't think it was his imagination that the brooding atmosphere had lessened, that the house had become somehow less threatening, less intelligent, and less awake in the short while since they had come out of the ordeal room.

            And that meant, Harry thought, if he was right, that the house could go back to being dormant, the way it had been all those years while Sirius was in Azkaban and the house had no proper heir. It could just lie there and die. Eventually, Harry would have to figure out what to do with it, whether he could tame it, whether he wanted to keep Draco and Narcissa as his heirs, and all the rest of it.
            Draco shot him a sideways glance and squeezed his wrist, correctly finding it even under the hang of the Invisibility Cloak.
            But not today.
*
            "I think Kreacher was the representative of the house, the one that conveyed its will to its heir."
            Draco sat comfortably at the table in the Gryffindor common room. It was several hours later, after Harry had had another bath to try and remove the effects of the hyssop, and got dressed again--that part, Draco could have done without--and the Gryffindors had sneaked Draco into their common room so that they could have a comfortable discussion without worrying about curfew. Draco wasn't worried about getting back to the Slytherin common room again, either. He would have an Invisibility Cloak with him when he chose to ask for it.
            And something else, too, more than likely.
            "I don't understand what that means." Granger stared at the small glass jar on the table, with Kreacher still using his wrists to hammer furiously on the sides. "Does that mean he was really the house's heir while it didn't have a human one?"
            Draco paused, then inclined his head graciously. "That's nearer to the truth than I expected you to come," he murmured, and Granger flushed a little, looking as if she didn't know whether she should be pleased or not. "Yes. That's the best way to describe it. He looked for an heir, and looked for the way to bring the right heir into the equation at the right time. He offered himself as a convenient target, at times, so Harry could blame him and express that rage and hatred that the house desired in its heirs." He looked at Harry out of the corner of his eye, and Harry shook his head a little. So he still hadn't told his friends he had tortured Kreacher, then. Well, Draco would leave that up to him to confess in his own time. "He hastened Harry's first kill. If Harry had spent more time in the house, he would have shown him more secrets, like the ordeal room, and attempted to entice him into using them. Luckily, Harry had the sense to leave the house."
            Harry squeezed his hand. Harry's friends politely ignored both that and the look Draco could feel himself giving Harry in return.
            "You've heard of these representatives before?" Granger asked.
            Draco nodded. "They're rare, so I didn't think of the theory at first. But there was always the chance that a family line would be disrupted, or the true heir would be raised away from the house. So it made sense to connect the house to an object, or a living being, that would serve its will and had every reason to do so. When the heir came into contact with that object or that living being, then it would do what the house wanted."
            "Kreacher didn't try to corrupt me when we were living in Grimmauld Place last year, though," Harry pointed out.
            Draco smiled at him. "You weren't of age. The house could initiate its heirs before then, mostly, but not when someone wasn't of the blood and didn't live in it for an unbroken period of time. Last summer gave it the excuse it needed."
            Granger looked a little ill. "And if you hadn't handled the ordeal the way you did..."
            "Harry might have killed me," Draco said. He saw no reason to conceal that part from them. "And then the house would have had its insane heir, good and right impulses literally murdered."
            He saw Weasley giving him a steady stare at the notion that Draco was the source of Harry's good and right impulses, and grinned.
            "But what are you going to do with Kreacher, and about the house?" Granger asked Harry, still staring broodingly into the glass jar. "How can you..."
            "I'm going to make the decisions later," Harry said roughly, and turned to Draco. "There's only one thing I want to do tonight. And Draco can help me with that."
            Draco glanced back, letting his eyes show half-lidded, feeling his blood heat. He heard Weasley's disgusted exclamation, and Granger's chiding, but he didn't care. He wasn't the one who had to listen to them.
            And Harry was doing a more than passable job of handling them.
            All Draco had to do was lean back in his chair and wait for the moment when Harry was ready to go with him. And while his heart raced, waiting for it, his body felt perfectly poised, prepared.
            Is this what it's like to be in love?
*
            MPythonGirl: There's no indication in canon that the Potters have the same sort of house. If it was the one they had in Godric's Hollow, that was pretty thoroughly destroyed, and no one else has ever told Harry that James had other properties. Besides, the Potters were a Light family, or at least Muggle-approving, and that means they're unlikely to have tried to bind their heirs to the house in the same way.
            Alexiel: The title is plural simply because I happened to like the sound better.
            SP777: And madness is not an uncommon result, as Draco reveals here.
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Ancient and Noble Houses