A/N: Chapter thirteen: a visit from the Ministry.

This is Harry/Draco, post-Hogwarts, though the slash content is extremely light. There are very vague suggestions of other relationships as well.

I've got this all written out, and am posting one a week. There will be 23 chapters total. All that's left is the editing.

Disclaimer: Not mine.

Dedication: To Foodie, who still betas me despite my predilection for slash, and for FionaFawkes, who read and reviewed every single chapter, and gave me such excellent feedback. Also, for everyone who's read and loved my Harry/Draco. This one's for you.

-----13

About halfway through the month, shortly after the full moon, a visitor from the Ministry came for the day. Because Lucius had failed his first test, he was now on probation by the Ministry, and given how he had tried to manipulate their new program, it was unlikely that even a single misstep would be ignored.

Harry had warned Draco they would be receiving a Ministry employee who would evaluate whether Lucius would be allowed to continue in the program. Still, even knowing it would happen didn't make it any easier to deal with her when she arrived. Lucius had been sulking in a corner when she'd knocked on the front door, so Draco had gone to answer the door, leaving Lupin and Harry to deal with Lucius.

When he saw the woman, his heart dropped. He'd known that they would send her at some random time, so as to catch them unawares, but Lucius hadn't been too horrific of late. If only she'd come just a day earlier. Lucius had spent the entire day before reading, and had caused almost no problems whatsoever. Why couldn't she have seen him that way?

The woman was dressed in a Muggle skirt-suit, and had silvering brown hair that she'd drawn back into a bun. Her face was pinched, and Draco could tell that she'd heard the shouting going on in the living room already. "Hello," he said, sticking out his hand.

She nodded to him. "You are which Malfoy?" she asked imperiously, ignoring his hand.

"Draco," he replied, scowling. No, this was definitely not going to be good.

"And the other—Lucius, I believe? Is inside with your guardians?" Draco nodded. Like she didn't know who they were. Like Lucius Malfoy wasn't the most well-known Death Eater left alive. He stood aside and let her enter, wincing as Lucius's voice rose in volume.

"I refuse, Lupin, and that should be that! I don't care what you think!" his high voice squeaked from the living room.

The woman's lips thinned, and Draco watched as she wrote something in a notebook she was carrying. She entered the living room, and Draco followed quickly after, horrified at the scene that met them.

Lucius was now standing in the centre of the room, glowering at both Harry and Lupin. Harry was glaring back, but Lupin had on his usual calm mask. "And I don't particularly care how you feel about it, Lucius. If you can't cooperate…"

The woman cleared her throat, and all three of them jumped at the sound, turning to look at her. "Mister Potter and Mister Lupin?" They both nodded, and she turned to Lucius. "And you must be Lucius Malfoy." She looked back towards the two grown men. "I've been sent to see how your household is…" she looked around the room, which, while not the war zone it had been before, was still far from clean, made a sniffing sound, and turned back to them, "…getting on. You don't seem to be faring too well, though, do you?"

Lucius narrowed his eyes at the woman. "And what is it to you?" he asked snidely.

The smile she gave him chilled Draco, and when she spoke, her voice was like shards of ice. "It is my job to make sure that you and your son are at least trying to conform to the rules, since Mister Potter insisted that he be allowed an exception. Particularly since you do not seem to be doing quite as well as your son when it comes to the tests the Ministry is giving you." She stepped closer to where Lucius stood, his jaw clenched in what Draco recognized as helpless rage. "You, Mister Malfoy, are on a one-track road, and it will be my pleasure to see you sent back to Azkaban to live out the remainder of your natural life there. All one hundred years of it," she smiled.

Harry was quick to interrupt her smug statement. "I hope you realize that adjustment takes a while, Miss…?" His voice was tight, and Draco knew that he wasn't really any more pleased with Lucius than he was with the woman, but it made him feel better, knowing that at least he was willing to stick up for Lucius.

