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
- 24
- 25
- 26
Thank you again for all the reviews!
Chapter Twenty-Five—In Depth
            “This is a lot more fun than I thought it would be, Dad.”
            Harry smiled tenderly down at Lily. She was tucking into the cherry pie that she had persuaded Kreacher—well, and Harry, too—to serve her for dinner. She had promised not to eat more than two pieces. Remembering how much it would have meant to him to have sweets for dinner sometimes as a child, Harry had let her do it.
            “You mean spending time with me?” Harry asked, sitting down across from her and stealing a bite of cherries with a fork. Who said that he was too old to enjoy pies?
            Lily blushed. “Yeah,” she said, staring at her plate and seeming to lose interest in the food. Harry made a point of crunching through his bite, and she started eating again, but slowly. Harry waited. Sometimes he thought it would be best if he didn’t push Lily to talk, just waited for her to be ready to do it of her own free will.
            Lily sat back and stared at the pie for a while. Harry stole another bite, and that made her smile, but the smile faded again quickly. Harry controlled his impatience. He couldn’t force her to talk. He just had to wait for her to come around.
            Slowly, Lily said, “Dad, why are you living with Mr. Malfoy?”
            “Do you want him to go home?” Harry asked. It was true that Malfoy had claimed the right to stay at Grimmauld Place because it wasn’t technically Harry’s home, but Harry and Lily had barely seen him today, after breakfast. He had stayed in the library, or the bedroom he had claimed as his own, and the house was so big that it was easy to pretend that he wasn’t there. “Because I’ll talk to him about it.”
            “No.” Lily looked up at him, and she seemed as if she was about to jump and as if she was about to drill through him, at the same time. “I just—I just wondered if he was the reason you and Mum divorced.”
            Of course she would think that, what with Ginny announcing that I was gay to all and sundry, Harry thought in exasperation, but he kept the exasperation out of his face as much as possible. “No. I didn’t save Scorpius’s life until after were officially divorced, and he’s only here to pay back the life-debt that Scorpius owes me.”
            Lily bit her lip and looked down at her plate again. “Why can’t Scorpius pay it himself?” she mumbled.
            “I don’t know,” Harry said. “He did offer, but only after—” Well, he wasn’t going to tell Lily about Al and the part he had played in pressuring Scorpius to ask Malfoy. “After he had already agreed that his dad should do it,” Harry continued, smoothly he thought. “So Malfoy said that he couldn’t change his mind in the middle like that and leave the debt half-paid. Mr. Malfoy will stay with me a few more weeks and try to make sure that I don’t—well, get so upset. There’s no reason for me to get so upset all the time, about things like your Mum and you asking to come over. So he’s trying to help me with that.”
            Lily picked up her fork and began eating again. Harry waited. He didn’t think the conversation was over. She just needed time to think about what she’d heard.
            And sure enough, Lily put down her fork a second later and focused on him again. She started to say something, and Harry looked at her and handed her a napkin for the cherries dribbling down her chin. Lily flushed, but her smile when she’d wiped away the food and made herself able to talk again was heartening to see.
            “Why did he walk out of the room when you were talking about your cousin and uncle and aunt?” Lily whispered. “I thought he was going to stay and talk. He was the one who wanted you to say more about it.”
            Harry shrugged. “That, I don’t know. I’ll find him after you’re gone and ask him.”
            “Why not ask him while I’m here?” There was a storm threatening over Lily Land, Harry thought, seeing the way her brow furrowed. She probably thought she was being shut out of things because she was a child.
            Harry answered as casually as he could, given the importance of the words. “Because while you’re here, I want to concentrate on you.”
            Lily stared at him, and then she grinned and started shoveling the pie down as fast as it can go. “I want to go flying after this,” she said. “I want you to show me what you can really do on a broom.”
            Harry chuckled and leaned back in his chair, watching his daughter with a warm feeling running through him like cocoa. “Sure. Whatever you want.”
