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The Descent of Magic	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 18803 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 5
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I am making no money from this fanfic.

Chapter List
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Thank you again for all the reviews!

Chapter Two—Study Makes the Difference

"Oh, wow, Uncle Harry!"

            Harry smiled at Lucy as she clambered up one of the ladders he'd had Kreacher install in the library, after promising faithfully that he would never use them himself. Lucy was Percy's daughter, but she took his studiousness and his rule-following and made it an interest, not an obsession. Her eyes sparkled now as she turned around on the ladder, balancing a book in front of her that seemed to just about counterweight the long red hair dangling over one shoulder.

            "I never knew you had all these!" Before he could tell her not to, Lucy jumped from the rung she was on to the floor, landing with a flexibility that made Harry wince. She held out the book in front of her and admired it. "A complete copy of Moongrass's Rules of Potions-Making for the Beginner! This teaches all sorts of stuff they think is NEWT level now..."

            Kreacher appeared in the middle of the room, looking around frantically. Harry held out a hand to calm him down. It had only taken one of his falls for Kreacher to respond that way to any loud thump.

            "Oh," Lucy said, when she saw him. She put her hand over her mouth and looked at Harry with wide, dismayed eyes, more like her Aunt Hermione than her father. Harry tried to picture Percy feeling the same kind of dismay and ended up snorting.

            "It's all right," he told Kreacher. "She jumped off the ladder, that's all."

            That caused Kreacher to go into a furious flurry of scolding about the ways that "young mistresses' heads could break open and their brains could spill around the library," which Lucy listened to with a meekness that wasn't like her. Harry snorted again, into his hand. If this little incident made Lucy listen a bit better, that was all to the good. Harry enjoyed his nieces and nephews as well as his own children, but he didn't appreciate their ambition to die in new and interesting ways.

            Did I seem that reckless to the professors, when I was young?

            Harry grimaced. He owed an apology to the shades of Professor Snape and Professor Dumbledore if that was true--well, maybe only the former, since he doubted that Dumbledore had had any qualms about Harry's ability to take care of himself.

            But Lucy had inspired him, and he returned to the library later that afternoon to check out the volumes on the higher shelves. After one try at the ladder that made both it and his knee sway alarmingly, he let Kreacher fetch the books down to him, while he examined them with some attention.

            There was one that looked interesting, and he retired to his bed with it. Legends of Perpetuation Among the Pure-Bloods, it was called, and written by an author whose name was so smudged Harry couldn't make it out, but it was about legends concerning marriage, childbirth, children, and inbreeding in general.

            Harry had to snicker over a comment he found in the book's preface. It is now generally agreed that the most inbred pure-blood family is the Malfoys, who have married their cousins for sixteen generations. It was probably a good thing for Scorpius that his father and, as far as Harry knew, his grandfather had been only children.

            For a few seconds, he tried to imagine the sort of woman Scorpius would marry, and then shook his head. Whoever she was, she'd need a large tolerance for pranks, property damage, and mutant Crup sick on the rugs.

*

            Harry sighed and leaned over the Black family tapestry again, tracing the broken lines and the burned-out members with one finger. He could feel the tantalizing hints of answers hovering at the edges of his mind, but whenever he thought he had grasped one, he found at least two pure-blood families, and usually more than that, who were an exception to the rule.

            It shouldn't be so difficult to prove that the "Muggleborn plague" the pure-bloods had feared was just a myth, and that they were having fewer magical children for some other reason. But the theories Harry had started with--some kind of magical disease, a certain combination of spells taught at Hogwarts, the presence of one bloodline that had been contaminated with something in almost all pure-blood families, a sterility curse that had not quite worked as advertised--all broke down. The Weasleys were fertile, families that didn't send their children to Hogwarts still produced Squibs, most sterility curses were all or nothing, and there was no magical disease that produced three children in one generation, then two, then four, then one and one and one and one, the way the Malfoys had worked, for example. Harry had also tried looking at the matter by gender, by location, by age of first marriage, and even by magical specialty.

            Nothing.

