lomonaaeren

Chapter Eight.

Chapter One.

Title: The Parselmouth Promise (9/25)
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairing: Harry/Draco, past Harry/Ginny and Draco/Astoria, other canon pairings mentioned
Content Notes: Angst, divorce, Parseltongue, brief violence, ritual magic, not epilogue-compliant
Rating: R
Summary: Voldemort’s influence lingers after his death in the form of Parseltongue passed on to the children of everyone with a Dark Mark—or, in Harry’s case, someone who once hosted a Horcrux. As Harry struggles to be a good single father to his son, James, he inevitably runs up against Draco Malfoy, who’s not only a Parselmouth now but attempting to create a whole ritual and school system to benefit himself, his friends, and his son, Scorpius. No matter how much some people don’t like that.
Author’s Notes: This is probably going to be a medium-length fic of around 10-20 chapters. Note that it’s fairly angsty.

Thank you again for all the reviews!

Chapter Nine—The Past’s Echo

“Can I talk to them, Daddy?”

Harry sighed. They were walking through Diagon Alley, and people were whispering and pointing at him and James. It was a natural consequence of the explanation he’d given about the school, but he had hoped to shield James from some of it.

“Only if I’m right there,” Harry said, and noticed that a few people turned around to stare at him, but didn’t scream or gasp. He hoped that the articles had done that much good, then. Parseltongue was James’s native language, like it or not, and Harry wanted him to be able to speak it in public without a fearful reaction from the mob.

Besides, it was pretty convenient to have a private way of speaking to his son that not many people could understand.

“Potter.”

Harry sighed. And here were some of the people who could understand it. The way James had lit up at the sight of Scorpius made up for it, but not as much as Harry would have liked it to. “Hello, Malfoy.”

Malfoy’s arms were laden with baskets, and his pockets bulged. A small line of packages floated behind him as well. Harry wondered idly how many people in the Alley had noticed the subtle protective spells shimmering around the packages that kept them from being touched or bumped or tampered with. Harry himself had probably only noticed because he cast such spells on his own shopping all the time.

“Buying supplies for the school?” Harry asked as he slowed down to match Malfoy’s pace. James and Scorpius were already lagging behind, chattering away to each other in Parseltongue. Harry maneuvered to get the boys in front of him, and wanted to snort when he realized that Malfoy was doing the same thing at the same time, like a coordinated dance partner.

He hadn’t danced since his divorce.

But thinking about it just made him feel pathetic, so he turned back to Malfoy in time to see him nod. “Some people who didn’t admit before this that their children could be Parselmouths are contacting me now.”

“Children of other Marked Death Eaters?” Harry asked as politely as possible.

“Near the end of the war, he was Marking people it never would have occurred to him to do it with before.” Malfoy shook his head. “He was desperate, and he wanted to intimidate some people and bond others to him through his favor.” Harry watched his left hand close on the handle of a basket. “But there were also other people who apparently spent time around one of his safehouses or the like. Some of those less tangible connections…it’s hard to trace. I was hoping to consult with you about it.”

Harry snorted a little. “I’m afraid I won’t be able to help.” He rolled his eyes at the expression of displeasure on Malfoy’s face. “I mean, sure, if you want me to talk to these people about how it feels to be marked by him in a less tangible way, fine. But no one else had the link with him that I did. My experiences are too unique to be useful.”

“Tell me some more about that.”

“No.”

Malfoy blinked, and then seemed to be fighting back his own irritation. “Haven’t I proven that I’m nothing like him? Do you really think I’m going to go off and hurt other people the way he did?”

“It’s nothing to do with not trusting you, Malfoy. It’s to do with not trusting anyone. People already know more about my connection with Voldemort than I’m comfortable with.” Harry hid his reaction at Malfoy’s flinch at the name. If he isn’t comfortable enough even to hear the madman’s name, how does he think he’d be comfortable enough to listen to me talk about it in detail? “Someone might overhear us. You might think you could explain to other people about it, and hint around the subject, and one of them might guess.”

“I can’t imagine what you think you have to hide now.”

What it was like to find out I was a Horcrux. Harry shrugged. “Believe what you like.”

