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.

Chapter List
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Thank you again for all the reviews!
Chapter Twenty-Two—Losing Days
            “I feel like I’m losing days to your damn sleeping potions and spells,” Harry grumbled as he stepped into the kitchen. He estimated that he and Malfoy had got home about seven-thirty in the morning, and now it was almost six in the evening. “I didn’t even get the chance to write that resignation letter that Head Auror Robards is waiting for. He might not think that I’m serious about it.”
            “He’ll think you’re serious,” Malfoy said. He didn’t look up, pondering a piece of parchment on the table in front of him. Harry thought it was a letter to Scorpius, and wished he hadn’t complained the way he had. He had disturbed Malfoy from a more important duty.
            Or maybe not, given that there was dinner steaming on the table and Malfoy went on talking. “No one could see that look in your eyes and not think you’re serious.”
            Harry snorted and eased into the chair on the opposite side of the table from Malfoy. He’d slept restfully, but he’d stayed in one position during the whole day, the Sleeping Draught clogging his limbs and brain the way it always did, and his back hurt. “You’d be surprised. For some reason, criminals never think that I’m serious when I tell them to halt. It almost hurts my feelings, how determined they are to resist me.”
            He saw Malfoy’s lips tremble a little, and had to smile back as he tore into the roast beef that Kreacher had apparently decided was the done thing for dinner tonight. It was delicious, and filled his mouth with juice that made him mumble his way through it. Malfoy never looked up one way or the other to be disgusted by his table manners.
            Harry finally realized that he hadn’t asked if there was news about Jamie. Then he shook his head. He’d done that because he trusted Malfoy. He’d assumed there was no news because Malfoy would have woken him up if there was something urgent. He probably knew spells that could counter his bloody Sleeping Draughts, even.
            But he did swallow the piece of meat in his mouth and ask, “Any news?”
            Malfoy looked up. “Your son’s still asleep. Madam Juniper called to tell me that. Well, to tell you that, and to ask you to come back to Hogwarts, so that you could be there when Jamie woke up. I told her you were resting.”
            “When did she think he would wake up?” Harry glanced at the clock. Maybe he could still make it.
            “Two days from now,” Malfoy said. “She apparently was under the delusion that you would spend all the time between now and then in the infirmary.”
            “Well, I’ve done that before,” Harry said. “Although not when the children were in a healing coma where they had a certain time they had to wake up by. I didn’t know when they would wake up, and I wanted to be there when they did.”
            Somehow, he had managed to attract Malfoy’s undivided attention. He put the letter to Scorpius aside—Harry had a pang in his heart at that, but by now he knew better than to interrupt Malfoy—and said, “Why has that happened more than once?”
            “The children being in a coma? Or in a hospital bed?” Harry swallowed again and wished that he knew a way to bring Malfoy’s burning attention to him for a pleasant reason. It would make a nice change from all the ways that he seemed to acquire it, lately.
            “In a hospital bed.” Malfoy’s voice was clipped, his eyes intense.
            Harry shrugged. “Because of Jamie, mostly. He’s tried to steal things before and ended up getting injured doing it. And Lily’s fallen from her broom, and Al, too, a few times. When they were kids, they got into the Weasleys’ attic and got injured by the ghoul. They were too young to be up there, I wanted to kill Ron for sneaking them away, but at least he apologized.”
            Malfoy relaxed a little. “The broom accidents and the ghoul could happen to anyone. But your eldest son is a thief? Not only sometimes, but constantly?”
            Harry sighed, wondering how he could explain to anyone about Jamie. He didn’t want to sound too defensive, but—well, his elder son was a bloody genius. He doubted anyone who had a genius kid really had a normal parenting experience.
            “He knows things about Potions that I don’t think Snape knew at that age,” he said finally. “He says that he needs plants and other things he steals for his experiments, but when he tries to explain the experiments, they go over my head. Ginny’s, too. And certainly Lily’s and Al’s. He stopped trying to explain because he got frustrated that we couldn’t understand, and picked up stealing.”
            “Mmm.” Malfoy nodded. “I would like to be there when he wakes from the coma.”
            Harry shot him a cautious glance. “It’ll happen over the weekend. You agreed to stay away for the duration of Lily’s time here.”
