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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 Five—The Demi-Demi-Marriage

            Harry’s first thought was that he didn’t know any spells that could stop a dragon, his second that the new wards shifting about them, not yet anchored in place, certainly wouldn’t, and his third that they were all going to die.

            Then he told himself not to be an idiot. His mind flashed back to the Triwizard Tournament, and he jerked his arm up, down, sideways, and barked out a Transfiguration incantation before he could convince himself that it wouldn’t work, which was half the problem with his combat spells.

            One of the peacocks stalking Hermione beyond the ward circle shrieked and cooed as its wings grew longer and scales streamed over its body. Harry swallowed and faced the winged serpent that now dawdled there, somewhere between ground and sky, its body brilliant green with golden lightning bolts stabbing down the sides. It had feathered wings in the same colors, but its head was still pale white.

            “Defend us,” Harry demanded in Parseltongue. “I know that this is your home, and you don’t want to see it burned down.”

            Not all the words came out the way they would if he was speaking in English, undoubtedly, but he said enough—or something—for the winged serpent to take notice. It faced the dragon diving down from the clouds, and its tongue flicked out before it snapped its body straight and took off. The wings stroked steadily, and it coiled its tail around itself as though it wanted to strangle the dragon.

            As Harry had intended, the dragon took notice of the winged serpent and swerved towards it, the way that Cedric’s dragon in the Tournament had been distracted by the dog he conjured. Harry had read once that a lot of dragons paid attention to the closest prey, unless one of its opponents was obviously more dangerous than the others.

            The serpent probably looked dangerous to the dragon because it was in the sky, just like the dragon was. Harry cast furiously, adding bright sparkles of light to the serpent’s wings and tail to attract the dragon further, and then spun around and looked for Hermione. She stood beyond the circle, the book forgotten in her hands, staring up at the contest in the sky.

            “Hermione!” Harry shouted, using the voice he had when Ron had nearly gone over a cliff during one of their wilder chases as Aurors.

            Hermione started and faced them again, and caught sight of Harry’s plan in his eyes or face or just because of that general telepathy that had sometimes done well by them when they were in danger on the Horcrux hunt. She nodded and immediately started chanting again. The blue wards that had drifted untethered in the air floated back towards her, compelled by the runes her wand drew towards the earth.

            Harry turned to Malfoy. He hadn’t stopped gaping up at the battle in the air. His grip on his wand was so tight that Harry started to fear they would have to send it back to Ollivander after all, just in two pieces.

            “Focus, Malfoy!” Harry snapped, his hands clenching on Malfoy’s. “We need to keep imagining the wards! Concentrate as hard as you can!”

            Malfoy turned back to him, his head shaking and his hands spread as though he was going to seize Harry and dash him to the ground. “It isn’t going to work,” he hissed. “There’s no wards that can keep out dragonfire, except the old ones that you destroyed, and it’ll come too close for us to—”

            “We still stand more of a chance with some wards than we do now,” Harry said, and raised his wand. “Concentrate.”

            Malfoy looked at him some more, but either Harry’s last word had actually hit him or he had decided that he might as well cooperate, because he closed his eyes. Harry reached out and began to weave the wards, letting the images from Malfoy’s mind flow along his hand and down his wand; Hermione hadn’t explained that part well, only that, when she began to put the circle and the runes into place around the Manor, they would take Malfoy’s imagination and make something solid out of it.

            And what other choice did they have at the moment?

*

            With his eyes closed, Draco was alone in the darkness with his racing thoughts.

            Which could have been summarized as: A dragon. His enemies had the money and the resources to bring in a dragon, and that meant this was the end of everything. Why keep fighting? He could let the wards, that is, the pathetic attempts at wards that Potter and the Mudblood were trying to help him with, fall now and walk out with open arms to welcome the fire diving at him. It would be a quicker end.

            Malfoys are not meant for quick ends.

