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lomonaaerenSecond post of two. Don't start reading here.
He did. Somehow, he managed.
When he went home, he spent long moments contemplating something he’d always worked to keep from facing: his feelings towards Ginny. She was away playing for the Harpies so much of the time that he’d been able to avoid thinking about her, and when she was home, the very rarity of her presence made her someone to be treasured.
But now…
He had never once thought of owling Ginny and telling her about James and Scorpius’s spats. He’d never thought of correcting her when she got irritated about Al’s being Sorted into Slytherin. He’d never thought of asking that she Floo him more often when she was traveling, although he knew she often stayed in villages that had Floo connections.
He didn’t really miss her. He’d didn’t really love her. He was fond of her, and he found her convenient.
And that was all.
Harry shivered and scratched the back of his neck, feeling as though he were covered in grime and would be the better for a thorough, scouring shower. He was sitting on his couch in the middle of their drawing room, staring out the window. He had nothing to do for the next twelve hours, at least; Lily was spending the night at Ron and Hermione’s house with Hugo, and there was no one else in Harry’s life who depended on him so intensely.
I don’t depend on them, either, when I should, like with Ginny. Or I depend on them in the wrong ways, to make me normal, and that’s a burden too heavy for anyone to bear.
He didn’t like himself very much at that moment.
Did he have the courage to do something about it?
He did.
Harry took a deep breath and went to consult the copy of the Harpies’ schedule that Ginny had left for him when she began this particular tour. He knew roughly where she was staying each night, in the villages that scattered the Pyrenees. And even though the actual schedule sometimes varied from the printed one and he might not catch her, he wouldn’t use that as an excuse to back away from what he needed to do.
A great change, Malfoy’s voice murmured in his head.
Shut up, Harry answered him as he looked at the first Floo address and then reached for the green powder in a bowl on his own mantle. I’m doing this more for myself than you.
Malfoy laughed, as though to say he knew better, and Harry focused his attention more firmly on the impending Floo calls. There were some complexities that he still wasn’t ready to face.
*
“This is—unexpected.” Ginny sat back on the couch in the posh inn room where she was staying, blinking and twirling a curl of red hair around her finger.
Harry found a genuine smile for her, the first in years. “I know,” he said gently. “But I don’t think I’ve been happy for a long time—or else I was relying on you and the kids to make me happy. And that’s not fair. I think you should have the chance to be with someone who can make you happy the way you deserve to be.”
“Nice words,” said Ginny, her eyes narrowing. “But you’re still divorcing me.”
“I’m asking for a divorce,” Harry corrected her quietly. “A mutual parting of the ways. I think it’ll be better than what we have now, don’t you?”
“I don’t know.” Ginny tilted her head and regarded him. “You seemed satisfied. And I was happy playing some of the time, and then being home and seeing the kids the way I did.”
Harry waited a minute, but she didn’t seem to realize what she’d said, so he asked, “And what about seeing me?”
Ginny opened her mouth to respond, then shut it and swallowed. “Oh,” she whispered then.
“Oh.” Harry sighed and folded his arms behind his head. “I wish this could have ended differently, Gin. I should have made up my mind years ago to tell the kids the truth, to tell you the truth, to wake myself up and start thinking about the world again. But I whimpered that it hurt too much after the war, and I just needed peace and quiet for a while. How did a while turn into nineteen years? I don’t know, but it did.”
“It can go on.” Ginny’s voice was pleading. She leaned towards him, one hand extended as if she would reach through the flames and touch him. “What we have might not be the best we each could have, but what marriage is ideal? It’s comfortable, that’s what it is, and I want it to continue. Why can’t it?”
Harry felt the desultory, clinging tug of temptation. Eyes fastened on Ginny’s, he knew that she would be willing to forget this if he was. She might be extra attentive for a time when she came home, but in the end she and he would fall back into the routine.
Routine.
He was tired of living his life by that word.
He shook his head, and turned away from the temptation, more gently than he had thought himself able to. “No,” he said quietly. “It’s not enough for me anymore. I’m sorry.”
Ginny’s face hardened, and she looked to the side. “Is it someone else?” she asked through clenched teeth. “Tell me that, Harry.”
Harry thought of denying it, because the divorce would get nastier than it had to if he admitted the truth. But if he pursued Draco, as he fully intended to if he could, and even if he just declared his feelings to him, which was all he would do as long as Draco was married, Ginny was certain to learn of it sooner or later. And initial nastiness was better to deal with and get over with than long-lingering nastiness.
“Yeah,” he said. “There is.”
Ginny’s hands clenched. “And how long have you been cheating on me?”
“Never,” Harry said, and the shocked sound of his voice seemed to convince Ginny, because she relaxed slightly. “This is—someone I want the chance to be with, but I might not even get that chance.”
Ginny turned back to him, eyes wide now, as if curiosity compelled her to ask the question in spite of the fact that she’d probably rather not know. “I can’t imagine many people resisting Harry Potter,” she murmured. “Who is she?”
“He,” Harry corrected quietly.
He braced himself for a nasty comment on that, too, but Ginny’s mouth simply hung open slightly. Shock seemed to have taken away all her words. After a moment, she did swallow, wrap her arms around herself as if she were cold, and say, “All right. I can’t compete with that, obviously. I’ll agree to the divorce.”
“Gin—“ Harry wanted to tell her that he wasn’t attracted to other men, that it had only ever been Malfoy, that she didn’t have to feel inadequate, but Ginny looked past him and spoke as rapidly as a Muggle secretary typing on a keyboard.
“Lily will have to stay with you whilst I’m touring. And James and Al will be all right at Hogwarts, for now. I want to see them at holidays and on their birthdays if no time else.”
“Of course. I’d never keep you from your children, Gin.” Harry tried to catch her eye, but she shook her head and turned away, dashing at tears.
