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Returning to Sanity	By : AchillesTheGeek Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 31212 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 3
Disclaimer: I do not own the Harry Potter books or films, nor the characters from it. I do not make any money from the writing of this story.

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85. Returning to Earth with a Bump
Thursday 12 November
Ginny knew very well that, with Ron away, Hermione had been going to bed early; so, as it was after nine by the time she'd finished her study, she decided to wait until Thursday morning before using the mirror to call her sister-in-law.
"Ginny!" Hermione shrieked in delight when she made contact. "I was about to see if you were there!"
"Indeed I am," Ginny replied drily. "Did you find out anything yesterday?"
"Not much," Hermione replied, her face reflecting her disappointment. Then she brightened a little as she went on, "I did have a long chat with Lucius Malfoy—"
Ginny laughed at this, much to Hermione's discomfort. "What?" she said.
"Oh nothing," Ginny said. "Just that you and Lucius are such good pals."
"Yeah, well, we talked about that," Hermione replied. "About how I completely forgot about the horrible events at the Manor; and how we came to be friends as a result. We both agreed that it was a bit out of character, so there probably was something pushing us together. But in the end we came up with nothing. There doesn't seem to be any spell or potion that fits the case. Neither the Malfoy library nor the Ministry one was any help."
Ginny couldn't help but smile at the tone in which she said this; Hermione made it sound like coming up with nothing was only just less tragic than a death in the family. Perhaps, in a way, it was; for Hermione to find a problem that could not be solved, or even attacked, from books was probably a very sobering event.
"Perhaps I can help," Ginny replied. Hermione raised an eyebrow, but said nothing, so Ginny continued, "you see, Luna and I were talking …"
Ten minutes later, it was a very pensive Hermione Weasley who left for work at the Ministry. She might be called 'the brightest witch of the age', and certainly no-one could doubt her powers of reason and analysis; but it was the dreamy Luna Lovegood who seemed to have grasped what was going on. Harry was right, she thought; there was definitely a lot more to that girl than she let on.

If it wasn't for Ron Weasley and Thomas Parris, Harry might have felt that there was something seriously wrong with him. All the other trainees seemed to be giving him a wide berth. It made for a very uncomfortable couple of days training to finish off the week; not, of course, that the rest of it had been comfortable, not by any stretch of the imagination, though at least their tent was much nicer accommodation than most of the other trainees had, a fact which still clearly rankled with his cohort.
Harry decided he simply didn't have the energy to care and spent two days just going through the motions. It didn't help matters that they seemed to have moved on from interesting activities to spending time being shown and discussing survival tactics in the field. He found that most of what was said was either something he knew or felt was rather obvious; though of course he and Ron had actually had the experience of being hunted in the field for real, unlike the trainees and, he suspected, even the Aurors in charge themselves. He could see that the Aurors were somewhat peeved that he'd clammed up and didn't give any help; it was as if they expected him to do the teaching for them. Wasn't it obvious to them that, in their present mood, his classmates were most unlikely to listen to a word he said? At least Ron did volunteer some information, so he could just nod and smile in agreement.

Lucius Malfoy was more than a bit concerned. The letter that had arrived with the morning post was pleasant enough, to be sure, and couched in informal, not to say chatty, terms; but when the head of the Wizengamot invites you to lunch, it's not something you can say no to. Especially when there's a feeling in the air that people are starting to look for change, and wondering if perhaps they haven't been taken for a ride somehow, and you're an ex-Death Eater with a suspended sentence hanging over your head.
So Lucius made his way to the Merlin Club, thankful that at least its very exclusive dining-room was a very private place, and had some of the best food in Britain. Not that he would be welcomed there any more in his own right, he considered rather ruefully; the Club had written to him during the last War and suggested, very diplomatically to be sure, that his visiting the Club 'might send the wrong sort of signal'. Of course he knew perfectly well that that meant 'you're out', and they knew that he knew it, but the forms had to be observed.
So he made sure to greet the maître d'hôtel with a jaunty smirk as he entered. Hilaire Evans, said maître d', had been there forever and knew perfectly well why Lucius Malfoy was smirking; but frankly, who the Club let in or didn't was entirely its affair, and Hilaire, the perfect staff member, treated everyone who came in with the same exquisite politeness.
"Mr Malfoy," he said, bowing slightly to the man, as befitted the guest of a member; Lucius, always aware of such things, immediately got the message: 'you have not been reinstated as a member yet, so I will only defer to you so far'. Well, that was fair enough, he supposed.
"Good afternoon, Hilaire," he replied.
"Chief Wizard Doge arrived a moment ago; you will find him in the bar," the other replied, indicating with a gesture that Lucius was free to make his own way there. Lucius raised an eyebrow, but made no comment.
It was the work of a moment to find Doge; he had not got away from the bar yet.
"Malfoy!" he called out as soon as he saw him. Lucius was very amused at the dirty looks several members aimed at Doge; but the bar was the one place that there was neither requirement nor expectation to be stuffy and formal, and Doge ignored them. There were, to be sure, dirty looks aimed at him by some of the older members, who no doubt wondered why he had been let in; but it was none of their business who the Chief Warlock chose to entertain, and he followed his host's lead and ignored them himself.
"Chief Warlock," he replied suavely. "I do hope I'm not late."
"Nonsense," Doge replied. "You're bang on time, and you know it. And call me Elphias. We're all friends here."
Lucius was rather taken with the irony of that statement; he knew perfectly well that, quite to the contrary, he was probably top of the 'hate list' of at least half-a-dozen people in the room. But their discomfort made for his enjoyment, so he smiled and replied, "then you must call me Lucius."
"Yes of course, Lucius," the man replied. "Now, spot of whiskey?"

