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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 Six—The Bathing

            Harry raised his head slowly from his pillow, blinking, then grunted as he remembered. Malfoy had told him to sleep late this morning, because apparently the demi-marriage was best performed in the afternoon. Something about the slant of the light being correct then.

            I should have paid more attention.

            But on the list of things from the demi-marriage that Harry thought likely to affect him, the slant of the light was pretty low. And he had chosen this, as he told Hermione, wound himself in chains of obligation and threat and decision. Learning disturbing things about the demi-marriage or the ceremonies that surrounded it wouldn’t actually change what he had to do.

            He rose to his feet and crossed the bedroom to look out the window. Always assuming that the view of the grounds it gave could be trusted, instead of it being an enchanted window that always showed a perfect day, it was about mid-morning. There were a few peacocks stalking under his window, graceful and slow until something startled them and made them bound. The lawn was smooth enough to look like a billiard table; Harry was sure the house-elves kept it that way. Here and there were equally perfect spots of red and blue and yellow, the flowers the house-elves also tended.

            And around the edge of the property shone the blue flames of the wards.

            Harry nodded at them. Demi-marriage or not, only at the beginning of paying his debt or not, he had done his part and more in that particular payment, and he thought he could be proud of himself.

            He turned towards the bathroom, wondering if he should call Ossy. He wasn’t hungry, and he didn’t know if he was supposed to eat anything this morning anyway, but he might also lack towels and soap for the bathroom—

            Someone knocked on the door. Harry turned, blinking. It seemed strange Malfoy would have come to see him, but even stranger that Narcissa or one of the house-elves would have knocked. “Come in,” he called.

            The door swung open, and Malfoy entered, with two floating green things draped over his arm. Harry blinked at them. They looked like sheer silk robes, and he swallowed, an uncomfortable feeling in his throat that he knew what they would be wearing for the marriage ceremony itself.

            Malfoy laid the robes on the bed and clasped his hands behind his back, which made his arms curve like a bird’s wings. Then he bowed to Harry, for all the world like a bird pecking for seed. Harry opened his mouth to laugh, and then Malfoy did something that topped it all, ridiculous gestures notwithstanding.

            “Harry.”

            Harry jerked a little, the way he had yesterday when Malfoy was doing the chant and he’d heard Hermione scream, but he managed to nod cautiously back. If this was playacting, Malfoy had doubtless done it in the service of the marriage ceremony. He took that dead seriously.

            Malfoy straightened up and came a step forwards, reaching out to put his hands on Harry’s shoulders the way he had during the chant yesterday. Harry stood still and suffered it, because the grip didn’t get as heavy. Malfoy studied him from that point-blank range, and then smiled, a soft smile that had nothing to do with emotion. “I can’t call you Potter now, when your name has technically already changed,” he explained.

            “I thought you said that my name wouldn’t change officially until the demi-wedding,” Harry said, shaking his head. There were strange things happening to him, tied to the tone of voice in which Malfoy spoke and the expression on his face. He doesn’t want this to happen any more than I do, even though he’s the one who proposed it. But he’s capable of pretending, and he practically worships the pretense. It’s like the way I was willing to go ahead and do those interviews with Skeeter to get the truth out in fifth year.

            This was something Malfoy took so seriously that he made it seem high and dazzling to Harry, too.

            “To me, it has changed,” Malfoy said. “Because you intend to keep your commitment. I see that now, after the way you stood up to the dragon.”

            Not quite the truth there, either, Harry thought, from the way that Malfoy clamped his lips together. But Harry just nodded and said, “What’s the first thing I have to do?”

            “Relax.”

            Harry stared at Malfoy, starting to open his mouth. He couldn’t believe that Malfoy would have chosen a ceremony that required him to do service for Harry.

            But Malfoy stepped up to him and made a little spinning gesture with one finger. More because he was caught in that sense of strangeness than because he wanted to, Harry turned his back, and Malfoy reached over and slipped off the shirt that Harry had worn to bed.

