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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.

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Thank you again for all the reviews!
Chapter Thirty-Two—Recovery
            “Mr. Potter? I know that you must be wary of visitors now, after your last experience, but I need to speak with you.”
            Harry leaned his head out his office window. A woman he didn’t recognize stood on the front step, her cloak braced around her as if against the wind, although Harry didn’t think it was very cold today. She had long brown hair, and brown eyes that made Harry want to trust her immediately. He wasn’t that stupid, but he did look at her thoughtfully as he opened the door and let her in.
            “Thank you,” said the witch, and shook some rain off her cloak. “I know how it must look, but I have arthritis bad enough that it aches all day if I don’t wear something specially warming.”
            Harry flushed a little. He hadn’t meant for his thoughts to be so visible on his face. “You’re welcome here,” he said. “What’s your name?”
            “Katherine Huggins,” the woman said, and Harry thought he recognized the name for just a moment before she continued, “The Head of Child Welfare Services, the one who wrote to you when you asked if the Ministry had a department dedicated to aiding war orphans. I’d like to talk to you about the rumors that Anne Quillona has spread.”
            Harry paused before he turned away. “You know she spread them?”
            “She’s a frequent visitor,” said Katherine dryly, and took the chair in front of Harry’s desk, drawing her cloak even harder around her. Harry waved his wand at the fire and built it up, and received a grateful nod. “I feel sorry for her granddaughter, but Madam Quillona was the nearest blood relative, and most of the time, the Ministry won’t hear of the child going anywhere else.”
            “That’s something that needs to change,” Harry muttered as he sat down behind his desk.
            He’d thought his voice was soft enough to escape notice, but Katherine immediately fastened her gaze on him. “Yes. Well, I suspect that placing you in the Muggle world was not the best idea.”
            Harry froze, but Katherine shook her head. “I’m not referring to anything specific. Not even rumors, this time. Simply the acknowledgment that you performed a lot of accidental magic at your relatives’ home, and there’s usually a reason for that.” She huddled closer to the fire again and sighed in relief. “Now. The main reason I wanted to speak to you is to ask if you think you’re mentally stable enough to be counseling children and families.”
            Harry found himself with no words for a moment. Then some came to him. “Well. That’s blunt.”
            “Yes,” said Katherine, and didn’t seem as if she was going to apologize for it. “I find that I need to be, in this job. I’ve dealt with people who thought I couldn’t tell that they were abusing their children, and others whose desire was for Galleons, or advancement in the Ministry, or even my job. I’ve learned to judge people well.” She paused and studied him. “Admittedly, we’ve only talked for a short time, but you don’t seem mentally unstable.”
            Harry snorted before he thought about it. “Why ask me if I think I am or not? Why not judge for yourself?”
            “Well, if you were sitting in a corner staring into space or attacking imaginary enemies, I wouldn’t need to ask you.” Katherine folded her arms close and turned a little, probably getting her legs into a more comfortable position. “But the only reason I came is because of the rumors spreading as a result of that article. I didn’t know you were visiting a Mind-Healer. I think it’s fine. But other people need to see something being done, and it can’t hurt to have official Ministry approval of you as well as your business.”
            Harry hesitated, then nodded slowly. “I think—I’m better than I’ve been in some time. There was the war, and that wasn’t easy to deal with. But something else happened three years ago that a friend has finally persuaded me I need help with, since the ways I’d tried to cope with it weren’t working.”
            “What happened three years ago?” Katherine asked quietly.
            Harry swallowed once, and then made the decision that he probably could trust her. Once again, if word of his condition spread all over the papers, then he would know who to blame.
            “A combination of hexes hit me that made it impossible for me to have children.”
            Katherine blinked, once, hard. Then she nodded. “Certain things become clear about why you wanted this job.”
            Harry frowned at her. “I want to help people, too.”
            “I don’t doubt that.” Katherine watched him thoughtfully. “Then my question is a bit different. Are you sure that this is the best thing for you to do? If you’re getting help from a Mind-Healer, then perhaps you’ll learn to cope with your loss in a different way. You might abandon this business if you become healed enough.”
            Harry bit his tongue for a second. Then he said, “Even if I feel better, I won’t do that.”
            “Really?”
            Harry met her stare for stare. “Yes. Really.”
            “Perhaps you won’t, then,” said Katherine, unhelpfully. She put a hand beneath her chin and studied him again, then smiled a little. “Understand, Mr. Potter, I don’t think that you’re inherently untrustworthy. But I have seen even those people who dedicate the most time to caring for children lose interest when something else comes up, unless the child is their own.”
