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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 Three—Dueling Stances
Draco looked around curiously when he came down to breakfast. His mother ate before he or his father did, always, but as usual, she lingered at the table, sipping a cup of tea. But there was a second plate not far from hers, and it wasn’t as though one of the elves would be permitted to have it, which left—
            “Potter?” he asked incredulously, staring at Narcissa.
            “Yes, he was here,” his mother said, and turned a page in the paper. “I believe he’s in the south wing by now, practicing in the room that Triffy will clear for him. He’ll need to keep up with his hexes if we’re to have the pretense that he’s your bodyguard.” She clucked her tongue and shook her head. “Will you look at this? Celestina Warbeck has taken another lover, and once again she went after someone who’s already married. Disgraceful.”
            Draco sat back and tried to stop gaping. His breakfast was appearing, but his mother hated it if she could see half-chewed food in his mouth. “You’re giving him a training room? We’re going to pretend that he’s a bodyguard?”
            “Well, the poor boy has to do something other than sit around all day,” Narcissa said, riffling the paper closed and looking at the back page. From her slight sneer, Draco knew the political cartoon was incompetently drawn, again. “This makes the most sense, and will allow us to have our story in place before a goblin visits.”
            “I think we’ve done all we have to.”
            His mother sighed delicately and laid the paper down. “You knew that it would not be easy to get him out,” she said. “But what did you think would happen afterwards? We cannot simply pretend that he doesn’t exist, although from the look on Harry’s face this morning he might have preferred that, as long as he gets fed.”
            “Harry?”
            “No one will insist you call him that,” his mother said calmly. “He seemed rather surprised when I claimed the privilege. You can get along with him from a distance and not make friends, as long as you do get along. If he starts a fight, so be it, I’ll make sure he understands my displeasure, but the same thing applies to you, Draco.”
            Draco shook his head. He’d eaten an early dinner last night, but he couldn’t touch his food yet, not until he understood what his mother was talking about. “We don’t have to do anything more for him than we already did! Why are we giving him a training room and coming up with stories at all?”
            Narcissa half-closed her eyes. “I must admit to some relief that you are not already on your own, if you cannot think further of the consequences than the immediate action,” she murmured.
            Draco winced, and his mother reached out and gently touched the back of his hand. “Your father would say much the same thing,” she said. “But this is the reason.
            “We promised that we would help him fool the goblins into thinking he was still a slave. He can’t do that on his own, particularly if the goblins appear and he isn’t acting like a slave and all of us ignore him when he asks for help. If he’s bored, he could tear the house apart, or try to escape, and then the risk we took and the sacrifice of the vault mean nothing. And someone might get hurt, either him or you. Or possibly your father, although I will be having a little talk with him later about antagonizing Harry.
            “We don’t have to do this, Draco, but we should. The life-debts justify it. We do not behave graciously, the way we should, once and then stop. We follow through with the action and complete it. And in this case, the action will not be complete until a year in the future.”
            Draco had to think about the words, turning them over and over in his head like jewels falling through his hands, until he got most of the way through his breakfast. All the time, his mother sat across from him, reading through a paper she had obviously finished, instead of getting up and walking away as she usually did.
            Draco finally swallowed and said, “I—think I see. And I’m going to go find Potter.”
            “Are you?” His mother didn’t look up.
            “To offer him some help, and get our stories straight if someone asks.”
            His mother looked up this time, and Draco felt her approval, gentle and warm as an arctic summer.
            “There’s the son I raised.”
*
            Harry rolled on the floor, then almost did a handspring when the floor itself opened and started hurling hexes at him. He was panting, and laughing, and the adrenaline running through his body was doing him more good than a thousand days of rest.
