Adult-FanFiction.org : Harry Potter

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.

Chapter List
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Thank you again for all the reviews!
Chapter Thirty-Five—Who He Is
            “I’ve been wondering when you would come to discuss things.”
            Harry raised an eyebrow as he stepped out of the fireplace into Ron and Hermione’s drawing room. At least they had stopped putting pokers and other things in front of the hearth that would make him stumble when he came out. He didn’t know what Hermione meant, though, and studied her as she sat on the couch with her arms folded.
            Hermione looked the same as she had for years now. It was like, once she had started acting as a combination solicitor for Muggleborn cases against the Ministry and house-elf rights activist, she had stopped aging. There was a touch of silvery grey along her temples, but the same kind as Harry had, and while it had appeared early, it hadn’t grown. She had glasses that she used most of the time now, but they were so small and precise and like McGonagall’s glasses that Harry was half-convinced she just wore them to intimidate people. She was looking over them at him now as if that was true.
            “What do you mean?” Harry finally asked, because he didn’t know, and slung his cloak towards a peg. It landed on the right one. Ron and Hermione had had this house for almost seventeen years now, and Harry knew where everything was.
            “I mean that I never thought you were gay, but maybe you were bisexual,” Hermione said. “And I was waiting for you to come to and talk to me about it. I have lots of books on it.”
            Harry had to grin. Of course Hermione would feel slighted that she wasn’t the one to start bringing knowledge into Harry’s life about something as new and important as this.
            Although honestly, it didn’t feel as important as it had, and Harry wasn’t as angry or frightened as he had thought he would be, fighting back against Ginny’s imputation that he was gay. Yes, he didn’t exactly want her to be right, but there were more important things going on than that right now.
            Besides, if Hermione’s right and I’m bisexual, then Ginny was wrong anyway.
            “I didn’t know one way or the other,” Harry admitted, dropping down on the chair across from her. “Until Draco showed up in my life, I didn’t think about men that way.”
            Hermione shifted a little. “Do you think that means that you’re not—I mean, that this won’t last? Is this just a break of some kind, a diversion from Ginny?”
            “Ginny and I are divorced, Hermione,” Harry said, as gently as he could. There was a reason that he and his friends didn’t discuss his divorce very often, and it wasn’t because they thought Ginny was a saint. It just made things awkward and caught them between two “sides.” Harry didn’t want there to be sides.
            At one point, he had thought he could keep there from ever being sides by staying married to Ginny. He didn’t think that was a viable option anymore, as unhappy as Ginny had been, but it did mean that he didn’t want his friends to think they had to talk about Harry and Ginny in the same breath.
            “Well, a diversion from something else, then.” Hermione wrapped her arms around herself as if she was going to shiver. “From your work. Ron told me that you were quitting, and he explained the reasons, but it still seems incredible to me. Your job was your life for so long.”
            “And my marriage and my kids weren’t,” Harry said. He saw Hermione opening her mouth, but it hadn’t been a question, and he went on. “No, they weren’t. Not nearly as much as they should have been. I didn’t show them the kind of love and respect that would have made my marriage strong and left the kids unspoiled, because I was anxious and focused elsewhere.”
            “I don’t want to hear you say that you were a horrible father and husband,” Hermione muttered, frowning at him. “Because you were neither.”
            “I wasn’t horrible all the time, but I also wasn’t the best,” Harry said. “And I was horrible sometimes. I can admit that now, Hermione, really. If I was in tune with Ginny at all, I would have seen that she needed more a long time ago.”
            “Still.” Hermione’s frown deepened. “She told me that she thought you were cheating on her. I don’t understand why she thought that.”
            “Because she thought I didn’t enjoy sleeping with her.” Harry hesitated, because this came close to the borders of things that he didn’t want to discuss, but maybe they needed to be said this one time. “Look. You—you and Ron enjoy a lot of—healthiness in…well, in bed, right?”
            Hermione flushed a little, but nodded. “It’s not exactly the same as when we were twenty. If you’re going to blame yourself for not being the way you were when you and Ginny were dating, then—”
            “I don’t think she ever asked that of me,” Harry cut her off quickly. Once again, he didn’t want this to turn into a discussion about Ginny, except as much as it needed to. He wanted to talk more about Draco. “And I never asked that of her. But she did expect more—passion from me, more commitment to sex as well as everything else. And when she saw how easily I gave it up, I think that’s why she thought I was getting something elsewhere, with someone else.”
            “It doesn’t give her the right to say it in front of Lily.”
            Harry shook his head. “But she can still feel anything she wants, and I don’t want to prevent her. I think we’re closer to an understanding, Hermione. She knows now how I feel about her talking to Lily that way, and I don’t think she’ll do it anymore.”