“Good, then. Good night, Harry.” She started to say something else, let it die on a breath, and shut the Floo connection with the flick of her wand.
Harry bowed his head as he knelt before the empty fireplace. He could feel a coil of guilt twisting in his stomach, the kind he’d felt during the first year after the war, when he went to funeral after funeral and grew heartsick from grief and wanted a way to make the grief stop. He’d never meant to cause Ginny pain, and he’d hoped for a friendly parting where neither of them wept.
But it was still an ending. The ending of a marriage, the ending of a life together.
And yet, he still wanted to go on.
*
“Why?”
Harry gazed down helplessly into his daughter’s eyes. His sons had both been easier than this. Al had accepted the news of the divorce with a little shrug, as if he had expected Harry to leave Ginny for a long time, and Harry had thought there was actually a small gleam of relief in his face. James had stormed and contacted Ginny by owl and then calmed down as soon as he figured out that it wouldn’t really change much between them, especially now that he would be at Hogwarts most of the year.
But Lily had been far more invested in the ideal of a happy family than Harry ever knew, and she had asked again and again, sometimes subtly and sometimes baldly, like this, why he and Ginny couldn’t get back together.
“Maybe you could date at first,” she said earnestly, attracting his attention again. “And then kiss slowly, and then get married again. A second honeymoon does lots for people, Witch Weekly says—“
“I know,” Harry said, crouching down in front of her and putting his hands on her shoulders. He had only discovered since the confrontation with James and Scorpius how much that gesture seemed to soothe his children. “But that doesn’t mean your mother and I can get back together.”
“Why not?” Lily stamped her foot on the floor and then folded her arms and glared out the window. “I know that you and Mum are different from most other people, but not that different. What works for most other couples should work for you.”
Harry blinked. Those few sentences told him more about his nine-year-old than a whole succession of years beforehand had.
“It won’t work because I’m half in love with someone else,” he said.
Lily’s mouth dropped open, and her face suddenly flamed with—something. Harry didn’t know what to call it. Romance, maybe. He didn’t know. He was already too old for things like that at her age, and the few months of what he’d felt for Ginny during his sixth year didn’t really count. “But that’s wonderful, Daddy,” she said, and hugged him around the shoulders, since he was at her height. “It’s wonderful to be in love with someone. Who is it?”
“Not yet,” Harry said, and blew in her ear, making her jerk away and giggle. “I don’t think I should tell one of my children before I tell the person I’m in love with.”
Lily stamped her foot again. “You mean you haven’t told her?”
“Not yet,” Harry said, letting the pronoun pass unnoticed for now. “And I need you to keep quiet about it, too. Your mum knows that I’m in love with someone, but not who it is, and Al and James don’t know even that much.”
Lily put her finger to her lips, her brown eyes sparkling.
And just like that, one of the potential breaches his divorce might have caused was cured. Harry had no illusions that everything would be so easy—for one thing, Mrs. Weasley had already contacted him, crying, and Ron wouldn’t like it when he found out who Harry had divorced Ginny for—but at least Lily was skipping around the house and shooting him conspiratorial glances now.
*
A red-tailed hawk came winging through the window to deliver Malfoy’s message the morning the announcement about Harry’s and Ginny’s divorce appeared in the papers. Harry raised an eyebrow and unsealed the envelope gingerly. He thought almost anything might be in the letter, from mockery about Harry’s decision to About time, but he didn’t cast the spells that his Auror training told him to, just in case the letter had Dark hexes on it. He thought he and Malfoy were past that point in their relationship.
He thought.
The letter was longer than he had expected, but still only a paragraph. It had no salutation or signature, but Harry had no doubt about who it was from. Apart from anything else, he still had Malfoy’s letter suggesting a meeting at Hogwarts to compare the handwriting of this one to.
You gave up your marriage with your wife even though you had no guarantee that I’m going to give up my marriage with Astoria. Why? What in the world would prompt you to do something like this? When I said you should grasp your courage, this wasn’t really what I meant.
Harry took a deep breath and put the letter on the desk in front of him. Then he surreptitiously locked the door. Ron was out on a mission with a trainee Auror and wouldn’t be back for hours.
Behind the locked door, and breaking a lot of quills, and smudging a lot of pieces of parchment, and starting over completely four times, Harry wrote his first love letter.
He explained, awkwardly, about how he’d seen Malfoy the day of the battle in the Great Hall, and how he’d admired his devotion to his family and a fearlessness in his expression that made them alike for a brief moment.
He explained that he admired how hard Malfoy had fought for his parents to walk free of Azkaban.
He said that he liked Scorpius, and respected the way Malfoy was raising him.
And then he wrote, finally, the hardest words of all.
I don’t really know you. This attraction may come to nothing. I can’t ask you to leave your wife for me. I have no idea if you like men. I don’t know what liking men means, myself. I’m thirty-seven years old and the only person I’ve ever slept with was Ginny, and not even her for the last six months or so.
God, this is hard.
But I’m willing to fight for what I want, and start thinking in terms of greater complexity. And I wanted you to know that I do want you, and I’m willing to fight for you. But you need to tell me what the fight means. I won’t interrupt your marriage with Astoria. I have no idea how you feel about her, and no right to tell you how you should feel about her.
Harry paused, sweating, his hand shaking, and then managed to copy down one more line before his nerve failed him.
If you wanted an act of courage in return for your act of courage in reaching out to me and trying to be pleasant to me since the war, here it is.
Love,
Harry.
He hardly had time to fold it into an envelope before the red-tailed hawk snatched it from him and soared out the window. Harry leaned back in the chair, shut his eyes, and drifted until Ron’s knock interrupted him.
*
“Potter.”
