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An Image of Lethe	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 21751 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 3
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter and am not making any money from this story.

Chapter List
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Chapter Forty-One—The Recovering Hours
            Harry took a long, long drink out of the glass of water that the Wizengamot had offered him. Then he began to eat the food on the plate in front of him. They’d set up a sort of folding table in front of the chair so he didn’t have to leave it in order to have dinner.
            At the moment, though, Harry could have eaten food through a cat door, the way the Dursleys used to feed him. He was so hungry. Veritaserum seemed to increase his appetite as well as making him speak the truth.
            The meat was venison, Harry thought, and he ate his way through most of a plateful before one of the Wizengamot members still staring at him asked another question. “Did you think you would be able to get away with everything you were trying?”
            Harry swallowed hastily before the potion could make him dump a mouthful of half-chewed food on the floor, but he still had to answer, “Yes.”
            That made some of the people who had been acting more sympathetic to him since hearing more of the story narrow their eyes and lean away from him. The man who’d asked the question, in a set of black robes that looked as if they’d been based on a Muggle tuxedo, just stared. “Why?”
            The question was broad enough to let Harry have some more discretion in answering it instead of just speaking the literal truth, so he did. “Because I wanted to ‘get away’ with returning people’s sanity to them and convincing the Ministry they’d done the wrong thing in trusting the Lightfinder. And I worked hard to make that happen.”
            The man tapped his fingers on his stomach. Harry took the chance to swallow some more water and a piece of bread that he’d spread with butter but hadn’t had the chance to eat yet.
            Then Black Robes asked abruptly, “You didn’t want to get away with convincing the Ministry that you were Light when you were really Dark?”
            This time, Harry managed to delay his answer because he was laughing. Then he had to swallow to get the food out of the way of the words emerging whether he wanted them to or not. “How could I? They saw I was Dark because of the Lightfinder and immediately decided I was a dangerous criminal.”
            “Why did they decide you were a dangerous criminal?” That was a woman Harry thought vaguely that he recognized, with a prominent nose and bright blue eyes, but he didn’t know her name. He didn’t know the names of most of the Wizengamot members, he realized. They hadn’t offered them. They just kept questioning him as if they were the only ones who had the right to ask anything.
            “Because I was Dark.”
            “It must have been for some reason other than that,” Black Robes said. “After all, there are other wizards who tested Dark in the Lightfinder and were not immediately arrested.”
            It wasn’t a question, which left Harry free to answer the way he wanted. “No, but some of them were sent to prison, like my friend Bill Weasley. And some of them were hunted down because they had apparently committed other crimes. May I remind you that the Ministry judged Draco Malfoy free to go after he was tried for his crimes and then immediately started hunting him down again?”
            “He had done other things he hadn’t been tried for,” said a witch with a wand longer than her arm.
            Harry shrugged. “I don’t know about that. What I know is that he was told he could go, he Apparated from outside the Ministry, and then the Aurors started hunting him again.”
            “Who told you that?”
            “Draco Malfoy.”
            The woman gave him a tight smile. “Well, no wonder you believe that nonsense, coming from such a biased source. You don’t want to listen to a criminal talking to you about the reasons for the accusation.”
            Harry gave her another, even tighter smile back. “But what are you listening to right now?”
            She looked uncomfortable for the barest second. Then she did shrug and say, “That’s different. You’re under Veritaserum.”
            “And if Draco Malfoy agreed to submit to Veritaserum? Would you believe him then?” Harry looked around at the other Wizengamot members. “I was informed that he had been put under Veritaserum during the part of his trial when he was questioned about his father’s activities. Surely you believed him then?”
            “Dark wizards know methods of tricking Veritaserum,” said Kingsley, where he was watching intently from the side.
            “Then why believe me?” Harry turned around and grinned as widely and brightly as he could. He wanted to punch someone, but his hands were down at his sides, where they couldn’t be seen that well, and he had the chains linking him to the chair as well, a reminder of what he’d endured.
