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A More Worldly Man	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 10961 -:- Recommendations : 2 -:- Currently Reading : 1
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter, nor any of the characters from the books or movies. I do not make any money from the writing of this story.

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Chapter Twenty-Three—Rita’s Article

            Harry blinked as a loud thump sounded throughout his flat. He lifted his head, trying to figure out if it came from the front door or the fireplace, and the thump repeated itself. Then he realized Draco was lying beside him, twitching like a dog in a dream, and his arm was dangling almost all the way down to the floor. His hand was thumping his knuckles against the side of the bed. Harry stifled a chuckle and wrapped an arm around his shoulders so he wouldn’t roll off the bed. Draco snorted and woke up.

            “Why am I so stiff?” he muttered, passing a hand across his eyes. He stretched and winced, which had the effect of dissipating Harry’s amusement at once.

            “I’m so sorry,” he murmured, cupping one hand around Draco’s arse. “Are you all right? Did I hurt—“

            “This is a good kind of soreness,” Draco said, dropping his hands and giving him an incredulous look. “As you would know if you’d ever experienced it.” Abruptly, he grinned, and the expression was so lustful that Harry felt his cock twitch in response. “That’s right, I forgot you hadn’t. I’ll have to correct that soon.” He sat back on his heels and raked his glance down Harry’s body, as if he were imagining doing so just at that moment.

            Harry would have agreed, but a true, separate thump, not a dreaming Draco, sounded from another room. Someone was knocking on the front door. Draco sighed, said, “Bother,” with a martyred expression, and reached for Harry’s wand again to Summon clothing for them.

            Harry felt a soft tingle traveling through his bones when Draco used the wand, which he had been too busy to notice yesterday. He smiled, which made Draco raise an eyebrow. “And you think being caught naked is amusing?” he asked. “I’ll have to remember to ask Granger what exactly you got up to with Weasley in your bedroom at Hogwarts.”

            “I was wondering what it felt like to you when I used your wand in our seventh year,” Harry said, looking at the hawthorn wand lying on the other side of the room. “Or could you feel it at all? I took that wand from you, after all, and you’re using mine with my permission.”

            Draco paused for a moment, then shrugged and continued casting. He already wore a white shirt that looked impeccable and would probably please the person who still pounded on the door, at least if that person was Hermione. “You can’t sense the use of your own wand like this unless you’re close to it,” he said. “This one feels—friendly to me, as if it’s happy to let me use it because I please you. And when you took my wand, it made me feel bereft.”



            Harry wrapped his arms around Draco and dragged him closer for an impulsive kiss. “I’m so sorry,” he whispered again into his mouth. “I hope I’ll never leave you feeling like that.”

            “Well,” Draco said into his neck, “you also made me feel naked, and I certainly hope you’ll help me feel like that again.”

            “Draco—“

            “Harry.” Draco sat back across his legs and shook his head. His hair, looking impossibly good when he’d spent last afternoon having sex and most of the night sprawled across Harry in various states of snoring and drool, clung around his ears for a moment and then feathered softly back. “Listen to me. What you did to me in the past is nothing, compared to the protection and healing you’ve tried to give me since Daphne kidnapped me. And even before that, when you gave me a home in your flat and helped me brew Desire. I have a partner I’m in love with now. Please don’t spoil that with constant whinging about guilt. It makes you unattractive.”

            “One of you had better be dying,” Hermione’s voice said from the front room, “to excuse how long it took you to answer the door.”

            Harry grinned, kissed Draco to show he understood, and then reached for the clothes still draped half across the bed.

*

            “I still wish I could have seen it.” Millicent was sitting on one of Harry’s kitchen chairs, examining the cup of tea she held as if it might reveal visions of Harry’s trial if she peered hard enough. “I didn’t hate Diggory as I hate Lucius, but it’s pleasant to watch anyone who’s obstructed you flounder.”

