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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
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Chapter Fourteen—Lapped In Uncertainty

            “I don’t think that’s going to work.”

            Harry leaned back in his chair, sipped his tea, and concentrated on yesterday’s Prophet spread out in front of him. When Hermione started a conversation like this, he only had to wait for what she would say, not ask. “What?” he said mildly.

            “Approaching Highfeather like that.” Hermione washed back and forth in front of him, briskly pacing, her arms folded as if she had to keep herself from striking out and thought the best way to do that was to wrap her heart up tightly. “There are other pure-bloods who will object that they didn’t get a personal letter from you. And what will the Muggleborns feel when they find out that you’re communicating with someone who spoke up like a personal enemy?”

            Harry folded the paper down on the table and smiled at her. “I’d hope they’d understand the necessities of politics and compromise like the adults they bloody well are,” he said.

            Hermione stopped pacing and stared at him. Her mouth stretched wide around words, but she didn’t speak them, until at last she made a weak noise like a dying kitten.

            “Malfoy was the one who came up with this plan,” Harry said, leaning back and stretching his arms over his head. He was acting more and sleeping better as a consequence, without the little naps where he’d drop off in the middle of the afternoon, but as a natural follow-up to that, his muscles were starting to ache more. “And you had your chance to object when he did. You didn’t seem interested in objecting. So that means that we’re going ahead with the plan, and now the first part of it is done.”

            “It’s just,” Hermione muttered, and tapped her fingers against one knee and looked away from his calm, neat gaze. “I’m getting owls from Muggleborns who say that they feel we’re focusing too much on pure-bloods.”

            Harry snorted. “Pure-bloods are the source of the problem. That’s like complaining that we’re talking about polluted water and concentrating too much on fish instead of desert animals.”

            Hermione blinked again, maybe at the comparison, and then said, “But I do feel that it’s a legitimate complaint. They could be a problem if they felt you were spending too much of your time and attention elsewhere, and started claiming that the Savior of the Wizarding World was abandoning them.”

            Harry shook his head. “Anyone who wants to can see my notes and theories. And if you give me a list of important names, then I can write owls to them. But part of this movement is approaching the pure-bloods and giving them their fair share of information so that they’ll actually change their minds, Hermione. You know that.”

            “I wasn’t sure if you did,” Hermione said, and sucked her lip. “Harry…are you sure that you know what you’re doing, listening to Malfoy?”

            Harry smiled and leaned forwards over the table. “Why don’t you get the list of important names to me, Hermione? That’s what I can do best right now. Write owls and talk their ears off, and explain the theory to anyone who wants to know about it, and the ways that we tried to prove it wrong and weren’t able to. I’m not up to traveling on long journeys.”

            “None of that has anything to do with listening to Malfoy or not listening to him,” Hermione said obstinately, setting her hands on her hips and glaring at him.

            Harry rolled his eyes. “Yes, it does,” he said. “He’s the one who can recommend the important pure-bloods to me for attention, and tell me how to handle them. He’s doing the same work that you’re doing, but from the other side.”

`           “But what if he tries to encourage you to give up the notion of placing magical creatures at the center of your concern?” Hermione asked, her voice rising just a little. “Like I said, I’m hearing a lot about how much of the rhetoric focuses on pure-bloods and their chances of having children. But we should remember that the magical creatures are the real victims here. The pure-bloods are the ones who caused their own problems.”

            Harry nodded. “I know that,” he said, and wondered that Hermione should argue about this. She had used similar tactics herself in her fight to free house-elves. But perhaps she hadn’t had to work with anyone she despised as much as she despised Malfoy. “This isn’t the thing that we believe is the unvarnished truth, but the thing that we hope will draw the pure-bloods in and make them see that it’s in their own self-interest to treat magical creatures better.” He softened his voice a little when he saw the way that Hermione stared at him and gnawed her lip. “Hermione. Please. I know what I’m doing.”

            Hermione sighed, and this time, it really did sound as if it had drained her body all the way to the roots. “As long as you’re sure.”

            Harry nodded. “And if you see a sign of corruption from Malfoy in me, then I know you’ll help me to deal with it quickly. But it has to be a real sign, not just something that you think you see, or imagine.”

            Hermione flashed him a quick, hurt look, but Harry continued to smile at her, and then she nodded. “I’m sorry, but I haven’t made any progress with Hugo yet,” she said, taking out a list of names and sliding it across the table to him.

