[From Samhain to the Solstice]: A Godfather Like Him, gen, Malfoys series, 6/6, PG-13

[lomonaaeren]

Part Five.

Part One.

Title: A Godfather Like Him (6/6)
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 4500
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! This is the end of this particular part, but the story will continue with another part in my next round of seasonal stories.

Part Six

“Um, I can’t invite you in,” Harry said, looking back over his shoulder. To his relief, Draco was still asleep. “But I can get you something to eat?” Black in human form didn’t look much less starved than his dog form had been.

Black sighed and nodded. “I’d appreciate that. Thank you, Harry.”

Harry went over to the tray of food that Dobby had delivered earlier that day. He had apparently decided that Harry—and Draco—would eat more if he left it to sit than if he took it away again immediately. Harry still had a bowl of soup under a permanent Warming Charm and half a sandwich left. He scooped them up and carried them over to the windowsill, while Black watched him, not moving, then set it down and retreated.

“Oh. Sorry. I didn’t bring you a spoon—”

Black scooped up the bowl and began to drink straight from it, tilting his head back as he slurped. Harry jumped, but, well, he was probably used to drinking that way as a dog, and Harry supposed he couldn’t get too upset about it.

He stayed still and watched Black carefully until Black had drained the soup bowl and eaten the sandwich. Then he settled back with another sigh. “What do you want me to tell you about?”

Harry wavered between the two options for a second, and then chose the one he wanted to avoid less. “What do you mean by saying that you didn’t betray the Potters to Voldemort?”

Black flinched at the name, which maybe was a point in his favor. Surely he’d be used to hearing it if he was a Death Eater? But he looked at Harry with wide, pleading eyes. “They were your parents. Why do you call them the Potters?”

Shit. So this led straight back to the subject Harry hadn’t wanted to talk about after all. He took a deep breath. “Because they weren’t my parents. I know they loved me and they died for me, but they—they went along with you kidnapping me. They didn’t give birth to me.”

“So?” Black uttered a shrill, barking laugh that made Harry glance uneasily over his shoulder again, but then he remembered that Draco had asked Dobby to put up some charms around the bed. He claimed Harry’s snores were so loud that he couldn’t sleep. He probably wouldn’t wake up for this, either.

“I had a horrible family,” Black continued in a slightly quieter voice. “My father just didn’t care, except when it came to wanting me to live up to his ‘proper example.’ My mother was a harridan who tortured us while she tried to make us learn Dark Arts.”

“Us?”

“I had a younger brother. Regulus.” Black’s face was closed-off. “In Slytherin, like all the rest of my wonderful family. He died being a Death Eater.”

Harry swallowed. “But that doesn’t explain why you took me away from the Malfoys.”

Black pointed a finger at him. “Ha! You think of them as the Malfoys! Not really your family at all, are they?”

Harry folded his arms and frowned at him. “Yes, well, you see what it does to your definition of family, to be jerked back and forth between who you were born as and who you grew up as.”

“Who you grew up as is superior,” Black said with no hesitation. “What matters is the family we choose, Harry. The ones who gave us love. I ran away to live with your father’s family when I was sixteen. They were worlds better than my birth family. Worlds. I am—I promise you, I took you away from here to give you a better life.”

Harry laughed in spite of himself. “I grew up in an abusive Muggle household with the people I thought were my aunt and uncle and cousin. They made me do all the chores they didn’t want to do, and beat me up—I mean, my cousin did, with his friends—and swung frying pans at my head and locked me in a cupboard and didn’t give me food for a week at a time. Yeah, that was such a better life.”

Black was staring at him in horror, his mouth open. Harry nodded to him. “So that’s what became of your better life.”

“I didn’t know—I had no way of knowing—”

“No, you didn’t,” Harry interrupted, weary of talking about it and already regretting telling him about the Dursleys. Black was one of those people who would make a huge deal out of it, Harry just knew it. “But that’s the point. You didn’t know how things would turn out. What if I’d died in the attack Voldemort launched? What if the Dursleys had starved me to death through sheer neglect? You didn’t know that taking me away from here was actually better than leaving me here, but you did it anyway.”

Black straightened up then, and his mouth set in a very stubborn line. It occurred to Harry that he’d sometimes seen it when he looked in the mirror, both before and after he’d found out who he really was, and that if Mrs. Malfoy was related to the Blacks, so was he.

Before he could think more about that, Black leaned forwards and spoke in a low, intense voice.

