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The Only True Lords	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 54578 -:- Recommendations : 4 -:- Currently Reading : 11
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I am making no money from this fanfic.

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Chapter Sixty-One—Changing the Bond
            “I presume that you know how you’re going to do this.”
            Severus thought his words would startle Potter, maybe make him leap to his feet and turn around with a scowl. Instead, though, Potter only opened his eyes and turned his head in Severus’s direction. He was in the middle of a completely bare sitting room, from which he’d taken out all the furniture. Even the fireplace was covered with a grate, and the rugs rolled up against the walls.
            “Yes,” said Potter. “I do now. It’s different from the change that I made when I first gained control of the bond. I thought I could just meditate now and everything would be all right, but it didn’t work out that way.”
            Severus moved restlessly. He had to shut the door behind him, he knew, and set up the wards he and Potter had discussed, because otherwise there was too much chance of someone barging in and trying to interrupt them, but he didn’t want to. It would feel like being trapped in one of the bleak Ministry holding cells with Potter.
            “You could leave it open, as long as you put up the wards to hold sound out.”
            Severus tensed, wondering if this was a bad idea. He didn’t like the thought of Potter knowing him well enough to figure out his nervousness. Did he really want a more intimate bond?
            But yes, he did. Even if it was only because he had realized that he would have little structure during the remaining year of his imprisonment and fewer friends without the bond being wrapped around him. He might be pathetic, but at least he would have the foundation to build a new life on.
            Grimacing, Severus looked around the room. “I assume that we will need to sit during this process?” He wondered why Potter had removed all the furniture.
            “No,” said Potter, and stood up, locking eyes with Severus. Severus stared back, a prickle of danger running up his spine the way it sometimes had when he confronted one of the more fanatical Death Eaters. “It’s going to take a long time inside of our heads, but not so long outside it. And the more sensations we have, the more it’ll distract us. I didn’t realize that until last night,” he added, maybe because he had seen, or sensed, Severus opening his mouth to ask how he had known that. “But I couldn’t do anything with the bond when I was sitting in a comfortable chair or on the couch or even on the rug. So I tried getting rid of most of the sensation, and that turned out to be what was wrong.”
            “Let us hope that neither of us falls and cracks his head open on your bare floors.”
            Potter only nodded as though Severus’s objection was one that he shared as well. Severus frowned again. Well, perhaps that came from his overprotectiveness of his vassals.
            “Did you remove all the Occlumency that you used to shore up your side of the bond?” Potter asked.
            Severus hesitated. Potter sighed, and suddenly looked a lot less like the all-wise and all-knowing idiot he had said he was, and more like an ordinary idiot. “I told you that you have to take all of it away, or this wouldn’t work.”
            “I left one prop in place, holding up some of the Occlusion,” said Severus reluctantly. “Like the last support that you would leave in a mine. I didn’t want your emotions flooding in on me all at once.”
            “You’re going to have to be willing to feel that for at least some of what’s going on here, or it’s not going to work.” Potter’s face had gone neutral in a way that Severus had rarely seen, even around masters like Albus who could control their expressions well.
            Or maybe not neutral, just blank, unwilling to afflict Severus with the pain that was likely coming. Severus asked, in what he knew sounded like a crow’s squawk, “And why is that?”
            “Because when I lower the shields, the emotions will rush in on me,” Potter said gently. “And when you get rid of that last piece of Occlumency, they’ll do the same to you. It’s not going to last very long, and we’ll raise the new barriers that will keep the bond less intimate, just like you said you wanted. But if you don’t suffer those few seconds in my head, then you’re going to not have what you want.”
            “I thought you said that we will raise the new barriers?”
            Potter nodded. “That was the other thing I figured out last night. This isn’t going to work if I do it alone.”
            “You have had no chance to practice.” Severus wondered if he had wrapped the wards too tightly around the door to get through them quickly from the inside. “And you really think that you can do this when we will be doing it for the first time?”
            “Yes,” said Potter.
            That I had such unwavering confidence. Although, to be fair, Severus didn’t know if it was that or a mask, and he wouldn’t know until he removed the last piece of Occlumency protecting his thoughts. He found himself as reluctant to do that as he would have been to get naked in front of Potter.
            Potter waited, though, his eyes unmoving, and Severus growled. He would not let a mere boy, one who had not made as many sacrifices as he had during the war, shame him. The likely outcome had been that he would die trying to defend his Slytherins or when the Dark Lord found out his true allegiance, and he would never had had to deal with Potter as he wavered his way into the post-war world. That things had worked out otherwise was part of that horrible Potter luck.
