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The Descent of Magic	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 18803 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 5
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I am making no money from this fanfic.

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Chapter Twenty-Eight—Fathers and Uncles

            Draco stepped back from turning the portrait to the wall and eyed the back of it. As far as he could tell, it was ordinary wood, or plaster, or whatever was usually used for portrait frames; the house-elves polished the ones in the Manor, and he didn’t know what they were. There shouldn’t be a magical way for his ancestor to break through it.

            A rustle made him look up, hoping it was Potter at his doorway. Draco had left him downstairs visiting with two of his nieces, but he should go to bed soon, and it wasn’t beyond possibility that he would stop and talk to Draco when he did.

            But it was an owl, a tawny owl with black edges to its wings that Draco recognized. He stretched out an arm, and the owl landed delicately and extended the letter it held to him, then leaned back and looked around the room as though it assumed he was hiding the owl treats in a secret door in the wall.

            Draco stared at Scorpius’s jagged writing on the envelope, and Summoned a scone from the kitchen for the owl. Kreacher had made them for the Weasley nieces, but they would have to understand that Draco needed it more urgently.

            The owl hooted in what sounded like disappointment, but flew over to the ancient perch in the corner and began to snack. Draco sat down on the bed and remained clutching the letter for a few minutes before he hissed out and opened it.

            There was only a single thin sheet of paper inside. Draco wondered as he turned it over if it was another insult, or another putdown. Really, Scorpius couldn’t have anything worthwhile to say if he wrote so short.

            On the paper was a single line, but it was the kind to make Draco’s heartbeat pick up again.

            We need to talk. No running this time.

            Draco nodded to a son who couldn’t see him, and reached blindly for ink and parchment on the table beside the bed. That was right. He had finally come to the point where the thought of running, of hiding what he had once been too embarrassed to have anyone notice, like his affair with Potter, disgusted him.

            He had hidden from the truth when he was a boy; he had hidden in the Manor after the war; he had hidden in his father’s shadow as a husband and a parent. Now it was time for both of them to come together, he and Scorpius, and Draco to learn who he really was.

*

            Harry laughed as Lucy tried again to braid Molly’s hair. Her younger sister squirmed in front of her, pushing the red strands out of her face when Lucy tried to let them hang there for a bit. “I don’t want a fringe,” she kept whining. Then she glanced up at Harry and made a face. “Sorry, Uncle Harry.”

            Harry shook his head. “You don’t have to apologize to me, but I think your sister might take it as an affront when she has a really magnificent one.”

            Lucy snorted and tossed her hair back. Hers was the true Weasley flame-red, and made her look so much like a younger Ginny that Harry had to bite his tongue when he was around her, to keep from making jokes that only Ginny had the proper context to understand. “I didn’t plan to have one. That was just what happened when I cut my hair.”

            “And you want me to let you near mine?” Molly ducked and flinched and then sprang up, turning around with her head shaking and her hair flaring behind her like the tail of a comet. “No, thank you. I never would have let you start this if I knew—”

            “I’m the older and wiser one, and I know better than you—”

            Harry settled back and listened to them argue. He was lucky, he thought sometimes, that his own children had never had this amount of rows. But then, when they did explode, it tended to be bigger and more serious.

            Like the way that Al has decided he should just ignore the danger that house-elves and pure-blood fertility are in to follow Scorpius.

            Harry sighed. No, that wasn’t fair. He hadn’t paid all that much attention to what Al thought about the subject, simply because he had counted on his children to support him without question. Hell, he had thought the same would happen with Scorpius. Scorpius didn’t share his father’s prejudices.

            Now I wonder how much of that was because of what he really thought and felt and how much was what he wanted to think and feel to spite Draco.

            Before Harry could wander off into brooding or Lucy and Molly could come to blows, the fire turned dark red. Harry turned his head towards it, curiously, wondering what was going on. Usually, the fire only turned that color when—

            “Uncle Harry.”

            When it was coming from someone that the house’s owner had yelled at recently, Harry completed in his head. There were wards on Grimmauld Place that he would never understand, and while some had rejected him because he wasn’t a blood descendant of the Blacks, others accepted him and made him part of the house in ways he hadn’t anticipated.

            Now Hugo’s face was in the fire, and the Floo connection would have closed if not for Harry’s will keeping it open. He leaned forwards, aware that Lucy and Molly had fallen comprehensively silent behind him. They hadn’t heard his conversation with Hugo, of course, but gossip had a way of spreading around the entire family of cousins. Never easily traced back to the source, but Harry realized how foolish it was to expect someone to confess that.

            “Yes, Hugo?” Harry asked gently. He realized he had held his breath after he spoke and forced his lungs to start moving again.

            Hugo let his eyes fall so he seemed to be staring intently at the hearth, and he mumbled, “Is—can I come in?”

            Harry turned around and looked at Lucy and Molly. Lucy blinked at him and said, “You’re letting us decide?”

