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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 Thirty-Four—Dissolvo Obices
            Harry thought he saw Landen’s eyes shut in relief for a moment before the spell struck. The incantation was a simple one that would make someone say the most embarrassing thing in their head at the time. It could dissolve inhibitions or barriers, but because it was so limited, it was mostly restricted to a hex between joking friends or jealous lovers.
            Harry had to smile at Landen as the light of the spell flared in a corona around her head and Rosier’s. Landen ought to have remembered the power of his magic and the things that he could make spells do now.
            Sure enough, Landen took a stiff step forwards a moment later and spoke to Rosier. “Do you ever care about anything other than your own family’s advancement?”
            Rosier turned to her. He was so blank-eyed that he might have been under the same spell that he’d cursed Draco with, but he shook his head and said, “I care about the fact that all I can do in most of our planning sessions is stare at your breasts.”
            In most cases of the spell, the effect would have ended there. They had both said something embarrassing, and the hex simply wasn’t that powerful.
            But Harry had chosen those words, even more than the magic, for a reason, and it went on.
            Landen tore open her robes and shirt, or tried. They were thick enough that the cloth resisted her hands, and hung at her sides as she panted at Rosier, “I thought you would never say that.”
            Rosier leaned forwards and buried his head in her chest, snuffling and licking. Landen staggered back in front of him, falling to the floor with her hands on either side of his head.
            The other Wizengamot members were staring. Harry saw more than one red face, more than one chin quivering with suppressed laughter, and eyes darting to him and then away again, as if they wondered whether he had caused this.
            But Harry had said the spell aloud for his audience’s benefit as much as for the benefit of Landen and Rosier, once they regained their senses. It was supposed to be harmless. It wasn’t kind, but all Harry had done was bring out desires that had already been there, not created them.
            Rosier was still snuffling and burrowing like some kind of demented pig, and Landen was still stroking his face. Then she tripped on the hem of her half-torn robe, and they fell on the floor, and went rolling around, too caught up in what was happening to them right at the moment even to strip each other naked.
            Harry watched with his lips twitching. He didn’t really want to laugh, though, the way that some of the other Wizengamot members had succumbed to. The emotion that filled him was a lot worse, a lot more savage, than amusement.
            He could have done worse. He wanted to do worse.
            But he might need Rosier’s help to remove the spell from Draco, and so he had left him alive and sane. That was the only reason, though. And it was a fragile barrier against the beating fire of his temper.
            Harry found his hand rising, as though someone else was directing it. He shook his head in irritation and pulled it back down. No, he wouldn’t strike Rosier dead, or Landen either, although he could do it right now, and easily. His magic might throb around him, as dangerous and, in its way, as disgusting as their unfulfilled passion, but he wasn’t going to hurl it at them.
            Depending on what Rosier said and did after he returned to his right mind, though…
            Harry had to admit that he might let it go then.
            Rosier was on top of Landen now, rubbing against her leg as though it was the only thing that existed in the world for him. Landen had her head thrown back, gaping at the ceiling. Because control of basic bodily functions was another thing stripped from her by the spell, a thin line of drool was running down her chin.
            Harry counted down the seconds, his eyes fixed on the red flush on Rosier’s face, and his ears attuned to Rosier’s breathing. When Rosier had risen to his knees above Landen and opened his mouth, Harry released the spell.
            Rosier, frozen a few seconds away from embarrassing himself very publically indeed, stared slowly around the courtroom. His eyes came to Harry last, after studying every one of his flushed colleagues. Then he climbed to his feet and wiped the drool away from his own lips with a trembling hand. Beneath him, Landen was trying to cover up.
            Harry held his eyes. “I can do worse than that,” he said. “Cast the countercurse on my man. And it had better be the countercurse,” he added, as Rosier’s hand inched towards his wand. “If you cast anything else…”
            He thought the green sparks falling around his fingers, the color of the Killing Curse, spoke eloquently enough for him, but he did lift his hand in case Rosier didn’t get it.
            Rosier’s face was drained as he slowly lifted his wand. Harry watched and judged angles, and his eyes went back to Rosier’s face as he opened his mouth.
            So Harry was prepared when Rosier abruptly whirled on him and attempted to cast something else, although his voice was a wordless shriek instead of an incantation, so what it was really meant to be, Harry never knew.
            Harry slashed his hand sideways. Rosier spun around twice, and his wand clattered out of his hand. Harry spun him back around, and then froze Rosier in place with a twitch of his finger and advanced on him. Rosier was still staring at him, eyes bulging, and Harry could feel rage and fear fighting so strongly for possession of him that it would be impossible to say which was worse.
            “I told you,” Harry breathed. “And I think that I’m tired of warning you and giving you second chances. Tired of playing nice.”
