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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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Chapter Seventeen—Slow, Like Snakes
            “You seem to be happier.”
            Harry smiled at Hermione. She was sitting on a chair she’d conjured in his new room, and Ron sat on the bed. Harry had a second chair near the base of the waterfall. It had taken a lot of enchantments to make sure that the water wasn’t going to rot the wood or put mold on it, but it was totally worth it. Especially the little, fresh, cold current he could feel caressing the back of his neck.
            “I am,” Harry said simply, and leaned forwards to shuffle through some of the books Draco had delivered to him. Draco had combed through the Malfoy libraries to find everything he could about taming magic talents that showed up spontaneously, or accidental magic that lasted beyond childhood. The results were diverse enough that Harry knew he was going to spend a lot of time researching.
            “Why?”
            Harry blinked at Hermione, and glanced at Ron. Ron’s silent, watching demeanor told Harry that Hermione spoke for him, too. Harry turned back to Hermione with a slight frown. “Why? Because I’ve discussed things with the Malfoys and this finally feels like home, of course.”
            “I did hear Malfoy talking to you before we came upstairs,” said Hermione. “He said that he thinks the plan will work, and he was going to talk to his father about it. What plan?”
            Harry knew he didn’t have to have secrets from his friends, but still, he hesitated. Maybe because he knew that they still distrusted Draco a bit, maybe because they had supported his plan to go to the Muggle world when they saw how determined he was on it, and this would feel like changing his mind.
            But in the end, he told the truth. “Our plan to take revenge on the goblins.”
            Ron whistled, long and low. “Are you sure you should be doing that, mate? It’s what got you in all the trouble in the first place, after all.”
            Harry had to roll his eyes at that. “It was not. Yes, I’ll grant you that the goblins got angry about something I did, but that wasn’t vengeance on my part. They could have solved it a lot of ways, and instead they decided to do something so despicable and pathetic that—”
            He clenched his teeth. He was shaking. That mildly surprised him, but he supposed it was easier to feel calm when Draco was around.
            “You don’t have to tell us if you’d rather not,” said Ron, who was watching him closely now.
            “No, you asked and you have a right to know,” Harry said, shaking his head. “Especially if I call on you for help, or you manage to think of something I didn’t and I want you to keep me out of trouble.” He smiled at Ron.
            “What kind of revenge?” Hermione was the one who asked the question that probably mattered most, the way she usually was.
            Harry cocked his head at her. “One that threatens what they love most.”
            He wanted to draw it out a little, tease them, but Hermione was too quick for that. “Their money?” she asked, and then lowered her voice to a hiss, as though goblin spies might be hiding around the corner. “How are you going to threaten that—take that? I agree with Ron that it would be too dangerous, and you shouldn’t try.”
            “It’s not theft,” Harry said. “Not exactly. What Draco thinks I should do is tame my magic and learn to wield it so that I can destroy stone and metal as well as things like cloth and blood and bone. Then I can threaten their money.”
            “Not unless you sneak into the bank,” Ron said, lifting his head as if he scented something on the wind. “And, sorry, mate, I refuse to do that again.”
            Harry smiled. Draco’s help or not, it was comforting to remember that his friends would always stand by him. “No. There are rituals that would let me do it from a distance.” He laid his hand on the pile of books in front of him. “But I have to get through these to make sure that I know how to control the magic in the first place, and that’s going to be a job and a half.”
            “Do you want some help?” Of course Hermione was already in motion, reaching for the pile of books as though she didn’t care that they came from a Malfoy library and might contain things that she’d rather not read.
            And she probably didn’t, Harry thought. That was another nice thing about his friends. “That would be great. I know that these books have something to do with taming wild magic, but they don’t all cover the same kind. And I don’t know how I’m going to locate my kind among all those pages.” He rifled through the top book on the pile. It was at least thick enough for the papers to make a licking, hungry sound as they traveled by.
            Hermione arranged the books on the bed and held up her wand. “This spell should do the trick. Comperio organic magic!”
