Chapter Twenty-Five of 'For Their Unconquerable Souls'- New Realms of Honesty
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Chapter Twenty-Five-New Realms of Honesty
Lucius had made up his mind through long, solitary hours of thought, both before and during the time when the house-elves had fed him the sleeping draught. He had insisted on the potion being mild enough that he was simply detached from his own emotions for a time and his body could relax. He floated at a distance from the situation and contemplated it.
And each time he looked at the problem from a new angle and came at it again like a stooping hawk, his decision was the same.
Harry deserved to know the extent of his problems with the hospital administrators and why he seemed to have so many and such determined enemies. Perhaps keeping the information from him had already damaged and slowed Lucius’s own treatment.
Of course, giving it to him too early would have implied too great a trust, Lucius reminded himself, and leaned back against the pillows to await Harry’s advent. It was soon to happen.
*
Draco blinked his eyes open and froze for a moment. He was staring at a head of shaggy black hair that lay on the pillows next to him, and his arms were wrapped around a warm torso. Still clad in robes, more’s the pity, he noted, in the moment before his brain caught up with the sensations.
Then he realized he was lying next to Harry-intruding on him in bed, which was one thing that he had promised not to do. He blushed and leaped out, putting distance between himself and the bed, as if Harry might sit up at any moment and point an accusing finger at him.
He didn’t. Instead, he breathed on, his mouth slightly open, a tiny line of drool working down the side of his cheek.
Draco brushed a hand over his face and let his breath out slowly. He stretched, never taking his eyes off Harry, and paused in startlement. His muscles had never felt so relaxed. He couldn’t remember a single dream, either a nightmare about the war or anything else.
He didn’t think he had ever rested that sweetly, that simply, that naturally, next to anyone.
Of course Harry is good for me, he thought after a moment, his feelings surfacing as a smile. He’s good for everyone in our family.
And now he had to consider, perhaps to plan with Narcissa, how they were to ensure that their family could do good to Harry, as well.
He lingered a few moments more to gaze at Harry. He had shifted to the side, and his mouth had shut, so that the line of drool was cut off. His chest rose and fell with each deep breath. Draco wondered absently if he usually slept this well, himself, and then decided he did not. He wouldn’t have a face shaped by weariness if he did.
There are still so many things I don’t know about him. Does he really have irrepressible nightmares all the time, the way the Daily Prophet reported? Did he cling to his other lovers because they gave him people to look after, or because they made him feel worthwhile? He could have had anyone he wanted, and yet he seems to have made consistently bad choices.
Well, when he chooses me, he will have no reason to think he has made another one.
Draco started, realizing he had taken a step back towards the bed. If he remained here, he would probably end by convincing himself that Harry could not greatly mind the intrusion of another warm body into the bed, especially someone he was beginning to show he trusted. And that could potentially be disastrous, at least to that burgeoning trust Draco wanted.
He turned and left the room, shutting the door behind him before he summoned Rogers and gave him directions to make Harry’s breakfast large and plentiful.
*
Narcissa was arranging her hair in different ways and watching the mirror for the ways it changed her face when her son came into the room behind her with love shining in his eyes.
She stayed very still whilst he kissed her cheek and then sat down in the chair next to the mirror and began to babble about Harry. After a moment, she went on winding her hands in thick plaits of hair and drawing them over her shoulders, now and then turning so that she could look at the back of her neck or the way that they coiled around her ears. But most of her attention had focused on Draco, whom she had never seen this open.
This dangerously open.
He is more passionate than Lucius and I. I knew that. But I have seen him guarded in past affairs. I did not know that merely falling in love with a Gryffindor would cause him to act like one.
And as Draco talked on, his hands making small restless gestures, his conversation full of plans to make life more comfortable and opulent and tempting for Harry, Narcissa saw the necessity to check him.
“Son,” she said, when he was full in the middle of a lyrical flight about how they might coax Harry out of the shell caused by the Muggles’ abuse and the apparently relentless demands of being a St. Mungo’s mediwizard.
Draco blinked, then shut his mouth and turned his full attention to her. Narcissa was grateful to see that he retained that much of his sense of what was important in their world. When she called him “son” instead of “Draco,” she was expecting him to respond as someone who had a certain relationship to her.
