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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 Thirty—About Astoria
            “I told you once that it was a matter of honor.”
            Harry did his best to look attentive as he settled in his chair. He did want to be attentive, he really did. But it was a little hard when he was mostly paying attention, at the moment, to the way that Draco’s mouth moved.
            “Problems, Potter?” Draco drawled the words in a tone not too different from the one he would have used to mock Harry at Hogwarts, and Harry took a quick breath and brought his eyes back to Draco’s face.
            “No,” he said. “Just—I want to make sure you’re comfortable.” And that was true, too, and when Draco looked at his hand as if he expected it to be holding a glass, Harry summoned Kreacher and said, “You should fetch…”
            He looked at Draco, who shook his head slightly. “Just water,” he said. “More than that, and I won’t get through the story before I fall asleep.”
            “At this time of the day?” Harry asked blankly, and then noted the heavy shadows around Draco’s eyes. It wasn’t physical exhaustion, he thought, it was emotional. Draco had done all he could to get through to Jamie, to get through to Harry, to restrain himself from snapping at Al (and maybe boasting to Ginny), and he’d been through the same stresses in the last few days as Harry had, too. Maybe more intense for him than for Harry. He had been the one who hadn’t wanted to wait after the first kiss.
            “I understand,” Harry said quietly. He turned to give Kreacher the command, but he had already vanished.
            When he turned back, Draco was staring at him with slightly narrowed eyes. “You do understand, don’t you?” Draco murmured. “Without me having to explain it.” His lips curved up in a smile that Harry had to admit was smug. Sometimes he could see why other people found Draco exasperating. He was just losing the ability to see things that way, himself. “That just proves that we were made for each other.”
            Harry snorted in spite of himself. “Of course that’s it,” he muttered. “But seriously, Draco, if you want to tell me the story in the morning, then you should. What you need is more important than what I want to hear.”
            Draco considered him a second, then nodded. “That’s good,” he said. “That’s all right. I thought you were going to say that what I needed was more important than what you did, and we would have had an argument about it. I’m not automatically the most important person in the room just because you want to take care of me.”
            “I know that Astoria didn’t take care of you,” Harry said. “That Scorpius is too young to do so. Who else do you have? I should take care of you. I want to take care of you.”
            “And I appreciate the impulse.” Draco’s hands were white where they clutched the arms of his chair. “Just not at the expense of yourself.”
            "It's not that, this time," Harry said. Kreacher came back with the water, a tall crystal glass that Harry hadn't even known they owned, and he handed it over to Draco. Draco sipped from it, his eyes shut, and some of the color returned to both his hands and his face. "In fact, remaining awake to talk to me is a fulfillment of what I want, as well as what you want. You want to tell someone the story, and I want to listen to it."
            Draco opened his eyes and gave him a somewhat wry smile. "Now that we've settled who has priority here, shall I tell you the story?"
            Harry held up a hand and leaned back in his chair. He found that he was staring so hard at Draco that his eyes were drying out. But the sensation that he might miss something if he blinked was too strong for him to look away.
            "Astoria and I had a traditional pure-blood marriage," Draco said, staring into the fire. "Love--can be part of it, but it's unlikely, for reasons that have to do with knowledge as much as anything else. I'd known most of the people I was at Hogwarts with for years and years. It's hard for love to develop out of that."
            Harry frowned, thinking of Ron and Hermione, but kept quiet. He was here to listen to what Draco said, to finally afford him the relief of saying it, and listen to the story that affected so much of their lives, not to challenge him.
            "We promised each other that we would be perfect partners," Draco said, swallowing. He had shut his eyes now, and didn't look as though he would open them any time soon. "We promised each other--so much. Respect in public, discretion in private. We promised that we would have children. We promised that we would be polite to each other's families, which is the most anyone wanted from us."
            Harry winced as he thought about how much his marriage would have suffered if he could only have brought himself to be polite to the Weasleys. On the other hand, there was no reason that Draco's marriage ought to have been less successful if he was used to that and Astoria's family expected it.
            And his own "perfect" marriage had hardly endured, either.
            "So what happened?" he asked, when Draco only sat there sipping his water and keeping his eyes shut.
            "I fell in love," Draco said bitterly, and opened his eyes to look at Harry.
            "With someone else?" Harry asked. He was thinking of what Al had said, and wondering if it was possible that Draco had been in love with him before he'd come to help Harry. "Someone that she couldn't--"
            "With her," Draco interrupted. "I fell in love with Astoria."
            Harry opened his mouth, could think of nothing to say for a moment, and then asked, "And she didn't want that?"
            Draco closed his eyes again. "She wanted what I had promised to offer her. Not this."
