Title: The Night With Stars

Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.

Pairing: Harry/Lucius

Warnings: Angst, violence, mentions of past torture and gore

Rating: R

Summary: Two years after the war, and Lucius is back in a position of power as if he's never been gone. Harry, gifted himself with power that he's grown tired of denying, decides that he might as well enlist Lucius to help him change the Ministry instead of trying to struggle against him.

Author's Notes: Another of my Wednesday one-shots, for the following anonymous request: Harry/Lucius. In which Harry is intelligent enough to realize that working with the enemy will be more productive than trying to battle it out. Could be political Harry OR magically powerful Harry. Post-voldemort if possible. Maybe even mentor Snape here. Other than the mentor Snape being a portrait, this is basically the plot of the fic. It will probably have five to six parts.

The Night With Stars

Chapter One—Who Calls

Harry stepped into the Minister's office, already crowded with people who wouldn't call themselves flunkies, and waited for the reaction to his presence to subside.

It took a moment. It always did, at least since the war. Harry's power soared around his shoulders in a snapping comet tail that disturbed dust, made people smell various things that mattered to them—like Amortentia, they'd told Harry—and ruffled the air and made it clearer and purer. And it apparently weighed on their heads and skin in a way it never did to Harry.

When the non-flunkies looked as if they could discuss things again, Harry sat down in the chair in front of Kingsley's desk and paid calm attention to him. Kingsley gave him an apologetic look and held up his wand.

"Do you mind?" he asked, and when Harry shook his head, cast the small Wind Charm that would clear the heads and noses of the people in the room and set up a breeze to counter the one Harry's magic always caused.

The noise didn't resume when their heads had cleared, because these people were more polite than that. Harry waited a little, and then asked, "What did you want to see me about, Minister?"

Kingsley glanced once around the room. Harry looked with him. He didn't actually know the names of most of these people. The post-war Ministry went through constant changes, as people who had worked willingly with Voldemort got exposed and sent to Azkaban, and others Harry had thought they could trust said something thoughtless about Muggleborns and got overheard.

Harry knew these were the current heads of Departments, though, or at least undersecretaries. He nodded again once Kingsley turned back to him. "Then you've made the decision?"

"Yes." Kingsley cleared his throat even though there was nothing to clear it about. "We—can't, Harry. We're sorry. But what you're asking for is too sweeping a change, and too quick."

Harry sat where he was, tapping his hands against the arms of the chair.

"Please don't be angry," Kingsley continued, and then stopped. Maybe he realizes that pleading tone is inappropriate for a Minister actually in control of his Ministry, Harry thought snidely. "I mean—understand that everyone needs to go through the appropriate channels, Harry. That includes the magically powerful."

Harry sighed a little. "Can you tell me one thing?" When Kingsley nodded anxiously, Harry continued, "What is so objectionable about giving proper schooling to Muggleborns before they enter the wizarding world? About inviting them to attend the sort of tutoring and play groups that children raised in the wizarding world have? About checking on them to make sure their relatives don't abuse them?"

His magic curled and howled around him when he said that, but Harry ignored. Rita Skeeter had discovered eighteen months ago that he'd been abused and gleefully abandoned talking about Dumbledore to talk about that. Harry had grown past and around that wound of public attention.

And Skeeter had done him a favor, even though she hadn't meant to. What everyone knew about Harry, no one else could use to blackmail or hurt him.

"It's not that it's objectionable," said Kingsley weakly, his eyes on the space immediately beyond Harry's shoulders. Harry assumed a black cloud was forming there, the way it sometimes did. "It's that you're asking for immediate, huge changes. You know how slowly the Ministry moves. We would need time, we would need money, that you're not letting us have."

"I offered to donate the money. I've already started construction of some of the buildings that could support schools and orphanages."

"The problem is," said one of the undersecretaries who worked in the Department of Magical Law Enforcement, "we have to question what sort of authority you have to establish these schools and orphanages. You don't know much about children, do you? You have to listen to the experts."

"Those experts who've spent decades assuming we could leave abused children in the Muggle world?" Harry smiled at the tall, thin woman, April Gunarke, who looked away from him uneasily. "You know what that nearly resulted in with both myself and Voldemort."

"Did result in," whispered someone who seemed to assume he would be anonymous.

Harry just looked at him. "With Voldemort, yes. But if you're going to say that I'm the worst result of that system you can imagine, I'm going to respond that you seem to have a rather limited imagination."

