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Starfall	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 32486 -:- Recommendations : 3 -:- Currently Reading : 4
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Chapter Four—Ethan
            Kingsley’s voice was very gentle, but in that way that meant it would get sharp later if Harry didn’t pay attention. “Harry? Are you listening?”
            Harry sighed and lifted his gaze from the table in front of him to focus on Kingsley. “Yes, I am,” he said. “McCann has been arrested twice, but managed to slip away from us each time. You think someone has been losing evidence on purpose. That means that we have suspect someone in the Department of Magical Law Enforcement and be careful about what we share with whom.”
            Kingsley went on watching him. Harry looked stoically back. He was dealing better with things now, since he had moved in with Dean and heard messages from the Weasley family that they didn’t plan to turn their backs on him despite the divorce, but he wasn’t going to play the pretend game of how he was perfectly fine.
            Kingsley finally grunted. “A good summary,” he said, and tapped his wand against the parchment in front of him. A photograph of Reynold McCann appeared on the wall, blown up to gigantic size, like a Muggle projection. “Now, remember, McCann is an expert dueler. We think that one of his connections might be to an old classmate or teacher in the Department, but given how many people have that kind of training…”
            Harry stifled another sigh and studied McCann. He was so distinctive in his features—hair even more orange than Ron’s, a huge scar on the left side of his face, and almost-gold hazel eyes—that he would probably be going about under a glamour anyway, which made everything all the harder.
            Harry knew McCann was dangerous. He knew that he and Ron would be assigned to this case because they were one of the most effective partner teams when it came to keeping each other from being injured.
            But not hexed.
            The last thing he wanted to do was start blaming Ron for the hex that had made him infertile, though, and Harry ruthlessly put the thought away and went back to listening to Kingsley. He could do this. He still wanted to be an Auror, although Kingsley himself had advised Harry to take some time off, or at least temporarily switch to a different partner other than Ron, when he had thought there would be some nastiness about the divorce.
            But this was what came nearest to normal in Harry’s life right now, and he didn’t want to lose it. He listened.
*
            The other part of the reason he was coping, and didn’t break down when Ginny sent him a letter asking him to reconsider the divorce, was the journal that he had begun keeping as Ethan Starfall.
            Harry had never thought he was a good storyteller or anything, mostly because he had never tried. But the details of Ethan’s life were just there when he reached for them, the details that came from his own deepest desires.
            His parents were Isidora and Julian Starfall, the way that Harry had come up with the names on that first night, but the more Harry wrote about them, the more he came to believe in them. They weren’t perfect. They fought sometimes. But Isidora was the sort of witch who came up with charms to cast on her not-perfectly-cooked food to make it taste better, and comforted Ethan when he was sick, and doted on her grandchildren. And Julian was the sort of wizard who would have fought to protect his children if he had to, but he didn’t have to; he grew herbs that were of use to apothecaries instead, and peacefully sold them. His hands always smelled like dirt and weeds.
            Writing about Ethan’s children was equally as easy. Harry knew without thinking about it that their names were James, Albus, and Lily—names that he thought he probably couldn’t have got Ginny to agree to in reality, but this wasn’t reality. James was nearing the age when he would go to Hogwarts, because Ethan was older than Harry, and he had red hair and a reckless grin. And Al had inherited Ethan’s poor sight and hazel eyes, and he worried a lot about what other people thought of him. Lily was lazy and spoiled and sweet; she just smiled to get her way, instead of throwing a tantrum. Most people gave in to her.
            It was when he had to talk about Ethan’s wife, Anne, that Harry hesitated, and wanted to backtrack. Did he really need to talk about her at all? Ethan was the sort of wizard who—
            Who adored his wife, and would talk about her constantly. And being married was an important part of that normal life that Harry wanted for himself. Having a divorce wasn’t.
            He knew it was fiction. That was the important part, that it was fiction. It was different from reality, and helped him hide from it, a little. Sometimes, when he stood up from writing down a description of Ethan playing with his children or watching fireworks with his wife, he wondered if he could really go through the divorce with Ginny. There was his last chance at a normal life in reality slipping through the cracks.
            But what he and Ginny had said to each other wasn’t normal. That rage wasn’t normal. The grief was, but they hadn’t managed it well together. Harry wanted a divorce so that he could recuperate at a distance and think about it later, and hopefully be friends with Ginny as well as the rest of the Weasleys someday, and maybe not be so bitter about it when he heard Ginny was pregnant.
            So he told Ginny he wanted a divorce, and flung himself into the McCann case whenever he was around Ron, and left Ethan at home. His name might literally mean that a star had fallen, but that was in Harry’s life, not his.
*
            “Out with it.” Harry put down his fork and leaned commandingly forwards to look into Hermione’s eyes.
            “What?” Hermione lifted one hand and stared at him. “What are you talking about?”
