Chapter Forty-Seven of 'The Marriage of True Minds'- Within the Ring
Chapter Forty-Six.
Title: The Marriage of True Minds (47/?)
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-Seven--Within the Ring
Draco would have known something had gone wrong without Harry's scream. The bond linked suddenly around his waist like a rope and tugged almost hard enough to cut him in half. Draco swore and staggered. The protective spiral in front of him flashed warningly.
Draco did hold himself back for a moment, wondering if the bond was simply responding to the ritual circle in between them. If that was the case, he couldn't do anything about it, and he would just have to suffer. Harry had to make this choice by himself and give his will over to the inferno ritual to complete it successfully--
But the bond yanked again, and then Harry's scream rose up, despair in it beyond anything that Draco had heard. He was running without thought, straight towards the barriers of shimmering flame and burning blood that barred him from Harry, without thinking about how he would get through them, just that he needed to. The ring on his finger buzzed and rang as though it would shake itself apart.
"Malfoy, stop!"
Granger--she was the only one in the room who would speak his name in that tone--but Draco didn't care. There was danger and then there was danger, and he was going to be at Harry's side to face the latter kind.
Her spell pulling him to a halt seconds later did make him think, though. Draco gasped, caught without breath between that spell and the pull of the bond. Then Granger stepped up beside him and slapped him smartly across the face.
She must have been wanting to do that for years, Draco thought, as his vision hazed black and red with outrage and then cleared. He nodded sharply to Granger, who didn't look convinced, and Harry screamed again.
Granger went pale. Oddly, that relaxed Draco. At least he knew that she cared about Harry as well as about all her theories proving correct because the ritual had gone right.
"We have to leave him to face this on his own," Granger whispered. "We've done our parts of the ritual, and you can't interfere in an inferno ritual, those spirals are there to protect us in case something goes wrong with the sheer volume of magic in the air, we push too far and do something wrong deliberately and they can't protect us--"
The bond yanked at Draco again, making him stumble several steps forwards. "It doesn't matter," he said. "The bond is going to pull me across the ring anyway." He watched Granger look as if she would faint, and felt a small, mean satisfaction that he would deny if anyone ever asked him about it. "The problem is, Granger, there's more than one kind of magic in operation here. And the half-marriage Harry and I have doesn't care about the inferno ritual."
Harry screamed again, and Draco was done talking. He turned and flung himself at the curtain that separated them--
Only to recoil with a burned hand and smoking robe. He beat the smoke out and stared at his hand. It looked as though he had just plunged it deliberately into one of the large fires his mother favored. Blisters were springing up already, and the skin was red and black and hurt like hell.
"You have to do something," Weasley said from behind Draco, iron and tears in his voice.
"Yes, but I can't get burned to death doing it," Draco snapped, and closed his eyes, and stood there, forcing himself to ignore Harry's next scream.
There had to be a way to cross the barriers between them, but not do it physically. After all, the marriage bond managed to do it. Draco had half-thought they'd be completely isolated from each other once the barrier of fire rose, but obviously that wasn't the case.
There had to be a way.
The bands. The bronze band. Harry and I were separated from each other when the decay wizards captured us, but he still managed to hang onto his sanity and call the beast back when it attacked me.
It couldn't be exactly the same, Draco knew, even as hope cooked him from inside the way the fire would do from the outside and his eyes snapped open, because they didn't want Harry to put the beast back in himself but burn it out. That was the entire point of the inferno ritual. But it might be possible to technically fulfill the condition that he had to do it himself and still give him help from the outside.
Draco pointed his wand at his own temple. He saw, from the corner of his eye, Granger take a step forwards. She seemed to fear that he'd off himself. His mother, though, stared at him with extreme calm. Draco nodded to her--she was the only one in the room who completely trusted him--and then spoke the words of the spell that had just come to him.
"Mente vox!"
The world in front of him snapped down and narrowed to a single tunnel, black with the sprinkles of stars. Draco felt himself rushing down it, an arrow of magic and mental force that crossed the distance between him and Harry, and landed in the middle of a maelstrom.
Harry's thoughts.
Draco flung up barriers against the terror and began to call, over and over again, demanding that Harry pay attention to him, that he focus on him and not on the fear that wanted to eat him. Harry! Harry! I'm here! You're not alone!
He had no idea if it would work. But leaving Harry to die, or dying himself, were no longer options. Not when they had come so far.
