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Narcissa Militant	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 17885 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 3
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I am not making any money from this story.

Chapter List
- 17
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Thank you again for all the reviews!
Part Seven
Narcissa leaned slowly forwards and considered the mirror that lay on the table before her. Sirius, hiding in the Forbidden Forest during Harry’s confrontation with Voldemort, had recorded the whole incident in this magical mirror. Narcissa had waited to do anything with it, not sure whether it would be needed when there were so many witnesses.
It looked now as if it would be needed. Fudge was hysterically insisting that Harry was still lying, and the Daily Prophet went along with him—less, Narcissa thought, because of sycophancy than because conflict was good for its sales. And none of the witnesses at Hogwarts had spoken up in any numbers.
But Narcissa thought she had another way.
And it would tie into the beginning of her campaign to free Lucius from Voldemort’s influence, as well.
Narcissa stood, smiled, swirled her cloak around her shoulders, and strode for the fireplace. “Minister of Magic’s office!”
*
Fudge’s lackey, a thin, nervous woman whom Narcissa thought might have been hired because she looked the opposite of Umbridge in every way, didn’t keep Narcissa long in the plush waiting room. Malfoy money still greased enough of Fudge’s wheels to ensure that. Narcissa gave Fudge’s inquiring stare a smile of her own, and settled into place on the chair in front of his desk, inclining her head. “Hello, Minister. Are you well?”
“Of course, Mrs. Malfoy. Of course.” Fudge had started playing with the rim of his bowler hat. “You’re, er, here with a message from Lucius?”
Narcissa nearly chucked as she realized what was going on. Fudge thought she was here with a threat to withdraw monetary support. “Not at all,” she said, and smoothly crossed one leg over the other. Distracted and upset as he was, Fudge’s eyes followed the motion of her leg under her robe. “It’s my message.”
That got his attention enough to make him pay attention to her face, with some stops along the way. “Oh?”
Narcissa nodded, earnest and patient. “Yes. I wanted to talk to you about leaving my son alone.”
“I don’t think I’ve ever met young Draco for long,” Fudge said, and put his hat down to frown at her. “Can’t think of what I’ve done to him!”
“I meant my other son,” Narcissa said. Fudge maintained a facade of perfect blankness that Narcissa knew wasn’t put on. With an inward roll of her eyes only, she said delicately, “My foster son. Harry Potter.”
Fudge acquired a purple tinge around his mustache that spoke of no good health in his heart. Narcissa found herself regretting she hadn’t included a proviso in her Imperius Curse for Auror Dawlish about what to do if the Minister died of a heart attack. “Now, see here. The boy’s made a fool of himself, spreading these wild lies! Nothing I’ve done but tell the truth! He could have withdrawn the lies at any time.”
“And is what happened at Hogwarts another of those lies?”
“No one’s talking about what happened at Hogwarts.”
“On your instructions, I assume, Minister.”
Fudge gave her a smirk that had a good deal of the simper in it; he’d spent too long as a flunky to Lucius and the like. “Of course. It’s good to see that you understand how politics are played, Mrs. Malfoy. All you have to do is instruct your boy to withdraw the accusations. And then it’s over. Simple as that. Neat. Easy.”
“Easy,” Narcissa echoed softly. “Really.”
“Of course it is.” Fudge leaned towards her and shook his head. “If you’ve been teaching the boy to play politics, better to teach him to stay in the background. He’s not loyal to the Minister. Can never get ahead if he isn’t. Tell him so, would you?”
“I would tell him so if it were true.”
Fudge’s face turned from tomato to plum to some color on the far side of purple. “You presume a great deal, Mrs. Malfoy. Too much! I have a mind to have the Aurors in here. Lucius was good about the lessons that he needed to learn. Sounds like you might need to learn, too.”
Narcissa ignored the words. Fudge had never threatened Lucius with being arrested for his Dark Mark. If anything, he had taken the opposite tactic, enjoying Malfoy money too much. “I am merely going to emphasize two things, Minister. The first is that Lucius is not me. When a mother wants her son left alone, it’s more important than when a father does, wouldn’t you agree?”
“I’m sure we can all agree that fathers love their sons, too, but when their sons have done something wrong—”
“And the next,” Narcissa said, standing, “is how weak you look attacking a fifteen-year-old through the press. You might think about that.”
As she had thought would happen, Fudge’s face rapidly darkened into purple again. “Mrs. Malfoy,” he said sternly, and then seemed to recover and shook his head and softened his voice. “No one seems to think so so far, do they? All listening to me. All following me. You might think about that.”
“You haven’t faced me yet,” said Narcissa simply, and walked out of the office.
He didn’t call her back. He didn’t have that much political sense, Narcissa thought as she trailed towards the lifts, shaking her own head, even though he’d been in office for years. It seemed that Malfoy money and other bribes had cushioned him so much that he’d never learned what he needed to know.
