Chapter Twenty-Three of 'Changing of the Guard'- Unexpected

[lomonaaeren]

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Chapter Twenty-Three—Unexpected

Draco slowed when he entered the house. He knew something was different, though for long moments he could not pinpoint that sense of difference to one specific object or sound. He stood still, his gaze sweeping the length of the entrance hall.

Then he located the source of the strangeness. No house-elf had come to greet him, which always happened when he came back from more than an hour’s journey, even when he dismissed it again in the next few moments.

It was not quite as clear a sign as raising the wards against him would have been, but it was still a signal of his father’s displeasure.

Draco smiled a little. He wished he had worn gloves today, so he could have removed them slowly and ostentatiously, with an excuse for lingering in the entrance hall until Lucius came to find him. As it was, he would have to hasten the confrontation with his father himself.

Draco strolled out of the entrance hall and up to the study Lucius usually occupied by this hour of the day, opening and discarding several conversational gambits in his head. No, he didn’t want to give his father a chance to slide around this. Open defiance appeared to be the only course of action that actually commanded Lucius’s attention and didn’t allow him to hide behind some polite excuse. Certainly he had only treated Draco’s objections to his future seriously when Draco started dating Harry.

Brian, he reminded himself, as he opened the door of his father’s study without knocking. Make sure that you call him Brian in this conversation, or you will give your father information that you prefer he not have.

Lucius looked up with no expression on his face. He sat in a large, comfortable chair, piled with Cushioning Charms. It had been the favorite chair of one of Draco’s great-great-uncles, who had taken a claw in his backside from a hippogriff when young. Lucius had no excuse for indulging in such excessive luxury, however, Draco thought. A large book bound in dragonhide rested on his father’s knees.

“Yes, Draco.” Lucius did not make it a question. “I am here. And you could have waited for dinner if you wanted to speak to me. It is no good holding an argument on an empty stomach.” His tone was lightly chiding, with a chilly hint of superiority that would have had Draco shivering twenty years ago and seething with helpless rage a decade back. Now he saw it too clearly as part of the mask his father was trying—and failing—to wear, and had to smile.

“May I sit down, Father?” he asked. He kept the question perfectly polite, but coupled with his rudeness so far, there was no way Lucius could take it as anything but mocking.

Lucius’s eyes narrowed, and his expression appeared to set itself in ice. “But of course, Draco. Would I refuse the hospitality of any part of my house to my son?”

“You’ve refused the house-elves,” said Draco, and sat down in the second most comfortable chair, taking a moment to look around the room. The shelves were of light, pale wood, which nicely complemented the sunshine streaming in through the high windows. Some Malfoy who loved light had designed this room, Draco thought, long before the family thought their association with Dark magic also required association with literal darkness.

“You should not take my little fits of temper so hard, Draco,” Lucius murmured at once, as if he had thought Draco’s complaint was actually serious. “I may sometimes send you a message through indirect means, but when I am displeased with you, I will make that displeasure known.”

“How directly?” Draco cocked his head. “Would an attack by Ministry Aurors be enough of a message?”

Lucius’s fingers tightened on the book, but he said nothing, and no line of his face stirred. “You are beyond being beaten like a child, Draco. And why would I invite Aurors into the Manor? They do cause trouble, and stir up the clouds of cobwebs that I would prefer stay discreetly out of sight.”

“Oh, I don’t say they would have to intrude into the Manor,” said Draco. “Just into a house where I happen to be at the time, for a purpose that is understandable if not exactly innocent.” He leaned forwards, smiling. “We’re discussing this as a hypothetical situation, of course. Perhaps not as something that happened, but rather something that might happen if, say, your patience ran short.”

Lucius hesitated, holding Draco’s eyes. Now, Draco thought, he would wonder whether his son had actually gone to the meeting this afternoon or not. Draco didn’t intend to hold him in suspense long, but he would tease the information out of him this way if he could, slyly, indirectly. So much more elegant, in the long run.

I have myself as an audience to perform to, even if there is no one else.

“I still would not call on Ministry Aurors,” Lucius said at last, his voice distant as starlight. “What need have I? I have words, Galleons, connections, knowledge of magic. All of those would be much better ways to chastise my enemies.”

“Ah,” Draco said, “but we aren’t talking about enemies.” It will have to be the direct method, then. His father was trying to shift the grounds of the conversation far too early in the game. “We’re talking about someone you’re close to, but who has willfully and repeatedly defied your attempts to bring him under control. Someone you can’t stand to see rebel, because that would mean you had been wrong about him being a small soul, obedient, content to follow you and to trust in your prescriptions for his future. Could you see yourself using the Aurors against someone like that?”

