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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Thank you again for all the reviews!
Chapter Twenty-Six—A Touch of Defiance
            The next day passed like a dream. There were still a few points when Lily looked at Malfoy doubtfully, but she didn’t question his continuing presence in the house, and did what Harry asked of her—for the most part—and didn’t say that Harry was horrible, except when he told her to pick up the clothes that she had scattered all over the floor when she wanted to change after Quidditch practice. And that was the kind of ten-year-old “hatred” that Harry had experienced with his sons, too. He knew it would pass.
            There was no sign of the Spiders, and Kreacher only watched Harry and shook his head indulgently sometimes, as though he wondered why it had taken Harry so long to catch on to Malfoy’s attraction. Malfoy was quiet, eating meals with Harry and Lily and reading next to Harry in the library, but only contributing to regular conversation now and then. Most of the time, Harry got the chance to be a dad.
            And that was worth the danger he still worried about, that the Spiders might attack Grimmauld Place while Lily was here.
            He considered the risk small, because of the powerful wards and the Dark spells lurking behind them which a group of Dark wizards would be more prone to sense than most of the ordinary people who came by the house, and because they hadn’t come after him and Draco yet. In the meantime, he could keep his promises.
            And get to know his daughter.
            There was nothing horrid about Lily when she wasn’t yelling at him, only exasperating things. She wanted to do everything in sight, and everything her mind came up with, and whined when she didn’t get what she wanted right away. Harry couldn’t help comparing the way she acted to the way he had at that age. He complained all the time in his mind about the Dursleys, but not aloud, and he only asked for things he really wanted, because he knew the chance was high that he wouldn’t get them. Lily had never had to live with the disappointment that Harry did, the feeling of not being wanted.
            Harry would rather put up with all the occasional unpleasant consequences of that than even think of Lily, or any of his children, in the same situation he had been in with the Dursleys.
*
            It was Saturday evening when Lily stirred uneasily in her seat at dinner, and dropped her chatter about the litter of boarhound puppies that Hagrid had sent her pictures of, and her hope that Harry and Ginny would let her adopt one of the pups. In reality, Harry had no objection to it, but he did think that splitting the care of a dog between two houses could be hard, and he’d told her to wait and ask her mum.
            “What?” Harry added, when he saw the almost uneasy, fascinated way her eyes had locked on him.
            Lily swallowed. “I wanted to ask you more about—about the Muggles you lived with, Dad.”
            Malfoy stopped eating across the table. Harry couldn’t tell whether Lily noticed. She was still looking at him, eyes big and hands clenched on the edge of her plate as though she would break it with her need to know.
            Harry exhaled slowly. Nothing he could think of was too bad for either Malfoy or Lily to know, he decided, equally slowly. If the Dursleys had raped or beaten him, he would have kept that to himself, but he’d already told them most of what there was. “All right,” he said. “Do you want me to just—tell you what I didn’t tell you already—”
            He ignored the little remark from across the table, “You mean, the part that you left out?” If Malfoy couldn’t understand the difference between his words and Harry’s own, then Harry wasn’t going to try to explain it to him.
            “Anything you want,” said Lily, and looked as though she wanted to reach across the table and touch his hand. In the end, maybe because she would have had to come around the table to reach him, she clutched her plate instead. “Just talk to me. I like to listen to you talk.”
            And tell secrets, Harry thought, but Lily might be too young to think about that. Harry picked up a forkful of food and chewed it slowly, then put it down and nodded to Lily.
            “Okay,” he said. “The cupboard—I told you about that?” Lily nodded rapidly, and Harry didn’t look out of the corner of his eye to see what Malfoy was doing, because he had the feeling it would only upset him. “So. That was my bedroom. They gave me my cousin’s second bedroom eventually, but that was my bedroom for ten years.”
            Lily stared at him. Then she shivered and looked down at the food on her plate. “Why didn’t you do something about it?” she whispered.
            Harry smiled in spite of all the emotions colliding and burning and freezing in the center of his chest. “Believe it or not, Lils, I wasn’t always as big as I am now.”
            Lily shook her head and looked up at him. “I mean, why didn’t you tell someone at school?”
            Harry sighed. “I tried a few times. They thought that I was lying because my cousin and my uncle and aunt had already told them that I was, and even the ones who half-believed me thought it was really strange. I mean, maybe they would have paid attention if I told them that my uncle and aunt were beating me up, but who ever heard of a kid being put in a cupboard all the time?”
            “I have,” said Malfoy, his voice such a soft breath that Harry turned his head sharply.
            “Who?” he demanded. If there was another child like him, a wizarding child who had suffered like that, even raised by his own blood family, then Harry was going to find out and do what he could to repair the damage.
            Malfoy just looked at him steadfastly, and Harry felt his ears color up. Oh. He probably meant Harry himself—he wanted to show he believed Harry. Harry shook his head and turned back to Lily, who was frowning as though she didn’t know how to react next.
            “What else did they do?” she asked, before Harry could pick something to say.
