Chapter Forty-One of 'The Marriage of True Minds'- Shared Lives
Chapter Forty.
Title: The Marriage of True Minds (41/?)
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 Forty-One--Shared Lives
"Good morning. I wondered if you would sleep it away."
Draco started, and opened his eyes. He was in his own bed, the way he had known that he would be; he and Harry had made their way to his bedroom when they were done eating. He didn't remember falling asleep, though. That was usually Harry's province. He rolled over and stared at Harry, who sat beside the bed with wet hair and a towel wrapped around his waist, busily scratching away at a piece of parchment spread over the table next to the bed.
Draco took a moment to simply admire the sheer beauty of Harry's body. His hair shone darker than ever with the water, and his scars looked like strange medals implanted directly into his chest. When he shifted, Draco could make out the twisting grey mass of the scars from the beast on his shoulders, but they didn't strike him as ugly, the way they had such a short time ago. Maybe because Harry had opened to him so fully during their bout of fucking that Draco had ceased to notice them.
"I still want you to get rid of those," he murmured.
Harry started in turn this time and looked up. "What?" Then he followed Draco's gaze and caught sight of the trailing gray thing on the edge of his shoulder. He gave a dismissive grunt and returned to his letter. "Yeah, I'd like to, too. But we have other things that we should do first."
Draco reached out and rested a hand on the edge of the towel. "Yes, we do," he whispered.
Harry's eyes focused on him, and widened. Draco watched the pupils dilating for a long moment before he tugged on the towel and pulled Harry towards him. Harry moaned softly, and Draco knew before he touched him that he'd hardened.
"Draco," Harry said breathlessly, as Draco gripped his shoulders and leaned in for a kiss. "We really--I have to finish this letter to Ian, and then we have to do something other than fuck. Please. I--"
Draco bit his neck, and pulled the towel away completely. "I want your mouth again," he whispered, pressing Harry's head down towards his groin.
Harry wavered one more time, but Draco whispered, "This is the way that married people do it," and Harry opened his mouth and gave in with a long, slow sigh that deepened as he started sucking.
Draco closed his eyes and spread his arms. He could get used to this, and he thought he'd have the time to--
Then thoughts of the future dissolved into the pleasure of the present, and Draco arched his back and ceased to think.
*
"Still writing?"
Harry rolled his eyes and leaned up to kiss Draco. He'd gone for a shower when they were done--Harry still shivered at the memory of the events that had led up to that "done"--and Harry had resumed his letter to Ian. Draco's hand wandered down as if he would take the parchment away, or perhaps dip into Harry's pants; Harry slapped his wrist smartly and ducked back.
"Stop that," he said sharply. "We have to eat sometime, or we'll faint and have no strength left for fucking. Not to mention the research."
"I don't see any food here," Draco said, looking around as though he expected the house-elves to have left trays in the corners against the walls.
"I wanted to wait until you got here," Harry said. "Narcissa told me about your strange breakfasts. God forbid that I order something normal." He nodded as Juli appeared, right on schedule, and said, "Yes, I'd like toast, pumpkin juice, and cornflakes. With milk to go with them, of course." He eyed Draco sideways.
"Honestly, anyone would think that you were still at Hogwarts." Draco let himself sprawl bonelessly on his bed, reaching out so that he could rest casual fingers on Harry's arse. Harry remembered what they'd done yesterday and found himself flushing. Draco smirked at him and kept his hand in place. Harry ducked his head behind his letter and told himself that Juli had probably seen worse, especially if she'd served the Malfoys for a long time. "I want grilled chicken, berries, and a cup of hot tea."
Harry rolled his eyes as Juli disappeared. "Why are you so strange? From what your mother told me, it's not as though you need a lot of energy in the mornings most of the time."
"There are always those mornings I go into the office." Draco rolled up and tugged on the letter again, apparently to see if Harry would part with it. Harry retained it and stared at him. Draco smirked and rolled down again, humming under his breath. His fingers had started to caress Harry's skin, one stroking towards his entrance. Harry rolled his eyes again.
"Is sex all you can think about?" he asked, reaching back to take Draco's wrist and lift his hand out of the danger zone.
"I want you," Draco said.
Harry licked his lips. It was intoxicating, the way Draco watched him. He had once thought he would never like that kind of intense attention paid to him, if only because it reminded him too much of all the people who adored him for nothing more than dying. But from someone he wanted, who wanted him, who he'd struggled with and fought with and beside...
"Come back to bed," Draco said in a lulling voice, and tugged on the letter again.
Harry sighed as the parchment crinkled. "I want to," he said honestly. "But I really do think I owe Ian more than just an owl telling him that I'm sorry. He'll have to see me to understand all the complexities."
