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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 Four—Matters of Flesh and Blood

            “Auror Potter? Are you all right?”

            Harry let his eyes flutter open, and straightened, nodding in front of him before he realized that the voice had come from the side. He turned with a sheepish smile and found Auror Kristin Garrett regarding him with her eyebrows raised high enough to look like clouds.

            “Sorry, yes,” he said. “I’m not as able to be up all night anymore as you youngsters are.” He reached for the cup of tea that she held out to him, and glanced bleakly around the bloody room. They had spent the last nine hours here, studying the blood patterns, trying to identify the spells that had made them. There was so little left of a body that they didn’t yet know who had died. Auror Linger had tried to argue that it could be suicide, but Harry and Garrett and Donin had all stared him down, and he had slinked away muttering sulkily about how they couldn’t decide anything, with a body missing.

            Garrett snorted, her blonde hair dangling over her shoulders as she conducted a sweep of the room with her own eyes. “Oh, please, sir. You’re only five years older than I am.”

            “And you don’t have any kids,” Harry said, knuckling sleep out of his eyes. “Trust me, that makes the difference.”

            Garrett grinned at him. “Yeah, I can see it does.”

            Harry smiled, stood up straighter, and turned around. Auror Gisella Donin stood up at once and waved a hand at him. Harry made his way to her side, not really trusting that she had found enough to declare the scene a murder beyond doubt, but vaguely interested anyway.

            Donin pointed down at a notch in the wooden floor. “Have you ever seen anything like that before, sir?”

            Harry obediently knelt down to look. He had to close his eyes when he saw the blood splashed around the notch; it was no wonder none of them had spotted it before now. The blood was…rather eye-catching.

            He no longer burned with the same fire that used to make Auror work almost fun, a hunt, a chase, but he had eighteen years of experience now, and he could feel it swinging into place in his mind, forming a structure that could support any conclusions he cared to draw. He opened his eyes again and bent towards the notch ready to observe and catalogue first, and theorize only afterwards.

            This time, he could see the odd shape of the notch, as though someone had stamped straight down into the floor with a triangular boot, and the dark particles scattered around it. Harry controlled the impulse to stretch his hand out and feel the particles, which appeared to be grainy and gritty, some kind of powder. He had no idea what it was yet or whether it could harm him.

            He enchanted a grain to hover in front of him instead, one near the outside of the pattern, so he would disturb less of it. He recoiled a little when he got a hint of the smell it carried with it. Thick, musty, like rotting rodent. He moved his wand in an elementary detection spell, ready to follow it up with stronger ones in an instant. These spells almost never had any result on anything compl—

            The grain burst into dazzling flashes, all of them dark, all of them blinding. Harry flung a hand up in front of his eyes, shouted a warning to the others and heard them raise shields, and rolled on the floor an instant before the grain shot over his head and embedded itself in the far wall. Then he tucked himself behind a Shield Charm and saw nothing more for a while.

            When he was sure that the building wasn’t going to burn down around them, he lowered the shield and cautiously stood up.

            The grain had landed in the far wall at head-height. And—Harry nearly smiled. There were more dark grains around a notch the same size as the one in the floor.

            “Contact the Unspeakables,” he told Garrett, not taking his eyes off the notch. “We have an unknown Dark artifact on our hands.”

*

            The chiming of the Floo woke him up at noon.

            Harry stumbled out of bed still wearing his Auror robes. He didn’t remember hitting the pillow when he got home; hell, he barely remembered getting home. And he’d only had two hours’ sleep, given that he’d been at the murder scene all night and then there an extra hour answering the Unspeakables’ questions. Whoever was at the Floo, Ginny or Malfoy or his superiors or all three, they’d just have to deal with seeing him in his robes.

            But the face that appeared in the fire, faintly smiling, was Neville’s. “Hello, Harry. I’m afraid that we have a bit of a situation here.” The smile disappeared a second later. “What is going on? You look awful.”

            Harry smiled back at his friend and flopped down on the floor in front of the fire, not in the mood to bother with chairs. “A murder case. Now, tell me. Is it Al or Jamie? You’re smiling, so it can’t be worse than a broken arm.”

