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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 Six—Dealing and Dueling
            “You can’t sulk in here forever.”
            Draco made his voice as bold and challenging as he could. In truth, he was a little unnerved that there were no wards on Potter’s rooms to keep him out. That didn’t seem like something his mother would have forgotten, so instead Potter had left them down. Draco didn’t know why.
            “I know,” Potter said, in an absolutely flat voice, his eyes on the ceiling. He lay on his back in the middle of the bed, and it made Draco’s skin prickle with irritation to see how his hands lay beside him, flat and helpless, not even knotting into fists. “I know it’s horrible. I’ll be down tomorrow.”
            And Potter turned his head away and closed his eyes.
            As far as Draco was concerned, that tore it.
            He marched across the floor towards Potter, who never seemed to notice him coming. He grabbed his shoulder and shook it, hard.
Potter rolled back towards him and shot his own hand out. Draco tried to gasp around the wand suddenly poking into his throat, but he couldn’t. His breath stuck, and he couldn’t shake his head or speak the scornful words he wanted.
“You bought me to play the part of a slave,” Potter said flatly. “That’s all well and good. I owe you a debt of gratitude. But I didn’t realize until today how hard it would be to play that part. I think you could at least have the courtesy to let me have some time to come to terms with it, instead of intruding and yelling at me.”
Draco managed to swallow. Then he said, “You don’t understand. I think that you might get stuck like this forever. I’m just intervening to make sure you don’t. That you’ll remember there’s a world outside this room, and you’ll have to come back and be part of it sometime.”
            Potter continued to examine him. Draco stared back. What he had spoken was the truth, strange though it might seem to both Potter and his father to hear that. Draco thought his mother would understand, though.
            Then Potter shook his head and said, “I’ve dealt with shocks like this before. The prophecy and the Parseltongue and Sirius and—oh, lots of others. I can get used to it, but it takes me time. Give me that time, and I can master it.” He gave Draco a tired smile that seemed to surprise him almost as much as it did Draco, from the way his eyes crossed a moment later. “But you have to give me that time in quiet.”
            Draco thought about it for a minute, then nodded. As long he had some assurance that Potter would emerge from his rooms again and stand up to him, then he could give Potter the time he needed now.
            “All right,” he said. “As long as you come down tomorrow. And as long as you eat a full meal when Ren brings it to you.”
            “What are you, my keeper?” Potter asked, but his voice was already drowsy, his muscles relaxing. Draco rejoiced to see it. Potter had been too tense before, too caught up in the sick tension that could turn him into the killing predator Draco had seen in the bank, and again on the floor of his parents’ drawing room. “Ren will make sure I eat it, because he’ll whine until I do, otherwise.” He paused suddenly, and gave Draco a considering look. “Muggles think pets get to act like their masters, after a while. I wonder if the same thing happens between wizards and house-elves?”
            Draco made an appropriate spluttering noise, though more because Potter expected it than because he felt it. He found the insinuation less outrageous than the feeling that had passed through him as he watched Potter kneeling at his father’s feet. Nothing would surprise him again for a while, he thought, until he had regrown the nerves that that sight had seared.
            “Right,” Potter said, and his face had relaxed, too, his hands falling open on the bed. He hesitated, then added, “Thanks, Malfoy. See you tomorrow.”
            Draco nodded and retreated, closing the door behind him. After a moment, he put up a privacy ward on it, since Potter was obviously too much of an idiot to do it himself.
            He walked away with a spring in his step, to the training room, where he practiced some of the spells that Potter had successfully used against him this past week. He wanted to spread some of the surprise around when Potter felt well enough to come out of his confinement.
*
            Harry came down the stairs slowly. He’d already eaten breakfast in his rooms, like dinner last night, but Ren had told him that Lucius wanted to see him. Without the excuse of a meal, Harry wondered what for.
            Lucius stood at the bottom of the stairs, in fact, the cane casually in his hand, examining one of the portraits with a frown on his face that made Harry wonder if some Muggle ancestor had crept in by mistake. Harry halted. It was the sight of the cane. It made it hard to move forwards, hard to catch his breath.
            Lucius turned around, saw him, and Vanished the cane after a long look at Harry. Harry sighed. He wondered if he should regret becoming so transparent to the Malfoys, and then decided that he didn’t. If it led to them caring for his comfort instead of him just having to suffer because they didn’t notice and he wouldn’t betray his weakness to them, then that would make him stronger in the future, by saving his strength for things that really mattered.