Silence for a moment, and then Kingsley leaned forwards. "Undersecretary Gunarke does have a point, Harry. You could soothe a lot of anxieties by working with the experts the Ministry employs."

"I tried that for the last month," Harry said, and leaned forwards. The magic moved with him, making the air burn and ripple. Harry waited patiently for some of the dropped jaws to pop up again and the glazed eyes to focus, then shook his head. "And they told me there was nothing that could be done. Not small steps, not temporary measures. Nothing."

Kingsley cleared his throat and looked around once at his enchanted subordinates. Harry shrugged unrepentantly when Kingsley turned back to stare at him. He had given up apologizing for his magic, too.

"I think you perhaps took their words too literally. If you explained some of your plans and what you would like to do—"

"I tried," Harry said. "I spent hours in meetings with them. All of them told me that Muggleborn children needed to stay in the Muggle world for fear of violating the Statute of Secrecy. All of them told me no one could be sacked from the Ministry, or even asked under Veritaserum, if they knowingly refused pleas from abused children at Hogwarts, because that would violate privacy laws. All of them told me I couldn't use my magic to shelter some Muggleborn children because it might frighten the parents."

Kingsley hesitated. Harry thought he knew why. Kingsley had thought they were talking solely about young Muggleborn children, and that was the cause that was most important to Harry. But now Harry had brought up the issue of children already in the wizarding world.

"Those are true, as far as they go," said Kingsley. "But you can work for emendations in the laws. And visiting the parents of Muggleborns on your own is probably not a good idea, but you could hire someone qualified to go with you."

Harry smiled. "Who? They've all refused, and told me that Muggles need to be left alone."

Kingsley turned around as if he would look for the culprit among the undersecretaries. Harry serenely ignored the way some people shuffled and blushed. No one in this room had actually said that.

He couldn't even blame individual people for this, really. Harry was past the notion that he could blame Voldemort or Dumbledore, and have his happy answer, and that everything would be better the instant he killed Voldemort or began to speak up against some of Dumbledore's policies.

The problem was wizarding culture. The culture that said Muggles were dangerous and pleasing at the same time, sort of like lions, and needed to be stayed away from. Some people were frightened by the thought of going among Muggles. Others were fascinated, but they just wanted to ask Muggles questions about how they got along without magic. Neither attitude would help Muggleborn children.

"You also can't make the case that all Muggleborn children are abused, or even the majority," said a fussy voice from the back of his room. Harry knew without looking that it was Ichabod Crabbe, who worked in the Department of Records. "I'm sure that many of them are well-treated by their parents. We would cause more harm than good by interfering with their family situations."

"The point is," said Harry, "we don't know. Because we have no numbers. Because no one's checked." His magic rose around him, and he ignored Kingsley's calming stare. "You might be right, but you can't know because you haven't gone and looked."

"There is no truth to the assertion that all Muggles are wild beasts, violent people who hate magic—"

"There is also no truth to the assertion that all Muggles would react calmly when confronted with magic that we've done a good job convincing them doesn't exist." Harry gestured to the black cloak snapping behind him. He knew it would be insubstantial right now; people would see it but not feel it touch them. Unless he willed them. "I know now that my accidental magic outbursts were unusually strong. Would anyone have known what to do with them, how to confront them?"

"If they wouldn't, you couldn't have expected your Muggle relatives to deal with them well." Crabbe was nodding as if he had solved the problem.

"But they did an especially bad job of coping with them," said Harry. He had no need to speak in further details, not when the details had been in all the papers for months already, with some repeated whenever the editors ran out of other news or got bored. "I want to make sure that doesn't happen to any other magical children."

"Mr. Potter, magic as intense as yours is—rare." Undersecretary Gunarke had probably been about to put "thankfully" in that pause, Harry thought. "You can't assume the treatment of all magical children living with Muggle relatives will be as bad as yours was."

"Or as good as you think it will be. We can't assume anything."

"Mr. Potter." That was Holden Perslana, who had changed his name from Umbridge after the war. "You sound dangerously close to voicing the sort of anti-Muggle bias I thought you had made it your life's mission to struggle against."

Harry shook his head slowly. "I've made my life's mission knowledge, Mr. Perslana. That means we need more of all of it."

