lomonaaeren

Part One.

Title: As Proud As Love (2/4)
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairing: Harry/Lucius, background Draco/Astoria and Ginny/OMC, past Harry/Ginny and Lucius/Narcissa
Rating: R
Content Notes: Veela-fic, ignores the epilogue, unrequited love, angst, drama
Wordcount: This part 4300
Summary: Some idiot invented a potion after the war that gives whoever consumes it the characteristics of a Veela—and people keep taking it to find their mates or impress their lovers. A shame that the transformed people are violent and leak allure until they find their true mates. Harry Potter, immune to the Veela allure because of his unrequited love for his ex-girlfriend, provides guardianship for transformed Veela against other people and their own impulses until they can find their mates. Guarding Lucius Malfoy should have just been another such duty. But Malfoy is taking an unusually long time to find his mate.
Author’s Notes: This is one of my “From Samhain to the Solstice” fics being posted between Halloween and the winter solstice. This should have four parts.

Thank you for the reviews!

Part Two

Oddly, he had dreamed last night, Harry thought as he turned around underneath the shower, gripping and shoving shampoo through his hair. He needed to get it cut. He wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d dreamed about that, actually. It seemed that he had his most mundane dreams after the weirdest days.

But instead, he had dreamed of a lingering, aching sense of sadness. And he had dreamed of a silver coffin being lowered into the earth and covered with roses.

Harry shook his head and ducked his head underneath the water. There had been that glass coffin in the book of Muggle fairy tales he’d read to his goddaughter Rose last weekend. Probably that had caused the damn dream.

Then he heard the sound of the Floo coming to life, and his name being loudly called. Harry rolled his eyes, stepped out of the shower, conjured the illusion of robes around himself and cast a Drying Charm on his hair, and sauntered out to meet the urgent call.

It was Arcanus, who relaxed a little when he spotted him, but not much. “Auror Potter. My apologies for calling you at home, but our patient has become worse.”

“Again?” Harry frowned. “All right, I’ll be right in. I can take another day off from the Aurors.”

“Thank you. I want you to know that we appreciate you.”

Arcanus was smiling at him in a way that probably meant “I” instead of “we,” and Harry smiled back, but in a temperate way. He appreciated Arcanus’s competence and wit, but he wasn’t interested in dating the man.

Or anybody. Ginny was still the first thing on his mind when he woke in the morning and the last thing when he went to sleep.

“Let me slip into another pair of robes—” a real one “—and I’ll be right there.”

*

“Why am I free from pain only when you are here?”

Harry raised his eyebrows a little as he stepped into Malfoy’s part of the ward and sat down in the chair next to his bed. “They’re not sure. That’s what the Healers are working on.”

“I want answers.”

At least he’s recovered enough to get the imperious voice back, Harry thought wryly. But most of him was taken up with worry for Malfoy, and why this particular case would be so different from the others that Harry had helped the Healers handle. He hadn’t even needed to touch Malfoy this time. Instead, Malfoy had stopped screaming three minutes before Harry had come into the room, which would have been approximately when he came through the Floo.

“I don’t want to be dependent on you.”

“I don’t think you need to worry about that,” Harry said, as patiently as he could. “The Healers will sort out this odd reaction to the potion. And your mate should show up soon.”

“Mate. Like a beast.”

Malfoy’s lip curled as he looked away, and Harry decided that he had to speak up. Besides, in a way, he was doing the man a favor. This was his future and his nature. Best if he got on with accepting it. “You say that like Veela are lesser than human beings,” Harry stated in a bright, inquiring voice.

“They are.”

“Then why did you drink the potion to become one?”

Malfoy snapped back around in the bed. Already there was a flowing grace to his movements too great to be human, Harry thought, and he didn’t think it was his imagination that Malfoy’s hair had turned more silvery than blond or white. “I told you! To impress my wife.”

“The wife you divorced six months ago? What were you trying to make her do, come back to you as if she had no choice?”

Harry’s voice had grown harsh despite himself, and Malfoy snapped back again, a movement that reminded Harry of a startled bird jerking. “Draco talked to you.”

“Yes. So. Answer the question.”

“I was not trying to force her to do anything. I was trying to show her that we belonged together.”

Harry sighed and scrounged up some sympathy. Just because he thought of someone with Veela allure as trying to enslave the other person didn’t mean everyone thought that way. “Look. She left you of her own free will, didn’t she?”

“I hope Draco never gave you that much detail.”