            Half the books glowed red, and the other half jumped off the bed and rolled about on the floor. Harry jumped himself, at the noise, while Ron only looked resigned. “She does this all the time at home,” he told Harry, with a small roll of his eyes.
            Harry glanced at the books, wondering if Hermione’s spell had separated them into two piles based on which contained information and which didn’t, but then realized that it was searching them in two different ways, instead. The ones on the bed flipped rapidly through their pages, and then settled either on an open one or with their covers shut, which presumably indicated they didn’t have anything to offer him. The ones on the floor piled on top of each other, with a gleaming, gold-threaded bookmark sticking out of the tomes at a certain point. Hermione gestured with her wand to the one on the top, the thick one Harry had already flipped through. “These are ordered by relevance. It looks like you had the answer at your fingertips already, and you didn’t know it.”
            Harry plucked the book from the pile. Relevance or not, the pile was a little shaky, as if it could tip over at any second. Relevance didn’t take things like relative size into account. “Thank you.”
            “You’re welcome,” said Hermione, and settled back with a smile that she turned on several different places in the room, as though the hidden audience this time were people waiting for her and watching, ready to applaud.
*
            “What nonsense is this that I hear you encouraging Potter with, Draco?”
            Draco stared blankly at his father for a second. He’d been so busy reading about the kind of rituals that the Dark Lord had conducted, the ones that would let someone practice magic from a distance, that he had lost track of time and his surroundings. It was as if his father had appeared out of nowhere.
            “Mother told you, I suppose,” he said at last, and settled his book beside him. He hadn’t talked to Narcissa in detail about his plan, but he’d hardly been able to avoid saying something when he brought a book with him to the lunch table.
            “She told me the broad outlines. I worked out the details by noting which books were missing from the library.” Lucius took a measured step towards Draco, across the threshold of Draco’s bedroom. He almost never did that. He said that his son’s chambers were private and should remain that way. “Are you mad?”
            “There’s no good solution to this,” said Draco, with a calm that came to him as a gift. He certainly wasn’t able to reach for it and command it ordinarily, but when he really needed it, there it was. “The goblins would hate us if they found out the charade, but once the year ends, there’s nothing to keep them from taking Harry back into slavery if he stays in the wizarding world and they change their minds.”
            “Goblins keep their word.” Lucius’s fingers had tightened on his wand. “They must, or there would be no trusting them.”
            Draco had to snort when he thought about the endless newspaper articles that had appeared once the goblins suggested taking Harry into slavery. They had discussed it in tones of fascination and scandal and surprise and sorrow, but no one had ever expressed outrage. “They proposed taking one of the most powerful and beloved heroes of the war—well, he should have been beloved—as a slave, and no one really tried to stop them. I think you’re wrong about the power relationship there, Father, and what direction it flows.”
            There was a long hesitation. Then Lucius stepped fully inside and shut the door, leaning with a resigned expression against the wall beside it. Draco waited. This was different from anything his father had ever done before.
            “I want you to think about what you’re doing,” Lucius whispered. “Disappearing into the middle of a long fight. Do you know how long? Do you have the slightest idea? Do you know what might happen even if the goblins don’t find out about the charade?”
            “Actually, I don’t. Why don’t you tell me?”
            Draco knew Lucius was going to anyway, and at least this way, it would seem like it was at Draco’s invitation instead of something forced on him. From the pause and slight narrowing of his eyes, Lucius knew that, too. But he proceeded.
            “They could take away our vaults. They could decide that since Potter hasn’t technically served his year, they’re going to take him away and make him finish it, and you could go with him, since you’re the one who helped him to avoid the punishment.”
            “I’m the one?” Draco hadn’t meant to interrupt, he’d meant to let Lucius have his narrow-brained say, but he couldn’t help it. “I’m not the one who sacrificed a Malfoy family vault to save Harry Potter.”
            His father opened his mouth as if he would respond, and then shut it tight again. Draco nodded. “We’re all in this together,” he said, as gently as he could, because he knew how much his father would hate the reminder. “We intervened to rescue Harry, and that means that we have to bear the costs of such an action.”
            “I did not know the costs would be this.”
