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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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Chapter Thirty-Eight—A Civil Conversation
            Harry had imagined, stupidly, that nothing else that dramatic would happen between the end of their conversation with Ron and Sunday, when they would actually go over to the Burrow and confront the Weasleys in person for the first time since the divorce.
            Now, staring at Ginny’s face in the fire, Harry knew that was stupid, and he mourned the death of his younger self’s sense of adventure. He would have thought this was funny, at one point, or at least interestingly dramatic. Now he just winced and tried in vain to think of a way to escape.
            “Can I come through?” Ginny asked quietly. “I promise that I won’t take long.”
            “Does it have to be now?” Harry knew Draco was in the library, reading, but he might come down any instant, and Harry hadn’t called him down when Kreacher told him Ginny was in the fire. He didn’t want the kind of confrontation it would inevitably become if Draco knew Ginny was here.
            On the other hand, it could become that kind of confrontation any time if Draco came down the stairs. Harry kept his eyes on Ginny’s face, and saw the moment when her lips tightened and she shook her head.
            “I think it needs to be now,” she said. “If Malfoy wants to talk to me—he can wait. Ask him to wait, if he comes down the stairs.”
            Harry nodded immediately. He supposed that Ginny was sort of deputing him to do her dirty work, in a way, but it was a way that he could grasp and understand. After all, she wouldn’t tell Draco no diplomatically, any more than Draco would have a diplomatic reaction if he came down and found her here.
            Ginny stepped through the fire and walked into the kitchen with what seemed intolerable slowness. Harry bit his lip to keep from asking her to hurry it along, and again to keep from asking if this was about the party on Sunday. If Ginny didn’t know about that, he didn’t want to prejudice her, and if she did, he didn’t want to have a fight about it.
            When did I start thinking solely in terms of avoiding a fight with Ginny?
            Harry sighed and took a seat at the table, refusing Ginny’s silent offer of the teakettle with an equally silent shake of his head. Since he and Ginny had started having lots of fights and sealed the fate of their marriage, he decided. That was a good way to think of it.
            Ginny made a cup of tea for herself, using Quickening Charms that would have scandalized Kreacher. Harry felt his mouth trying to smile as he thought of that, but the smile fell away again when Ginny glanced at him over her shoulder.
            “I don’t know if you realize how hard this is for the kids,” Ginny said.
            “Lily understands a little better now, I think,” Harry said. He didn’t say now that you’re not fucking lying to her all the time anymore, because there was no need for that conversation. “And Al is still having trouble. But I think he would have trouble with anything right now, honestly. He told me that he wishes he had a normal dad, and that’s not something that would be improved by anyone I dated.”
            Ginny frowned as she poured the tea into her cup. “He told you that?”
            Harry raised his eyebrows. “He hasn’t told you that? No, wait, you were in the hospital wing when he was talking about that for the first time. So you know.”
            Ginny opened her mouth as if she would snap, and then let it trail off into a long sigh. She took the seat across from him, rapping her nails for a moment on the table. It was another time that would have turned into an argument if they were still married, because Harry would have told her not to do that, and she would have snapped back, and he would have said that she should just say what she felt instead of sighing, and everything would have gone spiraling downhill from there.
            But he wasn’t going to let it happen this time. He looked back into Ginny’s eyes and asked, “Who do you think is more upset, the kids or you?”
            Ginny blinked, but her face was clean of all expression rather than hurt. Harry thought she hadn’t really expected him to say it. She looked down at her cup for a moment, and then back at him, shaking her head.
            “I know that you think you’re making the right decision,” she said. “You’re divorced, and you’re moving on.”
            Harry suppressed all sorts of things he could say, and tried to look attentive. He was not going to let this turn into an argument, and that included picking up on the implications in Ginny’s words that it was too quick for him to start dating Draco.
            Ginny frowned now, and said, “But I think you should consider the impact it will have on your kids. Lovers will come and go, but your children will always be your children.”
            “I agree,” Harry said. “And if I was dating someone who hated my kids and was monstrous and abusive towards them, I’d be worried. I’d stop. But otherwise…what’s the real objection here? Should I pick a woman? That wouldn’t make Al think I was more normal. It wouldn’t make Lily stop wondering if I was gay.”
            “I said I was sorry for that already,” Ginny said sharply. “I’m not going to say I was sorry for it again.”
            Harry nodded. He was restraining himself pretty well, he thought. He hoped he’d be able to do the same thing if Draco came downstairs and joined the conversation unexpectedly.
            Although there, to be honest, it wasn’t likely to be him who was the problem.
            “I think you should have waited,” Ginny said, staring at her fingernails now. “Getting involved with someone so quickly after the divorce probably makes it look worse to the kids.”
