Chapter Seven of 'Changing of the Guard'- Exceptions to the General Rule

[lomonaaeren]

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Chapter Seven—Exceptions to the General Rule

Harry opened his eyes when the sun rose; he usually did, even on those assignments when he could sleep later. He liked to wake up, make sure there was no danger and nothing drastic had changed, and examine his immediate surroundings before he went back to sleep.

Now, though he drew Brian’s wand and carefully cast a few detection spells, he couldn’t find a trace of foreign magic in Draco’s room. Harry nodded in satisfaction. Apparently, Draco’s parents weren’t desperate enough yet to intrude into their son’s private quarters, even—or especially—when they must have guessed what he was doing there with his new boyfriend.

Harry turned on one elbow to stare down at Draco’s sleeping face. A stir of the excitement he’d felt last night came back to him, and he frowned.

He had gone along with Draco’s passion because it seemed as though Brian would. Brian was more spontaneous, more liable to get excited, than Harry himself was. And there was no great distrust holding him and Draco apart.

But there were moments when one of Harry’s roles could seem like a thin mask over reality. That had happened once when he played a bodyguard, and the person stalking the woman he protected, the Seeker for the Kenmare Kestrels, had tried to kill her young children as well as her. Harry’s own rage at the thought of innocents being threatened had nearly shattered the cool, professional competence that Ursula Windwood had the right to expect of the man she’d hired.

And last night, how much of Brian’s passion had been his own?

Too much, Harry thought with a light shake of his head. I stand a danger of falling into a pool that I normally avoid.

It was true that Draco was fantastically responsive in bed. But Harry hadn’t come into this job to find a partner; he would do that as himself if he wanted a permanent relationship, which so far he’d never yet yearned for. He had come into this job to get Draco disowned by his parents, and he should focus on that.

The obvious conclusion: Brian could join Draco in bed again, as Draco would be suspicious if he didn’t, but not in the same way. Not so intimately that Harry nearly lost himself.

He sat up. He’d write out a note that recounted last night’s conversation with Lucius and Narcissa for Draco, and then leave it pinned beneath his gift, the statue of the siren. He started to smile as he considered how to phrase the truth in Brian’s bombastic style.

An arm settling heavily, possessively, against his chest halted the plans whirling in his head.

“Where do you think you’re going?” Draco whispered into his ear.

Shit, Harry thought in self-loathing. You really should have noticed that he was awake.

He shoved Harry away in the next instant and donned the mask of Brian, who would not be embarrassed to be caught like this. He turned around and stared at Draco, raising an eyebrow. “Out, of course,” he said. “I certainly wasn’t about to go downstairs and try to chat up your father.”

*

Draco smiled, but he could feel suspicion blossoming in his mind, dragging itself out of the intense haze of pleasure he remembered from last night. Brian certainly could make love.

But he could do other things, too, and Draco should not have let himself forget those other things.

“Do you have such a busy schedule that you couldn’t wait until I was awake?” he whispered. He had woken up the moment Brian moved from beside him, and he knew the man had spent a few minutes silently contemplating his thoughts before he sighed and sat up. Draco wanted to know what those thoughts had been.

If he had become so involved with Brian in such a short time, the only acceptable response was for Brian to become more involved with him, too.

“Actually,” Brian murmured, “I’ve blocked out most afternoons and nights for you as long as I’m working with Metamorphosis. But I do have a life of my own, as you know.” He grinned. “And some friends who will be waiting impatiently to ask me questions. I told them I was going to do something spectacular. They won’t be expecting my name in the papers, though.”

Draco narrowed his eyes a little, but kept his voice delicate. “Then take me along to meet these friends.” His fingers traced the line of Brian’s waist. No, he hadn’t put on any clothes again after they’d come. They had spent the night tangled together absolutely naked, a privilege that Draco didn’t allow many of his lovers.

“No,” said Brian.