            Hermione gnawed on the edge of a nail, something Harry hadn’t seen her do in a long time. She looked as if she might stop when she saw Harry staring at her, but then she shrugged almost defiantly and kept on. “It’s still a stupid thing to think about you. That you would ever cheat on her.”
            “I think that much, too,” Harry said, and gave her a smile. “But enough about Ginny.” He was starting to think that Hermione wouldn’t stop talking about her until Harry gave her something else to consider instead, so he did, although he knew it was probably going to shock her more than comfort her. “Besides, now that I do have someone else, Ginny being my wife doesn’t matter to me as much.”
            Hermione stared at him. “And how long have you had—someone else?” she asked, her voice a breathless sound.
            “Only for a week or so,” Harry said. He actually wasn’t sure when he should start counting, from the time that Draco had started staying with him or only since their first kiss, but he didn’t think anyone could object to this. “It’s Draco. And I saw Ron smirking when I went to tell him I was resigning from the Aurors and Draco was with me, so I don’t think that you’re as surprised as you looked,” he added. The more he thought about it, the weirder Ron’s behavior then appeared, unless he thought that Draco was going to be Harry’s lover.
            “Draco,” Hermione said faintly, and shook her head. “Maybe that’s one reason that Ginny was so hurt when she talked to me about it. Not only do you have a male lover the way she always thought you did, but it’s someone her family has a blood feud with.”
            “Can we stop talking about Ginny?” Harry rolled his eyes when Hermione stared at him. “I’m sorry that she feels hurt, and I want to get along with her for the children’s sake, but her ideas aren’t the most important things around right now. Draco’s and mine are.”
            “He…” Hermione didn’t seem to know what to say. “He loves you? He’s been with you for a while now?”
            “Yes, and yes,” Harry said, and enjoyed seeing the way Hermione flushed a little. “I know that it sounds crazy, but this is the way it worked out. And I’m confident and happy with him in a way that I haven’t been for a long time.”
            “Yes, I know that you were unhappy for a long time before the divorce.” Luckily, Hermione didn’t take that as a cue to start talking about Ginny again. She leaned forwards instead, and considered Harry closely. “You’re all right with him having a son and a former wife?”
            “He’s been divorced a lot longer than I have,” Harry said comfortably. If not for what Draco had told him, he would have wondered about Astoria as a rival. After all, Draco had been in love with her. But from the sound of things, Astoria had been happy to get away from her marriage, so Harry hardly thought she would come back and try to claim Draco, or something else equally ridiculous. “I know that Scorpius gets along with Al, and from the way we’ve talked, he can get along with me, too.” He hesitated and then decided that he wanted to talk about this, too. “I would get more concerned about the way Al feels about it, really. And Jamie, except that he thinks it’s wonderful that Draco’s a Potions genius. And Lily is coming around, too.”
            Hermione didn’t pick up on the cue this time, other than to sit there looking expectantly at him.
            “Hermione.” Harry took a deep breath, not sure what else he should do to show he was serious. But she sat there with her bloody intuition failing her for once, so Harry had to ask outright. “How badly did I bring up my children, that they’re so spoiled?”
            Hermione gave a little sigh, her eyes on the floor. “We thought that Lily was a little spoiled when she started rejecting all these gifts,” she said. “But she always seemed to reject your gifts and not Ginny’s, so I thought it was that she blamed you for the divorce.”
            Harry nodded, waiting.
            “Jamie is more of a problem.” Hermione rubbed her hands together. “There were times that I knew he was intending to steal something and I gave him a set of Potions ingredients or whatever it was he wanted so that he wouldn’t do it. He always smiled at me and thanked me, and then he didn’t do it. But—he’s not a bad boy, Harry. He’s really not.”
            Harry half-snorted. “Draco managed to make him confess that he thought he wouldn’t go to Azkaban if he got caught stealing when he was older, because the Potter name would protect him.”
            “Really?”
            Hermione’s voice soared, and Harry relaxed a little. At least he hadn’t been the only one surprised by that, or not knowing that Jamie had harbored such unpleasant fantasies about how he thought he could get away with everything.
            “Yes, really,” Harry said. “I think—maybe you get so used to the way that things are, inside your family, that you don’t realize how strange it is until you look outside it. So none of us realized just how deep Jamie’s attitudes were, or how strange it was that he was stealing all the time.” He had wondered why Ron and Hermione hadn’t tried to help him stop Jamie, but it seemed that everyone had fostered it all along, because they wanted to believe that Jamie was a genius and a fundamentally good person.
            “Why did he think that?” Hermione shook her head. “I know that you and Ginny never taught the kids to expect any privileges because they were Potters.”
            Harry sighed. “His basic justification was that he could get away with the thefts because he was smarter than anyone else and they deserved to lose what they had.”
