Adult-FanFiction.org : Harry Potter

The Daring Win	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > General > General Views: 8178 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 2
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I am making no money from this story.

Chapter List
- 19
- 20
- 21
Thank you again for all the reviews!
Chapter Twenty—Meeting Lucius
Dolores stepped out of the Leaky Cauldron’s Floo and made sure there was no soot anywhere on her robes. She was wearing dark blue, which flattered her more than the pink she tended to prefer. She had thought of silver or green, but it was just as well, at the moment, not to remind Lucius that she had shared his House.
“Morning, Miss Umbridge.”
Dolores nodded to the barman, Tom. She wouldn’t have been worthy of such a greeting only a short while ago, but everyone knew her now as the guardian of Harry Potter. “Good morning. I am supposed to be meeting Lucius Malfoy here. Has he shown up yet?”
Tom blinked rapidly. “Haven’t seen him, miss.”
Dolores dipped her chin in acknowledgment and took one more look around the Leaky Cauldron. No, she didn’t think Lucius had disguised himself as another patron; his pride would hardly stand for it after she had announced their meeting to all and sundry. She had to assume he was deliberately late.
Perhaps as a test to see what I will do.
What Dolores did was settle down at a table with her hands folded in front of her and wait five minutes. Then she ordered a butterbeer and sipped it slowly, watching the fireplace and the doors simultaneously. Her seat was well-chosen for that.
Lucius finally appeared half an hour late, stepping slowly out of the fireplace and adjusting his cuff links. His robes were apparently spelled to refract all soot automatically, as none clung to them. They were a deep blue, a few shades lighter than Dolores’s robes, which she found hysterically funny.
He glanced up, saw her, and checked a little in his stride. Dolores didn’t know for sure whether it was the color of her robes or the fact that she sat there calmly sipping a drink instead of raging at him, but she was sure it was one of the two.
“Madam Umbridge.” He bowed to her, making his long white hair sway around him. It was braided behind his neck, gathered with a silver band in the best pure-blood tradition. Dolores didn’t have hair long enough to do that.
It didn’t matter. Where a Malfoy would use tradition as his weapon, Dolores used cunning and patience—the weapons that never went out of style. “Mr. Malfoy.” She stood to drop a curtsey, and sat back down. Lucius took the seat across from her, eyes narrowed and fixed on her face.
Dolores didn’t give anything away. She only sat, smiling blandly, until Lucius turned to order a Firewhisky. Dolores wanted to snort. Was he really trying to take her off-guard by making believe he would get drunk?
If so, it was as childish a tactic as making her wait.
Lucius turned to her and stared in silence until the Firewhisky arrived. Dolores had no problem with that. It was a technique her mother used to use on her. It had never worked after Dolores had learned what it meant that her mother was a Muggle and powerless against her. In this situation, Lucius was powerless to take Harry away from her.
She sipped, and smiled.
When Lucius had taken one drink of Firewhisky—and Dolores was sure he was feigning how much he swallowed—he set the bottle down and said, “You endangered my son.”
“How?”
“By allowing as reckless and irresponsible a man as Sirius Black to take him outside the house.”
“Well,” said Dolores slowly, consideringly. “I’m not the one who permitted that, you know. If you’re angry at anyone, I think it should be your wife. She allowed Draco to come with Sirius under the pretense of getting to know his cousin. I think it’s sad that she would want to allow Draco to know someone so reckless and irresponsible.”
“You condoned it so he could meet up with your ward.”
“Surely you won’t tell me that you think Harry is reckless and irresponsible, Mr. Malfoy. Or that they were meeting alone. I was there as a chaperone and guardian at all times. And so was Sirius, whatever Mrs. Malfoy’s fears that he might have taken Draco to—I don’t know, perhaps a Muggle cinema?”
Lucius straightened his cuff links again. Perhaps he meant to draw attention to them and how magnificent they were, but all Dolores could think was that he didn’t know how to answer her. She sipped and smiled.
“You did it under false pretenses.” Lucius turned his head as slowly as a leopard slewing around, catching her eyes and staring directly into them. “You knew my wife didn’t want Draco to have any more contact with Harry, and you provided them with a means to meet up anyway.”
“That is certainly true.”
“Why?”
“Sirius came up with the plan to allow Draco and Harry to meet. I tried to discourage him. It did no good.” Dolores shook her head sadly. “I would rather that it not have been under false pretenses. On the other hand, I do not think a seven-year-old capable of adult discretion, either, and I cannot believe that Mrs. Malfoy was ignorant for long of what the meetings really entailed. Then the question becomes, why did she let Sirius continue to bring Draco?”
