Adult-FanFiction.org : Harry Potter

Marathon	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 52456 -:- Recommendations : 2 -:- Currently Reading : 5
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I am making no money from this fanfic.

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Chapter Thirteen—Breakfast in Diagon Alley
            “Thank you.” Malfoy smiled at the man who showed them to a table inside the Leaky Cauldron, nodding as graciously as though he ate at the place all the time instead of the posh restaurants that Harry was certain he frequented.
            For that matter, it was ridiculous to have someone show them to a table in a pub, but the boy, related to Tom by his height and his eyes, had insisted on doing so the minute they stepped through the door. Harry, already bright red to the ears because of all the staring people had done in the middle of Diagon Alley, had let him do it. And Malfoy, of course, probably didn’t even realize this wasn’t the way things were normally done, because he was so used to service.
            Now, though, Harry shook his head at Malfoy. “You really think I can be just like anyone else?” he asked, tossing his head at the door. “After that gauntlet we walked through outside?”
            “Don’t be absurd, Potter. When you run a gauntlet, people beat you with heavy sticks, doing their best to kill you. The most those people might have done was kiss your feet.” Malfoy leaned back in his chair, taking off his cloak, and looked at Harry thoughtfully. “I see another thing we need to work on is your sense of proportion. Perhaps that paranoia serves you when you chase criminals, but it’s no wonder that you find yourself stuck in the house and unable to interact with anyone, if you think of them as your enemies.”
            Harry hunched his shoulders up around his ears and stared at the tabletop, at a hole that looked as though it might have been left by a curse that had burned through the wood, or maybe just worn down through the presence of countless mugs over the years. He wondered how he could explain to Malfoy that he would rather have heavy sticks beating on him. That would give him enemies to fight, and it would let him understand his own feelings.
            Now, though, he didn’t understand the embarrassment and the fear and the shame that overcame him every time he had people staring at him. It didn’t matter why they were staring at him, whether they thought he was insane or a hero or someone they should buy drinks for. He didn’t like the attention in general. If he knew that no arrest he made would ever land him on the front page of the Prophet again, no matter how big it was, he would have relaxed with a long sigh of joy.
            “Listen.”
            Harry started and looked up at Malfoy, who was reaching out towards him. Harry wondered for a guilty second how long Malfoy had been speaking without him being aware of it. He tried to make up for his inattention by clearing his throat and sitting up. “Yes? Listen, do you want a drink?”
            “In a second.” Malfoy’s eyes were deep, but his mouth relaxed, and the angle of his face as he watched Harry was thoughtful. “You don’t care that no one’s actually asked for your autograph or any other nonsense, do you? You want them to leave you alone and treat you like an ordinary person.”
            Some of the tension departed Harry in a rush after all, which left room for anger to come in. He sat up and clenched his hands on the table in front of him. “If you could know that, why did you ask me to come here?” he asked in an angry hiss. “If you knew that I would be uncomfortable—”
            “Discomfort is worth getting over,” Malfoy said, and made a little motion with his hand that could have indicated the other customers in the pub as well as those outside it. “Think about your discomfort, Potter, don’t just feel it. I agree that it would be awkward if people mobbed you at our sons’ Quidditch game, as you once told me they did. But they’re not doing that here. Yet you react as though they were. Why?”
            Harry thought about it, then stood up. “I’m going to get a butterbeer,” he said to Malfoy. “What about you?”
            Malfoy stared at him, then sighed. “Firewhisky. I accept no lesser drink.” As Harry turned away, he added, “And I expect you to stop running away from my questions, Potter.”
            Harry scowled lightly as he walked through the silent room, and saw the eyes fixed on him. No one had gone back to what they were doing yet, whether that was drinking or eating or talking to the person across the table from them. All of them waited in panting silence for what he was going to do next.
I’m going to get drinks for myself and Malfoy, that’s what I’m going to do, Harry thought, and ordered the drinks in a loud, clear voice. There was a low murmur of voices then, as the smarter parts of his audience grasped that he wasn’t here for anything extraordinary.
By the time he turned around with the drinks, made by Tom’s worshipful young relative, Harry had made up his mind. Malfoy had already understood part of the truth. That meant Harry could at least try to tell him the rest, no matter how stupid it sounded.
He put the Firewhisky in front of Malfoy, who considered it for long seconds, and then held up the mug and turned it back and forth near the light, although what the hell he was looking for, Harry had no idea. Finally, Malfoy lowered the mug, nodded, and said, “Acceptable.”
“You haven’t tasted it yet,” Harry had to point out.
            “I’ll drink it, but I’m thirstier for an answer to my question,” Malfoy said. “Why do you hate them so much when all they’re doing is looking at you?”
            “I’m hungry,” Harry said, and put his mug down after a long swallow of butterbeer. “You shouldn’t drink on an empty stomach, anyway. What do you want?”
            Malfoy reached out and laid a light hand on his wrist. He was frowning at Harry as though he was a rare butterfly who wasn’t cooperating by sticking itself on the pin for Malfoy’s collection.