“No. I promise, Harry, I took you away to a better life no matter what happened. It would still have been a better life even if you’d died with your parents, your real parents, in the attack. The Malfoys are straight-up evil.”

“You mean, like the spell that Mrs. Malfoy cast at you?”

Black nodded once, his eyebrows rising a little, as if he didn’t expect Harry to choose such a good example. “Yes. They live and breathe the Dark Arts. You can’t do that without it corrupting you. I saw it when I lived with my family. Even Regulus, who was a good sort at first—well, at least not bad, just weak and too eager to please—fell to it in the end. Practicing that sort of magic darkens your soul.”

Harry swallowed. “But you must know something about it, because you reversed it. You survived.”

Black laughed again. The sound creaked at the edges, less than sane. Harry managed to squash the impulse to lean away from Black, but it was hard.

“Yes, that’s the way I grew up. I didn’t choose that knowledge.” Black shrugged. “But Cissy could have run away from the family, and not married Lucius, and kept on practicing Dark Arts. Past a certain age, we have a choice. She didn’t take it.”

“I didn’t have one.”

Black didn’t seem to notice the quiet tone that Harry’s voice had taken on. He nodded eagerly. “I know. And I didn’t want you to grow up as the child of yet another Dark family, abused the way I was. I took you and gave you a better life. And Lily and James…they were so desperate for children. They should have had the chance to have them on their own. But when they didn’t, and I realized that I could do something about it, I had to do it. It would have been irresponsible of me not to.”

Irresponsible. Harry bit his tongue hard and looked at the ceiling. Then he looked at Black again. “And you didn’t think that Mrs. Malfoy and Mr. Malfoy would feel grief when I disappeared? And Draco, when he grew up and learned about me?”

Black stared at him blankly. Harry wished he dared reach out and shake him. “Didn’t you?”

“No,” Black said hoarsely, blinking. “I told you. They’re evil. They can’t feel that kind of thing. If anything, they would only have mourned because I deprived them of yet another pawn they could put in their stupid games.”

He spat the last word, and Harry jumped. Yes, there was the Black madness peeking through. He didn’t know if Black’s mind had entirely shattered under the pressure of the Dementors, but it was clear that just because he could sit still and speak calmly and refrain from grabbing Harry sometimes, that didn’t mean he was sane.

Harry braced himself. “I think they really did mourn me. Mrs. Malfoy acts like she did.”

Black shrugged. “They have to be good at acting to fool the people who would otherwise never buy that Lucius was under the Imperius Curse. I think they’re good enough at acting to fool themselves, sometimes. But it’s not real. Don’t let them make you think that it’s real, Harry,” he said, and his voice cracked, and he leaned near enough that Harry skittered another few steps backwards. “Don’t. They’ll just fool you and make you into another Regulus if you let them. I won’t do that.”

And his eyes were shining like flame. Harry backed away further, and Black stretched out his hand and kept it extended.

“Lily and James, your real parents, the ones who loved you, chose me as your godfather,” he said, his voice unsteady. “I love you, Harry. Come with me, and you can go back to being Harry Potter.”

“But how?” Harry exclaimed, glad that he had the chance to ask Black himself. Even with him being certain that he’d known what Black’s plan was when he tried to snatch Harry in Diagon Alley, that didn’t mean it made sense. “Everyone who reads the papers will know that I’m Henry Malfoy now. It’s not like I could show back up as myself and have people just accept it.”

“As yourself!” Black crowed. “You know it’s true, Harry! You know that you’re the Potters’ son!”

“It’s a way to refer to it,” Harry said, while silently cursing himself for putting it in a way that would appeal to Black. “But you haven’t answered me. How could I just become Harry Potter again?”

Black gaped at him in silence. Harry folded his arms and stared back. He didn’t think of that. Typical.

“Well,” Black said, his eyes widening as a new idea visibly occurred to him, “I can use a necromancy ritual.”

“What?” Harry asked weakly. He knew a little bit about necromancy, just because it was the kind of vocabulary word that came up and that you asked questions about when your brother was Draco Malfoy, but he had no idea what it had to do with Black kidnapping him and making him into another person again.

“There’s a ritual that can give people a new body,” Black said excitedly, pointing at him. “It uses the bone of the father and the blood of the enemy and the flesh of the servant. I know where James’s grave is! We can use his bone, because you are really his son, of course. And I can use my own flesh, because I love you, Harry, I’ll serve you.”

He’s mad. Totally mad. Harry swallowed. “What about the—the blood of the enemy?”