“If you are accusing my wife of recklessness—”
“Only of letting her son go out with a man that you yourself describe as reckless. Say that she didn’t know he was meeting up with Harry, or me.” Dolores put her hand beneath her chin and stared into Lucius’s eyes. “That makes her look even worse, doesn’t it? If she thought her son was alone with someone who spent six years in Azkaban?”
Lucius’s fingers were tight on the stem of his glass. “You will not accuse my wife, madam.”
“And you will not accuse my ward. I am willing to trade one condition for the other.”
Lucius swept his gaze over her. Dolores waited. She thought she knew what he was trying to do: unnerve her so badly that she would trip up and start babbling. He would have to do better than this.
“You are such a little thing,” Lucius whispered. “How could you step into the path of my ambitions like this?”
“I was unaware that I had. We cooperated in getting rid of some of Dumbledore’s influence in the Wizengamot, and I have custody of Harry. What did I interfere in?”
“I should have had custody of Harry Potter.”
That was blunt enough that Dolores did stare. Then she confined herself to a single twitch of her shoulders under her robe. “You never applied for it. You could have done that if you wanted it, when I was before the Wizengamot. They would have given it to you.” Lucius had more power and connections than she did. Of course they would have.
“I faced those—unfortunate accusations in the war. I thought we would cooperate for a time and you would pass the custody to me when the scrutiny was less intense.”
“The scrutiny will never be less intense as long as Dumbledore believes he needs Harry to win the war,” said Dolores automatically, but her mind was busy. “How could I—do that when I didn’t know you wanted it?”
Lucius looked straight at her, his eyes pale and gleaming like the stones in the collar of his robe. “How could you think to keep the Boy-Who-Lived for yourself when you are of such low status, and no better than half a Mudblood besides?”
Dolores didn’t react because of her surprise at first, which clamped around her mouth and arms like steel. Then she nodded slowly. “I see. I did not realize that you thought of me that way.”
“Did you think I thought of you as an equal?”
“As an ally.” Dolores took another pull on her butterbeer. “Most allies can control their tongues around one another, and their contempt, if they actually feel it.” She didn’t think Lucius had picked up on her contempt for him, or would have been able to believe in it if he had.
“You were useful. I was content to have the boy grow up in your household for a few months as his first exposure to the magical world. And then you seemed set on keeping him, and you deceived me. I was waiting for you to realize the truth. You never did.”
“Well. I have now.”
“You have now,” Lucius echoed softly. “After convincing half the wizarding world that you are the only right and proper guardian to the boy, making it extraordinarily difficult for me to get further in my petition to claim him. You will pay for that.” He stood. “And for the deception that you perpetrated on my son and my wife,” he added, as if he had just now forgotten the supposed cause of his outrage.
Dolores thought about telling him that Draco would be devastated to be separated from Harry, but then didn’t say anything. If he believed it, it would be worse for her.
“Nothing to say?” Lucius asked after a moment, when he had stood there staring at her and Dolores had remained quiet.
“Nothing that would make you see the sense of allying with me.” Dolores stood and shrugged, then finished the butterbeer. “Perhaps this meeting was useless to both of us.” She turned away.
In truth, of course, she had discovered something useful no matter how Lucius might see it. He was still, and always, invested in blood status, more than in creating political contacts that would be useful for himself at some point in the future.
Let us hope that Draco is not so entrenched and might be redeemed.
She thought Lucius might call after her, but he did not, only pivoting on his heels like a machine to look as she made her way to the Leaky Cauldron’s Floo and called out the address of home.
*
“Does that mean I won’t see Draco again?”
The four of them—Dolores, Sirius, Harry, and Lupin, since Dolores thought the Malfoys might try to get at him should they realize he was Harry’s tutor—were sitting in the drawing room that Dolores sometimes used for Harry’s etiquette lessons. Harry had his head bowed and was picking at a trailing string on the sleeve of his robe.
Dolores cast the spell that would sever the string and sew up the edge of the robe, a little annoyed. The house-elves should have attended to that. Harry jumped and focused on her.
“Of course not, pup,” Sirius said at once. “I’ll just go and kidnap him sometimes, and that means we can all play together!”
Dolores rolled her eyes. “You will do no such thing, Black.”
“But if they want to see each other and we give Draco back once in a while, what’s the matter with it?”
Dolores didn’t bother to respond. Sometimes there was no reasoning with a man who had spent seven years in Azkaban. Lupin, at least, had his hand over his face, which might mean he shared her despair.
“I think you will see him again, but I don’t know when,” Dolores told Harry. “It means making the Malfoys realize they made a mistake to stop him coming to see you, and that they will never have custody of you.”
