Chapter Thirty-Six of 'The Name That I'll Give to Thee'- In the Dazzle
Chapter Thirty-Five.
Title: The Name I’ll Give to Thee (36/?)
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 Thirty-Six-In the Dazzle
“Department Head Halloway and Mr-Malfoy to see Mr. Malfoy.”
Harry smiled at the door in front of him, which meant that he wasn’t smiling at the Auror who had stumbled over his name. It did sound strange when someone said it like that, but he would get used to it over time, he thought, as he heard it repeated. And so would other people, no matter how much they hated it.
The Aurors kept glancing at them as they led Harry through the dim, downwards corridors to the cells. Harry kept a bland expression on his face most of the time, but when he caught someone’s open stare and couldn’t ignore it, he raised his eyebrows and stared back. The Auror immediately turned away again, muttering something Harry couldn’t catch.
“Few Aurors have the poise that you did,” Halloway said over his shoulder. He didn’t seem to have trouble with the Azkaban corridors despite his leg and the cane, Harry thought. Ease of use, probably. He would have walked them many times before. “I think it’s to their detriment rather than their credit.”
“I had less poise than I wished for,” Harry muttered. “There were the times that Prophet reporters surprised me, and the times that a fellow Auror said the wrong thing and ended up with my wand at his throat, and those times that someone spoke up and said that Voldemort’s death was the worst thing that ever happened to the wizarding world…”
“It did take us a long time to convince her to come out of that cupboard, you know.”
“Sorry,” Harry said, not feeling it. He had already been having a bad day before he’d heard Andrea Channing say that, since Ron had almost died from blood loss and was still in St. Mungo’s, and he had no patience for that particular Auror’s pure-blood sympathies and little simpering insistences that there was just something “fundamentally different” about pure-bloods and Muggleborns.
“You might feel differently now, do you think?”
Harry raised his eyebrows all on his own this time, wondering if they were about to enter on the interrogation he’d been a little surprised not to get the first moment he stepped into Halloway’s office. “Not really,” he said. “There’s a difference between being a member of a pure-blood family and thinking that Voldemort’s determination to slaughter whoever he wanted was praiseworthy. Channing probably thought she would never be in the category of his victims, and so she can admire him or whatever. People who think like that are always surprised when the consequences do catch up with them.”
“You were the consequences that day, then?”
“Better than some she might have faced out in the field if she’d refused to arrest a Death Eater because he was continuing Voldemort’s ‘noble work’ or something,” Harry said shortly. “Is there anything else you want to know about my current beliefs, sir?”
“No, that’s enough,” Halloway said, and Harry thought he saw a faint smile on the man’s face as they went through the final door and entered the level where the most dangerous, and sometimes the most political, prisoners were kept.
The ceiling was low here, even in the corridor. That hadn’t been a problem when Dementors guarded Azkaban; they could change the size of their bodies and patrol one by one or in groups. Now that the Ministry had finally confirmed Dementors were not coming back, some of the guards had talked about raising the roof, but no one knew what they would do with the prisoners in the meantime.
Lucius Malfoy was in the first cell to the left of the door. Harry turned to face him, shaking his hair so that his fringe fell away from the dragon-shaped scar on his forehead.
Lucius stared at him. The cell he sat in was more luxurious than Harry had thought it would be, something like a stone drawing room, but he still only had one chair, one table, a crooked shelf, a small bed, and a chamberpot. Harry searched his face quietly. It didn’t look as though Lucius was being beaten or starved. Still, there were other methods of mistreating someone, as Harry had reason to know from his time at Privet Drive.
“Harry Potter?” Lucius whispered. “Am I dreaming?” He wore pale grey robes, the usual clothes of an Azkaban prisoner. They would turn black and cling like tar if the prisoners managed to escape. As Harry watched, he clutched them around him and gave a convulsive shiver.
“I don’t know what I would be doing in your dreams, sir,” Harry said. He had considered and rejected the idea of calling Lucius Father-in-law, and his first name seemed too dismissive. The absolutely grey and neutral manner he used with Halloway would do instead, he thought. “I came to make sure you’re being well-treated.”
“Is this a political decision?” Lucius narrowed his eyes at him. “Why would you care that I’m well? Has the Ministry assigned you to care?”
“No.” Lucius didn’t seem to have noticed the changed scar on his forehead, so Harry swatted at his fringe again. “I’m part of the Malfoy family now. I entered a demi-marriage with Draco about a month ago.”
Lucius went so still that Harry would have thought one of the Aurors behind him had cast the Stone-to-Flesh spell, but he knew better. He held Lucius’s eyes, and waited.
“You cannot have done that,” Lucius whispered. “You have no reason to do it for our benefit, and Draco would not have asked it.”
