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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.

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Chapter Twenty-Five—Soothing the Pain
            Harry Apparated to the place just outside the gates of Malfoy Manor without trouble. He was never going to forget what this place looked like, although there were times when he wished he could.
            He strode, footsteps crunching on the gravel, up to the gates. There he paused. They hadn’t swung back to admit him, and he was unsure, for a second, whether knocking was a good idea. There might be a spell that would fling him back a hundred feet, or maybe a huge face would appear and stick out its tongue at any Gryffindor who dared approach.
            Then Harry rolled his eyes. The Malfoy he had met recently was melodramatic in a lot of ways, but it was also true that Harry thought he was past such petty pranks. He would prefer to make his visitors feel unwelcome personally, most likely, with a good dose of coldness.
            Harry did lift a Shield Charm behind him, just in case, before he reached out and rapped on the gates, calling out, “Malfoy? It’s Harry Potter. I got your owl, and I came as soon as I could.”
            No response for long moments. Harry pulled his cloak close around him, and shivered. It wasn’t that cold, but the feeling of being utterly alone in front of a place where he’d previously been captured by Death Eaters was unnerving nonetheless.
            The next second, there was a house-elf behind the bars of the gate, bowing so deeply that Harry was sure its nose scraped the gravel. “Master Harry Potter is being welcome, and is coming in,” it said, in an unusually high-pitched voice for a house-elf, and unlocked the gates with no more than a snap of its fingers. “Izzy is being sorry for the wait.”
            “It’s no trouble,” said Harry. He wondered, for a second, if Malfoy had ordered all the elves to treat him that politely, or if it had something to do with Dobby.
            Harry did have to close his eyes as he followed Izzy up towards the house. Dobby had died free, he reminded himself. That was the important part. And if he still didn’t like Lucius for what he had put Dobby through, well, that had been Lucius. It wasn’t Lucius he was here to speak with.
            They arrived at the front of the house, and Izzy hopped up the stairs in front of him. The door opened before the elf could touch it, though.
            Malfoy stood framed in the doorway, staring down in such intense silence that Harry bristled again. If Malfoy didn’t want him, just wanted words on a page, then Harry would take himself away again. He wanted to help, but he wouldn’t stay to be insulted.
            Instead, Malfoy made a convulsive motion, and then turned and ran back into the house. Harry blinked, but Izzy was beckoning him, so he walked up the stairs instead of away. He wondered if Malfoy had run off to be sick in the bathroom or something.
            Malfoy was waiting just inside, though, his arms folded as though he was the one who’d been out in the cold. His eyes studied Harry’s every movement intently as Harry took off his cloak. Harry looked for a peg to hang up the cloak, and Izzy whisked it neatly away from him, shaking her head and clucking her tongue a little.
            Harry didn’t listen to the elf’s mutters about how some people hadn’t grown up in a proper house, and instead focused on Malfoy. “How is he?”
            Malfoy had opened his mouth to say something, but snapped it shut now, with a bit of color high on his cheeks. A second later, he muttered, “Of course. You’re here for my son.”
            I thought that was what he wrote to me for—Oh. This was about the weird connection that Malfoy thought they had, or wanted to have, or something in between. But Harry wasn’t going to talk to Malfoy about that weird thing right now when there was a child in pain. He asked again, “How is he? Is he angry? Frustrated? Frightened? Am I going to frighten him more, showing up like this?”
            “Angry and frustrated,” said Malfoy, and tipped his head to Harry, reminding Harry oddly of someone bowing to an altar, before he turned to lead Harry up the corridor. “He didn’t want to lie to me, I think, but being caught out in the lie frustrated him more.”
            “Yeah,” Harry muttered, abstracted, and remembering some times that the Dursleys had caught him in a lie. “Is he in his bedroom?”
            Malfoy looked back at him and nodded. He seemed oddly natural, Harry thought, framed by blank white marble walls, different and better than he looked in Andromeda’s house. “That’s where he usually goes when he gets like this.”
            Harry held his peace, but he did wonder. When Teddy got that frustrated, Harry would go after him and try to talk it out. Malfoy seemed content to let his son, much younger than Teddy, run off without knowing where he was or tracking him down in case he got into trouble.
