[From Litha to Lammas]: A Name Like Henry, sequel to How Like Hatred, gen, PG-13, 3/3
Part Two.
Title: A Name Like Henry (3/3)
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairings: Background Lucius/Narcissa, otherwise gen
Content Notes: Angst, major AU (Harry is Draco’s twin brother), discussion of canonical child abuse
Wordcount: This part 4900
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Sequel to “How Like Hatred.” When Harry goes back to school after Christmas holidays as Henry Malfoy, he has to cope with friends, professors, and just about everyone else having an opinion on his new name and appearance. And that’s not to mention his smotheringly overprotective family.
Author’s Notes: This is the sequel to “How Like Hatred,” and really won’t make sense without having read that fic first. This one will have three parts and be posted over the new few days as part of my “From Litha to Lammas” fic series being posted between the summer solstice and the first of August this year.
Thank you again for all the reviews! This is the end of the second part of the story, but I certainly won’t be opposed to continuing it in the future.
Part Three
“Why did you never tell us you were abused?”
Harry stared at Mr. Malfoy, who had begun the interrogation. Not reasonable in any fashion, no. “Because until this year I didn’t know who I was? Why would I just randomly walk up to you in the Diagon Alley bookshop and start telling you?”
Mr. Malfoy’s lips tightened. “You are being unreasonable, Henry. Please understood the question in the spirit it was meant.”
“Then maybe you can sound less like you’re accusing me of having abused myself and kept the secret just to annoy you. Sir.”
There was a long pause. They were in the infirmary, the same place that Harry had had to find out he was Aldebaran Malfoy. At least that awful name was gone, but the tension in the air was the same as it had been then, and Mr. Malfoy had the same forbidding expression on his face that said he wouldn’t be getting out of this.
Or maybe this was worse, because they looked hurt, but Harry didn’t have the same feeling of anger to defend himself from their hurt. Before, he’d had no idea he was a Malfoy and he hadn’t been delighted by the news, and he’d been sure that no one could blame him for not being delighted.
But now he felt the squirm in his stomach that said maybe he should have told them, maybe they would have understood.
“I know that you did not abuse yourself,” Mrs. Malfoy said, her voice very soft. Mr. Malfoy sat back and seemed content to let her take over, but his eyes were still raking over Harry in a way that Harry very much did not like. “And I know this might seem unreasonable to you. You’re not used to having adults care. But you’re our son. We need to know.”
Her voice was trembling by the time she got to the end of the sentence, and Harry glanced at her and-
Yeah. He was making his mother cry. Bloody hell.
Harry stared down at his pale hands and said, “I didn’t tell you because I didn’t want anyone to know. I didn’t want to seem weak. And when people came near to guessing it before, they never did anything. They thought I was making things up. And I didn’t know what you would do.”
“If you thought we would not love you-”
Mrs. Malfoy had reached out for him. Harry sat back a little further, noting with some hope that Draco looked nearly as unhappy as he did. Good, big long emotional discussions weren’t a Malfoy family thing.
“Not that. I didn’t know what you would do to the Dursleys. I know you hate Muggles.” He looked at Mr. Malfoy. “I thought you were going to torture or kill them. I know what it’s like being an orphan, and I have a cousin-I mean, someone I thought was a cousin. I wouldn’t want to have Dudley have that.”
Mrs. Malfoy abruptly stopped reaching for him and sat back down. Harry watched her. He wondered if this was going to be one of those compromise things; Mrs. Malfoy had said over the Christmas holiday that Mr. Malfoy and Draco would try to compromise hating all Muggles and Muggleborns, and Harry would have to compromise, too. But Harry just couldn’t compromise about making Dudley an orphan.
“It was your abuse,” Mr. Malfoy said after a long moment of struggle where everyone watched him. “If you do not want me to harm your kidnapper’s family, I will not.” Harry nodded and kept quiet about the “kidnapper” thing. “But I do want to know what happened.”
“Please, Henry,” Mrs. Malfoy added. “When Draco sent us the letter yesterday-it was hard to sleep, thinking of all the horrible things that might have happened to you.”
