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lomonaaerenTitle: Difficulties of Being
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this for fun and not profit.
Rating: PG-13
Pairings: Albus Severus/Scorpius, Harry/Draco (past Harry/Ginny and Draco/Astoria)
Warnings: Heavy angst, profanity, slash sex. Compliant with the DH epilogue.
Wordcount: ~18,500
Summary: “You’re so much like your father!” If there’s one sentence Al’s tired of hearing, it’s that one. But maybe he can arrange things so that he doesn’t have to hear it anymore.
Author’s Notes: See that heavy angst warning? That’s there for a reason.
Difficulties of Being
He’d always heard it, but Al really grew conscious of it during his first year at Hogwarts.
The first one to say it was Headmistress McGonagall, who Al had met a few times over the years. She looked at him with misty eyes when the Hat Sorted him into Gryffindor, and then she called him up to her office. Al went with his throat tight and his heart being so fast it almost deafened him, wondering if someone else had overheard the Hat’s offer to put him into Slytherin.
It’s all right for Dad to say it doesn’t matter, he thought, kicking moodily at the steps of the moving staircase. He was already a hero. Even if he had been in Slytherin, everyone would have liked him anyway. But what am I?
After a few minutes in McGonagall’s office, he could answer that question.
Harry Potter’s son.
“You’re so much like your father,” McGonagall said as she handed a cup of tea and a small plate of biscuits across the table to Al. He ate them gratefully; he’d been too nervous to eat much in the Great Hall so far, even though his cousins Dominique and Louis were both in Gryffindor and promised him that they’d show him around. “The same hair, the same eyes…the only thing that’s missing is the scar.”
Al gave her a small smile, and then concentrated on the food while the Headmistress rambled away into some long, pointless story of Dad’s “antics” at Hogwarts. Al had already heard the story, of course. He’d heard all the stories, a hundred times, and the number of people who thought he hadn’t and they had to tell him about them were just more people to resent.
McGonagall finally let him go. Apparently he’d been called up there so that she could reminisce. Al leaned on the wall on the way down and rubbed his belly—he’d eaten too many biscuits too fast—and hoped that was the end of it.
Of course it wasn’t.
Professor Flitwick squeaked with excitement when Al cast the Wingardium Leviosa Charm right on his third try and told Al that his father had been good with Charms, too. Professor Trelawney, who looked ancient enough to crumble away if you blew on her, got misty eyes over Al and talked dolefully about the many times she’d predicted Harry Potter’s death and how he’d managed to survive them all, due to his “inner eye.” Two of the portraits, even, stopped Al on the way to class so that they could exclaim over a Potter child who didn’t look like a Weasley.
On and on it went. When Al sneaked out to Hogsmeade, people noticed him and sent him back to Hogwarts immediately, because “we know that Harry Potter’s son what looks like him is too young to be here.” Hagrid started bawling when he found Al petting his boarhound and took him to the hut for a long tea of rock-hard cake and tales about Dad and his old boarhound Fang. Professor Sinistra, who didn’t ordinarily look away from her telescope, handed back one of Al’s essays with a smile and a comment that a talent for maths must run in the family.
The worst thing was when Jamie noticed and made up a song and dance about how Al and Dad were twins, separated in space and time, and doomed to repeat each other’s actions over and over again. Al cast a Boils Hex on him and spent a week in detention, but it was worth it for the cautious looks that Jamie gave him after that.
It got to the point that Potions, and the company of Slytherins, was a relief, because the Potions Professor wasn’t one who’d known Dad and the Slytherins were too busy sneering at Al for being a Gryffindor to sneer at him for being Harry Potter’s son. Al would pick up his cauldron the moment Professor Brizzgard gave the instructions for the potion and join Scorpius Malfoy.
Malfoy gave him raised eyebrows the first few times that happened, but one day, he looked straight into Al’s face and said abruptly, “Do they give you the same kind of shite about being your father over again?”
Al was too surprised to lie. “They tell you that, too?”
Malfoy snorted and rolled his eyes as he turned his satchel upside-down so that all his Potions ingredients pitched onto the table. Somehow, he managed to dart his hand into them and come out with the right one every time. Al had been watching, but he hadn’t figured out how to do that trick yet. “Oh, yeah. McGonagall watches me like I’m going to grow a Dark Mark on my arm or something. And Sinistra makes ‘cute’ little jokes about my name and Dad’s name. And the portraits tell me that my father looked just like me when he was my age.” Malfoy shook his head, looking ill. “I get enough of that from Grandmother, I don’t need it from painted women who’re trying to pinch my cheeks.”
Al nodded fervently. “When I grow up, I’m going to do something completely different,” he said. “Something that’ll separate me so decisively from Dad that they won’t have any choice but to decide that I’m not that much like him after all.”
Malfoy paused and looked at him hard. “You sound like a Slytherin,” he said. Al decided not to take offense; he knew it was supposed to be a compliment. “What’re you going to do?”
“I don’t know yet,” Al said. It was hard to know what would make him happy for the rest of his life, which was something that adults who asked him what he wanted to do when he grew up never seemed to understand. “But I know it’s going to be something grand, and something good, and something that will make other people look up to me. And it’s my name that’s going to be famous, instead of my Dad’s. No one will compare me with Dad ever again. He’ll be just a footnote in history.”
The next moment, he blushed and shut his mouth. He’d never spoken that openly to anyone. Most of his family seemed to think ambition was evil. Dad didn’t, but Al couldn’t really talk to him about how Al was going to replace him and how his life would be forgotten when Al was famous.
But Malfoy grinned at him, and said, “That’s what I want to do, too.” He put out his hand across the cauldron, and Al smiled at him and shook it tentatively.
“You’re not so bad when you let yourself be, Malfoy,” he said. “That must make you different from your father, right?”
Malfoy laughed. “Call me Scorpius.”
*
The rest of Hogwarts wasn’t as bad, not with Scorpius by his side. Al now had someone to play pranks with and study with—honestly, the rest of Gryffindor didn’t seem to study at all, and Rose, who was in Ravenclaw, did nothing else; you had to strike a balance—and fly with. He didn’t want to be on the Quidditch team, he wasn’t good at Quidditch, but he liked flying, and Scorpius was always willing to sneak out with him and circle above the Pitch a time or two, sometimes diving at the lake to see if they could scare the giant squid.
And always, always they talked about what they were going to do when they grew up.
Scorpius had lots of dreams. “I’ll be a Quidditch player,” he told Al one week. “You should be one, too. Then everyone will scream your name, and fans will go on talking about you for a long time after they forget about Dark Lords and wars. People don’t like thinking about Dark Lords and wars. They like thinking about fun. It’s the perfect solution.”
Al wasn’t good at Quidditch, so he thought that had to be out, but sometimes he dreamed about practicing until he was better than anyone, and watching his father’s face when he saw Al leap onto a broom and go casually after the Snitch. But no, maybe it would be better to be a Beater, because then no one would think he was in his father’s shadow because he was a Seeker. Al practiced with the Bludgers for three straight weeks on the sly, and the only thing that resulted from it was a broken arm that he had to take Skele-Gro for.
Well, that and Scorpius changing his dream.
“No, I think we should be wild animal tamers!” he said one day in third year when they’d conned some of the house-elves in the kitchens out of butterbeer and were talking in a window alcove that Scorpius knew about from his father’s stories, safely hidden from sight. Scorpius sat bolt upright, his hair flying around him and his eyes brilliant with inspiration. “We’ll travel all over the world and come back with magical creatures that no one’s ever heard of before!” He punched the air with his fist. “We’ll be the first to tame a dragon!”
That sounded great. Al had met Luna and her husband Rolf Scamander a few times, and they led lives that were full of excitement, capturing and writing about fantastic beasts. He and Scorpius could do the same things, and then they’d be best friends forever and never have to part.
Even drunk, there was something about that thought that made Al pause and frown. Something about it was wrong.
But he couldn’t figure out what it was, because Scorpius leaped from the windowsill and insisted on taking Al to the library so that they could find the spells they’d need to tame dragons. Madam Pince discovered them, and they got in trouble, but Al didn’t really care. What mattered was that Scorpius was with him, and he made faces imitating Madam Pince behind her back as she looked at Al and scolded him, which made Al laugh, which made Madam Pince turn around and catch Scorpius, which meant they got into trouble together.
Then they were going to be painters, and then they were going to be pirates, and then they were going to be spies, and then assassins, and then thieves. Al wore black hundreds of times during the next few years as they sneaked around practicing deadly spy skills. Scorpius cast a spell that flooded the Quidditch Pitch so they could sail wooden boats about and prepare for the day when they would be deadly pirates on the high seas. Al tried to persuade Lily to play the part of a kidnapped maiden when Scorpius decided that he and Al would rescue people for a living, but Lily demanded too high a price, his dessert every day for a month. In the end, he and Scorpius made a maiden out of wood and took turns rescuing her from a cave near Hogsmeade, the Shrieking Shack, a hole that Scorpius used a curse to drill in the ground, and various corners of Hogwarts.
And then, one day when they were both fifteen, Scorpius came up with the best idea of all, and the last one.
*
Al was panting, stripped to the waist so that his sweat could fall on the stone instead of going on his robes, and shaking. He’d run an obstacle course Scorpius had set up on the sixth and seventh floors, which consisted of several falls, several leaps across huge gaps left by moving staircases, and a gauntlet of enormous skipping boulders. When Al asked why he had to run it, Scorpius had looked mysterious and said that it was preparation for the most important plan of all, and if Al was his friend, he’d do it without question.
Well, he’d done it, and now he was so tired that Scorpius couldn’t reasonably expect him to do anything else right away. Al swallowed a huge gulp of air and turned his head so that he could watch Scorpius. They were on the Astronomy Tower, their latest secret place, and Scorpius sat with his legs crossed and his arms folded on top of them, watching the stars with a wise expression that made Al afraid his next project would be that they should both become astronomers.
Astronomers only have to have fit eyes, not fit bodies, Al told himself, and then cleared his throat expectantly.
Scorpius turned around and looked at him with brilliant eyes and a slight smile curving his mouth. It was a sight that Al had seen plenty of times before, but which made him stare uneasily now. It was as though Scorpius was a siren, but instead of singing, he would just look at you and draw you into focusing on him. Al shifted uncomfortably and waited for Scorpius to speak, because he knew he wouldn’t be able to look away until Scorpius did.
“I have the best idea,” Scorpius said, in the caressing voice he used when he wanted Al to agree before he even heard what the idea was.
“Is it related to the obstacle course?” Al glanced across the battlements of the tower at the stars. They weren’t what he really wanted to be looking at, but it was better than peering at Scorpius like a lovestruck fool.
Lovestruck.
