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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.

Chapter List
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Chapter Five—Kneeling
Draco tried not to twitch as the goblins marched into the Manor.
            It was the way they walked as though they owned everything. They looked around, and nodded at the marble walls and the gilded mirrors as though they were old friends. They considered the portrait frames, and their fingers and claws rapped together. They were probably thinking about taking the portraits out of those frames, Draco thought, staring straight ahead but catching more than enough from the corner of his eye, and selling the frames for good money while burning the portraits.
            Because when had goblins ever cared about what humans wanted?
            “Mistress Malfoy,” said the one in the lead, whom Draco thought was the goblin his father had bought Potter from. He bowed over Narcissa’s hand. Draco could see nothing in her face but the lovely, motionless mask that she always wore whenever someone visiting made a mess at the table. Come to think of it, she hasn’t looked at Potter that way once since he arrived here. “Thank you for inviting us.” The goblin straightened up and leered, though Draco had to admit that ordinary smiles would probably look like leers on the mouth that toothy. “Could we see the prisoner now?”
            His mother looked convincingly blank for a moment, then smiled. “The slave. Of course. I fear that’s our more common name for him.” For a moment, she turned her head to lock eyes with his father, who stood on the other side of the entrance hall with his cane supporting him. “We tend to think of prisoners somewhat differently.”
            Lucius nodded. Draco hadn’t been trusted with a part in this charade because his parents didn’t think he could lie well enough, so he just remained silent, the obedient son who would think whatever his pure-blood mother and father told him.
            Narcissa clapped her hands, and Ren appeared. “Summon the slave,” she said idly, and guided the goblins through the entrance hall, down the corridor, towards a sitting room where everything looked appropriately expensive without actually being so. All four who had come tottered after her eagerly.
            Draco relaxed with a whoosh of breath, and then caught his father’s warning eye and tensed again.
            “We cannot relax yet,” Lucius whispered harshly. “There is no saying but one of them will notice.”
            Draco nodded carefully, but he did have to say, “How do you know that Potter’s going to be able to keep up his end? I have more talent at acting than he does.”
            His father gained that strange, lit-from-behind smile that he wore lately when Draco mentioned Potter. “I think that you will be surprised in him. That young man is stronger than you think.”
            Than you think, not than we think, Draco thought crossly. He wished he’d been present at whatever meeting or discussion Potter had been at with his parents a week ago, to make them think that Potter was actually impressive.
            But he hadn’t been, and right now he could do nothing but troop after the goblins, Lucius coming behind him, leaning far more heavily on the cane than he was used to. They had to do this to keep up the charade of the story about needing Potter for protection. Draco understood that. But he still felt old, dull, bubbling resentment rising in him, and kept his head turned away from the stairs when he heard the clank of chains.
            Then he heard his father catch his breath in a sharp exclamation, and turned his head despite himself.
            Potter was coming down the center of the staircase, his face set in a pout that made Draco instinctively want to recoil. He wore chains that Draco knew were at least part glamour, but they swayed and sang and clanked with a convincing sound. Potter’s lip pushed out further when he saw Lucius and Draco waiting for him, and he shook his head and sat down in the middle of the stairs, folding his arms.
            Draco saw motion ahead, and realized that his mother had paused in front of the sitting room. There was a large mirror on the wall opposite its door that reflected the staircase, and thus the goblins could watch Potter in “privacy.” They were exchanging glances now, their fangs bared where their lips writhed back.
            “Come, slave,” Lucius said. Draco had to admit that he wouldn’t have been able to muster that particular voice, so haughty and repressive. He was too used to meeting Potter on equal grounds. “We have visitors who want to see you.”
            Potter pushed his lip further out, until it could have supported a continent with ease. “I’m tired,” he whined. “I don’t want to.”
            Lucius stepped forwards and lifted his cane a little.
            Potter shrank and tucked his hands over his head. He was panting now, and his voice was soft and panicked in a way that made Draco’s spine prickle. “Please don’t, master. Please don’t hit me again. I’ll be ever so good.”
            Lucius lowered the cane and leaned on it, shaking his head in a way that seemed to convey even to Draco how tired dealing with a rebellious slave made him. “Then come,” he said. “I will not tell you again.”
            Potter scurried down the stairs with his head bowed. He passed within a meter of Draco, and Draco didn’t think he would have recognized him if not for knowing him so long. Every line of his body screamed subservience, and he scraped and bowed endlessly as Lucius herded him into the middle of the corridor. The scraping and bowing didn’t look fake, either or at least Draco didn’t think they did. They looked like the kinds of things Draco would have done when the Dark Lord was living in the Manor.