            On the other hand, maybe that’s why he owled me.
            “Here.”
            Harry started and looked up. He must have been deeper in thought than he’d realized; they’d already passed through what seemed to be several miles of corridors thick with carpet and bare with stone, and now Malfoy paused in front of a deep brown door banded with gold. Harry shook his head.
            Malfoy caught his eye. “Some people do have the money to live in luxury, Potter,” he said, voice almost a hiss that Harry didn’t need Parseltongue to translate.
            “Is that what Scorpius wants, though?” Harry asked, fed up with Malfoy simultaneously acting like someone who needed his help and the prat Harry remembered from school. “Or would he be even happier if his parents had stayed together and he had some siblings and less toys but more attention?”
            Malfoy flinched as if Harry had struck him. Harry sighed, said, “Fine, I’m sorry,” and turned and knocked on the door.
            Scorpius uttered a wordless scream from inside, and something flew against the door and shattered. Malfoy jumped violently. Harry, a little more used to this sort of thing from his time as an Auror, frowned and asked, “Do you want me to go away, Scorpius?”
            There was immediate silence, cutting off another scream that had been in the process of beginning, and Harry heard feet shuffling closer to the door. Then Scorpius whispered, “Mr. Potter?”
            “You can call me Uncle Harry,” said Harry. “I think I told you that.”
            He had thought that maybe that would make Scorpius laugh or something, but instead, the door flew open and Scorpius grabbed him so tight around the waist that Harry grunted in surprise. Harry reached down and picked him up, and Scorpius grabbed him around the neck instead and ducked his head down so he was buried in Harry’s shoulder, or neck, or the complicated place where his body became both.
            “Scorpius…” Harry whispered, cradling him close.
            He could feel the warm weight in his arms, the weight that Teddy was too big to be now and Rose and Hugo were too impatient to be—as soon as Harry picked one of them up, they started squirming to be put down—and hear a noise like a sniffle. He didn’t think Scorpius was upset, though.
            And a second later, sure enough, Scorpius whispered, “It’s all going to be okay now that you’re here.”
            “Maybe it will be,” said Harry, and tried to look away when he caught a glimpse of Malfoy’s angry face.
            He didn’t really want to be better with Malfoy’s own son than Malfoy was. On the other hand, Malfoy had been the one to divorce his wife, and the one to discipline Scorpius and try to make him into a “proper” pure-blood all these years. Maybe Scorpius needed someone other than his father right now, at least to turn him around and listen to him and then give him a gentle push back in the direction of his blood parent.
            Harry set Scorpius back down on the floor, although from the way he clung to Harry he didn’t want to go, and then crouched down and held his eyes. “Can you tell me what happened?”
            “Daddy should have told you.” Scorpius gave a proud little toss of his neck in Draco’s direction, his eyes narrowed at Harry as though Harry was trying to trick him into a confession instead of simply push him into one.
            Harry bit his lip so he wouldn’t betray how cute he found this, and said simply, “I know there are two sides to every story. You tell me yours.”
            Scorpius peered at him with astonished eyes, and then at Malfoy. Maybe he thought he’d interrupt. For that matter, Harry was surprised Malfoy hadn’t.
            But when he looked at him, he saw Malfoy standing with his hands locked together behind his back and his lip firm and his eyes far away, as though listening to distant music. That was probably as good a sign as Harry would             get that Malfoy didn’t want to interfere.
            “This is my side,” said Scorpius, still uncertainly, and sneaked another look at his father. The emotion Harry saw in the boy’s face decided him. Scorpius did want to love and be loved by his father; he just felt so distant from Malfoy at the moment that it was no wonder he was having trouble.
            Harry nodded. “Yes?” he asked, and arranged himself more comfortably on the floor. He was already getting old, he thought. His knees protested the crouch the way they wouldn’t have just a few years ago.
            Scorpius looked at him again, sighed, and said, “I wanted to go see Granddad and Grand-mum.” He paused. Harry waited. Scorpius mumbled, “I didn’t think Daddy would let me go see them again so soon. So I said I left a toy there.”