            Harry hesitated. This next thing came the closest to a secret he would have kept from Lily—like beatings—of all the punishments the Dursleys had inflicted on him. But he had two people waiting for the truth, even if he didn’t think of one of them, at the moment, deserving to hear it. “They didn’t give me a lot of food.”
            Malfoy made a low sound, but it was so low that Harry could pretend he hadn’t felt it vibrating in his bones. Malfoy had probably just thought that a lot of strange things about Harry, like his thinness, made sense. Harry acknowledged, grumpily, in his head, that some truths about him could be traced back to the Dursleys’ abuse.
            That didn’t mean what he had said to Malfoy last night was a lie. There was still a lot that had formed him and had nothing to do with them.
            “They starved you?” Lily whispered.
            Harry shook his head. He and Ginny had never censored the kids’ books, and so it was possible that Lily had read graphic accounts of starvation. Harry would never want to compare himself to that. “No. Only—made it uncomfortable for me to live. And sometimes my owl, too,” he added, wincing. It made him more upset to remember the treatment Hedwig had got, locked in her cage all the time during the summers, than it made him to remember his own.
            Malfoy was being spectacularly silent on the other side of the table. Lily gnawed her lip and swallowed, then said, “I’m glad that they didn’t make you like them.”
            Harry smiled. He didn’t know if his daughter had ever heard the stories that said abused children could grow up to become abusive adults, but she was smart, his little girl. He wouldn’t be surprised if she had managed to intuit it herself. He reached out and ruffled her hair, and it took her a second before she ducked away with an exclamation of annoyance. “Thank you, Lils. I promise that I would never do anything like that to you.”
            Lily nodded, her uneasy eyes still on him, and then she pushed back form the table and said, “I think I’ll go read for a while. There was that book Aunt Hermione got me for my birthday that I still haven’t finished.”
            Harry managed to conceal the roll of his eyes. Hermione had calmed down a little from the days when she was giving one-year-old Jamie a tome of potions lore six hundred pages long, but her definition of “light reading” and everyone else’s still didn’t match, so Harry wasn’t surprised that Lily hadn’t finished the book. “That’s fine. I’ll see you later.” He kissed Lily’s forehead, and she hugged him briefly before racing off.
            Harry turned around to call Kreacher to clear the table—he didn’t want Harry to do any chores right now, for some reason—but halted when he saw the way Malfoy looked at him.
            “Everything’s fine, of course,” Malfoy said, while his fingers curled into the table. He didn’t seem to have any impulse to clutch his plate, the way Lily had. Harry thought he might want to break the wood beneath his touch instead, the way he was hanging onto it.
            “Now, it is,” said Harry. “You’ve done what you promised, you know. Made me concentrate on something other than what a failure I am. So thank you for that.”
            Malfoy blinked for a second, but stood up and came around the table. Harry rose to his feet, feeling obscurely—or maybe not so obscurely—at a disadvantage as long as he was sitting down.
            “They did a lot more than you told me,” Malfoy murmured, and held up Harry’s hand. Harry didn’t know what he was doing that for, until he noticed the way that Malfoy’s fingers met in a circle around his wrist.
            Harry jerked his arm back, his face flaming. “Yes, they didn’t give me a lot of food,” he said. “I was never in danger of dying, Malfoy. They didn’t like me, but they wouldn’t have killed me.”
            “There’s a lot of ground in between those two extremes,” said Malfoy, his eyes never leaving Harry’s face. “I would have described myself as disliking you when we were in Hogwarts. But if you were my prisoner, I would never have starved you.”
            “You heard me tell Lily the difference between starvation and what I endured,” Harry said, and this time he did manage to pull his hand free. He hadn’t noticed, before, that Malfoy was still holding it. It worried him, a little, how natural it felt to have Malfoy touch him. “Do I have to tell you, too?”
            “I want you to tell me,” Malfoy hissed, leaning towards him. Harry had just opened his mouth to say he had done that but he could do it again, when Malfoy continued, “Not lie to me.”
            “I like that,” Harry said, keeping his voice down to an outraged whisper with effort. He didn’t want to bring Lily running back in here. “I wasn’t lying. I didn’t tell you everything at first, but that isn’t lying. And what if I don’t think that you have the right to the whole truth?”
            Malfoy’s nostrils flared, but he maintained control of his temper much better than Harry had thought, even if his hand tightened nearly intolerably on Harry’s wrist. “Say that I don’t have it yet,” he said. “That doesn’t diminish the fact that I want to have it.” He hesitated, then added, “And nothing can.”
            It took Harry a second to realize what he was hearing: that nothing could diminish Malfoy’s desire to have Harry’s perfect confidence. He swallowed through a suddenly dry throat.
            Malfoy lifted a hand as if he was going to touch Harry’s cheek and wanted him to watch every movement of his fingers as he completed that perfect caress. Harry found himself turning his head, parting his lips without meaning to, his breathing so loud that he sounded hoarse.
