Adult-FanFiction.org : Harry Potter

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.

Chapter List
- 29
- 30
- 31
Thank you again for all the reviews!
Chapter Thirty--A Strange Kind of Conversation
            "Please come in. Please sit down."
            Does he know how much he sounds like a house-elf? But Harry concealed his amusement as he sat on the couch in front of Malfoy. He could guess that Malfoy wouldn't find it amusing, and he really didn't want to deliberately piss off someone who was trying to be nice to him--who had sat all the way through that long confession Harry had made to Healer Brandeis without indicating how boring he must have found it.
            "Do you want tea?" Malfoy asked abruptly, perching on a couch across from Harry. Harry took a moment to look around before he answered. They were in a room in a part of the Manor he hadn't visited before, and it was brightly-colored, more than Harry would have thought Malfoys would admire. The walls were blue with pale accents, and the couches were blue, and the floor was deep blue tile. Harry admired it as he answered.
            "Yes, please. With lemon."
            Malfoy gave him a narrow glance as he waved his hand and a house-elf appeared. "You didn't ask for that before."
            Harry shrugged. "It puts the house-elves out a little, and I didn't want to do that, as a guest."
            "Hmmm." Malfoy didn't take his eyes off him as he gave the orders for the tea to the house-elf, Izzy. Harry stared blandly back, even though his stomach was doing slow somersaults as he realized something.
            This was the first time they had been alone in Malfoy's house without Scorpius. Before that, they had had conversations that mostly centered around Teddy or Scorpius. And when Malfoy had confronted him near the ruins in Godric's Hollow, and when he had done the same thing in the alley near the Ministry, they had almost immediately engaged in violence.
            It didn't give Harry high hopes about how this encounter was going to go, especially because Malfoy didn't seem to have any idea of what he wanted to say.
            Izzy came back with the tea, and they both sipped in silence. Harry sighed when he saw the way Malfoy glanced at him and then away. It seemed that once again he was going to have to be the one to take the wolf by the ears and speak the first thanks. Well, it wasn't going to be as dreadful as all that.
            "Thanks for listening without saying much," he said quietly. "I know it had to be strange when seen from your perspective, but thanks."
            Malfoy glanced back at him. "What do you mean, strange from my perspective?" At least his voice was slow and he held the teacup in his right hand, which would make it hard for him to reach for his wand. Harry still set down his own cup on a table of ornately carved wood next to the couch so as to have his own hands free.
            "I mean, that you believed different things about me in school, and it must be a shock to hear they were wrong."
            Malfoy hesitated as if he was turning those words over in his head and comparing them with words that did come from his own perspective. Then he nodded sharply. "I never knew that you lived with abusive Muggle relatives, for one thing. I have to think back and think about how that changes some things I had...misinterpreted."
            "Yeah," said Harry, and rubbed the back of his neck. "But I was just going to say, I trust your discretion. You're not going to spread what you heard around." He left unsaid the reason he was sure of that: Harry would know exactly who had told, and his vengeance would be swift. "So if you wanted to tell me that, you don't need to. I already knew it."
            Malfoy's face went more mask-like than ever, and he stared into his cup. "And if I invited you here to say something else?"
            "Then I don't know what it is." Harry settled more solidly on the couch. He had been sure that Malfoy had been hesitating because he had to say something that would make him uncomfortable. Hell, Harry was uncomfortable enough with the mention of trust between them. Malfoy was probably caught in a delicate state where he wanted to insist he was trustworthy and yet knew there had been times in the recent past where Harry would have insisted otherwise.
            "What is it?" Harry added, when Malfoy went on looking into the surface of his tea as though it was the most fascinating thing in the world.
            Malfoy copied his actions of placing his teacup on the table next to him. When he turned back, Harry tensed again. There was a ferocious spark in Malfoy's eyes that made Harry half-expect a lunge off the couch after all.
            But he had no idea what he could have done to piss off Malfoy this time, and he decided that he would ask the question before Malfoy could explode. "Why are you angry?"
            "I'm angry for you."
            "Huh?" Harry spent a moment reviewing what Healer Brandeis had said to him, trying to imagine how anything had been inappropriate, especially when Malfoy had been the one to recommend that particular Mind-Healer to him in the first place. Then he abruptly realized what Malfoy must mean.
            His muscles tightened so fast that it made his stomach ache. He held up a hand. "You don't--you don't need to say anything about the Dursleys, Malfoy."
