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Starfall	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 32486 -:- Recommendations : 3 -:- Currently Reading : 4
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Chapter Twenty-Six—An Awkward Dinner
            If Draco had had to make dinner for Potter himself, he knew he would have messed it up. He had no idea what to make. He had no idea how to relate to Potter. He had no idea what had prompted him to ask Potter to stay for dinner, except that Scorpius had wanted it and Draco didn’t want to tell him no when his son was in this fragile mood.
            But what would he and Potter talk about, for Merlin’s sake?
            Draco was still brooding on that when they had been in the dining room for thirty minutes and eating for twenty. Potter sat in the seat across from Draco, biting his lip and sometimes staring at the table. Scorpius had propped himself up in his chair on his knees so that he could see Potter better. Draco opened his mouth to forbid that behavior, then closed it again. He didn’t want to scold Scorpius in front of Potter. He didn’t want to say anything that might spark conversation.
            How had he felt when he opened the door and realized Potter had come himself, instead of an owl? Instead of Ethan, as it were?
            Relieved. Disappointed. Frightened. Devastated. Unable to draw a breath.
            Only the first emotion, out of all of those, made sense, and Draco was struggling not to show the rest. Potter would think he was mental. And he would have a right to think that.
            Draco knew that they were connected, that he didn’t want Potter to walk away again and ignore that connection, and that he couldn’t explain the nature of the connection. That was the only thing he knew.
            Theodore’s explanation flashed into his head, and he dismissed it. Yes, it was possible he had an obsession with Potter. But that wasn’t the same thing as sitting here and staring at him and then looking away again, unable to say a word. Draco had been straightforward about what he wanted from his obsessions. He had wanted Potter to pay attention to him. He had wanted the Dark Lord to guarantee his parents’ safety. He had wanted his father’s respect when they began to drift apart after Scorpius was born.
            He had not the least idea what he wanted from Potter.
            “I’m beginning to think this is a bad idea.”
            Draco started. His nerves thrummed as if they were harpstrings connected to Potter’s mouth. He managed to force a smile and shake his head. “Why would it be?” he asked, and his voice was too loud for the hushed dining room. He coughed and tried to bring it down, and then he sounded artificial and fake as he said, “We asked you to stay, and you accepted. This is a perfectly normal dinner between host and guest.”
            Potter looked at him with eyes as wild as a stag’s. “The last thing the relationship between us has ever been,” he said slowly, “is normal.”
            “I have a lion,” Scorpius volunteered. “A Muggle lion. I bought it when I was in London with Uncle Blaise. He takes me to Muggle London. I’m very responsible.” He leaned forwards and caught Potter’s eyes. He probably didn’t understand the tension between the two of them, Draco thought, but he was responding to it.
            That made Draco feel bad, again. He didn’t want to make his son uncomfortable, when what he had asked Potter for lessons in was ways to make the relationship between them comforting and calm for Scorpius. “Perhaps I should—” he began.
            “How often do you get to go to Muggle London?” Potter asked Scorpius, and shot a quick, false smile at Draco, at least as false as the one Draco gave him in return.
            Why did I think this would be easy? There was a difference, Draco was discovering, between not wanting someone to walk out the door, and knowing what to say to them. He had experienced it before, sometimes, with his friends, especially when he had been busy shoving them away to concentrate on Scorpius, but Pansy would retort, and Blaise would laugh at him, and Theodore refused to be ignored. None of them were like this.
            “I get to go sometimes,” said Scorpius. “Daddy doesn’t always let me go.”
            Potter frowned at Scorpius for the first time. Or maybe it was really the second or third time, and Draco was only thinking that it was the first because he was so much more sensitive to the frowns Potter shot at him. “Well, he might have reason for that, you know? Muggle London could be dangerous.”
            “Uncle Blaise can do anything.” Scorpius sat up and shook his head. “Muggles aren’t dangerous to a wizard.”
            This time, Potter looked at Draco, and Draco thought it was a glance of fellowship. Certainly the words seemed that way. “He doesn’t know much history yet, does he?”
