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Black Phoenix	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 21568 -:- 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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Thank you again for all the reviews!
Chapter Seven—A Gift to the Goblins of Gringotts
            Draco raised his wand and cast a few spells of his own. One dissipated Granger’s Privacy Charm. They couldn’t have that up for long, or it would attract more attention than it would ever deflect.
            Granger opened her mouth—to shout, Draco thought—when the charm fell, but then she seemed to feel the mask of a glamour settling on her face. That, in itself, wasn’t unusual. Some of the Ministry employees coming to speak with Draco were high-ranking and wouldn’t want anyone who saw them to know who they were.
            Granger bit her lip and glanced up at him, then turned her eyes back to the floor. “Thanks,” she mumbled.
            Draco inclined his head and held out his arm, angling it at the precise crook that a pure-blood man should use when offering to escort a pure-blood woman. He and Granger were the only ones here who knew, or should be the only ones who did, that she wasn’t one of those. “Would you like to go out into the garden?” he asked, raising his voice enough that the people hovering nearby and waiting to talk to him could hear. “The view is stunning. And I think the clear air might help you to recover your breath.” Another excuse for being alone.
            Granger’s eyes fluttered once, in the uncertain manner that Draco was more used to seeing from Rosenthal than her. Then she breathed out and took his arm. “I’d like that,” she murmured back, and if Draco’s glamour hadn’t concealed her voice, Draco doubted that anyone there knew her well enough to notice the mismatch between it and her face.
            Draco almost hovered over her as they stepped through the heavy glass doors, open in honor of the party, and out into the garden. That was etiquette, too, although Draco had thought that a woman who’d grown faint in the heavy air of a crowded ballroom shouldn’t have people breathing into her face. His mother had only frowned at him when he brought it up and said that was the way it worked, and as he had been raised to be polite, he would do it if he ever had to be alone with a pure-blood woman in such a situation.
            And his mother had a way of getting what she wanted, Draco thought wryly. Not unlike the woman on his arm, who kept her steps slow and gentle until they reached a patch of night-blooming pale flowers surrounded by low brick walls. Draco leaned down as if to pluck her a flower, but really brushed a brick with one finger that made another, more subtle, Privacy Charm spring up. Now they would be able to speak freely, and no one would be able to approach them within five hundred feet without warning.
            “I plan to do lots of things when I’m Minister,” he said, straightening up and turning to face her. “And I think Harry will only have as much influence on those plans as the resident Dark Lord of Hogwarts should have.”
            “I know it’s more than that,” said Granger, and her eyes were so dark that Draco kept himself from taking hold of his wand only by asserting reason over his instincts. “I saw the way he looked at you when you were under that mind control spell and he was researching ways to wake you up.”
            So she does have more knowledge than I thought she did. Wonderful. For a moment, Draco wondered why Harry hadn’t told him that, but it was easy enough to guess. Harry had never thought Granger would seek Draco out.
            Draco looked down into her eyes and said gently, “Shouldn’t you be rejoicing that the next Minister has a reason to leave your best friend alone, instead of persecuting him?”
            Granger turned away, stooping over the night-blooming flowers as if admiring them. Or maybe it was to hide her eyes while her breath came out in a hiss. “I know very well that you would be an unjust Minister if you were focused on him.”
            Draco blinked. He blinked again. Granger looked up at him again as those blinks passed by, apparently wanting to see his reaction.
            Then Draco began to choke with laughter. He cast another spell that would muffle it more strongly, because there were people here who would give a great deal to know what made him laugh, and he had no intention of placing another weapon into their hands. But he had to lean against a small, slender tree nearby to try and stop choking, and it just didn’t work. On and on it went, his little gasps and cries, while Granger stared at him, looking first bewildered and then furious.
            “What—what did you think I would do if I wasn’t involved with Harry?” Draco finally gasped, leaning forwards, wheezing. He made the words come out around the laughter, though. He would have to get back to the party soon, and Granger was Gryffindor enough to stomp in there and denounce him if he waited too long. “Of course I’m not going to be fair and just the way a Gryffindor thinks I should be.”
