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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.

Chapter List
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Chapter Five—Foundations
“You’re wrong.”
Harry blinked, and opened his eyes. It had been long enough, with Malfoy flipping through papers and sometimes turning them over to make his own notes, that he had fallen into a doze. Malfoy was leaning forwards across the stool to stare at him now, with a half-sneer on his face that said he never would have fallen asleep in a position this vulnerable.
That was probably true, but they were in his house and Harry had Kreacher within call, not to mention all kinds of other people in and out all the time. Harry just sat up and nodded, leaning forwards with his hands on his knees. “What did you find?”
Malfoy watched him with twitching fingers. Harry wondered what particular thing about him was provoking contempt this time, and decided that it was probably everything, so it was useless to ask.
Then Malfoy seemed to remember Harry’s question, and shook his head, reaching firmly for the list in front of him. “There have been plenty of other periods in history when my kind treated house-elves normally,” he said briskly. “What you would call badly.” He flashed Harry a harsh glance, but Harry only sat there and said nothing. If Malfoy wanted to handle it this way, they would. “None of them has affected our fertility this way.”
Harry blinked. “You mean you didn’t read the list on page seven?”
“What the hell are you talking about?” Malfoy asked, his voice not rising as much as Harry had thought it would when he was contradicted. “What are you—no, I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. Tell me.” He waved the sheaf of papers in front of him as though he wished they were solid enough to beat Harry over the head with.
Harry held back the sigh and reached out, scooping up the papers. Sure enough, seventh from the top was the sheet of parchment with the numbers from previous centuries listed. “Look,” he said, turning it around so Malfoy could see. “This is the 1700s. There was a liberal Minister then who’d been raised by house-elves, and he passed laws mandating that they not be given certain punishments. No ironing their hands, being forced to cut their ears off, that kind of thing. Look at what happened to the pure-blood family numbers right after that.”
Malfoy stiffened and looked at him sideways, but he bent over and stared down at the parchment. Then he said, in an unnaturally loud voice, “So? So what? You think that—you think that it’s important, what you’ve found? That’s a coincidence.”
“I’m sure it looks that way from the outside,” Harry said. “But for two generations after that, while people were still living under those laws and no one had overturned them yet, pure-bloods were having families of four or five children, or more if they wanted them. That was a period when contact with Muggles was pretty rare, too, and the theorists who hold blood prejudices usually attribute the larger families to that. But contact with Muggles was even rarer in the proceeding generation right before that, and what do you see? Small families. One child, two, three if they were lucky and had a woman who was willing to undergo large numbers of miscarriages. When they overturned the laws, then the numbers of children immediately began to shrink again.”
Malfoy closed his eyes, opened them. Then he said, “But there must have been hundreds of other things happening at the same time. There were other laws being passed, and some families would have secret contacts with Muggles to trade with them, and some people would have practiced things then that would seem barbaric today. Why are you so sure that the link is to house-elves? Why not something else?”
“Well, there is something else,” Harry said, and began flipping through his notes again until he found the photograph he’d discovered, and carefully used several complicated charms to copy from the page of the book it had been in to his parchment. “I just don’t think it’s as intimately related, since the house-elves actually live in our families and help us—”
“Don’t refer to yourself as pure-blood.”
Harry looked up. Malfoy was leaning close enough to touch him now, although of course he held his hands back so that wouldn’t happen, and baring his teeth at Harry. Harry bared his back.
“I was referring to myself as a wizard,” he said. “Look, Malfoy, if you can’t listen to anything I say because of blood prejudice, maybe I should just give you the notes and you can go and investigate them with someone else.”
*
Draco stared at Potter with his skin crawling, in rebellion against the ridiculous idea of him considering himself equal to Draco, and with his head ringing with Potter’s words. That was what he had hoped would happen, hadn’t he? That Potter would turn over control of this research project—what there was of it—to Draco, and he could make it his own work?