            Harry scanned the list, and found some people he’d heard of and some people he hadn’t. Well, that made sense. Hermione, in her own way, was as conscious of blood status as Malfoy was, while Harry had simply worked on the cases he was assigned as an Auror, regardless of who the victims’ families were. “Don’t worry about it,” he said. “In the end, he’ll probably have to come around by himself.”

            There was silence, and then he looked up to find Hermione staring at him fixedly. “You believe that?” she whispered. “You believe that he’ll come around, when it’s been two years and he hasn’t, yet?”

            Harry shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said, wishing he could move on, and that Hermione hadn’t brought up Hugo. At the moment, he had more important things to worry about. “I’m only saying that, if he’s going to get over this, then I think his own head is the source of how he’s going to do it.”

            Hermione looked at him a little longer, then sighed. “Let me know when you’ve written those letters,” she said, turning away. “I have a few more historical investigations that I want to do in the library.” The Black library, she had told Harry, was full of information on the old treaties between wizards and magical creatures once you knew what you were looking for. Not many of them had been discussed in much detail because, once, arranging private deals with the magical creatures was something the pure-blood families did as a regular business affair.

            Left alone at the table, Harry reached for the list of names. Maybe he could concentrate on what he was supposed to be doing to help their revolution and not the endless feuds between Hermione and Draco, now.

            Then the Prophet’s owl fluttered down and dumped today’s paper in front of him, and Harry realized the story on the front page was about Draco and not all of them. And it was illustrated with a restless, constantly head-turning photograph of Astoria Greengrass.



            He picked it up with a restlessness like Astoria’s moving in his gut. He would only read the first few lines of the story, he told himself, and then he would apply himself to the work that he had been so grateful to receive a moment ago.

            But the first lines drew him in, and he began to realize that Hermione certainly would have mentioned this story if she had read it this morning before she came over. That meant she hadn’t seen it, and he needed to read it first before the inevitable firecalls telling him how wrong he had been to support Draco.

            So he settled in, and read.

*

            Draco ate his way through his porridge, and read the story. He always read the front page of the Prophet at breakfast, he told himself, and just because he was on that page this morning was no reason to alter his custom. His father hadn’t changed what he liked to do simply because small details shifted in the world around him, and that was one of his traits that Draco thought worth retaining.

            Once, you would have thought it was all of them.

            And now I don’t think that, Draco answered, and read.

            Astoria had done a good job; she had confessed everything. And the photographer chosen to illustrate the story had done a good job, too. Astoria’s picture looked vulnerable and lost, as though she was about to be kicked out of her home for telling the truth.

            As he read the piece, Draco wondered idly how many of the others doing so would remember that he and Astoria had been divorced years ago, and that Scorpius was as free to spend time with his mother as with his father, especially now that he could Apparate. Probably not many.

            Potter will.

            Unaccountably, that gave Draco strength to read beyond the first few paragraphs.

*

            DRACO MALFOY: STILL A COWARD AT HEART?

            An exclusive interview with Malfoy’s former wife and the mother of his child

            Draco Malfoy stunned the pure-blood world recently by coming out as a supporter of the Chosen One’s theories—politely described by Alicia Highfeather as “wild” to this correspondent—that low numbers of pure-blood children came from the way that wizards have treated magical creatures, especially house-elves, down the years.

            But now it turns out that he may have a rather unexpected reason for doing so. Draco Malfoy’s former wife, Astoria Greengrass, contacted me with an offer to explain that reason, as she does not want her ex-husband to do damage to the wizarding world.

            I sat down with Ms. Greengrass in her comfortable home near Hogsmeade. The walls around me were covered with portraits of the Greengrass family, including Ms. Greengrass’s elder sister, Daphne, a member of the prestigious Wizengamot.

            “Draco told me some intimate secrets down the years,” Ms. Greengrass said, leaning back in her chair and fixing me with a piercing stare. She is still a handsome woman, without a streak of white in her glowing blonde hair. And her eyes are the sort of blue-green that you might find at the bottom of a particularly serene pool. That color, however, does nothing to lessen her formidability. “This happens to many a married couple, you know, even the ones who married for as shallow a reason as we did. Beauty, and to keep money in the family,” she adds, before I can ask.

            She then tells me how Mr. Malfoy confided several things to her when they were married: that he still fears being called out as a Death Eater, despite the years that have passed since the war; the real amount of the money in his Gringotts vault; the depth of his obsession with retired Auror Potter, who was his schoolboy rival.