            The room that Mrs. Malfoy had let him have as a training area was wonderful. There were openings everywhere that might fire sudden curses or hexes, though nothing above a certain level of power. There were dummies that sometimes hung there limply on chains, for Harry to practice on, and sometimes came to life and tried to curse him in return. Sly hands rose up and tried to snatch his wand. Trapdoors opened beneath his feet. Obstacles rose, piled cushions and smooth curls of wood and piles of what looked to be legs taken from the couches, which could invite Harry to hide behind them or come to life themselves, depending on the room’s temperament at the moment.
            Harry had no idea how the house-elves had managed to create this so fast. Probably there was a training room somewhere in the house that they used as a prototype, or at least one that had existed, once. House-elves had good memories, Hermione had said. They could remember meals that their owner had ordered years ago, or the owner’s ancestors. It was probably the same thing for rooms.
            Hermione.
            He would find some way to get in contact with her. He would. Things were not going to stay the same as they currently were, because Harry would not let them.
            He rolled and dodged and sprang, and came up spinning so fast that he made himself dizzy, but escaped the last seven hexes that danced out of nowhere and nothing. They splintered the wall and doorframe instead, and Harry stood there, hands pressed over his stomach, his body aching with his laughter.
            “Potter?”
            Harry turned and came down lightly as he lifted, his wand pointing in the right direction to guard him against any spell in the back. Malfoy, his hand still on the door, let his mouth fall open, and then ostentatiously raised both hands above his head.
            “I only wanted to get our stories straight,” he said. “But if you want me to leave you alone with your paranoia, then that can be arranged, too.”
            Harry shook his head, biting his lip so he didn’t say something unfortunate. He had held his tongue around the goblins; keeping it around Malfoy shouldn’t be that hard. Malfoy was part of the family that had helped him.
            But the searing joy was gone, and he stepped mechanically aside from the room’s next attempt to roast his legs. He only nodded to Malfoy, and said, “Yeah, that would be a good thing.” He conjured a chair with a flick of his wand and gestured him towards it. “You can sit down, if you want.”
            “You won’t?” Malfoy glared at him as though suspecting an insult. And he has the gall to call me paranoid, Harry thought idly.
            “I prefer to stand,” he said.
            Malfoy worked his way over to the chair and dropped into it with a haughty lift of his chin, apparently waiting for Harry to say something unforgivable. Harry practiced in holding his tongue again, and constructed a series of spells in his head that he would use if he was dueling Malfoy, along with Malfoy’s likely responses.
            “Mother said you were thinking of a story about being my bodyguard,” Malfoy muttered finally.
            Harry wished, for a moment, that he could have been there to see the conversation between Malfoy and his mother. “Yes,” he said. “It would give me a chance to leave the house, and give me an excuse for retaining my wand. The goblins were going to take it away from me, and they might find it suspicious that you let me still have it.”
            Malfoy stared at him. “And you didn’t walk away from them?”
            Harry snarled at him. He could feel the magic whispering to him, beneath his skin, not the magic he had used in his wand but the magic that could disintegrate ropes, turn bones to dust, make flesh and skin never have been. “What the fuck would that solve?” he demanded. “Ron made the same argument, as if walking away was simple, as if the goblins wouldn’t track me down somehow. As if everyone wouldn’t blame me for dissolving the economy.”
            “The goblins wouldn’t have carried out that threat,” Malfoy said.
            “How sure are you?” Harry asked dryly. “Because people with more experience of the world than you have were saying they would.”
            Malfoy shook his head. “They don’t have that much control. The money in the vaults belongs to wizards.”
            Harry gave him a nasty smile, remembering something Griphook had said to him during the negotiations that had resulted in his year of slavery. “Who owns the money? The person who has it. Do you think you would have got that money out of the vaults in time? That you could even find your way down to your vaults without a goblin to lead you? No, they had the means to make things a lot worse. I agreed to serve out the year because I knew that, and because I’d decided that would be the last time someone could take advantage of me. Then I would leave, and that would be the end of it.”
*
            “But you’re still here,” Draco pointed out. Potter was still trying to sound as though he was the champion of justice and reason, and Draco knew he just wasn’t thinking it through. “Why did you stay if you hate everything so much?”