            “Hmm,” said Draco into his own cup. He knew Harry had not told Granger about Skeeter, which meant Millicent could not have known, either. He had to fight hard, biting his own lips several times and pretending to more sleepiness than he really felt, to conceal his grin. The Daily Prophet post owl hadn’t arrived yet, but Draco hoped it would soon. What if Skeeter’s article was so long it had to be put off until the evening edition? Then he would lose the chance to see the two women’s faces change.

            Harry, oddly enough, sounded more in command of himself, but he had the luck of standing at the counter with his back to the kitchen whilst he prepared breakfast. “It was less exciting than you’d think. He made quite a fool of himself when he confessed under Hermione’s spell.” His wand twisted over in his hand, and four eggs made a floating procession past him into a pan. Draco stifled the impulse to ask if he’d learned that spell from a Weasley. He wanted to tease Harry like that, but only in private for the moment, until he learned to trust more strongly in the fragile, glowing bond that connected them. As it was, Granger would probably take the question for an insult and lash out to defend her dead fiancé’s family. “I almost felt sorry for him.”

            “That’s the one thing you should never feel for an enemy,” Millicent said firmly. “The next thing you know, you’re being betrayed by your own weakness into surrendering to them.”

            “I don’t know,” Harry said, and twisted around to smile at Draco. “I think it’s more difficult to judge those things. Do you feel that I’ve surrendered to you, or you’ve surrendered to me, or are we both as helpless as each other?”

            Draco smiled tentatively. Perhaps he couldn’t tease in front of other people yet, but it seemed Harry had no trouble doing so. And seeing the way Harry stood straighter and beamed back at a smile from him made it much easier to relax.

            “Yes, but you weren’t really enemies when you fell in love,” said Granger, who had to miss the point and make things more annoying as usual. “Harry was reluctant to ask you for help with modifying the potion for me, Malfoy, but that was because he thought you would treat us with contempt even as you helped. He didn’t doubt your skill. And I think you found him fascinating from the first, if only because you didn’t know what potion he was drinking. That was the continuation of an old fascination from your schooldays, which began when you realized that you couldn’t cow or intimidate the Boy-Who-Lived. I read a book once which said—“

            And other times, Draco thought, Granger is all too disconcertingly intelligent. “And I read a book once which said that long-term dependence on a potion, any potion, makes a person difficult to live with, because she starts thinking about vials and corks and the next dose instead of other people,” he said. “What about you, Granger? Are you ready to stop using the Desire potion?”

            Millicent looked up and ceased tapping her finger for a moment on the teacup. “Were you?” she asked. “I didn’t know that.”

            Granger looked at Draco with no very friendly expression, but he knew himself to be her equal, and under Harry’s protection in any case, so he could look back with equanimity. So she had to clear her throat and say, “I don’t think the depression will come back. I—I enjoy seeing people again, and when I was affected by that sadness I didn’t want to see anyone. I would have liked to push my face into the back of the couch and never move again, in fact.”

            Millicent was leaning forwards, staring at her incredulously. Draco supposed she was trying to reconcile the active, plotting Granger she had come to know with the woman as she described herself.

            “But I can’t be certain that it won’t come back,” Granger finished in a low voice. “What if this energy to face life again is only the product of Desire? I know the potion was meant to give me some time free of the depression to recover my own natural strength, but is there really a way to tell the difference between strength I may have recovered and strength I’ve only developed as a result of the potion?” She looked at Draco, who found himself acutely uncomfortable. He cleared his throat in turn and decided that he would find a graceful way to say he couldn’t be sure if it killed him.

            Millicent intervened before he could. She snorted and leaned into Granger’s line of sight. Her hip was braced on a chair, and she was shaking her head as though a fly had flown into her ear. “Really,” she said. “You can ask that question?”

            Granger glared at her, her arms folded and her face once again flushed with anger, which Draco thought she enjoyed a great deal more than the weakness she had just shown. From the more relaxed way Harry was watching her, he thought so, too. “You weren’t around to see me as I was three months ago,” she said shortly, “or you wouldn’t ask that question.”