Harry shook his head. “He just said that you were divorced. But if you’re the one who took the potion hoping to impress her, I’m going to take, oh, a wild guess and say that she was the one who initiated the divorce.”

Malfoy looked down at the white sheets over his legs, or maybe the fall of the white hospital robe they’d given him to wear. “Yes. She did.”

Harry nodded. “Fine. You have to let her go, Mr. Malfoy. You can’t cage her. Someone who wants to leave deserves to leave, and she gets to. It doesn’t matter what the person who’s left behind feels.”

“You sound as if you are talking about yourself and the Weasley girl.”

“That’s where I learned the lesson,” Harry said, smiling and trying to look as encouraging as possible, while Malfoy stared at him like he was mad. “I loved Ginny, but she fell in love with someone else. And she came and told me about it, and I could see that she was sincere. I had to let her go to live with myself.”

“Narcissa is not in love with someone else.”

Malfoy sounded almost petulant. Harry hid a grin, and leaned back in his chair. “But she might love the idea of divorcing you more than the idea of staying married to you.”

Malfoy jerked as if Harry had stuck a pin in him. Harry gentled his voice, because he knew what he had to say probably wouldn’t come across as anything but painful. “She might change her mind. Who knows? It’s something to hope for. I certainly hope that Ginny will change her mind and come back to me someday.” Her thought of an image of Ginny flying on her broom, her hair streaming behind her, beautiful as a phoenix’s wing.

Malfoy hissed, and Harry jerked back to reality to see that a silver feather had grown like a real pin through his bare arm. Harry touched it and watched the feather melt back down. He deliberately ignored the fact that his hand was only a few centimeters from the Dark Mark.

“But from my reading on the potion, once my bond with my mate is complete, I won’t want Narcissa anymore. I won’t—feel what I do for her now. And why in the name of Merlin am I telling you this?”

Malfoy’s voice was low and painful. Harry met his eyes. “I’ll swear an oath to keep your secrets if you like.”

Malfoy stared at him, and finally burst out, “Why?”

“Because I don’t think that someone who’s become a magical creature should have their secrets spread far and wide,” Harry said firmly. Even if they’ve become a magical creature for an exceedingly stupid reason. “Our society disadvantages you enough. I haven’t spilled the secrets of anyone else before, but I’m willing to swear a personal oath to you.”

Malfoy put his hand over his eyes. Harry assumed he was thinking and left him alone, but then Malfoy’s shoulders began to shake, and Harry leaned towards him. “Are you all right, Mr. Malfoy?”

Malfoy drew his hand off his face, and revealed that he wasn’t having a bad reaction to the potion at all, the way Harry had thought, but was laughing. Harry raised his eyebrows, and waited. Presumably the laughter would be explained sooner or later.

“You are too good to be true,” Malfoy gasped, and faced Harry. His eyes had altered towards silver more than blue or grey, but still showed an odd mixture of contempt and trust. “How often has our society disadvantaged you? And yet, you are willing to swear a magical oath to someone who was once a mortal enemy.”

“I think we’re past that.”

Malfoy lifted his left arm and shoved it directly at Harry’s face, so that Harry had to lean back a little. “How can you be past what this represents?”

Harry held still for a long moment, until Malfoy was paying more attention to him than to whatever mixture of sensations the potion had brought on. Then he said, slowly and clearly, “I’m more than the scar on my face. I suggest you try to be more than the scar on your arm.”

Malfoy stared at him in clear shock. Then he glanced away.

“No one has ever said anything like that to me before.”

“They probably didn’t dare. You were good at practicing intimidation.”

Harry had meant it as a light tease, nothing more, but Malfoy bowed his head, his hair swishing around his face. “That’s one reason Narcissa left me. She said that I had sunk into a shell of being Lucius Malfoy, proper pureblood Death Eater, and didn’t know how to exist outside it.”

“And you took the potion because you thought that would bring about a notable change, at least,” Harry said softly. “And probably show her that you were willing to change in the first place.”

Malfoy gave him a slightly aghast look. “Are you a Legilimens?”

“What?” Harry had to laugh. “I know you don’t know me, but you must have seen the expressions that I have trouble keeping off my face. I’m pants at Legilimency.”

“Then how could you know what I was thinking?”

Harry paused, but only because he hadn’t explained this to someone outside the Weasleys before, not because he hadn’t explained it. And, well, even if this ended up in the papers, so what? The Prophet had already run story after story on his breakup with Ginny and the “sublime” life she was enjoying with Wallman. This would only be another of them.

