Chapter Fifteen of 'For Their Unconquerable Souls'- Narcissa's Certainty
Thank you again for all the reviews! This chapter is a bit shorter than normal, because it consists of scenes that weren’t in the original story, and I didn’t want to trim one of the original scenes at an unnatural stopping point.
Chapter Fifteen-Narcissa’s Certainty
Narcissa was opening her mouth to compliment Eleanor Greenbriar on the décor of her drawing room and ask whether she might be permitted to look at the rooms upstairs when Lucius’s voice struck her like a spear to the side of the head.
Come home at once. We have something to discuss concerning Harry.
The words were gone in moments, but Narcissa’s sharp gasp had been enough to alert Eleanor. A strong-featured woman with blue eyes that Narcissa envied for their piercing color-though of course Eleanor would never know of that envy-she leaned forwards and stared hard. “What is the matter?” she asked. “Is the tea not to your liking?” The tea was exquisite, of course, and she knew it. In the back of her voice was a soft, delighted purr that came from catching Narcissa off-guard.
“The tea is wonderful,” said Narcissa, and lowered the cup to the table. She had spilled a few drops, she saw to her disgust, spattering the side of her hand. Lucius would pay. She remained a moment longer with her eyes on her hand, as if contemplating the nonexistent burns the liquid had inflicted on her skin, and then looked up. “I have-I have received news that I did not wish to tell you.”
“Received news?” Eleanor’s eyebrows crept further up her face. “Strange. I saw no owl fly to you.” The purr grew stronger. No doubt she imagined that Narcissa would be compelled to confess some Malfoy family secret now. The existence of the telepathy between the Malfoy spouses was surely suspected outside the family, for all that the Malfoy ancestors of the past had been careful with it.
But never careful enough, Narcissa thought, and wished she could have aimed the thought like an arrow at her husband. She sighed, barely letting the sound escape through parted lips, keeping her face like a mask. “It is the absence of an owl that alerted me to the news,” she said. “My son should have sent me a letter by now, proclaiming that my husband had abandoned an unsuitable-liaison-he had formed for himself. I wanted to read that letter, and receive it, in front of witnesses. That it has not come tells me Lucius still errs.” She lowered her eyelashes again, watching the motion of Eleanor’s hands intently. Few people realized that one could tell as much by the hands as by the face, assuming one was reading the right kind of person. “I had lost track of the time, and then I remembered it, and it was-as you see.” Once again, she gestured to the drops of tea on the back of her hand, only now picking up a napkin to blot at the liquid.
Eleanor was full of compassion mingled with glee; it twisted white lines across the back of her knuckles. Narcissa could have given her lessons in composure, but the Greenbriars had been connected to the Dark Lord by means of financial support, even if none of them had been Death Eaters, and Narcissa did not consider her enough of an ally to merit the lessons. “He is supposed to keep to his bed, and still he chases another woman?” Eleanor gestured at the line of Narcissa’s throat and hair. “When he has you?”
“Yes,” said Narcissa, rising to her feet. “And now I must deal with my straying husband. There are truths he has too long forgotten.” It was no effort at all to let her voice chill on those last words, considering how angry she was at Lucius at the moment.
Eleanor licked her lips, a habit of hers when she was swallowing a delicious tidbit of gossip she meant to spread around as soon as possible. It was another fault that Narcissa’s lessons might have cured her of, and which Narcissa would never alert her to the existence of.
Narcissa turned away with a snap of her skirts. She had created the impression that Lucius was stronger than had been reported, strong enough to chase a lover, which would hinder some of their enemies in case they plotted to attack Malfoy Manor now, and confound those who had cast the curse in the first place-
And she had created a problem for Lucius to deal with and clear up, shifting the blame for her weakness from herself to him.
It is the least you deserve, she addressed her husband, and walked outside the Greenbriar wards, and Apparated.
*
His mother had arrived home by the time Draco returned to his father’s room. She was straightening from a kiss she had placed on Lucius’s cheek. Her face was so pale that Draco was certain she had spoken sharp words.
Lucius didn’t look less confident than usual, but then, he had just survived a near-fatal bout with the curse. Draco didn’t think he would lose composure over a few harsh words from Narcissa.
He closed the door and cast a locking ward, causing Lucius’s brows to rise. “I have Rogers watching Harry,” Draco answered the look. “But still, Harry has been known to do unexpected things. In case he does manage to wake up and get here unnoticed to check on his patient, I wanted to ensure he couldn’t hear us.” He looked at Narcissa. “Father told you what happened?”
“He did.” Narcissa said no more than that, but Lucius flinched back into his pillow. Draco blinked. He wondered for a moment if the relationship he would have with Harry someday would be like that, and if he wanted it to be.
Draco nodded. “He has the capacity for the blood magic,” he said. “He was the reason Lucius survived, so he has saved my father’s life not once but twice. He is deserving of honor, but he doesn’t feel he is. What are we going to do to ensure that he doesn’t kill himself trying to save Lucius, or someone else, once Father is well?”
