Chapter Thirty-Two of 'The Marriage of True Minds'- Within the Circle
Chapter Thirty-One.
Title: The Marriage of True Minds (32/?)
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.
Chapter One.
Thank you again for all the reviews!
Chapter Thirty-Two--Within the Circle
"I think we finally have a lead."
Harry smiled in cautious hope when he heard Ron's words. They were the kind of thing he had thought about hearing for what seemed like months, but now, with the pain stirred up by Narcissa's words and Draco's stubbornness circling within him, he couldn't feel as deeply about them as he wanted. "Yeah?" he asked, and hoped that Ron would accept the lack of enthusiasm in his voice.
Ron peered at him for a second, then shrugged in what looked like resignation and nodded. "Yeah," he said. "There's a witch called Elisa Grayson that we've been watching for a while, because we thought she was connected to kidnappings of other prominent figures." His eyes were gentle as he looked at Harry, and Harry stiffened his shoulders and stared back. Ron flicked a finger, apparently dismissing the need to argue about whether Harry's disappearance had been a kidnapping or not, and continued. "Someone smelled magic that fit the description you provided outside her house the other night. She wouldn't answer a few questions about it and acted shifty, so she's been brought in."
"Can you do that?" Harry asked, a bit suspiciously. "If they don't actually have a crime to arrest her on--"
Ron grinned. "The trainee who arrested her noted that she hasn't been cleaning up after her Crup, which you're supposed to do ever since a bunch of kids got sick from Crup shit last year."
Harry chuckled. "Good." He began to pace back and forth, running his hands over his shoulders and trying to reassure himself mentally. They had Grayson, and she might lead them to others. At least some of the nightmares he had might be put to bed soon.
Ron watched him, then, trying for an elaborately casual tone that didn't quite come off, asked, "How's the family, then?"
Harry sighed. "Malfoy--Draco, that is--is being stubborn." He didn't think he could tell Ron all the details of Draco's courtship in case there was something he wanted to keep private, and in any case, Ron was nodding, apparently in sympathy with that particular experience. Harry smiled slightly at him and went on. "And his mother is confusing me. She acted at first like there was nothing more important than the Malfoys and I should be grateful to be married into them, and now she's acting as though--I don't know, as though she cares about me and supports my right to make my own decisions."
Ron blinked a few times. "That's good," he said. "Isn't it?" He sounded like someone who had just realized that the branch holding him wasn't as sturdy as he'd thought.
"It hurts," Harry said simply. "And I don't even know why."
Ron hesitated, then came around the desk and patted him awkwardly on the shoulder. "I'm sure it'll work out," he mumbled. "You know that if you need to talk to me and Hermione, we're here?"
Harry nodded. Ron opened his mouth to say something else, and the office door opened. Ian stood framed in it, looking briefly at Ron before his grey eyes focused on Harry. His smile was warm, and Harry smiled back with no effort at all.
So much less effort than it would take with Draco, where all the gestures we make have this weight of history behind them.
"Harry?" Ian said, slowly, like someone savoring the name. "They brought Grayson in. They've told me to fetch you." From the edge to his voice, he knew that the woman might have something to do with the secret case Harry had hinted about to him yesterday, if not what.
"Thanks," Harry said, and clapped Ron's shoulder, bringing him up out of the chair. As he passed Ian, Ian's hand clasped his arm. Harry halted, looking up at him. Ian's hair was deep brown, touched with a hint of grey, and it hung in his eyes as he stooped down and gave Harry a kiss on the cheek.
"Luck," he whispered.
Harry watched him in wonder. Ian looked back, kindly, steadily, as though this was nothing remarkable and lovers did plenty of things like this every day.
They do, when they're not as screwed-up as Draco and me.
Harry swallowed down the lump in his throat and kissed him back, on the lips this time. He could be bold, too, when he wasn't living with someone whose every move he had to worry about, and the look of wonder in Ian's eyes when he drew back was worth it.
"Thanks," he whispered, and led the way out of the office, trying to ignore Ron's complicated silence behind him. They didn't have time to discuss this right now, not if they were going to be in the right mood to interrogate Grayson.
*
"You seem distracted, Draco."
Draco smiled at Laura and lifted the cup of tea to his lips, wishing that she wasn't as bloody observant as she sometimes was. "Am I?" he asked. "My apologies. I was contemplating our future and the many twists and turns it could take."
The words were ones guaranteed to soothe, and Laura relaxed, nodded, and picked up a stack of parchment that lay in front of her. "Now, this is the chart I drew up of our business holdings. Many of them should remain in our separate names, of course, but there are some it may prove profitable to combine."