The thought lodged in his mind like food stuck in his throat.
“Yes, of course.” Scorpius laughed and leaned forwards to shake Al’s shoulder. “You don’t really think that I would have you do something like that and not give you some reward for it, right?”
I know what reward I’d like. And then Al was confused, because no, he didn’t. Mostly, he wanted to know what the idea was, so that he could deride it the way he probably would—no idea could be this good—and then go to bed.
“Well,” he said, “there was that raid on the kitchens that you made me do last year—”
“I can’t believe you remember things like that,” Scorpius said, as he often did. “Honestly, I don’t know anyone who holds grudges as long as you do, Al.”
Al pushed himself up on his elbow, glad that the mood between them seemed to be shifting back to normal. “Tell me that covering me with rotten food and then leaving me trussed up for Filch to find isn’t worth a grudge.”
Scorpius adopted an injured expression. “If you’d just run when I told you to, then there wouldn’t have been a problem.”
“Hard to run when you’re trussed.” Al considered pouncing on Scorpius and extracting a little more payment for that prank, but Scorpius suddenly looked so solemn that Al assumed he was about to explain what he’d called Al up here for. He fell silent and raised an eyebrow pointedly.
“We’re going to be Aurors,” Scorpius said.
Al blinked. It wasn’t what he would have expected. “But my Dad’s an Auror,” he said. “And if I’m going to be different from him, then I don’t see how I can do the same thing.”
Scorpius rolled his eyes and snorted, pushing Al hard enough in the shoulder that he slid towards the battlements. “I know your Dad’s a good Auror, Al, but does he ever do anything really spectacular? I mean, the way that killing You-Know-Who was spectacular? You told me once that he just goes through his daily routine and doesn’t seem to be excited about capturing Dark wizards anymore.”
Al thought about it. It was a while since he had paid that much attention to his Dad’s job; most of the time, he was at Hogwarts, and at home during the hols, he had more important things to think about than Auror work, like Scorpius’s next owl. But yes, from what he could remember his Dad treated the job like any other job. He didn’t talk about the chases and the exciting arrests and the investigations into murders, even though Al knew they happened. It was like the war. When someone asked about it, most of the time Dad would just smile and change the subject to something infinitely less interesting.
Al had had to hear the story of how Dad actually defeated Voldemort from Uncle Ron, and that was wrong. How could you put something like that behind you?
“We’re going to be the best Aurors ever,” Scorpius said, and his face shone like jewels. Al caught his breath. Yeah, this is different than all the other times he’s thought something up. “You’ll be spectacular because you have me for a partner. Your Dad doesn’t have a spectacular partner, and he doesn’t care enough about it to do exciting things on his own. But when there are two of us who are both committed to being the best, they’ll have to notice us, and you’ll become famous in your own right.”
Al nodded slowly, thinking about it. Yes, it made sense. It was the right thing to do. Sometimes he’d thought about being an Auror on his own, before Scorpius suggested it, but he’d put it aside because he didn’t think he could put up with all the Auror instructors talking about how much like his father Al was.
But this way, he could have what he wanted, and it would be very different from what his father had at the same time.
Al grinned at Scorpius. “Well, it’s our OWLs year, and that’ll be important to being Aurors as well as being fit. What are we waiting for?”
“You like to study too much,” Scorpius complained. “It’s somewhat disturbing.”
But he willingly followed Al back downstairs, and Al found that he liked that. It was nice to be the leader sometimes.
*
“Your mum and I are getting a divorce, Al.”
Al had been in the middle of writing a letter to Scorpius when his father said that. He found that he’d dropped the quill and blotted the paper with a spreading pool of ink that erased most of the words he’d already written. He looked at it with a long series of blinks before he managed to look up and turn around so that he could see his dad.
Harry leaned his shoulder on the doorframe of Al’s bedroom and smiled tiredly at him. Al had taken to calling him by his first name lately, because that was what Scorpius did with Mr. Malfoy, and if he could do it with someone so distant and formal that he made Al’s skin crawl every time he visited the Manor, then Al could do it with someone who was more open and friendly.
“I’m sorry,” Harry said gently. “We would have stayed together if we could have, but your mother was more and more unhappy.” He shrugged a little. “We’re friends, but not really in love any longer. So we decided a divorce would be best.”
“You don’t need to explain to me like I’m a little kid,” Al said roughly. “Anyone could see that you should have got a divorce years ago.”
Harry winced and ran a hand through his hair, over his lightning bolt scar. Al wondered sometimes why he didn’t get the stupid thing altered or removed. Harry had admitted that he hated it. “Yes, well,” he said quietly. “First we thought you children were too young, and then we still hoped we could make it work.”
“But Mum’s been unhappy for years,” Al said. The words seemed to be tumbling out of his mouth almost despite himself, while he was distant from them and just watched. “How is it that you only now noticed?”
He should have noticed, he told himself when Harry winced again. What kind of a husband is he? I wouldn’t fail at my marriage if I got married. I would stay together and make it work and always notice when my spouse was unhappy. He didn’t do that, because he thinks too much about his job and Uncle Ron and Aunt Hermione and everyone else in the family. Why didn’t he do something to help his own family first?
“There’s no excuse for it,” Harry said in a low voice. “You’re right to blame me.”
“I’m not blaming you.” Al’s voice sounded too loud in his ears. He stood up and almost knocked the table he’d been writing at over. He was sixteen now, and his limbs were too awkward and hit everything in sight. Al already knew that he was going to be taller than his father. Harry glanced up at him, and Al felt a surge of irritation that someone who was so short was important. There was nothing about him that was heroic, nothing. “I’m just saying what you should have done, that’s all.”
Harry reached out and squeezed his shoulder. “I know it hurts,” he said. “I think that you might prefer to grieve in privacy, so I’ll leave you alone now.” He smiled at Al, and the smile and his eyes both held a sharp kind of painful love. Then he turned around and left.
Al collapsed into his chair and closed his eyes, listening to his father’s regular steps thumping down the stairs.
Of all the things that irritated him about Harry, the worst one was the fact that he could say something like that and cut to the heart of a situation, and then Al felt like he was whinging if he kept trying to blame him.
*
Harry moved out of the house. He stayed with Uncle Ron and Aunt Hermione for a short time, and then took a small house in a little experimental wizarding village in the south of Wiltshire. More people were trying to live in those kinds of villages, so that Hogsmeade wasn’t the only one like it in England. Al thought he’d mostly chosen it because the people who lived there were all strangers.
Al wrote long, angry letters that he tore up and never sent. Lily did owl Harry regularly, with tear-stained letters that begged him to give Mum another chance. That drove Al mad. Didn’t she realize that Harry was the one who hadn’t noticed Mum’s unhappiness in the past and so he was the one who broke up the marriage?
Jamie, the prat, just accepted the end of it and shrugged and said that, if they were both happier living apart, then it was the best thing for everyone concerned. Jamie was infuriating like Harry sometimes. Al tried to punch him, but Jamie was bigger and stronger and quicker, always had been, even after Al and Scorpius had been training to become Aurors for almost a year. Al staggered to the hospital wing nursing bruises and sullenly endured the lecture from the new mediwitch, Madam Pagnell, on fighting.
Scorpius was the only one who really understood. Well, not understood, because his parents had been divorced for years and he never seemed to be upset about it. But he offered sympathy and listened to Al’s complaints, and that had been all Al really needed. He didn’t understand what was so hard about it.
“Do you ever wish your parents would get back together?” Al asked him, one night after they’d spent the evening writing a Potions essay. They were both in NEWT Potions, and Scorpius needed Al’s help most of the time now. It never seemed to bother him.
Scorpius had been lying on his bed in Slytherin and staring dreamily out a window that looked into the green underworld of the lake. Now he blinked and looked back. “No,” he said, after apparently giving it some grave thought, “not really. Astoria was bored sick with Draco, you could see it.” He grinned suddenly. “And with Dad’s extracurricular activities, it’s really for the best that he wasn’t married anymore.”
“He was cheating?” Al knew his voice was too shocked, an innocent, prudish voice. Scorpius’s wider grin and reaching out to ruffle his hair confirmed it. Annoyed, Al ducked away.
“No, he wanted to sleep with men,” Scorpius said. “And Astoria’s not a man, whatever else she is.”
Al choked. There was nothing in his mouth to choke on except air, but he managed it anyway. Then he shook his head. “That’s impossible,” he whispered. “I’ve seen your father, and he didn’t look—I mean—”
Scorpius rolled his eyes. “It’s not as though it’s some brand you carry on your skin, Al. It took him a long time to realize that he preferred men, and then he thought he had to go ahead and get married because he would need children. Once he had me, though, there was no real reason for him to stay married for the rest of his life. He would have been miserable, and Astoria would have been miserable, and I would have found out that they only stayed together for me and been furious. I don’t like people doing things that are just for me.” Scorpius frowned for a moment, then shrugged. “So they got divorced like civilized people.”
Al nodded as if he was paying attention, but in reality, he was thinking more of the first words Scorpius had said.
It’s not as though it’s some brand you carry on your skin, Al.
Maybe then… maybe there was some explanation for the formless emotions that roiled in his gut when he looked at Scorpius, and the dreams he sometimes woke up from. Al had dismissed them as simply being very strange, but he kept having them. There could be an explanation for them, and a name.
But it wasn’t a name that he was prepared to think of in relation to himself at the minute, especially since Scorpius was the only boy he had those feelings around. Maybe he wasn’t. And Scorpius was speaking again.
“I do think you’re being too hard on your dad. He honestly didn’t have any idea that your mum was so unhappy. Why not give him a bit of sympathy?”
Al flashed his friend an ugly look and rolled away from the bed. “If he really couldn’t see that, he was blind.”
“Then why didn’t you tell him about it, if you saw it?” Scorpius asked in a tone of sweet reason.
Al shook his head. “That’s not the kind of thing kids are supposed to do.”
“You have such strange ideas, sometimes,” Scorpius said in a patronizing tone.
*
Al hopped around the room holding his letter from the Ministry and fighting back the temptation to howl like a wolf. The owl had said that he was accepted into the Auror program. It was what he and Scorpius had been training for for two years, and still Al had worried that it wouldn’t happen.
The fireplace in his bedroom flared, and Scorpius tumbled out of it, waving his own piece of parchment and talking so fast that Al found it hard to make out his words at first. “Did you get accepted? Of course you did. I got accepted. We’re going to be partners, Al, and we’re going to single-handedly reform the Auror program from the ground up—”
“More like revolutionize it, knowing you.” Al laughed, holding his arms out, and Scorpius grabbed him and spun them around in dizzy circles, until they toppled over on the bed, laughing like madmen.