            He straightened up and shook his head at Granger. “My dear girl, what the Ministry needs is someone who knows what is important. Tillipop has offered his friends plum positions and engaged in nepotism. That’s expected, really. But he’s carried it too far, and started to obsess over his personal enemies and use Ministry resources to punish them, even when they’re useful or important in the political structure. You can see that in the way that he kept sending Aurors after Harry, when it was stupid to do so. You bribe your enemies or make truces or eliminate them by turning up scandals from their pasts if you’re Minister, you don’t just smash them. As someone intelligent I spoke to earlier said, we need a Minister with a sense of style. I have it.”
            Granger was so pale that Draco would have offered her a drink and a chair if she’d been a different person. As it was, he doubted that she would be appreciative if he did. So he waited, and a second later she snapped out of her shock.
            “But that means you’ll favor Harry,” she whispered. “Give him a Ministry position?”
            “No,” said Draco, exasperated. Honestly. He’d heard that Granger had been working with and against the Ministry for the same length of time as Harry and Weasley. That meant she should have some idea how things worked. She might not approve of them, she might want to change them, but she should know how her enemies thought.
            Then again, she didn’t even know how her best friend thought, or she wouldn’t have turned against him with visions of him becoming an all-powerful Dark Lord.
            “I can’t give him anything like that,” Draco continued, when he saw Granger paying attention to him. “I know that. He’s too much the Ministry’s open enemy right now, and we’re going to have to meet in secret. I don’t think we can ever reveal that we have a relationship, at least not in the conventional sense of the word. What I can do is try to ease tensions between him and the Ministry, and that would be beneficial for the people I’m supposed to lead as well as him. That’s what I’ll do.”
            Granger straightened up. She had thrown off her fainting fit as if it had never threatened. Draco had to admire her for that, though perhaps for nothing else. She could cause trouble like no one else, he thought, except perhaps Weasley. And Weasley had chosen not to leave Harry’s side.
            “I thought you needed someone,” Granger whispered. “That you were a helpless victim of his influence, and would welcome someone else interfering.”
            “That was your first mistake, then,” Draco said, looking at her with half-lidded eyes, no longer seeing a need to keep the thick contempt from his voice. “Malfoys are never helpless.”
            Granger shook her head. “The wizarding world needs a real Minister. Someone who will keep the needs of both humans and magical creatures in mind. Someone who will know how to resist Harry and keep the world from falling under the dominion of a Dark Lord.”
            Draco rolled his eyes in spite of himself. It seemed nothing he could say would make any difference to her. Even telling the truth didn’t. So he might as well show everything else openly, too. “Planning to run yourself?”
            Granger gaped at him. “What? No. I wouldn’t want a position so steeped in corruption—”
            She stopped.
            Draco watched her, and let his smile widen further when he saw the way she stared at his flowers. “Yes,” he said softly. “You pictured yourself as the rescuer of an innocent wizarding world who needed you, but it’s more than that, isn’t it? It’s more complicated than that. You’re smart enough to understand. The Ministry functions that way because the people who work for it want it to, and there is always going to be a certain amount of corruption inside it. I must admit,” he let himself add in a musing voice, “I’m glad Harry chose to be a Dark Lord instead of hanging around the Ministry and trying to clean up the corruption in it. He never could have succeeded without destroying everyone’s free will, and that would have broken his heart.”
            Granger jerked her head up. “That’s not true! He’s trying to destroy their free will anyway, just from the outside!”
            Draco’s amusement, and his admiration, fled. “That is enough,” he said, his voice deepening into a hiss that made Granger back up a step and look as if she would reach for her wand. Of course, if she did, there would be house-elves on her in seconds. Maybe she knew that, because she kept her hand trembling at her side, but didn’t actually complete the gesture.
            “If he was going to do that,” Draco continued, “he would have done it already, and you would have been his first victim. One of his best friends? Who accused him to his face and proposed to leave him? You don’t think he would have fallen to the temptation to keep you at his side, if he was going to fall?”
