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Sleepless	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 16095 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 1
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter and I am not making any money from this story.

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Chapter Twenty-Five—Mired in Secrets

            Harry could only stare at Hermione for a long moment. He wasn’t sure what she wanted him to say or do, though, and she seemed to take the stunned expression he knew he wore as tribute enough. She bobbed her head and worked open the bag that she was carrying. It had handles that looked as though they would clip closed like a crocodile’s jaws, Harry noted with the part of his brain that wasn’t consumed in surprise.

            “What?” he managed at last, his voice so hoarse that he didn’t know if Hermione could hear him. He cleared his throat. “That can’t be true. Surely someone would have known. And then, how did you discover it?”

            Hermione gave him a thin smile and held up a scroll twisted shut with a black ribbon. “There are always resources if you know how to look for them,” she said softly. “If she didn’t want anyone to know that she was a half-blood, then perhaps she should have made sure to destroy the official records the Ministry has of her birth. Of course,” she added, visibly spiraling away on a tangent, “if she’d done that, then alarms would have flared and alerted the Archivist that someone had tampered with the records, and they take any kind of tampering so seriously that—”

            “Didn’t the alarms flare when you touched the records?” Harry demanded. “I can’t imagine that she would leave a vulnerability like that unprotected.”

            “Oh, she didn’t,” Hermione said, and opened the scroll so that Harry could see the writing on it. “But I work for her, you see. It did take me a few days to access the records, though, and defeat the protection spells that she’d laid over them. She didn’t dare tamper with them in a way that would be visible, but she did lay a glamour on them that rendered them hard to read.”

            Harry shook his head. “I just can’t believe it,” he muttered. “This has to be something that she’s afraid of other people knowing.”

            Hermione paused, her head tilted to the side as she examined him. “I keep forgetting that you don’t know her very well,” she said, “and that you aren’t acquainted with the direction that she’s trying to lead the Ministry in.”

            “No,” Harry said, rolling his eyes. “Especially because I don’t understand why she wouldn’t be Minister if she wanted to lead the Ministry in any direction at all, as opposed to having some people listen to her.”

            “It’s complicated,” Hermione said, her fingers strumming the scroll as if she had forgotten how much she’d wanted to show it to Harry. “But I think I finally understand her after seeing this. She wants to change minds and influence them, but she doesn’t feel as though she can stand up in front of them and demand that they do it her way. She doesn’t have the popular support, for one thing. But I always felt that something else held her back, even in cases where most people would probably have agreed with the tack that she wanted to take, such as executing most Death Eaters without trials. She—respects codes of conduct outside herself. She needs a higher authority.” Hermione stared at the scroll again. “She needs to believe she’s doing the right thing,” she whispered. “At first I thought she simply favored the pure-bloods because she’s one of them, and promoting their interests promoted her own. But that can’t be it, not when she has a Muggle father. Now I think she admires them instead. She aspires to be part of them, and she’s ashamed that she’s not. So she buries the knowledge deep, and attempts to act even more pure than they do.”

            “That would make sense,” Harry said, Snape’s words thrumming in her brain. “Longbottom is pure-blood, right?”

            Hermione nodded. “His family is one of the few left that wasn’t touched by the war in some way. Well,” she hastily corrected herself, “obviously he lost his parents. But they gained rather than lost prestige, because they were on the right side of the war, and they’ve never been involved with Ministry corruption or even had enemies that I know of, in the last several generations.”

            “You’ve studied the enemy,” Harry said.

            “There’s no reason for us to be the enemy,” Hermione said, and flashed him a bitter smile. “But you could say that I understand Discipula because I’ve done some of the same things, though without ever being able to deny my heritage. I still work for people who despise me, because I want more power than I would be able to have otherwise.”

            Harry thought he could see it now, but he still bent down and read the scroll, because he wanted to take a few more minutes to let it all come clear in his head.

            Yes, it still claimed that Discpula’s mother had been a Mondragoran, or at least married to one, but her father was listed as Ofnon-magical extraction. Harry raised his eyebrows at Hermione. “It doesn’t actually give a name. Are you sure that her father wasn’t a Squib, and that she’s not covering up her mother’s adultery rather than the fact that she’s a half-blood?”

