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Burning Day	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 10061 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 2
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I am making no money from this story.

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Chapter Eight—One Snarky Dark Lord
            “Did it go well?”
            Hermione’s voice came from the office doorway, and Harry took his time looking up at her. He saw the way she tensed when he did, and snorted. “Draco is fine. Ron is fine. Everyone there is fine. I just appeared and made a dramatic statement when someone tried to say that killing magical creatures is a cherished wizarding tradition and I was being mean and unfair to act against that.”
            Hermione’s mouth fell open a little. “What did you say to them?”

            “They can say and believe whatever they like, but if they try to act against any of the magical creatures who are sheltering in my Court, then I’ll burn them.”
            Harry took his time putting his feet up on his desk after that. He wasn’t sure that he wanted to encounter Hermione’s disapproval on the matter. It had seemed so simple when he was in the crowd listening to Draco’s speech, and then heard that woman speak about a nonsensical tradition of killing magical creatures, and a fire of his own had filled his head.
            But he wasn’t sure Hermione would take a naked threat, even if covered with a little humor, the same way.

            “Good.”
            Harry sneaked a cautious peek at Hermione. She was standing in front of him with a vial full of what looked like ground-up jade—or a green potion, it could be that, too, Harry—instead of the usual papers. She had a vicious smile.
            “People need to understand what’s going to happen if they interfere with beings who never hurt them,” said Hermione. “What Killian did to that foal was inhuman, not all the things they complain about.” She extended the vial. “Nott invented this, or brought it with her. She says she invented it a while ago. What do you think about using it as a defense on the wards?”
            Harry lifted the potion, feeling a little stunned. I suppose all that’s needed to overcome some of Hermione’s moral scruples is an attack on non-humans. “Maybe I would say that it’s a good defense if I knew what it does.”
            Hermione shook her head. “Oh, right. I forgot that I hadn’t told you. I was just picturing what some of their faces might have looked like.”
            “I can give you a Pensieve memory.”
            “Do. Later.” Hermione tapped the vial with a finger. “This is a poison that only remains in liquid form while it’s in a bottle, Nott said.” Harry opened his mouth to ask how that would be possible when she would be working with an open cauldron during the brewing process, but Hermione only shrugged. “The woman’s a Potions genius, ask her. But when the vial is broken, which you could spell to happen when someone you didn’t want to cross the wards crossed them, it turns into a gas.”
            “What does it do then?” Harry wondered for a second if Snape had ever taught Hortensia, and if he would have liked the way that she’d decided to use her poisons in Harry’s service.
            “It blinds everyone there, and starts making them vomit.” Hermione looked pensive for a second. “I told her that it sounded like what Muggle nerve gas does, and Nott says that she studied Muggle nerve gas when she was researching how to create the poison.”
            Harry snorted, understanding Hermione’s expression perfectly. She might approve of more wizards and witches getting involved with Muggle culture, but she could have wished for a different way that they applied the knowledge. “It isn’t fatal?”
            “No. The worst it can do is make them sick for a while. Well, Nott did say that it would be fatal if they breathed it for more than twenty minutes, but she doesn’t think that anyone would do that on purpose.”
            Harry nodded. “And I can watch the wards, and if someone falls down and starts breathing it without knowing what they’re doing, then I can kick them beyond the wards and out of danger.”
            “I don’t think they would try to cross them twice. At least, not at that place,” said Hermione, and in her voice was exhaustion, like his, with the stupid way that the Ministry was acting most of the time.
            Harry nodded and touched the vial. “Does she need this back?”
            “No. She’s making more, and she said that she could come up with as much as you need.”
            “Good. Then I’ll come up with a way that I can link it to the wards, and everyone should be satisfied. Well, except the people who try to cross it. But watching them wheeze and vomit might be amusing.”
            “Amusing, in a way,” said Hermione, and gave him another smile before she left the office.
            Harry smiled and leaned back to study the vial. He felt his heart hammering in something that might be either fear or excitement, or perhaps just passion. He and Hermione were more on the same page now, he thought. They would take non-fatal measures when they could, but the people who attacked them now wouldn’t receive the same compassion they would offer to people who left them alone.
            Or even tried to help them.
            Harry’s mind turned to Draco, and he wondered idly what he was doing, but he decided against either sending him an owl or starting a firecall. Draco was probably still at his speech, and if he wasn’t, then Harry would get to see and speak to him soon enough.
*
            “Tell me you didn’t know that Lord Potter would appear today.”
            Draco rolled his eyes and gently shrugged on a new robe, one that wasn’t as finely-made as the one he had worn at the speech. “The way I’ve already told you six times, and you haven’t believed me once?”
