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The Long Defeat	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 30612 -:- Recommendations : 2 -:- Currently Reading : 7
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I am making no money from this story.

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Thank you again for all the reviews!
Chapter Ten--Reflections on Magic
            Of course, now that he had the time alone that he’d asked Draco for, Harry had no idea what he should do with it.
            He stood looking out the window of the dining room, which was enchanted but still showed a pretty view of green gardens and white blossoming apple trees, for a while. Then he turned and walked into the corridors.
            The Manor was bigger than he’d ever thought, with more wings and more rooms. Harry kept opening doors and looking at enchanted windows, and then shutting the doors up again. He was looking for something, but he had the feeling he wouldn’t know what it was until he found it.
            Then he opened one door that made him blink and shade his eyes, and wondered if he had found a way out into the gardens.
            No, he saw at a single glance. The room was huge, but still a single room. The light came from an enchanted window on the far side, with the sunlight dancing on shelves and shelves of books. And in the center of the room was a podium with a single book open there. Harry wandered up to it.
            The words on the page moved as he looked at them, and he grimaced. Too much of that would give him a headache. If it was a Malfoy book, it probably had an enchantment to prevent it from being read by Muggleborns, anyway.
            He’d barely turned towards the door, though, when the words settled. Curious despite himself, Harry turned back around.
            And he’d found it.
            The words on the page sparkled as he read them. It was an ordinary story, a story about a boy who grew up in a cold, wet hut on the edge of a village and dreamed of hunting dragons even though he didn’t have a wand or a sword or anything else, and who had parents who treated him unkindly, so he also dreamed about running away. Harry swallowed as he read the descriptions. Maybe the book was touching his mind, interfering with his thoughts, drawing on his memories.
            But he read on, because he had to. And the boy did run away from home, and ran into a group of people on the road who felt sorry for him and gave him food and water and new clothing. But when the boy woke up in the middle of their camp, he was clapped in chains, and they told him he was their slave now, and he had to march with them and work for them during the night, cooking their food and setting up the camp.
            Harry leaned nearer, reading more and more rapidly. The boy slaved away, and Harry wanted to find the point where he broke free and made his captors pay for what they’d done, or at least ran to a new home with people who really would love him.
            It didn’t come. Page after page of grueling slavery description, and Harry felt his magic snarling and tightening in him, the way it always did, the way it always would. He was a fool to think that he would find any redemption here, or that he would be able to find any in the wizarding world.
            The rage nearly exploded when he got to a scene where the people who had captured the boy refused to feed him. Harry pulled his hand sharply back from the book. His magic could damage the organic leather binding and the paper that had once been a tree—
            Then he realized that his magic was quiet, calm, beneath the surface of his skin.
            Harry shook his head. Then he shook it again. He could feel the anger blazing away in his forehead and his cheeks and his heartbeat and his ears. It just seemed disconnected from his magic, the way it had once been before he began to feel his rage turning into and influencing his power.
            What about the book had made it do that? Was there an enchantment of some kind on the book?
            Harry picked up the book and turned it around, more confident now that he knew he wouldn’t turn it to sludge right away. But he couldn’t see any sign of enchantments he didn’t know on the cover or the binding, and he was usually pretty good about seeing things like that, after the amount of training he had received.
            Harry frowned and lowered the book to the podium again, shaking his head. On the other hand, what were the chances that he would just happen to stumble into this room and find the book laid out and open to a story about a slave? Maybe one of the Malfoys had arranged this.
            For a few minutes more, he concentrated on the book the way he had been taught, to make sure that he could correctly recall all the details in a written explanation as well as in a Pensieve memory. Then he turned away.
            His alone time was over after all. He wanted to find Draco and see what he had to say about the book.
            But he ran into Lucius first.
*
            “I wish that you would speak to Draco about the pace of his courting young Mr. Potter, Lucius.”
