lomonaaeren

Part Two.

Part One.

Title: A Godfather Like Him (3/6)
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairing: Background Lucius/Narcissa and mentions of Lily/James, otherwise gen
Content Notes: Major AU (Harry is Draco’s twin), not compliant with PoA, violence, angst, drama, family, discussion of canonical child abuse
Rating: PG-13
Wordcount: This part 3500
Summary: Sequel to “How Like Hatred” and “A Name Like Henry.” Harry comes home for the summer, and it really is a relief to be at Malfoy Manor with his parents and brother—at first. But then he finds out a secret that they’ve been keeping from him, and gets the news that Sirius Black has broken out of Azkaban. Plus he has to go a Mind-Healer. Harry isn’t sure which one is worst, frankly.
Author’s Notes: Make sure you read the first two stories in the series before this one. I’m posting this as part of my “From Samhain to the Solstice” fic series, and it should have between four and six chapters.

Thank you again for all the reviews!

Part Three

“So I was wondering if I could have Dobby as my personal elf.”

Mr. Malfoy choked on his tea.

The Malfoys had seemed hopeful when Harry came down to breakfast that morning. Mrs. Malfoy had beamed and given him a biscuit. Mr. Malfoy had given Harry several smiles over the top of his newspaper. Draco had scooted his chair over to sit exactly beside Harry’s and kept trying to make plans to fly with him.

Harry had smiled and answered them and eaten the biscuit. And now this.

“Why, Henry?” Mr. Malfoy asked, putting the paper down and giving Harry his full attention.

Part of Harry froze, remembering what happened when Uncle Vernon did that. But he forced it away, and reminded himself with a deep breath that this was the Malfoys, not the Dursleys. And Healer Letham had reminded him that if he wanted to get them to agree with him, he couldn’t treat them like they were evil or monsters.

“Because I think we would both be happier that way,” Harry said. “Dobby is really miserable, and I’m miserable because he’s miserable.”

“Dobby!” Mr. Malfoy called, without taking his eyes away from Harry’s face.

Dobby appeared, but immediately flung himself on the floor and lay there like a tossed-aside doll. Harry swallowed and didn’t say the angry things he wanted to say. They wouldn’t help. Sulking in his room for days hadn’t helped. He needed to do this for Dobby, not himself, the way Healer Letham had said.

“What have you been telling Henry?” Mr. Malfoy demanded.

Dobby started to tremble, but Harry intervened before he could say anything. “He isn’t to blame. I am. I asked him what the elf quarters were like, and he said they were cold and dark. And he said that you punish him by making him shut his ears and fingers in things. That—that reminds me of what I endured with the Muggles.” He ignored Mrs. Malfoy’s sharp gasp and the way Draco leaned against him for a minute, just staring at Mr. Malfoy. If he had to use this to get sympathy, then he would. It was less important than getting help for Dobby. “So I thought, if he served me, then he could be happy, and I would be happier.”

Mr. Malfoy, oddly, had something like a smile lingering around his lips. “You are trying to make this a bargain, Henry?”

Harry twitched. He hadn’t thought of it like that. And it made sense that Mr. Malfoy would be happy if he was. It was probably a sign that Harry was acting like a pureblood, or a Slytherin, or something.

But in the end, Harry swallowed and stared straight at Mr. Malfoy and said, “If I can.”

“One thing concerns me,” Mr. Malfoy said, his hand lingering for a second on the edge of the table before he glanced at Dobby. “If you feel sorry for all our elves, then will you demand that all of them be assigned to you? That is unsustainable.”

“No.” Harry folded his arms. “But you could cast some spells to make the quarters light and warm, couldn’t you? And you don’t have to order them to not shut their ears and fingers in the doors and things like that. They could serve you better if they weren’t in pain all the time. If they were happy.”

Mr. Malfoy stared at him. “We keep the quarters dark and cold because the elves like it that way.”

“Yes, Henry,” Draco added, squirming around on his chair as if he wanted to try and bring himself into Harry’s line of sight and break the staring contest he was having with Mr. Malfoy. “House-elves are just—different from us. They enjoy the dark because it lets them sleep better. And they like the cold because they have lower blood circulation than we do.”

Harry stared at him for a second, then at Dobby. Dobby had lifted his head and was looking at Harry with his tears once again quivering in the corners of his eyes.

“Dobby? Is that true? Do the other elves like the sleeping quarters?”

Dobby took a long, deep breath, and then he looked down and whispered, “No, Great Master Harry Potter. They not be liking it.”

“Do not call him that!”