Harry rose to his feet, and then wondered why he’d done that. It was just Malfoy, walking into his office at the Ministry. Harry shouldn’t have to show respect or fight him, especially since Ron was watching from his desk right next to Harry’s with a face like a gathering storm.
But Harry had already done it, and though he was willing to grant himself more complex motivations than he used to have, he wasn’t willing to spend all his time investigating them and doing nothing else. He nodded and kept his eyes on Malfoy’s face. “Did you need something?”
“I came to speak to you on the matter you owled me about,” Malfoy said, too rapidly, and his cheeks were a brilliant pink. Harry raised his eyebrows. He had never seen Malfoy look so flustered.
It was a good expression on him, but Harry thought, with a sort of amused tolerance for himself, that he would probably find every expression that Malfoy cared to wear good-looking, so he wasn’t exactly a reliable authority.
“Of course,” Harry said. “Forgive me my surprise.” He nodded to Ron, who was staring at him with devouring curiosity and dawning suspicion, and then moved past Malfoy out the door of the office. He cast a privacy ward once he’d shut the door. He didn’t want anyone who passed by hearing every word they spoke. The news of his divorce had sparked enough interest in him again that even his colleagues might be tempted to report what they heard to the Prophet. They could disguise it as worry about a friend to themselves, if they wanted. “What about it?” he added, turning back to Malfoy when the ward was finished. “Was anything in the letter unclear?”
“Just why you wrote it at all.” Malfoy stepped towards him, body leashed and quivering with—what, Harry didn’t know. He could name it intensity, but that wasn’t enough to catch all of it.
He met Malfoy’s eyes and felt himself spinning and falling through a brand new universe. There were so many emotions there he had ignored for years. Anger, curiosity, fear, awe, longing. He could feel himself responding, and his smile sharpened and he moved a few steps closer. Malfoy lifted a hand as if to ward him away. Harry promptly caught it and laced his fingers through Malfoy’s, recklessly; the ward only prevented people from hearing, not seeing, them.
“I want you,” he said. “I respect you. I admire you. I like you, a lot more than I ever did in school.” He laughed, quietly. Malfoy waited like a horse with pricked ears for some sort of signal, his eyes so intent on Harry that it looked as if the gaze hurt him. “I don’t know if that will lead to love, but I’m willing to try.”
“I’m married.”
“I know that. So I’ll only ask as much of you as you’re willing to give.” He bowed to Malfoy. It was a stupid and extravagant gesture, but Harry felt like doing it. “If you want me to go away after this and stop bothering you, then I will. If you want me to write to your wife and take on the unpleasant duty of telling her that we’re running off to Majorca together, then I will.”
“I’m not running away from Astoria.” Malfoy’s spine had stiffened as if someone had shoved a blade up his arse.
“That’s not the same thing as not divorcing her, I notice,” Harry observed blandly.
“I don’t know that I want to,” Malfoy said bluntly. “She’s Scorpius’s mother, and she’s been a good wife to me. And this—I haven’t spent as much time on this as you have.”
“Actually,” Harry corrected him, “you were alert enough to see a certain look in my eyes and remember it for years. And I was trying to bury my memories of you as much as possible, because I didn’t think they were compatible with a normal life. So you’ve probably spent more time in the past decade thinking about me than I’ve spent thinking about you.”
Malfoy made a small frustrated sound and tugged at Harry’s hand, which Harry didn’t remove. “You have no idea if this would work.”
“I don’t,” Harry agreed cheerfully.
“Then why risk it?” Malfoy eyed him. “From what you’ve described as your emotional state in this past decade, you’re not someone who would take a chance like this.”
“I’m learning to carve up the negative space, maybe,” Harry murmured. “Create my own intaglio.”
Malfoy stared at him, not blinking, barely breathing.
“Dream,” Harry said, stepping close and letting his breath rake over Malfoy’s lips without closing them in a kiss, “about what’s not there. Draco.”
Malfoy might not run from his wife, but he ran from Harry then, pulling his hand free and whirling around. Harry watched him go, not pursuing. Draco was the one who did have to make his own decisions about what he wanted to accept, and Harry would be disappointed—all right, devastated—if he didn’t make the same one, but he would survive.
He walked back into the office and into an ambush. Ron glared at him and said, “I’m not blind, I just take a long time to see things. Talk.”
Harry smiled slightly and started doing so.
*
The next time he saw Draco, it was on a jog that the Ministry had insisted he take around the edge of a large Muggle park, because supposedly most of the older Aurors were more out of shape than they should have been. Harry slowed and bent over, panting. His breath whistled in and out of what felt like torn lungs. Yes, he was out of shape, but perhaps this program hadn’t been the best way to cure it.
“Harry.”
His name was spoken sharply, hostilely. Harry glanced up and nodded at Draco, who leaned against a tree with his arms folded. He grinned, because his happiness outweighed his surprise. “Hullo.”
“You say you want me,” Draco said abruptly. “Prove it.”
Harry cocked his head and advanced a few steps, his confidence increasing when Draco lifted his chin and gave a single shiver.
“I don’t want to do too much,” Harry whispered, “not when you’re still married. But there’s no harm in touching your hand, the way I did the other day. That’s not cheating. Or there’s this.”
He reached out and traced his finger in the air above the bridge of Draco’s nose and the line of his cheekbones. He made sure to keep an inch of space between his and Draco’s skin at first, but then he moved closer and closer until Draco’s eyes were fluttering shut, his breath creating crisp puffs of smoke in the cold air. Harry moved, carefully, nearer still, and his fingertip brushed the fine hairs that coated Draco’s chin.