            Hermione nodded with a small, cruel smile. Harry reckoned that she might enjoy being in a position of power to threaten a woman who had been so patronizing to her for so many years. “Yes. Squibs would be listed that way, and so would someone who had lost their magic some time during their lifetimes, but the color of the ink is purple for Squibs and green for people who lose their magic. This is plain black.”

            Harry looked closely at the scroll and realized that, yes, Hermione was right. Not that he would ever have thought to look for the colors of the ink or known what they meant if he did. He shook his head. “You’re a wonder,” he told her, and to his surprise she blushed, bowing her head for a moment as though struggling to control her surprise and pleasure.

            “Yes, well,” she muttered, and cleared her throat. “Anyway, it’s another reason that she would dare to keep the record. If anyone ever thought to look, then they might see that her mother had committed adultery, but all she had to do was cast an illusion on the ink, and they would believe that he was still a pure-blood.”

            “Squibs are considered pure-blood, then?” Harry asked, tapping the edge of the scroll. Ideas were colliding in his mind and birthing new ones. Yes, if he left them alone long enough, he thought the truth ought to emerge from them.

            “If their parents that bore them were.” Hermione clenched her teeth for a moment; Harry wondered if she was biting back a rant on how unfair it was that people without magic got to have that title as long as they had the right family, while someone who was Muggleborn got ignored. She jerked up the scroll a moment later and looked at him. “I hate her for hiding this,” she said, softly but clearly. “If she had accepted it and decided that she would make her way in the world no matter what her parentage, then she could have helped those of us who were Muggleborn and half-blood a lot more than she did.”

            Harry wasn’t as sure of that as Hermione was. “There’s no way that she could have done that,” he said. “She was probably fighting prejudice that was too much older than she was, too entrenched.”

            But it did explain some things, he thought. Why would Discipula not have claimed credit for the defeat of Voldemort and become a heroine herself? Because she wasn’t pure-blood, and afraid to the death that someone else would find out. And probably ashamed of her blood at the bottom, if Hermione was right and she was always looking for someone to admire and imitate.

            “She fucking well could have done something!”

            Harry blinked and recalled himself from his thoughts. Hermione was leaning towards him, as close as Ron had come earlier, and with the same fire burning in the back of her eyes.

            “Yes, she could have helped us,” she said. “She was powerful, and if she had made herself someone whose opinions no one dared disagree with, then she would have smoothed the way. Once people get used to something, they accept it as though it’s always been that way. One powerful half-blood means another powerful half-blood is possible.”

            Harry snorted. Hermione was smart, but he thought her idealistic tendencies were carrying her away. “No,” he said. “People are more likely to accept the idea of one powerful half-blood. And if Discipula had admitted her heritage from the beginning, then do you think that she would ever have become what she is now? I don’t know exactly how half-bloods qualify in the pure-blood and Muggleborn market. But she wouldn’t have that power, and then you would probably despise her as just another victim, someone who should have battered further into the world and knocked down more walls.”

            Hermione froze, staring at him. “How did you know that?” she asked in a small voice.

            “It seemed like the kind of thing she would do,” Harry said cautiously. He was a bit surprised that Hermione hadn’t demanded to know why he wasn’t familiar with the status of half-bloods. “And—”

            “No,” Hermione said, lowering her eyes and toying with a bracelet that Harry hadn’t noticed before, around her wrist. It looked Muggle-made, of bright plastic, and he couldn’t sense any enchantments on it. “That’s—the way I feel. That I should have got further by now, done more. How did you know that?”

            Harry shook his head, in the uncomfortable position of having to pity someone he knew was smarter than he was. “You know it’s prejudice you’re battling,” he murmured. “Not reality. And you couldn’t have concealed your heritage the way she did.” He paused, then added, when Hermione showed no sign of looking up, “I think you’ve come pretty far for someone who most of the world despises.”

            Hermione sniffed and wiped at her eyes. “I can’t have everything I want,” she whispered. “I wouldn’t have as much as I do if Discipula hadn’t hired me. I reckon that was her good-will gesture, her way of making up for some of what she’d done to the people whose blood she shares.” She looked up suddenly. “But I want it to change. And she doesn’t want it to.”

