lomonaaeren | Chapter Two of 'Hephaestus'- Monsters Working the Forge

Thank you again for all the reviews! To answer some questions, I anticipate this story being 8 or 9 chapters long.

Chapter Two—Monsters Working the Forge

“Daddy?”

Draco started and snapped his gaze back to his son. He couldn’t see the shed that the Metal-Dancers had set up from this window, he reminded himself, and Scorpius should be more than enough to hold anyone’s attention.

Draco’s two-year-old son was leaning up against the pillows of his bed, carefully turning a practice wand in his hands. Malfoy tradition had always insisted that the children were best off when exposed to magic as soon as possible, and so Lucius had given Scorpius the wand before he and Draco left Malfoy Manor to come to the new estate so it could be warded against Muggles. Scorpius hadn’t left off playing with it ever since, as if he wanted to understand every grain of the wood. Draco knew that was a hopeful sign for his son’s future magical prowess.

Merlin, but his son was beautiful. His hair was darker than Draco’s, but only by a shade, closer to Astoria’s honey-gold than to the silver platinum that Lucius and Draco both possessed. His eyes were blue-gray, a perfect combination of his grandparents’, and Draco was always finding some new fleck of color every time he looked into them. He had skin that would never know a spot—Draco would take care of that with magic, if it didn’t happen naturally—and still glowed with both Malfoy pallor and baby softness. Draco watched him turning the wand over and over, and experienced a deep sensation of peace.

Then Scorpius gave him an impatient look that belonged on his mother’s face, and Draco shook his head and remembered that his son had asked him a question. “Yes, Scorpius?” He reached out and ran a hand over his son’s head. Scorpius leaned tamely against him, accepting the petting as his natural due. Draco could admit, if only in the privacy of his mind, that he didn’t look forwards to the day when Scorpius would decide that he was too grown-up for such attentions. Draco himself had been four when he started squirming away from his mother’s kiss.

“Who are the funny people?” Scorpius looked up at him with large, drowning eyes, confident that his question would be perfectly understood the first time.

And Draco did understand it, although he didn’t want to, and his hand grew heavier on Scorpius’s head for a moment. Then he forced a smile and continued ruffling his fingers gently through the honey hair. “They’re called dwarves,” he said. “They came to work the forge and protect our estates.”

“Oh. Who’s the big one?”

“There’s a big dwarf?” Draco widened his eyes comically. “But they’re small, like you.”

“Not like me,” said Scorpius. “They have hair here.” He tugged at his chin. “And they smell bad.”

Draco relaxed. At times, before magical children came to understand the differences between wizards and creatures, they made unfortunate mistakes and held unfortunate opinions. It sounded as though Scorpius would not put him through any embarrassing explanations. “They do,” he agreed. “But who’s the big one?”

“He has dark hair,” said Scorpius, pulling away and beginning to bounce in the bed, because that was one of his amusements lately. The covers, a dark green color, rippled and shone around him, and Draco felt as though his heart had caught like his breath for a moment. “And he walks like this.” Scorpius crooked his fingers in the shape of legs and ran them awkwardly up and down his leg, giggling. He never stopped bouncing, looking up at Draco with innocent trust, his eyes so wide that Draco thought he could see the future in them.

And then Scorpius’s words caught up with him, and he swallowed hard, his anger beating in him like a second heart. How dare Potter show himself to a child who didn’t have the understanding yet to process what he saw! Draco would have to have another talk with him, and make it clear that such behavior was unacceptable. Maybe Draco didn’t have the right to force his lover into a glamour, but he did have the right to control what his child heard and saw.

Of course, if you had decided to hire some other company of Metal-Dancers besides this one to protect your home, the situation would never have arisen.

Draco ignored the thought and stood. Of course he had hired Potter’s Metal-Dancers; they were the best company in Britain, and Malfoys deserved only the best, even for an estate that would be used for charity functions so that none of the unwashed needed to intrude into Malfoy Manor. Once on the grounds, it was Potter’s duty to do what was asked of him.