            “Let me guess,” said Harry, and managed to sound normal, he thought. She already knew he was upset. But he didn’t have to lash out at her. “The people who might want to work for your department in the Ministry?”
            Katherine nodded grimly back. “Yes. Sometimes I have people who tell me that it won’t matter what I can pay them, that they just want to be around children and work with them. Many of them haven’t spent much time around children at all.” She paused. “I have to admit, when I first heard about Mathilda Patience saying you wouldn’t take payment from her, that was what I thought of.”
            The woman’s a menace, Harry thought. Mathilda had apparently taken her mission to promote his business by word of mouth seriously indeed. “Well, I do want to help. I didn’t think I could help Justice Quillona, so I told her grandmother to take her to the Mind-Healer I have.”
            “Understandable.” Katherine hesitated once more. “How much money do you need this business to make?”
            “I have enough of my parents’ fortune left to live on for a little while,” said Harry. “But I’m not rich in the way that some people would think of it.” Like Malfoy, for example. “I can try to establish my business and the trust that people will need to come to me.”
            “All right.” Katherine stood and nodded. “I’ve seen enough to give you the official Ministry approval. I’ll announce it to the papers tomorrow. That ought to take care of some of the pressure that you’ve got from this article.”
            Harry smiled. “Thank you.”
            “Do be careful of Anne Quillona,” said Katherine. “She didn’t mean to stir up such a firestorm, only ruin your business.” She paused when Harry snorted. “Yes. Only. But she can be vengeful when provoked.”
            “I’ll remember that,” said Harry. Perhaps he would be talking to George, or even Malfoy, about defenses against Quillona after all. “And in the meantime, I think I’ll firecall Mathilda Patience and ask her to tone down what she’s saying a little.”
            “That would be just as well.” Katherine looked around the office once more, as though she could see what Harry had intended for it rather than the bare walls he had right now. “I hope you succeed, Mr. Potter. It’s an intriguing idea, and a service that I think we need outside the Ministry. My office is sometimes too tied down by regulations to do as much as I’d like.”
            Harry nodded respectfully back to her, and got up to open the door. “I hope to do that. And what I told you about—about not being able to have children is true, but I’m doing this for other reasons, too. The ones you mentioned.”
            Katherine paused outside the door and turned around, peering at him. “A bit of advice, if you’ll take it.”
            “Of course.” Harry waited eagerly. He thought Katherine could probably tell him a lot about running a business, if she wanted to.
            But what she said was, “I think that you need something in your life to live for besides your business alone. Even if it increases the chance that you’ll find something else to focus on. I think you’re right that you wouldn’t simply abandon this business and the people who depend on you. But don’t make your work your life.”
            Harry blinked. “I’m not. That’s one reason that I stopped being an Auror, because I noticed a tendency to make that job my life.”
            “Just remember,” said Katherine, with a small, sad smile, and patted him once on the shoulder before she walked out the door.
            Harry shook his head as he shut the door. No matter what he did, someone always seemed to think it was wrong, and to want to give him advice.
            All right, sometimes he needed the advice. But it was still annoying.
*
            “Can we visit Teddy today?”
            That was at least a change from the endless requests to visit “Uncle Harry.” Draco put down the history book he’d been reading to Scorpius out of—give Scorpius credit, he was at least pretending to listen—and leaned back in the large, comfortable library chair he’d been taking lately when they were in here. “Let me firecall Andromeda. She’ll probably say yes, but I want to announce us.”
            Scorpius nodded. The instant Draco had stopped reading, he’d slumped sideways, and now he was toying with a thread that stuck out from the knee of his robe.
            “Are you all right?” Draco asked.
            Scorpius looked up. “Izzy said something about Uncle Harry firecalling the other day,” he said. “And you didn’t tell me.”
            It actually took Draco a second to remember what Scorpius meant. His past few days had been occupied: another visit with Theo, one of Pansy’s whirlwind trips to the shops that usually meant she was pouting and trying to conceal it, and a cautious conversation with his father that had left him in a better mood after it ended than when it started, which was an exception to most of his talks with his parents, period.
            “That,” Draco said. “Oh. No. I didn’t tell you. Mr. Potter called to discuss something extremely private with me, and I didn’t want you to be upset because he didn’t have time to speak to you right then.”
            Scorpius stared at him for long enough that Draco had to remind himself he was the father here, and not the child. Then Scorpius looked away and sighed. “Okay,” he said, his word drawn-out to the point that Draco stood up immediately.
