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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.

Chapter List
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Chapter Seven—The Ritual

            Harry stepped out of the Manor, and shivered as air moved against his skin. He hadn’t thought a lot about what would await him outside. Malfoy had said the ritual had to take place on the grounds, so that was that. Maybe they would have an audience of watching house-elves, and clasp hands in a garden.

            Instead, he found himself standing on the steps of a raised platform arranged right outside the door, which ran up to the platform itself. Harry blinked and stared. It looked like it was made of weathered grey stone, with a kind of gazebo on the top, and he had no idea how old it was or where it had been before now.

            He glanced back over his shoulder at Malfoy, who only smiled grimly and stepped up behind him with a little push. “Go on, now,” he said softly. “The sooner we reach the top, the sooner the ritual can begin.”

            Harry began to climb. The steps were small but not that narrow or steep, which was good for him. Not only did he have his glasses on and some problems with depth perception sometimes, there was the fact that the green robe rippled up around his thighs with every motion and stood a chance of exposing more than he wanted to expose.

            He reached the top and bit his lip, glancing around. No sign of anyone watching. Well, of course not. Narcissa was still too sick to come out, and Ron and Hermione, although they’d asked Harry if he wanted them to come to the wedding, had gratefully accepted his negative. They didn’t want to watch him give his life up, Harry knew.

            Or so they’ll see it.

            But Harry could feel the slow, iron-hard conviction moving in him, the way he had earlier, that he had made the right choice. If what Malfoy could offer him was one bit as luxurious as that lotion—and the time alone in particular should be—

            Then he would do a lot worse than offer to pay back a debt.

            Malfoy made an impatient little gesture behind him. Harry realized that he didn’t know how long he’d actually stood there staring into space, and turned around with a little flush of chagrin. Mercifully, Malfoy didn’t seem minded to notice it.

            “This is the place that all the demi-weddings happen,” Malfoy said quietly, indicating the stone platform. His voice was so neutral that Harry didn’t know if he was speaking the words of ritual now or just explaining it, the way he had been in the bathroom. “It appears each time that it’s needed and then vanished again.”

            Harry nodded. “And what about regular weddings?” he asked, less because he was interested than for the sake of something to say.

            Malfoy reared back a little so he was staring into Harry’s face. “They’re confirmed by private vows on this platform after the official wedding is over,” he said, after long enough that Harry had started to open his mouth to apologize. “It always appears when it’s needed.”

            The most comprehensible answer that I’m going to get, Harry thought. If he was Hermione, or if she had been around, he could have asked all sorts of questions about magical theory. But Malfoy didn’t seem interested in discussing that. Maybe because the platform was just part of a tradition to him, and not worth talking about further.

            Maybe because he had the same uneasy relationship to this particular tradition, at the moment, that Harry did.

            Harry took a deep breath and stretched his hands out in front of him, the way Malfoy had told him he would have to. His heart was beating a fast enough call that every part of his body felt flushed. Malfoy was the only one who knew exactly what Harry was feeling. He was the only one in the entire world who would know what the demi-wedding was, what lay between them—

            Or, well, he would be, if he wasn’t watching Harry right now with his forehead furrowed and his mouth slightly open. Harry let his hands drop.

            “I feed you first,” Malfoy said.

            Harry just nodded. He could have said that Malfoy hadn’t mentioned that along with the hand-holding thing when they dressed in the robes, but he wanted to go along, to get along, and not drive away the fragile feeling of empathy he felt right now. Tolerating luxury was one thing, and he could happily do that. Tolerating Malfoy was quite another. “All right. Where’s the food?”

*

            Draco reached out and snapped his fingers, which made Ossy and Affy appear with the traditional wedding meal on neat wooden plates, on equally neat wooden trays, resting on a table of polished pine. He knew that because he knew the traditions, not because he saw it. At the moment, he didn’t think he could look away from Potter.

            Harry.

