Chapter Twenty-Two of 'The Name I'll Give to Thee'- A United Facade
Chapter Twenty-One.
Title: The Name I’ll Give to Thee (22/?)
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairings: Harry/Draco (eventual), Ron/Hermione, Lucius/Narcissa
Rating: R
Warnings: Heavy angst, violence, illness, references to canonical child abuse, forced adoption.
Summary: Harry just saved the world-again. But he did it by pulling on the magic and lives of all the wizards tied to him, and the Malfoys had the most to lose. Now Draco is demanding the ancient payment of such a debt: that Harry become a Malfoy, in name and life and tradition.
Author’s Notes: This is going to be a long, slow-moving story, with lots of angst, especially at the beginning. I don’t yet know how long it’ll be. The title comes from a variation on a line in the poem “Be Mine, and I Will Give Thy Name” by William Cox Bennett.
Chapter One.
Thank you again for all the reviews!
Chapter Twenty-Two-A United Façade
“You’re sure about this?”
Harry looked up with a small smile, shaking his head. “It’s only going to the Ministry, where I’ve been a hundred times before. I’ll be fine.” He brushed one hand along Draco’s arm in silent question.
Draco straightened up and nodded to him, a bit offended that Harry would think he was the one who needed comfort. They both wore their best robes, dark blue for Harry, the ones that Ossy had chosen for him, and silver-grey for Draco. They didn’t flatter him as some other colors might have, but the richness of the material and the thick lace that clung to the cuffs was more important than that. Draco knew other wizards would look on the robes and see them as a declaration of war.
And even more than that, someone might betray surprise at the way they would walk together, and that would be worth appearing less than his best.
“It’s not like other times that you’ve been in the Ministry, and you know it,” he said back, quietly. “Plus, we know we have enemies with access there, given the way I was stabbed during the party. I want to know if you’re sure.”
Harry considered the question with the gravity that Draco had wanted, which satisfied him. For a moment, his eyes narrowed, and he reached out one hand as though for the support of a table that wasn’t there. Draco moved his arm under Harry’s palm instead, to practice the naturalness of the gesture, and felt the enormous heat beating and burning through his hand.
“Yes,” Harry said at last, in a voice so determined Draco could imagine his enemies running away from the mere sound of it. “I am. I don’t see any other way to flush our enemies into the open, and I told you last night how sick I was of sitting and waiting for them to come to us.” He grinned at Draco. “And I can’t wait to see the look on Zabini’s face.”
Draco smiled back. He had composed a letter to Blaise last night, on the ponciest parchment he could find, picking and choosing his words with care. Blaise had to think he was desperate for the sex Blaise offered, but trying not to appear desperate. Draco had had long training in pretending things he didn’t believe, but it wasn’t every day that he did it in writing, up against someone who had known him from a child and had much the same training.
The date was set for today, though, for an imaginary “clandestine” meeting at the Ministry with Blaise later in the afternoon. Instead, Draco would go in earlier with Harry, and they would start the first phase of their campaign. The meeting with Blaise would be the second.
“What’s the matter?” Harry asked, pausing and lowering his voice as though they were already in the Ministry rather than the entrance hall of the Manor. “You’re frowning.”
Draco shook his head. “I am looking forward to this,” he murmured. “With-intense anticipation.” In reality, he didn’t know if those were the right words for the feeling that coursed through him, that made his heart thrum almost hard enough to take him off his feet. It had been flowing like a buried river under other emotions, and now it was there, on the surface, where he was incapable of ignoring it.
“Well,” Harry said, with a small shrug, “we’re taking the offensive against our enemies. I feel better about it, too.”
Draco bit his tongue to avoid saying something he wouldn’t mean, that was meant only to curry favor with Harry. Or something he was not certain he meant, perhaps, but something that was with him and in him every time he looked sideways at Harry, or watched the way he bit his lip when he was thinking about something else.
I am with him.