            Harry leaned back on the stool that he used when he had to sit for long periods and cursed under his breath. He didn't know why he was so eager to solve this riddle, other than it had become his riddle and that he feared, someday, the pure-bloods would use it to stir up prejudice against Muggleborns the way Voldemort had managed. Going back through old newspaper clippings of the first war against Voldemort had revealed, sure enough, that he sometimes used the rumor that pure-bloods would become infertile unless they stopped associating with Muggleborns.

            There has to be some way to approach this. You've thought of the obvious things. Turn to the stupid things.

            Harry rubbed a hand across his face, half-smiling. All right. He would start with things that couldn't possibly have anything to do with blood purity, like if they had studied at Muggle universities or what color hair they would have.

            That might be enough.

*

            "Daaaaad."

            "Ah, it's the hunting call of the wronged Lily," Harry said dryly, not looking up from the list of names he had made. He had gone it over several times now, and each time, he had shaken his head to clear it. No. His conclusions weren't making sense. Or rather, they corresponded to each other, but it still didn't make sense. Why would it be the families generally considered blood traitors who were the most fertile?

            "You could be more sympathetic."

            Harry grinned up at his daughter as she sulkily hugged the doorway of his reading room. At sixteen years old, Harry thought she could probably break hearts, except when she pouted the way she did now. Then she looked all of six. "I'm sorry, sweetie," he said, and patted the stool beside him. "Who was it this time?"

            "Augustus Cornfoot." Lily drooped over to him, kissed his cheek, and moped her way into the seat. "He seemed so perfect. He was attentive and the perfect gentleman and he said that he wanted to date me and that he didn't care you were my dad and..." A vague gesture encompassed all the qualities that Cornfoot hadn't turned out to actually have.

            "Ah. What happened?" Harry wasn't about to comment on the impact that his being her father had on Lily. For one thing, she'd told him so little about it that he honestly didn't know what he should say. For another, well, he had limited his impact in the only ways that could. His early retirement had probably helped.

            "He was dating me and another girl at the same time, is what happened." Lily flattened her hands on her knees and sniffed. "And I hexed him. I got detention for a fortnight, but I couldn't do anything else, could I?"

            Harry considered. It was the sort of response her mother would have had, but as far as he knew, Ginny hadn't acted on her temper every time she was wronged. She'd been too shy for her first few years at Hogwarts, among other things. Shyness was a foreign word to Lily. "Are you supposed to be out of school right now?" he asked.

            "Um," said Lily, and suddenly found the rungs of her stool fascinating.

            "Lils," Harry sighed.

            "Don't call me that!" Lily could flash up into fire, like her mother, when she considered that she'd been wronged. "Everyone calls me that just because they think that I can't get back at them, and I hate it!"

            That was a usual argument, too. Harry let it pass, and then leaned forwards and looked hard into her face. "If you're found out of school this close to the end of the year, Lily, then you know that they might simply gave you detention until the summer holidays begin."

            Lily pouted at him.

            Harry shook his head. "What kind of hex was it?"

            Lily brightened and leaned in to hug him. "Then you agree that it was justified?" she asked in a pleased voice. "Professor Grimfoot said it wasn't."

            Harry sighed again. Professor Grimfoot was the Potions professor at Hogwarts and the Head of Hufflepuff House, into which the Sorting Hat had placed Lily. To this day, Harry still had no idea why. The Hat must have been having an off day. "Of course it was justified," he said. "He shouldn't have cheated on you. But it would also depend on what the hex was. The thought was good, but the casting might not have been."

            "It was the Bat-Bogey Hex," Lily said. "He wasn't worth more than that."

            Harry nodded. "Then I think you can go back and you won't have detention for the rest of the year." Clumsily, he patted her shoulder. Of all his children, she was the one he felt the most helpless around. After years of work, he thought he understood James, and his relationship with Al was very calm and uncomplicated when Scorpius wasn't there. Al had grown into who he was and what he wanted during school, and needed little help. But Lily was a riotous, rollicking, bounding bag of desires and wants and yearnings that Harry sometimes thought he sympathized with and sometimes found alien. He never knew if his advice was good for her or not.