Even if you were to ask him to come to you and let you explain, to listen to you without interrupting, to—

Draco turned his head sharply away. He had had these fantasies since his confrontation with Potter yesterday, imaginary scenes in which Potter exonerated him. But that was all they were, fantasies. Potter was too stubborn and hard-headed to forgive someone when he refused to do something small like make his face beautiful again. And what had Draco to be forgiven for, anyway? If anything, Potter’s face showed that he was the one who must have done—something—in order to be scarred that way. Things that bad were attracted to the people they happened to, instead of simply occurring.

At least, Draco had to think so. That way, he knew nothing that bad would ever happen to him, if he was lucky and careful.

“Daddy?”

Draco looked back at Scorpius, who had stopped bouncing and was sucking his finger instead. He took it out of his mouth with a loud smacking noise to observe, “You never said who the big dwarf was.”

“Someone you have to stay away from,” said Draco, regaining his voice. “Do you understand, Scorpius? You aren’t to go visiting.”

“Oh.” Scorpius put his head down and pouted.

“You mustn’t see him.”

Scorpius nodded, still staring at the bedcovers.

“I shall be very angry if I hear that you were with him,” Draco added repressively. He didn’t like being this stern with his son, who usually had everything exactly the way he wanted it, but he had to be. The mere thought of Scorpius slicing his palm open on Potter’s face provoked shudders all down his body.

“All right, Daddy.” Scorpius yawned and lay down, kicking his feet out as if he expected a pillow to brace them. Draco fetched one for him, and Scorpius smiled angelically up at him from his usual sleeping posture, pillows at both head and feet. So sweet, Draco thought, stroking his son’s hair again, and so spoiled. Well, there was nothing wrong with that when the parents had the money and beauty necessary to back up the spoiling, as Draco did.

“Good night, Daddy,” said Scorpius, as he always did no matter what time of day he took a nap, and closed his eyes. Draco kissed his forehead and stepped back, feasting his gaze on Scorpius’s features again. The rest of the time, he saw little of himself in his son, but when asleep, Scorpius looked exactly like the photographs Narcissa had taken of Draco sleeping when he was young.

“Good night,” Draco responded quietly, and stepped out of the nursery, shutting the door behind him with a gentle thump. He thought of calling house-elves to attend on his son, but he had business affairs to think of now that Scorpius was asleep, and he would need the elves to fetch and carry for him whilst he calculated.

Besides, Scorpius had a bell he could ring beside the bed that would summon an elf or his father in a moment if he had a nightmare. Draco went downstairs, thoughts of expenses buzzing in his head. He had to pay the Metal-Dancers, and he had to decide what the first charity event they held at this estate would be, and he had to decide which charities were both the most worthy of benefiting and the most politically interesting.

He thought he heard a faint creak behind him once, but the house was old, and did tend to settle. There was no point in worrying about it.

*

Harry poured a cup of water over his head, and sighed in relief as it flowed, cool and stinging, into his eyes and then down the folded ridges of his face. His skin felt little, caught and crumpled like tissue paper in the wake of those scars, but he could still sense the sweat sloughing off and the heat from the forge draining away. He shook his head vigorously, then plunged it into the bucket of water that stood next to him and came up spluttering.

“Well,” said a thoughtful, amused voice from the door of the shed, which Harry reserved to himself to pick among the different metals and look for impurities in them, “I thought you might need company, but you’re so busy, I don’t know if you do.”

Harry spun around, smiling. “Ginny!”

Ginny stepped forwards and into his arms. Harry held her tightly, running one hand up and down the back of her robe—but he didn’t press on the skin itself. He knew how the scars there had the tendency to become inflamed at any touch heavier than cloth.

Ginny stepped back at last and stared him in the face. Her own wasn’t nearly as scarred as his, but she still had a long, jagged stripe that ran from the top left corner of her face to the bottom right, and ridged her nose and removed her right eye on the way. Her other scars were mostly elsewhere; the Death Eaters had worked on her leg and spine the same way they’d worked on his. Harry thought he’d escaped more lightly than she had there. She found it difficult to sit without pain, whilst Harry could at least sit down whenever his leg cramped.