            That was all Narcissa had had to say. Well, the press of her hand on his arm had helped as well, Lucius had to admit. But he would have spoken to Draco regardless. That demonstration in front of the goblins had been planned, and accomplished what it was supposed to. But Lucius doubted that the rage and the passion on display had been false.
            He was walking through one of the corridors that led out towards the gardens when a door to a library Lucius hadn’t visited in years opened, and Potter stumbled through. Lucius stayed his steps. Draco was the one he still needed to speak to, but Potter was an acceptable substitute.
            He didn’t get the chance to speak his carefully-prepared words. Instead, Potter looked directly at him and asked, “Was it you or Draco who put that book there?”
            “What book?” Lucius considered his tone polite and well-bred. He certainly did not deserve the contemptuous gaze that Potter threw at him a minute later.
            “The book I found in that library,” Potter said, and jerked his head at the door he’d stumbled out of. “It was open on a podium, and it was telling me the story of a boy who was treated badly and ran away and then was enslaved, and I got angry, but my magic didn’t melt the book.” He took a deep breath at the end of that long sentence; Lucius might have felt compelled to check him if he went on. “And then I realized that my magic was calmed down. Why?”
            “It was not because of any magic on the part of the book, if that is what you are thinking,” said Lucius, recognizing part of where his distress had come from.
            “Then what was it because of?” Potter turned blind, seeking eyes on him. “What else would make a book show me that story?”
            “It was magic,” Lucius conceded, “but it was of the house, and not the book. The house must have let you into that library, or perhaps even subtly guided you there.” He paused. Potter showed no sign of wanting to talk about how he had found the library, so Lucius had to go on. “It can produce books that will soothe someone’s mind or answer a need when someone who belongs in the house needs it badly enough.”
            Potter recoiled with a hiss. “I don’t belong in this house!”
            “The definitions of old magic like the Manor’s are not the definitions of human beings,” said Lucius with a vague soothing air that he thought should really have belonged to Draco. Well, Draco was not here right now, and Lucius had no wish to be harmed in the way that the boy’s magic could harm him. “The house felt that you did, so it guided you to one solution to your problem.”
            Potter clenched his hands. “Does that mean my magic won’t come back when I need it?”
            “I doubt it,” said Lucius. “The magic of the library is limited, as is the magic of all books. It can provide only a temporary solution.” He hesitated, then went on, because Potter was still looking distressed, and he did not wish to fear for the future of his portraits or his son, either. “My father found a suggestion for a gift that he needed to impress a potential ally in that library. It was still up to him to find or make or buy the gift. The books could not force him to do anything.”
            Potter stared at him. “Why are you reassuring me?”
            “Because of my son, and my wife,” said Lucius. “They’ve taken a shine to you, although I don’t understand why. I want peace in my house, and I want my son to have what he wants.”
            “Which is me not to leave the wizarding world.” Potter shook his head. “Even though I have no idea why.”
            Lucius thought about correcting Potter on what Draco wanted, and then decided that that was Draco’s to do. Perhaps even Lucius was wrong about what was going through his son’s head at the moment. “Consider that, if you stayed in the wizarding world, you might be able to find a permanent solution to calming your magic down.”
            “Or I might hurt people, because I’ll be around all the people who were irritating me in the first place.”
            “Or you might find a solution,” Lucius repeated. The boy seemed thick to him, though perhaps that was only a result of having most of his friends and “allies” stand back and refuse to respond when he was being enslaved. Perhaps the lingering confusion in his head had clouded his mind. “I do not think you will in the Muggle world, unless you find another wizard who will know your identity in any case, and might irritate you further with hatred or worship.”
            Potter bit his lip. He looked young now, much younger than the skilled negotiator who had confronted Lucius in his study over the weregild that he wanted Lucius to pay for the youngest Weasley. “That’s a perspective I never considered before.”
            Of course not, because I am wiser than both you and the fools that you usually deal with.