            But he had learned a little more about Professor Grimfoot than he'd known when his children started school, and on this score, he was sure that he was right. "He doesn't like punishing you," he said, and Lily pulled away and stared at him. "No, really," Harry assured her. "I think he regards you as a promising student. The way he treats you when I visit reminds me of the way that Professor McGonagall treated me."

            "I think she drank an immortality potion or something," Lily confided. "There's no way that she can be that old and still teach all the time."

            Harry shook his head with a faint smile. McGonagall was the only one of her professors that Lily instinctively obeyed, because McGonagall would do things like set her to writing lines when she didn't. "Witches and wizards live longer than Muggles, and Professor Dumbledore was a lot older than she is now. Anyway. Professor Grimfoot isn't trying to make your life miserable. He thinks you could be a brilliant Healer, or Auror, or whatever else you want to excel in Potions for. But he hates the way that you get distracted. He thinks it takes away from your schoolwork."

            "Cornfoot, and dating in general, and boyfriends, and vengeance, aren't distractions," Lily said. Her voice sounded stuffy.

            Harry nodded. "I know. But a hex isn't vengeance, either, and you aren't someone who can make reliable judgments about who should suffer. Lily--you're a wonderful person, but you think almost exclusively of the present, and your professors are thinking more of the future. That's why they can give you detention and you can think they're unfair, at the same time."

            "And they're right, of course." Lily didn't sound upset, which might mean that he hadn't given her disastrous advice this time.

            "No." Harry kissed her forehead, which she didn't complain about, because there were no boys around to see. "I think the truth lies somewhere in between, the way it does with most things."

            Lily watched him for a moment, then bounced to her feet. "Thanks, Dad," she said. "I'll remember that." She kissed him on the cheek, then ran into the other room. A moment later, Harry heard the whoosh of the Floo. He made a mental note to figure out how she had made the school fireplaces work to get into his house. Most of the time, Hogwarts had precautions in place to prevent students from doing that.

            He stared down at his notes again.

            I think the truth lies somewhere in between.

            All right. Instead of denying his conclusions, then, he should look for some other way that they could be true. It wasn't really the case that rich pure-blood families were infertile and the poorer ones were fertile, because there were some branches of both that produced more or fewer children. But some condition connected to wealth or the lack of it could be the answer.

            With new determination, Harry bent over the papers again. His children always inspired him.

*

            And that was it. There were no more conclusions to be drawn. Harry leaned back and stared at the papers in front of him, shaking his head.

            It sounded right to him. Of course, Hermione's warnings had to be heeded, too. For all Harry knew, dozens of other people had also thought this, and then their theories had been shattered by some basic fact that they'd overlooked.

            But it seemed to fit the facts as Harry understood them.

            The families who had had the most children in the last three hundred years, and the branches of those families individually who'd also had the most, were the ones without house-elves.

            It was there, Harry thought, putting his finger at the top lefthand corner of the parchment, where he'd started drawing some of the family lines, and then tracing down towards the bottom righthand corner. The Weasleys had had small families until the middle of the 1700s, when they'd lost a lot of their money in legal fees and feuds with the Malfoy family. Within two generations, they were having four or five children, not the single heir they'd struggled so hard to have when they were richer, and the women had stopped dying in childbirth quite so often, and Squib children became rarer.

            The same thing had happened to the Prewetts, Molly Weasley's birth family. They had no twins until the point where one of their heirs gambled most of his money anyway and had to live frugally for the rest of his life. Then suddenly there were twins everywhere, including Mrs. Weasley's twin brothers, Fabian and Gideon, the ones who had died in the war. Harry reached up to touch the small twist of metal on a chain around his neck, all that remained of the battered watch she’d given him.

            The Longbottoms had had a long stretch of single male heirs; then one of those heirs died early, and the house-elves, the formal records said, refused to obey the distant cousin that the house and property legally belonged to, maybe because he wasn't harsh enough. But that cousin had children and to spare, and they had children, and everyone seemed to have been both happy and fertile, having single heirs by choice only, until the point where the old house-elves died and they could acquire new ones. Then both Longbottom women and Longbottom men turned infertile, and the family was quickly down to a single male heir and perhaps one sibling again, a lot of whom had a nasty habit of dying shortly after they'd had their own heirs.

