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Starfall	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 32486 -:- Recommendations : 3 -:- Currently Reading : 4
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I am making no money from this story.

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Thank you again for all the reviews!
Chapter Forty-Seven—Play to Win
            “I notice you haven’t been practicing the spell I showed you, to dull emotions.”
            Harry winced a bit, and ducked his head. It seemed so easy, when he was outside Healer Brandeis’s office, to tell himself that what she said was interesting but not always right, that he could do something against her advice and have it be reasonable. And then he was inside the office and back in front of her soft, disappointed eyes, and all his objections disappeared like snowflakes in an inferno.
            “I didn’t want to,” he said simply. “I found—something new with Draco, and I thought that the spell might affect that, since that was the strongest emotion inside me.”
            Brandeis paused for a moment, then smiled. “Emotions that give you something you want, and didn’t have?”
            “Exactly.” Harry hesitated once more, but if his Mind-Healer wouldn’t understand his excitement and happiness, honestly, she didn’t deserve to be his Mind-Healer. “And I even have a child now. Draco’s son, Scorpius. He’s accepted me into the family and it’s…” There weren’t words for it except ones that sounded bland, so after a while Harry gave up and used one of them. “Wonderful.”
            It had been wonderful, this past weekend, when he and Draco and Scorpius had visited Andromeda and Teddy like one family visiting another, not just a lone person who needed Andromeda and Teddy to let him come in out of the cold. Harry knew Andromeda would insist he had never been just that to her and Teddy, but, well, it was nice to know that he didn’t even need to feel that way in the privacy of his own head.
            “Good,” said Healer Brandeis, and Harry snapped out of his recollections to see her smiling at him. “You deserve some of your own happiness, too, Mr. Potter. I think you know that now.”
            Harry lifted his head. “You think I didn’t know it before?”
            “I wondered how much you kept it in mind.” Healer Brandeis regarded him for a moment before she nodded. “And the fallout of announcing that you can’t have children? Was it as bad as you had thought it would be?”
            Harry grimaced a little. “It caused some tensions with my ex-wife, and with my friends.” He knew that Ron and Hermione had at least noticed the way Ginny’s talking to the papers had ceased, although he was virtually sure they didn’t know Draco had threatened her into shutting up. They were currently keeping the sort of distance that involved plenty of firecalls and visits at his office, but a lot of tension, too, and strained smiles. “I think it still does. I mean, she’s part of their family, no matter what she does.”
            Healer Brandeis sat up as though she was going to pounce on something. Harry only had a moment to worry about what it was, because she clarified it for him in the next moment. “And you don’t see yourself as part of the Weasley family? That was something you talked about, the first time, that made you fear less for you than I might have done. If you had a family, when your blood one had failed you, then I knew you would be taken care of.”
            Harry flushed. “Well, now I have a different family. One with Draco and Scorpius.”
            “And does that cancel out the feeling you’ve experienced with the Weasleys, apparently for years?” Healer Brandeis asked gently. “I wouldn’t think so, unless you’re so sure they’ll choose your ex-wife’s side that you’ve already exiled yourself from them in your mind.”
            Harry closed his eyes. The mere thought of never seeing Ron or Hermione, Rose or Hugo, again, made him want to be sick. But the thought of causing trouble with them, forcing them to pick between him and Ginny, made him feel worse. And if they’d been able to survive the past three years since the divorce not choosing between them, what right did Harry have to make them pick now?
            “I don’t want to make them choose,” he whispered.
            “Do you think they have to?” Healer Brandeis whispered back, matching his volume exactly. Harry found it a little creepy how she did that. “Would you demand it of them?”
            Harry took a deep breath and opened his eyes. “No. But I’m afraid Ginny might, or they might think that supporting her right to speak out against me means choosing her side.”
            “Why does she have a right to speak out against you?”
