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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.

Chapter List
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Thank you again for all the reviews!
Chapter Nineteen—The Monster Unchained
            “I don’t know if this is a good plan.” Hermione was sitting on Harry’s bed this time—Ron was in an intensive Auror training program at the moment and couldn’t come to the Manor—and looked at him doubtfully. “I mean, I know why you think it is, but you’re going to have to be really fearsome to pull it off.”
            “The same is true about threatening the goblins.” Harry shook his head and watched as his hands settled on the bed in front of him. He was ruffling the covers, pinching them. He made himself be still. Yes, he was nervous and upset about having to do this at all, but he wasn’t going to step back from it, and he didn’t want Hermione to think her warnings were making that much difference to him. “We have to do it right, or we might as well not do it at all. But you didn’t think that was a bad plan.”
            “I think that you can do it if you have those rituals that you talked about,” Hermione said. “The ones that let you practice magic from a distance. But you have to do this right in front of people.”
            Harry cocked his head at her. “Why, Hermione,” he said. “One might think that you’re all right with threatening goblins but not other human beings.”
            Hermione flushed so hotly that Harry was surprised she didn’t set the bed on fire. “That’s not true at all,” she said, voice low and passionate. “It’s just—just wrong, Harry, to do this. You shouldn’t have to.”
            “I know that,” said Harry. “But I’m going to threaten and frighten them. I won’t actually hurt anyone.”
            “I didn’t have as much of a problem with the goblins because they did actually try to enslave you,” said Hermione, not really responding to what he was saying. “But these people haven’t done anything wrong.”
            Some of the sheets abruptly withered beneath Harry. Hermione gasped and drew her hand back. Harry curled himself up and watched her with sharp eyes.
            “It was precisely not doing anything that I had a problem with,” he said, and his voice was quiet, so quiet. “They stood by when the goblins agreed to enslave me. They went along with the threat without a protest, without a murmur.”
            “Luna tried,” said Hermione.
            “I know she did,” Harry said. Luna’s articles in the Quibbler offering evidence of past goblin slavery and how the goblins were probably doing this even more as revenge for that ancient insult than as revenge for Harry’s more recent one had been well-intentioned. But not enough people read the Quibbler, and too many people read the Daily Prophet. “But she’s not one of the arseholes who wants to interview me and who’s pretending that the Malfoys are the source of the whole problem, either.”
            Hermione half-sighed. “I don’t think that you’re going to win fans. This might make it even more uncomfortable for you to exist in the wizarding world, later.”
            “I still haven’t absolutely decided that I’m going to do that,” Harry said pointedly. “I want to keep my options open.”
            “Even with the way that I saw you look at Malfoy before he agreed to leave us alone?”
            Harry blinked. Then he blinked again. Then he said, “You know without us telling you, don’t you?”
            Hermione was concentrating on the carpet in front of her, and her face was bright red. She shrugged a little. “I thought you would probably arrive at this point soon enough,” she said vaguely. She shot him another glance. “That doesn’t mean that it’s not surprising, because it is.”
            “Yeah,” Harry said. Surprising was one word for it. But it was wonderful, too, to feel Draco’s casual hand on his shoulder, and to know that Draco was doing it because he wanted to, and see the way Draco leaned towards him when Harry was speaking as though his words were the most important things in the world.
            “That’s something else to consider,” Hermione continued, soft and distant. “If you want to live openly after this with M-Malfoy as your lover, you shouldn’t encourage people to believe the worst of him.”
            “They’re going to believe it anyway,” Harry said. “If we don’t make some kind of answer to this, then they’ll accuse us of hiding and holding back, and say that we’re afraid to show the absolute truth. And we have to base some of our strategy on the stories we’ve already told them, the ones about me being an utterly submissive slave. We want them to believe us, not doubt us.”
            Hermione reached across the bed and held his hand. Her eyes were bright with tears. “I know,” she whispered. “I suppose I needed to hear you say that you knew, too, but I realize how hard it is, Harry. And it really isn’t your fault. It’s their fault. But I wish you didn’t have to.”
            Harry grabbed her in a rough hug. In the end, all her objections and little niggles were because she cared about him. He’d remember that.
            And if this thing between him and Draco blew up, the way he thought it might sometimes, at least he would know that his friends would be there with him, and there was someone he could always count on. After the weeks of feeling like he could really rely on no one except himself, that was exceptionally comforting.