            And not always natural deaths, either. Harry thought of Frank Longbottom.

            He also thought of the way that Hannah Abbot, who'd married Neville, had miscarried again and again, and how her one daughter was a precious surviving child, overprotected by both her parents. But who could blame them, when Neville, at least, must have some idea of his family's history?

            The Blacks seemed to be the exception at first, because they'd had lots of children by pure-blood standards. But they'd married cousins, and not all those cousins had house-elves; only the main branch of the family, the one that had owned Grimmauld Place, could afford them. As those branches were folded back into each other, the number of children diminished, and the madness that plagued the family increased. Bellatrix hadn't had children, though Harry wasn't entirely sure that was attributable to house-elves. Regulus and Sirius--he swallowed roughly--had died early. Andromeda and Narcissa both had one child each, and though Tonks might have had more if she hadn't died early, Draco Malfoy had produced only one, as well.

            And Scorpius had told Harry, one night when he'd needed to talk about it or explode, how badly his parents had wanted more children. But no matter how they tried, the furthest any pregnancy got was a stillbirth, which the Healers had told them was the result of the child being so low in magic that it couldn't cope with the power that flowed in Astoria's blood. If that little boy, Scorpius's younger brother, had lived, he would have been pure Muggle.

            It's like a curse, Harry thought. Not just an association, not just the natural consequences of in-breeding, but a magical consequence.

            Of...what?

            That was the part he couldn't figure out. He knew now, from his reading, that some families had had house-elves raise the children, but others hadn't. There was no guarantee that one generation of one particular family would follow the custom of their parents, either. Sometimes a powerful woman set a certain fashion, or the Ministry made a declaration that was more or less followed, or the Healers said one thing or the other was more healthy and people listened. Harry had found a diary written by Walburga Black that suggested they'd had Sirius raised by house-elves but not Regulus. Both of them had still died young and possibly had a touch of the Black madness about them.

            It didn't make sense. Having house-elves in the home, even having them around the children, couldn't be it.

            So he'd found one part of the answer, but the larger one was still missing. Harry shook his head and stood up, striding towards the library.

            Three steps and his knee locked up, the part in the middle that often felt liquid shifting and blending with the frozen joints. Harry folded forwards over it and managed to catch himself in time to keep from falling. Kreacher still appeared in response to his groan of pain, ears oriented on him.

            "Master Harry has overstrained himself," he said, in the kind of tone that he would usually keep to accuse someone of stealing the plate.

            Harry winced and sat up, doing his best to stretch his leg out in front of him without straining it. That would only prove the truth of Kreacher's words. "It's not as bad as it looks," he panted, closing his eyes and leaning his head against his knee. It hurt, badly enough that he felt as though someone was scraping at it with a pick. But, well, he simply had to ignore that. When he thought he could get his hands under him and push up, he did so.

            Kreacher was there before he could move any further, binding him with that silent magic house-elves had and levitating him onto a stretcher. Harry hadn't seen the stretcher appear, but he knew Kreacher must have fetched it from the store of them in one of the unused rooms on the first floor.

            "Kreacher, I'm fine," Harry said, but his voice withered a bit in the face of Kreacher's glare.

            "Master Harry is not being fine," Kreacher said. "Master Harry is being stupid, ungrateful, hurt, in needing of care, requiring his friends..."

            On and on it went, a long list of descriptive phrases, while Kreacher levitated Harry up to his bedroom. Harry closed his eyes and lay back, concentrating on his breathing. When he didn't, it seemed to come out in time with the throbs in his knee, and that increased the pain.

            He hated this. He was grateful to be alive, no matter what Kreacher said, but he wished that those warlocks who'd captured and tortured him hadn't used the kind of spells to slowly tear his knee joint sideways that meant even magic couldn't completely help him recover from the problems.

