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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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Chapter Fifty—Letters Flying Through the Air
            “I don’t think that you should open it.”
            About to tear into the letter Molly’s owl had delivered to him, Harry paused and eyed Draco curiously. Draco was sitting up in bed, eating breakfast from the tray that Kreacher had brought them. Since they had slept in this morning, it seemed Kreacher had decided they were both sick, and he had simply carried an enormous amount of food up the stairs to them. More was waiting on the trays that hovered over to the sides, one on an end table, and the others hanging in midair.
            “I don’t think that Molly will have anything bad to say to me,” Harry said, rolling his eyes at Draco. He knew Draco didn’t have much of a reason to trust Weasleys, but on the other hand, this extreme distrust wasn’t something Harry had anticipated. “She knows what problems in the divorce were my fault and which Ginny’s, and as long as neither of us complain to her about it anymore, she won’t take either of our sides.” That was really the impression he had got, that Molly had only ever snapped at Ginny or recommended divorce to her because Ginny wouldn’t stop complaining.
            “But I recognize the handwriting on that envelope.” Draco leaned back against the pillows, his eyes on the letter as though he assumed it would explode in Harry’s hands. “And it’s from your wife.”
            Harry dropped the letter on the sheets, and then scowled as Draco snickered. “Bastard,” he muttered, bending down to pick it up. “Ex-wife, I’ll have you know. And she would have sent me a Howler if she had bad feelings to express.”
            Draco said nothing. Wondering if he had managed to silence him at last, Harry looked up.
            Draco was staring at him, jaw dropped. “You really think that,” he said. “After the debacle at her family’s party. You think that she couldn’t say cutting things in a low tone of voice.”
            “That wasn’t a low tone of voice that she used there,” said Harry, and opened the letter before Draco could argue with him further. Draco snatched his wand from the end table that held the one tray and performed a spell that would detect Dark magic. Harry ignored him. The fact that bright sparks formed around the envelope and fell away clear blue and green, an indication there were no Dark Arts present, was a small satisfaction.
            The letter inside was indeed from Ginny, but Harry wasn’t sure how Draco had recognized her handwriting. It was a match for his name scrawled on the envelope, small and round and crowded together, unlike the confident hand she usually used.
            Dear Harry, said the top of the letter, and then a long, blank stretch of parchment after that, as if Ginny wasn’t sure that she would get away with addressing him by his name. Harry scanned down the letter, aware that Draco was reading it over his shoulder. Of course he was.
            I hope this letter doesn’t come at a bad time. But I’m sitting here in front of the fire and thinking, and I’ve been thinking for a long time, and I think I know what Mum was talking about. Finally. She would say that, and maybe you would, too.
            “She forgot about the third person in the room,” Draco said, reaching out to put a hand on Harry’s shoulder. Harry rolled his eyes and told himself not to jump, even if it was a little creepy that Draco was keeping perfect pace with Harry’s own reading. Harry didn’t think that someone could Legilimize him through the back of his head.
            I wanted so badly for everything to be perfect. I saw Ron and Hermione’s marriage, and maybe I wanted to compete with Ron. We did all the time, you know, since we were the closest in age. We always wanted the last sweet, and we debated who Mum and Dad were going to buy a new wand for when we could only afford one, and I wanted Scabbers, but Mum said I wasn’t going to have him because a rat was too dirty a pet for a girl.
            Harry shuddered a little. He could only be grateful for Molly’s prejudices, right now. Scabbers would probably have tried to do things with Ginny that he never would have attempted with Ron.
            So I wanted to have a perfect marriage, too. Ron and Hermione were so in love, and I wanted to be like that. I thought we had to have passion all the time, and spend all our time together, or as much as we could. And we had to have smart and happy children like they had. I was so mortified when I realized that Jamie was stealing and our family wasn’t perfect.
            “It was hard for her,” Harry murmured, not thinking about his audience until Draco responded.
            “Then she should have done more to stop it, instead of sitting back and deciding that since her son was a genius, he was allowed to steal,” Draco said. He stuffed a little toast into his mouth, and refused to look away from Harry’s frown. “Aren’t you going to finish reading the rest of the letter?”
            Harry nodded and went back to it.
            I think that was when I started losing it, because I wanted our marriage to be so much like someone else’s. And Hermione always told me when Ron didn’t want to be with her, but it was always because of some stress in the Aurors. So when you said that you didn’t always want to be with me at the same time as Ron told Hermione that, that was all right. I could attribute it to the Aurors, and be fine.
            Then you started telling me that you were too tired during nights when I knew you didn’t have a stressful case. And I started thinking that you must have been doing something else that was—less stressful for you.
