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.

Chapter List
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Chapter Eighteen—Reluctant Partners
“I didn’t know you were so bothered about blood prejudice.”
Harry ignored Malfoy. He could still hear him behind him, even kneeling the way Harry was with his head in the fireplace, but he had to concentrate on the conversation with Auror Flowing that was coming up, not Malfoy’s random bitching. Malfoy had enough to occupy him with Harry’s first plan for the school that he’d scribbled down on several sheets of parchment, and Harry knew he would make lots of criticisms, too. He might as well ignore them now, since he was sure Malfoy would repeat them again and again over the next several days.
Flowing, who had appeared when he called the main fireplace in the Department, stared at him blankly, and then shook her head. “Aur—I mean, Mr. Potter? Is there something wrong?” She looked as though she was ready to shrug the blame off on someone else if so, and Harry couldn’t blame her. She would have had enough of being blamed for what she couldn’t prevent after Malfoy’s stunt with the owl spell.
“I wanted you to know that a folder with copies of your memos and other files that were lost in the destruction is on its way to you,” Harry said carefully.
Flowing stared at him. Then she rose and backed away. Harry opened his mouth, wondering if she had gone to fetch someone and end this dangerous conversation, but he heard a distant bang, and Flowing hurried back to the fireplace. Evidently she’d just closed the door.
“How did you manage that?” she whisper-hissed. “Even though you could do a lot of things, why didn’t you do it earlier, if you could?”
Harry inclined his head. That was a fair question, and he knew that he couldn’t answer all of it. Like hell was he about to say anything about Herbert or the Archives. That would plug a hole in the Ministry’s security, yes, but he no longer owed them any loyalty.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “Matters took a little while to get this far. But I promise, it’s all the files that you made for any kind of public consumption. If you wrote private records, they might not be there.” There had to be a limit even to Herbert’s powers, after all. “But you’ll have back what you need, and you can show them to Head Auror Thorin, if he’s still talking to you about how this is your fault.”
“He is,” Flowing said. “He’s Thorin.” She hesitated, and nibbled her lip. Then she said, “I don’t blame you for quitting. Every time I think he can’t get more obsessed with paper and power, he does.”
Harry nodded. “Maybe, once upon a time, we would have needed a Head Auror like that. Now I just think of him as a prick.”
Flowing laughed, a sharp little bark like a seal’s. “That’s a good way to think of him.” She spent a moment looking into Harry’s eyes, which surprised him. He’d thought she would thank him or end the conversation by now. “How much do you want for it?” she asked abruptly. “What’s the price?”
“For getting you your files back?” Harry shook his head. “I didn’t do it to create a debt, but to repay one. You would never have ended up in trouble in the first place if my tactics against the criminal I was chasing hadn’t backfired.”
Flowing stared at him for so long that Harry thought the conversation would become impossible, and was about to bid her farewell. But then she said, “You’re with him, aren’t you? Or you captured him. The—one you were hunting.” She glanced over her shoulder, probably towards the door Harry had heard her shut.
“Yes,” Harry said gently. “I did what I couldn’t do as long as I stayed in the Aurors. You don’t need to worry about it rebounding back on you, though. I promise. That’s over and done with.”
Flowing shook her head. “I wasn’t worried about that,” she said, though from the way her eyes tightened, Harry thought she was lying. “I just wanted to know, and to say that I think you should think carefully before you trust him.”
“Believe me, I know,” Harry said, and smiled at her. “Thanks for your concern.” He hadn’t realized that she wouldn’t hate and resent him for getting her files destroyed; it was a relief to find out she didn’t, though.
Flowing gave him a little wave of her fingers, and then shut down the Floo connection. Harry leaned back from the fireplace with the satisfaction of a job well-done. He just wished he could have seen Thorin’s face when Flowing showed him the replacements for all her files.
Still, perhaps, if he was good, Flowing would share her memory of Thorin’s expression with him in a Pensieve someday.
“I can’t believe that you care this much about this.”
Harry stretched his arms above his head and made sure that all the muscles in his back were fully relaxed before he turned to face Malfoy. As expected, he had a sheaf of parchment in his hand and was glaring at Harry. Harry gave him a faint smile in return. “Why not? What is it that makes it hard to believe, that I can gather this amount of research in this amount of time, or that I can write articulate sentences?”
“The sentences I’ll put down to Auror training, and not to your general brain damage,” Malfoy said, for a moment smiling more like the criminal Harry had chased than the man Harry had willingly let into his home this morning.
“Thanks,” Harry said, and rolled his eyes. Malfoy glanced down at the parchment in his hand so he wouldn’t have to see.