Draco blinked, for a moment thinking the word an answer to his thoughts, and then he remembered his own demand. He frowned and withdrew his arm from Brian’s chest. “What?”

“You purchased my services to help you get disowned.” Brian stared calmly into his face. “You didn’t purchase my friends. You didn’t purchase every single moment of my time. Besides, the point of Metamorphosis is to provide you with a perfect stranger, remember? We aren’t supposed to get intimately involved in the details of each other’s lives.”

“I’ll have you meet my friends,” Draco said, deepening his voice from the shout he wanted to give. The shout was hardly the way to convince Brian, who had shown himself not readily susceptible to intimidation.

“And that’s your choice.” Brian shrugged a little and pulled back. “I won’t have you meet mine.”

Draco smiled a little, acknowledging that he had moved too fast and got out of his depth. He was used to people who ultimately gave in to him. The few friends of his who weren’t like that, namely Pansy and Blaise, didn’t have anything he wanted badly enough to require him to manipulate them, and they preferred free association, too. Brian had warned Draco that he would push back. That was abundantly clear now.

Brian would need a different tactic. Draco didn’t mind having an equal, he told himself; he just needed to be sure he wasn’t the one falling under the spell.

“Very well,” he said. “But tell me what my parents said to you before you depart, so we can plan for Lucius’s next attack.”

Brian blinked, but went with the rapid shift of subject, recounting the conversation word-perfect. When Draco stared hard at him, Brian shrugged and murmured, “I’m an actor, remember? Play instructions are harder to memorize. Some of them don’t make near as much sense as that conversation did.”

“Hmmm,” said Draco. Really. “I’ll meet you at two in Diagon Alley.”

“Good enough.” Brian waved his wand and lazily Summoned his robe. “Where?”

“Oh,” Draco said, “I think you’ll be able to find me.”

Brian kissed him before he left, with the assured confidence of a boyfriend who assumes it’s perfectly all right. Draco wasn’t sure if he found that attractive or not. He lay there thinking about it before he shook his head, got up, and went to take a shower.

He had an outraged father to confront. He expected breakfast to be entertaining.

*

Harry gratefully altered his face to have the right angles again, and then spelled his eyes from blue back to green. His lightning bolt scar spread across his brow once more. Harry spent a thoughtful moment looking into the mirror, then shrugged.

He had just thought that he knew himself less than he knew any of his created personalities, but that was the point. He had made up those personalities the way novelists made up their characters; there was no reason he shouldn’t know all about them. But the personality he had left…

Harry snorted.

The person he had been had died with Voldemort. When he’d had some time to pause and think after the final battle, he’d realized he didn’t really know what to do with himself when Voldemort wasn’t threatening him. The other man had defined his life for so long. Harry had planned, acted, reacted, thought, loved, related, solely with the thought that Voldemort could kill him someday. If he hadn’t done that all the time he’d been at Hogwarts, he’d certainly done it since Sirius died.

Where did the shadow go when the light that had cast it was gone?

And then the media had descended.

Harry had thought he understood what it would be like from the fuss over his entry into the Tri-Wizard Tournament, and the accusations of his insanity during fifth year. Those occurrences gave him no idea of the reality. This time, he wasn’t a young wizard competing in a dangerous sport or a potential future Dark Lord; he had saved the world, and it seemed that was something Britain hadn’t seen in too many lifetimes.

Many, many times during that frenzied last year of school, when they somehow caught pictures of him in the showers in Gryffindor Tower, when he couldn’t play a game of Quidditch because the number of admirers on brooms was too great, when someone had broken his hand with a spell that attempted to force him to sign a thousand autographs, Harry had wished Dumbledore was still alive. Had people lauded him like this after he defeated Grindelwald? Harry longed to ask. How in the world had he dealt with it?

McGonagall, as Headmistress, had done her best, but she couldn’t keep everyone determined to have a piece of Harry out of the school, even with the strongest wards; desperation and cleverness together let them find a way inside. So Harry, aware that he might literally go mad with all this attention—he had lain with his wand against his throat in the darkness too many times—found his own escape.

