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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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Chapter Two—The Long Con
            Harry’s first thought about Malfoy Manor was that it held more space than anyone would ever want or need.
His second thought was: anyone sensible.
His third thought was that the Malfoys weren’t sensible, which was probably going to have consequences for him, one of these days.
Oddly, it wasn’t that bad as long as he kept his eyes aimed straight ahead and followed the tug on the chains. He presumed the Malfoys would replace them with something else soon. Couldn’t have your slave clattering around in those great old iron things and making so much noise and general tumult. Perhaps a delicate, decorative set of chains, made in elaborate white iron studded with diamonds, suitable for the people they intended to show him off to.
If they had the money to buy chains like that, after the vault that Lucius had given up to the goblins. But Harry dismissed that thought with a snort. If they were really strapped for wealth, they wouldn’t have offered for his worthless carcass. And they could make all the money they wanted by showing him off to their friends, or associates, or whatever one called the people they used to be Death Eaters along with.
They led him to a large room that looked like some sort of indoor garden. Harry glanced around, assessing it. The room was roughly oval, with a pond in the middle of it, under the only portion of the ceiling that was open to the sky. White marble walls curved down to the trellises and platforms where plants stood. There were nodding flowers there, but more climbing vines, and what looked like a lot of miniature fruit trees. Harry thought about destroying everything with his magic, because he could.
And then he sighed and sat down where Narcissa gestured for him to sit, in a chair before a desk, which probably had charms on it to preserve it from the wet and the heat. What else could he do right now? Unless he wanted to kill them with a touch, and his rage had drained as they walked away from the bank.
I got through the Dursleys. I got through half the wizarding world deciding to turn their backs on me once the goblins threatened them. I’m going to get through this.
The rage would come back if he needed it, if the Malfoys tried to curse him or hurt him more than they had done already. He knew it would. So, for right now, he fixed his eyes on the patient, pale faces watching him, and waited to hear exactly what they wanted from him.
Narcissa was the first to speak, her hands as lightly clasped as though she were speaking to a house-elf about arrangements for a dinner party. They all sat behind the desk, but the desk itself was so wide and long that Harry couldn’t see the chairs. “I suppose you don’t understand the reason why we bought you.”
“I understand,” Harry said. “You wanted to make me miserable, and make money off me.”
From the side, Malfoy—Draco—gaped at him. Harry rolled his eyes. Perhaps he hadn’t thought of the money-making potential that a captive Harry Potter could mean for his parents, but Harry was sure Lucius and Narcissa had. He met both of their eyes in turn and added, “Isn’t that right?”
Narcissa and Lucius exchanged a glance of the kind Harry had seen Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernon give each other when they were trying to come up with a last-minute present for Dudley. Then Lucius shook his head, and Narcissa sighed and sat up. “No. We had to lie to convince the goblins that we intended something as severe for you as they did, but we do, in fact, want to protect you and treat you as well as we can. You’ll have to stay inside the walls of the Manor; we can’t do anything about that. And you’ll have to act broken and despised if any goblins come on visits of investigation. There are other things we can’t allow you to do, like use your wand outside the wards where someone could detect it. But we do intend to work with you to give you a comfortable year, and make it only a pretense that we are mistreating you.”
Harry didn’t let his spine relax. This was too much like some of the things that the Dursleys had said over the years, too much like the things Voldemort had sometimes said to convince Harry he wasn’t so bad after all. Lure him close, make him relax, soften him up, and then launch the hammer blow. “Why would you do that?” he demanded. “There’s no reason for you to do anything but hate me.”
            Narcissa again clasped her fingers in front of her, or interwound them. The way she was sitting, with her shoulders high and still and stiff, set off all sorts of other alarms in Harry’s head, because, frankly, that wasn’t the way he thought normal people, ones who had sensible reasons for buying him, sat.
            But maybe it’s stupid to demand common sense out of anyone in this scenario. It’s stupid that the wizarding public abandoned me and allowed me to be sold in the first place.
