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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.

Chapter List
- 6
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Chapter Seven—A Collection of Letters
            When the next letter came, Harry was lying in bed with his leg stretched in front of him and his arms strapped down. He knew he shouldn’t have scratched that hard at what had originally been a small sting, but how was he supposed to know that it would explode in his face and scatter evil-smelling goo everywhere?
            The letter was delivered by the same owl as before, but this time, Harry opened it a lot more eagerly. Someone else in the world knew who Ethan was, and found him convincing enough to respond to. Harry could feel his heartbeat picking up and the prick of sweat on his palms.
            Dear Ethan, it began, and Harry rested his head against the pillow and savored that beginning for a long second.
            Then, curious, he went to the signature, wondering if it would still be the single letter M, only to be confronted by the name Draco Malfoy.
            Harry sat there with his mouth hanging open a little, and then he tipped his head back and began to whoop in laughter.
            “Mate?” Ron was walking into his hospital room, carrying Rose. Each evening he or Hermione visited, usually with one of the kids in tow. Ron had been looking at Rose as if he expected her to climb out of his arms and go mad with every object in the room any second, but now, Harry was the one who got that stare. “Is something wrong?”
            Harry thought of trying to explain the joke, but that would mean explaining Ethan, and he thought he might see uncomfortable pity in Ron’s eyes. Probably not, but possibly, and it meant that he didn’t really want to tell the truth.
            “A strange fan letter,” he said, and shook his head, and put the letter underneath his pillow. “What’s my favorite girl doing here?” Hermione had brought Rose just yesterday, so it should have been Hugo’s turn.
            Rose laughed and held out her arms. “Hi, Uncle Harry! I maded a big cake.” And then she started telling him a story about a crocodile that Harry found it hard to follow, the way that most of Rose’s stories were. One had to just listen and enjoy the experience, as best as one could.
            For the first time since Rose had started talking, though, Harry listened to her with only half his attention. He really wanted to get away and continue reading that letter. He woke up only when Rose fell asleep abruptly on his shoulder, and Ron dragged a chair up to the foot of the bed and sat down with a significant look at Harry.
            “Yeah, what?” Harry asked, keeping his voice low because of the sleeping child he was holding. Maybe Ron would do the same thing, or at least refrain from yelling the way that he looked as if he’d like to do.
            “This is the second time you’ve wound up in hospital in two months, mate,” Ron began, and his voice was low in the way that Harry had last heard it when they were talking about Harry’s divorce from Ginny. “I have to wonder if you’re—depressed, or taking risks, because of that news we got.” He gave Harry another meaningful look that, this time, Harry had to admit he didn’t know how to read.
            “What news?” Harry rocked Rose as she sighed and shifted in her sleep, and felt a soft protectiveness rise up in his stomach. No, she would never be his blood daughter, but he would fight as hard to defend her as he would have for his blood children if it was still possible for him to have them. “No, really, just raising your eyebrows at me isn’t going to tell me what you mean.”
            Ron sighed hard enough to blow one of the potions vials on the table beside Harry’s bed back and forth. “That news about Ginny being pregnant.”
            “Oh!” said Harry, with a blankness that Ron didn’t find convincing, if the way his eyebrows rose was any indication. Harry shook his head. “Honestly, I wasn’t thinking about it. I can’t say that I’m completely happy for her, but at least I’m happy enough not to be an arsehole about it.” And even then, he thought, his lingering bad feelings came mostly from thinking that Michael Corner, Ginny’s new husband, was the man she had been planning to sleep with and have sire her children when she and Harry were still together.
            “Then why haven’t you been paying attention to things?” Ron demanded. “First a dragon kicks you because you stupidly get in the way, and now magically-created wasps? And always to your leg!”
            Harry rolled his eyes. “Because I was focused on other things instead. Like getting those kids away from the dragon, and the Killing Curse that that last insane idiot was shooting at my partner and best friend.”
            Ron at least had the sense to look abashed there. As he should, Harry thought, having stumbled into an ambush that he’d been deliberately left out of and ruining it. Harry loved Ron, a lot of the other Aurors in the Department liked working with him, but subtle he was not. “Fine. Then—then you’re going to be all right with seeing Ginny and her kid and Michael a few times at parties and holidays?”
            “It’ll take a while for me to be completely fine, but I won’t go up and start yelling at them,” said Harry. “Just don’t suggest that I be godfather to her kids or anything like that.”
            “You’re already godfather to three of them,” said Ron, and looked at Rose, still asleep against Harry’s neck although kicking and shifting her legs in a way that indicated she was probably ready to wake up and wreak havoc again. “I don’t think you’ll any more time for godfatherly duties if we give you another one!”
            “If you and Hermione have another one, it would be my honor,” Harry said, and caught Ron’s eyes for a moment, and made him be serious. “You know that.”