Lucius rose to his feet. He laid the book precisely down on the glass table in front of him, which somewhat disappointed Draco. He had been looking forwards to seeing that book fall with a crash.

“You have made many references to our family conflict in arenas where I would prefer that you not make them,” Lucius said. “You have made our name one that people snigger at when heard. You claim to care for your mother and I and our reputations, yet still you take these actions. You will answer me, now. In what way have I mistaken you? In what way have I given you less than a life to be proud of, a life to honor and imitate?”

I wonder if he’s talking about the example life he’s lived for me, or the life he’s actually tried to give me, Draco thought idly. Well, he’s about to learn that there’s a difference between them.

“For one thing, Father,” he said, leaning back in his chair and smiling up at Lucius, “I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, but I’m fucking a man.”

Lucius’s lip twitched at the vulgarity. Draco didn’t care. He was pressing his father closer and closer to ultimately losing his temper and ordering him out of the Manor. If that happened, then disowning would soon follow, because Lucius was one to carry a dramatic gesture fully through instead of retracting and apologizing; he feared that would make him look weak. Draco waited, holding his father’s eyes.

“Who one sleeps with and who one marries are often not the same,” Lucius said at last, with his voice softer and more conciliating than Draco would have liked. Why isn’t he screaming with rage? “So long as you are discreet, Draco, there is no reason—“

“I have no wish to be discreet,” Draco said. Save with my real purposes, of course. “I have grown tired of lying and deception, and with the lack of real attention you have given me.” Careful, he chided himself a moment later, or you’ll sound like a spoiled child. You do not want Lucius thinking of you that way no matter how true it might have been when you were younger. “I have tried to hint before that I did not wish to marry, that continuing the Malfoy line is not of the utmost importance to me,” he said, “and you have simply assumed it is and carried on. There are many names for that ignorance of reality, Father. None of them are complimentary.”

“You are pure-blooded,” said Lucius. “You are the only Malfoy heir.”

“The only one in the direct line.” Draco smiled at him again. “There are Cousin Maxwell and his children, after all.”

“You will not disgrace our family by accepting one of them as your heir.” Lucius spoke as if it were a fact, or a prophecy, not a simple pronouncement, Draco thought. That was the most infuriating aspect of his father’s behavior. He was too used to commanding something and having it be done. Well, Draco was not a house-elf. “You will marry where and how we tell you to. There are many young women who will accept you and turn their eyes away if you wish to continue this ridiculous love affair.”

“I like fucking Brian,” Draco said. “I may very well be in love with him.” I will know that answer for certain in a week’s time, I should think. “I won’t give that up for some insipid little bride and some colorless marriage such as you’ve allowed yourself to be content with.”

Lucius gave a dry laugh, though the narrowing of his eyes showed he was furious. Probably more over the insult to Narcissa than the insult to himself, Draco had to admit. In his own way, his father cared for his mother.

“There are many things in the world to content oneself with beyond lovers,” said Lucius. “And many things beyond marriage, come to that. Marriage is merely a necessary component of those other pleasures. As you grow older, Draco, you will come to see beyond the lusts of the flesh. You will learn the joy that comes from seeing plans unfold—“

Oh, that I know.

“—and the joy that comes from seeing the quiet dance of society go on around you, ordered and neat, precise as the small clockwork of a watch, and beautiful as the uncontrolled chaos that you have connected yourself with never can be.”

“Why, your poeticizing might convince me, were I still in the stage where pretty words concealed a brutal truth,” Draco said. He rose to his feet. He was tired of sitting still and allowing Lucius to loom over him, and it was probably giving his father too much confidence that he could win this argument. “I do not want what you are offering me, Father. Save the truth that you have finally spoken about my connections with the rebellion, of course. Thank you for that. So now I know that you would use Aurors to chastise a family member, if you thought that family member to be out of line.”

Lucius became still, every line of his body coiling like a snake about to strike. “If you had maintained your proper social standing,” he murmured, “you would not have stood a chance of being caught up in that…unpleasantness.”

“I dare say it was more unpleasant for the Aurors than for me.”

Lucius’s right hand twitched, opening as if he wished for his snake-headed cane. Draco laughed inwardly, not allowing a ripple of the amusement to show on his face. Lucius had picked up on the causal connection that the words suggested between Draco and the failure of the Aurors’ raid, and was interested.

“I do hope that you didn’t sneer at them,” was what Lucius said, mildly. “Despite your opinion of words, they can be deadly when wielded by a master.”

“It will be interesting to hear what they say when the Minister asks them questions, don’t you agree?” Draco cocked his head. “I wonder whether they will remark on my face, my words, my clothes, or on my presence at all.”