            “Talk to me,” he murmured.
            Harry stared at his hand, and then sighed. He’d thought only a minute ago that he could trust Malfoy with part of the truth. Malfoy wouldn’t make fun of him even if Harry was acting stupid, he thought. Malfoy had too much riding on paying the life-debt back in a few weeks. Driving Harry away, or making him want to do something other than pay attention to Malfoy’s words, wouldn’t accomplish his purpose.
            “Fine,” he said. “I just don’t like people paying attention to me. I didn’t like it when I was a first-year and almost all of the attention was positive. And I don’t like it now, even though you might argue I deserve it. It’s not just the people who threaten my kids and won’t let me enjoy a simple Quidditch game.” He gestured around the pub, and the nearly half the patrons who hadn’t gone back to their own conversations, but were watching him in case he jumped up and slew a dragon or something. “It’s them. I don’t like it. I want to be ordinary. I want them to look at something else.”
            Malfoy stared at him. He cleared his throat for a second. Harry looked down at the table between them, expecting Malfoy to let go of his hand, but Malfoy tightened the hold, although the way he hummed beneath his breath made Harry think he might have done it unconsciously.
            “That can’t be true,” Malfoy finally said.
            Harry snorted. Here it came, then, the lack of understanding he had expected from the first. “Why not?” he snapped, tapping his foot against the floor.
            “Listen,” Malfoy said. “I don’t think you’re lying to me. But, I mean—you played Quidditch. How could you have done that if you hated people staring at you?”
            Harry shrugged, but found himself smiling. “That happened because I was good at it. I’d never had anything that I was really good at before. That helped overcome it. And they weren’t just watching me. They were watching Wood, and the Weasley twins, and you when you were playing, and everyone else out there. I wasn’t alone.”
            Malfoy frowned, looking even more baffled. “So if someone else had helped you defeat the Dark Lord, you would have been all right with people praising you, too?”
            “Not at ease with it, but better,” Harry said, nodding. “And the stupid thing is, other people did help me defeat him! Ron and Hermione were with me all the way, and I’ve tried to tell reporters that I couldn’t have done it without them, but they just ignore me and go on writing the story the way they’ve always told it. And Dumbledore was the one who told me what I really needed to know to defeat him, and Neville was the one who cut Nagini’s head off, and Snape was the one who took the most risks, and McGonagall could defy the Death Eaters even though she’d spent an entire year suffering under them. They’re just as heroic as I was! Hell, I couldn’t have done it without you, even. If you’d told them who I was when they brought us to the Manor, it would have been all over.”
            Malfoy’s cheeks turned a pale, soupy color, and he took several deep breaths. Harry watched him in some concern. He reckoned part of it was the same thing that had made Malfoy upset when they battled the Spiders; he probably didn’t think about the war often, and having the memory brought up like this had made him upset.
            “Sorry,” Harry said. “I didn’t mean to make you think you—I don’t know. Sorry,” he added inadequately. Malfoy already had his breathing under control again, but it made Harry feel sore in the chest to know he had caused even a small part of that.
            Malfoy shut his eyes and returned to his normal pale coloring. Then he said, “I did not expect to find you so resistant.”
            Harry snorted and stared again at their clasped hands. If Malfoy wasn’t worried about that, he was. Or at least, he kept noticing it, with the same prickling feeling racing all over his entire body that he had once got when he and Ron were tracking a Dark wizard who pretended to be on the verge of surrendering to them. “I’m just telling you what it is. I hate being stared at. I hate people paying attention to me. I mean,” he added, as Malfoy drew his head back and looked at him, “I’d want people to pay enough attention to me to serve me in restaurants and get out of my way when I was running after someone, but I don’t want—I don’t want anything more than that. The same as everyone else gets. That’s fine. That would be fine for the rest of my life.”
            Malfoy was staring at him, eyes clouded for the first time Harry could remember since they had started the process of paying back the life-debt. He shook his head, not as if he wanted to deny Harry’s words, but slowly, slowly. “I’ve never met anyone like you, Potter,” he said. “Only you could say that and make me believe it.”
            Harry shrugged and made to pull his hand back. Malfoy kept hold of it. Fine, Harry thought. He had no idea what Malfoy was doing, but Harry still felt a little bad for reminding him of the war, so he kept still. “You can think of it this way, if you want,” he added, struck by a sudden inspiration. “I wasn’t ordinary when I was a kid. My relatives knew I was a wizard when I had no idea, so they treated me strangely and I didn’t know why. Then I came into the wizarding world and found out that I’m not even normal for someone who can do magic. I want to be normal because I’ve never been that way.”
            Malfoy reached out, picked up his Firewhisky, and took a long swig. Harry had to laugh. “I’m driving you to drink?”
            “I’m thinking,” Malfoy said, and turned back to him with a faint frown, finally releasing Harry’s hand. “But in the meantime, you’re right that you didn’t have any food recently. Go and find some. I need to think some more.” He folded his hands in front of his forehead and bowed his face down so Harry couldn’t see any of it, looking at the table.
