Title: Secondhand Heroes

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

Rating: R/M

Warnings: DH spoilers (ignores epilogue), violence, torture, angst, profanity, paranoia, past character deaths.

Pairings: Harry/Draco

Summary: The world Harry helped save is darkening and changing around him, and he doesn't think he can save it a second time. Maybe hiding a fugitive Draco Malfoy is a start, however.

Author's Notes: This is a medium-length chaptered fic, with eight parts, and thus will end up being about 32,000 words. It's dystopia!fic, and for reasons that will be revealed later, some of the characters might seem rather OOC at first. The violence and torture warnings are serious; please don't read this fic if you have a weak stomach.

Secondhand Heroes

Harry saved Draco Malfoy because he was tired.

He was so tired that he couldn't Apparate when he came out of the Ministry, and so he stood with his eyes shut for some moments in the middle of Muggle London, swaying with the pulse of cars traveling on a distant street. He thought about collapsing in the middle of the alley and staying there until morning. Or, no, he wouldn't be allowed to remain until morning, would he? Someone would find him and take care of him. He'd wake to soft sheets—some poor bastard turned out of bed for him—and hushed whispers of awe and whatever he wanted to eat.

It made him so tired. He could have lived with hero-worship if the "worship" part of it hadn't become so literal.

He forced his eyes to open and his legs to move. Already he'd attracted a small crowd of wizards on their way to the Ministry for late-evening business or their way home, like him; he'd become good at sensing such things. They'd stare in adoring silence until one of them managed to come up and ask if he could be allowed to do something for Harry. And Harry couldn't stand that. The way he felt right now, he would cast a curse that would stick the questioner's tongue to the roof of his mouth forever.

And he wouldn't be sent to Azkaban for it.

That, Harry thought, as he managed to shamble out of the alley that housed the Ministry's entrance and into a second alley, sums up what's wrong with the wizarding world today.

The stones beneath his feet were dirty, the sky above him gray and dripping a mild, warm rain that Harry tilted his head back to drink. He would be soaked by the time he got home. He didn't care. No one shared his flat with him.

He'd thought, once, that people who had known him from childhood and remembered his bumps and bruises and poor scores in Potions class might be immune to the disease of loving him that had swept the wizarding world after his defeat of Voldemort at the Battle of Hogwarts. He'd been wrong, and bitterly, and loudly, and since then, he'd thought it best if he stayed alone.

Ron asked Harry to move in with him and Hermione every week, of course. He'd asked again this morning, in between giving Harry the names of the latest Dark wizards to be sent to Azkaban. Harry had pretended an intense interest in his paperwork, and Ron had clapped him on the shoulder and told him in a commiserating fashion that he understood; Harry wanted to get back to what was important, documenting the fates of victims. What was one Dark wizard or Death Eater more or less?

Harry had begun to scribble furiously as Ron left, and Ron had assumed he was working on a report and tiptoed out. In reality, Harry was composing the tirade on parchment that he couldn't yell into his best friend's face.

Scattered scraps of the tirade returned to him now as he walked down the alleys, passing the occasional Muggle and, far more often, the disguised wizarding placards that would reveal their true messages about peace and safety and law and order and turning in suspected Dark wizards only to those with a touch of magic in their blood.

What in the world is wrong with everyone? The Death Eaters took over the Ministry during the war, so you want to root them out of the Ministry; all right. But is throwing people in prison on the testimony of one person, without a trial, the way to go about it? Why are we developing spells that track Apparition and spells that destroy an individual's wand from a distance if it's thought to be used in a curse? If they're so necessary, why didn't they exist until the last year?

Why are we going back to literal witch-hunts? Why can the Aurors use the Unforgivables again? Why is everyone spying on each other?

But he kept the questions to himself, because when he tried to voice them, even Ron and Hermione only looked at him in wonder. Kingsley patted his shoulder and told him not to worry about it. Harry had saved the world from Voldemort, and had been recruited immediately into the Aurors, without even having to take his NEWTS. He'd done enough for the present. He could hunt down Dark wizards and bring them in, but why didn't he let other people handle the justice?

Harry was the only person he knew who thought it was too much, both the reverence paid to him for something he'd needed the help of two dead men to accomplish and the punitive measures taken against the Death Eaters. That meant something was wrong with him, didn't it? If only one person in the entire wizarding world—only one person on the right side, anyway—thought things had gone too far, then he must have a biased perspective. Everyone else agreed with each other.

Well, not the Order of the Dragon, if they were real. But Harry thought the rumors of a group of rebels dedicated to disrupting the harsh punishments and freeing the wizarding world from the tyranny of the Ministry were only propaganda, put about to keep people "alert." He wished them luck if they did exist, of course.

