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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 Forty-One—Smoldering Embers
            “He’s here because your grandmother invited him,” Harry said, turning around to face Al but keeping his face and body and voice all easy. He wouldn’t do any good if he snapped at Al for no reason. “The same way that she invited me, and you, and your mum.” He thought it was a good guess, although so far he hadn’t seen a sign of Ginny.
            Al glanced over his shoulder as though he was looking for people to support him. But his cousins were mostly engaged in playing with each other or eating or talking with their parents, and the adults had carefully stepped back. Harry did see Ron’s eyes fixed on them, and supposed that Ron was prepared to intervene if things got really bad. But for the most part, this was Harry’s discipline problem that would be up to Harry to handle.
            “That’s not a good enough reason,” Al finally said, and faced Harry and Draco again. Harry suppressed the impulse to step in front of Draco and protect him. That would only draw attention to what Al would mistakenly think was his weakness, and Harry would be doing Draco no favors in making his own children think Draco was weak. “I mean, why does he need to come here? Why can’t this just be a place for family to enjoy?” He sounded as if he was about to start crying.
            Harry shut his eyes. A month ago, the sound of that much pain in his child’s voice would have made him do whatever he could to soothe it, including making foolish promises, and ask questions later.
            But he had learned some things since then. If he just gave in and handed Al what he wanted without considering whether he could really afford it, he was only setting up trouble for later. And then there would be more pain in his children’s voices.
            “It’s a good enough reason for your grandmother,” Harry said, when he could trust his voice not to shake. He looked at Al again, and wondered for a second if his own dad’s heart would have broken, if James had lived and Harry had looked up at him like this, with betrayal in his eyes. “It’s her house, so she can invite who she wants.”
            “Does that mean he’s family?” Al was holding onto his plate of food with a grip that Harry mostly saw him use on his broom during a Quidditch game.
            “I consider him that way,” Harry said.
            Of all the many things he could have said, no other possibility occurred to him until he felt Draco’s hand clench down on his arm. Harry leaned back quietly into him, and stayed silent. He stood by what he had said. Draco was an important part of his life. He’d become that way suddenly, but hell, other people had become important to Harry suddenly, too. He and Ron had become friends the minute they met. It had only taken a few minutes of fighting a troll to seal his friendship with Hermione.
            “Can I please talk to you without him?” Al glanced fiercely at Draco, and then away, as if he couldn’t bear to consider him.
            “It would depend on what you wanted to talk about,” Harry said.
            He felt Draco straighten up behind him, but while that may have been necessary, it wasn’t necessary for Draco to snap at Al, and he didn’t. When Harry glanced back at him, he saw that Draco had adopted the glazed expression of boredom that Harry himself usually used when he wanted to see through an Auror meeting without getting in trouble. Harry grinned and turned back to Al, who was staring at him in frustration.
            “I don’t want to say it in front of him, either,” Al mumbled.
            Harry sighed. “I’ll do what I can for you, Al. If speaking to someone else’s parents will ensure that you don’t get bullied, then I’ll do that. If I can cast those wards I was talking about to keep people away from me at Quidditch games and eyes on you, where they belong, I’ll do that. But there are certain things I can’t do, and one of them is make you happy when I don’t understand what it is you want.”
            “Just you to be normal,” Al said.
            “What does that mean in this case?” Harry could sense stares coming at them from every direction, but he kept his voice steady and low. Al had been the one to begin the confrontation here, and Harry thought that perhaps this was the best place to settle it. Al had to know that he was surrounded and loved by so many people here, even if he didn’t count Harry as one of them. He was at home in the Burrow in a way he could never be in Hogwarts. “Do you want me to have red hair and freckles?”
            Al stepped away from him as if Harry had brought up something disgusting. From the fleeting touch Harry felt from Draco in the middle of his back, Draco agreed. “What? No! I just want you to be with Mum again.”
            Harry sighed. He had been afraid that something like that might lie behind Al’s strange requests, and it was something that he just wasn’t going to grant, no matter how Al pleaded. “I’m sorry. But we really are divorced now, and getting back together wouldn’t make us happy. I doubt it would be normal, either,” he added, seeing the response that brimmed in Al’s eyes. “Unless you consider yelling at each other normal.”
            Al’s hands were in fists, and his face was tensely flushed. “Why couldn’t you and Mum be like Uncle Ron and Aunt Hermione?” he whispered. “Why?”
            Harry considered him carefully. He had known that Lily was having a hard time dealing with the divorce, but Al hadn’t said much specifically about it. All his complaints about Harry not being normal had seemed tied up with Harry’s fame more than anything else.
