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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-Six—Messages from Son to Father
            “Why didn’t you wake me up earlier?” Harry felt as if he could go back to bed and sleep for a week, but that wasn’t the point. The point was that he should have been up hours ago, and while Kreacher wouldn’t have woken up, Draco would have, most of the time. Harry flopped back into his seat at the kitchen table and glared at Draco.
            Draco didn’t turn away from the paper, which he was leafing slowly through as if looking for an article he’d lost. “What would you have done if you were awake earlier?” he asked finally, looking up. “Called Robards through the fire to tell him off? Visited some other friend, the way you did yesterday?”
            Harry blinked slowly. It helped that Kreacher put a steaming cup of tea in front of him, but not as much as he had thought it would. “You knew I was going to visit Hermione. Why are you angry about it?”
            “Not angry,” Draco said, tucking his paper away and focusing on Harry as though he needed to be sure that Harry saw the movement of his lips. “I simply want to know why you’re so intent on denying yourself ordinary pleasures like having a lie-in.”
            Harry studied him, then shook his head.
            “Why are you doing that?” Draco narrowed his eyes in Harry’s direction. “You don’t get to shake your head at me and make a self-righteous proclamation, in case you’re wondering. I decided that wasn’t allowed.”
            Harry had to smile. “It’s more than your anger that I don’t allow myself simple pleasures,” he said mildly, taking a sip from the tea. It was delicious. Kreacher knew how much milk Harry liked in it, of course, but it seemed especially delicious this morning. “Something else happened. I want to know what it was.”
            For a second, it seemed as though Draco would fight back against him. Then his eyes shut, and he sagged into his chair, shaking his head.
            “You got another firecall from Hogwarts,” he muttered.
            “Madam Juniper?” Harry became aware that he was trying to stand up, but something was in the way—the edge of the table, he realized with annoyance. He pushed it out of the way and stood up, still focused on Draco. “Did she say something was wrong with Jamie? What was it? You should have woken me up—”
            “Not from Juniper.” Draco seemed to be his normal self for a second, watching Harry with a cocked head and sardonic eye that wouldn’t have been out of place on a much younger Draco Malfoy. “There are other people in Hogwarts besides Juniper, you know. For example, Longbottom. He said that he had a message to deliver. Something about the message being from your son. Not the injured one,” he added, as though Harry had lots of sons and he couldn’t keep track of them all. “Jamie is fine. But not Al.”
            “Al has something to say to me?” Harry squared his shoulders. Well, he had known it would come to this, and better Al talk to him than simply run back down to the Slytherin common room every time they came into conflict. “Then I ought to contact him.”
            “What I want to know is why a professor is playing errand boy,” Draco muttered, picking up his cup of tea again. “Surely your son can firecall your house if he wants to.”
            “Technically he isn’t supposed to.” Harry cocked his head. “I would have appreciated it if you’d woken me up, but just Neville calling wouldn’t have put you out of temper like that. And he didn’t say what Al’s message was, did he?”
            Draco shook his head, not looking at Harry.
            Harry thought some more about it, pondering with his fist curled beneath his chin, his eyes locked on Draco. “And you can’t be upset about Jamie being out of the hospital wing. I know you now, and you’re not the kind of person to resent something like that.”
            Draco looked at him around the corner of the paper this time, with an expression that Harry thought he’d probably reserved for Robards before this. “Of course not. I could never be angry about something that touched on the welfare of your children.”
            “You were angry about Lily before this,” Harry said. “And Al. And what Ginny did. And you were angry with Jamie.” Thinking back to it, he couldn’t believe that he hadn’t recognized Draco’s anger at the time he was speaking with Jamie. He supposed that the lesser level of sarcasm and the way that Draco hadn’t actually gripped and shaken Jamie’s shoulders had thrown him off.
            Draco rolled his eyes. “Of course I was angry about things that would cost you some time and trouble to deal with. You’ve already had enough of that.”