Draco obediently bent his head to the parchment. They were sitting over a small, intimate table in Laura's office, and this close, he could easily smell the scrubbed-clean scent of her skin and hair. Laura's fingers tapped and sped over the parchment, and he could watch them, the neatly pointed nails, the slight flash of dark polish on them, and know just from looking at them how incredibly sophisticated she was. Everything about her was different from Harry: polished where Harry was uncouth, full of dark understanding where Harry would scoff, thinking of the consequences of her actions where Harry would be thinking of ways to put them off for as long as possible.
Draco found it difficult to listen to her, to want her. His mind was on what Harry might be doing right now with this Shelborn bloke he'd found; his finger was, more often than not, on his wedding ring.
Would he know if Harry slept with Shelborn? As far as Draco knew, it was never the kind of thing the rings had been designed to track. He would know if Harry was in danger, yes. The ring had warned him of that so far when they were fighting the beast in Harry's back and when Harry was about to conduct the ritual by himself. But that wasn't the same thing.
Would he know if Shelborn pressed Harry back against the wall, murmuring against his mouth as he kissed him, running his fingers over the scars? Harry might give him permission, at that, because Shelborn wasn't someone he had a long and fraught history with. Or he might look on, glassy-eyed, as Shelborn sank to his knees and took his cock in his...
"You are not attending."
Laura's voice snapped into the building anger in Draco's gut like a volcano into the middle of a hurricane. He gritted his teeth and glanced at her. Laura leaned back in her seat and reached for her own teacup as if it would provide a shield. Her free hand had dropped beneath the table to rest on her wand.
"I'm sorry if I'm distracted," Draco said through gritted teeth, not even trying to make his voice the sweet and polished thing that he knew his mother would say it should be. Screw what should be. I want to screw Harry. "I had an argument with my husband last night, and the effects linger."
"Ah, yes." Laura raised an eyebrow. "Do you know, Draco, I think I would like to meet with your husband."
Draco blinked. "Why?" he asked, honestly surprised. "I can assure you that he doesn't know anything about business, Muggle or otherwise, and he couldn't offer you an opinion on how it should work between us."
"Seeing him would let me know more about your marriage," Laura said. "And your first marriage is still an obstacle to ours. I always like to feel out my business partners, to understand them better. If the marriage with you is such an arrangement, inevitably, Potter--excuse me, Harry Malfoy--is one of those who is involved whether he understands the ramifications of the whole thing or not."
Draco breathed out slowly. "All right," he said. He could see, put like that, why she would desire such a meeting, although he couldn't predict how Harry would react. "I'll ask him. So far, he hasn't liked the idea."
Laura cocked her head. "Why? Does he want to stay married to you?"
Draco tried to make a single, wordless gesture that would take in the whole tangled mess of what lay between him and Harry, but Laura kept watching him as though that didn't suffice, and perhaps it didn't. "I don't know," he whispered. "He doesn't understand everything about pure-blood traditions. No, scratch that, he understands nothing about them. And he doesn't want to learn. I have to have someone by my side who knows them." He looked Laura in the eye.
Laura only smiled back, humming under her breath, a gesture that denied him a straight answer. Draco was forced to go on, to try to explain this to someone outside the family and not have it sound completely mad.
"But he thinks that a marriage should be the romantic stereotype, full of glory and loyalty to one another and love and passion and all that shit." Draco shook his head, running his fingers through his hair. "I don't think he would even let me have children with someone else, if we stayed married. And I have to have children. Heirs. He's not--he doesn't understand that."
"Yes, I want to meet him."
Draco stared at her. "Are you sure? I don't think he could be civil. He'd probably insult you to your face, and I don't want a struggle between your family and mine."
"I wouldn't consider it an insult if I could learn what he feels, and what I'd have to do to placate him," Laura said easily. She had taken her hand off her wand and was sipping her tea, regarding Draco with what he felt sure was quiet amusement. "I wouldn't have begun the marriage negotiations in the first place if I didn't intend to wed you, Draco. It's always good to understand the competition."
Draco's ring buzzed, probably in response to his own strong emotions. He rubbed a finger over it, and it quieted. "If you hurt him," he began.
Laura laughed in what sounded like delight. "I recognize that 'tear you limb from limb' gleam in your eyes. My mother used to look like that when someone threatened to take my father from her." She leaned towards him and lowered her voice. "I hope that you will feel something like that for me someday."
Draco gave a brittle smile back. It was what he wanted, but the more he thought about it, the more he thought it might not be what he wanted.
But the ultimate dream fantasy, a Harry who understood all about pure-blood tradition and would let him do what he needed to do without fear or jealousy, was out of his reach. That meant he should marry Laura, a witch who found the idea that Harry might be angry at her merely amusing.
