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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.

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Chapter Twenty-Four—Brought on Owls’ Wings

            Harry made sure not to stare at Draco the next time he saw him. Draco wanted to pretend that nothing had changed, wanted to talk about his potion without making eye contact with Harry and tighten his hands down into small fists whenever Harry made a move towards him. Fine. Harry leaned back in his bed and talked about the politics of Highfeather’s visit, and watched the way that the light flared back in Draco’s eyes, the way that his hands rose and fell and his voice became strong again.

            Harry wished there was a way he could tell Draco he wouldn’t demand any return of his feelings immediately, or ever, if Draco didn’t want to. But he thought talking about it at all would only encourage more of Draco’s nervousness, so he looked slightly past his shoulder and said, “Do you think I should offer Highfeather anything to eat while she’s here?”

            Draco leaned back and gave that due consideration, his hands linking around his knee. Harry watched him and found something to admire even in the way that the tendons stood out on the backs of his hands, in the way his veins glowed through his skin.

            I have it bad.

            Harry didn’t care, though. No one else was going to be harmed by what he felt for Draco, so he didn’t need to hold back or restrict it.

            “No,” Draco said at last, judiciously. “Because you do your cooking by house-elf, and she might think that you’re being hypocritical when she notices that. If she asks, have Kreacher leave tea outside the door and bring it in yourself. She’ll still know how it got there, of course, but that’s something that’s relatively easy for her to ignore.”

            “Fetch it myself?” Harry looked at his knee.

            “By then, you’ll be able to walk,” Draco said, and turned his head in the direction of the lab. “That, I can promise.”

            Harry nodded. “And what kind of silver should I use, and what kind of china?”

            Draco gave him more advice, and even his clenched jaw relaxed as he spoke. Harry hoped that he didn’t notice the warm flush Harry could feel working its way up beneath his skin, but if he did, at least he didn’t seem disposed to get upset about it. That was all Harry would ask for, really. To be near the object of his obsession, to look at him, listen to him, work with him. When it became more than that, if it did, then Draco would have chosen it himself, and would have no reason to fear.

*

            “We have too many letters to answer.”

            Draco raised his eyebrows as he watched Granger tip her huge armful of owls onto Potter’s kitchen table. It did look that way. But when he began to sift through the letters, he sniffed. There were too many names that he recognized, names that belonged to half-bloods and thus exiled them from the ranks of the Muggleborns that Granger wanted to respond to, and wanted Potter to write personal notes to.

            “Put these on the bottom of the pile,” he advised Granger, interrupting her as she was raking her fingers through her hair and about to begin another tirade. “They’re pretending to more outrage than they feel.”

            Granger spun to face him like a martial artist. “You would decide that,” she said, and her voice snapped and almost broke, like the strand of hair she was stretching around a finger. “I always knew your true colors would emerge, when you felt that you had Harry trusting you enough.”

            “Will you be quiet,” Potter said, in a casual tone, before Draco could. “He only means that those letters are from people who have some pure-blood heritage and usually identify themselves that way. They’re trying to have it from both sides, saying that they’re pure-bloods and can’t be forced to stop using house-elves, and then bitching because we haven’t paid enough attention to Muggleborns.” He waved his hand at the letters Draco was holding and went on assembling a small pile in front of him, of what Draco assumed were important names. Except for Granger’s lectures, he was honestly unfamiliar with most of the “important” Muggleborns.

            Silence, and Granger turned red.

            Draco held her eyes and said nothing. Then she reached down, picking up the letters that Draco hadn’t sorted yet, and went back to reading the envelopes.

            Draco nodded to Potter. Potter nodded back, a little distant. He had been that way in the last two days, Draco thought. Potter seemed to have decided that he only owed Draco common courtesy until he finished the potion.

            Or perhaps he had seen what Draco intended to hide and was giving him some space to decide what he wanted to do about those feelings.

            Draco’s fingers scrabbled at the edge of the kitchen table for a moment, and then he shook his head and leaned back. No. He would not think that way. If he thought Potter had a straight line into his heart and soul, he would cower before the man, instead of retaining enough distance to be a good political ally and critic.