            Harry reached out and pressed Draco's hand. Draco started and almost dropped his water, as though he had forgotten that Harry was sitting right there. Harry smiled at him and asked softly, "Did you tell her? Did you keep it concealed from her?" He didn't know what Draco's choice would have been then, no matter what level of understanding he might have for the man seated across from him now.
            "I told her," Draco said. "It did take a struggle of a few months, but I thought she deserved an explanation of why I suddenly wanted to accompany her on trips to Diagon Alley that had always been her time to share with her sister or her friends, or why I wanted to go with her to Ministry galas that we both thought were boring and not good opportunities for meeting people who might influence Scorpius later. I wanted--I wanted to be with her. Do you understand?'
            Harry, his mind full of memories of how he had wanted to go to Ginny's Quidditch practices as well as games--and how Draco had wanted to stay in his house and making him leave when Lily came over would have been unthinkable--nodded. "Yeah, I understand."
            "She didn't take it well." Draco stared with unseeing eyes at the far wall. "She pointed out that we had promised each other we would be partners. Friends. Good parents to Scorpius. Not that we would be overinfatuated with each other and jealous of each other and--always wanting to spend time with each other. She did point out that we couldn't live in each other's robe pockets all the time and expect our marriage to survive. No one could."
            "Well," Harry began, but let it trail off when Draco glared at him.
            "No," Draco said. "Some things she was wrong about, and I don't know that she's accepted that even now, but this she was right about. Spouses, even loving ones, have to have some time apart and some time with their friends and not just each other. I wasn't giving her that. I said--" He pinched his lips shut.
            "What?" Harry urged gently, when it seemed that Draco was going to sit there without saying anything for years.
            "I said that because I had fallen in love with her, and my parents were at least deeply affectionate, love wasn't impossible in pure-blood marriages," Draco said. "That much was true. But when she told me that she didn't feel any love for me, I got angry. I told her that she owed me her love."
            Harry winced a little. Draco caught the motion, even though Harry hadn't particularly wanted him to, and nodded with a grim face. "Exactly. That, I had no right to do. At the time, though, all I could think was how I was devoting myself to her and she wasn't returning any speck of that devotion."
            "What finally happened?" Harry asked.
            Draco stared into his drink, and shrugged. "Astoria said it didn't matter, as long as I could hold to the terms of the original bargain. Let her do what she wanted, do what I wanted, and spend time with her on times when we both agreed. She didn't mind--making love more often, the way I wanted, as long as I didn't nag her into it.
            "I thought I could keep those promises, even with those new emotions." He raised his eyes to Harry's face again. "I couldn't."
            "You couldn't what?" Harry asked as gently as he could, trying to pick through all the tangled implications. He was glad that he was sitting down. If he was standing up, the temptation to pace, or at least take Draco's hand, would have been overwhelming. But right now, he didn't think that Draco wanted any casual touch. "Leave her alone, let her do what she wanted to do?"
            Draco swallowed and shook his head. "I became--jealous. You have no notion how jealous I can be when something piques my temper."
            Harry gave him a wry look. "From seeing the way you behave towards Ginny, I think I can."
            Draco looked briefly startled for a second, and then his face smoothed out, the draining of expression that Harry remembered from his being Malfoy. "I hadn't realized it bothered you so much," he said. "But believe me, I've learned politeness and restraint since I was Astoria's lover--would-be lover."
            Harry swallowed a little. He was human enough to admit that he felt a little jealous himself, wistful that he could have experienced the temper that Draco apparently only unleashed around her. He had never had people fight over him.
            Then he gave himself a bit of a shake, reminded himself of his eighth year at Hogwarts when it had seemed that some people did nothing but, and returned to earth. "Anyway, I think I know what you mean. What happened then?"
            Draco closed his eyes and leaned his head back in his chair, so far that it looked as if he was falling. "She told me that this was growing intolerable, and threatened divorce. She thought that would bring me to my senses. No Malfoy has ever divorced." He opened one eye, as though contemplating half of Harry's face would help him get his point across. "We don't do it. It's not done."
            "Yes, I think I understand that," Harry said. "Because mostly, you don't fall in love with your spouse. You might live separate lives so it's like being divorced, but you don't actually make that rupture public."
            Privately, he shuddered. He had been devastated when Ginny had asked for a divorce from him, he had felt like a failure, but now, equally privately, he thought he could see how it could have been worse. If they had felt themselves bound to act by that version of pure-blood etiquette...
            Luckily, Ginny had been raised so differently that Harry reckoned there was no way to compare the two. He didn't know exactly what had made the Weasleys so different from the general run of pure-bloods--not having money, not having house-elves, being willing to associate with Muggles?--but he was grateful for it.