Scorpius propped himself up on one elbow and grinned down at Al. Al stared up at him and felt those formless emotions waking up in his gut again, stirring like currents, trying to make him do something stupid. He gulped and snatched his gaze away from Scorpius’s, looking down at the bedspread.
“Al?”
The single word was like the crack of a Blasting Curse in the quiet bedroom. Al blinked and jumped. When had it got so quiet? He sat up and cleared his throat. “Yeah, what?”
“Are you all right?” Scorpius reached out as if he was going to feel Al’s forehead for fever. “You looked so queer for a minute—”
“Just excited,” Al said hastily, and pulled back out of reach of Scorpius’s hand. He had no idea what Scorpius would do if he thought that Al might be gay. “Have you told Draco yet?”
Scorpius laughed. “He was the one who got the owl, because I was in the bathroom! When I came out, he was sitting there with the letter in his hand and this stuffy expression on his face, like he was disappointed that I hadn’t signed up for a Malfoy course in Dominating the World Through Evil. But then he hugged me and told me he was proud of me.” Scorpius grinned. “We’ll see how proud he still is when he starts hearing about my differences of opinion with my instructors.”
Al winced. Mr. Malfoy hadn’t liked hearing about the times that Scorpius got in trouble for pranks—mostly with Al, he had to admit—at Hogwarts. God knew what he would do if someone told him about the discipline problems Scorpius would undoubtedly have with the Aurors, some of them because they didn’t like his name and some of them because Scorpius was a walking discipline problem all on his own.
“Have you told your Dad?” Scorpius rolled over on his back and looked earnestly at Al upside-down.
Al swallowed and looked away.
“You didn’t,” said Scorpius, with no hint of a question in his voice. “What is he going to think when you walk through the door into the Ministry and plop yourself down at a desk?”
“I’m not going to have a desk for three more years,” Al reminded him. “They’ll make us share this little cupboard-like space. I know they will.”
“When you’re very literal, that means you’re trying to avoid the question.” Scorpius stretched his arms above his head, his eyes bright and alert and never looking away from Al’s face. “What’s your father going to say?”
And the flood of Al’s bitterness that hadn’t been purged in years came pouring out of him. It wouldn’t have, but Scorpius kept provoking and provoking him, and wouldn’t take “no” for an answer, and frankly, Al was sick of it.
“He’s going to think that the only reason they hired me is because I’m his son, of course,” he said. “What else should he think? He never saw that Mum was unhappy in their marriage. He never saw how much I resent it that I look so fucking much like him! He never notices anything without relating it back to himself! He’ll decide that I don’t have any talents of my own, that my fate is just to be in his shadow forever—”
Al stopped speaking then, not because he was out of things to say, but because Scorpius was watching him with wide eyes and a questioning quirk of his mouth that didn’t look like the expression of support Al had expected.
“I don’t think your dad’s like that at all,” Scorpius murmured. “Maybe somewhat like that, but not all the way.”
“I just—everyone says that I’m his son, and that’s the first thing they notice, and the only thing they notice.” Al sat down on his bed and wiped his face off. “I want to be seen for something else, by someone.”
Scorpius squeezed his shoulder. “I see you as something else.”
Al looked up. Scorpius looked back at him, not smiling. The air between them seemed to change for Al, as though someone had bound a cloth around both their heads and started tightening it so that their faces were forced slowly together.
And he couldn’t let that happen. He had no idea if Scorpius might be gay or whether he would return Al’s feelings in any sense at all, and he wasn’t about to make the first move. He didn’t take risks. He wasn’t like his father.
He coughed and stood up, almost banging his head into Scorpius’s chin, and snatched up the letter again. “Do you reckon we’ll be in any of the same courses together?”
Scorpius was quiet for a moment before he answered, but that could have had a lot of causes, and then he talked in the same lighthearted tone as ever, so Al decided to ignore his own misgivings.
*
“Hi, Al.”
His father stood in the door of the Auror classroom, looking uncertainly at him. Al finished picking up his books deliberately before he turned around to face him. Harry gave him that embarrassed smile he always seemed to be wearing. Al was sick of that, too. Why couldn’t his father be a man for once, and stop looking and acting weak? Honestly, he could have had anything he wanted after he defeated Voldemort, including the privacy from reporters that he was always talking about. Al didn’t understand why he hadn’t taken it.
“Hello, Father,” he said coolly, and saw that it worked. Harry promptly lost the embarrassed smile and took a step away from him, stopping the pretense that they had anything affectionate to say to each other. That’s right, Al thought. You have to stop thinking of me as your son and start thinking of me as an adult.
“So you got into the program.” Harry’s voice was strained, and he was looking somewhere over Al’s shoulder now. Al wanted to sneer, but Scorpius had told him that it made his face look disfigured, so he didn’t. And now Harry couldn’t even look at Al, as though there was something wrong with him.
You made the decision to be such a poor father that your marriage collapsed, Dad. And now you can’t face your children.
“Yes,” Al said. “And it was entirely on my own merits, whatever you think. They didn’t hire me just because I’m your son.”
Harry looked back at him, his gaze meditative. That was another thing Al hated about him, that he recovered so swiftly from insults. Mr. Malfoy would have fired off some cold and cutting remark in return and made you feel it. Harry just acted as though he’d forgotten. “Do you know,” he said, “I don’t even think of you as my son at all. There are more important ways to be someone’s son than looks.”
And he turned and wandered out of the room, leaving Al to wonder why it was so hard to catch his breath.
*
Six months into the program, Al was hanging upside-down from a rope ladder strung across the ceiling of Training Room Five and watching Scorpius swinging towards him, laughing, his hair in a bright fluffy halo around his face and his eyes fixed on Al, and he knew that he couldn’t deny it any longer.
He had feelings for Scorpius. Feelings that intensified to jealousy every time Scorpius talked about dating one of the other Auror trainees, a young woman named Sarah. Feelings that sometimes left him locked in unseeing stares at Scorpius’s face, and which meant he would probably figure this out fairly soon.
Al wanted to tell him about it instead of having him figure it out. That would be too humiliating.
“Move!” Scorpius yelled as he swung towards Al, and Al started and realized that he was blocking the ladder. He faced the far wall and began to swing again, suddenly more aware of the eyes of the Auror instructors than he was of Scorpius. He flushed and fixed his attention so straight ahead that no one would be able to find anything to scold in him.
He was sure that they were judging him anyway. He was sure those heavy, judging eyes could read every thought in his mind, and that they were shaking their heads and sucking at their teeth in rejection.
Al gritted his teeth. Even here, it seemed, he couldn’t escape the shadow of his father.
Oh, they didn’t say it in the way that the Hogwarts professors had. Harry had been someone special to people like McGonagall, and Al got the distinct impression that these instructors hadn’t liked his father at all. But they looked at him and shook their heads and sighed when he hadn’t done anything wrong, or when he was honestly trying his best and still failing at a task that was slightly beyond his abilities. He could read those glares. He knew them well. They were measuring him against some other standard and finding him wanting.
What standard could there be but his father?
He couldn’t change the way he looked without announcing that he somehow didn’t have a right to his appearance, which his father had claimed first. He wouldn’t do that. The only thing he could do was impress them so much that they forgot he was the son and started judging his father’s accomplishments by him.
That was why he couldn’t allow himself to brood on his feelings for Scorpius. They would become a weakness, an obsession that he would think about instead of his studies and his physical training regimen. They were already becoming that, given the evidence of this training session.
He had to get past that.
And, terrifying as it was, the only way he thought he could do that was to confess his feelings to Scorpius.
I’m not doing this because I’m weak, he reminded himself, as he reached the far end of the room and dropped from the ladder to the floor, folding his knees beneath him. I’m doing this to become a good Auror and to prove that I’m my own person, not just my father’s shadow.
Put like that, the confession was tolerable.
*
“Scorpius, I need to talk to you.”
Scorpius, still drying his sweat-soaked hair with a towel, paused and looked at him with startled eyes across the office. Al had his hands braced on the desk and his face set in what he hoped was a stern look. Scorpius looked frustrated instead of apprehensive, though.
“It was that last jump, wasn’t it?” he asked. “I know it looked as though the tendon on my right leg was pulling. I swear, Al, it wasn’t. What happened is that I stumbled just as I began the jump. I’m not injured, and I won’t let you down in the field, you can be sure of that. I just need to—”
Al shook his head and stepped around the desk to grab Scorpius’s shoulders. That left them standing very close, and Al had to swallow nervously against the temptation to back away. If he did that, then he thought he would never get the courage for this again. Scorpius’s eyes were already widening with curiosity, and Al didn’t think he could face the eager questioning that would begin in a moment.
“It’s not that at all,” he said. “It’s something that’s been brewing for a long time.”
Scorpius wrinkled his brow and cocked his head. “Felix Felicis?”
Sometimes Scorpius would pretend to be considerably stupider than he really was, in order to defuse tension. Al didn’t dare allow the trick to work this time. He bit back the building laughter, pressed his fingers into Scorpius’s arms, and said, “I think I have a crush on you. I understand if you think it’s only silliness or getting ideas because your father is gay. I understand if you don’t feel the same way. But I had to tell you because I think it’s impacting the way I work with you in training sessions. That’s all.”
Scorpius’s eyes got wider and wider, and again Al got that urge to laugh, but for a different reason. He held it back as he had before, and stepped away—except that their office was so small his legs banged into the desk. He cleared his throat and had to stand there. He would be cursed if he looked like he was retreating.
Scorpius rubbed his forehead several times, as if he had hit it on something and thought this might be a vision, or a dream. Then he said, “Really, Al?”
Al nodded tensely, his shoulders so tight that he thought his muscles would snap in a few minutes. Here would come the laughter, or the mockery, or the scorn and the sneer that curled Scorpius’s lips when he hated someone but which he had never directed at Al—
But Scorpius was giving him a wide, delighted smile instead, and stepping forwards, and clasping his hands to Al’s shoulders, and murmuring into his ear, “Thank God. I thought I was the only one.”
“Excuse me?” Al’s voice had risen higher. He cleared his throat and tried to make it lower. “You’re also in love with yourself?”
Scorpius snorted. “Sometimes, Al, you’re really quite stupid,” he said. “And far too obsessed with our respective fathers.” He clasped his mouth to Al’s before Al could do more than make a faint protest about his non sequitur.
Al reached up with one faltering hand, which he ended up putting on Scorpius’s shoulder. His fingers dug into flesh, still hot from the training exercises. His body shuddered, and he realized that he had stepped closer again, this time without fear. His tongue was twining around Scorpius’s, and that soft blond hair was falling around his face this time, and those intense grey eyes were so close that he couldn’t see them properly—
Scorpius broke free and held Al’s cheeks in his hands, staring at him. Al licked his lips and tried to return the stare, but Scorpius had always had a more commanding gaze than he did. He looked away.