            Harry was able to snort at that, and not feel anything but bitter amusement that was all directed against his friends and Ginny, without guilt. “Because she’s pregnant, apparently. And their little sister, and no one can persuade her to stop—except Draco, when he did it.” Healer Brandeis simply nodded. Harry hadn’t told her any details of how Draco had done it, just that he had. “So what else can they do, if not persuade her? They’ve told me they don’t have the right to stop her or hold her back.”
            “Yet, they expect civilized behavior of you.”
            Harry darted a glance at Healer Brandeis, who was watching him in fascination. “I would still want to spare them suffering,” he said. “No matter what Ginny had said. No matter whether Draco had been able to make her stop.”
            “I think,” said Healer Brandeis softly, “that you have to consider whether this tense truce is the relationship you want with your friends. Because it is probably the one you will have to maintain, unless you or your ex-wife change something. And I do not think she would change it in any way you’d favor.”
            “No,” said Harry. “I just wonder—if they feel they can’t tell her to do anything differently now, is that going to change if I get involved? It probably won’t.”
            “It will change,” said Healer Brandeis. “Because nothing stays the same. Because we grow and change whether or not we want to. And as I said, I fear it would grow into you retreating from your friendships because you want so much to preserve your ex-wife’s relationship with her family—when she does not seem worried about preserving yours.” She caught and held his eyes, in that forceful way she had when Harry least expected it. “I know that you will no longer say her relationship with them should have priority because she is their blood family. I know you no longer place blood family in such a position above adopted family.”
            Harry swallowed. “You’re right. I don’t.”
            Healer Brandeis leaned back and smiled. When she flourished her wand, a silver basin of water floated into the room. Harry tensed for a second, thinking it was a Pensieve, but there was absolutely no sign of that, as he could admit a moment later. The basin had a pattern of leaves around the top, but the liquid inside looked like ordinary water, not the silvery shimmer of memory.
            “Now,” said Healer Brandeis, and spun her wand into the water. Colored shapes trailed it, and formed a glittering symbol-building of octagons and linked hexagons, perfect, brilliant, shimmering. “What do you think of this? This is a representation of the importance that you are currently placing on several sources of your strongest emotions.”
            Harry leaned over the basin. “What’s that one?” he asked, pointing to a blue circle, the second-largest shape.
            “Your relationship with your ex-wife and her family,” said Healer Brandeis simply. “No longer as important as it once was, nor as stressful, as you can see from the cool blue color.”
            “And this one?” Harry had to resist the urge to touch the largest shape, a shining green triangle. He thought he knew, but he wanted Healer Brandeis to say it anyway.
            “That is your relationship with your newer family.” Healer Brandeis smiled at him. “I don’t think that it will diminish in size over time. Green is a color of healing, rebirth, new life.” She swiveled her wand again, and the shapes dissolved into swirls that reminded Harry of water going down a drain. They disappeared in the same way, too.
            “You have their support, your Malfoys’ support,” Healer Brandeis said, and leaned back to consider him. “And while I doubt that will diminish in size, except in the ordinary way of fluctuations that trouble any relationship in the form of arguments, I am concerned your blue circle could change color, and grow.”
            Harry grimaced. “You weren’t as concerned about what I thought about Ginny last time.”
            “Because your resentment was not the same,” Healer Brandeis said. “And it is not currently poisoning you, but only because you have given up, in some ways, on maintaining a close relationship to your Weasley family.”
            Harry drummed his fingers on his knee. He wanted to say that he hadn’t given up, that his friends would always be important to him, but it was true that he had let them drift away at least a little since he’d started spending more time with Draco and Scorpius. He had thought it was the best thing to do, to give Ron and Hermione in particular time to get used to Draco.
            But what about the rest of them? He hadn’t spent time with George and Molly and Arthur on a regular basis in…months at least. It felt like years, but Harry had been over to the Burrow. Just never when Ginny was there.
            “I don’t see how we can get back on a completely comfortable footing,” he muttered, barely aware that he was talking aloud. “I mean, not as long as they think I’m the one who wronged her.”