“Because I’ve been in the same position as you. Hoping that if I made a deep change, a sudden one, it would bring her back.”

Malfoy stared at him with his lips slightly parted. Then he glanced away. “What change did you make?”

“I tendered my resignation from the Aurors.”

“But it didn’t stick.”

“No. Ginny came to me and told me that she didn’t want me to retire, that I was doing good work there, and that it wouldn’t work to bring her back, anyway. She didn’t fall in love with Ernest because he wasn’t me, or because he had a safer job than I did. She fell in love with him because he was himself.”

Malfoy was silent for a long moment, staring down at his hands. “But in this case, my wife did not fall in love with someone else.”

“No. But she did fall out of love with you. So changing yourself wouldn’t bring her back.”

Malfoy gave a chuckle as thick and bitter as the Veela potion itself probably was. “I wish I could have had the benefit of your advice before I took the potion.”

“So do I.”

Malfoy winced, probably because the potion was causing another of those surges of change, and glanced at Harry. “You wish that you had not had to save my life?”

“No. I don’t like the potion because I think almost everyone is taking it for stupid reasons. They look down on magical creatures, but they want to become one?” Harry shook his head. “They’re not thinking that through, of course. They just assume they’ll become sexy and romantic and seductive. And they keep doing it. Even though that potion killed its own inventor. Even though some of the people who take it keep declaring their support of laws that hamper Veela. Even though some people have died from it.”

“They have?”

Harry reached over and squeezed Malfoy’s hand quickly. “I don’t think you will. Your changes are odd, and not proceeding according to the usual schedule of the potion, but that’s probably because your allure hasn’t had a chance to call your mate yet. They must be incredibly far away.”

“But those who died—”

“Most of them kept trying to bond to one person when the potion was trying to tie them to someone else. They ignored and rejected what their own bodies and instincts were telling them. I don’t think you’ll have that problem.”

“No. Not since the one person I would have bonded with willingly has already rejected me.”

Harry frowned chidingly at Malfoy, and didn’t care if it looked chiding. “A few people also died because they rejected the idea of having a mate entirely.”

Malfoy was silent, looking at Harry’s face as if he thought Harry might be lying and was attempting to see a sign. Harry focused on projecting calm and sincerity as hard as possible.

“You are—unexpectedly sympathetic to me.”

“I hate the way magical creatures are treated. It’s not personal, Malfoy.”

Malfoy hissed and closed his eyes for a second. Harry leaned forwards in concern. Malfoy hadn’t had any symptoms in long enough that Harry had begun to think he was past the worst of it, but that didn’t sound like a groan from someone who was past the worst of it. “Malfoy? What’s wrong?”

“I don’t know. A churning in my stomach, and it felt as if my skin was trying to grow feathers but they were growing underneath it.”

Harry stood up. “That’s not a normal symptom. I’ll get Healer Arcanus.”

He took a step away from the bed, and Malfoy shrieked.

Harry swung back around at once. This time, Malfoy’s hair was actually standing on end as feathers wormed their way from under his hair. His hands were curled in on themselves, and he looked as if he were on the verge of sobbing. He bowed his head and trembled.

Harry surged back across the room and placed a hand on Malfoy’s cheek.

This time, it didn’t work. He could feel the skin writhing and changing shape beneath his touch, but not calming. And Malfoy turned his head, moaning, and snapped at Harry’s hand.

Shit. That symptom, Harry had seen before, when transformed Veela were convinced that their mates had tried to reject them. Malfoy’s mate was taking so long to get to him that his body had probably interpreted that as rejection.

Harry drew his wand. Most of the time, he could soothe someone affected by the potion with his touch alone, but there were desperate spells for desperate measures.

He quickly murmured the charm that he had discovered in an ancient book in the Ministry Archives—not much touched in these days when so few people cared about the rights or comfort of magical creatures—and Malfoy’s eyes abruptly flipped open. His skin calmed, and so did his hair. He stared at Harry as if he had never seen him before.

“Potter? What did you do?”

“Turned your own allure back on you,” Harry said. “You feel calm right now, right? And more inclined to consider yourself worthy of finding a mate and bonding to them?”

“I—yes.” Malfoy turned his head from side to side, spreading his arms as if surprised not to find them covered in blood and feathers, but kept glancing back at Harry. “I’ve never heard of a spell like that.”

Harry shrugged and put his wand away. “It isn’t used very often anymore, when even most Healers don’t specialize in treating people who are part-Veela and the like. It calms and focuses the mind, forces the allure back inwards. An allure makes someone else have a positive opinion of the Veela, so it can make the Veela have a positive opinion of themselves, too.”