They continued walking down the alley side-by-side, which somewhat surprised Harry. He’d have thought Malfoy would leave in disgust or high dudgeon, but other than a few annoyed blinks, he seemed to take what Harry had said in stride.

“There was something else I was hoping to speak to you about,” Malfoy said then. “Something that I believe you could do to benefit the school.”

“Sure,” Harry said, feeling as though someone had fed him a Calming Draught. No one except Ron and Hermione had taken his refusal to talk about something this well in years. “I’ll donate as much money as you like.”

“Not that, Potter. I was going to ask you about teaching for us.”

Harry halted and stared at him. Malfoy came to a halt and stared back, eyebrows rising a little. “Something wrong, Potter?”

“I don’t have any teaching skills. And having me at your school would be more trouble than it was worth.”

*

He’s not even trying to get out of the obligation the way some people would. He just truly and actually believes that.

Draco swallowed to control his long breath of disgust. He would have liked to speak to many of the people who had hurt Potter, including the Mind-Healer who had betrayed him, and ask them to look at what they had wrought. Potter looked back at Draco with slow blinks, caught up in a world where he was broken and hurt and couldn’t trust anybody except possibly some of the Weasleys, and thought it was fine.

“You could teach,” Sela hissed, lifting her head to stare at the side of Potter’s face, as if she thought she could will him to face her. “You have taught your son many things, and he has not been in the school long.”

“Why would you assume that your presence would be more of a deterrent than an attraction?” Draco asked then. He half-hoped that having two questions to answer at once would make Potter drop a few more hints about the inside of his skull.

Draco would have liked to turn him upside-down and rattle him back and forth until what was inside dropped out. But that was both impossible and frowned on by people Draco wanted to be allied to in the future, so speaking to Potter this way it was.

“Oh, I think it might be an attraction,” Potter said calmly. He was keeping one eye on James as he turned his head, and Draco wondered if he even realized that his hand was on his wand anymore. “But the kinds of people who would come because I was there wouldn’t be serious parents or students. They would just want to gawp. And that would disturb James’s education. And the education of the others at the school, of course,” he added, as if thinking about it in more detail.

His son is always the center of his fucking universe. And although there might have been people, like Astoria, who would say the same about Draco, Draco didn’t think it was the case. He’d had friendships and the goal of staring the school and promoting other Parselmouths and Parseltongue ritual magic from the time Scorpius was an infant. Potter appeared to have nothing except James and his obsessive circling around the boy.

“And what James knows, the other children at the school would already know,” Potter was saying to Sela. “Basic skills like telling the time and naming colors and washing their hands.”

“You’re so fucking frustrating, Potter,” Draco muttered without thinking about it.

Potter narrowed his eyes at him. “Keep the swearing down when the children are present, Malfoy. And remember that they can understand Parseltongue, too.”

Draco blinked back at him, then snorted. Of course Potter would be concerned about something like that, and not the very obvious fact that Draco thought he was frustrating.

“Children of professors at the school get free tuition, you know,” Draco murmured, deliberately provocative.

Potter gave him a bright smile. “Good thing I can afford it, then.”

Draco shook his head. He supposed he shouldn’t have expected to get so quickly through walls thick enough to have withstood years of betrayal, but he was still…well. Frustrated.

He started to say something else, but Potter abruptly moved like a whirlwind, turning and ducking so that he was crouching over James, Scorpius, and their snakes. Draco started fowards, and found himself encased in a translucent shield. Stunned, he stood still and stared around as Edwina reared, hissing, on his shoulder, and only then realized that there was a hole in the cobblestones at his feet, and people were screaming and scattering.

A dark-robed wizard was walking towards them, hood up to conceal his, or her, face. One hand rose, and the wand pointed steadily at Potter. Draco’s blood swam cold, and he grope for his own wand, even though he wasn’t sure he could get through that shield.

Potter snarled, a sound that made Draco feel for a moment as if he understood what other people felt when they heard Parseltongue, and struck to maim.

Draco didn’t know the dark red spell that soared away from Potter’s wand and crashed into the other wizard, but he didn’t know that he had to. The intent behind the spell was perfectly clear. The flesh on the other wizard’s wand hand unraveled.