            Hermione put a hand to her mouth. Her eyes shone with what Harry thought was a weirdly personal hurt until she said, “I thought—I used to think something like that. When I came to Hogwarts. I was so much smarter than anyone else that I thought they deserved it when I scolded them for being stupid. Like Lavender and Parvati. I did that, and then I wondered why they didn’t want to be friends with me.”
            “I don’t think it’s exactly the same,” Harry offered quietly, mostly because Hermione looked so stricken rather than because he thought Jamie needed to be exonerated. “You wanted friends and didn’t know that you were driving them away. Jamie was convinced that he was smarter than everyone, but he didn’t talk to them about that. There are plenty of people who are his friends because they think he’s polite and honest. You at least respected the professors and thought they might have more knowledge than you did.”
            Hermione gave a watery laugh and stood. “That’s true,” she murmured, and moved into the kitchen. “Do you want something to drink?” she called over her shoulder.
            “Sure.” Harry settled against the back of the chair, wondering. So far, Hermione had taken the notion of his having Draco as his lover better than Harry had expected. Was it just because Ron had prepared her somewhat for the news after he’d seen Harry and Draco together in the Ministry? Harry had no idea, but he was looking forward to finding out.
            When she came back with a glass of Firewhisky, Harry didn’t refuse it. He’d left early this morning, and let Draco know where he was going, but he still felt the better for having the warm alcohol pouring down his throat.
            “Now,” Hermione said. “Do you have any idea how permanent this arrangement between you and Malfoy will be?”
            And now she cuts to the chase, Harry thought dryly. Hermione wasn’t leaping around and denying that he had a right to be with Draco, but she still wanted to know the answers to questions that Harry had barely begun to answer for himself.
            “I don’t know yet,” he answered, sipping the Firewhisky slowly, the better to savor it. “I think that Draco would be happy to make it permanent. He doesn’t fall in love often, he told me, and the—last person he was in love with, he would have been happy to make a permanent arrangement with.” That was the closest he could come to the truth without betraying Draco’s secrets about Astoria.
            “And it’s been so short a time,” Hermione whispered.
            “We’ve shared some intense experiences.” Harry set his glass down in his lap. “I actually don’t think I’d be thinking about it so seriously, but I’ve saved his life and he’s showed me the truth about some of the things I was doing. Like moping around in hopes of getting back into my children’s good graces instead of being a parent. I don’t know anyone else who could have told me that.”
            “I would have tried, if I had any idea how unhappy it was making you,” Hermione said, gently. “I just thought—well, that it was the way you wanted things to happen, and criticizing the way you raised your children was hardly the way to make you come to me for help.”
            “Don’t worry about it,” Harry said, shaking his head when he noticed the expression in her eyes. “Molly said almost the same thing, and I understand now, the way I didn’t when she was talking about it.” He sighed and looked down at his lap. “Draco is the one who’s been honest with me and taught me to be honest. He’s the one who taught me that I could desire someone other than Ginny, and it wouldn’t result in a complete collapse of my hopes.”
            “Your hopes?” Hermione balanced her glass on her hand and stared at him.
            Harry waved his hand around vaguely, although he thought he was probably indicating Ron and Hermione’s house and confusing himself as much as her. “All this. The life that I had, the life with my friends and my children that was important to me. I kept thinking that it had all gone to hell when I divorced Ginny, and he’s the one who’s helped me repair my relationships with my children.” He looked into Hermione’s eyes. “He’s given me the courage to approach you, too. I don’t think that my relationship with you ever needed repair.”
            Hermione gave him a bright smile and reached out to squeeze his hand. “You didn’t need to. I’m glad that I can talk about the divorce and your kids with you now, really. I thought I had to wait until you were ready to make the first move, but I didn’t know if you ever would be.”
            Harry sighed. “Please, tell me if you see me doing something wrong. It doesn’t mean that I’ll always believe you or take your criticism into consideration, but please tell me. I’m tired of running from the obvious without even realizing that was what I was doing.”
            “He has been good for you,” Hermione almost whispered. “I never thought I would say this, Harry, but maybe you can be happy with Draco Malfoy.”
            Harry smiled at her. “That’s what I hope, too.”
            He didn’t think that he had put enough of the passion he really felt into his voice, but there was enough there to make Hermione squeeze his hand again.
*
polka dot: But he doesn’t expect ever to be an Auror again, and Robards has now accepted his resignation. There’s no reason not to.
The Pink Fuzzy Elephant: Harry was so consumed with his job that he did think that was the top of the line broom. So it’s mostly down to him paying too much attention to things that are not what his kids want.
And thanks for the compliments!
SP777: Well, Harry certainly decided so.
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Marathon