            “Very well,” Severus, and reached in, and pricked the last bubble of Occlumency that floated in his mind, obscuring some of the brighter, livelier corners.
            The emotions came roaring back at once. In seconds he knew that Potter was nowhere near as confident as he appeared, and this was like these bloody “adventures” he was always having with his friends in the school, and Severus had not needed to know all those details of the basilisk fight in second year that popped up the moment he glanced at them.
            But Potter also launched himself forwards along the bond at the same time, so that Severus had only an instant to contemplate such things. Then the sensations of the bare room around them faded, and Severus was in a mindscape he neither liked nor understood.
            It was not even Potter’s mindscape, which Severus had become resigned to exploring during their Occlumency lessons. It was a strange borderland full of shifting shadows and memories and emotions that exploded into brilliant shards of nothingness when Severus touched them. It was all too obvious that they had come into the landscape of the bond, the unstable place where their thoughts and emotions touched.
            We have to meld them.
            Those words echoed through the borderland and made more emotions explode. Severus ground his teeth. That is not what I asked for.
            Meld them and weave the barriers from them. We can only do this if we’re able to move and think as one being.
            Severus shut his eyes. He hated the thought, hated it hard enough that he wanted to shudder away from it. But Potter tugged at him insistently, and remaining in this place was no better an option. Neither was feeling Potter’s emotions undimmed for every day of his life.
            Very well, he whispered, and reached out, and tried to find the places where his emotions would meld and slot into Potter’s.
            It was surprisingly easy, something else that made Severus want to writhe. They coiled and snapped and locked, and it was like solving a simple Muggle child’s puzzle, the sort with wooden pieces that Severus had played with until the pieces disintegrated. They were there, and they thought together.
            For a moment they turned, tangled together, gold and floating green, voices yawning and yearning around them. They saw Dumbledore as through a thousand faceted insect eyes, and Draco, and other people that Severus did not know but knew. He felt the same instant recognition thrilling through him from Potter’s side.
            If there were sides. If there was anything between them now but the intense play of the emotions and the struggle to change the bond in the way that Potter wanted it. That Severus wanted it, too, he reminded himself. Potter would never have embarked on this without him.
            He could see the trailing blue and silver of the Lordship bond winding through Potter’s thoughts, and his own, and the chains that would bind them if they stopped. He did not want those chains back. He continued to press, to try and push the bond into the new configuration that Potter had promised him.
            Then the joined puzzle pieces that linked them wavered and fell over, and Severus was gasping in the middle of what looked and felt like a wide hall, their minds stretching limitless around them.
            He glanced around, trying to figure out what had become of Potter. He knew that even the most intense pressure between them would have been incapable of destroying the bond, which meant he had to be somewhere.
            Then he saw a flickering fireplace behind him. Severus approached it warily. He had associations with fire that marked it as a destroying force far more than a preserving one, though he supposed that Potter might think of Dumbledore’s phoenix and place fire on the good side because of that.
            When he knelt down and reached out to feel the warm stone, Severus knew where Potter was. On the other side of a flexible but firm barrier, one that they could take down at any time. This was only the image that Severus was receiving right now, no more existing in material reality than the chains of the bond he had seen entwining Potter’s thoughts.
            Any time one of them wanted, he could come to this barrier and feel it, and Severus would know that Potter was right there and what his emotions were. And Potter could do the same thing with Severus.
            Neither of them could remove the barrier entirely unless they cooperated, and they could withdraw to distant corners of their minds the way that Severus could get up and walk back across this large room, to the other side, and be distant from the fireplace. That would prevent the mind-drowning influx of emotions and thoughts that he had feared, and the unrestrained access that had been the greater fear.
            And when he touched the warm stone and felt the concern and the relief there, the care that beamed like an underground sun, he acknowledged what the impulse nudging at the back of his own mind was.
            Isn’t it about time that you called him Harry?
            It was. And when he knew he was safe, Severus could do it without resentment or fear. He nodded his acknowledgment to Harry, and felt the same acknowledgment come back, safe and secure and strong and radiant with the knowledge of what they had accomplished together. Severus turned away.
            He faded back to the surface of his mind and opened his eyes to Harry’s beaming welcome.