But it couldn't be his fight. He was tired, and uncertain he was morally right—all his certainties had been casualties of the war—and too effectively a hero. The people who called him Savior would do anything for him, except let him do anything.

He walked past the mouth of an alley that probably connected with Knockturn, it was so small and dark and contained such a strong smell of musk and potions ingredients. God alone knew what the Muggles thought went on in there. Of course, Muggles were probably smarter than to walk past the alley mouth at eight in the evening. Harry grimaced and sped up a little.

"Help."

The cry stopped Harry, not because it was loud, but because the pain in it was inhuman. He spun around, one hand resting on his wand, eyes aching because he'd opened them so wide with startlement. Perhaps he'd happened on one of the real crimes, rather than the suspected ones.

"Lumos," he whispered, and stepped closer.

Then a voice he recognized chuckled, and said, "You'd have to do better than that to convince someone to help you, after what you've done, Malfoy."

Harry froze. No, it wasn't a real crime, it was another half-crime. The person who had spoken was the Auror Emmet Gingerbrats, who had lost a cousin to Bellatrix Lestrange. His eyes had shone the day that Draco Malfoy was declared a fugitive for violating house arrest and casting a curse with his interdicted wand. No doubt he'd dreamed of getting Malfoy alone and making him pay, since Narcissa was in Azkaban already, the Lestrange brothers had died resisting arrest, and Lucius Malfoy had died of "extreme questioning."

Harry had spoken of the part that Draco, via his wand, and Narcissa, via her lie to the Dark Lord, had played in helping him win the war. Everyone had patted him on the head and ignored him as usual. The wizarding world, they said, needed to see justice done, and Harry had given in because, well, did he know what justice was?

Gingerbrats must have cornered Malfoy at last. That weariness roared up in Harry again like a white flame. Even if he interfered, it would do no good. Did he want to try?

He leaned around the corner.

He was just in time to see Draco Malfoy, lying on the dirty ground of the alley, arch off the ground, his limbs splayed to the sides and twitching, his mouth open in pain so extreme that he couldn't cry out.

And Harry was too tired to ignore that.

He stepped forwards. Gingerbrats turned to face him, mouth open in surprise and then in shock. He fell to one knee and bowed his head.

Malfoy slumped, his head turning to the side in a limp, lolling manner that made Harry sick to look at. A small trickle of drool crept out of the corner of his mouth, cutting around his lips like a line of blood.

Harry trembled with fury, but managed to restrain himself. He wouldn't impress Gingerbrats by flying into a rage, and he needed the man to obey him so that he could actually win Malfoy free of this situation.

"What are you doing?" He had never heard his own voice sound so icy, except in his dreams, where he told all the people who loved him blindly off and it actually worked. He was mildly impressed that he could translate that tone from imagination into reality.

Gingerbrats looked up, his forehead wrinkled. Contrary to his name, he had curly dark hair, and his eyes were a brilliant blue. Looking at those eyes, Harry could imagine Ron in the same position, genuinely unaware of what he had done wrong, and his heart wrenched and tried to spew out of his mouth. But he maintained his intense, still, waiting posture anyway, and his leveled wand.

"Sir?" All the Aurors called him that, though Harry was the least of them in seniority, along with Ron, and in a sane world wouldn't have finished his trainee years yet. "Only what we're allowed to do. I've claimed Malfoy as my kill."

Harry closed his eyes. He had heard, but not actually received confirmation of, the existence of "claim pools" where certain Aurors demanded the right to kill fugitives if they ran across them.

"Of course, if you want him, then you should have him." Gingerbrats scrambled to his feet, and his voice was eager. "You'll let me watch as you kill him, won't you, sir? And perhaps you'll use Cruciatus. I don't think I can manage it yet, but I heard all about how you managed it during the war, against one of the Carrows."

What have we come to, when that story is repeated, and not used as a cautionary tale? Harry opened his eyes and gave Gingerbrats a scornful glance. "Do you think I would rely on the Unforgivables when I can use more powerful and subtler magic?" he asked. He could make his voice like a whip tipped with scorn, too, he noted with interest. Perhaps he should have tried this tone on Ron and Hermione. Gingerbrats winced. "How do you think I defeated Voldemort?"

The other Auror flinched a second time from the name, but his eyes were wide and his breathing short. Like almost everyone else, he didn't believe that Harry had gained mastery of the Elder Wand and killed Voldemort that way. Tales of Harry's "unknown" powers had made the round of the Ministry three times before he stepped through the front door for his first day as an Auror.

"Can I watch, then, sir?" he asked timidly.

"I don't choose to share the secret of that magic with someone who claimed a kill I wanted for myself." Harry turned his back on Gingerbrats and made a show of contemplating Malfoy. No matter how good he might be at lying with his voice, he feared his expression would give him away if he went on looking at Gingerbrats.

