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Made of Common Clay	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > General > General Views: 10987 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 1
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Chapter Thirteen—Mighty Nations Would Have Crowned Me
Harry wakes up with an abrupt toss of his wand into his hand and a fire spell dancing on his tongue. When he hears wings flapping above him, he manages to redirect it into a spell that only lights the candles beside his bed.
The black owl carrying a thick golden letter—a bird he doesn’t recognize—swerves over to the side and lands on the perch that he keeps near the wall, staring at him. Harry sits up in bed and eyes the letter. He doesn’t know anyone who uses parchment, or an envelope, whichever it is, the color of pure gold. It’s beyond ostentatious. It actually hurts his eyes, glittering in the candlelight. Even the Sun Chamber just uses their seal, the symbol of a sun, on a white background.
“Who do you belong to anyway?” he asks the owl, which has eyes and legs as golden as the envelope.
It peers at him haughtily, and doesn’t answer. Harry rolls his eyes and casts a spell of his own creation that Summons the letter from the owl without hurting it. The owl squawks and flaps its wings as the letter zooms away from it and lands in Harry’s hand.
“Should have brought it to me in the first place,” Harry tells it absently as he examines the letter. No, the parchment really is golden, which means that it probably has grains of gold dust embedded in it. He’s read about such things. Never seen it.
Whoever this is is probably making a mistake by thinking this will impress me, Harry decides, but he slits the letter open with a precise Cutting Curse anyway, once he’s determined that the envelope doesn’t contain anything dangerous to him.
The parchment inside is just as intensely gold, and Harry lowers the level of the flames on the candles before he can read it.
Dear Lord Potter,
I know it must seem like everyone in the Sun Chamber is against you, underestimating you for your mother’s blood. But this letter is to tell you that you do have your adherents, those who appreciate your magical blood and the shakeup that you have brought to this group of Lords and Ladies.
We have thought for a long time that the Sun Chamber is past its usefulness. It cannot even obey its own rules when dealing with anyone who is slightly different. We wish to join you in changing them.
Harry cocks his head at the owl. “Well, your owners might be ostentatious, but maybe they know what they’re talking about,” he tells the bird, who fluffs up all its feathers and turns its head around to face the other way. Harry goes back to the letter with a faint smile on his face that feels good.
To this end, we wish to speak with you about dissolving both the Sun Chamber and the Ministry—
“Better and better.”
—and making you the magical monarch of wizarding Britain.
Harry drops the letter flat on the bed and howls with laughter, so hard that soon he’s howling for breath. He rolls in a circle on the bed, his hands clasped over his stomach. The owl twists its head to stare at him over its shoulder again.
Harry finally splutters to a halt, and lies there, grinning at the ceiling. Really. There are people smart enough to figure out what he’s doing with the Sun Chamber—members, it sounds like—but stupid enough to think he would want to be a king?
Then Harry pauses thoughtfully. No, they must not think that. They must just know that he’s powerful and they’re looking for some way to take advantage of it. He can’t actually advance in the Sun Chamber. Holder of two Lordships or not, he’s not a leader there. He can’t claim more Lordships. He can’t even climb much higher in the Auror ranks. These people must think that offering him a way to a kind of promotion and to use his magical power openly would be a temptation.
They even talk about dissolving the Ministry. So they’re picking up on, or intuiting, the fact that he doesn’t want the Ministry to stay around, either.
They would almost be allies. If not for that last, stupid line.
But it’s not the last line of the letter, is it? Harry picks the thing up, ignoring the way his fingers almost clang off the stupid gold parchment, and reads a little more.
If you are open to discussing this, then wait for us in the Ministry Atrium at midnight tomorrow.
It’ll be easy for Harry to contrive a way to be in the Ministry at that time tomorrow. Even Kingsley is used to him staying late for cases, the way he did on the nights both the assassin and Lady Honeywell found him.
It might be the most useful late night he’s had in a long time.
*
“What the fuck,” Hermione says, pushing her hair out of her eyes as she reads the golden parchment.
Harry grins. “You should swear more often,” he says, leaning back in his chair at Ron and Hermione’s dining room table and ignoring the chiding way Hermione glares at him around the corner of the letter. So what if the chair is balancing on the very tips of its back legs and the only things keeping him upright are his own toes hooked under the edge of the table? He’s never tipped over yet. “It makes this impressive kind of homicidal look come into your eye, did you know?”
“I had some inkling,” Hermione says, and then presses her lips firmly together and shakes her head. “Harry. Listen to me.”
“I am. I always listen when you start swearing.”
“I think this might be a trap.”
“Really?”
“No, I don’t mean a trap to use you or try to take advantage of you. I mean a simple ambush to kill you. What if Parkinson sent this?”
“Well, for one thing, I really doubt she could afford the gold.”
