Chapter Four of 'The Long Defeat'- Unfinished Business
Chapter Three.
Title: The Long Defeat (4/?)
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairings: Harry/Draco, Lucius/Narcissa, mentions of Ron/Hermione
Rating: R
Warnings: Some violence, some angst, ignores the epilogue.
Summary: Harry thought that becoming a slave to the goblins was about the worst thing that could possibly happen, except the sinking of the wizarding economy that the goblins had threatened if he didn’t. Then Lucius Malfoy showed up and offered to buy him instead, and maybe that was the worst thing. Or maybe not-at least, not if the Malfoys are sincere in their efforts to help him fool the goblins.
Author’s Notes: This is being written as a thank-you fic for
helenadax, who’s given me several virtual gifts and a lot of reviews over the years. She left this prompt of Harry being enslaved by the goblins and the Malfoys stepping in to help for the Draco Tops Harry fest a few years back, but although I intended to claim it, I didn’t get around to doing so before time ran out to submit fics for the fest. She asked for a happy ending and focus more on the con side than the angst side of the story. It does eventually get there, although with some angst at first. This story will be updated every Saturday evening.
The title is a phrase from The Lord of the Rings: “And together through the ages of the world we have fought the long defeat.”
Chapter One.
Thank you again for all the reviews!
Chapter Four-Unfinished Business
Harry paused where he was, one hand still lifted to knock on the door in front of him. He had been supposed to meet Narcissa in one of the small sitting rooms for a chat at noon, but the door was partially open, and he could hear voices coming from behind it-Lucius and Narcissa Malfoy’s voices.
Harry stepped back and cast a Tempus Charm, nonverbally. It told him that he still had another ten minutes before Narcissa would probably think he was late. He leaned on the wall and listened, quietly, ready to move if he had to so he could be inside the room before anyone would think he was eavesdropping.
“Draco told me what you said.” By the sound of it, Lucius was pacing around the room, and his robe was rustling and sliding over most of the furniture. Harry held his breath and listened, but heard no crack of delicate ivory knickknacks falling to the floor. He exhaled, disappointed. “And there’s no reason that we have to put our son to inconvenience being nice to the boy.”
“We must do what is gracious,” Narcissa said calmly. “I told you that already, Lucius. I did think you might have agreed when you agreed to give up your vault.”
“That was a necessary gesture,” Lucius said. “Not one I would have done without the life-debts.”
“True graciousness is what one will do outside of necessity” Narcissa said, sounding as if she was quoting something. “Are you going to ignore Harry for a year, Lucius? What will that do to your dignity, not to mention your ability to go about your own house? I know you. You would resent Mr. Potter for it, and come to restrict yourself to a few rooms. Such a wonderful example for our son.”
Lucius came to a stop, from the sound of it. Harry resisted the urge to move closer to the door and peek through the gap, though. They would probably hear him. “I have no idea how to get along with him, Narcissa,” Lucius whispered harshly. “He lost me a house-elf, and I tried to resurrect the Dark Lord from one of his little friends.”
Harry closed his eyes. It was do that, or burst into the room and scream at Lucius until he was hoarse for acting as though those two things were equivalent.
“Yes, and you tried to curse him in the Department of Mysteries, and then he got rid of your Lord for you, I know the whole sorry tale,” Narcissa said, sounding impatient with said sorry tale. “That doesn’t have to do anything to dictate the way you behave now.”
“Of course it does-”
“No, Lucius, it does not.” From the sounds now, Narcissa had stood up, and Harry got ready to dive back from the door if she came towards it, but she only stopped walking a few seconds later. Harry envisioned her in front of Lucius, her hands clasping his shoulders and her eyes looking deeply into his, though of course he had no real idea what they would look like together. “You can do this,” he heard Narcissa whisper. “You can change things. You can be a new man. I believe in you.”
There was silence, and Harry retreated from the door. He shouldn’t have listened to that much, he thought, but he deserved to know what they were planning to do about him, how they were planning to treat him.
He waited for a count of fifty, which he thought would give them enough time to finish-whatever they were doing. Then he marched up to the door, and knocked.
He heard a shuffling sound and a throat-clearing sound, and tried not to picture the way they might have sprung apart from each other, because it was simply too embarrassing. He stared at the wood of the door instead, and rather desperately studied the bright brass of the knob, and the plate around the keyhole, and then Lucius opened the door.
They stared at each other for what felt like a count of endless heartbeats, and was probably twenty seconds. Lucius’s lip kept trembling like he wanted to curl it. Harry held still.
