Chapter Thirty-Nine of 'The Name I'll Give to Thee'- Guest Lists
Chapter Thirty-Eight.
Title: The Name I’ll Give to Thee (39/?)
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-Nine-Guest Lists
“I have to admit, this isn’t a method of investigation that would have occurred to me.”
Harry glanced up, and then looked down at the list in front of him with a small snort and a smile tugging at the corner of his mouth. Draco’s voice was exquisitely modulated, but Harry knew what it meant. It wouldn’t have occurred to Draco to spend an afternoon in the Manor’s library sorting through piles of paper.
“This is our best chance of finding out who was at the party and could have had an opportunity to stab you,” Harry pointed out, holding up the list of guests in front of him and squinting at it. He didn’t recognize most of the names on it, which wasn’t a surprise since it was composed of pure-bloods. He didn’t see a lot of pure-bloods even as an Auror. The Head Auror tended to arrange things so that other people who weren’t quite as objectionable to former Death Eaters and their families arrested them or answered their complaints. “Everyone who was there is a suspect until it’s proven otherwise, and of course it’s best to look at other lists of other parties so we can tell whether a group or pair of people appear at the same one every time.”
“Except for you, of course.” Draco smiled sweetly at him. “Everyone is a suspect except for you, I mean,” he added, when Harry glanced at him askance. “Unless you’re trying to kill me like this, with boredom.”
“Oh, the things I could do if I had the Malfoy money without your annoying presence.” Harry laid down the list with a few tick marks next to names and stretched his arms over his head, arching his shoulders and rolling his neck. Bending over paper wasn’t something he was used to doing. Auror reports were made to be copied with a few words changed and names scribbled in on the run. “Create life-sized marble statues of myself. Pension off your mother to stop bothering me. Go on a holiday to Majorca.”
“You must have been to Majorca.”
Harry cocked an eyebrow at Draco. “Not really,” he said. “Poor, pitiful relative of a Muggle family that didn’t want me, remember? They went a few times, though.”
Draco’s mouth tended to fold in when they were speaking of the Dursleys, as though he was biting into the sourest lemon ever. “I don’t want to talk about that,” he announced majestically. “Because it might make me angry enough to hunt them down and see what my basilisk wand can do.”
Harry snorted. “You’re not a killer at heart, and you’re not a torturer, either. I could tell you everything about them and you wouldn’t do anything except start a gossip campaign to ruin their lives.” He turned back to the guest lists again.
“You’d do that?”
Harry glanced up. “Let you start a gossip campaign to ruin their lives? Of course not.”
“Tell me anything I wanted to know.” Draco’s face had a shine to it that looked faintly, and disturbingly, like religious fervor. He reached across the table as if he was going to take Harry’s hand, then hesitated and retracted his own. “You haven’t made an offer like that before.”
“Yes,” Harry said, because it was late and they’d been in here all bloody afternoon with the lists they’d requested from someone Draco knew because they were “putting on a party to rival the one at the Ministry,” and supposedly had to know who to invite. “Whatever you want, whenever you want. Although I think we should find out who stabbed you first.”
Draco closed his eyes and hummed in a pleased way that Harry thought he could grow addicted to. “Quite right,” he said, and turned back to the lists in front of him.
Harry watched him for a few seconds, and the curl of blond hair hanging above his ear, and then smiled and went back to sorting through the lists.
*
Although it was Harry’s idea to search the guest lists, and Harry’s idea to “take care of” the person who had stabbed Draco in some mysterious way he still wouldn’t tell Draco about, Draco was the one who noticed the two names that kept reoccurring together on the lists. He sat back and shook his head.
“I should have suspected,” he said aloud. “But I really didn’t think she was that bloodthirsty, even to avenge an insult. All the time she’s had by herself since the war must have gone to her head.”
“What is it?”
Harry leaned across to him from the other side of the table. Draco took the time to admire the swiftness of that movement, because he could. This was the Auror, the man he had married with fire burning in his eyes.
Mine.
A sentiment that meant more than ever, with the names he had discovered on the parchment and the night he had remembered.
“Look at this,” he said, and slid the ten guest lists he’d discovered the “coincidence” on across the table to Harry, the guest list for the party they’d attended in the Ministry, and parties for several weeks before that, and the one they’d held in their own Manor. It didn’t mean they had plotted together all along, of course, but given how long one particular plot had been brewing, Draco saw no reason why that one couldn’t have picked up and assimilated the other.
