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Easy as Falling	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 31246 -:- Recommendations : 3 -:- Currently Reading : 4
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I am making no money from this fanfic.

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Chapter Nine—By Storm

            “You did what?”

            Ron’s voice was a little faint. Harry winced in spite of himself. He hadn’t meant to make either of his friends react that way. Maybe Hermione would have, if she hadn’t already gone through the crisis of him declaring himself a Dark Lord.

            As it was, Hermione just rolled her eyes and sat back from the table. Harry had come to their house for dessert, and he leaned out and snagged another chocolate biscuit from the plate of them in the center. Molly must have made them; Ron refused to try cooking, and also refused to let Hermione near the kitchen after what was affectionately known as the “Spiderweb Incident.”

            “I put pimples on Bradley Williams’s head naming him a murderer,” Harry repeated gently. “So everyone will know anyway, and the best way to make sure that I get to tell my side of the story is to give an interview to the papers now.”

            “I didn’t mean that, mate.” Ron picked up his glass of pumpkin juice and took a careful sip. When he put it down again, he seemed to be stronger, maybe because the taste reminded him of times at Hogwarts when they had survived breaking the rules. “I meant, you went and had dinner with Malfoy?”

            Harry rolled his eyes in tune with Hermione this time. “He could be a good ally,” Harry pointed out. “He seemed serious about helping me to become a better Dark Lord.”

            “There’s no such thing,” Hermione interrupted firmly. “But I’m glad that it sounds like he talked some political sense into you, Harry. Maybe you won’t do something like sending out those letters again without thinking it through.”

            “Knowing Malfoy, he’ll have him down in the cellar sacrificing fuzzy little animals in Dark rituals,” Ron said.

            “He wouldn’t go that far,” Harry said, and picked up another biscuit while composing his face, so that he wouldn’t sound like he was joking when he said it. “There might be a snake or two involved. Slytherins think it’s good luck, you know.”

            Unfortunately, he succeeded too well and lost it at the look on Ron’s face when he was in the middle of the biscuit, which led to a lot of crumbs sprayed everywhere and Hermione rising to her feet, shaking her head in disgust. “That’s enough,” she said. “Come into the drawing room where we can talk like civilized people.”

            Harry followed her meekly, at least until Ron caught his elbow and whispered, “What else did he tell you about Slytherins, mate?”

            “He couldn’t believe I was almost one,” Harry said.

            Ron frowned. “Well, of course not. He thinks of you as the perfect Gryffindor. What are you going to do to keep him from thinking that way?”

            Harry clasped Ron’s arm and squeezed. Sometimes Ron was abrupt and harsh and ignorant, and sometimes he was the best friend Harry could have. “I think I made a pretty good start on it just by telling him that the Sorting Hat considered me for Slytherin.”

            He would have said more, but Hermione huffed from the drawing room, and Ron got an alarmed look in his eyes that made talking with him worse than useless. He ran. Harry trailed after him, chuckling.

            Yes, I think I can have both my friends and my allies, as long as I make sure that they don’t meet too often in dark alleys.

            And setting up a makeshift altar at Hogwarts with a conjured snake on it was looking better by the minute.

*

            Draco stood up and turned in a slow circle. Pansy whistled and clapped her hands. Blaise leaned forwards and considered Draco’s robes with his chin on his fist and a slight, contemplative frown that changed into a slight smile. Draco tried not to show how much of the tension went out of his shoulders at that.

            “Yes,” Blaise said. “That will do. Provided that you don’t muss them too much,” he added, with a faint sniff.

            Draco looked down at his robes again. They were a kind of bright, shimmery grey, the color of rain falling behind glass. He had been reluctant to wear robes of that color at first, but Rosenthal had taken several photos of them on herself while she was Polyjuiced as him, and Draco had accepted. She said they made him look mature, distant but still approachable, and wealthy. The voters who cared about elections still looked for that in their candidates.

            “I’ll try,” he told his best friends solemnly, and turned away from them. He was waiting in the back drawing room of Pansy’s house for Rosenthal to come in and tell him the reporters were all gathered. Not as many of them would come to this speech as the last one, because Minister Tillipop was holding a conference on ways to deal with “the Dark Lord Potter.”

            “What has Potter done now?”

            Draco blinked and glanced at Pansy. He hadn’t tried to explain his dinner with Potter, because neither of his friends would understand. “What do you mean? Declared himself Dark Lord, and that was the last I heard.”

            Pansy shook her head and stood up to cross the room, ending up in front of him with her fists on her hips. “You only get that look when you’re thinking about him and when it’s something new, not the old stories they’ve already reported in the papers. What did he do?”

            Draco hesitated. But he had already trusted his friends with the inner secrets of his campaign, and they hadn’t gossiped yet. Of course, that might be because no one had offered Pansy enough money yet. But he chose to accept the risk.

            “I had dinner with him last night,” he said. “He walked in and out through my wards and in general acted like an arrogant bastard, planning to rule on power alone, but he also revealed that he was almost Sorted Slytherin. So there’s that.”