“Remarkable,” Scorpius whispered. “I would have thought you had a lot of experience if I didn’t know better.” And then his voice changed so that Al had to look back and see the wide grin cracking his face. “Of course, it’s good that you don’t have a lot of experience.”
“Why’s that?” Al asked.
“Fewer people to be jealous of,” Scorpius said, and grasped greedily at Al’s chin, and kissed him again.
Al held him fast, his mind busy with many dancing thoughts. This was Scorpius, and he had him, and Scorpius seemed to return his feelings as far as Al had confessed them, and—
And it was something his father had never done.
*
Al halted outside his father’s office and spent a moment straightening and smoothing the collar of his robe. He could feel his breath coming fast, and he smiled in contempt at himself. There was no reason to be nervous. He was simply going to tell his father that he had finally broken free of his shadow. Harry would be so astonished that he would simply gape. Al had had people tell him his father was quick in a crisis, but Al had never witnessed it.
He raised a hand to knock on the door, and then he heard an unexpected voice in the office: Draco Malfoy’s. He paused. Had Scorpius already told his father and Mr. Malfoy been so displeased that he came down to yell at Harry about letting his second son grow up gay?
He leaned towards the door and listened, suddenly no longer certain that he wanted to simply walk in and toss the truth in his father’s face.
“I don’t know about you,” Mr. Malfoy was saying, his voice strung so tight with tension that Al winced and felt as if he were standing in front of Scorpius all over again, “but I think two and a half years since your marriage was dissolved and fourteen years since the end of mine is quite enough time.”
“Maybe it would be.” Harry’s voice wavered between the same kind of tension and a coldness that Al had never heard before. Maybe that was what the Aurors had in mind when they told him that his dad was good in a crisis, he thought absently. “But I keep thinking of what everyone will say—”
There was a loud crack. Al jumped and listened with a pounding heart, picturing broken bones and overturned furniture, and then Mr. Malfoy said in a muffled tone, “That hurt.”
Al barely got a hand over his nose in time to conceal a snort. It seemed that some habits were inherited. Mr. Malfoy, like Scorpius, must have slammed his hand into Harry’s desk to make a point, and then been startled by the stinging pain that resulted when he did that.
“I’m not surprised,” Harry said. His voice was gentle and amused now, which made Al wonder if he and Mr. Malfoy had become friends over time and Al had never noticed. “What else do you expect when you hit solid oak?”
Mr. Malfoy ignored this, which was the same sort of thing Scorpius would have done, and said, “I’ve never known you to care about public opinion.”
“Not public opinion.” Harry’s voice hardened slightly, and Al was reminded of the time he’d heard Harry talking to Jamie about a Slicing Curse he used on Lily. “Our families. Our friends. Don’t tell me that you think your son will accept this tamely.”
What in the world is he talking about? Did they make a declaration to forbid us dating already? And what would that have to do with their marriages? Al leaned closer to the door, trying desperately to make use of the slight gap without widening it further.
“My son knows that I date men,” Mr. Malfoy said. “My son has long since accepted that, similar though we may look, we are separate people with separate lives. You are the one who spends your days living in fear of what your children might think.”
“Jamie won’t mind,” Harry said quickly, as if he wanted to defend himself against that accusation, which made no sense, because Al knew it couldn’t be true. Harry never paid the least attention to what Al wanted. “He never does. I tell you, with all the pranks he pulled as a child, I never would have thought that he could have grown into as mild a man as he’s done.”
“But your two youngest?” Mr. Malfoy’s voice fell. “Or should I say, your younger son?”
There was a squeaking sound, as if Harry had turned his chair about. Al ground his teeth and leaned in again, mentally praying that he wouldn’t slip, but not wanting to cast a Sticking Charm in case they heard him. He’d never become good at nonverbal magic.
“You should consider what your children want, of course.” Mr. Malfoy was almost whispering now. “But there are some things that do not concern them and never will, especially when years have passed since the divorce.”
There was a soft gasp and a wet sliding sound. Al heard a brief scuffling, and then a moan that made the hair on his neck stand on end.
Not even thinking about consequences, he pushed the door the rest of the way open.
The two men in the office probably wouldn’t have noticed an asteroid crashing to earth. It looked as though they were wrapped around each other, tongues thrusting into each other’s mouths, arms around each other’s waists, groins crashing together.
They looked wild, and uninhibited, and Al stared long enough to burn the scene on his brain before he turned and ran away. His heart was so loud that he didn’t hear any cries that might have echoed after him.
Well, his heart and the one thought that clanged in his head like a gong.
No. My relationship with Scorpius is the one thing in my life that’s different from you. You don’t get to do this. You don’t get to take my importance away.
I won’t let you have this.
*
“Have you heard?” Scorpius lay on Al’s bed, grinning at him and moving his limbs in suggestive ways. Al turned his back, trying to ignore the fact that Scorpius was naked from the waist up, and yanked his robes over his head. He’d had a hard training session today, and the lack of sleep he’d been having—both because he’d taken up with Scorpius and because he’d been worrying about how to get his father away from Mr. Malfoy—was taking its toll.
“Heard what?” Al spoke around a deliberate yawn. If he could convince Scorpius that he didn’t want to hear any stupid gossip, then Scorpius was much less likely to continue.
But apparently, it was too good to resist this time. “That our fathers are considering dating!”
Al froze in the act of reaching for his jumper. Then he forced his hand to keep moving and scoop up the garment. “Really?” he asked, pretending as hard as he could to be indifferent, while he yanked the jumper over his head. “That would be a strange coincidence if they were.”
He had thought he had more time. Harry had sounded so frightened—as he should be—when he was talking to Mr. Malfoy that Al had thought it would be a long time before he gathered up courage to speak to his children, let alone let other people know.
I should have found out from him, not from Scorpius.
“Yes, but it’s not so strange when you consider that your father is almost all my father’s been able to talk about for the last year,” Scorpius said, and chortled. Al turned around to drink in the sight of his eyes shining and his mouth stretched in a wide grin, even though he already knew exactly what it would look like. Scorpius caught his eye and promptly engaged in a wicked stretch, showing off the flexing of the muscles in his stomach. “I think he’s been thinking about dating him for a lot longer than this.” He shot Al a grin. “And I must say, it’s an excellent idea. Of course it would be, because we’re both Malfoys.”
Al licked his lips, wishing that he could simply pounce on Scorpius and fasten his mouth to his neck. But there was something that had to be settled first.
“Your father wants my father? And—and you’re all right with it?” He took a step nearer the bed as Scorpius sat up and looked provocatively over his right shoulder, but resisted. This was too important.
Scorpius’s seductive look faded into one of confusion. “Of course. Why wouldn’t it be?”
“Because—” Al foundered. Scorpius had sometimes shown a distinct lack of understanding when Al tried to talk to him about being in their fathers’ shadows, at least since they got out of Hogwarts. He seemed to feel they were automatically their fathers’ equals now because they were of age. Al had to make him see that that wasn’t true until they were completely and totally separated from their fathers, and for good. “Because don’t you think that one Malfoy and one Potter getting together is enough? It might seem a bit creepy if it’s two pairs of us.”
Scorpius rose from the bed with a hasty motion, and Al swallowed, looking away. He’s going to leave now.
Instead, Scorpius’s arms wrapped firmly around his waist, almost crushing the breath out of him, and he leaned towards Al to murmur, “Who told you that it was unnatural? I have to know the name, so that I can crush him or her to dust.”
Al stared at him with his mouth open for a moment, then shook his head. “I didn’t—Scorpius, I didn’t mean it that way!” he objected, even though part of him reveled in the deep, serious gaze Scorpius was giving him. He’ll fight for me. There’s few enough people in the world who will do that. “I just meant that someone might start snickering and making jokes about a ‘family tradition,’ or something like that, and I don’t want you to feel uncomfortable because of it.” That was a slight deception, but Al was beginning to see that Scorpius simply considered his relationship with his father very differently than Al considered his.
Scorpius rattled Al’s teeth with the way he shook him. “I don’t care, you idiot! I think people ought to do what they like as long as it doesn’t hurt anyone else. I can thank you for teaching me that lesson,” he said softly, and kissed Al on the cheek. “You were the one who realized that keeping quiet about what I felt for you might hurt me and you, and you had the courage to stand up and say something about it.”
Al swallowed. He wondered what Scorpius would say if he confessed his real reasons, that he wanted Harry not to date Mr. Malfoy because it was mimicking Al, and Al wanted to be special and unique and alone for once in his life.
He’d probably snort and roll his eyes, Al acknowledged to himself bitterly, as he listened to Scorpius and pretended to accept his reassurances. None of them have ever really understood why I resent my Dad so much.
I’m alone, really, in my heart of hearts.
If I want someone to do something about them, I’m going to have to do it myself.
*
Al had to wait, of course.
He had to let the storm of the news break, so that the immediate family could all say something about Harry and Mr. Malfoy, and Uncle Ron could rage and storm and shout and say inconsiderate things and be locked out of the house by Aunt Hermione, and then apologize through the keyhole and be allowed back in, and then apologize to Harry and be clasped and hugged. He had to wait for his grandmother’s shock and then her acceptance. He had to listen to Lily ask questions that had no answer, fold in on herself for a bit, and then go back to sending owls as if nothing had happened.
He had to listen to Jamie brag that he’d always known something like this would happen, and wonder in silent bitterness why he’d never told Al, then.
The newspapers rattled on about it for pages and weeks, but then seemed to realize that both Harry and Mr. Malfoy had been divorced for years and there was absolutely no evidence they’d been seeing each other before their marriages dissolved. Besides, their readers were more interested in the new celebrity couple now, not in trying to find out whether they’d been adulterers in the past. So the papers started publishing new articles and photographs and interviews and wishing congratulations that were sincere if you were addle-brained.
Al stood in their office watching a photograph of Harry and Mr. Malfoy taken some weeks after the event. Mr. Malfoy was touching Harry’s cheek, coaxing him to tilt his head back. Harry did it, blinking as though he didn’t know what would happen next. What happened next was Mr. Malfoy feeding Harry, with infinite tenderness, a bit of the cheese that was the specialty of the restaurant they were eating at.
Harry smiled and ate it. There was no blush, no shamed look, no nervous darting of his eyes from side to side to look for reporters, even though he had to know they were there.
Al nodded and shut the paper with a sharp motion of his hands. It was time.
Part Two.
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this for fun and not profit.
Rating: PG-13
Pairings: Albus Severus/Scorpius, Harry/Draco (past Harry/Ginny and Draco/Astoria)
Warnings: Heavy angst, profanity, slash sex. Compliant with the DH epilogue.