            Yes, he had to remember that. Call him Potter and he was only exaggerating the difference between them, when the demi-wedding was meant to erase the differences, or at least the ones that would matter to the outside world: the differences of name and blood.

            Draco reached out to the left, and felt Ossy shift the table a little so that his hand landed on the right piece of food, a long, narrow cheese with a ring of embedded nuts studded along the top. Draco nodded so Ossy would know Draco was grateful for the assistance, and then held out the piece of cheese to Harry.

            Harry looked once at Draco, a quick flicker of his eyelids that someone watching the marriage could have mistaken for a blink. Then he opened his mouth, and Draco pushed the cheese slowly inside, stopping when he felt the nuts click against Harry’s teeth. He made a little circling motion with his hand, and Harry closed his mouth, his teeth flashing briefly before he buried them into soft yellow, hard brown, glittering white.

            Harry’s eyes widened, and he kept chewing until he had swallowed all of it. Draco smiled. He knew the particular musky taste of that cheese, piercing his throat, and the small bite of nut Harry would have got along with it made it all the better.

            When he started to reach after it, though, Draco shook his head and laid the cheese aside, picking up the next dish, chicken flesh roasted until it was tender and falling off the bone, then rubbed with a compound of roasted tomatoes and olive oil. He held it out, a little ivory dish with black on the inside, although what the black was he didn’t know.

            Harry flicked his eyelids again, and then bent his head. Draco had to nod in approval, or would have if he wasn’t already holding his neck stiff, hoping everything would work. Yes, Harry had learned fast. The new heir wasn’t allowed cutlery or even his fingers to use at the feast. He was supposed to take everything from his new guardian’s hand, on trust, to taste it and swallow it without the option to pull it out of his throat before he choked.

            Some of the books said that Malfoy heirs had poisoned their prospective spouses that way, and secured the lands under dispute.

            But Draco would inherit nothing new if Harry died in this moment, so he didn’t need to worry about that. He watched as Harry bobbed his head, uncertain, and then pulled loose a strip of chicken and managed to eat it with only a few flips of his tongue and clicks of his teeth. His eyes closed in the same bliss he had shown when Draco rubbed the lotion on him.

            Draco wanted to reach out and touch his face. But his parents had taught him young that he couldn’t have everything that he wanted, and in any case, family always came first. He set the dish of chicken down and reached for the next, the eggs boiled and sliced and salted and covered with a mixture of paprika and other spices, the yolk churned until it was the color of new spring grass.

            Harry cocked his head like a curious bird. Draco wondered if he was making the connection: everything Draco fed him came from an animal. That was deliberate. In the old days of the demi-marriages, those foods were more luxurious and took longer to prepare than any fruit or vegetable dish, and using them was an indirect boast that the Malfoy heir—the one born so—had the ability to take care of anyone who depended on him.

            But although Harry looked at the table, briefly, for a moment, where peaches swimming in cream awaited, he also opened his mouth, and Draco pushed the slices of egg in, smiling when Harry immediately closed his lips around them.

            Harry’s eyes closed. Draco wished for a moment that he was good enough with Legilimency to slip in and out of Harry’s mind undetected. Then he might know what was happening there right now, and even taste the spices for himself, the bursting paprika and something yellow and drifting that might have been saffron or just a bit of yolk.

*

            Harry knew that a meal as wonderful as this was a dream, and that he would wake in a few minutes and lament the ending of it, even though waking up would also mean that he wasn’t about to be married to Malfoy.

            So much flavor. That was what he had been missing, all his life, in so much of his food, and not even known it until this moment. He had wanted the spices, and the leap of sweetness that tasted like nothing at first and then burst into glowing fire in the middle of his tongue, and the burning heat that made his face flush. He ate as much as Malfoy would permit him, and tried not to drool when Malfoy took away the rest of it and presented the next dish, because the next one would probably taste just as good, in a different way.