            “You’ve been giving Ron those sideways looks that you think I don’t notice and hemming and hawing around something for days now,” said Harry firmly. They were seated in Ron and Hermione’s back garden, because it was a fine, cool night, and Hermione was pointing out stars to them that she said centaurs had different names for. “I told myself I was going to talk to you about it tonight. So I am.”
            Hermione bit her lip and lowered her plate to the grass, as if this wasn’t an announcement that she could make while holding it. Ron put an arm around her shoulders and glanced at Harry gravely.
            For a second, Harry was afraid they were going to tell him that they were supporting Ginny’s side in the divorce, and his slowly pounding heart seemed to consume the universe. But then Hermione said, “I’m pregnant. And we didn’t know how to tell you.”
            Harry swallowed, carefully, but his heartbeat slowed down. Then he said, “Well. Congratulations. I want—I mean, I wish I had a child on the way to play with him or her, but I can’t not congratulate you.”
            Hermione’s smile was slow, as if checking that he meant it, but luminous when it did finally come. She nodded and reached out a hand to Harry. He went with it, clasping her hand firmly enough that she finally seemed to believe him. “Thank you,” she whispered. “It would have hurt to think that we couldn’t share this with you.”
            Ron still had his arm around Hermione’s shoulders, but he reached out to touch Harry’s wrist in the hand Hermione was holding. “You’re going to be named godfather,” he said. “I hope you realize that. We wouldn’t think of having anyone else.”
            Harry nodded. “I know that.” He sat there for a few seconds, holding onto his friends, envisioning the way their kid would look. Who knew if it would be a boy or a girl, but Harry saw a girl with Hermione’s wrinkled forehead poring over a book, a boy with Ron’s red hair, a girl with brown frizzy hair, a boy riding a broom and laughing.
            When his friends finally let him go, Harry felt more settled and calm. Not everything was disintegrating, and if he couldn’t have children of his own, then he would have to learn to be a good uncle and godfather.
            It wasn’t perfect. He didn’t feel at all like it was right now. But he would get used to it.
            The same way I could have got used to Ginny wanting to have a child if she had just waited and talked to me about it…
            But that line of thinking would only make Harry bitter in a way he was trying to learn not to be. He stopped it as firmly as he could, and picked up his glass.
            “So what names are you thinking about?” he asked, and unwittingly sparked a long and bitter fight that made him forget all about his own bitterness, in laughing at the bickering of his two best friends.
*
            Ethan was quiet in Harry’s head most of the time. He knew he had to raise walls between his day life and his fantasy life. His fantasy life was there to help him cope. He didn’t think that any of his friends would really make life difficult for him if they found out that he was writing in this journal, but it would be embarrassing, and hard to explain.
            So he worked. And then he came home and wrote of comfortable arguments with Anne, of the way that Ethan’s children played around him, of the way that Ethan himself made a living as a supplier of utterly tame and insignificant magical creatures, like flobberworms, for Potions ingredients. Anne was the Auror, the one with an exciting and dangerous life. Ethan was the one who stayed home with the children and got to enjoy them all the time.
            He hadn’t been in Britain during the war, because his parents had gone abroad the minute they realized how dangerous things were getting and had taken him with them. Ethan had lived in Spain, and could speak some Spanish, which Harry looked up and learned. He had come back to Britain after the war and lived in quiet contentment, without scars, without nightmares.
            Everything in his life was very boring and quiet, but sunny and vivid, with the colors that Harry thought would come from a garden in the height of summer. The words slipped out of his quill more and more easily the more he practiced, although he had never done this before. Of course, he’d never had a need like this to do it before.
            Today Anne said that we hadn’t been spending enough time together. So we went outside and had a little picnic in the garden near a stand of the flowers that Father planted for me. He said that they would grow into champion potions ingredients, but I’m afraid that I’ve never tested that. I don’t know that much about plants compared to animals, anyway. I only know that there were purple flowers on it, and they smelled sweet when Anne plucked them off and threw them at me because I teased her about letting McCann get away.
            Harry paused when he realized that name had showed up, and carefully scratched it out, turning it into Maudsley. He was determined that nothing of reality would intrude here. Next thing he knew, he might start talking as though he was Ethan Starfall in daily life.
            And he wasn’t. He couldn’t be. Not without a wife and children. Not without parents. Not without that blessed and sunny past that Ethan lived in and swam in, like a fish through water, while at the same time never taking it for granted, because he had seen how other, less happy people lived.
            Harry shut the journal and put it away for the night, and went to bed to dream of happiness.
*
            “Do you really dare to confront me, Potter?”