            Potter only sighed and said, “Are you going to agree with the bodyguard story or not?”
            Draco shook his head. “There has to be something else we can come up with. I can protect myself.” He had promised his mother, he really had, but being back in Potter’s irritating presence had made his skin itch to the point where he wanted to lash out to defend himself. And surely Potter had to make compromises, too, if having him in the family was going to work out at all.
            Potter looked at him for a moment, and then narrowed his eyes. Suddenly invisible sticks were slapping Draco from every direction, breaking and beating against his ears and head and hair. Draco cried out and raised his hands to protect himself, but that only made the sticks hit his hands instead, making his palms and his knuckles sting. The blows never stopped.
            Finally, Draco remembered. Magical attack, right, it wouldn’t be delayed or blocked by something physical. He raised his wand and croaked out a Shield Charm, and it surrounded his head and hair. The blows stopped.
            Draco swallowed and lifted his head. Potter watched him with a faint, sharp smile.
            “And you think that you can protect yourself from me when you didn’t even remember the right defense against a simple nonverbal spell?” Potter asked softly. “You think the bodyguard idea would be impossible?”
            Draco scowled and stood up. All right, so he had failed one test, but that only meant he wanted to become better. “Teach me, then. If you think you’re so good at dueling magic and defensive magic, teach me.”
            Potter smiled at him, calm and cold and dangerously near the Potter who had made Draco want to edge away in the bank yesterday. “What makes you think I’m a good teacher? Since I’m someone arrogant that you don’t want to learn from anyway.”
            Draco sighed loudly, glad to notice that his hands weren’t shaking as he lowered the Shield Charm. “I want to learn from you. To prevent myself from being laughed at. And if you teach me, I’ll agree to the bodyguard story.”
            “Fine,” Potter said.
            Draco studied him. “You would just give in and agree?”
            “You’re angry at me for giving in and agreeing even when that’s what you want,” Potter said, in a voice as bored as stone. “I agreed because it might make time pass a little more pleasantly. And once this year is done, I’m gone, I told you.”
            “You said that was what would happen when you were the goblins’ slave,” Draco said, stepping back and raising his wand. He wasn’t even sure why he was arguing, except that Potter made no sense and it was time someone told him so. “You don’t have to do that now because you’ll be our bodyguard instead and won’t spend the year working in Gringotts.”
            Potter only frowned at him. “Who told you that was a reasonable dueling stance?”
            “What?” Draco glanced down at the way he was automatically standing, his feet braced apart and his arms spread so that any spells he cast could cover as much of the area of his body as possible. “I don’t know what you mean.”
            “I mean,” Potter said, “that you’re spread too wide. Someone could come in under or between or, hell, through your guard, and you wouldn’t be able to stop them in time.” A Stinging Hex erupted from his wand and crossed the distance between them faster than Draco had thought possible, exploding against Draco’s chest and making him wince and hiss. “See? I don’t think it’s a good way to stand, is all.”
            “How would you suggest I do it, Master Duelist?”
            Potter only smiled, as though Draco’s best insults were so much foam that could break apart against his protection. “I would suggest that you stand like I do. Watch me.” He brought his feet close together and turned himself a little, in a way Draco supposed would protect him, but thought would make it difficult to fire curses at anyone who wasn’t standing to the side, too. “See?”
            “You’re all twisted around,” Draco said.
            “That’s so I can change directions easily,” Potter said. “Think of the most powerful spell you can that’s not actually Dark, and cast it at me.”
            Draco raised his eyebrows, but the temptation felt too good to refuse. They were behind wards anyway, which meant that the goblins wouldn’t be able to detect Potter using his wand, and the Ministry wouldn’t be able to detect Draco using Dark Arts. He raised his wand, spent a few moments thinking and to throw Potter off-balance—which he had to admit didn’t look as if it was working—and then said, “Confercio.”