            The radiant look she flashed him showed that she really believed he meant that, maybe for the first time. And Harry could have flown off the roof without a broom.
*
            The broom flight had been a wonderful idea, Harry thought, as he settled Lily into bed. This time, Lily had been interested enough in his moves to try and copy them, and while there had been a hair-raising moment when she was twisted around the broom and hanging by one arm and Harry was speeding across the pitch to reach her in time, she had been all right. And she hadn’t wanted to talk about Malfoy or Ginny or the divorce anymore.
            “I love you, Dad.”
            Lily’s voice was slow and sleepy, and it didn’t sound as though she was placing a lot of importance on what she was saying. But Harry’s heart almost stopped. He leaned over and kissed her brow, feeling as though he was in slow motion.
            “Good night, sweetheart,” he whispered. “I love you, too.”
            Lily grinned at him, and yawned, and turned her head to the side. She didn’t go to sleep fast very often, but this time, Harry thought her snores were real, instead of the fakes she would use to try and stay in the drawing room instead of going to her bedroom. He stood there watching her, his heart beating hard, before he stepped back and gently closed the door.
            He was really meant to be a dad, he thought. He hadn’t done the best by his kids so far, but he could make them happy when he tried, and nothing made him feel better.
            He turned around and nearly yelped and reached for his wand. Malfoy leaned against the wall not far from Lily’s door, his eyes shadowed and his leg cocked as though he would hold it across the corridor if Harry tried to run away.
            “We need to talk,” he whispered.
            “I want to focus on Lily right now,” Harry whispered back, annoyed with the way his heart was still thumping because it hadn’t caught up with the fact that Malfoy wasn’t an enemy yet. “We can talk when she goes back to her mother.”
            Malfoy blinked for a second, so slowly that it was like he had a disease of the eyes. Harry felt a little tremor of concern, but he stood stubbornly still. If he was going to focus on his kids, he couldn’t focus on anything else.
            “She’s asleep,” Malfoy said a moment later, more reasonably than Harry would have expected from him, although with a tremor in his voice. “She doesn’t need to hear this, and I wouldn’t be comfortable talking about it in front of her.” He extended a hand to Harry, and it trembled, too. “Please. I need to talk to you.”
            Harry stared at the hand, and then sighed. He supposed it couldn’t hurt, as long as he kept Lily in the forefront of his mind and went to her immediately if she woke up with a bad dream or something.
            And he had to admit, the force of his own curiosity to find out why Malfoy had wanted to hear more about his childhood, why Malfoy cared so much, as well as why he’d walked out of the room and what the hell he was thinking in general, was devouring.
            “This way,” he said, and guided Malfoy to what had once been the library. Harry had moved the books and the shelves into other rooms, and cleaned up the windows, and added lots of furniture. It was one of the biggest rooms in the house, with the most windows. There was no reason not to take advantage of the sunlight.
            Now, Harry stepped in and drew the curtains with the flick of his wand. Then he set the fire going with another, and turned one of the huge, soft chairs around so that it faced another. He sat down in the first one, and watched Malfoy pause with his hand tight on the back of the other.
            Maybe he was uncertain of his welcome. “Please, sit,” Harry said quietly.
            Malfoy came around to the front of the chair and sat, though the way he bristled, Harry wondered if he had been wrong about the cause of his uncertainty. Or maybe he was insulted by—something. Harry could come up with too many candidates for what it could be, especially given that he had ignored Malfoy all day, so he tried to sit back with his arms flat on the arms of the chair and pretend that he was absolutely relaxed.
            It would be a pretense. Harry couldn’t help that, though. He looked at Malfoy, and waited for him to start this conversation. He was the one who had wanted to have it, so Harry thought he would begin it soon.
            But Malfoy looked into the fire and played with his lower lip using one finger. It made him look absurdly young. Harry finally sighed and said, “So why did you walk out of the room?”
            Malfoy turned and looked back at him in a way that made Harry certain his words hadn’t startled him—which meant he had known all along that Harry would speak and that his silence was probably just a game, a test. Harry rolled his eyes, but waited.