Draco scowled and tossed his fringe out of his eyes. "I don't want him coming behind the wards. I don't trust him."
"Then we'll meet him in a neutral place," Harry said. The mere thought of leaving Draco behind made his stomach bubble in panic. He put the letter aside as Juli and the tray of food came back. "We have to do something about this tied-together aspect of the bond."
"Do we?" Draco asked lazily, sprawling on his back and letting his legs fall open as if that would attract Harry's notice. It did, of course. Harry looked away, flushing, and heard Draco chuckle quietly. "I wasn't aware that it was going to be an inconvenience for the next few days, at least. Most people would expect us to remain quietly at home after an assassination attempt on you."
"But we do have to meet Ian," Harry pointed out patiently. "That means that we have to figure out what to say."
"And for that, we'll have to wait and hear what my mother's discovered." Draco's hand crept up dangerously near the scars. Harry flushed harder when he remembered that he hadn't cared about the scars at all yesterday, about whether Draco touched them or not, but today wasn't yesterday. He hunched forwards, and Draco smiled at him and stopped moving his hand. "I don't know yet if it's dangerous for us to be in public. How much of this will be visible to someone else? How much can we pass off as the ordinary closeness of a married couple concerned for each other's lives?"
"Not much, if we meet someone who's seen the way we acted before Lucius tried to dissolve it," Harry pointed out. "Ian, for example."
Draco abruptly heaved himself up to a kneeling position on the bed, so that his lips hovered less than an inch away from Harry's. Startled, Harry fell silent. Draco reached down and hooked his fingers in Harry's shirt, tugging almost viciously.
"I hate it when you say his name," Draco breathed. "I want to talk about something else."
Harry tensed his muscles. He didn't like being that close to anyone, sometimes--
No, in the last three months. And Draco was different, and so were the bond and the choices that connected them. Although it made his muscles tighten and strain to the snapping point, Harry managed to stay close. He leaned his head on Draco's shoulder, and Draco lowered his head until his chin rested on Harry's. The tension had blown out in both of them like a candle.
"Sorry," Harry mumbled. "But I do think it's important. Besides, the sooner I talk to him, the sooner you don't have to hear his name again."
Draco's fingers were caressing the nape of his neck, tangling with the curls of hair there. Harry reached up a hesitant hand to mimic the gesture, and Draco made an encouraging sound and turned his head so that he breathed out against Harry's neck.
"Why do you act as if I'll hate you for touching me back?" he murmured, his chin digging in more firmly. "I want you. You have to know how much, by now, or at least have a good idea."
"It's--it's partially the darkness, and the beast," Harry said, forcing his way through more of the same barriers that their lovemaking session had broken. Draco had been on top of him, riding his arse, had made him forget about his scars. That had to count for something. "I didn't want anyone to touch me when I thought I might hurt them, and I didn't want to get so caught up in passion that I forgot myself and relaxed my control over the beast in the scars."
Draco nodded, a movement that Harry felt as bony and rasping, thanks to the position of his head. "And what are the other parts?" His hands were firm cups, one on Harry's shoulders, one on his arse. Harry rolled his eyes in annoyance, but he knew what Draco would say if he could see the gesture. You don't want me touching your back, where else am I supposed to hold on? And he would say it with an infuriating flutter of his eyelashes and a bright, simpering smile, too.
"That I didn't trust you at first," Harry said. "When that started changing, I didn't--" He hesitated, and tangled his tongue around a tooth. His mouth felt fuzzy, probably because he'd gone straight from kisses to eating, and then back to kisses. Should he go brush his teeth?
You're avoiding the subject. Draco didn't say it aloud, but he didn't need to, not with the way that his hands had tightened around Harry.
"I don't--it's not casual for me," Harry said, and his face was burning so badly that he was grateful Draco wasn't looking directly at him. "It's hard for me to think anything about touching is casual, okay? When Hermione used to hug me, or Mrs. Weasley, it was something I always remembered. It was so rare. And that means that I have to have some kind of emotional relationship with someone before I fuck them. I wasn't sure that my relationship with you was emotional enough, or deep enough, or likely to last."
And now that I've said that, can we discuss Quidditch or something so I can stop feeling like an idiot?
Draco evidently didn't agree that he'd sounded like an idiot, or that he was unmanly. He tightened his fingers and murmured, "And why were hugs rare enough for you to remember each individual one, Harry?"
Shit. He'd been watching his back for the moment when Narcissa decided to pursue talk of the Dursleys, and he'd totally forgotten that Draco might someday know him well enough to ask the same thing.
