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Starfall	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 32486 -:- Recommendations : 3 -:- Currently Reading : 4
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I am making no money from this story.

Chapter List
- 19
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Chapter Twenty—In Godric’s Hollow
            Harry walked through the streets of Godric’s Hollow towards his parents’ graves. He felt as though he was perched on top of his own head, manipulating his body like an iron puppet. It was so hard to take a step.
            He manipulated himself around the corners that he remembered, and past the broken house that he had lived in with them when he was a baby, and then over the crumbling wall, until he stood before the two graves. He sat down there, and only briefly paused to Disillusion himself so that someone walking by wouldn’t wonder what he was doing there and invite themselves to join in.
            His hands were shaking again.
            “Hello, Mum,” Harry said. His voice was brittle and dry. He cleared his throat, coughed, and managed to continue speaking. “Hello, Dad. I’ve come to visit.”
            He had no idea what to say after that, at least for long minutes, and he sat there and listened to the silence and wished there was a voice, any voice, to speak back to him. He violently regretted throwing away the Resurrection Stone. He had done it for what seemed good reasons at the time, but if he had known that his only family was ever going to be the dead, then he wouldn’t have.
            “All of you are dead,” he whispered to the graves and the grass that stood off to the sides. “Sirius and Remus and Dumbledore.” Then a thought made his laugh start rising up his throat, and he bit his lip, because he knew from recent experience that laughing through a Disillusionment Charm was a great way to alarm the Muggles. “I suppose I could track down Petunia and Dudley and ask them if they wanted to come visit the graves.”
            But he shook his head a second later. That was only ever going to be a sick fantasy. He and Dudley had sort of reconciled right before the Dursleys vanished, but Harry didn’t think Dudley would ever feel comfortable here, standing in front of the grave of the aunt he’d never known. And there was no one else in the world who was related by blood to James anymore.
            “I didn’t think of that,” he told James then. “Until just now, I mean. At least if Dudley has kids, there’ll be another generation of Mum’s bloodline alive in the world, but not yours.” He put his hand on his father’s gravestone. It was faintly warm to the touch. “Did you—I mean, would it have bothered you? To know there’s going to be no more Potters?”
            Harry thought about that moment in the Forbidden Forest when he’d been walking to what he thought was his doom. His father’s shade had smiled at him. No, he decided. It would have been okay, if James was still alive and Harry had found out he couldn’t have kids. His dad had been proud of him when he thought Harry was going to die. Either way meant no kids. Maybe he would have been sad because he’d known the Potter family in a way that Harry never would, and maybe the legacy meant something strong to him, but he wouldn’t have rejected Harry for not being able to produce children of his own.
            Not rejected him the way Andromeda had.
            Harry shuddered then, and shook his head. It felt disloyal to Andromeda to be sitting here and thinking that, even if it was what he felt.
            “It’s not—I know that she didn’t mean it that way,” he told his parents, and reached out and placed his hand on his mother’s stone under her name. “She just wanted to talk to Malfoy, and they’re related, and she didn’t want me mucking it up.”
            Then he was silent, thinking. Andromeda had a blood connection to Malfoy, and so did Teddy. He was only Teddy’s godfather. Maybe he’d been stupid, thinking that the special place he had in their lives would endure forever.
            “But Sirius was special to me, and he was my godfather.”
            Harry knew there wasn’t really a special silent encouragement coming to him from the gravestones, but he liked to pretend there was. He leaned his hands on them and continued.
            “Maybe Teddy doesn’t need the same connection to me, because he has so many other relatives left alive. Maybe I would never have wanted to live with Sirius if the Dursleys had been nicer to me. Or if you had still been alive,” he added, and then sighed. That was the most impossible of all impossible wishes. To turn back time and make sure that Halloween night never happened…
            But he returned to himself, and reality, with a bump when he heard a noise behind him. He rose quickly to his feet and backed away from the graves. If someone else was here to say hello to his parents, then the last thing he wanted was to be caught.
