Chapter Twenty-Two of 'The Descent of Magic'- Like Compassion
Chapter Twenty-One.
Title: The Descent of Magic (22/?)
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Warnings: Issues of disability, angst, epilogue-compliant.
Rating: PG-13
Pairings: Harry/Draco, past Harry/Ginny and Draco/Astoria
Summary: Harry Potter, retired Auror, is also a budding magical theorist who likes a quiet life. When he discovers what seems to be a possible reason that so many pure-blood families are losing their magic and having Squib children, he keeps it quiet, because he knows it would only cause a storm of controversy. But an equally budding acquaintance with Draco Malfoy might change his mind.
Author's Notes: The title of the fic and a few details of Harry's life are taken from the story of Darwin, who was also reluctant to publicize the details of his evolutionary theory, knowing the controversy that would result. Both Harry and Draco are older in this story and have had their epilogue marriages, so avoid if that's not something you like. Chapter lengths will be variable, and this will probably be somewhere around 18 or 20 chapters.
Chapter One.
Thank you again for all the reviews!
Chapter Twenty-Two-Like Compassion
Harry woke up to concerned faces leaning over him, and Draco leaning over his leg, and he flushed as red as the ribbon on Highfeather’s medal. He braced his hands on the floor and started to sit up.
“Oh, Mr. Potter, you mustn’t move.” That was a woman Harry hadn’t spoken to, a tall pure-blood woman with more nostril in her face than anything else. She took her wand from her pocket as she spoke, and cast a few spells that made sparks rain down over his knee. Draco turned his head to half-look at her, but she didn’t see the deadly edge of his expression the way Harry did. “I’ve taken training as a Healer,” the woman continued. “You must remain as still as possible until we can get you to St. Mungo’s.”
“No, he needs movement,” someone behind the woman disagreed. “And fresh air. A walk back and forth on the balcony would cure him faster than anything.”
“Wine,” someone else said, a man whose face came into view as he craned his neck. “And a pain potion of some kind, poor bloke. Did you see how pale his face turned right before he fell?”
Harry blinked. It seemed that perhaps he hadn’t ruined everything after all by fainting in the middle of an important pure-blood gathering. Maybe it helped to have the audience on your side before you fell.
“Back off.”
That was Draco, but Harry only knew it because he’d heard that voice in many different moods now, from the public register Draco adopted to the sneering at the Healers he indulged in when they were in private. More than one person fell silent and turned to look, and then tumbled back from Harry in a graceful hurry when they found that Draco had his wand aimed at them. Even Highfeather moved further away, though she kept her hand on her medal as if it was a pledge of safe conduct. Harry noted the way her eyes moved from him to Draco, who still had his hand hovering above Harry’s knee, and knew that Draco would hate the way those eyes narrowed and she seemed to sniff.
“Well,” said the woman with the nostrils, snapping her wand back into her pocket and her head to the side as she moved backwards, probably, Harry thought, so no one would see the way her hand shook. “As if one could want to stay near someone who’s so rude to her.” She turned her back and looked around for a glass of wine, but no one handed her one. Harry checked his chuckle and turned to Draco.
He met a glare that would have done justice to the basilisk, and Draco saying in the same grinding tone, “You spent too long on your feet. Now you’ll have to spend longer in a bed. Do you understand?”
Harry did, but he wondered if Draco did. To be betraying such confidences in front of their possible allies might make Harry look weak, or Draco. Harry had no idea if pure-bloods considered it weak to care for someone outside of your family, but it seemed likely.
“Thank you for your concern,” he said, and tried to produce the carefully unimpressed smile that he thought would be the best fit for the situation-well, a situation where they were trying to convince the pure-bloods that they weren’t worried about what had happened, anyway. “If you could help me to get up, then I’m sure our kind hostess will offer me a seat and I can finish my speech from there.”
Draco hunched like a gargoyle now. Harry blinked. He wasn’t sure of much, with his head spinning dizzily between a hundred different possibilities for what could happen next and trying to keep track of the alliances that he thought were changing and drifting around him, and with the pain in his knee flaring up like a windstorm, but he knew one thing: he had just pissed Draco off even more.
I didn’t mean to. But there was little to do now but keep still and keep his gaze on Draco’s face, waiting uneasily for some sort of signal.
*
The idiot.
Potter seemed to think that he needed to preserve a little distance between them even now, but it was too late for that. Draco knew it had probably been too late for that the moment he came back through the balcony door, and certainly by the time that he made a dash for Potter. Given that, he was not about to tolerate Potter’s attempts to treat him as a mere acquaintance at best.
“You’re going to lie down,” Draco said. “And you know as well as I do that you’ve strained the joint too far, and that you’ll be in pain tonight if you don’t lie down immediately.”
Potter’s eyes widened to the point that Draco thought he might actually be able to see a jade-green slice of idiot hero brain. He kept staring into them, and let the other people around them think what they would. It was more important that Potter not permanently disable himself than that they keep or lose a few temporary allies. After the speech Potter had made, and the medal he’d awarded, Draco thought it likely that they wouldn’t drift as far away, anyway.