But he'd started this. And Draco's body, warm and tight against his, just meant that he had more of a right to ask the question. Harry closed his eyes, gritted his teeth, and forced himself through the confession that he'd never intended to make, even when he realized how much he trusted the Malfoys. It wasn't really a matter of trust, or he would have told Ron and Hermione all the details, in order, a long time ago. It just--he didn't talk about it, and they already knew everything important. That was all.
"My relatives," he said. "They weren't that thrilled about having a wizard in the house."
Draco didn't say anything. His fingers lightly caressed Harry's shoulders and arse, and Harry gradually relaxed. The waiting silence was its own temptation to talk, he thought. Draco wasn't exploding in righteous rage the way he imagined Narcissa might have done, and that meant he could keep going. There weren't going to be consequences for the Dursleys from this. Probably. If he could keep his tone middle-of-the-road and reasonable, if he could tell Draco what had happened without getting hysterical about it.
The fact that you kept it secret so long is going to work against you there, though. He's going to think it's something a lot more dramatic than it really is.
Harry grimaced in acknowledgment and continued. "My mother's sister--my aunt, who took me in behind blood wards--she always wanted to be a witch. She was jealous that my mum was and she wasn't, and she turned away from her. I think that hurt both of them," he added. Now that he had time and distance, he could see Aunt Petunia more clearly.
Draco said nothing, but his hands grew a little tighter. Harry had no idea why, so he continued. "She married the most Muggle man she could find, and they had the most normal lives they could imagine. Then I arrived. That broke everything up. I mean, my uncle knew about magic before that, but he'd always thought it would have nothing to do with him and my aunt. So they took me in, but they weren't happy about it. I--did a lot of chores."
"Harry."
That voice came from someone he could trust utterly. He knew it. Harry dug down and found both of them waiting, the courage and the truth.
"They didn't like me. They didn't want me. I didn't know about magic until I came to Hogwarts, because--they told me that my parents died normally. Nothing about murder or curses or evil wizards. They told me my parents were drunks." He was whispering feverishly now, the words pouring out of him like pus from a wound. He hadn't realized how good it would feel to get this out, to clear it out. "They told me that I was a freak, because sometimes magic happened, but I didn't know that's what it was. They didn't like the word. I did a lot of chores."
Draco's hands tightened on him. Harry didn't think he was angry, or at least, he could trust it wasn't anger at him.
"They didn't always give me food," Harry said. "I slept in a cupboard for--a long time. Until the Hogwarts letter came. Then they got upset because they thought someone might be watching, and moved me up to my cousin's second bedroom."
Draco's chin came to rest on his shoulder. His hands clamped down. Harry leaned closer to him and sighed, for once welcoming the embrace, the tightness of it. He wasn't being caged, wasn't being held captive. This was someone who would never let him go, but for different reasons.
He could learn to trust it fully, in time.
*
Draco knew he had to keep his rage where it belonged. He wanted to shout and storm around the room and kick things, but not only was that undignified; it would cause his mother to raise an eyebrow at him, and Draco didn't think he could deal with that.
And it wouldn't help Harry, which was the most important thing right now.
He waited until he thought that his face could express some emotion other than anger, and then drew back and smiled temperately at Harry. He raised an eyebrow back, obviously not believing it, and his fingers twined hesitantly in Draco's shirt.
"It sounds bad," he said. "It sounds worse than I knew, saying it all aloud like that." His face was pensive, and he stared over Draco's shoulder at the far wall. Draco waited until he looked back of his own free will, because as angry as he was, nothing would matter if he compelled Harry right now. He would pull back, and Draco would lose this fragile, shimmering trust between them.
"I don't want you to make excuses for them," Draco said. He had barely known that Harry's Muggle relatives existed a day ago, barely begun to speculate that they might have something to do with the way Harry behaved. Now he knew, and he wanted to--
That was the problem. There was a lot he could do to them, but the spells crowded each other out on his tongue and in his mind, as he kept trying to come up with something as bad as what Harry had suffered. And there was so little he could do that Harry would permit.
"No," Harry said. "But I want you to know something."
Draco leaned forwards, his forehead hovering in front of Harry's, his eyes nearly as close. Harry tried to pull away to look at him more fully, but Draco held him where he was and shook his head. Not yet, not this way. "I'll be honored to hear whatever you want to tell me," he whispered.
"Right," Harry said, with a slight, odd tone in the back of his voice, not as if disbelieved Draco, but as if he'd never heard someone say that before. "They didn't beat me, Draco. My cousin--chased me sometimes, but my uncle didn't beat me. Didn't whip me. Didn't rape me." He paused, chewing on something invisible and probably indefinable. Draco waited, one hand still on his shoulder, for Harry to spit out the words he needed. "Didn't do half the things that you're probably imagining right now. I've told you what they did."