            “We have life-debts to you,” Narcissa said quietly. “Not to mention the other less tangible but no less real debts that we owe you for having killed the Dark Lord and restored what we can have of our good name. That my husband is free right now and not in prison—and perhaps also my son—I must attribute to you.” She shook her head slightly. “I see by your eyes that you do not believe me. Nevertheless, you should ask yourself for what other reason we would do this. I am confident that the ones you come up with would make even less sense for someone like us than this. If you think about it.”
            Harry leaned against his chair and gaped at her. He was too late to hide his surprise anyway, so he said the first thing that came into his head. “No one has ever said anything about what they owe me for defeating Voldemort.”
            Simultaneous flinches from all three of them, which Harry could have found funny if he was in the mood. As it was, Narcissa bowed her head and murmured, “We would ask you not to speak of him by that name, since it will still cause us distress. But that is one of the reasons. Did you think we would be ungrateful?”
            Harry ran a hand over his face. He was too tired for this. But he had been too young to participate in the war, too, and too young to lose his parents, and too powerful for the Ministry to treat normally. He might as well get used to being “too” everything. “I thought you would be angry at me for losing your husband the position he had in his inner circle.”
            “By the end of the war, I no longer cared about that,” Lucius said, perhaps because his wife had nudged him in the side with her elbow. “I wanted only to be free of the demands that pressed on me.”
            Harry raised his eyebrows. “Why? Anyone at the time would have bet on Vol—him to win the war, and not me.”
            Lucius grimaced. “I did not say that having faith in you was easy. Only that we had no choice. I was out of favor. So was my wife, for having gone to Severus Snape and persuaded him to swear an Unbreakable Vow saying that he would complete Draco’s task if Draco failed at it.” Harry wondered if he was the only one who noticed that Draco turned his face away at the words, his throat bobbing. “And Draco, for not having completed a clearly impossible task that was only ever intended as punishment in the first place. If he had won, the Dark Lord would have destroyed us, sooner or later.” He spent a moment staring at Harry as if he could impress the next words into his mind telepathically, and then burst out, “I did not become a Death Eater to spend my days in a piranha pool, with everyone else trying to eat me alive.”
            “A very good comparison,” Narcissa murmured, laying her hand over her husband’s.
            “Okay,” Harry said. He thought about it a little more, and came up with a question that Hermione would probably never forgive him if he didn’t ask. “But why not protest earlier, when the goblins wanted to enslave me? Why now?”
            Lucius gave him a strange look. It went on being strange, until Harry didn’t think it was simply that he was tired. Then Narcissa whispered into his ear, and Lucius laughed a little, some of the lines of strain on his face easing.
            “Do something direct?” Lucius asked. “When the goblins could have stopped us, and would have sensed right away that our ruse was only that, instead of the plan we came up with to trick them?” He snorted. “Of course not. We are Malfoys.”
            Harry thought of pointing out that if Malfoys could snort, which wasn’t very dignified either, then they could sure as hell act directly. But Malfoy—Draco—was fidgeting in his seat now, and the chains were heavy, and part of him wasn’t hesitant to trust, to reach out and accept what was offered. If only because there had been no hope, and suddenly there was some, and he was as incapable of ignoring it as he had been of ignoring the food that the Dursleys offered.
            Just so there are no misunderstandings, though.
            “I have magic capable of crumbling any organic thing I touch,” he said abruptly. “Wood, plant fibers, anything that was once alive. And flesh. It’s why the goblins have me in chains instead of ropes.” He fixed his eyes on Narcissa, since she was the one who seemed to speak the most for them and understand everybody’s position the most. “Try to hurt me and I’ll use it on you.”
            Draco jumped as though he wanted to run out of the room. Even Lucius paled. But Narcissa reached out, her hand slow-moving and subtle, but not hesitant, and placed her fingers on the bones of his wrist in what was almost a caress.