            Kingsley paused, and some Wizengamot members twittered like birds. Harry wasn’t sure whether they were laughing at him or not. He was too busy paying attention to Kingsley instead, who coughed and said, “But you’re not Dark. You’ve made it plain how flawed the Lightfinder is. We have to rely on what people have done, not on the color of their aura in the Lightfinder.”
            Harry wanted to shout. So this was how the Ministry planned to reconcile their role in the latest madness with the revelations Harry had brought them. They would just say that the people they liked weren’t really Dark and pretend everyone else was.
            Harry didn’t know what they were going to do about the Unseen, because Kingsley and a few other people had left the courtroom for a while to “discuss it” and he hadn’t heard. But his voice was low and vicious now as he said, “What about the other people tested in it?”
            “We’re not going to pursue action against Bill Weasley, or his Veela mate.” Kingsley sent him a firm nod. “We realize now that we were wrong to jump to conclusions and imprison him, or her.”
            “And the other people who tested Dark because of it? The ones that the Ministry said deserved to be in prison or have their homes and property taken from them?”
            Silence. Harry pushed the remains of his food away and shifted around in the chair so that he was facing both Kingsley and as much of the Wizengamot as you could.
            “Don’t you see,” he told them, “if you let this happen, things are going to return to a status quo that won’t last. You’ll still condemn Dark wizards. You won’t admit any wrongdoing. You won’t admit that you did something wrong by trusting the Unseen and letting them almost sacrifice my magic.” He looked straight at Kingsley as he said that.
            “Of course that was wrong.” That was the Wizengamot member who had questioned Kingsley most sharply about the Unseen’s involvement. She laid a hand over her heart in a gesture Harry didn’t believe for a second. “No one should ever have trusted a secret group that hid so much of their own agenda.”
            “But was it wrong because it was me, or wrong in general?” Harry asked her. “If you had Draco Malfoy in front of you, would you have let the Unseen sacrifice his magic?”
            Silence, again. Harry shook his head slowly. He wondered if this was what Draco had foreseen. They believed Harry, but they were only willing to change their minds about a few people, the ones who they had thought were Light before the tests. They would still pursue others, like Astoria, who had done nothing wrong except refuse to be put through the Lightfinder.
            “Don’t you see,” Harry whispered, “that you can’t integrate people back into the wizarding world if you do this? The Unseen will come back. The prejudices will come back. There’ll be more trials that don’t need to happen, because you think Dark wizards have done something inherently wrong by being Dark wizards.”
            “They have,” said a squeaky-voiced wizard who sat on the far left. “They’ve shown they have an affinity for torture spells—”
            “Then I have that, too?” Harry spread his hands. “I’m Dark.”
            More silence. Harry watched them and wondered what they had thought he would say.
            They thought you would be so grateful to be accepted back into the wizarding world that you would also accept whatever sentence they handed down. And they thought you wouldn’t bother to stand up for anyone but yourself.
            With a weary sigh, Harry admitted, if only to himself, that it wouldn’t matter if Draco returned to stand trial for the other crimes they’d said he committed, but somehow neglected to mention during his first trial, only “remembering” them the minute he Apparated away. They would find some way to condemn him. They had already decided, preemptively, that a Truth Trial wouldn’t be an option because “Dark wizards can trick Veritaserum.”
            Harry abandoned every notion, then, of encouraging Draco to come in and stand trial. It wouldn’t do any good anyway, even to prove a point of principle.
            “If you’re Dark,” said Squeaky Voice then, “how do we know that you’re telling the truth?”
            The question pulled the truth out of Harry, as he’d known it would. “I am. You can ask the Healer who brewed the Veritaserum.” He looked around, but didn’t see her. Perhaps she’d left after the fiasco with the Unseen.
            “But you could be tricking it now.” That was the wizard in the black robes, leaning forwards intently. “When you say that you’re sorry and want things to go back to the way they were before.”
