Chapter Eighteen of 'Bonded Consort'- Planning the Attack
Chapter Seventeen.
Title: Bonded Consort (17/25)
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairings: Harry/Draco eventually, one-sided Draco/OFC, Lily/James, Lucius/Narcissa, mentions of Pansy/Blaise
Content Notes: AU, courting, weird marriage customs, bonding
Rating: R
Summary: Nineteen years ago, the Potters betrothed their firstborn child to the firstborn Malfoy child. Eighteen years ago, Voldemort was defeated for good. Seventeen years ago, the Potters changed the contract so that their secondborn child was substituted for their firstborn. Now, Draco Malfoy is trying to work out what happened.
Author’s Notes: As you can probably see from the summary, this is a massive AU, some of the background of which will be explained as the story goes on. The most important facts to know are that Voldemort was vanquished for good in 1981 and thus the Potters are still alive; Harry did not attend Hogwarts; and Harry and Draco have never met. This story should be between eight and eighteen parts long, and will update on Tuesdays.
Chapter One.
Thank you again for all the reviews!
Chapter Eighteen-Planning the Attack
Draco ate his lunch-delicate slivers of fish and chicken in a salad of spinach, berries and candied flowers placed here and there; much better food than he would have expected of a pub like this-and considered Black. Black hadn’t stopped talking to Harry about his exploits with James Potter at Hogwarts. Apparently there was a mutual, silent agreement they would wait until after lunch to discuss why he had abandoned Harry.
Draco wondered about that, and also what kind of influence Black would be on Harry. His tale of losing his best friend to adulthood was plausible enough, but it made Draco concerned about how adult Black was.
Luckily, Harry seemed to share some of his wonder and concern. He pressed back towards Draco, one elbow resting on his knee, eyes bright and skeptical. Draco smiled at him and nudged Harry’s plate, a mess of a sandwich with butter and jam that Black had insisted he had to try, towards him.
Harry smiled a little and began to eat.
“-And that’s the way that we made Severus Snape hate us forever,” Black finished with a grin that revealed bits of fruit stuck in his teeth. Draco thought about pointing it out, but he knew what kind of reaction he would get. Black changed moods in the next second anyway, almost Vanishing the grin. “So, you want to know why I never came to get you?”
Harry nodded and jerkily reached for the butterbeer that Marcos had brought them. Draco touched his arm for a second, silently.
“I didn’t know what James and Lily were doing for a while.” Black scowled at the wall behind Harry. “I kept waiting for them to adopt you out to a Muggle family. And I know Muggles want babies, because I watch them sometimes and they’re always talking about that. The older you got, the less likely it seemed. But I didn’t know what they were doing.
“Finally, I went over and asked one day. James was so startled that he let me in.
“He told me that they’d found out you had Voldemort’s magic.” Black glanced at Draco and seemed disappointed that he didn’t jump at the name. “That you weren’t suitable for their purposes. No one else could adopt you, because they might be corrupted. No one was safe around you except maybe another Squib. They were looking for Squibs, but not looking very hard. And, of course, no precious Malfoy could marry you.”
“Bond,” Draco said, with a small smile.
Black leaned forwards, his face hard and shining. “I don’t know what changed, but-”
“What changed is that I despise Dahlia Potter,” Draco interrupted coolly. “I learned of Harry’s existence from gossip I wasn’t aware of and forced the Potters to confess to me what they’d done to him. Farmed him out to a Parselmouth Squib, was the answer. And Harry is a powerful Dark wizard. I’m going to bond him. You don’t need to worry about that.”
“I can worry about-wait. James never talked about what he’d done with Harry in public. How did you find out?”
“I used Veritaserum on him and his wife.”
Black looked at him with his lips almost trembling. Draco sat up a little. Maybe he would defend his friend even though he hadn’t seen him for years. Draco reached for his wand under the table.
Then Black let loose with a great whoop of what Draco realized was laughter, not yelling. He pounded the table with one fist and nearly spilled Harry’s drink and then leaned back and went on laughing until the chair shook.
“No mourning!” yelled Marcos from the open door.
“No mourning here!” Black snapped in return, and focused his eyes on Draco. There was something like respect in them now, but respect was the last emotion Draco had thought his confession would inspire, so he held still. “You are going to be good for Harry. His father would never teach him the flexible morals you need to be a Marauder, so you’ll have to do.”
“Marauder?”
“Weren’t you listening?” Black reached across the table to flick his fingers against Harry’s temple, or he would have, but Draco caught his wrist. Black leaned back in his chair, grinning and unoffended. “The Marauders were what James and Peter and Remus and I called ourselves in school.”
“Pettigrew was one of you?”
Black’s face cooled and darkened like lava. “Yeah. It was one reason that James and Lily trusted him around you at all. And Dumbledore. No one knew he was a Death Eater.” He shrugged the mood off, and grinned again. “But he’s in prison now, and he didn’t understand what happened that night, but neither did anyone else, and here you are, a wizard instead of a Squib! Isn’t it wonderful?”
“I think we both still want to hear more about why you never tried to find Harry,” Draco interjected. “Or take him out of the awful situation with his family, since you knew about it.”