            “Maybe she did, at one point,” Harry murmured. He kept trying to think of a time when Discipula would have betrayed her true feelings, but all he could see was the smooth, blank politician’s mask, or the way she had reacted to Snape’s taunts at the trial. But those had been about the potential revealing of her heroism, not because Snape knew she wasn’t pure-blooded. “But she has too much invested in gaming the system now.”

            She isn’t as much of a villain as I thought she was. And Malfoy was right. She was using a mask of pride to hide something—only it was a blood poverty rather than money poverty, the way it was with Bulstrode.

            “I can’t let it influence me,” Hermione said resolutely after a moment. “We still have to stop her.”

            Harry nodded. “I know what I plan to do with this information,” he said. “What are you going to do?”

            Hermione jerked her head up. “What do you mean, do? We have to let everyone know about this!”

            “Really?” Harry raised his eyebrows. “What do you think it will change?”

            “It will let everyone know that one of the smartest and most feared people in the Ministry has Muggle blood!” Hermione gestured wildly with one hand, her eyes shining. “That has to tell them that some of their prejudices were wrong!”

            “One of the most feared,” Harry echoed softly. “She might get away with lying to them if she was well-loved, but she’s not. As it is, you’d be more likely to start a panic over what other Muggleborns might be hiding within the Ministry, and who else is lying about their blood heritage. And you’d confirm that prejudice about Muggleborns being people that you can’t trust.”

            “That’s not—fair.”

            Harry had to smile a little at the wounded tone in her voice. “Not very, no,” he conceded. “But then, Discipula’s spent most of her life making things a little less fair for everyone else, by running in fear from her own shadow. I think the best we can do is use the information to do a little good, to blackmail her into doing what we want.”

            Hermione blinked at him. “You talk so easily about blackmail, Evans,” she said. “It makes me wonder who you were and what you did before you showed up here.”

            “I wasn’t ordinary,” Harry said, and left it at that. He didn’t think Hermione was as interested in his background as she was in figuring out what to do about Discipula, and had that proven when she just glared at him and waited for him to continue. “Anyway, I’m going to use this to make sure that she at least lets Narcissa and Draco Malfoy go. I don’t know if anything can save Lucius.”

            “How can you be sure that influencing her will do any good?” Hermione turned her head like an owl’s. “The Wizengamot is ultimately the one who has to make that decision.”

            “The Wizengamot abided by her decision not to give any of the other Death Eaters trials,” Harry said. “I think they’ll listen to her, and that’s the important thing. And if they don’t, then I’ll make her responsible for figuring out what to do.”

            He smiled. Hermione smiled back at him and looked again at the scroll that contained the information about Discipula’s father as though it would give her the answers. “I don’t know what the best thing to do is,” she said.

            Harry opened his mouth to give her a suggestion—

            And paused.

            Why did he care? Why did he have to care? He thought this world’s struggles with blood prejudice were disgusting, and that Voldemort’s death should have stopped all that. But was it his struggle to fight?

            It could easily become so. He’d jumped into defending the Malfoys without thinking things through, and the same thing could happen with blood prejudice if he didn’t hold back.

            But in the end…

            He had to stop sacrificing himself because someone needed him, or he felt someone did. He no longer wanted to stay in a world as fucked-up as this one, and the one goal he had set himself was freeing the Malfoys. If he couldn’t free Lucius, well, at least he would try. Anything beyond that was extra.

            Hermione had to fight her own battles. Ron would have to decide what to do about the knowledge that Discipula and not Longbottom had defeated Voldemort—and Harry thought he wouldn’t let it rest for long. He had put weapons into the hands of the people who would have been his friends if he’d been born here, and he thought he could trust them to fight the good fight.

            He wanted to go home.

            Hermione didn’t seem to notice that he hadn’t spoken. She was running her fingers over the edge of the folder she’d held out earlier instead, which looked to contain more records, and at last she gave a faint, grim smile. “I could make her do what she always should have done,” she said.

            “What’s that?” Harry jerked himself back to the conversation again. Usually, he never had this much trouble in staying interested in the events of the dreams. Did suspecting they weren’t real make that much of a difference?

            No. I suspect not wanting to stay in them forever with Draco does.