The way Harry’s breath hissed between his teeth said that Harry had read what Draco wanted him to. Draco nodded and sat back. “Daphne Greengrass and Blaise Zabini attended the same ten parties together,” he said aloud. “We know that Blaise was looking for someone to marry, or otherwise join, because he wanted to abandon his last name and enter a family of rank and distinction. And Greengrass-she might have been separate at first, but after the way you insulted her the evening we danced together…”
“It’s at least something to look into,” Harry said, eyes narrowed, voice cool but distracted, and Draco felt a jolt of pleasure at the bottom of his stomach. He would bet anything this was the way Harry spoke to his Auror partners, like Weasley, accepting them as part of the investigation without flinching or backing down. “You think Greengrass might have been resentful enough to arrange the stabbing?”
“It’s more her style than Blaise’s,” Draco said. “Although I’m sure Blaise encouraged her to arrange something-”
“But Zabini wanted you alive,” Harry interrupted, smashing Draco’s perfectly good theory to rubble with a few words. “Why would he agree to let her hire an assassin, or whatever it was, that left you for dead?”
“There are a number of answers to that,” Draco said. “First of all, we wondered why the attacker didn’t check to be sure I was dead. We concluded that you must have come in too fast and scared him off, or he was cowardly and ran for it.”
Harry nodded, his eyes never moving from Draco’s face. Draco licked his lips from the sheer heady force of Harry’s attention. Good God, he wished he could travel back in time and tell his younger self that he would have it someday, and it was worth waiting for.
“Perhaps he was never meant to kill me,” Draco said. “Only meant to ‘warn’ me about Daphne’s displeasure. And it would have provided a great opportunity for Blaise to come in and be my hero, if you had left me a little longer instead of realizing I was in danger and running in after me.”
Harry nodded. “But the warning went awry because we didn’t know who had ordered it,” he murmured, his eyes still fastened on Draco.
Draco turned his head a little so he could present his best profile to Harry, not so much because he was vain-although some of that was there-as because he thought Harry might not have had the chance to look his fill. “I never considered Daphne,” he admitted. “I know you insulted her, but she’d insulted you by calling you a Mudblood. Most pure-bloods would accept they were worsted and go their way.”
“But not her?”
Draco shook his head, trying to remember some of the rumors he had heard circulating about Daphne after the war. There was that bit about her biting someone’s shoulder and swearing she’d eat them, wasn’t there? And Blaise had sometimes told him amusing stories that seemed more believable in the heat of firelight and wine than they did when Draco opened his eyes in daylight.
“She could have meant to warn me, yes,” Draco murmured. “It could have been a way for her to express her frustration. She could have meant to insult you. Maybe she did the stabbing herself and was drunk at the time.” He shook his head. “The problem is that we don’t know what her motive was, or even for sure if she was behind it. The coincidence of her name with Blaise’s is suggestive, but maybe it wasn’t her.”
“Well, there’s a simple way to settle that,” Harry said, and stood up twirling his wand between his fingers. “Let’s go ask her.”
Draco stared at him, and then realized that wasn’t working, because Harry evidently didn’t pick up on his message from only his stare. Draco had to speak it, between clenched teeth that made his head throb. “Are you mad?”
“Why would I be?” Harry smiled tranquilly at him. “From the method of her attack, if it was her attack, she isn’t all that smart. If it wasn’t her, then she has no reason to be expecting us and will be taken by surprise when I sweep in and snatch her. Either way, it’ll be easy enough to pick her up and make her regret anything she did to us.” He tossed his head, eyes so bright and hot that he made Draco’s fingers ache.
“You’ll get in trouble,” Draco said. “Kidnapping pure-bloods with a presence in the social world is a lot worse than taking a nobody like my cousin, who even other pure-bloods are ashamed to own.”
“Then no one has to know it’s me,” Harry said. “You can come up with a way to help me.”
Draco shook his head. “It’s too dangerous.”
Harry leaned forwards. “More dangerous than leaving someone out there who can strike at you again?” he asked quietly. “Because that’s what this comes down to, Draco. Either doing what we can, now, to make the problem go away, or watching it grow, and grow heads, and return like a hydra in the night.”
Draco blinked in spite of himself. “You do have a way of turning a phrase,” he said.
Harry remained with his hands poised above the table, and looked at him calmly. “Do I have your attention, is the important thing. And your agreement?”
Draco huffed and folded his arms. “Where did this reckless Gryffindor side of you come from? Just a little while ago, you were determined to take all the time we had to to figure out this mystery and make sure we didn’t lose a chance at the real villain.” He tossed Harry’s words at him without much thought that they would slow him down, and with a deep, real hope curling in his belly that they wouldn’t.
Harry smiled at him with teeth as bright and sharp as a piranha’s. “It’s always been here, but most of the time, I’ve been reactive with it, only exercising it in a crisis. There’s no reason it has to go on being that way. Let’s make a move for ourselves, now, before Greengrass realizes that she’s in danger from the way we took down Blaise.”