“The house is full of Malfoys, isn’t it?” Black shrugged. For a second, his gaze swung in the direction of Draco’s bed.

Harry felt as though someone had slammed into him, and he took a few moments to breathe through his disappointment. No matter what Black said, he wasn’t an alternative to the Malfoys. He had the same kind of madness as Mrs. Malfoy. He would use the Dark Arts. He just thought that the people he used them on were justified, while Mrs. Malfoy thought the people she used them on were justified.

A wave of longing for Lily and James Potter struck Harry. Would they have loved him without expecting him to make these choices?

But then he remembered that they had known Sirius had stolen him and had adopted him anyway, and used magic to change him so that he looked more like them. And lied to a bunch of other people, like Dumbledore and Snape and so on, to pretend he was theirs. They hadn’t thought that maybe the Malfoys were grieving because their younger son had disappeared.

Harry closed his eyes. It felt so lonely at the moment, like there was no one he could depend on.

But Ron and Hermione’s faces floated into his mind as he stood there. And Healer Letham’s, even. Harry didn’t know if he could trust her not to make him face uncomfortable truths—probably not—but she would keep his secrets and listen to him if he said that he didn’t want to talk about something right now.

And Mrs. Malfoy had promised that she was going to try and use other spells if she saw Black again. And Mr. Malfoy had said he was turning away from Voldemort. And Draco had listened to Harry—eventually—when he said that he didn’t want Draco following him into the bathroom, and Draco had acted like a brother.

Maybe it was just—spread out, Harry thought in wonder, the good and evil that everyone did. Maybe Mr. Malfoy was a Death Eater and someone who loved his children. Maybe Mrs. Malfoy was a crazy mad person and someone who would do anything for him and Draco. Maybe Draco was a stuck-up, pompous git who held ridiculous beliefs about people like Hermione and someone who would fight for him.

But that just meant that there had to be good in Sirius Black, too. Harry opened his eyes and studied Black again. Black already seemed to have forgotten what they were talking about, the disturbing necromancy ritual and everything involved. He was looking down at his hands with a blank face.

“Tell me something,” Harry said, and watched as Black jumped and stared at him. “What did you mean by saying that you didn’t betray the Potters? I was there when Mr. Malfoy questioned you under Veritaserum. He asked you if you were in prison for betraying the Potters, and you said yes.”

“Accused of it.” Black’s eyes shone with madness again. “I didn’t receive a trial. And the bastard knew exactly what he was doing, asking the question that way. He was a Death Eater, Harry! He would have known I wasn’t one. He wanted to make sure that I was never released, because he knew I would come and get you.”

“The way you did once before,” Harry couldn’t help adding.

Black didn’t seem to hear him. “But it was Peter who betrayed Lily and James. Peter Pettigrew. I swear! I was their Secret-Keeper at first, or I was supposed to be…” Black trailed off for a second. “I can’t remember. It’s hard to remember.” He stared at Harry with eyes that, this time, glittered with tears. “Why is it so hard?”

Harry stood there, and didn’t know what to say.

Black dipped back into his memories. “But I suggested the switch. I was James’s best friend. Everyone would suspect I was the Secret-Keeper. No one would suspect Peter. He was a coward, kept out of things, didn’t even fight with the Order of the Phoenix—”

“The Order of the Phoenix?”

“Dumbledore’s Order. We were some of the only people resisting You-Know-Who.” Black shivered. “Everyone else just wanted to roll over and play dead, pretend that he wouldn’t hurt them that way, or they were helping him. Like Lucius Malfoy, evil bastard that he is.”

Harry hurriedly asked another question, since Black looked ready to rant about the evil of Mr. Malfoy for the next hour or so. “So Pettigrew went and sold them out to Voldemort? Why?”

“Because he was a coward!” Dark fire flashed for a second around Black, which made Harry cautious of what he could do even without a wand, which he still probably had. He prudently scooted further away. “Scurried straight to Voldemort, sold the secret, and then Voldemort came and killed your mum and dad!” He glanced at Harry and seemed to remember who was actually alive and who was dead. “And marked you.”

“What happened then?”

“I came and lent my motorbike to Hagrid.” Black smiled a little when he saw Harry’s confusion. “I had a motorbike, I’d enchanted it to fly. I gave him to you, or Dumbledore gave him to you. I don’t remember, it was a long time ago.” Black rubbed his head as if it hurt. “And then I went after Peter.”

Harry’s chest went cold again. Black said that he was his godfather and loved Harry and he’d stolen Harry to give him a better life, but he’d just run away after Pettigrew? Just like that?

