Adult-FanFiction.org : Harry Potter

Anarchy as Art	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 12617 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 3
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I am making no money from this fanfic.

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Chapter Sixteen—Learning Desire

            “And he really said that?” Hermione had a slice of orange in her hand, but she didn’t seem to notice that the juice was dripping down her fingers, although ordinarily she would be sensitive about something like that. She just stared at Harry with her mouth open instead.

            Harry finally reached across the table and tapped her wrist. Hermione jumped and then started eating again, her eyes never leaving his face.

            “He really said that,” Harry said, leaning back in his chair and sipping at the glass of pumpkin juice that he’d asked for. He’d spent yesterday reflecting on Malfoy and the strangeness of him showing up like that at the trial and offering to help, and then today he’d had to come over and tell it to someone before he exploded. Hermione had a stack of files in front of her, but she’d willingly pushed them aside to listen to him. “It makes me wonder—d’you suppose that he could just become a philanthropist like he’s pretended to be all along? That would mean that he could still have a career and the adoration of the public. And he wouldn’t even really have to change anything.”

            Hermione shook herself back to life, more deeply than Harry thought she had a while ago. “I suppose it could happen, yes,” she said. “But I wouldn’t count on it, Harry. You can’t count on anything from him. You need to concentrate on your own life and how you’re going to change it.”

            Harry nodded and swallowed more of the pumpkin juice. He felt young in some strange ways, which was why he’d asked for it. He had made mistakes in the past with Malfoy, but maybe he could wipe them out and start over again, even mistakes going as far back as when they’d both been eleven years old.

            “It’s going to involve Malfoy, though,” he said. “In some capacity. That’s the way it is. I’m too obsessed to walk away from him.”

            Hermione looked up with her eyes widening. “You don’t mean that, Harry!”

            Harry blinked at her and drank some more, swirling his tongue around to get the taste all through his mouth. “What do you mean? Of course I do.”

            Hermione sighed and put her scraps of orange peel neatly in a bowl in front of her. “You didn’t realize for years that what you had was an obsession for something other than bringing him to justice,” she said. “Now you do. The thing to do now is walk away from him. You’re past the denial. But keeping the obsession alive is a way of chasing away rational thought and the adulthood that you need to achieve.”

            “Do you think up speeches like that in your sleep?” Harry asked, because he had to know.

            Hermione flushed, but then looked at him and shook her head. “This is the way I talk,” she said. “It just is. Harry. You know that obsession isn’t healthy, and you can’t construct anything real from it. Look at the way Voldemort was obsessed with you. It doomed him in the end. I don’t want to see the same thing happen to you because of your infatuation with Malfoy. It’s cost you your job and your peace of mind. That’s enough. Cut off contact with him, or at best be polite and friendly to him when he comes after you.”

            “I can’t,” Harry said gently.

            Hermione stared at him. “What? Of course you can.” She flicked the orange peel shreds in the dish in front of her as if they were to blame. “There’s no law saying that you need to stay with someone who’s cast the kinds of spells on you that he did, and tormented you, and bothered you, and made you feel—”

            “A lot of that was also me tormenting and bothering myself,” Harry interrupted her. “If I’d understood myself better from the beginning, it never would have got this far.”

            Hermione faced him with arms folded. “Fine. Granted that. What makes you think that pursuing the obsession now is the best way of going about this?”

            “Because trying to ignore it is just another form of denial,” Harry said. “You don’t escape from feeling sick because you understand what the disease is. I’m going to make sure that I understand it well enough not to succumb to it.”

            Hermione moved her lips for a minute, then gave him a small smile. “All right, I admit that you’ve stumped me. What does that mean?”

            “It means,” Harry said, draining the pumpkin juice and thumping the glass down in the middle of the table to the accompaniment of a wince and a murmur from Hermione, “that I find some way to integrate Draco bloody Malfoy into my life without letting him take it over completely. And I decide what that life is going to be.”

*

            Harry sat in the middle of his drawing room and stared into the fire, sipping idly now and then at the glass of brandy he held. It wasn’t a drink that he had all the time, but that was part of the point. Get beyond the usual, the accustomed, and focus on the new.

            Hermione didn’t seem to think that would work, but Hermione wasn’t here right now. Close his eyes. Relax. What were the things that he had enjoyed about Auror work? Besides the prospects that it offered him for hunting Malfoy down?

            Definitely not the paperwork. Harry never wanted to work somewhere where he had to file things in triplicate again.

            He celebrated the decision with another small swallow of brandy. Merlin, it didn’t half make his throat burn. All right. That meant any job in the Ministry was out. Thorin’s obsession or not, the Aurors still didn’t do as much paperwork as some of the other divisions did.

            It didn’t tell him what he wanted to do, but it did close off one route, and left the field clear for others. What had he enjoyed?