            "But I'm going to." Malfoy tapped his fingers on the couch arm in a pattern that would have seemed nervous to anyone who couldn't see his eyes. "I never realized how awful they were to you. How deep the roots of your longing for a family go. And it makes perfect sense now that losing the ability to have children would have devastated you enough to create Ethan Starfall."
            "That didn't give me the right to pretend to be someone else and write to you in a false persona," Harry said. Merlin, he wasn't sure the truce between them could survive Malfoy's pity. "You can understand what I did without liking it."
            "Or being angry for you?" Malfoy gave him a thin smile that was more familiar. "I think that's what you were also about to say, wasn't it? You don't want me to feel it."
            "You're not--" said Harry, and this time he was the one who was left without knowing what he wanted to say, while Malfoy watched him with the smug air of a cat. "You're not someone who has to be angry about it," Harry said at last, slowly. "I would expect that from Ron or Hermione, and it's Healer Brandeis's job. But it's not yours."
            "You would expect it from a friend." Malfoy's voice was flat. "What do you think we are?"
            "I don't know." Harry didn't want to insult Malfoy by saying they weren't friends, even though part of him thought it was true. "We have a truce so that I can mentor your son and you can be part of Teddy's life," Harry finally said, a little desperately. "And we get along well enough when we're talking about the children. But this isn't them."
            "It's connected to them."
            "It's also connected to things that happened long before I came to Hogwarts," Harry snapped. "I don't compare you with Dudley in my head anymore. I don't think that you're responsible for my state of mind. The way I created Ethan and involved you was my fault. What the Dursleys did was their fault. You don't need to be involved."
            "Why do you think I accompanied you there, and stayed and listened?" Malfoy asked.
            "I don't know."
            "Because I want to be someone who has the right to be angry." Malfoy once again had the access to the smooth store of the words, while Harry stared at him and spluttered. It wasn't a power reversal that Harry approved of. "It might take a while longer before you're comfortable with that notion. But I am, already."
            "Okay," Harry said, and found he had to repeat the word before he could come out with anything else. "Okay."
            Malfoy sat back, lounged really, and watched him with those inscrutable silver eyes. He had already picked up his teacup again, and looked perfectly calm now that his statement was out. Harry felt the swell of something like a bubble of anger in his chest, and locked his teeth on a retort that would have set everything back.
            "But you didn't come into Healer Brandeis's office expecting to hear what you heard," he said, choosing that for his return to the attack.
            "Of course not," said Malfoy. "I had some idea about some of it beforehand, but not nearly all."
            The look he was giving Harry was almost condescending. Harry didn't like it, and he didn't care if it was only there because they had only recently tried to be something else to each other. It was still annoying. "Then why did you stay and listen to what I said, if it wasn't--if you weren't looking for something to be angry about?"
            Malfoy set the teacup down again. Ha, Harry thought. He had won a kind of victory, and he would cling to that in default of another more definite.
            "The nature of the connection between us is strange," Malfoy began. "I haven't felt anything like it before." He gave Harry a very direct stare. "And if you have, then I think you would know how to go about it better."
            Harry nodded unwillingly. "But that connection is based on chance and coincidence," he said. "It was just chance that your owl came to me. Just chance that you found out about Ethan. Just coincidence that Teddy got sick, and I went to you instead of invoking the life-debt that your mother owes me."
            "You think that somehow lessens the emotions we feel because of it?" And now Malfoy looked amused, the bastard. "That didn't seem to be the case with, for example, the way you reacted when I confronted you in Godric's Hollow."
            "I mean that it has to matter less than if I'd been honest and confessed to you about Ethan on my own." Harry pushed his glasses up his nose, and noticed that both his face and his fingers were sweaty. Wonderful. He was being pulled back into feeling strong emotions just by talking about them. "I didn't go to you about Teddy because we were already friends, and you didn't come to me for advice about Scorpius. If--there has to be something more between us than just these things that happened to happen."
            "I wouldn't have listened if one of my friends had tried to give me advice about Scorpius," Malfoy said promptly. "Merlin knows they'd tried often enough. And the same with my parents. I'm glad I found out about Ethan on my own rather than as part of a general confession, because that means I'm the only one you share the secret with." He picked up his tea and sipped it.
            "And Teddy?" Harry asked, because that was the one point he had raised that Malfoy didn't seem to have an answer to.