“Do you truly feel that’s a danger?” Lucius folded his hands under his chin and tried to look wise.
Draco caught his mother’s eye, and barely kept from rolling his own. His father was a strong, proud man, the symbol of the line of Malfoy right now as their current patriarch, and Draco cared for him more than he could ever acknowledge openly, especially now that his life was in danger. But since the curse had caught him, Draco found himself seeing his father’s faults more often. Lucius was less clever than he thought, less subtle than he thought, and more inclined to doubt the word of those he should trust above all others. Draco didn’t want to change him, but it would have been pleasant if he could have forced him to shut up for a time.
“I do,” Draco said. “It’s a wonder he hasn’t died already.” He hesitated, groping for words to explain what Harry was in such a way that Lucius would respect it, instead of merely thinking it silly. “Father…Harry wants to pour all of himself down an enormous well for as many people as need it. He doesn’t think about the future, about the people who love him as separate entities. They’re just more people he can serve. And I don’t think he acknowledges the Malfoy claim at all. He thinks of making sacrifices for us, but we’re not special.”
“Can anyone be special to him, with that kind of mindset?” Lucius slumped back against the pillows. His face had aged whilst Draco was speaking. Draco blew a low breath through parted lips. Maybe there was something to be said for a near-death experience in convincing his father to still his wagging tongue.
“We can,” Narcissa said, her blue gown shifting and shining in the lights from the lamps and the enchanted windows, “if we offer him something that no one else has, not even the Weasleys.” She paused, glorying, Draco knew, in the curious eyes of her husband and son fastened on her. “A sense of home, of permanent belonging. With people who understand him.” Her glare took in Draco and Lucius impartially.
“I’m starting to!” Draco said, and a snap of anger worked its way across his voice like ice breaking before he could stop it. “Who just explained his psychology to you in convincing terms?”
“More than that,” said Narcissa. “We must learn to ensure that he understands us. The man you have described, and the man I truly believe Harry Potter to be, will not regard us as anything special if he is merely ordered to open his heart to us. He will give us his service and reserve his personal regard. We would be no more than the newspaper reporters, importuning him for some personal fact whilst not making themselves vulnerable in turn.”
Draco blinked at her. “I do plan to show him emotion,” he said. “I plan to show him all the intimacy he desires. More than he could desire.”
“I will do the same.” Lucius’s voice had a catch in it for only a moment. Then it firmed. “It will be a pleasure to teach the boy, Narcissa. He is so lacking in subtlety as to make almost a divine student.”
More suited to you than you will ever know, Father, Draco thought, and his mother’s glance and his crossed like paired swords.
Narcissa slowly shook her head. “You flirted with him at first, Draco, remember?” she asked him. “He is likely to distrust merely an offer of sex. As he will distrust lessons in actions he considers evil.”
Lucius folded a hand a touch too heavily on the blankets in front of him. “Then what can we give him?” he asked. “If not our presence and our kindness and our secrets? There is no other way to show vulnerability in return for his vulnerability that I know of.”
“We will give him our anger,” said Narcissa. “Our irritation. Our impatience. Our explanations. Our fears. All the emotions that he is accustomed to soothing.” She lifted her head and fastened her eyes on Draco. “But with that come our strengths. We cannot simply show him those, or he will consider us invulnerable behind a polished and gleaming surface, in no need of his sacrifices, and nothing to do with him. And we cannot only show him need; he will serve us then, but he will not come to love us. The combination of strengths and weaknesses, of truths, is what will win him.”
Draco shifted uncomfortably. He had never done as much with any of his lovers, because he understood the power dynamics of relationships too well. Someone needed to be the caretaker and defender, someone the yielding one. Draco had played both roles in his time, though he enjoyed the more protective role more, and played them both supremely well. One could maintain control of a lover in either position.
Narcissa was asking him to give up playing the role, to act as Harry did, and pretend the dynamics didn’t exist.
“We’ll seem unnatural,” he muttered, voicing the rebellion that he could see in the back of his father’s eyes. “Isn’t he likely to distrust that more than anything else we can do, and think we’re hatching some evil plot?”
“We’ll seem natural for the first time in our lives, because we won’t be perfectly in control,” Narcissa corrected him. Her face was shining with serenity. Draco wished for a moment that he had her confidence, and then reconsidered. He was not at all sure he wished to live in the world his mother’s insight regularly led her to. “He’ll notice the contradictions and the cracks. He’ll realize, eventually, that we’re letting him into our hearts. And that, I think, is all he has ever asked.”
“But that’s what the Weasleys gave him,” said Lucius. “Our gifts will not be unique. How are we to win him if they aren’t?”