            Malfoy started to speak. Harry caught his eye and shook his head once, sharply. Malfoy turned his head away and snapped his jaw shut. Harry faced Scorpius and tried to sound as calm as he could. “Why did you think he wouldn’t let you see them?”
            “They were—we were just there. I was just there.” Scorpius was so busily fumbling for words that he didn’t notice the hand his father had reached towards him. Harry picked Scorpius up and lifted him into his lap, and Scorpius leaned forwards and pillowed his head unselfconsciously against Harry’s chest. Harry turned around so Malfoy could rest his hand on his son’s head. Scorpius sighed, but didn’t look up. “I was there while Daddy was gone.”
            “And it seemed like you were just there? And you thought your father didn’t want you to go back so soon?” Harry tried to keep his voice gentle so Malfoy could touch Scorpius and Scorpius would ease into the touch instead of moving away when he saw it was his father. Harry himself gently petted Scorpius’s hair and the nape of his neck.
            “Yes,” said Scorpius, and his voice slid down. “But Granddad Lucius said I didn’t leave a toy, and then he said he was going to talk to the house-elves, and Daddy said I was lying.” He lifted his head and fixed Malfoy with such a deep, disappointed gaze that Harry choked back what he would have said. “I wasn’t lying! I just wanted to visit them!”
            Malfoy waited, and Harry had to applaud the ruthless suppressing of what he was sure was going to be irritated, snappish words. Instead, Malfoy arched an eyebrow and murmured, “I would have let you go if that was what you wanted, Scorpius.”
            “But you would have been angry at me!” Scorpius buried his face in Harry’s robes as though he couldn’t bear to look at Malfoy.
            “I was angry because you didn’t tell me what you wanted.” Malfoy was being very careful, his words falling like small snowflakes, and Scorpius looked up. “Then you lied. That was the wrong thing. What you wanted—Scorpius, it wasn’t wrong. I wouldn’t have been angry at you for that.”
            Scorpius squinted at him. “You have been before.”
            Harry had no idea of the truth of that or not. He thought he had to interfere, though, or the argument would turn into an endless circle more appropriate to kids of Scorpius’s age than a kid and an adult. He cleared his throat softly. Both Malfoys glanced at him.
            God, does Scorpius have any idea how like his dad he looks? Not that Scorpius could probably hide his name or his heritage anyway—that hair would give him away at once—but it was a little uncanny.
            “I think that this could be cleared up by talking to each other,” said Harry. “And maybe some apologizing. Scorpius, are you sorry that you lied? Do you understand why it was wrong?”
            Scorpius resorted to burying his head in Harry’s robe collar again, but Harry just petted his hair and waited until Scorpius finally mumbled, “I understand why it was wrong. I wouldn’t do it again.”
            Malfoy’s eyes said clearly how little he believed that. Once again, though, he was smart enough to keep the disbelief to himself. Harry gave him a stern glance, just in case he forgot, and asked, “And do you apologize for getting angry at your son in the past when he wanted to go visit his grandparents?”
            Malfoy flushed, opened his mouth, probably to defend his side of the story, and then eyed the way Scorpius’s hands clung to Harry. He deflated. “I’m sorry I was angry,” he said, and his voice was soft and barren.
            Harry nodded, and determined to ignore the uncomfortable currents swirling through the room right now. “Now, Scorpius, do you think you can go and hug your father? I think he’s been missing you.”
            Malfoy shot him a wide-eyed, betrayed gaze that Harry also determined to ignore. If Malfoy thought keeping from Scorpius how much he missed him was the right course, Harry could only say that he was mistaken, and he would leave it at that.
            Scorpius sat up and stared at Malfoy. “But he doesn’t look like he misses me,” he said, and turned back to Harry. “He just looks like Daddy.”
            Then the cold expression and the stuck-up nose are business as usual? Harry managed to stifle his sigh, which neither father nor son would take well right now. “I think that he could look like he misses you,” he said. “Just like you could hug him.” He shot Malfoy a suggestive glance that Malfoy would have to be an idiot to misread.