            “We would expect nothing else, when so many have played you false,” she said. “Welcome home, Harry.” She stood up and gestured, and a house-elf appeared in front of Harry’s chair, bowing so fast to everyone that his ears almost fell off. “This is Ren. He will be your personal elf for your stay here. Would you like to go to your room now?”
            And maybe it was a trap, but Harry didn’t care anymore. The backwash of rage and hope had left him exhausted, trembling.
            “Yes,” he said, and stood up. Ren snapped his fingers, and the chains vanished.
            Harry lifted his wrists and rubbed them a little. He hadn’t realized that the weight irritated him more than not being able to move freely until that weight was gone. He turned his hands over, and frowned for a moment at the welts there.
            “Allow me,” Narcissa said, and leaned her wand against the welts. Harry passively allowed her to heal him. Maybe he should have been more suspicious, reacting faster, striking back, but the Malfoys hadn’t proven themselves treacherous like the Dursleys so often were—
            Yet.
            And that weariness was still there, weighing him down more heavily than any chains. Too many changes in his life in too short a period of time, and there was nothing he could do, and nothing he wanted to do.
            “Yous is coming along now,” Ren said, and led the way around a corner and up a flight of stairs that looked as if they climbed forever. Harry decided he could climb them, though, for the promise of a soft bed at the end.
            He could feel his brain trying to work as he climbed, coming up with ways around the prohibition on sending letters to his friends, and he could hear the Malfoys starting to talk behind him. Part of him thought he should listen.
            He couldn’t care enough, though. Resignation and rage and hatred and relief combined to make him drop straight down the moment his head hit the pillows, and if someone pinched or pulled at him after that, he would deal with the bruises when he woke.
*
            “Can we trust him in the house?” Draco’s father was asking. “You heard what he said about his magic. If can touch any of those old chairs that Aunt Emily left and disintegrate them—”
            “I should think that he wouldn’t do that as long as we take care not to irritate him,” Narcissa said, and turned to look at Draco.
            Draco glared at her. “What? Do you think I would try to irritate him the way I did in school? No! Not knowing he can do that.” He shivered again. This was worse than that remote look in Potter’s eyes when they were taking him out of the bank. Now he was going to be in close quarters with Potter for at least a year.
            He might change.
            Draco didn’t think Potter had changed since the war, though, except to grow angrier and more dangerous. He’d still been more concerned about his friends when they were trying to get him out of there than the welts on his wrists or the true motives of his captors or his change in circumstances. And if Potter started trouble with him…
            “You need not speak with him,” his mother said, shaking her head. “I think we’ve proven today that I’m the only one of us who can successfully converse with him.” She sighed and glanced at Lucius. “You might at least make an effort, Lucius, as the older man, and one who does not have a boyhood rivalry with Mr. Potter.”
            “He cost me one of my house-elves,” Lucius said, standing up and arranging the formal robes fussily around himself. Draco smiled a little. At least he had a kindred spirit in his father. As long as there was a definite goal, buying Potter before the goblins could take him into slavery and thus repaying the life-debt, his father had moved like a comet, but now that the goal had arrived, he saw no reason why he should be troubled further. “I need not be sympathetic to him.”
            Draco nodded. “I’ll be happy to stay away from him and not start fights,” he told his mother. “But in school, he was always the ones who started them.”
            For a moment, Narcissa stood before them. Then she raised her eyebrows and said, “Very well,” and swept out of the room.
            There was another thing that Draco and his father were kindred spirits in, and that was in being able to feel like shit because of a single glance from his mother. Draco winced and looked at Lucius, who had gone a little pale.
            “I suppose,” his father said in strangled tones, “that common civility to the boy will not be out of the question, since we did bring him into our home. I would not have it said that we treated guests inhospitably.” He glanced at Draco. “But I expect you to help me in this, son, instead of undermining my efforts.”
            Draco squawked a little before he could get control of himself. “When have I ever undermined your efforts?”
            His father ignored the question magnificently and flipped his cloak over his arm, calling to the elves to help him. Draco, who preferred to get undressed by himself even if his father did reassure him that there was no recorded instance of a house-elf ever taking advantage of a naked human, trudged up to his own room. Sometimes, he would have liked to Apparate, and this was one of them.