            But Lucius was also wise enough to know that saying that would not exactly encourage the boy. He only nodded and examined his sleeve for a moment. “I think Draco would like to speak with you, when you make your decision about whether to stay here or not.”
            “Well, I don’t have a choice right now.”
            And Potter gave him a look of loathing and walked off. Lucius sighed. He had done what he could. Narcissa should be pleased, and Draco, once Lucius had found him and discharged the errand from his mother.
            The rest was up to Potter, and would have to be left up to him. Lucius was not sure that Draco understood that part yet.
*
            “May I ask what you intended when you kissed Potter?”
            Draco sighed and leaned further back on the stone bench that one of his ancestors had put outside near the largest rosebushes in the gardens. The white roses spread ripples of new, honey-like scent on the air whenever the breeze stirred them. They had helped to calm Draco down, but the tension had crinkled his spine up again the minute he heard his father’s voice.
            “To fool the goblins and make them think he was really submissive,” he mumbled, watching his hands. “I told you that.”
            “You did not tell me the exact method.” His father’s voice was dry as he paused at the end of the bench and twirled his cane. Draco caught the flashes of the sun off the metal of the cane, but he kept his eyes on his hands, in his lap. “Was there a reason for that?”
            “I thought you and Mother might object,” Draco admitted, finally looking up.
            “Why, when we did not object to the fact that you are practically courting him?” Lucius leaned on his cane and studied the white roses. “The house-elves need to trim these back. Just because they are beautiful is not reason enough to allow them to take over from the red roses.”
            “You didn’t object then—” Draco began, and then stopped, because he wasn’t even sure whether he was going to ask a question or start an incredulous statement. He sighed and let his head collapse into his hands. “It was so simple when it was just life-debts.”
            His father didn’t answer for long moments, long enough for Draco to hope that Lucius would just walk away and leave it. But that wasn’t his way, and sure enough, a second later he started talking again.
            “We have given you little enough true happiness, Draco. Because of my choices, you and your mother had to suffer torments during the war that I would not wish on Potter.”
            Draco winced and lifted his head. “It wasn’t just your choices.” His left arm burned with memory.
            “Perhaps not,” said his father, with a pause delicate enough that Draco nearly got up and walked away. The shards of that memory pierced him so much. “But I was part of it, and since the war—I have learned—there are things more important than the traditions and continuity I once thought were greatest. If you were happy inside those traditions, well enough. But you are not going to be happy inside them.”

            Draco blinked and looked up at him. “How do you know that?” It wasn’t like his parents had talked to him about his current beliefs or when he was going to get married in the year since the war. They were busy with too many other things, including just settling back into the Manor and dealing with their own memories of it.
            “Because of the way that you look at Potter.” Lucius reached out and tapped his cane against one of the tendrils of white roses that he said were overgrown, although honestly Draco didn’t see how he could tell. They were just beautiful and there, and that was all that mattered to Draco. “I know that you’ll follow him with your heart. You might never go with him if he persists in making his home in the Muggle world, but you won’t stay completely here, either.” He wrung his hand over the cane-head in a way that told Draco how difficult the next words were for him to speak. “I do not want you to enter into marriage or adult life with a divided heart.”
            Draco flushed hot enough that he nearly thought about ordering a house-elf to come outside and fling water on his face. “Just because I kissed him and don’t want him to leave doesn’t mean…I’m not in love with him, Father.”
            “But you are not in love with anyone else, either,” Lucius told his reflection in the surface of the cane. “And that sets out, helps to limit and guarantee, your reactions to him. At the moment, you feel passionately that you’re interested in him.” He eyed Draco sideways. “And you wouldn’t be happy if he left, even at the end of a year.”
            Draco studied his tightly-clasped hands. No, he wouldn’t. He felt that.
            But he brought up, hardly knowing why, the arguments he had expected his parents to use against him. “This is—it’s an unusual situation, though, Father. Of course it is. Maybe I just feel so intensely about Harry because we’re all in the same house together, and he’s been training me to duel. Maybe I would feel that way about anyone I’d wanted to befriend who finally started paying attention to me.”