            “I know that you wrote to Hugo the other day,” Granger said abruptly, seeming to have decided that she should bring up a different uncomfortable subject if her discussion of the first one had been blocked.

            Potter leaned back in his chair and looked at her, calm as a sage. “Yes. I think it’s ridiculous that I’ve let this go on so long, the way that he whines at me and pretends that I deserve no consideration because I’m not his hero anymore. He could start efforts against the house-elves, or he could distract me as we get further into them. So I owled him, because even if he rips up the letter that way, he can’t interrupt me.”

            “I don’t think,” Granger said, nipping at her lip. “I don’t think it will accomplish anything.”

            “Certainly, standing around and waiting for the brat to come to his senses won’t,” Draco drawled. He wanted to leave the subject behind and get on with sorting the letters, perhaps even write some of the ones that had been too-long delayed, but it was plain that neither Potter nor Granger would do that until Draco intervened and made them. “It’s a wonder to me, Granger, that you haven’t already made your son apologize to Potter. You’re all for the rights of house-elves and werewolves, but wounded humans aren’t one of your prize groups? Or are you only for the rights of everyone as long as it doesn’t require your children having to explain themselves?”

            Granger turned and stared at him. “I don’t think you, of all people, have the right to complain about how someone else raises their children,” she began, body rod-stiff.

            “He does,” Potter said, voice as calm and icy as Draco’s had been. “Because Hugo is distracting me. And I wrote a letter to him when I could have spent my time more productively writing or talking to someone else, because he nags me. He’s actually declared that he’s on the opposite side from you, his mother, as well as us.”

            Granger only bowed her head and shook it. “You know the difficult things with your children,” she whispered. “Hugo is like Al was, when he was twelve. It’s—it’s just difficult to wait for them to do anything but grow out of it.”

            “Al was ashamed of being a Slytherin for three months,” Potter said, leaning across the table and rapping one finger down on the back of Granger’s hand. “And that was because several of his Housemates told him he could help them with a harmless prank that turned out to almost kill someone else. Hugo’s been ashamed of me for more than two years. I didn’t do anything but get tortured.”

            Draco kept his eyes lowered, because he wanted to hide the triumph blazing in them from Granger. Potter was using Draco’s words and concepts now, and using them well, better than Draco had thought he possibly could.

            More than that, though, he wanted to keep what he felt hidden from Potter. Because Potter was more likely to see, and then he would know.

            “You agreed to this,” Granger whispered. “You know that all of us agreed he would come around eventually. And we understand him, we were all so disappointed when Dumbledore turned out not to be what we thought he was—”

            “I never manipulated Hugo into saving the world,” Potter said, his voice sinking. “I never told him that he would have to die to do it. I never left him alone on dangerous adventures in Hogwarts. We overprotected our children, if anything, because we didn’t want them left to face the challenges that we faced when we were their age. Hugo doesn’t have anything to forgive me for. I know how we thought, Hermione, but lately I’ve been thinking more about it, and deciding it doesn’t make much sense. I want Hugo back as my favorite nephew. I want him to know me as more than the indulgent uncle, and if he can’t accept that, I want to know that, too, so I can stop waiting for him to come back.”

            Granger looked up then. “You would give up on him forever because Malfoy said so?” she asked, gesturing with her head at Draco as if using a finger would demean her.

            “No,” Potter said, and his face had gone calm and angry both at once, which was an expression that Draco had never seen before but thought he could stand to see again. “I’m doing this because I realized that I was making myself miserable for no reason. Hugo might hate me forever, I don’t know. But waiting for him doesn’t work. And I want to do this, I want to make sure that I know the answer, one way or the other. I’ll be happy to welcome him back and talk to him again if he actually wants to talk. If he wants to blame me, then I can stop waiting, and he can be the one to make the first move sometime if he decides that he’s ready to grow past his stupid teenage disappointment.”

            Granger didn’t look up, didn’t move, now. She was sorting through the letters, and it seemed to take all her strength for her to exhale, hard, and say, “I—I don’t like the pain that it’ll put Hugo through, but I think—you’re probably right. In fact, someone should probably have done it a while ago, but we didn’t want to listen to his whining, and we thought he was too much like us when he wasn’t.”

