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Easy as Falling	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 31246 -:- Recommendations : 3 -:- Currently Reading : 4
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I am making no money from this fanfic.

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Chapter Ten—Damage Done

            “Someone needs to tell your precious Potter how to control himself.”

            Draco blinked and tilted his head back, swatting sleep out of his eyes. “What?” he asked, while the room grew brighter and he saw Pansy standing on the other side of the table, glaring at something that lay in the middle. Draco looked down and saw it was the Daily Prophet. He sighed and picked it up. “What has he done now?” he muttered, scanning the photograph.

            His first thought was that someone had Polyjuiced as Potter, because the serene smile he wore made him look nothing like the man Draco had met with, eaten with, teased and bargained with. But then he made out the headline below, and was glad he hadn’t eaten anything to choke on yet.

            MINISTRY TRIES TO ASSASSINATE FORMER AUROR

            The byline was Helena Spivak’s, of course. Draco read through the article with growing disbelief, shaking his head when the feeling of nonsense got to be too much and he had to try and unload the accumulation in his brain. The headline was brilliant, distracting the reader from focusing on Potter declaring himself a Dark Lord and making anything the Ministry tried seem unjust. This wasn’t self-defense, said those blunt words, or even a strike in a war against a Dark Lord, the way that it could have been. It was murder, pure and simple.

            No. Assassination. Draco understood the difference between those two words, of course, since he started running for office. Murder was what you did to your neighbor who annoyed you one too many times. Assassination was what you did to a Minister.

            He skimmed the article, which quoted Potter liberally. And Draco could even see how Potter had arrived at the conclusion that Tillipop wanted to kill him (which was not one of the accusations Draco had told him to make). He had made a statement that Spivak had pounced on, about his relationship with the Ministry, and then held it up and continued with it.

            And Spivak had the story of her career, and Draco had…

            What did he have, exactly?

            Pansy was still raging in the background, complaining about the stupid things that Potter had always done and the stupider way that Draco had indulged his tenderness for them, when common sense should have made him reject them right away. But Draco could ignore her as long as she was listening to the sound of her own voice and not addressing him, and he pushed his chin into his palm and contemplated the picture and the article.

            So. Why had Potter done this?

            Because he had no choice, Draco supplied easily. He had made the remark, and Spivak had interpreted it one way, and Potter could back down or he could defend it, and he had chosen to defend it.

            But he could have been more careful from the beginning, and not said something so stupid.

            Draco tilted his head, thinking about that, and never taking his eyes off the article in front of him in the meanwhile. That was true. But Potter wasn’t a natural politician, and no matter what Slytherin instincts he had hinted to Draco he might have, he wasn’t used to listening to them. Draco knew that. An outcome like this shouldn’t have surprised him that much.

            He had to smile. He was practicing the sort of tolerance Rosenthal had told him was natural to a Minister, and more than natural, necessary. If he didn’t practice it, he would lose control of his Ministry as he met more and more people who disagreed with him, and who flung insults at him because they couldn’t tolerate his past.

            Pansy’s voice changed, and Draco folded the paper and put it down, leaning back so he could focus on her.

            “…have to realize that he could damage you,” Pansy said, and leaned forwards and put her hands on the table, in a pose that Draco vaguely realized was supposed to be intimidating. She shook her head when Draco just blinked at her. “You aren’t thinking about this at all, are you? You don’t think that Potter will cost you enough to give him up.”

            “He’s done something unexpected,” Draco said, and crossed one leg up and over his lap, while finally reaching for the cup of coffee Pansy’s house-elves had brought him. “But he didn’t mention me at all. No one outside of you and his friends knows that we have an alliance.”

            “And Rosenthal,” Pansy said.

            Draco sometimes admired her determination to be thorough. This was not one of those times. He managed to smile, a smile that Pansy should take for a warning, and nodded a little. “But none of you will betray me. And it’s implicitly Minister Tillipop that Potter’s accused of wanting him dead, not me. How can that not help me?”

            “Because you’ll become part of the Ministry eventually, you idiot, and then you’ll inherit the accusations,” Pansy snapped, stepping back and crossing her arms in front of her chest. Her head poked up atop them, and she eyed Draco long enough to make her shake her head. “You still don’t have any intention of letting him go.”

            “No,” Draco said. “Because I intend to reveal my relationship with him—my alliance,” he added, as he saw Pansy’s eyes take fire and her lips open to object to what he had said, “at the proper time, and make it clear that I don’t support whatever mad suppression measures Tillipop has dreamed up. That will be enough to distance me from them.” And he sipped some more of his coffee and reached for one of the buttered scones that Pansy’s elves were so clever at making.

            Pansy spent some more time peering at him. Draco maintained a calm gaze. He didn’t know what else he could do. What he had spoken was the truth, and he didn’t think Potter’s way of announcing his grudge against the Ministry could really do him harm. Maybe it could be annoying, the way Tillipop was annoying in general, but Draco didn’t stop or slow down for minor obstacles.