            "You reached out to me based on the Black blood relationship, but also probably because you know I wouldn't raise tiresome objections about the use of blood in a potion." Malfoy gave him a smile that was thin enough to look as though someone had carved it on his face with a razor. "Right?"
            Harry sighed and settled back against the couch. "Right."
            "If those things are the result of chance and coincidence, then the chances and coincidences happened a long time ago." Malfoy leaned forwards, holding the teacup in his lap, and went on the attack. "Why don't you spend some time telling me why you're so desperate to deny any sort of connection existing between us, instead of requiring me to answer why it's perfectly natural."
            Harry looked away. "Because I don't understand it," he said. "I really don't think this can turn into the kind of friendship I have with Ron and Hermione."
            He thought he saw Malfoy shudder out of the corner of his eye, and turned around to glare at him, but Malfoy had already settled back into stillness if he had moved. "True enough," Malfoy said, with a sage little nod of his head.
            "And it's not going to be the kind of bond I have with Andromeda, which is mostly based on the care for the children we're both tied to." Harry hunched his head down like a turtle and looked at his hands again. He had to do something to escape the intense pull of Malfoy's gaze. "We're here without them right now."
            "Have you and Andromeda never visited without having Teddy between you?" Malfoy asked, in an amazingly soft voice.
            Harry thought about it, trying to find a time, then shook his head.
            "Then the bond is shallow," said Malfoy, and raised a placating hand when Harry opened his mouth to respond. "Children are a great shared interest, but it's not something that can keep you together all by itself, or Astoria and I would still be married. You need to be able to associate with adults sometimes, too."
            "I can do that all the time," Harry said, and didn't care about the whine in his voice. Malfoy had already heard it all in Healer Brandeis's office. "I want to be with kids."
            "Believe me," Malfoy went on as if he hadn't heard Harry, "I learned that to my cost. I was alone with Scorpius all the time, because I thought I had to be, to be a good father and to isolate him from the corrupting influences of the outside world."
            "You've at least learned better than that, right?" Harry asked. He hated to think of what Scorpius's life would be like if Malfoy hadn't.
            Malfoy gave a swift nod. "But that just means that I have the better perspective on what life would be if you never associated with anyone but a child, or saw other adults as simple gateways to a child." He leaned in with his eyes shining. Harry wondered why. The subject they were discussing had to be at least a little irritating for Malfoy. "You have this business in your life. That's good. You'll have a Mind-Healer you can trust. Even better. But are you going to have the same friends and this bond with Andromeda that's centered on Teddy and nothing else?"
            "Ron and Hermione are great friends."
            Malfoy nodded. "I think they must be, for your friendship to have survived what it has." Harry relaxed a little, hearing the apparently sincere admiration in Malfoy's voice. "But they have children, too, and you won't get to see Weasley as often now that you're no longer working as an Auror. What else are you going to do?"
            Harry coughed for a moment, and then had to offer, "I'm sorry, Malfoy, but I don't think you can replace them."
            "Not replace them. Add to them."
            Harry looked at him uncertainly. "Even though you're not exactly a friend, in the same way they are?"
*
            I never realized how the life of a hero who's gone through so much is still narrow and circumscribed by these little codes of behavior he probably learned at Hogwarts.
            What Draco wanted to say was that friendship was too small a word for all the possible connections that Potter could form to an adult the same age as him. That they should wait and see where it went--but for them to do that, Potter had to admit the connection existed in the first place. That Draco didn't intend to turn away from someone who had shared what Potter had with him and never speak to him again.
            But Potter would, quite possibly, take that the wrong way. There was no reason that Draco couldn't say the other things, though.
            "Have you always had clear and defined relationships with people, Potter?" he asked. "I don't recall you and Granger being friends your first few months at Hogwarts."
            "Yes, but Ron and I became friends right away."
            After what he had heard Potter speak of in Healer Brandeis's office, Draco thought he even knew why. Potter had flung himself headlong into the embrace of the first people to accept him. If Draco had had more compassion and forbearance when he was eleven, and hadn't taunted Weasley, he might have had Potter's friendship after all.
            "But not you and Granger."
            Potter fidgeted and looked away. "I'm not proud of the way I treated her," he said in a small voice. "It's not as though I had--well, no, I treated her badly and didn't stop Ron from talking badly about her."
            "I'm sure she's long forgiven you," Draco said lightly. He really didn't intend to spend this evening discussing the intricacies of Potter's bond with Weasley and Granger. He thought Potter spent too much time brooding about them as it was. "What's interesting is that you have always made friends quickly, when you made them, and then not looked elsewhere. I want to know if you can accept the company of a different kind of--adult."
