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Easy as Falling	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 31246 -:- Recommendations : 3 -:- Currently Reading : 4
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I am making no money from this fanfic.

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Thank you again for all the reviews!

Chapter Twenty-Four—Backlash

            “What makes you think you would be a good Transfiguration teacher?”

            The witch Harry was interviewing, a tall dark-skinned woman with black hair that hung to the middle of her back and long pale gloves on her hands, smiled at him and laid a sheaf of parchment on the desk in front of him. Harry picked up and turned it curiously back and forth. Most of the parchments he’d been given in the last little while had lists of accomplishments on them, or teaching positions that the person had held, or, in the case of Potions masters, famous potions they had brewed or invented or assisted in inventing. This one was blank.

            He looked at the witch. “Miss Hellebore, what—”

            Ariana Hellebore flicked her wand at the parchment and murmured, “Finite commutatus,” a spell that Harry knew would restore a Transfigured object to its original nature. Curious, he let her do it.

            The parchment crumbled in his hands, a small group of ashes assembling on his desk. Harry stared at them, then up at Hellebore, who bowed.

            “I didn’t know that you could bind more than one object into becoming only one,” Harry muttered, already planning to try it himself, within the bounds of Hogwarts.

            “It works best if the objects are similar, the way ashes are,” Hellebore said. “These are ashes from the same burning. But—with your permission?” She turned and aimed her wand at one of the empty glass vials of sample potions that prospective Potions teachers had brought Harry. Nearly all of the potions had gone into the infirmary, and into different containers. Harry had kept these vials to give back to their original owners. He didn’t want any foreign material staying long in Hogwarts.

            Harry nodded, curious. Hellebore had seemed to accept it easily when Harry told her that performing any hostile magic in Hogwarts would result in the school attacking her. She had asked now only as a matter of courtesy, he thought, not out of fear.

            Hellebore concentrated, and three of the glass vials, plus a cauldron that Harry had placed there to let Potions teachers experiment if they wanted to, rose into the air and whirled around each other. Harry could see Hellebore guiding them with motions of her wand, but her spellwork was entirely nonverbal.

            The glass vials and the cauldron shimmered and vanished, collapsing in their new form to the floor. Harry started up, but Hellebore bent down and picked the new object up to show him that the fall hadn’t hurt it.

            It was now an Invisibility Cloak.

            It wasn’t like his, of course, as Harry saw after a moment of shocked staring. It was the ordinary kind made with demiguise hair, and it would probably disintegrate in a few years. But when Hellebore handed him the cloak and Harry automatically accepted it, he felt the silkiness, the slithering sensation, that was only a little coarser than his own Cloak. When he wrapped it around his arm, the arm still disappeared.

            “This is remarkable,” Harry said, and looked back at her, and tightened the air around the room so that whoever spoke a word in here would have to say the truth, him included. “I wonder why you want to be a professor, when you have a Transfiguration skill so developed.”

            “There actually aren’t that many jobs that give you a chance to show off this skill,” Hellebore said, shaking her head. “It’s not like Potions masters, who have customers all the time. Other than the rare occasion when someone calls me forth to reverse a human Transfiguration or testify in a Ministry case, I sit at home. I don’t need the money, but I do need the public. And maybe if I can teach children the finer points of my art, there will be fewer people who act as though it’s too complicated to learn or to respect.”

            Harry had to smile. “Good. I expect you’re wondering why I want to hire a Transfiguration professor at all, when Minerva McGonagall taught it?”

            “I did wonder.” Hellebore gave him a small smile. “But you let it be known that the position was available, and I came to interview for it.”

            “Headmistress McGonagall is going to be busy with other matters of administration for the school,” Harry said. “Really, she hadn’t taught for several years anyway, since she did have a Transfiguration professor, but that one left last year rather abruptly, and the Headmistress had to take up the teaching duties again. It was very stressful for her.”