“I mean,” Malfoy said, “that you haven’t struck me as a warrior against blood prejudice in the past, but here you paint yourself as nothing but. You can’t have any notion how long and exhausting a struggle like this is going to be.”
Harry kept smiling, but inwardly he wanted to laugh. So Malfoy was his, was caught. He had thought this might happen. Malfoy would complain and criticize and maybe even hate him before this was all over, yes, but he would fight the battle at Harry’s side. Because he couldn’t walk away from Harry any more than Harry could turn away from him.
“I do know,” he said, more gently. “That’s one reason that I wasn’t sure you would want to be with me enough to even come over here and read the documents this morning.”
Malfoy turned fully to face him, arms folded and chin up in a way that said he had heard Harry’s silent laughter and probably had his own version. Harry winced a little in spite of himself, and stood to attention. In his own way, Malfoy was more intimidating than Thorin. He could have had a deeper career in politics if he’d wanted one.
“I think you need someone to keep you from killing yourself with battles you can’t win,” Malfoy said. “Someone to make sure that you still have enough energy left over for other things. And that’s me.”
Harry smiled, even as he felt his blood accelerate. “I don’t think you quite understand what I’m doing here, Malfoy,” he said. “I won’t give up no matter what you say. You can’t persuade me out of it.”
“Idiot,” Malfoy said. “You can’t win in a day, either. I mean that you need someone who can teach you to relax, to compromise when necessary—and you’ll need to do that on occasion, Potter,” he added as Harry opened his mouth. “If you don’t think so, you really know nothing about this at all, and the most responsible thing to do would be to never let you start it.”
“I can compromise on something like what subjects get taught at the schools,” Harry said. “Not on their existence, or on the idea of teaching Muggleborn children at all.”
Malfoy made an impatient noise, and strode towards him, circling around him at an easy pace. Harry, with an effort, kept his hands off his wand. It was exactly the same sort of thing many Dark wizards he’d chased would have done to make him nervous, and although Malfoy only belonged to one category now and not the other…well, it was still hard.
“Of course I was talking about the first kind of compromise, Potter,” Malfoy snapped, halting in front of him. “You propose everything at first, including those bargains that you think you’ll never get, and then you look magnanimous when you back away and seem to give in to what they’re asking for.”
Harry nodded seriously. “Then I only have one question.”
“What’s that?” Malfoy relaxed the tiniest bit, rocking back on his heels and staring at Harry. Harry thought he might be fighting a smile.
“What does ‘magnanimous’ mean?”
Malfoy’s frown only lasted until he saw the smile that Harry was trying to hide. Then he reached out and struck him, hard, on the back of the head. Harry reached up and caught his wrist before he could do it a second time, to show that he could, and let the smile out.
*
“There is no way that this could work.”
Harry wondered for a moment what Malfoy’s tactic would be, in the face of that. He had said they needed to begin as if they wanted everything and then back away, yielding what they had never expected to win, but in the face of the flat refusal of Julius Pembroke-Wiltshire, the Wizengamot member in charge of Education, there wasn’t any place for them to start.
Malfoy half-leaned forwards across the space that separated their chairs from Pembroke-Wiltshire’s gleaming ebony desk. His hand fell briefly on top of Harry’s and squeezed. Harry turned his hand up so that his fingers brushed Malfoy’s wrist. That was the signal they had agreed upon that Malfoy could be the one who began the retaliation.
It was so strange, Harry thought. Malfoy had gone from not realizing why breaking through Harry’s wards could look bad to being absurdly solicitous for Harry’s opinion and what he wanted Malfoy to do.
Then again, Malfoy did seem to take seriously the idea that Harry might leave him if he wasn’t a little more considerate.
And this is ridiculous, to think about this—whatever it is—in the middle of such an important meeting, Harry thought, and focused his attention on Pembroke-Wiltshire’s face again. He was frowning, looking down at them across a long and broad nose with eyes like an owl’s. Harry waited, and let Malfoy take over with smooth voice and smoother persuasion.
“Sir,” he murmured, “I assure you that we have thought of the advantages of this, and surely one of them is obvious?” He paused, as though inviting Pembroke-Wiltshire to make the contribution, and continued only when the man’s face had flushed red for a few seconds and he hadn’t answered. “This way, we can teach Muggleborns our way of thinking.”
Pembroke-Wiltshire blinked and then nodded slowly. Harry made a mental note never to tell Hermione in detail about this meeting.
“As it is,” Malfoy continued, “they come into the magical world prepared to despise us. We seem strange and inconsistent to them, because so much of what renders us native to magic is taught in those precious years before we go to Hogwarts. And so they react against us, and many of them return to the Muggle world when their education is done, wasting the time and money we’ve invested in them. This way, we can keep them in our world from the very beginning. Change them. Teach them our ways, instead of asking them to rebel against eleven years of training.”