            Rosier tried again to flex his muscles against Harry’s magic, and someone from the side gave a low murmur of protest. Harry paid no attention. He was tired of warning people, of trying to anticipate what they would do and then make his response proportional.
            And people like Rosier are never going to think it’s proportional, Harry thought cynically to himself as he watched Rosier struggle. They’ll say it’s my fault no matter what happens. They’ll whine and complain and make it clear that I was the one who made them do something. I could quit calling myself a Dark Lord and dedicate myself to Light magic for the rest of my life, and there would still be someone waiting for me to trip up and kill people. Hell, they were planning for me to be their future political enemy when I was eleven.
            “Did it ever occur to you that I might not have been your enemy if you had rescued me from the abuse and made me grateful to you?” Harry asked Rosier softly. He didn’t loosen his magic enough to let the man reply, of course, but he was interested in seeing the expressions that crossed his face as he listened to Harry’s words. “You could have left me there until things got really bad, as based on your own pictures, and then taken me away. You, or someone else. You could have raised me to be loyal to the Ministry, and hate Dumbledore, once I found out that he was the one who left me with my relatives. That would have been the smart political thing to do. Instead, you left things alone to fester, and now you object to dealing with the festering.”
            Rosier stared at him with those bulging eyes, but the rest of his face was clear enough; Harry only had a tight grip on him to prevent him from moving his jaw. It didn’t prevent the rest of his muscles flexing, or his forehead from wrinkling.
            And at the moment, he was staring at Harry as if he’d never seen him before. No, Harry thought, the notion piercing to the heart of him, not so much for himself—he had survived, he was grown and he could protect his own interests now—as for the other children that might have been left in situations like his. Maybe the Ministry wouldn’t take pictures of their abuse and try to use them to manipulate those children later, but they could project the same vast indifference.
            “You like to think that you’re a master of politics,” Harry said. His voice had lowered. He couldn’t help it. Besides, everyone else in the chamber was breathless with listening, so it wasn’t like he needed to speak up to be heard. “You think you would do anything to control your enemies and keep them from toppling your political position. But if you never thought, not once, about using kindness as a tool instead of manipulation, then you’re stupid.” Harry laughed, and ignored the way that not only Rosier but a bunch of other people flinched. “Dumbledore told me that love was the power the Dark Lord knew not. It seems that now it’s the power that the Dark Lord knows, and the Ministry never thought of.”
            “You think luxury and kindness would have worked to turn a heart as Dark as yours?” Landen gasped, struggling to her feet. Harry was completely aware of her, although he didn’t turn his gaze away from Rosier. “They wouldn’t have worked. We would have wasted time and resources that could be better spent on something else—”
            “I’m tired of your voice,” Harry said casually, not turning to her, and her lips sealed themselves.
            Harry moved a step closer to Rosier, never taking his eyes from him. Rosier now looked frightened enough to piss himself, although there was, frankly, already a wet patch on his robes, and Harry couldn’t be arsed to try to distinguish one from the other.
            “I think that I wouldn’t have gone Dark if you had tried something else,” Harry said. “Maybe not. But who’s more likely to be Dark, the child abused most of his life who later finds out that at least some adults knew perfectly well what was happening and didn’t bother to step in, or the child rescued at a young age?”
            “There were blood wards,” someone else in the Wizengamot murmured.
            “You can’t simultaneously hate Dumbledore and work against him, and then believe everything he says,” Harry said. He could feel another emotion swelling in him, like a faraway wave, roiling and black. He didn’t know what it was yet, and he didn’t know what he would feel when it got here. For the moment, he ignored it. “I could have been your friend, your pet. You could have raised me, trained me, molded me to be anything you wanted, the way you thought Dumbledore would,” he went on, turning back to Rosier. “But instead, you couldn’t be bothered. Nobody could.”
            The same way Dumbledore and McGonagall had thought he might be unhappy with the Dursleys, that he might have a reason to be, but they couldn’t interfere because it would complicate things too much.
            Harry knew the way Dumbledore’s thoughts would run. Who would take him? What would they do with Harry during summers in the wizarding world? Who would make sure that he behaved when his relatives weren’t watching him? Who would discipline him if he had problems during the school year?
            It was all so hard, so complicated, and it might mess up Dumbledore’s plans further, Harry thought, his mind speeding along tracks that he was sure Dumbledore’s had taken. If Dumbledore hadn’t wanted to tell Harry the prophecy when he was eleven because he loved him so much, could he have sent Harry to his death to slaughter the Horcrux if he had been the one to rescue and raise him?
            The wave broke on him.
            It was rage, and sorrow.