"My name is Dianna Hughes, and I have been given supreme authority in this matter, Mister Potter. Should I feel that neither you nor Mister Lupin are making any progress with Mister Malfoy here, I can send him back. After all, the Ministry does not wish to waste any more time on the failures than necessary. I've already visited one household this week, and will be on my way to a third before the week is up. Whether or not you feel they deserve another chance is irrelevant, after all. In the eyes of the public, they're already being given a second chance simply by being allowed back into the real world."

Lucius scowled at this, and Draco worried that he would say something to make things even worse, so he quickly spoke before Lucius could get a chance to. "Please, ma'am. I know this all looks bad…"

The woman turned to look at Draco, her face calculating. "Mister Malfoy, I am aware that you might feel it your duty to protect your father, but let me tell you right now—things do not look good for him, and you all would do better to cut your losses, lest he drag you down with him."

"No, you don't understand," he said, hoping Lucius would go along with what he was about to say. "Lucius was just upset because L—Re…Remus didn't want him joining me in the den this afternoon, because he hadn't finished his chores yet, that's all. Really."

The woman scrutinized him for a moment, but Lucius and the others remained utterly silent. "The den? And what is the den, may I ask?"

"Harry's got his Telly in there, and his computer. We watch movies or play games in there, but it's kind of a privilege, and Lucius hasn't gotten to go in there recently."

"Really?" the woman asked, a gleam in her eye as she turned back towards Lucius. "Is this true, Mister Malfoy?"

Draco tried to catch Lucius's eye over her shoulder, but Lucius was ignoring him, his chin in the air as he glared at the woman. "It is," he said, with all the dignity he could possibly muster in a nine-year-old body.

"And what games do you play on these Muggle machines, Mister Malfoy?" she asked in a condescending tone.

"Well, there is a game that allows us to play god, another that allows us to conquer the world, and there is a racing game," Lucius stated, his eyebrow raised.

The woman frowned. She'd obviously been hoping that Lucius's answer would allow her to catch the lie Draco had told her. She jotted down something in her notes, then turned to Harry. "And you approve of this, Mister Potter?"

Harry nodded sharply. "It worked for Draco. The games taught him a great deal about the Muggle world, in fact."

She turned back to Lucius. "And which is your favourite, Lucius?"

He held her gaze. "The one where I conquer the world, of course," he said with a smirk.

The woman smiled. "You should show me." Draco's heart, which had been rising steadily with his father's responses, sank.

"He doesn't…" The woman held up her hand to stop him.

"He says he enjoys the game. I wish to see how well he plays it," she said with a satisfied smile.

"As long as we can be there as well, Miss Hughes," Lupin said with a smile.

She narrowed her eyes at him. "I should watch him as he would usually be playing."

"Oh, well, then you should have Draco helping him. He still doesn't understand how the machine works yet. He just enjoys the game itself," Lupin replied.

She made a sour face. "Very well. But if I see any coaching…"

"Of course not," Draco assured her with his sweetest smile, then turned and led the way to the den.

As Draco turned on the computer, he worried about whether Lucius would be able to pull this little charade off. He might be good at intrigue, and getting things to go his way, but with Muggle technology, he was entirely out of his league.

He clicked on the Civilizations 2 icon, and turned to see Lucius staring at the screen intently.

"Well, Mister Malfoy?" Miss Hughes asked.

"If you don't mind, woman, I am trying to decide which country to play. Is it too much to ask that I be allowed time to decide?" he asked in a snide tone that went poorly with the highness of his voice.

"Which do you usually play?"

"The Romans. But it gets so boring, doing the same thing time and again. Perhaps I should make a new tribe," he smiled. "The Wizards." He looked at Draco, who looked at him, astonished, but felt a smile slowly spread across his face.

"That could be interesting. Shall we?"

Lucius nodded, and Draco moved forward to begin the process, but felt a hand on his shoulder, and looked up to see her holding him back. "Let him do it. I want to see how much he has learned."

