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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 Seven—Designing the Attack

            “You haven’t thought about this at all, have you, Potter?”

            Harry rolled his eyes, but didn’t look up from the parchment in front of him, where he’d started writing down the list of pure-blood families who had suffered some sort of problem with their children in this generation. Those would be the people they most needed to convince, and the ones, especially the ones like the Longbottoms, Harry thought, who were personal friends, that should know first. “What do you mean?”

            “These strategies.” There was a rattling, rustling noise as Malfoy slapped down the parchments on the counter in front of him and stalked closer to Harry, who was sitting at the kitchen table. “You can’t honestly think that most of them will work on the pure-bloods.”

            Harry sighed and leaned back, wincing a little as the charms on his leg loosened and made it ache. Prop it up in the one position where his knee wouldn’t hurt and the muscles tended to stiffen and bother him later. At least, they did when he was sitting in the same position for as long as he’d been sitting in this one. “Well, that’s why I have you, don’t I? To tell me what doesn’t work and plan out something that will.”

            Malfoy jerked his head up, eyes seeking Harry’s, but Harry looked back and said nothing. It was true. No matter how long Malfoy looked at him, it wouldn’t become less true, and Harry wondered idly what he thought he would accomplish by his staring.

            Finally, Malfoy sniffed and shook his head, laying down the parchment he was still holding on the table. “Fine. Then one of the first of my strategies is that you should do something about that.” He gestured at Harry.

            Harry looked down, thinking he meant the Weasley jumper. “No,” he said peacefully. “I’ll dress the way I want to in my own home.”

            “Not that,” Malfoy said, and his hand darted down towards what he could see of Harry’s leg sticking out from under the table.

            Harry didn’t even think, he just reacted. His wand was up, serpent-quick, and pointing at the base of Malfoy’s throat. Malfoy froze, and Harry, breathing carefully, wondered if maybe he wasn’t the only one who still had reflexes left over from the war.

            Malfoy cleared his throat a moment later and turned his head to the side, as if there had never been a confrontation. “If you don’t want to walk again, then tell me why,” he said.

            “I’ve been to the best Healers in St. Mungo’s already,” Harry said, lowering his wand but resting it on the tabletop again, where he could reach it easily. “And the best Healers in private practice that I could find, too. I even went to see a few people in other countries, at Hermione’s insistence. None of them could do anything. And everyone knows about the wound, anyway. It’s one of the few things that tends to convince people I’m harmless. If I suddenly got rid of it, more people would be inclined to distrust us.”

            He expected Malfoy to agree about the commonsense nature of that objection, since he reduced everything else to strategy already, but instead, Malfoy turned his head and stared intently at Harry. “What happened, that they couldn’t fix it?” he breathed.

            Harry was about to retort that he was sure Malfoy recalled the details from the newspaper stories, so Harry didn’t have to share, but then he paused. What reason did Malfoy have to follow the news of him, really? It was one thing to outcompete him or sneer automatically at him when they met because of their sons, but they’d ignored each other for the most part since the war, and Harry’s injury couldn’t have been important to him.

            “A group of warlocks tortured me for a week,” he said.

            Malfoy frowned and looked at his face as if to check for the presence of other scar tissue. Harry shook his head. “Only there,” he said, and shuddered a little. He didn’t like thinking about it. Then again, thanks to the war, there were plenty of other things he didn’t like thinking about, either, and he’d learned to survive having to do so. “Wrenched it back and forth and to the side and up. The joint, I mean. There was nothing the Healers could do by the time I was rescued.”

            Malfoy stared at him, and said nothing. Harry looked back, and wondered whether he would say something that would let them get on with their research on strategies to break the news to pure-bloods, or not.

*

            Draco wanted to vomit. Or punch Potter. Potter sat there and talked about that as though—as though it didn’t matter. But of course it always did, torture always mattered. Draco could remember every single piece of torture he’d inflicted at the Dark Lord’s command, and most of them had been easier than what Potter went through.