He began to study masks, glamours, disguise charms, spells that altered the color of eyes and hair and skin, spells that had originally been meant to conceal disfigurements and scars and a lack of magic. He observed the way that people, even the importunate reporters who badgered him, walked and talked, stood and moved their hands, met other people’s eyes or didn’t. He took personality as a plastic cast and poured new materials into it, imagining what he would be like if he had grown up with parents, in France, with only one leg, with a permanent grudge against the world. (He thought he almost deserved to have that last one).

And he learned he could become other people, and those other people saved his life.

When he was Robert Barrington, walking down a Muggle street in Muggle London, no one troubled him. When he was Sheila Hacklestein, a sixteen-year-old witch bitterly complaining because her parents had chosen to keep her at home instead of letting her go to Hogwarts, a few people murmured sympathetically, but no one looked at him the way they looked at Harry. When he was a hunchbacked drunk crooning into his glass at the Three Broomsticks, no one even cared about his name, as long as he had enough Galleons to pay for his drinks.

Harry ran further and further away from himself, until at last he saw the Harry Potter part of himself as the most hollow personality he owned, just the dressing robe he put on between a bath in one persona and the clothes of another.

And then he had opened Metamorphosis, and that had done well, and he had discovered that he had a talent for acting and lying, for being someone other than himself. Maybe that talent wasn’t natural, forged instead in the fires of desperation, but it was real enough now.

He had to be Harry for a short time this morning; he wanted to catch Hermione before she went to the Ministry and tease and congratulate her on the coming child. But he could be Brian again this afternoon.

Harry hummed softly under his breath as he chose one of the robes that Ron and Hermione would expect to see him appear in. Acting like a shell of a person wasn’t so bad, when he knew he had full, rich personalities he could change into with a few flicks of his wand. And Ron and Hermione gave the Harry Potter shell life it never could have had without them.

*

“Morning, Father.”

Lucius greeted him with a perfectly cool face as Draco strolled into the dining room. “Hello, Draco. Did you have a restful night?”

“More than I’ve had in some time,” Draco said, and chose a seat a few chairs away from his father. The table was large enough that he could have sat near the far wall if he wanted, but Draco didn’t want to appear eager either to get away from Lucius or cozy up to him. He ran a hand through his hair, which he’d left deliberately damp from the shower, and smiled at the house-elf who appeared with a cup of tea and the mixture of several different kinds of meat that Draco liked to eat in the mornings. He picked up his fork and ate a few bites, aware of Lucius reading the newspaper instead of looking at him.

He can do that if he wants. It doesn’t make the charade any less a charade.

“It feels so much better to have the secret out in the open at last,” Draco continued, sipping his tea and glancing at the front page of the Daily Prophet. They were carrying some story about a Quidditch match where the Seeker had fallen from his broom and been rescued by one of the opposite team’s Beaters just in time. His party had taken place too late the night before for it to have made the lead article, Draco judged. But that would alter by this evening. “To know that I’m not deceiving you about my future plans.”

“I see no reason that those future plans should change,” Lucius said, in a deceptively mild voice.

“Why not?” Draco lifted an eyebrow and plucked a strip of ham loose from a strip of sausage. “You have to admit that you never expected me to turn out gay.”

If he hadn’t been watching closely, he wouldn’t have seen Lucius’s knuckles turn white where they gripped the paper. He had obviously used the night to talk over some things with Narcissa and rebalance and reorient himself. Draco was reluctantly impressed. He would have expected the shock to last longer.

“Of course not,” Lucius said. “But gay men can still marry and father children. It has been done for years, in times when attitudes—and laws—were stricter than they are now.”

Draco knew exactly what his father was talking about, and though he smiled without effort and continued eating, he felt a sharp spark of disgust at the base of his brain. It was no longer actually legal to imprison a wizard or witch just for being gay, though parents could still legally disown them for no other reason. Lucius quite obviously wished that the lawmakers of a generation or two back had not been so permissive.