*
            “Ready?” Harry shifted and shook his head as though the weight of the chain and collar around his neck were itchy.
            “Ready.” Draco wound the chain around his knuckles and gave Harry a measuring look. For this stunt, Harry had insisted that the chain be real, although the spikes that shimmered on the collar were purest illusion. Draco didn’t like it, even so. The black links of the chain weren’t actually all that heavy, but heavier than anything he could imagine actually holding Harry with.
            “Yes,” said Harry, as though he was answering Draco’s thoughts instead of the question that Draco had thought was actually hovering between them, and then he nodded at Draco and gave a brave little smile and walked out of the gates of Malfoy Manor.
            The reporters who had been standing outside them opened their mouths at the sight of them. Then they closed their mouths. Draco knew why. Even from here, they could make out the chain and hear it clinking, and most of them could probably see the crazed expression on Harry’s face.
            “Now,” Draco said to them, astonished that his own voice could sound like that, gentle and soft and mocking and cruel, “don’t everyone step forwards at once to get their pictures taken and ask their questions.”
            There was a long silence until a woman edged towards them. She was older, maybe one of the former Ministry employees who had taken to journalism after the war. She nodded to Draco, but focused on Harry as she asked her questions. “Can he hear us?”
            “What do you think?” Draco asked, and thumbed through the links of the chain, smiling thinly at her. “He’s chained, not deaf.”
            “Oh.” The reporter made a nervous little gesture down the front of her robes, and then stood up straight. “So. Mr. Potter. How does it feel to know that you’ve been unjustly taken into slavery?”
            “We do not speak of justice here,” Draco said, and tugged on the chain a little. Following their prearranged signal, Harry dropped to his knees in front of Draco, his head hanging and swaying back and forth. “We speak of power.”
            “I would still ask the question,” said the woman, with a stubborn look in her brown eyes that marked her as the bravest of the reporters he would see here today, Draco thought. Then again, Harry hadn’t yet demonstrated his magic. Maybe they didn’t know there was anything to be scared of. “Can you hear me, Mr. Potter?”
            Harry looked up at her and opened his mouth.
            The sound that came out was a chilling mixture of howl, gabble, and cackle. Draco had to keep himself from jumping, and he’d been there when Harry had practiced it. The witch fell back a step with her hand on her bosom and her eyes so stunned that Draco had to fight to keep from snickering.
            “What is wrong with him?” the reporter asked, lifting her quill in front of her like it was a shield, and there was no question that she was talking to Draco now.
            “He’s had to be taken into slavery because his mind was already descending into madness at the time we agreed to take him over from Gringotts,” Draco responded, and crouched, letting one hand run over Harry’s shoulder for a moment. He only regretted that they had to do it like this, that he couldn’t touch Harry in the privacy of their bedroom and have it count. “If you knew what he was like when he first came here, you wouldn’t ask stupid questions.”
            Harry looked up at him and gurgled wordlessly. Draco converted the shoulder rub into a soothing pat on the head. “He can’t speak anymore,” he added.
            “But I was here!” Appleby, the annoying reporter who had written the first story about them, pushed her way to the front. “You didn’t say anything about it then!”
            “Well.” Draco half-shrugged. “It wasn’t that far advanced then, and I still cared a little about protecting Harry’s privacy.” The women exchanged a look when Draco said Harry’s first name. Well, whatever conclusions they drew from that were probably going to be wrong, anyway. “Now, he’s not going to regain his sanity for at least a year. At least,” he added, when the two women looked shocked. “We’re giving him a home and treating him as well as we can, but there’s a powerful curse on him. We had no idea it was there. I certainly wouldn’t have taken him into my bed if it was.” He frowned a little down at Harry.
            “What’s the curse?” The two women both asked at the same time, and then frowned at each other. Draco smiled gravely, wondering if there was any way he could make their rivalry work for him.
            “That his magic goes wild,” Draco said. “He can destroy anything living he touches. Observe.” He bent down and plucked a clump of grass from the ground and held it out to Harry. Harry gave his impression of a drooling, wide-eyed, mindless stare in response.
            “You know you’ve seen this before,” Draco murmured, easily able to ignore his audience now. This wasn’t so different from planning with Harry. They had already plotted out every movement of this little drama. “You know what you can do with it, what I want you to do with it.”