            “Come to my study,” Lucius said. He began to walk down the corridor, taking it for granted that Harry would follow. Harry rolled his eyes, and did, because it wasn’t worth making a fuss about.
            The study was so dark that Harry wished for a lamp other than the small one Lucius had lit on his desk. He couldn’t guarantee that he wouldn’t stumble over the small rugs on the floor or the sharp corners of the bookshelves otherwise. Somehow, though, he made it to the chair that sat in the middle of a brown-and-red rug, in front of Lucius’s desk, and took his seat with his hands folded in his lap. His heart was still beating faster than it should have from such a short walk, and he found it hard to look Lucius in the eye.
            The man was no Narcissa.
            “I have looked up the amounts of the weregilds paid in the past when someone killed a member of a prominent pure-blood family, as well as what a trained house-elf was worth,” Lucius said briskly, pulling the book in front of him open. Harry squinted, but the book was as dark as anything else in the room, bound in aged leather. If there was a title on the spine, or an author’s name, it had long ago been reduced to flakes of gilt. “The weregilds ranged in the amount of a thousand Galleons, slightly less than that if the victim was only crippled instead of killed. I think such an amount would be appropriate, don’t you, since the girl escaped in the end?” He looked up.
            Harry stared back into his face, and bit his tongue on what he wanted to say. This is comfortable for him. Thinking of people in terms of money. It makes it possible for him to deal with things that he would have no means to deal with otherwise, because they would be…too real, or something. Who the hell knows?
            Anyway, Harry had agreed to let this go as far as it had, so it would be hypocritical of him to scold Lucius now for thinking of Ginny’s life in those terms. He cleared his throat, and said, “She only escaped because I rescued her, not because the diary you gave her let her go, or something.”
            “Then she owes you a life-debt,” Lucius said, and his eyes shone as he made a quick stroke across the parchment in front of him with a quill. “That makes her life further valuable to you, and exempts me from paying as much as I would have if she were crippled. Now, subtracting the amount that you owe me for my elf, I end up with two hundred Galleons. Is that fair?” He sat back and looked at Harry.
            I could refuse, Harry thought, but he didn’t want to. This was the man who had helped him to play out a successful deception yesterday, and given up one of his vaults to secure Harry’s freedom—well, eventual freedom—even if that was by way of paying back a life-debt. Harry nodded, and let it go.
            “Good.” Lucius twirled the quill between his fingers. “We must think of a different deception, one that will allow you to communicate with your friends and venture outside the Manor on occasion. I think you will suffer without those.”
            Harry blinked. Then he reminded himself where Lucius was coming from. It wasn’t that a sudden fit of compassion had overcome him; it was that Harry not having those things made Harry act in ways that inconvenienced Lucius, and might do more than inconvenience him when it came to the goblins.
            “Yes, I will,” Harry said. “I thought that having my messages taken by some bird other than an owl would help with the deception.”
            Lucius smiled, his eyes alight. “I know where one can acquire trained ravens—trained, as well, in making it seem as though their deliveries do not happen. Please allow me to buy one and present it as a gift to you.”
            Harry sighed out a little. “Fine. And venturing outside?”
            “The Manor’s wards cannot be turned opaque,” Lucius said, standing. “A condition of the Ministry’s allowing us to keep them at all, after the trial. But I may think of something else. In the meantime, why don’t you go practice dueling with my son? He was whining enough about it last night that I don’t want to listen to any more of it.”
            Harry blinked a little at the abrupt dismissal, but part of him was grateful for it, too. He and Lucius weren’t friends, and it was good to remember that when he seemed inclined to forget it. He stood up, swayed a little, put his hands on the desk to brace himself, and said, “You’re being generous.”
            “Narcissa reminded me that I should be.”
            Harry nodded back, and left the study under his own power, which was far better than being propelled out of it, the way he had assumed he would be if he had any sort of private conversation with Lucius.
            And he didn’t have far to walk before he stumbled over Draco, lurking in the corridor with an air of nonchalance that Harry could have told him didn’t look any better on him than it did on a house-elf. He and Ren are definitely alike, Harry thought, as he nodded to Draco.
            “Do you want to go practice?” he asked.
            Draco’s face lit up. Harry blinked. That seemed a reaction out of all proportion to the request.
            Then he shook his head. I asked him, instead of making him ask. I think he likes that.
            And Harry liked seeing him that way. Far better than he liked seeing Malfoy sulky or insulting him, at least. When Draco said something in a low, grateful tone, Harry nodded to him and began walking towards the practice room. His head still had a few cobwebs from his encounter with Lucius, and the scene last night. He would do better when he was dueling, and pumping adrenaline through his muscles.