Wordcount: ~18,500
Summary: “You’re so much like your father!” If there’s one sentence Al’s tired of hearing, it’s that one. But maybe he can arrange things so that he doesn’t have to hear it anymore.
Author’s Notes: See that heavy angst warning? That’s there for a reason.
Difficulties of Being
He’d always heard it, but Al really grew conscious of it during his first year at Hogwarts.
The first one to say it was Headmistress McGonagall, who Al had met a few times over the years. She looked at him with misty eyes when the Hat Sorted him into Gryffindor, and then she called him up to her office. Al went with his throat tight and his heart being so fast it almost deafened him, wondering if someone else had overheard the Hat’s offer to put him into Slytherin.
It’s all right for Dad to say it doesn’t matter, he thought, kicking moodily at the steps of the moving staircase. He was already a hero. Even if he had been in Slytherin, everyone would have liked him anyway. But what am I?
After a few minutes in McGonagall’s office, he could answer that question.
Harry Potter’s son.
“You’re so much like your father,” McGonagall said as she handed a cup of tea and a small plate of biscuits across the table to Al. He ate them gratefully; he’d been too nervous to eat much in the Great Hall so far, even though his cousins Dominique and Louis were both in Gryffindor and promised him that they’d show him around. “The same hair, the same eyes…the only thing that’s missing is the scar.”
Al gave her a small smile, and then concentrated on the food while the Headmistress rambled away into some long, pointless story of Dad’s “antics” at Hogwarts. Al had already heard the story, of course. He’d heard all the stories, a hundred times, and the number of people who thought he hadn’t and they had to tell him about them were just more people to resent.
McGonagall finally let him go. Apparently he’d been called up there so that she could reminisce. Al leaned on the wall on the way down and rubbed his belly—he’d eaten too many biscuits too fast—and hoped that was the end of it.
Of course it wasn’t.
Professor Flitwick squeaked with excitement when Al cast the Wingardium Leviosa Charm right on his third try and told Al that his father had been good with Charms, too. Professor Trelawney, who looked ancient enough to crumble away if you blew on her, got misty eyes over Al and talked dolefully about the many times she’d predicted Harry Potter’s death and how he’d managed to survive them all, due to his “inner eye.” Two of the portraits, even, stopped Al on the way to class so that they could exclaim over a Potter child who didn’t look like a Weasley.
On and on it went. When Al sneaked out to Hogsmeade, people noticed him and sent him back to Hogwarts immediately, because “we know that Harry Potter’s son what looks like him is too young to be here.” Hagrid started bawling when he found Al petting his boarhound and took him to the hut for a long tea of rock-hard cake and tales about Dad and his old boarhound Fang. Professor Sinistra, who didn’t ordinarily look away from her telescope, handed back one of Al’s essays with a smile and a comment that a talent for maths must run in the family.
The worst thing was when Jamie noticed and made up a song and dance about how Al and Dad were twins, separated in space and time, and doomed to repeat each other’s actions over and over again. Al cast a Boils Hex on him and spent a week in detention, but it was worth it for the cautious looks that Jamie gave him after that.
It got to the point that Potions, and the company of Slytherins, was a relief, because the Potions Professor wasn’t one who’d known Dad and the Slytherins were too busy sneering at Al for being a Gryffindor to sneer at him for being Harry Potter’s son. Al would pick up his cauldron the moment Professor Brizzgard gave the instructions for the potion and join Scorpius Malfoy.
Malfoy gave him raised eyebrows the first few times that happened, but one day, he looked straight into Al’s face and said abruptly, “Do they give you the same kind of shite about being your father over again?”
Al was too surprised to lie. “They tell you that, too?”
Malfoy snorted and rolled his eyes as he turned his satchel upside-down so that all his Potions ingredients pitched onto the table. Somehow, he managed to dart his hand into them and come out with the right one every time. Al had been watching, but he hadn’t figured out how to do that trick yet. “Oh, yeah. McGonagall watches me like I’m going to grow a Dark Mark on my arm or something. And Sinistra makes ‘cute’ little jokes about my name and Dad’s name. And the portraits tell me that my father looked just like me when he was my age.” Malfoy shook his head, looking ill. “I get enough of that from Grandmother, I don’t need it from painted women who’re trying to pinch my cheeks.”
Al nodded fervently. “When I grow up, I’m going to do something completely different,” he said. “Something that’ll separate me so decisively from Dad that they won’t have any choice but to decide that I’m not that much like him after all.”
Malfoy paused and looked at him hard. “You sound like a Slytherin,” he said. Al decided not to take offense; he knew it was supposed to be a compliment. “What’re you going to do?”
“I don’t know yet,” Al said. It was hard to know what would make him happy for the rest of his life, which was something that adults who asked him what he wanted to do when he grew up never seemed to understand. “But I know it’s going to be something grand, and something good, and something that will make other people look up to me. And it’s my name that’s going to be famous, instead of my Dad’s. No one will compare me with Dad ever again. He’ll be just a footnote in history.”
The next moment, he blushed and shut his mouth. He’d never spoken that openly to anyone. Most of his family seemed to think ambition was evil. Dad didn’t, but Al couldn’t really talk to him about how Al was going to replace him and how his life would be forgotten when Al was famous.
But Malfoy grinned at him, and said, “That’s what I want to do, too.” He put out his hand across the cauldron, and Al smiled at him and shook it tentatively.
“You’re not so bad when you let yourself be, Malfoy,” he said. “That must make you different from your father, right?”
Malfoy laughed. “Call me Scorpius.”
*
The rest of Hogwarts wasn’t as bad, not with Scorpius by his side. Al now had someone to play pranks with and study with—honestly, the rest of Gryffindor didn’t seem to study at all, and Rose, who was in Ravenclaw, did nothing else; you had to strike a balance—and fly with. He didn’t want to be on the Quidditch team, he wasn’t good at Quidditch, but he liked flying, and Scorpius was always willing to sneak out with him and circle above the Pitch a time or two, sometimes diving at the lake to see if they could scare the giant squid.
And always, always they talked about what they were going to do when they grew up.
Scorpius had lots of dreams. “I’ll be a Quidditch player,” he told Al one week. “You should be one, too. Then everyone will scream your name, and fans will go on talking about you for a long time after they forget about Dark Lords and wars. People don’t like thinking about Dark Lords and wars. They like thinking about fun. It’s the perfect solution.”
Al wasn’t good at Quidditch, so he thought that had to be out, but sometimes he dreamed about practicing until he was better than anyone, and watching his father’s face when he saw Al leap onto a broom and go casually after the Snitch. But no, maybe it would be better to be a Beater, because then no one would think he was in his father’s shadow because he was a Seeker. Al practiced with the Bludgers for three straight weeks on the sly, and the only thing that resulted from it was a broken arm that he had to take Skele-Gro for.
Well, that and Scorpius changing his dream.
“No, I think we should be wild animal tamers!” he said one day in third year when they’d conned some of the house-elves in the kitchens out of butterbeer and were talking in a window alcove that Scorpius knew about from his father’s stories, safely hidden from sight. Scorpius sat bolt upright, his hair flying around him and his eyes brilliant with inspiration. “We’ll travel all over the world and come back with magical creatures that no one’s ever heard of before!” He punched the air with his fist. “We’ll be the first to tame a dragon!”
That sounded great. Al had met Luna and her husband Rolf Scamander a few times, and they led lives that were full of excitement, capturing and writing about fantastic beasts. He and Scorpius could do the same things, and then they’d be best friends forever and never have to part.
Even drunk, there was something about that thought that made Al pause and frown. Something about it was wrong.
But he couldn’t figure out what it was, because Scorpius leaped from the windowsill and insisted on taking Al to the library so that they could find the spells they’d need to tame dragons. Madam Pince discovered them, and they got in trouble, but Al didn’t really care. What mattered was that Scorpius was with him, and he made faces imitating Madam Pince behind her back as she looked at Al and scolded him, which made Al laugh, which made Madam Pince turn around and catch Scorpius, which meant they got into trouble together.
Then they were going to be painters, and then they were going to be pirates, and then they were going to be spies, and then assassins, and then thieves. Al wore black hundreds of times during the next few years as they sneaked around practicing deadly spy skills. Scorpius cast a spell that flooded the Quidditch Pitch so they could sail wooden boats about and prepare for the day when they would be deadly pirates on the high seas. Al tried to persuade Lily to play the part of a kidnapped maiden when Scorpius decided that he and Al would rescue people for a living, but Lily demanded too high a price, his dessert every day for a month. In the end, he and Scorpius made a maiden out of wood and took turns rescuing her from a cave near Hogsmeade, the Shrieking Shack, a hole that Scorpius used a curse to drill in the ground, and various corners of Hogwarts.
And then, one day when they were both fifteen, Scorpius came up with the best idea of all, and the last one.
*
Al was panting, stripped to the waist so that his sweat could fall on the stone instead of going on his robes, and shaking. He’d run an obstacle course Scorpius had set up on the sixth and seventh floors, which consisted of several falls, several leaps across huge gaps left by moving staircases, and a gauntlet of enormous skipping boulders. When Al asked why he had to run it, Scorpius had looked mysterious and said that it was preparation for the most important plan of all, and if Al was his friend, he’d do it without question.
Well, he’d done it, and now he was so tired that Scorpius couldn’t reasonably expect him to do anything else right away. Al swallowed a huge gulp of air and turned his head so that he could watch Scorpius. They were on the Astronomy Tower, their latest secret place, and Scorpius sat with his legs crossed and his arms folded on top of them, watching the stars with a wise expression that made Al afraid his next project would be that they should both become astronomers.
Astronomers only have to have fit eyes, not fit bodies, Al told himself, and then cleared his throat expectantly.
Scorpius turned around and looked at him with brilliant eyes and a slight smile curving his mouth. It was a sight that Al had seen plenty of times before, but which made him stare uneasily now. It was as though Scorpius was a siren, but instead of singing, he would just look at you and draw you into focusing on him. Al shifted uncomfortably and waited for Scorpius to speak, because he knew he wouldn’t be able to look away until Scorpius did.
“I have the best idea,” Scorpius said, in the caressing voice he used when he wanted Al to agree before he even heard what the idea was.
“Is it related to the obstacle course?” Al glanced across the battlements of the tower at the stars. They weren’t what he really wanted to be looking at, but it was better than peering at Scorpius like a lovestruck fool.
Lovestruck.
The thought lodged in his mind like food stuck in his throat.
“Yes, of course.” Scorpius laughed and leaned forwards to shake Al’s shoulder. “You don’t really think that I would have you do something like that and not give you some reward for it, right?”
I know what reward I’d like. And then Al was confused, because no, he didn’t. Mostly, he wanted to know what the idea was, so that he could deride it the way he probably would—no idea could be this good—and then go to bed.