            “No, actually,” Harry said, and stretched his leg further out in front of him on the small stool that he kept there for that purpose. “I’m asking you to bugger off. Gently, so that you don’t get upset with me.”

            Lucy laughed and stood up to kiss his cheek. “Daddy would hate the fact that I know that word,” she said reflectively, and then tugged her sister after her. Harry watched them go, and wondered if he should tell Lucy to bugger off someday in front of Percy, just to watch the expression on his face.

            Then he told himself to stop putting things off, and turned back to Hugo.

            “All right,” he said. “Come over.”

            Hugo stepped through the fire. He was moving as though his back hurt him, which made Harry tense for a moment, and then relax and shake his head. He was ready to see mockery where there really was none, he thought. Hugo was acting like a kicked puppy because that was what he felt like, and he didn’t know if Harry might order him out of his house any second.

            Hugo huddled down into the nearest chair, and sat there, biting his lip. Harry left him to take his own time. He didn’t know yet how Hugo would respond, if it was too soon for him to have considered his responses in the way that Harry had hoped he would or not, and it meant that he’d prefer not to make the first move.

            Hugo finally took a deep breath and looked up. “Mum let me borrow her Pensieve,” he said. “To look at my memories of—what I called you. What I said. I didn’t think I said all those things, but I did.”

            Harry nodded. He could taste something crumbly and fragile at the back of his mouth, like the chocolate that Kreacher tended to put on biscuits. He thought it was hope. He hadn’t felt it around Hugo in a long, long time.

            “It’s different hearing them like that, all at once, instead of spread out over years.” Hugo raked his fingers through his hair and kept his head bowed. “I didn’t know how much I’d hurt you. And hurt myself.”

            Harry nodded again. “That was part of it,” he whispered, when he could speak. “I knew that you were hurting yourself, too, by dwelling on the way that I’d got injured like that, but I didn’t think that it was right for me to emphasize that when I was yelling at you.”

            “Is that the reason no one ever yelled at me before now?” Hugo twisted restlessly in his seat, as though he wanted to get up and run, but didn’t actually do it. “Because I was being a little shit.”

            Harry nodded again. “We didn’t want to hurt you,” he said. “We thought you’d been hurt enough. And the longer it went on, the more of an effort it would take to reach you. I didn’t have the heart for the kind of conversation—I mean, the kind of yelling I did at you, for a long time.”

            Hugo sat up, his face turning red. Draco would have said that he finally looked like a real Weasley, Harry thought, and managed not to laugh, because he shouldn’t think about making fun of Hugo’s family at a time like this. “You should have done something earlier,” he insisted. “You had no right to let me go around insulting you like that for so long. You were—you were still a hero, and you were learning how to live with being hurt. How would you have felt if I was insulting Mum like that?”

            “Your mother wouldn’t have put up with it, no,” Harry said quietly. “But that was the way I chose to deal with it, Hugo. And since I was learning to live with pain—this was one more example of it.”

            Hugo shook his head fast enough to make his face blur in front of Harry’s eyes. “You can’t do that ever again,” he said. “It’s not—it’s not fair. You can’t.”

            Harry bit his lip. Hugo was still Hugo, proud and impatient and thinking he knew best. At least that was a comfort on the question of whether he had actually changed his mind or not. If he had come crawling in, all penitent and blaming himself for everything, then Harry would have thought he wasn’t sincere.

            “I’ll try not to,” he said gravely. “But I hope that you’ll never need to be talked to like that again, either. I didn’t enjoy doing it.”

            Hugo sniffed. “I saw your face. Yes, you did.”

            Harry shook his head. “It was like peeling off a scab. You feel relief when it’s done, but it hurts while you’re doing it.”

            Hugo looked away. “And are you still hurting now?” he whispered. “Is that something else I should have to pay for?”

            “I don’t know,” Harry said. “Do you think you should?”

            Hugo shivered, and Harry studied him. Still suffering, still half-convinced he’d been right, still stunned by the revelation that he wasn’t, clinging to the remnants of his pride. Not enjoying this.

            Longing to have it over, forgiven, done.

            “Yes,” Hugo said. “Because I just realized there was something I never did, even when I came in and made Lucy and Molly leave just now.” Harry opened his mouth to say that they’d chosen to leave and Hugo shouldn’t attribute so much power to his own actions, but Hugo looked at him again, and his expression shut Harry up. “I’m sorry.”

            And with that, Harry could finally feel the pain lightening and blowing out of his chest like mist rising from a valley, and he could finally open his arms, and Hugo could come into them with a sound of pain and healing, and hug him for the first time in two years.

*

            Draco waited for Scorpius in a room that so far was neutral to him in Grimmauld Place, an abandoned bedroom that last looked as though it had been used some time in the early nineteenth century. The thickness of the furniture and the way that things were ugly but well-made contributed to that. Draco had rejected the thought of meeting in any drawing room, or his lab, or his bedroom. Any of those might put Scorpius on his guard.