“The parents would never agree,” Pembroke-Wiltshire said, but in the tones of someone who wanted to be convinced, from the way he swept his hand over Harry’s parchments in front of him.
“I don’t know about that,” Malfoy said. He could sound smug without a smirk on his face, something Harry hadn’t known. “The Muggle parents are as susceptible as magical people are to a judicious mixture of bribery, flattery, and fear. And they know so much less than we do,” he added, watching Pembroke-Wiltshire.
Harry raised his eyebrows and watched as Malfoy turned blood prejudice into a weapon of their cause. For sure, it wasn’t something he would have thought to do.
(And something else he would probably have to prevent Hermione from finding out about).
For a moment, Pembroke-Wiltshire sat still. Then he nodded and said, “There is something to be said for the way that pure-bloods think.”
Malfoy nodded back and said nothing more, his hands clasped in his lap and an absurdly saintly look on his face, as though he longed to hear Pembroke-Wiltshire’s thoughts more than to express his own.
Pembroke-Wiltshire shuffled the papers some more, and then cleared his throat. “As long as we can speak of what details we will offer the Muggle parents, and what other kinds of offers we will make to the pure-blood ones,” he said, “then I will give this my blessing.”
“Are you sure it’ll be that simple?” Harry had to ask, because this conversation hadn’t gone according to the plan that Malfoy had suggested at all. Then again, perhaps Pembroke-Wiltshire was simply greedier than most of those they’d have to convince.
Malfoy’s elbow dug into his side, but Harry didn’t take his gaze away from the Wizengamot member’s face. If they were just going to have do this all over again later because the apparent conversion wasn’t real, then Harry wanted to know now.
Pembroke-Wiltshire gave him a lazy smile. “There will be some parents who won’t object to their children being raised alongside Mudbloods as long as they have a decent education. And as long as some of the things the wild children learn point to the importance of pure-blood heritage and culture.”
Harry smiled. “Then we have a deal.”
Pembroke-Wiltshire started to smile back, but froze when he saw the not-at-all-casual way that Harry’s wand was pointed at his desk, or at least the portion of his desk where his legs would be. His eyes darted back up to Harry’s. “You don’t work for the Ministry anymore,” he said, threat or prayer, Harry couldn’t tell. “You have no idea what I can do to you now that you don’t have the Auror Department’s protection.”
“You have no idea what kind of protection I could buy if I wanted,” Harry said softly, “by offering nothing more than my name. And this is what I want. If you want to work with us, fine. If you hold some less than honorable motives for it, fine. I want schools established and working, and someone who provides me the means to accomplish that—I won’t question every motive he has for doing it. But you’re not going to express that same sort of contempt in front of me again. Or say that name.”
Pembroke-Wiltshire shook his head, but Harry thought it was more a denial that this was happening than anything else. “How can you be that ignorant? You know how politics work in the Ministry.”
“Yes, the ability to say anything in private while doing what you should in public,” Harry said evenly. “But I was watching the expression on your face, sir. You didn’t even hesitate before you spoke that insult, even though you know very well what my heritage is. That makes me think you might say it in public, too, and undermine everything. So I’ll just protect your investment, and mine, and make it impossible to say now, all right?”
Pembroke-Wiltshire swallowed, and swallowed again. “Yes,” he whispered at last. “Yes, you crazy bastard, all right, if you want to put it like that—”
Harry smiled again, and glanced at Malfoy. Malfoy was watching him with a steady, fascinated gaze, and made no motion, which meant that Harry could decide that there wasn’t any reason after all to give Pembroke-Wiltshire the bribe they had decided on. He stood up and extended his hand. “Nice doing business with you.”
Trembling, Pembroke-Wiltshire reached out. But Harry didn’t have a blade in his hand, and in a moment, the man seemed to see that, and shook. Then Malfoy shook with him, as well, and they walked out of there and into the dim, cool corridor from which the Wizengamot’s offices branched off.
Malfoy said nothing. Harry waited, and they Apparated back to his house, and Malfoy still said nothing. Harry finally sighed, rolled his eyes, shut the door behind him, and said, “Well?”
Malfoy turned to him, and yes, his eyes were saying something, so large and bright that Harry stared in spite of himself, and then Malfoy’s hand was on his arm, and his fingers were closing down, and something thick and warm stirred to life in Harry.
“I didn’t think he would be that stupid, so I didn’t guard against him saying that word the way I should have,” Malfoy admitted. “But, Harry. You were brilliant.”
He pulled him into the kind of hungry kiss that Harry had to admit was pretty brilliant in and of itself, his hands moving up and down, and Harry shuddered—
And ignored the voice of Hermione in his head, and yielded.
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