“When I defeated the Dementor ghosts,” Harry said, emotionless because it seemed best, “I drew on the life-debts that connected me to your family, because Ron and Hermione and I didn’t have enough power on our own. I didn’t mean to, but I still shattered Draco’s wand and the wards and took enough life-force from Narcissa to age her. Draco demanded that I marry him to repay the debt.”
Lucius did nothing but stare at him. Harry wondered if he needed time to absorb the enormity of the change, or whether he hated Harry for doing this the way Narcissa did, or whether it was something else. He couldn’t find out by interrupting his thoughts, though, so he stood and waited.
Finally, Lucius hissed, “What odd fates condemned me to have Harry Potter for a son-in-law?”
Harry shook his head gently. “I don’t know,” he said. “But Draco and I have managed to come to a sort of understanding, and the wards are back up now, and he has a new wand. And your wife is awake from the magical coma I cast her into.”
“You’re here at her instigation, of course,” Lucius said briskly. “You never would have thought me worth investigating on your own.”
Harry shrugged. “She asked me to come. But I would have done the same thing for Draco, if he wanted it.”
“There is a warmth in your voice when you say my son’s name, Mr. Potter, that is most disturbing.” Lucius pulled his robes tighter around himself.
“Mr. Malfoy,” Harry corrected him. “Since I took your name as my own when I married Draco. But yes, I would say that we’re in love. Stronger than mere allies, and not just friends. And you’re important to me because you’re important to him.”
Lucius shut his eyes. “My son was supposed to marry Astoria Greengrass at one point,” he whispered. “I discussed it with her parents, and she was infatuated with Draco. My initial arrest after the war put paid to that notion, but perhaps it would have happened as they listened to their daughter instead of the press. You’ve ended that, do you understand? You’ve ended Draco’s chance to have children.”
“He can still have them,” Harry said. He kept his breath steady and even. This was about Lucius’s pain, not his. “We just haven’t talked about it yet. Or we can get divorced and then both of our families will have the name Malfoy when we get married to someone else.”
Lucius opened his eyes. He looked the way Harry remembered Narcissa looking when she had demanded her husband’s freedom. “Do you have any idea of the complexities here, the ways that this upsets the future I had dreamed of for my son?” he said.
“I think your own imprisonment and the way he had to serve You-Know-Who disrupted his life enough already,” Harry said dryly. He would have used Voldemort’s name in front of Lucius the way he had with Halloway, but upsetting Lucius wasn’t part of the plan.
Lucius sighed. “That’s true, but this-you could have refused.”
“Not if I wanted to pay the debt.” Harry leaned back against the wall. He supposed part of his duties as a Malfoy son-in-law consisted of finding ways to ease his father-in-law past the shock. “Draco was the one who told me that marriage was the only way, because only marriage would help the family recover its strength sufficiently.”
Lucius stared at him, and shook his head. “You should have refused.”
“I didn’t, and we’re married, and getting divorced now would disrupt everything we worked for,” Harry said, and smiled at him. “So. Are you being treated well? Can I get you anything? Blankets, food? A pipe?” He had no idea if Lucius smoked, but he imagined that Dumbledore would have been grateful for something like that.
Lucius’s gaze drifted to Halloway, and he snorted. “Do you think that I would be allowed to answer you honestly in front of people who would have taken part in the mistreatment of me?”
“I still have some of my own power,” Harry said. “And if you tell me the truth now, then I’ll ensure that you don’t suffer for it in the future.”
“That kind of power, you don’t have.” Lucius spoke it as fervently as if it were an article of faith.
“Really? If I expose the abuses that are happening in Azkaban, and expose, no less, that my own father-in-law is one of the people suffering from the abuse, then Rita Skeeter will lap it up,” Harry said flatly. “She’s still after me to do another interview, even though I did one with her right after the wedding. So, yes. There are things I could do. You don’t have to tell me the truth if you hate me. But this might be your only chance to get the balance redressed if something is happening.”
“The minute you leave…” Lucius said, and this time he looked at the Auror guards.
“You have my word,” Halloway said, “as Head of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement, that nothing will happen to you merely for speaking of your experiences. If you fear that it will, I can give you further protection.”
Lucius started. He had overlooked Halloway, then, or dismissed him because of his injury, Harry thought. That happened to a lot of people.
“I want to go home,” was what Lucius said, sounding so much like some of the first-year Gryffindors Harry had comforted in the past that Harry blinked, hard.
“That’s impossible right now,” Halloway said. “But you can tell us the truth and be relieved of that particular trouble for the remainder of your sentence, at least.”
Lucius opened his mouth, then hesitated, and Harry thought he would stay silent after all, either through fear of the guards or because he didn’t want to call on Harry Potter for help. But then he turned to Harry and said, as fiercely as if they were alone together before a duel, “You swear that every word you say is true?”