*
            Draco leaned his chin on his hand and struggled to comprehend the stupid book open in front of him. It should have been interesting: the history of how Muggles had reacted to the disappearance of wizards behind the Statute of Secrecy. Some of them had known witches and wizards were real, or had relatives that could perform magic, and sometimes those people had been the most vicious of all about the two worlds separating.
            But the book used a higher level of vocabulary than Draco was used to, and it discussed all of these things in a soft, detached tone that hinted Draco ought to know about more history than he already did. It was hard to concentrate, when what he really wanted was to rest and have someone talk sympathetically to him. Oh, he’d spoken with Pansy yesterday, and even had the promise of a letter from his mother in the near future, but he wanted to talk with someone else.
            Draco sighed and shook himself, sitting up. He really had to finish this book if he was going to write the essay that Auror Stone wanted him to write by the weekend.
            “Draco?”
            He hadn’t heard the knock, but he was sure there had been one. He didn’t think Harry was one to walk into his bedroom without one. He turned around and blinked at Harry. “Yeah?” he asked, wondering what had happened.
            “What’s wrong?” Harry walked up to him and laid his hand on Draco’s shoulder, his eyes so bright and piercing that Draco blushed a little and looked away, to the side.
            “You felt me through the bond?” Of course it would have to be that. Draco didn’t know how he could still forget. It was just, he supposed, that he thought most often of the bond when Harry was right in front of him or hugging him and asking him what he wanted.
            “Yes,” said Harry, and sat down in the chair on the other side of the little table that Draco had dragged in here from the room his parents had been using. “I didn’t ask a lot about Auror Stone, I know. Was she too strict?”
            Draco shook his head. “She’s given me a lot of homework, but she’s good. We’re good. I just—I just wanted to talk to someone.”
            “What about?”
            “Things in general,” said Draco, and it came bubbling out of his mouth as soon as he got it open. “This can’t go on forever, can it? I mean, Auror Stone can’t assign me homework for five years! And we can’t all live here in Grimmauld Place forever. And my father can’t be in prison forever, and my mother won’t be under house arrest as long as the rest of us—”
            He took a deep breath and shut his eyes. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to blurt all that out. It’s just—it’s something I’m worried about, and I don’t know who else to talk to about it. Professor Snape has other things to worry about, and Greg is happy, and Pansy is just so concerned about her parents.”
            “I understand,” Harry whispered, and took his hand. “When I was a kid, I thought that it couldn’t go on forever, the way I was living with the Dursleys, the way they were treating me. I thought things had to change. And then, when they did, I was stunned and shocked, and then I decided that being a first-year at Hogwarts was great, but I was afraid the homework would go on forever.”
            “It probably seems silly to you,” said Draco, and opened his eyes to watch his hand in Harry’s more than to watch Harry’s face. “Because you lived through so much, and this is a nice house, and at least I’m free instead of in Azkaban.”
            “I know what it feels like to feel like something will never end, is what I’m saying.” Harry’s hand tightened, and Draco’s eyes jerked up to his face. Harry was gazing at him steadily, and the bond flooded Draco with a kind of shivery warmth. “But we can go a few places, you know. Under Auror guard, and with prior permission. And I don’t think Auror Stone will keep your mum from visiting you. You could even go visit your father, if you want.”
            “Not right now,” Draco said, shuddering. The thought of Azkaban and what he’d escaped—now that he understood what he’d escaped—was still too close. “I just wanted someone to listen when I said it was a lot.”
            Harry nodded slowly, eyes fastened on him. Draco didn’t think that Harry was really listening, though, and frowned at him. Harry seemed to snap back into reality at the motion and leaned forwards. “Do you want to do something that might relieve a bit of your boredom and help you recover some freedom and independence?”
            “Yes, of course,” said Draco. “It’s just, how can I? There are lots of people who will be upset if I leave the house.”
            Harry nodded. “I know. But I was thinking of traveling mentally, the way you do with a book, and helping me come up with plans.”
            “Oh.” Draco did his best to conceal his disappointment. He really had hoped that Harry had a way around the restrictions that these agreements put on him.
            “There’s still so much I don’t understand about the wizarding world,” said Harry. “Mostly because I didn’t grow up in it. I wondered if you would help me go through these newspaper articles that are being published about us and help me learn which ones are the genuine threats and which ones are just smoke and hot air?”