“Well,” he said, “there was that raid on the kitchens that you made me do last year—”
“I can’t believe you remember things like that,” Scorpius said, as he often did. “Honestly, I don’t know anyone who holds grudges as long as you do, Al.”
Al pushed himself up on his elbow, glad that the mood between them seemed to be shifting back to normal. “Tell me that covering me with rotten food and then leaving me trussed up for Filch to find isn’t worth a grudge.”
Scorpius adopted an injured expression. “If you’d just run when I told you to, then there wouldn’t have been a problem.”
“Hard to run when you’re trussed.” Al considered pouncing on Scorpius and extracting a little more payment for that prank, but Scorpius suddenly looked so solemn that Al assumed he was about to explain what he’d called Al up here for. He fell silent and raised an eyebrow pointedly.
“We’re going to be Aurors,” Scorpius said.
Al blinked. It wasn’t what he would have expected. “But my Dad’s an Auror,” he said. “And if I’m going to be different from him, then I don’t see how I can do the same thing.”
Scorpius rolled his eyes and snorted, pushing Al hard enough in the shoulder that he slid towards the battlements. “I know your Dad’s a good Auror, Al, but does he ever do anything really spectacular? I mean, the way that killing You-Know-Who was spectacular? You told me once that he just goes through his daily routine and doesn’t seem to be excited about capturing Dark wizards anymore.”
Al thought about it. It was a while since he had paid that much attention to his Dad’s job; most of the time, he was at Hogwarts, and at home during the hols, he had more important things to think about than Auror work, like Scorpius’s next owl. But yes, from what he could remember his Dad treated the job like any other job. He didn’t talk about the chases and the exciting arrests and the investigations into murders, even though Al knew they happened. It was like the war. When someone asked about it, most of the time Dad would just smile and change the subject to something infinitely less interesting.
Al had had to hear the story of how Dad actually defeated Voldemort from Uncle Ron, and that was wrong. How could you put something like that behind you?
“We’re going to be the best Aurors ever,” Scorpius said, and his face shone like jewels. Al caught his breath. Yeah, this is different than all the other times he’s thought something up. “You’ll be spectacular because you have me for a partner. Your Dad doesn’t have a spectacular partner, and he doesn’t care enough about it to do exciting things on his own. But when there are two of us who are both committed to being the best, they’ll have to notice us, and you’ll become famous in your own right.”
Al nodded slowly, thinking about it. Yes, it made sense. It was the right thing to do. Sometimes he’d thought about being an Auror on his own, before Scorpius suggested it, but he’d put it aside because he didn’t think he could put up with all the Auror instructors talking about how much like his father Al was.
But this way, he could have what he wanted, and it would be very different from what his father had at the same time.
Al grinned at Scorpius. “Well, it’s our OWLs year, and that’ll be important to being Aurors as well as being fit. What are we waiting for?”
“You like to study too much,” Scorpius complained. “It’s somewhat disturbing.”
But he willingly followed Al back downstairs, and Al found that he liked that. It was nice to be the leader sometimes.
*
“Your mum and I are getting a divorce, Al.”
Al had been in the middle of writing a letter to Scorpius when his father said that. He found that he’d dropped the quill and blotted the paper with a spreading pool of ink that erased most of the words he’d already written. He looked at it with a long series of blinks before he managed to look up and turn around so that he could see his dad.
Harry leaned his shoulder on the doorframe of Al’s bedroom and smiled tiredly at him. Al had taken to calling him by his first name lately, because that was what Scorpius did with Mr. Malfoy, and if he could do it with someone so distant and formal that he made Al’s skin crawl every time he visited the Manor, then Al could do it with someone who was more open and friendly.
“I’m sorry,” Harry said gently. “We would have stayed together if we could have, but your mother was more and more unhappy.” He shrugged a little. “We’re friends, but not really in love any longer. So we decided a divorce would be best.”
“You don’t need to explain to me like I’m a little kid,” Al said roughly. “Anyone could see that you should have got a divorce years ago.”
Harry winced and ran a hand through his hair, over his lightning bolt scar. Al wondered sometimes why he didn’t get the stupid thing altered or removed. Harry had admitted that he hated it. “Yes, well,” he said quietly. “First we thought you children were too young, and then we still hoped we could make it work.”
“But Mum’s been unhappy for years,” Al said. The words seemed to be tumbling out of his mouth almost despite himself, while he was distant from them and just watched. “How is it that you only now noticed?”
He should have noticed, he told himself when Harry winced again. What kind of a husband is he? I wouldn’t fail at my marriage if I got married. I would stay together and make it work and always notice when my spouse was unhappy. He didn’t do that, because he thinks too much about his job and Uncle Ron and Aunt Hermione and everyone else in the family. Why didn’t he do something to help his own family first?
“There’s no excuse for it,” Harry said in a low voice. “You’re right to blame me.”
“I’m not blaming you.” Al’s voice sounded too loud in his ears. He stood up and almost knocked the table he’d been writing at over. He was sixteen now, and his limbs were too awkward and hit everything in sight. Al already knew that he was going to be taller than his father. Harry glanced up at him, and Al felt a surge of irritation that someone who was so short was important. There was nothing about him that was heroic, nothing. “I’m just saying what you should have done, that’s all.”
Harry reached out and squeezed his shoulder. “I know it hurts,” he said. “I think that you might prefer to grieve in privacy, so I’ll leave you alone now.” He smiled at Al, and the smile and his eyes both held a sharp kind of painful love. Then he turned around and left.
Al collapsed into his chair and closed his eyes, listening to his father’s regular steps thumping down the stairs.
Of all the things that irritated him about Harry, the worst one was the fact that he could say something like that and cut to the heart of a situation, and then Al felt like he was whinging if he kept trying to blame him.
*
Harry moved out of the house. He stayed with Uncle Ron and Aunt Hermione for a short time, and then took a small house in a little experimental wizarding village in the south of Wiltshire. More people were trying to live in those kinds of villages, so that Hogsmeade wasn’t the only one like it in England. Al thought he’d mostly chosen it because the people who lived there were all strangers.
Al wrote long, angry letters that he tore up and never sent. Lily did owl Harry regularly, with tear-stained letters that begged him to give Mum another chance. That drove Al mad. Didn’t she realize that Harry was the one who hadn’t noticed Mum’s unhappiness in the past and so he was the one who broke up the marriage?
Jamie, the prat, just accepted the end of it and shrugged and said that, if they were both happier living apart, then it was the best thing for everyone concerned. Jamie was infuriating like Harry sometimes. Al tried to punch him, but Jamie was bigger and stronger and quicker, always had been, even after Al and Scorpius had been training to become Aurors for almost a year. Al staggered to the hospital wing nursing bruises and sullenly endured the lecture from the new mediwitch, Madam Pagnell, on fighting.
Scorpius was the only one who really understood. Well, not understood, because his parents had been divorced for years and he never seemed to be upset about it. But he offered sympathy and listened to Al’s complaints, and that had been all Al really needed. He didn’t understand what was so hard about it.
“Do you ever wish your parents would get back together?” Al asked him, one night after they’d spent the evening writing a Potions essay. They were both in NEWT Potions, and Scorpius needed Al’s help most of the time now. It never seemed to bother him.
Scorpius had been lying on his bed in Slytherin and staring dreamily out a window that looked into the green underworld of the lake. Now he blinked and looked back. “No,” he said, after apparently giving it some grave thought, “not really. Astoria was bored sick with Draco, you could see it.” He grinned suddenly. “And with Dad’s extracurricular activities, it’s really for the best that he wasn’t married anymore.”
“He was cheating?” Al knew his voice was too shocked, an innocent, prudish voice. Scorpius’s wider grin and reaching out to ruffle his hair confirmed it. Annoyed, Al ducked away.
“No, he wanted to sleep with men,” Scorpius said. “And Astoria’s not a man, whatever else she is.”
Al choked. There was nothing in his mouth to choke on except air, but he managed it anyway. Then he shook his head. “That’s impossible,” he whispered. “I’ve seen your father, and he didn’t look—I mean—”
Scorpius rolled his eyes. “It’s not as though it’s some brand you carry on your skin, Al. It took him a long time to realize that he preferred men, and then he thought he had to go ahead and get married because he would need children. Once he had me, though, there was no real reason for him to stay married for the rest of his life. He would have been miserable, and Astoria would have been miserable, and I would have found out that they only stayed together for me and been furious. I don’t like people doing things that are just for me.” Scorpius frowned for a moment, then shrugged. “So they got divorced like civilized people.”
Al nodded as if he was paying attention, but in reality, he was thinking more of the first words Scorpius had said.
It’s not as though it’s some brand you carry on your skin, Al.
Maybe then… maybe there was some explanation for the formless emotions that roiled in his gut when he looked at Scorpius, and the dreams he sometimes woke up from. Al had dismissed them as simply being very strange, but he kept having them. There could be an explanation for them, and a name.
But it wasn’t a name that he was prepared to think of in relation to himself at the minute, especially since Scorpius was the only boy he had those feelings around. Maybe he wasn’t. And Scorpius was speaking again.
“I do think you’re being too hard on your dad. He honestly didn’t have any idea that your mum was so unhappy. Why not give him a bit of sympathy?”
Al flashed his friend an ugly look and rolled away from the bed. “If he really couldn’t see that, he was blind.”
“Then why didn’t you tell him about it, if you saw it?” Scorpius asked in a tone of sweet reason.
Al shook his head. “That’s not the kind of thing kids are supposed to do.”
“You have such strange ideas, sometimes,” Scorpius said in a patronizing tone.
*
Al hopped around the room holding his letter from the Ministry and fighting back the temptation to howl like a wolf. The owl had said that he was accepted into the Auror program. It was what he and Scorpius had been training for for two years, and still Al had worried that it wouldn’t happen.
The fireplace in his bedroom flared, and Scorpius tumbled out of it, waving his own piece of parchment and talking so fast that Al found it hard to make out his words at first. “Did you get accepted? Of course you did. I got accepted. We’re going to be partners, Al, and we’re going to single-handedly reform the Auror program from the ground up—”
“More like revolutionize it, knowing you.” Al laughed, holding his arms out, and Scorpius grabbed him and spun them around in dizzy circles, until they toppled over on the bed, laughing like madmen.
Scorpius propped himself up on one elbow and grinned down at Al. Al stared up at him and felt those formless emotions waking up in his gut again, stirring like currents, trying to make him do something stupid. He gulped and snatched his gaze away from Scorpius’s, looking down at the bedspread.
“Al?”
The single word was like the crack of a Blasting Curse in the quiet bedroom. Al blinked and jumped. When had it got so quiet? He sat up and cleared his throat. “Yeah, what?”