And all the time and effort and imagination he had poured into the potions and into breaking the memory charms on Potter’s knee would not be wasted.
Potter might be an idiot hero, but he had enough sense left to know when he shouldn’t challenge someone. Draco presumed it was how he had got along with Granger so well all these years. “All right,” he said meekly, and held out his hand so that Draco could help him up.
Draco ignored the hand and tapped his wand against the leg just above the knee. Potter drifted to his feet instead, in a variation of Mobilicorpus that gave the person it was cast on a little more control; he could move by waving his arms and kicking off with his other leg. Potter’s face was still sunset-brilliant as he stood up, but that wasn’t Draco’s problem. He herded Potter towards a chair, threatening to kick in his good knee when he hesitated.
Eyes were on them, wondering eyes and solicitous ones. Highfeather had already made several offers that Draco had declined or accepted on automatic courtesy; he was grateful, for once, that his parents had made some effort to drill it into him.
But for Draco, at that moment, no eyes were more important than Potter’s.
Perhaps that should have terrified him. It didn’t. Instead, he simply settled Potter into his chair and pulled out the pain potion he had brought with him on instinct. “Here you are,” he said, and held the flask to Potter’s lips.
*
What are you doing?
Harry stared up at Draco and shook his head, then grimaced as his teeth bumped against the lip of the glass flask. Perhaps not the brightest idea that he’d ever had, then. “Are you mad?” he tried to mutter under his breath, not easy when he knew that everyone in the room was listening to them. “Do you think-don’t you think this has gone far enough?”
Draco’s hand holding the flask didn’t move, but his other one did, pressing forwards and down, and Harry realized that he had it on the nape of Harry’s neck, urging him to swallow the potion.
Harry hesitated once, then decided that, really, things couldn’t get much worse, could they? If Draco had decided it was safe to do this in public, then it must be. Draco was the one who knew pure-blood life from the inside out.
He swallowed, and the potion burned away some of the pain and the sensation that his brain was jumping around inside his skull, seeking a way out through his ears. His throat burned, but that was a good trade-off. And a moment later, the ache in his leg eased enough that Harry knew he could stand up.
He sat up, against the pressure of Draco’s hands, and smiled at him. “Thank you,” he said, then turned his head until he saw Highfeather, and bowed to her. “I’m sorry to have ruined your meeting,” he said.
“Nonsense,” Highfeather said, in the bracing tones that Harry thought she usually reserved only for intimate friends. “You gave us a very interesting speech, one that I think will linger in the memories of everyone here.” She glanced around at the other members of the Esoteric Song Society, and there were nods, sniffs, a scattering of applause.
Harry blinked. She’s telling them that that should linger in their memories more than my collapse. Wow, she really is on our side now.
“An interesting speech,” Draco said, his voice clipped the way it got when he was struggling against some high emotion. Harry wondered if he knew that he was doing it. “A thrilling one. But now, I think, Mr. Potter needs to make sure that he gets home and into bed as soon as possible.”
A few of the stares coming at them turned speculative, but if Draco wasn’t going to care about them, then Harry wouldn’t, either. He nodded and started to stand up, but stopped when Draco’s hands all but tightened around his throat. Harry leaned back against the chair and blinked at Draco, wondering when he had decided to care instead of be insulted.
“And without being on his feet as he does it,” Draco added, eyes fastened to Harry’s now as if he had no intention of letting go.
Harry just shook his head. “I’m all right to walk a few hundred meters to the Apparition point,” he said. He didn’t think Highfeather’s house was that far from it, but better to be generous with the distance than give Draco a reason to be angrier with him.
“Is that what you think?” Draco shifted his weight so that he was pressing down on Harry’s knee with his hand.
Harry felt his face go cold. Draco gave him a small, mean smile, and moved back with a nod. “Then come along.”
His spell, a Mobilicorpus, got Harry out of the chair and floating along. Harry felt the blood that had left his face come back with a vengeance when people stood back in an aisle to let them pass. It wasn’t that he had wanted to avoid attention, exactly; he had come in formal dress robes and prepared for a speech for a reason. But making a fuss because of his injury was something he had spent years in Grimmauld Place to avoid.
Draco seemed to have lost all awareness of the political situation, or at least any semblance of caring about it. He exchanged a few words with Highfeather, who nodded and once again played with the ribbon around her neck, smiling at Harry.
“Thank you for coming to a meeting of the Esoteric Song Society,” she said, holding her hand out to Harry. “I do hope that you will come back and enjoy my hospitality again.”
Harry bowed over her hand and tried to murmur something that he hoped sounded convincing. He was tired, and he was floating, with the sense of disorientation and wanting to grab a solid piece of furniture and hang onto it that always accompanied that, and really, he would have been perfectly happy to go home and sleep for hours.