            “I know that no one as strong as you are, and as clever with plans to harm Lucius and Diggory, should doubt herself like that,” Millicent said fiercely. She reached out and took Granger’s hand, squeezing it hard enough to make her wince. “Of course it’s your own strength. Desire might have made you a trifle quicker to recover, but it can’t give you what you don’t have within you.”

            “You can’t know that,” Granger said irritably. “And though you told me about arranging potions ingredients, that’s not the same thing as knowing anything about potions themselves.”

            “I know more than you do,” Millicent said, serenely unarguable. Granger opened her mouth again, probably to explain her high marks in Hogwarts—sometimes Draco thought she would live in school mentally for the rest of her life—but Millicent spoke straight on. “And I know that the only certain test you have is forsaking the potion and seeing what happens.”

            “I don’t—“ And then Granger shut her lips and sat very still.

            “You don’t want to see what will happen?” Millicent taunted her softly. “I can’t believe that, since the anxiety over it is causing you so much pain. At least once you face it, it’ll be done.” Granger started to stand, but Millicent leaned further towards her, making the chair that supported her wobble dangerously, and snorted again. “It’s more that you’re afraid to face disappointment. You don’t want to find that you can’t do without Desire, even though there’s no shame in it.”

            “No shame in being potion-dependent for the rest of my life?” Granger raised her eyebrows.

            “Gryffindors leap to such extreme conclusions all the time,” Millicent remarked to Draco. “I wonder that you don’t tire of it.” Then she turned back to Granger with the air of a martyr. “Because you might need another week or month of Desire doesn’t mean you would be potion-dependent for the rest of your life. Honestly, if you sat down and thought about saving your own life as logically as you think about ruining other people’s, you would realize that.”

            Granger looked as if she didn’t know whether to take those words as a compliment or an insult. In the end, a reluctant smile lighting her face, she nodded. “I won’t take the vial I’m due tomorrow,” she said. “The potion should work itself out of my system in a few days. And then—I’ll see what happens.”

            “We’ll see what happens,” Millicent said.

            “I would prefer to do this alone.” Granger regarded her unblinkingly.

            Draco could have told her Millicent would win any staring contest they had. She’d been famous for it in the Slytherin common room. She did it again now, and said sweetly, as Granger’s gaze dropped away from her, “Too bloody bad.”

            Granger narrowed her eyes. “You can’t force me to undergo this in front of you.”

            “If I hide your potion and then remain at your side for the next few days,” Millicent pointed out, “it will be just as if I did.”

            Harry’s shoulders were shaking with restrained laughter. Draco was too interested to laugh. He watched Granger stare at Millicent as if remembering those times in Hogwarts when someone tried to move Millicent where she didn’t want to be moved. She had been able to challenge even Vincent and Gregory for sheer passive stubbornness.

            And unlike them, Draco thought, wincing as he remembered Vincent’s death in the Fiendfyre, she retained that and learned to make it into a virtue.

            “All right,” Granger said, in the tone she would use when granting a favor. Millicent at once leaned back into the chair and picked up her teacup as if they’d had a conversation of no great importance. Granger opened her mouth to add something Draco knew would be highly entertaining, but at that moment, the Daily Prophet post owl swooped across the table.

            Draco couldn’t have planned things better if he’d communed with the owl beforehand. The paper fell right in front of Granger. Out of habit, or maybe because the noise had startled her, she looked down at the front page.

            The next moment, she gasped so loudly that Millicent hurtled to her side, and so both of them saw it in almost the same instant.

            For the rest of his life, Draco thought he would never forget their identical staring eyes and hanging jaws.

*

            First there was screaming. Then there was a medley of pointing fingers and reaching hands. Harry almost spilled the eggs on the floor, and then he almost burned the toast. Then there was a cacophony of argument in which he didn’t join, mostly because Draco was laughing so hard he made Harry’s contribution all on his own, and besides Harry was trying to rescue breakfast.

            So, when he finally sat down with the Prophet and had a look at the article Skeeter had concocted out of the observations she’d made yesterday, it was more than three hours later, and Hermione and Millicent had left to brood in peace. Draco was examining potions vials on the other side of the room, his shoulders still quaking sometimes.

