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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 Twenty—Trouncing

            “Dad!”

            The call came from the drawing room. Draco felt his hand begin to rise when Potter looked up from the parchments spread in front of them and wheeled around, and lowered it with an effort. Just because they had been discussing important things when the call interrupted didn’t mean Draco had the right to object. He thought he recognized the voice of Potter’s son, the one his own son preferred. Perhaps it was important.

            Although I doubt it.

            He moved unobtrusively to stand in the door of the kitchen when Potter walked out to answer it, and ignored the way that Granger shifted behind him. She was working well with him today, probably because she had finally decided, based on the way his potion acted for Potter, that he wasn’t evil. She might think he shouldn’t eavesdrop, but so far, she hadn’t objected to Draco wanting to listen.

            Potter knelt down before the fireplace. Draco felt his nostrils flare. He couldn’t have done that a week ago. Do you hear that, Scorpius? Do you hear that, Astoria, wherever you are?

            “Are you all right, Al?” Potter asked, and a faint smile touched his lips. Draco hadn’t seen the way that Potter looked when talking to his children before—he didn’t think the obstinate nephew he had met at Hogwarts counted—but he was sure this was it. “You sound as though someone hurt your feelings.”

            A splutter followed, and then “Al” said, “No, I’m fine, Dad. No, wait, I’m not fine. Do you know what your precious Mr. Malfoy said to Scorpius?”

            “He told me this morning that he had a conversation with him yesterday,” Potter responded, rocking back on his heels. “But only that Scorpius accused him of lying and not improving the lives of pure-bloods, nothing else. Why, what else did he say?”

            Silence. Draco imagined the staring contest taking place. He’d had many of the same sort with Scorpius.

            “That’s it,” Al said. “That’s enough. And you don’t care, do you?” He spoke with the bitterness of someone watching a ruined potion steam out on the floor. Draco wouldn’t have thought any son of Potter’s would have known that emotion, but since Al was going to partner with Scorpius in a business venture involving pranks, he probably did.

            “Not so much about that,” Potter said, voice slow and heavy and thoughtful in the wake of his son’s. “Because what Scorpius said might be understandable, but it isn’t true. His father isn’t lying in the way he’s working with me. And you and Scorpius have been making pure-bloods uncomfortable since you got together. His father wasn’t happy when Scorpius went into Gryffindor House, was he? I find it hard to believe that he cares about making people like his father used to be unhappy now.”

            Draco’s fingers tapped a little beat on the doorframe into the kitchen. He pulled them back before they could cause much noise, he thought, but Potter must have caught the sound, because he turned his head and smiled at Draco.

            Draco blinked and cleared his throat. Potter’s eyes were unexpectedly stunning, when Draco was seeing them from this angle. He ducked his head, and Potter let whatever he might have said die without speaking, turning back to his son instead.

            “I know that it’s different when Scorpius sees something that might change his whole conception of his father. I had difficulty letting go of lots of conception. About your namesakes—I told you that before—and about myself after I got injured. But it doesn’t do any good to keep believing something that you know isn’t true, Al. Scorpius’s dad is responsible for making this better.” He slapped his bad knee. Draco winced in spite of himself, but Potter didn’t seem to be in any pain as a result. “I don’t really think someone who’s prejudiced and only involving himself in this struggle to dupe me, or whatever other dark crime Scorpius is accusing him of, would go out of his way to brew such a complicated potion.”

            Silence. Then Draco heard a sound like a throat being cleared, and Al said, “You’re going to walk and be okay, Dad? Really?”

            “I don’t know how long the potion will last,” Potter said, his voice gentler than—than lots of things, Draco thought, already knowing that he didn’t really want to make the comparison. “But Draco also broke the spell on my knee that was making the Healers who worked on it forget about the damage. Even when they put the memories in Pensieves, someone who looked at it would forget what it really looked like. That means that I have the hope for a real recovery.”



            Silence again. Draco wished he could lean out far enough to see the expression on the boy’s face, but he would have hated it if someone had interrupted him like this with Scorpius, so he stayed still.