            Or quicker, at least. Draco reminded himself that he couldn’t really know if suffering through the Cruciatus Curse was easier, in comparison. Out of the two sensations, he’d only experienced one of them.

            “Then we have practical considerations to think of,” he said. “How easily can you stand on it?”

            “Do you want me to fall over in front of our audience?” Potter asked dryly. “Or be too high on Calming Draught and Cheering Charms to form a coherent sentence? I’ll have to sit.”

            “I’ve seen you walk,” Draco said. It was obvious his house-elf didn’t like it, but Potter had only smiled kindly at the creature as he walked down to the kitchen. Maybe that was the reason he had three children who had all grown up healthy, if his theory was correct.

            Although doing something a house-elf doesn’t want you to and refusing his help could still count as cruel treatment by some standards.

            Potter nodded. “For a few minutes at a time. Even then, if I walk too fast or hit my knee on something? It’s all I can do to stay conscious from the pain, sometimes.” Draco looked at him suspiciously, but he didn’t talk like someone full of self-pity. Potter turned back to the list of names in front of him. “How do you think we should break the news to the pure-bloods?”

            Draco waited a little more, and still there was no self-pity. He took the chair across from Potter, and renewed the Cleaning Charms that kept him from actual contact with the tainted wood. “Gently. How else?”

            Potter snorted. “No shit,” he said, and Draco opened his mouth and then closed it again, because scolding Potter for language wouldn’t improve relations between them. “What should we say first? Who to?”

            “We need a public appearance,” Draco said firmly. “I know that you probably want to break it to your little friend Longbottom first—” He broke off, because Potter was grinning at him. “What?” he demanded irritably.

            “If you think Neville is little now,” Potter said, “wait until you see him.”



            Draco waved an equally irritable hand. “Anyway. We need the public appearance, because that way, no one can accuse us of only telling certain people first, and making things up. Oh, it’ll be an accusation anyway, but this way, we can hold back that particular one based on favoritism. The only things we need to decide on are the venue and who we should invite to cover the story. I know that Rita Skeeter would probably want to, but it should be someone else who works for the Daily Prophet.”

            “Which leaves us with a limited choice,” Potter muttered, shutting his eyes and leaning back a few inches, probably all he could lean back with his leg propped out in front of him like another part of the chair.

            Draco watched him with half-lidded eyes and said nothing. Potter could think, when he put his mind to it. His notes were proof. The problem was that he too often wanted other people to think for him, a habit he’d probably picked up at Hogwarts when the Mudblood did all his homework for him.

            “Rosemary Dibs,” Potter said at last, when he’d thought for so long that Draco decided he would see steam rising from his head soon. “She’s the most neutral in the blood prejudice wars, and she’s not especially hostile to me, because she’s never wanted a personal interview.”

            Draco nodded shortly. It was the choice he would have made. Rosemary Dibs was half-blood, but her mother was pure, and she walked a narrow, neutral line between the two halves of her heritage, and she had been a Slytherin. “Let me compose the letter we send her. It has to offer the invitation in exactly the right way.”

            Potter’s eyes flashed open, and he smiled at Draco with an equal flash of teeth. “Gladly. In fact, I’m planning to let you write all the letters with the exceptions of the ones to the Longbottoms and the Bones.”

            “A good division of labor,” Draco said, shaking his head and standing. “Leave all the real work up to the pure-bloods, as usual.”

            Potter looked as if he might protest, but then snorted instead. Draco tracked the trail of small drops of mucus across the kitchen, and Vanished them when they landed. “Fine. If you want to look at it that way.” He murmured a Finite at his leg, and then stood, limping, with his hand on the back of the chair. “In the meantime, I’ll explain to Hermione what my research entails and that you’re helping.”

            “I am,” Draco said, in a careful, glacial tone, “persuaded that you have the harder task. In this one instance.”