More subtle threats. But still threats.

“Unless they’re utterly sexually incompatible with women, then yes, they can,” Draco agreed. “But there is no draw for them to get married, no attraction, as there is for straight men. And I have no intention of getting married.”

Lucius laid down the paper and gave him, at last, serious attention. His face was still a mask of serenity, of course. Only long experience made Draco sure that his father was ready to explode with fury and frustration at having one of his most-cherished plans contravened.

“You must,” Lucius said. “You know that the continuation of this family depends on you.”

“What about Maxwell?” Draco countered innocently, just for the sake of seeing his father flush a bit. Maxwell Malfoy was the bastard son of Lucius’s father’s younger brother, half Muggle and less interested in magic than machines. He kept in touch with the wizarding world, but erratically. And he was the only other possible Malfoy heir besides Draco.

“He is not pure-blooded,” Lucius said. “He has not been raised within our world. Why will you force me to state the obvious, Draco?” His face was pained, apparently appealing to an invisible audience of parents over his impossible child. “He will not make half the heir you will.”

“But to be your heir,” Draco said, leaning forwards and speaking seriously, “I would need to marry and have children of my own. One heir by himself isn’t enough. It’s the continuity, the line, that’s important.” He had heard those words from the time he was five years old. Lucius had wanted him to understand that he was not the center of the universe. Instead, the Malfoy family, the larger unit Draco was a part of, was the center of the universe. “Maxwell is superior to me as your heir because he’s straight.” Is he ever. Maxwell had apparently had two children already, and yet he wasn’t married. At least he was supporting both of them, which was more than Draco could say for what Maxwell’s father had done. Quintus Malfoy had deserved to die in that hippogriff accident.

“Your sexual orientation makes no difference to me,” Lucius said.

Yes, it does. Draco was absolutely certain of that. Maybe his mother could speak those words with some truth, but not his father. Lucius hated being wrong too much; he hated not being able to predict what his son would do next. Therefore, Draco watched his father with pardonable suspicion.

“This—stunt—can be recovered from. It need not change the course of your life,” Lucius continued, sounding calmer now. “You can give up this Montgomery, or retain him on the side if you must, but you will marry. You will have children. True, your orientation is an unfortunate fact, but it will change nothing.”

Well. Draco had counted on his father’s vast stubbornness. He simply hadn’t predicted that his father would try to paint him over like a hole in the plaster.

“You think there are still women who will have me, after last night?” he asked, pretending to play along for a moment.

“Alice Moonstone did not seem overly horrified,” Lucius said, his face and his eyes sending out subtle beams of pride in his son.

“She’s twelve years younger than I am,” Draco pointed out. “Just eighteen.”

“That only means she is still in her prime for bearing wizarding children,” Lucius said firmly. “You know that children born when their mother is younger than thirty tend to be Squibs less often. I have wished you married before now, Draco, but at least your delay will not affect your children as much as taking an older bride would.” He relaxed into a smile.

“Ah,” said Draco. These were calculations he had heard all his life. He was as tired of them as he was of everything else about his father’s dominion. “I am sure I would find this discussion more interesting if I intended to marry.” He finished his breakfast and stood, a house-elf appearing at once to take the empty plate and cup away.

Lucius looked at him with a face empty of expression for a moment. Then he said, “You may think that,” and picked up the paper.

Draco stepped out of the dining room and stood still for a moment, eyes shut, to all appearances enjoying the fall of sunlight through the large window at the back of the house. In reality, he was calming his anger. Making a mark on Lucius’s obstinacy was like trying to chisel diamonds with a piece of chalk.

“Draco?”

He opened his eyes and smiled down at his mother, who had come up beside him without even a rustle of her gown. She did not smile back. She held out her arm and said instead, “Walk with me in the garden for a while?”