“And I’d speak like this,” Harry said, finding a flowing and sensuous tone in his voice he’d never known was there. He simply reached for it, commanded it to exist, and it did. His confidence soared. He could do this. He could flirt with someone. He had simply never made a point of doing so with Ginny, because she had fallen right into his hand like an overripe plum. Only now was Harry beginning to understand how much of a disservice he had done both her and himself when that happened. “Because this tone is the best for whispering certain truths in. Truths like: You’re beautiful, Draco. Or: I think I would have been happier if I’d stayed to talk to you in the Great Hall, the day I returned your wand. Or: If you were free of Astoria, I’d run my palm, slowly, over every inch of your skin, followed by my tongue.”
Draco’s breath was coming in unsteady bursts. He still managed to whisper, “If I weren’t married to Astoria.”
“If you weren’t,” Harry agreed, also in a whisper. He traced his finger in a slight circle that scraped his nail, just the very edge of it, against Draco’s throat. Draco’s back arched as if the touch had been much heavier. “Too bad you are.”
Draco caught his hand, his fingers closing around Harry’s wrist, digging into skin, and pressing tendons to bone until Harry made a noise of discomfort. Then Draco’s eyes flared open and he jumped backwards as if his wife had been standing in the middle of the park and glaring.
“I can’t make a choice yet,” he said, and disappeared, which made Harry hope that the Obliviators weren’t watching.
Harry licked his own palm, since the one he really wanted to lick—that would have been his next step—wasn’t there. Then he shook his head, took a deep breath, and started jogging.
He reminded himself that Draco might make the decision to stay with Astoria after all. It was a slim chance Harry was asking him to embrace, no guarantee of happiness.
He was still grinning.
*
Harry started receiving letters after that, from Draco, usually at least one a day. They tried to explain, in disjointed sentences, the relationship that he and Astoria had together, and they taught Harry more than he had ever known of the other man.
We’ve always been friends. From the first day I saw her, I knew we’d get along. But now you’ve made me question whether it was ever more than that…
I said Scorpius adores her in my last letter, but that’s not true. He likes her, just as I do. But no more. I had to think of that today when he spent the entire visit I made to Hogwarts, in honor of the Slytherin-Gryffindor Quidditch match—and why weren’t you there, to see your James play?—following me around and staring up at me with shining eyes. He never once asked where she was…
My parents are indifferent to Astoria. It was Scorpius they wanted, the continuation of blood. No one could have been kinder to her when she was pregnant, but after that, it was as if she ceased to exist…
Damn it, why did you make me ask questions like this? Otherwise, I would have lived with her to the end of my days, and never questioned whether I was happy with her when it was just the two of us alone. I know that I’m happy with Scorpius, and that’s what I’ve never questioned…
And now you even have me wondering whether it’s fair to her, to keep her in a marriage like this. And then I’m laughing on the inside when I think about it some more, because this is not the sort of thing I ever expected to be thinking, this rubbish about fairness and justice. Damn you, Harry Potter, damn you.
Harry answered cautiously, not wanting to press Draco further than he was comfortable with. He thought they did their best communicating face-to-face, and preferably skin-to-skin. But no, he wouldn’t suggest that yet, lest Draco thought he was trying to speed up a seduction that was by no means certain.
So he talked about different things instead, like the way Ron and Hermione had reacted to the news that it was Draco he was interested in.
Ron said, “I can’t believe it,” about a hundred million times in one day. It got to the point where I was going to murder him if I heard it one more time.
Hermione’s been great. Really great. She’s nodded thoughtfully when I explained, and she hasn’t blamed me for abandoning Ginny. Of course, I do wish she would stop proposing psychological explanations for why my marriage was always destined to fail.
Divorce isn’t pleasant, but Ginny kept it from being hell. She stayed away from me until we could speak civilly, and now she does seem happy, since there’s evidently been a player on the Falmouth Falcons’ team that’s she wanted to date for a while.
The Weasleys are plain bewildered. But they aren’t unaccepting.
He showed himself and responded very gently to Draco’s revelations, trying not to think that it might all be for nothing. At the very least, the sharing of self-knowledge with another human being could never be “nothing.”
*
Someone knocked on the door of his house early one morning, so early that Harry was still blinking winter stars away when he stumbled to the door. He thought it was an urgent case at first. They usually tried owls or Floo first, but when an answer really couldn’t wait, sometimes the Minister himself came to summon Harry to the job.
But it was Draco, leaning against the doorframe and looking up at those same stars Harry’s vision had spun with a moment ago. The look on his face was as calm and as resolute as the one Harry had seen when he was talking to the solicitor long ago.
And he turned around, and his smile was warm, and he put something rustling and papery into Harry’s hand. Harry fumbled for his glasses and lit his wand with a muttered Lumos. His thoughts were still scattered, whirling between dreams and surprise, and he didn’t anticipate what he was reading until he was actually reading it.
By agreement of both, Draco Lucius Malfoy will separate from Astoria Heloise Malfoy…
Harry looked up, knowing his jaw had dropped, knowing his eyes were bulging, and not caring. Draco met him with a smug smile, but there was still a faint uncertainty about his lips and eyes that stung Harry into action.
He dropped the divorce papers, seized Draco, and kissed him.
Draco answered with stunning force, his hands clasping Harry’s shoulders and then rising up to his neck, as if he wanted to choke him with the sheer passion of the kiss. Harry slid one hand down to Draco’s arse and dragged him closer. They could have been convicted of public indecency had any Muggle cops been nearby, Harry thought hazily.
“Everything you hoped for?” Draco whispered at last, when he could draw his lips away.
“You’re everything I hoped for,” Harry answered honestly, and without thinking.
Draco’s eyes widened and flashed.
In the moment before he leaned in for another kiss, Harry thought that he saw a shimmering image behind the surface of Draco’s eyes, a reversed carving of crystal and dreams, their own intaglio, summoned shining into reality.
End.
