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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 Six--Meeting the Board of Governors

            "You're back earlier than I expected you to be, sir."

            Draco smiled a little at Rosenthal as he laid his cloak on the table beside him, and then shook his head, reminded himself of cleanliness, and hung it up on the peg instead. He knew that Rosenthal would reckon something was wrong. She had already started to stare at him, had half-risen to her feet as though she knew he would require her. But he couldn't be arsed to care about it.

            "Potter was more receptive to the idea of an alliance than I had ever known he would be," was all Draco said, and sat down at the desk he had abandoned that morning. A glance at the maps made the relevant names seem to sparkle and glow. Even his post looked less overwhelming than it had, the reports people had sent him on Tillipop's latest nonsense interesting instead of grinding. "I think we can count on him to keep his promises as long as I keep mine."

            "What kind of promises did you make him, sir?" Rosenthal's voice had grown sharp enough to pierce Draco's skin.

            Draco didn't let himself be pierced, this time. He lounged back in his chair and folded his hands behind his head in a sloppy way that left his wrists dangling. He had to laugh in spite of himself when Rosenthal's eyes almost bulged out.

            "That we would be faithful allies," Draco said. "And to find him some people who can advise him on regulating his post, and take over some of the teaching posts at Hogwarts." He watched for an entertained moment as Rosenthal's eyes attained the state of bulging this time, and then added, "You can find other people fit to advise a powerful wizard with a temper, can't you? After all, you produced yourself for me."

            Rosenthal closed her eyes. Her cheeks had gone pale, but with a heroic effort, she maintained color in her chin and around her eyes. "Sir," she said faintly. "You know how busy you are. You shouldn't be taking on extra responsibilities."

            "I'm not," Draco reminded her. "I'm handing them over to you. Get going. They'll ideally need people for all the positions, but I suppose Potter will feel compelled to let McGonagall remain as Transfiguration teacher if she wants to. So put that one at the bottom of your list. Defense Against the Dark Arts is first priority, and then all the others can follow in roughly equal order."

            Rosenthal made a despairing little noise and fled the room. Draco smiled. He knew that either she would recover in a distant corridor with the help of a house-elf and a little brandy, or she would fling herself into the work right away as a means of avoiding the crushing feeling. Draco thoroughly approved of either choice, since he himself was about to pursue the second.

            She'll get used to it, Draco thought complacently as he went back to studying the post. And so will I. Potter noticing me won't always make me feel like a teenage boy who's just drunk his first champagne.

            While it lasted, though, Draco bloody well intended to enjoy it.

*

            Harry stepped into the dark, wood-paneled room at the back of the school, a room he had never suspected was there, chosen by the Board of Governors for their confrontation. He wondered if they had thought the solemn, ancient furniture and the portraits of past Governors on the walls would intimidate him.

            But Harry would have been just as happy meeting anywhere, including the Ministry or the Headmistress's office. He shook his head as he walked down the center of the room, past an aisle of unoccupied chairs, to the round table with the Governors already seated around it. They had a thing or two to learn about intimidation. Even Voldemort had only scared Harry as badly as he had because he had killed Harry's parents and might have killed his friends. The Governors weren't going to do that, so they were already coming in second best.

            And when he compared them to some of the Auror trainers who had tried to turn him into a model citizen, and McGonagall when he was a kid, and even Uncle Vernon when he was in a really bad mood...

            No, there was just no comparison.

            He took the chair left over for him, an arching, slanting oak thing with a flat brown cushion that seemed to support his buttocks and nothing else, and looked from face to face. He knew some of them from Ministry functions and attendance at his speeches on the anniversary of the Battle of Hogwarts. Others, he knew from the faces of their relatives he had trained under or arrested. And the last few, he had no idea.

            It didn't matter. He had made his decision, and people could persuade him, but nothing could change his initial determination to protect Hogwarts. And Harry suspected they had come here to try.

            Poor bastards.