Malfoy blinked and swallowed. Then he said, “I felt the spell. It felt like a cool gale, not a breeze.”

“I never said it should be a breeze, Malfoy.”

“What did other Veela you’ve used the spell on say it felt like?”

“I’ve only used it once before,” Harry admitted. “And that was on a Veela who was dying and unconscious at the time. I don’t know what it felt like to her.”

“I thank you for sparing me dying and unconsciousness.” Malfoy sounded as if he was striving for an ironic, detached tone, and didn’t succeed. He ran his hands up and down his arms, staring at Harry the entire time. “You are…more than remarkable, Auror Potter.”

“Er. Thanks?” Harry blinked and scratched the back of his neck. “Anyone who knew the spell could have done the same.”

“I suspect that being able to master a charm to turn the Veela’s allure back on him is no more common than being able to resist the allure in the first place.” Malfoy’s voice was soft and warm, and his eyes had a silverier glint than before. “Thank you, Auror Potter.”

Harry concealed a little sigh. Sometimes Veela whose mates were long in getting to them, or who were being stubborn about bonding to the person their Veela nature had chosen, tried to slide him into the slot. It looked like Malfoy was heading down the same road.

But confronting him about that so soon after a bout of mate-rejection wouldn’t be a good idea. Harry changed the subject instead. “What do you hope for from your eventual mate, Mr. Malfoy?”

Malfoy shuddered a little and said, “Don’t call me that.”

“All right,” Harry said, baffled. “What would you like me to call you?”

“Lucius.”

Harry dithered for a moment, because it might mean that Malfoy saw him more firmly as the mate he would have to bond to eventually, and that wouldn’t be a good thing. Harry knew very well that no good came from interfering in a Veela bond. Finally, he nodded. “All right. What do you hope for from your eventual mate, Lucius?”

Malfoy leaned back on the pillows and closed his eyes suddenly enough that Harry wondered if he had fainted, or needed the sleep. But then Malfoy’s voice came out, soft and thoughtful. “Someone who would appreciate me for what I am. Someone who could offer me compassion and see past the scar on my arm. Someone whom I could benefit.”

“I’m sure that last part will be true, at least. Almost everyone I know would be thrilled to bond to a Veela.”

“Even if they were already married? In love?”

“Those situations aren’t easy. But yes, I’ve seen them work out. Even someone who has to divorce their spouse usually knows there’s a reason that the Veela chose them. And people have such a romanticized view of the Veela bond, they believe they’re signing up for endless love and coddling.”

Malfoy abruptly chuckled. Harry jumped, because he didn’t think he could remember hearing a carefree laugh from Malfoy before. “But you don’t believe that,” Malfoy said, opening his eyes a little.

“According to Healer Arcanus, I’m not a very romantic person.” Harry found himself smiling back. It was good to see Malfoy feeling better. “But more than that, I think any kind of relationship will have its challenges. With a Veela, the challenges are different, but not nonexistent.”

“What are the ones you’ve seen?”

“Almost all the result of that romanticized view.” Malfoy made an impatient gesture at the chair beside the bed, and Harry realized that he’d been standing up with his wand out since he cast the spell that turned Malfoy’s allure back on him. He flushed a little and sat down, while Malfoy watched him with more attention than the motion deserved. “People who think they should never argue, and who are devastated when they do. People who want only certain features of the Veela, and don’t realize that others need to come out, too. People who expect to be the spoiled one in the relationship, always taken care of, and don’t realize the Veela needs some of that, too.”

“I would like to take care of my mate.”

“Yes, Veela usually do,” Harry said, ignoring the way that Malfoy’s eyes glinted at him. Sooner or later his true mate would show up, and he would stop trying to slide Harry into that place. If he was in less pain from his own stupidity right now, then he would already have seen all the ways Harry wouldn’t suit him.

Malfoy sucked in a deep, pained breath. Harry reached out and put his hand on Malfoy’s arm, this time deliberately covering the Dark Mark. “Are you all right, Lucius?”

Malfoy’s eyes fluttered. He turned towards Harry, and sagged a little, as if someone had taken out the steel pole that he usually had shoved up his arse. “Yes, I am now. Please. Keep touching me like that.”