            The curse opened on either side of Potter, although you had to know what to look for, and Draco would probably have seen it as a heat shimmer if he didn’t know what was coming. Then the sides slammed together, trying to compress Potter into a small ball of flesh and bone.
            Except Potter wasn’t there. His silly-looking stance had changed into a nimble leap, and he was out of the spell before it had the chance to gather its full force. Draco opened his mouth to change its direction and send it after Potter before the power faded completely, but Potter was already busy with his own spell.
            “Decedes.”
            Before Draco could recognize the spell, he felt it grip his legs, especially his hips. He turned around and began marching before he could think about it, straight towards the door of the room he’d come in by.
            Draco struggled madly against it, throwing his will at the magic, before he realized where he was going wrong. This wasn’t like the Imperius Curse, something that would break if you only had the mental strength. This was a pure command to his muscles, and he couldn’t stop it without breaking the actual spell.
            He snapped out a Finite, and then he concentrated and tried to make his will well out through his skin, a tactic that had worked more than once before when he wanted to block a Dark spell another Death Eater was using.
            It didn’t work this time. His legs continued to march, and Draco knew that if he didn’t watch out, he would find himself outside the door, and then he would probably never be able to get back into the room. Potter wouldn’t want to duel with someone who couldn’t guard himself against such a simple spell.
            He laid his wand against his legs, envisioned the way he wanted to stand when he stopped walking—the “reasonable dueling stance” that Potter had talked about—and this time poured his will into the spell he was casting instead of just trying to exercise it. “Finite Incantatem,” he whispered, and the words made his lips tingle.
            The sharpness of the magic made him stumble. It seemed to nip at his heels and his hips, and he wondered what Potter would say if he fell flat on his face. Putting out his hands to possibly catch himself on the wall, it took him a moment to realize that he had stopped walking.
            “Very good,” Potter said behind him, so calm and cool Draco could hardly believe it was him, and couldn’t hear any emotion in his voice at all. “It took me ten minutes to break that spell the first time someone cast it on me.”
            Draco shook his head, turning around. “I don’t think you should flatter me if we’re going to be actually training together,” he said.
            “I’m not flattering you,” Potter said, peering at him. “It really did take me ten minutes the first time. I tend to lose my temper, though. And since the war, I can just fling my magic around. That makes focusing the way you have to do on that spell less of an option for me.” The same danger was glowing in his eyes that Draco had seen in the great cavern at Gringotts.
            Draco nodded cautiously. Then he cast, while Potter was facing him open and unguarded and wouldn’t be expecting it. “Smaragdus!”
            The burst of blinding emerald light that was supposed to happen with that spell didn’t have a chance to shine before the wave of Potter’s wand dimmed it. He simply held Draco’s eyes, though, and cocked his head a little. “I’m never unguarded,” he said. “Don’t think it.”
            Draco felt a crawling shiver come up his spine. He couldn’t claim the same, even though he had lived through the same war—and probably worse dangers, with the Dark Lord right in his house—that Potter had.
            For now, he coughed and brought his wand up. “What was that dueling stance you were going to show me again?”
*
SP777: Or the Malfoys!
Clau: Your questions will eventually be answered! But at the moment, I will say that Harry is too angry to retreat into childhood memories; he’s focusing on what’s happening to him at the moment. He also might be too paranoid to show the Malfoys any bad memories.
Draco has been laying low, hoping to evade the public’s notice, but he does have his own little projects, too.
Moon Whistler: Thank you!
Drarry-Obsessed: Yes, eventually. Harry doesn’t have a reason to tell Draco right now.
HEARTSTAR: It’s from a fest on LJ called the Draco Tops Harry fest. This one is a few years old, though.
CareLessLover: The Malfoys will handle accusations from the goblins as they come (if they come).
And I really don’t know how long it will be. Probably quite long, though, since it has to cover a year.
Tommy-Lane: Thank you!
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The Long Defeat