            “I don’t want things to go back to the way they were before,” Harry growled at them. “I want truth to matter more than magical affiliation. Why bother to give me Veritaserum if you don’t trust the responses?”
            “I did trust them,” said Black Robes. “Now I’m not so sure.”
            Harry wanted to bury his head in his hands, to scream. There was a way to heal the madness that had made the wizarding world into a chaotic place for the past few months. There was no way to heal sheer stubbornness.
            “I, for, one, believe Harry,” said Kingsley, and thus did the first thing Harry felt he could approve of since he’d been tested in the Lightfinder. “And if we disbelieve the Veritaserum, what are we going to do? Decide that he’s lying every time he speaks?” He stood up and looked around the room. “Honored witches and wizards of the Wizengamot, you didn’t start deciding that he could be lying until he said things you didn’t want to hear. Why don’t you want to hear them, while you did want to hear his earlier testimony about what he had to do when he was living among the Death Eaters? Ask yourselves that. What’s the difference between one kind of news and the other?”
            There was a long, suspicious silence in which the Wizengamot members exchanged glances rather than look directly at Harry. Harry simply sat still and said nothing. He was almost done with saying things, he thought, unless someone asked him a question. And then he would go back to his cell and sleep.
            Black Robes finally said, “He’s acting as though Dark wizards never caused any trouble. And asking for special dispensation for a Dark wizard who, on his authority, he was close to. That’s a bit suspicious.” He glared at Harry.
            Harry glared back, and answered, “The Minister was promising me that two personal friends of mine who were caught up in all this had been released from Azkaban and wouldn’t be troubled in the future. What makes that different? Just that they’re suspected to be Light wizards despite the way they tested in the Lightfinder, and Draco’s Dark, despite the fact that he was never tested in the Lightfinder?”
            More rustling, like nervous chickens. Then someone asked, “Are you saying all Dark wizards are good?”
            “No,” Harry responded instantly, the Veritaserum almost making him trip over his own tongue. He took a deep breath, and went on. “But neither are Light wizards.”
            A different kind of silence this time. Harry looked back and forth slowly, making himself really absorb the expressions on their faces, instead of seeing them all as the enemy.
            Some of them looked more reluctant than others. Some of them were whispering behind their hands to each other. And some of them met his eyes and gave him faint, nervous smiles. They might vote against the Wizengamot if they dared.
            If they dared.
            Harry understood, then, as much as he would ever understand the behavior of people who were so shrinking and small. Harry could dare things that would change the world because he was still young and he hadn’t had much to lose. If he hadn’t taken risks during the war, Voldemort would have killed him. If he hadn’t taken risks in the past few months, it would have ended with his magic being sucked into Lethe anyway.
            But his risks might have lost him the wizarding world now. And the members of the Wizengamot couldn’t take them when they had families and political power and all sorts of things they couldn’t stand to lose.
            Well. Harry worked his hands into his lap, folded them, and waited for the decision that would come down. I’ll work on not losing those things that are the most important to me, the things I really couldn’t get along without. My friends. Draco.
            And, honestly, that’s about it.
            His career as an Auror would never come to be now. He understood that. Kingsley might have been willing to “forgive” him—
            For my crimes that weren’t crimes, that were the only things I could have done.
            --but other people never would. They would never have enough confidence in Harry to let him be an Auror unquestioned. And his days of cringing and letting other people do what they wanted, unquestioned, as long as he could seem Light and obliging, were over. They had probably been over from the first moment that Draco had come to him and challenged to think what would happen to Muggleborn children who tested Dark.
            He swallowed back lots of things he might have done, might have said. Those were on other paths now, the paths of someone who had never tested Dark and never gone along with playing Voldemort for the Death Eaters and never fallen in love with Draco.
            This is the way things are going to be.
            “I’ve told you the truth,” Harry told the Wizengamot, speaking softly now. He didn’t want to appear particularly aggressive or stubborn, even though that was the way he felt. “I only want to know what further questions you have for me, and then I want to go home.”