            He wondered if he should tell them to forget about it and go home, but he suspected they wouldn't believe him without a demonstration, either of his magic or his stubbornness. So he folded his hands quietly in his lap and waited.

            "You may be wondering why we called you here," Ralph Grierson began. He was one of the Governors Harry knew from Ministry functions, a tall, heavy-faced man with a wavy mass of straw-gold hair that looked like a lion's mane.

            "No," Harry said.

            Grierson stared at him; then his jaw set. "Explain," he said.

            "You called me here to discuss the changes that I plan to make in Hogwarts," Harry said. "Such as making sure it stays open and the children can continue their education under a system that remains at least a little independent of the Ministry. You want me to stop those changes. They aren't going to stop. I don't know what else there is to wonder about."

            Grierson made an incoherent gesture off to the side and leaned back in his chair, shaking his head, as though to convey that he was done with Harry and anyone else who liked could have him. The woman to his right took up the challenge. She was someone Harry didn't know, although he thought he saw a slight family resemblance to the Blacks in her dark eyes and the heavy grey hair, carefully braided, that hung down her back. "You do understand that the children were learning almost nothing when the school was under Headmistress McGonagall's sway?" she asked.

            "It depends on what you mean by nothing," Harry said. "I know that not everyone could cast the spells perfectly. Who could remember them all? But we had some independent and tough-minded Auror trainees coming into the program, I know that. And the Healers had some of their best Potions students once Professor Slughorn adopted Professor Snape's ideas but taught them in his own manner. I don't know about all the other professions. Those, I do."

            The woman frowned at him and shook her head. "They had no sense of history. You are aware that no one could keep awake through History of Magic?"

            "Of course I am," Harry said. "You probably had Binns, too." The woman flushed. "But no one ever saw fit to do something about it until now. Why didn't you start talking about replacing teachers and looking into the courses first? But no, instead you just shut the entire school down, and everything I can find in the papers and those letters to me talks about how the children need to learn respect and obedience. Not history."

            "They need to learn the history of the Ministry, and all it's done for them," interrupted a man whose beard and hair almost hid his face, far down the table. "That's the important thing."

            "What kinds of things has it done for them?" Harry asked in interest. "Cooperated in sentencing Muggleborns for being Muggleborn during the war? Sent a teacher to become High Inquisitor and spread Ministry propaganda when the war was just beginning? Denied Voldemort's return? Been--"

            "Even you," the woman said, with a noise far back in her throat as though she was choking on bones, "cannot seriously suggest that there is no room for improvement, or that you learned everything you needed to."

            "No one could have taught me what I needed," said Harry, with a hidden wince at the thought of Dumbledore. "No one learns how to fight a war when they're eleven, no matter how good a school they're at, or how to stab a basilisk when they're twelve. That's exactly the kind of thing I don't want people to have to learn at Hogwarts. I want them to be able to be kids for a little while, before the whole weight of adult responsibility falls upon them. We should teach them how to cope with that, but also how to make the transition slowly."

            "And that is what we want to teach them," Grierson insisted.

            "Then tell me how," Harry said, and made a gracious little gesture so no one at the table would think he was only talking to Grierson. "Please, tell me how you're going to teach the students of Hogwarts to be responsible and make the transition to adults. I think you must have a really good idea in mind, because you wouldn't have closed the school otherwise."

            No one said anything for a few moments. Harry smiled. He knew that wasn't because they didn't have answers.

            "You know," Grierson muttered abruptly, "we've been doing too much of the talking. I think we should ask you how you mean to provide an education to the children of Hogwarts that they haven't received so far."

            Harry shrugged a little. "Of course. It's only fair." Their glances darted across the table, sharp and suspicious, again, a system that would have worked better if Harry wasn't sitting right in the same room with them. "I mean to work closely with a pure-blood ally of mine to hire a few professors who are experts in their fields but don't usually teach their practical knowledge. Many of the professors I had when I was a kid, I really enjoyed, but not all of them are still here. Or they might be teaching with outdated methods. Modern methods are needed."