            “I agreed to stay away from your house,” Malfoy pointed out. “Not Hogwarts. And you will not be staying here the whole weekend, unless you intend to ignore your son for your daughter.”
            “Should have known that you would stick to the letter of the rules and not the spirit,” Harry muttered, then wondered if he’d gone too far.
            Malfoy merely smiled. “You forgot you were dealing with a Slytherin?”
            Harry rolled his eyes and stood up to start clearing the plates. “I try to avoid thinking in terms of Houses except during a Quidditch game. There’s too much going on in my life right now to complicate it with House rivalry.”
            Malfoy opened his mouth, and Kreacher appeared in front of Harry with an indignant squeak and snatched the plate. Harry stared at him with his mouth open. Kreacher would sometimes help with the cleaning, just as he would with the cooking, but he had never objected if Harry started doing it first.
            “Master Harry is not to be doing things that Kreacher cans be doing for him,” Kreacher said, in what Harry thought was one long breath. He spoke loudly enough that the plates on the table rattled. “Master Harry is to be concentrating on getting well.” He jerked his head at Harry and marched away into another room, all the plates following him.
            Harry heard the gurgle of water a second later. He trotted into what had been a cupboard that morning, wondering if Kreacher thought the kitchen sink wasn’t big enough for them.
            Apparently not. Kreacher had installed what looked like a huge sink, except that it was set into the floor. A steady stream of water filled it from a pump off to the side. As Harry watched, Kreacher snapped his fingers and the pump’s handle tilted up, cutting off the flow of the water. Then Kreacher plunged his arms into the soap suds and began to scrub furiously.
            “Kreacher is doing things now,” he said over his shoulder, and gave Harry the kind of scowl that Harry knew made it wise to retreat. He had done the same thing when Ginny scowled at him like that.
            “That was odd,” Harry muttered as he and Malfoy walked back into the kitchen. “I didn’t know house-elves could do things like that.”
            “They can appear and disappear around wards and get food and prepare it anywhere they want,” Malfoy said, but he didn't sound interested in that. “What did he mean about you getting well? Are you sick?” He stepped up and rested his hand on Harry’s forehead.
            Harry felt his blood pounding in his ears, and leaped away. “You could have used a charm to check for that,” he muttered.
            Malfoy drew his wand slowly, as if he had forgotten he had it. Sometimes Kreacher had a weird effect on everybody, Harry thought, watching Malfoy narrowly. Malfoy shook his head a little and cast the spell that would check for a fever. A second later, he snorted and lowered his arm.
            “No,” he said. “You have a mild case of exhaustion, still, and a slight scratch on your arm that could turn into something serious if you tore it open and rubbed dirt into it.” A second later, his face grew haughty and austere again, as if he had exceeded his humor quota for the day. “But that doesn’t explain what Kreacher meant.”
            “I don’t know what he meant.” Harry flopped back into the chair he’d risen from. It seemed that he’d been scolded more in the last few days than in the nineteen years since the war. People had yelled at him because they were disappointed in him or he’d done something stupid, but not harassed him in circles the way Malfoy and Kreacher had. “And it doesn’t matter. Look. What can you do for Jamie?”
            “I know Potions,” Malfoy said. “I didn’t choose to make my living at them, but that doesn’t matter. I could understand the theory that he’s talking about, and perhaps turn him onto a different path that doesn’t require theft.”
            “Ha,” said Harry, and then shook his head and sighed when Malfoy glared at him. “I didn’t mean it that way. It would be great if it could happen. I just don’t think it can.”
            “You’ve stopped believing in your own impossibility,” Malfoy said.
            “Want to explain that one?” Harry glanced at the clock. Now he was wondering about writing the resignation letter to Robards, and whether it would arrive before Robards left the Ministry for the night.
            “Someone who defeated the greatest Dark Lord of this or any other century, and did it by dying and using a Disarming Spell, should believe that he has a chance at anything,” Malfoy said. “What you did was impossible. You know it. But you turned back into an ordinary person sometime in the last nineteen years. Why?”
