Chapter Seven of 'Easy as Falling'- An Unexpected Visitor

[lomonaaeren]

Chapter Six.

Title: Easy as Falling (7/?)
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairing: Harry/Draco pre-slash
Warnings: Somewhat crackish humor, a bit of violence
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Harry doesn’t really like the way things are going in the wizarding world. But who’s going to do something about it?...Him, that’s who!
Author’s Notes: This is the first chapter in a series of linked arcs about Harry becoming a Benevolently Snarky Dark Lord. It’s a prequel, or backstory, to my one-shot “Charming When He Needs to Be.” This will feature irregular updates and chapters or stories of various length to explain how the wizarding world ended up the way it did in “Charming.”

Chapter One.

Thank you again for all the reviews!

Chapter Seven—An Unexpected Visitor

Draco opened the newspaper and stared at the front page for a moment. Then he laughed, hard enough to bring one of his house-elves popping into the breakfast room, where it stared at him.

“Master Draco is needing some water?” the elf asked in a piping voice, its ears standing almost straight up.

Draco waved it away, his hand wrapped around his mouth as he studied the page. The picture was of the Board of Governors crowded in front of Hogwarts’s gates, their noses pointing straight up into the air. They were trying to look regal and in control, but that was hard when tendrils of iron on the gates kept uncoiling and poking them in the arses, trying to make them move further away.

The article was less informative than that picture. Draco skimmed it, but it was too obviously from the Board’s point of view, proclaiming that they had tried to give Harry Potter an ultimatum and he had been unreasonable. The way Draco saw it, they had indeed offered that ultimatum and been marched out.

The idea that Potter’s bonded with Hogwarts never occurred to them.

Well, Draco had to admit it hadn’t occurred to him, either, until Potter offered the information. But why let a perfectly good triumph over his enemies be ruined with that little bit of extra information?

He put the article aside to show Rosenthal later, and then leaned back and stared at the ceiling, working out ways that he could put this story into the speech he would give later that day. The speech had to go a certain way, of course, hinting delicately at the rumors about Minister Tillipop that Draco had planted and scheduled to appear in a few days’ time. But there was no reason he couldn’t bring up the new Dark Lord, too, and comment equally delicately about the exemplary way he seemed to be handling his school.

Draco laughed aloud, this time from the sheer pleasure of thinking about Potter showing the Governors the door, and popped to his feet. If nothing else, he had Potter to thank for giving him this feeling of sunshine in the world.

*

“Master Harry Potter Dark Lord Sir! There is being someone here to see you!”

Harry glanced up. Oddly enough, his first thought was that Malfoy might have come back, and he smiled. Then he wondered at the smile, and shook his head to focus on the house-elf in front of him. “Well, who is it?”

“He says his name is being Bradley Williams, Master Harry Potter Dark Lord Sir.” The house-elf had stopped wringing its hands, probably because Harry hadn’t punished it, and regarded him anxiously. “He is threatening not to go away.”

Harry shrugged. He recognized the name Bradley Williams as that of a Gryffindor who had been a few years behind him, and an eager part of Dumbledore’s Army during the Battle of Hogwarts. Perhaps he had become a reporter and wanted to interview Harry. Either way, Harry doubted he was dangerous to Harry right in the middle of his own Court. “Show him up to the office, then.”

The elf bobbed its head again and vanished. Harry leaned back in his chair and stretched. He was tired of writing letters and trying to come up with multiple convincing ways to explain why he had called himself a Dark Lord. Sooner or later people were just going to have to get used to reality, and understand that he had chosen the title because he wanted to.

It’s strange how they spent so many years expecting me to act mad and spoiled and Dark, but none of them believe it when I declare that I am that way.

Williams came up the moving staircase a few minutes later. He stood in the doorway instead of coming closer and stared at Harry. Harry arched his eyebrows and waved him forwards. “You came to see me,” he said, when Williams still hesitated. “You might as well come the rest of the way inside.”