Maybe because he’s also the sort of man who could kidnap a baby from his parents and assume that was really the best thing he could do for him.

“What happened then?” Harry asked quietly.

“I confronted Peter on a Muggle street. He accused me of being the Secret-Keeper—the liar, the filthy traitor—and then he blew up the street with a spell that killed a dozen Muggles. Blew off his own finger, too. Or cut it off. I don’t remember.” Black rubbed his head again. “Then he turned into a rat and escaped down into the sewers.”

Whatever Harry had expected, it wasn’t that, and he stared at Black in bewildered silence. Black seemed to notice. He sat up and said, “Peter was an Animagus. Same as me. I mean, we were all Animagi, all of us. James was a stag, I’m a dog, of course, and Peter was a rat. And Moony was a werewolf.”

“Moony?”

“Remus Lupin.” Black sighed with what sounded like fondness, but didn’t smile. “He never visited me in prison. He must have thought I was as guilty as all the rest. Or maybe he didn’t forgive me for assuming he was a spy during the war.”

This sounded as bewildering as everything else, and in a way that Harry didn’t think he needed to pay attention to. He changed the subject. “So you think that Pettigrew is still alive somewhere out there? Is that why you broke out of prison, to go chase him?”

“I know he’s still alive,” said Black darkly. “I feel it in my gut.” He clapped his hands over his stomach. And then he seemed to hear the rest of what Harry had asked, and shook his head hard. “No. I know he must be alive, but I don’t know where he is. I came to get you.”

“Because you think I ought to go back to being Harry Potter.”

“I told you, the real families are the chosen ones.” Black’s voice was soft and coaxing again, and he was leaning forwards for the first time in a while. “Not the ones you were born into.”

“But you didn’t give me a choice,” Harry said. “And everyone told me I was born a Potter. It’s not—it’s not the same thing as you running away to live with the Potters when you were sixteen.”

“But you can still have a better life as Harry Potter than you ever can here.” Black looked around scornfully at Malfoy Manor, and then looked at Harry again. “Come on, Harry. We can go and live on the run somewhere, and I’ll teach you all the spells I know, and then we’ll complete the necromantic ritual, what do you say? We can go abroad. There are countries where people have never heard of the Blacks or Harry Potter.”

Only the last part of that sounded tempting. Harry had hated the way people gawked at him when he was still Harry Potter, and there wasn’t much less gawking now that he was walking around with Malfoy features.

But being with a madman didn’t sound tempting. Being adopted or re-adopted or whatever in some kind of insane ritual didn’t sound tempting.

And the thought of what he would leave behind him, and how Mrs. Malfoy would probably cry, halted Harry before he could even think about saying yes.

There was the promise he had made Mrs. Malfoy, too. And his revelation from earlier, that everyone had good and evil in them.

Even Sirius Black did. He shouldn’t have kidnapped Harry, but he hadn’t deserved to be bunged up in Azkaban for twelve years for a crime he hadn’t committed, either.

Harry shook his head. “I want to stay here. Thanks, but no thanks.”

Black’s eyes snapped straight to devastated so suddenly that Harry could see the madness again. “But you’re the only thing I have,” he whispered. “Harry. I’m your godfather. You have to allow me to be your godfather.”

Harry sighed out, long and slow. Black reminded Harry of himself in so many ways. He wasn’t at home in his family, he hadn’t been at home with the Dursleys, and he had been desperate to change things so many times.

But the difference was, Harry was going to stay with the Malfoys and see what happened. He wasn’t going to run away the first time a chance presented itself, especially with the man who had been responsible for him not feeling at home in the first place.

Black had given up. Harry didn’t want to.

“No,” he said. “I don’t want you to get arrested and go back to Azkaban, but I don’t want you to take me.”

Black gave a hollow, desperate laugh. “You don’t have a choice.”

He started to lunge at Harry, but Harry hurled himself over his bed and onto the floor. And then he stood up and called, “Dobby!” even as Black was trying to scramble over the bed.

Dobby appeared between them at once, his head uplifted. “You shall not harm Henry Malfoy!” he snapped at Black, and then snapped his fingers.

A huge, transparent bubble appeared, encasing Black. He floated off the floor, staring at Harry and Dobby in bafflement. Harry swallowed and nodded to Dobby. “Thank you, Dobby.” He paused and looked back and forth between Black and the house-elf. He probably should have asked Black earlier, when he was in his expansive mood, but maybe Dobby would also know. It wasn’t like it would have occurred to the Malfoys to ask. “Do you know how he’s getting through the wards, Dobby?”