The “with” seemed to ring in his mind, and he was so quiet during the Apparition that Harry asked if he was feeling well when they landed outside the Ministry. Draco smiled at him. “Feeling thoughtful,” he said, and left it at that.
*
Harry straightened his back as he strode into the Ministry. This was different. Most of the time, he walked into this place wearing his Auror robes as a shield, and used that to deflect some of the blows that he knew would come at him otherwise.
This time, it rather felt to him as if his shield rode his left arm.
They attracted stares, but most of the first ones seemed befuddled, as if the people looking at them had no idea what would happen and wanted them to be someone else’s problem. Harry didn’t feel the need to look around, even to check if there were wands pointed at them, which was a refreshing change. His task was to stride along in a dignified way with Draco beside him, and he did it.
Finally, when they had crossed the entirety of the Atrium from the doors to the Fountain of Magical Brethren, someone did step in front of them. Harry stopped and gave her a formal nod. She was nice enough, Georgina Eliot, although she sometimes pried into things that were none of her business.
“Auror Potter,” Eliot said, giving him the same kind of nod back. Draco stiffened, and Harry wondered if it was at the lack of an equivalent title for him. “It is good to see you back. How long do you plan to stay?” She looked at Malfoy for the first time, and Harry saw her hands almost itching for her wand.
“We have someone to see up in the Department of Magical Law Enforcement,” Harry said. They didn’t, in reality, but there was something they did need to do. Harry and Draco were just going to get as much gossip out of it as possible. “A private matter.” He stressed the word “private” enough to make Eliot stare and a few more heads turn around the Atrium.
“I hope it’s nothing serious,” Eliot said. She had thick, curly dark hair, and she twined one curl around her finger as she watched them thoughtfully.
“Serious? In what sense?” Harry leaned towards her but raised his voice, as though he had forgotten other people were listening. “I can assure you that I take my marriage very seriously.”
Eliot dropped her hand and took a step back. “But it’s only a demi-marriage,” she said. “Most of the time, those are contracted for convenience only. The last I heard, you were straight.”
Harry half-grimaced .Most of the time, he found Eliot refreshing when so many of the Aurors around her were uptight and interfering, but that kind of thing really could go too far, he thought.
“It’s a demi-marriage with me,” Draco said, and leaned his cheek for a moment on Harry’s shoulder. His skin burned through the cloth. “That means that it’s more serious than it would be if it was with someone else.”
Eliot gaped this time. Before she could do more than splutter, Harry said, “Come, dear,” in Draco’s ear and led him along. Draco grinned at him as they went, and Harry thought it really could look to someone else like an adoring, besotted smile, instead of the smirk it was.
As they stepped into the lifts, Harry said from the corner of his mouth, “You didn’t tell me you were going to do that.”
“You didn’t tell me that we were going to meet someone so annoying.”
Harry had to pause at that, but in the end he admitted it was fair.
And they had accomplished what they wanted to accomplish. All the eyes in the Atrium were staring at them; the voices hummed and swarmed and talked about them, and Harry knew there would be more tales spreading, people trying to interpret what he and Draco were doing from their eyes and the way they stood and their hands, and thinking they knew. He shuddered a little, but kept a smile on his lips. Incredible to think that he had to welcome now what he had always hated.
But this was important. This was for him and Draco to have a working marriage, and that made it more important than anything else.
Well, just as important as Ron and Hermione, anyway. That was what he had promised, and although that sometimes seemed strange to him, too, he had made the promise and would try to live up to it. It wasn’t as though either his friends or the demi-marriage were going to go away tomorrow.
They took the lifts up to the Department of Magical Law Enforcement, and passed in silence down the main corridor, and towards the door at the far end that led to the Ministry Archives. There was no one in front of them all that way, and then there was. A tall woman in a grey cloak stepped out of her office and bowed to them.
“Are you seeking knowledge, gentlemen?”