            If this was really about the divorce, though…
            “I’m sorry,” he repeated, softly. “We made what we thought was the best decision, for all of us. I know it’s hard right now, but would you want your Mum and me fighting?”
            “That’s not what I said.” Al was staring at the ground now, as if he was ashamed of his outburst. “I just want to know why you can’t be like Uncle Ron and Aunt Hermione.”
            “Because they’re lucky, and not everyone is that lucky,” Harry said. Al stared up at him then, apparently too startled to look away, and Harry held back his snort. “What? Did you think they weren’t lucky?”
            “They love each other.” Al looked uncomfortable, the way most teenage boys would with talking about love, but he forged ahead. “You—Mum told me once that that takes hard work, not luck.”
            “And it takes a certain kind of people,” Harry said. “Your Mum and I weren’t those kinds of people, not for each other.”
            Al pointed a finger at Draco. “And you think you’re going to be like that with him? Don’t make me laugh! He got divorced, too, from Scorpius’s mum! If you think the two of you together can make something work—”
            Harry reached out and held up his hand in front of Al, palm facing him. Al hesitated a second, but dropped his finger back to his side and stared at the ground.
            “Al.” Harry spoke as quietly as he could. “That’s enough. I know that you’re upset and hurting, and you have a right to talk about how you feel. I caused some of it. But you’ve been so rude to Draco that I won’t tolerate it anymore. Pointing at him, yelling at him, insulting him, is all beyond what I’ll take. Apologize to him.’
            Al’s shoulders tightened, and Harry held back his curse. Of course Al would choose this time to go back to his childhood resistance to apologies.
            “Al—”
            “There’s nothing you can do to me if I don’t!” Al looked up at him with wild eyes. “I’m at Hogwarts most of the year, and Mum said I could live with her during the summers!”
            “I know that,” Harry said. “But do you really want everyone to go on stewing in bad feeling? I know Scorpius is your best friend. Do you really want him to hear about how you treated his father, and feel bad?”
            “Well done,” Draco said by his ear, in a breath so faint that Harry barely heard. He hoped Al wouldn’t hear it, either. Sometimes, Draco’s admiration for Harry’s Slytherin side wasn’t any better timed than Al resisting apologies.
            “I don’t want to apologize to him,” Al whispered.
            Harry nodded, once. “Then I’m afraid that I’ll have to take away your broom for a week.”
            Al stared up at him with his mouth hanging open. “Dad! You can’t do that. I play Quidditch!”
            “I know, and I also know that you can use one of the school brooms,” Harry said calmly. “I don’t have any right to keep you from Quidditch. I wouldn’t try. That’s up to your Head of House and the professors at Hogwarts. But I bought the broom for you, and I’m going to take it away now. Someone who’s behaving this childishly should lose some privileges. That’s the one I choose.”
            “I might not win without it!” Al was in full-on wailing mode now, and some of his cousins were looking over in concern.
            Harry refused to budge. This was the point where he had always backed down before, and all without the Weasleys watching. He would see his children’s faces turn red and tears start in their eyes, and he would relent. He couldn’t stand the sight of them suffering, and even this was suffering of a kind.
            “I know,” Harry said. “But getting it back is really simple. All you have to do is apologize to Draco.”
            “I hate you!” Al said, and then ran away towards the far side of the garden, where Fred and his sister Roxie were chatting with their parents.
            Draco stirred at Harry’s shoulder. Harry waited a minute, wondering what Draco would find to say. A lot of the problems with Harry’s parenting had been right there, he thought, on display in that little mess.
            But the only thing that Draco said, with a raised eyebrow, was, “I suppose that’s a normal reaction, at least. Scorpius used to tell me that he hated me at least once a week.” He paused. “Granted, he was a few years younger than Al is now. I think there was one row about him hating me because I wouldn’t agree to let a nine-year-old attend Hogwarts.”
            Harry snorted and relaxed. “Yeah, well. It hasn’t happened that often before. But I either gave in or didn’t listen, so maybe I wouldn’t have noticed even if it did.”
            “Are you going to keep your promise about taking his broom away?”
            Harry glanced back over his shoulder. “Of course. Why wouldn’t—oh, you’re worried I might change my mind because he got so upset?”
            “Yes.”
            Harry had to smile again. At least Draco didn’t mince words. “Well, like I said, it never would have got this far in the past. I wouldn’t have made the threat, because just doing that would have horrified me, and hurt him. But now that I’ve made it, I have to keep it. Like I said, I don’t think it’s appropriate for me to tell him that he just can’t fly. That’s a school issue. He might have to fly during lessons, and I can’t stop that. But I gave his broom to him, and I can take it away.”
            Draco hesitated. “Wasn’t it a joint gift? Will your wife get upset about it?”
