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Until the Solstice Rises	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 5147 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 1
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I am making no money from this fanfic.

Chapter List
- 11
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- 13
Title: On the Outside Looking In

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

Pairing: Harry/Draco (past), Harry/OMC, Draco/Astoria

Rating: PG-13

Warnings: Heavy angst, mpreg, voyeurism (sort of)

Wordcount: 2200

Summary: If he had known, he wouldn’t have made the decision he did. But he hadn’t.

Author’s Notes: Another one of my Advent fics, written at the request of allsmilesful_14, who wanted Harry mpreg. Here you are.

On the Outside Looking In

            Draco stood there with his fingers locked into the palm of his right hand, and gazed and gazed at the tiny mirror cradled in the palm of his left hand.

            The mirror reflected a small room where Harry Potter sat on a couch, his head tilted back, his mouth open as he snored. Someone who hadn’t read the papers in the wizarding world for the past eight months might have been surprised about the sharp way his belly projected, or the exhaustion worked deep into the lines of his face, or the man who sat beside him, his hand gently stroking Harry’s fringe back from his forehead.

            Draco knew everything. But it didn’t hurt less as he watched Edmund Cavalier touch Harry, or fetch water for him when he stirred awake, or quietly respond to his questions about what had happened that day among the Aurors.

            I should have known.

            He hadn’t, though. That was the problem. He hadn’t known, and so he had listened to what Harry said when Harry told him they needed to have an important conversation, and his response had been as inappropriate as it possibly could be.

*

            He’d laughed.

            “What?” he said. “You’re pregnant?” Then he shook his head. Harry might think Draco was laughing at the very notion of a man being pregnant, and it wasn’t about that. He had to explain himself, especially since Harry was staring at him as though he’d walked in to find Draco fucking someone else. “It doesn’t work like that. I mean, it can happen, but it only happens rarely, and only to pure-blood males. Someone whose heritage is so close to Muggleborn that they’re still half that isn’t going to get pregnant.”

            Harry shut his eyes for a minute. Then he said, “Well, can you argue with the Healer’s report?” and held out a parchment to Draco.

            Draco took the parchment and scanned it quickly, but snorted when he noticed that there was no St. Mungo’s crest on it. “You went to that bloody independent practitioner of yours, didn’t you?” he asked, handing it back. “The one who got kicked out of St. Mungo’s for not recognizing dragonpox symptoms?”

            “He got kicked out because he reported that it was dragonpox, and they told him it couldn’t be, not when they’d eradicated it,” Harry said coldly. “And when the scandal started up over those three people who died of it, they needed a scapegoat to throw to the bawling public.”

            Draco sighed. He’d always thought Harry too sympathetic to the young Healer he’d selected to treat him. Yes, Harry knew what it was like to be badly-treated by the public, but that was the only similarity between him and the other man.

            “The fact remains that he’s young, and hasn’t seen everything,” Draco pointed out. “I think that if you were pregnant, you would be showing by now.”

            Harry shook his head. “I’ve felt awful and had something wrong with my magic for three weeks now. He says that it’s been since the night I conceived. Sometimes sensitive men show changes immediately after conception, because it’s such a challenge to the body’s magic. So I won’t be showing when I’m less than a month along.”

            Draco narrowed his eyes. “I’ve never heard of such a thing.”

            “You’re also not a Healer. Look, you can talk to him if you want—”

            “He’s wrong,” Draco said harshly. He knew what he knew, and what he knew was a bloody sight more than Harry, who had come to the wizarding world so late and without the benefit of the tradition and education Draco had received from birth. “Go to another Healer. They’ll tell you the truth, and then you can rest easy.”

            Harry looked at him, long and closely. Then he said, “He said it probably happened because I’m so powerful. Blood doesn’t matter next to power. It’s just that pure-blood wizards have traditionally thought of themselves as the strongest, so when one of them conceived, it was attributed to their heritage and not their magic.”

            “I hate to remind you of this, Harry, but you’re not that fucking powerful,” Draco snapped.

            Harry went still and cold for a moment. Then he said, “I didn’t show it when I defeated Voldemort, no.” Draco winced, because Harry didn’t usually use that name. Now, later, he would wonder about that. But then, he didn’t. “But I’ve shown it to you since. You know my strength exists, Draco. I just prefer not to show it often, because it would mean that I was besieged by requests for help.” He let one hand rest on his chest, then started and moved it down to his stomach, as though he had forgotten where the child would be—if there was a child, Draco thought, which there wasn’t. “But it’s there. And now it’s done this.”

            “It hasn’t.”

            Harry stared at him again. Then he said, “Why don’t you go and speak to the Healer? He can show you the spells he performed. I don’t know the names of all of them. But he could tell you, and he could convince you.”

            Draco took a step back, shaking his head. His breath was coming fast, small spots were dancing in his vision, and all he could think about was that this couldn’t be coming true, not here, not now, when he had had no plans in place and sooner or later Harry would start showing and then everyone would look at them and know.

            “This can’t be happening,” he whispered. “I don’t want them to know, Harry. You said that no one would have to know we were dating. You didn’t tell my name to the Healer, did you?”

            Harry’s stillness was a deadly thing. But he said, as gently as though he was talking Draco off a cliff, “No. I didn’t.”

            “But you must see how impossible it would be for me to visit him,” Draco went on. “And you must see how impossible it would be for you to be pregnant, because that would mean—things would change, and how would people react to their Savior dating a Death Eater?”