He did. Somehow, he managed.
When he went home, he spent long moments contemplating something he’d always worked to keep from facing: his feelings towards Ginny. She was away playing for the Harpies so much of the time that he’d been able to avoid thinking about her, and when she was home, the very rarity of her presence made her someone to be treasured.
But now…
He had never once thought of owling Ginny and telling her about James and Scorpius’s spats. He’d never thought of correcting her when she got irritated about Al’s being Sorted into Slytherin. He’d never thought of asking that she Floo him more often when she was traveling, although he knew she often stayed in villages that had Floo connections.
He didn’t really miss her. He’d didn’t really love her. He was fond of her, and he found her convenient.
And that was all.
Harry shivered and scratched the back of his neck, feeling as though he were covered in grime and would be the better for a thorough, scouring shower. He was sitting on his couch in the middle of their drawing room, staring out the window. He had nothing to do for the next twelve hours, at least; Lily was spending the night at Ron and Hermione’s house with Hugo, and there was no one else in Harry’s life who depended on him so intensely.
I don’t depend on them, either, when I should, like with Ginny. Or I depend on them in the wrong ways, to make me normal, and that’s a burden too heavy for anyone to bear.
He didn’t like himself very much at that moment.
Did he have the courage to do something about it?
He did.
Harry took a deep breath and went to consult the copy of the Harpies’ schedule that Ginny had left for him when she began this particular tour. He knew roughly where she was staying each night, in the villages that scattered the Pyrenees. And even though the actual schedule sometimes varied from the printed one and he might not catch her, he wouldn’t use that as an excuse to back away from what he needed to do.
A great change, Malfoy’s voice murmured in his head.
Shut up, Harry answered him as he looked at the first Floo address and then reached for the green powder in a bowl on his own mantle. I’m doing this more for myself than you.
Malfoy laughed, as though to say he knew better, and Harry focused his attention more firmly on the impending Floo calls. There were some complexities that he still wasn’t ready to face.
*
“This is—unexpected.” Ginny sat back on the couch in the posh inn room where she was staying, blinking and twirling a curl of red hair around her finger.
Harry found a genuine smile for her, the first in years. “I know,” he said gently. “But I don’t think I’ve been happy for a long time—or else I was relying on you and the kids to make me happy. And that’s not fair. I think you should have the chance to be with someone who can make you happy the way you deserve to be.”
“Nice words,” said Ginny, her eyes narrowing. “But you’re still divorcing me.”
“I’m asking for a divorce,” Harry corrected her quietly. “A mutual parting of the ways. I think it’ll be better than what we have now, don’t you?”
“I don’t know.” Ginny tilted her head and regarded him. “You seemed satisfied. And I was happy playing some of the time, and then being home and seeing the kids the way I did.”
Harry waited a minute, but she didn’t seem to realize what she’d said, so he asked, “And what about seeing me?”
Ginny opened her mouth to respond, then shut it and swallowed. “Oh,” she whispered then.
“Oh.” Harry sighed and folded his arms behind his head. “I wish this could have ended differently, Gin. I should have made up my mind years ago to tell the kids the truth, to tell you the truth, to wake myself up and start thinking about the world again. But I whimpered that it hurt too much after the war, and I just needed peace and quiet for a while. How did a while turn into nineteen years? I don’t know, but it did.”
“It can go on.” Ginny’s voice was pleading. She leaned towards him, one hand extended as if she would reach through the flames and touch him. “What we have might not be the best we each could have, but what marriage is ideal? It’s comfortable, that’s what it is, and I want it to continue. Why can’t it?”
Harry felt the desultory, clinging tug of temptation. Eyes fastened on Ginny’s, he knew that she would be willing to forget this if he was. She might be extra attentive for a time when she came home, but in the end she and he would fall back into the routine.
Routine.
He was tired of living his life by that word.
He shook his head, and turned away from the temptation, more gently than he had thought himself able to. “No,” he said quietly. “It’s not enough for me anymore. I’m sorry.”
Ginny’s face hardened, and she looked to the side. “Is it someone else?” she asked through clenched teeth. “Tell me that, Harry.”
Harry thought of denying it, because the divorce would get nastier than it had to if he admitted the truth. But if he pursued Draco, as he fully intended to if he could, and even if he just declared his feelings to him, which was all he would do as long as Draco was married, Ginny was certain to learn of it sooner or later. And initial nastiness was better to deal with and get over with than long-lingering nastiness.
“Yeah,” he said. “There is.”
Ginny’s hands clenched. “And how long have you been cheating on me?”
“Never,” Harry said, and the shocked sound of his voice seemed to convince Ginny, because she relaxed slightly. “This is—someone I want the chance to be with, but I might not even get that chance.”
Ginny turned back to him, eyes wide now, as if curiosity compelled her to ask the question in spite of the fact that she’d probably rather not know. “I can’t imagine many people resisting Harry Potter,” she murmured. “Who is she?”
“He,” Harry corrected quietly.
He braced himself for a nasty comment on that, too, but Ginny’s mouth simply hung open slightly. Shock seemed to have taken away all her words. After a moment, she did swallow, wrap her arms around herself as if she were cold, and say, “All right. I can’t compete with that, obviously. I’ll agree to the divorce.”
“Gin—“ Harry wanted to tell her that he wasn’t attracted to other men, that it had only ever been Malfoy, that she didn’t have to feel inadequate, but Ginny looked past him and spoke as rapidly as a Muggle secretary typing on a keyboard.
“Lily will have to stay with you whilst I’m touring. And James and Al will be all right at Hogwarts, for now. I want to see them at holidays and on their birthdays if no time else.”
“Of course. I’d never keep you from your children, Gin.” Harry tried to catch her eye, but she shook her head and turned away, dashing at tears.