Except that he hadn’t wanted to drag Draco along with him, particularly when Draco was already fed up with him.
He waited until they were out the door, and then until they were far enough from the door that Harry thought no one could eavesdrop on them. He kept his voice light. “Thank you. If you don’t want to come with me, you don’t have to. Kreacher will take charge of me the minute I Apparate back, you know.”
“What makes you think that you can Apparate anywhere?”
Harry blinked, mildly insulted, and finally turned to look at Draco. “There’s this license they gave me that says I can.”
Draco shut him up with a look that Harry thought he should have used on Scorpius long before now, one that made Harry’s throat tighten and his urge to cough take over. He shook his head back and forth and recovered in a minute, but by then, Draco had herded him to the Apparition point and had a hand on his back that seemed to challenge Harry to do what he could to break free-if he really wanted to.
“They’re still watching,” Draco murmured. “You recovered from the mistake of not taking care of yourself, but you don’t want them to think that we have a disunited front for any reason.”
No, Harry didn’t. He held his tongue and scowled. Draco curled an arm around his waist and one around his shoulders, drawing him close.
And suddenly Harry could feel the silken cloth of Draco’s robes against his cheek, he could close his eyes and breathe him in, and he had the perfect excuse to hold on tightly to Draco as they moved through the dark, squeezing space of Apparition.
Why was I objecting again?
It only took that time of an Apparition for Harry to make peace with his feelings. He still didn’t know when the hour would come to confess them to Draco, but at least they were there, and he knew it, and he could stop worrying about what it would mean for their alliance. Now, he knew.
*
Draco grunted at the house-elf who immediately bobbed out to receive them. Kreacher would take care of Potter, as he had said, but Draco stepped into the house anyway and floated Potter up the stairs, then deposited him in his bed and stood guard while Kreacher fetched a tray of food, more pain potions, a glass of water, and a softer robe.
Once, Potter started to lift his wand. Draco looked at him, arms folded. Potter immediately fell back against his pillow and looked at Draco with shining eyes.
Draco kept the steady expression on his face with an effort. He would have thought that Potter would dislike anyone who crossed his will, even now. Yes, he had matured in many ways since their Hogwarts days, but he had cared enough to go up against the collective desires of the pure-bloods of the wizarding world. That bespoke someone who was still used to getting his own way.
And, well, he was Harry Potter. Not many people could have refused him in the last few decades.
“If you think I need to rest, then I will,” Potter said, and closed his eyes. His forehead acquired some new wrinkles as he shifted the leg.
“When did you start realizing that you should have sat down to deliver that speech?” Draco asked grimly, taking a seat on the edge of the bed. He had already come up with and rejected several ways to begin this conversation. He couldn’t accuse Potter of doing this to spite him, or to set back the cause they were fighting for. Potter actually did care about house-elves and the future of pure-bloods in the most sickening Gryffindor way.
“Before I stood up,” Potter admitted, his head turned so he could look past Draco while he ate some of the translucent slices of ham that Kreacher had brought up. “But Highfeather said that I should stand, and I thought I shouldn’t refuse in case it was a test.”
“A test,” Draco said, and shut his eyes as he sighed. “Potter, not all pure-bloods are that paranoid or searching, you know.”
“I don’t know,” Potter said simply. “You’re the only member of that society I’ve ever known who acts like a member of that society. Neville and Scorpius and Ron and the rest of them are different. And you searched hard for a way to disprove my theories.”
Draco looked at him again. He could have said many things, but all of them were too sharp in his mouth, and none of them would solve the problem it seemed they had here.
“You need to stay off your feet for at least the next five days,” he said.
Potter raised an eyebrow. “And you know that because you’re a Healer?”
“Because that’s how long it will take me to brew another dose of the potion that will last longer,” Draco said, standing. “I’ll try to make sure that I have all the ingredients I need here, but I’ll almost surely need to venture out to buy more, and Granger may need our help for our movement during that time, too. You’re only to give her the help that you can give from a bed, mind.”
“You’re staying?”
Draco turned. Potter hadn’t said that in the tone that Draco would have if someone had assumed they could stay at the Manor without being invited. Draco needed to see the expression on Potter’s face to judge his tone.
Potter’s eyes were soft, his limbs melting into the bed, the lines of pain on his face tumbling down like spring rain. Draco tried to imagine the last time someone had been that thrilled by his mere presence and…
Could not remember. Could not imagine.
Perhaps his mother, when he was first born.
“Thank you,” Potter whispered, before Draco could say anything. “I wanted you to, but I didn’t know how to ask. Thank you.”
And he closed his eyes and dropped straight into gentle, natural, relieved sleep, without even the pain potion Kreacher had brought.
Draco stood still for a long time before he could make himself leave the room, and even then, he had to pause outside Potter’s room and rest his forehead against the wall beside the door, his eyes closed, his body working with shudders, before he could come up with the list of Potions ingredients he would need to transport from the Manor.
Chapter Twenty-Three.
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