            Draco didn’t want his son on his guard. He wanted him thinking about how they were going to be together and reconcile.

            You sound soppy.

            It had been one of the worst terms of condemnation in his father’s repertoire. The only thing worse was “Mudblood,” and Draco knew that Lucius thought Muggles and Mudbloods were inevitably soppy. They were the sort who would forgive their children over and over again for not upholding standards, not caring that it denigrated the stock of their families each time.

            I’ve passed beyond that, Draco thought, in response to the voice. I can choose my own reactions, and do whatever I want with the son that I raised. You are a ghost in my mind, Father, one that I paid too much heed to.

            There were other reasons to fear that he might not have raised Scorpius the right way—Astoria, his pride, how he’d reacted to Scorpius’s Sorting—but he set them aside for now, and he was quiet inside and out when Scorpius paused in the doorway and stared at him.

            “Come in,” said Draco.

            He wondered about his tone of voice, whether it was threatening or not, but Scorpius seemed to have decided that he wasn’t afraid, thank Merlin. He walked in with his spine as straight as a cat’s, though. Draco could almost see the proudly fluffed tail that he carried behind him, and the way that his hands writhed at his sides before he fisted them shut. He took the chair beside the one Draco had indicated rather than that one.

            And he waited. Draco did the same thing, and then realized what they were doing and shook his head. He was not going to lose this chance to pride, either Scorpius’s pride or his.

            “What did you want to talk about most?” he asked. “I know that we can’t solve every problem I caused, every injustice I did to you, in one conversation.”

            Scorpius’s forehead wrinkled as he stared at Draco. It occurred to Draco that he looked a lot like portraits of his great-grandfather Abraxas when he did that, Lucius’s father. That relaxed Draco a little. Scorpius was still part of the family, no matter how far away he wandered, no matter how distant he seemed. And so was Draco.

            “You sound reasonable,” Scorpius said. “Among other things, that you’re willing to admit you didn’t treat me perfectly. I’ve never heard that before.”

            Draco examined the response in his head and discarded it. He would only alienate Scorpius if he said something like that. “I know,” he said. “From the time that you were born, I did everything I could to hold you at a distance, because I thought that was the right thing to do. Your mother did love you, at least.”

            Scorpius rubbed the back of his neck. “She was still upset when I Sorted Gryffindor, though,” he said abruptly. “Why? Why did it matter so much, as long as I still acted the way you wanted at home?”

            How often was that? Again Draco held back. He was the older one in this conversation, the one who was supposed to act as a role model for Scorpius, not the other way around. He hadn’t always done that job. “Because we thought we would understand you if you became a Slytherin, and not if you didn’t,” he said simply. “I suspect we knew even there how different you were, and wanted to reassure ourselves we were making it up.”

            Scorpius bit his lip. “Oh,” he said quietly, and then jerked his head up and focused on Draco. “Do you really care about Mr. Potter?”

            Among the people Draco had thought of confessing his affair with Potter to was not his teenage son. But although he felt his face flame, he didn’t look away, and that alone seemed enough to make Scorpius do so.

            “Yes,” Draco said at last. He didn’t feel up to explaining the intimate details, and there was a high chance that Scorpius wouldn’t believe him if he did. But he could say something that he thought Scorpius could at least respect. “I—put in much time and work brewing a potion that would let him walk without pain. Even if he proved politically incompetent, I would not be able to turn my back on an investment like that.”

            Scorpius leaned back. “You sound cold when you call it an investment.”

            “If I used warmer terms, would you believe it?” Draco didn’t blink, didn’t look down, and controlled his blush with a few deep breaths. “I care for him, yes. I am curious. I am interested. I am too deeply involved with him to back away.” Those seemed the right words to use. Not even for Scorpius, not for Potter, could he use deeper words yet.

            Scorpius grinned suddenly. “No, I wouldn’t believe you yet if you said you were mad about him,” he said. “And neither would Al.” He sat up, stood up, and crossed the room in a few quick bounds. Draco stared up at him, and Scorpius stared down.

            It was the sort of standoff Lucius would never have tolerated, but Draco thought he would, for his son’s sake.

            Scorpius hesitated, then held out his hand. Draco took it. Scorpius pumped his up and down a few times, then said, “Thanks, Dad,” and left, maybe before his own pride could completely crumble.

            Draco leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. Perhaps he should ask Potter if he had felt this way after confronting his obstreperous nephew.

            Drained, and empty, and quiet, and waiting.

*

            SP777: Well, Draco’s desire to take on and trounce them is mostly gone, because he knows that he’d rather reconcile with Scorpius. Astoria he can take or leave as long as she makes sure to leave him alone.

            ChaosLady: Sorry.
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The Descent of Magic