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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-Two—Fireworks
            “What is he doing here?”
            Draco said something on a breathless wave of air that Harry didn’t actually pay much attention to. He was standing up and facing Ginny, leaning forwards so that he could shield Draco a little from her. Draco might not thank him for it later, but Harry was the one who knew the place and the people.
            Well, he thought he knew the people, anyway. Right now, he realized that he didn’t have much idea how the Weasleys would react. He and Ginny had fought in front of them before, and they usually politely pretended not to notice, but there had never been this many of Ginny’s family with them at one time.
            And there had never been this big a fight coming.
            Ginny stopped with her hands on her hips, and gave Harry the sort of challenging look he once would have loved to meet. Until it had started causing problems in their arguments, Harry had been in love with Ginny’s temper as much as the rest of her. He wasn’t always quiet himself, and she could yell and fly and battle with the best of them. It had been a while since Harry started wanting something else, but he couldn’t forget that that was what he had wanted at one point in time.
            Now, he faced her down, raising his eyebrows a little, until Ginny muttered and blushed and looked away. Harry nodded and said, “He’s here because Molly invited him. That’s the only reason he needs.” And he sat down beside Draco again, and reached for the plate of food he had abandoned.
            He saw Draco staring at him. Harry ignored the stare as he ignored the way that Ginny was stomping towards him. Sure, he knew that wasn’t the end of the matter by a long shot, but he refused to see why he had to allow Ginny to dictate the argument.
            “That’s not enough,” Ginny said. She’d stopped by the table, but she hadn’t lowered her voice. Well, Harry was already resigned to the fact that they were going to have an audience for this once. “Why did you bring him along, when you know that these family gatherings are sacred?”
            Harry blinked at her, not so much because of the argument as because of the odd terms that she’d chosen to have it on. “What do you mean? They’re not sacred. Molly said that I should bring him, and I did. And I wanted him here, and he wanted to come.”
            Ginny’s mouth drooped open a bit. Harry suspected she thought he’d been lying about the invitation.
            “I wasn’t lying,” Harry said. It felt good to have it out in the open for once. “And Draco is living with me, and I love him, and of course I wanted to bring him with me. There was no reason for us to spend the day apart unless we wanted to. We didn’t want to.” He took a defiant bite of Molly’s fruit salad, keeping his eyes on Ginny.
            Ginny shook her head slowly, magnificently. Harry wondered if he was the only one close enough and knowledgeable enough to see her chin trembling, and know what was going to happen next.
            “If I took a lover,” Ginny said, “I wouldn’t bring him along to a family gathering.”
            “But what if you got married again?” Harry finished chewing the bite in his mouth and looked at her, blandly smiling. “Wouldn’t you expect your husband to be welcomed as part of the family? You always expected it with me.”
            Ginny stood silent for a few seconds, breathing. “Marriage and a lover are different,” she said. “And I don’t think you’re going to marry him, no matter what happens.”
            “We haven’t decided yet.” Harry reached across the table and took Draco’s hand. He felt the silent gasp of shock that traveled through Draco when he did, but he saw no reason that he should release Draco’s hand because of that, either. Yes, perhaps Draco didn’t want to get married or didn’t want Ginny’s wrath to come down on his head, but Harry was the one in charge here right now. “Maybe we’ll get married. We’re at the very beginning of our relationship, though. That kind of decision can wait.”
            “You wouldn’t want to do that kind of thing to your children.”
            “What? Marry someone else?” Harry leaned forwards. “Would you refuse to get married because of that?”
            “I would be marrying someone I could have children with.”
            It was such an unexpected argument that Harry gaped at her, and Ginny swept ahead. “I would be marrying someone I could make a life with. Someone I could integrate into my children’s lives. Someone I wasn’t going after merely to spite the rest of my family.”
            “You and I have no say in each other’s lives anymore, except as it concerns the children,” Harry managed to say, when he had his breath back. “There’s no reason for you to think that I would care who you married.”
            “You can’t look me in the eye and say that.” Ginny lifted her chin a little.
            “I don’t care who you marry.” Harry said it slowly. “If it’ll get you off this ridiculous obsession with who I’m sleeping with, then I hope you hurry up and do it soon.”
            This time, the gasp was loud, not only from Draco but from several members of the Weasley family. Harry ignored that, too. Molly had had a good idea, he told his furiously pounding heart. Get everything out in the open, and no one would be able to object that he’d done something underhanded and sneaky. And that meant bringing out all the objections he had against Ginny, and coaxing the ones against him from her.
            “You don’t know what it did to me, when I found out what you were doing,” Ginny whispered.
            This time, she’d chosen an accusation too obscure for Harry to immediately grasp. “What are you talking about?”