            Pansy sighed hard enough to make the surface of Draco’s coffee ripple. Then she sat down on the other side of the table and said, “Since we can’t detach you, we should plan what you’re going to say when Tillipop responds to these accusations.”

            Draco laughed. “Who are you, Rosenthal?”

            “This kind of politics, she’s too pleasant for,” Pansy said, with a sharp swish of her hand. “No, we need to think about what you know of Tillipop, and encourage those rumors that you started to plant yesterday, and we need to make sure that you visit a few more charities and orphanages and primary schools to improve your image as someone who gets along with everyone, and…”

            Draco let her chatter and plan. This was politics the way Pansy understood it, cutthroat and uncaring, but proceeding under a surface of charm and polish.

            And in the meantime, he could daydream about Potter, and the things he would say when he next saw him.

*

            “But the Ministry isn’t trying to kill you, mate.”

            Harry kicked up his legs on the desk in front of him, ignoring the way Ron winced. If anything, that should show whoever looked in that Harry wasn’t inclined to imitate either Headmaster Dumbledore or Headmistress McGonagall. They would never have sat like this.

            And Harry was different, anyway. He was the literal protector of Hogwarts, not the Headmaster. He would make decisions to keep the school safe, but what the students learned and so on was—

            Then he had to stop that chain of thought, because what was he doing if not controlling their education when he thought about hiring professors and what the children would learn, other than to be loyal to the Ministry?

            Ron’s fingers snapped in front of Harry’s eyes. He jumped, and realized that he’d been staring off into space and Ron was standing in front of him, glaring at him.

            “Maybe Hermione is right,” Ron muttered, barely loud enough for Harry to hear. “Declaring yourself a Dark Lord has done a number on your brain.”

            Harry sniffed at this description and rolled his neck a little. “I resent that remark.”

            “You didn’t respond to what I said, and you have to, one way or the other,” Ron said, flopping back into the chair on the other side of Harry’s desk. “The Ministry isn’t trying to kill you.”

            “They will soon,” Harry said, and smiled a little at Ron. “And if it isn’t Minister Tillipop, I think the Board of Governors would. They have a lot of proud people on there, and they won’t like the fact that I humiliated them.”

            “But I haven’t heard about any plots in the Ministry pointing to that,” Ron said. “And you know how gossipy Aurors are.”

            “With people who are my best friends, or at least still perceived that way?” Harry asked dryly.

            “That’s my point!” Ron leaned forwards. “People talk around me all the time because they want me to talk back to them. They think I’m a great source of gossip, and even though they should know by now that I don’t spread rumors about my mates, they keep hoping I’ll change my mind. If I’m not hearing about it, it’s not happening.”

            Harry considered that for a second. It was true that Ron had come up with really surprising gossip sometimes, things that even Hermione with all her fingers in different parts of the Ministry didn’t hear. But he shook his head a second later, rejecting this theory. “I don’t think something like this would be let out of a safe place where the conspirators could trust everyone,” he said. “That means no casual Auror gossip.”

            “Maybe you’re right,” Ron said. “And maybe you’re going mental.”

            Harry started to answer, but stopped as a house-elf popped up beside him with a little bow, carrying the Daily Prophet. It was the first edition published since the one that had Spivak’s article in it, and Harry smiled a little and spread the paper in front of him. “I think we’re about to find out,” he said.

            He immediately saw a photograph of Minister Tillipop shaking his head with a scowl on his face, but he went still when he saw the headline.

            HARRY POTTER DECLARED OFFICIALLY INSANE; ST. MUNGO’S RECORDS PULLED.

            Harry discovered that he was sitting there and simply staring. Then he began to read the article. Like the article Hermione had brought him that had started this whole mess, the one about the Board of Governors getting ready to close Hogwarts, he only skimmed this one in flashes, while different kinds of fireworks went off behind his eyelids.

            ...saw a Mind-Healer after the war…reminded the public that after the return of You-Know-Who...perhaps he wasn’t a liar at the time, but now…Mr. Potter is not thinking of the safety of the public…when reached for comment, Minister Tillipop expressed more sorrow than anger…Mind-Healer Yarrow…

            Harry found that his hand was clenched on the paper, and it was burning where he touched and then healing itself again, so that he could read the words again, and that Ron was pulling gently at his fingers, trying to get his fist to open up.

            “Mate, mate,” he whispered. “Harry. Please.”

            Harry lifted his head and blinked, slowly. That was when he realized that the desk had reached out to him, opening its desk drawers so they touched his knees, and the papers and quills on it were hovering around his head. The portraits of the Headmasters on the walls gave fretful little cries as their frames tugged towards Harry. Harry leaned his head back on his chair and relaxed as much as he could, so his bond with Hogwarts would stop trying to comfort him.

            “You’re really bonded with it,” Ron croaked. “I didn’t know that.”

            Harry opened one eye to smile at him. It astonished him that he still had a smile in him, after the betrayal the article represented, but if he could, it would be for someone like Ron. “I told you that.”