            Hellebore nodded. Then she turned her head. Harry didn’t, because Hogwarts had told him about the footsteps passing down the corridors in search of him several minutes ago, but he was impressed that Hellebore had heard that much from such a distance.

            “You were expecting visitors?” Hellebore asked, turning back to him.

            Harry nodded and stood up from the desk, facing the door. He knew who it was, and that this was going to be a rough encounter. “I’ll let you know whether you have the position in three days at the latest,” he said over his shoulder. “But as far as I’m concerned, you have it. There’s been only one other person interested in teaching Transfiguration, and he couldn’t do what you do.”

            Hellebore smiled at him serenely. “It’s always nice to have one’s talent recognized,” she said, and stood up to bow to him. “I’ll let myself out.”

            Harry kept his face towards the door as he listened to her fumbling with the Floo powder. She had just vanished when the door banged open, and Ron and Hermione stepped into the room. Behind them trailed Blackthorne, his hand on the lightning bolt pendant around his neck and his face shocked and disapproving.

            “Harry,” Hermione said, her voice so low that it was difficult for Harry to hear her at first. “What is this?” She turned around and gestured in the general direction of Blackthorne, but he was standing so close that she almost punched him in the eye. Blackthorne moved back with a little glare. Hermione dropped her hand and flushed, all the more, Harry knew, because she hadn’t meant to do that.

            “I’m sorry, my lord,” Blackthorne said. “You told me they were on the list of permitted people, and so I let them in. But then halfway up the stairs they started talking about you in…uncomplimentary terms, and I didn’t know what to—”

            “It’s all right, Blackthorne,” Harry said quietly, his eyes locked on his friends. Ron had stepped up to stand at Hermione’s side, and his face was quiet and his eyes worried. He would be the greater challenge, Harry thought. “They’re permitted. They’re the closest people to me, and I want to talk to them. You can go back to your post.”

            With a couple of worried glances backwards, Blackthorne left them. The minute the door shut, Hermione took a breath deep enough to increase her size by a couple of degrees. Harry got up and stood next to his desk, reaching down to tap one of the silver ornaments Briseis had insisted he put on the desk and make it spin. Briseis had said that it would make him look impressive. Harry didn’t know about that, but it wasn’t much of a concession to make to shut her up, and he might as well try it.

            “How could you do this?” Hermione whispered. “Taking someone as a servant? Showing up and interfering with a Ministerial debate?” She hesitated, and then reached into her pocket and pulled out the letter Harry had sent his friends when he decided that he would rather tell them about Fifernum and the consequences of the spell he had put on her before anyone else did it. “Taking an employee of the Ministry and binding her with a Dark spell?”

            “The Minister would have ruined the debate by himself,” Harry said quietly. “He wants to crush all opposition, and right now, Malfoy is the strongest opposition he has.”

            “But mostly because he gets support from you, mate,” Ron cut in. “If you let Ministry politics take their usual course, then Malfoy would have to take his chances, just like anyone else.”

            Harry shook his head slowly. “But I’ve already interfered. What Minister Tillipop and Malfoy do now is going to be changed by my presence. I can’t interfere halfway and then throw up my hands and proclaim I’m ‘done’ just because I want to. I interfered in the first place, and it’s my responsibility to—”

            “To keep doing it?” Hermione cut in bitterly.

            Harry smiled a little at her. “Well, yes.”

            “I just never imagined that you would be behaving so much like a Dark Lord,” Hermione whispered, and began to pace. “I thought that was a convenient title you were using to defend yourself and defend your takeover of Hogwarts. But it was real, wasn’t it?” She turned around and glared at Harry as if daring him to disagree.

            Harry nodded. “It was real.”

            “Why?” That was Ron, although he sounded more appealing than pissed, the way Hermione did. “What can you do as a Dark Lord that you can’t do otherwise?”