            Pansy reared back and stared at him as she would if he’d admitted sheltering a huge spider in his clothes. Blaise stood up, and his eyes were bright in a way that Draco had only ever seen clothes turn them.

            “Well,” he said. “That does change things. Do you think developing a working relationship with him would be profitable?”

            Draco gave him a slow smile, which made Blaise laugh and clap his hands. “Of course you do,” he said. “Which means that you’ve started it.”

            Draco nodded. He perhaps should have tried harder to keep the secret, but, well, he was sure that Potter would reveal it to his friends in the meantime. So he might as well enjoy himself with the people who truly understood him. “We talked about tactics, and Rosenthal is trying to find someone who could advise him.”

            Blaise snickered. “No wonder she looked as if she was tearing her hair out the last time I saw her. Someone who can advise Potter?”

            Draco gave a graceful little shrug. “Well, I can’t do it all the time.”

            “I don’t know if you should be doing it at all,” Pansy pointed out, with a single, even glance at him. “Yes, he’s fun to play with right now, and the fact that he was almost Slytherin makes me credit him with more common sense than I thought he had. But there’s the fact that you need to concentrate on your campaign.”

            Draco shrugged again. “Having dinner with him a few times and giving him a few words of advice doesn’t take much of my attention. If he requires more of me than that, granted, I might think about giving up the connection.”

            “Don’t shrug so much, it ruins the line of your robes,” Blaise said, and reached out to pinch a crease on Draco’s shoulder back into place. “As you wish, then. I think you’re foolish to try this, but not so foolish that I’ll walk away.”

            “Good,” Draco said. “Thank you,” he added, when he turned the other way and found Pansy watching him.

            She shook her head, making her hair bob around her face. “I think the problems won’t come from anything Potter does, unless you stand up as his champion while he admits to murder. The problem is that you have that old obsession with him.”

            Draco snapped his head down, ending the conversation as fast as an insult would have. It wasn’t Blaise that was the problem, since he knew, but Draco didn’t want the disturbing echoes of the past those words awakened rolling around his head while he was trying to prepare for his next public appearance.

            And just in time, Rosenthal put her head around the door and said to Draco, “I have some candidates for Potter’s adviser that we can discuss later. In the meantime, will you please come out and stand ready?”

            Draco did it, smile and robes perfectly in place, while the world rocked outside with the voices with his supporters.

            Not as much as it would rock a few hours later, but Draco had no idea of that then.

*

            “May I say that I’m flattered you chose me to be the one to record your announcements, Mr. Potter?”

            Harry smiled. He had chosen Helena Spivak for more reasons than just generally agreeing with her articles whenever they appeared. She didn’t show much fear of the people she interviewed, although some of them were prominent Ministry officials. She simply sat down, took out her parchment and quill, and waited for what they would say next.

            And she didn’t call him “Dark Lord Potter,” the way that some of the letters coming to his office did. Harry supposed he could hardly complain about that, when he had been the one to claim the title in those letters he sent out. But the address in the writing of other people always looked cringing, or, in the case of the threats, blustering.

            Spivak faced him and lifted her quill in readiness. “I have some questions that I think our readers will be very interested in the answers to, Mr. Potter, but in the meantime, why don’t you tell me what you wanted to say?”

            “It’s about a man named Bradley Williams, who came to see me yesterday,” Harry said, and leaned forwards to study Spivak’s face. There was no flicker of recognition in her eyes, although of course that might come later. Perhaps Williams had told another reporter about his assault on Harry, or hadn’t done it yet. “He told me he wanted to kill me, but that he didn’t represent any organization that wanted me dead. Based on other things he said, I tend to believe that.”

            Spivak blinked a little, but wrote enthusiastically. “And what happened when he tried to curse you?”

            “I stopped him,” Harry said simply, and leaned back to gesture around the Headmistress’s office—well, fine, his office now. He didn’t think McGonagall ever had any intention of moving back in, and while in one sense that was a shame, he might as well face reality. “Hogwarts and I did. I’m bonded to the school, as you might have heard some rumors of from the Board of Governors.”

            “They didn’t seem quite sure what you had done,” said Spivak, but her dark eyes had begun to shine. “Yes, they talked a little about some of the strange things the school had done when they were present.”

            Harry nodded. “I want everyone to know that I’m bonded to it, and any attempt to take the school away from me is going to be met with defensive action from Hogwarts itself. Maybe, if people take that seriously, then I can stop entertaining attackers like this soon.”

            “But is that all you did, made him leave?” Spivak had her head bowed as she scribbled again. “That seems a mild punishment for a murderer. And the people you want to make leave you alone might think so, too.”

            Harry nodded. “I know. Which means that I’m sending a message with what I did to him.”

            “And what was that?” A certain thickness had started to creep into Spivak’s voice. Harry leaned back for a minute, reveling in the feeling that he could make someone else impatient enough to hang on his every word. He let her wait a few seconds before he smiled and told her.

            “I branded MURDERER on his forehead in pimples.”

            Spivak stared at him in silence, and then began to scribble again. Harry hoped she would be able to read her own scrawl later; she was writing so fast it seemed like it might be a challenge. But her mouth was twitching wildly, and Harry suspected that the emotions that made her write like that weren’t fear and a desire to get out of his presence.