Williams gave him a quick, nervous smile and walked over to drop into the chair facing Harry, the same one Malfoy had sat in. “I know,” he muttered. He had darker blond hair than Malfoy did, and darker eyes. But almost anyone’s eyes would look darker than those pale grey ones, Harry thought. “You frighten me, though.”

Harry sighed, but did what he could to paste a smile on his face. “What about me frightens you?” he asked. “The magic? The fact that I called myself a Dark Lord? The only reason I did that was to protect Hogwarts.”

Williams started and then gaped at him. “But why would that protect Hogwarts?” he asked, after a few minutes in which Harry thought he might suffocate from breathlessness. “You don’t know—there’s no way that it could. They’ll just come after you and hurt you more than they would if you’d stayed an Auror.” He coughed and toyed in his pocket with his wand, and Harry nodded. Maybe he had come as a messenger with an ultimatum from the Ministry, and was trying to figure out how to lead into the subject.

“They’ll leave Hogwarts alone if they don’t want to face my magic,” Harry replied. “And them leaving it alone is really all I care about.”

“You don’t care about other people?” Williams faced him squarely now, and he had his hand on his wand firmly. Using my supposed indifference to nerve himself to face me, Harry thought wisely. He doesn’t have to worry about whether the Ministry is doing something just or not if I’m frightening.

“I care about the way they treat Hogwarts, and the way they treat my friends, and the way they treat me,” Harry said, mentally ignoring the Hermione-voice in the back of his head that murmured he would have to care about more things than that eventually, or he would start to lose allies. “Right now, that’s as far as I want to spread my magic. Hate me if you want, but that’s what I want to do.”

Williams shook his head a little. “I don’t hate you, but you are shortsighted,” he murmured. “You don’t think about how much you’re scaring people, and you don’t think about the way that you’ll go.”

Harry blinked at him. He had to admit, it was a little refreshing to have someone argue with him who wasn’t using the same tactics Hermione did. “What do you mean? By proclaiming myself a Dark Lord, I’ll inevitably turn out to be as bad as Voldemort, is that what you’re saying?”

Williams flinched at the name, and then took a deep breath. “You’ll do things in the name of defending Hogwarts that are evil,” he said. “You have to care about other things, especially when you’re as powerful as you are. You just have to.”

Harry would have replied, but that was when Williams took his wand from his pocket and said, “Avada Kedavra.”

Harry might have been able to resist the Killing Curse yet again when it hit him, but he wasn’t about to take the risk. He dived under the desk instead, and the curse soared overhead and hit the wall behind him. Harry rolled back over and propped himself up on one elbow, staring at Williams, who was calmly turning around and focusing his wand on him again.

“Are you mental?” Harry panted.

“That’s one thing I’m sure they’ll say about me when I succeed and deprive the world of the harm you’ll do it,” Williams replied, sounding unconcerned. “And I’m sure someone will manage to argue that I should be arrested for your murder. But it really doesn’t matter, you see. You’ll still be gone, and the world will be safe. I won’t care about them and what they say any more than you care about the people who will compare you to You-Know-Who.”

“A would-be killer who still can’t say Voldemort’s name,” Harry said, and reared up on his knees. “I would have hoped the one who took me out would have more courage than that, at least.”

Williams’s face twisted, and he charged. Harry didn’t know if he intended to use the Killing Curse again, and he didn’t wait to find out. He flung himself at Williams instead, and the two of them went down to the floor with the wand between them, and Harry fumbling for his own, and Williams spitting and cursing into his face.

And then Harry remembered where they were, and the advantage he had, and felt correspondingly stupid.

He laid his arms down on the floor, and requested Hogwarts’s help. Williams was grunting now as his hands closed on Harry’s throat, but he cried out in the next instant when the floor thrust up beneath his chest and legs and threw him off Harry.

Harry sat up and dusted himself off, his eyes locked on Williams. Williams lay still in the middle of the floor, because every time he tried to sit up, manacles of wood appeared and coiled around his wrists. He finally understood the general idea and fell back with an angry, incoherent sound, his eyes locked on Harry’s face.