"I never heard anything about your claim," said Gingerbrats, but he sounded humble, not challenging. "I'm sorry! I never would have put a mark on him if I'd known."

"It's all right," said Harry with feigned indifference. He bent over Malfoy and cast a Lightening Charm to transport him, then slung him over one shoulder. He hoped fervently that the position wouldn't cause him more damage, but he didn't dare treat Malfoy gently in front of Gingerbrats. "Doesn't look like there are many marks." He winked slowly at Gingerbrats. "Time to go change that."

Gingerbrats brightened. "I'll cover for you," he promised. "You might not like some of your fans knowing about this; they think their Savior should be more than human." He lowered his voice conspiratorially. "Only someone scarred by the war can know how much you just need to show anger sometimes."

Showing anger, he calls it. A pain spell like that. Harry took a single deep breath as though blowing away the temptation to do violence to Malfoy before he reached his flat, and gave Gingerbrats a tiny smile. "That spell you held him under seemed like an interesting punishment," he said. No one called the magic the Aurors practiced "curses," no matter how Dark it became. "Maybe I'll use that one to start with. What's its name?"

Gingerbrats blushed like Harry had when he tried to ask Cho out to the Yule Ball. That was a terrible thing to see on a grown man, Harry thought. "Oh, that? The White-Hot Spell. It's nothing much, just makes him feel like his veins are on fire."

"But it's not physical?"

Gingerbrats grinned. "No, it affects his mind, but not anything else." He grimaced at Malfoy, who lay with his head hanging limply past Harry's arm. "Of course, he probably feels like it affected more than that."

Harry nodded thoughtfully. "That is interesting. I know some spells like that myself."

"Sir?" Gingerbrats took a step closer, as if he imagined that the words he was about to hear would admit him to Harry's inner circle of confidants.

Harry smiled and aimed his wand casually at Gingerbrats's face. The man still didn't look alarmed. He kept on staring at Harry expectantly, a small smile tugging at the corners of his lips.

"As an example," Harry said, "Obliviate."

Gingerbrats blinked once more, and then his face went slack as if he had only just awakened from sleep. Harry shivered once—the expression, or lack of expression, reminded him too much of the way Malfoy had looked under the White-Hot Spell—and then rushed into the lies he wanted Gingerbrats to hold as his memories.

"You've been out walking, seeking Malfoy, this evening," Harry said. "You thought you had him, but it turned out to be a wizard with hair like his. You'll go back to the office and brood on your failure for a few hours, and then go home. And, of course, it would be too embarrassing to mention this to anyone else."

Gingerbrats sighed, as though complaining about his woe already to an invisible audience, and then turned and wandered out of the alley. Harry closed his eyes and used his wand to check for Apparition-tracking spells in the area before he vanished. There was one, which was probably the way that Gingerbrats had caught Malfoy. Harry disabled it with the counterspell Kingsley had confessed to him one night during a private party, and which he hadn't thought he would ever need.

He hadn't been going to interfere in this new darkness. It wasn't the kind he could fight.

But it seemed that one weariness had finally outweighed the other.

Malfoy was a mess.

Harry had expected that, but it was one thing to look at the trickle of blood coming out of his nostrils and another to read the long list of damage that was appearing in red ink on a scroll of parchment. Harry had used the same spell that Madam Pomfrey had sometimes used in the Hogwarts infirmary to check for hidden injuries after a Quidditch fall. He had vaguely thought it would be useful if his partner was hit by an unknown curse.

That had been back when he envisioned the former Death Eaters as the real enemies of peace and freedom in the wizarding world.

Now he finished reading to the bottom of the list and swallowed, looking back at Malfoy. It was a miracle his mind hadn't closed in on itself and driven him mad simply as protection. There had been the White-Hot Spell, and before that a curse which made his bones so fragile that they started to crumble under the weight of his skin and muscle, and a spell designed to make him relive his worst terrors in his dreams every night, and a spell to exaggerate his emotions so he would go into hysterics with each scrape or good deed done to him…

Gingerbrats hadn't done all this, not unless Malfoy had spent much more time under his wand than his call for help had indicated. Harry had to wonder if Malfoy had been captured some time ago, by the Aurors or other "interested parties," as the roving bands of vigilantes tended to call themselves, and worked over before he escaped. And then, of course, he'd run straight into Gingerbrats.

"You do have the worst luck," Harry told him, stroking the air above Malfoy's head where it lay on his pillow; he didn't want to touch the skin of Malfoy's scalp yet. Then he began to cast the necessary healing spells. He didn't know very many, but he was stubborn, and his magic was strong, though without the mysterious edge so many people thought had killed Voldemort. Healing spell cast on top of healing spell would work, eventually.