            Was this what he had been missing by not learning to cook for himself, the way that Hermione had once told him he should? He loved Molly, but her cooking wasn’t the same as this, or it was always the same as itself, sweet and familiar and warm. He had thought he was tasting the best lunches of his life when he was over at her house.

            He wanted to eat a full meal at the Manor, suddenly, house-elves in attendance and all. He’d had some of this delicious food, or delicious food of a different kind, when Ossy served him the other day, but—

            The peaches in cream were a new delight, and Harry leaned his head back and swayed on his feet as the sweetness threatened to overcome him. Malfoy supported him with a hand on his back, chuckling in a way that Harry should have found embarrassing. He didn’t, though. If this ritual was meant to encourage dependence on the person he was marrying, well, it was succeeding.

            And Malfoy already knew that Harry had never bought food like this for himself, or enjoyed luxuries like this; he knew that from Harry’s reaction to the lotion. Harry didn’t need to hide what he was feeling out of a false pride.

            “Can we have some of this later?” Harry whispered to him.

            Malfoy answered from so close that Harry opened his eyes to see how close, and found the grey eyes drifting right next to his face. “Not the same food,” he said. “But there will be a wedding meal, and food like this here.”

            Harry swallowed, and nodded, and accepted the next piece of the meal, a foaming milk poured directly from the glass into his mouth, Malfoy’s hand carefully cupping his chin, and it was thick and glorious. He wanted to get married, right now, for the same reason that he’d wanted the privacy the Manor’s rebuilt wards could give him.

            He wanted to do things for other people. He would always want to make up for the harm he had caused when he drew on the life-force of people who had not agreed to help him, even if it was harm he hadn’t known about. But he wanted to do things for himself, too. He had floundered around a bit since the war, in fact, trying to find out what it was that he liked. He’d had too few chances earlier in life to discover what it was he adored and needed.

            Now he knew. The flowers of sweetness on his tongue, and the thickness of clotted cream in the back of his throat, and the way that he licked at his teeth and palate and still hadn’t removed all the taste from them.

            “It’s the end.”

            It took Harry a moment to realize that he was hearing Malfoy’s voice, and in what context. He opened his eyes and blinked. Malfoy stood in front of the wooden table, regarding him with eyes bright enough to dim falling stars, and the house-elves faded with the rest of the food. Harry mourned to see it go.

            “The end of the ritual?” he asked, when he could shake enough of the trance from his mind. “We’re demi-married?”

            “It’s the end of the meal,” Malfoy said, and reached out for something standing in a wooden holder fastened to the platform. Harry wasn’t prepared to swear that that holder had existed before, but then again, the platform hadn’t been there yesterday, either, so that wasn’t as strange as it might have been otherwise.

            Harry stepped back in spite of himself when he realized it was a long, light, flexible wooden rod. His hands formed narrow fists in front of him, and his mind stormed him with images of the Dursleys, and Snape, and Voldemort, and everyone else who had punished him in the past.

            Then he forced himself past that, too. So he had made sacrifices, and it seemed that he had discovered there was something worth sacrificing for, even if they were purely decadent and material things and he had thought he wouldn’t want them. At least this time, if he underwent a whipping or something, someone would feed him afterwards.

            He met Malfoy’s gaze. “You’re going to use it on me?”

            Malfoy gaped at him. Harry’s back relaxed. Malfoy held the rod out in front of him and said, “This is a barrier, Harry, which we’ll get rid of together. To symbolize the barrier between our families, and the way it’ll come down.”

            Harry nodded and reached out to put his hands on the rod, next to Malfoy’s, but Malfoy wasn’t done yet. “You thought I was going to hit you with it?”

            Harry blinked at him. “It looked like something that you would use for hitting people,” he said. “I mean—not you personally,” he added, because Malfoy had gone still and had a glaze over his eyes, and Harry knew that he had to say something to make that right. “I just mean—something that would be useful if you wanted to. And I don’t know everything the ritual entails. There was a ritual bathing. Why not a ritual whipping?”