            “I haven’t heard one of them say that yet,” Harry said. He tried to think of the way that he had sometimes had to make reports to Robards about things that Robards would scoff at, because of the way his luck ran in Auror cases, and tried to make his voice that careful, that neutral. “Lily was upset, but I think we’ve got that largely settled now. She was able to be happier with me that I’ve seen her be with me in a long time, the other Saturday.”
            “You haven’t really asked her. And she was upset.”
            “Then I’ll talk to her the next time she’s over,” Harry said. He wanted to say, longed to say, that Ginny shouldn’t be talking about such things to him. Why was it appropriate for Ginny to nag him into asking Lily, instead of leaving it up to him to do it, or Lily to say that she was worried?
            Because in the past, you wouldn’t have noticed Lily was worried.
            That was fair. But beyond saying that he would talk to Lily, Harry didn’t even know what else he could do. He wasn’t about to dump Draco for the sake of a concern that he hadn’t heard Lily express yet.
            “You know that it’ll look bad,” Ginny said, still to her fingernails. “And Malfoy is abusive towards our children.”
            Harry clenched his hand under the table, and really hoped that Draco wasn’t listening on the stairs or something. He restrained himself to a slow blink, though, and what he hoped was the most innocuous “Oh?” ever produced.
            Ginny looked up and caught his eye. “I know you don’t believe me,” she said, flushing. “But I promise you, he was. The things he said to Jamie—Jamie told me about some of them after you left. They’re horrible.”
            Harry held back his own sigh, but wasn’t able to hold back his raking of his hand through his hair. “Gin,” he mumbled, “Jamie nearly died because of his latest theft. We haven’t been able to stop him stealing no matter what we did. And Hermione and Molly have both told me that they worried about it, but they kept thinking that they didn’t want to interfere if we saw nothing wrong with it. What would you suggest we do?”
            “Not abuse him.”
            “Did Jamie feel upset?” Harry asked. He had to look past her at the wall now, or he would lose his temper. “Did he tell you that? Because I thought he admired Draco’s Potions knowledge, and Draco was the one who told him that he would never have a reputation as a brewer if he just kept stealing from people. I thought it was an effective way to deal with him.”
            “He scolded him,” Ginny said. “He yelled at him. That is not an effective way to deal with anything.”
            Her voice had soared a little. Harry gave her a flat, meaningful look. Ginny promptly pinched her lips shut and looked down at the table again.
            Harry sighed, rebuked himself for it, noticed that Ginny apparently hadn’t noticed, and forced himself to speak again. “We tried speaking gently to him, and buying him things, and telling him that he was smart but shouldn’t steal. The professors at Hogwarts tried various detentions. I know that Neville only called me in when he was sure that he couldn’t do anything. I do know that Jamie was counting on his last name to keep him out of prison, because that was what he told me himself.”
            “With Malfoy in the room.” Ginny gave him a significant look.
            “He would lie in front of Draco?” Harry asked blankly. “Why? I mean, he doesn’t know him well, but he already knew him a little, since Al spends so much time with Scorpius.”
            “He was doing it out of fear.” Ginny sounded as certain as if she had been there. “He was afraid of being abused.”
            Harry only shook his head, wordless, but he knew that he would have to find the words, because there was no way that he could let Draco suffer through accusations like that undefended, even if Draco wasn’t in the room right now and wouldn’t know for certain. “Listen, Ginny. That’s not true. Jamie wasn’t afraid. I can read expressions on his face. Probably better than I can on Al’s and Lily’s, since they hide more and I wasn’t good with them,” he added, deciding that he wanted to do something that would placate Ginny more than anything had so far. “He was startled. Surprised that no one else thought his name would spare him prison, and that I was actually upset with him for thinking that. It was just something he hadn’t ever really considered, the danger he was in from the world around him not agreeing with him. Or me defending him. He thought I would.”
            “Why would he think that?” For the first time, Ginny seemed to be looking at him without a haze of anger over her eyes. “He knows that you don’t draw on the power of your name nearly as often as you could.”
            Harry silently let the implications of that, whether they were accusing or wondering, pass. “Because he’d never considered that my opinion had anything to do with it,” he said. “That’s the clearest sign of how we failed to influence him, Gin. He just never thought that what I had to say about this mattered. That I would disapprove. He was only thinking about how the world at large regarded Potters. And we’d never sat him down and made him realize that other people’s opinions are worth considering, even if they aren’t as smart as he is. We admired him too much, and we never tempered that admiration.”
            “Malfoy told you that, I suppose.”
            “Later,” Harry admitted. “But it’s the truth, Gin, I swear it is. We should admire him, sure. He’s our son, and I love him. But there’s too much indulgence going on there, too. We should never have decided that it was somehow acceptable for him to rob people because he was smart.”
            “We never decided that,” Ginny said. “That was a conclusion he came to.”