“Come in, Harry,” Narcissa said, gently, and Lucius stepped back so that Harry could see into the room. At least Narcissa didn’t look as though she’d been kissing Lucius, or running her fingers through his hair, or something. She smiled and extended a hand to him, and Harry went up and shook it.
Lucius made a little snorting sound. Harry shrugged. Presumably he’d been supposed to kiss it. Well, he wasn’t pure-blood, he didn’t know these things.
“If we could sit down?” Narcissa nodded towards the far end of the couch. Harry sat down on it, and Lucius took a seat on a chair at an angle to him. Narcissa sighed, at one of them or both, and sat down next to Harry.
“We agreed that you could pretend to be our bodyguard outside the Manor,” Narcissa told him. “The training room is adequate?”
Lucius’s glare intensified when she talked about that, as though he didn’t approve of a room put aside to let Harry train at all. Harry wondered if he would feel differently if he knew Draco was using it, too. Then he tried to ignore Lucius altogether as he responded to Narcissa. “More than adequate, thank you.”
Narcissa nodded. “The goblins will expect to see some kind of slave labor for us to put you to. But with the house-elves, having you clean things, or work in the kitchens or gardens, doesn’t seem like enough.”
Harry nodded, bracing himself. “Is this where you tell me that I need to wait on you hand and foot? Or at least on the days when the goblins visit?”
Narcissa blinked at him, looking a little lost. She opened her mouth, then cocked her head and said, “I would have left it alone, but you spoke as though it was a settled thing, so I must admit to curiosity. Why did your mind leap to that option first, Harry?”
Because it’s the sort of thing I would have thought you’d do if you meant this slavery bit. Because it’s the sort of thing my relatives would have loved to have me do, if they weren’t too anxious about my freakishness rubbing off on them.
But those were unacceptable answers, so Harry sat up straighter and shrugged. “It seems to be the only thing the house-elves don’t do for you,” he said.
Narcissa shot a glance at Lucius, but Harry had no idea what message she meant Lucius to take from that; it seemed only to make him glare all the harder. Then she shook her head. “I was thinking of glamours instead. And decorative chains.”
Harry blinked. “Goblins know metal. Are we going to be able to fool them if the chains aren’t heavy?”
Narcissa smiled. “They’re also contemptuous of wizard magic. Glamour the chains enough, to look like heavy iron, and crude iron, and I think they’re likely to ignore the spells wound about them as not worthy of their attention.”
Harry leaned forwards as he considered that. Then he said, “And what would you want me to do for you on the days the goblins visited? Serve the food? Kneel down and have you use my head for a table?”
“What tales have you been reading?” Narcissa brushed a hand through her pale hair. “Those novels that purport to tell the truth about how pure-bloods once treated captured Muggles? I can assure you those are nothing but lies.” She paused exactly the right amount of time, then added, “No pure-blood of those times could have borne touching a Muggle that closely, or eating from a plate that had touched their scalps.”
Harry laughed, because she had meant him to, and because it was funny, and because he could feel Lucius quivering with suppressed indignation. “All right,” he said. “So something else. The serving?”
Narcissa nodded. “I think that you should scowl as much as you can, and clink the chains, and resist at least one order, so Lucius can pretend to blast you with the Cruciatus.”
Harry turned to look warily at Lucius. He still remembered the man standing in the graveyard when Voldemort had actually cast it on him, and that memory made the words pop out of his lips before he thought about them. “Are you sure that he can pretend? That he won’t cast it for real?”
Freezing silence from Lucius’s direction-and freezing silence from in front of him, Harry realized, with a sinking heart. He turned back around. Narcissa was sitting up with her lips pinched shut and her hands folded in her lap, looking straight at him with a more than disappointed sheen in her eyes.
“I did think you had come to trust us more than that,” she said quietly.
Harry sighed and responded as bluntly as he could, because that was what he had to do. “I trust you more than that. Not your husband. Draco is-okay. But Lucius and I have unfinished business between us.” He turned to look at Lucius. “Don’t we?”
*
The brat.
Lucius wanted to react with more force than that, wanted to snap and snarl and tear. It had been his first reaction when someone insulted him ever since he was a boy.
But his father had trained the immediate resorting to that reaction out of him at the same age. So now Narcissa’s eye bent on him reminded him of that training, and what they might stand to lose if they didn’t show Potter that they shared some common ground with him.
Lucius ground his teeth for a moment. Then he nodded slowly and said, “Yes. We do. I am not sure what you can do to compensate me for the loss of my house-elf, and I am not sure which price you want for the amount of danger I put your friend in.”