            The fireplace in the next room roared to life, and Harry heard the clucking voice of Madam Juniper calling, “Mr. Potter!”
            Harry looked hard at Malfoy one final time, which he hoped would convey his apologies as well as his inability to stay there, but Malfoy was already moving fluidly away. He always did seem to understand that Harry’s children came first, Harry thought, rushing towards the fireplace. He saw Lily pounding behind him, too, disturbed from her book, and he decided that he would take her along as long as Jamie was awake and it wasn’t bad news. Al had already had the chance to visit with his brother, but Lily hadn’t, unless Ginny had taken her before she came here.
            “What is it?” Harry demanded of Madam Juniper, who for some reason hadn’t gone on talking when he wanted her to.
            “Jamie’s awake,” said the mediwitch, and smiled at Harry. Harry closed his eyes in relief and reached out sideways. He felt Lily take his hand and squeeze it so hard that he half-expected something in his fingers to rupture.
            Then his other hand was taken, too, from the other side, and Malfoy breathed something soft and thankful into his hair. Harry resisted the impulse to turn his head and—well, do something that he probably shouldn’t do with Malfoy in front of anyone, let alone his daughter and the Hogwarts mediwitch.
            “Thank you for telling me,” Harry whispered. “Please tell him that we’ll be there as soon as we can.” He opened his eyes then, because Madam Juniper might not have told him other things if she had held off on announcing Jamie’s being awake. “How is he?”
            “Still tired and sore,” Madam Juniper said, nodding as though she could sense all the wishes behind Harry’s words and wanted to fulfill them now. “He will be, for a while. But perfectly well. He doesn’t have any broken bones now, and he won’t suffer any side-effects from the potions.”
            “Thank Merlin,” Harry whispered this time, and felt his daughter squeeze from one side and his friend from the other again. He could at least call Malfoy that, he thought. “Then please get out of the Floo, Madam, so we can come through.”
            Madam Juniper smiled and vanished. Harry stood up and glanced around. He wanted to take something with him to Jamie, but he couldn’t immediately decide what he should bring.
            Malfoy, he saw, was holding a Potions book, or what was probably a Potions book, and Kreacher appeared in front of Harry, holding up a plate.
            “Master Jamie is liking small tarts,” he said, and shook his head when Harry looked at him in surprise. “Kreacher is remembering.”
            “Thank you, Kreacher,” Harry murmured, casting some Stabilizing and Preserving Charms on the tarts so they would survive the journey through the Floo and then shrinking the plate so he could carry it wrapped in one hand. “I’m sure Jamie will be pleased to have these.” He looked at Malfoy, still standing ready with that book and apparently with no question that he was going to go with Harry—well, he had asked to be there so he could talk to Jamie about Potions—and then turned and looked at Lily.
            Lily bit her lip and looked down. “I really want to see Jamie,” she said quietly. “And see that his bones aren’t broken. I know it’s near bedtime, but please? I promise to be good.”
            Harry couldn’t resist most of his friends begging, let alone his children. He smiled and picked up Lily’s hand. She should be safe enough at Hogwarts, along with Malfoy, he thought. The wards were even stronger than the ones at Grimmauld Place, and the Spiders couldn’t have a clue they were going there. “Sure. But we won’t stay too late. Come on.”
            They whirled through the Floo, and Lily left it more gracefully than Harry could himself, even though she had a lot less practice than he did. Harry shook his head and prepared himself for a stumble.
            Malfoy’s hand came out and caught his elbow before it could happen.
            Harry’s glance shot over to Malfoy, whom he had been looking at before, but only in scattered glimpses. Malfoy returned his gaze, rock-steady, as steady as the grip that he had on Harry’s arm, and maintained as they stepped out into the Hogwarts infirmary.
            “Jamie!”
            Lily hadn’t noticed the way that Malfoy was clinging onto Harry, for better or worse. She had shot straight over to Jamie, and was holding his hands in hers and beaming up into his face. Harry exhaled a little at the sight of his son, sitting up in bed and looking pale but all right, and went to hug him, Malfoy trailing behind like a tail of Christmas tinsel.
            Jamie smiled at Harry, and looked a little at Malfoy, but suffered his father to kiss him on the forehead and hug him. Then he said, “I’m all right, Dad. And you brought me something?”
            Harry thought he had seen the plate of tarts in Harry’s hand, but it turned out he was focusing intently on the Potions book Malfoy carried. Harry snorted as Malfoy held it out and said something solemn about the author. Well, at least that was a good beginning to the bond that Malfoy hoped to establish with Jamie.
            Jamie grinned, accepted the book, and glanced back and forth between them once more. “So does this mean that you’re dating Mr. Malfoy now, Dad?” he asked
            And it seemed the whole world, or at least all of it inside Hogwarts infirmary, held its breath and waited for an answer to that question.
*
polka dot: Most of it, anyway.
delia cerrano: He is. Much more than he did before.
SP777: Why? He has accepted that Draco has an interest in him.
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Marathon