“Are you all right?” Scorpius reached out as if he was going to feel Al’s forehead for fever. “You looked so queer for a minute—”
“Just excited,” Al said hastily, and pulled back out of reach of Scorpius’s hand. He had no idea what Scorpius would do if he thought that Al might be gay. “Have you told Draco yet?”
Scorpius laughed. “He was the one who got the owl, because I was in the bathroom! When I came out, he was sitting there with the letter in his hand and this stuffy expression on his face, like he was disappointed that I hadn’t signed up for a Malfoy course in Dominating the World Through Evil. But then he hugged me and told me he was proud of me.” Scorpius grinned. “We’ll see how proud he still is when he starts hearing about my differences of opinion with my instructors.”
Al winced. Mr. Malfoy hadn’t liked hearing about the times that Scorpius got in trouble for pranks—mostly with Al, he had to admit—at Hogwarts. God knew what he would do if someone told him about the discipline problems Scorpius would undoubtedly have with the Aurors, some of them because they didn’t like his name and some of them because Scorpius was a walking discipline problem all on his own.
“Have you told your Dad?” Scorpius rolled over on his back and looked earnestly at Al upside-down.
Al swallowed and looked away.
“You didn’t,” said Scorpius, with no hint of a question in his voice. “What is he going to think when you walk through the door into the Ministry and plop yourself down at a desk?”
“I’m not going to have a desk for three more years,” Al reminded him. “They’ll make us share this little cupboard-like space. I know they will.”
“When you’re very literal, that means you’re trying to avoid the question.” Scorpius stretched his arms above his head, his eyes bright and alert and never looking away from Al’s face. “What’s your father going to say?”
And the flood of Al’s bitterness that hadn’t been purged in years came pouring out of him. It wouldn’t have, but Scorpius kept provoking and provoking him, and wouldn’t take “no” for an answer, and frankly, Al was sick of it.
“He’s going to think that the only reason they hired me is because I’m his son, of course,” he said. “What else should he think? He never saw that Mum was unhappy in their marriage. He never saw how much I resent it that I look so fucking much like him! He never notices anything without relating it back to himself! He’ll decide that I don’t have any talents of my own, that my fate is just to be in his shadow forever—”
Al stopped speaking then, not because he was out of things to say, but because Scorpius was watching him with wide eyes and a questioning quirk of his mouth that didn’t look like the expression of support Al had expected.
“I don’t think your dad’s like that at all,” Scorpius murmured. “Maybe somewhat like that, but not all the way.”
“I just—everyone says that I’m his son, and that’s the first thing they notice, and the only thing they notice.” Al sat down on his bed and wiped his face off. “I want to be seen for something else, by someone.”
Scorpius squeezed his shoulder. “I see you as something else.”
Al looked up. Scorpius looked back at him, not smiling. The air between them seemed to change for Al, as though someone had bound a cloth around both their heads and started tightening it so that their faces were forced slowly together.
And he couldn’t let that happen. He had no idea if Scorpius might be gay or whether he would return Al’s feelings in any sense at all, and he wasn’t about to make the first move. He didn’t take risks. He wasn’t like his father.
He coughed and stood up, almost banging his head into Scorpius’s chin, and snatched up the letter again. “Do you reckon we’ll be in any of the same courses together?”
Scorpius was quiet for a moment before he answered, but that could have had a lot of causes, and then he talked in the same lighthearted tone as ever, so Al decided to ignore his own misgivings.
*
“Hi, Al.”
His father stood in the door of the Auror classroom, looking uncertainly at him. Al finished picking up his books deliberately before he turned around to face him. Harry gave him that embarrassed smile he always seemed to be wearing. Al was sick of that, too. Why couldn’t his father be a man for once, and stop looking and acting weak? Honestly, he could have had anything he wanted after he defeated Voldemort, including the privacy from reporters that he was always talking about. Al didn’t understand why he hadn’t taken it.
“Hello, Father,” he said coolly, and saw that it worked. Harry promptly lost the embarrassed smile and took a step away from him, stopping the pretense that they had anything affectionate to say to each other. That’s right, Al thought. You have to stop thinking of me as your son and start thinking of me as an adult.
“So you got into the program.” Harry’s voice was strained, and he was looking somewhere over Al’s shoulder now. Al wanted to sneer, but Scorpius had told him that it made his face look disfigured, so he didn’t. And now Harry couldn’t even look at Al, as though there was something wrong with him.
You made the decision to be such a poor father that your marriage collapsed, Dad. And now you can’t face your children.
“Yes,” Al said. “And it was entirely on my own merits, whatever you think. They didn’t hire me just because I’m your son.”
Harry looked back at him, his gaze meditative. That was another thing Al hated about him, that he recovered so swiftly from insults. Mr. Malfoy would have fired off some cold and cutting remark in return and made you feel it. Harry just acted as though he’d forgotten. “Do you know,” he said, “I don’t even think of you as my son at all. There are more important ways to be someone’s son than looks.”
And he turned and wandered out of the room, leaving Al to wonder why it was so hard to catch his breath.
*
Six months into the program, Al was hanging upside-down from a rope ladder strung across the ceiling of Training Room Five and watching Scorpius swinging towards him, laughing, his hair in a bright fluffy halo around his face and his eyes fixed on Al, and he knew that he couldn’t deny it any longer.
He had feelings for Scorpius. Feelings that intensified to jealousy every time Scorpius talked about dating one of the other Auror trainees, a young woman named Sarah. Feelings that sometimes left him locked in unseeing stares at Scorpius’s face, and which meant he would probably figure this out fairly soon.
Al wanted to tell him about it instead of having him figure it out. That would be too humiliating.
“Move!” Scorpius yelled as he swung towards Al, and Al started and realized that he was blocking the ladder. He faced the far wall and began to swing again, suddenly more aware of the eyes of the Auror instructors than he was of Scorpius. He flushed and fixed his attention so straight ahead that no one would be able to find anything to scold in him.
He was sure that they were judging him anyway. He was sure those heavy, judging eyes could read every thought in his mind, and that they were shaking their heads and sucking at their teeth in rejection.
Al gritted his teeth. Even here, it seemed, he couldn’t escape the shadow of his father.
Oh, they didn’t say it in the way that the Hogwarts professors had. Harry had been someone special to people like McGonagall, and Al got the distinct impression that these instructors hadn’t liked his father at all. But they looked at him and shook their heads and sighed when he hadn’t done anything wrong, or when he was honestly trying his best and still failing at a task that was slightly beyond his abilities. He could read those glares. He knew them well. They were measuring him against some other standard and finding him wanting.
What standard could there be but his father?
He couldn’t change the way he looked without announcing that he somehow didn’t have a right to his appearance, which his father had claimed first. He wouldn’t do that. The only thing he could do was impress them so much that they forgot he was the son and started judging his father’s accomplishments by him.
That was why he couldn’t allow himself to brood on his feelings for Scorpius. They would become a weakness, an obsession that he would think about instead of his studies and his physical training regimen. They were already becoming that, given the evidence of this training session.
He had to get past that.
And, terrifying as it was, the only way he thought he could do that was to confess his feelings to Scorpius.
I’m not doing this because I’m weak, he reminded himself, as he reached the far end of the room and dropped from the ladder to the floor, folding his knees beneath him. I’m doing this to become a good Auror and to prove that I’m my own person, not just my father’s shadow.
Put like that, the confession was tolerable.
*
“Scorpius, I need to talk to you.”
Scorpius, still drying his sweat-soaked hair with a towel, paused and looked at him with startled eyes across the office. Al had his hands braced on the desk and his face set in what he hoped was a stern look. Scorpius looked frustrated instead of apprehensive, though.
“It was that last jump, wasn’t it?” he asked. “I know it looked as though the tendon on my right leg was pulling. I swear, Al, it wasn’t. What happened is that I stumbled just as I began the jump. I’m not injured, and I won’t let you down in the field, you can be sure of that. I just need to—”
Al shook his head and stepped around the desk to grab Scorpius’s shoulders. That left them standing very close, and Al had to swallow nervously against the temptation to back away. If he did that, then he thought he would never get the courage for this again. Scorpius’s eyes were already widening with curiosity, and Al didn’t think he could face the eager questioning that would begin in a moment.
“It’s not that at all,” he said. “It’s something that’s been brewing for a long time.”
Scorpius wrinkled his brow and cocked his head. “Felix Felicis?”
Sometimes Scorpius would pretend to be considerably stupider than he really was, in order to defuse tension. Al didn’t dare allow the trick to work this time. He bit back the building laughter, pressed his fingers into Scorpius’s arms, and said, “I think I have a crush on you. I understand if you think it’s only silliness or getting ideas because your father is gay. I understand if you don’t feel the same way. But I had to tell you because I think it’s impacting the way I work with you in training sessions. That’s all.”
Scorpius’s eyes got wider and wider, and again Al got that urge to laugh, but for a different reason. He held it back as he had before, and stepped away—except that their office was so small his legs banged into the desk. He cleared his throat and had to stand there. He would be cursed if he looked like he was retreating.
Scorpius rubbed his forehead several times, as if he had hit it on something and thought this might be a vision, or a dream. Then he said, “Really, Al?”
Al nodded tensely, his shoulders so tight that he thought his muscles would snap in a few minutes. Here would come the laughter, or the mockery, or the scorn and the sneer that curled Scorpius’s lips when he hated someone but which he had never directed at Al—
But Scorpius was giving him a wide, delighted smile instead, and stepping forwards, and clasping his hands to Al’s shoulders, and murmuring into his ear, “Thank God. I thought I was the only one.”
“Excuse me?” Al’s voice had risen higher. He cleared his throat and tried to make it lower. “You’re also in love with yourself?”
Scorpius snorted. “Sometimes, Al, you’re really quite stupid,” he said. “And far too obsessed with our respective fathers.” He clasped his mouth to Al’s before Al could do more than make a faint protest about his non sequitur.
Al reached up with one faltering hand, which he ended up putting on Scorpius’s shoulder. His fingers dug into flesh, still hot from the training exercises. His body shuddered, and he realized that he had stepped closer again, this time without fear. His tongue was twining around Scorpius’s, and that soft blond hair was falling around his face this time, and those intense grey eyes were so close that he couldn’t see them properly—
Scorpius broke free and held Al’s cheeks in his hands, staring at him. Al licked his lips and tried to return the stare, but Scorpius had always had a more commanding gaze than he did. He looked away.
“Remarkable,” Scorpius whispered. “I would have thought you had a lot of experience if I didn’t know better.” And then his voice changed so that Al had to look back and see the wide grin cracking his face. “Of course, it’s good that you don’t have a lot of experience.”