            The headline was in letters three inches tall, of course, though for the first time Harry could remember, it was also in red ink. POTTER FOUND INNOCENT! The smaller headline—though only by an inch—underneath that read DIGGORY CONFESSES ALL!

            He wondered idly for a moment whether the headlines had been Skeeter’s choice, or that of someone more concerned about selling newspapers than about the finer details. But he was sure she was responsible for the photograph above the article itself. It showed him and Draco kissing, with Diggory flailing helplessly in the background.

            Harry found it uncomfortable to look at, and rather likely to increase his sense of sympathy for Diggory than otherwise. He looked down instead, and smiled at the byline, the first time he could remember having done so, before he was caught up in the article. It made no pretense of objective reporting, as usual, but this time Skeeter really had outdone herself in trying to engage her readers’ interest.

            Imagine, for one moment, that you’ve spent most of your life in the service of the wizarding world. From the time you were a baby, you were a hero to thousands, though you grew up not knowing it, in the middle of a Muggle world that ignored you as a small and useless child. And then you came to Hogwarts, to a place you hoped would be different, and found that the opposite of total neglect is just as bad. Sharp extremes of adulation, sudden fear, praise for moments that terror and rage and fighting for your life smeared in your mind—would you have been able to maintain your mental balance?

            She’d got one thing wrong, Harry thought. He remembered most of the horrible things that had happened to him all too clearly. If Skeeter wanted his memories so badly, he would have been glad to give her his nightmares of brilliant basilisk eyes and the whispering veil in the Department of Mysteries.

            And yet somehow, Harry Potter did exactly this, even with a Dark Lord trying to destroy him regularly every year of his entire schooling. Not only did he remain sane, but he created a highly successful business based on the modification of film for wizarding cameras after the war.

            “Define ‘highly successful,’” Harry muttered. Draco glanced up in curiosity, but turned back a moment later, because evidently a crack in a vial demanded his entire attention.

            He had a series of love affairs over the years, and didn’t settle down with his girlfriend Ginny Weasley, whom most people “in the know” expected him to spend the rest of his life with. But fate had greater things in mind for him. He extended the hand of friendship, and then of love, to an old enemy, Draco Malfoy, and created a potion named Desire that was even more successful than his film business. Yet the potion immediately came under attack from the Potions committee in the Ministry of Magic, and then Mr. Malfoy’s shop was destroyed, along with most of the stock of Desire. Fate or fortune, one of the two, seemed to have nothing but hatred for our young hero.

            Yet in this case fortune had a helping hand, just as it always used to when the Dark Lord confronted Harry Potter.

            Harry raised an eyebrow. He had wondered why Skeeter had spent so much space and ink telling people what they already knew. Now he realized the truth, and he had to admit he admired her strategy. She would spring the surprise on them by connecting the seemingly random occurrences of bad luck for Harry and Draco into a coherent narrative, just when she had lulled her audience into assuming they knew everything.

            The helping hand was that of Charlemagne Diggory, whom many of you may know from our pages as the popularly-favored candidate for Minister of Magic. Of course, whether he deserves that accolade remains to be seen. It was Mr. Diggory who was responsible for the Potions committee taking a sudden and violent interest in the Desire potion, and he was also connected to the collapse of Mr. Malfoy’s shop.

            And yesterday, he arranged an illegal trial, controlled by several of his friends among the Wizengamot, trying Harry Potter on charges of being able to devour magic and concealing creature blood in his family line.

            It will seem strange to the more enlightened reader, I know. You start back from the page. You cock your head. How could the blood of magical creatures in Mr. Potter’s family have gone unnoticed, with your faithful reporter investigating every occurrence of far more minor note in his life over the past few years? And you are right in surmising that it could not. Mr. Potter is as human as most of us, though considerably better-looking than most.