            He winced a little as he thought about that, and suddenly some of Potter’s resistance to this plan began to make sense to him. Would I have wanted to live with him forever? Well, Potter doesn’t want to please the goblins forever.
            His father caught Draco’s eye and nodded sternly down the corridor. Draco settled his shoulders, reminded himself that Potter had agreed to play this part for however long it was necessary, and then strutted forwards. Potter didn’t seem to notice him, but Draco aimed a kick at the back of his knee, and Potter whimpered and knelt.
            “I noticed that you sneaked a look at me this morning,” Draco said, bending down to whisper into Potter’s ear, although he was sure sensitive goblin ears would still pick it up. “You aren’t to do that again, no matter how many times you dress me. Do you understand?”
            “Master.” Potter bowed deeply enough that his fringe brushed the floor, and it didn’t look ironic, again.
            Draco licked his lips, surprised and revolted by the unnecessarily metallic taste on them, and moved back with a haughty, “See that it doesn’t,” that surprised even him. He swept into the sitting room, past the stunned goblins. He wanted to look over his shoulder and see whether Potter scraped to them, too, but he couldn’t manage it at the moment.
            There was a time when he would have thought his dearest wish was to see Potter kneeling to him, a time when he would have asked for that as a gift from the Dark Lord if he hadn’t known that his Lord had more delicious things in mind for Potter.
            But there was a time when I loved and believed in the Dark Lord, too.
*
            Harry badly wanted to throw up, especially when he noticed that two of the goblins among the group of them in the Manor’s corridor were the ones who had eagerly anticipated his imprisonment in Gringotts because they had “special” jobs for him.
            But he had made promises, and he would put the Malfoys at risk, or at least their money, if he came this far and then refused to go further. Besides, this was only one more indignity to endure before he left the wizarding world. Soon he would be in a place where people kept their money in ordinary banks and thought of goblins as fairy tales to frighten children.
            So he walked, and flung himself down at Lucius’s feet in his chains, keeping his head bowed. He didn’t even look up or flinch when Lucius’s hand buried itself in the hair at the back of his neck, although he hated that.
            “You have behaved well, slave,” Lucius said. “You may lick the tip of my cane.” And the tip appeared in front of Harry.
            They hadn’t discussed this part, and Harry felt that terrible temptation welling up in him again that had been there from the first time the goblins pushed their price. He knew what his magic could do. Reach out, touch Lucius, and concentrate, and fabric would dissolve to its basest fibers, skin would slough from bone, bone would turn to ash…
            And that’s disgusting, and not something I want other people to associate with me. I want to walk away in pride, not driven be off by people screaming in terror.
            So Harry kept his magic and his hands to himself, and simply shivered, and extended his tongue. The floors around the Manor were kept impeccably clean, thanks to the house-elves. Harry doubted it would really taste worse than some of the things he had eaten at the Dursleys’.
            It didn’t. The cane tasted like smooth wood and a harder substance that Harry suspected was the ebony that sheathed it, and in any case, Lucius pulled it away the moment Harry had taken a single firm lick.
            “I find it best to limit the rewards that our slave has,” Lucius remarked, lounging back on the couch and smiling at the goblins. “That way, he cannot grow too used to his status and start thinking of himself as above us all, as above his crimes. And we must teach him that riding a dragon out of Gringotts is a crime, must we not?”
            The goblins laughed, a sound like pans clashing, and Griphook said something that Harry knew he couldn’t listen to, because it would make him kill. So he huddled on the floor next to Lucius’s boots, and didn’t flinch when Lucius petted his neck or his scar, or let his hand fondle the middle of Harry’s back in a way that probably looked precariously exciting to the goblins.
            He would get through this. He would always get through this, and the Malfoys had spared him some of the things he might have had to do in the goblins’ power.
            But Merlin, he would be glad when this visit was over.
*
            Draco was progressing rapidly from the revelation that he wouldn’t have wanted the Dark Lord to make Potter kneel, surprising enough in and of itself, to the one that said he didn’t want to see Potter kneeling to anyone.
            He didn’t like it. It changed things, and he didn’t think that he wanted to be the kind of person who would change that much, whose mind could be changed by the sight of something as simple as a man falling on his knees. Or by the feel of Potter’s magic, constricted around him and breathing barely more than a vampire.
            It was…
            The thing, Draco thought wretchedly as the goblins prated on and his parents fed them story about story about the vague but lurid things that Potter supposedly did for them, was that Potter had always stood up to him. Stood. He hadn’t been impressed by Draco’s parents. He had laughed at Draco’s claims to be superior based on blood. He had rolled his eyes and snorted in the right places, and he had turned his back and walked away during the times when Draco had most badly wanted him to bow.