            “But, Father,” Draco said, and lowered his voice a little, “weren’t you the one who taught me to think carefully about all the costs of an action before I committed myself to it, because later I wouldn’t be able to back out?”
            Lucius abruptly turned his back. Draco thought he would march straight out of Draco’s rooms again, but instead, he apparently needed to commune with the wall. After a few long seconds of breathing, when Draco, too, held his breath, his father turned around and looked Draco in the eye.
            “I think that you are getting carried away by the admittedly powerful notion of saving someone you owe a life-debt to,” said Lucius. “Why not pause and think about whether Potter needs this, or if you are only doing something that appeals to you and not something that will benefit him?”
            “He’s been moping around the house,” said Draco. “There’s really no question in my mind that he needs this.”
            His father gave him a smile that was more like a grimace. “There is in mine.”
            “I know.” Draco looked down with a fluttering of his eyelashes that he thought he saw his father scowl at from the corner of his eye. “But there’s no way to be safe, Father, not if he stays in the wizarding world. Someone could come and question him and harass him. We have to terrify people. We have to show them that Harry will use his magic against them if they bother him.”
            “That part might be no problem. But wizards are one thing, and goblins are another.”
            Draco blinked, and something he had never known came to him like a gift. “You’re scared of them, aren’t you?” he whispered.
            “Scared of what?” His father was holding himself so stiffly that Draco thought he could push him over and he’d shatter.
            “You’re scared of the goblins,” Draco clarified. He felt a little dazed and yet impressed at the same time. His father had worked against his fear in order to free someone that he felt he owed a life-debt to. It was impressive. “You think that angering them can have worse consequences even than angering Harry when he’s not in control of his life-destroying magic.”
            “Given that Potter hasn’t brought down my house around my ears yet, I would say that I am not wrong to be calm around him.”
            “But neither have the goblins.” Draco leaned forwards persuasively. “We interfered once already. We’ve fooled them so far. Why not keep doing it? Harry doesn’t ever have to use his magic during this year, you know. But when the year’s up and we have to let him go outside the house, then there might still be people—or goblins—who are insistent on bothering him. The threat is the best defense.”
            Lucius was still, pale, thoughtful, for a moment. Then he said, “What happens if the goblins decide to take revenge on the Malfoy vaults because they know that Malfoys helped Potter?”
            “They’re going to look indescribably petty,” said Draco, with an unconcerned little shrug. It didn’t bother him as much as his father evidently thought it should, and Draco knew he should clarify why. “Besides, I’ll already have removed all the Malfoy money from the bank, just in case they think of trying anything.”
            Lucius leaned back against the wall with a little grunt of surprise, his eyes on Draco. Draco smiled at him. “Did you think I hadn’t thought of that?” The emotion that filled him this time was an absurd tenderness, for his father as much as anything else. “Of course I don’t want to be poor. I’ll take the money out from the Malfoy vaults before Harry starts threatening the goblins.”
            “You mean that I will take it out,” Lucius corrected him.
            “I thought you didn’t want to have any part in our plan,” Draco said, and he knew he was baiting him, but honestly, he couldn’t help it. “That means I would have to play the part of the head of the family, and protect our wealth.”
            Lucius gave him a cool enough look that Draco lifted a hand in front of him in instinctive defense. “I am still the head of the family. And the more I think of it, the more I believe that you are likely right. The goblins are not like wizards. They do not think the payment of a life-debt sufficient to end their engagement with that debt. They would believe that we took responsibility of some kind for Potter, and they would feel free to extend their enmity against him against us, as well.”
            “Yes, sir,” said Draco, and bowed his head. As long as his father would do what he could to protect Harry and help them with their plan, then Draco was satisfied. He didn’t need to be the one to take out the money from the vaults, as long as it was done.
            “Good,” said Lucius, and stood frowning at Draco a bit longer, as if he would have said something else. Draco held his breath. Then his father abruptly stepped up to him, and tapped his cane on the floor in that way that said Draco had to pay attention. Draco looked up.
            “I may not understand your intimacy with Potter,” Lucius told him. “I may not like it. I may think that it is strange and not worth paying the amount of time and attention for it that you have.”
