Chapter Two of 'The Marriage of True Minds'- Across the Abyss
Chapter One.
Title: The Marriage of True Minds (2/?)
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this for fun and not profit.
Pairings: Harry/Draco eventually, Draco/Astoria, Harry/Ginny, and Harry/OMC.
Warnings: Sex (het and slash), angst, manipulation, bonding. Ignores the epilogue.
Rating: R
Summary: Lucius curses Harry and Draco into a forced marriage. They’re required only to live together, not to be together, and so both of them pursue relationships on the side. But as time passes, things change.
Author’s Notes: This will be a leisurely novel-length story, and at the moment, I don’t know how many chapters it will be. If you don’t like the cliché of a forced bond, it’s probably not going to appeal. The title comes from Shakespeare's Sonnet 116.
Thank you again for all the reviews!
Chapter Two--Across the Abyss
Malfoy Manor unfolded around Harry as the elf led them further and further into it, up stairs, down stairs, around corners, through corridors, through rooms. He stared at ivory and gold and marble and silver and obsidian and emeralds and stained glass, and his feet clicked on tiles and wood and smooth stone that he'd hate to be on during a running battle. And there was always more of it. He didn't think the journey to Lucius took ten minutes, but it was twice that long in terms of fortunes and riches.
Harry swallowed back his own saliva. It burned, sour, going down.
It was too much. For the first time, Harry thought he understood the Malfoys. To live in a house like this, you'd either have to let it crush you with thoughts of the grandeur that you could never live up to, or you'd have to expand your spirit until you filled it from top to bottom. Obviously, they had chosen the latter course.
Harry understood it now. That didn't mean he had to like it. He rubbed at the ring on his finger and wondered for a moment why copper was part of it. That looked like base metal that the Malfoys would never willingly allow into their house or their lives.
But there were more important things to think about, like the way Malfoy followed him without complaint and the anxious bows the elf gave him when it finally opened the door into a book-lined study.
Lucius Malfoy sat behind a table so polished that Harry winced back from it. He might see his reflection. Malfoy gave him a smile full of teeth he'd probably stolen from a shark and leaned forwards, giving a gracious wave of one arm.
"Permit me to welcome my new son-in-law," he said. "I am honored to have someone in the family who has done so much for it."
Harry gauged Lucius's mood from his eyes, from his smile, from the eager way his fingers shook when he uncurled them, and decided on his own response in proportion to that. No, he couldn't exactly read people the way the Auror instructors thought he should be able to, but he had his own resources and weapons. "Tell me what I need to trade to be free of this."
Lucius sat upright, his smile fading. Harry heard Malfoy click in behind him, but he said nothing yet. Of course, he thought opposing his father was hopeless. Harry would have been surprised if he had decided to intervene.
"You think a trade can annul a marriage?" Lucius shook his head. "The customs of marriage are ancient and forceful. You are our son-in-law until such time as I decide to release you."
"I know that," Harry said. He leaned one hip on the table that separated them. "So tell me what will make you release me."
Lucius laughed low in his throat and glanced past Harry at his son. "I chose better than I knew when I gave him to you, then. I like this one, Draco. A core of steel is always appropriate for a Malfoy spouse."
Harry waited until Lucius looked at him again. He knew that Lucius wanted him to fly into a rage from being ignored. Harry was disinclined to give him the satisfaction. Besides, he'd had a chance to learn something about patience recently.
Many chances, really.
For a moment, his spine crawled. Harry let nothing of it show in his face. "Perhaps money traded to you," he said in a thoughtful voice. "The Wizengamot doesn't permit you to have control of the Malfoy fortune, of course. But I could provide some. Tell me how much you need."
Lucius stared again. "You would do that? Empower an enemy that you know now can hurt you?"
Harry shook his head and spun the ring on his finger. "I have no admiration, only resentment. So, yes." If Lucius was stupid enough not to realize how little Harry valued money next to his freedom, then that was fine. Harry could let him keep thinking that.