            “But you weren’t concerned about the time and trouble that it would cost you to move in with me and live like that until you had paid Scorpius’s debts, which could be weeks,” Harry said. “Or months. You didn’t know that the strategy you’d thought up would be effective.”
            Draco’s cheeks turned pink. “If you think that you know why I’m upset, then why don’t you tell me, instead of pretending that I’m hiding something?”
            Harry nodded slightly. The question was fair. “All right. I think that something about the firecall itself upset you. What? That Al wants to speak to me?”
            Draco flung down his paper and stood up. Before he could move, Kreacher had appeared in front of him with a hissing, spluttering kettle, and Draco had to stop or run into him and upset the whole thing. He sat back down, but his glare at Kreacher was sullen, and he didn’t show any acknowledgment when Kreacher carefully tipped the tea into his cup.
            “Master Draco Malfoy is being careful of his tea,” Kreacher said, leveling one finger at Draco as if he was going to poke him in the chest and make him sit down. “Master Draco Malfoy is drinking his tea and sitting here and talking to Master Harry Potter.”
            He paused, but Draco made no other move to get up. Kreacher gave a grudging nod, and then turned around to face Harry, still supporting the kettle in both hands. “Master Harry Potter is needing more tea?”
            “I wouldn’t mind some,” Harry said gravely, fighting the urge to laugh. It was absurdly gratifying to see someone else blocked and herded by Kreacher into doing what the little house-elf considered right. Harry held out his cup and watched Kreacher fill it, then lean over and blow into his cup as if he could get the steam out of the way like that.
            “Kreacher is glad that Master Harry Potter is being sensible,” Kreacher said, nodding to Harry as if congratulating him, and then turned and marched back into the kitchen.
            “Are we ready to talk about it like we’re adults now?” Harry sipped from his tea, eyes never moving from Draco’s bowed head and clenched fists. “Was it something Neville said in the firecall that got you so upset? Something else? I really don’t understand what upset you so much, Draco, and I won’t unless you tell me.”
            “He has no right to make Longbottom a go-between for you.” Draco’s voice was choked, and he flung back his head and turned it to Harry, with an unhealthy gleam in his eyes. “He had no right to try and make my son interfere with the means I chose of settling the life-debt, either. Your second son is a menace, Potter.”
            “More than my first one?” Harry asked, but Draco didn’t laugh.
            “Your first one at least listened to me when I tried to talk to him,” Draco muttered, and shook his head in what looked weirdly like disgust. “This one…I don’t know how you’re going to reach him, Harry.” He broke off, and looked at his teacup as though that was the first time he had noticed it.
            Harry didn’t believe that, of course, so he reached out and placed his hand over Draco’s. They sat like that for long minutes before Draco bowed his head further, until the tips of some of his strands of hair brushed the table, and whispered the rest of the truth.
            “I’m so afraid that with this one, you’ll fall back into bad habits. Al is older than Lily. He’s not as persuadable. And he doesn’t have a reason to admire me, the way Jamie does now. You’ll give up and give in, and I don’t…I don’t have any way to combat that.”
            Harry squeezed Draco’s hand one more time, and spoke in a low voice. “I know that you won’t have much reassurance until you see me actually doing it, but I wanted to tell you that I won’t give you up simply because Al says so. I used to say that I would do whatever my children needed, but that was when I thought I was a good judge of what my children needed. It turns out that I was spoiling them and didn’t know it.”
            Draco turned his head towards him. “I don’t know what that means,” he said simply.
            Harry lifted Draco’s hand and kissed the knuckles. “I mean that I would probably have thought, at one point, that Al needed you gone and us not in a relationship simply because he said he wanted it.” He noticed the way Draco’s breath caught and held at the word “relationship,” and smiled at him. “But now I have to rethink the kinds of decisions that I used to make in the snap of a second. I need to decide if that’s what Al really needs, and weigh that against what the rest of my children need, and what I do.”
            “Why do you think that he doesn’t really need that?” Draco whispered the words with his eyes fastened on Harry as if he was glowing with light, the center of Draco’s universe.