            Harry blinked and opened his mouth further, wider, until Draco could see almost all the way down his throat. Draco tapped him on the nose. “Not bite it,” he said. “You know that’s not what I want you to do. Give me your hand.”
            It took a long time before Harry extended his hand, but Draco couldn’t be sure if that was part of the charade or just Harry struggling against his own disgust at the avidity on the women’s faces. Draco placed the grass carefully in Harry’s hand.
            “Now,” Draco said, “destroy it.”
            It seemed Harry had decided that he’d hesitated too long before, because this time his hand closed down right away. Draco felt the surge and tingle of magic, opening briefly around Harry’s body like a wildflower. And then he opened his hand and held it up, and nothing except bits of grey sludge dripped out. Draco could feel the tension in Harry’s body as he held still, rather than shaking the disgusting stuff from his hand right away, as he wanted to do.
            “You can put it down,” Draco said, trying as hard as he could to mimic the voice of a kind slavemaster—rare though those were—and Harry laid his hand down on the grass and wiped it clean.
            “That’s the curse?” When Draco looked up again, the two women stood a safe distance back. Draco restrained a savage smile. It would probably make things worse rather than better.
            “That his magic can do that? Oh, no.” Draco put a reassuring hand on Harry’s shoulder. Harry only watched the two women with parted jaws and hanging tongue. Draco bit his lip, hard, so that he wouldn’t laugh. “The curse is that he’s losing his sanity and his control over his magic. He can only be tamed by someone who’s not afraid of him.”
            They might have disputed that only a little while ago, he thought, but they looked from the way that Draco kept one hand on Harry’s head and didn’t move away even when Harry wrapped a hand around his ankle, and didn’t protest. The other reporters had shut up, the babble of questions that Draco hadn’t paid attention to dying away.
            “This is such a horrible thing,” whispered Appleby.
            “It is horrible,” said Draco. “And if you insist on taking him away from the Manor and letting him run about in wizarding society, this is the sort of thing that you’ll be spreading around.” He looked gravely from face to face. “Do you want to do that?”
            “Well, I mean, if he just destroys the grass,” said another reporter that Draco remembered gleefully covering his family’s fall from grace, “then we could make sure that he stays on the stone. Or something.” His voice trailed off at the end as Draco glared at him, and Draco was glad to finally have a weapon that would shut up idiots like that.
            You have to show me as a weapon that only you can control. That had been Harry’s initial plan, both to show off his magic and to make it plain why he needed to stay with Draco’s family, and everything else had simply been a refinement of that plan.
            “He destroys anything living,” Draco said simply. “Or made from something living. Wood, cloth, paper, fur, skin, grass, flowers.” He paused and gave the reporter a narrow smile, remembering that he was particularly scared of some curses the Death Eaters had used. “Flesh.”
            The man squeaked and stumbled back, almost fanning himself. The two women made sounds not far from squeaks, too. Draco knelt down next to Harry and spoke soothingly into his ear. “Are you all right? Do you want to go back inside?”
            Harry’s hand tightened on his ankle. Draco knew what that meant. Harry could put up with this for a little while longer—just. They probably should end it as soon as they could and get back inside.
            “That can’t be true,” said the most annoying of the reporters, again. “You’re letting him touch you.”
            “Did you not read the articles?” Draco looked at Appleby and smiled nastily. “Someone who’s broken another person to his will, even a person this dangerous, doesn’t have any reason to fear.”
            “It is true that last time he seemed utterly submissive,” Appleby confirmed to the other reporters, nodding to Harry and looking around impressively, as if she thought someone was about to give her a reward for her poorly-written article. “And he let Malfoy put his hands all over him. I can’t see him doing that if he still had his sanity.”
            That’s not what you thought last time. But the whole point of this was to both build on their previous charade and to show people why Harry’s magic was dangerous, so Draco did nothing but smile tolerantly and then bend down and ruffle Harry’s hair. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw several people backing away hastily.
            Draco didn’t sneer, but it was hard to avoid doing so. “I don’t know what else there is to say,” he said, and glanced over their shoulders to the people waiting beyond them. “Unless you still think that he should come out of our custody?”
            “Your custody,” said Appleby, a little insistently, her quill poised. “Or do you let your mother and father do the same things to him?”