            Ginny darted one look around, as though she was wondering if she should bring this up now, and then she faced him again and nodded dismissal to whatever invisible fears she had. “When I found out that you were cheating.”
            Harry winced. He did wish that she hadn’t brought this up in front of the kids. He couldn’t see any of them without turning his eyes away from Ginny, but he knew what an accusation like that could do to them.
            But he didn’t see any way to get away from answering the accusation, either. Whether or not he liked it, Ginny had brought it up, and in a public place. He had to defend himself or risk shooting Molly’s plan, and his, all to hell.
            “I never cheated on you,” he said.
            Ginny looked expressively at Draco.
            Harry snorted. “You really think that I was with Draco when we were still married?” he asked. “Why would you think that? What proof would you have?” This hurt, it dug and scraped into old sores and made them open into huge bleeding wounds, but he had to go through it. Maybe he would finally have a little of Ginny’s respect, or she would leave him alone, if he went through this.
            “You found someone new awfully quickly after you left me,” Ginny said. “It does make me wonder if those protests about the divorce and how you wanted our marriage to last were all protective cover.”
            Harry shook his head wearily. “I found someone new without thinking I would,” he said. “Because he came and helped me, and I fell in love.” He looked at Draco and smiled. Draco blinked several times, little expression showing on his face. “I hope that you can forgive me for not seeing your magnificence at once, Draco.”
            This time, the expression that crossed Draco’s face was more recognizable and vulnerable than shock. He was trying not to laugh, Harry saw. He leaned back and raised his water cup in a toast to Harry. “I’ll learn to forgive you eventually, I’m sure,” he said.
            Ginny turned towards Draco. Harry opened his mouth, because he thought her fight should be with him alone, but he wasn’t quick enough. “How does it feel to be sleeping with someone who was married to a Weasley a short time ago?” Ginny asked, her words hard and swift, like little jabs. “Can you put down your disgust long enough to do it?”
            Harry closed his eyes.
            Draco touched his hand with a light brush of his fingers, enough to make Harry open his eyes cautiously. Draco leaned forwards and said, “I think you’re too interested in what Harry and I are doing. I begin to wonder about the source of that interest.” He fixed his eyes on Ginny’s face and gave her a smile dirtier than half the things he could have said.
            And more sparing of the feelings of the parents here, too. Harry smiled at him, and he thought he could see Bill and Fleur do the same thing. Dominque and Victoire were kind of gaping at them, but that was all Harry had time to see before he turned back to Draco and Ginny.
            Ginny spluttered for a second, then turned her back on Draco and faced Harry. “I don’t know why I’m bothering to argue with him when you’re the one who chose to break up our marriage vows and sleep with other people,” she said. “I should have known something was wrong the first time I suspected you of cheating.”
            Harry said, slowly and loudly, “I never cheated on you. You have no proof. I didn’t sleep with anyone else until after the divorce was final.”
            “You never would have acted the way you had if you’d been faithful,” Ginny said. “You weren’t a good husband to me. That has to be the reason. We were so happy together before you were promoted after that case when Lily was three and you started spending more time around other Aurors.”
            “At least you’ve given me a beginning,” Harry said. “But I would have taken Veritaserum to prove to you that nothing was going on, and it was all your imagination, if I’d known you believed that.”
            “You would?” Ginny glanced around as if hoping that someone would have a convenient vial of Veritaserum on hand.
            “I said I would have,” Harry said. “But that would be to give my lover and my children peace of mind, so that you would stop accusing me of this. Not you.” He paused, thinking about it. “Besides, why should I? I don’t have anything to prove to you, anymore. I would just be indulging your insane fantasies. And you would probably ask me questions while I was under the Veritaserum that you weren’t supposed to.”
            “How can you distrust me that much?”
            From the wounded tone of the question, Harry thought it was genuine and she really didn’t know what kind of harridan she came off as. Harry snorted in spite of himself, and then had to shake his head. His throat hurt. “You’re asking me that, when you were the one who thought I was cheating for seven years?” Maybe it should be six, since technically they had got divorced when Lily was still nine, but at the moment, Harry wasn’t in the mood to be that precise.
            “I wanted our marriage to work. I fought harder for it than you ever did. I was the one who had more commitment.”
            “Maybe that’s true,” Harry said wearily. “All I know is that it’s over, and I want to move past blaming each other and discussing whose fault it was. Don’t you, too? Don’t you have a life of your own that you’re eager to start leading?”
            Ginny hesitated, as though that appeal reached into her heart and hooked something there. Harry hoped it would. Ginny had her career, and she still had their children and her family. That had to matter more to her than wrecking Harry’s life, or getting him to admit that he’d been the one in the wrong.
            “I want you to admit that you did something wrong, though,” Ginny whispered, and if there was a hard kernel of hurt in her heart, the way Harry suspected there was, it hadn’t melted yet. “I want you t-to admit that you were wrong in the way that you pulled away from me, and hurt me.”