            Then he found that he had compressed his lips. As if I would ever have a conversation like that with Scorpius. I am not injured.

            “I’m—glad,” Al said quickly, as if it hurt to say that much. “But I still have to think about what he’s doing to Scorpius, and I hate that. I hate seeing the way that Scorpius suffers.”

            “I can’t promise that he’ll have a good relationship with Draco,” Potter said, voice a shade cooler. “But I think he would have a better one if he stopped accusing his father of lying all the time and focused on something else instead. You told me that you’d almost rented a shop. Concentrate on that. Is it finished?”

            “I—ah—”

            Draco felt his eyebrows go up, and saw the same expression show on Potter’s face. It didn’t really matter if you were pure-blood or not, Draco thought—one of the few times when it didn’t. That you were a parent meant you understood that hesitation.

            “What happened?” Potter asked.

            “Nothing!” Al said hastily. “It’s not something we need to talk about right now, I mean. I only firecalled you to talk about Mr. Malfoy, and to ask about your knee, and they’re both really good, right?”

            Then he shut down the Floo without giving Potter a chance to open his mouth again. Which meant he was bloody quick, Draco thought, since he had had a chance to observe how fast Potter talked several times now.

            Potter sat back, blinking, and then glanced at Draco and smiled faintly. “I hope that your relationship with your son improves outside of this,” he said, standing up with a care that reminded Draco of how much he must expect the potion to stop working any minute now. “But in the meantime, we can at least hope he has other things to concentrate on than spreading the stories about your lying.”

            Draco nodded, but had to ask, “You think your son can convince him?”

            Potter grinned. “I don’t know. I have someone else who might be able to.” He went on before Draco could ask who that might be. “But—as much as it pains me to say this, Draco, we don’t really need Scorpius to love and respect you. We just need him to stop telling people that you must be lying despite all the lack of evidence for it. I think that fewer people will pay attention to him since you shut him down so well at the Hogwarts meeting, but even the chance that some people might isn’t a chance that I want to take.”

            Draco nodded his understanding. “I am not sure why he chose that particular tactic.”

            “Because it offended him, I think,” Potter said, and swatted once more at his knee before ambling back towards the kitchen table. “That you could be, as he saw it, prejudiced against Muggleborns and threatening to disown him for not being pure-blood enough one day, and then championing the cause of Muggleborns the next.”

            Draco curled his lip, but was aware of Granger behind his back, and kept silent.

            Well, Granger and the way that he had touched Potter without flinching the last few times he had examined his knee. But that was something that neither his son nor Granger nor even Potter really needed to know about.

            “I understand now,” Draco said, and switched the subject back before Potter could get out of it or Draco could forget about it. “What did you mean, when you said that you had found someone else who might convince him?”

            “Teddy came back home,” Potter said, and a subtler glow of happiness joined the one already on his face. Draco stared at him, and Potter rolled his eyes. “Teddy Lupin, my godson. Your cousin. And Scorpius’s. He’d been in Brazil studying Lethifolds. I told him about the problem with Al and Scorpius, and he promised me that he would go talk to them. Someone who’s nearer their own age might convince them more than someone who’s not.”

            “I wish you had not interfered,” Draco said through stiff lips.

            Potter gave him a faint, rueful smile. “Sorry. I mean that. But although we don’t need your relationship and Scorpius’s to be better in order to make things work out with other pure-bloods, I’d like it if it was better, anyway.”

            Draco turned his head away and swallowed hard. He wished he could make sense of half the things pulsing in his chest and pushing at his throat, but he couldn’t, so he settled for saying, “I don’t think the interference will make things better. I think it will make them worse. Will you apologize if it does so?”

            “Of course,” Potter said, sounding surprised. He touched Draco’s shoulder, then seemed to realize it wasn’t the right time for that and pulled his hand back. “Or do something else to make it up to you, if you want.”

            Draco glanced at him from the corner of his eye. Potter wasn’t smiling now; he waited, his eyebrows up and his head tilted as though he thought Draco would fling an object at him and he had to be ready to dodge.