            “I’ll firecall Andromeda now,” he offered, neutrally, and went over to the hearth.
            Andromeda was home, and looked happy to see him for once. “Teddy is driving me mad,” she confessed, after a look over her shoulder to make sure that Teddy wasn’t standing behind her. “He keeps complaining he’s bored, and then he doesn’t want to do anything I come up with for him to do. He’ll be happy to see his cousin.”
            Draco nodded, and herded Scorpius through the fireplace. Scorpius leaped through and immediately ran over to Teddy, who had come into the room by the time they got there.
            “I want to learn how to fly upside-down,” Scorpius announced.
            “We’ll do that,” said Teddy, and gave his grandmother a pleading look.
            “Sticking Charms for the both of you,” said Andromeda at once, and led them outside. Draco followed slowly, noticing for the first time that the garden at Andromeda’s house was pleasant, bigger than he had expected, and with a huge border of sunflowers that might cushion a fall from a broom.
            “Nothing is going to happen,” Andromeda said, almost under her breath, without looking back at him, and then started casting spells on the brooms that Teddy held out to her.
            Draco started and turned back to her. “At least I’m different than I would have been a month ago,” he said. “Then, I would have been mainly worried about how Scorpius falling off his broom would affect his future self-confidence as a Malfoy.”
            Andromeda gave him a sharp look, but it wasn’t like some of the ones she had used when Draco was talking to her before, about Potter. This one was considering. “I think we have some things to talk about,” she said.
            Draco nodded distractedly, and watched as Scorpius climbed onto his broom. Teddy followed a second later, and flew a circle around Scorpius. Scorpius didn’t get upset, though, just turned the broom to follow Teddy and demanded, “Show me that!”
            Teddy made his broom dance back and forth, and Draco blinked. He thought he would have been hard-pressed to do that himself when he was Teddy’s age. Perhaps Teddy would grow up to be a professional Quidditch player. “You have to master a few other skills first,” Teddy said, and led Scorpius into a spiral.
            Draco watched them long enough to convince himself that he could see the shimmer of the Sticking Charms on Scorpius’s legs, and then followed Andromeda inside. She served him biscuits that glowed with chocolate and scones that shimmered with butter. Draco hid a smile behind his cup, which he had asked be of just plain water. He’d already had his fill of tea today.
            “You care for Scorpius more than I thought at first,” said Andromeda, rolling the words in her mouth like loose teeth. “And I don’t think that you—that you’re trying to take Harry away from me anymore. If he wants to come back, he’ll come.”
            Draco nodded patiently, waiting. Andromeda might have said the same things in a letter, but he didn’t think she would have liked to. Still, he thought this conversation was also going to last longer than just those words.
            Andromeda looked down at her knees and squeezed her kneecap for a moment. “I want to know if you’ll speak to Harry for me, though,” she whispered. “Just to ask him to visit me, and give me a chance to apologize and tell him that I didn’t mean that comment about family. I thought it was a small thing, that he’d get over it. But he isn’t.”
            “Despite what you just said about him coming back if he wanted to come?” Draco asked as gently as he could.
            Andromeda looked up and blinked. “He has to hear the apology first before he can make that decision.”
            Draco picked up a biscuit and ate while he thought about it. Normally, he didn’t interfere in other people’s families. He knew Blaise had a lot of conflicts with his mother and Pansy with her husband, but he didn’t ask about them. Likewise, they left him alone when it came to his parents. Blaise giving him advice about Scorpius at all was a little amazing, when you thought about it that way.
            Still, he wanted to do this. He couldn’t deny that. And it had little to do with the fact that Andromeda was family asking him for a favor. That was important, but Draco knew he would have politely refused if it had been anyone other than Potter she was asking him to help her with.
            Why is that?
            Draco felt a shifting heat move across his skin, and Andromeda cleared her throat. “If it makes you that uncomfortable, then I’m sorry I asked.”
            Mortified to realize he was blushing, Draco shook his head sharply and said, “I’ll talk to Potter. But I’ll only pass along the message that you’d like to see him. I’m not going to urge him to come.”
            “All right,” said Andromeda. “That’s more than I would get of anyone else I asked, I suspect.” She leaned back and watched Draco for a long moment, her eyes narrowed as though she was contemplating him in another light than the one Draco wanted her to see him in. Then she added, as if casually, “You’re going to see him and ask him soon?”