“Good, then. Good night, Harry.” She started to say something else, let it die on a breath, and shut the Floo connection with the flick of her wand.
Harry bowed his head as he knelt before the empty fireplace. He could feel a coil of guilt twisting in his stomach, the kind he’d felt during the first year after the war, when he went to funeral after funeral and grew heartsick from grief and wanted a way to make the grief stop. He’d never meant to cause Ginny pain, and he’d hoped for a friendly parting where neither of them wept.
But it was still an ending. The ending of a marriage, the ending of a life together.
And yet, he still wanted to go on.
*
“Why?”
Harry gazed down helplessly into his daughter’s eyes. His sons had both been easier than this. Al had accepted the news of the divorce with a little shrug, as if he had expected Harry to leave Ginny for a long time, and Harry had thought there was actually a small gleam of relief in his face. James had stormed and contacted Ginny by owl and then calmed down as soon as he figured out that it wouldn’t really change much between them, especially now that he would be at Hogwarts most of the year.
But Lily had been far more invested in the ideal of a happy family than Harry ever knew, and she had asked again and again, sometimes subtly and sometimes baldly, like this, why he and Ginny couldn’t get back together.
“Maybe you could date at first,” she said earnestly, attracting his attention again. “And then kiss slowly, and then get married again. A second honeymoon does lots for people, Witch Weekly says—“
“I know,” Harry said, crouching down in front of her and putting his hands on her shoulders. He had only discovered since the confrontation with James and Scorpius how much that gesture seemed to soothe his children. “But that doesn’t mean your mother and I can get back together.”
“Why not?” Lily stamped her foot on the floor and then folded her arms and glared out the window. “I know that you and Mum are different from most other people, but not that different. What works for most other couples should work for you.”
Harry blinked. Those few sentences told him more about his nine-year-old than a whole succession of years beforehand had.
“It won’t work because I’m half in love with someone else,” he said.
Lily’s mouth dropped open, and her face suddenly flamed with—something. Harry didn’t know what to call it. Romance, maybe. He didn’t know. He was already too old for things like that at her age, and the few months of what he’d felt for Ginny during his sixth year didn’t really count. “But that’s wonderful, Daddy,” she said, and hugged him around the shoulders, since he was at her height. “It’s wonderful to be in love with someone. Who is it?”
“Not yet,” Harry said, and blew in her ear, making her jerk away and giggle. “I don’t think I should tell one of my children before I tell the person I’m in love with.”
Lily stamped her foot again. “You mean you haven’t told her?”
“Not yet,” Harry said, letting the pronoun pass unnoticed for now. “And I need you to keep quiet about it, too. Your mum knows that I’m in love with someone, but not who it is, and Al and James don’t know even that much.”
Lily put her finger to her lips, her brown eyes sparkling.
And just like that, one of the potential breaches his divorce might have caused was cured. Harry had no illusions that everything would be so easy—for one thing, Mrs. Weasley had already contacted him, crying, and Ron wouldn’t like it when he found out who Harry had divorced Ginny for—but at least Lily was skipping around the house and shooting him conspiratorial glances now.
*
A red-tailed hawk came winging through the window to deliver Malfoy’s message the morning the announcement about Harry’s and Ginny’s divorce appeared in the papers. Harry raised an eyebrow and unsealed the envelope gingerly. He thought almost anything might be in the letter, from mockery about Harry’s decision to About time, but he didn’t cast the spells that his Auror training told him to, just in case the letter had Dark hexes on it. He thought he and Malfoy were past that point in their relationship.
He thought.
The letter was longer than he had expected, but still only a paragraph. It had no salutation or signature, but Harry had no doubt about who it was from. Apart from anything else, he still had Malfoy’s letter suggesting a meeting at Hogwarts to compare the handwriting of this one to.
You gave up your marriage with your wife even though you had no guarantee that I’m going to give up my marriage with Astoria. Why? What in the world would prompt you to do something like this? When I said you should grasp your courage, this wasn’t really what I meant.
Harry took a deep breath and put the letter on the desk in front of him. Then he surreptitiously locked the door. Ron was out on a mission with a trainee Auror and wouldn’t be back for hours.
Behind the locked door, and breaking a lot of quills, and smudging a lot of pieces of parchment, and starting over completely four times, Harry wrote his first love letter.
He explained, awkwardly, about how he’d seen Malfoy the day of the battle in the Great Hall, and how he’d admired his devotion to his family and a fearlessness in his expression that made them alike for a brief moment.
He explained that he admired how hard Malfoy had fought for his parents to walk free of Azkaban.
He said that he liked Scorpius, and respected the way Malfoy was raising him.
And then he wrote, finally, the hardest words of all.
I don’t really know you. This attraction may come to nothing. I can’t ask you to leave your wife for me. I have no idea if you like men. I don’t know what liking men means, myself. I’m thirty-seven years old and the only person I’ve ever slept with was Ginny, and not even her for the last six months or so.
God, this is hard.
But I’m willing to fight for what I want, and start thinking in terms of greater complexity. And I wanted you to know that I do want you, and I’m willing to fight for you. But you need to tell me what the fight means. I won’t interrupt your marriage with Astoria. I have no idea how you feel about her, and no right to tell you how you should feel about her.
Harry paused, sweating, his hand shaking, and then managed to copy down one more line before his nerve failed him.
If you wanted an act of courage in return for your act of courage in reaching out to me and trying to be pleasant to me since the war, here it is.
Love,
Harry.
He hardly had time to fold it into an envelope before the red-tailed hawk snatched it from him and soared out the window. Harry leaned back in the chair, shut his eyes, and drifted until Ron’s knock interrupted him.
*
“Potter.”