            "What kind?" Potter looked at him warily.
            Draco didn't know every answer to that question himself, but he could give Potter some. He looked Potter squarely in the eye and returned the conversation to himself and the words he'd already spoken. "Someone who wants the right to get angry about what he heard today. Somebody who thinks you were treated horribly by your relatives, you were abused, and that means you deserve more compassion than you've ever received."
            Potter closed his eyes. "That makes me feel vulnerable and weak."
            "Even when I won't spread your weakness around? Even when I've kept the other secret I learned about you?"
            Potter stared at Draco as if he had never seen him before. Draco offered him a smile that was only a little smug.
            "Healer Brandeis can't be angry in the same way," Draco said softly. "It's her job to help you heal from this, and she has to maintain more of a distance from it. I don't. I can commiserate with you."
            "You want to?"
            Before this morning, Draco would have seen that as an insult to himself, Potter thinking that Slytherins had so little compassion to spare that Draco couldn't possibly feel any. Now he saw it in a different light. Potter had had relatives who drummed it into his head, constantly, that he wasn't worthy of attention.
            "I do," was all he said.
            Potter slowly leaned back against the couch without taking his eyes off Draco. It was intoxicating, Draco had to admit. Head-turning. "What else?"
            "I want to be a friend you can come over and have dinner with," Draco said. "Someone who can turn to you for advice about his son, without Scorpius being the only thing we ever talk about. Someone who can talk about Ethan Starfall with you." Potter's shoulders tensed, but he didn't shut himself off. "Someone, perhaps, who can tutor you in potions. You'll probably need some in your new job. At least Calming Draughts."
            Potter blinked a few times, and then nodded. "I didn't think of that, but they would be useful."
            I want to be more than useful. But Draco held his tongue. He didn't want to rush too much, either; Potter would only retreat and go back to holding his silence and licking his wounds in private. His tendency to do that was huge, if Draco considered how he hadn't told anyone else about Ethan Starfall or about the abuse before.
            "I don't know," Potter was saying now, and Draco paid more attention. "It does sound like a friend to me."
            Draco smiled. "Then let's call it that." He didn't think it would stay that way, because Potter was used to defining his friends only as Granger and Weasley, and when Draco did something that carried him beyond that boundary, Potter would react negatively. But it could be a good name at the beginning.
            "Even though you were talking about how complicated this relationship between us is?" Potter hadn't taken his eyes off Draco, and Draco reminded himself that Potter had trained as an Auror and had said both insightful and cutting things about Draco in the past.
            "Yes," said Draco. "You're right that there's probably not a word for it, and the search for one is making me tired." Potter's smile was a quick thing, there and then gone, but Draco treasured it the more for having seen it when many people wouldn't. "So. Now that we've discussed this, can we discuss your horrible childhood?"
            Potter sighed, and his face aged, so Draco again saw the man who had spoken of his childhood that morning in Healer Brandeis's office. He blew across his teacup, although Draco was sure it was long since cool. "You'll probably want to hit me if I say that it's not as bad as it sounds."
            "Yes," said Draco.
            Potter blinked at him as if he hadn't expected the response despite what he'd said himself, and then he shrugged and looked aside. "It's not as bad because I lived through it. It's not as bad because other things in Hogwarts and the war were worse. It's not--it's not not bad. But I know how horrible life can get, now."
            "That doesn't mean it wasn't wrong," Draco says, quietly. "Or that other people can't help you and care for you."
            "Like Healer Brandeis."
            "And me."
            Potter paused, eyes locked on Draco's face, and then it happened. He gave the smallest of nods, and while it was small, it didn't look forced, or fearful, or anything else that would have happened before, when they hovered in that borderland where neither of them wanted to acknowledge their connection.
            "Yes," said Potter.
            Draco smiled.
*
            staar: There won't be mpreg in this story, no.
            delia cerrano: Well, now that Harry is in therapy perhaps he will get past that.
            moodysavage: Thank you! Draco is annoyed with what he perceives as Harry playing it down, of course.
            Meechypoo: Harry mostly forgot Draco was there, honestly, but he does trust him not to reveal it.
- 29
- 30
- 31
You need to be logged in to leave a review for this story.You need to be logged in to leave a review for this story.
Report Story

Starfall