*

            Draco had many things that he wanted to say, but for once he listened to his own instincts and went with the one that he most wanted to know the answer to first. He might have opened the path to Harry’s honesty through his shock. Many things could close that door, though.

            “The ritual is meant to bring us closer together,” he said quietly, shifting his hands back and forth on the rod. Harry followed his gestures, and part of Draco calmed. They were still doing things in sync, then, which meant they had not abandoned the meaning of the demi-wedding. “Do you think you would ever trust me again after I had struck you?”

            Harry went on peering at him, as though Draco had asked a much harder question than that. Finally he said, light in tone, light in body, light in his hold on the barrier, “It’s a wedding. And a tradition. I know that of your own free will, you never would have touched me and spread lotion on my back, either. But the usual rules are suspended here. I did think that you might have to whip me, yes.”

            Draco shook his head and took a step forwards. Harry mimicked him, and the rod ended up pointed to the sky between them. That wasn’t the right position, but right now, Draco didn’t care. “There is no violence,” he whispered in this. “The Malfoys might have wanted to brag and show off in ceremonies like this, but there would be no point if we ended up hating each other.”

            Harry smiled with his lips alone. “We already hate each other, Malfoy. This wouldn’t have changed anything. And I know when I chose this that I was going to have to go through a lot to get what I wanted.”

            Draco closed his eyes. “What do you want?”

            “Atonement. To pay the debt. And luxury, to my surprise.”

            Draco felt the words pass through him like a shock, and half-shook his head. Well, he had wanted honesty, and this was what it got him. He sighed, opened his eyes, and found himself regarding Harry bleakly. “This is the way that we have to do the ritual. I’ll step back. You do the same thing, so that the rod is parallel between us again.”

            Harry smiled, as if to say that Draco calling the rod by that name confirmed him in the thought that this was a punishment. But he also moved, stepping back until the rod straightened out and half-floated between them, held by both their hands. His breath came slow and steady. He met Draco’s eyes and nodded.

            “This is the barrier between us,” Draco whispered, caressing the smooth wood. He didn’t know what it was; it had seemed sufficient that it was the dark color of good nuts and flexible enough to fit its purpose. Now Draco wished he had asked, if only to give Harry more answers. “And we must push against it and break it down. Do you understand? Are you ready to push?”

            “Ready,” Harry whispered, and Draco shivered in the wake of that word pressing against his skin.

            Draco leaned forwards from his side, and Harry from his. Draco watched the muscles straining in his forearms, and wondered what Harry thought of the Mark he could glimpse on Draco’s.

            He never seemed to look there, though. His eyes remained on Draco’s face, and Draco looked into them for long, silent seconds, as the wood between them bent, the face of a man who had believed that Draco would offer him violence but had been prepared to endure it anyway, for the sake of paying back his debt.

            Something Draco had depended on, when he had gone to Potter at first. He had been desperate and hurting and angry, and this was the only thing he could think of to keep his family safe. And that Potter would agree was a given, because he had that delicate Gryffindor sense of honor, and that guilt complex.

            But now…

            Draco found himself wondering what it would be like to have someone like that as part of the family, someone who considered obligations the most sacred thing in the world.

            The wood broke. Harry stumbled. Draco did the same thing, but caught himself and balanced against Harry, the way Harry was balancing against him. Harry shivered and shifted his head to the side, but Draco breathed gently on him, and he froze, his head still turned and his eyebrows arched in silent question.

            “We catch each other,” Draco whispered, the words flowing forth easily from his lips. “We brace each other. We protect each other. Can you swear your honor to serving me and mine, commit yourself to our family?”

            Harry blinked and seemed to think deeply, although it wasn’t more than a moment before he replied. “Yes. I can.”