“Mother,” he said, and inclined his head. Only an experienced observer would have noticed the way his jaw firmed, Narcissa thought, and Harry Potter was not one of those. “Is something wrong?”
“Have you considered what you might give up,” Narcissa asked softly, turning away and arching her neck as if she were mainly interested in the way that her hair swept towards the middle of her back, “if you give constant gifts and attention to someone who does not have the same level of love and trust for you?”
Draco said, “You haven’t listened to me. He’s on his way to trusting me. I saw that last night, when he gave in and accepted the potion without my even having to coax him. And then he didn’t chide me when the effects on him were stronger than he probably would have liked.”
“Probably,” Narcissa said into the mirror. “On his way.”
Draco hissed beneath his breath, and in the next moment he was up and facing her, clasping her arms in his hands. “Mother,” he said, the word loud and cold and ringing. “You know that Harry is different from most of the others we’ve dealt with-the enemies beyond our family, the Healers, the allies, the lovers I’ve taken. He has no idea of deception, and he’s already made sacrifices to keep us safe. Now you’re telling me to be wary of him? Why? What do you know?” His eyes were trying to cut into her.
Narcissa had long since made a habit of meeting harder gazes. It was a pity that Bellatrix had been so mad; she would have made a good teacher for Draco in that respect. “I know nothing in particular,” she said calmly. “I only know that I see you surrendering power in a frantic search for-what? You have not named it. I do not think, Draco, that love requires you to relinquish any crown of ambition or power, though I am certain Harry would urge you to, because to him those are dirty words. You need not adopt his ideals. You need not trust him unquestioningly.” She paused, then gave full play to the argument that, at the moment, would probably mean the most to Draco. “You need not become too eager and warm, and thus surrender the difference from him that probably attracted him to you in the first place.”
Draco’s nostrils flared for a moment, and then he turned his head away from her and lowered his eyelids in the way that meant he was thinking. His fingers tightened on her arms for the longest moment-Narcissa bore with it patiently, but disdained the emotions racing behind Draco’s calm demeanor that had made the bearing necessary in the first place-before he broke away and began pacing through her room.
“Do you think there’s really any danger of that?” he asked suddenly, turning around and trying to spear her with another glance. “You were the one who said we should be more honest and open to gain his trust.”
“And you are the one who thought on your own of the point, which I only amplified, that our pride as well as his must have acknowledgement,” Narcissa said calmly, to remind him of the conversation in hospital yesterday. “Yes, Draco, honesty is important. But we cannot and should not take away from our own goals.”
“I didn’t think I was.” The slight narrowing of his eyes qualified the statement as dangerous, though Narcissa doubted either Harry or Lucius would have thought so.
“You may,” Narcissa murmured. “It is prevention that is important, after all, more than a cure.”
Draco tilted his head in reluctant acknowledgment of that, but his eyes stayed narrow. “Do you think Harry would really rush to take advantage of any weakness on our part, when he has shown himself blind to such power dynamics in the past?”
“He would do it without realizing what was happening,” Narcissa told him, “much as he did during the war when he acted without realizing how many sacrifices other people had made or how much danger and trouble they had gone through. Yes, most of the time he makes himself into a servant and a sacrifice for others. But that constitutes a blindness of its own. He is so concerned with whether he has given enough, whether he is the right relation to other people, that he is not liable to notice what they give up until someone reminds him. And then he would only torment himself with guilt, which is worse than useless.”
Draco began, reluctantly, to smile. “I think you understand him better than I do, for all that I’m the one who’s falling in love.”
“Simply remember that it is called falling for a reason,” Narcissa responded mildly, “and that you have family around to help you-also for a reason.”
Draco nodded, then laughed. Narcissa came to startled attention. If anything, she would have expected Draco to maintain a sober, perhaps sullen, silence after their conversation; it was the way she would have responded had her mother tried to counsel her on her approaching marriage to Lucius back when she was Draco’s age. But his laughter sounded free and joyous, without constraint.
“Discussing him in the abstract,” Draco said, cocking his head, “it doesn’t seem possible that I would fall in love with someone like him. Selfish, even if he doesn’t mean to be; demanding of attention, and in ways that I am not accustomed to giving it; refusing to adhere to our ideals insofar as he understands them, and not adhering to them in other ways because he is blind to their existence. Would you believe I could desire him from that description alone?”