            His father’s voice seared across an image of his mother in bed, and his mouth tightened. No, his father was right. No way that he could let his mother die in the flames, not if there was a chance. And he had reached out to Potter and done horrible things for his family just in the past few days. He could do something as easy as this.

            He concentrated, and felt no devouring flame, no touch of furious pain in the moments before it took him. Cautiously, he opened his eyes and turned his head.

            Granger was practically dancing with her wand, on the north side of the Manor now, working a rune-circle that made Draco’s lip curl. If she had had the power and the blood, he would have made her part of the family. She certainly had more magical knowledge than Potter did, and far more theory.

            Then he turned back, and saw what Potter was doing.

            If Granger danced with her wand, he partnered with it, demanded it work with him, and then flung forth the magic that came into it in noisy splashes of blue. The shields coalesced into sparkling wards, and flew to Granger, who fastened them into place. But she couldn’t have done that as fast as she did without Potter’s pace, which Draco thought looked as if it was enough to rip his wand apart.

            It wasn’t. It didn’t.

            And Potter and Granger had almost completed the circle, and the dragon hadn’t killed them yet.

            Draco looked up to see what was happening.

            The winged serpent that Potter had Transfigured out of Draco’s peacock still circled, beating its wings and darting around the dragon—a Common Welsh Green, Draco could see, now that he didn’t fear burning to death in the next second—and nipping its tail. The dragon kept turning to chase it, but its movements were hastier now, its chest inflating.

            Draco swallowed. So the dragon would breathe out soon and incinerate the serpent, and then they could go back to worrying about burning to death.

            Potter cursed. Draco spun back, a defense as to why he had stopped concentrating on the tip of his tongue.

            But Potter was crouching over the ground, studying what appeared to be nothing more than grass and soil, but which Draco assumed connected to their defenses in some way. He shook his head and yelled words to Granger that Draco didn’t bother keeping track of. What mattered was that the blue wards had stopped moving towards the circle Granger had sketched.

            Draco came up behind Potter and leaned a knee into the middle of his back to let him know he was there. “What is it?” he demanded, as low-voiced as possible. Talk loudly, and Potter would hear the nervous snap from Draco’s fear of the dragon. “What is it?”

            Potter spun around and glared at him. “Your fucking grounds,” he said. “Hermione has to get the circle down deeper to anchor it, and the runes are meeting resistance. She says that she recognizes it. Some bloody ancestor of yours made the soil so thick and unresponsive that we can’t get the circle into it.”

            Draco blinked, and then sneered at him. “If you’d told me that your plan involved disturbing the soil, I could have told you that,” he snapped. “Yes, of course we don’t want people able to affect our grounds when they’re not Malfoys. What would be the sense in—”

            Potter pulled away from him and stomped towards Granger, yelling something at her. Draco reached out and snagged a handful of his hair, pulling him back.

            Potter yanked and spun and crouched, and spit at Draco from a safe distance away, or what he seemed to think was a safe distance. Draco still had soft black strands of hair twined around his fingers. “What are you doing?”

            “I have a solution,” Draco said. He hadn’t known he would speak until he did, but now his voice and heart both hammered along in him, and he was confident that he could do what he must. “The solution we were going to do anyway. If you become a Malfoy, then the soil has to respond to you.”

            Potter stared at him. A curl of hair fell over his eyes. Then he said, “You told me the demi-marriage would be a full ceremony.”

            “The essentials are the important thing,” Draco said. “I want the ceremony because that way there can be no doubt that you belong to me.”

            Potter showed his teeth.

            “But the essentials are what bind you to the soil,” Draco finished hastily. “The same thing that would make it possible for us to affect it. We can’t raise the family-based wards yet, we’ll need the full ceremony for that, but we can do this.”

            Potter whipped his wand around in a motion that made it seem as if he was cutting his throat, and then reached up and clasped Draco’s wrists, drawing him down to crouch at his eye level. Draco gasped and bucked, but Potter hadn’t harmed him. He was just staring at him from a few centimeters away, intense as a forest fire.