Lucius leaned forwards across the desk and studied him some more. Harry bore up to the scrutiny easily. Lucius had nothing on Head Auror Jansen when he was in a foul mood, or even Hermione when Harry had been out drinking the night after some case gone wrong.
Finally seeming satisfied that Harry wouldn't crumple up and blow away to dust in front of his eyes, the way his son probably did, Lucius grunted and shook his head. "No, money is not enough."
"Then what is?" Harry laid one palm on the desk, letting smudges of sweat creep over the wood.
Lucius looked from Harry's hand to his face. Harry let his lips twitch, and didn't move.
"I have chosen better for you than you would for yourself, Draco," Lucius said at last. His voice was thick with some emotion Harry couldn't identify. "I'll let him remain in harness with you for a while and see what happens. He might bring back the prestige and honor to our family that we so badly lack."
Harry blinked, once, and Lucius lurched back with a cry as a silent explosion of white light went off right in front of his eyes. Harry started to move around the desk. He had used that trick, one bit of wandless magic he had thoroughly mastered, on a hundred enemies. While they flailed at the afterimages, he would get close enough and take them by the throat.
Malfoy seized his arm, bearing down on it. Harry hissed and twisted to throw him off. Malfoy let himself fall so that his ringed hand brushed against Harry's.
A shock of tingling paralysis through the rings made Harry hiss again and stand still long enough for Malfoy to wrestle him around. Malfoy's eyes were wide, and he looked at Harry as if he were a dog who had gone unexpectedly rabid.
"What are you doing?" he whispered. "Offering violence to your father-in-law?"
"This is a sham marriage, Malfoy," Harry said, keeping his voice low, because obviously Malfoy had lost some of his higher brain functions sometime in the last few minutes. "That means I don't owe him anything but a firm grip that will force him to change his mind. Unless you want to remain in this trap for reasons of your own, of course," he added, aiming his words to sting, and rubbing his fingers furiously against Malfoy's. "This the most action you've had lately?"
*
It took more effort than Draco liked for him to remain still and meet Potter's eyes. He wanted to turn his back. He wanted to spit. He wanted to crush the bastard's fingers and break his skin against the unyielding ring.
He understood nothing. If Potter had become stronger and more violent, he had done it at the expense of more subtle reasoning skills.
If Potter could have convinced Lucius to accept something from him in return for removing the marriage bond, then Draco saw no reason to intervene. He would have tried negotiations himself if he hadn't known that there was only one price his father would accept and that he could not bear to pay it. But violence was another step up the ladder, a step into unacceptability.
Not to mention that the marriage bond would hurt Potter if he hurt Lucius, and his spouse along with him, and Draco had no desire to experience that pain.
"This may be a sham in your eyes," he said, when Potter was leaned forwards and focused on him to an extent that Draco knew meant he had forgotten Lucius, still trying to get his sight back across the desk. "But it is a real marriage to anyone pure-blooded. We need not treat it like one in the privacy of our house. But you will not threaten my parents. You will not destroy our property. You will accept me and name me your spouse in polite conversation."
Potter's lips smiled. His teeth didn't. "Why should I care what you want?" he asked. "I'm not pure-blooded, and if I did pretend the way you wanted, no one who matters would believe it in any case. We won't spend one unnecessary moment together. Pretend to your friends all you like. I won't be doing the same." And his magic spiked and swirled down his arm towards Draco, like a coil of barbed wire.
Draco ignored that. They couldn't threaten each other with magic when the rings were touching like this. "I thought you rational," he said. "Grown up from the stupid child who would have wrestled with the inevitable exactly like this. Shall I be glad that I was wrong?"
Potter hesitated, his nostrils narrow. Then he called his magic back into himself with a swift snap that made Draco's mouth water. If he had that sort of control over his magic, he wouldn't have cared about the ring around his finger. He would have been secure in himself against any bond that his father tried to place on him. He wondered what else had happened to Potter, that he couldn't be content with that.
"You don't think he'll negotiate with me?" Potter turned his head and watched Lucius with a feral expression. Draco looked with him. His father had recovered and sat with his hands quietly folded in his lap, face expressionless. Draco knew that wall-like aspect of his features from childhood. He sighed.