            Harry thought of the many ways he could answer that question, but restricted himself to shaking his head. “I can respond to my enemies better now than I could if I was still an ordinary Auror,” he said quietly. “What would I have done, then, if someone leaked the news that I was abused when I was a child, or leaked what I told the Mind-Healers? I wouldn’t have had any recourse. I would have had to go along with what they wanted. Now, I can fight back.”

            “But,” Hermione said, and her body was practically trembling with the desire to speak, which Harry knew meant he would have to let her. He took a step back, hoping she wouldn’t destroy anything. Hogwarts tended to take that personally. “If you were still an ordinary Auror, they wouldn’t be trying these things.”

            “I don’t know that,” Harry said, meeting her eyes. “Fifernum told me that the pictures had been on file for years, since Fudge was Minister. It’s possible they might not have done anything to me, but if I was becoming politically troublesome, even in a way that had nothing to do with Hogwarts? She heavily implied they would have used them.”

            Hermione’s eyes were bright with something that looked like tears. “But you can’t just go outside the system to change things, Harry! That’s not the way it works.”

            “What works?” Harry waved his hand around Hogwarts. The walls hummed in response, and a rug that Harry had tried out in the office and then exiled to a room down the corridor came sneaking in at the doors, aiming at his friends’ feet. Harry shook his head at it, and it subsided into a small, bright pile in a corner, sulking. “The school is functioning. I’m interviewing professors. I’ve sent invitations out. Not everyone will come, but maybe it’s best if we have a small number of students at first, so that the professors can get used to teaching before they have a large number. Hogwarts is working.”

            “But you can’t make lasting political change with violence.” Hermione whispered it with conviction.

            Harry sighed. “Maybe not. But right now, I’m fighting back against people who attacked me. And the root of all this is the decision Tillipop made to close Hogwarts. He shouldn’t have done that if he didn’t want me against him.”

            “He couldn’t have anticipated that,” Ron said, with a glance back and forth between Harry and Hermione.

            “No,” Harry admitted. “But he’s incompetent at dealing with stiff opposition. It’s possible that someone else would have raised it. And Tillipop is—is cotton. He sags in the face of the slightest difference of opinion and gets covered with the remnants of whatever he faced. If he was competent, he would have done something different by now.”

            “You’re not going to apologize and you’re not going to back down, are you?” Hermione whispered.

            Harry looked at her, and hesitated. The expression on her face was cracked down the middle, he thought, intense longing for him to apologize and intense frustration at seeing the battle she’d waged so long taken away from her. This could be the moment that would end their friendship.

            “I’ll apologize if I have to,” Harry said quietly. “Especially to you. But not back down, no. I made a promise, and I bonded with Hogwarts, and I have enemies who would take any concession I made now as a sign of weakness.”

            Hermione threw up her hands. “You have a knight now. Are you going to acquire more?”

            “If they want to come to me.” Harry shrugged awkwardly when she stared at him. “I did it in public. I can’t say that only Blackthorne gets to be a Knight of the Lightning Bolt and no one else.”

            “I think you’re going to get sick of that name by the time this is done, mate,” Ron muttered.

            Harry nodded fervent agreement. “I was just trying to come up with something dramatic enough to satisfy Briseis and Draco.”

            “You call him by his first name?” Hermione asked.

            Harry nodded.

            Hermione shut her eyes. “I don’t want to do this,” she announced to the room at large, and ignored the way that the rug crept towards her and some of the stones rattled in the walls. “But I have to. You need someone in your Court who doesn’t think your power is the only way to solve things.” She opened her eyes and glared at Harry. “Someone with some knowledge of the law. And history. You probably still haven’t read Hogwarts, A History, have you?”

            “Why would I?” Harry asked, partially for the joy of seeing the spark light up Hermione’s eyes. They were still friends. He was giddy. He could tease her because of that. “Hogwarts would tell me if there was something important it wanted me to know.”

            “You need someone,” Hermione declared firmly. “And I might not have much of a career in the Ministry after they realize that I’m still your friend and visiting Hogwarts.”