            “Have you told them the whole truth about the ending of your marriage?”
            Harry blinked and looked up at Healer Brandeis. He really had managed to forget her presence for a minute. “As much as wouldn’t make me look like the villain.”
            “And her?” Healer Brandeis cocked her head. “Or would this be another means to avoid forcing them to choose between you?”
            Harry blinked. “Well, yes. Maybe. I mean, I don’t know how much Ginny told them. It’s possible that they think we’re both to blame, just like I do. Just like I thought Ginny did,” he added. He had been surprised when she showed up at his announcement mostly because he’d thought she’d moved on, but also because he hadn’t known she thought of herself as a complete innocent and in the right.
            Bitterness stirred in the back of his throat. Harry swallowed and shifted his weight. Then he swallowed it again, forcing it back down. No, he hadn’t ever asked what Ginny had told Ron and Hermione.
            Maybe it was time to speak honestly. Maybe it was time to stop assuming that of course his friends would abandon him once he wasn’t their brother-in-law anymore, and just speak up about it directly.
            “There, that looks like a decision you’re happy to make,” said Healer Brandeis gently.
            Harry blinked, then grinned. Yes, he felt as though someone had picked up that large blue circle in Healer Brandeis’s symbolic representation and thrown it away into a corner, off his shoulders. He smiled at her. “Thanks.”
            “My job,” said Healer Brandeis, but the smile on her face said how much satisfaction she took in that job. “And next time you come, perhaps you’ll be happy to tell me about the other thing I can sense you holding back. The way that you coped for three years when you felt as if you had no family you could call your own and your friends couldn’t sympathize with you completely,” she added, when Harry raised his eyebrows at her.
            Harry flushed. “I haven’t told you because it’s childish,” he said. No denying that there had been a coping mechanism—not when Healer Brandeis was the one who had taught him to think that way.
            “More childish than thinking you never needed to deal with what your failed marriage was doing to your relationship to your friends?” Healer Brandeis’s voice was very gentle. “I haven’t thought that anything you told me was pathetic, Harry, if that’s what you’re afraid of. I never will. I think that you’ve been through immense difficulties and tragedies, and it’s not surprising that you needed something to lean on in the midst of that. I’m here to help you see that eventually, you don’t need to lean on much of anything at all.”
            Harry gave a choppy, uncertain nod. He couldn’t imagine not depending on Draco, at least a little, or not letting Scorpius soothe the void that had been left by imagining he couldn’t have children.
            Healer Brandeis sat with him in silence for a while, and then nodded and stood up. “When you’re ready, you’ll tell me,” she predicted. Then her voice softened. “In the meantime, think on what you’re going to tell your friends. I know that you don’t want to force them to choose, but like this, you’re drifting further and further from them and denying them much of a choice at all.”
            “Yes, I know,” Harry whispered. And it was hard not see it that way, now that she had pointed it out.
            He stood and hesitated, then reached out and gripped Healer Brandeis’s hand. She took his and shook it warmly.
            “Go and be at peace,” she said, and smiled at him. “Then come back and tell me all about it.”
            Harry did like having a Mind-Healer who could make him laugh at the end of his appointments.
*
            Draco paused and tilted his head at Harry. “Healer Brandeis is a skilled Healer and one of the best in her field,” he said.
            Harry played with the chocolate-covered strawberries that the house-elves had served them for pudding. Scorpius was currently building a tower of his, and seemed too thrilled about the unprecedented opportunity to play with his food to pay much attention to their conversation. “There’s a ‘but’ somewhere in there.”
            “But I don’t think you should confront the Weasleys,” said Draco. “You’ve done enough, and it’s up to them to reach out to you now.”
            He congratulated himself on the restraint of that little speech. For one thing, he hadn’t called any of the Weasleys names. He hadn’t said he thought they were idiots for choosing a sister who seemed to be as unpleasant to them and her own husband as she was to Harry over a patient and forgiving man like Harry. But Harry was shaking his head slowly. At least his eyes seemed to see Draco instead of a distant sight.