            “No,” Draco admitted. “It’s one of the things that I neglected teaching him. At least,” he added, not wanting to forget what Potter certainly wouldn’t let him forget, “any history that’s not the stories of his own family.”
            Potter’s eyes closed for a second, and Draco braced for some sort of tirade about pure-blood histrionics. But instead, Potter nodded, murmured, “That was the kind I was most interested in when I was a kid,” and turned back to Scorpius. “You know that your—Uncle Blaise can’t use magic in front of the Muggles?”
            “He would use it to save me.”
            Scorpius spoke with absolute certainty, and Draco sighed a little. He would have liked for Scorpius to have that much faith in him. But it was his own fault—in combination with other things like Astoria leaving—that it hadn’t happened.
            “He could use it to save you, but then both of you would be in danger,” said Potter. “And the Ministry would have to send Obliviators. It’s just better not to deal with Muggles when you use magic.”
            Draco held back a snort. That was the sort of position he had thought Potter would never come around to.
            “What’s an Obliviator?” Scorpius was frowning himself, but it was the sort of expression that meant he was being attentive.
            “It’s a person at the Ministry that uses Memory Charms on Muggles,” said Potter, and his face became solemn. “They use the Memory Charm, and then the Muggles can’t remember the magic they saw. So they use it when dragons escape or when someone Apparates in front of a Muggle. But it’s not something that you should use all the time. When someone has too many Memory Charms cast on them, they can go insane. Or they can lose all their memories. Or their brains can be damaged. We want to avoid that.”
            Draco nodded slowly. So Potter hadn’t changed completely enough to abandon his position that Muggles were okay. It was more that he saw the reason for the separation between the worlds, but didn’t want it to damage Muggles.
            “Uncle Blaise would do that to save me.”
            Potter reached across the table and tapped Scorpius’s fingers sharply. “Only Obliviators are supposed to use Memory Charms. Is your Uncle Blaise an Obliviator?”
            “Maybe he is, and he made me forget!” Scorpius seemed fascinated with the idea.
            Potter did shoot a cautious sideways glance at Draco, but Draco shook his head at once. Blaise was many things—a good friend, a good entertainer of children, a luxurious layabout, someone who had more humor than Draco had known could exist in a person who had been in Slytherin House as a child between the wars. But Draco would definitely have known if Blaise was an Obliviator. Hell, the teasing he’d give Blaise about having a career would have taken years to subside.
            “He isn’t,” said Potter firmly. “And I don’t think that it’s good to go into Muggle London and use magic at all. You might scare the Muggles away, and that’s not what you want to do, is it? You go to have fun.”
            “Maybe part of the fun is scaring Muggles.” Scorpius had an insolent set to his jaw that Draco knew well, although he didn’t know if Potter would recognize it for what it was.
            “I didn’t teach you that,” said Draco. He didn’t know he would speak until he did, and then he was also on his feet. Potter was staring at him. Well, he could stare. Draco walked around the table and put a heavy hand on Scorpius’s shoulder, bearing down so that Scorpius couldn’t mistake how much he meant the words. “You are to remember that you shouldn’t bait Muggles.”
            “But we’re not Muggles.” Scorpius turned to face him with his little arms folded, and on his face was an expression that he must have imitated from Lucius. Draco knew he had tried to attain that expression himself, but he never had. “That means we’re better than them. That’s what you said. That we’re better than Muggles.”
            Draco winced. Of all the times for his words to come back and accuse him…
            But Potter was there, and although he seemed disposed not to take part right now, he would soon. Draco was on his own to defend this, or at least clarify it for Potter.
            “I meant that we could do magic better than Muggles,” he said, and knelt down. Scorpius looked skeptical, and Draco couldn’t blame him. He was attempting to retrieve the situation, not speaking something he had meant at the time. But he meant it now. “Not that we should torment them or scare them. That’s called Muggle-baiting, and it’s a serious crime, Scorpius. I don’t want you to ever do it.”
