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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 Six—Learning to Say No

            Harry tore open the letter from Al when it arrived. He had written to him not long after that little speech Malfoy had made him, which sounded less convincing and less hypnotic when Malfoy went to the loo. How could someone from the outside, who relieved himself and drank tea and had to deal with his family like any other mortal, understand the tangle that enveloped Harry and his children?

            He couldn’t. It was that simple. He might try, but he knew even less than Harry did about the tempers of his children—witness the insulting comments he had made about Lily—and that meant this effort was doomed to failure, another thing Harry had tried to do that would end up disappointing the people he loved most in the world.

            But Al had written back at once, which meant that Harry’s letter must have arrived before he went to bed. His writing sprawled so much it was hard to read. Harry squinted and tilted the parchment into the light.

            Dear Dad,

            I think it’s a brilliant thing that Mr. Malfoy chose to pay back the life-debt that way! Scorpius needs to be free of it when he has his thirteenth birthday, and that’s only a few weeks away, you know. So it’s important.

            Al.

            Harry sighed and lowered the letter to the table again. So this letter left him in the same position as before. He had to allow Malfoy to help him for Al’s sake, but avoid getting Lily mad at him at the same time.

            “Have you eaten anything since you awoke?”

            Harry started and looked up. Malfoy was back from his second trip to the bathroom in four hours, sitting down on the other side of the table again. Harry grimaced and shook his head. It was eleven now, he’d woken at seven and written to Al not long after his strange conversation with Malfoy, and he’d spent the rest of the time listening to Malfoy tell him about things that needed to happen.

            “That’s one thing that needs to change,” Malfoy said, in the same calm, unscathed voice that he had used to talk about all the other things in Harry’s life that needed to change, too. “The lack of care you take of yourself. You’d had, what, perhaps two hours of sleep this morning when I called? Because you’d dealt with Auror crises, and then a crisis with your son at Hogwarts. It’s ridiculous that you expected to Transfigure your sofa and then sleep next to your Floo.”

            “Listen,” Harry said, leaning forwards, “I always get enough sleep and food in the end. That’s not something you need to worry about.”

            Malfoy turned around in his chair, face so solemn that Harry had no idea what spell he was casting as he flicked his wand. The doors of Harry’s cabinets and cupboards fell open. Harry glanced at them, frowning. He didn’t think even Malfoy could disapprove of his neatness. All the contents were neatly organized.

            “What?” he added, when he realized the flat way Malfoy was staring at him.

            “You have almost no food here,” Malfoy said. “Yes, you get enough sleep and food in the end. But how often have you picked up very few supplies because you were Apparating or Flooing in a haze of weariness, and you simply forgot?”

            Harry flushed. “I’m not always tired when I go to the shops,” he said, because he had to, the same way a bird would protest and flutter with a big snake staring at it. “Last time, I just didn’t pick up much because I was afraid that I wouldn’t be here when Lily got here.”

            “And not earning her disapproval is the center of your existence.” Malfoy watched him with eyes like a basking lizard’s this time. Harry wondered why in the world he was bothering to make a difference in his mind between lizards and snakes when it came to Malfoy’s eyes, and then why he was looking at him at all, and turned determinedly back to his tea. “Strange that you’re so bad at it, with so much practice.”

            Harry snarled and leaned forwards. “I’ve told you before to shut up.”

            Malfoy shook his head a little. “Why should I? These are the truths that you need to hear. What is it about your daughter that puzzles you?”

            Harry hesitated, then said, “I don’t listen to her often enough. She wanted one kind of broom for her birthday, and I got her a different one. I know the divorce has been hard on her, and she feels that I don’t pay enough attention to her. I’m always rushing off on a case when I’ve promised a day to her.”

            Malfoy nodded and wrote something down on that damnable scroll that was covered with God knew how many scratches at this point. “Then part of what you need to do, to please her, is to learn to say no to your bosses.”

            Harry cleared his throat. “But they put me on kidnapping and murder cases. This last one is especially bad. If I—if I stay home, how do I know that someone wouldn’t die that I could save?”

            Malfoy looked at him in silence. Then he stood up and moved to the open cupboard on the wall opposite. Harry watched with a beating heart, wondering if he had found the combination of words that would drive Malfoy away at last, and how he had managed it.

            And if he really wanted Malfoy to leave.

            Malfoy reached into the back of the cupboard and twisted his hand to the side. With it came a shadow, and then a door swung open and Harry realized one of his cupboards now had a false back.

            He sprang to his feet. “What the hell did you have your house-elves do to my house?”

            Malfoy ignored him serenely, turning around with a squat, golden-colored bottle in his hand. Harry thought it was a potion, and started to open his mouth to tell him that trusting Malfoy to teach him to say no was one thing, trusting him enough to swallow a potion he’d made was quite another.

            But Malfoy opened the top of the bottle and waved it around, and the smoke funneling out of it coalesced into a meal on the table that made Harry’s mouth water. The nearest plates held thick sandwiches that dripped with lettuce and meat and cheese. The ones further back held tumbling masses of pudding and treacle tart and potatoes that looked as if they were ready to burst out of their skins with butter. And there was a glass of pumpkin juice at his elbow.