            Harry moved forwards, unhurried. He and Ron had finally tracked Reynold McCann down, in a house that belonged to one of the brothers of an Auror Hendred. Kingsley’s suspicions had been right, and McCann had escaped capture so far because he was being tipped off by an Auror who had once trained with him in dueling classes and was fond of him. That was Hendred, arrested earlier this evening.
            Now Harry and Ron just had to bring McCann in, and they could consider this case officially over and done with.
            “I don’t know why I wouldn’t dare,” Harry said, his eyes carefully traveling around the dusty room. It was probably the drawing room, but the house had been abandoned for years and they’d covered all the furniture, making it hard to be sure. There was a bowl of dried fruit and nuts McCann had been eating on one table, and footprints in the dust winding back and forth. “You don’t have your wand.” Ron had Disarmed him on the stairs, right before McCann ran in here and Harry followed, and a trapped door had fallen into the frame between the two rooms.
            “But what other traps might I not have?” McCann was backing up, trying to lead Harry towards what was probably a couch, grinning all the while. “You should think of that, and think of whether you dare to confront me until you know everything about the house!”
            Harry didn’t waste breath on a reply. He knew one such trap was probably near the couch, because McCann kept trying to lead him in that direction, and he wasn’t even being subtle about it.
            On the other hand, Harry didn’t think he had to move, not when he could set up a trap of his own.
            He cast a non-verbal Throwing Charm on the bowl of fruit and nuts, and it flew through the air towards the back of McCann’s head. He spun around at the faint whistling noise. All that meant was that the bowl hit him in the face instead of the back of the head, and he went down heavily, his skull bouncing off the cushions of the couch.
            “You need to think about unexpected traps, too,” Harry told him, and then bound and Stunned him, floating him back towards the door between the two rooms. Whatever other traps might be here, he would leave them to the members of the Department who would be conducting the official corruption investigation. Auror Hendred, or her brother, might have helped other criminals slip away; the existence of a conveniently abandoned and booby-trapped house suggested that, at least.
            The door dissolved just as he got there, under the pressure of an Acid Curse. Ron stumbled through, swearing.
            “The spells on that thing would have worked at Gringotts,” he muttered, and then stopped when he saw McCann floating on the air behind Harry. “You got him?”
            Harry nodded, and smiled at Ron. “He won’t get away this time. He implied there were traps in this room, too, though, so I’d rather get out of here and let the Hit Wizards come back and figure out what’s what.”
            “Good,” said Ron, and glanced around at the empty, silent house, shuddering. “I don’t want to spend any more time here than I have to.”
            Harry thought about teasing him about the presence of spiders, but Ron had probably already thought of that on his own, and a joke was always less funny when you were the second one telling it. They took McCann in.
            Only later that evening, when he and Dean were watching the telly and Dean was telling him furiously about how his favorite football team had only lost their last game because the other team had cheated, did Harry realize something. He had focused on the case and McCann until the end, and hadn’t thought about Ginny and his lost children at all.
            It didn’t mean the pain was gone. But it meant that the pain was no longer the center of his life, and that some of the things he was doing to try to handle it were working.
            Harry hid his smile behind his next beer.
*
            Ethan knew a lot about children and animals and love, but it was all small knowledge. He didn’t know about the horrible, painful things that Harry did. He had never heard of Horcruxes. He would stare if someone asked him about the Sword of Gryffindor or the defenses at Gringotts. He kind of assumed that the grand people were all somewhere else, living their own lives, and would leave the ordinary wizards like him to take care of themselves.
            Harry drowned himself in that life, in that life he wished he could live, in that life he wished he’d been left to live.
            Mother asked me today if I thought that Al had been spending rather too much time by himself. I told her that I didn’t think he had, but that I’d look into it. And I found Al sitting with his legs kicking on the edge of the wall at the back of the garden and frowning at nothing, and I began to think Mother had been right.
            I asked him what was wrong. Al didn’t answer for a long time, and then he turned and looked up at me.
            “Why did you name me Albus?” he asked. “James and Lily are just normal names, but I have to go by a nickname because Albus is so unusual. The only thing people want to ask me when they hear my name is whether I was named after Albus Dumbledore, and I don’t even know how to answer them, because you never told me why.”
            I couldn’t believe that we’d neglected to give him the answer for so long. I took his hand and said, “You were named after Dumbledore, in a way. We left the country during the war, you know, Grandmother and Grandfather and myself.” Al nodded, because he knows that. I told them that story early on, because so many other families had war stories, and they deserved to know why we didn’t have any. “But my parents heard about Albus Dumbledore and how brave he was and the sacrifices they made. They hoped they would have another child and they could name him Albus, but they never did. So I decided to name you that.”
            Al sat there and thought for a long time. I hoped he wasn’t too offended about being named after a dead person, but finally he sat up and said, “Yeah, that makes sense. Thanks, Dad.” And he went back to the house, and a while later I saw him flying.