            Granger shook her head. “But that power…you don’t understand, Malfoy. What he could do with it…”
            “I do know,” Draco said, rolling his eyes. It was too bad that some of the things he could have told her about Harry’s power and the gentle way he treated Draco were secrets too intimate for him to want to give up. “He could make me into a puppet. He could burn the Ministry to the ground. And he doesn’t. I don’t know if he could ever convince you, because you see potential for abuse as the same thing as abuse, but that’s what it’s like. He wants to remain the way he is, without corrupting anyone’s mind, and that’s the way he will be. If he has enough power to control everyone, he has enough to control his own actions.”
            Granger just stared at him, eyes shadowed. Then she said, “But he could.”
            “And I have the power to compel one of my house-elves to start smashing its face into these bricks until its brain is pulped,” Draco said coldly. “It doesn’t mean I would.”
            Granger looked sick. “That—that has to be stopped, too. I—”
            “I understand a lot more about you now,” Draco said conversationally, taking a step towards her. “Both about what you fought for and why you left Harry. It’s not the intentions that you care about, is it? Or the actions, that most other people pay attention to. It’s the power, and the fact that that power exists, that you want to destroy.”
            Granger stood still, as though she could sense the trap waiting for her beneath Draco’s words but not see it. “I don’t think all power should be destroyed,” she said at last. “Power can do great things, like give people freedom and a true future.” She glared at Draco as if he would agree with her to get her glare out of his face. “That’s the kind I want to preserve. But you won’t give people that. Neither will Harry.”
            “Of all the people alive, you’re doubting him?” Draco shook his head. “Your best friend? The one who already died to give people freedom and a future, as you put it?”
            “He’s growing more reckless lately,” Granger said, her hands entwining until Draco could see white spots standing out on the shiny red skin. “Your influence, probably. I don’t know what he might do.”
            Draco nodded, understanding something else. “And the uncertainty drives you mad,” he whispered to her, gently. “If you knew that he was evil, you wouldn’t feel so tormented. But you don’t know what he’ll do, what he’s capable of, and you can’t stand that. So you distance yourself from him and tell yourself it’s for the best.
            “If you were close, you could influence him, keep him on the Gryffindor path that you insist is the most moral. But you won’t trust him enough to do that, will you? Instead, you keep stepping back, because you don’t have an answer either to what he might do or the limits on his magic.”
            Draco edged towards her. “The limits on it are his will and his morals. You’re making both worse if you continue opposing him because of imaginary situations that might never happen. You erode his ability to trust other people. You make him think that there’s something wrong with him because he chooses to trust and love. Simply because you disapprove of who he chose to do that with.” He smirked. “So if he turns against the wizarding world and starts corrupting people and taking their free will, we would have you to blame, more than anyone else.”
            With a small cry, Granger turned and fled from him. Draco waved his hand so that the people he could see starting forwards around the edges of the garden, security that he was paying for the occasion, would let her go. There was nothing to gain from delaying Granger here. Draco hoped that she would go away and listen to the poisoned memory of his words in her mind.
            That might be the best way to convince her that what she had done was, after all, ridiculous.
            Glad that he had been able to accomplish something for Harry’s sake even in the middle of his own campaign party, Draco turned back to his guests.
*
            “Griphook?”
            Harry thought it was, but he wasn’t good at distinguishing one goblin from another. And he really hadn’t expected the goblins to come to Hogwarts. He had thought that they would summon him to Gringotts.
            If he got an answer to his letter, rewritten with Ron’s help, at all. It was possible that they would decide not to do anything except turn his letter over to the Ministry, or the letter would vanish into the muddle of all the documents they must have relating to human accounts, less important than the vast majority of them.
            Instead, Blackthorne had come flying to him with the news that several goblins were coming down the road from Hogsmeade, before they had reached the point where Harry’s wards would alert him that they were there. Now Hogwarts hummed beneath their feet, the stones of the entrance hall trembling a little. The school hadn’t decided if it liked them yet.
            Probably because Harry hadn’t decided if he trusted them yet. He folded his arms and regarded them skeptically, waiting.
