Draco had been forced to admit this was a point.
Hence the Potter Method.
"Please, Dr. Malfoy," whined Harry Potter, "why won't you accept my paper?"
Harry Potter had needed to repeat the phrase "just pretend to be pretending to be a scientist" three times before Draco had understood.
In that moment Draco had realized that there was something deeply wrong with Harry Potter's brain, and anyone who tried Legilimency on it would probably never come back out again.
Harry Potter had then gone into further and considerable detaiclass="underline" Draco was to pretend to be a Death Eater who was posing as the editor of a scientific journal, Dr. Malfoy, who wanted to reject his enemy Dr. Potter's paper "On the Heritability of Magical Ability", and if the Death Eater didn't act like a real scientist would, he would be revealed as a Death Eater and executed, while Dr. Malfoy was also being watched by his own rivals and needed to appear to reject Dr. Potter's paper for neutral scientific reasons or he would lose his position as journal editor.
It was a wonder the Sorting Hat wasn't gibbering madly in St. Mungo's.
It was also the most complicated thing anyone had ever asked Draco to pretend and there was no possible way he could have refused the challenge.
Right now they were, as Harry Potter had put it, getting in the mood.
"I'm afraid, Dr. Potter, that you wrote this in the wrong color of ink," Draco said. "Next!"
Dr. Potter's face did an excellent job of crumpling in despair, and Draco couldn't help but feel a flash of Dr. Malfoy's glee, even though the Death Eater was only pretending to be Dr. Malfoy.
This part was fun. He could have done this all day long.
Dr. Potter got up from the chair, slumped over in dismay, and trudged off, and turned into Harry Potter, who gave Draco a thumbs-up, and then turned back into Dr. Potter again, now approaching with an eager smile.
Dr. Potter sat down and presented Dr. Malfoy with a piece of parchment on which was written:
On the Heritability of Magical Ability
Dr. H. J. Potter-Evans-Verres, Institute for Sufficiently Advanced Science
My observation:
Today's wizards can't do things as impressive as
what wizards used to do 800 years ago.
My conclusion:
Wizardkind has become weaker by mixing
their blood with Muggleborns and Squibs.
"Dr. Malfoy," said Dr. Potter with a hopeful look, "I was wondering if the Journal of Irreproducible Results could consider for publication my paper entitled 'On the Heritability of Magical Ability'."
Draco looked at the parchment, smiling while he considered possible rejections. If he was a professor, he would have refused the essay as too short, so -
"It's too long, Dr. Potter," said Dr. Malfoy.
For a moment there was genuine incredulity on Dr. Potter's face.
"Ah..." said Dr. Potter. "How about if I get rid of the separate lines for observations and conclusions, and just put in a therefore -"
"Then it'll be too short. Next!"
Dr. Potter trudged off.
"All right," said Harry Potter, "you're getting too good at this. Two more times to practice, and then third time is for real, no interruptions between, I'll just come in straight at you and that time you'll reject the paper based on the actual content, remember, your scientific rivals are watching."
Dr. Potter's next paper was perfect in every way, a marvel of its kind, but unfortunately had to be rejected because Dr. Malfoy's journal was having trouble with the letter E. Dr. Potter offered to rewrite it without those words, and Dr. Malfoy explained that it was really more of a vowel problem.
The paper after that was rejected because it was Tuesday.
It was, in fact, Saturday.
Dr. Potter tried to point this out and was told "Next!"
(Draco was starting to understand why Snape had used his hold over Dumbledore just to get a position that let him be awful to students.)
And then -
Dr. Potter was approaching with a superior smirk on his face.
"This is my latest paper, On the Heritability of Magical Ability," Dr. Potter stated confidently, and thrust out the parchment. "I have decided to allow your journal to publish it, and have prepared it in perfect accordance with your guidelines so that you may publish it quickly."
The Death Eater decided to track down and kill Dr. Potter after his mission was done. Dr. Malfoy kept a polite smile on his face, since his rivals were watching, and said...
(The pause stretched, with Dr. Potter looking at him impatiently.)
..."Let me look at that, please."
Dr. Malfoy took the parchment and perused it carefully.
The Death Eater was starting to get nervous about the fact that he wasn't a real scientist, and Draco was trying to remember how to talk like Harry Potter.
"You, ah, need to consider other possible explanations for your, um, observation, besides just this one -"
"Really?" interrupted Dr. Potter. "Like what, exactly? House elves are stealing our magic? My data admit of only one possible conclusion, Dr. Malfoy. There are no other plausible hypotheses."
Draco was trying furiously to order his brain to think, what would he say if he was posing as a member of Dumbledore's faction, what did they claim was the explanation for wizardkind's decline, Draco had never bothered to actually ask that...
"If you can't think of any other way to explain my data, you'll have to publish my paper, Dr. Malfoy."
It was the sneer on Dr. Potter's face that did it.
"Oh yeah?" snapped Dr. Malfoy. "How do you know that magic itself isn't fading away?"
Time stopped.
Draco and Harry Potter exchanged looks of appalled horror.
Then Harry Potter spat something that was probably an extremely bad word if you'd been raised by Muggles. "I didn't think of that!" said Harry Potter. "And I should have. The magic goes away. Damn, damn, damn!"
The alarm in Harry Potter's voice was contagious. Without even thinking about it, Draco's hand went into his robes and clutched at his wand. He'd thought the House of Malfoy was safe, so long as you only married into families that could trace their bloodlines back four generations you were supposed to be safe, it had never occurred to him before that there might be nothing anyone could do to stop the end of magic. "Harry, what do we do?" Draco's voice was rising in panic. "What do we do?"
"Let me think!"
After a few moments, Harry grabbed from a nearby desk the same quill and roll of parchment he'd used to write his pretend paper, and started scribbling something.
"We'll figure it out," Harry said, his voice tight, "if magic is fading out of the world we'll figure out how fast it's fading and how much time we have left to do something, and then we'll figure out why it's fading, and then we'll do something about it. Draco, have wizarding powers been declining at a steady rate, or have there been sudden drops?"
"I... I don't know..."
"You told me that no one had matched the four founders of Hogwarts. So it's been going on for at least eight centuries, then? You can't remember hearing anything about the problems suddenly appearing five centuries ago or anything like that?"
Draco was trying frantically to think. "I always heard that nobody was as good as Merlin and then after that nobody was as good as the Founders of Hogwarts."