            Lucius made a smothered sound. Draco stared at him. Had that been laughter?
            “And who else is there, whom you wished to befriend and who rejected you?” Lucius asked, facing him fully. “You were very proud of telling me how everyone you wished to capture either came to your hand, or was a Gryffindor whom you hated anyway. Except for one person. One Gryffindor.”
            Draco hesitated. “But you would say that that’s just the frustrated desires of a child coming out, right? I mean, of course you would,” he finished, a little lamely, when Lucius only studied him as though Draco had started pulling roses off the bushes with his bare hands. “I can’t want to spend the rest of my life with someone we rescued because of life-debts and someone we had to pretend to enslave.”
            “Many things seem possible now that did not eighteen months ago,” said Lucius, and turned away.
            So now, of course, after he brought all that up, he’s going to leave me here to figure it out on my own?
            But to have a sort of blessing on his possible friendship with Harry, to have his parents thinking so deeply about what made him happy, was more than Draco had ever hoped to have.
            He sat back, and thought for a long time.
*
            “Forgive me for intruding, but you do not look happy.”
            Harry started and looked up. Narcissa had come on him in the small dining room where they usually ate meals, sometimes accompanied by Draco and Lucius now. He had been sitting at the table and turning dishes over in his hands without seeming to notice the clink of crystal and silver.
            “Is it time for lunch?” Harry stood up and scratched awkwardly at the back of his neck. “Sorry. I’ll move out of the way.”
            “It is remarkable to me,” said Narcissa, settling in the chair next to his instead of the one across the table from him, “that you see me and immediately assume that you are in the way, instead of simply early for lunch.”
            Harry looked at her and said nothing. Narcissa thought he was trying to feel her out, to see what she thought about the kisses that he and Draco had shared earlier.
            Narcissa, unlike Lucius, who found honesty difficult even now, when the war had destroyed so many of his preconceptions, decided she might as well tell him.
            “I suspect what convinced the goblins,” she said, “more than your chains and your charade, was the expression of happiness on Draco’s face when he kissed you.”
            Harry froze. “What?”
            Narcissa nodded. “He was not taking pleasure in your enslavement, I would think, but he was taking it from the way that you kissed him back, and the way that he got to kiss you in the first place.”
            Harry went on staring. When Narcissa said nothing more, he shook his head and demanded, “And you don’t care about that?”
            Narcissa raised her eyebrows. “Of course I care that my son is happy. I would say that I care when you are happy, too, but at the moment, I do not think that anything I can do will contribute more than momentarily to your pleasure.”
            Harry shook his head. “He wants me to stay here. I can’t do that.”
            “I can understand why you would wish to leave the Manor at the end of this year, yes, no matter how luxurious we can make it for you.”
            “No, I mean he wants me to stay in the wizarding world.”
            “He cannot force you,” said Narcissa. “He is not your owner in truth, you know, and neither are we. He can only ask you to reconsider.”
            Harry showed her his teeth. “And stay here with all the people who irritate me?”
            “If you did decide to remain in the Manor, the wards would keep most of them out.”
            Harry narrowed his eyes a little. “I can’t decide whether you’re making fun of me or not.”
            “Merely giving you a chance to think about other possibilities, the way that Draco is also doing,” said Narcissa, and had to smile at the baffled look on his face. She gestured, and the first plates and glasses appeared on the table, along with pitches of water that tilted themselves into the glasses. “Now it is time for lunch.”
*
delia cerrano: Thanks! Although Draco is less confident when Harry isn’t around.
CareLessLover: Lucius could wish for something different, but he’ll put up with it.
BAFan: Oh, believe me, it makes Harry and Draco cringe, too.
HEARTSTAR: Thank you!
Jester: Thanks! Draco is working pretty hard to change Harry’s mind.
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The Long Defeat