*
Faces and scraps whirled past him. Names. Lives. Memories. Places. Houses. Stones. Animals. Books. He knew they had all been in order once, but they weren't now, and he sacrificed them to the fear so that they would stand between him and it.
There was a beast, and he had to avoid it. Confronting it head-on would destroy him. He knew that, and he dodged, in his mind and his magic and his body. The suckers reached for him, and slipped and flailed off. He was running through the fire, and he turned even that into a wall, so that the beast couldn't reach past it and find him.
But then one of them caught him, and he screamed because it was there, and the darkness was there, and he was there, and he would rather kill himself than live like that through death. He started to pull down some of the barriers, some of the ones that he'd lifted without thinking to protect himself against the pain of the fire, because at least if he died in the flames then he wouldn't die squirming under the beast.
A voice cried out in the darkness of his mind, words flowered, a presence was there. Harry!
It was Draco. Harry didn't know how he could possibly be there when he would have had to cross fire and blood to do it, and he didn't care. He reached out and grabbed Draco in his mental arms, pulling him in so that Draco squirmed and grunted, and crushed him close.
You're not alone, Draco said. You can still destroy the beast, if you want to.
There's no way, Harry told him, his mind rebounding with pinwheels of gold. Draco was with him, and that meant he wouldn't die alone, but he didn't think it meant he wouldn't die. Opening his eyes revealed the beast to him; staying still revealed the suckers; and he couldn't dodge through the fire forever, even if the beast seemed beset by it, too, and couldn't reach him. I don't want you to die with me, and that's what will happen if you cross the circle. The ritual or the magic or the beast or the fire or my magic will kill you.
You're right, Draco said. You have to be the one to face down this monster.
But I've already tried. Harry whirled around past another reaching tentacle and hid behind a dancing pillar of flame. The beast soared over it and reached down again. Harry rolled on the floor, his hysteria flooding him for a moment so that he couldn't hear Draco's voice. How do I do it? he whispered, when he could.
Draco answered not with words, but with strength.
Magic came pouring across the barrier, guided by the mental conduit. Harry felt it open in the midst of him, the bond and the power that Draco had shown Harry when he showed him the statues in the Malfoy tomb and the sparks that had burrowed into his skin when Narcissa welcomed him to the Malfoy family in the name of the House of Black and the light that had flickered and danced between them for each of the metal rings.
You have to do this yourself, Draco whispered again. But spouses are traditionally one person, in the strictest of the marriage rituals. So I can give you what help I can, and it will be as if it came from yourself--but you still have to be the one to make the decision to use that magic.
Harry opened his eyes, and he could feel his sanity cracking as he looked at the beast. It had no eyes, he thought, his mood skittering up a staircase of feeling and ashes; it was all mouth. It would devour him. It would--
Harry!
Draco shouted back to him, Draco was his anchor, and Harry had to close his eyes and shake his head. What kind of bloody good am I going to do about that thing when I can't even look at it to place a strike? he snarled.
There was a moment of silence, physical and mental, save for the crackling of the flames and the wings of the beast as it tried to maneuver closer to him. Harry clung to the silence. It was preferable to listen to than almost any other noise right now.
Then there's no choice, Draco said, and his voice was so quiet that Harry couldn't make out the emotion in it. I'll have to cross the circle. I can't leave you to die alone.
But you can't, Harry said.
We don't know that for certain, Draco said. I shouldn't have been able to make contact with you mentally, either, according to the strictest interpretation of the inferno rituals. But I did. I think the marriage bond has something to do with it. Its half-state is something new, something the rituals weren't created to interact with because it wasn't around to interact with. But it might protect me. I think I can cross. And Harry heard--well, he must not have heard it, he couldn't hear it, but he must have sensed the gathering of impulse and intention through Draco's presence in his mind--Draco getting ready to leave behind the sane things he could still do and cross the circle.
You're mad, Harry told him. You can't do this.
I can't let you die.
That was it, the iron and steel in the words, the platinum and the bronze. Draco wasn't giving a hopeless wail of despair; he was saying something he was literally incapable of doing, like flying without a broom.
Oh, Draco, Harry said, and he reached out for another fear, one deeper than the fear that the beast would eat him, one that had always been there, running like a dark river beneath the surface. The fear that someone else would die for him, that he couldn't protect people. I can't let you do that.
He opened his eyes, and he turned to look on the beast with magic flowing from his fingertips.