            It was a hunched-over Muggle, though, moving slowly through the graveyard and staring at the headstones like a tourist. Harry hissed under his breath in annoyance. He wanted them to go away. He knew that Godric’s Hollow was a village that wizards and Muggles shared together, like Ottery St. Catchpole, but this was a bloody inconvenient time to be reminded of it.
            Unexpectedly, the Muggle froze and looked around. Harry looked down, wondering if he had left a foot visible. Sometimes Disillusionment Charms happened that way when he was upset.
            But instead, the Muggle peered at the flattened spot in the mud where Harry had been sitting and asked in a trembling voice, “Is anyone there?”
            Harry blinked, then grinned. Maybe the hiss he’d made, maybe a sigh or a shift of robes, had alerted the man that something was out of the ordinary. And because he didn’t immediately think of a wizard, he probably wasn’t a Muggle who lived in Godric’s Hollow and was at least a little immune to strange happenings. That meant Harry was within his rights to drive him away.
            He focused on the image of a serpent and hissed out a greeting in Parseltongue. “Hello, someone who shouldn’t have wandered here.”
            Before he even finished the sentence, the Muggle was running, banging his knees into several stones on the way out. Harry watched as he practically vaulted the crumbling wall, and held in his laughter until he was sure it wouldn’t be heard. Laughter wasn’t a sound snakes made, and he didn’t want the Muggle concluding it was a prank and coming back to catch the perpetrator.
            Harry sank down in front of his parents’ graves again when he was sure that the Muggle was gone, and stared at their names again. His mood had picked up a little during the prank, but it was already sinking, and he wasn’t sure how to get it back.
            “I just don’t understand,” he whispered. “I try to be—I don’t know, good at my job. A good person. A good godfather. And it seems like all these things happen to me anyway. Voldemort wasn’t enough for one lifetime?”
            He leaned his head on his arms and sat there for a while. He no longer felt the intense despair that had driven him here, desperate to connect with the only people he had left (for certain definitions of “left”) who would understand what family meant to him. And they would consider themselves his family. Harry was certain of that. He’d only been a baby when they died, but he would never have got kicked out of the house or disappointed them. Even once they found out he was a Parselmouth. Even if he did accept the Sorting Hat’s invitation into Slytherin his first year at Hogwarts.
            But there was no one else. Ron and Hermione would comfort him, invite him into their home, let him play with their children, but they couldn’t give Harry that comfortable solidity that only belonging to a family could. The Weasleys all maneuvered around each other and felt the ache of Fred’s grief in a way that Harry just couldn’t. And they accepted Hermione as one of them in a way they couldn’t accept Harry, now that he was no longer married to Ginny.
            He really was alone.
            It can’t be like that. It doesn’t deserve to be like that, Harry told himself fiercely, a minute later. Surely it’s not like that. That Dark hex destroyed my chance to have children. It doesn’t mean that I have to spend the rest of my life alone.
            Maybe in the Muggle world, he decided a second later, that would have been true. But not here, in the wizarding world, where lots of people married young despite their long lives. Harry had wondered why that was true, why Ginny had wanted to get married so soon instead of traveling around and playing years of Quidditch, but now he thought he knew. Seeing the world was fine if you had no attachments. But most wizards and witches wanted to stay within the embrace of their family, and you married young so you had more people to be with.
            It made intuitive sense to Harry, even though he had waited to marry Ginny until he’d completed his Auror training. He wanted children, he wanted a home, he wanted someone to share it with. That was all he’d ever wanted. For all the horrible things about the Dursleys, he had envied them that.
            Harry rubbed quickly at his eyes. The longer that he stayed here, the worse it got, the hollow feeling building inside him that said he might as well not continue living. No. He wanted to continue living.
            He just didn’t know how, or where, or with whom.
            He rose to his feet and stared at the gravestones, still feeling numb. Like it wasn’t fair. Like the only two people he would ever belong with were gone, and there was nothing he could do to bring them back.