            When he looked up, he realized that Draco was nodding again, and every trace of the cold mask that might have fallen on his face as Malfoy had melted away. "Yes, that was the way it would have been. Should have been. Any disagreement between spouses could be handled that way, even one that struck at the foundations of their marriage."
            He put his head between his hands. "That's what I mean when I say that I dishonored Astoria. She offered me a way out, the same way that thousands of wizards had taken before us and one that would have continued the same contract we had made with the beginning of our marriage. Nothing had to change between us, even though my feelings had.
            "And I couldn't take it. I told her that I loved her, and if I couldn't be married to her in the way I wanted, then I wanted a divorce."
            Harry sat still, staring at him. The hints that Malfoy had dropped about dishonoring had never led Harry to the conclusion that Draco had come to.
            "You're shocked." Draco lifted his head. "You're probably wondering why I can say that I--feel something for you if I was in love with her. You're probably wondering how long ago these feelings were, and if they could really go away."
            "I did wonder how long ago it was," Harry said, since it was difficult to say anything else at the moment.
            "Years," Draco said. "Almost ten, now, since it all began. Six years since we were divorced. We had four years when she put up with me and we could have worked it out a different way. Sometimes I think we should have, if only for Scorpius's sake." He sighed. "But that wasn't the way I wanted to play it. I wanted--some kind of acknowledgment. But it was wrong to pressure her. She had a right to expect a certain kind of marriage, and that was exactly what I couldn't give her."
            "I think it was right that you had the courage to announce you loved her," Harry said firmly. "Who knows? She might have fallen in love with you back. You could never know unless you said it. And if she couldn't love you back, then the divorce set you both free to find someone else."
            "You don't seem to think about your marriage and divorce in the same way." Draco's voice was light, but his hands had closed hard around the arms of the chair again.
            "If you think about it, my marriage failed for the same reason," Harry murmured. "Ginny had the right to expect a certain kind of marriage, and there was no way that I could give it to her. Now, granted, I had no idea that she thought I was cheating, and she was the one who decided on the divorce and not me, but she wanted me to keep what she saw as my promise to place her first, and I didn't do that."
            Draco looked at him intently, one hand moving before he took it back and placed it in his lap. "Did you ever place her first? I thought your children came first with you, from the amount of control they seem to have over your life."
            Harry winced. Then he decided that, if Draco had told him something that intimate about his marriage with Astoria, Harry could bloody well do the same thing, and he nodded, a bit stiffly. "Yes. Before the children were born, I placed her first. It helped that I wasn't an Auror at the time, though. I think for at least the last nine years, the children and my job have mattered more to me than she did."
            Draco's face was quiet, and Harry couldn't tell what he was thinking for long seconds before he spoke again. "And if you decided that I was going to be your next, would you place your new job and your children over me?"

            Harry spread his hands. "I don't have the best record for not doing otherwise."
            "I might be more insistent than someone who expected you to read her mind." Draco leaned forwards and continued before Harry could open his mouth. "She did. She never told you that she thought you were cheating, did she? Or that she thought you were gay. She complained to your children and then asked for a divorce."
            "I could trust you not to keep quiet," Harry said. "But I can't guarantee you a perfect thing either." If Draco wasn't going to use names for what they were to each other, Harry thought he should return the courtesy. "I don't know if this is going to work out, Draco, and that's the truth. You can come up with all sorts of reasons why you aren't Ginny and I'm not Astoria, but our marriages were both messes, in their different ways. I don't know that we're going to do any better the second time around."
            Draco gave him a look brilliant with determination. Harry found himself smiling back before he thought about it. Draco nodded in response, seeming pleased, and stood up, crossing the distance between them to place his hands behind Harry's back.
            "We're determined to make this work well now," Draco whispered. "We're warned. We both had idealized visions of what our marriages should be, and that didn't help. But this time, we know about the dangers. Maybe we won't overcome them, but a forewarning should help, shouldn't it?"
            Harry opened his mouth to tell Draco that he knew what being the object of a forewarning was like, and it wasn't the greatest feeling in the world.
            But then Draco was kissing him, and Harry reckoned that he could at least admit this feeling was brilliant, and worth striving for, and worth keeping. Or, if it wasn't, then they could find out together.

*
            delia cerrano: Well, now you have the reason. And Ginny didn't really do anything to Draco. Harry married Ginny and he's never had any other sexual partner.
            Sephla: Thank you! I appreciate it a lot.
            RoxasElric: Thank you! Here's the next chapter.
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Marathon