            “But Muggles are fun to scare.” Scorpius’s jaw jutted out. “That’s what Uncle Blaise said.”
            “Maybe he meant it,” Draco said. “I’m asking you not to do it. There are some things Malfoys are above, and baiting Muggles is one of them. We don’t need to do it.”
            Scorpius just looked at him, and then stuck one finger in his mouth. Draco decided to read it as a gesture of nervousness instead of defiance, even though he had told Scorpius again and again not to do it.
            “We need to live apart from Muggles,” Draco told him, wishing he wasn’t conscious of the silent, judging gaze from the other side of the table. He would do this so much better if he wasn’t. On the other hand, without that gaze, he wouldn’t have felt the need to justify himself at all. “The Muggles would be scared of us, if they saw us doing magic, and they might attack us. But you don’t need to attack them. Do you attack things that you’re scared of?”
            “No,” said Scorpius. “I call Izzy, and Izzy gets rid of the bugs.”
            Draco nodded. “And if you were ever in Muggle London and in trouble, you could call, and I would come save you. Or Uncle Blaise would. Or Mr. Potter,” he added, catching Potter’s attention across the table. “But you wouldn’t attack them.”
            “What if I had to make them leave me alone?”
            What kinds of things did I teach him without meaning to?
            That was the crux of it, for Draco. He had done a lot of things with regard to his son that he was ashamed of now, but he had always thought he was doing it deliberately. To find out that Scorpius had picked up lessons from the way he acted and talked that Draco had never meant him to pick up…
            “You wouldn’t need to,” he told Scorpius quietly. “You wouldn’t be in Muggle London without one of us, and we would always protect you.”
            Scorpius peeked at him from under his fringe. “What if a bunch of them attacked us and took away your wand and they were standing on your head and yelling at me and I was the only one who was there to save you?”
            Draco smiled a little. Scorpius’s real fear was blending into childish fancy. This, he knew how to deal with. “Then we would deal with that. I would reach up and grab their ankles and roll the one standing on me off. Then I would Summon my wand. I can do that without my wand, you know.”
            “I didn’t know that,” said Scorpius, and stared at him.
            Draco surprised a smile from Potter across the table. Well, as long as he was reconciling with his son, he didn’t need to bother about what Potter was feeling.
            Draco nodded. “It’s a skill I practiced a long time ago, until I got good at it.” No need to reveal to his son, yet, that his constant practice had been because of the war and his fear of being caught away from his wand when Death Eaters swaggered through the Manor. Scorpius would learn more history than Draco had taught him so far—history with a broader base and more implications—but Draco still intended to reveal what he thought a child should know slowly.
            “Oh,” said Scorpius, and was quiet for a second. Then he reached out and took Draco’s hand, and Draco turned his hand over and squeezed Scorpius’s lightly.
            After a long second, Potter cleared his throat and asked, “Are we going to have pudding? Or should I go ahead and leave?”
            “You can’t leave yet,” said Scorpius, and frowned at Potter in a way that Draco thought was entirely natural, not calculating, and his heart thumped warmly in his chest. “Pudding is important.”
            Potter raised one hand, his face solemn. He was holding back laughter, Draco knew, but at least he held it back, and spared Scorpius’s dignity. Scorpius had been mocked and disregarded enough, even if Draco hadn’t meant to do that at the time. “All right. So what are we going to have?” He looked at Draco.
            “The house-elves usually decide,” Draco said. “They have a list of my tastes and Scorpius’s, and a calendar of how long it was since we last had something.” He clapped his hands, and Izzy appeared, bowing.
            “I hate the calendar,” said Scorpius. “I could eat chocolate cake every day.”
            Draco smiled and touched his son’s hair. Scorpius leaned into the touch. Draco knew better than to think it would last forever, but it was enormously comforting while he did have it.
            “The pudding this day is bananas floating in cream and covered with chocolate and sliced strawberries,” said Izzy in a high-pitched voice, looking at Potter from the corner of one eye. Draco wondered if Izzy was nervous about having a guest, which hadn’t happened in a long time unless it was Blaise, or if she was nervous around Potter because she was afraid he would free her.
