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The Long Defeat	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 30612 -:- Recommendations : 2 -:- Currently Reading : 7
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I am making no money from this story.

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Chapter Twenty-Seven—A Personal Idea
            “They’re spreading horrible lies about you in the paper again, Harry.”
            Hermione spoke the words with a strong tone, but she kept her eyes on the paper. Harry thought it was to distract herself from the sight of Draco sprawled on Harry’s bed, his arm wrapped firmly around Harry’s waist. Harry put his hand over Draco’s and squeezed a little when he felt Draco starting to sit up and speak. He thought he should handle this.
            Draco grunted as if he didn’t agree, but leaned back on the bed and was silent. Harry rewarded him with a light caress to his hand. Then he grinned at Hermione—and at Ron, who was sitting in a chair next to Harry’s waterfall with his eyes closed, not a care in the world.
            “I knew they would,” Harry agreed calmly. “But they can say whatever they want. I don’t care.”
            “Then you’re really not going to sue the Daily Prophet?” Hermione put down the paper and stared at him. “I would, if it was me.”
            Harry sighed softly. “You might have a chance of winning. But I know a lot of people would support the Prophet and the reporters who are writing about me, because it’s me, and they think the public has a right to know all the gossip about celebrities, or something.”
            Angry tears glistened in Hermione’s eyes. Draco shifted uneasily, but Harry squeezed his hand again, and he was still. If he thought that Hermione would break down on them, he was wrong.
            “It’s not fair,” Hermione whispered harshly. “Why can’t they keep in mind for two seconds that you defeated Voldemort and won the war for them? Do they wish they fought him themselves? Why are they so—so arrogant and stupid?”
            Her voice rose almost to a shout. Harry was glad that none of the house-elves had come hurrying, the way they usually would when a human was upset in the house, to see what was wrong. The sight of a Malfoy elf might set off Hermione’s temper in a way he couldn’t deal with right now.
            “They’re that stupid because they feel guilty, I think,” said Harry. He had thought about it long and hard the night before, after he and Draco were exhausted and Draco had gone to sleep but Harry had lain up. “They don’t want to have piled everything on the shoulders of a sixteen-year-old boy. They wish they were better people. They want to excuse themselves from the guilt of the war, and the things that have happened afterwards, the Death Eaters who were running around and the way they turned against me. They can’t bear to face the thought of their own fear, the way they just stepped back and let the goblins have me. It’s easier to blame me instead.”
            “Do you really think it’s that, mate?” Ron opened his eyes and tilted his head a little, seeming to pull some trick with his eyes that cut Draco out of the picture entirely. Harry would have to speak to Ron about that, but not right now. “I mean, it seems like it could be true, but it’s also too—understandable.”
            Harry snorted. “I’m not saying they think about it the same way. I think it’s true, but they’ve buried that truth at the very bottom of their minds, and instead they came up with all sorts of justifications about why I should be the one to fight Voldemort and suffer the punishment from the goblins, and they came up with reasons why they couldn’t.”
            “It’s like the justifications people make for keeping house-elves,” said Hermione, nodding fiercely. “They do it because it’s convenient for them, and they never think about the truth!”
            Draco stirred. Harry reached out to press his shoulder back into the bed, but Draco sat up, gave him an even look, and said, “You can’t keep your friends and me from conflict forever, Harry. I have to say something before things go further and we have a stupid misunderstanding like the kind you’re talking about.”
            Harry hesitated, but Hermione was already surging forwards into the heart of the battle. “You do just justify convenience for keeping your house-elves locked up, don’t you? You don’t want to let them go because then you might have to learn household charms and how to pick up after yourselves!”
            Draco sighed hard. “Granger, what happens when most house-elves are freed? I mean, I know what happened with Dobby, but with most of them? They’re miserable.”
            “That’s only because they’ve been conditioned to think that they must be slaves!” Hermione countered fiercely. “They could be taught better, they could work for money, they could be free elves like Dobby was—”
            “Most of them don’t want that,” Draco cut in. “The elf you rescued from the Crouches spent all her time at Hogwarts wailing and weeping and talking about how she didn’t want to be there, she wanted to have a family to serve again. And I don’t think that you freed the Black house-elf, did you?” he added over his shoulder to Harry. “Kreacher, that was his name?”
            Harry nodded, watching Draco in silence. He thought he probably would have freed Kreacher, with Hermione working on him, except for the goblins’ demands that had interfered with his normal life.
            “Well, then,” said Draco, and turned around to fix Hermione with a sound glare. “You put up with Kreacher during the war. I know that you were staying in the Black house with him for a long time. And you don’t have to be here very often, and you don’t have to see the elves serving us. You can put up with them because they mean that Harry don’t have to do slave work.”
            “Everyone should do their own chores!” Hermione’s fists were clenched, and her face was red. “That’s fair! Why can’t you see that?”
            “You say that they don’t really know what they want?” Draco had a nasty smile on his face. Harry tensed, ready to interfere if he had to. “How does that make you different from the people who say that Harry doesn’t really know what he has or what he wants to do? You keep doubting their word, you won’t do what they want, you won’t help them live better lives the way they are. You just want to change their whole lives so it will make you more comfortable.” He paused, then added, “I think that’s more despicable than any task we’ve asked them to perform for us.”