            Neville cleared his throat. “No, it isn’t. At least, physically it isn’t.”

            “But morally?” Neville nodded, and Harry let his head fall back and a groan well out of his throat, knowing Neville would understand. “So, let me guess. It’s Jamie and his ingredients-stealing ways, isn’t it?”

            “Yes,” Neville said, and said no more, because Harry was waving his arms around and complaining the same old set of complaints. At this point, the words were almost a ritual between them, another one Harry knew Neville didn’t mind.

            “Did I ask to have a Potions prodigy for a son?” Harry asked the ceiling. “No, I did not. Did I ask to have Jamie get so interested in ingredients that he thinks he needs to steal what he can’t buy, beg, or borrow? No, I did not.” He lowered his head and peered mournfully at Neville. “I swear, Severus Snape is laughing at me from beyond the grave.”

            Neville held his hand over his mouth for a second, then lowered it and gave in to his own laugh. “Remind me not to tell you what his portrait said.”

            Harry rolled his eyes, but felt guilt like sand settle into his stomach. He forgot, continually, that Snape had a portrait at the school that he could go and visit. Somehow, he never made the time, and now it had been more than ten years since their last conversation. The same with Dumbledore. Something…always made it seem more convenient to put that last confrontation off.

            He tried to hurry past it now. There was no reason to let Neville in on that particular litany of complaints about himself. “What did he steal?”

            “A Mandrake.”

            Harry let his head fall forwards into his hands. “Which has so very many uses,” he muttered.

            Neville was nodding when Harry glanced up again. “We did rather wonder what he wanted it for.”

            “Did he say?”

            Neville shook his head. “No. Said he would serve his detention like a student should. And he was sincerely sorry about the students that the Mandrake’s scream knocked unconscious when he was carrying it into Gryffindor Tower.”

            Harry relaxed a little. “So, it had to be young, then.” Not that he thought Neville wouldn’t have let him know at once if Jamie had been stealing a mature Mandrake, whose scream would be fatal, but it made some part of him that had been tightly clenched in anticipation of exactly that bad news unwind.

            “It was,” Neville said, grinning a little at Harry. “Barely out of childhood. But he won’t tell us what potion he intended to brew. I contacted you because you got him to confess what he was doing when he stole that boomslang skin.”

            “That was a lucky guess,” Harry muttered. He had known it had to be Polyjuice Potion—he remembered that particular ingredient well—but he had never found out who Jamie had been planning to impersonate.

            Of course, knowing Jamie, he might not have been intending to cause mischief. He made potions for the pure joy of them, and just being able to brew something could have been enough.

            Harry sighed. Yes, in many ways Jamie was easy. He would smile at you and accept the detention, and admit he was wrong, and fulfill his punishments almost cheerfully, and play with his younger siblings, and be sympathetic about his parents’ divorce without demanding that they get back together. He was perfectly content with a few simple potions ingredients and vials and cauldrons. He just wouldn’t listen. He nodded along with Harry’s lectures, or Ginny’s, then went off and quietly did things his own way.

            “Shall I come through?” he added, when Neville didn’t vanish from the fire.

            “It might be best,” Neville said. “Jamie said that he would prefer to talk to you over his mother.”

            Harry started a little. Jamie had never said something like that before. Until recently, he and Ginny had handled Jamie’s little crises together, and then on alternating weeks. Harry had assumed Neville had firecalled him because Jamie had told him it was his week, not because Jamie wanted him.

            What have I been ignoring, while I got all wrapped up in work and the divorce? Harry asked himself, as he hastily went back into his bedroom and threw on more casual clothes. Someone other than the people who knew he was coming might see him in Hogwarts and panic if he went there in official Auror robes.

            My children. As per usual.

            With a heavy heart, Harry went back into the drawing room and Flooed to Hogwarts.

*

            “I have private theories.”

            That was one of Jamie’s most frequent responses, but it didn’t make Harry feel better right now. He took off his glasses and rubbed the center of his forehead, where he could feel a headache forming. It usually did that with too little sleep and too much worry. And when was the last time he had had something to eat besides the tea Garrett had fed him?

