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The Night With Stars	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Lucius Views: 9544 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 3
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I am making no money from this story.

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Chapter Seven—The First of Many Such Gatherings

            “Did something happen?”

            Lucius, his eyes resting on Harry in sheer appreciation that he didn’t want to hide, turned around. “I don’t know what you mean, Mr. Zabini. You ought to know what’s changed as well as anyone here, since you were the one who arranged this meeting.”

            Zabini shook his head with a faint frown. Lucius had always found him the most sensible of Draco’s friends, and it was only a shame that their friendship had withered after Hogwarts, as the two of them drifted into their separate interests. “Only that you look different from the last time I saw you.”

            Lucius considered the options for a moment. But he did not think Harry would strive to keep this secret, and it would be better to acknowledge it than for Zabini to feel as if they had been deliberately hiding it from him. Not everyone could control his emotions as well as Lucius. “I have learned to find a different kind of joy in Mr. Potter.”

            Zabini blinked enough times that his eyelids looked like a fluttering pair of wings. He glanced in Harry’s direction. Harry stood in front of a semicircle of chairs in the Zabinis’ outdoor garden, talking to the people in them. Lucius had no idea what Zabini saw.

            Lucius saw pride, and beauty, and strength leashed only by a stronger joy.

            “Can you do something for me?” Zabini asked abruptly.

            “Not without hearing the conditions.”

            Zabini, his gaze still on Harry, shook his head a little. “This isn’t conditional. I just want to be there when you tell Draco. Please.”

            Lucius felt his lip quiver before he suppressed it. He inclined his head. “I do not yet know when that will be, or if rumors will make their way back to him first. But if I set up a moment to do so, I will invite you.”

            “Thank you.” Zabini’s face was all glee as he opened the door of patterned glass that separated them both from Harry and nodded Lucius outside. “The house-elves will be out with refreshments in a moment.”

            Lucius nodded graciously to him, and walked out. The magic Harry had let him borrow seemed to tingle harder than ever as he moved towards its caster.

            And then Harry looked up at him and smiled, and Lucius was no longer sure the tingles came from the magic.

*

            God, he looks good.

            Harry took a moment to wonder why Lucius had been so surprised about Harry not having been involved with anyone since the war. Why hadn’t Lucius been? Sure, his divorce from Narcissa was recent, but he looked good enough to draw all sorts of admiring glances as he walked.

            It had probably been a lack of time and his own choice, though, Harry thought as Lucius came to a stop beside him and nodded to the wizards in the chairs—two retired Wizengamot members and the heads of several pure-blood families, as well as an older woman who had introduced herself as Kait Melganthe. Harry didn’t yet know why she was there. She chuckled a bit as her eyes fell on Lucius, though. He hoped that meant she was friendly.

            “Charmed to see you, Madam Melganthe,” Lucius murmured, which increased Harry’s confidence. He turned back to her and nodded.

            “I don’t recognize your name,” Harry said. “Are you a half-blood?” It was the kind of question that most of the people he knew in politics couldn’t get away with. But they expected Harry Potter to be ignorant and brash and more honest than he should be, so they’d answer his questions tolerantly.

            Melganthe faced him with a wicked smile. She had enormous dark eyes and a floppy white hat that prevented Harry from seeing the color of her hair. “I am,” she said. “My mother was Muggleborn, and my father married her back in a time when such things were not done. Plus I have an interest in another one of your causes. I stayed with a maternal aunt after my parents’ deaths who abused me, you see.”

            “I’m sorry to hear that,” said Harry, smiling. Yes, he could see why Zabini had invited her now. “It sounds like we have a lot in common. Did your parents die in the war with Grindelwald?”

            “Good guess. Yes, they both went to the Continent to try and help, and met their fates in different ways. My father died in a formal duel with Grindelwald himself.” Melganthe tilted her head a little, as if she wanted to see Harry from a different angle. “My mother wasn’t considered worthy of such a duel, being Muggleborn, so she was simply tortured to death.”

            “I’m sorry for your loss,” said Harry as simply as he could. He had no idea how Melganthe felt at the moment. She talked about this in a way was that obviously meant to make an impression on him, but she watched him with sharp eyes and a smile.

            “Thank you,” said Melganthe. “And in return, may I console you for your upbringing? It sounds like you faced your own challenges.”

            Harry smiled a little and sat down in the empty chair next to her. He saw Zabini nod from the corner of his eye. Presumably that had been something he was planning. Well, Harry had no objection with fitting into someone else’s plans as long as it benefited him.

            “I did,” Harry said. “But now that my childhood’s been brought out into the open, it’s valuable as a weapon.” Melganthe raised her eyebrows. “There are all sorts of people who imagine they can hurt me with it,” Harry said. “And that’s not true, but it takes them a while to discover it.”