            But the key to understanding him, she says, is what he confessed on their wedding night. As if to emphasize the special nature of that confession, and the way that she plans to repeat it to me now, she leans forwards, and the sun catches her hair and sets it on fire.

            “He told me,” she whispers, “that everything he’s done has been at the behest of his father. He joined the Death Eaters to save his parents. His father is the one who told him to marry me, who discouraged him from making a career in Potions instead of discreet experiments, who instructed him in how many children to have and the terms of his marriage contract. Draco Malfoy doesn’t breathe without Lucius Malfoy’s permission. And that hasn’t changed even though Lucius is so many years dead. He has a portrait of him in a private room that he visits and asks for advice at least once a week.”

            According to Ms. Greengrass, Mr. Malfoy considers himself a Malfoy first and an individual second. “He sees himself as the heir of many, many people who were all more talented and powerful than he is,” is the way that she puts it.

            “And that leaves him unable to appreciate different qualities in anyone, even someone who is as much like him as my son is,” she finishes, and then leans back and looks into my face, proud and poised and still sorrowful.

            “I would have been able to live with him if his worship of his father had been a tenth less blatant,” she whispers. “I know that many pure-bloods of our generation were raised to think of fathers, or at least parents, that way. But—it was too much. There’s too much of it in his life for me to think that he’ll ever recover.”

            And that is the powerful truth that Ms. Greengrass leaves us with, as readers: that the shadows of the war can still linger in someone’s soul when the war is years over, and leave them unable to recover.

*



            Draco leaned back in his chair and shut his eyes for a moment. Then he opened them and spread the paper out in front of him, fanning it on the table.

            Yes, that was the truth he had feared she would tell. Exposing his heart on the page to someone else, to many people, when Draco had striven to keep his emotions private for so many years. Especially, talking about his visits to his father’s portrait, which had diminished since the divorce and the way that Scorpius had grown away from him. Draco had been too afraid that he would flinch from the painted silver eyes looking at him with condemnation.

            But…

            It hurt less than he had expected. Seeing it in print, it looked more like Astoria’s petty attempt at revenge than anything else. Draco even wondered how many people would believe it, and for years, he had been certain that everyone would the instant it got out.

            Perhaps he had exaggerated the horror of the knowledge, however. Perhaps the fact that he was a coward and had entered the war only over threats to his family was true of other people, too.

            Perhaps Potter would not be surprised by anything except the specific details, like the visits to the portrait and the fact that Draco had told this to Astoria on their wedding night. Draco had told her then because he thought she deserved to know that she wasn’t marrying one of the great Malfoys of the past.

            And she had looked at him with uncomprehending eyes at the time, hadn’t she? She had reached out and put her hand on his head, and then shaken her own and drawn him down into the blankets, into the storm of emotions that were as uncomfortable as all the other feelings and sensations in their marriage had been for Draco.

            It was…

            It was something that he had protected for years as a secret weakness, the same way he had protected expression of the emotions that Scorpius and his divorce in general had made him feel. But seen from the outside, was it so horrible? He knew Astoria had used it as a weapon because she wanted to stop him. She would be watching for the effect on Draco more than for the effect on their enemies.

            And there were those who would try to use it as a weapon, especially pure-bloods who thought that Draco’s cowardice and pathetic nature were unfitting of the heroic legacy of the Malfoys. But there were other people who wouldn’t think it was unforgivable. Even the interviewer, Draco thought, reading it over again, had sounded puzzled towards the end of the article, as though wondering why Astoria’s revelations were so terrible. She had used the same words more than once, and tried to spin the worst details into something thicker, as though working with thin material.

            Other people might only see that as normal.

            It was like turning to face a nightmare and finding that it was the shadow a much smaller creature had cast on the wall. Draco sat there, shivering, cold sweat on his forehead, and he wasn’t sure if that came from the force of the revelation or the fear that he had felt when he began reading the article.

            Either way, it was an emotion that he wasn’t feeling right now.

Either way, it was an emotion that he doubted he would ever feel again.

*

ChaosLady: Sorry, but the story is going to be long and not particularly fast-paced.

moodysavage: Thank you! Draco truly didn’t know what to do at that moment.

SP777: Yes, it’s mostly the romance and figuring out what in the world they’re going to do about the theory.

unneeded: Oh, don’t worry, Draco still has his rough patches, especially with Scorpius. But it has started now, and he’d find it hard to go back without irritating himself as well as the rest of them.
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The Descent of Magic