            From the way Malfoy’s jaw set, he didn’t misread it, but he could have resisted it. Harry blinked a little and tried to make his eyes as appealing as possible. He knew there was a way to do it, because Andromeda had told him that Harry was as bad as Teddy for begging sometimes. He just had never done it on purpose before.
            Malfoy nodded a little, and then knelt and stretched out his arms. Scorpius made a noise like something small and wounded, and thrashed around in Harry’s grip.
            Harry started. He hadn’t realized that he still had his arms around Scorpius’s waist, making it difficult for him to move even if he wanted to. He lifted them, and Scorpius ran over to Malfoy and burrowed his head into his robes in turn.
            Malfoy lifted a hand and splayed it across the back of Scorpius’s neck, as if he was holding something unbearably precious. Which was true, but not the only gesture like that that he needed to make. Harry caught his eye and mouthed, Hug him!
            And when Malfoy folded his arms in and then tugged Scorpius fiercely against him, Harry was flooded with the satisfaction of a job well-done. He had worried a little about quitting the Aurors, but he didn’t think he needed to if he would feel this good helping all those families with children that needed him.
            He started to stand up, and both Malfoy and Scorpius turned around and regarded him. Harry paused, blinking. It was harder than he had thought to separate those faces when they were side-by-side like that, even harder than when he had thought Scorpius looked like his father.
            “I’m glad that you can get along,” said Harry, and smiled at them. Malfoy’s smile in return was sour. Well, maybe Harry had sounded condescending. He blamed it on not being as good at this as he would get, once he had practice and some people to advise him. “Do you need me for anything else, Malfoy? If not, I’ll leave—”
            “But you just got here!” Scorpius twisted hard enough that Malfoy almost dropped him, but he didn’t run back to Harry. He stood there and looked anxiously at Harry instead. “Teddy said you don’t leave fast when you come to visit him!”
            Harry blinked and inclined his head. “That’s true, but I think you need some time alone with your dad, don’t you?” He looked at Malfoy. Scorpius seemed to respect him now. Surely it would mean that Malfoy would want Harry to leave.
            But Scorpius said, “I want you to stay here!” and Malfoy nodded slowly. He probably didn’t have the same motivations for it, Harry thought, stifling a mad desire to giggle. The last thing he thought Malfoy was was jealous of Teddy.
            “I would like you to have dinner with us,” said Malfoy haughtily, his head uplifted and his cheeks coloring a little, as if he was listening to himself. “It’s the least reward I can offer for what you did for us.”
            “That’s right!” Scorpius looked pleased with the extra excuse, and stretched out one hand to Harry without letting go of Malfoy’s hand. “Now you can stay here and eat the house-elves’ cooking and keep me from putting a spoon full of chocolate on the table!”
            Harry blinked, at a loss. “Do you do that a lot?” he asked. He would have thought it was one of the (many) things that Malfoy wouldn’t allow.
            Malfoy caught his eye and gave a small shrug. Scorpius said, “I try not to do it, but sometimes I forget.” He was bouncing, looking back and forth between Malfoy and Harry as though he assumed that between the two of them, they could make this make sense. “You can stay and have dinner with us, and then you can stay over, and then we can go and visit Teddy tomorrow!”
            Malfoy turned his head abruptly away, but not before Harry saw the flush along his throat. He supposed that was Malfoy’s way of indicating that he wouldn’t be displeased if Harry stayed, although Harry thought it was still fucking weird.
            “I don’t know if Mr. Potter can do that.” Malfoy’s voice was stilted and strange after Scorpius’s over-bubbling enthusiasm. “He might have a job to go to tomorrow, since we know he works as an Auror—”
            “I’m giving that up,” Harry said abruptly. He was just glad that he had already told Ron and Hermione. He couldn’t have justified confessing it to Malfoy before them. “Being an Auror isn’t a good fit for me. I need to be in a job that works with children.”
            Malfoy’s head lifted like someone had yelled insults at him. “Oh?” he asked warily.