            Potter smiled at her. Draco blinked. He would have placed his bet on Granger’s dogged opposition until the moment that both Potter and her son died, because once she took up a cause, she didn’t let go.

            Apparently she can, if someone she’s friendly enough with asks her.

            Draco grunted and turned back to his own cache of letters. That was the reason he had never seen it, then. He had hardly seen someone demand that Granger stop what she was doing in a friendly context, after all, instead of one full of opposition.

            And that gave him something more to think about as their conversation turned, and became more about who they should write to next and who they should invite over than anything else.

*

            “Uncle Harry.”

            That was Hugo’s voice, small and sullen as ever, but there, not in the fire, where he could shut down the Floo connection and interrupt their conversation any time he liked. Harry shivered a little and laid his paper aside, looking up as Hugo stepped through the doorway into his study and then halted, uncertain, swaying on his feet, his hands making fists at his sides.

            “Hugo,” Harry said gently. This was closer than they had been in two years, except during the confrontation at Hogwarts, and then he had been up on the stage and Hugo had been beneath him. It seemed to imply a much greater distance than Harry knew had actually been the case. He waited now for Hugo to make the first move, keeping his hands calmly folded precisely because of how much he longed to touch Hugo. It would have to wait.

            “Why did you write this letter to me?” Hugo held up the letter in a shaking fist and made it rustle. “You know what I think about you and your stupid movement to make house-elves miserable and give pure-bloods a chance—”

            “It’s not about that,” Harry said. “It never was. It was meant to show pure-bloods that being unkind to magical creatures is going to backfire on them. Why do you think that it was just a way to soothe the pure-bloods’ consciences?”

            Hugo licked his lips. “Because you’re working with a bigot,” he said, as if he didn’t know himself. “Mum curses his name every time she comes home.”

            “Your mum knows her own mind,” Harry reminded him. “She would have stopped working with him if she found it too stressful.”

            “But she shouldn’t have to do that,” Hugo said, and now strong sparks were leaping to light in his eyes, and Harry thought they might get away from the distractions and into the actual argument that Hugo wanted to have with him and had cut off every time. “She should be able to do what she wants to fight for house-elves without worrying that she’ll need to work with Draco bloody Malfoy!”

            Harry shook his head. “She’s fought for the rights of house-elves without him for thirty years. What makes you think that she’ll stop that, or that this cause is going to replace that one?”

            Hugo stopped. He stood there, silent and staring. Harry looked back. Some of his nieces and nephews had had cases of thinking that they were the ones who knew better and had to protect their parents from decisions the parents had willingly made; Harry thought all teenagers did, although it was a little strange to him because he hadn’t had parents at that age. But Hugo had it worse than anyone Harry had known.

            And it wasn’t focused on Hermione, much as he wanted to pretend that it was.

            “Hugo,” Harry said, when some time had passed and it was all too obvious that Hugo wouldn’t make the connection on his own. “You know that talking about your mum is another way of avoiding talking about me.”

            “Why are you doing it, then?” Hugo promptly demanded. “Dad told me all about how Mr. Malfoy tormented you in school and tried to make you fail and tried to scare you at Quidditch. Why don’t you think he’s evil?”

            “Because it’s been a long time since then, and he’s doing good work for us,” Harry said, and tapped his knee, which was currently stretched in front of him on a stool. “It’s thanks to him at the moment that I can walk at all. What would you prefer? That I be stretched out on a bed and moaning with pain?”

            Hugo shook his head. “Of course not! I never wanted to see you in pain. I never wanted you to be in pain in the first place!” By now, he was shouting.

            “Really?” Harry smiled at him, and nicely calculated the blow that he gave then. After all, he had brought Hugo here so that he couldn’t retreat any longer, and his efforts would be wasted if Hugo simply managed to scuttle off into a different discussion or out of the room. “But that’s not true, because you wanted to hurt me when you shouted at me that I should never have let the warlocks capture me.”

            Hugo turned pale. Then he said, “I never said that.”

            “I’m quoting from several conversations,” Harry said. “With less cursing and blaming of myself, it’s true, but I think you can forgive me for leaving those out.”