            Thank you, Malfoy. I wouldn't have had that answer ready without you.

            The grey-haired woman interrupted, "That is hardly a complete plan."

            "It's more than you've given me so far," Harry said. He could be loud, he thought, unpleasant and demanding, in the same way she was. "I did ask you for details, but you didn't want to hand them over. And you didn't let me finish, either. Do you want me to keep going?"

            "There's no need for that." The woman's hands closed on the edge of the table as if she would have been happy to flip it over and put a stop to the whole proceeding right there. "We already know what you want."

            "Then tell me," Harry said. "I'm always interested in the perceptions of the public."

            A few Governors moistened their lips and edged their chairs away from the woman. She didn't seem to notice. Not reckless, Harry thought, but confident in her power. He surprised and pleased himself. He couldn't have noticed that a few weeks ago.

            "Can I have your name?" he added, before she could really leap into the conversation. "I always feel so awkward discussing the futures of children with people whose names I don't know."

            The woman's eyes glinted. "Ella Rosier," she said quietly. "As you would have known if you'd decided to pay attention to the news and politics before now, in the way that a future leader of the wizarding world really should."

            "Oh, I leave that up to the people who want to lead the wizarding world instead of keep Hogwarts safe," Harry said easily. "Not that Minister Tillipop is any good at it, but someone somewhere is, so I just assume they're doing their job." He reckoned that could count as the beginning of his putting in a good word for Malfoy's campaign.

            Rosier spared him a single glance of arrow-pointed contempt. Then she said, "You want to turn Hogwarts into a sanctuary for your precious Gryffindors. You want to repeat Dumbledore's errors."

            "No," Harry said, and felt his voice grow harsher. For a moment, the table trembled under the Board of Governors, and they pushed their chairs back and stared uneasily at it. Harry imagined flipping them into the air the way he had with Malfoy, and then shook his head to get rid of that idea. Hogwarts would do it, but he needed them to listen to him right now, not start exclaiming and getting upset about him being bonded with Hogwarts. "Do you have any idea what Dumbledore did to me? I'm not saying that he could do anything else, but he was willing to sacrifice my life to end the war. I'm not going to do what he did. He was a mentor and a friend to me, but he was no kind of hero."

            Rosier tapped her fingers on the edge of the table, once, twice. Hogwarts rang in Harry's head with his own irritation. "I was under the impression that 'hero' was also a title that you refused for yourself."

            "Yeah," Harry said. "Because I'm not all-kind or all-good. But I don't think someone who isn't those things has any right to claim it, either. People insist on calling me one. That means I've thought a lot about the nature of heroism. But we were talking about Hogwarts. No, I don't want to run it exactly the way Dumbledore did. That's why I'm talking about new professors instead of leaving them the same. Can't you come up with some better explanation for your dislike of me?"

            Rosier turned as pink as her namesake all the way up to her hairline. "Very well," she spat. "And what about your well-known prejudice against Slytherins? Can you keep yourself neutral when it comes to providing an education for them?"

            "Yes," Harry said. "Because I don't intend to just run around assigning points and giving out detentions. I'm not the Headmaster. I'll only intervene if a professor is mistreating students or if there's bullying going on so bad that students are terrified to go to class. I would make sure that Gryffindors and the other Houses couldn't mistreat Slytherins. And I'll make sure that Slytherins can't mistreat Muggleborns, either," he added, because Rosier had started to smile and he found the smile ugly enough to want to make her stop. "Something that wouldn't happen under a Ministry regime."

            "You accuse our neutrality?" asked someone who hadn't spoken so far, a shabby little witch in a grey cloak and hat.

