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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
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I am making no money from this fanfic.

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Chapter Six—Portrait of a Black Heir

            Draco adjusted his cloak in front of the mirror and gave himself a doubtful glance. The mirror was crooning over how handsome he looked, but it had done that the first day he walked back into Malfoy Manor after the trial, pale and haggard and looking like a collection of sticks on a scaffold. Draco knew better than to trust a mirror’s opinions.

            He thought he looked—okay. Certainly much better than he had two months ago, after he was acquitted and his mother acquitted, their wands bound, his father put in prison.

            Draco’s hand whitened for a second on the shelf beneath the mirror, and then he pushed himself away and shook his head. They were still alive, as his mother said every day the first time she saw him. That meant they could still do things, and the restrictions on their wands would change someday.

            Draco stalked out of his bedroom, ignoring the forlorn way the mirror called after him, and down the stairs, and through the twisting maze of corridors that led to the front door. His mother was waiting there herself, standing next to his school trunk as if guarding it, though of course the house-elves had packed it. She watched him and bit her lip, then stepped forwards and spread her arms to enfold him.

            Draco allowed it, his head bowed and his eyes on the floor. He expected a little speech about how he would go back to Hogwarts and do the Malfoys proud, or what remained of the Malfoys, and his mother would expect him to perform gracefully, calmly, to do his duty, even in the company of people who exasperated him or had last been seen testifying against him at the trials.

            “Remember that we’re alive,” Narcissa whispered as she stroked his hair. “From that, everything else follows.”

            A smile threatened to tremble through Draco’s control, but he retained it and nodded. Of course that had to come first.

            But then Narcissa’s hands tightened on his shoulders, and that surprised Draco enough that he looked up at her. Narcissa’s mouth had tightened along with her hands. She nodded at him, and exhaled until Draco thought all the air in her lungs was gone.

            “I’m not going to tell you not to resent them,” she said quietly. “Especially when it was your father’s mistakes that cost you so much, and not yours. There will be people who judge you for being part of this family who would have cowered at your feet or fawned for a scrap of attention a year ago. That’s going to be hard to deal with.”

            Draco covered the flinch he wanted to give, he thought, by standing up and straightening his shoulders. It wasn’t a year ago, with the Dark Lord stalking through the corridors of the Manor, that he missed. It was the time before that, when he was someone because of his name and growing, he thought, into someone else, someone people would respect or fear on his own and not just because of who his father was.

            The time before he knew the truth about the Dark Lord.

            “I don’t ask you not to resent them,” his mother repeated, smoothing his cloak collar. “I only ask you not to strike out at them.”

            Draco snorted and lifted his wand. “That’s going to be hard when I can’t cast anything more complex than a Summoning Charm,” he said.

            “Have you forgotten what a well-placed Accio can do, then?” His mother’s voice was as still and deep as one of the ponds near the back of the grounds.

            Draco flinched in spite of himself, and lowered his wand. His Aunt Bellatrix had killed one of the expendable Muggleborn prisoners by Summoning a chunk of a chandelier. The grey stains on the walls were worse than the red ones.

            “Good,” Narcissa breathed, and took his face in her hands, and kissed him on the brow. Draco closed his eyes. There was that, at least. Even in the worst depths of the war, even in the worst depths after the war, when he sat in a cell at Azkaban awaiting trial, he had never doubted that his mother loved him.

            “You could do it,” Narcissa continued. “You could hurt them. But I’m going to ask you not to do it while you’re at Hogwarts. Afterwards, you can concentrate on your vengeance and building a life for yourself. But you need NEWTS to do that, and we need at least a year to make them think we’re harmless and fitting back into the wizarding world. Can you do that?”

            Draco swallowed and nodded. He wondered what his mother would say if he told her that he was uninterested in vengeance. That he just wanted to live a normal life and get married and not have people sneer at him and find something to do that would content him for years. Maybe brewing Potions, but a lot of the joy had gone out of the art for him when he realized that Professor Snape was dead.

            His mother hugged him, fiercely, and Draco lifted his head for one more kiss. For a moment, Narcissa peered into his eyes as if she could see his future written there like some Seers could supposedly do, and then she hugged him again, hard enough to make Draco cough a little.