Black grimaced and tugged on his hair hard enough that Draco wondered he wasn’t bald. “I yelled at James and threatened him with trying to get custody of Harry. I tried, too. I went to the Wizengamot and everything. But there are laws on the books that are, like, from before the Ministry was a Ministry. Pure-blood family tradition codified into law. They say that a Squib can’t be adopted unless his parents willingly give him up. Most of the time, that was no problem, but James and Lily didn’t want to. And otherwise, Squibs remain under the control of their family for life. They essentially don’t come of age. I fought, but there was nothing I could do. And then James cast spells that meant I couldn’t even approach the house, let alone try to communicate with anyone in it. My Floo calls were automatically refused and my owls turned away. I tried to sneak in in my Animagus form, but they’d even thought of that.” Black gave a low whine of remorse, which told Draco something about what his Animagus form probably was. “I tried to ambush you when you were outside, but they never took you anywhere. I’m sorry, pup.”
Harry looked dazed. Draco had to know more, although he squeezed Harry’s hand reassuringly under the table to let him know he could interrupt if he wanted to. “And when you heard Harry had been exiled?”
“They wouldn’t tell me where!” Black uttered the last word in a roar that made Marcos poke his head out of the kitchen again. Black lowered his voice promptly. “I sent owls to you. They all came back. I don’t think they hid you under the name of Harry Potter, or maybe you were some place that wouldn’t take them.”
“Lilian kept me in South America for a few years,” Harry said softly. “The most distant part of the Brazilian and then the Peruvian jungles. Sometimes we got visitors to the little Squib community we lived in who said even a Patronus couldn’t have reached them there.”
Black nodded and slammed his hand against the table. Luckily, Harry had his butterbeer in his hand already, and Draco had finished his own drink. “I thought you were dead. Or they’d given you to someone who knew about me and had been told to refuse all contact with me.”
“Maybe they told Lilian. I don’t know.”
Draco rubbed his thumb gently across the back of Harry’s hand. “Who was Lilian?”
“Lilian Rosier. My mentor.” Harry rubbed his finger down the neck of the bottle instead of against Draco’s wrist, which Draco really preferred he would do instead. “She was a Parselmouth and a Squib, and my parents met her through-I don’t know. Someone your parents knew, I think.”
“You don’t need to call them your parents now. They’re Potters, and you’re not.”
Harry gave him a wan smile. “That’s true.”
“Then that means you can do whatever you want,” Black interrupted eagerly. “Listen, Harry, you don’t have to stay bound to what your parents wanted out of you. We can go and prank them until James’s antlers ache, and-”
“I don’t want to prank them, either.” Harry sighed and leaned for a moment against Draco, but that welcome warmth was gone too soon and he was studying Black again. “I want them to pay for what they did, but that doesn’t include seeing them. Unless you use that spell you were talking about and get pictures of the expressions on their faces from a distance,” he added over his shoulder to Draco.
Draco had to smile. “I worked long and hard on that spell, and I’ve only had a chance to test it a time or two. I can’t imagine a better purpose for it.”
“What are you talking about?” Black demanded.
Harry glanced at Draco sidelong. Draco nodded. He thought Black was trustworthy enough to know about it, even if he’d only just proved himself.
“We’re going to create an article that talks about what they did to me and how they disowned me yesterday and that they failed to recognize a wizard when he was looking them in the face.”
*
The problem with Sirius, Harry thought, is that he won’t stop laughing.
Not even Marcos coming to the door of the kitchen and frowning had worked this time. Sirius kept, literally, howling and slapping the edge of the table, shaking his head back and forth. Then he buried it in his arms and howled with tears streaming down his cheeks. Marcos disappeared back into the kitchen.
Draco looked as disgusted as Marcos had. He caught Harry’s eye and gestured emphatically with his head towards the door.
Harry shook his own head back and held still. He still wanted this link to his godfather and someone who had wanted him and tried to get him away from his parents.
Draco tilted his head again.
Harry shook his wrist so that the bonding bracelet flashed and glittered in the dim light coming down from the ceiling.
Draco rolled his eyes and waited. Sirius had lifted his head, and he was grinning now. Harry was suddenly sure that his Animagus form was a dog, or a wolf or something like that. Only a canine could smile with so many teeth.
“I love it. It’s perfect,” Sirius declared. He turned his head and scowled as Marcos came out of the kitchen with a frying pan at the ready. “What are you doing?”
“I was going to smack you on the back of the head.” Marcos studied them and finally slid the frying pan into a slot on the wall. “I see there’s no need.”
“I can keep my head,” Sirius said, with dignity that Harry thought wasn’t so much wounded as crippled and dying, and then faced Harry and Draco again with an enormous grin on his face. “I think it’s the perfect revenge. James and Lily have become so stuffy and respectable over the years, and they held to that contract when they should have just dissolved it. This will scoop their guts out.”
“Um,” said Harry.
“Aw, come on! You’re not going to do it because I approve of it?” Sirius made huge eyes at him and let his head flop dramatically into the middle of the table. “Fine, I withdraw my approval of this plan. I absolutely forbid you to do it! You are supposed to come back and be the good little respectable pure-blood son they always wanted! Do as they tell you! Go away! Get out of my sight!” He flung his head back and his hand up, warding Harry off, then peeked at him in between his spread fingers. “Did that work?”