            Melganthe laughed. Harry grinned. And then they began to talk in a more private conversation, but Harry was still aware the instant Lucius passed him.

            He moved in a calm way, Harry thought. Before they slept together, he would have said it was stalking, or elegant, or confident, but really, calmness was the essence of the way Lucius usually walked and stood. Harry only had to contrast it with how Lucius’s hands shook when they touched him.

            Lucius knew he had a firm place in the political circles of the wizarding world and a way to defend himself. It made him harder to touch than most people. He had a base to strike from.

            Harry wanted to have the same thing. And if Lucius could help him to attain it, all the better.

            “Oh my,” Melganthe murmured abruptly. “So it’s like that between you, is it?”

            Harry didn’t pretend to misunderstand, which would be useless as well as annoying her. He turned back to her and nodded. “Although we’re trying to keep it quiet until it can provide the biggest advantage,” he added. “Do you mind not saying anything?”

            Melganthe had turned her head to watch Lucius assume a chair on the far side of the semicircle. She turned back to Harry with her hands clasped and her eyes shining like pearls.

            “I’d like a ringside seat,” she said. “Perhaps in the Wizengamot? Is that where you’ll announce it?”

            “If it’s not expedient to announce it earlier,” Harry said, trying not to laugh. Normally, he was so annoyed when people speculated on who his lover was and how him dating someone would break hearts. But when that person was Lucius and they had the kind of impact they were having, it was just funny.

            “Well, I shall at least look forward to the newspaper articles later,” said Melganthe, glanced at Lucius again, and then moved back to their former topic, home investigations of Muggleborns’ families, as though she’d never deviated from it.

            I don’t know why I was worried about becoming Lucius’s lover, Harry thought. It’s like Skeeter prying into the Dursleys’ treatment of me. It’s annoying at the time, but it benefits me so much in the end.

*

            Zabini leaned backwards with a glass of some red and cool drink in his hands—Lucius no longer bothered to keep up with the names of everything new; if it endured, then he would—and nodded to both of them. “You have a specific proposition to make to us?”

            Harry turned and looked at Lucius. Lucius inclined his head in return. Either of them could have spoken, but it was only fair to let Harry start, since he would put the passion forwards first. Lucius would follow up with the practicalities.

            “Yes,” said Harry. “It’s only in the last few years that I’ve come to realize a lot of your families do have a culture beyond sneering at Muggleborns and following Dark Lords.” That stirred some murmurs, but Harry only looked at them with wide and ingenuous green eyes, and they settled. “They have knowledge and traditions, proverbs and books, songs and history, that aren’t taught in Hogwarts. Why would they be, when the classes there focus on spells and practice more than theory?”

            “There are still written exams for the OWLS and NEWTS that emphasize theory,” objected Flavius Helgon, one of the retired Wizengamot members. He grew a huge silver moustache that Lucius thought was in part to hide his expressions and make his face harder to read.

            “But not the classes,” said Harry. “And how many times do students fail to get high marks on them because they ask questions that aren’t emphasized in class?” He sighed a little, probably, Lucius thought, at the blank faces lifted towards him. “The answer is, often. Either that, or they get fooled by minor differences in wording that are meant to make them choose among trick answers.”

            “The questions on the exams are hardly a trick!” Helgon said.

            “Forgive me, sir,” said Harry smoothly. “It’s a term adopted from Muggle exams with answers that are so similar to each other they’re meant to confuse the person sitting the exam.”

            Helgon spluttered a little, while Lucius relaxed and watched. He wouldn’t need to step in for some time, it seemed. Harry had turned to look at the others, completely unruffled by the way Helgon had tried to interfere.

            “Hogwarts doesn’t teach Muggleborn children the culture,” Harry was saying. “That might not be a great concern for those who return to the Muggle world. But at lot of them want to stay here, too. They simply don’t feel welcome in a world they don’t know much about. And any attempt to improve their knowledge is seen as trespassing on pure-blood territory, which further discourages anyone else learning about it. I’d like to see the boundaries of that territory expand, before it disappears with the dwindling of the protective families.”

            “Why should we try, though?” asked Melganthe. Lucius knew what she was doing: offering a milder version of a question that might show up in harder form later. “If Muggleborns cared about their world and its heritage, they would investigate, surely?”

            “There’s still the idea that they’re trespassing I already mentioned,” Harry said. “And many of the best books, the ones that pure-bloods use to teach their own children, are locked up in private libraries and the like. Or at Hogwarts, but they aren’t encouraged there to seek them out. It’s encouragement that’s the main problem. People like my friend Hermione Granger, who can stand up against the disapproval to educate themselves in law and custom, are rare.”

            “Then what would you have us do about it?” Zabini was leaning forwards with his elbows on his knees and his fascinated gaze on Harry.