Lucius didn't even bother glowering at her, just narrowed his eyes and moved forward. He glanced at the keyboard, and Draco knew he was trying to figure out what he was supposed to do. When Lucius reached for the mouse, Draco sighed mentally in relief, and watched as his father dragged the curser across the screen with the mouse a few times before moving it to the button he needed click on to change the tribe name. However, when he clicked, nothing happened. He scowled at it. "Ridiculous machine," Draco heard him mutter under his breath.

"The other button, Lucius," Draco said quietly. He felt the hand squeeze his shoulder in warning, but ignored it.

Lucius clicked again, and this time it brought up the screen to change the names. He glanced out of the corner of his eye at Draco, then moved his hand to the keyboard, and began to painstakingly pick out the letters on the keys. Draco could hear him mumbling under his breath about the idiocy of Muggles, but he continued typing until he'd finished the name. He clicked back to the main screen, and started up the game.

As the game screen loaded, Draco took a breath. This was make-or-break time. The load screens were simple enough, but now the game was much more complicated. He was sure this was where Lucius would trip up. But that hand on his shoulder wasn't going anywhere, and there was no way he was going to give the game away from his own nervousness.

Lucius looked at the piece blinking at the screen for several minutes, then clicked on it, and Draco was relieved to see that he seemed to at least be intently reading the pop-up messages as they appeared. It took several minutes for him to get into the game, but once he had, he seemed to be quite good at it. The hand disappeared from Draco's shoulder, and if it wouldn't have given anything away, Draco might have sagged in relief.

"Very well, Mister Malfoy. You can shut off the game. I do not wish to stand here too much longer," she said sourly.

"Of course," Lucius smiled.

Draco joined Harry in the kitchen to make some sort of meal for the five of them while Lucius and Lupin took the woman into Lucius's room so that she could see his living arrangements. The meal itself was relatively quiet, with Miss Hughes doing all the talking; asking as many questions as she could come up with in an increasingly dull tone as Lupin or Harry provided answers that she obviously did not want to hear. Draco was thrilled to see the back of her when she left, that he flopped down on the couch in relief once the four of them had seen her out the door..

Lucius scowled at him. "Malfoys do not flop, Draco."

Draco bit his tongue. To be honest, it was still difficult not to listen when Lucius chastised him, but somewhere inside, he no longer felt that it was Lucius he should be listening to—particularly when he currently looked younger than Draco—and Harry hadn't said a word. But it would hardly do to start arguing with him the moment the woman had left, so Draco found a way to change the subject. "You did pretty good with that game. I'm rather surprised, actually."

"You and Potter talk about it all the time. One would think you were obsessed with the thing," Lucius sneered.

"The fact that the game helped you out a lot with that woman didn't hurt either, did it?" Draco smirked in response.

Lucius scowled. "It was an—experience," he finally responded.

"One that you will be repeating, I hope," Lupin said.

"Why on earth would I do that, Lupin?" Lucius sneered.

"Because, Lucius, you don't want to go back to Azkaban. And to prevent that from happening, you're actually going to have to start cooperating with us," Harry responded. "That means following the rules, even though you think they're beneath you, and joining us for the movies we watch, and spending time playing those games. You seemed to do well enough with it." Harry's voice was utterly calm and reasonable, and Draco wondered how his father would respond to that. Lupin annoyed him, but Harry infuriated him.

"I may not want to go back, Potter, but I still fail to see how your little 'Muggles are great' campaign will help me. I have good reason for how I feel about them, and I doubt that anything you could show me would change that."

Harry smiled what Draco recognized as a very dangerous smile. "Really? Should we make a wager on that, Lucius? If you don't improve on your next test after watching movies and playing these games, I'll lay off, and I won't insist you watch them again. But, if they work, you start paying attention to the other rules in this house. Deal?"

Lucius narrowed his eyes, snorted, then held out his hand. "Very well, I accept."

Harry shook his hand. "I'm going to enjoy this," he grinned.