            “We could discuss that,” Harry said. “I did want to go public, remember? But I didn’t, because I love you, Draco, and I knew you didn’t want to. We can discuss it now.” His eyes were bright again, but that stillness was still coiled in the bottom of his muscles, and he reached out a hand. “We can discuss what to do. Maybe your parents would help us with the child, or Narcissa could tell us a good, painless way to get rid of it.”

            Draco shook his head until his hair blurred in front of his eyes. His parents would never agree to get rid of the baby, he knew. Not their grandchild. And he knew, likewise, that they would never forgive him for finding out that he was involved with Harry Potter, instead of free for the marriage they had been preparing for him.

            “You would get rid of it, if I asked you to?” he asked, his voice high.

            “I love you more than anything else,” Harry said, looking at him squarely. His hand was still stretched out. “But we need to discuss it, and you need to believe that there’s a baby, first.” His smile was slight.

            “But you would, if I asked you to,” Draco insisted. His heart was ringing in his ears.

            “We need to—”

            “If I just asked you to?”

            “Draco, we have to—”

            “I don’t want to discuss it, Harry!” He was yelling now, and his hands were pressed against the front of his stomach as though he was the one who would have some dangerous, deadly, secret-revealing burden tumble out of him in a few months. “I want you to just get rid of it! You told me once that you would do anything for me, anything! Well, do this!”

            Harry dropped his hand. They stood there. He was coiled up like a cobra, and Draco was panting like a rabbit, and there was silence flowing between them until Harry spoke again, low and passionless.

            “I said that I would do anything for you because I really believed that you would do anything for me in return,” Harry said, his voice slow, low, cold. “But that’s not true, is it? You won’t defy your parents. You won’t come out in public. You won’t believe me when I say I’m pregnant. You won’t do anything that I ask you to. And for a long time, I was content with that, as long as you shared your life with me. But this isn’t like anything else, Draco. I need you to—”

            “Get rid of it!”

            Harry stood there, and looked at him, and all the coiled strength and power Draco had denied he had drew itself up in him until Draco knew that he would have been in less danger if he was in the room with the Dark Lord.

            “Not when you say it like that,” Harry said, and turned his back. “Get out.”

            Draco stared at him. “You can’t just act like this only affects one of us, Harry,” he said, through numb lips. “If you are, and you show, and people start asking questions about me, if they find out I’m—”

            “It always comes back to you, and nothing else,” Harry said, and turned around. His green eyes were savage, and his power lashed out, once, twice, like whips from behind his head. Draco flinched as plates shattered around him, as cupboards flung open, as chairs rose from the floor and began to rotate. “You’re so bloody afraid that you don’t care about me, or this child, or the future, or anything else. Out.”

            Draco backed up, his eyes on Harry. He wanted to say something else, but his fear choked him.

            “I should have known better than to date someone so self-interested.” Harry’s lips pulled back from his teeth until he looked like a werewolf. “Get out.”

            And Draco went.

*

            Now Harry and Edmund, in the mirror, were talking about something related to Harry’s latest Healer’s appointment. They were laughing, and they were eating Muggle crisps out of a bag, and it was all disgustingly domestic.

            Draco closed his eyes. He would have dropped the mirror, but his hand remained clenched around it, as though his fingers didn’t belong to him.

            Harry hadn’t stayed in the house he’d thrown Draco out of, perhaps because it was (secretly, through a chain of Memory Charms on the people who had helped them purchase it) half Draco’s property, too. He had moved in with the Weasleys for a time, and then in with his Auror partner, Edmund Cavalier, when his refusal to answer questions about who was the child’s other parent had caused a row with his friends. As far as Draco knew, he had repaired that row, but the curiosity was bright and present in their eyes whenever they visited Harry.

            But Harry had never betrayed him. Draco could still go on and have the normal marriage his parents desired for him, something they were arranging as fast as they could now that they knew Draco would go along with it. His betrothal to Astoria Greengrass was set to begin as soon as they’d been properly introduced.

            Cavalier didn’t sleep with Harry. He supported Harry the way he had in the field: gave him his couch and then his bed, accompanied Harry to Healer’s appointments, asked silly questions about the child’s name that made Harry relax around him. And now he sat beside him, and ate from the same plate as Harry, and laughed with him, and touched him.

            No, he didn’t sleep with him, and Draco didn’t think Harry was in love with him. But it was plain what Cavalier wanted, and now that Harry had decided to keep the baby, he would win Harry’s heart by being kind to his child.

            Draco’s child. The child they should have decided together to have, or not.

            Draco glanced back once more into the mirror. Cavalier and Harry were watching Muggle telly and laughing.

            It felt as though Draco hadn’t laughed since that day.

            No, Harry hadn’t betrayed him. He might not welcome Draco if he tried to walk back into Harry’s life, but Draco was fairly sure Harry wouldn’t prevent him from visiting his son or daughter, either, if he wanted.

            But Draco couldn’t. The fear froze him whenever he tried.

            He lowered the mirror and stood there, shivering, choked with the endless, ravaging terror.

            “Draco?” his mother called gently from below. “It’s time to dress for the party, son.”

            Draco moistened his lips and took one more look in the mirror, at the life he could have had, and then turned and called back to his mother, towards the life he would lead.

            The End.

*

            delia cerrano: In that particular story, it wasn’t so much his friends’ reaction Harry feared as their reaction to the fact that he cheated on Ginny.

            BAFan: Thank you! I’m touched that you would read all the way through a long fic again for one small story. ;)

            And I’m glad you like the story about the morning after.

            Makoto_Sagara: Harry didn’t really know, himself, what he felt before. Hopefully now that he does, they can move forwards.
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Until the Solstice Rises