            “Get on with it,” Potter said.

            Draco licked his lips, and began the chant.

*

            Harry closed his eyes. He didn’t understand half the words that Malfoy was using, but he knew they were Latin, which meant that he could ask Malfoy to repeat them later and Hermione to translate them.

            Why are you worrying about the translation when you know what they’re going to do to you?

            Harry shivered uncontrollably, and then clenched his teeth shut in irritation. He had already agreed to do this, and right now, this ceremony, or bare outline of a ceremony, or whatever it was, could be all that stood between them and fiery death. Why was he objecting now, of all times?

            Malfoy’s hands on his shoulders had begun to feel like granite claws. Harry opened his eyes and didn’t shift his weight, because it wouldn’t help, but he did look at Malfoy’s face.

            It was desperate, set, pale. Harry took a deep breath and reminded himself that, just because Malfoy was willing to do this and had come up with the idea, it didn’t mean that he actually liked the way things had turned out any more than Harry had. He reached up and laid his hands along Malfoy’s.

            Malfoy’s jaw popped down, and he looked for a second as though he was going to ask why Harry had done that, but he snatched up the chant and continued with it a few seconds later. Harry shuddered as he felt the earth beneath his knees seem to become softer, more yielding, and the way that his hair hung around his neck changed, too. His hair was bristling, and twisting, and moving, but it was changing.

            And he could feel the magic flowing into his bones, filling them.

            Harry closed his eyes. He knew that he had agreed to the changes, but he still didn’t want to look at Malfoy while they were happening, see them reflected in the way that Malfoy’s expression would probably change to a smug one. At the moment, it was enough to feel the power surging through him and know that he could use it when he needed to.

*

            Draco had been worried that he wouldn’t remember the chant, but this was the simplest part of the ceremonies, if the one that took the longest. He might not be able to remember what liquid to bathe Potter with first, or exactly how to mark his face, but he knew what to say. The words curved back to the beginning and repeated each time.

            And with each repetition, Potter changed a little more.

            His black hair was becoming softer, more tamed, and the way it curled around his ears was different. Draco couldn’t say how, because it wasn’t like he had ever spent much time staring at that part of Potter and doing anything but daydreaming about hitting him in the neck with a hex. But he knew it was. The magic told him so, washing through his fingers, reaching out and embracing Potter.

            The angles of his face were changing, too, not enough that someone who walked past him on the street wouldn’t have recognized him, but enough that they might have stared before they did. Draco smirked even as he chanted, wondering how Potter would react when he found out that he was now “pointy” in the way that he had always derided Draco for being.

            For a moment, a gleam of gold touched the strands of his hair, and Draco raised his voice, wondering if it could conquer the darkness and make a blond Malfoy out of Potter after all. There were references to brown-haired heirs in the literature on demi-marriages, and all of them had taken on the paler color that marked the Malfoys.

            But perhaps Potter’s hair was too dark. After a few more seconds, the gold vanished, and instead the magic turned its attention to softening Potter’s hair still further, and lengthening it until it brushed his shoulders.

            Potter hissed. Draco looked down and saw the golden tendrils working their way through Potter’s fingers, over his wand.

            Granger screamed.

            Potter’s muscles bunched in a way that Draco knew, that meant Potter was going to try to rise to his feet and rescue her, but Draco’s hands latched even further, and he raised his voice again, the only way he knew of telling Potter that he must stay still without breaking the chant.

            Potter’s muscles trembled, and then he bowed his head and seemed to force himself to give in. His breath was still rattling and rustling around like dragged chains, but he didn’t even turn his head; he went on staring fiercely at Draco.

            Draco leaned forwards as the last round of the chant neared. He had committed Potter to the Malfoys, to the land, to the rain and the sun and the wind, the representatives of the elements. Now he needed to commit Potter to the marriage—the last measure needed to bind him as part of the family.