Except that he obviously didn’t understand the system that Potter used to organize his own files, because he had gone right past that document about the laws and whatever else Potter wanted to show him. What might he miss if he was away from the man in whose twisted brain it had originated?
Not that he was right, of course. But Draco would have to be more careful and subtle with proof that he was wrong. Make crude arguments, and of course it would be easy for Potter to answer them.
“I can listen,” Draco said, and tried his best to produce the kind of glittering, icy smile that had won Astoria’s heart years ago. “I simply object to you thinking of yourself as part of the same world that produced me.”
Potter gave him a twisted smile, but said nothing, shuffling papers until he arrived at one that bore a photograph and holding it out to Draco. “Here,” he said.
Draco stared. This was an old photograph, black and white and barely moving at all, but he was still sure that the man’s hair was a bright color, that he was a Weasley, and that he held his hand out to a centaur, who was shaking with him. From the trees around them and the length of the trunks, they were in the Forbidden Forest. “So?” he asked.
“He was a fairly high Ministry official, back when the Weasleys had a little more money,” Potter said quietly. “One of those people assigned to deal with centaurs and stay out of trouble, basically—except he actually managed to conclude a treaty with the centaurs, and get them to agree that humans could go in and gather herbs from the Forest, sometimes, as long as they were careful not to intrude on centaur territories.”
Draco shook his head. “I would have heard about that.”
Potter sighed and rubbed at his eyes. “The treaty fell apart two years later, when Rufus Weasley—that’s him—was killed. But for the rest of that century, the Weasleys didn’t even have one of their wives or daughters or sisters die in childbirth, no matter what family they married into, and only one of them miscarried. The one married to a Black, who treated their house-elves horribly.”
“You’re saying,” Draco said, spacing his words apart so that Potter could hear them spoken by someone else and realize how ridiculous he was being, “that the magic keeps track of what we’ve done in relation to magical creatures, and rations out the children we have?”
“It looks like it, doesn’t it?” Potter shuffled through some more papers. “And it’s not only the Weasleys, although there are a lot of references to them, since they were politically active for a while. The Bones family helped some merfolk escape from one lake that was getting overfished and polluted by Muggles to another, and they had thirty children in the next generation. And the Prewetts established a dragon sanctuary and defended it pretty ferociously. That’s when they started having twins.”
Draco reached out a hand and put it on the parchment in front of him, which showed some kind of chart, rising and falling lines with names beside them. The names seemed sometimes to belong to pure-blood families, and sometimes to blood traitors, and sometimes to families that Draco didn’t recognize at all, which must make them Mudbloods. “You only think this,” he said. “You haven’t established it beyond all doubt.”
“I know.” Potter yawned, although he’d just had a nap like the old man he was a short time ago, and scratched at his chin. Draco wrinkled his nose when he noted the faint strip of stubble there. “That’s why I want someone who has more expertise in this to look at it and tell me what I’m doing wrong. Once I start seeing a theory, I see it everywhere, and maybe I’m interpreting things in a way I shouldn’t be. Do you know someone who’s an expert on genealogy and can look it over for me?”
Draco clenched his teeth. Then he said, “That’s me, Potter. I’m your expert.”
Potter eyed him with his eyes half-lidded as though he had any right to examine Draco’s credentials, and his teeth nibbling his bottom lip in a way that Draco found frankly disgusting. “I thought your expertise was in Potions theory, not genealogy,” he said at last.
“I’m a pure-blood,” Draco said. “I learned the family trees by heart. I learned how magic originated, and the reasons that we don’t mingle with Muggles and the way that we intermix with magical creatures and the ways we don’t, by heart. That means I’m the best one to tell you, from an insider’s perspective, how your distorted history of the wizarding world looks.”
Potter rubbed at his eyes with one hand. “All right. It’s not like I care about the blood status of the person who does this.”
But you should, Draco wanted to tell him. Don’t you see it? Don’t you see? That’s the reason that this started in the first place. Someone who wasn’t a half-blood should have saved the wizarding world. Your father should have married someone from his own kind. And then nothing of this would ever have happened. We wouldn’t owe our lives and our freedom to someone like you.