            Harry grimaced and rolled his eyes, not able to stop himself. He didn’t particularly want to read another letter filled with recriminations, even if Ginny knew now they weren’t true.
            “You don’t need to read it,” Draco whispered, reaching over Harry’s shoulder to touch the letter with one finger. “You could give it to me, and you wouldn’t ever have to know what I did with it.”
            Harry laughed in spite of himself, and leaned back against Draco’s warm chest. “I would do it, too,” he said. “Except that you might write a Howler to Ginny once you had it in your possession, and I don’t want that.”
            “What’s to prevent me from doing that, when I’m reading it over your shoulder?” Draco settled his chin comfortably near Harry’s collarbone. “I’m already in the mood to send her something. This way, you wouldn’t have to listen to the message I composed.”
            Harry only shook his head and turned back to reading. He knew Draco by now. If he persisted in refusing, then Draco wouldn’t persist in offering. He had too much respect for Harry’s wishes.
            Now I know that that wasn’t the only thing that could have happened. I think that we never had the perfect marriage. We cared about the kids, but not enough to spare them from our fighting. And we cared too much about our jobs. And we didn’t care enough about each other.
            Harry thought about that. If she had said that to him during one of their fights, he immediately would have objected and said that she was wrong, that of course he cared about her, that he would never have married someone he didn’t care about.
            But if it was mutual, and when Harry thought about how much time and effort and anxiety he had invested in the Aurors almost from the moment he joined the training program, and how much he had at least tried to invest in the kids from the moment they were born…
            Yeah, Ginny was right.
            “What is that expression on your face?” Draco asked, his chin digging in. “Does it mean that you’re going to forgive her? I don’t think I can stand it if you do that.” He reached down and gripped the edge of the parchment, trying to slide it, lightly and teasingly, out of Harry’s loose grasp.
            Harry promptly tightened his hold and rolled his eyes at Draco. “You need to stop trying to do subtle when your brain is affected by hormones,” he said, and read the last paragraph when Draco was still gasping at him in silent shock.
            So I’ve come to the conclusion that you never cheated on me. That would have been the easier explanation, because maybe then I would have divorced you years ago. But instead, I had to figure out what was happening, and we were both at fault, and we had to move on slower than we would have.
            She hadn’t signed her name right after the last paragraph, but down in a little cramped corner near the bottom of the letter. Harry raised his eyebrows and pondered the whole thing again.
            “I think you should let me give her a Howler.”
            Draco said it so peacefully, calmly and reasonably, that Harry almost nodded before he caught himself. Then he arched one eyebrow back at Draco and said, “Nice try. But it’s not going to happen that way.”
            Draco’s face rearranged itself in lines of deep disgust, and he lay back, shaking his head. “Why not? Don’t you see that she’s only waiting to involve you in her life again, and make you think you need to give her another chance?”
            “Tell me, how do you sleep with all the paranoia?”
            Draco turned his head and regarded Harry out of one heavy-lidded eye. “Tell me what you think she’s doing, if not that.”
            “I think she’s telling the truth.” Harry regarded the letter again. It didn’t have the accusations he had come to expect out of any conversation with Ginny, but then, that wasn’t so remarkable, when she had apparently gone away to think about things. But it didn’t have any humor, either, and it sounded as though she was fighting really hard to keep from just launching blame at him. She had said that their marriage had failed, but it was both their faults. That had been something he’d never thought he’d hear her say. “It had to have taken her some time to write this. And it was really careful. I think she probably took out all the words that could have made me upset and uncomfortable.”
            “Then where are they?” Draco reached out and flicked a finger disdainfully against the parchment, making it bang back and forth. “I don’t see a single blotched word on this letter.”
            “She probably made several copies,” Harry said, rolling his eyes at him. “I know that you don’t know her as well as I do, but Ginny’s a perfectionist in things like this. If she really did change her mind and decide she didn’t want to blame me, she would have thrown away every letter she tried to write that had a blotched word or something she had to cross out.”
            Draco shook his head. “You sound a bit too wistful for my tastes,” he said, rolling over so that his shoulder was to Harry.
            Harry blinked and turned towards him. “What do you mean by that?”
            “You sound wistful,” Draco repeated stubbornly. “And there’s the way you sit there and look at that bloody letter. You really think that she’s learned anything? That she’ll meet you halfway? Then you might go back to her. You look like you’re wishing you were still married to her.”
            And then he buried his head in the sheets and pulled a pillow over it, maybe to hide his own blushing face.
            Harry sat there, because he honestly wasn’t sure what to do with that, and then reached out and hesitantly touched Draco’s shoulder. Draco squared it so Harry’s hand dropped off and back into the blankets. Harry rolled his eyes a little and bent over Draco’s shoulder. “Come on, Draco. You’ve got to know that I won’t go back to her at this point. I don’t want to be married to her again.”