            “You think you deserve to go home instead of back to a cell?” That was a woman in purple robes who sounded only curious, not hostile.
            Harry blinked at her. “Yes.”
            There was another debate that they mostly left him out of on the merits of trusting him whether he was under Veritaserum or not. The Healer who’d brewed it came back in and testified to the potion’s effectiveness even on a Dark wizard, sounding angry. Harry let the words wash over him. No one was asking him direct questions, and at the moment, that was enough.
            Kingsley finally cleared his throat, and the chattering voices fell silent. Harry blinked and sat up.
            “Then the Wizengamot agrees,” Kingsley said, and turned to Harry. Harry found himself holding his breath, even though he had no intention of simply abiding by the decree of the Wizengamot if they meant to lock him up for the rest of his life. “Harry Potter is to be released to the custody of Hermione Granger and Ron Weasley. And he is to remain there until the last Death Eaters are captured.”
            Harry blinked. “They weren’t all captured?”
            Kingsley gave him a mildly exasperated glance. That was probably one of the things he should have been paying attention to during the conversation he’d ignored, Harry thought, lifting one hand in apology. “I didn’t hear,” he said.
            “No,” said Kingsley with obvious reluctance. “Most of them were, but Fenrir Greyback escaped, and so did Rabastan Lestrange.”
            Harry just nodded. He didn’t know what to say. Lots of things he could have said about Greyback wouldn’t be the kind they wanted to hear, anyway.
            “To be safe,” Kingsley continued, sounding this time as if he would kick someone who interrupted him, “you’ll stay there. And we’ll spend some time rooting out the Unseen and trying to make sure we know the causes and consequences of their actions.”
            They won’t give a shit, Harry thought, with a sigh. They’ll do all they can to sabotage you and drag me back into the future they think the wizarding world deserves, the one where I’m without my magic.
            It was another reason to leave Britain, now that he thought about it. The Unseen might never stop hunting him, and he didn’t think the Ministry could call them to heel effectively.
            The dragon, which had been dozing on the floor next to Harry’s feet, lifted his head and blinked sleepily. Harry reached down and smoothed his hand down his back.
            “And here are Miss Granger and Mr. Weasley now,” Kingsley continued, without a change of expression until the end, when he suddenly broke out in a smile and waved his hand towards the door of the courtroom.
            Harry turned around. There were Ron and Hermione, and a bone-deep ache sprang up in him as he saw them. Merlin, he wanted to go over and hug them and go home with them and talk and talk and talk, and then sleep until he got sores from not getting out of bed. He was so tired.
            He didn’t want to tell them good-bye.
            Remember that I’ll only do that if I have to, Harry thought, to comfort himself, as the chains on the chair finally let him go and he stood up, rubbing his wrists. I don’t want to leave them. I really don’t want to leave them.
            It would never be like it had been, and he was a different person now. But Harry didn’t want to lose what he could have with his friends, either.
            For now, it was enough that they hugged him, and Ron in particular clutched at him like he would never let him go, and then they walked him out of the courtroom and up the corridors, talking, talking, talking, and Harry let go of worry about the future.
*
            Draco still felt shaken by the aftermath of his own daring in going to the Ministry when he woke up that evening. He’d fallen into a doze over the pile of books and maps of the Ministry. He’d meant to put them away, but he’d started to look through them again, in case he had to go rescue Harry tomorrow, and then the next thing he knew, he was asleep.
            Although not for long, because the insistently nudging head of Harry’s dragon wouldn’t let him sleep for long. Draco knuckled sleep out of his eyes, grumbling, and then held out his arm to the dragon.
            Soft claws prickled up his arm, and then the dragon bowed his head and let Draco see the letter he clutched in his teeth. Draco wrestled with it for an unsuccessful minute before the dragon seemed to get bored, opened his mouth, dropped the letter, and swooped over to the corner of the room where Draco kept water for him, which he drank long and thirstily.
            Draco turned the letter over, stared at the writing, and started to shake. It was a full ninety seconds, he thought, before he could get his hands under control long enough to open the letter.