            Draco maintained his calm expression, but his hand did clench, down at his side. Lucius could have no idea what it meant to Draco. He hadn’t been the one that Harry turned to and held and kissed.
            “But I do know that what one values is worth fighting for.” Lucius drew back far enough that he could survey Draco with a meditative eye. “That you are willing to fight for this, to risk our money, to take on the cause of someone who was a virtual stranger…that pleases me.”
            “In spite of the virtual stranger part?” Draco asked, fascinated. His parents had so often told him only to take risks like this for family.
            “In spite of it. Because it signals your commitment all the more strongly.” For a second, Lucius reached out and rested his hand on Draco’s shoulder.
            Draco bowed his head. Lucius turned and paced slowly out of his rooms, and Draco sat there in silence for a time before he could go back to reading his books on those rituals of distance magic.
*
            “I think I have something to show you.”
            Draco looked up in surprise. He and Harry had retreated to Draco’s bedroom with one accord after dinner, when Harry’s friends had ended their visit and Draco’s parents had retreated in another direction. Draco couldn’t stop looking at the way Harry moved through his rooms, the way the colors of his hair and eyes stood out, as though he was cutting the air around him into specific shapes.
            “You think?” Draco put the book he was trying to read aside. “This ought to be good.”
            “Shut up,” said Harry mildly, but hesitated one more time. When Draco was about to shove him in impatience, Harry finally took a deep breath and reached into one of his pockets. He came out with a jagged rock, an ordinary one, one that he had probably picked up in the gardens. Draco frowned at it nonetheless. The house-elves shouldn’t be letting such common rocks lie around the gardens.
            “Will you stop scowling at me like that?” Harry muttered. “I’m already nervous enough.”
            Draco suspected it would be useless to try to explain both what he was actually scowling at and the standards that made him do it. He leaned back on his bed and flapped a hand instead. “Go on. Show me.”
            Harry frowned at the stone himself, which Draco was going to remember and tell him about later, and then he abruptly closed his hand around it. Draco blinked. I thought he was going to do something magical, not use his strength on it.
            But Harry gave a deep groan, and there was a vibration that seemed to pass through the bed on which Draco sat and the walls and the floor but not through the air, and then Harry gave a deep sigh and opened his hand. Dust trickled out, dust that Draco knew no spell could have created without a wand. He let himself gape.
            “It’s different,” said Harry, and sank onto the floor behind him, his head hanging as he panted. “How I destroy non-organic things versus organic things, I mean. Hermione was the one who suggested that maybe I couldn’t turn metal or stone into sludge and ashes, and after that, it was easy.”
            As jealous as Draco felt that one of Harry’s friends had been the one to suggest the solution, he could at least smile. “That’s amazing.”
            He thought it was simple praise. But it made Harry’s head come flying up, and his eyes lock on Draco as if he’d said something startling. Then Draco thought he had something on his face. He raised a hand and touched the corner of his jaw instinctively.
            Still staring, Harry stood up and made his way forwards. Draco looked up at him and made a small noise. He didn’t think he’d really meant to make it.
            Harry pulled him slowly to his feet. Draco stood there with him, nose to nose, and Harry whispered, “You looked as though you meant it. That it was really amazing.”
            “Of course it was,” said Draco, and feeling he needed to do something to regain control of the situation—not that he really understood what the situation was—he reached out and put a comforting hand on Harry’s shoulder. “I understand what a struggle it probably was to master that magic. I was applauding your commitment and the result.”
            Harry only smiled as if he understood something that Draco didn’t, and then reached out and cupped his jaw and brought him in for a kiss. Draco submitted to it without a murmur. He let his tongue stretch out and explore Harry’s mouth, this time, and Harry pulled back from him with a shake of his head and a gasp.
            “That was wonderful,” he whispered.
            I’ll make it more wonderful yet, Draco thought, and leaned against Harry in silent contentment.
*
delia cerrano: It’s difficult for Harry not to care for someone who thinks he was treated unfairly and wants to help him. So far, he’s only really known that from his friends.
SP777: Thank you!
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The Long Defeat