The wizard began to scream, and it was a distinctively female voice. The hood still hid her face, and Draco had no idea who she was, but he felt a little better knowing her gender. He would have stepped forwards to support Potter, but the shield that still held him held him back, too, and he couldn’t move.

Potter narrowed his eyes and cast again. This time, the spell hit the woman’s shoulder, and pierced through cloth and flesh alike. Draco watched as the skin and muscle rotted and fell away, and revealed slick muscle beneath.

“Potter,” he breathed.

Potter twisted his head a little in Draco’s direction without looking away from his victim. “She still isn’t retreating,” he muttered. “I don’t know for sure what she’s going to try, but—”

“Avada Kedavra!”

Draco’s heart hurt for a long minute at the thought of Scorpius being hit, of him dying, of James dying, of their snakes dying, but Potter gestured sharply, and cobbles from the street leaped up and into the way of the green spell. They blew apart in pointed shards that bounced from the shield around Draco and the glimmering, moving red one that Draco saw now encased their children. But at least the Killing Curse was gone.

And the woman couldn’t cast anymore. She was staggering, most of her right arm gone, decayed and vanished. She sagged to her knees, her mouth open and her breath rasping up harshly from probably desiccated lungs. Potter walked slowly and deliberately towards her.

“Don’t kill her!” Draco called. “We need to know what she was doing.”

“I think I have a good idea,” Potter said softly, and then flipped the hood back from the woman’s head with a push of his wand tip. Draco stared at the face that was revealed. She looked shaggy and old. He didn’t know he’d had any enemies that looked like that.

“Potter?” he asked, because Potter had a look of both hatred and recognition on his face. “Who is she?”

“Her name’s Jolantha Moonborn,” Potter replied, not turning around from the woman, not taking his gaze or his wand off her. “She fancied herself Fenrir Greyback’s consort at one point. She hates me for killing him.”

“You struck from behind, like a coward!” Moonborn shrieked, spittle flying from her lips. “You were a coward! Any Gryffindor, anyone who respected him, would have struck from the front!” She dropped her wand and swiped with her left hand at Potter, the claws she had in place of nails glinting in the sunlight.

They bounced from a shield that Draco hadn’t even realized Potter had wrapped around himself. Potter broke it a second later with a twist of purple and blue magic that sent Moonborn sprawling on the cobblestones. At least it seemed as if the rotting spell wasn’t going to consume more of her, Draco thought, queasy. Her right arm was mostly bone, but it hadn’t spread anywhere else.

“Mr. Malfoy? What’s going on?”

James was looking up at him with big, scared eyes. Draco bent down, relieved to find that the shield around him could blend with the shield around the boys, and he could reach out and place his hands on their shoulders. “Someone attacked us because she hated your father,” he said quietly. “But we’re safe.”

“Is Daddy safe?”

Draco glanced in the direction of Moonborn and Potter. Potter met his gaze, all the hatred and rage he had shown already concealed behind the opaque surface of his face again. He nodded, as though in response to Draco’s silent question, and then turned away and cast a familiar stag Patronus.

I wish I know what question he thinks I asked.

*

“I could bite them, and they would go away.”

Harry didn’t acknowledge that Sela had spoken, other than shifting his shoulder a little when she tried to crawl down his arm and towards the Aurors his Patronus had summoned. Her Parseltongue would probably sound like ordinary hissing to them, and as long as she didn’t attack them, everything would be fine.

He had to believe that.

He hadn’t meant to use that kind of magic on Moonborn in the middle of Diagon Alley. In front of his son. In front of Malfoy, who thought he belonged around children other than James, for some reason.

But he had. And for all the disgusted looks the Aurors were giving him and the fact that they kept asking him the same questions again and again, trying to trap him into admitting that he’d used Dark Arts, he didn’t regret what he’d done. He had to make sure James was safe. Scorpius and Malfoy didn’t deserve to suffer, either.

Harry had got in the way of the person who could have damaged all of them. Other than being a father to James, it was practically the only thing he was good at.

