Chapter Thirty-One of "Nature of the Beast"- Giving Up and Giving In
Chapter Thirty.
Title: Nature of the Beast (31/40 to 43)
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairing: Harry/Draco (eventual), Ron/Hermione, Lucius/Narcissa
Warnings: Creature fic (Draco is a Veela), angst, some violence
Rating: R
Summary: Draco Malfoy knows how the world is supposed to go; he is a dominant Veela, with a submissive mate. It’s rather a surprise to find out that his mate is Harry Potter. It’s much more of one to find out that Harry, having been raised by Muggles, does not know how the world is supposed to go.
Author’s Notes: This story is going to be probably somewhere between twenty-five and thirty chapters.
Chapter One..
Thank you again for all the reviews!
Chapter Thirty-One--Giving Up and Giving In
Harry sat down at the dining room table two days after Mrs. Malfoy had told him the trth. He had to go back to thinking of her that way now, and not as Narcissa. It would be easier in the end.
Harry rubbed thoughtfully at his chin. He needed to shave.
And he needed, even more, to stop shying away from his problem instead of confronting it. Harry sighed and put his chin on his hand. He wondered how he was going to convince Draco, who didn't know what he needed most. Or who might have decided to ignore it for a while. Harry found that explanation more plausible than Narcissa's that he was crawling back to the feet of his abuser, honestly. Draco thought he wanted the slow bond he'd been building with Harry because he'd had to fight so hard for it.
But a Veela bond wasn't supposed to be a fight. It was supposed to be a smooth and blessed union, the way Ron had told him.
Ron. Surely he would know something about this? He could tell me? Harry nodded and stood up. He would Floo Ron first thing, and Ron could give him some kind of confirmation of what Narcissa had said. Then Harry would manage to convince himself to proceed.
You'd think I would leap at the chance to be free of this bond when I fought for so long.
But Harry knew that that wasn't the point. He had started to hope, in the last week, that this bond could be good for him, too, that he could finally have someone who saw him for what he was, not just the political animal or the hero or the Gryffindor or the abused child. It was hard to give up the fantasy of someone who would understand him and love him anyway.
Well, of course he had his friends. Why did he need a fantasy when he had a reality?
It's not the same thing, said a part of him, but he tightened himself against that part. It was probably the same part that had told his relatives that what they did wasn't really abusing him, it was only justified harsh treatment. He cast Floo powder into the fire and called out, "The Burrow!" It was usually where Ron was at this time of day.
*
Draco crept towards the dining room, his wings fluttering with every step he took. Harry had told him that he needed some privacy in the last few days, and Draco had held back and let him stay alone for hours at a time. Anything for Harry to begin relaxing and trusting Draco with the bond at last.
But they had been apart for most of the day, and Draco needed to spend some time with him now. He leaned on the door to the drawing room, so it opened gently, giving Harry time to notice and not resent what could seem like a hidden intrusion. When he heard voices, he froze for a second, but relaxed when he recognized one of the voices as Weasley's. Weasley had been the one to encourage him and tell him a little of why Harry had resisted the bond. He wouldn't mind Draco listening now.
"I don't understand, mate." Weasley's voice was low, wary, baffled. It made Draco's wings rise and fan around him, on guard instinctively. "If she told you this, why would you believe it? You've never been in the habit of taking advice from Malfoy's mum."
Draco crouched on the floor without even thinking, wings raised above his head. His mother had been speaking to Harry? When had that happened, why hadn't he known about it, and what had she said?
Why hadn't Harry told him?
"There was this one time," said Harry, in a light, brittle tone that rang false. If Harry had a flaw, Draco thought, it was that he was too serious most of the time. To hear him pretend to humor when he didn't feel it... "You know, the Forbidden Forest, the time she lied for me to Voldemort's face."
"And you think that makes her trustworthy now?" Weasley sounded as though his sigh could blow away half his hair. "Listen, mate. I believe it when you say she told you that she'd do anything for her son. I don't believe you abused Malfoy."
Say what? Draco rose to his feet in a soundless wave of feathers. Harry, with his head in the Floo, didn't notice. Draco stalked towards him, moving lightly. This was a great enough shock to make his toes as well as his fingers turn into talons, and that would result in a clicking noise on the floor if he wasn't careful.
He didn't want Harry to be soothed instead of startled by him, this time.
"That isn't the way I thought of it, either." Harry's voice was low and miserable, the humor gone as if it had never been. Draco reached out in a gesture he was still learning to access and found the bond quivering between them with a dark silver liquid sadness. "But that's what I did. I used my magic to fling him across the library for the great crime of being a Veela and bonding with me."
Draco opened his mouth, although his screech was muffled down inside his throat. So that was how his mother had presented this to Harry. He wouldn't have believed anything else, but that he was an abuser, like the ones who had raised him, must be a vulnerable point.
His mother was clever.
But Draco was far angrier, and rage was what mattered right now.
