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The Descent of Magic	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 18803 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 5
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I am making no money from this fanfic.

Chapter List
- 9
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Chapter Ten—Studies in Contrast

            “Where do you want me to put you?” Malfoy’s voice had a sharp tinge to it as they reached the top of the stairs. Harry wondered if he was growing too heavy for Malfoy’s magic, but, thinking about it, he decided that was unlikely. Perhaps Malfoy simply disliked being uncertain about which way to turn.

            “The bedroom is where I keep my pain potions,” Harry said, and waved his hand to indicate the half-open door on the left when Malfoy hesitated.

            Malfoy muttered something under his breath, but Harry hadn’t heard it fully and so felt free to ignore it. Well, in truth he would have felt free to ignore it even without that condition, but its existence was convenient.

            Harry floated through the door, and made sure to nudge it further open with his good leg so that Malfoy could come in without trouble. Malfoy flicked his wand once, twice, with easy but sharp motions, and settled Harry in the middle of the bed. Harry smiled his thanks and then nodded at the cupboard within easy reach of the bed. “The pain potions I usually take are in there.”

            Malfoy stepped up to the cupboard and began to rummage through it. Harry leaned back on the pillows and shut his eyes for a moment, then waved his wand to add another pillow beneath the bad knee. That sometimes helped, not always.

            There was the sound of Malfoy pulling corks and sniffing at the mouths of vials. “Why don’t you have them labeled, Potter?” he asked, and Harry heard something bounce with a ping off the side of the cupboard.

            Harry opened one lazy eye. “Don’t break anything you can’t Reparo,” he murmured. “And that’s because I know what all of them are, thanks to their smell and their places in the cupboard. Labeling them just made me feel—helpless, I reckon. Overwhelmed, with all those different names staring at me and knowing that I’d probably have to take them for the rest of my life. This way, I still have the number of the vials to make me feel overwhelmed, but I can tell myself that only some of them are different. The others are all vials of the same potion.”

            Malfoy grunted, but said nothing. There was the noise of more rummaging, and then he stepped away from the cupboard and dropped an armful of the largest vials next to Harry’s leg. Harry turned his head and craned his neck to watch Malfoy’s fingers dancing delicately among the glass.

            “You won’t have to take them for the rest of your life,” Malfoy said briefly, not looking up. “Even with your ability to evade addiction, there are some of these that you can only take for ten years or so. And I at least hope that you plan to live longer than that.”

            Harry blinked at him for a moment, and then waved his hand. “Oh, yeah. Because the fight for the truth will take longer than that. Don’t worry, Malfoy. I don’t plan to rush into danger the way I did when I was younger, so I’ll be around for a while.”

*

            Draco ground his teeth on the left side of his mouth, where it was less noticeable than if he did it on both sides at once, and continued sorting through the vials. For a reason that not even he could explain to himself, Potter’s assumption that Draco only cared about the length of his life because of their shared struggle was—

            Reasonable? The kind of thing that you would have wanted but not expected Potter to say? He’s behaving the way you want him to, but even that irritates you.

            Draco did what he often did with the same complicated, paradoxical tangles that he felt around his son, and placed them aside. He sat back with three vials, the generic pain potions Potter had said he was taking, and held them out. Potter leaned back and propped his glasses up on his nose to see them better.

            “These are the ones that will only cause trouble in the long run,” Draco said, quietly, forcefully, both wondering who had not explained this to Potter and wondering at his own gratitude that they had not. Of course, he could use this explanation to make Potter more dependent on him now, but he didn’t think he needed to in order for Potter to continue as his faithful ally. “They are not only addictive, but dangerous. They suppress the pain. They do not heal or help the injury. They make you think that you can maintain an effort—such as walking—that you cannot, and you will pay the price later.”

            Potter blinked, then said, “You’re right. I’ve noticed that effect when I take them. I mean, sometimes I need to walk, sometimes the price is worth paying, but it always does seem to happen with those potions that I have worse pain a few days afterwards.”