Hermione shakes the letter at him as if she’s about to sharpen an axe and try to chop off his head, and Harry relents. “I’m always aware of that, too. But for one thing, I don’t think I’ll have to deal with those ambushes for a while. The Sun Chamber became aware of just how powerful I am the other day. Even Parkinson would try to think of a sneaker plan than that.”
“She might be too homicidal to.”
“Well, notice I said try.” Harry raises his hands when Hermione glares at him. “Honestly, Hermione, what do you want me to do? I can’t take bodyguards, they’d be suspicious and maybe figure out that I’d been fooling them. And I don’t know who they are yet, so I don’t know if they’d be good enough at wards and charm detection to notice someone following me. And snarling in rage at these people hasn’t got me anywhere. I might as well keep an open mind and swear and laugh.”
Hermione’s sigh comes from somewhere in the region of her toes. “All right, I can see your point. But—Ron could follow under your Invisibility Cloak?”
“You know what the Cloak is doing right now.”
Hermione sits back with what is honestly almost a pout. “Everything we planned ahead of time seems to be getting in the way now.”
Harry shrugs and stands up to place a hand on her shoulder. “That’s the way politics is. One reason you could never convince me to run for Minister.”
“And afterwards?” Hermione gives him a serious look as he moves towards her fireplace.
“Afterwards, what?”
“If they want you to be a leader?”
Harry snorts softly. “They’re going to be busy with other things than idolizing me, Hermione.” He pauses. “That’s actually an advantage I never thought about before. If they’re this busy getting angry at me, then they won’t idolize me because they’ll have a better idea of what a ruthless bastard I am.”
Hermione sighs and reaches out to hold his wrist. “I wish something could have been done before it got to this point. That we could have figured out something that would preserve your innocence.”
“It’s a good thing that my innocence is gone,” Harry tells her, and means it. “My blindness to things like the Sun Chamber meant I was getting frustrated at the wrong people. I thought all the Wizengamot members were idiots, but I couldn’t figure out why. Now I know they’re either beholden to pure-blood tradition by people who didn’t even want to reveal their existence as a body, or their decisions are just meditated by a smaller population of idiots. The whole Wizengamot doesn’t actually vote together, and I was overlooking the dissenters in my frustration.’
“I didn’t mean just about the Sun Chamber. And I meant—”
“That I would be more willing to be a leader when we destroy the current government if someone had got to me earlier?”
Hermione nods firmly, but her face is red. Harry knows why. It does sound at the moment like she’s one of those people who think he should spend his life in service to the wizarding world just because of the bloody scar on his forehead.
But Harry knows Hermione’s intentions the way he can never know the true intentions of people like that. He only smiles at her. “I would be a terrible leader, in the end. Poor impulse control, insisting on some people paying the penalty because of how long they’d been on the run from Aurors, probably recommending execution for everyone with the Dark Mark if I’d been made Minister or king or whatever early enough—”
“You wouldn’t do that now. And poor impulse control—Harry James Potter.” Hermione actually stands up and puts her hands on her hips, something she usually leaves to Molly. “Who set up this world-spanning, world-shaking plan?”
“We all did.”
Hermione pauses, then sinks back into her chair. “That’s right,” she says unsteadily, a moment before she breaks out in giggles. “Damn. It’s hard to argue with you.”
“That means I’m doing something right.” Harry touches her hair and walks through the Floo, getting ready for another useless day at the Ministry.
Then he smiles. Well, not useless if he can find a chance to get Weston, that Auror who spoke up at the meeting with Kingsley, alone and talk to her.
*
“You have to know I have no interest in dating the Chosen One.”
Harry snorts and manages to keep from spurting his soup across the room. “You thought that was what I wanted, and you still accepted a lunch invitation with me?”
Weston nods and sips calmly from her own soup. She refuses to use the spoon, instead holding the bowl like a huge cup. Harry doesn’t know if it’s just personal eccentricity or a “fuck you” to pure-blood manners, but it’s a good sign. “It’s a nice lunch. I could eat it and you would still have to pay for it.”
Harry shakes his head and subtly casts a spell he’s perfected around the table. It’s a variant on Snape’s Muffliato, but this one will also chime at Harry if anyone tries to break it or comes near enough to overhear a normal conversation. “That’s not what I wanted to talk about. I wanted to talk about whether you’re serious in your attempts to make people see that Muggleborns are worth something.”
Weston catches on quickly. She lowers her bowl and leans forwards. “You’re with them?”
“Providing some of the money for them, yeah. And of course I have a stake in house-elf freedom.”
“I heard about the one who died for you during the war.” Weston studies him intently for a long moment. Harry’s pleased. The ones who leap too quickly to conclusions can still be of use in things like staged protests, but it’s no use bringing them deeper into planning. “What exactly is your ultimate goal?”
“To tear down the Ministry. Get rid of all of it.”