            He couldn’t remember. It didn’t matter. He had more important things to worry about right now.

            “All right,” Harry said, and pushed his glasses back up his nose before he scowled hard at his son. Jamie sat on a bed in the hospital wing. He’d been exposed to the Mandrake’s scream, too, although he’d only fallen unconscious for thirty minutes. Harry thought Neville was more mandating keeping him here because it was a way to ensure that he stayed put. “But look at it this way. Did all the students who heard the Mandrake scream know about your, uh, private theories?”

            Jamie blinked at him, then bowed his head and seemed to concentrate. “No,” he finally said. “They didn’t.”

            Harry nodded encouragingly to him. “And that means that…?”

            “I shouldn’t ask them to participate in my experiments?” Jamie phrased it as a question, looking up from beneath his fringe. Harry willed himself not to melt, and nodded again. The times when Jamie could come to the conclusions Harry wanted him to reach on his own rather than be lectured into them were always best.

            “Right. You can only ask someone to participate with full knowledge of what the experiment entails. Or what happens if someone does something wrong, and you don’t know if it was because the experiment is dangerous or because they just didn’t know what they should do?” Harry had been reading a bit about Potions theory recently, because of his case before this latest one. He hoped that it might help him reach Jamie.

            Jamie frowned mightily. “You’re right,” he said. “I should have known better.”

            Harry smiled at him, and reached out to pat his son’s knee.

            “Next time, I won’t take the Mandrake to Gryffindor Tower.”

            Fine. Harry hated getting like this with any of his children, but Jamie was the one most likely to respond—sometimes, if he was in the right mood. He frowned back at Jamie in turn and leaned nearer. “If you take another Mandrake from the greenhouses, it’s likely that you could be expelled,” he said harshly. “The Mandrake’s scream could have killed someone, Jamie! Do you realize that?”

            Jamie cocked his head. “But only mature Mandrakes do that. This one was young.”

            Harry was reminded of the way that Jamie had begun finding factual errors in the fairy tales Harry read him when he was three. Harry resisted the urge to bang his head against the walls, which would only slosh the few brains he still possessed around in his skull, and then bent forwards and said as plainly as he could, “I don’t think Professor Longbottom is going to care about the difference. You haven’t been expelled so far because they know that you’re a very good student in other ways, and you’re my son, and Professor Longbottom’s my friend. But that won’t last if you keep stealing Mandrakes.”

            “If they would let me have Mandrakes when I asked, then I wouldn’t need to steal them,” Jamie said, for the first time sounding a little plaintive. He kicked his heels against the side of the infirmary bed and ducked down so that he was peering at Harry through his brilliant red fringe. “I didn’t mean to hurt anyone, Dad, but it’s so boring, how they hold us back, when I know that I can go faster!”

            Harry patted his son’s shoulder. “I know, Jamie,” he said quietly. “But we said that you didn’t have to go to Hogwarts if you didn’t want to. You could have had private schooling for a few years, or gone to Durmstrang, and then taken on an apprenticeship with a Potions master. But you chose Hogwarts instead.”

            Jamie shivered a little. He said something too low for Harry to hear. Harry left his hand on his shoulder and said, “Repeat that, please.”

            “I don’t want to be different .” Jamie lifted his head stubbornly. “I know Hogwarts is supposed to have a great education in everything else, even if they can’t teach me anything about Potions. I wanted to go here. I just wish everyone didn’t look at me as if I was stupid for being different.”

            “You want to be different and you want to be normal at the same time?” Harry asked gently.

            Jamie blinked at him. “Yes,” he said, thought a minute, and then added, “But it sounds really stupid when you put it that way.”

            Harry laughed. “I felt the same way when I was at school,” he said. “I enjoyed the attention for things like winning at Quidditch, but then there were times when I wished everyone would stop staring at me and gossiping about me being the Boy-Who-Lived.”

            “How did you deal with it?” Jamie had wriggled forwards to the edge of the bed, stretching out on his stomach. Harry sighed in envy. Youth. His days of being able to do that easily were long gone.