Harry rose to his feet, and then wondered why he’d done that. It was just Malfoy, walking into his office at the Ministry. Harry shouldn’t have to show respect or fight him, especially since Ron was watching from his desk right next to Harry’s with a face like a gathering storm.
But Harry had already done it, and though he was willing to grant himself more complex motivations than he used to have, he wasn’t willing to spend all his time investigating them and doing nothing else. He nodded and kept his eyes on Malfoy’s face. “Did you need something?”
“I came to speak to you on the matter you owled me about,” Malfoy said, too rapidly, and his cheeks were a brilliant pink. Harry raised his eyebrows. He had never seen Malfoy look so flustered.
It was a good expression on him, but Harry thought, with a sort of amused tolerance for himself, that he would probably find every expression that Malfoy cared to wear good-looking, so he wasn’t exactly a reliable authority.
“Of course,” Harry said. “Forgive me my surprise.” He nodded to Ron, who was staring at him with devouring curiosity and dawning suspicion, and then moved past Malfoy out the door of the office. He cast a privacy ward once he’d shut the door. He didn’t want anyone who passed by hearing every word they spoke. The news of his divorce had sparked enough interest in him again that even his colleagues might be tempted to report what they heard to the Prophet. They could disguise it as worry about a friend to themselves, if they wanted. “What about it?” he added, turning back to Malfoy when the ward was finished. “Was anything in the letter unclear?”
“Just why you wrote it at all.” Malfoy stepped towards him, body leashed and quivering with—what, Harry didn’t know. He could name it intensity, but that wasn’t enough to catch all of it.
He met Malfoy’s eyes and felt himself spinning and falling through a brand new universe. There were so many emotions there he had ignored for years. Anger, curiosity, fear, awe, longing. He could feel himself responding, and his smile sharpened and he moved a few steps closer. Malfoy lifted a hand as if to ward him away. Harry promptly caught it and laced his fingers through Malfoy’s, recklessly; the ward only prevented people from hearing, not seeing, them.
“I want you,” he said. “I respect you. I admire you. I like you, a lot more than I ever did in school.” He laughed, quietly. Malfoy waited like a horse with pricked ears for some sort of signal, his eyes so intent on Harry that it looked as if the gaze hurt him. “I don’t know if that will lead to love, but I’m willing to try.”
“I’m married.”
“I know that. So I’ll only ask as much of you as you’re willing to give.” He bowed to Malfoy. It was a stupid and extravagant gesture, but Harry felt like doing it. “If you want me to go away after this and stop bothering you, then I will. If you want me to write to your wife and take on the unpleasant duty of telling her that we’re running off to Majorca together, then I will.”
“I’m not running away from Astoria.” Malfoy’s spine had stiffened as if someone had shoved a blade up his arse.
“That’s not the same thing as not divorcing her, I notice,” Harry observed blandly.
“I don’t know that I want to,” Malfoy said bluntly. “She’s Scorpius’s mother, and she’s been a good wife to me. And this—I haven’t spent as much time on this as you have.”
“Actually,” Harry corrected him, “you were alert enough to see a certain look in my eyes and remember it for years. And I was trying to bury my memories of you as much as possible, because I didn’t think they were compatible with a normal life. So you’ve probably spent more time in the past decade thinking about me than I’ve spent thinking about you.”
Malfoy made a small frustrated sound and tugged at Harry’s hand, which Harry didn’t remove. “You have no idea if this would work.”
“I don’t,” Harry agreed cheerfully.
“Then why risk it?” Malfoy eyed him. “From what you’ve described as your emotional state in this past decade, you’re not someone who would take a chance like this.”
“I’m learning to carve up the negative space, maybe,” Harry murmured. “Create my own intaglio.”
Malfoy stared at him, not blinking, barely breathing.
“Dream,” Harry said, stepping close and letting his breath rake over Malfoy’s lips without closing them in a kiss, “about what’s not there. Draco.”
Malfoy might not run from his wife, but he ran from Harry then, pulling his hand free and whirling around. Harry watched him go, not pursuing. Draco was the one who did have to make his own decisions about what he wanted to accept, and Harry would be disappointed—all right, devastated—if he didn’t make the same one, but he would survive.
He walked back into the office and into an ambush. Ron glared at him and said, “I’m not blind, I just take a long time to see things. Talk.”
Harry smiled slightly and started doing so.
*
The next time he saw Draco, it was on a jog that the Ministry had insisted he take around the edge of a large Muggle park, because supposedly most of the older Aurors were more out of shape than they should have been. Harry slowed and bent over, panting. His breath whistled in and out of what felt like torn lungs. Yes, he was out of shape, but perhaps this program hadn’t been the best way to cure it.
“Harry.”
His name was spoken sharply, hostilely. Harry glanced up and nodded at Draco, who leaned against a tree with his arms folded. He grinned, because his happiness outweighed his surprise. “Hullo.”
“You say you want me,” Draco said abruptly. “Prove it.”
Harry cocked his head and advanced a few steps, his confidence increasing when Draco lifted his chin and gave a single shiver.
“I don’t want to do too much,” Harry whispered, “not when you’re still married. But there’s no harm in touching your hand, the way I did the other day. That’s not cheating. Or there’s this.”
He reached out and traced his finger in the air above the bridge of Draco’s nose and the line of his cheekbones. He made sure to keep an inch of space between his and Draco’s skin at first, but then he moved closer and closer until Draco’s eyes were fluttering shut, his breath creating crisp puffs of smoke in the cold air. Harry moved, carefully, nearer still, and his fingertip brushed the fine hairs that coated Draco’s chin.