"I'm relieved," Draco said simply. He was glad that there was that much Harry had been spared from. "But if you were trying to make me hate them less, then you failed."
Harry gave him a fleeting smile. "Not that," he said. Yes, that, Draco said back silently, watching the way Harry's eyes darted away from him again and settled on his hands that were writhing back and forth, trapped between their bodies. "It's not--I've told you what they did. That's bad enough. Please don't go looking for more reasons."
Draco waited, until he thought the furious burst of heat he'd wanted to respond with was fully under control, and then nodded. "I believe you," he told Harry.
"You do?" Harry's voice was unsure, and he peered at Draco and then away again.
"Yes," Draco said. "But what you haven't thought about is the consequences of this. Is that the reason you've eaten so few meals with us? Because you're used to people taking control of your food away from you, and you want to make sure that it never happens again?" There. He was proud of himself for the steely control with which he'd said the words. It meant that he hadn't screamed, hadn't said half the torrent of abuse that he wanted to pour forth against Harry's relatives.
His relatives. They don't deserve to share the same flesh and blood he has.
"I don't know."
Harry's voice was clipped. Draco smiled at him and put an easy hand on the back of his neck when he seemed as if he would move away.
"You don't need to be ashamed of what they did to you," he whispered. "And if you don't know the consequences, well, that's fine. Why would you have wanted to think about what they did to you?"
"I don't trust you when you get that calm," Harry said, his shoulders tensed as if he believed that Draco would try to seize him and shake all the secrets of his relatives' location and names out of him.
"I wish you had thought about it," Draco said, deciding that anything was better than lying in this moment. "I think it would have helped you to come to terms with your pain and you would have realized that it's not your fault, what they did. It's all theirs."
"I don't see the point of," Harry said, and bit his lip, breathing in a way that Draco knew was meant to calm his anger. Draco waited him out, his eyes fastened on Harry's face.
"I don't see the point of assigning blame," Harry continued at last. "I know that it's other people's favorite game. Hell, it used to be one of mine. I would hear about someone breaking a rule or stealing something, and I thought it had to be Snape or one of you lot." Draco smiled, and continued to maintain his steady closeness. "But I grew up. And if I'd spent too much time thinking about whose fault it was when I was in the darkness with the beast, then I doubt I would have lived. I had to think about survival there, not the decay wizards."
"But you're free now," Draco said. "Do you want to see the decay wizards go unpunished?"
Harry sighed and shifted in a complicated pattern. "No," he said. "But I want it to be justice, not revenge. I want to see them locked up and all the conspirators captured and their draining of beasts and other people stopped. I don't think they should suffer for the rest of their lives just because of what they did to me."
"And I want to see your relatives brought to justice because that's what should happen," Draco said promptly. "Not because I want them to understand what they did to you and scream themselves to death in despair." Although that's what I would like to happen. Although that's what will happen, once I tell my mother.
Harry eyed him meditatively. Then he said, "I'll think about it," and moved firmly backwards despite all Draco could do to keep him close.
"Do you distrust me?" Draco asked. He stretched out along the bed and watched the edge of the grey scar he could see poking out from beneath the collar of Harry's shirt. Harry hadn't immediately replaced the glamours that he'd been using to hide the scars lately, which did say something profound about his trust, though for Draco's money nothing could match what Harry had allowed him to do yesterday, touching him without a thought for what he would say because of their ugliness. "I hadn't thought that was the case."
Harry looked as if he were grinding his teeth into his tongue. Then he sighed and shook his head. "That's not it," he said. "But they're my past. I would prefer to focus on the future." He turned around with a bright smile and looked at Draco, before Draco could make the argument that the past inevitably influenced the future, and talking about his relatives might help Harry explain some of the decisions he'd made and the actions he took. "And I would prefer to focus on you. You've heard everything I feel like telling for right now. What about you? What was it like to grow up in this place, with a father like yours? And a mother like yours?"
About to answer bitingly, Draco caught Harry's eye and saw how much of that was the truth. Harry had a hunger for family that seemed to go almost unrecognized. Draco had thought most of it came from his parents' deaths, but it seemed now that as much might have coalesced because he had never had the experience of belonging to people who wanted him.
So. His desire to know was sincere. And they would have the rest of their lives to explore what Harry had told him today. This was only the beginning.
Draco relaxed back against the pillows and began to speak, nothing loathe to talk about himself. "My father was the one who taught me about strength--brute force. He really wasn't all that subtle, never mind all the political contacts he had. My mother was the one who taught me how to take that strength and use it, with grace..."
Chapter Forty-Two.
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