At Hogwarts, another Malfoy was also having lunch, though in less rarefied surroundings.
Draco had had a very busy morning; though he was missing Harry, he had not been given time to think about it as Borage had him slicing, dicing, and brewing potions for the Infirmary all morning. He did not fail to notice that some of the potions he was making were specifically adapted to be pregnancy-safe; so he was not particularly surprised when Borage told him he could take what he needed, and pass others on to Hermione and Pansy.
By the time he got to lunch, he was pretty much tired out; he was very glad that Borage had told him to spend the afternoon resting and reviewing his notes. He just had to get through lunch and then he could relax.
Yeah, right, he thought. Just get through lunch. It sounded easy; but after yesterday's fiasco, he was very wary and watchful as he entered the Great Hall. He did not expect this to be a pleasant experience; in truth, for once, he would have been happy just to be ignored and allowed to eat his meal in peace. He really couldn't handle another attack right now.
But, to his great surprise and delight, as he sat down, all of the Eighth Year students greeted him warmly and ranged themselves around him, making it very clear to the rest of the school that they were protecting him.
"So, Draco," Ivanov asked, "what has old man Borage got you brewing now?"
And that was it; he spent the rest of the meal having a pleasant discussion about the finer points of potion making. To be sure, not all of the students participated, and some of the Beauxbatons girls seemed to have trouble following and wanted to ask lots of questions; but Ivanov somehow managed, without causing offence, to deflect them away with rather simplistic explanations. Draco smiled. He didn't have the patience to do that, not at the moment, anyway; but it seemed that, even without the students who had sat their NEWTs early, McGonagall's brave experiment in getting people together was still bearing fruit.
And didn't that thought make Draco sit back and take stock. How far did the conspiracy theory go, he wondered? Did people think that the Eighth Year programme, and its emphasis on working together, was part of the plot? It would be daft to think so; but people believed daft things all the time, he thought rather ruefully, remembering some less-than-stellar decisions he had been pushed into in the past.
"You all right, Draco?" Seamus Finnegan asked, bringing him back to the present.
"Oh!" Draco said, a little surprised by the attention. "Yes, sorry, I was just wondering about the rumours you were talking about yesterday."
"Oh yes? What about them?" the Irishman replied.
"I'm wondering how far they go. Do people think that the Eighth Year programme is all some sort of conspiracy to control us?"
Seamus looked confused at this question, but Ivan Smetana, who grasped immediately what Draco's concern must be, chipped in.
"People think all sorts of silly things," he said. "We have to have some form of control. It's better, I think, to have something that builds people together like this programme than, say, how that madman you had here would have worked; or so I hear, anyway."
Draco gave him a private smirk for the last comment; as Karkaroff, he had an excellent idea of exactly what life under Voldemort would be like, but of course Smetana could not be expected to know.
"That's true," Susan Bones chipped in, her face thoughtful.
"I hope I will not end up in your paper!" Smetana said with a little smile, though Draco suspected that he was only half-joking. Of course he would not want to be looked at too closely.
"You mean the Prophet?" Susan replied. "That was a summer job mostly. But I'm sure they'd be interested; would you perhaps give me an interview?"
Smetana groaned and Draco, having finished eating, took the chance to slip out unobtrusively. Lunch had proved much easier to get through than he had feared, after all.