            “You said that you were willing to give us the Sword of Gryffindor.” Griphook’s claws twitched, and then smoothed down again. His face was utterly inscrutable, and he looked as if he was sitting in on one of the meetings that Harry imagined were inevitable in running Gringotts. “Where is it?”
            “I’ll do it if you say that you’ll fulfill the terms I set out in my letter,” Harry retorted, and waved a hand, so that a stone pedestal rose from the rock right beside him. On top sat the Sword. Griphook continued to focus on Harry, but Harry thought it was an effort. The other five goblins with him stared at the Sword, trembling a little like hounds on the leash.
            “We will fulfill them,” Griphook said, and held up a stone shaped like a leaning triangle that flashed and glittered with shades of blue and white. “We are prepared to swear on this.”
            “What is it?” Blackthorne, Harry’s Knight, snapped behind him before Harry could speak.
            “A Stone of the Contract.” It was Briseis, standing at Harry’s right shoulder, who answered, her voice low and heavy to let Harry know this was important. “A vow sworn on it obliges the goblin, or wizard, who does it to keep their word. Otherwise, their magic is substantially weakened.”
            Harry nodded. He could understand how it showed the goblins were serious. They wouldn’t want to weaken the magic that guarded the bank, and he wouldn’t want to weaken the power that was his people’s main defense, either. “How do you swear on it?”
            “Blood,” said Griphook. He sounded satisfied, as Harry had anticipated, but his eyes were locked on the Sword anyway. He wanted it enough that he wasn’t taking pleasure in forcing Harry to swear a vow like this. It was just the instrument of how he would get what he wanted.
            “Like this?” Harry asked, and held out his hand. In moments, Persephone was on his shoulder, flicking out of a shadow suddenly enough to make the goblins in front of him jerk. Harry didn’t take pleasure in that, any more than Griphook did in the vow, but he had to admit that it was a lot harder for him than it probably was for Griphook.
            Persephone’s beak jabbed into his hand, locking on the thin web between his thumb and second finger, and for a second, she drank, sinking into and widening the wound. Then she lifted her head and shook it back and forth. The blood splattered on the Stone of the Contract, and the blue and white colors glowed and shifted like clouds and sky mingled.
            Then Persephone turned to face Griphook, and crouched a little. Griphook had already sliced his palm open with his own claws, though. Persephone sighed and flared her tail as Griphook smeared his blood on the stone.
            Harry half-bowed his head as he felt the vow settle around him, like chains. “You have the Sword of Gryffindor,” he said, his tongue thick. “And we have permission to have a pooled vault, with anyone who wants to having no trouble adding to it.”
            “We do,” said Griphook. “You do.” He reached up and gripped the Sword’s hilt. There was an expression of bliss on his face.
            Harry stepped back and bowed. He wondered for a moment if the vow would be broken if the Sword came back to Hogwarts to assist a Gryffindor in need.
            But he didn’t think so. He’d discussed the terms of the promise with Briseis beforehand, and she would have warned him if there was something different about the Stone of the Contract from the other methods of making the promise that she’d thought the goblins might use.
            In the meantime, Harry had a vault to clear out.
*
Kain: The problem is that Hermione began from a false premise: that Draco was an innocent victim that Harry is corrupting. She went so far into fear of what Harry’s power could do that she forgot things she does know about Draco. She’s clever enough to turn that perception around, but she ran it into the ground here and will need to take a bit to recover.
Harry does have to consider consequences now that magical creatures are involved. He has given up on some of the humans; they’ll never see him as good or trustworthy no matter what he does, so he’s just going ahead with what he needs to do and ignoring them.
Genuka: Thanks!
BAFan: Thanks!
SP777: Draco knows that Hermione doesn’t need swatting, she needs coaxing. The problem is, she came into this with the wrong sort of motivation entirely and will either need to come up with a way to actually fight based on that motivation or change it, because she’s not convincing Draco and Harry as it is.
banditdoz: Sort of? She’ll think about it.
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Black Phoenix