Mr. Malfoy’s voice flicked like a whip, and Dobby wailed and buried his face in the carpet again. Harry glared at Mr. Malfoy. “I asked him to call me that. If you want to get angry at someone, get angry at me.”

“Have we made so unsuitable a home for you?” Mrs. Malfoy asked, and her voice was so pleading Harry glanced at her. She was holding a hand out to him, and her voice was soft and upset. Harry gulped. He didn’t even like seeing Aunt Petunia upset. He hated it more when it was his mother.

Except that it was still hard to feel like she was his mother, and Harry used that to push back the impulse to just immediately give in.

“No,” he whispered. “But I’m not used to it, and I know that you kept the house-elves away from me, and you punish them like the Dursleys punished me. Is it really so strange that I sympathize with them? That I want to keep them from being hurt?”

“That is not strange,” said Mr. Malfoy, his voice sounding a little strangled. “But when you ask to be called by that name, it makes us wonder if you wish to go back to them.”

“No!” Harry glared at him. “But at the time, I didn’t feel much like Henry Malfoy. And you still—you could do so much with magic, so easily. You could make the elf quarters better. You could cook your own food. You could clean up spilled tea. Why don’t you do it? Why do you abuse the elves and make them punish themselves?”

“They do like the dark and the cold,” Draco insisted. “That’s the way it is.”

“You just heard Dobby say they didn’t!”

Draco folded his arms and gave him a stubborn glare that Harry was sure echoed the one on his own face. “Well, we didn’t know.”

“Now, you do. So fix it.”

“Boys,” said Mr. Malfoy sternly. Harry turned back to him, while Draco gave a little huff and glared at his plate.

“I am not averse to making a bargain,” Mr. Malfoy said. “So. You want us to improve the elf quarters?”

Harry hesitated. This sounded like a trap. Then again, he reminded himself, quietly, that the Malfoys were not the Dursleys, and Mr. Malfoy wasn’t Dudley making what sounded like a good bargain so Harry wouldn’t get bullied, then coming back to bully him anyway.

“Yes. But I want to look at them and make sure that you actually did something good.”

Mr. Malfoy nodded. “In return, what do we get?”

Harry hesitated, rapping his fingers on the side of the table. He hated this. He wasn’t good at this. Yes, Healer Letham had suggested that he make bargains with the Malfoys if he could, but he hadn’t thought it would be this literal. He’d just thought it would be acting happier once he had Dobby as his personal elf, which wouldn’t have been difficult.

“I act happier?” he asked. He hated that it sounded like a question, but it was.

“You act happier, or you are happier?” Mr. Malfoy countered swiftly.

Harry scowled at him. He wasn’t as smart as they were. He wasn’t a Slytherin. He hadn’t grown up like this.

“I’ll try to be happier,” he said. “I will be happier that you aren’t abusing them anymore. But I can’t promise that I’ll be happy in exactly the way you want me to. I’m not a Slytherin. I don’t turn my emotions on and off like that.”

“Fair enough.” Mr. Malfoy nodded and then glanced to the side. Harry looked around, wondering if another elf had appeared.

But Mrs. Malfoy was still sitting there, and she straightened her shoulders and said, “We can stop scolding the elves when they make a mistake.”

“What about not telling them to punish themselves?”

“Is that rather what you would want instead?”

“Why not both of them at once?” Harry clenched his fists, but he did it under the table, although from the way Mrs. Malfoy focused on him, she might have noticed. “Why are you bargaining with me like this?”

Mrs. Malfoy sighed. “Because we have overrun the boundaries, I think. We have assumed that you would be exactly like the son we lost—our stories of the son we lost. You are not.” Harry eyed her suspiciously and wondered if she’d been talking to Healer Letham. “And you are assuming that we would be more like your Muggle captors. Neither assumption has worked. I think it would be more productive to lay out these boundaries and discuss them as bargains we’re making, artificial as it seems. It ensures that we know where we stand, and what barriers are still in the way.”

Harry nodded. All right, he understood that. And he would rather that they not go around telling lies to him about Dobby and evil plots in Hogwarts again. He turned to Dobby. “Dobby, if you had to pick, would you rather avoid being scolded or being told to punish yourself?”

Dobby lifted his head and let his eyes dart back and forth between Harry and the adults before he dropped his head again. But his voice was still audible. “Dobby and the other elves does not wants to punish themselveses. It hurts.”

“Very well,” said Mrs. Malfoy. “I ask that you continue your sessions with Healer Letham in return.”

“But I thought you would make me do that anyway.”

“I do not want to make you do anything,” Mrs. Malfoy said, so passionately that Harry stared at her. “I want you to be part of our family, Henry. I want to help you recover. I want to bring you home.”