Narcissa thought her way kinder. At least she believed in educating the helpless.
She stepped through the lift door into the Atrium, and spent a few minutes standing in quiet attention, scanning the available victims, before she chose one who looked susceptible: a tall dark-skinned Auror with lines around his mouth and near his eyes that indicated sentiment. Narcissa bowed her head and trailed towards him, dabbing at her eyes with her handkerchief. She ducked as she passed him, apparently trying to avoid attention.
A gentle hand closed on her arm. The Aurors noticed such evasive maneuvers, of course, which was why Narcissa never practiced them when she was on a kill and Aurors were nearby. “I couldn’t help noticing you were crying, madam,” he said gently. “Is anything wrong?”
Narcissa raised her stricken eyes. The Auror had a bald head, but anxious eyes, and she managed a tremulous smile. “It’s just that my—child is in danger,” she said, and let her voice break. “And no one will help.”
“No one?” The Auror drew towards her. “How’s this, madam?”
“Because the one he’s in danger from,” said Narcissa, and lowered her voice this time, “is the Minister himself.”
The man’s eyes widened. Then he nodded as if that explained things, or maybe he’d recognized her as Harry Potter’s foster mother. When he darted a glance around, Narcissa thought it might be both.
He turned back to her and smiled a little. “My name’s Auror Kingsley Shacklebolt. Do you want to go to this café I know to talk about your problem? It seems like we might have a lot in common.”
“Narcissa Malfoy,” said Narcissa, and ignored the way his eyes widened. It was the Minister being the cause of the danger and not recognizing her that had put him in his mood, then. “Thank you.”
*
“But why would the Minister care so much about keeping your boy under control?”
Narcissa smiled at Shacklebolt and carefully ate a small croissant. It seemed the cafe was run by an émigré from France and did the food well, unlike the inferior imitations that usually went by the same name in Britain. “Because he knows Harry could be a challenge to his political power if enough people believed him. And, of course, he doesn’t want to deploy the resources and people he would need to if Voldemort is really back.”
“You don’t fear to say his name.”
“Anyone who threatens my son is going to hear his name spoken by me plenty of times.”
Shacklebolt smiled, but there was a tightness to the lines around his mouth that told her how troubled he was. “You do have proof of the attack, besides the witness accounts? And removing the Dark Mark from the students’ arms? Most of them are underage, so we couldn’t use Veritaserum on them anyway.”
“Yes. I have a Pensieve memory.” Narcissa saw no reason at the moment to explain the difference between the mirror Sirius had used to record the attack and an actual Pensieve. “Would that do?”
Shacklebolt frowned now. “It might. But it would be hard to get everyone who needs to see it near enough to see it, if you see what I mean.”
“I do.” Narcissa patted at her mouth with a napkin and then put it down. “But if we could spread the Pensieve memory around and give it to more people…”
Shacklebolt’s eyebrows rose. “You could do that?”
“With the special kind of instrument that I have, yes.” It was true. Narcissa didn’t see the point in lying to people who weren’t actively hostile to her and her family.
“Then perhaps we could do something.”
Shacklebolt sat silent for a long time after that. Narcissa didn’t bother him. The café’s food was good enough that she found several more delicate things to eat, and broke the fruit and dipped nearly everything into the chocolate.
“Yes, all right,” Shacklebolt finally said. “There’s one meeting of the Wizengamot open to the public next month. The Minister’s going to attend it because he always does. You think that you could show this memory there? There’s going to be lots of influential people who could see it and be swayed one way or the other.”
Narcissa smiled. “What would I have to do?”
*
“Yeah, no problem,” Sirius was saying the next time Narcissa looked up from her list of his notes. The mirror he had recorded the confounding of Voldemort with lay on the table, almost throbbing as crystalline magic poured out of it and into a bowl of water. “We can do this. But can we transfer the Horcrux to a portrait?”
“You’re the one who came up with the theory. And your notes seem sound.”
“But they’re only notes. I don’t know that I really want to gamble with Harry’s life with them.”
Narcissa reached out and patted her cousin’s arm. “So many other people are gambling with his life. At least you’re giving him the chance to live past the end that I think Dumbledore must have been envisioning for him.” There was no doubt in Narcissa’s mind that Dumbledore would have known Harry was a Horcrux, and no doubt what he had planned to do with that knowledge, either. Dumbledore liked the dramatic gesture, the grand notion. The sacrifice of a child he’d left to grow up in the Muggle world was not only not beyond him, it would fit into his plans.
Sirius was quiet for long enough that Narcissa nearly went back to copying out the letters that she would send to the reporters and other people she wanted at the Wizengamot meeting to witness this particular memory. Then he asked, a little hoarsely, “You—you think that he’ll survive this?”
“I would never do anything that he would not survive. Regardless of how little he likes the lesson at the time.”