And it was worth something, to watch Malfoy's skin gradually thicken and toughen, to see his eyes lose their glazed sheen—he'd been halfway to blindness, with some of the curses performed on him—and to see him twitch and then relax into a deeper and more restful sleep as the magic moved through him. Harry enjoyed the feeling that he was fixing something. Sometimes he had wondered whether the world wouldn't be better off under Voldemort than the twisted thing it had become since he defeated the Dark Lord.

Of course, when he finished healing Malfoy the larger problems would still remain. Harry didn't have the speaking talents that he really should have had, and that so many people attributed to him when the fawning Daily Prophet took some commonplace remark of his and surrounded it with complimentary adjectives. He couldn't persuade anyone that their actions were wrong. He didn't know how to whisper in the Minister's ear and turn him to a different course, either, even though the Minister was a personal friend.

But small things he might still be good at, in the same way anyone was good at them. Small things he could do. He would hide Malfoy until he recovered and send him on his way, perhaps procuring a passport that would take him to France or further. In other countries, the hero-worship of Harry and the hatred for Voldemort's followers was nowhere near as intense. Malfoy might have to live a guarded life for the rest of his days, but somewhere he would come close to normality.

When the last healing spell Harry felt capable of using had been cast and he sat panting in the chair beside the bed, he wondered if he ought to fetch Malfoy some food. His ribs had pressed against his skin because of the weight spell and not because of starvation, but still, he couldn't have eaten well, if at all, under the "care" of his captors.

He would get him some food. In a moment.

When he awoke, his neck hurt, his watch said he should have been in the office an hour ago, and Malfoy was watching him.

Harry sat upright, moving slowly so as not to startle Malfoy, and rubbed his neck with a grimace. The healing spells he knew unfortunately did little for strained muscles and bruises; he didn't know why. The wizards who had invented them thought those things too minor to bother with, maybe. Or maybe it really was better for them to heal naturally.

"Why did you save me?"

Malfoy's voice was so hoarse it made Harry wince to listen to it, but it was useless trying to pretend that he didn't understand. He met Malfoy's eyes. They were the hostile eyes of a hunted wild thing. But not a wild thing in a trap, Harry thought. Not yet. Maybe Malfoy really would survive his ordeal with only mental scars.

"Because I was tired of watching people be kicked around and knowing that I turned away from it instead of did something to stop it." Harry rose to his feet and stretched his neck again, which made his back flex in a way that fired a twinge of pain down his spine. He sighed. He was no good at healing himself with natural methods, that was certain. "I'll hide you for a few days, get you physically well again, and then send you to France. Well. France first. You'll go further than that to be safe, of course—"

"I'll never be safe again," Malfoy interrupted.

Harry blinked. Clearly he'd been too optimistic. His treatment must have given Malfoy the edge of paranoia.

"Never in Britain, no," Harry admitted. "But not everyone will care about your supposed crimes during the war, especially in countries that never cared about the war between us and Voldemort. You must find a home that—"

"I'll never be safe because of what I know," Malfoy said, and closed his eyes. "They want to kill me for what I know."

Harry frowned. "Did you overhear—"

Malfoy's steady breathing was the only reply. He had fallen asleep again.

Harry eyed him, frowning. He had the feeling that rescuing Malfoy was going to be considerably more complicated than he'd thought. What if Malfoy was so paranoid that he refused to leave the house? What if did have a scrap of dangerous knowledge that he gave Harry, and that put Harry in the sights of his enemies as well? Though there might be no one in the British wizarding world who would dare to kill its Savior, they could make his life unpleasant subtly, or alter his mind. There were too many Dark curses Harry didn't know, too many he might not recognize.

Well, saving the world from Voldemort had been more complicated than he'd thought it would be, too. But he managed it in the end. And he still owed Malfoy a life-debt from the time when Malfoy hadn't reported Harry to the Death Eaters in Malfoy Manor during the war, and if not for his interference with the Elder Wand, killing Voldemort would have been much more difficult. Like it or not, Malfoy deserved better than to spend the rest of his life running in fear.

Harry went off to firecall the Minister and tell him he wouldn't be in today. Kingsley would ask why. Harry only needed to wink, and Kingsley would accept that Harry was finally taking advantage of the hero's perks they'd all urged on him more than once.

Weariness and disgust turned Harry's legs to water for a moment, so that he had to brace himself with one hand against a door. It was wrong that they lived in a world where Harry could take time off from work simply because he'd been lucky and part of a prophecy.

Wrong.

But the wave ran away again, and Harry sighed and walked into the kitchen. What could he do about it? Nothing. Small things.

He would do his small thing, and hope that would be enough of a light against the darkness.