“I do,” Harry said, and this time tapped his scar so Lucius couldn’t miss it. “I have a dragon on my forehead because the magic of the demi-marriage changed it to reflect my husband’s name. I have loyalty to the Malfoys that you might not understand yet, but that doesn’t mean it’s not real.”
Lucius nodded and shut his eyes, retreating into himself like someone getting ready to make a confession. Harry settled himself. This was one of the things he had learned to be good at as an Auror, listening to someone who would come out with the whole truth eventually, but needed patience and indulgence in the meantime.
“I receive food,” Lucius whispered. “But not enough, and sometimes meat with maggots in it, and sometimes cereal with spit instead of milk.”
“That’s not true,” an Auror at Halloway’s shoulder said, loudly and hastily. “We never mistreat-we would never do anything so disgusting to anyone-”
He shut up, probably because Halloway had turned around and made it so. Harry didn’t see any reason to look away from Lucius, who had broken the first barrier and was now talking on, more freely.
“They cast spells so that I need blankets, and then make me beg for them before they give them to me. They don’t speak to me for days at a time, then come in while I’m sleeping and wake me up, asking me why I’m not talking, do I think I’m too good for them or something? They tell me that they’re going to torture my son and my wife, because they had to know what I was doing, and they probably have filthy Dark Marks on their arms, too.”
By now, most of the Aurors who filled the corridor were arguing, or at least muttering that Lucius was exaggerating or getting details wrong, that they didn’t hurt people like that. Harry cast a spell that silenced their moving mouths without turning away from Lucius. He would finish his tale, and Harry would hear it until the end.
“They don’t give me news,” Lucius breathed. “I don’t know what’s real and what’s not. Sometimes they tell me the season, but I don’t know if it’s true. Maybe I would come out of the prison when my sentence is done and not be able to count my time by the sun anymore.” He turned to Harry. “You’re not lying? You really did marry Draco?”
Harry nodded gently. His first thought on seeing Lucius was that the man had held up remarkably well for seven years in Azkaban, but he thought now that it was probably the Malfoy pride supporting him more than anything else. “Yes. And I’m going to protect him and all the family, including you. Go on. Are there particular names you can give us, for who treats you worse than anyone else?”
Someone lunged from the corner of his eye. Harry knew it was a guard, and that he was aiming his wand at Lucius, and that probably he was going to shut him up.
Or try.
Harry cast a Tripping Jinx in the guard’s direction, a Disarming Spell, a Stunner, and a charm that would roll the guard up in a conjured blanket and deposit him in a corner, all without turning away from Lucius. Meanwhile, Lucius shivered and stared a little, especially when Harry nodded gently and repeated, “Go on.”
“The names,” Lucius said, lost, drifting, for a moment before his pride snapped him together again. “Marcus Todworth. Gaius Linwood. Daniel-his name was Hexnot, I think.”
Halloway caught Harry’s eye. Harry nodded. He knew the reason for the slight frown on the Head’s face. Todworth hadn’t worked for the Aurors in years; he’d been caught stealing artifacts and sacked. That probably had something to do with the way Lucius’s sense of time had gone wonky in prison.
But the other two were current Aurors, and if they weren’t on guard duty here, Harry knew they had been in the past. He turned back to Lucius. “And is there anything else they did to you?”
“Hexed me. Hit me, sometimes,” Lucius whispered. “But not often. They didn’t want to leave marks, and they didn’t know the curses that would let hurt me without doing that.”
A good reason to leave that out of Auror training, Harry thought, and faced Halloway. “Well, sir? Can you promise me that those guards won’t come into contact with my father-in-law again, and that you’ll do an investigation into how many of the prisoners are suffering indignities like this?”
“I can promise it,” Halloway said. His face was pale, but Harry thought that might have been as much from standing with the cane for a long time as from hearing what he’d heard. “We will begin an immediate investigation into the guards who have been here and the names that Mr. Malfoy gave us, as well as what they might have urged other guards on to do. You have my promise of that.” He nodded to Luicus, a somber, impressive nod.
“Good,” Lucius said, and leaned back against the wall of the cell, his eyes closed as though the conversation had exhausted him. “Now I only need to worry about what will happen when you leave here.”
Harry narrowed his eyes. He imagined what Draco would feel when he heard what Harry had to say. He imagined what Narcissa would say. He could see their faces, even paler than Halloway’s, their closed eyes and their turned heads.
“That’s not going to happen,” he said, and reached out with his wand, tapping it against the bars of the cell before anyone could stop him. For once, he was glad of the official policy of not disarming anyone who visited with the Head, although it had irritated him a few times in the past. “Creo castellum!”