            This is the sort of time when it would have been easier to be a Dark wizard, Harry thought, a little resentfully. Then I could delve into necromancy or something and at least have the hope of talking to my parents again. He believed Dumbledore when he said there was no magic to bring back the dead, unless you wanted to make someone into a living Horcrux, but he knew necromancy would at least let him hear his parents’ voices.
            But he wouldn’t do that. It wasn’t the way he was made. The same way he wouldn’t go out and marry some random witch, and never tell her that he couldn’t have children. The same way he wouldn’t adopt a wizarding child as his own when he would never be able to give them a normal life, because he was alone and because he was the famous Harry Potter.
            It just...there were things he could do and things he couldn’t. Changing his situation was one of them. It was too bad that it fit in the latter category.
            And how long will you be content to let things go on like that, with one mindless sorrow after another? How long will you be content to be alone?
            Harry snorted bitterly. Well, that was another thing. He didn’t have to be single, either. Enough people had offered in the years since he got divorced, and he thought only about three-quarters of them were doing it because he was famous. There were some fellow Aurors who just liked him, he thought, and they wanted to make a go of it with him.
            But Harry couldn’t imagine making a family with someone else. It had been Ginny, it had always been Ginny, and without her, his hopes were just a few more of the things around here that were dead.
            You are getting maudlin in your old age, aren’t you?
            Harry snorted again and closed his eyes. His old age. His lonely age. At this point, it looked like they were pretty much going to be the same thing.
            He couldn’t stay in front of his parents’ graves forever, much as it would have comforted him. He heavily rubbed the dirt and dust from his robes, looking again at his parents’ names, and their dates. He’d already lived longer than they had, he realized with a kind of queer shock. It was something he had never thought about consciously before.
            “I suppose that’s the way it is,” he whispered. “I live longer than you and I’m twice as lonely as you were.” He could imagine his parents being afraid when Voldemort was hunting them, and maybe resenting that other people got to live normal lives while they were driven into hiding for fear of a prophecy, but he couldn’t imagine them as lonely. They’d had their family.
            Sometimes I wish I’d died with you.
            He didn’t say that aloud, but he did turn his back and make his way to the house where they’d hidden and he’d received the scar with much heavier steps than he usually would have used.
*
            Harry made a little camp outside the ruined house, raising a tent of clothes he Transfigured and starting a fire going in a small hearth. One of the more useful parts of his Auror training had taught him to make such things when he might be camping outside for long periods of time. He sat there and drank the mulled wine he’d made and stared into the fire.
            Kingsley didn’t want him back in the Ministry this week. Andromeda and Teddy didn’t need him, period, now that they had family. So what was he going to do for the seven days until he could go back to work?
            Harry turned around and looked attentively at the house, staring up at the broken walls and the rubble still scattered on the ground. He supposed some people wouldn’t feel right about him repairing the house. After all, since it had been left this way on purpose, as the sign in front of it said, then they might not want him tearing down a monument.
            But if he made little repairs one at a time, and still kept it a monument to his parents instead of living in it, that might be all right. And it would give him something to do, and end the crushing hopelessness that felt as though a demon was sitting on top of his heart.
            Harry stood up and made his way slowly towards the side of the house, resting one hand on the stone wall. He could feel nothing except the cool dampness of the evening. No magic, no sign that this had once been the place where he had lived with his family.
            Well. He could change that soon enough, Harry thought, and began to levitate pieces of stone off to the side.
*
            Draco woke up slowly, blinking. He had taken a nap with Scorpius for once, curled up on his bed with him, and it felt odd to wake and not know, for a second, what had really woken him up. He turned his head lazily to the side, surveying the room and wondering if one of the house-elves had popped in to clean and then popped out again when he saw them there. Scorpius was still more than fast asleep, curled up in the crook of Draco’s arm with a small line of drool sliding down his chin.