Harry had never been sure what to make of Elana Twine, whom the Minister had appointed Keeper of the Archives not long after he took office. Sometimes she seemed not to notice anything, such as the way her eyes looked at Draco without flinching, and sometimes she seemed to know everything. Hermione had met her and said she was so devoted to knowledge that she couldn’t imagine keeping it from anyone else, which Harry suspected was the best explanation.
“We are,” Harry said. “And we seek to copy a certain record.” He looked at the closed door, which was made of stone and had a carving in the center of it that changed every time a new Keeper of the Archives took office. Twine had chosen to make it a rearing, roaring lion with the world clasped in its paws. Harry had no idea why. He didn’t think Twine had been a Gryffindor.
“Then you shall,” Twine said. “Provided that the record belongs to you, and not to anyone else.”
“It belongs to both of us,” Draco said. “We need no more justification than that.”
Twine smiled at him. Draco took a cautious step back. Harry snorted and squeezed Draco’s hand in apology. He’d forgotten to warn him about Twine, who was always an experience. “Indeed, you don’t.” She turned and waved her wand in the intricate gesture of the opening spell that only the Keeper of the Archives learned. Harry saw Draco watching her intently, and shook his head. He wouldn’t learn the spell without also knowing the nonverbal commands behind it.
The door opened, and Twine moved out of their way, back into her office. Draco studied her back with narrowed eyes, but Harry shook his head. “She won’t have anything to do with the parties against us,” he said quietly, as they stepped into the gently musty confines of the Archive. “Some people tried to bribe her when she first took office. She didn’t know what they were talking about, and she hasn’t responded to any offers since then, either.”
“She could dislike me,” Draco said. “Or Death Eaters.”
“Did she look as though she did?”
Draco paused and thought about that. Then he said, “No.” His voice rang with reluctance. Harry smiled. He knew that Draco prided himself as a good reader and judge of character, which meant that someone couldn’t possibly be against them if Draco had seen them and decided they weren’t.
Maybe someday, he’ll trust my judgment as much.
Harry had to acknowledge that he hadn’t done a lot that would cause Draco to think he was stable and trustworthy, though. Their recent agreement was the first thing that had made Draco look at him with a different light in his eyes.
And you’re ridiculous if you think that you can read his emotions from this “light in his eyes” nonsense.
They took a couple of steps further into the Archives, and Draco made a surprised sound deep in his throat. Harry tilted his head back, and sucked in a breath through his nostrils, ignoring it when he started coughing and Draco snickered. Yes, there was a lot of dust here, but Twine took care of anything that could damage the books and other records stored in this room. And there was something soothing about studying or being here that the rest of his experiences at the Ministry really couldn’t match.
The bookshelves loomed above them, all the way to the arched and domed ceiling, which had stained-glass enchanted windows set around it. They gave (false, of course) visions of magical sunlight that Harry knew had probably been enchanted in turn not to fade any ink. The place was quiet and rich with silence, though here and there a quill scratched as some researcher or Ministry employee worked with the information.
“I’ve never been here before.”
Harry glanced at Draco and smiled a bit. “Haven’t you? I suppose I thought that you might want to see the documents that confirmed your pure-blood heritage.”
Draco gave him a quick glance, and then seemed to relax as he realized Harry wasn’t mocking him. “We know our heritage in different ways,” he said, and laid a hand over his heart. “We don’t need documents to confirm that I’m the Malfoy heir or that my mother is married to my father, though of course it’s nice to know they’re here in case someone else ever challenges those things. We know it already.”
Harry swallowed. An unexpected, aching void had opened up in him at Draco’s words. He wondered what it would have been like to go through life with that unshaken certainty, to know that you belonged somewhere and there were papers you could produce to back up your claim if you had to.
Well, parchments.
But his tendency to try and undermine the silly things he was feeling didn’t work this time. He felt as if he wanted to spread nonexistent wings and soar out of the room, flying until he found a place where he did belong, where there were people like him and people who looked like him. The Weasleys were family, and Harry had accepted long ago that he would never have any relatives except the ones he had chosen, but-
“Come on.”