“No,” Narcissa admitted. She felt a small easing in her heart as she realized that Draco did recognize the dangers, and perhaps better than she did herself. “I am glad that you do, however. He has strengths that complement the weaknesses, and perhaps our family needs such ideals to regenerate it.”
Draco nodded. “But I also needed your warning, if only to remind me to look beyond the boundaries of my own imagination in the way that Harry can’t, yet.” He touched her cheek with the back of one finger, sliding the nail across her skin. Narcissa met his eyes and smiled slightly. It was a gesture she had taught him, often used in her family between her and her sisters, who had sharp nails and could cut each other if they wished-but only if they wished.
“I love you,” he said, “and I love Harry, and I will be cautious with you both, as you deserve.” He bowed his head with a flourish. “Now, let us discuss in a more reasonable tone how we can make Harry’s life more comfortable and, through him, our lives.”
To this, Narcissa was grateful to assent.
*
“I fear I have not been entirely honest with you, Harry.”
It was easier to speak the words than Lucius had thought it would be, perhaps because Harry was in the middle of a healing spell at the moment and not looking directly at him. A phantasmal dolphin had swum from Lucius’s body back to Harry, and the strained smile he was wearing now might as easily be from what the spell had told him as because of his discomfort at Lucius’s words.
“That seems to be a common plague in this house,” Harry said at last, his voice flat and his eyes shadowed. “I wasn’t honest with you about my feelings of discomfort, either, and look where it got me.”
“This matter is more serious.” Lucius managed to hold his voice steady and keep his hands open and resting next to him even as he began to wince, imagining what would happen if Harry considered his own small indiscretions so far to be lies.
Harry paused in sliding his wand into his sleeve. Lucius lowered his eyes when the young man tried to capture his gaze in the next instant. He was not yet ready for that. He was not ashamed, of course; he had done what he thought had to be done to protect his family. But he preferred to examine the tension in his own arms so that they would not betray anything.
“All right,” Harry said at last, and perhaps he had some practice in controlling his emotions after all, because it was very hard to tell what he was feeling from his voice.
“I did not know what specific grievance my attacker had against me,” said Lucius. He strove to keep his voice balanced, calm, flat. “I have never raped anyone, and I do not even remember the girl Smythe claims as his daughter. And with what you have discovered about the Mirror Maze and the dreambane, though he obviously had help, I do not think anyone else was needed to attack me. They only needed someone who hated me enough to do as he was told and accept help he might have discovered came from former Death Eaters.”
Harry nodded slowly. “Then what-“
“The administrators of the hospital have a grudge against me,” Lucius said. He was impressed with the calmness of his own voice. True, it was not the way he would have admitted a mistake to Narcissa or Draco, but his relationships with them were different. They expected failures from him, and would wrap them into the ongoing battle within the family to be strongest. Still, until this moment Harry had had no reason to think that Lucius was trusting him less than was necessary. “Some time ago, I withdrew all of my funding and charitable donations, so as to spend my money on purposes tied more tightly to the Malfoy family. This resulted in a particularly large loss on their part in purchasing medicinal potions, which my donations had mostly been marked for. I went into hospital in the first place because I had no other choice. I did know from the first day that my life might be in danger, however, and so might the life of anyone who tried to help me.”
Harry backed away a step from the bed. Lucius could not interpret the expression on his face. His mouth worked open and then shut, and he breathed so noisily through his nose that for long moments Lucius worried he would do something impetuous. Lucius let his hand gently touch his wand. He did not need to defend himself physically from Narcissa or Draco, but it had already been proven how little Harry understood the contest of words. Perhaps he would think blows or hexes the best way to strike.
Then he shook his head and his eyes focused. Lucius deemed it best to go on speaking then, when he knew he would not be wasting his words on a lack of attention.
“I can give you names,” he said.
“You didn’t think at all about what might happen to anyone else, did you?” Harry whispered. “If I had died, it wouldn’t have mattered to you.”
Harry is sometimes tiresome. Or perhaps having a Gryffindor in the family is sometimes troublesome. It is no wonder that families often Sort along certain House lines. They could not live with each other otherwise. “It would not have mattered before the Heart’s Blessing spell, no,” Lucius said. “That made you part of the family. It changed things.”
Harry shook his head again. “Why didn’t you tell me before now?”
I have explained that. But perhaps he wants some reason closer to the moral or ethical ones that he would expect from other patients.