            “I was angry,” Malfoy said.
            That made Harry blink. “I don’t think it’ll do any good to be angry at the Dursleys,” he said, after considering it for a minute. “What they did to me happened years ago, and—and you can’t make them sorry for it even if you could find them.”
            Malfoy smiled viciously at him. “You have no idea what I could do,” he said. “But I’m angry at other things, too. Myself, for never realizing the truth. This makes sense of a lot of your actions that I didn’t understand before. And fate, for giving you a shitty hand. And maybe for the Dark Lord attacking your parents in the first place, and meaning you had to go to them.”
            “And maybe you should be angry at Trelawney, for speaking the prophecy, and my godfather, for going after the man who betrayed my parents instead of staying behind to take care of me.” Harry shook his head. “Shit, Malfoy. I thought it was something serious.”
            Malfoy looked as if he would puff up several sizes larger, like a frightened cat. Or maybe it was his magic that was giving Harry that impression, the way it snapped and wavered around the room like a banner. Malfoy’s eyes were locked on Harry, and there was a severity to them that Harry didn’t like at all.
            “You don’t think this is serious?” Malfoy whispered. “You don’t think that you owe me the right to take my anger on your behalf seriously?”
            “Not with what else you said.” Harry met him stare for stare. “That part about how knowing I was abused explains the rest of my behavior? I’m more than that, Malfoy. More complicated than that. I’m also affected by my years at Hogwarts, and Voldemort, and my Auror career—which I’ve done for almost twice as long as I lived with the Dursleys, let me remind you—and Dumbledore and the war and all the rest of it. You can’t reduce me to one set of circumstances. You think you’ve found the key to me, and you haven’t.”
            Malfoy’s jaw tumbled open. Harry settled back with his arms folded and a faint smile of satisfaction on his face. It wasn’t that he really enjoyed foiling Malfoy—well, not that much. But Malfoy had taken Harry’s revelations the wrong way, not seeing the difference between Harry’s life and his children’s, or even his past and his present, and rejoicing, the way Lily had. He had decided that he could explain Harry to himself, and he didn’t like what it explained.
            Fuck him, then, Harry thought, and started to push himself out of the chair. A few other people who had learned about Harry’s abuse had thought they could explain him that way—Ron before he came to his senses, one of the Aurors who had accidentally seen Harry’s memories in a case involving a Dark curse that showed them, and the Mind-Healer Harry had briefly seen before reckoning that he was as sane as you could expect when he’d been through what he’d already survived. He didn’t need Malfoy to join them.
            It did bother him, a little, that Malfoy had fallen into that category. Harry had thought he was better than that.
            “Potter.”
            Harry paused; this time he was the one with his hand on the back of the chair. Malfoy had risen to his feet, and there was a shadow on his face that didn’t come from the fire. He looked as though he’d like to throw something expensive at Harry’s head to hear it shatter.
            “You wanted something?” Harry asked evenly, and had the satisfaction—for what little satisfaction it was—of seeing Malfoy flush brilliantly.
            “I do,” said Malfoy, his voice lower than before. “I know that you’re right. This doesn’t explain all of you.”
            Harry waited, and started to roll his eyes when he realized nothing else was forthcoming. “That denial doesn’t sound all that convincing—”
            “But it still makes me bloody angry.” Malfoy jammed his hand into the chair as though he would have liked to set it on fire. “I still want to change things. I know I can’t, but I’d like to change them.” He bowed his head. “I’d like it to have been different for you.”
            “Okay,” Harry said slowly. He supposed the sentiment was nice, but he already knew that Malfoy liked him.
            The memory of the kiss returned to Harry, the way it honestly hadn’t when he had been mostly concentrating on Lily, and he felt himself flush. He cleared his throat awkwardly. Malfoy looked at him, his eyes still and brilliant.
