Adult-FanFiction.org : Harry Potter

Acts of Life	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 21189 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 2
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I am making no money from this story.

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Chapter Eight—Teaching
            Hermione shook her head at Harry in fond exasperation as he ran towards the Floo in Ron and George’s shop, his robes trailing behind him. “Aren’t you ever on time?” she called after him.
            “Only when someone’s trying to throw me off the scent by telling me a different time the trial starts!” Harry yelled back, as he tossed Floo powder into the fire and turned to face it. “Malfoy Manor!”
            Hermione called something else behind him as he whirled away, but Harry didn’t hear what it was. He could guess, though. Hermione thought he should return to Hogwarts next year since he hadn’t done it this year. She thought that he couldn’t take his NEWTS and really study for them unless he was in what she called “a productive learning environment.”
            “Why are you always frowning when you show up?”
            “Not always,” Harry said, standing up and swatting soot from his robes as he grinned at Draco. He had arrived in one of those large rooms the Malfoys seemed to specialize in, so cheery with fire reflecting off old ornaments and marble that it was easy to ignore the thick March rain beyond the windows. “Just, this time, I think Hermione was trying to talk me into going back to Hogwarts.”
            Draco paused when he would have said something, and his mouth sealed in a thin line instead.
            Damn. I should have remembered how much he’d give to do that. Harry nodded his apology—he would embarrass both of them if he referred to it—and then turned to the table spread with papers in front of him. “What is it today? Not more genealogies, I hope.”
            Draco sniffed and let it go. “Admit it, knowing who was related to who helped you the last time you were in front of the Wizengamot.”
            Harry nodded. He had been able to figure out both some of the tangled alliances and some of the reasons that Wizengamot members who should have been neutral had had for supporting that new law that would have required killing off any magical creature that appeared in front of Muggles. Wizengamot members might not be benefitting themselves, but they might be giving employment to a niece or nephew or cousin who was employed by the Ministry to do Walden Macnair’s old job. “You’ve helped me a lot,” he admitted. “Thanks.”
            As always, Draco didn’t seem to know what to do with the thanks, and just moved across to the table and picked up a stack of papers. “Anyway. These aren’t genealogies. They’re lists of the important laws the Wizengamot passed in the last twenty years to control magical creatures.”
            “All of them?” Harry gaped at the stacks of paper. He had known the Wizengamot was both busy and interfering. He had simply never thought it was this much.
            “Yes.” Draco looked a little smug. “And it was a pain in the arse to gather all that information, I’ll have you know.”
            Harry rolled his eyes back. “Thanks,” he said again, because that threw Draco into adorable confusion, and then he sat down and began to read through the laws. Draco’s breathing gradually steadied and blended with the noise of the rain as Harry sank deeper into concentration.
            He started seeing something soon that he didn’t expect, though. And didn’t like. He leaned back and asked Draco bluntly, “Why are so many of these laws focused on creatures in the Forbidden Forest?”
            “Hmmm?” Draco came back to himself, and then snorted. “Because they’re the largest groups of their kind in Britain, Potter. The largest herd of centaurs, the largest colony of Acromantulas, and so on.”
            “But they didn’t enforce them that I can remember.” Harry wagged one piece of parchment. “This one that says they’re supposed to regularly cull Acromantulas that get bigger than five meters across the legs, for example. I know that some of the ones I met would be dead if they’d done that.”
            “They couldn’t enforce them,” Draco said coolly. “Because Dumbledore stood in the way.”
            Harry gaped at Draco. He had known Dumbledore did a lot of things the Ministry and the Board of Governors didn’t like, but this was a new one on him. “He did?”
            Draco sat down on the other side of the table, looking uncomfortable and pleased at once. He wore that expression around Harry a lot of the time. Harry thought he enjoyed teaching him new political things about the wizarding world and at the same time thought Harry should have known them already.
            “Of course,” Draco drawled. “You really believe that the centaurs would have lived unmolested close to humans for that long without some kind of protection? Or the merfolk? That there wouldn’t be more hunting of unicorns, no matter how illegal it is? Dumbledore was making sure no one could come near the school for over fifty years, ever since he taught there. At first he just influenced Headmaster Dippet, my father said, but after he defeated Grindelwald, he became so popular he could use his own fame.”
            Harry kept silent, studying the parchment for a second. Then he said, “So now the Wizengamot is probably going to let people enforce these laws.”
            Draco grimaced. “You’re so naïve, Potter. Sure, some enforcement, but there will also be bribes to allow hunting, or capture of Acromantulas instead of killing them, or pilgrimages to ask centaurs questions about the future. The Wizengamot isn’t always in charge of laws like that, anyway. The Department for the Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures is about to get very, very rich.”
            “They don’t make any distinction between the ones like the centaurs who can speak and the ones like unicorns who can’t, do they?” Harry’s voice sounded strange to his own ears. He tapped his fingers on the table. His head had filled with an ache. All the things Hermione had wanted to tell him about magical creatures, things he had sometimes listened to and sometimes ignored, suddenly seemed a lot more important.
            “Between beasts and beings? Not always, although they’re supposed to in the laws.” Draco got up and came around the table. Harry started. He had thought Draco was going to go past him and pick up one of the cups of tea that a house-elf had popped in with a minute ago, but instead, he reached out and gripped Harry’s shoulder, hard.
            “You can’t save them all,” Draco said.
            “What? I know that.”
