Title: Twice Over
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Content Notes: Angst, seduction, manipulation, violence, depression
Rating: R
Pairing: Harry/Draco
Wordcount: This part 3000
Summary: A second prophecy has been found, focusing on Harry Potter, that says he will cause the fall of a second Dark Lord. Harry, on the verge of retiring from the Aurors due to moral exhaustion, agrees to go on one last mission: infiltrating rising Dark Lord Draco Malfoy's organization
Author's Notes: This is the first of the July Celebration Fics I'm posting between the first and the thirty-first to celebrate Harry's birthday this year. It has a second part that will be posted tomorrow.

Twice Over

"Harry Potter will cause the new Dark Lord to fall."

Harry blinked as he watched the misty figure, of a male Seer in transparent silver robes, retreat into the prophecy orb. Then he glanced up at Gawain Robards. "And that's the whole prophecy? It seems almost—simple."

"I know." Robards had a grim face and a grim smile and a grim way of folding his hands on his desk. "But yes, that's the whole thing. The Seer, Kevin Erasmus, gave the prophecy this morning, in front of I can't tell you how many witnesses in the Department of Mysteries. The prophecy orb was safeguarded at once, so you could hear it, but many others know."

Harry nodded slowly. "You know I'm about to retire."

"I do. And I understand why. The paperwork and the crimes are repetitive, and they never stop. But this is an unusual mission, and one that we need you for, Harry. Even if there wasn't the prophecy, I would have been thinking about sending you. If nothing else, you knew the target."

Harry sighed. That much was true enough. And he had known enough about Draco Malfoy to think he was a reformed man, that he would never become a Dark Lord when he knew what it cost. Still, how could he leave the wizarding world to suffer if he was the only one who could fulfill the prophecy?

"What will be my excuse for joining his organization?"

"The same exhaustion that you've announced in the papers as a reason for your retirement. I think it shouldn't take much effort to portray yourself as cynical and fed up with the wizarding world…"

No effort at all, Harry thought, but he bent over Robards's plans and nodded along with them. However long this took, it was his final mission. Then he could go away and try to regrow what felt like a spirit that had been chopped short every time it tried to lift its head.

Forget the poetic metaphors and focus on work, Harry.

"Harry Potter."

Harry stood quietly with his hands in the air, well away from his body. To his surprise, Malfoy's guards had taken away his wand and other weapons, but had then brought him straight to their Lord. Harry had anticipated spending at least a few days in holding cells or with interrogators first.

"Lord Malfoy." Harry didn't think he could help the grimace that slipped across his face, but then, that would probably help with his disguise.

Malfoy laughed. "You don't have to call me by my title yet. Not until you mean it." He slid off the black, throne-like chair he sat in and strolled casually towards Harry. Other than the chair, nothing in the room was dark the way Harry had expected it would be after seeing Voldemort's preferred décor. The walls were made of pale wood with threads of gold running through it, and the floor was white marble in the same pattern. Large windows let in glimpses of green and gold from the trees and sunshine outside. Malfoy's "secret hideout," which hadn't been that hard to find, seemed to be under a Perpetual Sunny Day charm. Harry thought the only reason the Aurors hadn't attacked was that Malfoy had werewolves and vampires with him, not to mention rumors of powerful ritual magic.

"Let me get a look at you," Malfoy murmured, and reached out to take hold of Harry's chin. Harry did his best to stand still.

Malfoy himself looked colder and more sophisticated than he had in school, but otherwise not that different. Only a little taller, his hair shone as it hung to his shoulders in a long braid. He wore white robes with golden embroidery, slightly open in the front to show off a pale shirt. Harry noticed new flecks of blue and gold in his eyes, but then, he had never looked into them for this long before.

Malfoy nodded and released his chin. "One of my permanent magical modifications is to sense hostility to me and my cause. You don't reek of it, Harry Potter." Harry blinked. "But you still haven't told me why you've come to join me."

Harry glanced aside a little. "Because—nothing changes," he said, and he was speaking the pure truth. Exhaustion welled up out of him and turned into words. "I arrest Dark wizards, and more pop up. A lot of them are their family members who want revenge. People get out of Azkaban and go right back to crime. Someone baits Muggles and gets a scolding and a slap on the wrist, and then the next week they're doing it again. The Ministry has archaic laws that mean we can only hold onto Dark grimoires and artifacts permanently if we can convince the Department of Mysteries to take them. Otherwise, they have to be released to the hands of their 'rightful owners.' And werewolves are being used as experimental beasts for new versions of Wolfsbane without the protections regular wizards get, and there's that stupid new law that says you can only sell house-elves directly to someone else, not free them. Supposedly because freed house-elves are so unhappy. I'm sick and tired of this shit."