            “Lived with it,” Harry said. “Muddled along. I didn’t have any grand plan. I wasn’t smart like you.” He ruffled Jamie’s hair, then added, “But even though I thought it was unfair when I got into trouble, I was smart enough to realize that what I was doing could get me into trouble. And I never even stole a Mandrake.”

            Jamie grinned. “You stole boomslang skin, though.”

            “I never should have told you that story.” Harry pinched his earlobe. “Now. I think this really is the last time, Jamie. Professor Longbottom is indulgent, but other students got in danger this time, and when their parents hear about that, the school will get a lot of Howlers. Some of them will think that you only weren’t expelled because you were my son. Please don’t do that anymore.”

            Jamie nodded solemnly. “All right. I won’t. I don’t want you to get in trouble. I’ll just have to find some other way to brew that potion.”

            Harry almost opened his mouth to ask, “What potion?” but he knew that Jamie would look at him patiently, and not tell him anything. And he probably wouldn’t be able to understand the answer even if Jamie did give him one. He sighed and stood up. “And you won’t do anything else that could get you in trouble, either?”

            Jamie kicked up his heels and grinned. “I won’t do anything on purpose. But not even you could keep out of trouble all the time.”

            “I suppose that’s true enough,” Harry said, and kissed Jamie quickly on the top of the head before he could duck. Then he left the hospital wing, grinning at Jamie’s apparent attempts to get the spit off his hair behind him.

            He met Neville in the corridor. Neville raised his eyebrows at him. Harry nodded slightly. “I think he’ll be all right.”

            “Thank you for getting through to him, Harry.” Neville squeezed his arm. “Do you have time for a cup of tea before you go back home?”

            A yawn interrupted Harry’s attempt at a response, and he shook his head. “Don’t want to stain your tables by falling asleep in the middle of the cup,” he mumbled.

            Neville’s chuckle followed him back home, and into his bedroom, and nearly followed him into a mindless collapse into sleep, but there was another sound that quickly interrupted the memory. The chime of the Floo connection.

            Harry groaned from the bottom of his heart, but he knew that he didn’t have the ability to ignore it, especially if it was from Ginny or something about the case—although if it was the Aurors, they’d contact him by his wrist-bell. He stumbled back to his feet and out into the drawing room again, glad that he hadn’t taken off his clothes yet.

            Malfoy’s face floated in the flames. Harry sighed. “I was up all night on a case, and then I got two hours of sleep before I got called to the next crisis,” he whined. “Can’t it wait?”

            “Not when I’ve found the perfect means to pay our debt,” Malfoy said. And the whipcord excitement in his voice convinced Harry it was true.

            “Come through, then,” Harry said, resigned, moving out of the way and waving his wand to readjust the wards on the Floo.

            Malfoy stepped through gracefully and quickly, brushed off the lone particle of soot that dared to cling to his robe, and focused on Harry. Harry winced. The stare was the kind that made him want to check that there was no spinach in his teeth.

            “It’s obvious enough that your life is a mess,” Malfoy announced haughtily. “With your divorce, your children insisting that you conceal yourself beneath an Invisibility Cloak because they can’t deal with your fame, the obscene hours you work—”

            “Don’t you accuse my kids—” Harry began.

            Malfoy ignored that magnificently. “You need someone who can set your life in order and do it perfectly,” he said. “That way, the next small random crisis can’t rearrange everything. That person needs to be on call for a few weeks. That’s how long it should take, if you have the perfect rearranger. And the more I thought about it, the more I realized only one person fits that criteria.” He smiled glintingly at Harry. “Me.”

            He snapped his fingers, and two trunks leaped out of his pockets and resized themselves on the floor. He turned to Harry. “Where’s my bedroom?”

*

            polka dot: I really don’t think Lily would act that way if Harry made more of an attempt to listen to her.

            delia cerrano: Well, you were kind of right?

            Rebelghost85: Thank you!

            Harry could sure use some counseling, but he would never take the time off from work that he needs to go to it.

            unneeded: Thanks. I haven’t been through a divorce as either kid or parent myself, so it’s nice to see that it chimes with at least one other person’s experience.
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Marathon