But Potter wouldn’t react well to that, so Draco confined himself to simply shrugging and saying, “If there’s a question I can’t answer, then there are a few people I can ask discreet questions among. That should be enough.”
He stared into Potter’s eyes, willing Potter to believe him, and rather ready to despise him if he did.
Potter gave a gusty sigh that Draco thought made a spot of saliva touch his arm, and then nodded. “Fine. Then why don’t you take the files home and look at them? I can’t do anything more with them than I already have.” And he pressed the files into Draco’s arms.
Draco snorted and spent a few minutes organizing the stack by feel and then by wand, so that larger pieces of paper were on the bottom and the smaller on top. It seemed as though Potter had made no effort to keep certain kinds, like lists or family trees or charts or photographs, together, and Draco’s way of ordering was better. “I’ll firecall you when I have something to share,” he said.
Potter shrugged and nodded, and the threadbare Weasley jumper gaped a little on his left shoulder. “Sure. My Floo’ll be open.”
Draco stood up and turned around before he could say something that would probably make Potter want to hit him. But it was true that by leaving his Floo open like that, he was opening himself to all sorts of attacks. Draco just couldn’t conceive of a way to tell him about it that wouldn’t sound like a threat.
And who knows? he thought as he left. Everyone knows that the atmosphere of Mudblood houses affects your brain. Maybe I’ll glance at this once I’m back home and see the thing that Potter missed, that he must have missed.
We’ve changed so much already. We can’t change anymore, not without losing everything that makes us ourselves.
*
“So where is it?”
Harry woke up with a start. He’d dozed off in his chair again, and this time, maybe because he was busy with the roast, Kreacher hadn’t been there to forbid someone from coming to see him. Harry knuckled sleep out of his eyes and then smiled at Hermione. She stood in the doorway with her hands on her hips and her hair almost bristling out from her head. There was a streak or two of grey there, but Harry thought it came more from the stresses of dealing with her children than age.
“Where’s what?” he asked, and yawned. “Hullo, Hermione.”
She came forwards enough to kiss his cheek, and then flopped down in the chair Malfoy had used and looked at him expectantly. With a look at the light coming through the windows, Harry estimated that it had been perhaps an hour since Malfoy left.
“Al mentioned something about your doing research on fertility and pure-blood lines,” Hermione said, eyeing him. “I didn’t have a chance to stop by before. You know how it is with S.P.E.W., always busy.”
Harry snorted quietly. From loyalty to her old self, Hermione wouldn’t change the acronym she’d come up with at fourteen, and she faithfully pronounced the letters separately each time. “I know. Any progress lately?” He asked with more than his usual interest, thinking of the firestorm he would face if he unleashed proof that magic itself wanted house-elves treated differently.
Hermione shrugged, making her hair bounce up and down. “Not really. There have been a few more pure-blood families who agreed that not telling their house-elves to cut off their noses would improve their efficiency.” She grimaced and shook her head. “Imagine. Telling me that they would consider not mutilating other sentient beings. That’s progressive for them.”
“You don’t know the half of it,” Harry muttered, thinking of the way that Malfoy had been so careful not to touch him, and to dissociate himself from even an accidental claim that he and Harry might be part of the same group.
“What?”
“Nothing,” Harry said. “Anyway, I can’t really show you my research right now. Someone else wanted to look at it, and I lent my files and my notes to them.”
Hermione blinked. “Who? I didn’t think anyone else knew about it. It was just chance that I heard Al mention it.”
And probably Malfoy heard about it by chance from Scorpius, Harry thought. We’d better hope that neither of them ever works in the Department of Mysteries, or the whole country will know what goes on down there before the end of the week.
Of course, that had its attractive side, too. Before he left the Ministry, Harry had been looking into the idea that the Department of Mysteries did more than its fair share of artifact-vanishing, that the promised publications about them somehow never emerged, and that the people recruited into the Unspeakables had a way of vanishing like the artifacts if they turned out not to fit the Department’s strict needs.