"No," he said. "And the magic of the bond won't permit violence in the family. Which means that we'll need to remain like this until he grows bored with the situation, or figures out that it won't get him what he wants."
"Why should I grow bored?" Lucius asked. "I told you, Draco, I rather like your chosen."
Draco turned his back to his father, shutting him out and forcing Potter to turn at the same time; this close, the rings wove a physical connection between them, though he didn't think Potter had figured that out yet. Potter watched Draco with a gaze like a forging fire. Draco nodded to him and didn't try to hold eye contact. It might make him seem weak to Potter that he couldn't, but he didn't think so. Potter had just seen how strong he was, how much certain things mattered to him.
"I want to preserve proprieties," Draco said. "I want to give my father--and my mother, who will also be affected by this--the respect due to them. Private family conflicts should never be exposed. We should be all praise and support for each other in public." He risked meeting Potter's eyes again, and encountered no understanding there, but a banked flame.
"That sounds as if you don't intend to work on a way to break the marriage bond," Potter said, and his magic gathered itself again, wrapping him like a storm of thorns. Draco shook his head and wondered if the control he had seen a moment ago was so real after all.
"Not in public," Draco said. "I will not show them what my father has become. And you won't, either."
Potter looked at him mildly enough now, but that was because, as Draco discovered a moment later, all the fire had gone into his voice. "That's going to be difficult," he said. "I'm dating Ginny. I'm on the verge of asking her to marry me. I won't put that off, and you're not going to interfere."
Draco grimaced despite himself. This Potter, with his power and his scars and his mixture of danger and restraint, deserved someone far stronger than the littlest Weasley, if not quite the honor of a marriage into the Malfoy line.
"Then the solution is obvious," he said. "We pass it off as a marriage of convenience. There are no rules about discreetly having lovers. Everyone will believe it on my side easily enough. They know that we need money if we're going to expand our businesses and our contacts in the new Ministry."
"And on my side?" Potter shifted his shoulders as though against the imposition of a yoke. "What will they think it comes from on my side?"
Draco looked at him, and the answer sprang to his lips without premeditation. "Privacy. Behind our wards, you can lead a life that the newspapers can't touch. And we have artifacts that can give you the same experience in public."
Potter reared back, then came to a stop as he noticed that the connection between their rings kept him from retreating. "Right," he said, a bit wild around the eyes. "My friends would believe that, perhaps, but the papers wouldn't."
"Does it matter so much what they say?" Draco shook his head. "There are some people who will make up stories about us no matter what we do. It's better to have one that your friends will believe, isn't it? That will make this seem all the more real."
"Telling them the truth doesn't sound bad at all," Potter said, and looked him dead in the eye. "They know that I love Ginny. They know that I haven't been associating with you. And I can trust Ron and Hermione to keep the secret, if we have to keep it a secret." His mouth twisted. "If we have to," he repeated softly, as though he was trying to come to terms with it himself.
"The problem is that I don't trust your friends," Draco pointed out. He wondered if he should emphasize to Potter that they had to act as a partnership now and in the near future. He would have thought that Potter had adapted to working with people by now, since he'd had Weasley as an Auror partner for years, but perhaps not. The glory showered on him alone might have accustomed him to his mental and emotional solitude. "No. We can't tell them. And you'd have an excellent reason for keeping any association with me from them. You know they would disapprove."
Potter's mouth curled again. "That's one word for it," he agreed.
"So." Draco caught his eyes again. "I meant what I said. The marriage curse will only pain us if we stay in separate homes or refuse to pool our vaults."
"What about someone calling me Potter?" Potter folded his arms, ignoring the way that that pulled on their joined rings.
Draco grimaced a bit. It was unpleasant to realize that the spell would deny him his favorite way of referring to his new--husband. "They can call you that," he said. "But you can't sign documents that way, and the official records at the Ministry--"
"No longer refer to me that way. Yes, you told me." Potter's gaze went over Draco's head to the far wall, and he stood so still for a long moment that Draco wondered if this was what it was like to be married to a statue.