            Hermione stared at him with wide and steadily rounding eyes, and Harry tightened his grip on Draco’s waist for a moment. Draco squeezed back, but didn’t turn to look at him. Apparently, keeping his eyes on Hermione’s face was more satisfactory for him at the moment.
            “Dobby wanted to be free,” said Hermione, and she was almost stuttering in her indignation. “You had no right to keep him here and mistreat him the way you did!”
            “Shall I call one of the other elves?” Draco asked. “Do you want to ask them if they’d like to be free?”
            Hermione folded her arms. “I know that they would say almost anything to oblige you when they found out that you were the one they had to speak in front of! And I know that mistreating someone can’t be right no matter if they want to work for you or not!”
            “She’s right on that,” Harry muttered, catching Draco’s attention. “I don’t see how making the elves injure themselves solves anything, especially when you want them to work and they can’t because they’re hurt.”
            Draco hesitated, then waved a hand. “Oh, all right, that wasn’t the smartest thing we could have done. I will say that I was young and stupid, and Father was in a stressed-out mood that year he abused Dobby. I don’t know why.”
            Harry thought it probably had to do with the Ministry and the Weasleys, but he said nothing. It wasn’t as though he could go back in time and change it.
            “He gave a book to my little sister that almost killed her,” said Ron, quietly, pointedly, but in the way Harry had observed before that Ron had, where he could draw all the attention in the room to himself. “What are we supposed to do with that? Just accept it?”
            Draco’s jaw firmed for a moment. “My father made arrangements to pay a weregild for that. You have to accept that and leave the past in the past if you’re going to accept the money.”
            Ron cast a piercing look at Harry. Harry nodded. “And I know that Ginny wants the weregild, because you told me she did,” he added.
            Ron made a face and waved a hand. “I still don’t understand why you’re with Malfoy and not writing to Ginny, mate, but fine. Then that’s one crime that’s left in the past. Are you going to forget about all the other things they did?”
            “Like not identifying me to the Snatchers, and lying to Voldemort for me, and paying a vault for my freedom?” Harry shook his head meditatively. “I think I would be stupid to forget about all the other things the Malfoys have done.”
            “That’s not what I meant,” said Ron, but Hermione was the one who nudged him in the ribs this time.
            “Do you swear that you don’t mistreat any of your other house-elves?” she asked Draco. She was speaking as if they were the only two people in the room, and Harry could understand that. Hermione did get passionate about the rights of house-elves. “That you don’t order them to injure themselves because they made a mistake or told you something you didn’t want to hear?”
            “I never did that again after our fifth year,” said Draco, and held her eyes. “I learned that there were other things in the world that mattered more.”
            And he was barely in the Manor for most of our sixth year, Harry thought, but he wasn’t going to say it. If the hardest thing for his best friends about coming to terms with Draco dating him was what Draco had done in the past, rather than just Draco dating Harry at all, then Harry would leave them to work out what kind of reconciliation they could.
            Hermione sat back slowly. She folded her hands in her lap and shook her head. “Then I can accept it, although I still don’t like any wizarding family having house-elves working for them.”
            Draco bit back what he would have said—Harry knew, because he squeezed Draco’s hand so that his first response didn’t come out—and inclined his head graciously. “As you will. I promise that you don’t have to be served by the house-elves while you’re here, and they can stay out of Harry’s room.”
            “This is what you want, mate?”
            Harry turned around and realized that Ron was looking at him. Hermione might be reassured by the news about house-elves, but Ron would want to know that Harry was happy with someone he had always thought of as a slimy git, too.
            Harry smiled and nodded. “Draco taught me about things that I never knew,” he added, and grinned as Ron flushed and groaned and flung up a hand.
            “Fine, fine, I’m sorry I asked! I don’t want to know!” Ron shook his head rapidly and stood up. “Then if you want it and he’s good to you, there’s nothing more to be said. Come on, Hermione. We should get home before Mum thinks that she has to hunt us down for Sunday dinner.”
            Hermione smiled and stood up. “Good-bye Harry. Malfoy.” Her voice was cool, but not as cool as it had been, and she didn’t edit Draco out of reality with her eyes as she walked up and kissed Harry on the cheek. “We’ll see you next week.”
            Draco was silent until Harry’s friends had walked out of the room and beyond earshot. “I don’t know how you can stand having them as friends.”
            “The same way I can stand being around you after all the years when I couldn’t,” said Harry.
            “Tell me that you were never—that you didn’t—”
            Harry let Draco stew in visions of him sleeping with Ron and Hermione for a few seconds, and then laughed and took his hand. “No. I meant that you went through some things for me, and so they did. They did it for a lot longer, and for different reasons, but I trust them and I want to be with them. And I trust you and I want to be with you, too.”
            Draco looked at him with quiet eyes, and then asked, “Would you stay in the wizarding world for them?”
            “They haven’t asked me to.”
            “If they did?”
            Harry leaned in to kiss Draco, and breathed into Draco’s ear when he came closer, “I haven’t made my decision yet. Don’t ask right now.”
            Draco sighed and curved a hand around the back of his neck, and they both found something else to concentrate on.

*
Marron: Harry is going to ignore the public as much as possible.
staar: But Harry still loves the places and magic of the wizarding world, and he might not want to leave.
BAFan: Yes, and Harry acknowledges that, which is another reason that he doesn’t entirely blame people for their reactions towards him.
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The Long Defeat