“How can you claim this wasn’t Dark Arts, man?” Auror Brooks finally snapped, gesturing at the place Moonborn had been. There were still a few dark flakes of what had been her arm wisping around the street, but other Aurors with better sense than these two had removed her to a holding cell in the Ministry. “You destroyed her flesh!”

“You can look up the spell in the special books kept in the Auror Academy,” Harry muttered, tilting his head slightly so that he could look Auror Brooks in the eye. The man flinched. Many people did when Harry looked at them. Harry had once thought it was because they believed he was a Legilimens—a persistent rumor that had spread after the war to explain his battle-forged instincts—but now he just thought they were afraid. “It’s not classified as Dark Arts because it’s specifically defensive. You can’t use it on someone who isn’t attacking you.”

“But it ate away her flesh,” muttered the other Auror, a trainee young enough that Harry hadn’t known her as a full-fledged Auror before he retired. He gave her a mild glance, and she flinched in turn, but squared her shoulders and met his eyes with her own dark brown ones, which at least made her braver than Brooks.

“A lot of spells could do that, Dark Arts or not,” Harry said blandly. “The Lye Soap Hex could do that, if you put enough power behind it.”

The young Auror blinked and looked at Brooks, but Brooks was concentrating on Harry. “We’re here to judge you, not someone hypothetical,” he snapped. “You could have brought her down with a milder spell.”

“I chose not to.”

Auror Brooks’s eyes widened, as if he hadn’t expected Harry to admit that. Then he gave a braying laugh. “So when we charge you for not following the Auror Code of Conduct—”

“I’m no longer an Auror, Brooks. And ordinary citizens don’t have to follow that.”

Brooks looked as if he wanted to bite through something. “You are dangerous,” he hissed. “A Dark Arts practitioner walking around, just allowed to do whatever he wants, thinking you’re above everybody else!”

Harry shrugged and glanced over his shoulder. Malfoy was standing with the boys and their snakes over against the wall of Flourish and Blotts. Maybe they would have questioned him, if they hadn’t seen Harry and decided he was their prey immediately. Harry caught Malfoy’s eyes, and Malfoy narrowed his own and looked down at James.

Harry saw how pale his son was, and lost all interest in debating with his former colleagues. “With your permission, Auror Brooks,” he said, his voice going clipped as he turned back to them, “I need to take my son away from this place now.”

“We aren’t done questioning you yet, Potter.”

“Are you going to arrest me?”

That made Brooks pause. He had probably thought Harry would go along with whatever they wanted to do in the interests of not getting bad publicity in the papers, and that meant they could bully him into coming back to the Ministry. But now he was on the spot and had to make a decision.

And Draco Malfoy, who did have some political power if he’d managed to keep his school open, was watching.

Brooks grumbled and postured some more, but he had no grounds to arrest Harry when he had acted in self-defense, Moonborn was a wanted criminal plus a werewolf, and Harry hadn’t actually killed her. In the end, Brooks let him go with some mutters that Harry didn’t bother paying attention to. He walked over to Malfoy and their sons, nodding in thanks to Malfoy before he crouched down in front of James.

“Are you okay?” he quietly asked in Parseltongue, smoothing James’s hair back.

“Yes, Daddy. You made the bad person go away.”

Harry wrapped his arms around James’s shoulders, and hoped he would always be able to.

A heavy hand landed on his own shoulder, and Harry nearly drew his wand before he realized it was Malfoy and not Brooks. Their eyes met, and Malfoy said in a soft, flat tone, “We need to talk, Potter.”

Harry supposed they did. Malfoy would want reassurances that Harry had a good reason to use that particular spell in front of Scorpius. “All right,” he answered, and wrapped James in his arms, and stood, ignoring the Aurors still watching them.

“You should have let me bite them.”

It wasn’t much of an effort for Harry to ignore Sela, too.

*

He has no idea that I owe him my life.

That much was evident in the wary way that Potter’s eyes passed across Draco’s face, as if he assumed that he would need to prepare for a confrontation with an enemy. Draco didn’t shake his head only because he knew Potter would see the gesture and misunderstand it.

Yes, we need to talk. For more than one reason.