            Draco nodded, and stepped back to turn around and face the mist that curled up either side of the platform. The books had said it would come, when both participants in the demi-marriage sincerely meant what they said. Draco slid his robe off, and felt Harry start. He must not have realized that Draco was naked beneath it, the way he was, although they had stripped in the same room.

            “All barriers have to come down,” Draco told him, quietly, soberly, meeting his eyes. There was still too much he didn’t understand, and questions he wanted to ask, but for the moment, those had to be subordinate to the needs of the ritual.

            For the moment. It would not always be so, and for the first time, Draco found himself content that it should be so.

            “I—right,” Harry said, whatever he’d been about to say swallowed like all the rest of his apparent defiance, and he peeled the robe off, wincing a little, as though he expected Draco to make mock of him. He’d taken off his pants when he put the robe on, at Draco’s insistence, and he was completely naked now, his cock hanging pliant and limp between legs that were even more muscled than Draco had realized.

            Draco smiled at him and held his arms out in front of him, extending them to their full length, showing Harry the Dark Mark. “All other allegiances fade before this,” he said, his voice ringing with the resonant tones of ritual. The mist rose higher and crept towards him, in shimmering silver curls. “All other questions leave, and this remains. Can you accept it, Harry? That I will be loyal to you, and my loyalty to Voldemort is a passing fancy in comparison to this?”

            The name spilled forth from his lips like the butter he had fed Harry earlier, and Harry’s head came up as though listening to his name shouted from a distance. He nodded, finally, when Draco had begun to feel as though the bones in his arms would crack and the mist had eddied in the same place for a long time.

            “Yes,” Harry said, and pushed the fringe on his head aside, revealing the dragon. “I know the scar already changed, so I don’t know how much proof of my loyalty I can offer you, but—”

            “You place the family before anything else,” Draco interrupted. “Your own personal safety. Your likes and dislikes. Your friends.”

            Harry had been nodding along on those first two things—of course, they didn’t matter to him as Draco had thought they did, not if he was willing to give them up even as much as he already had—but he froze on the last, and his head twitched to the side, not a complete negative, but enough of one that the mist crept eagerly closer.

            “No,” he whispered.

            “I won’t hold you away from them unnecessarily,” Draco said, trying to keep his voice as strong as it had been while they went severely off-track in the ritual. “I won’t tell you that you can’t keep being friends with them. But your first loyalty has to be to me, Harry. To us. To the family, and not more than that.”

            Harry watched him with wide, startled eyes, and then said, “My greatest loyalty has always been to Ron and Hermione.”

            Draco’s desire to ask why no one in Harry’s family deserved it turned to ashes as he saw the mist coming closer and closer. And anxiety sharpened his tone into knives even though he knew that it was the worst tack to take with Harry right now. “I just said all the things I wouldn’t do! Can’t you promise?”

            “I don’t work like that, Malfoy.” Harry was remote again, as much the snooty Boy-Who-Lived as Draco had expected to find him in hospital. “I won’t say something I don’t mean.”

            And the mist swept over the platform in a cool, devouring rush, and Draco felt dozens of small, cold teeth form against his skin.

*

            js: That is the kind of intimacy the marriage is meant to encourage. Not for them to sleep together, but for them to trust each other.

            Christopher: I appreciate the criticism. But I do think that Harry has made the decision for his own reasons, too—even more apparent in this chapter—and while the noble motivations are the ones that he tells to other people, they’re far from the only ones he has.

            moodysavage: Thank you!

            kain: Here’s an example of the strong-willed Harry! Just maybe not at the best time.

            But honestly, Harry is “giving in” on a lot of things that just don’t matter to him. For example, it honestly doesn’t matter to him what kind of clothes he wears.

            unneeded: Yes, emphasis on the “sort of.”

            addiena saffir: The ritual has made all the physical changes it can, and as Hermione reassured Harry, it can’t make mental or emotional ones.

            SP777: Usually a few days in advance.

            Nightlo: No, for the reasons given in this chapter.
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The Name I'll Give to Thee