            Harry tensed. The strangeness was there, too, not sexual, just solemn and pale. And Malfoy wouldn’t want to touch him, anyway. This wasn’t a marriage that they had to consummate. Hermione had assured him of that. This was—well, this was just part of the ceremony. If nothing else, Harry would have to take off his clothes to wear that sheer green robe that Malfoy had brought him.

            “Relax,” Malfoy whispered into his ear. “You need to show that you have trust in me, to take care of you and absorb you into the family as a Malfoy spouse. The Malfoys are the ones who take care of their cousins and their new heirs, not the other way around. The parents or the richer family is the one who has the ability to do that.”

            Harry shut his eyes. He hated sacrificing what his life could have been this way.

            But he would hate it even more if his sacrifice turned out to be for nothing, and so he made his muscles fall down into lax ripples the way he had sometimes done when he was making a speech for the Ministry and wanted it to actually succeed. His head lolled back as Malfoy took off his trousers, and he forbade himself to bolt the way he wanted to. Luckily for his sanity, Malfoy left his pants alone.

            Malfoy stood there behind him, silent. Harry didn’t know what happened next, but he also forbade himself to turn around and ask. That was just what they had to do. He breathed lightly and waited for Malfoy to perform whatever step in the ceremony was brewing in his pointy little head.

*

            Draco honestly wasn’t sure whether Harry’s body had changed from the ceremony they’d performed yesterday or whether Harry had always looked differently than he thought, under those Auror robes and official robes and school robes that were all Draco ever saw him in.

            But the body in front of him was all muscle, all over. Scars here and there, of course, but they were mostly the scars of burns and blasts from hexes that most Aurors would carry. Paler than expected, too, which meant Harry must not spend much time out in the sun. Draco half-smiled. Well, he would have plenty of time for that now, even with all the studying he had to do. He might as well sit in the sun in the gardens and do that as anywhere else.

            Not very broad shoulders, a tapered waist. Harry would never be as impressive and bulky as someone like Gregory or Vincent had been. But Draco still wanted to trace the edges of those muscles with his fingers, and see Harry twitch.

            As it happened, though, there was actually a reason that he had almost stripped Harry, and it wasn’t to stare for his own pleasure. “Come,” he whispered, and guided Harry with a hand on his shoulder and one on his hip into the bathroom.

            The tub was large, and slightly curved on the bottom only, so that it was possible to balance upright. Harry was flinching by the time that Draco indicated he should raise his leg and step into it, but that was probably only from cold or the fact that Draco was dressed while he was almost naked. Draco herded him into the middle of the tub and then clapped his hands, glad that most of the magic in the house’s bathrooms was made to respond to members of the family rather than cast spells.

            Harry yelped when the stream came down, but then stopped, probably because he realized that it was a fine and warm spray, not the freezing cold he must have anticipated. He did try to turn around and look at Draco, though. “You’re dressed,” he muttered. “Aren’t you going to get wet?”

            Draco smiled tightly. He appreciated and resented at the same time that Harry had remembered he wouldn’t be able to cast a Drying Charm.

            “This is traditional,” he explained, reaching into a pocket and drawing out the bar of mingled soap and shampoo that the ceremony called for. “The Malfoy heir entering the demi-marriage shows that he can soak his clothes and not care, because he always has more.”

            “Then why not give me some I can soak?” Harry muttered, but he closed his eyes obediently as Draco rubbed the soap in his hands, creating a thick, spicy-smelling lather, and began to scrub him. Another of those minute flinches, nothing large, and then Harry bowed his head and went back to the controlled breathing that Draco had heard him using a few minutes ago, when Draco first stripped him.

            “Because the new heir takes off all his old clothes, sheds his old coverings as he sheds his old name,” Draco murmured back, drawing his fingers up and over Harry’s shoulders, scrubbing. Harry stood there and let him do it, but it was relaxed in the same way that a unicorn waiting for hunters was. “And then he dresses himself anew, so that he can be entirely clad in his new family’s colors.”