Draco shook his arm. Harry nodded quickly and followed him down the aisles towards the documents they’d come to see. He reckoned this was belonging of a sort.
Although the demi-marriage will only last for five years, and after that, my choice is going to be limited to people who can accept both my reputation and the Malfoy name. Which will be pretty bloody limited.
Harry sighed. He wondered for a moment if Hermione had foreseen that he would want this sort of thing someday, and that was the real reason she had objected to him marrying Draco. Then he shook his head. How could she know he had wanted it, when he hadn’t had the first idea himself?
*
Draco had noticed the moment that Harry’s breath caught, the way his pace faltered for a moment before he followed, but he kept his own head turned straight on and his steps stately. By the time Harry caught up with Draco, his face was calm and he looked up at the shelves around them, with the spines of books and the cases of scrolls and the locked lead boxes of more sensitive materials showing, with the same emotions Draco had seen on his face when they first walked into the room.
But Draco retained the memory of his expression anyway. It was, literally, the expression of memory for him-the way Harry had looked at his dead family in the Forbidden Forest, during the memory Draco had seen in the demi-marriage ritual.
He wondered what thought, exactly, had crossed Harry’s mind, but he thought he could guess. He couldn’t do anything about it in the long run, but the next five years might be easier if they got along.
For that reason, he kept his hand locked firmly on Harry’s arm as they crossed the floor of the Archives. Harry would know that someone stood with him, for what good the knowledge could do. And Draco would do something more if he had an idea, or if Harry requested anything.
They finally reached the section at the back of the Archive where the records of slightly less common pure-blood procedures were kept: adoptions, arranged inheritances that went to people not related by blood or only distantly related, and demi-marriages. Harry blinked as he looked at the boxes, and Draco nodded.
“It’s true,” he said. “The Ministry really doesn’t throw anything away, and our families are older than anyone else in the wizarding world.”
Harry rolled his eyes but said nothing as he looked for the Malfoy records. Draco already knew the general section, and a moment’s staring rewarded him. A glittering wooden box sat at the top of the shelves, looking newly dusted. Of course, the Keeper of the Archives would have come to look at the records when a ward warned her of the arrival of a new document.
“There,” he said, and Harry floated the box down to them and they opened it together. The wood of the box was the soft dusty red color of cherry, but weathered and old, and glittered only because someone had made an effort to polish it up.
Inside lay parchments, some single-those were for the uncomplicated demi-marriages that ended with a simple annulment or the death of one partner-and some thick sheaves bound with ribbons, for the demi-marriages that had become true marriages, or that had become involved in inheritance machinations later on. Draco shot a swift glance at Harry, but he only looked interested in the parchment on top of the stack, not the rest.
I can’t interest him in Malfoy history, yet. Perhaps later.
“I wonder if the Potters have a box?” Harry asked, as if talking to himself. In fact, Draco wasn’t entirely sure that he had been meant to hear it.
Draco smiled at him. “I’m sure they do,” he said. “Do you want to go look for it while I make a copy of our demi-marriage record?”
Harry hesitated. His eyelids trembled for a moment, as though he was fighting his way up from a nightmare. Then he said, “I wouldn’t have any idea where to look, or what it looks like. I-I’ve never been in this part of the Archive before.”
“I know that,” Draco said, and forbore to point out that it was obvious in everything Harry said and did. “But you should still go and look, if you want. I want you to feel that you can still know your birth family, not that you’re completely cut off from them by marrying into the Malfoys.”
Harry frowned a little, and Draco thought he would say that he thought the demi-marriage was meant to cut him off by taking away his name. But instead, he nodded and said, “I’ll go do that.” He turned away and picked his way across the floor as though he thought the shelves would tremble and fall over if he stepped too heavily.
Draco smiled and unrolled the record of the demi-marriage. Yes, there it was, in the thick silver ink that the Ministry used for all records like this, relying on the same magic that inked the names of new pupils into the Hogwarts book. The minute a pure-blood family or heir changed their status by official ritual, the record would come into existence, or update itself if it already existed.