Unknowingly, Lucius Malfoy was thinking much the same thing. He returned to the Manor, a bemused expression on his face.
"What's happened?" Narcissa asked as soon as she saw him.
"What?" he asked absent-mindedly. "Oh, sorry, just thinking about the lunch I've just had with Doge. One of the strangest lunches ever."
Narcissa steered him into her private sitting room and demanded tea from Mappy, before looking him straight in the eye.
"Strange in what way?" she demanded, and Lucius knew he wasn't going to get away with anything less than a full explanation.
"Well," Lucius said, once tea had been served and they were comfortably seated and there really was no way to put things off any longer, "it was like the whole meeting was in code. It was all couched in terms of 'concerns have been voiced' and 'murmurings have been heard' and the like, but the long and the short of it is that Doge was really trying to warn me to keep my head down."
"What?" Narcissa demanded, exactly as Lucius had known she would. "Why should you keep your head down? The Wizengamot suspended your sentence, you haven't done anything since that should cause any problems!"
And then she looked at him searchingly, and asked, "have you?"
"That, I'm afraid, is in the mind of the beholder," Lucius replied drily. "Some of the murmurings were about whether the activities I have with the Muggles are quite the sort of thing that someone like me should be doing. Some of the Purebloods have been wondering that, but also some of the Muggle-borns. Apparently they think I might be contaminating the Muggles in some way."
Narcissa did not respond to this with words; the shocked look on her face said all that was necessary.
"I know," he replied. "But it seems that, along with Draco's pregnancy, something big has happened. The general feeling is that everyone was bewitched somehow, and now that has lifted. So people are looking for scapegoats."
"I see, And you'd rather not be one," Narcissa summarised.
Lucius beamed. This was going better than he'd feared – his wife was a Black, after all, and while he knew she would work it out quickly, there was always a chance that curses would get sent off first, and right now he was the only person who could be in the firing line.
"Exactly," he replied. "So, I'm going to keep a low profile. And try and work out if there really is something going on. Hermione Weasley and I have been looking into it; but we haven't got very far yet. We can't see what it could be – it's not a potion, or any known spell …"
Here Lucius withdrew into himself, and Narcissa gave a wry chuckle. She knew her husband; he was unlikely to be much use for a while; in this mood, he would go off and think about things for a long time now. But at least they had been given a warning; clearly, at least, the world was not united against them, and she took that as a crumb of comfort.
Friday 13 November
On Friday afternoon after lunch the trainees were returned to the Ministry. They spent a couple of hours being debriefed, discussing all the activities they had done and what they had learnt, before most of them were dismissed and allowed to return home. Harry groaned when he found that, instead of being allowed to leave, he had been summoned to the Head Auror's office; but he dutifully made his way there nonetheless.
"Trainee Potter," Gawain Robards said as he entered.
"Sir," Harry replied, standing just inside the door and making no move to sit down, having not been invited to do so. Indeed, instead of settling for a chat, Robarts stood up.
"Come with me," he said, walking out of the office. "Shut the door as you come, too."