            “When do you need to walk?” Draco asked, laying those vials back among the others and picking up the large, multi-colored glass container of the Joint-Easer. “I was under the impression that you never left the house.”

            Potter snorted. “When you have as many nieces and nephews and in-laws as I do, believe me, you leave the house a lot for birthday parties.”

            Draco tilted his head in concession, and told himself that he did not need to disdain the Weasleys for that, that he might well have his own brood of children someday when they had found a more permanent solution to the problem of pure-blood fertility than simply being nice to house-elves. “This potion, on the other hand, promotes slow healing of the joint. It should have helped you more than it has so far. Exactly when were you injured?”

            “Two and a half years ago,” Potter said, and there was a spark of something deeper and hotter in his gaze. “I can give you the exact date if you want.”

            “Not for now,” Draco said, and then hesitated. He had been certain that Potter was simply not taking enough of the Joint-Easer, or not on a regular schedule, but the organization of Potter’s cupboard had stymied him. Leaving off the labels was the sort of thing that someone comfortable with his potions would do, not someone who was too stupid to realize that a draught with a promising name might help him. “How bad was the injury at first?”

            “Bad enough that the Healers couldn’t do anything for it,” Potter said simply. “Bad enough that I couldn’t walk for two months. Bad enough that two of the Healers who treated me wanted to take the leg.”

            “They may have been able to replace it with a leg that would work better for you,” said Draco. “That would allow you to walk, at least.” He wondered if he had stumbled on some hidden well of Potter’s pride. Everyone wrote about how humble the Chosen One was, but Draco knew it had to be a lie. No one was that humble.

            Potter’s nostrils flared, and that spark burned brighter in his eyes, making him look more like the Potter Draco remembered than at any time since he’d started visiting the house. It was amazing what that injury did, changing him and making him look more helpless and harmless. Perhaps he’d been right not to want to stand when they spoke to their first crowd. “Did you see what Mad-Eye Moody had to limp along on?” Potter whispered. “No.”

            Draco snorted. “So you were vain?”

            Potter smiled at him. “Call it that if you like,” he said, and then moved on. “Anyway. What about the Joint-Easer? I assumed you wanted to say something about it, since you held it up.”

            “I wanted to know how bad the injury was at first, because I thought the potion must be taking longer to heal it than I expected, but that would make sense if it was coming from a place of greater damage than I imagined,” Draco said. “But you can give me no exact terms, and the Healers who could are not here. Will you allow me to cast a spell on your knee?” He took up his wand, and held Potter’s eyes, and waited. Yes, Potter had stopped Draco from touching his knee earlier, but there was no reason to hold him back now, when he could help. Asking to touch in the first place was just a courtesy.

            But the longer Potter stared at him, the more Draco became certain that he would refuse. “Well?” he sniped. “You want me to walk out of here and leave you unable to do it?”

*

            Harry constrained a sigh. Malfoy had the tendency to react badly to every time that someone crossed his will, even if Harry hadn’t done it formally yet.

            But he had always reserved the right to touch his knee for just Ron and Hermione. Not even Rose got to, or his own children, and out of all his nephews and nieces, he trusted them most. He’d got impatient with the Healers and their spells pretty early on in the recovery process, and if they couldn’t help him, then he might as well restrict the touching to people who he knew would be gentle.

            And now Malfoy was asking.

            But Malfoy didn’t have Hugo’s dislike of the injury, or Victoire’s curiosity as a trainee Healer, or Rose’s longing that she’d inherited from her mother to look at everything and anything. It was possible Harry could trust him with it because he didn’t care. The Healers had all been anxious that they be the ones who could help the Savior recover, but Malfoy didn’t have that same desire weighing on him.

            “All right,” he said, and leaned back, already wincing in anticipation of the way that Malfoy’s fingers would probably feel when they landed, but still willing to go ahead and let him do it.