            “Eat,” Malfoy said, sitting down. “This is a little trick that I usually save for myself when I’ve had a hard day, but I don’t think you’ve had anything to eat all day, and it’s affecting your brain. As evidenced by the idiotic arguments you’re making.”

            “I did so,” Harry muttered as he picked up a sandwich. He nearly passed out from the first taste of ripe tomato he got, but managed to scowl at Malfoy around his munching. “I had tea.”

            “That’s so nourishing,” Malfoy said, with a flatness that Harry could grow to hate. He turned to his list. “And if you’re worried about the modifications that my elves have made to the house, I suggest that you not go into my bedroom.”

            Harry munched, and scowled.

            “You needed food in your stomach to understand what I have to say to you.” Malfoy leaned forwards so slowly that it looked as though his chin would touch the table before he spoke again. But in the end, he was just staring, very directly, into Harry’s eyes, and Harry was biting his lower lip to keep from gaping.

            “It is not your fault if someone random dies because you weren’t there,” Malfoy said. “I can think of circumstances where it would be if it wasn’t someone random, particularly for an Auror. If you abandoned your assigned partner and ran away because you had a good lead, and your partner died because you weren’t there to protect them, then yes, it would be. Or if you promised a witness protection and then didn’t meet them at the time and place you specified. But how can you be responsible for children who died because of a kidnapping or murder that you didn’t prevent? That’s ridiculous. Your absence removes you from responsibility.”

            “But I’m good with kidnapping cases,” Harry said, and realized to his astonishment that he sounded like he was pleading. “I can usually solve them, and get the kidnapped person back, before anyone gets hurt.”

            “Usually,” Malfoy said, picking the word up with the delicacy he would a crushed Potions ingredient. “That doesn’t mean it always happens, does it?”

            Harry shook his head reluctantly. “Sometimes they come back hurt. Sometimes the kidnappers die before they can tell us where they took their victim. Sometimes we don’t even find a body.”

            Malfoy nodded. “Then the first part of your statement was accurate. You are good with kidnapping cases, and it makes sense that your superiors would want you on them. It makes no sense to blame yourself for the ones that you can’t work, either because you were assigned elsewhere or because you have a normal life like everyone else.”

            Harry swallowed slowly. The words made more sense, said in that dry, detached tone, than they ever had when Ron or Hermione had said them.

            But then he remembered something else, something Malfoy had failed to account for, and his stomach squirmed with a mixture of triumph and guilt.

            “You think only someone like me would blame me?” he asked, and took another bite of his sandwich.

            “Yes,” Malfoy said.

            So much certainty, and so wrong. Harry rolled his eyes at him. “But the others think the same thing. The other Aurors, I mean,” he added, when Malfoy closed his eyes as though Harry’s lack of precision in language hurt him. “When I haven’t been there, they tell me about the people who were hurt because I wasn’t there.”

            “Then they’re fools as well,” Malfoy said unhesitatingly. “Why don’t they blame the people who were there and presumably missed connections and clues?”

            Harry paused. Then he said, “Well, they do. I mean, there’s always lectures about how we could do better, and we break every failed case down and talk in detail about what went wrong and how to avoid it in the future.”

            “But how many other Aurors get personal lectures?” Malfoy still had his eyes closed, but now they seemed to share the thin smile that his mouth wore. “How many of them get told it was their fault for sleeping in or playing with their children, that someone else didn’t get rescued?”

            “Most people didn’t say that to me,” Harry said.

            “Then I’m a loss to know why you think they blame you.” Malfoy was examining him with nonchalant interest, eyes open now, hand cupping his chin.

            “The looks,” Harry said. “And conversations that I’m not supposed to overhear. Well, all right, I’m supposed to overhear part of them,” he added, as Malfoy’s eyebrows rose. Even Harry had to admit that he wasn’t all that practiced in the stealth that was necessary to real eavesdropping. “And people telling me when they hand me case files that they hope this time, everyone gets to come home safe.” He shrugged. Now that he came to tell someone else, it sounded thin, and maybe Malfoy would tell him that what he really needed to learn how to do was stop attributing motives to people that they didn’t have.

            But Malfoy had sat up like a serpent coiling to strike, and he looked at Harry for a long second before he inclined his head. “I understand,” he said, words bright, sparking. “You need not explain further.”

            “Er, all right?” Harry took another bite of sandwich, and had to admit Malfoy had been right about something else. He was starving. “I just don’t really see what you can do to stop something so diffuse.”

            “Stop yielding to everyone,” Malfoy said. “They think that they can impose on you and play on your guilt and you don’t mind it because you never object. The same way that your children don’t realize that you hate some of the things they do because you never say so. And how silent did you stay on the subject of your job and what the people there were doing to you with your wife? Did she ever know that you wanted to spend more time at home but felt compelled to go back because your colleagues would blame you if you didn’t?”