            Hugo shut his eyes and shook his head. “You don’t—you don’t understand,” he said. “I never wanted you to suffer like that. I never wanted you to suffer at all.”

            “You’ve done a bloody good job of disguising that.”

            And that, finally, knocked Hugo over the edge. He opened his eyes and advanced on Harry, his face furiously bright, his hands reaching out as if he intended to drag Harry out of his chair. Harry, who knew that he could summon Kreacher with a single whistle, just sat there and let him come.

            Besides, he trusted Hugo—or rather, this was the final test of his trust, his final attempt to get Hugo back. If Hugo hurt him physically, that would be a sign of a bridge crossed forever.

            “I didn’t want you to get hurt,” Hugo hissed, right into Harry’s face, so that a little fleck of spittle landed on his cheek. Harry didn’t bother wiping it off. “You don’t understand. I never wanted you to stay down. I wanted you to get back up.”

            “What do you think I’ve been doing the last few years?” Harry asked him, whisper-soft. “Learning to live again, learning to cope with the injury—”

            “You couldn’t even walk!” Hugo yelled, and Harry heard a stir down below. He hoped that no one was stupid enough to come into the room. Draco and Kreacher were the only ones in the house right now, besides them, and Harry had told them both not to interfere. “You wouldn’t take that treatment the Healers offered you! You kept saying that you needed to get used to the pain, but you fight the pain, you don’t get used to it—”

            “It’s never going to go away, Hugo,” Harry said quietly, and threw the words at him. “Even with Draco’s potion, it’ll never go away again. That was why I had to get used to it. And when I fought it, when I used my knee too much, it just hurt worse. There are some things that you can’t fight. There are some things I’m not a hero about. I know it hurt you, to realize that I couldn’t always be the hero and come back, but I didn’t do that to hurt you. And I should have told you this a long time ago, but I think you’re a selfish little brat for acting as though my primary motivation was to put you in pain.”

            Hugo shook his head, as though shedding the words. “I’m not selfish.”

            “You wanted me as a hero,” Harry said, “or you wanted me dead. That was another thing you said, that I should have died if I was going to lay back and give up. When I was fighting against the pain harder than I’d ever fought anything in my life, when I was looking for reasons to go on with my life instead of moping all the time, you told me it was no good because I wasn’t perfect anymore.”

            “I never said—”

            “Uncle Harry,” Harry said, and raised his voice, “why are you even sticking around if you can’t walk anymore?”

            Hugo backed up a step as though the words had been a slap. “I didn’t mean—I didn’t mean you should die.”

            “That’s what it sounded like,” Harry said, and at last the anger was there, the strong, good, clear anger that he had learned how to access when he was thinking of the warlocks and what they had done to him, instead of the muddled anger that made him feel as though nothing good was left to him. “And you’d better start thinking more about the implications of your words. You implied that you wanted me dead, that if I wasn’t a hero I was nothing, that I’d disappointed you and that was the worst thing I could have done. And worst? You made me believe it sometimes.”

            “Uncle Harry—”

            “There were days that I did tell myself it would be better if I was dead, because my knee hurt so much, and at least there wouldn’t be pain if I was dead and didn’t have a knee. There were times when I decided I was worthless if I couldn’t be an Auror and I might as well stay in bed for the rest of my life. It wasn’t you who got me out of that. It was Kreacher, and your mum and dad, and your sister, and your cousins and aunts and uncles, and now Draco. You’re the only one who didn’t help somehow.”

            And then Hugo did run out of the room, but Harry rather felt the point had been made. He closed his eyes and leaned his head back against his chair, letting his panting fall into silence.

            Purged, at last.

*

            ChaosLady: More afraid of admitting his feelings. He thinks that Harry would make fun of him for them, or at least he’s afraid that might happen.

            unneeded: Yeah, Scorpius does have reason for a grudge. What he probably needs to do is acknowledge that he does want his father to pay attention to him, when for a long time he’d said that he didn’t want precisely that.

            I think Harry and Hugo’s meeting was successful, for a certain definition of “successful.”
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The Descent of Magic