*
            Potter was incredibly good at dueling.
            Draco sometimes looked at him and despaired that he would ever be good—mostly when he was trying to recover his breath from one of Potter’s spells. But then he remembered who he had teaching him, and took heart.
            Of course, that was right before Potter hit him with a complicated spell that made him start breathing as though someone had kicked him in the solar plexus, and he had to spend the next five minutes bent over while Potter explained how to counter it.
            He’s good at teaching, too, Draco had to admit, as he watched him out of the corner of his eye. Potter didn’t seem to comprehend that Draco might resent him for succeeding in a duel. He simply explained what had gone wrong, with enough gentle, graceful gestures that Draco could imagine what it would be like when he could hit the spell back at Potter with enough skill to leave him lying flat on the floor.
            Maybe. I haven’t exactly got to that point yet.
            But neither was he defeated, and when he managed to counter Potter’s Fractas with a shield that held up under it instead of splitting into pieces, he won another reward. Potter gave him a slow, genuine smile that seemed to hold nothing in reserve. Draco stared, dazzled, before he became aware that he was staring, and guiltily averted his eyes.
            “Very good,” Potter said. “I think you’re really concentrating now, and that makes up for that slipshod technique that so many people pick up because they’re trying to be flashy, and don’t have the first idea of how to do it.”
            “Including some you trained with?” Draco guessed.
            Potter gave him a quick nod. “There are so many people who care more about how they look when they’re throwing a spell than about how the spell lands,” he complained, tossing his fringe out of his eyes. Draco wondered why he didn’t just cut his hair, if it annoyed him so much, but that wasn’t his business. Learning from Potter was. “There’s just not enough room for them in a serious training program.”
            “You’ll revolutionize the Aurors when you go there,” Draco predicted. “You probably already know more than half the teachers.”
            Potter’s face froze for a moment, while his magic writhed around him like a snake on fire, and then he shook his head. “Maybe I would, if I was going to go there,” he muttered.
            Draco blinked. “You’re still seriously thinking about leaving the wizarding world when the year is up?” Potter had mentioned that once or twice, but Draco hadn’t taken it seriously. Why would he? Real wizards had to be with their own kind, and from the hints and snippets and rumors he’d picked up floating around about Potter’s childhood, Potter had no reason to love his Muggle relatives, and therefore no reason to love Muggles.
            “Because there’s nothing left for me here, except my friends, and I can owl them,” Potter said. “Or raven them.” He visibly brightened. “Your father’s going to get me a raven so I can reach Ron and Hermione without anyone suspecting.”
            “That’s a generous gift,” Draco said. He didn’t know why he said it, except from a vague desire, he reckoned, to see how Potter would respond.
            Potter gave Draco a look that he didn’t know how to interpret. “I know it is,” he said. “Your family has been incredibly generous.” He shifted his stance and pointed his wand at Draco again. “Do you want to continue?”
            “If you’ll tell me what that chill in your voice means,” Draco said, still stubbornly holding onto his wand rather than lifting it to the ready. “Why should it matter to you that my family’s generous?” Then he saw the way Potter’s mouth curled, and amended it quickly to, “Why should it bother you that we’re generous, when that worked out to your advantage?”
            Potter seemed to spend a long moment pondering, although Draco hadn’t known he could think so deeply. He had obviously thought about dueling, but his gift seemed half-instinctive, and in Draco’s experience, people who followed instincts were like his Aunt Bellatrix: not great thinkers, even if they were brilliant.
            Finally, Potter said, “Gratitude always places you on a lower plane. You can never be equal to the person who gave you the gift, unless you can do something for them in return. And I can’t do anything for you.”
            And he’d be sensitive about being lower, Draco thought, remembering the way Potter had almost torn off his chains when the goblins left. “Potter—”
            But Potter shook his head violently and gestured him forwards, and Draco obediently lifted his wand again. They were here to duel, not to have insightful revelations into each other, and he did want to learn dueling from Potter.
            The other skill, he was already proving to himself that he knew how to do on his own.
*
Ciara_D: It definitely would have if Harry had been forced to touch the goblins.
BAFan: At least they’ll have wards to get through if they do, so it’ll be hard for them to take the Malfoys by surprise.
delia cerrano: Not every scene they stage will be exactly like that one.
Tommy-Lane: Thank you!
SP777: Thanks! But Harry’s temper tantrum would have caused a lot more troubles than it solved.
CareLessLover: Off in terms of characterization? What do you mean?
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The Long Defeat