Draco stepped out beside her into the sunlight. It was a beautiful June day, so warm that Draco would have thought it already past midsummer if he hadn’t known better. The sky was that rare, high, pounded blue of cobalt. The few clouds visible glowed as if made of gold. He followed his mother into the maze of lilies and roses that sprawled across the front part of the gardens.

Narcissa finally said, in a murmur just above a rustle, “Draco, how could you do that to us?”

Draco looked thoughtfully down at her head. He understood exactly what outraged his father, but his mother was a more complicated personality and always had been. “Turn out gay?” he asked. “I didn’t plan that, really. It just happened.” And so far as I’m attracted to men, that’s true. I’m just leaving out the part where I can find women attractive and sleep with them if I want to.

“Announce it in such a fashion,” Narcissa said, and this time she was whispering. “Publicly embarrass your family. Put our future in jeopardy.”

“It was the only way I could think of that Father wouldn’t be able to dismiss,” Draco said, stroking the inside of his mother’s elbow. The first step on the road to my actual dismissal as the Malfoy heir. “Otherwise, he would have ignored it. As if ignoring something changes the reality. I’m sorry you got caught up in it, but you know that many of your dreams for me are the same as Father’s.”

His mother pulled him to a stop with surprising strength, and then stood looking up at him. Her face was as pale as the lilies around them, but her eyes were as strong as the sun. Draco looked down at her, uncertain what he was about to hear.

“Not exactly the same,” Narcissa said quietly. “I do want you to be the patriarch of a successful pure-blood family, committed to keeping our heritage and traditions alive in a world that wants to destroy them.”

Draco did not say, though he wanted to, that maybe if the pure-bloods hadn’t done such a fine job of making others hate them by serving the Dark Lord in two wars, then maybe those traditions wouldn’t be in danger. He just held his mother’s gaze.

“But there is something that comes before all that,” Narcissa said. “Something your…your Mr. Montgomery said to me last night, which I discounted at the time but have been thinking on since. I want to see you happy, Draco. I want to see you standing free of your father’s shadow—which is there, even if Lucius does not mean to cast it—and independently, on your own.”

Draco tilted his head curiously. It was far from the first time that his mother had said she wanted to see him happy, but the other wish was a new one. “Then why did you encourage me to marry someone exactly like Father did,” he asked, “a beautiful pure-blood witch? Why did you encourage me to live exactly like he did?”

“Because I thought that would lead to your freedom in time, when Lucius died if no sooner,” Narcissa answered. “Lucius became free of his father in the same way, and Abraxas was yet more overwhelming.” She hesitated. “However, he died whilst Lucius was still a young man, younger than you are now. I had not considered before how much room that might have given Lucius to grow.”

“He will not give me that room,” Draco said. “I must take it.”

“I would wish you luck,” said Narcissa, “except that I do not believe Mr. Montgomery will make you happy. Nor will living as an exile from so many of our social circles in the wizarding world. Come back, Draco. You may not find your freedom right away, but you will only find it, ultimately, along with your happiness, here.”

Draco kissed his mother’s cheek, overwhelmed by love for her. She was brave and sympathetic in ways his father would never understand. Were it not for the marriage assuring his own existence, Draco would have passionately wished she had found a husband more suited to her. Lucius and Narcissa worked well together; Draco was not at all convinced they lived well together.

“Does this mean you will reconsider?” Narcissa breathed.

“No.” Draco took her hands. “Brian does make me happy, Mother. And I can stand the exile.” Since I will recapture the people who despise me now in ways that Father cannot even imagine doing.

Narcissa gave him a steady stare, then took her hands away and went into the house.

Draco smiled and cast a glance at the white marble clock in the middle of the garden. Still short of noon, and therefore a few hours away from his meeting with Brian. He would take a long, slow shower, swing briefly by his business to see what was happening, and then prepare himself for another meeting with the man who—

Intrigued him? Frustrated him? Complemented him?

All of those. And he makes me happy as well, at least for now.

Chapter Eight.