“I’m here.”

“But only in body, not in mind or spirit. If we can have you here, then all other sacrifices are worth it and we will learn a new way.”

Harry bit back the words that said they shouldn’t have been abusing their house-elves anyway, if they were good people. That would just start another argument that he didn’t want to start at the moment. “All right. You don’t order the house-elves to punish themselves anymore, and I’ll continue the sessions with Healer Letham.”

“Done.” Mrs. Malfoy smiled at him in relief so radiant that Harry had to look down and fiddle with his silverware for a second.

“And what do I get?” Draco asked, sounding exactly as petulant as he had when complaining about all the things his father would hear about.

“Draco,” Mr. Malfoy began, his voice stern.

“No, wait,” Harry said, and turned to Draco. His brother still looked like he had something shoved up his bum, but he had looked that way so often that it wasn’t anything new. “I want to bargain so the house-elves don’t get scolded anymore.”

“Yes.” Draco nodded as if he was perfectly happy to agree to that, although Harry wondered how many times he had screamed at the house-elves in private. Then again, Harry had never seen the Malfoys interact with any elf but Dobby, so he didn’t know. “And in return, you stop telling them to call you Harry.”

Harry shrugged. “All right.”

Draco squinted at him. “Just like that?”

“It’s a small price to pay to make sure that the elves are safe.”

Draco looked as if he had swallowed a lemon. Harry grinned at him. He knew why. Draco probably thought that was the most Gryffindor sentiment he’d ever heard.

“I mean,” Draco went on in a dogged way, “it must matter a lot to you if you told them to call you that. And now you’re giving it up. Just like that?”

Harry sighed noisily and ran his hand down his face. His parents were watching him across the table. He tried again to think of them that way, his parents, before he looked at his brother.

“I was Harry Potter for twelve years,” he said. “It was hard to give that up, sure. And I was only sometimes Henry Malfoy at school, you know? Around you, and around the professors who called me Mr. Malfoy. My friends all called me Harry. I just—when I want to feel more like the person I thought I was, I think of myself as Harry. It’s hard to give your whole identity up and hear that you were someone else. What would you do if you found out that you were actually a Weasley?”

“But I’m not!”

“But what if you were?”

“But I’m not!” Draco turned to Mrs. Malfoy. “Mum, tell him I’m not a Weasley.”

“I believe that Henry is making a special point known as a hypothetical,” Mrs. Malfoy murmured, so dryly that Harry gaped at her. She didn’t speak like that to him

Because we’re different. And she knows that.

It was such an unexpected thought that Harry swallowed a gasp, and noticed Mr. Malfoy studying him for a second. But Harry only shook his head, and Mr. Malfoy went back to looking at Mrs. Malfoy and Draco, who was insisting in a low voice that he wasn’t a Weasley and getting it explained to him that Harry hadn’t thought he was a Malfoy, either.

Maybe they’re not exactly good people, Harry thought as he studied the Malfoys. Maybe it would be better if they changed on their own instead of me having to bargain with them for it. But they do want to treat me right. They’re not as awful as I thought, either.

That thought left him oddly able to breathe again, and when Draco finally got over his snit and glanced at him, Harry nodded at him. “So you don’t scold the elves anymore, and I tell them to call me Henry. Deal?”

“Deal,” Draco said fervently. “And also, you come and fly with me this afternoon.”

Harry rolled his eyes. “You don’t need to bargain with me for that.”

Draco’s mouth actually dropped open, and Harry blinked again. Draco had really thought he wouldn’t get what he wanted unless he asked for it as part of a deal.

“You’re such an idiot,” Harry said in awe.

“Henry! Do not call your brother an idiot.”

Harry put up with the scolding from Mrs. Malfoy, while he watched Draco from the corner of one eye and Dobby from the corner of another. Dobby had lifted his head from the carpet and was watching cautiously, although he ducked back whenever he apparently thought the Malfoys were glancing at him, too. But he gave a huge watery smile when he caught Harry’s eye.

Harry didn’t think it was fixing everything that had gone wrong. But it was a start.

*

“Father is acting strange,” Draco complained out of the corner of his mouth as they soared on their Nimbuses across the Quidditch pitch at the back of the gardens. It was probably the part of Malfoy Manor that Harry liked best, huge and green and surrounded with low trees and shrubs that were there to make more hiding places for the Snitch.

Harry just nodded. Mr. Malfoy had come out to watch them fly, which Draco said he didn’t do all the time. He was sitting in a conjured chair on the far side of the pitch, a glass of water on the arm of the chair and a stack of parchment in his lap. Apparently he answered letters from the Ministry on a regular basis and offered them “advice.”