To his surprise, Potter’s teeth flashed in what looked like a grin. Lucius had expected simply a growl at the reference to Arthur Weasley’s youngest child. Instead, Potter leaned forwards and said, “You were willing to give up a vault to see me under your control instead of the goblins’. No one is going to question it if you take out a certain new sum of money, supposedly for the wards that you need to control me when I have my wand in hand.”
Lucius frowned. “To what end will the money go?”
“Find out the value of a house-elf,” Potter said. He looked as though he was standing in front of a classroom, the way he’d risen to his feet and put his hands on his hips. Narcissa’s slight smile said that she wasn’t inclined to interfere, so Lucius had to sit there and listen. “I’m sure there must be some kind of monetary value attached to them.”
“Priceless, now,” Lucius said tightly.
“More so than a human life?”
Lucius blinked. Then he said, “You are talking about the payment of a weregild.” The idea intrigued him, although it had been a century and more since anyone in the Malfoy family had paid one. They had mostly gone out of fashion along with the sorts of duels that tended to kill or incapacitate someone so badly that the payment was necessary.
“If that’s what they’re called.” Potter was supremely arrogant in his indifference to the matter of the price. Lucius felt his muscles coil with tension-
And admiration. Someone who declared himself beyond all laws like that, someone who turned his back on the accepted customs of law and social convention, was only an outcast and someone to sneer down one’s nose at until he had the power to enforce his will, at which point he became a Dark Lord. Or at least a wizard whose favor could be courted.
That Potter, under sentence of slavery, could somehow contrive to be someone like this hooked Lucius more powerfully than the idea of the weregild had. He wondered what would happen if Potter emerged from this year of slavery with his formidable will intact.
Someone worth courting, indeed. Someone who might as well have kindly feelings towards the family who had sheltered him.
“And the amount of money that a house-elf is worth would be subtracted from the weregild of a human life?” he asked, although he already knew where Potter’s thoughts were tending, and it seemed as if he should have from the time those intense green eyes focused on him.
“Yes, exactly,” Potter said, glaring at him, as though he suspected Lucius would renege on him even when he had come this far with feeling out what Potter wanted.
Lucius held up a hand to gentle him, and felt some strength return to him when Potter settled back on his heels instead of striking out. Yes, this could work. “Then I agree to the terms. Provided that we can consult some of the books in my library as well as the more recent tomes of law that might be in the Ministry libraries, and determine what the worth of property balanced against a life is.”
Potter blinked, and then nodded. “All right. When you give me whatever amount of money it is, then you’ll forgive me for having freed Dobby, and I’ll forgive you for having put the diary in Ginny’s cauldron.”
Lucius might have objected to this framing of the debate, but that was in a different lifetime, one where putting the diary in the cauldron had worked out and the Dark Lord stood before him. He nodded. “I will resign my disdain towards you, and speak to your cordially. I ask that you do the same with me, and not hold my actions against my son.”
Potter rolled his eyes. “There’s other things that I can hold against Draco than your actions. He had some stupidities all his own, at Hogwarts.” Lucius refrained from asking, interesting as it would be to hear Potter’s side of some of those stories. It wasn’t really what they were here for at the moment. “But he and I have come to a sort of truce now, so that’s all right.”
“Does that mean that you will trust us more now?” Narcissa, voice deep and soothing as always.
Potter turned to face her, to consider her. Lucius remembered him saying that he trusted her, and concealed a smile. Potter was not naïve to do so, not exactly, as Narcissa had his wishes most at heart of anyone in the family right now, Lucius knew. But it was interesting that he turned instinctively to her, as Lucius did. She would probably exert the same gentle influence over Potter as she did over them, before long.
“I hope I can,” Potter said. “But I don’t think we can know for certain until the goblins visit the first time.”
Narcissa nodded. “We had the promise them they could come whenever they liked, but it might be wise to arrange a visit of our own initiative, so we can show them something we’ve prepared.”
Potter grimaced, but nodded. “All right. Glamours of chains. The idea that I’m a bodyguard and that’s the only reason I’ve been allowed to retain my wand. What else should we come up with?”
Lucius stood up and absented himself from the room as Narcissa and Potter began to discuss the details of the con they would create. In other times, with an ally he trusted more, he would have involved himself in the discussion, but he trusted his wife absolutely, and his presence would be unwelcome to Potter right now.
He would show his good will and understanding, rather, by going to research the matter of the weregild, and learning how much he needed to pay to settle the debt.
His stride lengthened, and he found himself smiling. A traditional, non-traditional way to settle the debt. Potter’s friends might find it repulsive, and Lucius’s associates certainly would have, but Potter had more good sense than Lucius had credited him with.
Chapter Five.
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