“And I’d speak like this,” Harry said, finding a flowing and sensuous tone in his voice he’d never known was there. He simply reached for it, commanded it to exist, and it did. His confidence soared. He could do this. He could flirt with someone. He had simply never made a point of doing so with Ginny, because she had fallen right into his hand like an overripe plum. Only now was Harry beginning to understand how much of a disservice he had done both her and himself when that happened. “Because this tone is the best for whispering certain truths in. Truths like: You’re beautiful, Draco. Or: I think I would have been happier if I’d stayed to talk to you in the Great Hall, the day I returned your wand. Or: If you were free of Astoria, I’d run my palm, slowly, over every inch of your skin, followed by my tongue.”
Draco’s breath was coming in unsteady bursts. He still managed to whisper, “If I weren’t married to Astoria.”
“If you weren’t,” Harry agreed, also in a whisper. He traced his finger in a slight circle that scraped his nail, just the very edge of it, against Draco’s throat. Draco’s back arched as if the touch had been much heavier. “Too bad you are.”
Draco caught his hand, his fingers closing around Harry’s wrist, digging into skin, and pressing tendons to bone until Harry made a noise of discomfort. Then Draco’s eyes flared open and he jumped backwards as if his wife had been standing in the middle of the park and glaring.
“I can’t make a choice yet,” he said, and disappeared, which made Harry hope that the Obliviators weren’t watching.
Harry licked his own palm, since the one he really wanted to lick—that would have been his next step—wasn’t there. Then he shook his head, took a deep breath, and started jogging.
He reminded himself that Draco might make the decision to stay with Astoria after all. It was a slim chance Harry was asking him to embrace, no guarantee of happiness.
He was still grinning.
*
Harry started receiving letters after that, from Draco, usually at least one a day. They tried to explain, in disjointed sentences, the relationship that he and Astoria had together, and they taught Harry more than he had ever known of the other man.
We’ve always been friends. From the first day I saw her, I knew we’d get along. But now you’ve made me question whether it was ever more than that…
I said Scorpius adores her in my last letter, but that’s not true. He likes her, just as I do. But no more. I had to think of that today when he spent the entire visit I made to Hogwarts, in honor of the Slytherin-Gryffindor Quidditch match—and why weren’t you there, to see your James play?—following me around and staring up at me with shining eyes. He never once asked where she was…
My parents are indifferent to Astoria. It was Scorpius they wanted, the continuation of blood. No one could have been kinder to her when she was pregnant, but after that, it was as if she ceased to exist…
Damn it, why did you make me ask questions like this? Otherwise, I would have lived with her to the end of my days, and never questioned whether I was happy with her when it was just the two of us alone. I know that I’m happy with Scorpius, and that’s what I’ve never questioned…
And now you even have me wondering whether it’s fair to her, to keep her in a marriage like this. And then I’m laughing on the inside when I think about it some more, because this is not the sort of thing I ever expected to be thinking, this rubbish about fairness and justice. Damn you, Harry Potter, damn you.
Harry answered cautiously, not wanting to press Draco further than he was comfortable with. He thought they did their best communicating face-to-face, and preferably skin-to-skin. But no, he wouldn’t suggest that yet, lest Draco thought he was trying to speed up a seduction that was by no means certain.
So he talked about different things instead, like the way Ron and Hermione had reacted to the news that it was Draco he was interested in.
Ron said, “I can’t believe it,” about a hundred million times in one day. It got to the point where I was going to murder him if I heard it one more time.
Hermione’s been great. Really great. She’s nodded thoughtfully when I explained, and she hasn’t blamed me for abandoning Ginny. Of course, I do wish she would stop proposing psychological explanations for why my marriage was always destined to fail.
Divorce isn’t pleasant, but Ginny kept it from being hell. She stayed away from me until we could speak civilly, and now she does seem happy, since there’s evidently been a player on the Falmouth Falcons’ team that’s she wanted to date for a while.
The Weasleys are plain bewildered. But they aren’t unaccepting.
He showed himself and responded very gently to Draco’s revelations, trying not to think that it might all be for nothing. At the very least, the sharing of self-knowledge with another human being could never be “nothing.”
*
Someone knocked on the door of his house early one morning, so early that Harry was still blinking winter stars away when he stumbled to the door. He thought it was an urgent case at first. They usually tried owls or Floo first, but when an answer really couldn’t wait, sometimes the Minister himself came to summon Harry to the job.
But it was Draco, leaning against the doorframe and looking up at those same stars Harry’s vision had spun with a moment ago. The look on his face was as calm and as resolute as the one Harry had seen when he was talking to the solicitor long ago.
And he turned around, and his smile was warm, and he put something rustling and papery into Harry’s hand. Harry fumbled for his glasses and lit his wand with a muttered Lumos. His thoughts were still scattered, whirling between dreams and surprise, and he didn’t anticipate what he was reading until he was actually reading it.
By agreement of both, Draco Lucius Malfoy will separate from Astoria Heloise Malfoy…
Harry looked up, knowing his jaw had dropped, knowing his eyes were bulging, and not caring. Draco met him with a smug smile, but there was still a faint uncertainty about his lips and eyes that stung Harry into action.
He dropped the divorce papers, seized Draco, and kissed him.
Draco answered with stunning force, his hands clasping Harry’s shoulders and then rising up to his neck, as if he wanted to choke him with the sheer passion of the kiss. Harry slid one hand down to Draco’s arse and dragged him closer. They could have been convicted of public indecency had any Muggle cops been nearby, Harry thought hazily.
“Everything you hoped for?” Draco whispered at last, when he could draw his lips away.
“You’re everything I hoped for,” Harry answered honestly, and without thinking.
Draco’s eyes widened and flashed.
In the moment before he leaned in for another kiss, Harry thought that he saw a shimmering image behind the surface of Draco’s eyes, a reversed carving of crystal and dreams, their own intaglio, summoned shining into reality.
End.
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Date: 2009-01-01 04:24 am (UTC)