"Yes," Potter said finally. "All right. Ginny won't like it, but then, I suspect whatever witch you're courting won't, either."
"How do you know I'm courting someone?" Draco asked reflexively. He and Astoria Greengrass had met for preliminary negotiations, but he had made bloody sure that was kept out of the papers. He had her family's permission and his parents', and that was enough.
Potter gave him an amused, superior glance. "Not hard to work out," he murmured. "You want your family line to continue--why did your father curse you to be with a male, by the way?--and the only way to do that is have children. I've had plenty of opportunity in the past few minutes to see how highly you value your family. You would never do something that could endanger its future, such as not marrying."
Draco narrowed his eyes. He disliked being understood this way. He sought for something that would allow him to strike back, and remembered Potter's freak-out over his name, the way his eyes had shone--and not with happiness, either.
"You value your family, too," he said. "Or why were you so upset when the marriage named you Malfoy? I'd thought you'd have less pure-blood tradition to keep up, what with your mother's blood."
He had barely finished saying that when he found himself unable to breathe.
*
Harry watched with some detachment as his magic slid down and wrapped Malfoy's throat with glittering thorns that only he could see. They shone as if tipped with ice, and Harry reached out and put his hand on one, bearing down. Malfoy's eyes went wide, his breath bursting out of him as though in a hurry to escape the tainted confines of his lungs, and his hands rose uselessly.
"You said that we couldn't hurt each other with magic," Harry leaned in to whisper. "But this isn't hurting you. This is holding you on the edge of pain and showing what I can do. Don't say anything about my mother again, and I won't have to do this again." He clapped his fingertips together, and the magic vanished from Malfoy, withdrawing into his own body. Harry had read time and again during Auror training that wandless magic was impossible, but once again, he seemed to be the exception. It was true that he couldn't just will things to happen, though; he had to use some gesture from his eyes or hands to control it.
Malfoy stared at him still. Harry hitched his shoulder into a shrug and said, "I've dreamed of having a wife and children since I left Hogwarts. Ginny is going to be that wife. I am going to have these children. Now. You didn't answer me. Why did your father curse you to marry a man when he must have known that I wouldn't be able to provide you with the heirs he wants to have so he can twist their minds?"
Malfoy massaged his throat and shook his head. "He's still in the same room, you know, Potter." Harry had to smile. At the moment, even Malfoy's contemptuous tone to his name, his real name, thrilled him. Malfoy hadn't managed to forget who Harry really was yet, and if he didn't, then that might prevent it ever happening. "You could ask him."
"I don't trust his answers," Harry said, ignoring Lucius's chuckle. "I trust you more. Think before you respond, moron," he added, when Malfoy began to open his mouth with a speed that said nothing good about what was coming next.
Malfoy touched his throat again as if there were going to be bruises, and said, "This is not a marriage for the future to him, Potter. He cursed me purely out of irritation, and chose you as the candidate who would humiliate and anger me the most. When I give him what he wants, then he'll end it."
Harry cocked his head. Yes, that made sense as far as it went, but... "Why are you taking this so seriously, then, if he isn't?" Malfoy blinked at him, clearly showing that the words had sped past him like chances for altruism past a Death Eater, and Harry rolled his eyes and rephrased. "He abused a Malfoy family tradition that's meant to produce, oh, heirs and a suitable spouse for the heir, or however you would phrase it in your own inimitably pompous style." Malfoy rocked backwards as if slapped, and Harry had to laugh. "What, didn't know that I knew a word like inimitably?"
"You couldn't spell it, at least," Malfoy retorted, but he sounded a bit breathless for more than one word. Harry smiled. The more he could throw Malfoy off-balance, the better he could arrange things for himself, so that, as long as this sham marriage lasted, he didn't have to put up with something intolerable. Negotiations with the Ministry and criminals had taught him that you wanted to seize an advantage as soon as you could.
He resisted the urge to rub the back of his neck and said, "Well? He used this tradition as a means of revenge. Why are you taking it seriously, to the point of insisting that I should?"