            “Isn’t that similar to a trick that someone else used?” she asked, looking up. “I seem to remember a girl named Marietta Edgecombe…”

            “I got the idea from my friend Hermione, yes,” Harry said. “I don’t see any reason that Williams should be able to hide what he intended, even if it isn’t what he actually did. And since he wasn’t working with anyone else, he doesn’t have Ministry workers or a Board of Governors who might be upset about it, either.”

            He’d mainly said that to clarify, again, that Williams was working by himself, but Spivak sat up, and her shoulders hunched. “You think the Ministry might send someone to kill you?”

            Well. Here it came. Harry ought to have known it would come out this soon and chosen his words better if he wanted to avoid it. He held her eyes and nodded. “I’m an embarrassment to them, as the former Chosen One who turned out Dark and an Auror who quit with no notice to them. Of course they could.”

            Spivak watched him as though he was a goose laying golden eggs, and then began scribbling away so hard that Harry thought she would tear the parchment. He tried to sit as alertly as he could and look like he was in control of the interview, when secretly he wanted to admit that nothing had gone the way he expected it to so far.

            But Spivak looked up at him a moment later, her quill still clutched in fingers that looked nerveless, and demanded breathlessly, “Then do you think they might try even now, when you found out about Williams and stopped him? When you’re warned and lots of other people know you’re warned?”

            Harry understood then. She was excited at the thought that she might have uncovered a secret Ministry plot to destroy Harry Potter, and she would be the first to report the story.

            Harry hesitated one moment. He had no evidence that the Ministry wanted to kill him right now. He knew that Minister Tillipop would probably denounce him, but that was a long way from choosing assassins and sending them out with a mission. Or even ordering him to surrender, which they hadn’t done yet, either.

            But he remembered the way that so many people in the Ministry had looked at him in the last little while, and he stiffened his back and nodded, his chin coming up as he thought about it.

            “Yes,” he said. “I’m sure that eventually, they’ll decide the only way to deal with a Dark Lord is to conquer him. And one way to do that would be to send lots of Aurors, sure, and require them to arrest me. But when you publish the news about me being bonded to Hogwarts, how many of them will want to come after me in my own lair? A single assassin under cover of night might as well do it.”

            Spivak hadn’t looked up in the last three minutes, so intent was she on the words spilling across the page. She did glance up as he finished speaking, though, and something about her intent, focused gaze made Harry stir a little uneasily. He hadn’t realized she would look so much like a hunting ferret.

            Note: Never make that particular comparison in front of Malfoy.

            “You think of Minister Tillipop as a personal enemy?” she asked quietly. “You think he would authorize this against someone who was his loyal Auror until a short time ago?”

            And Harry took the step, turned the corner. In a way, he thought later, it was one of the best things he could have done. Malfoy was going to start spreading rumors about Tillipop soon. Harry was just spreading some of his own and giving things a little push.

            “That’s the point,” Harry said, and thought he should rise to his feet to emphasize the point. After he considered it, though, he was glad that he had remained seated. “I’m no longer his loyal Auror. I’m not loyal to the Ministry at all. A Minister who would make a truce with me would be a good thing, but until that happens, all I can assume is that they’ll want to attack me and act accordingly. I’m loyal to Hogwarts, and to the people who are students here and want to teach here, as long as they don’t attack me, either. And even then, all I would do is put them out. I don’t have to kill them.”

            “Just like you didn’t have to kill Williams,” Spivak whispered. Her face was alight. In another second, Harry thought, she was likely to jump up and start clapping her hands or something. “Mr. Potter—Dark Lord Potter—would you say that your magic is so great you don’t have to fear the Ministry?”

            Well, Harry thought, and exhaled a little. She came to that conclusion on her own. I didn’t have to guide her as to what to say. That has to count for something, right?

            “That’s exactly it,” he said, and gave her a serene smile as she drew a camera out of her robe pocket and snapped his photograph.

            Then Spivak was standing, holding out her hand, making her excuses. Harry saw how her hand shook, and knew it wasn’t from fear. He smiled and shook back and let her go.

            That smile would be on the front page of the Prophet tomorrow, he was certain.

            And then the avalanche could really begin.



*

            delia cerrano: Yes, he does, and Draco’s really surprised.

            BAFan: The Ministry’s really not going to know what hit them now.

            Glad you like the story. Hermione will come to terms with what Harry has done so far because she has no other choice.

            Harry isn’t naïve, exactly; he can be really cynical about the Ministry. But he does think that people tend to behave the way they say they will, and when they do something else, it surprises him.

SP777: Sorry, I don’t remember which ones.

            And I’m not a very visual person, so I can’t think of any celebrities that really look like Harry or Draco to me.

            Seiren: Thank you!

            alexkdp: Eventually, there will be smut. This is either going to be a very long story or the first arc of a longer story about how Harry and Draco become the people in the one-shot I posted a while back.

            Anon: Thank you! I don’t think there’s much chance of me abandoning this one; I really like the way it’s going.
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Easy as Falling