“Why won’t they have custody of me?”
“Because I won’t let them.”
Harry widened his eyes and blinked them rapidly. Dolores wasn’t sure what he was feeling. Maybe he wanted to be adopted by someone who had more money than they would ever have, and grand bedrooms, and more toys than Dolores could afford right now.
“Thank you.”
“You’re welcome,” said Dolores automatically, although she was still studying Harry and trying to figure out why he thought protecting her rights was something to thank her over. Perhaps he understood that his future was best with her. In which case, she had to give him more credit for insight than Lucius Malfoy.
Then again, I knew that already.
“I don’t know why Malfoy thought you would hand custody over to him without a murmur,” Lupin said then, softly. “Or at all. Why he waited this long. He thinks he can defeat you in a full argument before the Wizengamot.”
“He probably can,” Dolores acknowledged grimly. She would have Minister Bagnold’s support, but even Bagnold tended to back down from challenging the pure-blood supremacists with a lot of money and connections. Lucius was probably the archetypal rich, connected pure-blood.
“You said they wouldn’t have custody of me.”
Dolores nodded to Harry. “And I meant it.”
“But how can you keep custody of me if they make you back down in front of the Wizengamot?”
Sirius was the one who looked up, with a strange light shining in his eyes that Dolores thought had probably been more frequent before he went to prison. “You change the ground.” He smiled at Lupin. “You remember, Moony? All those times that Slytherins tried to ambush us in the dungeons, and we led them upstairs and then played pranks on them on ground that we knew.”
Dolores managed a slight, pained smile. She could take Sirius’s point, although honestly, she thought it could have been made without reference to his irrational prejudice against Slytherins. “We can do that. But it will take work to keep it from coming out in the Wizengamot.”
“We don’t want to go there,” said Harry, his fingers splayed out along his forehead, across the scar.
“How, though?” Sirius had swung right back into the depths of gloom, and he parodied Harry’s position without, Dolores was sure, delving into the deep thought that lay behind it. “All Malfoy has to do is announce he wants the Wizengamot to look into it, and we’ll have to go. They can legally require us to go.”
“Um,” said Harry. Dolores nodded to him, letting him know that what Sirius had said was true. But Harry went on. “What if they didn’t want me?”
“I’m afraid that’s not true, Harry. No matter what, they want to become your guardians for the political power they can wield by gaining control of you.”
Sirius hissed at her, sounding scandalized, but Dolores had never hidden that from Harry and she would not now. If she had, then he would have wanted to know at some point what all his political lessons were for, anyway. He was far smarter than either the Muggles or Dumbledore had given him credit for.
“No, I mean.” Harry was sitting up straight, and there was a light dawning in his eyes. “If they thought I was a horrible child? If they thought you had to do a lot more than you do?” He hesitated, then pushed on. “If they thought I was really like the burden and the spoiled freak the Dursleys always thought I was?”
“You’re not like that, pup!”
Luckily, Lupin leaned over and smacked Sirius’s arm so that Dolores didn’t have to take precious time out of her own day to do it. “That’s not what he’s saying,” Lupin hissed from the corner of his mouth. “Listen to what he is saying.”
Sirius rubbed his arm and frowned, but listened as Harry sat up and widened his eyes and let his lip tremble.
“I’m so damaged from my Muggle relatives that I still have nightmares sometimes,” Harry whispered. His voice slid into a whimper. “Well, not sometimes. Every night. And I worry about my dead parents and what they would think all the time. And I don’t know much about magic or history yet. And I don’t know what to think of Light and Dark. And I ask all these questions, all the time, and I don’t obey, and I like to sneak out and fly on my broom, and—”
The rest of the words were drowned in Sirius’s laughter as he leaned over and clapped Harry on the shoulder. “That’s brilliant, pup!” he exclaimed. “You don’t have to worry about any Malfoy adopting you with that.”
“Yes, you do not,” Dolores said, keeping her eyes from narrowing. “You are brilliant, Harry, and a large part of the reason that you are going to remain free and in my custody.”
Harry beamed at her, then got drawn into a conversation with Sirius and Lupin about how long he could keep up the act before Lucius Malfoy would be running in horror. No one seemed to notice Dolores as she leaned back in her chair and studied Harry pensively.
Brilliant, yes. And I wonder where he leaned some of that. I did not teach him all of that.
She would have to be careful. Harry was either learning more from Lupin and Sirius than she’d realized, or brilliant enough to come up with such ideas himself.
Neither thought pleased her.
- 19
- 20
- 21
You need to be logged in to leave a review for this story.You need to be logged in to leave a review for this story.
Report Story

The Daring Win