Malfoy licked his lips. "Because," he said, with a reluctance that reminded Harry of Hermione trying to crack an egg, "I can rage at him in private. You can rage at him in private, now that you're part of the family, as long as you don't offer him physical or magical violence." Harry glared at him, but he didn't take the warning. In fact, he moved closer and lifted their ringed hands between them. "But the public doesn't need to know. That's the distinction. Public and private. One you ought to be able to understand."
Harry sighed and nodded. He had learned early on in Auror training that the public would never leave him alone, and the best thing he could do was ignore the rumors and raise a defensive wall of truth or more rumors, whatever worked best. His private life remained that, despite the spirited attempts of Prophet reporters to erase the distinction.
"Doesn't explain why you take it seriously to the point of wanting me to lie to my friends, who would keep the secret, and follow all the forms," he said.
Malfoy moved closer still, and even though he kept flicking his eyes to Harry's fingers, as though he expected the thorns to sprout from them, his face held a quiet seriousness that made Harry blink and pay closer attention. Perhaps there was more to the bastard than he'd thought. He was certain of it when Malfoy reached out and put a hand on Harry's chest, above his heart, with barely a flinch at either the proximity or the coarse fabric of Harry's robes.
Harry controlled his immediate defensive reaction--Auror training was good for a lot of things, but not for tolerating casual touches in vulnerable places--and waited, eyes once again meeting Malfoy's.
"Because this is my choice," Malfoy said. "This is the way I've wanted to live my life since the war, being as much of a Malfoy as I can, when my father nearly undid all the chains that bind us."
"I could do worse than this, Draco," Lucius called from behind his desk.
Malfoy ignored him magnificently, perhaps, Harry thought, because he knew that was a lie. "My father cast this spell primarily to humiliate me. I'm going to show him that he can't succeed. I will live the way I want to, as the public face of the Malfoy family, as a pure-blood, as myself. If that means having a husband for a time who is not one I would have chosen..." He twitched, a motion that conveyed a shrug without doing anything so ill-bred as to actually give one. "Many Malfoys have not married at their own pleasure. I will be doing nothing more or less than continuing another tradition that matters to me." He leaned a bit closer, breath that smelled of citrus brushing Harry's chin. "Besides," he murmured, "living this way will irritate my father more than anything else, and may be the best chance we have to convince him to change his mind."
Harry stared hard at him. Malfoy never wavered away, never blinked more than was needed to moisten his eyes. His hand remained in place, and his fingers didn't pull away, either.
"All right," Harry said at last.
Malfoy's mouth tumbled open. Whatever victory he had expected to earn from Harry, concession didn't seem to be it. "What?"
Harry smiled a little. "I can respect that," he said. "The determination to be what you want to be, in the face of the world's wishes and hopes otherwise." The determination to be yourself. The Dursleys didn't break me, and neither did Voldemort, and neither did the media frenzy after the war. This is only another thing to resist. "Besides, you said that the bond would inflict lots of pain on us if we didn't at least move in together."
"And pool our vaults," Malfoy added, now sounding dazed.
"And pool our vaults," Harry agreed, with a wince that he hoped he kept in check. He had been living off the money that he earned as an Auror; he thought the Potter fortune should remain untouched for his children. He could only hope that Malfoy wouldn't take too much of it before this sham ended. "I don't want to endure that, and I do want this to end someday. Fine. We live as best as we can, and I'll pretend to everyone that this is--convenience. And date Ginny," he added, prepared to stare Malfoy down if he had to.
Malfoy shrugged. "I intend to continue my marriage negotiations, despite this setback."
Harry nodded, and sneaked a glance at Lucius as Malfoy finally twisted his hand and their rings separated. Lucius was smiling, but the smile looked like a soap scrawl on a mirror, and his hand was tight on his cane.
"Trying to force people to do what you want almost never works out," Harry told him. "Especially when one of those people is me."
He left the room before Lucius could respond, and his new husband walked beside him. Harry reckoned that was tolerable.
For a little while.
Chapter Three.
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