            Rosenthal was silent. Draco turned back and found that she was playing her fingers along her wrist, as though remembering the yellow light Harry had encircled her hands with when she swore to him. It was a precaution against her writing any truths that would betray him.
            “It bothers me that he was suddenly there,” Rosenthal whispered. “It bothers me that he’s keeping such a short leash on you and such a great scrutiny on everything his opponents say that he could suddenly appear like that.”
            “I know,” said Draco. “But I think he was only at the speech because he knew I was speaking. He wouldn’t have bothered to show up if I wasn’t there, and then that assertion would have to pass unchallenged.”
            Rosenthal’s eyes focused on him. “He burned that apothecary, too. I think that he might be going insane, becoming a Dark Lord in the way that You-Know-Who was.”
            “He burned the building, not the man himself,” Draco said patiently. He knew this was a misconception he would have to spend a lot of time correcting, probably. At least Harry had had some witnesses in Diagon Alley, and that meant there were people who would also spread the contrary story. “And if burning his shop and turning him over to the centaurs isn’t justified by his slaughter of a centaur foal, I don’t know what would justify it.”
            He expected Rosenthal to respond immediately with a good political argument, the way she usually would, but instead, she got a deep, thoughtful look on her face, and didn’t answer. Draco finished changing into his robe, and flipped through his mental schedule. Ah, yes. That little “private tour” of the Ministry, where he would meet some of the people on the council who were willing to work with him.
            “I think I can see the way the world he wants to make will work,” Rosenthal murmured. “Wizards can’t think that they’re superior to magical creatures anymore. They can’t take action against someone who’s announced that he’s a Dark Lord. If they send their children to Hogwarts, they at least have to accept that their children can’t follow all the beliefs they’ve taught them at the school. That will change things.”
            “I’m sure it will for some people,” said Draco. “The same way that Harry being willing to work with the Ministry if they leave him alone will for some people.”
            Rosenthal shook her head, her expression rapt. “I think this goes deeper,” she said. “Deeper than you might understand right now. You would probably know it better if you were older and had children. There’s this—strain—in some families, both pure-blood and Muggleborn, that they should be able to do whatever they like. They don’t respect Muggles, of course. They think they’re superior because they have magic. There’s still certain things they won’t do because it would expose us to Muggles and put us in danger, but they don’t fear them.”
            “Right,” Draco murmured, wondering where she was going with this.
            “And most people wouldn’t match into the Forbidden Forest and attempt to slaughter a centaur, but they’re used to the idea that they could if they wanted to.” Rosenthal lifted glowing eyes. “Now someone is telling them that isn’t true, and they’ll have to change a lot of the ways they think and do things, if they don’t want to suffer the consequences.”
            “You think that would make an actual difference?” Draco could now see where she was going with this, but he had to admit it made him skeptical. He didn’t think it would count all that much if it was a prohibition on something that most people would never do.
            “Think about it this way,” said Rosenthal. “Do you believe that woman who told you today that killing magical creatures is a tradition of her family has killed a lot of magical creatures in her lifetime?”
            “Not unless they were doxies.”
            Rosenthal smiled. “Right. And she probably doesn’t care that much about magical creatures one way or the other. She’s used to disregarding them and not caring about them. She was only trying to make a political point. But consider what it means to her to be told, directly, to her face, that attempts to slaughter magical creatures will result in death for her.”
            “It sounds like a risky long-term strategy,” Draco had to concede, his heart sinking a little. “Is that what you’re trying to say? That you don’t think Harry can keep this up for long?”
            “The opposite,” said Rosenthal, that real smile still on her face. “Because if most of the public is arrogant and convinced they should be able to slaughter magical creatures if they want to, they’re also afraid of Lord Potter and the way the newspapers and Ministry have portrayed him. Now they’ve come face-to-face with that power. They’ll have to change the way they act.”
            Draco rubbed his forehead. “Maybe I’m being unusually stupid today, but that’s what you said before, and I still don’t see how this becomes some important political revolution.”
            “They’ll change their minds,” said Rosenthal softly. “They couldn’t get through those shields Lord Potter put up today, even if they think they should have been able to. They can’t talk their way around his power, or offer him anything that would convince him to change his mind. They have to deal with him if they want Potions ingredients from the Forbidden Forest, or if they want to send their children to Hogwarts. There’s a new political power on the scene, one that isn’t the Ministry, and that can’t be bribed or tricked.”
            Draco nodded. “All right. I see it more clearly, now, but I think you might still be overestimating the impact of Harry’s little drama today.”
            Rosenthal snorted, something else she almost never did. “I think it see more clearly than you do even now. We live with constraints. The Statute of Secrecy, the limited number of magical people and pure-blood families, the unavailability of some ingredients and spells that would make our lives easier because they’re expensive or Dark Arts or just don’t exist. This is another constraint we’ll adapt to. And just like some wizards started to consider Muggles worthy of respect when they had no choice but to live with them, I think some wizards will start to think better of magical creatures.”