“Oh, yes!” Dobby looked delighted to be able to answer. “Mistress Narcissa is being thought of as a threat by the wards of Malfoy Manor when she be marrying Master Lucius. He be having to build exceptions into the wards that not react to the Black madness and let someone who has it cross the boundaries.”

Harry blinked. It seemed odd that the Malfoys wouldn’t have thought of that, but then again, perhaps Mr. Malfoy had thought it was only Mrs. Malfoy it would let in, or maybe that had been long enough ago that neither of them had thought about it in a long time.

“Thank you, Dobby,” Harry said, and looked at Black. “Can you take him over the boundaries and then do something to make sure that he won’t come back in?”

Dobby gave him a cowed look. “Dobby cannot be adjusting the wards without permission from Master Lucius, Master Henry.”

Henry. Harry listened to the name, and nodded in acknowledgment of it. If he kept nodding, if he kept working with it, then he thought the name would probably transform in his mind.

I won’t give up.

“But,” Dobby said, and suddenly seemed to perk up, “Dobby can be doing other things!” He faced Black and clapped his hands together, then held them there and closed his eyes. He seemed to be concentrating deeply.

Black abruptly shrieked, and then fainted in his bubble. Harry blinked at him, then at Dobby, who was sitting on the floor and breathing hard. Harry knelt down next to him. “What did you do, Dobby?”

Dobby beamed at him. “Dobby be taking the Black madness away! Now Mr. Black be being sane, and not able to cross the wards!”

Harry stared. “Thank you, Dobby,” he said at last. His head was reeling. Were house-elves really that powerful?

Who’s ever asked them?

“Please put him somewhere far away from the Manor,” Harry said faintly. Dobby jumped up after a minute, nodded so hard that his ears hit him in the face, and then walked over to the window. The bubble floated in front of him, and after a minute, they both disappeared, the bubble dodging out the window and Dobby popping away.

Harry stood there a second longer, thinking about the choice he’d made, holding it to him.

Then he turned around.

And saw Draco sitting up in bed, staring at him.

“Um,” Harry said, feeling as awkward as hell. “Hi. How long have you been awake?”

“Long enough to hear Black say that he was innocent of the one crime, but not the worse one,” Draco said quietly. He went on studying Harry.

Harry breathed out hard, and tried to ignore the fact that Draco thought that killing a dozen Muggles and running away was less bad than kidnapping him as a baby. Harry hadn’t thought of the Muggles part very hard, either, except to think that it meant Black didn’t deserve to be in prison. “Yeah.”

“And you chose not to go with him.” Draco’s voice was slightly warmer now.

“Yeah.” Harry looked his brother in the eye. “My place is here.”

Draco smiled at him, and jumped out of bed to hug him. Harry hugged him back, a little surprised. He’d thought Draco would be more upset than this and demand some sort of reckoning, but it didn’t appear that he would.

The door opened then, and Harry looked up, half-convinced it would be Dobby, even though he would have just appeared in the room. But it was Mrs. Malfoy, holding up her lighted wand and frowning at both of them.

“Henry? Draco? One of the house-elves woke us and said there was an intruder that your Dobby took care of?”

“There was,” Harry said, and braced himself to look at her, stepping gently away from the hug Draco still wanted to give him. “Black was here.”

Mrs. Malfoy looked ill. “And what did he want?”

“He wanted to take me away and use a necromancy ritual to make me into Harry Potter again.”

Mrs. Malfoy actually swayed. Harry ran over and grabbed her arm tightly, and then turned her around and made her sit on the bed. Mrs. Malfoy licked her lips and focused on him. “And you chose to not go with him?”

“Henry resisted him, Mother,” Draco said proudly. “Even when he was talking rot about being innocent of the crime of killing the Muggles and betraying the Potters. He said he wanted to take Henry away and give him a ‘real life,’ but Henry said he wanted to stay here.”

Mrs. Malfoy looked intently at Harry, her eyes glimmering with soft light. “Is that true, Henry?”

Harry nodded slowly. He wondered for a second if he should tell her about the wards and Black not coming back anymore and the fact that house-elves could probably cure her madness, too, but he could do that later.

There was something more important he wanted to do right now.

He said, “Yes, Mother.”

Mrs. Malfoy’s eyes were as warm as her arms when she hugged him.

Harry leaned against her, and hugged her back.

He could try. He would try.

The End.