Advice on evil, Harry had thought, from force of habit, but he didn’t know that for certain. And Mr. Malfoy had said they were trying to shift away from Voldemort.

For him.

It was a strange thought, and Harry got rid of it by pulling himself back in a flip that turned him head over broom bristles and made Draco yelp. Mr. Malfoy was also standing up, when Harry started flying forwards again and saw him, but Harry waved to him and he sat down, his face watchful.

“You’re mad,” Draco muttered to him, shoving at him with one hand.

It hadn’t been hard enough to knock him off his broom or anything like it, so Harry avoided it easily and snorted at him. “Draco, do not call your brother mad,” he intoned.

“You aren’t going to tell Mother, are you?”

“No. I’m making a special point called making fun of you, you git.”

Draco shoved him again for that, and then Harry pulled away and dived towards the ground. Draco chased him, laughing so hard that he sounded a lot younger than he was.

Than we are. Having Draco as a twin wasn’t the strangest part of the whole “being a Malfoy” thing for Harry, but it was still sometimes something that showed up in the corner of his mind and made him jump when he thought about it.

Harry pulled up out of the dive, and Draco followed, and then they were looping in and out among the trees and over the sides of the pitch and back. Draco kept laughing, and Harry glanced over his shoulder and grinned. This way, Draco was just a regular kid, one who was happy to be having fun with his brother.

And Harry was happy, too.

He dived again, and threw himself to the side so that he was skimming sideways above the grass. Draco flew overhead, shrieking about how Harry was mad and he would say that in front of Mother and he didn’t care.

Harry twisted out of the dive in time, and glanced to the side.

There was a huge black dog sitting on the edge of the pitch, staring up at him with eyes that seemed to shine unnaturally even from this far away.

Harry found himself shivering, even though the dog wasn’t doing anything threatening. Draco hovered beside him and stared around. “What is it? What are you—”

Then he saw the dog, and shrieked. “Father! It’s a Grim!”

Mr. Malfoy was immediately moving across the pitch, his wand snapping out. The spell he cast was a long one like a chain of blue lightning that Harry didn’t know, but luckily, it missed the dog, which hopped back and then turned and ran across the gardens. Harry flew down and towards Mr. Malfoy, landing in front of him and shaking as if he was scared, so that Mr. Malfoy couldn’t fire any more spells after Black.

“What’s a Grim?” he whispered, leaning against Mr. Malfoy for a second. Mr. Malfoy wrapped a protective arm around him. “Why was it here?”

“They’re magical dogs that some think of as death omens.” Mr. Malfoy’s voice was calm and reassuring. “I have never found any sign that they actually are, however.” He twisted a little and looked around as though waiting for something, and then Draco came running over. Mr. Malfoy embraced him, too, sighing.

“However,” Mr. Malfoy went on, “one of them should not have been able to cross the wards. I am going to strengthen them. And—I am afraid that I have bad news, Henry. It hasn’t been announced publicly, because the Ministry was hoping to capture him without causing a panic, but it will have to be tomorrow.”

“What?” Draco breathed the word. Harry found his breath stuck in his throat.

“Sirius Black has escaped from Azkaban.” Mr. Malfoy hugged Harry tighter, and probably did the same to Draco, too, but Harry couldn’t look up to see. “He has not been seen anywhere near the Ministry. They think his more likely goal, given all the newspaper articles about Harry Potter being discovered to be Henry Malfoy, is to find you. Perhaps to kidnap you again. We will be taking every precaution with your safety, Henry, be assured of that. But Black is still dangerous.”

Harry felt as though someone had stabbed him with a cold knife, even though he’d known perfectly well that Sirius Black was out of Azkaban. He cuddled closer to his father—he was his father, Harry wanted more now to get used to thinking of him that way—and glanced over his shoulder. He didn’t see a sign of the dog, the Grim. He hoped that that meant he was out of the gardens, and that Mr. Malfoy’s strengthening of the wards would mean Black couldn’t sneak back in.

Harry didn’t want Black to be hurt or killed. He didn’t even think that he wanted him to go back to Azkaban. From what Draco had told him about the Dementors, they sounded pretty awful.

But he also didn’t want to be kidnapped again. He probably would even have told the Malfoys about meeting Black before, except…

Things were so nice right now. He didn’t want them to get upset again.

From the way Mr. Malfoy kept his arm around both of them as he led them back to the house, Harry didn’t even think it was that bad. It wasn’t like there would be a chance for Sirius Black to get so close again.