Weston suddenly has a hard-eyed look that Harry didn’t think he would see her wear. “And what? Put yourself in charge after that?”
Harry laughs hard enough that he’s glad he doesn’t have soup in his mouth. “Do I seem like someone who wants to be in charge?”
“No. But a lot of people who are don’t.”
“Believe me, that’s the last thing I want. People already demand too much of me, because they think that someone who can kill one Dark Lord can kill corruption, or something. And now that the Sun Chamber’s conferred these ridiculous Lordships on me, it’s worse. They’re always wanting me to obey the rules while being convinced that my blood status means I can’t.”
Weston eats a little more soup before she says, “All right. But then what comes after the Ministry?”
“Why should I care?”
“You live in the wizarding world.”
“Sure, but the wizarding world is more than the Ministry. As best as I can see, the Ministry hardly does anything anymore. Every positive action they take has to be bound by all these rules, and they can’t take it for months. And what positive actions are there, actually? We don’t get sent after half the reports of Dark activity, because they take place at some pure-blood manor. Obliviating Muggles happens at the scene, most of the time. The Obliviators are mostly independent of the Ministry now, anyway. It would be better if the Ministry didn’t run Azkaban and run prejudiced trials in favor of who people are related to and cut off all access to the Department of Mysteries from the plebeians outside it. I can’t see anything the Ministry does that we can’t replace.”
Weston is silent and thoughtful through more than half the rest of the meal. Then she says, “You think people would step in to fill the gap?”
“Of course. Natural leaders and some people who have specific goals in mind.” Harry smiles as he thinks of Hermione and her books.
“But there’s the question of taxes and where they’d get the money to run the specific projects.”
Harry raises an eyebrow. It’s not a question most of their recruits asked, but some did, and that means he has the paperwork with him. He knew Weston was smart. He takes the sheaf of parchment out of his robe pocket, watched attentively all the while by Weston, and lays it down on the table. “Take a look at this.”
Weston reaches out and drags it across the table to her. Harry watches her face as she reads. It gets paler and paler, and she finally swallows noisily and pushes it back to him. “That’s true?”
“As true as I can find, and as recent as the first half of this year.” Harry nods and finishes up the last of his fish. The restaurant does do food well. “I doubt it’s changed in the few months since.”
“If this is true,” Weston whispers, as though they aren’t behind silencing spells already, “then most of the Ministry’s income comes from bribes.”
“Exactly. And our wages are being paid out of them.” Harry shakes his head. “The older records are clear. Taxes were collected then, and even under pure-blood Ministers, the corruption was minimal. But now most taxes aren’t being collected at all. The vast majority of Muggleborns go back to the Muggle world to live, and a lot of half-bloods have moved abroad since the war. So the pure-bloods are the only ones with a lot of taxable money, but they don’t want to tax the precious heirs of Magic’s essence—”
Weston snorts. Harry grins at her. “No, that’s really what they call themselves. So they let the pure-bloods ‘pay their taxes’ whenever they want, in the amounts they determine. And someone intelligent—I haven’t been able to identify them yet—makes sure the money is spread around enough that Ministry flunkies like us get paid on time. Probably because they know there would be a revolt without regular wages.”
“We have to do something.” Weston raps her fingers, with a musical sound, on some of the cutlery. “Why haven’t you made this public?”
Harry laughs harshly. “Aside from the fact that the Daily Prophet has a record of painting me as a mentally unstable liar whenever I say something the administration doesn’t want to hear? The only reason I got away with revealing the truth about the Sun Chamber is that Skeeter didn’t know about it, either, and was eager to. So I managed to make it seem as if I was telling the truth for the good of the wizarding world. I’ll be arrested if I spread this.”
“On what charges?”
“Sedition. Fomenting disorder. All of the charges they’re trying to get my allies on when they protest.” Harry folds his arms and stares at Weston. “They’ll put me straight in Azkaban, and I’m more vulnerable to the Dementors than most people. I can’t make any changes from inside a prison cell.”
“I thought—they don’t use Dementors at Azkaban anymore—”
“Most of the time, no. But when a particularly eloquent criminal or one with a lot of popular support goes there? They do. They did it last year for the Randolph fellow, the one who almost managed to make people care about Squibs’ rights. He was a gibbering wreck by the end of the month.”
“You know that how?”
“I went and saw him.”
“Despite being more affected by Dementors than most people.”
Harry simply nods. He’s waiting for the conclusion it seems that Weston is working herself towards, but he honestly doesn’t know, at the moment, what it will be.
Weston reaches it on her own. She tosses her head back a little and looks him straight in the eye and announces, “I want in.”
Harry smiles. “Good. Then this is what you can do…”
*
Paigeey07: Thank you!
SickPuppy: Yeah, Harry has a brand of gallows humor that's difficult to take on.
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Made of Common Clay