            “Then why are you looking at the letter that way?” Draco mumbled. Maybe because Harry was so close to him at the moment, he could make out the words easily.
            “Because I wish it could have been different for the kids’ sake,” Harry told him. “Lily said yesterday that she doesn’t like yelling. I didn’t know that. So I wish Ginny and I could have understood each other like this earlier, instead of fighting, so the kids could have had a more peaceful childhood and we could have had a more peaceful divorce.”
            Draco moved a little to the side. “But if she’d talked like that earlier, then you wouldn’t have wanted to divorce her. You would have thought she was nice and reasonable. You would have wanted to stay with her.”
            “If she’d talked like that earlier, then I would have realized sooner that we weren’t suited to each other. One reason I wanted to stay married was I thought Ginny loved me a lot more than I loved her by then.” Harry got tired of the pillow over Draco’s head and pulled it out of the way, reaching down to run a gentle hand through the soft, tangled blond hair sprawling over Draco’s neck. “If it would make her happy, then I was willing to stay in the marriage. I didn’t have anyone else I loved, anyone else I wanted to leave her for.” He paused. “Then.”
            Draco rolled over and squinted up at him. Harry was starting to wonder if he was the only one in this relationship who needed glasses. “You put a special emphasis on that word.”
            Harry nodded, and bent down until they rested nose-to-nose and Draco’s breath was fluttering soft and sour against his mouth. “Because I have someone I love now, someone who makes it so I would never want to go back to her.” He kissed Draco’s cheek. “Can you believe me on that? Or are you going to sulk and pretend to believe that it’s someone else?”
            A reluctant smile worked its way over Draco’s face. He kissed Harry hard enough on the mouth to dent his lips with his teeth, and pulled back, his gaze still so soft, so scattered, so insecure. “Then you’re going to stay with me.”
            “As long as you let me,” Harry said, his hands resting heavily on Draco’s shoulders. He thought about pushing down, imprisoning Draco against the bed, but hell, with the way he was lying over him, he was almost doing that already. “Beyond the end of you paying back Scorpius’s life-debt. Beyond forever.”
            Draco exhaled hard and wrapped his arms around Harry. “Because Scorpius will be thirteen in just a few days,” he whispered. “I didn’t know if you were thinking about that, and how I promised I would stay with you only until it was paid back, and…”
            “The only way I’ll leave is if you pushed me away,” Harry said, and grinned a little at the expression on Draco’s face. “What, did you think I would respect your boundaries? Gryffindors don’t respect Slytherin promises, I’ll have you know.” He kissed Draco on the side of the nose and rolled away, sitting up and shaking out his hair, running fussy fingers through it. “No, I’m just glad that this letter shows Ginny is coming around to my point of view, and that it’s better we’re separated—”
            He didn’t get to finish before another owl swooped into the bedroom, hooting softly and urgently, in that way owls from the Aurors were trained to do. Harry took the letter with a disgusted sigh. He thought it was probably another begging arrogant demand from Robards to come and sit in on an interrogation.
            But the writing on the envelope—which he was faster to recognize than Draco this time—was Ron’s. Harry found himself opening it and taking out the letter with some trepidation. It seemed that Ron had finally had the time to read the papers, or maybe just decide on what he was going to say.
            The letter said only, I don’t want to discuss this with you in a letter. We have to talk about it face-to-face. Come to the usual place at six tonight.
            No signature, but Ron must have known how familiar Harry was with his quill. Harry put it down and sighed, relieved. Even a firecall might have been a problem, and he didn’t want yelling to happen in any house with Lily in it.
            “The usual place?” Draco read the letter over his shoulder again this time, and spoke only when he seemed to realize that his disgruntled silence wasn’t getting Harry’s attention. “Where is that? A trap?”
            Harry shook his head. “That’s what Ron and I call the pub we usually drink at together.” He turned around and pinned Draco to the bed before he could retreat, grinning. The owl had already flown out of the room, a sign that Ron didn’t expect a reply, and Harry had a whole morning free. “What do you say we set up our own system of call and response?”
            Draco only looked puzzled until Harry lowered his mouth to Draco’s, and then Harry got as enthusiastic a reply as he could have wished.
*
SP777: Well, this was sort of that interlude, wasn’t it?
delia cerrano: Yes, probably.
Ciara_D: Well, good. I knew that Lily wasn’t hopeless, but I admit that I wasn’t presenting her that way at first. ;)
CareLessLover: Harry is less worried about Jamie, since he does seem to be responding pretty well to Draco’s insinuations about Potions masters.
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Marathon