            The claim that Mr. Potter was part-creature—specifically, part-incubus—was nothing more than a desperate, clumsy attempt by Mr. Diggory to punish Mr. Potter for not supporting him in the race for Minister of Magic.That’s right, dear readers. We might have traded a genuine war hero in our Minister Shacklebolt for a schoolboy who takes his grudges to ridiculous extremes.

            Harry grinned. He was sure that reporters from other papers would be scrambling, right at this moment, to seize on Skeeter’s example and repeat her phrasing. If Diggory escaped being known as the Schoolboy Candidate during the rest of the election, Harry would be surprised.

            The members of the Wizengamot who supported Mr. Diggory’s claim, specifically Eleanor Williams and Prunella Agonistes, were openly corrupt. They shut Minister Shacklebolt out of the proceedings. They claimed that the courtroom was closed to such character witnesses as Mr. Potter had tried to assemble. They refused Mr. Potter permission to take Veritaserum, using a variety of feeble excuses to abrogate a right that has been essential to wizarding justice since the Ministry was founded. They did not demand that Mr. Diggory summon the “expert witness” who was to have provided evidence that Mr. Potter really did have incubus blood.

            Under adverse circumstances, facing Azkaban, our hero fought back as he did when the Ministry wrongfully accused him of using underage magic in his fourteenth year. He destroyed Mr. Diggory’s arguments—weakened by his arrogance and belief that he would face no real opposition—with relentless logic. One memorable quote: “It sounds like what it is, a secondary plan put together on the fly when you realized the implications of some of the evidence we’d gathered against you.”

            That evidence turned out to be strong indeed. Soon a group consisting of Minister Shacklebolt, war heroine Hermione Granger, potions-brewer Draco Malfoy, and Hunter Littlesmith, a witness to the justifiable use of Mr. Potter’s magic-devouring powers, charged into the courtroom. Among other things, they brought with them evidence that Mr. Diggory had led a group of wizards to Mr. Malfoy’s new shop and ordered them to curse him all at once. The allegiances of the Wizengamot changed swiftly upon the witnessing of these memories, by which we may conclude that they realized what the man they were preparing to accept as lord and master was really worth.

            More courageous than anyone would have demanded he be given his family name, Draco Malfoy stood up before the court and explained his degrading and heinous treatment at the hands of Daphne Greengrass. This was the witch whose magic Mr. Potter devoured, leaving her a Squib. She was certainly a victim—but such a deserving one can rarely have been met with in the annals of our history. She tortured and raped Mr. Malfoy, and refused to stop when Mr. Potter offered her the chance. Driven by love alone, as he was when he saved the wizarding world, Mr. Potter did the regrettable but necessary thing and murdered her magic.

            As if that were not enough. Mr. Diggory lost his head and condemned himself out of his own mouth. He admitted that jealousy of Mr. Potter’s fame and what he called the “effortless” way he had earned it inspired him to lead his noisome crusade. One suspects that Mr. Diggory paid attention to only selected passages of this paper in the past few decades, or he would have learned exactly how hard Mr. Potter’s life has been.

            What followed was a tirade composed of baseless accusations, mindless envy, and claims that Mr. Diggory deserved to be made Minister because Mr. Potter had irritated him. He did his best to ruin people who were not Mr. Potter, including Mr. Draco Malfoy, because of that irritation. Let us be wary of putting power in the hands of such a madman.

            In the end, the Wizengamot sensibly declared that Mr. Potter was innocent and free to go, and he kissed his lover in front of the courtroom whilst those who had championed them looked on approvingly.

            Thus in one day, a ridiculous trial and an equally ridiculous run for Minister came to an end. It will be long before you see Mr. Diggory in these pages without a rider attached to his name, if ever.

            Harry laid down the paper and turned again to the front page, where Diggory stood behind the kissing figures of him and Draco and opened and shut his mouth uselessly. Harry’s sympathy for him had withered.

            If he dared to try and destroy me and Draco, this is what he deserves.

*

            broomrider949: Wow, that’s a lot of reading to do! I’m glad you liked the stories enough to read through them all the way.

            Mangacat: Thank you! I think you are right, on both counts.
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A More Worldly Man