Harry POTTER becomes this day Harry MALFOY in demi-marriage to Draco MALFOY, for the term of five years.
There were other lines, setting forth what would happen if they annulled the marriage in five years, and how Harry’s children would bear the Malfoy name and could be considered heirs to the Manor if Draco never married or left no heirs, and how Harry was currently Draco’s heir. Draco set himself to carefully copying it down. This was why they had come here, and this was what they would walk out of here bearing, to start the first step in the dance that would proclaim they took their demi-marriage seriously.
Draco took a sharp little breath. No other Malfoy had ever published the news or notice of his demi-marriage like this. It was a step he hadn’t thought he was prepared to take until Harry and he had talked yesterday. Some documents were meant to be private.
But, in truth, how private were they, when officials like the Keeper of the Archives had the power to walk in here and look them up when they wanted? They said the boxes were warded, and the old pure-blood families had put protective spells on them, but it was too much to deny access to them to everyone who wasn’t a Malfoy. That would prevent the documents from being used to settle inheritance disputes and the like.
Or to prove to the doubters that Harry and other people like him are Malfoys.
He worked in silence, producing a document that was as close to the original as possible, although in black ink rather than silver. Only when he sat back with a stretch and shake of his cramped hand did it occur to him that Harry had been gone rather a long time. He looked cautiously around.
Harry sat near him, on a stool at a different table. He was quiet, and there was no box in front of him.
Draco stood up and walked over to him, standing at his shoulder. He would say nothing, but he would offer his comfort and his calm and his presence, and see if together they inspired Harry to talk.
Harry took a deep breath and lifted his head. “The spells on the box won’t let me access it,” he whispered. “When I tried, I got this message that says-that says the last heir of the Potter line is gone, and that no one except someone who’s Potter by blood can touch it.”
Draco shook his head quickly. “There may have been protective spells like that, but the Keeper of the Archives has to be able to get into it if possible. Why don’t you ask Twine?’
Harry turned around on the stool and looked up at him. His eyes were dull and sick. Draco squeezed down hard on his shoulder, and waited.
“That was the first message,” Harry whispered. “When the second appeared, it said that no one who was a member of a family who had hurt the Potters in the last hundred years would have access to those documents. The Keeper of the Archives might touch them, but for everyone else-it said they ‘would be as dust and ashes.’” Harry closed his eyes. “A Malfoy and a Potter must have feuded, although I never knew that.”
Draco squirmed uncomfortably. He did remember Lucius’s story about his grandfather Abraxas winning something important in a bet from Charlus Potter, but he wouldn’t have thought that would affect the conditions placed on the box.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered, smoothing his hand up and down Harry’s arm. “Although I realize that probably doesn’t sound like much, right now, compared to what you’ve lost.”
Harry bowed his head and said nothing for some time. Then he lifted his head and shook it.
“I went my entire childhood until I came to Hogwarts without even knowing what my parents looked like,” he said harshly. “I heard all these stories about them during school, but that’s all they were-stories. I only saw them a few times, really saw them. They’re photographs and memories.”
He met Draco’s eyes evenly. “I entered into this marriage of my own free will. I’m not going to be stupid enough to blame you for a loss I didn’t even know I was experiencing until now.” He stood up and tucked his hand through Draco’s arm. “Come on.”
By the time they reached the door out of the Archives, Harry’s face was calm again. He was sliding back into the role they needed to play to convince the others they were happy in the demi-marriage, Draco thought, and he was the only one who would see that it was a little bit less enthusiastic than before.
He tightened his hold on Harry’s arm, and Harry smiled at him.
Draco couldn’t give Harry money or freedom from guilt or even entire safety, not with the enemies after them. But he could, and he would, try to give him a family. The way was open, and the method suggested itself to him after a bit of thought.
Harry was a Malfoy now. And Malfoys stood by each other.
Chapter Twenty-Three.
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