            “You try being a hero every day and see how you like it,” Harry said, which was really the only retort he had for that, and the only one he thought he needed. “I hated it, Malfoy. I hated the expectation on everyone’s faces. Maybe I could face another challenge like that if it came along. But if it didn’t, they would always be disappointed that I hadn’t proven myself exceptional. So I went back to being an ordinary husband and father and Auror instead, and everyone except the fanatics forgot about me being a hero.”
            “Except the ones who expected superhuman endurance out of you,” Malfoy murmured, “handling family and marriage and endless Auror cases all at once.”
            Harry shook his head. “Whatever. If you want to visit Jamie, you can. But I don’t think he’ll be happy to see you, and I don’t think that you can turn him from his path of theft.”
            “What matters is that I have your permission to try.” Malfoy gave him a little bow. “In the meantime—what is that?”
            “That” was a delicate white owl hardly bigger than Pig, who fluttered through Harry’s window and landed on the table in front of him. Harry snorted and reached out for it. “That’s Snow White. Ginny’s owl. Well, her owl when she’s being prissy and girly and trying to fool other people into thinking of her that way.”
            Malfoy settled back in his chair. Harry glanced at him, and then realized that he was waiting to see what happened with the owl. As though Ginny’s letter would be different or dramatic, somehow.
            Well, maybe it would. Harry thought Malfoy was a lot more electrifying, with his words and his simple presence, than anything Ginny could say, but it was hard for him to see himself like that, from the outside.
            Ginny’s letter was short. In fact, she’d written it like a list, so much without paragraphs that it was hard for Harry to understand what she was on about.
            Lily, from Friday to Wednesday. I’ll take her from Wednesday to Friday.

            Jamie, to have a long talk with both of us.
            You telling the truth to my parents and the rest of the family, about the reasons our marriage broke up.
            Alternate visits to Quidditch games.
            You finding another job as soon as possible. It’s not good for you to be sitting around in the house all the time, and you know it.
            She hadn’t signed her name, but she must have known the owl would be enough. Harry rolled his eyes and passed the letter to Malfoy when he held his hand out, expecting it. Maybe Harry should have thought that was arrogant, but honestly, he didn’t find it so. Ginny’s demands were more arrogant.
            It made sense for them to have equal custody of Lily. Equal. That didn’t mean Harry should spend more time with her than Ginny, especially since Lily might not want that. Ginny might be thinking of it in terms of him not having a job right now, but that didn’t fit with her urging him to find another one.
            At least the long talk with Jamie, and both of them being present, stood a chance of changing things. And the truth-telling to the Weasleys? Harry would gladly do that, although he suspected the reasons he would give wouldn’t be the ones that Ginny would think were the “real” ones.
            “She is worse than I thought.”
            That was a simple, flat pronouncement, but given the vividness of Malfoy’s words generally, Harry felt shaken. He stared at him as Malfoy slammed the letter flat on the table and stood.
            “Someone needs to speak to her,” Malfoy said, his violence leashed now. Maybe he’d seen how Harry reacted—and hadn’t liked it, though Harry found it hard to imagine the version of Malfoy who wouldn’t. “Someone needs to make it clear that she can’t treat you like a slave, and that she can’t expect you to take extra responsibility for your children.”
            “I’m the one without a job at the moment,” Harry said. He didn’t really want to defend Ginny, not against the anger that Malfoy turned on him in the next second, invisible but strong, like a beam of warmth. But he understood the way she thought, and he didn’t want to expose her to that anger either. “And I’ve neglected the kids in the past. She probably thinks that this is a way to make up for that.”
            “Do you think your daughter, or your sons, would think it was real or true if you dedicated yourself to them because your ex-wife wanted you to?” Malfoy asked, and his voice rang like a bell, and Harry winced before he could help himself.
            “That’s what I thought,” Malfoy said, and his mouth formed into something harder than a smile. “That’s what I told you. You can’t wallow in guilt and expect that to satisfy your children. You have to make the choice to go to them of your own free will, and—”
            Harry whipped around. Something had been nagging at him for the last few seconds, but it had been easy to ignore under the flow of Malfoy’s compelling oratory. Now, he finally figured out what it was. The wards had never risen back around the house after Ginny’s owl had flown in.