A spasm ran up his leg now, and Harry drew his wand to conjure a chair. It was only metal-dancing that he was able to do wandlessly. As he sat down, Ginny conjured a stool and then added several modified Cushioning Charms to it. With the angle she had to lean at, she was taller than he was sitting, and she regarded him frankly as Harry stared back at her in amusement.

“What are you doing working for Malfoy?” Ginny asked. Perhaps her silent scan hadn’t told her everything she needed to know, then.

Ginny had the right to ask him such blunt questions. She had endured the torture with Harry, and then been one of the people to draw him back into the world, as he had helped to do with her. They had been lovers for a short, intense time after he separated from Draco, their shared experiences acting like a rope to join them. Harry owed her for everything from making him laugh just a day after he had walked away from Draco to teaching him how he could make love without irritating his scars, or hers.

“I don’t know, really.” Harry linked his hands meditatively in front of him. “Will you believe that he pays well, and, if we do this commission well, we’ll earn more attention and commissions still?”

He grinned at her, but Ginny raised an eyebrow and waited. Harry sighed and looked towards the manor house, imagining Draco in the midst of his beautiful life, tending to his duties, never thinking once of Harry. “I had the stupid idea that he might want me back,” he muttered.

“Er, Harry,” said Ginny, after a breathless pause. “He was the one who rejected you.”

“But I was the one who walked away.” Harry looked at her. “Who knows what might have happened if I’d fought for him? And anyway, I still want him.”

“I don’t understand why.”

Harry leaned his forehead in his palm and stared at the floor. It was a question Hermione and Ron had asked him when they found out Harry regretted the break-up with Draco, and so Harry could only tell Ginny the same thing he’d told them. “I’ve never met someone who’s so purely himself as Draco is. He doesn’t apologize for his appetites or his illusions. Those illusions break, but he thinks about it for a while and then goes on living after that. He can conquer so many challenges because he doesn’t really think of them as challenges. They can’t shake his self-confidence. He doesn’t doubt. He just charges ahead. I admire his certainty.”

“He won’t apologize for his treatment of you if he’s like that,” Ginny said gently.

Harry winced. “I know. Maybe this is meant more as a way to get over him myself, to look at those characteristics and take a breath of the air that surrounds him and then say good-bye.”

Ginny chewed her lip for a moment, then nodded and stood up. “I came to see how you were getting along, when Ron and Hermione told me you’d actually accepted a commission on Malfoy property,” she said. “I should have known you would go and do something that stupid when I went off with Neville.”

Harry smiled and also rose to his feet. He was happy for Ginny that Neville had managed to look past her scars and accept her for who she was, though he had to admit he felt envy, too, when he was lying awake at night. “Thank you. I don’t think there’s anything anyone can do to affect the outcome of this, except me and him. And maybe not even me,” he added, remembering the brick-wall force of Draco’s revulsion, then and now.

Ginny nodded once, then punched him on the shoulder like her brother and said, “If you get hurt—well. There are a few boggarts I know that need a new place to stay.” She gave him a sweet smile. Ginny worked as a remover of Dark magical creatures; that seemed to be work that most people would trust her with, perhaps because they assumed her scars would frighten the boggarts and the doxies as much as they frightened them.

“Gin,” Harry said.

She put up her hand. “I’m not saying it’ll happen, because we don’t know if he’ll hurt you again, do we? Just that he should be careful, that’s all.”

Harry kissed the top of her head. “I don’t deserve you.”

“Of course not,” Ginny said. “And Malfoy doesn’t deserve you.” She ducked out the door of the shed before Harry could scold her again. He rolled his eyes and turned in the chair to consider the sheet of silver in front of him Grishnazk wanted to use it for the roofing sigils that would protect the ancient estate from the ravages of weather—Harry was the first Metal-Dancer to adapt the protective symbols for that function—but Harry had his doubts about its purity, which would affect how easy it was to work with.

