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The Descent of Magic	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 18803 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 5
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I am making no money from this fanfic.

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Chapter Four—Controversy on the Horizon

            “Oof.”

            Harry blinked and stepped back. Trust him to be paying enough attention to his knee this morning to walk straight, but not enough to avoid hitting Victoire as she stepped out of the main library with a book in her hand.

            Harry smiled at her and nodded to the book she held, which looked like one on wedding traditions he had delved through when he thought it might hold a clue to the mystery of pure-blood infertility. “Is that serving as a source for your wedding?”

            Victoire still blushed brightly when she wanted to, although in this case, Harry didn’t think she particularly wanted to. She glanced down at the book and blew off a piece of dust that didn’t technically need to be there. “Well, since things didn’t work out with Teddy, exactly,” she said, and let her voice trail off.

            Harry patted her shoulder. “You know that it still might.” Victoire and Teddy had dated off and on for years now, though mostly off lately, since Teddy had developed a fascination with hunting Lethifolds and gone off to Brazil to practice his Patronus Charm on them.

            “I know,” Victoire said, and gave him a dazzling smile, a little softened from the one her mother still turned on Bill to make him melt. “And I thought he was right when he said that we should wait to get married and have children, because there were so many things that both of us wanted to do first.” She stared vaguely down at the book, her fingers moving over its brown leather cover. “Only now I can’t remember what those things were. Or maybe I’ve done all of them. And sometimes I wonder if there’s some reason that so many of my friends had something wrong with their children, and if we’ll hurt our chances if we wait.” Her fingers closed spasmodically over the book’s spine.

            Harry swallowed, his throat so tight that he couldn’t speak. He wanted to tell her that she had nothing to worry about, that neither she nor Teddy did, but then she would want to know how he knew, and…

            You might not be right. And say you are right. How in the world are you going to get the pure-blood families who are suffering to change things? You know it’s not a change that they’ve been willing to make even with Hermione fighting for twenty-six years.

            That was the problem. If the solution had been simple, Harry would have shouted it from the rooftops. But it wasn’t, and it would just make people hate him if he pretended it was.

            Victoire shook herself out of her mood and said, “Anyway, Uncle Harry, I did come over here to borrow the book from you, but also to make lunch for you.”

            “Kreacher’s lunches for Master Harry are being the most nourishing!” Kreacher said, appearing in the middle of the room and staring about with folded arms, the way he always did when someone mentioned food in his vicinity.

            Harry suppressed his groan and smiled at Victoire. “I think that, for one day, we can spare Kreacher,” he said. “Kreacher, why don’t you get started on the dinner for tonight? You know that roast I like can take hours to prepare.”

            “Master Harry is being very wise,” Kreacher said, bobbing his head. He paused as if listening to the echo of his own words, then amended carefully, “Master Harry is being very wise sometimes.” Then he disappeared back to the kitchen.

            Harry raised his eyebrows at Victoire. “What did you have in mind?”

            “Well, actually,” Victoire said, after looking both ways to make sure that Kreacher wouldn’t actually appear again, and then took a small square object out of her robe pocket and waved her wand over it. Harry laughed as the square thing became a basket, out of which Victoire took a tablecloth that she spread over the nearest stool and then steaming, hot scones, thick sandwiches dripping with meat, neat pats of butter, shining strawberries, and cups of pumpkin juice.

            “Did you make that, or did Molly?” Harry asked, sitting down in the chair nearest the stool and extending his leg so that his knee would be quiet. Victoire pulled out some plates, too, and put a sandwich and some strawberries on one before she handed it over.

            “I can make some things, Uncle Harry,” Victoire said, with a sniff. Then she looked away and mumbled, “Anyway, I made the sandwiches.”

            Harry toasted her with his and said, “It’s good. I’m sure Teddy will appreciate it when he feels that it’s time to get married.”