            Potter snorted again, but this time, Draco didn’t see the mucus. He stumped away into the room that Draco thought must be the library, or one of the libraries, from the books on the walls, and Draco turned to the writing of the letters. The one to Dibs first.

*

            Harry was smiling when the Floo connection opened in Ron and Hermione’s house, but neither Ron nor Hermione answered his firecall, although it was Saturday morning and he could usually count on one of them being home.

            Instead, it was the only face he dreaded in Hermione’s family, and the only one of his nephews or nieces he had ever fought with.

            “Hugo,” he said stiffly, and then waited to see if the still face Hugo turned towards him would show as much response.

            Hugo took a few deep, sharp breaths, and his hands opened and closed. He had red hair and brown eyes, like Lily, but the resemblance stopped there. While Lily was growing up looking like Ginny, Hugo looked like his father, but without having realized yet that being strong didn’t all have to do with your body.

            “Uncle Harry,” Hugo said at last. “Are you sitting down?”

            Harry winced in spite of himself, not so much from the words, but from the tone, which ran up and down his body like someone scraping with a razor. “You know I am, Hugo,” he said quietly. “I have a hard time kneeling anymore, since—”

            “But you could,” Hugo interrupted, and his voice was dull and pounding now. “You could. If you tried. If you forced yourself. If you fought. Instead of just giving up and collapsing back into your body like it’s a sack.”

            Harry shook his head. Half the time, he thought, Hugo didn’t even listen to the specifics of what he was saying. He just rattled things off and tried to press his rage and disappointment into Harry, who refused to accept it.

            “This injury is never going to heal,” he said. “And it’s not what I called about, anyway. Is your mum home?”

            “You could have,” Hugo whispered. “Mum told me. There was that one Healer in Ireland who said that you could walk again if you just tried his methods.”

            “He wanted to cut off my leg and drain half my magic,” Harry said. “And even then, he didn’t promise that he could do anything.” A moment later, he stopped and bit his lip. Arguing with Hugo never did any good, because he didn’t argue, he just shouted. Harry should have been the better person, because he was the adult, and not let himself be drawn in.

            “Is your Mum home?” he asked again.

            Hugo stared at him with dry, red eyes. Harry just looked back at him. That was the danger of hero-worship, he thought. He’d been Hugo’s hero, and Hugo couldn’t accept how much he’d changed.

            “You could have walked again,” Hugo whispered. “You didn’t want to. And that means that—that people out there are dying who you could have saved, they’re dying, and they’re never going to forgive you. And neither am I.”

            He turned and bolted away from the fireplace, and Harry knew Hermione was coming. He would have to talk in just the right way to her, to explain why he had told Malfoy about the research before he’d told her, and to persuade her that they really did need Malfoy and the expertise he had with pure-blood things.

            But for a moment, just a moment, before she got there, he let himself shut his eyes and wince.

*

            Draco told himself he could too be in the same room as a Mudblood and not strike out. His father had done this several times, when he’d met with high Ministry officials who he’d had to talk to or bribe, and he hadn’t done anything unbefitting a Malfoy. Draco, though falling short of his father’s ideal in so many other ways, could do this much.

            Granger swept into the room and stared at him. She had her hands on her hips and her hair hanging loose around her face in an unattractive fashion that made Draco abruptly long to see Astoria, just so he could position her next to the Mudblood as a contrast. But she wasn’t there, and Granger was, so Draco nodded stiffly and started to open his mouth.

            Granger beat him to it. She was always doing things like that, Draco thought, ducking his head so she couldn’t see the emotion in his eyes. “Harry tells me that he put you in charge of this research and proving it wrong. You couldn’t, could you?”

            Her tone, far more than her words, made Draco want to blaze with rage. But he didn’t do that around his son, and he was infinitely more worth getting upset about, now that he had turned his back on his heritage. So all Draco said was, “Harry has the makings of a competent magical researcher, yes.”