            The sense of usefulness. Although technically Harry reckoned he could take the rest of his life off and live on his parents’ fortune if he was careful, he would get bored quickly. He needed to do something beyond himself, serve something larger than just his goal of getting up every day. The Ministry had been that ideal for him, until Malfoy opened his eyes. He had been able to tell himself he was doing good by putting criminals in cells, because at least it meant one less person to sell addictive potions or murder innocent wizards.

            But he couldn’t do that if the Ministry released every criminal he caught and wouldn’t arrest the source of all the trouble…

            Harry let the thoughts drift off, and shook his head. No, that was the kind of thinking that had got him into this mess in the first place, and caused him to waste several years of his life in the Ministry. What else could give him that sensation of usefulness?

            And there was only really one answer, when he thought about it. If he’d been as passionate about house-elves as Hermione was, there would have been two, but he simply wasn’t. He’d known Dobby well and loved him, and Kreacher and Winky were good in their own ways, but he didn’t know whether it would be a good thing for the rest of them if he freed them, and that meant he couldn’t get involved.

            Not hurting other people. That’s another requirement. I might get people upset, but doing them damage is out of the question, unless they try to hurt me or someone else first.

            Harry swirled the brandy around on his tongue, wondered idly what Malfoy would say was the proper way to enjoy it, and then turned his mind back to the problem.

            Yes. He wanted to help heal the rift between Muggleborns and pure-bloods. It was the big gaping wound in their world that had never gone away. It wasn’t as bad as it had been during the war, but that wasn’t saying much.

            Harry smiled grimly. In fact, not saying much was precisely the problem. Everyone pretended everything was fine, references to blood politics in the papers were few, and people sought for some other explanation when a pure-blood got away with the same crimes that would see a Muggleborn in Azkaban for at least a few months. The tension had sunk under the surface. For a lot of people who had lived through the days of pure-bloods accusing Muggleborns of stealing wands—like Umbridge had—that was enough.

            But Harry knew the simmer was still there, and that meant another Voldemort could come along and exploit it. He had fought the war to get Voldemort to stop hunting him, but he had only been able to do that because his Muggleborn mother had sacrificed her life for him, and she had only died in the first place because of Voldemort’s determination to kill the prophecy child who could stop him, and he had only wanted to kill Harry in the first place because his parents defied him, and Lily and James had only fought because Voldemort’s plan to kill all the Muggleborns and put the pure-bloods in control was frankly insane.

            So. Everything was all tangled and tied together, the way he and Malfoy were. Nothing could be separated.

            It’ll piss Malfoy off something fierce, Harry thought, as he tipped the last of his brandy down his throat.

            Then he grinned. I knew there was something else I liked about this plan.

*

            “O-of course, Mr. Potter, if you want to. But what exactly do you want to see?”

            Harry smiled. He thought Miss Mulligans, the primary school teacher in Ottery St. Catchpole whom he’d contacted, was a breath away from calling him “Mr. Chosen One,” but she had the wit to ask a good question. And she stood, shivering a little in her bland grey robes, in front of the door of the school, as if to prove that she would let anything happen before she’d let him go in and disrupt the children’s learning for no reason.

            “I want to see what they’re learning,” he said quietly. “Hear it. I know that lots of different magical children come to Hogwarts with lots of different educational backgrounds.” Miss Mulligans seemed to relax a little, and Harry nodded. He was proud of that particular phrase. It sounded like something an adult would have said. “Some of them are taught at home by their parents, and some by other relatives, and some in the primary schools, and some not at all. I know what it’s like to come in with no education in magic at all, and I can’t question every single set of parents, but I can look at the schools.”

            Miss Mulligans nodded, then paused. Her chin came out, and she moved her wand into sight, out from a fold in her robes. “To what purpose?”

            “I want to see how hard it would be to integrate Muggleborn children into them,” Harry said. “Or children whose magic is too weak to attend Hogwarts but who can learn a few simple spells. If necessary, I hope they could come here, and other places like it. Or I could found a school myself.”

            Miss Mulligans’s prim, sensible mouth fell a little open that time. “But, Mr. Potter, that’s not done!” she exclaimed. “Bringing in Muggleborn children would mean telling their parents about magic years ahead of time, and the poor children who can barely manage household charms would feel so inferior next to some of our students!”

            “Keeping them apart doesn’t work either,” Harry said, gently but insistently. “It just makes the children who do learn magic feel superior to the ones who don’t.” He thought of Malfoy at eleven, so sure that Harry would know what Quidditch was and the Houses were, so sure that he was better than everyone, like Hermione, who came in without years of knowledge behind them. Hermione had worked to make herself a part of wizarding culture; Ron was effortlessly a part of it; and Harry…

            Harry grimaced and pushed the question away for later consideration. I don’t know that I ever had a chance to be a normal part of anything, but I don’t want to pity myself.