Harry had to laugh, and noticed that even Draco was grinning. “No, I just meant-that image. Their guts scooped out. You really don’t like them, do you?”
Sirius’s mood changed like a leaping hare again, and he threw himself back in his chair and sighed at the ceiling. “I don’t understand! James never liked all that pure-blood stuff when we were younger. He was impatient about the people who expected him to hate Muggleborns-which is how he got together with Lily in the first place. He despised Voldemort from the first time we heard about him. And he would have laughed in anyone’s face who suggested that he betroth his children with contracts.” He groaned and hit his fist into his palm. “I don’t know what happened to him.”
“But you can’t forgive him for it,” Harry said.
It was a guess, but Sirius nodded at him. “Or Lily for going along with it. I mean, I think I know what she might be thinking. She always felt out of place. Someone would make a remark about politics that happened in closed sessions of the Wizengamot or private conversations, but got out because the pure-bloods all knew each other. Or someone would act perfectly friendly to her face and then say ‘Mudblood,’ and then hasten to reassure her that she wasn’t like them. So she might have adopted this as a way to fit in. But James has no excuse.”
“Neither does she.” That was Draco, glittering-toothed.
“Either way, it’ll be fun to bring them down,” Sirius mused. He glanced at Harry. “Who were you going to get to write the article?”
“I thought Rita Skeeter,” said Draco, because Harry had no idea and had to glance at him.
Sirius snorted. “She deals in gossip, and she’s widely-read, but her stories get forgotten as soon as they’re read. And she’ll be as ready to turn on you as she was on James and Lily.”
“But she’s the only reporter I know.”
“Easy enough to find someone else,” said Sirius, and now he was grinning in a way that made Harry eye him. “You’ve heard the name Remus Lupin, I know.”
“I remember him visiting the house!” Harry blurted. When Sirius blinked, he added, “I mean-I was just startled at how much I remembered when I came back to Britain. I remember all of you playing on brooms on the Quidditch pitch. When was that?”
Sirius sighed. “That was before I made my last attempt to get custody of you. I still thought I could persuade James. And when we got him out of the house, then he sometimes acted more like his old self. But Quidditch was the only time that happened.”
“And then he kept you from coming around at all-”
“What about Remus Lupin?” Draco said, prodding Harry in the back as if to remind him that they had a vindictive article to publish.
“Only that he sometimes works for the Quibbler,” Sirius said, swinging a glass back and forth in his hand so hard Harry thought it would fly into the corner of the table and splinter in a second. “And publishes articles on the Continent the rest of the time. In werewolf-friendly publications, of course.”
Draco made a choking sound. “He’s a werewolf.”
“Yes, I rather thought you knew that,” Sirius drawled. “Either from your parents saying something about why it wasn’t suitable for me to be around anymore, or from the articles he published.”
Draco only shook his head, looking overwhelmed. Harry frowned a little. He remembered his mentor saying that werewolves were reviled even more than Squibs in the wizarding world, but he didn’t know much about them. “Would he be able to have-I don’t know, people pay attention to him, right? Even if he’s a werewolf?”
“You had better pay attention to a werewolf if you don’t want to die.”
“Don’t talk about Remus that way,” Sirius snapped, and flicked his fingers so hard against the back of Draco’s hand that Draco jumped. Harry chuckled, which he knew wasn’t nice, but Draco’s wounded look made any non-niceness worth it.
“Yes, people respect Remus,” Sirius continued. “Not every country is as bigoted about werewolves as we are. And it would make him all the more listened to because he used to be James and Lily’s friend, and not everyone has forgotten that. It’s one of those things James turned his back on to fit in with the proper pure-bloods.” He was looking at Draco again, his sneer slight but there. Then he turned to Harry. “Are you sure you want to marry him? I could find you a nice Muggleborn boy who would still totally shock your parents.”
“Bond.”
“Yes, I reckon you do want to marry-bond him, you’re talking like him, even,” Sirius said, and rolled his eyes. Then he grinned. “What we really ought to do is present it as supportive.”
“Of the Potters?” Draco sounded like he was about to sick up.
“Empty your little porcelain head of all those pure-blood fantasies you might be having,” said Sirius. “No, I mean you and me being supportive of Harry.”
Harry wasn’t sure where it came from, but suddenly the perfect picture was in his mind. “You mean-like, I’m sitting in a chair in the photograph, and the article says I’m talking softly about how they threw me away and convinced me I was evil for most of my life? And Draco is standing behind me and patting my shoulder, and you’re sitting off to the side looking furious and saying, ‘That’s right’ sometimes? And then I start telling the story of how Draco taught me I was a wizard, and I came back to life, and it turned out to be my sister after all, and my parents disowned me for no reason, and we come off looking triumphant and totally in the right and they look like they’re idiots?”
Sirius laughed like a bear, clapped his hands, ducked the skillet that came soaring out of the kitchen, and shouted, “We’ll make a Marauder of you yet!”
Chapter Nineteen.
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