            Ron snorted and shook his head, almost hiding the flash of delight that danced through his eyes. “We appreciate that, but we’re not going to have another one, I’m pretty sure. Two has us stretched as it is.” He reached out and flicked a thumb softly against Rose’s heel. “So, when are you going to be battle-ready again?”
            The conversation drifted, and Harry allowed it to. But all the time, he thought of Malfoy’s letter under his pillow, and he probably paid a little less attention to the conversation and to Rose and Ron leaving than he otherwise would. He did listen to make sure their footsteps had faded before he took it out, though.
            Not because he feared what they would say about him hearing from Malfoy. It was Ethan’s existence he thought they would object to.
            Dear Ethan,
            I have to admit that I hesitated when I saw your name. I wasn’t sure that someone who wasn’t from a recognized pure-blood family could tell me the proper way to bring up a pure-blood heir.
            Harry scowled mildly. If the whole letter was like that, he would have to change the good opinion of Malfoy he was forming.
            But then I realized that I’m too desperate to refuse help. I read your letter and tried to apply the advice. It worked. Talking to Scorpius about things that his grandfather had done and letting him choose his dinner were small and simple things, but they made him happier than anything has made him since the divorce.
            Harry put a hand over his mouth. The mediwitches had shown an alarming tendency to burst into his room if he made any sound at all, apparently under the belief that he must be suffering from some kind of wound and there were lots of people who wanted to assassinate him. He had to muffle his snorts of incredulous laughter at the name.
            Scorpius Malfoy!
            After that had gone on for a while, Harry shook his head and continued reading. He supposed that some people would find the names he had chosen for Ethan’s children stupid, too, especially the middle ones, but at least he had never shown anyone else those names.
            It’s difficult. I’m having a certain degree of trust in you by revealing this, but now that I’ve written Scorpius’s name and I want more of your advice, it was inevitable in any case. And I want to know if you will continue to write once you know who I am. I would like to know what I can do to talk about the divorce to Scorpius in more detail. My wife and I parted because it bored us to be together. How does one explain that to a five-year-old?
            Then came the signature Draco Malfoy, done with the same sort of flowing grandeur that Harry had seen Malfoy use in school.
            Harry leaned back with his lip curling a little. They were bored? What a reason to abandon a marriage.
            But he wasn’t sure that trying to explain the story of his own divorce to Malfoy would go well, either. Malfoy would probably tell him to cast a Confundus Charm on Ginny and then take her into the Muggle world and have her artificially inseminated anyway.
            Why am I thinking about that? Malfoy’s never going to know that it’s me, anyway. He wouldn’t trust me, and I won’t betray my secret or Ginny’s. It’s Ethan he’s going to get to know.
            Luckily, the mediwitches didn’t think he was too weak to write letters or that they had to intercept and inspect them. Harry picked up the quill and parchment he needed, and called for ink. He was excited to write back, with Ethan’s emotions and not his own stirring in him. Ethan could see even Draco Malfoy as an object of compassion, and understand the reason for his marriage ending like that, because Ethan had a bigger heart than Harry dd.
            Dear Draco (I hope I can call you that?)….
*
            The question you asked is difficult. But if you’ve explained a few hard things to your son already, then this should come easier. One thing I would emphasize is that your wife and you didn’t divorce because of him, because she was bored of being his mother or you didn’t want to raise him anymore. That would be deadly, if he started believing that.
            Maybe build up to the subject gradually? Talk about your ex-wife, if you can bear to, and it sounds like you can. Show him photographs from the years you were together, and see if he asks about the expression on her face, if he can see the boredom for himself. If he doesn’t, then you might tell him the good things about his mum and encourage him to talk about her, too, and show how happy she is with her life now (I assume she is). It would probably help him to see that his parents are happy.
            Draco’s eyebrows rose, and he leaned back on the couch. This Ethan Starfall had better advice than Draco would have thought. It was an even chance that he only knew a few things about kids and had got the advice right in his first letter by lucky coincidence. Even then, Draco wasn’t sure how much someone who had never been divorced and apparently lived in a disgustingly happy marriage would be able to tell him about raising a son.
            A lot, it seemed.
            We had to do this with our daughter, recently. She had been getting more and more unhappy, and we honestly didn’t know why. She gets most everything she wants (I’m willing to admit that we’re more relaxed with her than the others, since she’s younger and by the time we had her we both knew that we hadn’t made any horrible mistakes with the older two). But it didn’t seem to content her the way it had. Her mother talked to her, thinking it might be something more common to girls than boys, but it wasn’t that.
            It turned out that she’d seen how we were getting unhappy with some of her behavior in shops. She used to ask for things, and we’d buy them for her without hesitation. But as she’s got older, she wants more expensive toys, ones that we don’t think she needs. So we buy them for her, but I reckon we were pausing more often and acting more unhappy about it.