            Then Draco heard the distant chime, and sighed. It was the Floo. Someone was trying to contact him in the library, it sounded like. That meant it was probably his parents, wanting to know the next time Scorpius could visit them. That Floo was reserved for members of his blood family only.
Draco gently disentangled himself from Scorpius and made his way downstairs, casting a few Freshening Charms on his hair and face as he went. He was trying to repair his relationship with his parents the way he was trying to do it with his son and aunt, but he knew the caustic remarks he would attract if he appeared in front of them looking half-asleep.
The face that appeared in the Floo was Andromeda’s, however, not his mother’s or father’s. Draco blinked, feeling his heart quicken for a second. Then he shook his head. It was probably just a matter of a lost toy that Scorpius had borrowed from Teddy without permission or something.
“Good afternoon, Aunt Andromeda,” he said. “Was there something you needed?”
Andromeda’s face hovered in the flames for the longest time, staring at him. Draco felt his chin tilt up defensively and a few of his inner barriers rise. Perhaps she didn’t want them to come back to her house. Perhaps he had offended her. Well, he still wanted the children to have the chance to play together, and he would fight her on that, instead of accepting it passively, the way he once would have.
            Andromeda finally sighed and asked him the strangest question. “Have you seen Harry?”
            “Potter?” Draco asked blankly. Seeing the quick flicker of her eyes, which he knew was scornful, he immediately said, “Of course not. He’s much more likely to visit a dragon’s lair than to visit Malfoy Manor, unless on assignment.”
            “He was supposed to come back and see me today, and I haven’t heard from him,” said Andromeda, frowning more heavily than ever. “I wondered if he had contacted you and said something about not coming over in case you were here.”
            Draco snorted. “You’re still more likely to hear from him than I am.”
            “What happened between the two of you?”
            Draco flushed. The story he had once told his father as though it was the end of the universe sounded so childish to him now. “I wanted to shake his hand on the Hogwarts Express when we were both kids, he wouldn’t, I insulted Weasley and him, we became eternal rivals and then rivals at Quidditch, we were on opposite sides of the war, end of story.”
            “I didn’t mean that.” Andromeda folded her arms. “You may think I’m blind or too concerned with Teddy to notice, but I have eyes. The way you greeted each other when you came to give your blood for the potion was too touchy to be from that old a wound. Something happened between you more recently. What was it?”
            “I think Potter has to be the one to tell you that. It concerns his secret.” Draco spoke with as much restraint as he could, given what he was still thinking about Ethan Starfall. “Maybe he’s on a mission for the Aurors or something. I’m sure he’ll be back soon.”
            “I’ve spoken with his superior, Kingsley Shacklebolt. He told Harry to take the week off because he’s been reckless lately and Shacklebolt thinks he needs some time away from his job.” The pinched skin around Andromeda’s eyes was familiar to Draco from his mother’s face, and the mirror. “I’m worried about him.”
            Draco shook his head. “I still don’t know what you want me to do. I haven’t seen him. I promise, I would tell you if I had.”
            “Just like you’re telling me the source of the recent tension between the two of you?” Andromeda leaned forwards as if she would pounce on him.
            Draco shrugged, uncomfortable. “The only reason I’m keeping mum on that is because Potter asked me to, and it really does involve secrets that are his.” He suspected that Andromeda likely knew about Potter’s infertility and Potter wouldn’t care if Draco discussed that with her, but Draco thought he was the only one who knew about Ethan Starfall.
            It was strange, to be in such unique possession of one of Potter’s secrets and not want to use it to humiliate him. Draco would have valued the power it gave him over Potter, once. Now he was only aware of how much he had to skirt around other people because of it.
            “Draco. Please. Harry doesn’t…deal well with being isolated from his job or people he loves. I’m worried about what he might do. If this secret concerns anything important to him, please tell me.”
            Draco hesitated for a long moment. He wondered for a second if she was right, if Potter would harm himself, maybe kill himself, if he thought the rest of the people in his life had turned their backs.