“Why’s that?” Al asked.
“Fewer people to be jealous of,” Scorpius said, and grasped greedily at Al’s chin, and kissed him again.
Al held him fast, his mind busy with many dancing thoughts. This was Scorpius, and he had him, and Scorpius seemed to return his feelings as far as Al had confessed them, and—
And it was something his father had never done.
*
Al halted outside his father’s office and spent a moment straightening and smoothing the collar of his robe. He could feel his breath coming fast, and he smiled in contempt at himself. There was no reason to be nervous. He was simply going to tell his father that he had finally broken free of his shadow. Harry would be so astonished that he would simply gape. Al had had people tell him his father was quick in a crisis, but Al had never witnessed it.
He raised a hand to knock on the door, and then he heard an unexpected voice in the office: Draco Malfoy’s. He paused. Had Scorpius already told his father and Mr. Malfoy been so displeased that he came down to yell at Harry about letting his second son grow up gay?
He leaned towards the door and listened, suddenly no longer certain that he wanted to simply walk in and toss the truth in his father’s face.
“I don’t know about you,” Mr. Malfoy was saying, his voice strung so tight with tension that Al winced and felt as if he were standing in front of Scorpius all over again, “but I think two and a half years since your marriage was dissolved and fourteen years since the end of mine is quite enough time.”
“Maybe it would be.” Harry’s voice wavered between the same kind of tension and a coldness that Al had never heard before. Maybe that was what the Aurors had in mind when they told him that his dad was good in a crisis, he thought absently. “But I keep thinking of what everyone will say—”
There was a loud crack. Al jumped and listened with a pounding heart, picturing broken bones and overturned furniture, and then Mr. Malfoy said in a muffled tone, “That hurt.”
Al barely got a hand over his nose in time to conceal a snort. It seemed that some habits were inherited. Mr. Malfoy, like Scorpius, must have slammed his hand into Harry’s desk to make a point, and then been startled by the stinging pain that resulted when he did that.
“I’m not surprised,” Harry said. His voice was gentle and amused now, which made Al wonder if he and Mr. Malfoy had become friends over time and Al had never noticed. “What else do you expect when you hit solid oak?”
Mr. Malfoy ignored this, which was the same sort of thing Scorpius would have done, and said, “I’ve never known you to care about public opinion.”
“Not public opinion.” Harry’s voice hardened slightly, and Al was reminded of the time he’d heard Harry talking to Jamie about a Slicing Curse he used on Lily. “Our families. Our friends. Don’t tell me that you think your son will accept this tamely.”
What in the world is he talking about? Did they make a declaration to forbid us dating already? And what would that have to do with their marriages? Al leaned closer to the door, trying desperately to make use of the slight gap without widening it further.
“My son knows that I date men,” Mr. Malfoy said. “My son has long since accepted that, similar though we may look, we are separate people with separate lives. You are the one who spends your days living in fear of what your children might think.”
“Jamie won’t mind,” Harry said quickly, as if he wanted to defend himself against that accusation, which made no sense, because Al knew it couldn’t be true. Harry never paid the least attention to what Al wanted. “He never does. I tell you, with all the pranks he pulled as a child, I never would have thought that he could have grown into as mild a man as he’s done.”
“But your two youngest?” Mr. Malfoy’s voice fell. “Or should I say, your younger son?”
There was a squeaking sound, as if Harry had turned his chair about. Al ground his teeth and leaned in again, mentally praying that he wouldn’t slip, but not wanting to cast a Sticking Charm in case they heard him. He’d never become good at nonverbal magic.
“You should consider what your children want, of course.” Mr. Malfoy was almost whispering now. “But there are some things that do not concern them and never will, especially when years have passed since the divorce.”
There was a soft gasp and a wet sliding sound. Al heard a brief scuffling, and then a moan that made the hair on his neck stand on end.
Not even thinking about consequences, he pushed the door the rest of the way open.
The two men in the office probably wouldn’t have noticed an asteroid crashing to earth. It looked as though they were wrapped around each other, tongues thrusting into each other’s mouths, arms around each other’s waists, groins crashing together.
They looked wild, and uninhibited, and Al stared long enough to burn the scene on his brain before he turned and ran away. His heart was so loud that he didn’t hear any cries that might have echoed after him.
Well, his heart and the one thought that clanged in his head like a gong.
No. My relationship with Scorpius is the one thing in my life that’s different from you. You don’t get to do this. You don’t get to take my importance away.
I won’t let you have this.
*
“Have you heard?” Scorpius lay on Al’s bed, grinning at him and moving his limbs in suggestive ways. Al turned his back, trying to ignore the fact that Scorpius was naked from the waist up, and yanked his robes over his head. He’d had a hard training session today, and the lack of sleep he’d been having—both because he’d taken up with Scorpius and because he’d been worrying about how to get his father away from Mr. Malfoy—was taking its toll.
“Heard what?” Al spoke around a deliberate yawn. If he could convince Scorpius that he didn’t want to hear any stupid gossip, then Scorpius was much less likely to continue.
But apparently, it was too good to resist this time. “That our fathers are considering dating!”
Al froze in the act of reaching for his jumper. Then he forced his hand to keep moving and scoop up the garment. “Really?” he asked, pretending as hard as he could to be indifferent, while he yanked the jumper over his head. “That would be a strange coincidence if they were.”
He had thought he had more time. Harry had sounded so frightened—as he should be—when he was talking to Mr. Malfoy that Al had thought it would be a long time before he gathered up courage to speak to his children, let alone let other people know.
I should have found out from him, not from Scorpius.
“Yes, but it’s not so strange when you consider that your father is almost all my father’s been able to talk about for the last year,” Scorpius said, and chortled. Al turned around to drink in the sight of his eyes shining and his mouth stretched in a wide grin, even though he already knew exactly what it would look like. Scorpius caught his eye and promptly engaged in a wicked stretch, showing off the flexing of the muscles in his stomach. “I think he’s been thinking about dating him for a lot longer than this.” He shot Al a grin. “And I must say, it’s an excellent idea. Of course it would be, because we’re both Malfoys.”
Al licked his lips, wishing that he could simply pounce on Scorpius and fasten his mouth to his neck. But there was something that had to be settled first.
“Your father wants my father? And—and you’re all right with it?” He took a step nearer the bed as Scorpius sat up and looked provocatively over his right shoulder, but resisted. This was too important.
Scorpius’s seductive look faded into one of confusion. “Of course. Why wouldn’t it be?”
“Because—” Al foundered. Scorpius had sometimes shown a distinct lack of understanding when Al tried to talk to him about being in their fathers’ shadows, at least since they got out of Hogwarts. He seemed to feel they were automatically their fathers’ equals now because they were of age. Al had to make him see that that wasn’t true until they were completely and totally separated from their fathers, and for good. “Because don’t you think that one Malfoy and one Potter getting together is enough? It might seem a bit creepy if it’s two pairs of us.”
Scorpius rose from the bed with a hasty motion, and Al swallowed, looking away. He’s going to leave now.
Instead, Scorpius’s arms wrapped firmly around his waist, almost crushing the breath out of him, and he leaned towards Al to murmur, “Who told you that it was unnatural? I have to know the name, so that I can crush him or her to dust.”
Al stared at him with his mouth open for a moment, then shook his head. “I didn’t—Scorpius, I didn’t mean it that way!” he objected, even though part of him reveled in the deep, serious gaze Scorpius was giving him. He’ll fight for me. There’s few enough people in the world who will do that. “I just meant that someone might start snickering and making jokes about a ‘family tradition,’ or something like that, and I don’t want you to feel uncomfortable because of it.” That was a slight deception, but Al was beginning to see that Scorpius simply considered his relationship with his father very differently than Al considered his.
Scorpius rattled Al’s teeth with the way he shook him. “I don’t care, you idiot! I think people ought to do what they like as long as it doesn’t hurt anyone else. I can thank you for teaching me that lesson,” he said softly, and kissed Al on the cheek. “You were the one who realized that keeping quiet about what I felt for you might hurt me and you, and you had the courage to stand up and say something about it.”
Al swallowed. He wondered what Scorpius would say if he confessed his real reasons, that he wanted Harry not to date Mr. Malfoy because it was mimicking Al, and Al wanted to be special and unique and alone for once in his life.
He’d probably snort and roll his eyes, Al acknowledged to himself bitterly, as he listened to Scorpius and pretended to accept his reassurances. None of them have ever really understood why I resent my Dad so much.
I’m alone, really, in my heart of hearts.
If I want someone to do something about them, I’m going to have to do it myself.
*
Al had to wait, of course.
He had to let the storm of the news break, so that the immediate family could all say something about Harry and Mr. Malfoy, and Uncle Ron could rage and storm and shout and say inconsiderate things and be locked out of the house by Aunt Hermione, and then apologize through the keyhole and be allowed back in, and then apologize to Harry and be clasped and hugged. He had to wait for his grandmother’s shock and then her acceptance. He had to listen to Lily ask questions that had no answer, fold in on herself for a bit, and then go back to sending owls as if nothing had happened.
He had to listen to Jamie brag that he’d always known something like this would happen, and wonder in silent bitterness why he’d never told Al, then.
The newspapers rattled on about it for pages and weeks, but then seemed to realize that both Harry and Mr. Malfoy had been divorced for years and there was absolutely no evidence they’d been seeing each other before their marriages dissolved. Besides, their readers were more interested in the new celebrity couple now, not in trying to find out whether they’d been adulterers in the past. So the papers started publishing new articles and photographs and interviews and wishing congratulations that were sincere if you were addle-brained.
Al stood in their office watching a photograph of Harry and Mr. Malfoy taken some weeks after the event. Mr. Malfoy was touching Harry’s cheek, coaxing him to tilt his head back. Harry did it, blinking as though he didn’t know what would happen next. What happened next was Mr. Malfoy feeding Harry, with infinite tenderness, a bit of the cheese that was the specialty of the restaurant they were eating at.
Harry smiled and ate it. There was no blush, no shamed look, no nervous darting of his eyes from side to side to look for reporters, even though he had to know they were there.
Al nodded and shut the paper with a sharp motion of his hands. It was time.
Part Two.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2009-11-27 08:56 pm (UTC)"I don't think you dad's like that at all"
should be "your"
FYI
Now back to reading the fic...
no subject
Date: 2009-12-03 01:40 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-11-28 11:38 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-12-03 01:40 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-11-28 03:20 pm (UTC)Great stuff for a bit of weekend angst. Looking forward to finding out if you work it out or let them crash... or both.
C Dumbledore
no subject
Date: 2009-12-03 01:40 am (UTC)Harry is more perceptive than Al in this story (that is not hard), but so worried about hurting him that he messes up by trying so hard not to mess up.