            “Oh.” More tensing. Draco worked the soap in, and wondered. Harry was rich enough on his own to afford servants if he wanted them. Draco fully understood why someone wouldn’t want to be scrubbed by a house-elf, but had Harry really never had the experience of someone else washing him? It was a luxury Draco couldn’t imagine giving up.

            You will have to, for the duration of the demi-marriage, unless you take lovers who can do no harm to your discretion or your reputation.

            Draco shrugged at himself and then squeezed the soap, working the lather between his palms so that it became smoother and thinner and changed its scent. He pushed his soaking, silky fingers up along Harry’s neck and worked them so deep into the new, longer, softer hair that Harry tensed again.

            “You haven’t looked in a mirror since I changed you yesterday, have you?” Draco asked, because Harry acted as though the weight and length of his own hair surprised him now.

            “Since we changed me,” Harry said. Draco blinked at the nape of his neck again. “No. Hermione told me about the scar. That’s the only change I really know about.”

            “Your face looks a little different,” Draco said, and worked his fingers in again. There were strands of Harry’s hair that he was sure he had washed before, but they kept getting away from him and curving around to prove that it was only water on them and not shampoo after all. The essentials of the ceremony wouldn’t change the thickness of his hair, then. “Your hair is softer. And the scar.”

            Harry grunted, and said nothing else. His head was drooping forwards, as though some of the relaxation that Draco had assumed the touches would inspire in his muscles was happening in spite of himself. Draco smiled and rubbed the back of Harry’s neck with the shampoo, then guided him forwards so that the shower-spray splashed his hair.

            Harry spluttered, but his voice was normal when he spoke again. “And you like these changes?”

            Draco blinked some more, and wondered whether he would gain power if he confessed or if he kept silent. Before he could decide, Harry had come to his own conclusion, from the sound of the twig-dry chuckle in his voice. “Yes, of course you do. The more I look like a Malfoy and less like the boy you used to hate, the better it is for you.”

            “It’s not as though we’re going to have sex,” Draco reminded him, and shoved him forwards so that Harry caught himself with his hands on the wall of the shower. Draco blinked again. Harry acted as though he had done something like this before, despite his evident lack of experience with someone washing him. Draco shrugged it off and said, “But I do like that you’ll look more like part of my family. You can be handsome when you want to, you know. I don’t know why you continue to huddle in ragged clothes like the ones you wore here.”

            “No, you wouldn’t understand it,” Harry said, and remained silent for the rest of the time that Draco washed him. Well, other than a sharp intake of breath when Draco knelt down behind him and rubbed his fingers over Harry’s buttocks, ignoring the way that the cloth of the pants rucked under his fingers. Technically, the supplicant in the demi-wedding was supposed to go through this bathing entirely naked, but that wasn’t a requirement most of the time, and Draco preferred to leave Harry a little of his dignity.

            I’m not kind. But he can think I am, if he likes.

*

            Harry reached up towards his hair the instant he got out of the shower, intent on feeling the softness for himself, but Malfoy caught his wrists. Harry tensed against the push he thought would follow, the way he had when Malfoy shoved him forwards under the water. That used to be one of Dudley’s favorite tricks, to sneak into the bathroom when Harry was taking one of his rare showers and shove him like that.

            “I have to dry your hair,” Malfoy said. “To prove that I can take care of you.”

            Frankly, Harry didn’t see what drying someone’s hair had to do with taking care of them, but he shrugged and followed the subtle—and not-so-subtle—pushes of Malfoy’s hands until he was sitting on a stool that was evidently right in front of him. He bowed his head and let his hair fall forwards around his face, shivering as the cool, wet strands started to drip. He no longer felt warm.

            The towel that Malfoy wrapped around him in the next few seconds helped with that, though, and so did the second one that he laid on top of Harry’s head. “All done with towels,” Malfoy said, when Harry murmured a question that he really didn’t know how Malfoy managed to make out. “Not charms. This is the way that the ancient ceremony was completed, and this is the way that I’m going to do it.”