            “Because he got along with you well enough before, when you were just Scorpius’s dad,” Harry said calmly. “And because he hasn’t given me any reason for it yet, except that he resents my fame and this is another way that I’m not normal. Even if I decided that I should drop you and get back together with Ginny, though, my fame wouldn’t go away. There’ll be newspaper stories about me whether I’m an Auror or not. There will be people who follow me around and try to get to me even if I’m living a life that’s exactly like the life that I’ve lived for the past nineteen years. The Spiders proved it by coming after me. It’s not like I have connections with anyone in the Ministry who could get evaluate their new inventions, but they came after me because I was famous and that would get them noticed.”
            Draco was quiet for a second. “Moving away from Britain and giving up public life could give Al what he wants. Would you give it to him, if he asked?”
            Harry shook his head impatiently. “I don’t think anything like that could satisfy him. Then I would be someone who doesn’t live in the same country as he does, and that would make firecalls and visiting for the holidays and everything like that harder. Besides, he’s never indicated that he would ask that of me.”
            Draco shut his eyes and nodded once. “You’re right,” he added, when he opened his eyes and saw Harry watching him. “You never—you never said that you would do anything unreasonable that he asked of you. You stood up against him well last time. I’m worrying for nothing.”
            Harry kissed his knuckles one last time. “I don’t think your fears are silly. I’m glad that you asked me.” He smiled one more time at Draco and stood up. “In the meantime, I’ve got a son to firecall.”
            He waited until he reached the entrance of the kitchen to look back at Draco. Draco was lounging at the table, humming under his breath this time as he actually scanned the newspaper for something that he wanted to read.
            Harry smiled, and left the kitchen.
*
            “If you think that this is a neutral setting…”
            Harry nodded to Neville. “Your office is fine,” he said. “Although I don’t know if Al will want you to stay for our talk, but I’m fine if you do.”
            Neville cocked his head slightly. “He’s never particularly seemed to me like a bad kid,” he observed. “Why do you think he’s taken so hard against your relationship with Malfoy?”
            Harry blinked at him. “You mean, besides the reasons that most of his family and most of my friends aside from you would have for doing it?”
            Neville moved his hand in a little brushing-aside motion. “I don’t have a blood feud with Malfoy, and he’s obviously changed a lot from the time we were in school, or he couldn’t have raised Scorpius as well as he has.”
            Harry smiled and relaxed a little. He sometimes forgot that Neville had more chances to observe the children than any of them, since he worked here. “Do you think that Al will come around? I mean, just from watching him?”
            Neville opened his mouth to answer, but the door opened just then, hard enough to disturb the tendrils of the plants that hung over it. Neville stood up a little and cast a charm that would move them aside, but Al was already stomping past them, to come to a halt in front of Harry with his hands on his hips and his chin jutting out so obnoxiously that Harry had to fight hard not to sigh.
            “You said you wanted to talk to me,” Al said, fixing his eyes on Harry.
            He looks so much like me when I was that age, Harry thought. A lot of people said the same thing about Al, but at the moment, Harry didn’t mean the shaggy black hair and the green eyes that everyone else apparently found so remarkable. Harry was thinking about the grief and the burden on Al’s shoulders. It might be different, maybe it was more unreasonable, than the one Harry had carried when he was twelve or thirteen, but it was still there, and Harry knew Al felt it as much as he’d felt the Chamber of Secrets or the murderer of his parents running around.
            “Yes,” Harry said quietly. “You sent me a message that you wanted to talk to me.” He didn’t glance at Neville, who stood along the wall. “So I came here to find out what it was about.”
            Al just shook his head, his expression wild and wounded. “About Mr. Malfoy. What else could it possibly be about?”
            Harry managed to keep from rolling his eyes. He leaned down until he was face-to-face with Al, and spoke gently. “I know that you don’t like me dating him, and that you want me to be more normal. The thing is, Al, do you think that I’ll ever be completely normal? Is there anything that could make me that way? If there was something that could do it for you, and it didn’t damage me or anyone else, then I would do it.”