            “Ex-wife,” Harry corrected, thinking it was no wonder that Draco had trouble acting like Harry and Ginny were divorced, if he still thought of them as married. “And no, not this time. It was going to be a joint gift, and we presented it to Al that way, but I was the one who paid for it. She never got upset even during the marriage if I did restrict something like how much time they spent flying.”
            “During the rare times when you actually punished them,” Draco murmured.
            Harry sighed. “Yeah. I was a lot better about it when they were younger. I didn’t know that Al would be a good flyer when he was three and trying to take my broom for a spin.”
            Draco choked. “Three is a bit precocious,” he finally said. “Yes, I would have been upset about that, too. You’re better with dangers to life and limb than you are when they’re being rude to you or other people, aren’t you?”
            Harry nodded. “I think—some of that comes from wishing, now, that someone had taken better care of me when I was at school, and got angry when I was doing things like going into the Chamber of Secrets to kill a basilisk.”
            “The way they treated you was ridiculous.” Draco reached out and took his hand. “Sure, I know that Professor Snape saved your life, and I suppose Dumbledore did too, but Dumbledore shouldn’t have let you get into the situation in the first place.”
            Harry gave a shrug that he hoped would keep the situation from getting too serious. His feelings about Dumbledore were complex, and not to be sorted out in a few minutes on a sunny afternoon. “Well, Al interrupted us when we were going to get something to eat. Do you want to do it now?”
            Draco nodded, and began piling his plate high. Harry grinned to see that he took a lot of the salad made of small chopped fruits that was one of Molly’s specialties. He wouldn’t tell Draco that before he ate it, just in case he behaved weirdly about it.
            But Molly herself bustled up to them just then, and nodded at both of them. “Are you boys enjoying the party? Do you have a table yet? Do you want some of the pork, or some of the beef, or some of the ham?”
            Draco blinked and clutched his plate defensively close. Harry held down his chuckle as he answered, “Actually, Molly, we were just going to sit down and start eating. We haven’t had a chance to take a bite yet.”
            That worked the way he thought it would. Molly threw up her hands in horror and promptly began herding them towards the nearest table, where Fleur and Bill’s children had been sitting. But Louis was running around with his model plane now, and Victoire and Dominque had been drawn into the game with Molly, Lucy, and Lily. “You poor dears! Sit down, right now. I’ll bring you some of all of the meat as soon as it’s done.” She bent down towards Harry and added, in what she thought was a whisper, “And you did the right thing with Al, dear. Sometimes it has to be that way.”
            Harry smiled at her, happier than he could say that she approved of his actions. She’d raised seven children, and she’d done more than all right with them. If she thought it had to be that way…
            He turned back to his meal, and his conversation with Draco, with a hearty appetite.
*
            In retrospect, Harry supposed he should have known that it was too good to last.
            He and Draco were sitting back in their seats with hands folded over replete stomachs, watching as Molly, Lucy, and Lily put on the play they had made up. Dominque and Victoire were issuing orders and prompts for lines and hissed instructions so fast that it was sometimes hard to hear what the younger girls were actually saying, but that didn’t matter so much. Lily, at least, had a strong voice, and she made her will known as the princess her sisters wanted to leave behind while they went dragon-hunting. She sneaked after them, and she did the sneaking so well, crawling along the ground on her belly, that Harry’s cheeks hurt.
            Al had stayed on the far side of the garden for most of the day and hadn’t looked towards them, but Jamie had come over and talked to Draco for a few minutes. He listened so intently that Harry half-wondered if they needed to be worried about Jamie developing a new obsession. But an obsession with Draco’s advice had to be better than an obsession with stealing artifacts and Potions ingredients, so Harry allowed it.
            And then came the moment when the door to the house swung open. Harry didn’t think he would have noticed at all, but there was that shift of motion from the corner of his eye, and he was still trained to notice things like that, since they were the prefigurations of violence in Auror situations, a lot of the time. He turned his head.
            Ginny strode into the middle of the garden, halting just before she would have crossed the line of sight to the play. She was looking in several directions. Harry found himself holding his breath.
            Her eyes caught his—and caught sight of Draco at his side.
            Things blew up.
*
SP777: Thanks. But I did end the chapter at what felt like a natural place to me.
delia cerrano: Thank you! Yes, Harry has to be careful and sensitive around Draco, but he also feels like he hasn’t done a good job with his children, so they need attention, too. It’s a mess.
CareLessLover: Al was far more hurt by the divorce than Harry realized. That’s part of what made him react so badly here.
polka dot: Ron and Hermione are still his best friends, and the Weasleys his family. That’s one thing that Draco won’t be able to change.
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Marathon