            Harry closed his eyes and went with it. In some strange way, Malfoy was right and it was pleasant to be dried like this, hands moving up and down his sides in smooth strokes instead of rubbing roughly the way that Harry always dried himself, or the quick, astringent tickling of a Drying Charm.

            He’d probably learn how to do this for himself, too. What would he have when he was a Malfoy but time?

            Harry shrugged to himself. That was one of the reasons he had made this choice, really, one of the things he had told Hermione would be no sacrifice. He wanted the time to think, to make decisions for himself. He’d swept straight from the Dursleys into Hogwarts, straight from Dumbledore’s murder into war, straight from the war into studying for his NEWTS and then Auror training. He deserved the chance, for once, to slow down and figure out what he wanted from his life.

            Then Malfoy lifted the towels and slapped the middle of Harry’s back. Harry jumped. Truthfully, it wasn’t a slap. It was just something sticky and warm that had no right to be there. Harry started to hunch his shoulders again, wondering if Malfoy had sacrificed everything to his idea of a joke and was going to rub urine on Harry or something.

            Or, maybe, this was part of the ceremony. Pure-blood families might do some really weird things, for all Harry knew.

            “Relax,” Malfoy said, as irritated as though he had warned Harry about this and Harry hadn’t listened. “It’s just lotion, mixed with balm. A good way to clean you up further, soften your skin, and heal any wounds that the new heir has.”

            Harry greeted those words with relief, and not just because it wasn’t urine after all. It was more soothing when Malfoy talked about all the things heirs had undergone down the ages, instead of it being Draco Malfoy and Harry Potter. “Oh. It smells nice.” The lotion did, a mixture of the spices that Malfoy had had in the shampoo he’d used on Harry and something else. Not flowery but woodsy, Harry thought, reminding him of some of the dark, secret places in the Forbidden Forest.

            “Another method of cleaning,” Malfoy said, but his voice was a little muffled. Maybe Harry’s response had taken him off-guard. He massaged the lotion in, and Harry leaned forwards and put his elbows on his knees and took it in.

            The hands moving on his shoulders, the way that Malfoy muttered to himself now and then when laboring over a particularly curved spot, the fact that Malfoy was completely focused on Harry right now and doing what had to be done…

            He liked it.

            Yeah, he’d never had half the luxuries that were apparently available to him here. But he could do better than live with them, the way he’d been assuming he would. He could learn to like them, to want them, to wallow in them.

            I’m more decadent than I thought.

            Or more human.

            Harry shrug-shoved the thoughts away, and heard Malfoy move off and put down whatever bottle or box he’d held on the floor. He started to stand up, but Malfoy immediately came back to him and said in a strange soft voice, “Hush. I’m not ready for you to move yet.”

            Harry raised his eyebrows. That was a strange thing to say. Not “The ceremony says you can’t move yet,” but that he wasn’t ready.

            That made Harry wonder if they were getting away from the idea of heirs and demi-marriages in the past and what would ideally be done during them, and back into the personal Potter and Malfoy. Except his name wasn’t Potter anymore, and Harry was probably refining too much on a little sentence Malfoy said. He probably had one more lotion to put on or something. Harry tried to sit there patiently, his elbows on his knees and his head bowed forwards so that his hair dangled around his hands.

            Then Malfoy brought something else back, something with a lid that clinked and clanked, and when he touched the middle of Harry’s back with his hands coated in that, Harry gasped and tossed his head despite himself.

            It was so warm, so soft, so inviting, that it felt like Malfoy was sinking him into an upright bed of comfortable pillows already heated by someone lying in them. “What is that?” he asked, when he could. His mouth was filled with saliva and it spilled down his chin, and he shut his eyes and turned his head when Malfoy began to move his hands away, wanting more, yearning after it.

            “This is another lotion,” Malfoy said, but his voice was so low that he didn’t sound smug. Or maybe he really wasn’t and Harry was listening too hard for him to be. Malfoy’s hands moved in a way that a smug person’s probably wouldn’t, up and down, over and over, and then in circles, rubbing in, taking, tracing, tracking.