            Al stared at him in a baffled way, and spoke slowly. “Break up with Mr. Malfoy. That wouldn’t hurt anyone, and it’s what I want.”
            “It would hurt me and Draco,” Harry said. He had thought about using Draco’s last name, but Al had to know sometime.
            Al’s face twisted, and he turned away. “You don’t know what it’s like having a famous dad,” he said. “All the teasing that goes on.”
            “Teasing?” Harry asked sharply. He’d been aware that Al didn’t like living under heavy wards or being recognized for being Harry Potter’s son, any more than Lily did, but this was something different. “What for?”
            Al’s shoulders hunched a little. “The other Slytherins were upset that you interrupted the Quidditch games last year. And people keep asking me if I’m on the team and getting good marks because I’m your son. And sometimes a professor looks at me, and I know they’re just thinking about whether they should see me as myself or someone else.”
            “I think I’ll start keeping portable wards around me at the Quidditch games, so no one else can come near enough,” Harry said thoughtfully. “And that way, they should get the point soon enough.”
            Al looked at him over his shoulder. “What about the other things?”
            “No one who’s seen you fly should doubt why you’re on the team.”
            Al’s shoulders stiffened up again. “But it doesn’t keep them from saying that shit.”
            “Language,” Harry said, although he tried to make his voice mild. At least Neville hadn’t had to scold Al. “You can talk to a professor or your Head of House about it, if you want. I don’t like you being teased, Al.” He reached out and put his hand on Al’s shoulder. “And I want you to have an easier time of it than I did.” He thought about being called the Heir of Slytherin and doubted all the time. No, that wasn’t the kind of life he wanted for Al.
            “What if they won’t stop?”
            “Then we figure out something else.” Harry bent nearer. “As for the professors, has anyone said that they’re giving you good marks only because you’re my son?” He would have been surprised if they had, really. Beyond Neville, and some of the others when Jamie had stolen something that belonged to them, Harry had never heard from most of the professors at Hogwarts.
            “They looked like it.”
            Yes, of course they did. “If they say anything about that, then you have the right to come and tell the Headmaster about it,” Harry said. “If they don’t, then, well, they can think whatever they like.”
            “But everything would be fine if you weren’t famous.” Al’s eyes were staring up at him from behind his glasses again.
            “Then it sounds like what you really want is a non-famous father, not a father who’s not dating Mr. Malfoy.” Harry held his eyes. “Is that right?”
            Al glanced away from him and mumbled something that sounded like an acknowledgment a moment later.
            Harry sighed. “It’s too late for that, Al. If I can help you, tell me and I’ll help you. If not, then we may both have to live with it.”
            Al stood there with his head down. After a second, he asked, “Can I go now?”
            “Yes,” Neville said, and watched with something like pity in his eyes as Al marched out. Harry was surprised to see the pity turned on him after a second, though.
            “Can I help you in any way?” Neville asked.
            Harry rose wearily to his feet. “No.” At least Al hadn’t been unreasonable so much as upset in this conversation, and Harry thought that was the best he could hope for. “I think we’ll get there, although it’ll take some time.”
            Neville’s smile was slow and warm. “That’s all anyone can say.”
*
delia cerrano: Ginny didn’t do anything to cut out Draco specifically. She was anxious about Harry spending time around men, though.
Kain: Thanks!
Yes, while Ginny was mistaken about Harry cheating and being gay, I think the worst thing she did was speaking about it in front of Lily. They were different and growing apart, and even if she had voiced her concerns to Harry earlier, he might not have changed. Even with will to supposedly spend more time with his family, he neglected them for his job. He needed someone to come in from the outside and boot him in the arse, and while Draco was willing and able to do that, it shouldn’t have to be Ginny’s job.
CareLessLover: Are you talking about him dating Draco? She pretty much already thinks that is going on.
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Marathon