Harry blinked as he stared at Malfoy, although the git didn’t open his eyes to look back. This was—weird. Most of the time, when transformed Veela tried to bond with him because their mate was late in getting there, they didn’t have this kind of reaction. This bone-deep relaxation and soft song that was boiling up around Malfoy at the moment from deep in his throat, the way that Malfoy seemed to need Harry to call him by his first name, and the reaction to—

He flinched when I thought he was stupid. When I thought that he should have rejected me.

Malfoy arched and made a little pained noise. Harry raised his free hand to stroke Malfoy’s hair, and Malfoy pushed into the touch. Harry thought for a moment about what would happen if his heart was free and he could bond to Malfoy.

Malfoy gasped. He opened his eyes and stared at Harry, and there was a light shining on them slantwise that didn’t come from anything in the room. “Whatever you’re doing,” he breathed, his voice thick. “Keep doing it.”

“Feels good?” Harry asked, his voice as detached as he could come up with.

Malfoy blinked a little. “It felt better just a moment ago. What happened?”

I withdrew myself emotionally.

And Malfoy, even if he was a Legilimens, presumably wasn’t reading Harry’s every thought and emotion, especially during the times when he had his eyes closed. Shit.

“What are you doing?” Malfoy moved his head restlessly on the pillow. “For a moment, it felt as if I was soft and warm and drifting without pain, and now some of the pain is coming back again.”

“What makes you think I had something to do with it?”

Malfoy snapped his head around again the way he had before, staring at Harry with those glittering eyes. “I know you did,” he said. “The tone of your voice says you did. What is going on?”

Harry took a deep breath. All his brave words about living with a Veela mate bond and leaving previous commitments if that was what the Veela needed were coming back to haunt him now. He swallowed and said, “I think I might be your mate.”

Malfoy froze, in a way that Harry doubted he could have before the potion. It was a bird-like stillness, not a human-like one. He stared at Harry with his body on the edge of trembling but just prevented from it, and silver feathers spread in a smooth cloak down his neck and chest, presumably continuing under his hospital robes.

“Why do you say that?” Malfoy whispered.

“You were encouraging me in intimacies, like calling you by your first name, that I doubt you would have without the potion,” Harry said, keeping his voice as calm he could. Detached would hurt; warm might put Malfoy in a position he didn’t want to be in. “And when I thought about you in a negative way—or about my ex-girlfriend—you started to have a bad reaction. Even thinking about you less warmly than I did is enough to produce that.” He sighed. “I’m sorry.”

“Why is that?” Malfoy’s hand reached out and slid up Harry’s arm to his shoulder. It was on cloth all the way, which Harry was grateful for. He didn’t know what might happen if they touched him skin to skin right now—at least, with Malfoy initiating the touch. None of the Veela who had thought Harry might be their mates had ever been right about it. “Do you still hate me for what happened during the war?”

“No. It’s because I know that you took the potion hoping to impress Mrs. Malfoy, so you would much rather have someone else as a mate than me. Probably a woman. And my heart is given to my ex-girlfriend, so I don’t have anything left for you.”

Malfoy recoiled from him, snatching his hand back. The silver feathers turned and started growing inwards towards his eyes again. And now there were thorns curling out from under his fingernails, something else Harry had never seen before, not even with Veela trying to reject their mates.

Harry grabbed Malfoy’s hands, heedless of the thorns sinking into his flesh. “Lucius!”

The thorns vanished, dissipating into a few dark drops of mist, but the feathers kept growing. Malfoy tossed his head back and panted, “You don’t want me—you don’t—”

“Auror Potter, what is going on?”

Arcanus was standing at the end of Malfoy’s bed, staring at them with wide eyes. And presumably feeling no allure, Harry noted grimly. That had to mean Malfoy was focusing it on Harry, instead.

“Lucius has chosen me as his mate,” he said.

Arcanus’s jaw dropped for a second, and then he nodded briskly and raised a translucent shield down the middle of the ward like the one that had kept the allure-affected people away from Malfoy the other day. “All right. I’ll contact your superiors at once, of course, and inform them of what happened. I assume that you won’t be going home tonight. We’ll move you two to a private room.”

“Yes, that would probably be right,” Harry said, a little dazed.

He sneaked a glance at Malfoy, who was staring at him with eyes so wide that they seemed to take up most of his face. At least the feathers had stopped growing for the moment. Malfoy seemed poised, waiting, to see what would happen.

“It’ll be all right,” Harry said, instinctively, even though his heart was beating hard enough that it threatened to tear itself out through the cage of his ribs.

How could it be all right? How could he give Lucius what he wanted, what he needed, when Ginny held his heart?