“If it was her,” Draco murmured, deliberately provocative. “If he had anything to do with it. You know it might turn out he didn’t.”
Harry showed his teeth so much now that Draco had a momentary fear his lips would fall off his face. “Then let’s prove it. I’m more than happy to set about proving it.”
And Draco, his blood dancing in his veins, couldn’t come up with a good reason to go on opposing his husband.
*
Harry waited a few minutes, glancing from his watch to the sun in the sky overhead. Greengrass had a modest sinecure at the Ministry, Draco had told him, but he was emphatic that she didn’t really work. She just showed up once or twice a week, hung around in the offices, chatted, spread her vicious brand of gossip, and then wandered out to lunch and didn’t come back for the rest of the day. She changed the restaurants she ate at often, too, and didn’t usually make meetings or dates for lunch; she seemed to entertain most of her friends back at her home.
No one would notice she was missing for hours, if they took her on at lunch.
Now, Harry was only waiting for her to step out of the Ministry. He had checked his disguise several times-a glamour charm that darkened his hair and changed the shape of his face, Muggle contacts that dimmed what Draco insisted on calling the “distracting green” of his eyes, and a smear and dab of thick makeup over the scar-until Draco had floated a mirror in front of him and told him it was perfect.
The problem was that it didn’t only have to be perfect, Harry thought. It had to be attractive to Daphne Greengrass, and Draco hadn’t been able to tell him much about what she preferred.
Finally, though, she came out, sauntering along in her green robes, which did look nice with her blonde hair and the flowing way she wore it, Harry had to admit. But her hair didn’t look as nice as Draco’s.
Not that he was thinking about that, either. Talk about distracting.
Harry arranged the signet ring on his finger-a fake one, proclaiming he was from a minor but pure-blooded family-and left his corner behind the Ministry, gaping at Greengrass. She saw him and turned towards him. Harry whipped his head away, and let his cheeks flush deeply as he began to walk off.
Then he glanced back at her as if he couldn’t help himself, and saw her coming towards him at a slow but confident walk, her eyes narrowed as if that would better help her evaluate her prey. Harry cleared his throat and shook his head a little, as though that would help him clear it.
“I don’t even know who you are,” he whispered, as she stopped in front of him and looked at him with an unmistakable meaning in her face.
Greengrass laughed. If the memory of her saying that his blood was muddy didn’t burn so brightly in Harry’s mind, he might even have found the noise attractive. “But I know that you like me, and that’s enough.” She looked at his signet ring and his eyes and his hair and probably other things Harry didn’t even know about but which mattered to someone who was considering taking a causal lover, and took his arm. “I was going to lunch. Join me?”
It was just what Harry and Draco had hoped for when they came up with this plan, and which Harry hadn’t known they could achieve. He nodded, gaping despite himself at Greengrass-and not for the reason she thought-when she turned hard enough to give him a glimpse beneath her robes. Not much, just a flash of pale skin along her side and flank, but Harry reckoned it would be irresistible for a lot of people.
It wasn’t for him. His skin seemed to burn, remembering the teeth that had attacked him in the mist during the demi-marriage ritual, and the bonds he had created to Draco.
But he was doing this to find out what Greengrass knew, and ultimately to protect his family. He went with her.
*
Daphne had chosen the most expensive restaurant in wizarding London, or at least the most expensive one that had opened since the war, a lovely but private place called Fallen Eden. Draco knew he couldn’t follow her and Harry in there without revealing himself, and spying in was discouraged through discreet Privacy Charms.
Luckily, there were spells available to a married couple-and a married couple where one of them had a powerful wand that obeyed his every whim-that ordinary Privacy Charms couldn’t do anything about. Draco leaned back at his table in another restaurant across the street and studied the glass of water in front of him. The images wavered and danced in the water and sometimes on the side of the cup, which only meant Draco had to cup his hands in front of it when someone wandered by.
He had chosen to place this surveillance spell on Harry’s cloak collar, which meant he had had a good image of Daphne as they walked to Fallen Eden, and now that Harry had taken off his cloak and draped it over an empty chair at the table, he had a good view of both of them.
Harry leaned his hands on the table and gazed at Daphne with wide eyes, now and then ducking his head and looking aside with flushed cheeks, playing besotted but shocked innocent for all he was worth. Daphne smiled at him over a glass of the delicately-flavored wine that was thought proper to begin the meal at Fallen Eden.
Draco nodded slightly. They had her. He had remembered some of the things Daphne had confessed about the Hufflepuffs she seduced, that year after the war, and while they couldn’t make Harry into a literal Hufflepuff, they could give him the same sort of background and naïve charm.