            But they hadn’t, and as far as Draco could tell, Potter hadn’t revealed the secret of Starfall to anyone else. No, in fact, Draco was sure he hadn’t, even without Potter’s word on the matter. For one thing, most people would have spread the news of the Savior’s coping tactic around, just like they would have the news of his infertility. And his friends would have got him into therapy or something. And Andromeda would probably not be asking him these questions.
            Draco was Andromeda’s nephew, and that tempted him to yield. So did the thought of what he would be feeling if Scorpius was the one who had disappeared. It was the closest he could come to conceptualizing Andromeda’s relationship to Potter.
            But he was also sort of a bastard, and if he was being honest with himself, he wasn’t ready to surrender the pleasure that came from knowing one of Potter’s secrets. Not to mention that he had a strong self-preservation instinct, and he wasn’t sure that he could survive the spells Potter would unleash at him if Draco told anyone else about Starfall.
            “I can’t tell you,” he said, and when Andromeda’s face went grey and she opened her mouth, he held up a hand. “But I can look for him. You think that he’s feeling abandoned by everyone right now?” Something finally occurred to him. “Why would you think that? Only asking him to come back the next day isn’t unreasonable.”
            Andromeda looked aside, and there was a flush on her cheeks now that looked uncomfortably like guilt. Draco waited, and Andromeda finally murmured, “I told him that he had to come back because I was talking with you, and it was a time for family.”
            Draco just stared. It was probably because he’d known Potter’s secrets, both of them, although one longer than the other, but the words struck him in a way that they couldn’t have before.
            Andromeda, though, knew at least one secret, and she was perfectly capable of guarding her words, and even making Teddy guard his, if he had something to do with it. Draco spoke before he could stop himself. “You said that to him, when you know that he—lost his parents?” Safest to stick to public knowledge right now.
            Andromeda flashed him a dark, humiliated glance. “I didn’t think he would take it that way! Harry should know by now that I love him in a way that doesn’t have anything to do with blood connections, that family can mean more than that.”
            Draco snorted. He couldn’t help himself. “Perhaps he should have known it, but you spoke as if blood connection was the only thing that mattered, didn’t you?”
            Andromeda drew herself up. “I know that blood is the only thing that matters to you,” she said, voice trembling. “I should have realized that you would mock me for even trying to include Harry in my family.”
            Draco held up a hand, while his mind worked rapidly. Potter wanted family. He would go find something that reminded him of his parents. Draco had used James and Lily Potter as a conversational gambit just now, but that didn’t reduce their importance to Potter in this context.
            What likelier place than the place where his last memories of them must linger, the place where they had died?
            “I think I know where he is,” he said, but shook his head sharply when Andromeda opened her mouth with what looked like joy on her tongue. “I’ll be the one to go and fetch him.”
            “What? Why you?”
            “Because right now,” Draco said, “I think I have the dubious honor of being the person in this room who’s hurt him the least.”
            And, he added to himself as he closed the Floo connection on Andromeda’s stricken face, away from prying eyes, it’s not going to matter what he might say or if he duels me. And I think we both need to have our say out.

*
moodysavage: Harry really doesn’t think that he can make a family as a single parent, because he thinks the child should also have other blood connections.
HEARTSTAR: Thank you!
kit: Andromeda is worried, as you see here, but because she doesn’t know about Ethan, she doesn’t understand how deeply he’s hurt.
Marron: She really didn’t mean to. But her defensive reaction makes Draco bristle, because he thinks that she should have to be careful in a way that he shouldn’t, when he doesn’t have any particular connection to Harry.
Meechypoo: Draco is disappointed that he has to be the noble one, here. Other people should have that job!
Jester: Thanks! Draco will go to him, though whether he’ll help is an open question…
SP777: Harry is going to be all right, hopefully. But it will take a long time.
My TV broke and I never got another one.
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Starfall