There was a low, ringing note, and Harry shuddered a little as it traveled through his body. Then a blue glow sprang up around the bars of Lucius’s cell, with only a slot at the bottom, like the one that the Dursleys used to leave at the bottom of Harry’s bedroom door so they could feed him through it. The blue glow turned downwards and solidified, and a thick sheet of magic hung there.
Harry turned towards the guards staring at him. “There,” he said quietly. “Now you can feed him and give him water, and when he really needs it emptied, the chamberpot can be passed out, because the space will grow big enough for that. But none of you can touch him. And that slot won’t permit the passage of any magic, so you can forget about casting spells on his food. Or poisoning him, for that matter. It doesn’t let that happen, either.”
The guards backed up in front of him, and said nothing. Of course, with his Silencing Charm on them, they probably couldn’t, Harry thought, annoyed with himself. He sighed and glanced at Halloway. “Can we get out of here, sir?”
“Pot-Malfoy.”
Harry thought it quite big of Lucius to correct himself like that when he still wasn’t sure Harry had been telling the truth, and turned around with a nod. “Yes, sir?”
Lucius had come up to the blue covering over the bars, and felt them with one hand as though to make sure the magic really did exist to touch as well as sight. Then he regarded Harry. “Tell my son and wife that I am doing well. That I hope to be home in a few years, if the Wizengamot concedes that I have served enough time.” And he turned and went back to the small chair in the corner of the room.
“I think we’ve seen enough here,” Halloway said, although Harry didn’t know whose benefit he had said it for, the Aurors’ or Harry’s or even Lucius’s. But Harry agreed, so he nodded, told Lucius farewell, and followed the Head back up the sloping corridor to the world where you could trust more of your own senses to be in accord with reality.
*
“He wasn’t being treated well.”
Draco had glanced at Harry’s face and opened his mouth to call Ossy. As it turned out, he didn’t need to. Ossy was right there with a glass of strong Firewhisky and some kind of pasta dish Draco didn’t recognize. Ossy led the floating tray over to a chair in the sitting room and stared at it pointedly until Harry sat down, at which point Ossy had put the tray into his lap and the Firewhisky into his hand.
“How many times had he had been-hurt?” Draco asked quietly, not sure that he could bring himself to say the word “raped.”
Harry stared at him, and then reached out and took his hand. “It’s not as bad as you think, Draco,” he said. “Bad, but not that bad. He was hexed and hit, and they lied to him about how you and Narcissa were going to be arrested or tortured, and they spat in his food. But nothing worse than that. I really think he would have told me.”
Draco closed his eyes, trembling. For some reason, that had been his greatest fear. Probably because his father had received threatening owls years ago telling him that he deserved to be raped for being a Death Eater during the first war. “Thank you,” he whispered. “I couldn’t have gone in and asked him those questions.” He hesitated, and glanced at Harry. “I’m surprised he was willing to talk to you about them.”
“I tied up and Stunned an Auror who was going to hurt him, probably because he was going to give us names of specific people who had participated in making him beg and torturing him,” Harry said simply. “After that, I think he trusted me more.”
Draco leaned back in his chair, shaking his head. “I thought-I wish there was some way that he could be completely safe. But you said the Head promised his protection, so at least people who respect him might hesitate.”
“Didn’t I mention that?” Harry had his mouth full of pasta, but he hastily chewed and swallowed when Ossy, who was adding wood to the fire, turned on his heels and glared at him. “I set up a magical protection on his cell bars. They only have one space to give him food and water through, and if he really needs to empty it, then it’ll become big enough to pass a chamberpot through. But no magic. No poison. No one can reach him as long as he’s in the cell, and the ordinary guards don’t have keys.”
Draco swallowed, feeling his heart jump. “Thank you,” he whispered again. “I had no idea you knew a spell like that.”
“It’s a pretty common spell. I think it’s called the Blue Asylum.” Harry was picking a bit of pasta out of his teeth.
“I know what the Blue Asylum does,” Draco said, “and it’s not that. It couldn’t create something so safe, and that protected against magic and poison, too.”
“Well, I made it do that.” Harry scowled at him and looked as if he would have folded his arms, except the tray was in the way, and he was too wise to upset Ossy by tipping it over or trying to move it. “It’s not a big deal. I just added power to it.”
“How strong are you?” Draco said, narrowing his eyes. “You told me you weren’t very strong. I haven’t felt much magic from you at times. But if you can do something like that, and invest the spell with more power than it should have…” He jumped to his feet and held his hand out to Harry, Ossy be damned.
“What do you want to do with me?” Harry looked at the hand like it was a snake he couldn’t speak Parseltongue to.
“Take you to my private lab, where I was working with the basilisk wand, and test you,” Draco said shortly. “I think it’s time we know what kind of strength we’re really working with.”
Chapter Thirty-Seven.
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