The ring buzzed again. Draco stared down at it, and let his fingers move away from it. The bands that he and Harry had added, the platinum and the steel and the bronze, were all shimmering, and the ring rose briefly above his finger before falling back, as if it would hover through the air and lead him somewhere. Draco surged to his feet, nearly upsetting the table. Laura rescued it, staring at him with narrowed eyes.
"What is it?" she snapped.
"Harry is in danger." Draco turned his head from side to side, holding the ring up so that he could get some better sense of the distance and direction. The other times this had happened, Harry had been nearby, and it was fairly easy to reach him. This time, he could be almost anywhere in Britain if he'd been sent out on a new case. "I don't--"
The ring began to buzz again, and radiate a heat that felt as if it would burn his fskin. Draco clutched his hand to himself, grimacing. The heat began to spread up his finger in sharp lines, and Draco cursed and snatched his wand.
"I'm sorry, I have to go," he babbled to Laura, who was watching him with wide eyes but a cloak of calmness already settling on her. "I have to make sure that he's not in danger. We still have the rings binding us together, we're still a married couple--"
And then the buzzing stopped. Draco stared downwards, and found that the shining of the bands he and Harry had added to the ring had stopped as well. Once again, the marriage band lay there on his finger, a fairly ugly piece of jewelry, but not one that would cause most people to look twice unless they knew who he was. Draco shook his head in confusion. As far as he knew, the ring didn't do things like that. The only reason the buzzing should have stopped was if Harry was dead, and in that case the ring would have snapped in half and fallen from his hand.
Unless that's only another superstition about forced marriage bonds instead of something that does actually happen.
Draco swallowed through the fear-tightness of his throat, and nodded at Laura, holding out his arm. "You wanted to meet Harry? Here's your chance. We're going to the Ministry."
*
It had happened fast enough that Harry barely knew she had moved before he was in the thick of it.
He stepped into the interrogation room that held Grayson. She was a slender woman with hair dyed blue who sat holding her head in her hands so that he couldn't see her face. Two Aurors stood on either side of her, their wands aimed. Harry arched his eyebrows. He knew they were taking her this seriously as a threat because of the Ness case and the runes in blood that had been found, not because of his case, which almost no one knew about, but it still meant they were responding better than he had thought possible. Your average Auror thought he could overpower most criminals and didn't always guard them seriously enough.
"Miss Grayson?" he asked, moving forwards. "My name is Harry Potter. I'll be talking to you today, and if you answer honestly, then you'll be out of here in under an hour."
Grayson dropped her hands from her face and turned to look at him.
Harry recoiled. Her eyes were thick black holes, and out of them he saw something looking back that he recognized at once even though he had never seen it in the light.
The beast.
He might have stood there, paralyzed with fear, and let it take him, but one of the Aurors standing beside Grayson slammed into her from behind in response to the greasy smell of decay in the air. She turned on him with a snarl, and Harry saw the writhing tendrils reach for him, saw him melt, saw the bright smear in the air that was his arm becoming nothing more than food for the force reaching out of Grayson--
He was moving as if in a dream, raising a Shield Charm in front of Ron, yelling for the other Aurors to clear out of the way, yelling to attract Grayson's attention. The scars on his back writhed and twisted, either because of his fear or because the beast in him sensed the presence of another like it, and Harry had to spare a second to worry about how in the world he could control that if it decided to manifest--
And then a lightning flash passed him and slammed into Grayson. She let out a high, undignified, yelping wail, and crashed straight to the floor. The way her head bounced off it left no doubt that she was unconscious.
Harry turned, shaky with the adrenaline of battle, and saw the Auror who had saved him, saved them all, standing in the doorway of the interrogation room, just lowering his wand.
Ian.
"Are you hurt?" he asked quietly, looking at Harry first before his gaze moved on. It was strong and professional of him to check that other people were all right, Harry thought. In his place, he probably would have stood there just staring at Ian or whoever else was most important to him in the room instead of glancing at the others in the way he was supposed to.
If you had saved Draco...
Harry bit the thought away and nodded. "Fine, but Auror Moulson will have to have his arm regrown," he said, after taking a moment to listen to the scars on his back. He no longer felt that grotesque movement beneath his robes, and he relaxed. "Are you all right? That was strong magic you used to bring her down." He knew that his voice had more of a caressing tone than they had any right to, but from the small smile Ian gave him, it didn't matter.
"Fine," he echoed. "The magic I used was really just a variant on a lightning spell. It burns the consciousness out of Dark wizards who are too far gone in their insanity or their adrenaline to notice most pain."
"Brilliant," Harry breathed, and then turned away so that he was looking at Grayson instead of staring at Ian like an idiot any longer. He thought he would make Ian blush in a second, anyway. "So. Does anyone care to tell me how she got brought in when she was like this?" He heard his voice go dry, but he didn't care. Anyone who had arrested Grayson or spent any length of time with her this morning ought to have seen that something wasn't right.