            He glanced once down the corridor that held Potter’s rooms, and then turned his back firmly. He kept nothing down there; when his mother’s family had been alive, they were used as guest rooms for them, but no Black had come to visit in years. Draco had no reason to feel deprived by the loss of a wing.
            It’s still going to be hell sharing my home with Potter, he thought, as he banged the door of his bedroom to behind him and began to take off his clothes.
            But they had done what they had to do. Draco had learned the difference between that and what you simply wanted to do well enough in the war.
*
            Harry opened his eyes and sat up, magic waking in his muscles, stretching, pacing back and forth.
No. He didn’t need to break out of chains, out of cages. He was in Malfoy Manor, not the goblins’ vaults, or wherever else beneath Gringotts they would have had him work. He was safe.
Harry closed his eyes and shook his head back and forth. Safe, in Malfoy Manor. How Hermione would laugh if he told her that.
And he would find some way to tell her that. He would play along with the Malfoys and fool the goblins into believing that the Malfoys were treating him like their broken toy, but he was not going to go a year without communicating with his friends.
He had been a bit foolish to ask about it in front of an audience, though, he had to admit. The Malfoys had done exactly what they needed to. Lucius had offered a vault and no more extravagant price. They hadn’t mentioned or discussed anything except what would help them, hadn’t wasted a word more.
There was something in that Harry could admire, and something a lot unlike what he would have expected from the Malfoys. He would have thought waste was what they were about, not economy.
Harry stretched his arms above his head, looking around the room. It looked like it wasn’t much larger than the drawing room at Grimmauld Place, which made it a good choice. If the goblins visited unexpectedly, the Malfoys would be a little hard-put to explain why he had a grand room. They couldn’t give him a house-elf’s sleeping area, maybe, since he wouldn’t fit, but they didn’t have to be nice either.
He put on his glasses and climbed slowly out of bed. The windows were false, obviously enchanted, displaying views of the sea and a snowy winter field that Harry didn’t pay much attention to, but it felt like early morning. His stomach grumbled, and Harry touched it once before he glanced down at his clothes.
The Malfoys would probably expect him to appear with clean but not rich clothes, both in the play and in reality. Trouble was, Harry hadn’t brought any other clothes with him. The goblins had specified in the “contract” that made their slavery all nice and legal that they would provide him with rags to wear.
Harry shrugged, and cast quick charms on himself, scrubbing his skin and the fabric of his clothes, then refreshing his breath and arranging his hair so that it looked as though someone had angrily smashed it flat with a hand, rather than angrily run a hand right through the middle. It was the best he could do, even Hermione agreed on that.
Thus armed and fortified, he set out to find if the staircase was really as tall as he remembered.
Ren appeared to meet him before he got to the door, smiling and bowing. “Harry is being restings?” he asked anxiously.
Harry blinked at him and took a minute to translate that. “I’ve had all the rest I need,” he replied, when he realized that he really couldn’t. “Now I’m going downstairs.”
Ren nodded. “Mistress Narcissa is to be waiting for Harry Potter,” he announced, and the door clicked open at the same moment as he vanished. A moment later, Harry heard the sheets on the bed vanishing as well.
He relaxed. At least he wouldn’t need to be responsible for cleaning that up, then, and the goblins were unlikely to realize the difference between linen cleaned by one kind of magic and one cleaned by another.
Yes, the staircase was still formidable. Harry went down the ivory-white treads that curved around and around, and discovered that the Malfoys’ economy was an illusion. He had never seen this part of Malfoy Manor, or else they had cleaned and polished and expanded after the war. So much whiteness and brightness everywhere, and what could be gilded was.
Harry paused, then shrugged. His will had brought him this far, and he didn’t want to dissolve the Malfoys or disintegrate the house—yet. Besides, his magic couldn’t do anything about the gilding unless it was on wood.