            Draco tried to imagine that state of mind, willing to apologize to someone when you had done what you thought was for the best, and irritably rejected the next emotion that showed up to ram the inside of his heart. They had business to conduct.

            “It’s possible that other pure-bloods will follow Highfeather’s example of endowing sanctuaries, but not without encouragement,” he said, aiming his eyes at the high wall of the kitchen and counting the peeling strips of paper there. “That means that I’ll need you willing to appear in public and give it to them…”

            And they came up with their plans, nothing more remarkable for the rest of the afternoon than Granger agreeing with him without a reference to the conversation between Potter and his son, and Potter watching him tenderly.

            Which might be fairly remarkable, when Draco thought about it.

*

            The next morning brought a faint return of pain in his knee, but Harry had expected hat, so he could go down and have his breakfast with a modicum of acceptance. What he hadn’t expected was the sound of fury coming through his Floo. He turned his head, listening, wondering if Al and Scorpius had decided to bring the argument they must be having with Teddy by now into his house.

            Then he heard a female voice, and stood up and moved more briskly despite the way that the joint ached.

            Lily stood in front of the fireplace, facing Teddy, who looked as though he wished he was a real werewolf at the moment so he could terrify Lily into shutting up. From the way she was speaking, Harry knew this wasn’t the first argument they’d had in the last twenty-four hours.

            “If you’d left well enough alone, I would have persuaded them around!” Lily’s red hair looked as if it was about to stand on end, and she stomped closer to Teddy, glaring at him. The glare forced a smile from Harry’s lips. He had so many memories of her mother doing much the same. “But no, you had to come in and throw your weight around as though anyone wanted to see that, and brag about your experience as a man of the world, and make them so resentful that there’s no chance they’ll listen to me now!”

            “The stupid things they were saying,” Teddy began, in a voice that Harry knew was meant to imply Lily was also saying stupid things, “meant I had no choice but to explain the truth to them. And I am older and more experienced than they are—”

            “Says the man who’s terrified to ask my cousin to marry him because he’s so certain that she’ll hate him for his dad,” Lily snapped.

            Teddy’s eyes changed color, towards amber, and his hair darkened. Harry knew he never looked more like Remus than in those moments, but Lily had known registered werewolves from the time she was a girl, thanks to the people who visited her Aunt Hermione, and she only rolled her eyes.

            “I think Victoire is more likely to hate you for being a Metamorphmagus than to hate you because you’re a werewolf,” Lily said. She looked Teddy up and down. “Unless you can change the size and shape of everything—”

            “That’s enough,” Harry said hastily, stepping in. Lily had sometimes made enemies for life when she talked like that, and Teddy’s face was steadily freezing up, his fists clenching as if he would strike out. “Teddy, what are you doing here? And you,” he added belatedly to Lily. “You still have a few weeks of school.” Of course, it had become somewhat of a fashion among the younger Gryffindors to sneak out of Hogwarts via the Floo to visit their families. Harry thought people had probably done it when he was a student, too, and he hadn’t known just because neither he nor his best friends had wanted to go home all the time.

            “He ruined everything,” Lily said, putting her chin up. “I was talking to Al and Scorpius, and I’d made them think about what they were saying, and made them realize that they don’t really want Aunt Hermione to hate them. Or you, either, Dad,” she added, with a glance at Harry that made him smile in spite of himself. “Then Teddy cornered them and said some stupid things.”

            “You don’t know what I said—”

            “Stupid things,” Lily repeated sternly. “Because when they came back from talking with him, they were embarrassed, but Al just kept saying that Scorpius didn’t have to pay attention to his father if he didn’t want to, and Scorpius kept saying that he did, because his father might ruin the wizarding world otherwise, unless someone stopped him.”

            Harry checked a sigh. “It didn’t go as well as you hoped?” he asked Teddy.

            “Were teenage boys always that stupid?” Teddy asked earnestly.

            “Yes,” said Lily.