            Granger made a disgusted noise and shook her head. “You can’t even admit now that we might be better at you than something, can you?” she asked, and drummed one hand on the table. Draco waited to catch his notes in case she disturbed them, but she didn’t. He did cast Cleaning Charms with his wand down at his side where she couldn’t see it, though, in order to keep her contamination from getting on his parchments. “You’re going to go on holding pure-bloods up as better, the way you’ve always done—”

            “We are better,” Draco said, and managed one of the better bored stares of his lifetime. “The proof is in the name. What’s pure is better than what’s mixed, stained, muddy—”

            “What’s mixed,” Granger said, and her voice edged towards the shrillness that Draco had been sure would come sooner or later, because Mudbloods resembled parrots as much as they did any other animal, “is often stronger than its parents. It’s called hybrid vigor, Malfoy. They can survive diseases that their parents can’t, they can breed in ways that their parents can’t, they’ll have all sorts of advantages. You can’t stand that your breed is the dying one and that mine is the one that will survive, can you?”

            Draco smiled and opened his mouth to answer, and Potter stepped between them.

            Well, considering his leg, it was more like he limped between them, and he was holding onto the back of his chair and breathing noisily, but he was there, and his eyes were enough like his eyes on the day he had killed the Dark Lord to make Draco take a step backwards.

            “I know your children, Hermione,” Potter said, quietly and clearly. “And I know Malfoy’s son. Neither of them are worth despising. And both of them could be affected by this if they want to have children with pure-bloods. And nobody, whatever they’ve done, deserves to watch their children die, or suffer miscarriage after miscarriage. We’re doing this for the pure- bloods on the surface, but everyone underneath. Including the house-elves. It’s going to make everyone’s lives better, and you can’t argue about that. All right?”

            “You heard what he was saying, Harry!” Granger pointed one shaking finger at Draco. “He hasn’t changed at all!”

            “I’m pleased to say that I haven’t.” Draco raised his upper lip. “I’m pleased to say that I have some standards—”

            Potter turned to face him, and Draco’s tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth this time.

            “I’m calling in the life-debt that you owe me for saving you in the Room of Requirement, Malfoy,” he said flatly. “You’re going to work with me and Hermione to get the truth out there, and persuade them of it. I won’t ask you to change what you think. I can’t. But I’m going to tell you to watch what you say. Don’t call Hermione or anyone else that name. We can’t afford less than a united front.”

            Draco stared at Potter for a long, silent moment, ignoring the way Granger flailed behind him. He—

            He hadn’t known that Potter would do something so pure-blood, something so formal. It was the only way Draco could accede to his request without feeling that he was betraying his heritage.

            After a moment, he inclined his head and said, “Of course. I’ll work with Granger, because this issue concerns my kind, too.”

            “His kind,” Granger sneered. “Harry, he still thinks of us as completely separate species, how can you—”

            Potter turned his head and looked at Granger, and she shut up, too, although Potter didn’t say anything. Then she nodded.

            “It’ll benefit house-elves,” she said, as if trying out the argument in front of a crowd.

            Potter smiled at her, or at least Draco thought so from what he could see of Potter’s profile, and then slumped into his chair and leaned back. His leg trembled and shook all over. Granger clucked over him and fetched his house-elf and ice and a hot cloth, while Potter just accepted what she handed him, shrugging or shaking his head now and then.

            Draco, secure in his honor, and with an odd contentment humming in his blood, went back to writing the letters.

*

            moodysavage: Yes, he is. Although I suspect some of the other Slytherins, like Snape, might be embarrassed to own him.

            ChaosLady: Thanks! Hope you like this chapter.

            unneeded: You’re welcome! You got to see the kind of thing Hugo does in this chapter, now.

            And Rose is probably right, but pain really is the main reason that Harry pulled back so far, so he can concentrate his resources on dealing with it.
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The Descent of Magic