Harry Potter The Long Lost Malfoy

"But you're acting like it is." Harry turned and stared out the window again, trying for tearful, but not too tearful. He was going to burst out laughing if he went much further, or just alert Draco to the fact that all of this was a put-on. "I didn't have any means of learning about magic among the Muggles. Most of them don't know about it, unless they have Muggleborn family. And the Dursleys knew but didn't tell me. Whereas you could have looked up anything you wanted to. You had the giant family library—and you had our parents—and—and—"

Draco abruptly jumped up, crossed the compartment, and wrapped his arms around Harry. Harry, startled, sat there for a second before he hugged him back. He felt a little bad that he had upset Draco enough to hug him.

But not bad enough to confess that this an act.

"I know," Draco whispered, his head lowered so that his hair seemed to blend with Harry's in the reflection in the window glass. "I'm sorry. I shouldn't remind you of the awful time you had to spend in prison with them. And of course you tried to get by the best you could. Of course Muggle inventions seem amazing to you, and they don't seem inferior. They were all you knew. You thought you were one of them until a few years ago."

Harry nodded against his shoulder and pretended to sniffle a little. Then he sat back and sighed. "So. Telephones are devices that most Muggles have in their homes. They connect Muggles to each other with a system of wires—"

"What do they have to do with it?"

Harry wasn't about to admit that he was a little shaky himself on the concept of exactly how telephones worked, so he just shrugged. "They vibrate with the sound of someone's voice, and transmit that voice. Pretty neat, huh?"

"But these wires can't go everywhere."

"I don't see why not. Some of them go over mountains and under water." Harry was pretty sure about that, anyway. "They don't have to fly for days like an owl could if it was taking your message to another country."

"They sound like Floos," Draco said. "Calling someone on the Floo would be faster than using this—tellyphone."

"But what happens if the person on the other side has their Floo blocked so you can't access it?" Harry asked. He knew that could happen because he'd seen Father try to Floo someone a few days ago, and heard him growl in displeasure when the Floo on the other side turned out to be closed. "Telephones ring if they're working at all. Maybe someone isn't there to pick it up—"

"You pick them up and hold them? Why?"

"They have more than one part," Harry said patiently. "You have to put the part that transmits the voice to your ear so that you can hear the voice on the other end. And that's a lot more convenient than a Floo. Even Father has to get down on the floor and put his head into the flames to speak to the person on the other side, doesn't he? You can stand when you're using a telephone, or sit."

Draco was frowning a little now. "We could build a fireplace higher so that we didn't have to kneel down if we wanted," he muttered.

"But you don't, do you? All the fireplaces in the Manor are the normal height and shape. And I don't think all of them are capable of Flooing someone else, anyway. The Floo is a pretty open security point, when you think about it."

"It can be dangerous to leave them open to access by just anyone!"

Harry held up his hands. "I'm not saying that it wouldn't. But telephones aren't dangerous that way. All they transmit is the sound of someone's voice, not their whole body if they decide that they want to attack you."

"So you can't even see the person on the other end? Then the Floo is superior."

Harry snorted. "Oh, yeah, when it turns your face green, and prevents you from reading expressions half the time." That was something else Father had complained about in the last few days.

Draco hesitated, then scowled at him. "Okay, maybe some Muggle inventions are better some of the time. That still doesn't mean that I'd want to go and live in the Muggle world."

"Of course not. I wasn't trying to convince you to. I was just saying that Muggle inventions prove that they're not inferior, either. They don't have magic, but that just means that they make do with what they do have. The way that wizards put up with Floos because they do have magic, and they think the advantages of the Floo are enough for them to be going on with."

Draco nodded slowly, reluctantly. "So that means that they're human, like us. And we can't just kill them."

Harry beamed at him. "Exactly."

"Unless they really hurt someone. The way the Dursleys hurt you."

Harry groaned a little. Slowly, slowly. I'll have to convince him of these things slowly.

....

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