“Why?” he asked. “You ought to know that I’m not the only one, that others will come who don’t want anyone to become a Dark Lord.”

Harry touched the floor and thanked Hogwarts silently. The magic came back to him with a curl and wave like the tail of an excited kitten. Harry smiled a little. Hogwarts was proud of defending him, and perhaps happy that it got to do something. Lifting Malfoy in his chair the other day and marching the Governors out yesterday hadn’t been nearly enough.

“Who are you with?” he asked. “Who do you represent? Are they likely to send someone else now that you’ve failed?”

“I came for myself.” Williams lifted his head as much as he could when Hogwarts had come up with a collar for his neck, too, and stared unflinchingly at Harry. “I thought someone who knew you should be the one to kill you, that you might appreciate the personal touch. And the Ministry hasn’t overcome their fear yet. By the time they do, it might be too late to kill you.”

Harry sighed. “God knows why I believe you, but I do.” He wondered for a moment why Hogwarts hadn’t picked up on Williams’s hostile intent, and then laughed a little, shortly. He had mostly armed the school’s defenses against people hostile to Hogwarts, not himself. It hadn’t occurred to him that someone might want to kill him without also wanting to close the school.

“You’re going to go evil, you know,” Williams said, watching him with clear, untroubled eyes, even as the wooden manacles lifted him and wrestled him into position against the wall.

“I suppose when that starts, my friends will be the ones to stop me,” Harry said, and leaned back in his chair behind the desk, and pondered Williams. If he hadn’t come from the Ministry or the Board of Governors, then they wouldn’t care what Harry did to him, or if he sent him somewhere, or if he told everyone what he had done.

That’s the best thing to do.

The thought seemed to come from Hogwarts, rather than Hermione. The Hermione-voice in the back of his head generally advised him to do less reckless things. Harry nodded slowly. He had told everyone he was a Dark Lord, whether or not that was a good thing, and he had to live with the consequences.

Like people coming to slaughter me.

But the people who thought he was their victim would need to live with the consequences, too. Harry leaned forwards and smiled at Williams. He didn’t seem nervous, even though Harry had tried to make his smile as unnerving as possible. He just watched Harry and shook his head slightly.

“You don’t know what will happen,” he said. “You don’t know how many people will oppose you. And someday soon, one of them will get through and kill you. I almost did.”

“I wasn’t suspecting you,” Harry said. “Doesn’t that say something about my innocent and unsuspicious nature, that I just let you walk right in here and you almost killed me?”

“You can’t be innocent any more,” Williams said. “You’re a Dark Lord.”

Harry rolled his eyes and stood up. “That bloody title has blinded you. You think you already know the story and how it’ll go, don’t you? The bloody hero who’ll kill me, the way that someone has to be a hero and the horrible things I’ll do now that I have the title? But maybe I’m interested in telling different stories.”

“You can’t,” Williams said, although he squirmed a little in his bonds as though he was worried about what Harry would do next. “You started telling this one when you started talking about being a Dark Lord, and you can’t take that back because you’re tired of it. You have to keep going ahead and hope that someone else doesn’t make it through.”

Harry smiled. “No, I don’t. I can still give you a different name than hero.” He moved forwards and stood so close to Williams that his eyes almost crossed as he regarded Harry. “Murderer. Assassin.”

“Killing a Dark Lord isn’t murder,” Williams said.

“Killing a Dark Lord who never hurt anyone and hasn’t come up with any plans of conquest yet might be,” Harry said gently. “And I don’t intend to let the Ministry judge you and comfort you. I’m going to let the press judge you.”

“Look, this is ridiculous,” Williams said, struggling hard enough now that Harry had to command Hogwarts to hold him tighter. “You had to know this would happen. You don’t have the right to act completely surprised.”