            “Healer Brandeis said that my friends probably think I’m just too occupied with my new life with you to pay attention to them,” he whispered. “I think that if they’re going to avoid me, or lose hold of me—or if I’m going to lose the Weasleys as my family—then it should be because of a conscious choice, a conversation, not because we just gave up on each other.”
            Draco grimaced. “I don’t know how I can stay with you to make sure that you get respected, and yet not make the situation more awkward than it should be with my mere presence.”
            “You shouldn’t be there at all,” said Harry, and now his eyes were glittering with his version of independence.
            Draco watched him patiently. Harry just watched him back with the same patience, even cupping his chin in his hands and forsaking the pretense of eating altogether. Draco finally sighed and said, “Fine. Suppose you tell me what your idea was about confronting Ex-Weasley. Were you going to invite her to the Manor?”
            “I was going to speak with Ron and Hermione,” Harry said. “Not her. And no. I think we ought to meet in a neutral setting. One of the little restaurants in Diagon Alley, or maybe Andromeda’s house.”
            Draco nodded slowly. “That would work. As long as we picked a middle-brow restaurant so that Weasley wouldn’t feel I was remarking on his lack of money.”
            Harry stared evenly at him. “Not that Ron is as poor as he was now that he’s making a good wage as an Auror,” he said, “but what implied to you I was going to let you come along and speak to them?”
            Draco winced, a sharp sensation like a repressed slap cutting across his mind. “Really, Harry,” he said. “How can we get them used to you having me and Scorpius as your family if you’re just going to avoid all contact between us?”
            “We’ll get them used to it,” Harry said. “Later. For now, I’m going to have Ron and Hermione leave their kids and siblings and parents elsewhere, and I’m going to meet them on my own, too. Just the three of us. That’s the best way to find out whether I’m going to have any chance with the rest of the Weasleys. If they can’t get over this feeling of utter loyalty to Ginny and helplessness in the face of whatever she wants to do, then I’ll know that Molly and George and the rest of them can’t, either.”
            Draco straightened up. “You mean to cut me out of this and leave things just as they were, don’t you?” he asked quietly.
            Harry blinked and stared at him. “What are you talking about? Of course you won’t be left out in the cold. I want to do this so they’ll accept you and Scorpius eventually. I know that right now, it wouldn’t be good for any of us if I pushed for too much. You would accidentally say something cold—”
            “Or on purpose,” Draco muttered, although that somewhat undercut his goal in speaking to Harry.
            “Or on purpose,” Harry said, with a quick, darting smile. “There’s too much history there, and it’s not the kind that can be overcome in a day.”
            Draco reached out to him and slowly slid his fingers against Harry’s wrist. “We overcame it, and there was a worse history between us.”
            Harry lifted his eyebrows. “Worse than the history of your blood feud with the Weasleys? Worse than the history that taught you had to be prejudiced against people like Hermione?” He leaned in, and his eyes were soft and searching. “You and I were on opposite sides of the war, but I always had the feeling that we had more of an individual hatred, without the family connections and blood purity nonsense.”
            Draco hesitated. He could remember despising Harry for being a half-blood, he was certain, even if he couldn’t call that exact memory to mind at the moment.
            “It’s all right,” said Harry, his eyes shining as he examined Draco. “I know that I didn’t behave the best, either, and we did manage to overcome it. I hope someday, you and Ron and Hermione can speak civilly to each other. I won’t ask for more.” His gaze slid to Scorpius, whose tower of strawberries had fallen. Scorpius was peeking at them apprehensively from under a strand of blond hair, waiting for his punishment. “But maybe, Scorpius can play with Rose and Hugo someday, side-by-side.”
            “Hugo,” Draco said, because he had to say something. “A ridiculous name. It sounds Muggle.”