            Harry snorted and stood up. He had allowed Malfoy his fair chance at convincing him. Malfoy couldn’t say that Harry hadn’t. Harry waved a jaunty little salute at Malfoy and turned away, walking towards the far side of the pub.
            The change in the noise warned him before he’d taken many steps. Harry turned around and drew his wand, dropping into a crouch at the last moment and putting a table in between him and the door. It was an empty table, or he wouldn’t have chosen it, but people were staring at him now as if he was mental.
            Then they were screaming, as the Spiders, white-cloaked this time, stepped through the door and tossed a handful of the black powder high into the air.
            Harry didn’t dare chance that it was just the fake powder they’d scattered around the “body” at the entrance of Knockturn Alley. He raised his wand and spun it through the sharp, difficult gesture that made the Wind Net spell, chanting the incantation under his breath.
            The net swept in from the sides and down, as if it were hanging from the ceiling of the pub. It gathered up all the powder and snapped it up against the ceiling, but not in contact with it, hovering and harmless. The Spiders looked up, gaping. It was obvious they had never expected their trap not to work.
            Harry jumped out from behind the table while they were distracted, and got to work.
            It didn’t take much, not with his opponents still standing there motionless and the people around him just starting to rise from their tables. Harry had done harder spells, in more crowded conditions. He whispered the modified Stunner that one of the Aurors had invented several years ago, and the spell glowed and sprang away from his wand, subdividing again and again into several red beams.
            It hit everyone in the room wearing white robes. That included the Spiders, and also a few of Tom’s customers. Harry shrugged apologetically at their staring friends as they slumped over the tables. The Stunner could be modified to hit all the people in a room who wore a certain color of robe, useful when they were fighting against the Dark wizards who wanted to imitate Voldemort and made sure their followers all obeyed the same dress code. The caster only had to put the Latin word for the color he wanted into the spell. The one drawback was that anyone else in the room wearing the same color would fall over, too.
            Harry set about reviving the innocents he’d Stunned, casting Incarcerous spells at the Spiders in between soothing words and pats on the back. For once, his celebrity came in useful; a smile from Harry Potter made some angry people, who might have screamed for much longer at anyone else trying to rescue them, forget what they were about to say. Harry apologized handsomely for bumped heads, too, and caught himself with one hand on the table when he started swaying—probably from lack of food. That charmed the people there, a woman in white robes and her husband. They thought he was leaning over to talk with them personally.
            Finally, everyone in the pub had been soothed, and someone called for a round of applause since Harry had just saved everyone again. Harry grimaced, but managed to turn it into a smile when a camera flashed at him, and waved.
            Malfoy came up next to him. His face was smooth and neutral. Harry was glad. If he ended up in the Prophet as so many people out with Harry for innocent reasons tended to do, at least he would look good in the meantime.
            “Come on,” Malfoy said, his hand locking on Harry’s arm.
            Harry shrugged. “Do you want to come with me to the Ministry again? I have to take this lot there, and there’ll be hours of paperwork.”
            Malfoy paused, and then his hand dropped away. Harry nodded, half-disappointed and half-relieved. He opened his mouth to suggest that Malfoy go back to the Manor, in fact. No knowing how long Harry would be taken up with the Spiders at the Ministry.
            “I’ll get you some food, and meet you there,” Malfoy murmured. He was gone with a swirl of his cloak.
            Harry watched him, then shrugged again. If Malfoy wanted to get common pub food, that was his problem.
            “Mr. Potter!” It was the woman with the camera, who was indeed from a newspaper, to judge by the breathless speed with which she asked the question and the quill hovering in front of her. “How does it feel to be a hero again?”
            Harry gave her the fake smile that charmed them, and replied, “I never really stopped,” which he knew would charm them, too, and which he had also said before.
            Distantly, he wished he could show that moment to Malfoy, who probably hadn’t heard it. See? I do so know how to behave. I’m not going to throw their adoration back into their faces.
            But that wouldn’t keep him from hating it, every second of it, and thinking wistfully about Ginny’s level of ordinariness, or Ron’s, or Hermione’s. They were so quick to recognize his heroism, why couldn’t they recognize that he was normal, too?
            Harry wasn’t sure he had anyone who thought that way about him. Certainly not Ginny, to whom he was a villain and not a hero now. And not his children.
            Malfoy?
            Harry didn’t look back as he gathered up the Spiders, floating, and left, because if there was a time and place to find an answer to that question from Malfoy, it was not now.
*
            snowangel88: Thank you! I’m really glad that you like the story, and that it seems new—something that’s difficult, with all the HP fanfics out there.
            chris7100: Well, Lily does tend to act this way only in front of Harry and to an extent Ginny, not the rest of them. The divorce is the excuse they usually accept for it, so no one’s been disciplining her because they hope it will go away as she adjusts. Harry is the only one who knows that it’s been going on far longer than that.
            Chester: Thanks!
            moodysavage: Yes, although the other demons (the Spiders) keep interfering.
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Marathon