            I hope that my relationships with my children are always that gentle and easy. I know they can’t always be, especially because all of them will be teenagers at the same time, but right now, it seems like they will be.
            Harry slept hard after that, and his mind was filled with images of a life that he wasn’t living, but one he could make up.
*
            Ginny came up to him on the day they were supposed to meet with the solicitor to sign the divorce papers, and asked quietly, “Can I talk to you?”
            “Of course,” said Harry. “That’s what we’re here for, isn’t it?” He followed her into one of the little anterooms that the solicitor had set aside in her house. Harry thought that giving couples privacy to talk was probably one of the purposes of those anterooms. This one, at least, was pretty, with some stones set on the wall in the shape of a peacock’s tail and a spell that made an illusion of water flow down from under them.
            “Don’t be cruel,” said Ginny, and she faced him with her hands clenched in front of her. “I’m asking you one more time to think about the divorce. To—not go through with it. You were right. I was acting irrationally because the—the hex was so sudden. But if I’d had more time to think about it, I would agree with you. Let’s give it a few years. Maybe we can come around to the idea of adoption.”
            Harry thought about that. He knew that two months ago, when he was still swaying back and forth between pain and rage, he would have leaped at the chance. At least that meant Ginny had reconsidered, and the pig-headed way she had insisted that of course she was right had been the one thing Harry hated the most.
            But now, with the curse three months behind him and the image of the marriage he wanted in the journal he was keeping as Ethan…
            Harry carefully put the thought of Ethan away—he would never think it in front of anyone who was part of his real life—and asked, “What does it mean to you, that I got cursed and the first thing we leaped to was thinking that it was horrible if we didn’t have blood children? And that we yelled at each other and insulted each other?”
            Ginny blinked. “That we were under a lot of stress?”
            “We were,” said Harry. “But you were irrational, and you went on acting that way. And then I wanted a divorce over something that should have been handled other ways, probably.” He saw the protest rising in Ginny’s eyes, and spoke on before she could continue. “We both didn’t trust each other. We both leaped too quickly into anger. We both—Ginny, our marriage wasn’t strong. I want a strong marriage. We didn’t have one.”
            “We did! We loved each other! We were married for five years!”
            “And all it took to undo that was the thought that we couldn’t have children.” Harry had to turn away and look at the wall. He wasn’t as calm as he wanted to be. The rage was clogging his throat, making it hurt, but on the other hand, he knew what he wanted to say this time. “I think we married each other thinking we would have kids together. We had to have kids together, or it wasn’t a real marriage. And we didn’t care enough about each other to stay together despite that.”
            “I still want children. But I could get along with adopted children.” Ginny’s words were cold, though, and Harry noticed she hadn’t stepped forwards to put a hand on his shoulder the way she might have at the beginning of the conversation. “That’s what I’m telling you. That I know I acted irrationally, and I’m sorry, and this is a second chance.”
            “I was irrational, and I was weak, and I’m not sorry,” said Harry, looking at her now. “Because it wasn’t enough.”
            Ginny folded her shoulders up. “I’m willing to wait for children! What else do I need to do?”
            “Listen to me?” Harry snapped, his own anger rising again. “Because I’m saying that it’s not enough! We might have to wait years to have children, for me to be comfortable with the idea, and even if you acknowledge that you don’t have to have children right now, would you be willing to wait for years?”
            The sharp turn of Ginny’s head gave him her answer.
            Harry nodded, and tried to make his voice softer. “I’m sorry, Ginny. This is—I just want something different, that’s all. It’s hard on both of us, but I want to have some time alone and think. I just don’t want to share this right now.”
            “So it’s selfish as well.”
            “Yeah,” Harry said, and now the rage was running backwards and turning into sadness. “Yeah, I reckon you could say that.”
            Ginny walked away from him and into the solicitor’s office. Harry followed her, shaking his head. Maybe the only marriage he could have was an imaginary one, because he might not ever find someone he loved who would also accept that they couldn’t have their own children.
            But he knew he wanted more than a marriage that collapsed at the first real challenge. Whether it was weakness in him, or Ginny, or both of them together, or just too much stress, or something else, he didn’t really care anymore. His decision to divorce had been quick, but it didn’t mean it was the wrong one. He wanted out of this marriage, and into the freedom to—
            Think, and heal, and withdraw, and mourn, and do his best to accept.
*
BAFan: Thanks! And no, Ginny wasn’t trying to cover up a pregnancy or cheating. She just really wants kids, but she also wants Harry. And if she can’t have them both, she is upset. The way Harry is upset that he can’t have a strong marriage and blood children.
SP777: Someday I will write a chapter long enough for you, and you will die of shock. See, I’m preserving your health by writing short ones.
Jester: Thanks! Draco does appear in the next chapter; I appreciate his introduction has been delayed.
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Starfall