“Oh,” Harry said. “Malfoy. His son mentioned it to him, too, and he thinks that he can find a way to prove me wrong.”
Hermione sat up, and her eyes widened. “Malfoy? You did at least make a copy of these notes?”
Harry rolled his eyes. “I don’t think he would destroy them, Hermione. All I’d have to do is say that he did, and you know the full might of the Ministry would fall on him. He can’t stand up against the law, not now, not the way he is, and I think he knows it.”
“But you wouldn’t set the Ministry on him,” Hermione said, her head tilting to the side, those sharp eyes that he knew so well and which knew him in turn staring through his skin to his heart. “That means that he might do it because he knows that he can get away with it. And then come back and Obliviate you for good measure.”
Harry shook his head. “I don’t think so. I really don’t. He doesn’t like what I found, but I think he really wants to prove me wrong, rather than destroy it. He’s been like that for a while,” he added, thinking back to the ways that Malfoy had nodded tightly at him when they saw each other and the interviews he had sometimes given when a reporter dug up news of their rivalry at Hogwarts and reached him for a “comment fifteen years later.” “He doesn’t want to kill me. He’s not that evil, not that bad. He just wants to surpass me.”
He paused, thinking back to other interviews with Malfoy on Potions theory. He’d always read them, just because of Scorpius, and because he knew it would affect Al. “Wants to surpass everybody,” he added more softly. “He’s in competition with the world, and he probably has been since the war.”
“What did you find?”
Harry looked up, and hesitated. Hermione wouldn’t see what was wrong with his theory, the way she would have if he had discovered real proof that marrying Muggles caused problems with the inheritance of pure-blood magic. She would want to spread it far and wide, she wouldn’t think about the controversy it could cause…
And maybe she was right. Maybe, if he really cared about everybody, about equality and justice, Harry shouldn’t be preparing to fight a battle when the information came out, but should just spread it now, and damn the ones who argued with him.
Except that he couldn’t do that, anymore. He’d learned things in twenty years in the Ministry and through his son’s friendship with someone who came from one of those old pure-blood families. He had learned how they understood the world and how they thought, or something about it, anyway, and he’d learned to respect them as people with their own perspective.
Even if, when it came to blood politics, he thought they were dead wrong.
“Did he convince you not to tell me?” Hermione had drawn the worst conclusions from his silence and was already sitting up straight, her eyes narrowed. “Because if you tell me that he did—”
“He didn’t,” Harry said. “He didn’t do anything except be an annoying arse, which is par for the course. Really, Hermione, it’s okay,” he added, seeing the way she was staring at him. “It’s all right. I just don’t want to say right now. I would look like an idiot if I was wrong, anyway. You know how new I am at this.”
Hermione wavered for a moment, but she was older, too, and she would listen to him more now. She leaned over and patted his leg, just above the hurt knee. Harry smiled at her. She and Ron were the only ones that he let touch him like that. “Well, okay. Just let me know when you’re ready to discuss it, right? And come to dinner tonight. Everything’s fine.”
Harry knew, and appreciated, that that meant she and Ron had a special chair for him, and that Hugo wouldn’t be there. Hugo had been—well, disappointed, anyway, by the injury Harry had taken, and he had the tendency to ask questions about it that Harry didn’t like. “All right. I will.”
And in the chatter that filled the way Hermione helped him outside, the Apparition, and the dinner with his best friends, Harry managed to let a lot of his worries over Malfoy and the research go. He was probably worrying for no reason. Malfoy would probably find a dozen ways to prove him wrong.
Well. Half a dozen, anyway.

*

layne: Thank you!

moodysavage: And both of them got away without hexing each other!

unneeded: I don’t think you can really compare pains. It’s unique to each person.

Yes, the real safeguard is just not to have elves. Neutral treatment doesn’t always overpower the effects of centuries of abuse.

Scorpius wants his father to stop nattering on about his Sorting and his friendship with Al. He would leave Draco alone if Draco left him alone.

And yes, Teddy definitely should stop being a coward.

SP777: Thanks!

ChaosLady: Thank you for reviewing.

dominque1: Scorpius would probably think he’s too old for a spanking.

Sorry, I don’t write mpreg.

UnwantedMemories: I thought speeding collision, but it may be longer than I thought.
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The Descent of Magic