“The Weasleys had too many children to give Harry the amount of attention he deserved.” Narcissa managed to speak the words without condemnation, which was more than Draco could have done. “And he was not bound to them by blood. He is to us.” Abruptly, she smiled, and Draco couldn’t remember seeing her put so much warmth in the expression before. “I assure you, give Harry Potter the merest idea that he could belong to us by blood, really belong, and he will snap it up.”
Draco tapped one hand against the inside of his other arm, frowning. He wanted to doubt his mother, but she seemed so sure, and in any case, he wasn’t really in the habit of doubting her. Maybe it would work, if she was sure it would. Her will had changed the world before, more often than the world knew it had; the incident in the Forbidden Forest where she had saved Harry’s life by lying to the Dark Lord was only the most visible.
“Narcissa.” Lucius was the one who spoke with the stubbornness dripping from his tones that Draco had wanted to voice, but not to his mother. “You must give me your word that this will work. I will not expose myself otherwise.”
Draco bit his lip. Merlin, he was getting as bad as Harry. When his father said “expose himself,” it was an undignified image that entered his head, rather than the solemn one that should have plagued him, that of the head of the Malfoy family giving up all his secrets and receiving nothing in return.
“I am certain,” said Narcissa. “Would that you were as sure of the necessity before you undertook one of your impulsive actions.”
From the way Lucius flushed, Draco was sure something unspoken and unknown to him lay between his parents-perhaps whatever they had been talking about before he returned to the room. But the next moment, Lucius dropped his chin, and Draco thought it was beautiful, and a gesture of love, how completely his father committed himself to this plan on Narcissa’s say-so.
“I will give Harry a place in the secrets of my heart and allow him to see my weaknesses, then,” he said.
Draco nodded when Narcissa looked at him. His throat felt tight and full with an emotion that crowded the line between fear and desire.
*
So he lay in the bed with Harry and watched him sleep, something he wouldn’t have dared do only yesterday. It would reveal too much of himself, how deeply and desperately he craved for Harry to lie beside him of his own free will. Now, thanks to the plan that said he had to reveal himself whether or not he wished to, he could actually do it.
And it had been-
Stunning was so slight a word.
Harry had arranged himself, as if by instinct, so that he was crowded into one corner of the massive bed. Even asleep, he had to leave room for other people, Draco thought, exasperated. Then he wondered if that was less the result of self-sacrifice and more the result of Harry’s habit of sleeping with other men, and for a time jealousy stalked up and down his body, playing the keys of his spine.
That had lasted until Harry turned and cuddled himself into Draco with a little sigh, slinging one arm halfway around his shoulders and draping a leg over his hip.
Draco held himself still, eyes half-shutting. Harry shifted, and his leg fell and trailed down so that it rested almost between Draco’s thighs-would have rested, if Draco had shifted a bit himself-instead of over his hip. His face was softened and flushed with sleep when Draco gazed at it, his lips so slightly parted that they begged a kiss, his free hand sprawled up beside his head with the palm open and the fingers curled as trustingly as a baby’s.
Draco had never known sexual desire as fierce as the wish, in that moment, to stoop down and kiss Harry on his mouth.
But doing so might wake him, and Draco didn’t want to do that. He simply wanted to lie still and listen to the pace of his breathing, to feel his warmth, to let his mind drift through lazy imaginings of what would happen when they regularly shared a bed this way.
To think about what would happen should Harry plunge his leg between Draco’s thighs with intent.
His cock hardened, but as gently as Harry breathed. Draco lay with it an inch or so away from Harry’s skin, and continued to listen to his gasps and mumbles, to watch the way his lips twitched, to study the curls of his hair and try in vain to find the same wildness in the way his lashes lay along his skin.
This was more about love than arousal.
The moment he understood that, Draco shuddered hard enough to make Harry’s knee slip to the bed again. Even that didn’t wake Harry, or disturb his cuddling with Draco. He ducked his head instead and pressed it into Draco’s chest, uttering a wordless, contented sound, a Crup puppy finding a dark corner under its blanket to hide.
His chest aching with his held breath, Draco reached up and trailed a hand through Harry’s hair, not touching the scalp itself. He concentrated on the feel of the curls instead, and the way they rustled and rasped against his skin.
His imagination had not been equal, after all, to the way it would feel.
Draco felt a great wash of helplessness. He wanted to curl himself around Harry and hold him there, safe from all harm, and he knew he couldn’t. He would have to let him get out of the bed and go into danger-fighting Lucius’s enemies, spending himself to heal, injuring himself in the pursuit of self-sacrifice.
This was the hard part about showing the truth to Harry, he thought. It made him feel weak instead of strong, where emphasizing his strengths at least might impress Harry and comfort himself.
But there were a few things he could do to mitigate the harm and help to protect Harry. Rogers would play a part in that.
So he lay there and meditated, happy in his plans, confident that he could keep Harry safe after all, if not perfectly safe.
And then Harry woke and ruined it all.
Chapter 16.