When Ron got home to Grimmauld Place he was rather surprised to find Hermione there.
"Hello!" he said. "How come you're home so early? Not that I mind!"
Hermione looked up from the old books she had spent the last few hours reading, rather surprised to find it was already nearly four o'clock.
"Oh! You startled me!" she gasped. "Sorry! Um, I've been looking into stuff over the last couple of lunchtimes and my supervisor caught me today and sent me home."
"Oh," Ron replied in turn. "Um, you're not in trouble or anything?"
"What? No!" Hermione said, laughing. "No, she just said if I was so engrossed in something I should take the books I needed and go and sort it out. She'd rather have me get it out of my system and come back and concentrate on the job."
"OK," said Ron, a little slowly, and it was clear that he was not entirely convinced. "So, what has you so engrossed?"
"Ah," Hermione replied. "It must have happened on Tuesday night – or perhaps Wednesday morning, I suppose."
"What must have happened?" Ron demanded, managing, with evident difficulty, to keep his temper in check.
"Didn't you feel it?" she asked. "It was like we had been under some mild enchantment, and then it lifted. And it made us all wonder just exactly what was going on. Like, for example, why I was so keen to go to Malfoy Manor and didn't think about the fact that Bellatrix Lestrange had tortured me there."
"That's true," Ron said, pensively. "I can see why that's got you thinking. I wonder…"
And now it was Hermione's turn to be annoyed: "about…" she prompted.
"Harry was in Hogwarts on Tuesday night," Ron replied.
"Now!" Hermione exclaimed. "Ginny mentioned something about that, but I didn't quite realise what she meant. Harry was at Hogwarts? Really? How did that happen?"
"We were in an exercise on Tuesday afternoon, and he got hit with a spell. The Haussmann shield flared up, and when it dissipated, he'd gone. Vanished completely. We had no idea what had happened until he returned on Wednesday morning. But that's not the strangest thing."
"It's not?" Hermione demanded, with a 'you-will-explain-that-right-now' look on her face.
"Nope," Ron said. "Really, I should let him tell you…"
"RON!"
"All right!" Ron said, smiling, raising his hands in surrender. "He did say I could tell you, even though it's their secret; and we have to keep it so. When he got to Hogwarts, he found out that Draco is pregnant."
"WHAT!" Hermione exploded. "And they're keeping it a secret?"
"Yep. Only family is allowed to know. Including us," he added, seeing the inquiring look on Hermione's face. "Draco doesn't want to announce it till after Blaise's wedding tomorrow."
"But …" Hermione said and sat back, her eyes going glassy in, had they known it, the same way Lucius's had the previous day.
"How?" she demanded eventually.
Ron shrugged. "No-one knows," he said,
"But…" Hermione said, then sat up, a new light kindled in her eyes. "It can't be a coincidence," she said.
"What can't?" Ron demanded.
"Oh, well, we have two things here we can't explain by spell or potion: Draco getting pregnant, and, at the same time, this enchantment we can't explain lifts."
"Makes sense," Ron said slowly. "That they'd be related, I mean. Tell me more about this enchantment; I don't really get it."
"Well, there have been reports of people feeling themselves having been pushed into things they wouldn't normally do. And even wanting to do them. Like I wanted, so badly, to go to the Manor. And Ginny gave up on Harry without a fight. And Lucius's sentence was suspended."
"So, what's your theory?" Ron asked.
"Oddly enough, the best theory isn't mine, it's from the last person I'd expect."
"Who?" Ron asked, then added cheekily, "Loony Lovegood?"
"It's Luna," Hermione corrected. "And yes, it was her. She and Ginny have been talking. She explained it as a general sort of funneling that's been going on for some time. She expressed it as 'we've all been being pushed into doing the right thing.'"
"How long has she thought this?" Ron asked. "And why didn't she say anything sooner?"
"Apparently she's known for ages," Hermione replied. "And she didn't say anything because, quote 'because it was the right thing, of course.'"
Ron could easily imagine the dreamy Ravenclaw saying this; and it was clear from their previous experience, and from the fact that Hermione was offering this as a credible explanation, that it was probably the truth. Though of course exactly what 'the right thing' meant was up for discussion.
"How does she know?" he asked.
"That's the really weird bit," Hermione replied. "She said it was obvious; it was because it came from Harry."
"So hang on," Ron said. "Are you saying that people were being manipulated into doing things they wouldn't have otherwise by Harry? But that can't be right! Harry's not evil!" Ron exclaimed.
"I didn't say he was," Hermione replied, keeping her voice even. "It's Harry's heart, but someone, or something, was enforcing it. The interesting question is, why did it stop?"
"Because Draco got pregnant?"
Hermione's brows knitted. "Not sure on that one. It could be that, I suppose; but remember that it didn't stop until Harry found out about the pregnancy; if the pregnancy made it stop, surely it would have stopped at the actual conception. I think it's more that they are two separate, but related events. Something else is going on. Something is wrong, Ron. It has to have something to do with Harry; everything always does. We have to go and talk to him."

Harry was rather worried. Robards stalked the corridors of the Ministry at a great pace, and Harry had to rush to keep up with him. The only good thing was that that meant it did not take long to reach their destination; they found themselves in the Secretariat in minutes.
"Yes?" the receptionist asked. "Can I help you, Head Auror?"
"I need to see the Deputy Minister," Robards answered. "He's expecting us."
Harry's heart fell. Arthur was expecting them? Just what was going on?
Before Harry got worked up any further, Arthur's door opened, and he invited them in.
"Now, Harry," he said, once they were comfortably seated and the inevitable tea and cakes had appeared, "we don't normally have interviews like this but…"
"Especially after the events of the last few days, we really would like to know," Robards continued, as Arthur paused, "whether you want to stay in the Auror programme?"
"Well, sir," Harry replied, "I've been thinking about that a lot over the last two days. And, to be perfectly frank, no, I don't think I really want to be an Auror."
"I'm disappointed," Robards said, "but I can't say I'm surprised."
Harry looked at him quizzically, and the Head Auror continued, "to be honest, I think you've simply got too much going for you to be an Auror. Granted, we need wizards of great, if not exceptional power; but there's a lot more to you than just power. Once an Auror gets well-known, they tend to have a very tough time – the papers track their every move, the public tries to 'help' them, which always ends up getting in the way; and there's a big target on your back."
"Every ex-Death Eater is going to be gunning for you," Arthur concurred. "As well as every two-bit villain in search of a little fame. Frankly, I understand why Gawain is disappointed – you would make a great Auror – but I'm not sad at all that you're not going to be one. Of course we would support you if that's what you really wanted to do; but I'm sure Molly will rest easier if she knows you won't be sent out as the first line of defense. I know I will. And I think you've really done enough of that for one lifetime."
Harry smiled. This was a lot easier than he thought it might be. Now he only had Draco to face.
'Only Draco'. Yeah, right. Maybe he shouldn't count his basilisks before they hatch, he decided.

Notes:

Thank you for all the comments!
And many thanks to Bicky Monster for her help as always.
I wish you all a very happy Christmas. (We don't do 'Holidays' here in Australia; at least, not in my part of it.)
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Returning to Sanity