            Draco paused. “I didn’t think any of them were genuine threats,” he said slowly, and his heart began beating faster. “I thought all of them were just people yelling about things they couldn’t change. Are you saying they might break into the house and hurt us?” He looked around at the walls and windows that had seemed so sturdy, and wondered if they would splinter in front of another attack like the one the Freedom Fighters had tried to launch.
            “No, no, nothing like that,” said Harry, and pressed down on his fingers until Draco had to start looking at him and thinking less about the threats that might come from elsewhere. “I just meant that I didn’t know which ones were worthy of a response and which ones weren’t. Could you help me?”
            “I don’t know,” Draco said. “What makes you think I have any more knowledge than you do about that? You should ask Pansy or Granger.”
            “Hermione might not know, either, because she’s also Muggleborn,” Harry said firmly. “And Pansy—”
            “You’re not Muggleborn!”
            “I grew up in the Muggle world, and one of my parents was,” said Harry. “I think that makes a lot of difference. And Pansy…well, she’s so interested in her political career that I think she might put politics first and the safety of the bond and me and you and my friends and the other vassals second.”
            Draco held back the temptation to say that Harry wasn’t Muggleborn and should stop thinking of himself that way, and then paused. That was it, wasn’t it, the reason that Harry wanted his help? He didn’t understand what the nuances like that meant, why it was important to say that one of his parents was Muggleborn but he wasn’t, and what the difference was.
            “And you think that I know about pure-bloods and Muggleborns and that sort of thing, and I can help you,” he whispered.
            Harry nodded. “Maybe I’ll eventually acquire some knowledge on my own as to what’s really worth responding to, but I don’t have it yet, and I don’t want to fuck things up.”
            Draco lifted his head, feeling as though the blush that had invaded his cheeks was retreating to something more soft, and gentle, and bright. This was saying that he was still valuable in spite of everything. This was taking what he had assumed would be shameful for the next five years, the knowledge that his parents had taken so much time and effort to teach him, and transforming it so that he would be able to help Harry.
            “I want to do it,” he said. “I can’t promise that I’ll always be good at it, either, and maybe there are some people where you don’t want them to know that a Malfoy was writing the letters. But you’re right, there could be some serious things in there, things that you would be better off talking about. Maybe we can even make some people into allies.”
            Harry’s hand tightened to the point that Draco didn’t think he could get away even if he wanted to. Luckily, he didn’t want to. “Thanks. I wasn’t looking forward to asking Severus for help on this and hearing him explain why I was an idiot.”
            Draco snorted. “No, Professor Snape doesn’t have the experience in the wizarding world necessary to catch all the nuances, either.” He didn’t think he could bring himself to call the professor by his first name unless Snape gave him specific permission, but there was no reason to think that he’d have to. “Now, one thing you should remember is that not everyone writing and saying that they’re pure-bloods and you should listen to them is actually expressing what a lot of pure-bloods think…”
*
            Severus had intended to talk with Draco about many things that day. The trial, whether he was fully settled into the life that Harry and Auror Stone between them seemed determined to make for him, how much he missed his parents, whether there was anything Severus could do to help him. In struggling for his own freedom and setting up Occlumency against the bond, Severus had neglected his Slytherins more than he liked to think about.
            But when he paused at Draco’s room, preparing himself for the knock on the door and the little speech he would have to make when Draco asked why Severus had abandoned him, he found that he didn’t have to intrude after all. There were two voices in the room, and Severus would have recognized the heavy tones of Mr. Goyle’s or the light ones of Miss Parkinson’s. He’d heard them plotting enough with Draco over the years.
            This was two voices, one that asked questions and one that answered them, and the one that answered them—Draco’s—was filled with a swelling confidence that Severus had believed would take him much longer to recover after the trial. And the other, Harry’s, was low and soft and asked things and listened to the explanations.
            Standing there, Severus felt he understood, with his emotions as well as his intellect, what Harry had been saying, about why it didn’t matter if the bond had changed them, since the changes were entwined so insistently with their own identities and ideas anyway. If the bond had made Harry into the kind of person who could give Draco back his confidence, then Severus was content with it.
            For Draco, if not always for himself.
            He turned and slipped quietly down the stairs and in the direction of the library. If Harry had used the bond to notice his presence, it never showed up in the constant calm, easy stream of speaking.
*
delia cerrano: Severus realized that his life wouldn’t have that much structure without the bond, and it would be lonely to be stuck in the same house with people who were all bonded when he wasn’t. Not that he would probably admit that in so many words.
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The Only True Lords