The wings covered him with their shadow. Where they passed, the fire was not. The hanging suckers surged up and then down, and Harry knew they would make contact with his body and that he would scream when they did so and that that would be, in so many ways, the end of him.
It would be the end of him if he let it be. It would be the end of him if he could not master the fear.
The terror was there, surging, ready to leap the fragile walls that he had built against it.
But he wielded terror against terror, the way he had when he thought that the beast coming from him would consume Draco in their captivity, and he reached for the fire of the inferno ritual and lit it again, this time inside his brain.
Draco cried out, and Harry flinched. He didn’t know using fire like that could cause Draco pain, but of course it made sense, because Draco was linked to him at the moment and sharing the same mental space.
Are you all right?
What are you doing?
Harry didn’t know himself. The fire leaped around him and soared and looped back, the flames imagined in his brain really there, burning away the fear, burning away the doubt and the conviction that there was no way he could face the beast. The fire on his body was dancing higher in response, and he knew the beast was flinching back from it as it rolled nearly to the roof, to the height of the spirals that floated above him. The spirals bent the flames back on themselves and so redoubled their heat. That was their function in the first place, to prevent the supporters from being burned by an inferno ritual gone out of control.
What I’m supposed to be doing? Harry asked, but he knew that he was asking himself more than Draco.
Draco said something, but Harry lost it in the rush and roar of the fire, in the way the beast suddenly tried to cut through the walls of red and gold to get at him. He flung an arm across his eyes, because there were limits to his bravery, and began to retreat.
The flames in his mind promptly burned lower. Draco said something sharp, and Harry knew the tone although he couldn’t hear the words. When he paused, then he did hear them.
You can’t retreat! You can’t show fear like that! You have to prove to the beast that you can master it, and the terror it causes.
Harry shivered and locked his legs, then dropped his arm. His reason still tottered when he looked at the beast, his throat seeming to shake separately inside him from his tongue and his stomach, but he thought of Draco crossing the circle, or Hermione and Ron burning to death, or Narcissa with her expression of brilliance and steadiness becoming uncertainty, and that was worse.
The beast was directly above him now, and as Harry watched, one of the tendrils lowering towards him opened its sucker on the end wide, like an eager flower. Out of the one right next to it flowed the thick white liquid that Harry knew would congeal into what was essentially tasteless bread, the nourishment that had ensured he didn’t die of starvation when the beast had him last time.
The fire!
Harry wasn’t sure whether the answer came from him or Draco, and he didn’t much care. What mattered was that he finally remembered what the ritual had been designed to do in the first place, and no, retreating madly or even facing his fear wasn’t it.
He set himself on fire for a third time. Body and mind were already burning. He imagined his will and magic as twin flames, and they drove into the bloody scars on his back, bearing down, stabbing in, cutting at the connections that bound the beast, tendrils and all, to him.
He recalled it, deliberately, brought up the memories and threw them on the flames, thought of the bread and burned up the taste, knew the feeling of the suckers liquefying flesh and power and sacrificed them. He was part of the immolation, no longer separate from it, burning and knowing that he could die from the burning. The fear was behind him in the same way survival was. Neither was the goal now. It was burning the beast out, sucker and tendril, so that if he went to his death, at least the death would be a pure sacrifice, a clean passing.
He burned, and the scars burned, and he felt a moment’s peace and contentment as he thought about what would happen when he finished.
The beast screamed.
Not the cries that Harry had heard so often, the hunting cries meant to stun anything who heard it into terror. Or the soft whimpers it had given, or the sucking motions it had used on him. He was no longer prey. He was no longer in the darkness.
He was in the light, the burning light. He stood in the heart of the sun. He was fire, and he was everywhere, and there was no place that a shadow could hide.
He pressed forwards, and now the beast was the one who retreated before him, tendrils waving as though it would cover its nonexistent eyes. The wings beat in agitation, and at one point it tried to rise out of the circle.
But it had been brought here, borne here, by him. Harry had half-eaten it and made it hibernate in his scars. This was the moment when it finished once and for all. Harry burned its tethers in his scars, and burned it at the same time.
The fire bit deeper, burned brighter. Dimly, Harry could feel the pain, but since he had lit so many flames, since so much of him was flame, it felt petty to think that he could hurt from it. He laughed aloud.
Draco laughed in his head, or shrieked. Harry didn’t know which one it was. He did spare one moment to reach out and lavish a caressing thought on Draco.