            “Thank you for that,” Harry said. The library felt too small, for all its size. Maybe the fire he had lit made it more intimate than it really was. He took a step backwards. “It’s not that you can change it, but thank you for wanting to—”
            “The part I don’t understand,” Malfoy persisted, “when you have the courage to overcome your childhood, and face up to your mistakes with your children, is why you don’t have the courage to face me.”
            Harry jerked himself to a stop, as hard as he had when he’d faced his last Dementor. He gave Malfoy as wry a smile as he could imagine. “Face you? What are you, an enemy?”
            “The opposite of that, if you’d let me be,” Malfoy breathed, and walked towards him.
            The accusation of cowardice had stung, and so Harry managed to stand still as Malfoy slid a hand around the back of his neck and back and forth in a slow rhythm, watching Harry breathlessly all the while. Harry half-shook his head when Malfoy finally looked at his eyes instead of his lips. “Why did you kiss me?” he asked. He thought he knew, but he’d like to hear Malfoy confirm it aloud.
            “Because I wanted to,” Malfoy said. “Because I like you, and find you attractive, and find someone who cares enough about me to save my life and try to protect my honor attractive.”
            Harry reached up and gripped Malfoy’s forearms. Malfoy went very still. Only when Harry pressed down a little harder did he realize why. His palm covered the Dark Mark, and he could bet that damn few people touched Malfoy there willingly.
            “About that honor,” Harry said. “You’re still grieving over your divorce, or whatever else it was that you think caused the loss of Astoria’s honor, and in the meantime, I don’t think this should go further.”
            “When could it go further?” Malfoy whispered. “Your divorce is final, and mine has been over for years.”
            “But you’re still not over it,” Harry said, and transferred his grip to the sides of Malfoy’s face, stroking gently. “Listen. We both need time to think about this. And what about my kids, and what about Scorpius, and what about Ginny?”
            “I can promise you that Scorpius won’t mind.” Malfoy was still regarding him with that brilliant look. “He has an entirely pure-blood view of lovers and marriage. They’re your private business, except for keeping up appearances, and as long as we don’t embarrass him in public, he won’t care.”
            Harry shook his head, frustrated. “So even if I did pursue this further—if we pursued this further—we couldn’t appear together in public? I could never date someone if that was a condition.”
            Malfoy gave a dry little laugh. “That’s not what I said. He wouldn’t want us to stick our tongues down each other’s throats or fuck in front of him, for the same reason that so few teenage boys want to see their parents having sex.”
            Harry jolted. It seemed that he really liked the word fuck spoken in Malfoy’s voice, which was not something he had known.
            Malfoy watched him for a moment, then sighed and stepped back. “If you’re determined to wait, then we will,” he said, and pressed a fingertip into the middle of Harry’s chest. “As long as you focus on your children and your ex-wife and whatever else you need to think of with the perception that we’ll resume this once you’re no longer so busy. And as long as you stop avoiding me, and talk to me.”
            “What about you?” Harry countered, looking at him. “Will you be willing to talk about Astoria?”
            Malfoy flushed, but didn’t run. Then he said, “For someone who cares about me the way you do? Yes.”
            And he left the room first, leaving Harry there to deal with the heat of the fire and his blush and his own incredulous sense that maybe he was taking the first steps to having a lover.
            A male lover, at that.
            Harry sighed. He still wasn’t looking forward to the expression on Ginny’s face when he told her…
            But maybe some things mattered more than her expression.
*
moodysavage: Draco does suspect that, but right now, he isn’t going to push Harry.
kit: Ginny doesn’t want to act jealous, but it seems to her that Harry is moving on with his life more easily than she can, and that does make her jealous.
And yes, Draco is angry at himself for not seeing it before.
polka dot: Harry might have told him to go away if not for the Spiders. He doesn’t want them attacking him.
CareLessLover: I think she did. They just had too many problems communicating.
And Draco knows the solution is not to kill the Dursleys, because he can’t change the past, but he still wishes he could.
- 24
- 25
- 26
You need to be logged in to leave a review for this story.You need to be logged in to leave a review for this story.
Report Story

Marathon