“You’re the big dwarf.”

Harry controlled his reaction with a small twitch and glanced over his shoulder. A young boy stood in the door of the shed, staring at him with fascinated eyes. Harry would have known him for Draco’s son if he’d seen him far away from the house. He had that ruffled blond hair, the smooth and shining face.

Harry raised an eyebrow. Well, he’d known Draco had a son; the news of the marriage contract with Astoria Greengrass had appeared in the papers less than a month after he and Draco broke up. “My name’s Harry Potter,” he said. “And I don’t think your father would be pleased if you were here.” He had a habit of speaking to children exactly as if they could understand him, picked up because Ron and Hermione’s daughter Rose really could.

The boy shook his head, disregarding this, and came forwards, staring at him critically. Harry fought the impulse to raise a hand and shield his face from sight. This was part of the reason he didn’t wear a glamour, so that people could get used to what he really looked like—and thus to the results of uncontrolled Dark magic. Over the last few years, Harry had come to think that the reason the Dark Arts were still popular and practiced had a lot to do with the way Healers hurried to cover up the result of any curse.

So he stared at the boy, and the boy stared at him, and finally said, “You have the scars.”

“Yes,” Harry said. “I know.”

“The scars on your face,” the boy went on, blithely ignoring his tone, “and the scar on your face.” He reached up and traced a finger down his forehead.

Harry started and touched his forehead with a self-consciousness he hadn’t felt in years. The scarring of his face had rather buried the lightning bolt that had caused him so much trouble. It was still visible, in a patch of the stretched, flat, shiny skin between the sharp gray and black ridges, but few people looked for it any more.

“You’re Harry Potter,” the boy said, as if that meant Harry passed some test, and then stretched out his arms commandingly. “Pick me up.”

Harry did, and grunted a little as he settled the boy on his lap. He was heavier than he looked, especially for someone less than three years old. Knowing Draco and the Malfoy house-elves, he was probably fed too many sweets and not let near much physical exercise yet. “What’s your name?”

“I’m Scorpius Malfoy,” the child said, with a pride that made Harry have to swallow tears, because of course that was exactly the way Draco’s son would sound. “And I want to know about this.” He pointed at the sheet of silver. “What are you doing?”

“I’m a Metal-Dancer.” Harry reached out and picked up his wand, gesturing so that the sheet of silver tipped over on its corner. Scorpius considered this, then pulled a practice wand from his own robe pocket.

“I want it to spin,” he said, and pointed the wand. “Zappus!”

Harry, concealing a smile, obeyed, and the silver danced in place, rotating to brush first one corner and then another against the table it rested on. Scorpius accepted his triumph with grave aplomb and tugged at Harry’s sleeve.

“Sweets,” he suggested.

Harry had no sweets on him, but he Summoned a bit of bread left over from his sandwich and told Scorpius, “This bread went on adventures with me. It was in a mine where we fetched home copper, and in high mountains where an avalanche almost fell on us as we brought gold back.” That wasn’t quite true, but Harry did possess an Everlasting Loaf that this piece of bread had been hacked from, and other bits of the Loaf had been on those adventures with him. “Do you want to eat it?”

“Yes, please,” said Scorpius, and took the bread away and ate it with something like reverence. Then he slid off Harry’s lap, gripped his hand, and announced, “My Daddy will be angry. Come back to the house.”

“I can’t do that,” said Harry, though he hated to watch Scorpius’s face cloud over, and not just because he might cry. “Your daddy doesn’t like me.”

“But you have bread, and magic, and scars,” said Scorpius, as if this meant it was extremely unlikely that anyone would hate Harry.

“He hates me for the scars.”

Scorpius blinked and tilted his head to the side, as if studying Harry’s face in this new and unexpected light. Then he said. “That’s stupid,” and pulled on Harry’s hand again.