            It was so good. This time Harry could only compare it to liquid sunlight. He whimpered and turned his head despite himself, seeking more of it, and Malfoy obliged him, spilling up onto his face.

            “A special lotion?” Harry asked, when he could breathe. “Kept for the ceremony?”

            “Yes,” Malfoy said. “And it’s supposed to help the person who’s marrying into the family bond more strongly to it, too.”

            Harry opened his mouth to ask how that meant it would affect him, and then closed his mouth and sat there again. Because he, honestly, didn’t give a fuck about anything right now but the way that Malfoy touched him, the heat and the way it had begun to soak into his skin, easing some aches so old that he hadn’t even been aware they were still there.

            He laid his head back and floated on the motions of Malfoy’s hands. He doubted that he would enjoy anything else about the ceremony as much, but he might as well enjoy this while it lasted.

*

            Draco became aware of a warmth like the lotion’s building in his own gut. He thought he could see why the ceremony called for this particular step in the current heir’s preparing the new heir. It bonded both of them, putting the new heir in such a vulnerable position and making the current one, also shortly to be a spouse of sorts, feel protective.

            Then Potter moaned, and Draco felt his mask of indifference crack and fall apart. No, it was more than that, although it was probably a part and the source of some of the references to this lotion that had puzzled him in his reading of books about the demi-marriage.

            This was his pleasure in giving Harry pleasure. Draco repeated the name silently, working it into the contours of his mind the way that his hands worked the lotion into the contours of Harry’s muscles.

            It wasn’t vulnerability, exactly, because Harry sagged forwards and abandoned himself to his own pleasure without seeming to care if Draco saw or not. He was open, though, his moans soft but persistent, and his panting loud enough to make Draco’s fingers flex. Draco had never seen him this way, and neither had the wizarding public, though his friends might have.

            Draco wouldn’t mind seeing him this way again.

            He held on to that thought. Like the thought of alliance from yesterday, it would make it possible to build something on this footing, to make the demi-marriage more than the struggle for control Draco had realized yesterday he couldn’t win. Harry had too many hidden strengths, too great a propensity for rearing up suddenly and proving that he wasn’t as much of a weakling as Draco had thought.

            So it would have to be something else. Because Draco’s family, and in particular the safety of his mother, mattered more to him than merely personal feelings.

            He stroked, and smoothed, and touched Harry’s hair, and only stepped back, with some reluctance, when the three double handfuls of lotion that the ceremony required were all gone and it was time to get dressed again. He cleared his throat, because Harry didn’t move right away. “That’s it,” he said. “We put on the robes now.”

            Harry turned to face him.

            Draco’s breath caught, because the relaxed, hazy green eyes, the gentle smile, the slightly tilted head, went home to him like a spear thrust. Harry didn’t seem to realize what he had done or the way Draco had reacted, because he nodded and said, “Thank you,” and stood up with the towel wrapped around his waist.

            Draco bit his lip and put the containers of lotion back in the basket he had used to carry them in, shivering a little.

            Yes, this was going to be different, in many ways, many ill-defined ways and ill-controlled ways, from the marriage he had thought he was going to have.



*

            js: So would Harry!

            SP777: I thought I’d leave Harry’s height alone. There isn’t a huge indication that their heights are different in the books.

            And thank you!

            thrnbrooke: Draco is distantly perceiving that now.

            unneeded: It can’t alter Harry’s mind and soul just by itself. He would have to let it.

            Harry will find out what happened to the peacock in the next chapter.

            polka dot: Harry doesn’t look that different, although different from what he did. Draco is exaggerating it a bit in his desperation.

            disgruntledfairy: Thanks for reviewing.

            Nightlo: Draco isn’t thinking in terms of lovers at this point. But the idea of spouses is not far away.

            delia: There’s a reason this story will be as long as it takes to get them together!
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The Name I'll Give to Thee