"Look, from what you said, that was what made him wake up and start listening to you." Draco empathized perfectly with the thick frustration in Weasley's voice. He saw a shadow gesture from within the flames, as if Weasley was holding out his hand to Harry, who probably missed it because he was kneeling with his head bowed like a penitent fool. "If Malfoy felt angry with you, he could have flown away. Or yelled at you, the way you said he'd done. He could have done lots of things to show you his displeasure without breaking the bond. Why do you believe what she said rather than what he did?"
At the moment, Draco would rather have liked to give Weasley a spare mansion.
"It's because she said that he doesn't know himself that he was abused," Harry whispered doggedly. "You know, the way I refused to acknowledge for so long that what the Dursleys did was abuse? He doesn't want to admit it. But it's true. And I have to get myself away from him before I encourage him to sink further in his mindset."
Draco decided that was enough of that. He only knew the decision because he stepped around the chair that had probably been partially concealing him from Harry's sight and scooped Harry up from the floor, moving him aside on his knees. Harry gave a squeak of surprise, and then stared up at him with sorrow draping itself like a cobweb over his features.
Weasley gave a shout. Draco knelt down and put his head in the place where Harry had been, and said, "Excuse us, Weasley. I thought allowing Harry to proceed further in his false beliefs would be painful for both of us, so I removed him. I'm going to talk to him. You'll make my excuses to Granger if Harry was going to visit you?"
"He wasn't," said Weasley, but there was a tight smile on his face and a gleam of satisfaction in his eyes. "He probably knew we'd manage to talk him out of his stupidity if he was right in front of us. Go ahead, mate."
Draco suppressed the twinge of both amusement and pain that came from hearing Weasley apply that word to him, and nodded. "Good day."
He cut the Floo connection and turned around to study Harry. Harry had stood up beside the chair. He was looking at Draco the anxious way that a Healer might when he was sick, or even the way his mother had looked at him during the symptoms of his last illness.
Draco smiled. In his own way, he was going to enjoy this. He stood up himself, spreading his wings, flaunting them, his size and strength, the way that while he wasn't much taller than Harry, he was bigger with his wings spread.
"Were you ever planning to talk to me about your delusions?" he asked. "Or were you going to take even that power of choice from me under pretense of rescuing me?"
*
He's angry.
But Harry had known Draco would be. It was one reason he had wanted to avoid a confrontation between them. He had wanted to ask Ron for advice about concealing his emotions from Draco long enough for Narcissa to perform the ritual or whatever it was she had found for parting them and transferring the bond.
Ron had been horrified and told him he couldn't. Harry had tried to argue that with their bond as tattered and unsatisfactory as it was, it wasn't like he was making any grand effort, and Ron had pounced then and told him the bond was real, and Harry sneaking around like this and making a desperate effort to deny it only said that the more.
Harry had let himself get distracted with the ethics of the situation, and what exactly Narcissa had said to him, and he wished now that he hadn't. He had never got any advice from Ron, only refusals. As Draco stalked slowly towards him, Harry thought he could have used lots of advice right then.
"I planned on doing the same sort of thing you would do for someone who was under the Imperius Cure and insisting he wanted to surrender all his worldly wealth to the person who cast the curse," Harry answered steadily. "I was going to keep it from you for your own good and make sure you were safe and happy in the end."
Draco twisted his neck. "Safe. When I'd already refused this substitute mate my mother promised, no matter how pretty and blond and female?"
Harry stared at him. "She talked to you about it?" Narcissa hadn't mentioned that at all, or at least only in the way that she'd said Draco refused to listen to reason about Harry's abuse of him. Harry hadn't envisioned a conversation about the method of ending the bond, only a general hinting of Narcissa's concerns that Draco had reacted violently to.
"She did," said Draco. "Interesting it never got mentioned, isn't it?"
Harry took a deep breath and resettled himself. So Narcissa had approached things in an underhanded manner. That didn't ultimately change things. "Safe from me," he said. "Because I did hurt you and you know it."
"I acknowledge you hurt me," said Draco. "That's not the same as abuse."
"It is." Harry leaned forwards. "If what I suffered while I was at my relatives' house is abuse, so is this."
"Then have you Obliviated me?" Draco asked, turning his neck again and arching his wings so the circle at the top of them seemed to wind around his throat. Distantly, hopelessly, Harry admired how beautiful he was. "Of all the times you've starved me and hit me?"
Harry rolled his eyes. This was the way that Draco was irritating, he thought, or most irritating, out of all the different ways that Draco could be irritating. "Abuse doesn't have to be exactly the same to be abuse," he said. "I meant they hurt me when they had a duty to care for me. And I did the same thing. Or at least I should have treated you decently like a human being," he added, when he saw Draco opening his mouth. "Not used my magic to fling you into a wall."
"You didn't think I was a human being at the time," Draco murmured, provocatively. "You didn't think I was someone you had a duty of care to at the time."