Lucius came forwards a step. There was still a table between them and Draco had his hand closer to his wand, so he didn’t back up. He was only mildly surprised to find that his heart was beating fast enough to stir a haze of blood through his head. This was the moment he had been hoping would happen from the time he wrote Metamorphosis. Perhaps the goal had become somewhat subsumed under his physical passion for Brian and then finding out Brian was Harry, but it was still real for him.

Father. I will make you crawl.

“You have never been political enough for my tastes,” Lucius said distantly. “Still, I would mourn to see my only heir destroyed in swirling waters that are too deep for him.”

Draco kept from smirking with an effort. You don’t know the half of it. I doubt that you would have survived the intellectual parade of changes necessary to keep up with my life in the last few days. “These are waters where I have chosen to swim,” he said. “I carefully measured their depth before I entered them.”

“Shall I be frank, Draco?” Lucius twisted his head to the side, so that he was watching Draco with one eye, like a raven. If he meant the pose to be frightening, it failed.

“I don’t know,” Draco said. “Can you be?”

Lucius drew in a slow breath, which was the first sign of his mask truly cracking that Draco had seen so far, the first gesture he’d made that he didn’t make on a regular basis. “There will shortly be things happening in the wider world that it would be safer if you were ignorant of,” he said. “If not in reality, then on the surface. And once you see those actions that certain—friends—of mine will take, you will be glad that I informed you of them in time.”

Draco felt a very slight smile lift his lips. He hadn’t known he would do that before he did it, but now the words were falling as naturally from his mouth as the smile had. “Even if I wanted to change my mind now, Father, I very much doubt that I could.”

“You do not have one of those sadly inflexible minds, set in granite or marble.” Lucius folded his hands over each other. He was wearing gloves, and Draco expected him to start pulling them off in a minute, if only to calm down the shaking or fist-clenching his fingers might otherwise get up to. “You can change your mind when you realize what a string of bad choices you have made.”

“If I see them as bad choices, yes.” Draco widened his smile. “But I have a lover who is most Gryffindor-like in his courage and his outrage over perceived social injustice. You saw his face when he threatened you in the dining room?”

Lucius’s nostrils flared in a way that said he did not understand why Draco was bringing that disgraceful episode up, now or ever.

“And that was only anger over me,” Draco whispered. “Imagine what he will be like when he turns his sights on an entire society that has made it impossible for us to live as we desire. Make no mistake, Father. He knows what will happen to me if we continue to be public about our love. And what will happen to him, but it is me he cares about.” Not such a lie. “He blames, not individuals, but social systems, as Gryffindors often do. And he has no anxiety about setting out to reform them. He will not back away from this fight, and I will not back away from him.” He paused just the right amount of time, he knew, to set Lucius seething, and then gave an elegant little shrug. “Even if the waters are a torrent, we intend to swim them. Together.”

He added a very slight whine to his tone, making it the voice of a bedazzled teenager in love.

And Lucius broke.

His lips wrinkled back from his teeth, and he leaned across the table that separated them with a brutal snarl. Draco laid his hand on his wand, just in case he had misjudged his father—which had happened several times since this all began—and Lucius went for curses, but words dragged themselves out of Lucius’s mouth instead.

“You are to be gone from my house within the hour,” he said. “I will have no heir who does not understand that his obligations to his family and the continuance of his line take precedence over a small fling.”

“It is not a fling—“ Draco began, adopting the proper indignant expression.

“You have one hour to leave,” Lucius repeated. Already he was calming, stepping away from Draco and tracing one finger over the center of his gloved palm. If there was any doubt in him that he had just done the right thing, Draco knew, he still would not yield to the doubt. He never questioned his own decisions or his own perceptions. He went forwards and tried to live in his own version of reality. “Then the wards will forcibly Apparate you beyond the Manor’s walls, and any belongings that you have here must be lost to you.”

Draco bowed a little, but he wanted to make sure this was the moment of ultimate separation from his family. “And when may I hope for an invitation back?” he asked.

“Given what I know?” Lucius’s hands clenched involuntarily. “Never.”

It is done, then.

Draco bowed again and walked from the room. If Lucius thought he did not look upset enough by the disowning, then he would decide it was just a front, and that Draco was really devastated and sobbing inside. He would not readily glimpse or guess his son’s complicated joy even if it was presented to him in interpretative dance.

Free, now, to make my own way in the world, to make my own name—in the end to win the name back when Lucius comes groveling at my feet.