            Yes, by all means, think that only one person is raping Harry, if that makes you feel better about leaving him where he is. Draco inclined his head, saying nothing for a second until he could master his voice. “No. It was agreed that Harry should be my slave, because I was the one who had the rivalry with him in Hogwarts.”
            After that, it was really over, even with all the people lingering to ask questions. Draco answered them shortly. He could feel Harry’s trembling where he leaned against Draco’s leg.
            And he could feel the way that Harry’s magic was uncurling around him, slowly, the way that a snake would arise from a cold nap. But this was no snake, which could bite one person at a time and make them uncomfortable, or kill them. This was the kind of power that could kill them all if Harry let it loose.
            Draco stroked his shoulder one more time, and hoped that he had made it look like the kind of pat you would bestow on a dog to the people watching him. Then he herded the reporters away, still smiling, still dropping hints and threats. Harry moved after him, crawling.
            Someone screamed.
            Draco turned sharply around. If there were goblins on the grounds, then yes, Harry might lose control of his magic. It was about the only thing Draco could think of that would make him do that, though.
            They were all staring at the grass where Harry had been crouching. Draco looked down and realized it was blackened, withered, a bunch of separate seared strands that crumpled as he looked at them.
            “Yes,” Draco said, and smiled even more widely as he realized where their surprise came from. “He doesn’t need to use his hands to touch what he wants to destroy.” There were some blackened handprints on the ground as well, but that wasn’t what they were staring at. “He could use his knee or his back. The nape of his neck.” He looked up at Appleby. “His hair.”
            It had been a guess, following the direction of Appleby’s stare to the top of Harry’s head, but it was a good one. Appleby shrank back from him, her mouth fluttering open. Her hand sagged around her quill, and she glanced aside.
            “I wouldn’t have tried to touch him,” she whispered.
            Draco didn’t actually think she would have. But she would have asked him for permission to touch Harry, and that was simply unacceptable. He gave her another thick-toothed smile that she didn’t look at.
            “If you want me to release the chain, then I could do that,” he said.
            The terrified chorus that answered him convinced him they’d achieved their goal. All the people around them knew now that Harry had that kind of magic, and they didn’t want him free of those chains.
            As they entered the Manor again, Draco reached down and rattled the chain. Anyone watching would only see it as another typically cruel, Malfoy gesture, but Harry looked up, so Draco could show him the apology in his eyes.
            Harry bobbed his head a little, as though receiving a silent command. Draco sighed shakily. They had done what they wanted to do, come through it safely, but he would have preferred almost any other way of doing it.
            The door swung shut behind them, and Harry stretched his arms and legs like a cat before he climbed to his feet and touched Draco’s shoulder for a second. “Thank you,” he said. “I could see how difficult that was for you.”
            “For me?” Draco had a lot of things that he wanted to say, and that he’d planned to say the moment they were alone. But he had to shake his head instead, and his mouth was dry and empty. He reached out and put one hand on Harry’s shoulder. “You were the one who had to crouch there and listen to them saying all those horrible things to you,” he whispered.
            “I know.” Harry’s eyes darkened in a way that Draco took to mean he’d hardly forget. “But you were the one who had to stand there and hold the chain and actually speak. Make them believe that you’re a different kind of monster. If it’s ever possible for me to get out of this character, I’ll have an easier time. I’m playing against what they expect of me. You’re playing into their expectations.”
            Draco shut his eyes. That was true, but he had thought of it and then tried to dismiss it. After all, it wasn’t like they could change their strategy now.
            “Thank you,” said Harry again, and leaned in near enough for a kiss that made Draco gasp and decide that Harry really, seriously meant it. His hand was around Harry’s neck in an instant, and his arse was against the wall, and Harry paid steady attention to his mouth.
            Harry drew back and looked him in the eye. “They tried to take everything from me. But I know this cost you, too. And I’m not going to forget that cost, and we are going to make them pay.”
            Draco knew he was talking about the goblins, not the reporters. He nodded blindly, tears stinging his eyes and vanishing again when he thought about it. It wasn’t as though he was about to weep for sadness.
            If it was for anything, it was for gratitude.
*
staar: His rage is so intense that it manifests this way. That’s why it only happens when he’s angry.
SP777: This one is longer!
- 18
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The Long Defeat