            Victoire smiled again, but she looked a little pained, and Harry made sure to change the subject and talk about her job as an apprentice Healer and some of the milder and more amusing stories from his Auror career for the rest of the lunch. He knew that the real reason Teddy was afraid of having children was his fear that they’d inherit lycanthropy from his side of the family, even though Teddy himself hadn’t. But he didn’t think he could betray Teddy’s confidence that way. Just encourage him to keep writing and talking to Victoire until he trusted himself enough to say it aloud.

            I wish someone could encourage me to talk about this bloody secret.

            Harry imagined doing so…

            And winced as he thought of the angry newspaper articles, the denunciations from the families whose genealogies he’d traced, the attention and the limelight that would descend on him. He hadn’t chosen to retire, but one good thing about it was that it got him away from the more ridiculous sorts of attention that might otherwise follow him.

            “Uncle Harry? I can stop talking about Mrs. Flitworth’s wounds, if you’d rather.”

            Victoire had seen his flinch. Harry returned to the conversation and shook his head, smiling. “That’s okay. I’m not that sensitive, just because someone is talking about knees.”

            Victoire smiled and chattered happily on. Harry listened with half an ear, and told himself over and over again that he had a happy life, he had a good life, and if he didn’t do any research again for fear of what he might find, that was all right. His children and nephews and nieces would fill it up.

            And yet the notebooks sat up in his study, casting a shadow on his mind from here, heavier than the pain in his knee was most of the time.

            I have to tell someone about them. If I can ever figure out how. If there was someone else who would present the research as their own, maybe…

*

            “Master Harry is not having visitors this morning.”

            Harry blinked and put aside the book on house-elves he’d been reading in a desperate attempt to convince himself that his suspicions were false. Instead, new confirmation stared out from every page, and it would only depress him if he continued.

            “Kreacher?” he called. He was most certainly receiving visitors that morning, he always was, although in the case of visitors like Al and Scorpius, he preferred to receive a little warning first. “Who is it?”

            There was a long pause, and Harry thought he heard the elf grumbling to himself the way he did when Harry interrupted his attempt to make yet another new hot poultice for his knee. Then Kreacher appeared in the doorway of the study and bowed to him. “Master Harry is being courteous,” he said. “Master Draco Malfoy is not.”

            Harry frankly stared. He hadn’t had any contact with Malfoy since the war, other than the slight nods and short exchanges of words that had been necessary when Al and Scorpius started visiting each other and one of their parents had to escort them to the other’s house. Even that had largely stopped after the boys were old enough to Floo reliably on their own. The idea that Malfoy would come to visit him on his own was preposterous.

            It has to have something to do with the boys. Harry started to stand, and then ended up sitting down again very fast and putting his head in his hands. His face felt cold against his palms.

            “Master Harry Potter is not having visitors,” Kreacher said, his voice low and dangerous.

            Harry spent a moment gritting his teeth, and thought about what would happen if he sent Malfoy away. Maybe nothing at first, but then he thought Scorpius would feel disappointed, or perhaps it would interfere in his friendship with Albus. That was the last thing Harry wanted to do. Scorpius spent enough time hinting darkly at how upset his father was with him for Sorting into an un-Malfoy House and making friends with some of the Gryffindor Muggleborns. Harry didn’t want to snub Malfoy in a way that he might take out on his son.

            “No,” he said, looking up and catching Kreacher’s eye just as he was about to pop out of the room. “No, Kreacher, I forbid you to tell him that.”

            Kreacher spent a few minutes staring at Harry. Then he said, tentatively, “Master Harry Potter is not needing visitors.”

            “No, but I want them,” Harry said, and leaned back in his chair, casting the spells that would keep his leg up and extended, embedded in an invisible cast of air. He didn’t like using them most of the time, because it made him look awkward and ridiculous, and the people he loved knew the reason he might freeze or wince in pain. For Malfoy, though, staying comfortable enough to keep calm was important. “Send Malfoy up.”

            Kreacher stood there for a long moment, hovering as though Harry really would change his mind at any moment. Then he sighed gustily and shook his head so hard that the rough hairs in his ears bobbed. “Master Harry Potter is going to be regretting this,” he predicted gloomily, and turned away so that he could fetch Malfoy.