            Teddy had evidently decided that it was beneath a twenty-six-year-old to argue with a sixteen-year-old, because he turned his head to the side so that even werewolf vision couldn’t have kept track of Lily, and continued with a brittle dignity. “I mean it, Uncle Harry. Merlin. Scorpius just kept saying that his dad was really evil, if he’d convinced me to do his bidding, and Al was saying that they wanted to concentrate on their joke shop and not do anything else.”

            “I talked to Al myself yesterday,” Harry said, shaking his head. “I hope it can convince him to at least keep out of politics if he won’t be sensible. But Scorpius…the bitterness there is so deep I don’t know what will convince him.”

            “Let me talk to him,” Lily insisted. “I was talking to him like Aunt Hermione talks to people she doesn’t really like but has to deal with.”



“And you have the audacity to blame me?” Teddy muttered.

Lily said, “There’s a strong smell of wet dog in here, Daddy,” but she shut her mouth and squirmed a little when Harry gave her a look. “Sorry,” she muttered. “Anyway. I wanted him to see that I didn’t really care what he felt about his father. Sometimes Mr. Malfoy is annoying, from the way he talks about him. But he wasn’t really making things better for house-elves and goblins by opposing him. He can keep an eye on things and make sure that you and Aunt Hermione are really in charge, if he wants. But if he wants to sell pranks to all kinds of magical creatures as well as humans eventually, which he says he does, then it’s to his advantage if they get treated better and trust humans more.”

“Where did you get that tactic?” Teddy asked, staring at Lily.

Lily tossed her hair at him. “I told you. Aunt Hermione. She’s always making people see that it’s to their own advantage to treat magical creatures better. I only had to think about what kind of advantage it would have for Scorpius. And it’s even better because he doesn’t have to do things himself, like work beside his dad. He only has to keep from doing some stupid things, like implying that my dad and my aunt are stupid.”

Harry smiled at his daughter. “If you can get him to listen, then I’d appreciate it,” he said. “But ultimately, I think Scorpius will have to make up his mind about whether to live with his dad or stop saying stupid things himself.”

Lily shrugged. “Maybe. I can at least let him know that someone else thinks he’s being stupid, though. He hates the sensation of having an audience.”

Harry hummed in response, and managed to change the subject to one that he knew both Teddy and Lily found fascinating—the secret passages that they had occasionally found in Grimmauld Place, and the way that they seemed to open into each other, as though whoever had built them had assumed that people would want to go from one place to another in the labyrinth rather than in the open air. Teddy and Lily disappeared into the library soon to look at the bookshelves, where they had found a tome once with a scribble in the margin that showed them how to open the first of the passages, and Harry turned and limped up the stairs to his bedroom.

Draco wanted him to appear that afternoon at a gathering of pure-bloods called the Esoteric Song Society. Harry didn’t really know what they did, other than gather around to appreciate music. Draco had said that the house was Highfeather’s, or one of hers, and that Harry was going to dress appropriately or Draco was going to kill him.

Harry chuckled as he began to search among the ranks of robes he hadn’t worn in two years, but which should still fit. Pain had kept him from taking exercise, but also from eating much. He would need Kreacher to press them and clean them, though.

What will Draco think if he sees you in these robes?

Harry folded up those thoughts for storage along with the robes he rejected. Draco hadn’t promised that he would be at the meeting of the Esoteric Song Society.

But Harry could feel the flame of that hope burning in him, strong and bright, and he didn’t try to keep the smile off his face as he dressed.

*

ChaosLady: Thanks for reviewing!

TalisRuadair: Draco and Harry are both less stubborn than they used to be, but yeah, it’s going to be a struggle to convince them.

Thank you very much for the compliments! I’m glad that you’re enjoying those other stories, too.

SP777: I think Harry would ultimately miss flying more, and his knee would keep him from doing the dangerous tricks he used to.

Thank you!

Zip: Thanks! Hope you continue to enjoy.

unneeded: Highfeather will probably be unable to tell if it has or not for a little while.

Glad you liked those moments, too.
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The Descent of Magic