As long as Draco looked at it that way, remembering that it was a mission and Harry was playing a part, he could smile and even shake his head when Daphne put a hand on Harry’s and he nearly knocked over his glass in response. He didn’t go so far as to knock it over, of course. That would mark him as too gauche for Daphne, just as a refusal to go to Fallen Eden would have marked him as too cheap to be worth her time. Harry knew exactly how far to go, how to flirt and hold her attention.
But when Draco thought of the fact that it was his husband flirting and acting like this, then his amusement disappeared.
His hands wanted to clench around the water glass and toss it to the floor, sometimes, or smash it to pieces. He wanted to shriek and lash out. He wanted to march across the street and taken Harry forcibly by his cloak collar and drag him back to bed and fuck him. None of this nonsense about his husband holding hands with someone else, even in the pursuit of truth about their enemies.
Demi-husband, his mother would have said, a touch of coolness in her voice. With Narcissa, a touch was enough.
Draco bared his teeth at the water glass, and then went and got some food so he would have something to do with his teeth other than grind them. The last thing he wanted was to wear down his enamel. Daphne wasn’t worth that.
He sipped at his water and took bites of hot, spicy meat while he studied the glass. He could make out some words from the way their lips shaped them, but the spell didn’t come with sound. Draco would have had to do something more complicated to make that happen, something Daphne would be much more likely to notice.
But he saw the moment when Harry turned dark red and glared down at his plate, and Daphne laughed in what looked like deep humor even though Draco couldn’t hear it, reaching out one hand to let her nails flutter gently down Harry’s face.
Draco closed his eyes and took a long, long bite of meat, after which he had to drink most of the water because of the burning in his throat from the food. So Daphne had touched Harry. He had known she would when he agreed to this ruse. She might need to do a lot more than that before this was done and Harry could go back to the Manor, and Draco had agreed to it. He had agreed to it all.
He shouldn’t be on the verge of marching over to Fallen Eden and destroying their whole plan because he was jealous.
But I am going to make sure that our interrogation of Daphne doesn’t take long. I can’t wait for hours.
He opened his eyes and checked the glass again, and then started to his feet. The viewpoint had moved. Harry had once again settled the cloak on his shoulders, which meant Draco couldn’t catch more than a blurred glimpse of his face, and he was tenderly settling Daphne’s over her shoulders. Daphne fluttered her eyelashes at him and tilted her head back enough to give him a good look at her color-changing eyes.
Glamours, Draco thought. They hadn’t looked like that when they were students together in Slytherin, or even a few weeks ago at the party he’d held to celebrate the demi-marriage.
Harry, of course, was playing the sort of fool who wouldn’t notice a change, so he let his jaw dangle and then sucked it back together and said something that made Daphne laugh and toss her head back again. They left together, Daphne’s hand on Harry’s arm. When they came out of Fallen Eden, Draco could see them with his own eyes, and they were turning up the street in the direction of an Apparition point.
The plan had succeeded, then, at least in the sense that Daphne had accepted Harry’s invitation to spend the afternoon together. Draco had only to follow them.
He paid for his meal by the simple expedient of tossing down a few Galleons and made his way to the door, casting a Disillusionment Charm on himself. When someone gaped at him, he said in a low mutter, “Think she’s cheating,” and ducked out the door, seeing wisely nodding heads behind him.
Change the pronoun, and it would be almost true.
Draco ground his teeth again, until he remembered that he didn’t want to waste the enamel on Daphne, and then did his best to stop. He pasted a pleasant expression on his face and sauntered until he was sure he was a reasonable distance from anyone who had seen him cast the charm. Then he sped up.
Harry and Daphne were almost at the Apparition point, but Harry knew to delay until he felt Draco touch his arm. Draco angled to come in at his side, the opposite side from Daphne, and saw her fluttering her eyes again in an attempt to enchant him. Draco could hear them now.
“…never met someone like you before,” Harry was saying in a husky voice, staring at her.
“I know that,” Daphne said, and lowered her eyelashes.
And that’s true, but not the way you imagine, Draco thought, and took Harry’s arm with a little nod he couldn’t prevent himself from giving, even though Harry wouldn’t be able to see it.
Harry stiffened for the barest second, but, good for him, he didn’t start and give away the game. He smiled at Daphne and drew her close, slowly enough that Draco could come with him and keep his hold at the same time. “Shall we go?” he murmured.
Another flutter of Daphne’s eyelashes, and they were off, Apparating straight to a bedroom in the Manor that Draco had cleared of anti-Apparition wards for the occasion. Draco was dragged along, too, and he had mad fantasies of telling Ossy to prepare his bedroom, or a bedroom. The nearest one to the one they were taking Daphne to.
Because he didn’t want to fuck Harry in the same room where they would interrogate her, but God, he wanted to fuck Harry.
Chapter Forty.
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