He looked back at Malfoy, and again spoke the truth. "I've heard some rumors that your changes are actually different, not just putting pure-bloods in power and persecuting Muggles like Voldemort wanted. I don't know if I believe that yet. But I wanted to come and find out the truth for myself."

Malfoy studied him intently for a moment. Then he said, "I won't preach to you, Potter. If you want to learn what I'm like, stay around me for a time and see what I do."

"That's exactly what I'm planning on."

Malfoy smiled like a devil in the sun, and turned to walk towards the far side of his throne room, beckoning Harry after him.

This could be going worse, Harry decided, and followed.

"This is the main reason that those experimental trials the Ministry wants to conduct on werewolves are so much bollocks."

Harry wanted to answer that the main reason should surely be that werewolves were people, too, with people's rights. But he couldn't make his throat move as he stared down at the courtyard in front of him.

Two floors below the balcony he stood on, wolves played on a long sweep of sweet-smelling grass, in between high hedges of hawthorn and roses. Wolves, not the mockery of them that Remus had become when he transformed. Their fur shone silver and black and white and fawn. Harry even saw one wolf who looked golden tip over a young cub and then tug on the young one's tail, eyes alight with fun.

"You taught them to transform on their own."

"I taught them to harness their lycanthropy as if it were the same inner force that makes someone an Animagus. Becoming an Animagus is dangerous; you can get trapped in your animal form or caught between forms or lose your mind. Well, the same thing can happen to a werewolf. But it doesn't have to. Honestly, most of the reason for their savagery is because all of us were taught from birth to believe they were savage. Of course terrified people, who believe with all their hearts that they're about to become wild human-killing monsters, do become that."

Harry watched as one white wolf sprawled in the sunlight, rolling on his back, waving his paws around. He swallowed. "And now they can transform whenever they want. What about the full moon, though?"

"It's still a powerful trigger on them, but they've got other triggers. Most of them transform automatically if they smell raw meat. And we work constantly on those transformations. At first, every time they change, they go wild. But we cage them and work them back into calmness, and sooner or later, that happens with the full moon, too."

"It—seems so simple. I mean, I don't want to downplay your achievement, Malfoy. But like someone should have discovered it before."

"That would be the bollocks part I was talking about, Potter. The Ministry has enough researchers and time and money to have found this. But they didn't. When have werewolves ever been a priority for them?"

Harry thought of what Remus could have had if someone had only talked to him and helped him, and closed his eyes.

"Potter?"

"Sorry. Just thinking that this came too late for some friends of mine."

"But not too late for my cousin."

Harry actually turned around and stared before he remembered that, of course, Teddy and Draco were cousins. He jerked his head down in a nod. "He's—shown no sign of transforming yet, and he's twelve. On the other hand, one Healer I talked to said it can sometimes happen at any age."

"True. Well, if it does, then this sanctuary is open to him."

Harry looked back down at the courtyard and a group of werewolves, wolves, playing stalk-and-pounce around a clump of trees, and said, "Yeah. I'm glad it is."

Malfoy let his forearm glance around Harry's shoulder. Harry shut his eyes. It felt as warm as sunlight.

"Uh. All right, then," Harry said, and averted his eyes from the vampire drinking from the throat of a young witch in front of him. He could feel his ears getting hot.

"You don't like this solution as well as my werewolf courtyard, Potter?"

"I just didn't know that vampires could feed from humans and give them pleasure like that." Harry would have looked around the large space, made of marble and pale wood like Malfoy's throne room, but his eyes would have only met more scenes like the one in front of him, so he kept his gaze firmly on his feet. He heard the sounds of soft music and splashing fountains and ecstatic gasping anyway.

"Not many did. To be fair, part of that was on vampires themselves. They preferred to drink as quickly as they could and get away. Which meant they often killed their victims, of course."

"So you didn't provide training or research for them the way you did for werewolves?"

"No. Only a place to do it in safety and slowly, with willing partners, where it's not a crime."

Malfoy led Harry out of the large room and shut the door. Harry blinked at the door, something about the pattern of leaves and palm fronds on it registering with him. "Wait. I know we're not in your manor. Did you decorate this one sort of like it?"

Malfoy glanced at him, his eyebrows slowly going up again. "Potter, this is Malfoy Manor. Transfigured."

"You can't Transfigure—"

"With a pattern of runes drawn in silver on the night of a blue moon, you can. If you make the pattern large enough, and have other magic at your disposal."

Harry considered it. It didn't sound possible to him, but then again, he knew nothing about ritual magic. "So you must have moved it as well."

"Yes. That took more magic, admittedly. And some favors owed to my giant allies."

"Then what's the Malfoy Manor that everyone thinks is there?"

"A Transfigured manor house, bound with the same sort of permanence magic, that used to belong to someone who annoyed me."

Harry paused as he thought about something else. "I bet some of your ancestors would be furious at what uses you've put Malfoy Manor to."