            Scorpius broke in before Malfoy could say anything further or Harry could confirm it. “Then you could work with me!” he declared ecstatically, and gave Harry a smile that showed how much of a cute kid he could be when not throwing a tantrum. “I’m a child! You could work baking for me and Teddy!”
            Malfoy smiled as though in spite of himself. Harry liked it a lot better than most of his planned smiles. “You do bake supremely well, Potter,” he murmured.
            Harry shook his head, visions of a bakery dissipating. He liked the idea he had written to the Ministry about—and told Ron and Hermione about—better. “No, I’m going to run a service that helps families who lost relatives during the war and adopted their relatives’ children. They need help with room and feeding the children and taking care of them and—oh, all sorts of things. No one really made any arrangements for that. They just assumed that because all the orphans got adopted, things were fine. They’re really not.”
            Malfoy blinked, and blinked again. Scorpius wasn’t ready to give up. “Take care of me and Teddy,” he said. He hesitated, then added, “And maybe Heloise?”
            “Who’s Heloise?” Harry asked.
            Malfoy cut in before Scorpius could give an answer that would probably have been confusing. “Heloise Yaxley,” he said. “Granddaughter of a minor branch of the family. She and Scorpius play together sometimes.” He was staring at Harry again, consideringly. “You realize that such a job would involve a lot of changes in your life and a lot of work?”
            “No shi—”
            “Potter.”
            Harry cut himself off in time. He supposed that he’d been spoiled by the free and easy environment of the Auror Department, which considered swearing a perfectly acceptable response to a lot of the cases they saw. “I know it’ll take a lot of work,” he said, with a repressive look at Malfoy. Really, Malfoy thought this was news to him? “But it’s work I want to do. Half the people in the Ministry think I have a death wish, or I’m obsessed with glory. It would be nice to work at a job that helps people but no one could accuse me of hunting glory in.”
            Malfoy’s lip curled a little. “There are other things you can do. You’re probably rich enough not to have to work.”
            “Money can’t give me the one thing I really want.” Harry’s voice roughened despite himself. Seeing Scorpius standing there, all big eyes and tilted head, had set him off again. He started blindly at the wall until he was sure that he could speak without huskiness. “This will. Or at least, I have to try.”
            Malfoy continued staring at him in what seemed like a dazed state. Harry hid a roll of his eyes. In the end, he thought, what separated him and Malfoy wasn’t their past or even their more recent scuffle over Ethan and other secrets. It was their incompatible worldviews. Malfoy had a child, so he thought children weren’t as precious because he already possessed one. Or something. Harry had no doubt he valued his own son. He just didn’t seem to extend the same value to other children in general.
            Harry would have given his world for a Teddy, for a Scorpius, of his very own. It wasn’t to be, so he would fill his heart with numbers of children instead.
            “Anyway,” Harry finished with a shake of his head, “I’m quitting that Auror job, so I don’t have to be at work tomorrow.”
            “Then you can stay for dinner!” Scorpius said, with all the glee of someone who had found the most important part of the argument.
            “He’s right, Potter,” Malfoy murmured, and picked his son up with a faint smile that didn’t hide the edge of his own glee. “You can.”
            Harry hesitated again. “I already ate—”
            “A small dinner!” Scorpius declared.
            Malfoy didn’t say anything, but looked at Harry over Scorpius’s shoulder with his eyes almost closed.
            Harry hesitated one more time, then shook his head and said, “All right.” And it was hard to resist the impact of their faces together, not just to resist the sight of Scorpius’s beaming smile.
            Not that I’ll ever tell Malfoy that.
*
Meechypoo: Harry now wants to help Draco and Scorpius for Scorpius’s sake. It will take him a while to feel that he’s also helping Draco.
delia cerrano: Thank you!
butterpie: Yes, I think Harry does a good job. Although he thinks that Scorpius ultimately has to “belong” to Draco, as it were, because of their blood relationship and because he doesn’t have any relation to Scorpius like Scorpius being his godson, the way he does with Teddy. He’s actually a little surprised that Draco appears to want more help from him than that, and so does Scorpius.
Jester: I think Draco could have managed on his own, but it would have to have started years back, and Draco can’t time-travel back!
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Starfall