"No, but that just makes it worse." Harry wondered for a moment how they seemed to have switched positions and be arguing each other's side, but he knew Draco was trying to undermine Harry's position now by quoting his original feelings back to him. "Ron tried to tell me what a great honor it was to have a Veela bond, and--"
Draco blurred into the air. Harry tossed his head back, trying to see where he had gone, and found Draco's hands resting on his shoulders and his face bent down near Harry's neck, as if was seeking answers in the folds of skin there.
"Listen to me," Draco whispered. "I know what I want. I should, since I actually had to struggle and think about it instead of just settling into the perfect, mindless bond I always expected. And who I want is you."
Harry caught his breath, but he remembered how much he had struggled to get the Dursleys to love him, even long after he should have given it up as hopeless. And that he felt remorse now and the Dursleys never would didn't change their respective positions. He had still hurt Draco. He didn't deserve a chance after that.
"I have to let you go," he said. "You'll have a mate you can dominate, someone who can never hurt you."
Draco snarled softly at him. "And I said before that my mother already approached me about this ritual, and even told me the mate she'd picked out for me. I said no. Are you going to insist I should have the ritual inflicted on me against my will?"
Harry blinked and hesitated. That went along with what he had been saying about not obeying the directions of someone under the Imperius Curse, but on the other hand, when Draco was actually confronting him...
"You had your will taken away from you when I turned out to be your mate," he said. "Can you really put up with this?"
Draco drew back, his head cocked like a puppy's. "Then you agree with me?"
"I mean, can you stand to have your will taken away from you because you're living with someone who abused you?" Harry asked, and reached up to frame Draco's face with his hands when Draco screeched at him. "I know it doesn't feel like that. But someday, you'll wake up and know the truth, just like I did with the Dursleys. And then you would hate yourself and me. You could say I'm leaving for selfish reasons, because I couldn't stand to see that day."
"I could definitely say that you're leaving with selfish reasons," Draco said, and his eyes sparked. "You agree I should have what I want?"
"As long as it's good for you," Harry said cautiously, because he thought this was probably some kind of ploy to get him to agree that Harry was good for Draco.
Draco gave an awful, barking sort of laugh. "Of course," he said. "And when I say that your strength is good for me, that it's taught me to be more careful and thoughtful, and I understand you better than I ever thought I would understand anyone, and you make me a better person--that's reason enough for you to leave?"
Harry tore his attention away and shut his eyes, turning his head to the side. Instantly Draco fitted his head alongside Harry's, so that Harry knew, if he looked again, they would seem to be gazing in the same direction.
"You need what you desire," Harry whispered. "What a Veela should have."
"You speak as if you think all Veela bonds are identically strong," Draco said. "The way I used to believe. What happened to believing bonds could vary, and the individual Veela and humans involved could have different reactions?"
Harry shuddered. It felt as though Draco had reached in and was playing expertly on the strings that tied his heart.
But he couldn't give in, for so many reasons. Not the least of those was that he wanted so badly to do so. If he wanted it that badly, it had to be a selfish desire.
"Draco," he whispered through numbed lips, "how much did your mother tell you about this? Did she tell you that she felt I'd abused you?"
"No," said Draco instantly. "Did she tell you that? Or were you the one who brought up the word first, and she seized on it? Because that's what I suspect happened."
Harry hesitated. He couldn't remember the conversation for a moment, but now that he thought about it...
Draco nodded immediately, leaning in and peering at Harry's eyes as though they were lenses that would reveal the real Harry if he just looked through them hard enough. "She manipulated you. It's what she does. She wants me away from you. She may sincerely care about me. I think she does." For a minute, Draco's voice broke, and then he laid a hand delicately across Harry's cheek, stroking his skin without breaking it even though his fingers had become talons. "But she can't live my life. I'm the one who has to make the choice. And even if you abused me, if you could convince me to believe that, you're still the one I want for my mate."
Harry closed his eyes. "If you regret it someday, that would be more intolerable than leaving you now."
"Even though one is my will and the other isn't?" Draco sounded as though he was choking on air.
Harry blinked and looked at him again. "You don't want to be protected?"
"Not from myself," Draco said. "Not from you. I can handle you if you ever turn on me again. And as for the past...I'm the only one who can say whether that was unforgivable or not. I'm the one who should make this decision."
"That's what I wanted to believe," Harry whispered involuntarily, and winced a little from the sharpness of the gaze Draco turned on him. "But your mother sounded so serious, and she knows you so much better than I do."
"Not in this," said Draco. "I fought for you to become my mate, and I won't see that wasted. I have no interest in this Camilla Hughes she chose for me. I have interest in you."
Harry closed his eyes again. It was hard to give up the belief that Narcissa had implanted in his heart, because he had wondered himself how Draco could forgive Harry for flinging him against the will. It had seemed simplest to believe Draco couldn't.
But since when had things between them ever been simple?
Harry raised a hand and laid it on Draco's cheek in turn. Draco made a happy, bubbling croon, and rubbed a piece of hair that felt feathery against Harry's fingers. Harry swallowed and touched Draco a little harder, a little more permanently.
For now, I'll try this.
Chapter Thirty-Two.