“Oh.”
When the mirror was done and the bowl of water glowed with the crystal, Narcissa put down her quill and leaned over it. She smiled. Yes, this was as clear as a Pensieve memory, but it was playing on the shimmering surface without needing to plunge her head into it. It should work exactly as the books of the Black library Sirius had found it in said it should work. “You are a genius, Sirius.”
“I’m concerned for Harry.”
“And a genius,” Narcissa teased, but she regretted it when she saw the tight lines forming around Sirius’s mouth and eyes. “He will live.”
“How can you know?”
“Because I swear it.”
Sirius looked up at her. There was so much darkness in his eyes that Narcissa was tempted to swear it again. But she could not give more than her word. So she held his eyes, and after a long moment Sirius exhaled and let his head fall forwards onto his hands.
“Thank you.”
Narcissa patted his shoulder. “You’re not the first person to have found out how secure life is when you trust in me.”
*
Narcissa glanced up when Draco walked carefully into the room. He was stopping every so often to lean against the wall. For a moment, she wondered if he had got into his father’s Firewhisky the night before for a post-Christmas celebration, and not been sober enough yet to cast a Sobriety Charm.
But then she saw something else about the way he was limping, and how he favored his bum as he sat down, and simply returned to her breakfast without a word. There were things she did not need to know about her son’s life.
“Mother?”
Unless he involves me in them. Narcissa made sure that Harry was not sitting at the table, and then gave all her attention to Draco. “Yes, darling?”
He winced at the address, but met her eyes firmly. “How did you know that you were in love with Father?”
Ah. A related question. Narcissa sipped her tea slowly. “I don’t know if there was one moment,” she said at last. “It was a process. We both saw something in each other that we needed, of course. Otherwise, our parents would never have consented to the marriage, or wanted us married in the first place. But when we got beyond the need, I started seeing things I liked, as well. I was happy to stay with him, in the end.”
“But what if you don’t fall in love like that at all?”
“Everyone falls in love in their own way, Draco.”
Draco frowned at her beneath a curl of hair that she had thought had stopped being so rebellious long ago. Then again, he had hardly spent an ordinary night last night. “You’re not helping, Mother.”
“You know that we’re not the same person, Draco. I can give you advice, but not the truth of your own heart. Do you have some reason to doubt that you’re in love?”
Draco continued looking down at the table. His cheeks got redder and redder. Then he said, so softly that Narcissa could have ignored it if she wanted to and undoubtedly would have if she was Lucius, “No.”
Narcissa smiled and went back to her tea, and the preparations that she would need to make for the Wizengamot meeting.
*
“Thank you for allowing me to attend.”
Narcissa spoke to the Wizengamot members as well as the reporters she had invited. Some of the older witches and wizards looked disgruntled at the presence of other people in the room. Shacklebolt stood near the doors and looked straight ahead as befit an Auror on guard for the meeting, but Narcissa knew she wasn’t imagining his near-smile.
Fudge was purple.
“What is the meaning of this, Mrs. Malfoy?” he declared, waving his finger around. Narcissa thought he should be careful where he was pointing that thing. “Do you intend to embarrass yourself on the world stage?”
“The world stage? At a Wizengamot meeting?”
Sometimes the moment was right, everything about the moment, from the words one spoke to the words one’s opponent spoke to the people listening to the quality of the silence. In the echo of her words, Fudge turned as brilliant a purple as a Hungarian Horntail’s belly scales.
Narcissa turned and picked up the crystal bowl that Sirius had given her. “And this is the point,” she continued gravely, and poured the water mingled with the mirror memory out.
Instead of tumbling to the floor, the water curled and foamed about halfway between the bowl and the floor, and then reared up in a glittering crystalline cascade. Narcissa found herself stunned at how clear the images were, and she had been there. Voldemort’s glaring face was pure white. The Dark Marks bleeding off the students’ arms were shimmering black, almost with the colors of a starling’s wing. The brown of the Forbidden Forest where Sirius had hidden, holding the mirror up, looked as rich as honey.
When the memory finished, Narcissa folded her hands and turned back to the Wizengamot. “How are we going to deal with Voldemort’s return?”
Voices exploded, but mostly at her use of the beast’s name, and not disputing what they had seen. Narcissa smiled. They were discussing battle strategies against the right enemy now, and not against a fifteen-year-old boy.
She caught Fudge’s eye. He was glaring with such malevolence that she wouldn’t have been surprised at a transformation into that Hungarian Horntail.
You will not harm my son, Narcissa thought, and then, more idly, Perhaps it is time wizarding Britain has a new Minister.
*
SickPuppy: Thank you! I don't think Narcissa's spell is necessarily ethical, but what about this story is?
Staar: Or she at least needs to stop threatening Harry. Narcissa wouldn't care so much if not for that.
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Narcissa Militant