“I could be surprised about the length of time that it took, maybe,” Harry said. “But what matters is I’m going to give you a punishment of my own. You thought you could murder me without consequences. It’s time to show you, and them, the kind of consequences I hand out.” He put his hands on either side of Williams’s face and closed his eyes, reaching for his power the way he had when he bonded with Hogwarts.

Williams cried out, but Harry thought it was more from the strangeness of the magic flowing through him than because he was in pain. Sure enough, when he opened his eyes and looked again, Williams’s face was pale, his jaw dangling—

And his face changed, the way Harry had wanted it to be. Across his forehead ran the letters in pimples arranged the way Hermione had once cast a spell to arrange them on Marietta’s: MURDERER.

“There you are,” Harry said, and smiled at Williams, and dropped him on the floor. The manacles coiled back down into the wooden floorboards, and Harry patted Williams on the shoulder. “Now you can go and live your normal life, but anyone who looks at you will know what you tried to do.”

Williams felt at his forehead and otherwise looked so panicked that Harry drew his wand and conjured a mirror. Williams stared at the pimples, and then set his jaw and looked at Harry as if he thought Harry would kill him for speaking the words but he had to do it anyway.

“You have no right to do that,” he whispered. “It was a cruel thing to do.”

“And trying to kill me wasn’t?” Harry raised his eyebrows and shook his head. “See, I used to care about that sort of thing, balancing fairness and everything, and not doing bad things even to people who did bad things to me. But now I’ve lived in the wizarding world for several years without a war, and I realize that no one else thinks like that. They just want to take advantage of me and then get upset when I defend myself. I don’t see any reason to indulge them in a way that gives them all the moral high ground.”

“But I’ll bear this for the rest of my life.” Williams reached up and felt at his forehead, fingers stumbling among the pimples.

“And if you got your way, I wouldn’t have had the rest of a life,” Harry said sharply. “Shut up and go away.”

Williams looked as though he would have liked to stay there and argue, so Harry had the floor rear up in front of him in a temporary desk, shoving him towards the moving staircase. Williams was still trying to protest when the door shut in front of his face and he began to ride the staircase down.

Harry leaned on the wall and sighed. Then he straightened up.

He wanted to tell his friends what had happened, preferably before they got the news from the papers. But there was someone he wanted to speak to first.

*

Draco jumped when he turned around. One moment he had been alone in the sitting room that he and Rosenthal were setting up as an interviewing room, making sure the decorations showed just the right amount of taste and not enough wealth to offend, and the next second Potter was standing behind him.

“How did you get in here?” Draco asked, swallowing against his own heartbeat and frowning at Potter.

“Oh, I persuaded the wards to let me in,” Potter said, and then focused on him. “Someone came into the school today and tried to kill me. I didn’t anticipate that happening.”

Draco blinked, but decided that he would do better by going along with Potter’s mental way of looking at the world, especially when Potter could walk through his wards like they weren’t even there. “Really? I did. I didn’t know it would happen so soon. I thought the Ministry would wait to see what your real intentions were, because most of them probably don’t believe that you really set yourself up as a Dark Lord.”

“He was someone who knew me, and was acting on his own, not from the Ministry.” Potter shook his head. “I didn’t anticipate that at all. I need you to tell me how you overcame your past and made yourself appear reasonable to the press. They all think I’m evil now, and they hate me. I’m going to defend Hogwarts, but I want them to leave me alone most of the time, not constantly challenge me. How did you do it?”

Draco felt as though his eyebrows might levitate off his face. But he managed to smile and say, “You know this information isn’t going to be free, right?”

Potter nodded. “But I don’t know what you want me to pay you with. The open support of a Dark Lord could hurt you more than it could help you.”

Draco thought for a moment, but he could think of nothing better than the plan that had immediately leaped into his head. “Why don’t you stay to dinner, and we’ll talk about it?”

Potter didn’t even pause to consider before he nodded. “I’d like that.”

And so would I, Draco thought. Perhaps it was only because Potter was someone who wouldn’t be horrified if Draco said what he was really thinking, but it was still an interesting impulse.

“Come on, then,” he said, and led the way further into the Manor.