            Harry’s mouth hung open. Malfoy sniffed and gestured for him to close it. “If I wanted to see chewed-up cheese and meat,” he said, “I would watch Scorpius while he eats.”

            Harry lowered the sandwich to his plate. Then he said, “You’re implying—that my marriage ended because I don’t know how to stand up for myself.”

            Malfoy shrugged. Even that motion seemed to have as much elegance and coldness as it could, given that it was a shrug. “You only told me one thing about how your marriage ended. This is the extrapolation I made from that. I’m sure that the ending of your marriage was more complex than that, and there were other factors involved that I know nothing about.”

            “Why did yours end?”

            Malfoy’s eyes were as cold as winter rain, with no transition between one state and the other. “From factors that you know nothing about.”

            Harry held up a hand. “Okay, okay. Forget I asked.”

            Malfoy sniffed once, and folded his hands in front of him. “The next time that someone wants you to come in and work extra hours on a case, or makes an exception for another Auror and not for you, call them to task. We can rehearse a speech if you like.”

            “The other Aurors don’t get special treatment,” Harry snapped back. “Maybe I get extra work, but we all work hard. They don’t get holidays because I take over their cases.”

            Malfoy smiled. “Really? So there’s never been a plea that someone needs to stay home because they’re sick, or they have a sick relative they need to take care of, or they have a child’s birthday to celebrate?”

            Harry scoffed, feeling good that he could do that, and honestly. “Of course there has. What are you, mental? Aurors have normal lives like anyone else. I believe that was part of the point you were making,” he said, and tried to imitate the poncey cadences of Malfoy’s speech.

            “And do you get the time off to care for your sick family members?” Malfoy asked. “Or to celebrate your children’s birthdays?”

            Harry felt his face flame, remembering the bell-call that had interrupted Lily’s birthday party. “That was different,” he muttered. “The last time I got one of those, it was an escape. I really didn’t want to be there.”

            “And the one before that?” Malfoy could smile while he was cutting someone’s throat, Harry thought, and probably had. “And the one before that? Has no one ever taken a holiday because they were slightly sick, or just lazy, and made you bear the burden?”

            Harry stared down at his sandwich.

            “I don’t ask these questions for my health.” Malfoy spoke with a sufficient force to have cracked the tiny porcelain cup, Harry thought, if it had been on the table. “I would like an answer.”

            Harry lifted his head and shook it. “I don’t know,” he whispered. “I couldn’t prove anything. There were a few times I thought someone was taking advantage of me, but what was more important? Me accusing them and causing dissension in the Department, or going in and saving the innocent people who needed me?”

            “The answer,” Malfoy said, “is always, always, spending more time with your family.”

            Harry flung his hands up. His eyes were burning and his joints felt as though they were full of poison on fire. “Fine. I give up. You have me. What do you want me to do about it, Malfoy? I destroyed my own marriage. I’m weak and give in too much, because I value other children above my children. You have my confession. Are you going to go away now? Am I too weak to help?”

            Malfoy regarded him in silence. Then he said, “Are the rumors true? That you went to death in the Forbidden Forest?”

            Harry stared at him. Then he said, “You know they aren’t. You should know better than anyone, since it was your mother who lied to Voldemort about me being dead.”

            “Don’t be obtuse.” Now that clear poison seemed to be on fire in Malfoy’s eyes. “I meant, did you march into the Forbidden Forest thinking you were going to die? Or did you know that the Killing Curse would only slay part of the Dark Lord, and spare you?”

            Harry took a swallow of air, long and slow. He couldn’t imagine why Malfoy wanted to discuss this, but at least it was an old, healed wound, instead of the new ones that Malfoy had insisted on tearing open.

            “I didn’t know,” he said at last. “I might have hoped, but I thought I was going to die.” He thought about mentioning the Resurrection Stone, but there were secrets he had to keep safe for the sake of the whole world.

            Still.

            “Then you were prepared to sacrifice your life once before,” Malfoy said calmly. “For the sake of people you loved, sure, but also people you didn’t know, and some you quite despised.” He stood up and came around the table. Harry found himself watching Malfoy from a sitting position, not wanting to rise to his feet even though it technically put him in a position of less power, to be seated while Malfoy stood.

            Malfoy rested his hand on Harry’s shoulder and squeezed. Harry leaned into the touch without meaning to. He just couldn’t remember the last time someone had done it.

            “Don’t let anyone tell you that you’re selfish because you want to spend time with your family instead of running off to spare another Auror from doing their job,” Malfoy said, his words deep and patient, pressing into Harry like a brand. “You’re not. There’s no one else I know of who made that sacrifice for so many people.”

            Harry rested a hand on his chest. His heart hadn’t stopped, but it felt like something else had.

            An ache, perhaps. An old wound.

*

            delia cerrano: He is sensitive. And Harry is going to probe more and more at that wound as time goes on.

            Easyreader: It’s starting to show him that with his bosses, although it will take him longer for the children.

            SP777: It’s going to be an intense relationship, rather than one that builds and builds. With the time limit, it has to be.
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Marathon