“Well, it’s true.” Harry wasn’t about to try explaining the whole tangle of their relationship to Draco’s son, who probably hadn’t ever heard Draco say that he loved anyone besides Scorpius’s mother. He looked towards the door of the shed, but no vengeful Draco appeared—yet. He looked back at the little boy, studied his eyes, which were wide and earnest but didn’t hold any understanding, and said, “He wouldn’t want me in the house.”

Scorpius stood there chewing his lip for a moment, his head tilted as if he were eating another morsel of bread that Harry had offered him and trying to decide if he liked the taste. Then he said, “That’s still stupid.”

“But real.” Harry crouched down in front of Scorpius so that the boy wouldn’t have any choice but to take him more seriously. “And I don’t think your father would want me to talk to you. At all.”

Scorpius smiled and patted Harry’s cheek, not even flinching after his fingers came in contact with one particularly sharp, obsidian-colored ridge, though he did look at them in interest afterwards, as if to judge whether Harry had rubbed off on him. “My Daddy loves me,” he said. “And I like you, so he’ll have to like you.”

Harry shook his head, but said nothing more, standing and following Scorpius’s tug towards the door. At the least, he would make sure the boy got back to the house and didn’t wander off in pursuit of the dwarves or the metal they were forging. Some of them wouldn’t be as patient with Scorpius.

Harry blinked when they stepped out into the sunlight, and then looked towards the house. He forgot which pure-blood family it had belonged to before Draco bought it, but it was absolutely enormous, with a tower at each corner, like linchpins digging it more solidly into the earth. Its walls were white stone in some places, and gray stone in others, with flashes of greenery along the walls where the gardens still stood. It had no wards left, though, or other defenses, which was one reason that Draco had hired Harry’s Metal-Dancers to guard the place.

“My bedroom’s there,” Scorpius said, and pointed at one of the towers. Squinting, Harry could make out a single window sparkling like a sapphire—some kind of ward already planted, doubtless. Harry knew Draco could be protective of those he loved. “You have to come with me and play with my toys.”

“Scorpius!”

Draco was running towards them across the lawn, his face so white that Harry could see it even from this distance. Harry quickly let go of Scorpius’s hand and stepped back. He didn’t think he’d done anything wrong, but Draco wouldn’t see it that way, and Scorpius was his child to raise, not Harry’s.

No matter how much you might wish otherwise, he reminded himself, as he watched Draco swing Scorpius up into his arms, clasp him to his chest, and stare at Harry as if he were a slaver.

“Oh, hullo, Daddy,” said Scorpius. He wriggled around so he could see Harry again. “This is Harry Potter, and he—“

“He’s going away now,” Draco said.

Harry raised his hands in useless protest of his innocence, and then turned around and limped away. He had never felt so conscious of his dragging right leg since he received the wound.

On the other hand, the horror in Draco’s eyes confirmed what Harry should have realized before: that Draco thought him a monster in soul as well as body. He really never should have come here. The Draco he loved, who could have looked past the scars and might have tried, had never existed.

*

“I want you to stay away from him, Scorpius.” Draco shook his son’s shoulders slightly as he looked into his eyes.

“Why?” Scorpius was looking at his face with an interest that Draco knew was a bad sign. The bad thing about raising a spoiled child, he thought despondently, was that he didn’t understand what it meant when you forbade him to do something.

Draco shuddered. He could still see the image of Potter’s hand close-clasped in Scorpius’s if he closed his eyes. And it made a dreadful shiver run through him, something that he thought was composed of too little loathing and too much yearning.

People are often fascinated by what they fear, he reminded himself, and opened his eyes to stare sternly at Scorpius. “Because I want you to.”

Scorpius just looked at him and said nothing. Draco knew he couldn’t count on his son to obey when he wore that expression.

Then I’ll have to make sure he listens to me.

I don’t—I can’t take another loss. Not again.

And the fact that he couldn’t articulate what the second loss would be didn’t bother him as much as the strange sweetness shaking open broad wings inside him when he thought of Potter standing near his son.

Chapter 3.