He descended the last curve of the staircase, and another hovering elf, who was flicking its hands at the floor in such a way that the dust appeared to leap up and become part of its fingers, bowed and squeaked Harry on his way through a forest of corridors. Another elf appeared whenever he was about to be lost and kept him moving.
By the time he arrived at a door considerably taller than he was and made of black oak, with silver handles and hinges, it was ten minutes later and Harry was hungry enough to kill. He paused and shut his eyes, bowing his head for a few seconds while he thought. He could go in there and start an augment with the one Malfoy who had actually seemed sympathetic to him yesterday, or he could have something to eat.
Hunger won. Since his childhood, it always did. He nudged the door open, his annoyance only increasing when it swung as if it was on a pivot instead of hinges.
Then he rolled his eyes. They were the Malfoys, this was Malfoy Manor. What did he expect?
He stepped in, and found Narcissa sitting on the near end of a large, round table fit for about seventeen knights. Harry stood in the doorway and waited for her to notice him, which she did after a moment. She had the Daily Prophet spread in front of her, and he thought her smile was strained when she greeted him. Well, it would be.
“Harry,” she said. “Do you mind if I call you that? Of course we’ll have to adopt some degrading title in front of those awful goblins, but your last name seems a little formal for everyday wear.” Her smile eased. “And I’m certain you’ll hear it enough from my husband and son to remember who you are.”
            “Yes,” Harry said, as he sat down across from her. “That’s fine.” He glanced at the table, where plates of scones, kippers, toast, eggs, and some kind of mash, as well as giant pots of porridge and tea, had appeared. He blinked. Generally he’d at least seen the food arriving at Hogwarts.
            “Thank you for granting me permission,” Narcissa said, with a little nod, as if she was really honored. “I was waiting for you to join me before I ate. Are you hungry?”
            Considering he already had some honey spread on a scone and the entire thing jammed in his mouth, Harry thought the answer to that question redundant. He nodded and tried to slow down. He hadn’t eaten much yesterday, because rage had filled his stomach instead, and then he’d gone to bed early.
            Luckily, although Narcissa made some remark about the age of the house now and then, or said that she hoped he’d slept well, she didn’t say anything else that actually required an answer in words. Harry munched his way through the rest of breakfast, too absorbed in the flavors to glance at her often.
            He did look up when Narcissa said, “You may be wondering why my husband and son haven’t joined us for breakfast.”
            Harry did his best to give a large shrug, to convey that he hadn’t wondered it and didn’t care.
            Narcissa smiled a little sharply, but continued. “They were agreed that we needed to rescue you, to fulfill the life-debt and the debt of honor we owed you, but now that you are here, they don’t know quite what to do with you. I would give them a few days to loosen up and start treating you with courtesy.”
            Harry only nodded, and returned to his meal. That was fine with him. He could be polite if he met them, because they had rescued him, and because his life had changed so much. It included more important things than the taunts Malfoy might make about his hair or his parents or—other things that had irritated him. Some of Harry’s Hogwarts memories had gone dream-like in the intense time since the war. He remembered the mysteries and the battles and the moments of high emotion.
            But really, who cared what Malfoy had said to him on a spring afternoon seven years ago? Harry had been furious about it at the time, but he wasn’t that person anymore.
            Lucius might be different. Harry still remembered that he had nearly killed Ginny with the diary, that he wouldn’t have cared if she had died. But he could stay away from Lucius, too, or be polite when he came near. It wasn’t as though Lucius Malfoy would be dying to spend time with him, either.
            “I think you should have something to do,” Narcissa said, when Harry had finally stopped clearing his plate every time he piled more food on it. “Not slave work, not in the way the goblins would have meant it, but something to occupy you.”
            Harry faced her and nodded. “Whatever you like,” he added aloud, when he realized she was waiting for that. It seemed strange to him that she would want the words at all, but she was the only Malfoy in front of him right now. He might as well be polite to her, too.
            “What would you like to do?” Narcissa asked quietly.