Dear one. I love you so much. I’m doing this for you.
As the fire burned through, cleansing and purifying in exactly the way it was meant to, Harry realized that was true. Yes, he was doing it so that the beast would never harm him again, but also because it might have harmed Draco. He was pressing forwards so that he would never have to deal with what had nearly happened when they earned the bronze band.
Draco’s sanity was his to protect, and so was his destiny, and so was his life, and so was his blood. Harry smiled, and he knew it probably looked like an insane rictus, and he didn’t care.
Everything was fire.
Including the buzzing song that he knew had started from the ring where it gripped his finger. But Harry didn’t have the time to slow down and look. He continued pressing forwards, and now the beast had reached the far edge of the circle and the burning blood, and it had nowhere else to go.
It turned to face him and spread its wings. The noise of them would have terrified Harry into instant compliance once, but he couldn’t hear it now, not over the noise of the burning. He laughed at the beast, and stepped forwards. Draco’s face was in his mind, and Ron and Hermione’s, and Narcissa’s, and Ginny’s, and Ian’s, and the rest of the Weasleys’. It was for them, not himself, that he did this, and although he had to be the one who made the choice, he knew that gave him a strength that the creators of the inferno ritual couldn’t possibly dream of.
There came the moment when the beast had to choose between him or the circle, between the fire and the fire. Harry spread his arms wide and laughed and laughed. Then he lunged.
The beast soared backwards, and its wings caught at last, going up like fireworks. It screamed again, but the hunting cry was swallowed by the crackle, and it vanished into the roar. Harry watched, vindictive, satisfied, smiling, until he was sure that the last drifting pieces of it had been swallowed by the fire.
Then he had another choice, and the flames leaped around him and sang about it, while Harry stared into the darkness that floated between them like the last stubborn pieces of the beast.
He knew that coming back would entail pain. There was no telling how badly he had been burned, and how long it would take him to recover. If he embraced the pain and the fire completely, he would fade when it did. The beast was conquered. He was purified. He would, indeed, make a clean death of his passing.
But it was never a choice, Harry thought. Not when he had people in the world who would help him bear the pain of healing.
He turned back and spread his arms again, only this time he put the fire behind him. This time, he walked towards life and the future, and the pain that came with him could be borne.
He wasn’t meant to live forever in the midst of steady light.
*
Draco came back to his own body with a stagger. Being sealed so in Harry’s mind had meant that he experienced some of what Harry did, but, he was sure, not all of it. And he was still trying to breathe.
For Harry to have gone through what he did, summoned the will and the energy and the drive to push the fire into the beast, to push the fire into his own scars, was something Draco could not have understood without being there. He wondered if he would ever find the words to explain it to those who, like his mother, would have seen the ritual only from the outside, as a wall of flame, and perhaps caught a glimpse of shadow just before Harry destroyed the beast, but nothing else.
He didn’t think so.
And he understood something else, something that made him step forwards at once as the fire died and Harry crossed the circle. Harry had done this all for love of him.
There was no higher compliment.
Harry was soot-covered and burned, his hair singed short by the flames, but he smiled at Draco. Draco took his hands and gave him a soft kiss on the lips, not wanting to touch anywhere else for fear that he would aggravate the burns. There were no words for what he wanted to say, anyway.
Weasley and Granger shrieked, of course, and came running. Draco knew his mother was following at a more sedate pace.
“Did you see it?” Harry whispered.
“I felt it,” Draco said, because “seeing” seemed such an inadequate word.
Harry gave him a single blazing glance, and then shook his head. “No. I meant this.” He held up his left hand, and Draco looked down.
The ring had worn a half-melted appearance ever since his father broke the marriage bond. Platinum and steel, bronze and iron, were still there, but didn’t twine neatly with each other; the braids broke off at odd places.
Now there was something else there, a deep blue glaze, mending the broken places and tying the other braids together. Draco stared at it. He didn’t recognize it, and then he did, and he didn’t know what it meant.
“What is it?” Harry whispered.
“Cobalt,” Draco said. “I-have no idea. It wasn’t in the books I read.”
“I know what it means,” Harry said. “I know it means that I chose you.”
Draco didn’t have time to say anything else as Granger ran up to them and Weasley reeled up, tried to hug Harry, and was scolded sharply by Granger, but he caught Harry’s eye.
He knew he would search out meanings, but for now-
For now, Harry’s words were true.
Chapter Forty-Eight.
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