Malfoy's answering smile was slow and revealed more teeth than Harry thought most people had. "Potter, that's one reason I did it."

"So tell me what could make the great Harry Potter give up being an Auror when, by most reports, that's all he ever wanted."

Harry spent some time letting the delicate roast beef melt on his tongue before he answered. Malfoy did have good cooks, or maybe good house-elves. But that last thought didn't cause him as much guilt as it usually did. "I'm tired."

"I would think that we all are."

"I mean—tired spiritually." Harry tried to think of words to explain it that didn't sound stupid, because so much depended on him not sounding stupid. He had to make Malfoy fall somehow. For right now, Malfoy seemed content to sit on the other side of the vast stone table, with the flicker of the candles reflecting in his eyes and hair, and listen.

"I wake up in the morning, and I don't feel any hope," Harry said finally. "I accomplish something, and there's no lift in my heart. People praise me; I can't even smile. There's nothing left for me in the Aurors that makes me happy. I have to retire."

"So it's not so much about the unchanging nature of the job that you mentioned before," Malfoy murmured. A jewel-colored blue bird with a long tail soared through the window and landed on his shoulder. Harry started, but Malfoy only fed it as if he'd expected its arrival. "It's about wanting to be happy."

Harry shrugged. "Yeah. I don't know what that's going to look like yet. But I don't have time to plan for being happy in the Aurors, either. It's a time-consuming job. When I resign, then I'll be able to think."

"Why did you come here, then?"

"To see if there was something here that could make me happy." The lie sounded natural. "I think you've accomplished some amazing things, if what you've done for the werewolves and vampires is typical—"

"It is."

"But it wouldn't make me happy to join you."

"Why not?"

Malfoy leaned on his elbow and watched him with a look of such genuine interest that Harry stopped eating. A second later, he said, "Because of the fighting. Obviously you're going to face opposition from those who don't want a Dark Lord to take over the wizarding world. I don't want to be caught in the middle of another war, with no way to stop it."

Malfoy leaned slowly back. His face was thoughtful now. "You could help stop it. You could persuade some people to step down instead of fighting it."

"With you calling yourself a Dark Lord? I doubt it."

"I mean it." Malfoy smiled at him, but there was something different in his eyes now, a glint that Harry thought might have been excitement. "Really, I do. You have no idea how much respect your name still commands. If you told the people who follow your every exploit in the Daily Prophet that you believe I'm a force for good in the wizarding world, they would support me."

Harry just stared down at his plate. "I don't think that's true. They don't listen to me when I ask them to leave me alone and stop coming up to shake my hand in public. Why would they listen to me about something much more important?"

"Because the important things are also the abstract things, to them." Malfoy was suddenly close to him, breathing out against his ear, making Harry start and turn to face him. Malfoy smiled and studied him, and yes, that glitter was definitely present now. "They see you and want to touch you. You're there. You're real. But another wizarding war? Distant. Impossible. If Harry Potter talks about it, then I'm going to believe him."

Harry didn't know how long he sat there, caught in Malfoy's gaze and the strange, tempting version of the future it opened to him, but it couldn't have been longer than a few seconds. Then he snorted and shook his head. "Yes, but then I would be responsible for good people dying."

"How so?"

"Some people would fight anyway. Some of your people would fight. People would die on both sides. No, thank you."

"It's not your fault if that happens, Harry. Just like none of the deaths in the war with Voldemort were your fault. If you spoke up and asked people to let me take over, you would be doing all you could to prevent deaths, wouldn't you?"

Harry stiffened. That struck too close to home. He stood. "Thank you for dinner, Malfoy. I don't know what you wanted me to do about spending the night…"

Malfoy, smiling a little, stood. "Follow me."

"A bedroom right across the corridor from yours," Harry said flatly.

"Of course. You are an extremely honored guest."

Harry turned quickly at the fingers pressing into his shoulder. Malfoy smiled at him, his face seeming to flicker as the candle he held did.

"I've been hoping you'd come here for a long time," Malfoy breathed. "I don't think you're fully convinced yet. But that doesn't have to be a problem. Stay as long as is necessary for me to convince you, Harry."

He brushed his fingers across Harry's collarbone, then his chin against Harry's shoulder, and turned and went through the ornate door across from Harry's. Harry closed his eyes until he knew he'd regained his mental balance, then entered his own room.

It was absurdly large, a theme that extended to the bed and the wardrobe and the bathroom and the tables on either side of the bed. Harry opened one of the drawers in the nearest table and found quills, ink, and parchment.

He'd intended to write a report for Robards tonight, but honestly, he was too tired. He undressed and fell into bed, not forgetting to cast the charms that would warn him if someone entered the room and conceal his own noise, including any talking he did. He had a terrible habit of talking in his sleep, according to every partner he'd had.