            Draco caught on this time. “They’ll do it because the alternative is admitting that they’re scared.”
            Rosenthal smiled. “Right. I’m not saying that everyone is going to make the change. But eventually? Yes, I think we’ll see a more relaxed attitude towards other beings, and it’ll be easier for you to make some legislative changes. It’ll take time. It’ll take campaigning and laws and probably bribes on your part, and Lord Potter accepting some more people into his Court and showing that the standard of living really isn’t lower there. But it will come.”
            “You really should be the one running for Minister, not me.”
            Rosenthal waved a hand. “I would lose my patience too easily with people who looked to me for direct orders, rather than being able to manipulate them from behind the scenes.”
            That made Draco wonder exactly how much she enjoyed manipulating him, but he didn’t get a chance to ask before Rosenthal leaned forwards briskly. “So. I suggest that you start thinking about that meeting at the Ministry. How many people are you going to see?”
*
            “Lord Potter. We have a report.”
            Harry had come awake with difficulty, to the point that Hermione practically had to shake his shoulder blade apart and shout in his ear before he sat up, and now he wanted to rub his eyes and tell Niamh to tell him later. But she had come through a lot to enter the castle at midnight, and he nodded and sat up. “All right. What did Killian tell you?”
            “That he had one of those artifacts like the one I gave you.” Niamh looked at the drawer in Harry’s desk that still held the piece of golden crystal, and he wondered if she could sense it. “He claimed not to know who gave it to him at first, but then he broke down and admitted it was an Unspeakable. He still did not know the woman’s name.”
            “That doesn’t matter,” Harry muttered, grimly. So there was his proof that these artifacts were originating in the Department of Mysteries, and he doubted that he would get any more specific answer. “Did he say how they could be stopped?”
            “No.” Niamh stamped one hoof down. “I doubt that he knows himself. He did say something about our enemies’ future plans, however.”
            “Did he?” Harry promptly sat up. This was interesting to him, and possibly relevant. “How could he know that, if he was just a dupe of the Unspeakables?”
            “They mentioned something in their conversations in front of him, when he questioned whether he would be safe using the crystal. They wanted to reassure him that they were giving the crystals to many people, I believe, although Killian did not want to phrase it that way.” Niamh gave a satisfied little twitch of her flanks, and Harry had no trouble believing that Killian would have trouble phrasing anything that way right now, or any other way. “They said that they would soon have crystals that could travel through water.”
            Harry turned and stared out his office window towards the lake, which he could sense but not see with the darkness that had closed around Hogwarts. “The merfolk,” he whispered. He had made a bargain with them, too, although it didn’t seem to be as widely known to the public as his bargain with the centaurs was.
            “That is what I thought,” said Niamh, though in the infuriating way of centaurs, she didn’t sound as if she had much concern about the merfolk. “Do you wish to question him yourself? He is still sane enough for that.”
            Harry shuddered a little, though it was more because he was imagining what he might do to Killian than because of what he thought the centaurs had done. “No. I don’t think it would be a good idea for me to see him. Do go on asking him questions, though. And if you feel like delivering him to me when you’re done…”
            “If he is still alive,” said Niamh, and bowed her head, and left.
            Harry’s hands closed down slowly on the windowsill when she was gone. He knew that his breathing was spinning out of control, and there was an ache in the center of his soul where Persephone had been and was no more. She would have landed on his shoulder and rested her beak against him if she was in her sweet, sick mood; she would have screamed at him and distracted him from brooding if she wasn’t.
            The attack planned on the lake might never come now. The Unspeakables had to be aware of what had happened to Killian. They might think he would tell Harry of their plans, and change them accordingly.
            But what happened if they had given crystals that could bypass his wards to other people? And what happened if those people believed some new rumor about the scales or skin or eyes of merpeople being beneficial to potions?
            This was a multi-pronged attack that would never be countered by the kind of fear that Harry was hoping to raise in people who proclaimed that it was part of their traditions to kill magical creatures. This was the kind of danger that would be ended only when he had managed to figure out how the artifacts worked, and counter them.
            Hopefully with some kind of poison that Hortensia’s invented.
            Harry walked grimly back to his desk and opened the drawer that held the golden crystal prisoner. He had some research to do.
*
Jester: Well, in this case it helped that Draco didn’t know Harry would do that, either, and so his surprise was obvious. Harry and Draco are going to have to stage a different kind of interaction soon, though.
BAFan: Were you afraid that Harry would be hurt or captured again?
SP777: Thank you so much!
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Burning Day