            Potter leaned back with his hands clasped behind his head. “That sounds like it’s worth staying for.”
            Izzy’s face cleared, and she bowed. “Then pudding is coming up for master sirs in short while!” she said, and vanished again.
            “Do you have any house-elves, Uncle Harry?” Scorpius asked, licking some juice off his spoon. Draco kept his peace, although ordinarily he would have said something to Scorpius about that. One could sip juice from a spoon, but one did not lick it.
            “Sort of,” Potter said, and sipped from the glass of pumpkin juice that he had, for Merlin knew what reason, requested with dinner. “I own an old house where an old house-elf lives. He spends a lot of his time at Hogwarts, though. He has a kid there.”
            “What’s his name? What old house? Is it a house as old as this?” Scorpius sat proudly upright and gestured around the Manor in a way Draco had never seen him do. Maybe there was some hope of training him to have pride in his heritage after all.
            “His name is Kreacher,” said Potter, using the glass this time to hide what was probably an inappropriate smile. “And the house is called Number Twelve Grimmauld Place. It’s a house your ancestors used to live in.”
            “My ancestors,” said Scorpius, and looked at Draco.
            Draco supposed the subject wasn’t very inviting to Scorpius, after the long lectures that Draco had given him when he was trying to pour Malfoy history into Scorpius’s head. “Your Black ancestors,” he said. “Your grandmother’s ancestors. You’re named after them. You have a star name,” he added, as Scorpius’s eyes widened. “Your Black ancestors all had star names.”
            Scorpius twisted around and looked at Potter. “How come you own the house, Uncle Harry?” he asked.
            Draco was just as glad to sit back and let Potter take over this part of the conversation. Responding intelligently and clearly to his son’s questions was more exhausting than he had thought it would be.
            But being a good father was exhausting, and that was something he should have known if he didn’t already know it. He would remember it, for the future.
*
            “Well, you had a—a cousin,” Harry said. He couldn’t remember, off the top of his head, what exact relation the Black family tapestry had shown between Scorpius and Sirius. “His name was Sirius Black. He didn’t like his family much—”
            “Why not?”
            Harry looked at Malfoy. Malfoy just looked placidly back at him, his expression quivering a little with the smile he was suppressing. Harry could imagine what he was saying. You come up with a way to explain this one.
            “They were very stuck-up,” Harry settled for saying. Once again, he didn’t know how much Scorpius knew about the Black family history and the history of the wizarding war and Muggle-baiting and all the rest of it.
            Strange that I keep being associated with that history, long after I thought I would be able to leave it behind.
            “They didn’t like some of the things Sirius believed in,” Harry continued. “He was Sorted into Gryffindor House at Hogwarts, and they didn’t like that, either. So Sirius ran away, and his family disinherited him.” From the way Scorpius’s eyes widened, he was indeed familiar with that word—perhaps as a threat, though Harry hoped not. “So he never thought he would inherit the house. But most of his family was dead or—gone, so he did. And he was my godfather.”
            “Like you’re Teddy’s godfather?” Scorpius was so fascinated that he didn’t seem to notice as the pudding appeared in front of them.
            Harry took a bite of the thick mixture before he answered, and was glad to find it good. “Yes. In fact, Teddy’s father was a friend of Sirius. That’s one reason he wanted me to be Teddy’s godfather.”
            He wondered for a moment if he had confused Scorpius, because he was blinking. But Scorpius seemed to be good at sorting out complex family relationships, because a second later he nodded. “And he left you the house in his will?”
            “Yes,” said Harry, a little surprised. Well, once again, I shouldn’t be surprised that inheritance and inheritance rights are something he knows about. “So I own the house now. But it’s sad and gloomy, and Sirius hated it, so I don’t really like living there. I wouldn’t destroy the house and free Kreacher, though, because that would be cruel. So I just keep it shut up and let Kreacher spend most of his time at Hogwarts. He likes doing that anyway.”