            “Yeah, but it’s different seeing it,” Ron said, and finally took the paper away from him. “What did the bastards do this time?”

            Harry swallowed a little. “Pulled those records from the time I went to that Mind-Healer after the war,” he said. It was difficult to talk. He had said things to Mind-Healer Yarrow that could ruin him, for more than just being judged honest. He sounded mental in a lot of those things. He sounded like he wanted to die, like he wished the war had killed him, like he hated everyone in the wizarding world.

            Yarrow had told him that was normal at the time, just part of the process of coping with the intense emotions the war had stirred up in him.

            Harry’s eye fell on the front page of the paper again, and the earnest photograph of Yarrow they’d found for it.

            Now they want everyone to think of me that way. Mental. Suicidal. Dark. Insane.

            Harry stood up from the chair before he consciously thought about doing so, but this time, his mind felt crystal clear. He wasn’t going to do that. He wouldn’t let them. He was going to start opening Hogwarts right now.

            “They’ll think—how did they get confidential records?” Ron was standing there, looking so lost that Harry couldn’t help reaching out and gripping his hand, squeezing silently.

            “Yarrow might have volunteered them,” Harry said. “Someone might have found out he was my Mind-Healer and bribed him. Or maybe someone broke into hospital and stole them, and Yarrow and the Mind-Healers are even trying to soften the blow.” He shrugged and turned his back. He had to admit that his impression of Mind-Healer Yarrow hadn’t been someone who would betray secrets, or Harry would never have confessed so many of his own in the first place. But then, Mind-Healers had masks of their own, ways that they could conceal their own emotions so as to get emotions out of their patients. “What matters is that they want me to cower and flinch, or maybe try to reconcile with them.”

“What are you going to do instead?” Ron had put down the Prophet and was looking at him in interest.

Harry smiled and bowed back a little, glad that Ron knew him well enough to realize Harry wasn’t about to curl up and crumple under the blow. “Well, I thought maybe I would put out a call for professors to interview,” he said. “And I would invite any students who want to move into the towers and their House common rooms to come back.”

Ron blinked. “You think that’s going to be enough? I mean, you think that enough people are going to come, because they won’t be afraid of you?”

“Some people are desperate enough for jobs, they’ll jump at the announcement that they could be a professor,” Harry said briskly. For some reason, he thought he would hold off on mentioning that Malfoy had promised to look for knowledgeable pure-bloods until such time as he actually produced any. “And there are people who will always trust me no matter what. Some who will be influenced by that interview I gave Spivak. Maybe even seventeen-year-olds who think of it as a lark and an adventure to go to a school run by a Dark Lord, and their parents can’t stop them since they’re of age. Who knows who’ll turn up?”

Ron frowned a little at him. “I just hope you aren’t disappointed if no one turns up.”

            Harry rolled his eyes back. “Of course I’ll be disappointed. I won’t promise anything about controlling my emotional reactions. The really important thing is that I do what I can. And I’m going to show them that they can’t control me.”

            “Them?”

            “Tillipop and all the rest who want to do that, through the Ministry,” Harry said. “Come on,” he added, when Ron chewed his lip and looked at him. “They released confidential records to the papers, and you still believe there’s no conspiracy?”

            Ron suddenly snorted, following it with a grin. “Not a conspiracy,” he said. “Just a group of people who are openly out to get you.”

            Harry clapped him on the back and said, “That’s the spirit. Now, help me write some of these owls.”

*

            “Draco!”

            Draco took the paper from Pansy, wondering why other people always got to it and saw the articles and interviews before he did. He shook his head in wonder at the photograph of Tillipop and the words below that, about Potter’s Mind-Healer and the secrets that had come out.

            “He’s just destroyed himself,” he murmured.

            Pansy nodded emphatically, so that Draco could see her hair flapping over the top of the paper. “That’s what I told you. Potter destroyed himself by giving that interview and forcing the Ministry to retaliate by pulling out his mental history.”

            “No,” Draco said, and turned the paper around so she could see the photograph of Tillipop. “I mean that he’s destroyed himself by releasing Potter’s history.”

            Pansy stared at him. “Draco, Potter is mental.”

            “No,” Draco said. “No, I don’t think so.” He would have sensed it when he met with Potter, if declaring himself Dark Lord was the act of a man on the edge of sanity. Instead, Draco thought, it was the Ministry that had exasperated him until that point, but this was—Potter was going to obliterate them.

            “Draco?” Pansy asked warily. “Why are you smiling like that?”

            “It would be too complicated to explain,” Draco said, and put the paper down briskly, while reaching for more dinner. “Suffice it to say that I don’t think I need to break off my alliance with Potter. Now, did Rosenthal tell you how fast those rumors about Tillipop are spreading?”

*

            alexkdp: Thank you!

            moodysavage: I think Harry would call it being political, rather than Slytherin.

            Niamh: Sorry! I find this works better with shorter chapters, so each one can focus on one important event.
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