            Malfoy gave Harry one more faint frown, as though he couldn’t imagine where the bracing came from, and then reached down and curved one hand above the knee. The other, holding his wand, lowered it in the gentlest of taps to the top of Harry’s knee—or, well, to the part where the bone bulged out oddly.

            It still made the whole thing tremble and hurt as though someone had embedded a thread of fire under the skin. Harry shut his eyes and gritted his teeth. Malfoy paused, but apparently decided to go ahead as long as Harry wasn’t actually saying anything, and murmured a spell.

            Harry had usually felt something when magic touched the knee, even if it came from the most delicate Healer he could imagine. This time was no different, but gentler than usual. Malfoy’s power seemed to spread healing ice across the skin, and then dive beneath it. Harry held his breath a moment to make sure that wouldn’t hurt even more, and then relaxed a little, digging his shoulders into the pillow.

            “You’re anxious,” Malfoy said, in a voice that Harry didn’t think he would have heard if he hadn’t relaxed. “I can hear your heartbeat from here.”

            “Yes, I get anxious when someone I don’t really know touches my knee,” Harry said, and opened his eyes to stare at the ceiling. He focused on the plaster flowers that some ancient Black had thought were good decorations for this room and began counting petals, something he had done more than once to distract himself. It was hard, because there was space between each petal that might actually be space or just another clustering part of the flower, done more roughly.

            Malfoy was silent then, for a time, his fingers flicking the air above Harry’s knee but not touching it directly. Harry shut his eyes at last and concentrated on his breathing. The flowers weren’t enough to calm him this time.

            At last, Malfoy made a small sound. Harry raised his head, slightly surprised at himself. He knew that Malfoy had made a noise of shock, but how could he know that? Malfoy was still a stranger to him.

            Well, I have to work with him. Maybe it’s best to accept any knowledge of him as a blessing. “What have you found?” he asked aloud.

*

            Draco stared at the glitter beneath him. He had cast a spell that essentially turned bone and skin and flesh transparent, and let him see into the pains and injuries that were part of them, pinned beneath his gaze like cold insects on an icy collection card.

            He had expected the marks of torture, the multiple dark lines that showed where the joint had been wrenched and shattered, the far deeper marks of pain. After Potter’s story of the warlocks, none of that would have surprised him.

            But there was something else, and it had taken him until now to realize that it ran deeper than those marks of pain, that it was loopy and lumpy and dark and thick, and wrapped around Potter’s knee joint like a rope. A curse, it had to be. A bone-bound curse, a flesh-bound curse, attached to Potter in the way that a spell would more normally be attached to an object, such as an enchanted dagger.

            “You have a curse on your knee,” he breathed, never taking his eyes away from the thing, half-afraid that he would lose track of it and it would become another mark, impossible to distinguish from the other brands of suffering, if he did. “Did you know that?”

            “Well, the warlocks put a lot of curses on it.”

            Draco looked up, shaking his head, and found that Potter’s face was a shock after all the secrets he had seen beneath the surface of his knee. Pale, normal skin, golden glasses, faded scars, and green eyes, the only startling thing there. Potter had sat up enough to tilt the knee towards Draco and heave his good leg off the bed, and his glasses glittered for a moment like Dumbledore’s as he trained his eyes on Draco’s.

            Draco immediately looked away from Potter’s face, scowling at himself for bringing the thought up, and said, “No. I don’t mean that. This is a different spell, one that’s meant to let the healing progress to a certain point and then continually disrupt it.”

            Potter was so silent for a moment, even the buzzing heartbeat that Draco had identified quiet, that Draco wondered if he was about to accuse Draco of lying. Then he said, voice faint, “Well, that would certainly explain some things.”

            “Why did no one else ever find it?” Draco asked of himself and Potter and the absent Healers, bending close to the knee again. The cracks and shattering patterns he could see all traced back to the spell, sure enough. It was obvious once you knew what you were looking for. And for trained Healers, it should have been more than obvious. The curse was the center of Potter’s problems the same way that a hole chopped in ice would be the center of the crazy maze of broken ice that would result.