            He had been a rival when Draco had most needed him, loathe though he was to think that he really needed one. A rival stood and fought and panted and only kneeled because you made him.
            It was Potter’s desire for freedom that bent him now, that and the desire to fall into place and go along with the plan. Nothing Draco had done. Nothing the Dark Lord had done, even. It was an interference from people who felt wronged by Potter, but not people who had been rivals with him, who had quested after the Snitch with him, who had argued over House points and taunted him about his parents.
            It was wrong.
            Draco didn’t plan to explain this to anyone, because he knew his parents would reprimand him for being so incoherent and Potter had already proven that he didn’t understand the psychology of rivalry when Draco had tried to talk to him in the training room. But what mattered most of all was that this revelation was his own, and private, and no law said that he needed to share everything he thought with everybody.
            His Aunt Bellatrix had thought he did. The Dark Lord had wanted to know every thought that went through a Malfoy’s head. Maybe he even deserved to know the thoughts of the people he had Marked, by right of strength in Legilimency if nothing else.
            But no one was going to take Draco’s thoughts about Potter away.
            And if a Malfoy bowed to no one, then a Malfoy’s slave should only bow because a Malfoy had made him.
*
            The visit was coming to an end. Harry could tell by the way the goblins shuffled their feet and cleared their throats, sounds familiar to him from visits at the Dursleys’ when Uncle Vernon’s clients would do the same things, and Harry listened to them from the cupboard. Lucius and Narcissa were probably running out of stories to tell them, at that.
            Good. Harry could feel the insinuations and innuendos layered like slime over his skin. He wanted a bath.
            “Mistress Malfoy…”
            That was Griphook, one of the whiniest, as though he thought Harry owed him something for rescuing him from Malfoy Manor, or doing that and then tricking him. Harry stiffened with his eyes on the floor. Griphook would notice the gesture, of course, and that would only increase the price of whatever demand he was about to make.
            “Yes, Master Griphook?” Narcissa was so cool and gentle that Harry could hear no contempt in her tone, and he knew what to look for. He doubted that Griphook would notice. “Was there something?”
            “We never did get the full benefit of his services, and it sounds like he’s an exceptional slave,” Griphook said. “Would it be too much to require him to kiss our feet?”
            Harry felt the revulsion burst out shining anew in him. He had barely managed to kiss Lucius’s cane, and he thought he knew what would happen if he touched the goblins right now. His hands were burning, and as he watched, small, dark puddles spread out from them across the floor. Luckily, it was made of marble, and Harry could do nothing more than pit it a little, as the power in him reached out in search of organic material.
            “Well, I don’t know,” said Narcissa, and her voice had not changed, except that now it had taken on rather more of a tone of serious consideration. “We use that as a reward, you see, and I’m not sure he deserves it. Being allowed to kiss Lucius’s cane is more than he could have expected today, already.”
            Harry began to breathe again. Narcissa might have just prevented a series of murders that would have shaken the world and which Harry would have regretted, but was not sure that he could have stopped.
            “Oh, in that case.” Griphook sipped at his tea and set the cup down on the table. “In that case,” he repeated, standing up, “may I commend you on your excellent and unusual discipline, Mistress Narcissa? Of course, it sounds as though some disrespect remains to be extracted from him, if that scene we witnessed on the staircase is any indication. Please do let us know if you require any help in that endeavor.”
            “Oh, we will,” Narcissa said, and her voice was a thing of deep, cold beauty, that Harry thought he might have admired under other circumstances, and which only made the things she had hinted about him worse. “We more than appreciate it.”
            There came a shaking of hands, and the goblins bending down to examine him and the chains before they left. Harry bore it, his arms shaking with what they might assume was fear, but which Narcissa would know was the need to lash out.
            Finally, they were through the front door and away. Harry rose to his feet and reached out to rip the chains off.
            The glamours vanished at the same moment as the real chains they were built on unlocked and dropped to the floor. Narcissa Vanished them and raised an eyebrow at Harry. “Why don’t you go to your room for a while, dear?”
            Harry nodded shortly, and left. He couldn’t thank them right now. He hoped they would understand.
*
delia cerrano: He did have to bow here, but as you can see, he feels dirtied by it.
Ciara_D: Thank you!
SP777: Thank you! There are going to be plenty of them to come, as well as Harry’s interactions with the other Malfoys.
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The Long Defeat