            It would be only a temporary measure, of course, until they could actually perform the demi-marriage and attach him permanently to the name. But just because of that, they had to make it count all the more.

            Draco breathed into Potter’s face. Potter snapped his head backwards, staring at him as if he didn’t know what Draco was about.

            Draco didn’t dare break the chant, but the breath had to be done, and he glared until Potter seemed to realize that. He breathed back, and Draco opened his lips and caught it.

            That raised the magic around them, to the point that Draco could feel it crawling around them like stone walls and turning his blood to some leaping fountain. He shuddered, dizzy with power. He hoped that he would be the one who could hold on until the end of the chant, now, and not release Potter’s hands because of the way his shook.

            One last chant.

            He finished it with a long hiss on the last “familia,” and then leaned forwards and slapped his lips over Potter’s.

            Potter’s muscles tensed again, a muffled jerk of surprise. He didn’t pull away and yell at Draco, but it seemed likely that he was considering it. Certainly his lips were a good deal stiffer beneath Draco’s than in any kiss Draco had ever had before, and his hands wrung as though he thought breaking Draco’s wrists was a good idea.

            But then he kissed back.

            No tongue, but a decent movement of lips, Draco thought, his brain suspended for a single dazzling instant in the middle of all that magic, able to think about something as ordinary as this.

            And then the nothingness exploded around him, and flung him high into the air. He was gasping from the force of it; he was bent double, and his hands were around Potter’s, and Potter was sitting there, waiting for the moment it was right to break away.

            Draco sucked in a breath and looked up at him.

            He hadn’t changed in his eye color, and the gold had made no inroads in the black of his hair, either. But his scar was gone, and his forehead was marked instead with a small, coiling dragon. Draco felt his lips move. Given his first name and the way that they were fighting a dragon during the first part of their wedding, he found that appropriate.

            “Done,” he whispered.

            Potter bolted to his feet—Draco wondered if it was his imagination, or if Potter really did move more gracefully than he had a short while ago—and whipped around with his wand aimed high. Granger had been beyond the circle, Draco remembered, and leaned around Potter, no, he would have to call him something else now, to see if she was all right.

            She was backed up towards the circle, with the dragon hanging above her. It had not attacked yet; its tongue was flicking out instead, and it clawed at its muzzle with one talon as though someone had stuffed pepper up its nostrils.

            Draco blinked, and then realized what had happened. His laughter rang out in spite of himself. The blast of magic he and Potter had unleashed had dazzled the thing much the way it had them, but instead of giving it strength, it had clouded the dragon’s senses. Draco remembered reading a book saying that a dragon’s perceptions were keener when it hunted. Its eyes would be wide open, its ears tracking all sorts of sounds it never noticed most of the time. This was the equivalent of blinding and deafening it.

            Granger turned towards them when she heard Draco laugh, and then ran desperately for the rune circle.

            The dragon’s head snapped towards her. It might be paralyzed by some of the blasts of light and power they’d come up with, but its fundamental instinct was still to track prey, to pay attention to running things. It dived with its talons aimed straight at her.

            Potter spoke, with compelling power behind every word, a curse Draco had never heard, and the earth and sky split apart.

*

            Harry threw the spell before he could think if it was a good idea, while he was still brooding and deciding and hesitating, and then remembered how Hermione and Malfoy would probably react to it.

            But if it saved Hermione’s life, he thought, as he rode the earthquake down to a kneeling position and bowed his head against the thunder, he would live with whatever disdain and incomprehension came his way.

            The shaking settled. Harry rose carefully to his feet, because sometimes when he had done this curse—always in battle alone, always against opponents that he knew were going to kill him and so get away with torture and murder—a second tremor had happened.

            When he looked up and around, though, it had worked. The sky was slowly stitching itself back together form the gaping wound his curse would have caused, opening a deep tunnel to another place. The sight of the hole made Harry’s eyes water, but he could turn his head to the side and look at it indirectly.

            Yes. The last stitches sealed, and the hole was gone.