            He could walk, if he was careful. But a simple rap of his knee against a bookshelf or a desk could set off the pain for several hours, and he couldn't run or move at a pace much faster than a scuttling limp. It was the reason he had retired from the Aurors. They would have kept him on, gladly, working a desk job or instructing trainees in the sort of classes that one didn't need to walk for, but Harry hadn't needed the half-awed, half-pitying glances that came his way. He had enough pity for himself, which he knew he needed to overcome or he would drown in it. And he couldn't overcome it when more was pouring in on every side.

            He'd got over it eventually, he thought. The time spent alone, especially in the first few months after his retirement, had done that. But then something like this would happen, he would forget, and he would hate the world.

            For a little while.

            Kreacher offered to bring him the pain-dimming tea that Hermione had brewed for him. Harry refused it and asked for Firewhisky instead. Kreacher dithered, Harry scowled, and in the end Kreacher's anxiety for him to feel better overwhelmed the little elf's fear about what would happen if Hermione found out.

            Firewhisky fetched, Harry sipped and sighed. There were a few charms that worked slightly on the pain, and he'd already cast them, but the fastest way was to put a pleasant layer of fuzziness between himself and the world. He always stopped before he reached the level of totally pissed, because neither staggering to the bathroom nor vomiting in the bed was fun.

            And this time, he didn't want to get completely drunk, anyway, because his mind was still working on something.

            There has to be another reason that some families are so lucky in their children and some aren't.

*

            Harry sipped at his Hangover Potion and squinted at the list of numbers in front of him. They were figures for numbers of children in various generations. They varied between 7 and 12 at first, because the lucky families would have multiple children who would go on to produce multiple children of their own, but they became a depressing line of 1 1 1 1 in the most recent generations.

            "What is the secret?" Harry said aloud. "I think I'm onto something, but I wish I knew what it was."

            He shook his head and levered himself carefully out of the chair, grabbing his cane so that he stood a chance of making it across the kitchen without listing like a broken-masted ship. Kreacher appeared and watched him, but made no move to interfere. Harry nodded his thanks to him. Except for the times like last night when Harry was so badly hurt that he couldn't get up by himself, a lot of the attempts that Kreacher and other people made to help him actually hindered. He was the one who knew what his leg felt like and how to handle it.

            He went to the library where Lucy had leaped the other day, and to a row of books that seemed to have little to nothing to do with his topic. He still felt the relentless curiosity driving him to find a solution to his question, but it could bloody rest for a few days, which might mean that he would get some rest, too.

            Since he'd been thinking about house-elves on and off for days now, he selected a book about magical creatures on a whim, a book of the kind of stories that most children raised in the wizarding world would have grown up reading, and went into the garden. The black flowers and tangled weeds that had grown here were gone, now. Harry sat down happily on a stone chair, one of those Kreacher had covered with a cushion and cast cleaning spells on, and breathed in the sunlight. The trimmed grass and the flowering rosebushes around him made him stare for a long time, and forget the book lying in his lap.

            But when he picked it up and started reading, the stories worked the opposite way, making him forget about the outside world until evening when he dropped it, blinking and shaken.

            He'd gone away from the answer, and found it by a different route, as Hermione would say.

            I...this could be real.

*

            dominique1: It will become Drarry, though not a very high-rated one.

            LadyFreak: Thanks! There will be lots of antics from various epilogue kids in this story, including Al and Scorpius.

            unneeded: Lucius is dead, Narcissa is still alive.

            Thank you!

            SP777: Thanks! I think in most stories I’ve written with him, Scorpius is a massive pain in the butt. Or at least could be.

            Basically, the reason Darwin’s theory was controversial was that he was stating species had changed over time, rather than being created perfect and whole from the beginning of the world, the way that many people at the time believed. He saw two mechanisms for that, natural selection (the natural environment, competition for food, natural disasters, and so on) affecting animals directly in order to change them, and sexual selection (the way that animals display for and choose mates) affecting their reproduction indirectly.

            Nathoca: Thanks! I’m glad you’re enjoying.
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The Descent of Magic