            Harry took a step towards Rosier. He could feel the uneasy way that some of the others were watching him, but he couldn’t bring himself to care. They could be uneasy all they wanted. They hadn’t stopped Rosier and Landen, and they hadn’t cared about his abuse. He was willing to bet that more people than just Rosier were aware of it, too, whether or not they had actually participated in gathering the evidence. They hadn’t cared. He needn’t care about them.
            “I couldn’t make you suffer what I did,” he whispered. “There’s no way to bring it all back, and no spell that can turn back time and put you in my place.”
            His magic eddied for a second, and Harry took the time to consider that maybe he could bend the laws of the past and subject Rosier to the same abuse he had taken from the Dursleys. But then he shook his head. He would mess up trying to do that, and he wanted to walk out of this tangle of shit with a clear conscience. Hurting innocents, the way he probably would without more experience with time travel, was still impossible.
            “But I can do this,” Harry said, and he clenched his hands down, working his fingers deeper and deeper into his palms, imagining the result he wanted.
            Some of the months he had lived with the Dursleys was blurred in his memories, and would not come back. So even if he’d wanted to inflict all the pain on Rosier, he couldn’t. But he remembered some things very well.
            So he breathed them into the air, a pulsing, lead-grey mist that drifted towards Rosier. Harry’s magic opened his mouth, and Harry’s magic made his lungs inflate so that he inhaled it. Harry watched him, and although he knew Rosier felt the spell affecting his body, he gave Harry a baffled look.
            Harry nodded. “I knew you wouldn’t understand, so I’m going to explain,” he said gently. “Whenever you ignore child abuse from now on, you’re going to suffer an injury I did. Maybe one of your bones will break. Maybe you’ll suddenly lose all sorts of weight and become malnourished for months on end. Maybe you’ll find yourself in a small dark space that won’t release you except at someone else’s will.” He paused and smiled, watching Rosier’s face continue to pale. “Make that mine.”
            Harry leaned forwards and lowered his voice. “And if you attack any of my people again, all of those injuries are going to fall on you at once. It’s in you now, hiding there. Your bones are inherently fragile. Your mind is inherently prone to start imagining things that aren’t there, if it will satisfy the curse. It’s a disease that can flare up at any time, if you do the wrong thing.” He bared his teeth at Rosier’s horrified expression. “It’ll probably kill you, to have to survive what I survived for ten years in the space of a few seconds. I wouldn’t test it.”
            He turned away and gestured to Landen. She squeaked as her tongue twisted in her mouth, and she clapped her hands to her lips. Harry glanced at her.
            “You can speak now, but I think that you shouldn’t plot against any of my people,” he said mildly. “I think you’ll find that your tongue grows a needle that pierces the bottom of your mouth if you do.”
            Landen backed away from him, her hand still over her lips. Harry turned his back again and walked towards Draco, his head up. Draco continued to look at him with blank, oblivious eyes.
            Harry could feel the tremble in his lungs, although no one else noticed it—he hoped. Using so much magic at once, and so far away from the center of his strength, Hogwarts, made him feel as though he had been running long-distance for hours. He needed to go back home, and rest. And he needed to wait a while before he tried to snap the spell on Draco, much as he hated that. He wasn’t about to ask Rosier for help again, and if he tried it when tired, he would mess things up in a different way.
            He did pause to touch Draco’s head, and Draco looked up at him. “We’re going home,” Harry told him softly. “Come on.”
            Draco followed him obediently out of the courtroom. No harm in that, Harry thought. Everyone there was aware of the obedience curse that Rosier had put him under, and no one knew who he really was.
            And no one was saying a word.
*
            Draco could feel distant emotions, clawing up in his mind slowly, as if from the bottom of a deep pit. He thought some were horror, and some were rage.
            And some were satisfaction.
            He looked ahead of him, at the walking form of his master who was not his master, and it wasn’t the curse that made him not resist when they reached a fireplace and could Floo through it. It wasn’t the curse that made him lean on Harry and shut his eyes, and sigh when they tumbled out into a room where the stones picked Harry up and urged him along towards the chair in the corner.
            “We’ll free you soon,” Harry whispered into his ear, stroking his back. “I promise.”
            Draco knew he wanted to be free, knew with a kind of drifting intellectual curiosity that this was not the person he really was, and things would look different when he got back to being that person. But for now, the concern, the care, the way those hands trembled on him, for him, was enough.
*
            Moodysavage: Thanks! While Harry didn’t kill Landen or Rosier, I think he embarrassed them for a good long time to come, and they’ll be very cautious around him now.
            SP777: I don’t know about a familiar. Maybe Hogwarts is his familiar.
            Glad you enjoyed the chapter, though. ;)
            Property_Of_A_DeadGirl425: Thank you!
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Easy as Falling