            It was Harry’s writing. They wouldn’t have let him have ink and parchment if he was going to Azkaban. Draco thought.
            He refused to think that they might if they were granting a prisoner’s last request, and read it eagerly.
            Dear Draco,
            The Wizengamot did decide not to put me in Azkaban. I’m in Ron and Hermione’s custody for the moment, though. Officially it’s because they’re worried about Greyback and Rabastan Lestrange escaping, and I need protection. But I think they might want to keep an eye on me because they’re still worried I’m going to turn Dark.
            “Which only shows how many fools there are in the Ministry,” Draco told the dragon, who moved his tail a little, as if to say that it was all very interesting, but Draco would have to excuse him while he finished this water.
            I don’t think they really knew what to make of me. They said I would go free and Bill and Fleur would go free, but then they started balking. Some of them thought I was managing to trick the Veritaserum because I’m a Dark wizard and apparently Dark wizards can do that.
            “That would have been a handy trick to have during my trial,” Draco said, and stretched back in his chair. “I shall have to scold Mother and Father for not teaching me.”
            And they especially balked at you. I don’t think they would trust you even if you gave yourself up to a Truth Trial. I’m sorry, Draco. They acknowledge they were wrong about the Lightfinder, but they don’t want to change anything else, especially not the convenient belief that everyone who tests Light is good and everyone who tests Dark is evil. I think they might try to come up with another way to separate Light and Dark wizards, even though they wouldn’t dare use the Lightfinder again.
            Draco sighed slowly. It was a revelation he had had a long time ago. He wished he could have been with Harry when Harry had it.
            And I don’t…There was a long scratch, as though Harry had tried to think of what to say and had waited so long that he’d finally had to dip his quill in more ink. I don’t think I want to live in a world like the one they’re proposing, Draco. But I don’t want to leave my friends and my home, either, if I can avoid it. So for now I’ll wait and see what will happen.
            But if it turns out that they decide they can’t trust me and they’re going to lock me up again, then I’ll ask you to be ready, Draco. The dragon can bring me your answer and get me out of here if anything comes up. I’ll come to you.
            Draco reached out and gently laid his hand on those last words. Even more than the signature, the sign of Harry’s name, they were the most precious ones to him.
            He had at least until the morning to decide what to say, he thought. The dragon had curled up in a way that made it very clear there would be no more flying tonight. And Draco didn’t want to sound like he was urging Harry to abandon his friends. Draco didn’t want that. He might never like Weasley and Granger, but Harry needed them and wanted them by his side.
            Not at the cost of freedom, though. Especially when Harry had made up for the worst thing he’d done, or been involved in, and done nothing else wrong, except try to save a lot of stubborn arses who would never understand a tenth of what he’d struggled through or endure it themselves.
            Draco ended up falling asleep in the library again, but this time, his sleep was unbroken and his head pillowed on paper he liked much better than the maps and books he’d been reading. And he was smiling.
*
Kain: Draco is mostly exasperated because he doesn’t even understand what the hell Ron and Hermione want. He doesn’t see why what Harry did is wrong, any more than someone going undercover would be, and he’s pretty sure Ron and Hermione know that Harry doesn’t really have a shard of Voldemort left in his head. So he’s upset that they seem to think Harry playing Voldemort is worse than being involved in the explosion of the Lightfinder, and he thinks them waiting for groveling apologies from Harry is both wrong and stupid.
(But I agree with you that he really could have explained things better).
Harry has told his story, but they are already finding ways to work around it. As I tried to show in this chapter, Harry is just tired. He’s trying not to condemn them, but he’s done.
Yes, leave me another prompt if you like.
Parselmouth: Thanks! I appreciate it.
moodysavage: Thank you! Harry is going to have to do something about the Unseen, but that’s going to come up, too.
SP777: You’ll get to hear more about Fenrir in the next chapters.
moon: Thank you!
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An Image of Lethe