            Harry winced. “Sorry.” He hadn’t thought about possible consequences to his friends when he declared himself a Dark Lord.

            “We’re going to stand with you,” Ron said, smiling at him, and clapping him on the shoulder. “As long as you don’t murder someone. Forcing an enemy to dream of the place that she was happy to abandon you to doesn’t sound that bad to me.”

            “It’s still worse than legal solutions to things,” Hermione said, an argument they’d heard again and again. But it made her Hermione instead of someone else, and now Harry nodded and prepared to listen to it again. “We have to think about what we want to teach students at Hogwarts, and that means we have to think about what they would learn otherwise. How can we make our ideas revolutionary while compromising with the wizarding world’s traditions? How can we…” She trailed off when Harry grinned at her. “What?” she added suspiciously.

            “I think I just found my History of Magic professor,” Harry said happily.

*

            It was midnight, the day after the debate.

            And Potter still hadn’t firecalled. Or even sent him an owl.

            Draco sat alone in his study, turning over the glass of butterbeer in his fingers. He had promised Rosenthal he would have nothing stronger to drink during the campaign.

            But Rosenthal wasn’t here right now, and Draco badly wanted the taste of something in his throat. If not Potter, wine. But apparently Potter was uninterested in what he wanted, and he hadn’t noticed Draco’s silent declaration of loyalty yesterday at all.

            Draco put down his glass and sat up. There was one solution to that, one he had been avoiding because it was the common and obvious one and Malfoys didn’t do things like that.

            But Malfoys also didn’t run for Minister instead of trying to get close to the Minister and control him. Draco had already broken from a lot of traditions.

            The debate with Tillipop yesterday had gone well, once he was allowed to actually have it. Draco had made points that Tillipop couldn’t answer, and made his audience laugh, and impressed, he thought, even the Aurors who had come to arrest him on Tillipop’s say-so. Or at least they had slinked away instead of staying and facing him, or making faces at him, the way he had almost thought they would.

            But he wanted to tell someone about it. Rosenthal didn’t need telling, since she had been there, and likewise Pansy. Draco wasn’t sure what to say to Blaise right now.

            He wanted to firecall Harry—and it would be Harry and not Potter if he accepted Draco’s firecall—and tell him about it.

            No, he wanted to go to Harry.

            Draco stood up, took a deep breath, and cast a handful of Floo powder into the fireplace. “Hogwarts!” he called, and stepped through without allowing himself to wonder about where he would end up.

            He stepped into Harry’s office. Harry looked up, blinking, from a desk crowded with parchment, and stood with a smile. “Draco. Is there another problem with Tillipop?”

            Draco felt a great shudder run down his back, but it was one that relaxed him instead of annoying him. He settled in front of Harry, arranging a chair, while Harry watched with growing curiosity.

            The smile was part of it, Draco acknowledged to himself. And the way that Harry had asked the question without much haste, as though seeing Draco here alive and free was enough reassurance for him that the problem with Tillipop wasn’t deadly. And the way that Draco was trusted enough to enter this office without a guard or an announcer.

            But most of all, it was the way Harry reached casually across the desk and took his hand for a second before letting it go.

            This will be all right. If I don’t think it will be, I will only have to make myself as indispensable to him as I promised I would.

            “I wanted to tell you about the debate,” Draco said, and paused a little. He wanted to ask if that was all right, and at the same time, he didn’t want to reveal anything so pathetic.

            Harry smiled a little. “And I want to hear it.”

            And that settles it, really. Draco put his feet up on the desk, and began.

*

            moodysavage: Harry might pick something like that so that it would stand out, yes. He’s all about making statements right now.

            SP777: Harry is reluctant to have animals close to him because of what happened to Hedwig.

            LeaniaSTL: Thanks! Arguably, Harry gets better results with intimidation anyway, the way he’s going.

            polka dot: He’s not really a traditional Dark Lord.

            Meechypoo64: Well, even in the future, only certain people know about Harry and Draco.
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Easy as Falling