            Harry smiled in spite of himself. “Fly, but I know you can’t let me outside,” he said. “What about a room where I can train?”
            “With hexes, and so on?” Narcissa nodded. “Of course. The goblins’ demands did rather interrupt your Auror training, didn’t they?”
            Harry shrugged, and didn’t answer. Let her think what she liked. She was hardly the only one assuming that he would be an Auror when he got free of his imprisonment, instead of leaving the wizarding world forever, as Harry still intended to do. His friends and the Malfoys had spoken up for him. No one else. He was done with the lot of them.
            “I think we have a room that can be adapted, although no room ready right now,” Narcissa said, and tapped her finger against her lips for a moment before a house-elf appeared at her side. Harry blinked, wondering if she had called it in silently, the way that people would cast a nonverbal spell, and then shrugged and leaned back. Perhaps it was something as simple as the elves sensing the mood of people who lived in the house. “Triffy, if you will examine the rooms in the south wing and see which can best be spared as a training room?”
            Triffy bowed. He seemed to be a less excitable elf than Ren, Harry thought, but he was probably more senior, to be serving Narcissa. “Triffy be knowing all the rooms in the south wing, Mistress,” he murmured. “The room of the couches would be being the most appropriate.”
            Narcissa smiled. “Of course. Thank you, Triffy.” She turned to Harry as the elf disappeared. “We have a room that we store old couches in, because they’re still fine furniture but are unsightly due to stains or burns that even the elves can’t remove. Or sometimes, simply, the color chosen, which tends to resist Transfiguration because of the accidental magic of children.” She shook her head, her lips narrow. “I don’t know what my husband’s ancestors were thinking.”
            Harry stirred a little. “You don’t have to—I mean, I can practice somewhere else if you don’t want to move them.”
            Narcissa waved her hand. “We are already using wizardspace to store them. It’ll be a simple matter to expand the wizardspace so that you can have some empty places to practice. It is infinitely flexible, after all.”
            Harry found the room for a smile for the first time since he’d walked through the doors of the Manor .That wasn’t Hermione’s theory of wizardspace at all, and he wondered what she would say if she could hear Narcissa’s. “Thank you. I appreciate it.”
            Narcissa nodded and leaned back, thinking. “You might be practicing sometimes when a goblin comes over. They’re likely to make at least one unannounced visit. We should think of a suitable lie for you to be practicing hexes.”
            Harry clenched his hands under the table. He was tired of lying. He wanted to tell everyone to go fuck themselves, and mean it. But he couldn’t do that until a year had gone past, so he might as well make the best of what he had.
            “You want me trained as a bodyguard,” he said. “Rather than take my magic away from me, you thought you’d use it.”
            Narcissa’s eyebrows slowly rose. “That is not at all a bad idea,” she said. “And it would make a good reason for you to be outside the Manor with your wand, as long as you don’t mind accompanying my son to Diagon Alley.”
            My son, Harry thought. She never refers to him as “Draco.” I wonder why? He nodded. “I wouldn’t mind.”
            “Good.” Narcissa rose and gave a slight bow to him that Harry returned before he thought about it. “I hope you can be happy with us, Harry. And I have hope that my husband and son will attempt to return the polite tolerance you will offer them.”
            Harry, with less hope, nonetheless nodded again, and stood up to call Ren to escort him to the couches room.
*
Moon Whistler: Thanks! I hope to have a chapter up every Saturday evening.
chester: Well, in this case it comes straight from the prompt! So thank helenadax for a great prompt, too. ;)
BAFan: Thank you! I hope this works out as well as I want it to.
Wölkchen: Thank you so much! This story intrigues me, too, and I think it will be a long one.
SP777: I don’t think it’s all that different. It does involve Harry interacting with the Malfoys as a family, which he’s done before.

            Jester: Yes, he’s committed to that, but he’s still determined to leave in the end.
Rabiarose: Thank you! Harry really is irritated that no one spoke up for him, but that’s to be expected, I think, when wizards get threatened with the loss of their money.
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The Long Defeat