            Harry thought he might, too, but there were things more important than his immediate comfort.

            Like the need to tell your secret to someone.

            Harry told his thoughts to shut up. This wasn’t about him.

*

            Draco, grudgingly, had to admit that he wasn’t ashamed of visiting Potter’s home, at least not in the sense that he had to physically flinch from the paper on the walls or the soft carpet of the stairs beneath his feet. The carpet was horribly out of fashion, yes, and not even Potter’s house-elf could restore some of the shine to the ancient furnishings. But Draco could relax some of the preemptory wince he’d been carrying about.

            There was no guarantee that would last when he actually got into Potter’s study, of course. And it didn’t. The faux-marble fireplace was enough to make Draco curl his lip and wish he could give a lecture on design without Potter taking it amiss.

            He looked, and there was Potter himself, leg extended out into the air in front of him in a silly fashion, bobbing his head a little. “Malfoy,” he said. “Hullo. Sit down if you like.”

            Draco did take a chair across from Potter, but all the while, he also studied him critically, trying to see if there was anything more heroic about Potter than there had been the day he defeated the Dark Lord, as all the papers tended to insist.

            No. Potter still looked as rumpled and rough as ever, his hair having only a passing acquaintance with comb or brush. Having seen Potter at school, Draco knew it probably had and this was just the way Potter looked, but still. There were such things as Straightening Charms. Draco would have studied them religiously by now had he not been born with a natural advantage in that area. (Which was not thinning, whatever Astoria said.)

            Potter could have been any one of a hundred older wizards at home, really, if not for that lightning bolt scar. He wore a ragged green jumper that probably represented a Weasley crime scene with yarn, and Muggle jeans that at least looked clean and unslept-in. His glasses were small, thin, with a touch of gold on the rim. Draco wondered who had advised him to replace the monstrosities he’d worn in school. It could have been anyone from Granger to a Ministry publicity representative.

            No, probably Granger. I doubt that he’d listen to anyone else.

            “What brings you here?” Potter asked, in the scraping voice of someone who had got tired of waiting for Draco to make the first move.

            Draco privately rolled his eyes, but decided that he might as well speak. It wasn’t as though Potter would ever guess why he had come. “I heard my son saying that you’ve been doing research into fertility problems, the problem of pure-bloods having children,” he said. “I have a personal interest in that matter myself, at the moment. I want to know what you’ve learned so far, and—” the word stuck in his throat, but it was true “—help.”

            Potter stared at him, his jaw hanging. Draco made a motion as though he would close it in spite of himself, because it looked so stupid. Potter seemed to pick up on Draco’s feelings a moment later and shut it, flushing as he did so.

            “I, ah,” he said. “Well. It’s true that I’ve found something—”

            No, you haven’t, Draco thought. Granger found something, or you’ll find it under my direction. But on your own? No, I don’t think you’ve changed that much.

            “But I don’t know, it could be nothing,” Potter said, and frowned into the distance for a moment, raising his hand as though he was going to shove the glasses back and off his face. “Other people have been in this field before me. I’m sure someone must have discovered the reason that some families like the Weasleys can have lots of children and others can’t.” His eyes drifted to Draco for a moment.

            “In my wife’s case, it was by choice,” Draco said, and tried to make his voice as stiff as Potter’s leg looked. It was the only way Draco thought he would learn. “To bear a single son, that is. But I doubt that many people have done research on this. Too many think they know the answer already.”

            “Mingling with Muggleborns?” Potter shook his head. “The Weasleys haven’t actually done a lot of that, although they’re friendly with them. And they keep having children. While the Bones family has married Muggles sometimes, and they keep having lots of children. And pure-blood families like the Longbottoms who never opposed people like Hermione and my mum coming into the wizarding world still don’t have many children.”

            Draco raised his eyebrows. “It sounds as though you’ve already looked into this extensively.”