            “But we didn’t know that he was thinking it, or talk him out of it.” Harry leaned forwards and made his voice as earnest and low as he can. “Do you see it? We failed to do what we should have, and he’s paid the price. He could have died falling from Gryffindor Tower. The fact that he didn’t is something we have to thank luck for. And he’ll just get into more and more dangerous situations unless someone gets through to him.”
            “That should be one of us,” Ginny said. “Not Malfoy.”
            “I agree. But I think Draco broke the path for us. Maybe Jamie will listen now.”
            “He did it by abusing him.”
            “He did not fucking abuse him,” Harry snapped, feeling as though a chain had snapped and a dragon was sitting in the back of his head, flooding his voice with fire and light. “And I think you know that perfectly bloody well, you’re just saying that because it’s the worst accusation you can think of to fling at Draco.” He stood up and turned his back on Ginny, pacing over to the far side of the table so he wouldn’t loom over her. His teeth were grinding. He managed to unlock them so he could get the next words out. “Unless you think that allowing Jamie to go ahead believing whatever he wants and then die is better?”
            Ginny was silent. When Harry turned around, she had her hands locked on the cup and her eyes locked on his face, which was better than he’d expected.
            “I don’t like someone else interfering in our family,” she whispered.
            “Molly had already told me that she didn’t approve of the way we handled Jamie and Lily,” Harry said. “Before that. And Hermione told me afterwards. Would you have minded if one of them had said something to Jamie?”
            “They’re part of the family.” Ginny didn’t look away from him, but there was a shadow of sadness in her face that made Harry more sympathetic than he would have been otherwise.
            “I know,” he said softly. “But we didn’t succeed, and if Draco got through to Jamie, if he can keep him safe, then I think we owe him a debt.”
            “We?”
            “Yes.”
            Ginny looked back down at the table again.
            Harry took a deep breath. This was going to take a lot out of him to say, but at least he was making the choice to speak for his own reasons this time, instead of because he wanted to repair his failing marriage, or because he felt the words coaxed or wrenched out of him by some need on Ginny’s part. He wanted a civil relationship with her because of their children. This would help maintain that relationship. But just like he wasn’t going to let her sit there and say Draco was abusive, he wouldn’t go further than this. This was his last best effort for right now, and if she didn’t understand that, then he would ask her to leave.
            “I would break up with Draco if he was abusive towards the kids,” he said. “I would even consider breaking up with him if Lily or Al or Jamie told me that they really hated him, and told me why. But I won’t consider breaking up with him to be normal, whatever Al thinks that is, or because Lily thinks she hates him when we’ve been dating less than a week. I won’t consider breaking up with him because you think I should.”
            Ginny’s shoulders hunched. “You’re with a man now,” she said. “I’m right.”
            “Maybe you would have been right if I’d ever been interested in men when we were married,” Harry said firmly. “Or if I was gay now. But just because I’m with Draco doesn’t erase our marriage. I think I’m probably—both, Ginny. Bisexual.” The word was weird in his mouth, but there, he’d said it. He had the odd sensation, stranger than the word, that Hermione would be proud of him for doing this. “So you weren’t right about that.”
            “I can’t be right about anything, can I?” Ginny stood up and walked towards the fireplace.
            “You can be right about the kids,” Harry told her back. She stopped walking. “You can be right about our marriage being a problem, and me not spending enough time with you, or responding to you enough, or caring about you enough. You can be right about that. I’m sorry.”
            Ginny turned around to look at him. “But you won’t consider leaving Malfoy,” she said.
            Harry looked into her eyes. “Why would you really want me to? You don’t want to get back together any more than I do.”
            Ginny’s eyelids fluttered, but she did come up facing him and looking more or less stunned. “You’re right,” she said. “Maybe I needed to hear someone say it.”
            Harry smiled, tentatively. Ginny didn’t smile back, but she didn’t run away, either, so Harry continued on to say, “So—I’ve told you the circumstances that would make me consider breaking up with Draco. But otherwise, it isn’t too soon, and he isn’t abusive. He’s good for me. He makes me happy.”
            “The way I didn’t do.”
            “I don’t want to compare you,” Harry said.
            “You can’t help it.”
            “I can help doing it aloud. And that’s what matters.”
            After a stiff, ungracious second, Ginny inclined her head.
            Harry would have reached out to touch her, but he knew that was a mistake. He just asked, quietly, “Are we good for now?”
            “Yes,” Ginny said. “I’ll make sure that Lily comes over on time.” And she did turn and depart through the fire.
            Harry sighed and turned around. He felt as though someone had just beaten him very hard with a huge bag of sticks.
            And from the look in Draco’s eyes as he stepped into the kitchen, that feeling might be about to intensify.
*
SP777: I don’t think I would write that kind of story well.
Well, Harry is trying not to act like a teenager right now!
BAFan: Well, we’ve got one other show to get through first!
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Marathon