            “Sometimes,” Miss Mulligans said, standing up straight and folding her arms in front of her as if she thought they would form an impenetrable barrier that way, “one must maintain a sense of superiority and tradition in order to get anything done.”

            Harry raised his eyebrows and came back from his inner thoughts to attend to the conversation that he’d started. “What is being done here?” he asked. “Think about it. Whose purposes does it serve to have pure-blood or half-blood children trained in their magic, and Muggleborn children not trained at all, and scrambling to catch up?”

            Miss Mulligans looked a little uncertain, but then gave him a conspiratorial smile. “Come, Mr. Potter, you can’t make me think that you believe in that myth about the inferior intellectual capacities of Muggleborns! Everyone knows how smart your Muggleborn friend is.”

            “I don’t believe in any such thing,” Harry said calmly. “What I do believe in is a disadvantage handed to a bunch of people for no good reason, and although some of them can overcome that disadvantage, there’s no reason it should exist. Consider what my friend could have done if she’d been able to take some of the things she studied for granted, if she hadn’t spent hours trying to learn and understand the cultural context before she could even grasp the importance of concepts like the Statute of Secrecy.”

            “It can’t be done,” Miss Mulligans said.

            “Not by an ordinary person, maybe not,” Harry said, and smiled at her. “But the Boy-Who-Lived has a lot of political clout. I think I ought to start using it for something.” He gestured to the school behind her. “Can I have a look?”

            For a long moment, he thought she would continue to refuse, but in the end, she dropped her arms and stepped to the side so that he could get around her, giving him a glare all the while. “You can’t change people’s natures,” she whispered. “And the way that we educate children is a part of human nature.”

            Harry ignored that ridiculous statement, and walked into the school. He had a lot to learn, and maybe everything he wanted to do wouldn’t be possible. But staying away from things that made people uncomfortable wasn’t a skill that had ever come naturally to him.

            As Hermione said, if you were making the right people uncomfortable, then you were doing the right thing.

*

            “Harry.”

            And there was Malfoy, sitting in the chair in front of his fireplace, standing up as Harry came in through the front door. Harry stood a moment with his hand clenching around his wand and his mouth opening in a snarl. Malfoy would probably never know how close he had come to dying in that moment.

            Harry exhaled at last and lifted his hand. “Malfoy,” he said, crossing over towards his fireplace and not looking towards Malfoy, who he knew would have his hand extended. “Determined to show me that you can still break through my wards?”

            There was a long pause, and then Malfoy said, “Fuck, yes, you would interpret it that way, wouldn’t you? I’m sorry. The only thing I was thinking about was showing you that I was serious and still wanted your attention. Well, and a place where we could have a private conversation instead of a public one.”

            Harry walked into the kitchen and poured himself a glass of Firewhisky before he answered. It gave him time to get his shaking and his temper under control. He turned around, sipping, and considered Malfoy.

            Malfoy wore soft, fine, pale dress robes that Harry had to admit looked good on him—not that that excused breaking into Harry’s home again. At the moment, he stared into the flames and looked a lot like a scolded little kid. Harry worried his lip between his teeth for a moment, then sighed and put the drink down.

            “What did you want to talk to me about?” he asked.

            Malfoy turned and beamed hesitantly at him. “Does this mean I’m forgiven?” he asked, eyes wide and appealing.

            “Let’s not talk about that for right now,” Harry said. “I don’t know myself. But I am curious as to what could be important enough to make you break in again.”

            “I want to—you said what most upset you was the way that another Auror’s files got destroyed,” Malfoy said, and now he was swishing his hand through the air by his side, in random patterns. Harry decided that was all right as long as he wasn’t carrying a wand. “I think I came up with a way to make it up to her. But I wanted your opinion before I did it, in case it upset you again.”

            Harry smiled in spite of himself. “In case it upset me?” he asked. “You don’t care all that much about upsetting her?”

            Malfoy looked up, eyes clear and as honest as Harry had ever seen them. All right, perhaps more honest than he had ever seen them. “No,” he responded, gently. “I’m still who I am, and you still matter to me more than most other people. If it makes her happy, fine, I can be satisfied with that. But my main concern is the effect it will have on you, and thus on me.”

            Harry studied him. On the one hand, as he could almost hear Hermione arguing, he didn’t know if he could live with someone whose compassion would always be conditional, who would value himself and Harry so much more than everyone else.

            On the other hand, he understood the impulse. He had quit the Aurors to spare himself aggravation and because of concerns connected with Malfoy, and consideration of how many people might suffer that way, because he wasn’t able to help them any longer, hadn’t stopped him.

            We can meet in the middle, maybe, approaching it from opposite directions.

            “What did you have in mind?” he asked.

*

            unneeded: I like that line!

            Harry does feel kind of sorry for the other Aurors, but he’s accepted that he can’t change everything for everybody, and moved on.

            SP777: I intended it to be romance! At the moment, it seems to be breaking free in different ways.
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