            Draco relaxed slowly. She didn’t sound as though she thought there was anything that unusual about his blush. Instead, she probably just wanted Potter back in her home and reconciled with her as soon as possible, so she didn’t have to spend any more time feeling guilty.
            “Of course,” he said, and drained his cup, wishing that it didn’t feel so much like an excuse.
*
            Harry rolled his eyes and flung the letter into the fire. It was from Anne Quillona, informing him in stiff and haughty terms that she had taken Justice to Healer Brandeis and the Healer hadn’t been able to help, either.
            “I only recommended her, I didn’t say she was infallible,” Harry muttered to his walls, because there was no one else around to hear him, and sank down on his chair. He was lonely and bored and out of sorts. A few people had come in to see him, lured by Mathilda’s gushing words or the official announcement that Katherine had made, but not many, and they had all been vague and only promised to bring their children to see him later. Most had been so vague that Harry couldn’t even tell whether he could help them or not.
            He tipped his head back and stared at the ceiling. He’d eaten dinner, and filled out what would hopefully be the last of the forms to establish his business as a legitimate one. And now his evening was filled with hours of sitting on his arse.
            Hours I used to spend working or writing about Ethan.
            Harry gave himself a sharp shake. His evening didn’t have to be filled with hours sitting on his arse, now did it? He knew Ron and Hermione were busy tonight, over at the Burrow to give Molly a few hours with her grandchildren and Ron and Hermione a few hours with family, but he didn’t have to sit around waiting for them.
            He stood up and walked into his bathroom. There, he carefully examined his face in the mirror and then shut his eyes. He’d cast Disguise spells plenty of time during his Auror training and his actual war. He could do it now.
            “Oculus muto,” he whispered.
            The spell shifted into his eyes, slowly changing the color of them. Harry shivered. Changing the color wasn’t dangerous the way changing the actual shape could be, but it did make him feel as though something cold and soft was spreading across his eyes’ surface, as though someone with a tiny little brush was painting them a different color.
            When he looked again, his eyes were a pale, watery blue that he thought he’d accidentally based on the eyes of some Death Eaters he knew. With a shrug, he straightened his hair, and then cast a glamour that hovered right in front of the scar on his head. Then he studied himself in the mirror again.
            He supposed the resemblance to Harry Potter was still there for someone who looked for it, but he doubted that many people would look for it where he was going.
            He hadn’t dated since the end of his marriage. He’d had too many other things to content him and occupy his time. Now he didn’t.
            But Harry thought he deserved to have fun like anyone else. Or at least voices around him, discussing things that had nothing to do with Dark wizards and Dark magic. He could go to a pub like this and drink without a concern that someone would want to either flatter him or kill him the moment they saw his face.
            He wouldn’t lie to someone to the extent of denying who he was. But he would use a false name and a false face for those hours. He had the right to do so. Lots of people did worse things every day.
            That doesn’t make this right.
            Harry shook himself. He was being stupid, holding himself to such a high standard that he felt worse about minor things like this than some of the major mistakes he’d made. Malfoy would say that he was being stupid, surely.
            Harry hesitated.
            Malfoy?
            But although Harry felt as if he had hours of the evening left, it was still seven, after dinner for most people, and Malfoy was probably occupied in putting Scorpius to bed or visiting with his friends who’d been invited. The mere thought of crashing into a party that he hadn’t known was happening made Harry blush hard enough to show up through the glamour on his scar.
            No, he wasn’t going to wonder and worry about what Malfoy would say, or Ron and Hermione. Maybe he would think about what Ginny would have said, but only to imagine her mouth falling open in astonishment.
            He would go out and have a nice, normal evening, and he would come back and go to bed with no one the wiser, and no one would have been hurt, even if a few people had been fooled into thinking he was someone else. How many people went to pubs every day and brushed elbows with fellow drinkers and dance partners they would never see again, whose names they never bothered to ask?
            Maybe in the Muggle world. It’s rarer in the wizarding world.
            Harry nodded sharply. Then he would go to a Muggle pub, and he would enjoy himself..
            And standing here in front of the mirror and fuming at himself, or wondering about how well the glamours would hold, wasn’t the same thing.
            The slam of the door didn’t shake the house, but Harry felt as though it should have.
*
Meechypoo: Yes. And likely to get nastier.
delia cerrano: Well, I think that Ron and Hermione, while not perfect friends, were still good friends for Harry. The main problem in this story is that they have their own lives and their own children, and so Harry feels cut off from an experience that he knows he’ll never be able to share.
SP777: He may, now that he realizes more than one person (him) knows.
Jester: And is about to have more.
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Starfall