            We didn’t even know we were doing it. We didn’t know she’d noticed. So we talked about it, and she agreed to ask a little less and not throw tantrums when she didn’t get something she wanted. Not that she ever had thrown many, but those were so bad that Anne and I were holding back and flinching and not wanting to refuse to by her something in case she had one.
            We were both being dishonest with each other, without realizing it. And it took some time to work out what was going on, because Lily can’t be as articulate with us as I can be for her, of course! But then it was there, and we’ll all been happier since.
            So maybe try that with your son. Emphasize your own happiness, and hers, and he’s more likely to settle down and grow up comfortable. And emphasize that he was in no way the cause of the divorce.
            Yours,
            Ethan.
            Draco laid the letter down and looked towards the corridor that led to Scorpius’s wing. The letter had come early enough that he wasn’t up yet, and Draco was having a small breakfast of scones and tea. He turned back to the fireplace and tore up a scone absentmindedly, his mind alive with all sorts of thoughts.
            They already had done their best to reassure Scorpius that he was beloved, and safe, and happy. That they were happy, maybe, Draco corrected himself a second later. He had to admit that when he was Scorpius’s age, he wouldn’t have taken reassurance that he really was happy when he knew himself not to be at all well.
            Ethan had a daughter named Lily. Two older sons. A blissful marriage. Draco wouldn’t say that he envied him, not exactly, not when Ethan was Muggleborn and Draco wasn’t, but at least he had an interesting life, and not a disrupted one.
            And at least this gave him a legitimate reason to firecall Astoria. She would be awake. She said that she found the nights and the early mornings the best time for working on fruitful projects, while she slept during the lazy light of afternoon.
            Draco cast some Floo powder in and called, “General Morgana’s office!” Astoria was calling her company General Morgana, after one of the most powerful witches in legend, who had influenced the political destiny of England. It was a testament to the impact that she intended her inventions to have on the wizarding world.
            It took some doing before the faces of Astoria’s subordinates disappeared from the fireplace and Astoria herself appeared. She curled her lip a little when she saw him, the sure sign that he had interrupted her in the middle of one of her projects. “Yes?” she asked curtly.
            Draco sighed, and tried to control the paralyzing ennui that was creeping over him merely from looking at Astoria. It had gone from being bored dancing with her and sleeping with her, to being bored when she talked about the things she wanted to invent, to being bored by the sight of her. That probably wasn’t healthy, but then again, he wasn’t sure he cared.
            “I know that you want to help me raise Scorpius the way we should,” he said. “Well, lately he’s been acting like a brat.”
            Astoria’s lip uncurled. “How?” Even though Scorpius didn’t bear her last name, she would take any transgressions against the pure-blood image Draco was raising him in seriously. And she would know that Draco didn’t use the word “brat” lightly.
            “Throwing things against the wall. Screaming when he doesn’t get his way. Trying to tear down his curtains. He even refused to have dinner with Blaise.” Draco eyed her, and made sure that she was still listening instead of opening her mouth to comment on the way that Draco was raising their son. She looked calm. Good. “I find an adviser who told me that Scorpius is taking the divorce badly, and that we need to emphasize that we’re happier this way and he wasn’t the cause.”
            Astoria considered that as deeply as she had considered Draco’s plan for them to divorce, at least if the way her hand rose to touch her head was any indication. Then she nodded. “I can visit to help you with that. Or I can bring Scorpius here if you think that would work.”
            “It’s better if you come here.” On Scorpius’s last visit to General Morgana’s offices, he had talked about the inventions, but not about any time spent with his mum. Draco knew Astoria could get more involved in her work than Scorpius’s life, pretty easily, but that was the opposite of what they should be trying to do right now.
            “Very well,” Astoria murmured, her voice going clipped. “I’ll be by this afternoon, then.”
            “No,” Draco said, strongly enough that Astoria stopped and stared at him. “I don’t want you showing up in the middle of what should be your naptime and giving less than your full attention to Scorpius because of that. Come tonight. Better later than not focused on him.”
            For a second, he thought Astoria was going to challenge his characterization of her, but then she tipped her head to the side. “Very well. I’ll see you at perhaps eight tonight?”
            “That will work,” Draco told her. Normally, Scorpius would be on the verge of going to bed by then, but Draco would relax the restrictions so he could spend time with his mum.
            Astoria disappeared from the fireplace, and Draco stretched and sighed and stood up. He had a lot to do before he could fully apply all of Ethan’s advice, and making the rooms Astoria would stay in comfortable for her was only part of it.
            “Daddy?”