And now a man was missing his arm, his eyes standing out with the wide, frantic circles around them that Harry was sure he had shown himself days after escaping the beast. Moulson's partner moved towards him and put one arm supportively around his shoulder, looking at Harry for instructions. Harry nodded, and she escorted him out of the room, his quiet moans of shock and fear trailing behind him.
One of the remaining Aurors coughed and stared at the floor. Harry focused on her. "Jacobs? You have something to say?"
"Something wasn't right," Auror Jacobs whispered. "I remember seeing that in her eyes when I came into the room. But something else...I don't know. I remember that, and then I remember forgetting it. I remember taking up my position as if everything was normal." She glanced up apologetically at Harry. "I think she locked away the part of my mind that was protesting."
Harry considered her, then nodded. She was being honest as far as she knew, and he didn't think that Grayson had poisoned her more than anyone else she'd been in contact with. Still... "Go to a Mind-Healer," he said, and she nodded at him and scurried out. Harry turned back to Ian. "Could you teach me that spell? I think we're going to need it if we encounter more people like this."
"If you'll tell me what she was doing, or what you know about it," Ian said in a low voice, with a shudder that seemed to ripple full-length down his body. "Whatever she was doing...fuck. I've never seen anything like it."
"I can't promise you the full story," Harry cautioned. "Some parts of it are still impossible to talk about. Other parts we don't know."
Ian nodded. "Whatever you can tell me will be fine."
Harry smiled at Ian, and glanced over his shoulder at Ron. Ron blinked at him. "I'm fine, mate," he whispered. "But I didn't know...you really do look at him as though you'd like to date him, don't you?" He sounded as though he didn't know whether to be intrigued or worried.
On that ambiguous note, Draco stepped into the room, a dark-haired pure-blood woman right behind him.
*
Draco stared at the room. A woman sprawled on the ground, Weasley and a second gaping Auror standing around useless as usual, a tall Auror glancing around at him with an expression of mild surprise...
And Harry. Harry without wounds, but looking at him with a complex expression on his face that suggested his appearance wasn't entirely welcome.
"How did you get in here?" the tall Auror asked. He had a quiet, commanding voice, but Draco didn't intend to listen to it. He zeroed in on Harry and walked away from Laura, who he knew would be content to stand there and watch everything in escalating amusement anyway.
"Didn't you feel the rings buzzing?" Draco demanded of Harry. "Didn't you know that you were in danger?"
Harry turned to glance at the sprawled woman, then turned to him. "Yes?" he asked, voice dry as dust. "Forgive me for having no time to send an owl when someone with tendrils coming out of her eyes was trying to kill me. Again."
Draco closed his eyes. Now that he thought about it, he could smell the heavy scent of decay in the air. He swallowed. He didn't want to think of Harry coming close to that, having to suffer through that and the memories it undoubtedly stirred up, all over again.
"But no, I didn't notice the rings buzzing," Harry said. "I tend not to, when I'm involved in battle situations." He glanced at the tall man standing beside Laura. "You can thank Auror Ian Shelborn for having saved me."
Draco whirled around. The tall Auror, Shelborn, lifted a cautious hand, as if he assumed that he would have to defend himself from Draco, and then gave an equally cautious smile. "Yes," he said. "I happened to know a spell that has functioned in the past to bring down criminals who seemed as deranged as this one did, and it worked this time."
His boyfriend saved his life.
Draco thought his jealousy would eat a hole in his heart. He was the one who saved Harry, protected Harry. He was the one who had a platinum ring in his wedding band because he and Harry had saved each other. But that wasn't enough. This man--who talked like a prat, honestly, who said has functioned in the past like that?--had to step in and take his place.
He might also have kissed Harry, but Draco didn't think that could have made his jealousy swarm up like this.
"Anyway," Harry said, as if determined to cut through and banish the tension in the room, "we have to make sure that Grayson is in proper custody before she wakes up, and have a Mind-Healer standing ready. He might be able to help her." He clapped his hands, and Weasley and the other Auror standing beside the chair started and moved forwards.
Shelborn didn't move, but stood eyeing Draco as if he wondered why he had him for an enemy. Draco glared back, and then turned to Laura, who had got them into the interrogation rooms in the first place by reminding a trainee Auror of a debt she owed.
Laura glanced at him and smiled. Her eyes were liquid with amusement.
"Oh, I do like him," she murmured. "So fierce and green-eyed. I see why you want him." She glanced over his shoulder. "And why this Shelborn does."
Draco closed his eyes. The jealousy was dancing there, under the surface, shimmering liquid tar.
I have to do something about this.
Chapter Thirty-Three.
This entry was originally posted at http://lomonaaeren.dreamwidth.org/372015.html. Comment wherever you like.