It was not the way he had originally planned to lose his father’s respect, Draco had to admit. He couldn’t have foreseen himself becoming involved in a rebellion of this scope at the time, not when he had thought his major concern would be with his own problems and suffering. And he really had planned to eventually reveal to his parents that he could sleep with women too, and thus that he could get married and continue the family line. He did not dare to reveal that yet, or they would have disregarded his objections and pressed marriage on him. They had to think he was completely gay.

But now—

Who can tell how this will end?

The thought invigorated Draco, so that he whistled as he went to his rooms and started packing up his belongings. For now, he would stay in the flat where he had first met Harry disguised as Brian. It wouldn’t do as a permanent residence, but it would hold him whilst he looked about for a better flat or a house close to the center of wizarding London.

A few house-elves came mournfully into the room to snuffle or wring their hands or wish him farewell. None of them offered to help with the packing. Lucius must have forbidden them to do so. Draco shook his head a little as he cast a spell that folded a series of thick, shining gray shirts and distributed them neatly into his traveling trunk. No matter which person I am, the starry-eyed social reformer or the real, true plotter, is Lucius such a fool as to think that not having help would dissuade me?

A noise in the doorway made him think it was another house-elf come to visit him. He blinked when he turned about and found his mother standing there, her hands tightly knotted together, staring at him.

“So the day has come,” she said, in a low voice that Draco didn’t think sounded at all like her.

Draco stepped across the room to kiss her cheek. “It has,” he agreed easily. “And whilst I can understand Father’s reasons for disowning me, I hope that he doesn’t take his bad temper out on you.”

Narcissa swallowed and went on looking at him for long moments, so long that it made Draco uneasy. Her next words proved he had been right to be uneasy. “This was what you wanted, Draco, wasn’t it? You’ve decided on independence from your father, and you chose to seize it by giving up our name.”

Draco knew he made a bad show of covering his shock. His mother spoke through any protests he might have given, gazing meditatively at the floor. “So long as the Malfoy name cloaks you, you would be seen first as Lucius’s son, and only second as yourself, if at all. So you chose to make your way in the world, away from us.” She lifted her head and stared at Draco. “Did you know that you would force me to choose between my husband and my son?”

Draco’s back straightened. That, at least, was an accusation he had been prepared to face. “No one is forcing you to choose anything,” he said. “Agree with Lucius in public if you must, but think whatever you want in private. My plans from now on don’t depend on your support or your anguish.”

“Nevertheless, my anguish will be the result.”

“And you cannot blame me for that,” said Draco, “not when Father and I have grown so far apart. Do you believe that I would have done this unless I was forced to it? I have tried other ways to persuade Father. He will not listen to reason, so the most blatant unreason is needed to shake his preoccupations with pure-blood politics.”

Narcissa looked at him with her lips so tightly shut that Draco wondered if he had managed to alienate her after all. Then she nodded and drew out a letter from a pocket in her robes. “I have made my decision,” she said. “I think you should have this. I discovered Brian Montgomery was Harry Potter some days ago through my familiarity with his magic, and gave him two weeks to leave you, since shortening the time to a week. This is what he has written to me in reply.”

Draco read the letter. His heart was pounding as much with shock over his mother’s news as it was with anger at Harry by the time he finished. He folded the letter very carefully and looked at her. “Why do you think he sent this to you?” he demanded. His lips felt numb. “He must have known there was a chance you would show it to me.”

Narcissa shook her head. “I think he believed I cared more for you than for your happiness.” Her eyes briefly flashed. “And he may have feared that I would tell the secret to others—as I could have—if he was not in communication with me.” She sighed, then, and the fire seemed to leave her, though Draco could still see the steel. “But it appears that he is essential to your future happiness. And that is what I want. At one time, it was only your safety. But through the years, I have watched you, and come to believe that you need your freedom and your own power to find any future at all. The man who writes a letter like that, who was able to lie to me so convincingly that I half-believed him, and who inspires such passion in you seems to be a necessary ingredient of that future.”

“Mother,” Draco whispered. He was dizzy.

“I will stay here with Lucius,” said Narcissa, looking very strong and very tired. “If I can, I will halt his more doomed plans—and I suspect that the majority of them will be doomed, if he plans to attack you and Harry Potter combined. Go find your future, my son, and may you be happy and strong.”

Draco embraced her, more fiercely than he had in years. He could feel her arms close around him, too, trembling, and he wondered how much second-guessing of herself she must have done before she finally arrived at her decision.

“May there be peace in this house someday,” she whispered into his ear. “Between family members, and from such hard choices.”

“I shall endeavor to see that there may be,” Draco said, and kissed her hand, and Summoned the rest of his belongings, and went, his soul burning like phoenix fire with his joy and his anger.

Chapter 24.