            Draco blinked and turned rapidly. Scorpius stood in the doorway of the library behind him, his thumb in his mouth again. Draco controlled his automatic irritation at the sight, and nodded. “Yes, Scorpius, what is it?”
            “Is Mummy coming because she wants to?”
            Caught off-guard, Draco said the first thing that came to mind. “She’s coming for you.”
            Scorpius’s eyes widened. Draco wondered what he was thinking. In the old days, before Astoria departed, he used to think that he understood his son well, far better than most of the pure-blood parents trying to raise their children formally understood them. But now he thought that he must only have understood the simple things, the childish things on the surface of Scorpius’s mind.
            “I can stay here?” Scorpius whispered.
            “Oh, yes,” Draco said, and knelt down and reached out his arms. Scorpius came a few steps towards him, and then stopped and looked at his face. Draco remembered the time when Scorpius would have rushed forwards, but if he had to sacrifice a shallow understanding for a deeper one, that was what he would do. He forced himself not to simply drop his hands. “She’s coming to visit you, to show you that she’s happy.”
            “Happy?” Scorpius popped his thumb back into his mouth.
            “Scorpius,” Draco said, flinching as he did, because speaking this openly felt like peeling back a layer that had protected him from the outside world. “We didn’t divorce because of you. Both of us want you to be happy, you know. We’re happier now. We thought you would be, too.”
            Scorpius again stood there, saying nothing. Draco held his arms out until they started to tremble, with no notion if he was making the right decision or not. He had never felt so vulnerable.
            Finally, Scorpius wandered forwards and leaned his head on Draco’s shoulder. Draco let out a cautious breath and reached for him, moving slowly so that Scorpius could get away if he wanted to. But it seemed he didn’t want to, and Draco finally held him and cradled him, almost rocking him. Scorpius sighed and said, “Sometimes I’m happy.” It sounded like one of those simple facts Draco had thought he knew about his son.
            Draco was determined not to take those simple facts for granted this time. “I want you to be happy all the time,” he said. “Can you tell me when you’re not?”
            Silence, until he thought that he would be relegated to asking every hour. Then Scorpius’s head moved against his in the barest of nods.
            Draco leaned back against the fireplace and sat there holding his son until both their stomachs rumbled. It was the most precious, uninterrupted time he had had with Scorpius in months, and by the end, he didn’t even care how silly he probably looked.
*
            Dear Ethan,
            You were right about working with my son to show him that we were happier than he’d realized. I don’t think that he was as happy as I assumed, but if he’s growing towards that now, then I’m content.
            My ex-wife came for a visit tonight. She lives in France and works there, but she agreed to sacrifice some of her time to make the Floo journey. If you knew her, you would realize that is a sacrifice, although I suppose it doesn’t sound like it to someone with as happy a marriage as you have. She was able to tell Scorpius that she didn’t stop being his mum, which was something I hadn’t even realized he was worried about.
            Scorpius is behaving a little better. He still screamed when I asked him to clean up his room, but he ate a lunch he didn’t choose, and he went to bed right after his mother spoke with him. I think this might work. I can’t believe that you were able to offer me such good advice—someone my owl went to on a chance. And I think that this might be harder when I start training Scorpius more the way a pure-blood heir should be trained, because those ways aren’t the same as Muggle or Muggleborn ideals. But for now, I have to thank you.
            The best way of thanking you, to me, would be explained if we could meet. Do you live closer to London or to Hogsmeade?
            Sincerely,
            Draco Malfoy.
            Harry snorted at the last words and shook his head. Malfoy was getting a little pushy, wasn’t he? He didn’t even know if Ethan was someone he’d be partial to in person, and he wanted to meet him?
            It was impossible, of course. Harry had never developed a glamour that would allow him to pass as Ethan Starfall, and he never would. It would be dishonest. He supposed that writing letters to Malfoy could be seen as dishonest, too, but at least the advice was real, and helping. Otherwise, Ethan was going to stay in the pages of his journal, Harry’s private game and pretense. If Malfoy got too insistent, then Ethan would just melt away. It wasn’t as though Harry had left any trace of his existence in the wizarding world, not when he hadn’t ever mentioned Ethan to the outside world before.
            He picked up a piece of parchment and began to write.
            Dear Draco,
            I’m very glad that your son is learning that you do love him and care about his happiness, and that his mother does, too. I can’t even imagine what it would be like to be a child going through the pains of divorce, but I know he needs you.
I don’t think meeting would be a good idea for a number of reasons…
*
Marron: Thanks! Yeah, Teddy’s a good kid, and he loves Harry a lot.
delia cerrano: No, there’s not going to be a cure. But Harry does have a very fulfilling life with his friends and their kids.
moodysavage: Thank you!
Jester: Well, not all Harry’s suggestions will work (and not all of Draco’s, either), but enough to keep them writing.
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Starfall