            “Shit,” Harry said, and grabbed at his wand in the same moment that all the lights in the house dimmed—the fires muffled, the lamps blowing out. Harry dropped to his knees on the floor and tugged sharply on Malfoy’s arm, pulling him after him. Malfoy cursed at him, but the darkness must have warned him something was wrong if Harry’s instincts didn’t.
            “What is it?” Malfoy breathed, so softly that another inch away probably would have meant Harry couldn’t hear him.
            "I know this spell," Harry said. He had only seen it used once, but that wasn't the kind of thing you forgot, not when you'd been through what Harry had. "And the most likely people to use it right now would be the Spiders."
            He could practically feel Malfoy twitch beside him with the desire to ask questions, but he didn't. He touched Harry's arm instead, and then rested his arm on his shoulders. Harry turned his head in the darkness, feeling Malfoy's hand against his hair. He was pointing right.
            Harry nodded, a motion he knew Malfoy would feel, and they edged through the legs of the table, in the direction of the drawing room. Trying to get a fire back up might not work, but it was still a better chance of escape than breaking through the doors, or the anti-Apparition wards he could sense shimmering around the house. The Spiders had given up the advantage of surprise the moment they attacked. They would take a chance with anti-Apparition wards because they had already taken the chance with the darkness.
            There came a loud thump, and Harry froze. Malfoy was doing the same thing, leaning against him, his breath ruffling Harry's hair over his ear. Harry ignored the temptation to swat. He was all right. Malfoy would be all right, because Harry willed it so.
            "What's that?" Malfoy asked, in the same sort of quiet voice he had used before.
            "Someone coming through the Floo," Harry replied. He supposed it was possible that they could have lit a fire and simply used a glamour to keep him and Malfoy from seeing the light, but he knew no glamour that could block smell, and there was no scent of smoke.
            His mind was racing, putting together a few connections from files and cases in the past months that hadn't seemed important. Someone had speculated, before his friends came through with money to rescue him from the prison cell and a hidden sanctuary out of the country to keep the Aurors from finding him again, that it might be possible to travel through a Floo by darkness rather than light.
            Harry was afraid that might be exactly what had happened.
            There was a soft, slight chattering noise. Harry's hair on the back of his neck rose, and he swallowed. It was too easy, remembering the Spiders' emblem, to imagine that it wasn't a human who had traveled through the darkened Floo.
            "What now?" Malfoy breathed into his ear.
            Harry straightened his shoulders again. There was a strong chance that he might have panicked if he had been alone, but he wasn't, and he had to remember that. He had someone to protect, and Malfoy might not be able to handle himself the way another Auror would.
            And Harry would be here tomorrow, to greet his daughter in his own home and start actually paying some attention to her and disciplining her the way she needed. He refused to consider anything else.
            "Stay here," he breathed back, and squeezed Malfoy's arm to emphasize the point. This wasn't Knockturn Alley, where Malfoy could at least see to follow him. "I need to try something."
            Harry closed his eyes and began to compose himself. He had magic that sometimes only showed up when he was angry. It had taken him years to learn how to summon it when he wasn't in the middle of battle.
            When he thought he had it, he raised his wand, and the flame flared out from it, hot and intense enough to melt stone. It melted the darkness, too. The light and not the destructive power of the fire was the point right now, striking hard at the spell the Spiders had cast over the house.
            It let Harry see down the corridor that led away from the kitchen, although not into the drawing room, since the wall bent there. It let him see a single long, pale leg, crooked in a way that meant it did probably lead to a giant spider's body. It let him see that leg start turning the body towards him.
            Harry swallowed. He started to rise to his feet, to get away from under the kitchen table and into an open place where he could fight.
            And then something lunged past him, something small and furry and fast-moving, but still at least the size of a rat, and straight at Malfoy. Malfoy let out a cry. Harry had trouble, over the blur of emotion the scuttling thing had cast him into, telling whether it was a cry of pain or just one of surprise.
            It didn't matter. Suddenly he had no trouble in summoning the magic that anger normally kept caged at the bottom of his heart.
*
            BAFan: No, this was only Al's idea. Jamie didn't know what would happen, and his fall wasn't on purpose.
            As for why Al wants Harry and Draco apart, best to let him explain that when he shows up.
            SP777: Maybe? Not that he would admit it.
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Marathon