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Under the Manor	By : WillGirl Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 13318 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: Disclaimer: I make no claims to Harry Potter, either books or movies, and all rights belong to JKR. No money or other recompense is being made from this story.

Chapter List
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Or...not so much “the end,” apparently. It’s been pointed out that this really does have the potential to be continued, and it occurs to me that’s true, so...here goes. An attempt at continuing. I apologize for the title’s utter lack of connection with the remainder of this story; when I called it that, it was a one-shot. Now, I have no idea how long it’s going to be, or where it’s going, but let’s find out, shall we? Please bear with.

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Harry Potter attended the trial of every single Death Eater. He had been the one to insist that everyone, no matter how obviously guilty, no matter how evil, deserved a trial—the image of Sirius’s emaciated face painful in his mind—and so he felt that he needed to be at all of them, no matter how long they dragged on; no matter how hard they were to sit through.

They finished with the Malfoys last.

Aside from the three cringing, repentant blonds, the only Death Eaters who were willing to spill their guts without restraint were the worst, the craziest, the most bloodthirsty—those like Greyback and the Lestranges, who were all too happy to detail their depraved crimes. The Lestrange brothers even sometimes argued amiably about which of them deserved credit for a particularly awful kill.

So it was important to the Ministry to keep the Malfoys under guard (for their own protection, as well as the Ministry’s purposes) where they could be counted on to give up every single secret.

They had done so, all three of them, without reserve.

Narcissa wanted to see the people who had hurt her precious son burn for it, and had bitterly recounted every crime she had witnessed, every abomination she had overheard; even the horrors that she herself had participated in, although there were not many of those. She had never been a Death Eater herself, not exactly, and so her only real crime had been standing by, offering the occasional scrap of support, and saying nothing.

If that last bit was a crime, then there were several more arrests that needed to be made.

Besides, she had saved Harry Potter at the end; without her betrayal, Voldemort would have won, Harry was sure of it. He would not see her go to prison for that—especially given the reason that had made her switch sides.

Harry Potter was not going to see a mother punished for trying to save her son.

He couldn’t, in all honesty, see Lucius much punished, either. The man was cold, heartless, murdering scum, and Harry knew it, but in truth, Lucius had had very little chance to incriminate himself during the Second War. He had spent most of it imprisoned, first locked inside Azkaban and then in his own home, wandless and helpless. He was a villain, Harry knew it, but he had simply not had any real opportunity to do evil, this time around.

And besides, he told them all everything, with no thought for himself; his lawyers wanted him to doll out scraps of information only in exchange for promises and concessions, for immunity, but Lucius was not begging for immunity for himself. He wanted to keep his wife and son out of prison, and so he talked freely, desperate to save them. He tried to claim every single dark deed of Draco’s as his own; tried to take the blame, instead, for everything that his son had been forced to do; saying that all of it was, in the end, his fault, because he was the one who had allowed the Dark Lord access to his boy.

Harry would personally have liked to see Lucius Malfoy thrown back into Azkaban for the rest of his natural life, but he couldn’t bear the idea of splitting up a family, especially not one that so obviously cared for each other; that had nearly sacrificed everything in order to save one another. Even if they were a family of hateful, awful people, they were still a family, and Lucius was a father who clearly loved his son, however cold and aloof he might otherwise seem.

Harry remembered arms reaching out of the darkness to wrap a frightened, trembling boy in a hug, and a glimmer on cheeks that might have been tears, and he could not, completely, hate the man the way he once had.

And Draco, Harry knew, did not deserve punishment. He had been punished enough, already—more than enough. And if anyone thought that Draco Malfoy needed to suffer further for his crimes, they had only to watch him speak of them.

He wept as he recounted everything to the Ministry, clearly hating himself. He pleaded for his mother’s freedom, and tried to spare his father blame, and confessed to every horrible thing that the Dark Lord had forced him to do—or almost everything, at least. There was one thing he did not tell that Harry knew of; perhaps there were others. But Harry was grateful, at least, that Draco kept that one particular piece of darkness to himself when he was reciting the long list of his crimes.

Harry couldn’t blame Draco for any of it, not even the last-ditch effort to capture Harry and his friends in the Room of Requirement, when it had looked so certain that Voldemort was about to win, and Draco had scrambled for one last chance to protect his family from their Dark Lord’s wrath. Harry would have loved the chance, himself, to take desperate action on behalf of his own family; would have killed for the opportunity to make mistakes to save them. And he had made plenty of mistakes himself, anyway. It had been war, and people do awful things during times like that; Harry had done some himself that he was particularly ashamed of, cast spells he had never believed he was capable of...

So he stood up on the stand and argued for the Malfoys' freedom, and tried to ignore the look of resigned disgust on Ron’s face, and the bemused understanding on Hermione’s. He also tried, very hard, not to look at Draco; he had been trying not to look at Draco ever since that night in his parents’ manor. So he faced the judges instead, and talked loudly to cover his discomfort.

Harry talked about the things he had seen, with his own eyes and through Voldemort’s, and about how unwilling a Death Eater Draco had obviously always been. He asked the court what they would have done if Voldemort’s wand had been pointed at them, at their parents; no one could answer him, but the silence that followed his question was heavy and uncomfortable. Ron had gone very pale around his freckles, and cleared his throat several times, and looked at no one. Hermione’s face went tight and thin, and Harry knew that she was thinking about Australia, and how glad she was that her desperate plan had worked.

Harry talked about Albus Dumbledore, and how hard he had worked to save the boy who was trying to kill him, and how Dumbledore would not have wanted Draco punished now, because he had failed to do so in time.

Then he climbed off the stand, and walked away, and the Wizengamot had ruled, and all three Malfoys had crept out cautiously to enjoy their new-found freedom.

Harry managed, somehow, to not look back.
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Under the Manor