            “I love you,” she said, and sharpness pricked at Draco’s eyes for a moment before he dismissed it. He had never doubted that, but it was nice to hear once in a while.

            “And I love you, too,” Draco whispered, and picked up his trunks with a single flick of his wand before he walked the door. The sharpness would come back and he would weep if he stayed there, and that was not acceptable—not to him, even if it was to his mother.

            His last sight of his mother was her standing in the doorway of the Manor, hands clasped at the waist of her silvery grey gown.

            Then she shut the door gently, and Draco swallowed and took his first steps forwards in two months by himself.

*

            Getting onto the Hogwarts Express was easier than he’d pictured. There were no hateful crowds waiting for him, no one trying to fling stones or rubbish at him, and Draco slipped into one of the compartments and sat down with his eyes closed, trying to calm his breathing and reassure himself that it would always be like this, if he just had the courage to make it so. No one would be trying to make his life miserable.

            Frankly, he doubted that anyone cared that much. But with his wand bound and his long residence in the Manor since May, it was hard to convince himself of that.

            He kept the door of the compartment open and a mild version of the Notice-Me-Not Charm on himself, not something that would discourage his friends from actively looking for him, but which would keep someone else from glancing casually into that compartment and then trying to taunt him. He wanted to see who came back, and who didn’t.

            He saw Millicent, stalking through the train like she was waiting to break the first student who challenged her right to be there, and Blaise, face utterly smooth and cool. Daphne. Astoria, in tow. Draco hunched his head back at that, glad that neither one bothered to glance through his door. He knew that his mother was considering “arrangements” with the Greengrass family, but he didn’t want to think about that aspect of his particular future. It—didn’t fit him.

            His musings on why were interrupted when someone he didn’t recognize glided past the door.

            And it was gliding, nothing so clumsy as walking. Draco stood up and walked to the edge of the door, peering around it to watch the stranger. He had thick black hair, done in neat waves that made Draco suspect some kind of skill with Coiffure Charms. His skin was pale, and he was tall enough to challenge Weasley. Draco wondered if some student who had fled Durmstrang when Dark Arts moved from a subject taught there to the main focus of the school had decided Hogwarts was a more comfortable place to study instead.

            But no, he saw when the student turned his head in response to a call from Weasley and he saw Potter’s green eyes. Potter? Really? Since when does he wear his hair like that, or walk like that?

            Yet, when Draco thought about it, he realized that he really had no idea what Potter’s hair had looked like in the Battle of Hogwarts, or since. The most important thing about Potter at that point was that he was pulling Draco out of a fire, and then he was covered with blood and looked dead, and then he was alive and dueling the Dark Lord. And then he was testifying for Draco, to say that Draco hadn’t given him away at the Manor and he wouldn’t have survived without Draco’s (accidental, inadvertent) mastery of the Elder Wand. And then he was just gone from Draco’s life, because Draco didn’t want to read the Daily Prophet. It was as much as his mother could get him to do to listen to her summaries of the articles.

            Maybe Potter could have changed his hair and his walk that much just because he was appearing in front of the public and he had finally listened to Granger and the other people in his life who would probably try to encourage him to take on more political responsibility. Maybe.

            But Draco had stared because, he could acknowledge now without fantasies of a Durmstrang student distorting his view, Potter looked so exactly like some of the portraits of his Black ancestors that his mother had brought to Malfoy Manor when she married. Not far off one of the Arcturus Blacks, with perhaps some of old Phineas Nigellus in the way he turned his head.

            Draco cocked his head. Well, Potter was related to the Blacks by blood, too, wasn’t he? His grandmother had been one. No one had ever suggested that James Potter looked anything like a Black, and it wasn’t as direct a connection as Draco’s, but still, the traits were there.

            It had just struck Draco as unusual, that was all.

            He sat down again, in a thoughtful frame of mind, and wondering if he had imagined the fretful, forceful way Potter’s jaw had clenched when Weasley launched into some long story about his sister, right before their compartment door shut behind them.

            Maybe I can do something this year besides just keep my eyes down, after all.

*

            delia cerrano: No, Harry never wrote.

            And Harry abandoned the house because he was terrified of it.

            SP777: Well, good. Because it is heading that direction.
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Ancient and Noble Houses