            “I could make her start working on better relations between Muggleborns and pure-bloods.” Hermione’s smile was positively unholy. “Set up a Department in the Ministry that would deal with it. I know there are a lot of discontented people around, and others who would do something if only they weren’t so afraid of the consequences. Like me,” she added bitterly. “But this way, she would have to do what she always should have done, and there would be worse consequences for not doing it than for doing it. You’re right, they would never trust her again if she revealed her blood heritage now, so she can’t be our hero. But she can be someone who fights for us.”

            Harry nodded. “And you’re all right with blackmail?”

            “For this purpose? Yes.” Hermione struck the closed file with her hand and stood up straight. “Is there anything else you need from me, Evans? Only I should go back soon so that I’m not missed.”

            Her eyes had fire in them, Harry thought, instead of ashes, as they had the first time he’d seen her. Count this as my good deed for Hermione, I reckon. I can hope that she doesn’t get hurt, but I can’t be here all the time to protect her. Any more than I protected the real one when she decided to become a barrister and I knew that she would face a lot of opposition and heartbreak and disappointment.

            “No,” Harry said. “Unless you want to give me a copy of the documents.”

            Hermione nodded, opened the folder again, and cast a complicated charm that Harry wasn’t familiar with. Two ghostly images seemed to drift off the face of the paper and become copies, rather than the paper simply duplicating itself. “This way,” Hermione told him, as she handed him one paper and took the other to tuck into her pocket, “we both have the evidence of the lie that she would die to defend, even after I return the file to the Ministry.”

            Harry nodded his admiration and watched her as she strode out of the Ministry lodgings, strides so rapid that Harry wondered for a moment if she would hurt herself.

            No, but she’ll probably hurt someone else.

            Harry shook his head and turned away. He could go up to his room and sleep, but he didn’t want to. He could go after Discipula now and confront her, but he didn’t want to. He wanted to leave the dream, to look at Hermione in his world, the way she should have been, and think about what the fuck he would do next.

            And then the dream began to pull itself to clots and pieces around him, and Harry sighed in relief. Good; for once its ending matched his desires rather than coming too soon or late.

*



            He woke, and he couldn’t breathe.

            Harry clawed at the air and then at his throat. He tried to cough, but no sound came out. For a moment he thought he was choking on a piece of food, but he couldn’t remember what he would have been eating.

            He lunged for his wand, lying beside the stack of books, and cast a spell that he thought would force air into his lungs. But either he was remembering the incantation wrong—he’d only studied it briefly as part of Auror training—or he wasn’t strong enough to do it nonverbally. The wand fell from his hands again, and the choking went on.

            Harry shook his head and staggered to his feet, trying to concentrate past the piercing pain and the panic that threatened to overwhelm him. If he couldn’t do this one way, he would do it another. He turned and rammed his back as hard as he could into the wall of the office, not fighting to keep his head from bouncing.

            The impact hurt, but it didn’t hit hard enough. Harry bent down and struck one of the desks this time, driving the corner into the small of his back. His head swam, and he could see little flashes of color and threads of darkness, and not much else.

            It seemed to work. Suddenly the choking hold on his throat eased and the air rushed back in. Harry collapsed and lay there, unable to care about the way his back and head ached. He could breathe again. Everything else melted into stupidity before that.

            He didn’t know how long he kept lying there, but suddenly there was a flash of silver in front of him and he saw Hermione’s otter Patronus again. It placed its paws on either side of his head and said, “Harry, I’m worried about you. If you aren’t home in ten minutes, then I’ll come to the office, and I don’t care whether you like me interfering or not.”

            Harry braced his palms flat against the floor and pushed himself up. He couldn’t let Hermione come here and discover him wounded and breathless. That would make her think again that the dreams were dangerous, and then she would—

            He paused, then.

            Why does it matter to me if she knows the dreams are dangerous? I thought that I wanted to stop them anyway, and she might know why I suddenly started choking now when it never happened before. Or she might have theories, at least.

            Yeah, he thought as he stood up, retrieved his wand, and went down the stairs to follow the retreating Patronus. It felt better when he didn’t have to lie to his friends.

            And it would feel better if he didn’t die of this choking sensation, either.

*

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Sleepless