He supposed it would also be fair to say that he had made his life's mission changing the Ministry, but that was the sort of thing they didn't need to hear about. Harry had lost the tendency to think he needed to explain everything after the war.

"I'm afraid that we can't help you." Kingsley brought his folded hands down with a little thump in the middle of his desk. Harry thought it was his way to regain control of the meeting. "Mr. Potter. I do appreciate what you want to do. But you want too much, too fast, and you won't meet with the experts."

"I told you that I had, and what they hadn't done."

Kingsley shifted a little under his stare, and shook his head. "I can't give you any different answer, Mr. Potter. For the sake of the stability of the Ministry and keeping families together, I can't."

Kingsley's eyes were pleading with him for understanding. And Harry did understand. Kingsley had won support from the political machine that was the Ministry, and he needed to stay in power to accomplish his own goals. They were no less urgent for him than Harry's were for him. Kingsley couldn't take the risk to help him.

But Harry said only, "I've learned that a family is who you choose. Not who you're blood-related to." He stood with a little bow of his head towards both Kingsley and the flunkies, and said, "Thank you for seeing me this morning."

The current of relaxation running around the room would have been visible to him even without the instincts he'd developed in the last two years. Harry hoped he hid the twitching of his lips well enough.

They thought he was defeated. They would reassure each other. What could he possibly do on his own? He'd come to them for help, and they'd turned him down. There was nowhere else he could go.

Their definition of nowhere, Harry thought, as he moved away from Kingsley's office and into the corridors, is not the same as mine.

His magic snapped behind him once more, making small blue fires spring up on the curtains. People rushed to put them out with water charms, and it was easy enough to do. Harry hadn't intended to burn Kingsley's office down behind him.

Merely to make them think a little. Merely to warm them, though there weren't many who would manage to take the warning.

Lucius leaned back and considered the request lying on the desk in front of him. It had made it through every protective spell he had around his study, every test to reveal harmful magic on the parchment, and every test with an artifact that would have shown Lucius subtler compulsions or attempts to make certain contingencies come true.

Either Potter was so clever there was no point in defending against him and it would be an honor to die at his hands—

Or the request was genuine.

For the first time, Lucius let himself fully read and soak in the words, rather than studying the color of the ink for hidden poisons or casting charms that made the parchment leap and rustle to the point where he could hardly read them anyway.

I won't pretend we're friends. But I thought we could be allies. I know your goals aren't the same as mine. But I thought they might coincide. And I have the power to make good on my end of any bargain we strike. Your power is beyond question.

I wish to change the Ministry. At first I only wanted to change it in one specific direction, to make the people who worked there see Muggleborn children and wizarding children growing up in Muggle homes as people who might be abused. Now, though, I realize the problem is the culture of the Ministry itself.

I might be stupid to ask you for help. After all, you benefited from that culture both before and after the war. But I do think that you could benefit from a change. Your name is still tarnished with some people, no matter what you do. For now, the ones you bribed and who respect your name and owe you favors are still in power in the Wizengamot.

For now.

I think you can see the numbers as well as I do. There are more Muggleborn children at Hogwarts this year than pure-blood children. The number who grew up in the Muggle world, even if they have magical parents, are two-thirds the number of those who grew up in the magical world. That number might increase more slowly than the number of Muggleborns, but things are changing.

If you want your family to go on having power and prestige in the midst of the change that's coming, then you need to do something that will endear you to the Muggleborns. And there are people in the Wizengamot who would never listen to you, but would listen to me. And this magic that I carry around me like Voldemort's final revenge.

Will you consent to a meeting with me? I can be free at any time in the next week except Saturday mornings. That's when I spend time with my godson.

Yours,

Harry Potter.

Lucius nodded slowly. Other than the possible touch of melodrama when he called his magic the Dark Lord's final revenge, this was the letter of someone both powerful and sensible, someone who had considered the odds and arrived at a reading of the current political situation much like Lucius's.

There is no harm in a meeting, Lucius wrote back, the only line he intended to scribe on the parchment. He would let Potter choose the time and place of the meeting. Not only would it make Potter feel more secure, but it would allow Lucius to draw him into further correspondence, to test his mettle and his potential as an ally, and think through the possible consequences.

In his own chest, though, the seat of all his own most secret impulses and thoughts, Lucius felt no real doubt as he watched the owl wing off into the sky.

Working with someone this adult will be a positive pleasure.