            Scorpius watched him with big eyes. Harry paused. Sometimes Scorpius seemed so fiery and willful, even more than Teddy had been at his age, and then he would do something that reminded Harry of how serious he could be.
            Well, with a father like that, how could it be otherwise? Harry thought, and his gaze went to Malfoy.
            Malfoy straightened his shoulders under Harry’s gaze. “I raised him the way I thought fit,” he muttered out of the side of his mouth. “It’ll be different now, but at the time, I didn’t know any better.”
            Harry thought about that, then shrugged. “Fine. It’s true that I wouldn’t have done a perfect job of raising my sons, either, if I’d been lucky enough to have them.”
            “You think it would have been multiple sons,” Malfoy muttered. “And one daughter.”
            “That was my ideal life,” Harry admitted, and turned back to Scorpius, who was getting restless, and who didn’t need to know about Ethan and his father’s part in destroying Harry’s ideal life, either. “Maybe I’ll leave the house to Teddy. He has Black blood, too, you know. His grandmother and yours are sisters. Or maybe I’ll leave it to both of you.”
            Scorpius sat upright in his chair. “You want to leave it to me?”
            “I think that I need to think about it,” said Harry, and smiled at him. “But I don’t really like it or use it, and it should go back to some people who are part of the Black family. Both of you are. Do you think you could share it?”
            He meant to tease and take away Scorpius’s thoughts from some of the seriousness, but Scorpius had something else on his mind. “I want to see it. The house that you’re thinking about leaving me! I want to see it.”
            “Not right now,” said Harry. “But I’ll think about it, and maybe I’ll invite you over to see it if I can get Kreacher to come back and dust it.”
            “I don’t care about dust!” Scorpius looked so irritated that Harry bit his lip. He could see so many different sides to this child, and this time, he didn’t envy Malfoy for having a son, but for having this one.
            Harry didn’t want to stop talking to him. He didn’t want to leave.
            But he did need to go home, since it was the end of dinner and the crisis between Malfoy and Scorpius seemed resolved, and he wanted to think about what had happened and if he had done the right thing or not. Maybe he had been too lenient with Scorpius. Maybe he had been too harsh with Malfoy. It was the sort of thing that would give him good practice with reassuring and helping other families with children, and then waving as they left.
            “I do,” said Harry, and stood up. “Kreacher can clean the house, and maybe you can see it sometime next week. I’ll want to invite Teddy over, too, and that’ll depend on Andromeda’s schedule.” He knew Andromeda had at least one meeting with a Healer next week. She wanted a Healer to look at Teddy now that every trace of the Black madness seemed to have disappeared and make sure he was really all right.
            “You have to go?” Scorpius scowled at him.
            “Yes,” said Harry, and nodded at both of them, though he made sure that Malfoy got his fair share of the nod. “Thank you for having me over for dinner. Thank you for letting me spend time with you.”
            Malfoy gave him a single glance that Harry thought probably saw further than he wanted it to, but he nodded. “Scorpius, can you say goodbye to your Uncle Harry?” He pushed gently at the back of Scorpius’s shoulder.
            “Good-bye,” said Scorpius, and held out fingers that weren’t sticky at all to shake.
            Harry knew he was probably beaming like a fool as he shook Scorpius’s hand, but he did that with Teddy and Rose, too. If Malfoy narrowed his eyes at him, that was only because he didn’t know Harry.
            “Good-bye,” said Harry solemnly, and walked to the front gates.
            That was fun. I wouldn’t mind doing it again sometime.
            Then he sighed. He knew that he should hope for things to go so well between Malfoy and Scorpius that he wouldn’t need to come over again. They should be father and son to each other, without his interference.
            But he still cast a glance back at Malfoy Manor before he Apparated.
*
Jester: Well, now you know at least part of it!
staar: At least they both have the will to make it work now.
delia cerrano: He knows that he doesn’t want Harry to go away, but he can’t explain what he wants from him.
SP777: If he can figure out what he wants!
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