            “Welcome in Muggleborns,” Harry said without hesitation. “Adopt some of the children we take away from abusive families, if their personalities prove congenial to your own. Fund schools that could educate the children before they arrive at Hogwarts. Make copies of some old books and release them. Volunteer to become teachers yourselves, if that’s within your purview.”

            “I think I would make a wonderful teacher,” said Melganthe. “Not professor, perhaps. But a teacher I could do.”

            Lucius experienced a brief, terrifying vision of a generation of young minds molded by Kait Melganthe. Then he stopped shuddering. In this case, the vision was one that would help his and Harry’s case.

            “I hope some people do take up those tasks,” Harry said, and drew in the others with a look around. That was something he hadn’t studied, Lucius thought. Learned, perhaps, from those speeches he’d had to make after the war because there was no one else. But he gathered them in, pulled them in, and made them part of what he was proposing. “We need pure-bloods. This isn’t a task for Muggleborns alone, which is something I’ve heard some people saying. We need you to tell us all the things we don’t know.”

            Brilliant, Lucius wanted to tell him. Harry was letting them have some position of superiority, so they wouldn’t have to give everything up at once, or think themselves doomed before the coming tide of Muggleborns. He smiled at them now, and even the more hesitant were starting to smile back.

            But Helgon was still stubborn.

            “We can’t just adopt Muggleborn children,” he said, fussily. “Blood matters. More than culture.” He turned to Lucius. “And I’m sorry that you would support such an unrealistic delusion, Lucius. Where’s your Malfoy pride?”

            Lucius looked towards Harry, a faint flicker of a question as he stood. Harry answered with the angle of his shoulder. Lucius was welcome to come forwards and take this particular challenge. Harry faded towards the back, and Lucius moved until he was directly in front of Helgon’s chair but still visible to everyone there. Melganthe was the only one who smiled as if she recognized the scripted nature of the change.

            “I have my pride,” Lucius said. “I understand the claims of blood. I have made the best provision I can for them. And at the same time, I understand the nature of such claims cannot always be the same as the claims of principle.”

            A few of the people who knew Draco’s exploits best snorted at that. Helgon might not have, because he frowned. “Then you would adopt a Muggleborn child, Lucius?”

            “If I didn’t have a son, then yes. I want my family line to continue.”

            Helgon gaped at him. Lucius raised an eyebrow and continued, “And it may yet be best to leave some of the books my ancestors have gathered, if not the heirlooms, elsewhere.” The heirlooms he was thinking of could only be handled by someone with a blood connection to his ancestors. The books, though…

            There was knowledge in them which Draco would inevitably misuse. Perhaps his children wouldn’t, but they might never get a glimpse at them, either. Lucius still had to await the future and, assuming no change in his son, find someone to leave them to.

            “But plenty of other pure-blood families have children,” Helgon argued weakly.

            “And plenty of others don’t,” said Zabini, looking interested. “I’ve experienced pressure to marry myself, and it’s wearying, the idea that just producing people is more important than the kind of people who result. It might be more interesting and advisable to choose your heir than create them.”

            Especially with the threat of your mother perhaps removing any wife she deems unsuitable, Lucius thought.

            “I’ve had it, too,” said Melganthe, with a nod. “Most of the people who tried to threaten me into it have different ideas now, but dealing with them while they thought I should do it was bad enough.”

            “Of course,” Harry cut in smoothly, “we wouldn’t ask just anyone to adopt any child. There’s the question of compatible personalities. Some Muggleborn children would probably be glad to leave the Muggle world entirely. Others might want to visit their parents. This might be a tapestry of temporary and permanent arrangements…”

            He does it very well, Lucius thought, as Harry began to explain the way he saw the adopting process working. He might not care about most political issues—one reason a lot of people in the Ministry saw him as dangerous—but the ones that he did care about, he put thought and study into.

            As Helgon sank into grumbling silence and Melganthe and Zabini asked brightly leading questions, Lucius studied the gathering. They wouldn’t light the wizarding world on fire tomorrow. They wouldn’t march out and besiege the Ministry and force them to investigate situations that might be harmful to children.

            But they could start the groundswell that would change things. And Harry was wise enough now to anticipate the groundswell and work with it instead of demanding the cascade.

            Harry caught Lucius’s eye once during the conversation that followed, and smiled. Lucius tilted his head back. The kind of smile he wanted to give Harry was not proper for a public gathering.

            When they were back behind closed doors, however, and had some worthwhile time alone together…

            I meant what I said. I am his first lover? I will be his only.

*

            autumngold: Thank you! There’s only one chapter, so I won’t be showing the whole transformation of the wizarding world that they plan, not by a long shot. But I hope that I’ll show enough to satisfy.

            djaddict: Thank you!
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The Night With Stars