            "Yes," Harry said. "I know what you've been saying, what you've been doing. When Dumbledore was here, your main interest was in getting rid of him, not running the school. And now your main interest is in closing the school so that the Ministry can decide what gets taught. I know a lot of you are Slytherins, and Minister Tillipop was one, too. What would happen if you just decided because it was best not to admit Muggleborns anymore? Or if you hired professors who hated them?"

            "Muggleborns must be brought into our world," said the little witch. "Forced to adapt."

            "You know who has some fucking trouble adapting?" Harry snapped, and ignored the gasps at his language. That only proved they hadn't been paying attention to the important things. "The pure-blood children who grow up locked away in their precious family homes and never even go to primary school. They're just taught by their parents and sometimes private tutors for years on end. Then you bring them to Hogwarts and expect them to get along with other students and share their toys and their teachers' attention? It's not a surprise that we have so many problems with prejudice! The biggest problem to me is that no one is doing anything about that!"

            "So you admit our children need attention?" Grierson leaned forwards.

            "All the children need attention," Harry said, and stood up. The table shook for a second, until he laid a soothing hand on it. He could feel the spirit of Hogwarts rippling in the wood on the walls, making knotholes into spaces through which weapons could reach, grains in the wood into potential strangling ropes. For now, he restrained it. "But not prejudice, not being shoved out or closed out or told they're not good enough. Not taken away from their families and locked up in the wizarding world the way so many of you are proposing doing. If you did it with Muggleborns, you should do it with pure-bloods too."

            "The Muggleborns have more to learn--"

            "And the pure-bloods have a lot to learn about Muggleborns, and Muggles, and magic with a wand, and getting along with other people, and magical creatures," Harry said. "Listen, you can fight this battle with me all day long, but I don't care. Hogwarts is mine now. I'm going to make it to the center of my Court." He grimaced a little as he said the word, but he'd been reading endless literature about Dark Lords as part of his research and training in the past few years, and apparently most Dark Lords had one. Voldemort had actually been unusual in that he didn't have a permanent fortress or base of operations. "This is the way things are going to go."

            "Why meet with us, if you intended all along to ignore our opinions and do what you like?" The moustache of the shaggy wizard who sat at the end of the table was bristling out.

            "Because I thought you deserved to hear about what I was going to do," Harry said. "I see I was mistaken." He bowed a little to them and turned away, walking towards the door.

            Grierson cast a spell that locked it. Harry paused, shrugged, and lifted his hand, at the same time asking Hogwarts for a little bit of power.

            The door burst open hard enough to make the lock sag against the wall. Harry turned, raised his eyebrows at the stunned Grierson, and nodded a little. "That's what I mean when I say Hogwarts is mine," he said. "Good-bye."

            The walls moved in a little closer to the table, at the same time as the chairs pulled back and the floor rippled, propelling the Governors to their feet. They gaped at Harry. Harry motioned to the far door, and the room turned them around and began to jog them out. Harry didn't care to watch the dirty details, so he exited, shaking his head.

            He had thought maybe he could make a few of them see reason. He had thought the ones who had some Muggle grandparents might see that it was silly, talking about imposing special requirements on Muggleborn students or taking them away from their families, and that all of them might see the Ministry couldn't control Hogwarts, or the content of the students' classes would change every time a new Minister came into power. But no, they hadn't, and he was done dealing with them.

            He had plenty of other things to do.

            He walked back into the Headmistress's office and shut the door behind him. He still thought of it as the Headmistress's office, he realized with some distant surprise. He reckoned that would have to change eventually.

            But not right now.

            He sat down at the desk and began to work through the post, like a good little Dark Lord.

*

            kain: Thanks! Harry intends to talk about it a lot, with lots of people, which is something that most people in the wizarding world seem not to do. You either aren't supposed to mention it in polite society or "everyone knows" that the way they think is right.

            Rina: Draco doesn't see the bonding with Hogwarts as much separate from Harry's power at the moment, and he's already impressed with that. Being impressed with specific feats of it rather than the power as a whole isn't his way.
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Easy as Falling