            Harry stared at her. “I can’t admit to the things that you want me to admit to,” he said. “I can admit that I probably should have paid more attention to you and worked harder on making the marriage work. I can’t say that I ever cheated on you, because I didn’t.”
            “Is that offer of Veritaserum still open?”
            “No,” Harry said. “Because I might have had something to prove to you when we were still married, but now I don’t.”
            Ginny just stood there with her hands clasped in front of her and her body very still. Harry had seen her look like that sometimes before one of the Quidditch games that she knew would challenge her. He wondered if she was looking at him like a Quidditch game, or an opponent, or what. Maybe even a broom.
            “I know that there was a reason our marriage failed,” Ginny whispered. “Ours is the only one that did. Everyone else’s is fine.”
            Harry thought of what Lily had said about how he and Ginny should have been like Ron and Hermione, and stifled a sigh. At least Lily was getting to hear both sides of the argument at once now, for all the good it would do her. “Our marriage failed for the reasons that you already know, Ginny,” he said. “And it’s boring to talk about it over and over again. I don’t want to do it anymore.”
            This time, for the first time, Ginny flinched like he had tried to hurt her. Harry stared at her, baffled, not knowing why, and saw the way spots of color flared in her cheeks as she turned away her head, how she bit her lip. He blinked, and thought he might understand. Ginny could take a lot of things, but not hearing that these constant arguments bored him. Not if they were life-blood to her.
            He would have gone to her once, put an arm around her shoulders, tried to comfort her. But that was when they were married. And he didn’t want them to scream at each other every time they were in the same place, but she was the one who had shown up at the Burrow and started this screaming match.
            For once, he felt maybe that excuse of “She started it!” was justified.
            But, Harry thought, he could still try to be the bigger person, even as he showed everyone how little and petty and stupid these arguments were. He looked at Ginny and waited until she was focusing on him again, instead of the pain.
            “Don’t you want to talk about other things?” he asked quietly. “How Al and Jamie are doing at Hogwarts? What’s going to happen when Lily goes to Hogwarts, what sort of wand she’s going to have and where she’ll be Sorted?” He didn’t know if it was his imagination, or if he could feel his daughter’s eyes burning at him then. He didn’t look away from Ginny, though. “How we’re going to handle holidays and that kind of thing? Those are the interesting things we could say to each other. Going around and around in circles is all that’s going to happen while we discuss what—we used to have. If we can just get out of that and do other things…”
            He let his voice trail off hopefully, and watched her. Ginny’s hands tightened to the point of snapping around nothingness. Harry thought she was wishing for a real broom that she could grab and use to launch herself out of there. It would make a lot of sense. He might have felt that way once himself.
            But he had Draco beside him now, and the solid weight of his presence made Harry grateful for him.
            Ginny finally lifted her head and whispered, so softly that most of her watching family probably didn’t hear, “Just tell me one thing.”
            Harry held himself rigidly still, telling himself that he might regret this but he had to find out what she wanted, and only nodded.
            “Did you ever cheat on me?”
            If I tell the truth, it’ll be for my satisfaction alone, Harry thought. And Draco’s. Because Ginny would never believe him, no matter how convincing his arguments were. If he did agree to take Veritaserum and talk to her under that, she would probably say that that batch had been tampered with.
            But his own satisfaction still mattered. It had to. This was the last gasp. From now on, he would just walk away if Ginny tried to bring up this stupid argument again. Maybe Ginny didn’t agree with Molly’s policy that they should have it all out here and then that was the end of it, but it was the policy Harry intended to adopt.
            “No,” he said. “Never.”
            Ginny looked at him with dim eyes.
            Harry stood up and moved back to the food table. He got some more of the fruit salad for himself, and one of the slices of beef. Then he turned back and caught Draco’s eye, silently asking him if he wanted more.
            Draco hesitated, then nodded.
            And when Harry went back to the table, Ginny had moved away. Harry sighed and began eating again, and Draco and some of the others—except Molly, who was talking to Ginny—gradually followed suit.
            As far as Harry was concerned, it was over.
*
BAFan: Oh, no, this was Ginny’s chapter. No Spiders in sight.
Thank you!
SP777: Al thinks he’s being unfairly treated because of Harry’s fame, with results that he explained to Harry in Chapter 36.
Scorpius would have been there shaking his head.
kit: Thank you!
CareLessLover: The first one, definitely.
delia cerrano: Ginny did want to stay married, but more than that, she wants Harry to admit that he cheated. Otherwise, she would have to face the fact that her main reason for ending the marriage might be a false one.
I think it’s a good thing that Harry and Ginny aren’t married anymore, but it has to hurt to know that you might have divorced someone because of what was only suspicions.
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Marathon