            Potter shrugged. “I think I have. But what I found is…strange. Like I said, someone must have found it before me and discovered a reason that it couldn’t be true. I’m such a newcomer into this field that almost anything might be true.” He ducked his head as though he wanted to avoid Draco’s gaze.

            “Perhaps you should tell me what you’ve found,” Draco suggested, smoothly. “I may not be an expert in the field of blood genealogies, but I am an expert in pure-blood families, and living within them. I may be able to tell you if your find means anything.”

            It would mean nothing, of course, but it could provide a foundation to build upon. Draco had learned that particular trick when pursuing his own Potions researches. Studies by inferior scholars that meant nothing by themselves would become important and meaningful when placed into their proper context, by him.

*

            Harry spent a second studying Malfoy. On the one hand, he really had no reason to refuse. If he was wrong or mistaken, Malfoy could tell him, and set the worrying part of his mind at ease.

            On the other hand, Malfoy was one of the people Harry was sure would hate his conclusion and insist on denying it.

            You want it denied, remember?

            In the end, Harry raised his wand and summoned the books and the records he’d been working with from his study. They skimmed through the air and settled obediently into place on the stool, and he opened the folder on top and pulled out his notes, holding them towards Malfoy—who, he noted, took them with a grimace of distaste, perhaps for Harry’s Muggle blood and perhaps for his handwriting.

            “You could make things simpler by telling me,” Malfoy said distantly, and looked at the top sheet, the list of numbers for pure-blood families who had both children and house-elves, flicking past it in instants.

            Harry cleared his throat. “I found out that families who have house-elves have fewer children. The Weasleys don’t have them, haven’t had them for centuries. But then I thought, that doesn’t work, because the Bones still own some, don’t they? Then I found out that Susan’s died years ago, and there were only two anyway, and they both were treated kindly while they were there. Because that’s it.”

            “What’s it?” Malfoy had his lip curled so far this time that Harry could make out a whole row of teeth. Idly, Harry wondered if he would be able to stand staying in the same room with Harry long enough to hear what he’d found.

            “How someone treats the house-elves,” Harry said. “Not whether they have them or not, not even whether they let them raise their children or not. How they treat them. House-elves with families that hunted them or abused them or mounted their heads on the walls—those are the notes on the bottom—well, those families have fewer children. So the biggest families are either the ones without house-elves at all or the ones who don’t hurt them.”

            Malfoy’s hands froze on the papers, and a moment later, he looked up at Harry. Even having anticipated what this news might do to him, Harry still flinched at what he saw in his eyes.

*

            No. No, that cannot be possible.

            “I should have known,” Draco said, surprised in spite of himself by the way his voice hissed and rattled like a snake imprisoned in a cage. “Granger’s passion for freeing them has—infected you. And was it an elf who told you this? Or a hallucination from the pain potions that you presumably have to take for your leg?”

            Potter narrowed his eyes, but didn’t rise to the bait. That only infuriated Draco further. To have him sit there, all calm and cool, and not respond to the conflict between them the way Draco did, was maddening.

            “I looked up information on house-elves in several books,” Potter said quietly. “I got the idea from a book of stories about how magic used to belong to everybody, when it first came into the world. Wizards and house-elves and centaurs and merfolk and dragons and the rest of them. They lived in harmony—well, when the dragons weren’t killing and eating everyone, I suppose—because they recognized themselves as kin to each other. They were connected. They couldn’t break apart. The Fountain of Magical Brethren. The Ministry still has some old vestiges of the idea.”

            “Don’t take up public speaking,” Draco advised him, his spine still crackling with the emotions that surged along it. “You’re not suited for it.”

            “One of the reasons I never made the speeches about Voldemort’s defeat that they always wanted me to make on the anniversary of the war,” Potter said, and ignored the way that the Dark Lord’s name went home like a crossbow bolt to Draco’s gut. “I think this is right. I think this is true. It didn’t matter if the house-elves were servants, maybe that was even the place they wanted, just like some stories talk about brownies or other fairies helping humans in return for some consideration. But if you stop giving the fairies consideration, they leave the household. The house-elves couldn’t leave, but the magic could take its revenge. When we forgot about the way that we were bound to everyone else, then the magic recoiled back on us.”