            “Draco,” said Harry warningly, but when Draco looked at him innocently, he rolled his eyes and went on, “No one who names their kid Scorpius has any right to object to something like Hugo.”
            Draco would have said that Scorpius didn’t sound Muggle and that was its great virtue, but for now, he needed to talk to his son. He turned around in his chair and said calmly, “Scorpius, why shouldn’t you have done that?”
            “Um,” said Scorpius, and he looked at his hands, while he flushed and fidgeted and gripped the edge of the table harder than ever. “Because you said not to?”
            “That’s one part of it,” said Draco. “What’s the other part?” He could see Izzy peering in through the doorway of the dining room, but she obviously wasn’t going to come in until Draco gave permission. And Draco wanted to hear his son speak the obvious, wanting words.
            Scorpius bit his lip harder, and squinted. “Sorry?”
            “No,” said Draco gently, “the other part is that the house-elves will have to clean this up, and it’s going to take a while and make a mess.” He waved his wand, and the strawberries and chocolate vanished from the tablecloth, although he knew the house-elves would come and wash it anyway. “Unless I do it. But you need to think about what you can do before you do it, because there won’t always be spells and house-elves to take care of it.”
            Scorpius gave him an intensely questioning look. Draco nodded. “Yes. When you go to Hogwarts, for instance, if you make a mess with a potion in a cauldron, then you’ll have to clean it up. You won’t be able to use magic on it, and no house-elf is going to do it for you.”
            “Oh.” Scorpius seemed to waver between considering the lesson the right way, the way that Draco wanted him to, and considering that Hogwarts was still years away. Then he brightened a little. “But sometimes there will be spells and house-elves around, so I can do things like that?”
            Draco fought against the urge to shut his eyes. But Harry chuckled quietly behind him and tapped the back of his shoulder blade. “I think I can handle this,” he murmured quietly, for Draco’s ears alone.
            Draco hesitated, then moved his shoulders in response. Harry leaned forwards around him and said, “Sometimes, Scorpius, people might get tired of cleaning up your messes. That’s when you would really be in trouble, even if they didn’t punish you.”
            “Why?” Scorpius sounded as though escaping with no punishments was the kind of miracle he would happily pay for.
            “Because they might not clean up after you,” said Harry. “And the mess would be left there, stinking and smearing all over your hands, until you did something about it.”
            Draco held back his chuckle as he opened his eyes. Harry had hit just the right note. Scorpius liked creating messes, but they should also be gone before he next came back into the room, or he would throw a fit and act like he was about to faint. Scorpius’s face was all wrinkled up now, and he shook his head frantically back and forth. “I don’t want that to happen!”
            “Then stop creating so many messes,” said Harry, with all the appearance of earnestness, “and people won’t get as tired of cleaning them up as quickly.”
            “Yes, all right,” said Scorpius, with a sigh that made Draco smile, and he went back to eating the new portion of the strawberries that Izzy had placed in front of him.
            Draco leaned back towards Harry. Harry touched his shoulder once and breathed, “I can handle our family. Give me the chance to handle the people who used to be mine? And might be again.”
            Draco was silent. Then he nodded. He didn’t think he needed to express his fear, which was that Weasley and Granger would manage to take Harry from him. It probably wasn’t true, and even if they convinced Harry that Ex-Weasley wasn’t so bad, Draco had already threatened her.
            And he couldn’t see Harry turning his back on Draco and Scorpius, not now.
            Harry smiled and leaned in to kiss Draco on the lips. Scorpius, looking up from his plate, made a disgusted noise.
            “You shouldn’t kiss all the time,” he said. “Because someday no one will want to watch you!”
            He appeared somewhat offended when Draco and Harry both lost control of their laughter.
*
Severus1snape: Draco thinks so, too. ;)
SP777: Well, I’m still going to be out of a job in a few weeks, when my contract runs out. I’ll start looking for another one.
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