            And the dragon with it.

            Harry swallowed and turned back to face the rune circle. Somewhere in that disaster, perhaps because Malfoy had bound him to the land and Hermione’s spell had picked up on it or perhaps because of the magic he and Malfoy had generated, the wards had snapped into place. Now shimmering blue walls, like quiet fountains, surrounded the Malfoy property. Harry sat down before he thought about it, and then winced a little as Hermione descended on him.

            “You can’t just—” Hermione said, staring at him, and then shook her head. “You can’t Vanish a dragon like that!”

            “He didn’t Vanish it,” Malfoy said, in a tone Harry had never heard from him before. Maybe that was the way he talked when he disapproved of his cousin-husband, Harry thought tiredly. He turned his head, feeling the bones almost grinding together in the back of his neck from weariness, and found Malfoy staring at him. His face didn’t have an expression that Harry recognized, either. “He created a hole that took it—elsewhere.” He shook his head and glanced away. “If you could do that, Potter, why not do it from the beginning of the fight?”

            Harry raised his eyebrows. “It’s a Dark spell. And it takes more energy than I thought I could spare. At that point, I still hoped that we could raise the wards without stopping to deal with the dragon.” He sighed and wiped his brow, where the sweat was thick enough to feel like dust. “I was wrong.”

            “It’s a Dark spell,” Hermione agreed, almost pleasantly, but Harry heard the charge in the back of her voice and winced. Striking lightning couldn’t compare to this. “And you’re going to tell me where you learned it.”

            Harry faced her unflinching. “You know where I did. Auror training, just like all the rest of them I’ve shown you.”

            “I don’t believe they teach Dark spells in Auror training,” Hermione said. “Ron would have told me. He tells me everything.”

            Harry shrugged. If she didn’t want to believe him, that was her look-out.

            “Listen,” Malfoy said, and stepped forwards. “We have to complete the demi-marriage. What we did was only the most basic set of spells to make sure that you could bind the wards to the soil. It’s going to take more than that to make you become a true Malfoy.”

            “You already look different,” Hermione told Harry in an undertone. The anger was still there in the back of her mind, Harry knew, but she stepped forwards and gave him a long, slow look that said she wasn’t going to let that stop her concern for him. “Your scar’s—gone. Some kind of dragon in its place. And your hair and your face look different.”

            Harry raised his hand to touch his scar, and then brought it back down. “Good,” he said. “I’ve wished for years that my scar looked different, to get rid of that stupid connection to Voldemort and the names the papers were always coming up with. Lucky Lightning, the Prophet called me for a while, can you believe it.”

            Hermione just shut her eyes.

            “I made this decision,” Harry said, and stood up, and turned to Malfoy. “Yes, we need to have the wedding as soon as possible, you’re right, especially because the idiots with the dragon might attack again, and the Ministry hasn’t made any progress on learning the identities of the first lot who came after you. You’re ready?”

            “There are ceremonies to be gone through,” Malfoy said, still staring at him. “But I believe that I can be ready by tomorrow.”

            Harry nodded.

*

            Draco tried not to curl his fingers around his new wand, tried not to flinch as he looked at Potter. One of the power differentials between them that he had counted on tipping in his favor was that Potter knew no Dark magic.

            It seemed that was no longer true.

            And a second thought, a much more dangerous one, whispered on the heels of that first one. Should I be trying to conquer him then, if he is so strong? Alliance might work better.

*

            unneeded: Exactly. Hermione has found some worrying material about the demi-marriage, but a lot of it only applies to people who are already pure-bloods raised with those ideals that Draco thinks the marriage ceremony should instill in Harry. Harry is too busy being himself and fighting to yield that easily.

            SP777: Wasn’t it? I liked the ending of that chapter.

            disgruntledfairy: You got an abbreviated version of it here, but don’t worry, you’ll get a much longer one in the next few chapters.

            Nightlo: The public is going to explode.
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The Name I'll Give to Thee