            “No, you don’t.” Draco shook his head and looked up at an empty portrait frame on the wall—it was always empty when Harry came over—as if asking his invisible ancestor for help. “I know that look by now. Why I’ve lived to know it, I don’t know. What crime did I commit in a past life that’s being punished by this?”
            Harry grinned, but it was fleeting. Draco went still, looking down on him, and repeated, “You can’t save them all. There’s going to be some unicorns killed, the same way that there always were no matter what the laws said. There’s going to be people bothering the centaurs. McGonagall can make sure there are some protections in place, because too much hunting could also endanger the students at Hogwarts. But you can’t save all of them.”
            “I can do something for the centaurs, at least.” Harry pushed himself to his feet, his mind humming with plans. “Thanks, Draco—Malfoy. You’re a life-saver.”
            “Why do you keep calling me by my first name and then stopping?”
            Harry paused, looking over his shoulder, on his way to the fireplace. Draco stood with his hands crossed over his chest in the middle of the room, looking small and lonely.
            It was the loneliness that made Harry’s voice soft when he replied. “Because I didn’t think you’d want me to call you Draco.”
            “You could have asked.” Draco reached a hand up and performed a little gesture Harry supposed was meant to be one of blessing. “Please, call me by my first name. You sound ridiculous stumbling over it.”
            Harry smiled at him with a little catch in his throat. Nothing he could have said would have explained or justified the catch, so he only nodded, mouthed, “Thank you,” and departed through the Floo.
            He could do something for the centaurs. There was the small matter of Firenze having fought in the Battle of Hogwarts, and being awarded an Order of Merlin for it. Harry was going to start there.
*
            Draco woke up to a faceful of feathers, and tried to repel the bird. It was probably a bird, unless house-elves had started thrusting dusters into their masters’ faces when they were trying to sleep.
            The owl hopped off him after a moment and landed on the table next to the bed that usually held Draco’s breakfast, stretching its wings. Draco heard the crack of a glass cup and knew what had happened to his breakfast because of that bloody owl. He scowled at it.
The owl ducked its head and nibbled at his fingers in response. It was one of Potter’s, of course—of Harry’s. Draco had never encountered any others that were this enthusiastic so early in the morning. Blearily, he opened up the letter that it carried, which was only a single line, the way most of Harry’s letters were.
Read the paper.
Draco wanted to bang his head against the wall. Why couldn’t Harry just tell him what he would see in the paper instead of telling Draco to do something else entirely?
            “No response,” he told the owl, which flew cheerfully out the window. Draco shook his head. He understood Harry’s owl had been a gift from Weasley, because something about the way Harry’s first owl had died had prevented him from getting another one. It was probably Weasley obnoxiousness infecting the bird, instead of anything Harry had done.
            It was still annoying.
            A call to the house-elves replaced both Draco’s breakfast and the missing paper. Draco looked at the front page, and blinked. There stood Harry next to a centaur who looked vaguely familiar, which turned to totally familiar when Draco glanced at the headline.
            WAR HERO FIRENZE SPEAKS OUT ABOUT CENTAURS
            Yes, that was the centaur who had been the Divination professor for a while. Draco read slowly on, learning that Harry had gone to speak to Firenze, and actually brought him to speak to the Wizengamot on behalf of his herd.
            That made Draco blink. He didn’t think a centaur had ever consented to come to the Ministry. Then again, Firenze was already an outcast from normal centaur life, so maybe it didn’t matter so much to him.
            Then Draco hit the paragraphs that Harry had probably wanted him to read the most, the one near the middle bottom of the front page, and which made him choke on his tea.
            With the help of war hero Firenze, already the recipient of an Order of Merlin Second Class, the Wizengamot has established helpful new limits to the exploitation of the centaur herd at Hogwarts.
            Firenze will continue serving as a Divination professor at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. There will also be one day a month—to be announced a week before—when ordinary witches and wizards can come to consult a centaur about their futures. The selected centaur will appear at the edge of the Forbidden Forest.
            In return, the centaur herd’s territory in the Forbidden Forest will remain inviolate, and any wizard found with illegally hunted or purchased centaur potions ingredients will be punished severely.
            “I think this is the best compromise for all involved,” said Harry Potter.
            Draco sat slowly back in his bed. Harry had been listening, then. He had learned to compromise, something Draco told him he’d have to do, and he had found someone in the Wizengamot who would listen to him in return. Whether that was through knowing their blood connections or something else, Draco couldn’t know, because the article didn’t name the individual people who had worked with Harry.
            But this was all the result of his teaching. Draco knew that.
            A second later, he had to bite his lip, wondering if this meant Harry would never come to him for teaching again, because he already knew all he needed to know. He ended up sending an elf for an owl so he could respond after all, and tell Harry what he needed to know in his own letter of one line.
            Congratulations. Same time next week?
            It was hard to breathe until he got the owl back later that afternoon, when he was trying to concentrate on one of the more intricate incantations that had been a first-year spell fifty years ago. Draco tore it open at once, ignoring the way that the owl fluttered its wings in approval.
            Of course. I have new questions to ask you.
            Draco was smiling as he set the letter aside. He knew why. Harry was one of Draco’s few conduits to the world outside, and Draco would lose a source of life and vitality and news if he stopped coming. That made him more than a little pathetic.
            But Harry didn’t think so. And he was the only one whose opinion mattered right now.
            Contentment throbbing through him like a wound, Draco turned back to the book.
*
ChaosLady: Thanks!
moodysavage: There will be, but not jealousy of what you think.
starr: Ginny hasn’t really started, but she does dislike Harry’s political career.
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Acts of Life