            Draco shook his head. “What evidence do you have? Guts. Instinct. Intuition. Children’s stories.”



            Potter shrugged, his hands dangling down to the sides on the ends of his wrists, exactly the way a Mudblood’s hands would dangle, Draco thought, breathless with his own contempt. His heart slammed and roared in his ears, and he had to concentrate to hear Potter’s reply. “That’s why I want someone else to look at this and tell me I’m wrong. I have to be, right? It almost doesn’t make sense. It seems someone else would have found this. But I don’t know. If I can find my way to this conclusion and not see anything else wrong with it, someone else still might.”

            Draco dived back into the files with silent but renewed determination. He was going to be the one to set Potter’s research on the correct track, after all, though by scorching the conclusions Potter had drawn instead of leading him to them. What Potter suggested sounded nebulous and mystical, and therefore unacceptable.

            It could not be that mistreating house-elves—as Potter would put it—had cost his contemporaries their ability to have children. If magic existed that would punish them, it must be wiser than that and realize how often the house-elves brought it on themselves.

            Potter could not be right.

*

            Harry watched the way Malfoy’s cheeks and eyes glowed, and half-nodded. Yes, that was one of the reasons he had been reluctant to tell anyone about this. They would argue that it wasn’t possible to change the way they treated house-elves, and it wouldn’t really matter whether he was right or not. Because contemplating that he was right would cause them to contemplate the enormous change they would need to make.

            And that was something they wouldn’t do.

            Harry rolled his neck to the side, cracking it. He noticed the irritated twitch Malfoy’s lips made and subsided again, shutting his eyes. His leg ached. The cushioning spells held it still, but sometimes that was a good thing and sometimes that was a bad thing. At the moment, it was obviously bad. He could never predict it, though. He rubbed slowly up and down his leg with one palm.

            Malfoy was a little different than Harry had thought he would be, from Scorpius’s reports. Those had made it sound like the git who had irritated Harry in school hadn’t changed, and he hadn’t looked forward to meeting him. He would jump and shout like always, and Malfoy would shout back, and they would get nothing accomplished.

            But somehow…

            Maybe it was just that he’d had to grow up and learn patience when he had children, or when his leg got wounded and he had to retire. There were some things that couldn’t be changed, no matter how wondrous the magic. Malfoy’s character seemed to fall into that category, too. Harry could ignore his little gestures now and concentrate on the words that he was saying.

            Maybe Malfoy could help him avoid it somehow, the attention that Harry was afraid would come his way whether or not this was true, the consequences if it was. Because he knew he would have to fight for something that affected the wizarding community, something that could affect him personally if his children or his nieces and nephews wanted to marry into families that had that problem with their fertility. There wasn’t a lot that Harry wouldn’t do for the happiness of the people he loved.

            But the thought of the wearying uphill climb, of battle coming just as he had got used to not fighting, made his teeth grind.

            So he sat there, in the sunlight, his eyes shut and his hand rubbing at his leg, glad he had banished Kreacher from the room already so he couldn’t notice the rubbing and decide Harry should be in bed, and waited for Malfoy to tell him he was wrong.

            Please, Malfoy. Tell me I’m wrong.

*

            dominique1: Well, Harry thinks better of Scorpius, but he’s seen him in more situations.

            SP777: Draco has contributed to his share of the problems, beginning when Scorpius was Sorted.

            moodysavage: Draco actually never would, no matter how much he gets exasperated. Al has a Muggleborn grandmother.

            unneeded: I think you’re one of the few people who did express some sympathy for Scorpius!

            I’m sorry to hear about your leg pain. Mine comes and goes, usually it’s worse when I’ve been climbing stairs. Of course, it also doesn’t help that I have zero depth perception, so to me stairs basically look like a flat ramp and I have to be very careful to keep track of where the edges are.
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The Descent of Magic