“I honestly had no reason to think the administrators of St. Mungo’s were behind this, until you told me about the blue robes.” Lucius gave a small shrug. “I believed you when you said that the person who removed my stabilization fields and tried to kill me was most likely an individual, acting alone. Even after all my experience serving under the Dark Lord, I still suspect individuals first and conspiracies second, if at all.”
“But still-I needed to know if you had any enemies there particularly!” Harry glared at him. Lucius thought he would fold his arms and start tapping his foot in a moment, and in those he saw Harry’s difference from Draco, who would have waited patiently and expressed his own frustration and fury in private. “Things could have been different.”
And would they necessarily have been better for being different, Harry? That is the question that you fail to ask yourself.
“And why should I have told you?” Lucius said. Think, Harry. My questions are reasonable, as are my speculations. “That information is only for family to know. After the Heart’s Blessing spell, it is true, I did consider telling you. On the other hand, we left the hospital that same day, and then you were safe within the protection of the Manor’s walls, as a Malfoy should be. I did not foresee my son’s stupidity and your return, unescorted, to hostile territory.”
“But when I started suspecting Death Eaters were behind the curse and had the help of Healers, you could have told me then-“
He enters the territory of whinging. This had been the true reason that Lucius did not want to tell Harry, other than the idea of exposing a mistake that Harry would think of as moral wrongness and demand some sort of restitution for. He knew Harry would not be able to let the mistake go and would express himself in unattractive terms, which Lucius had not enjoyed listening to even when Draco was a small child.
“I did not think you ready for that knowledge yet,” said Lucius. “Indeed, you are so newly settled into the family, and your history with us before that was so tumultuous, that I wished to avoid any unnecessary reference to deeds you may have thought reprehensible.” I hope to see his eyes widen with understanding, but so far that is still a vain hope. “I did not want you to think-“
He broke off, but the damage had been done. Harry’s eyes were wide with understanding now, but it was not the kind Lucius had hoped to encourage. Harry knew what he meant.
I did not want you to think me reprehensible.
That, he had not meant to admit. Harry’s opinion of himself and the rest of the family was still fundamentally unimportant, as long as he learned to trust them and to comport himself as a Malfoy. Lucius knew that Narcissa, many times in their long association, had had uncomplimentary thoughts of him, but she confined them to herself and could attend celebratory occasions on his arm even when they had had an argument the same morning.
He should not care what Harry thought of him. He had acknowledged the “tumultuous” past between them; he knew, none better than he who had seen the Time-Turners smashed, that there was no way of changing it. This was true weakness, and the only thing worse than having it and letting it matter to him was admitting it-all of which he had just managed to do.
If this goes on, I may manage to be irritated with myself.
“You are a stubborn arse,” Harry said fiercely.
Lucius could not help staring. Through everything he knew about Harry, he had still expected his rejection of Lucius to be more dignified.
“I need the hospital administrators’ names,” Harry went on, striding towards the door from the bedroom. “And any other key information that you might have felt like squatting on instead of telling me about. And your promise not to keep it from me again.” His voice had remained vaguely calm, but just then he spun around and slammed a hand into the door panel hard enough to startle Lucius. His next words emerged as a full-throated yell. “And you’re an idiot if you think mere references to the past were going to jolt me out of a family who appeared to accept me, but keep in mind that stupidity like yours and Draco’s just might.”
Lucius felt his jaw drop. He couldn’t help it; things like this did not happen to him.
He had no time to ask questions before Harry was gone, the door swinging wildly in his wake. Lucius clapped weakly, and one of the house-elves appeared at once and shut it. Then it lingered, staring at him from beneath lowered ears and twitching its cheeks, which Lucius knew must be a sign that he was looking fairly bad.
“Does Master Lucius require-“ it began.
“No,” Lucius snapped, needing to be alone to think about the incredible thing he had just witnessed.
The house-elf bowed-in the way, Lucius was beginning to realize, that Harry never would-and vanished.
Lucius leaned back in his pillows and exhaled hard, his eyes fluttering shut. The last words played over in his head, and over again.
Lucius still did not understand all the peculiarities of Gryffindor psychology. He still had to scold himself for revealing his weakness.
But he did understand, incredibly, that he was not to be punished for that mistake to the degree that he should be. Not yet.
Chapter 26.