            “The Healers might not have looked deeply enough,” Potter said. “Or perhaps I stopped them too soon. At a certain point, the knee hurt so much that I didn’t want to hear what else they would suggest. I just wanted them to stop looking so I could go home and learn to live with it.”

            “Not like you, is it?” Draco said, transferring his gaze from the knee to Potter. “You faced everything unflinching, I thought.”

            Potter smiled, a little sadly. “If that was still true, then I would have tried to publicize the discovery about the house-elves the minute I made it, instead of waiting and hoping you could prove me wrong,” he said. “I don’t have that undiminished courage anymore. I’d give a lot for a little peace and quiet.”

            Draco shook his head, unable to understand. Yes, he wanted the same things, but he only wanted them as long as they were complete. “You couldn’t have peace as long as this was troubling you,” he said, and tapped Potter’s knee without thinking. The spell faded, hiding his vision of the curse, and Potter flinched.

            Draco pulled his hand awkwardly back. “That can start the pain ringing?” he asked.

            “Yes,” Potter muttered, closing his eyes and looking as though he rode on the back of a horse that had come close to throwing him. “Ringing. A good word.”

            “That tells me a little more about the kind of curse it might be,” Draco said, and sat back and up. “I’m going to solve this, Potter. Because the Healers should have, and there are some people in St. Mungo’s who will be embarrassed when it turns out that a mere Potions brewer knew more than they did.”

            Potter looked at him with an even fainter smile. “Thanks,” he said. “I know you didn’t have to do it. Thanks.”

            “It will make you more effective in the alliance,” Draco said, which was true, and more than enough excuse for the prickling flush that overcame his face—if anything could be excuse enough for that. “I don’t want you doing what you did today, and straining yourself to the point that you can’t move far without pain. Sometimes, you’ll certainly have to endure longer meetings than that.”

            Potter nodded. “You’re right,” he said. “Maybe Hermione was wrong, allowing me to give up on finding a solution so quickly.” He paused, and an odd expression crossed his face for a moment. Then he said, “Is there anyone else other than the Healers at St. Mungo’s that you think curing the curse would prove wrong?”

            Draco blinked, then smiled. It wasn’t a nice smile, but Potter didn’t look inclined to back away in front of it. “Your friends, including Granger, if what you say about them acceding to your wishes is true.”

            Potter gave a small laugh. “Yes, of course. Thank you again, Malfoy.” He held out his hand, and this time, Draco felt less reluctance about clasping it. He could cast a Cleaning Charm on his hands once he was back home.

            “I’ll bring you better potions tomorrow,” he said, standing. “In the meantime, think about what you’re going to say to Longbottom and Bones.”

            Potter nodded and lay back, closing his eyes. Draco looked at him one more time before he turned away and went back down the stairs.

            It only occurred to him once he was outside the house and preparing to Apparate home that he had touched the skin of a half-blood’s knee and not flinched from it. He frowned, then shrugged. Extra Cleaning Charms on his hands tonight. That had been a tactic that his father had sometimes used, and his wits and cunning were none the worse for it.

*

            Harry clucked his tongue sharply as he thought about it. Malfoy hadn’t said, but Harry couldn’t imagine that it wasn’t the case. He wanted Healers to respect him, sure, he would have fun proving them wrong, but wasn’t there someone closer to him that he would also delight in gaining respect from, which he didn’t have right now?

            I’ll talk to Scorpius tomorrow, Harry decided, and eased his leg back into its proper place, and fell asleep.

*

            ChaosLady: He'll try, but they need to get rid of that curse first.

            unneeded: Astonishing, isn't it? But they've always had their pride tied up in their response to each other, as you can see here from Draco's desire to beat the Healers, so it might actually be good for them.

            Hermione does talk to Hugo. It doesn't always do any good.

            moodysavage: It's not going to be a 100% cure. But he might be able to ease some of his pain.
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The Descent of Magic