Harry sighed and glanced at Draco. He didn’t look as if he’d been sleepless, but he caught Harry’s eye and nodded emphatically in a way that said he wanted to know, too.
“They really hated me, and my magic,” Harry said. “I didn’t know about the magic part at first, though. I just knew that sometimes strange things would happen around me and I couldn’t control them, and that was what got me called a freak.”
Mrs. Malfoy’s hand reached out and gripped Mr. Malfoy’s tightly. Mr. Malfoy’s lips looked as if they were on the verge of vanishing. “And what else happened?”
“They made me do chores.” Harry didn’t think that would be so bad given that the Malfoys had house-elves and they were all kept strictly away from the family. Draco probably didn’t even know what the elves did on a daily basis. But they winced and gasped anyway. “Cooking and gardening and things like that. And they-well, I didn’t have a bedroom for the first ten years I was there.”
“Did you sleep in the kitchen?” Draco blurted, as if he had been on the verge of asking that for minutes.
Harry shook his head. “No. A cot in a cupboard under the stairs.”
Mrs. Malfoy buried her head in Mr. Malfoy’s shoulder. Draco got up and came over and hugged Harry. Harry gave him a hug back, confused, not knowing what to say. It felt like jagged shards of glass in his throat to be telling someone, but it was also over.
“I can’t believe it,” Draco was whispering over and over again when Harry paid attention to him. “I made fun of you and I acted like I was so much better than you, and-I can’t believe it. I should never have teased you for being poor and not knowing anything last year. I’m sorry, Henry.”
Harry opened his mouth to say that Draco sounded like he was only sorry because Harry had turned out to be his brother and Draco shouldn’t make fun of people no matter how poor they were, but Mr. Malfoy spoke again. “And is that the end of it?”
Harry squirmed, his eyes on the floor. The cupboard was bad enough. Did he really have to tell the rest of it?
“Henry.”
The name helped brace him, oddly, even though it still didn’t feel like his name. The abuse had happened to Harry Potter, and Harry Potter would never be himself in the same way again. He would never have to go back to the Dursleys again.
And sooner or later, he did have to trust Mr. Malfoy when he said he wouldn’t go torture and kill the Dursleys.
“They punished me sometimes by taking food away from me,” he said. There was such absolute silence that he looked up, and had to look away again from the fury on Mr. Malfoy’s face. Mrs. Malfoy still had her head buried.
Draco tightened his arms around Harry.
“How often?” Draco asked hoarsely.
Harry shook his head. “There was no pattern. When they got really upset, it was longer. They told me I wasn’t going to have a meal for a week after I talked to a boa constrictor at a zoo and accidentally made the glass vanish so the snake got out and scared my cousin-I mean, Dudley. But they forgot about that a day later and fed me again because they wanted me to be strong enough to do chores. Then they would make me skip dinner if I burned something, or breakfast if they thought I was going to get ‘spoiled’ later with lunch at my primary school.”
“And no one did anything.” Mrs. Malfoy’s voice sounded almost broken.
“No,” Harry said, looking up. She was staring at him again, but tears still trembled in her eyes, and she was clutching Mr. Malfoy’s hand like she wouldn’t be able to stand up without it. “Sometimes a teacher asked me questions, but the Dursleys were pretty good at lying to get out of it. And my cousin made sure that other kids thought I was a freak, too.”
“What did he do?”
Harry shrugged. “Chased me with his friends. Beat me up. Lied to get me in trouble. Made sure I had no friends.”
“Shit,” Draco said, and then cringed as Mr. Malfoy glared at him. “That’s why you reacted so strongly to me taunting Weasley on the train. I thought you were exaggerating when you said he was your first friend, but…”
“He really was,” Harry agreed quietly. Hesitantly, he hugged his brother back. He wondered why it was so much easier to think of Draco as his brother than it was to think of the Malfoys as his parents. Maybe just because he knew Draco better. “I didn’t have anybody who would try and be loyal to me and care about me until then.”
“We care about you, Henry,” Mrs. Malfoy said, and then she stood up and walked over so she could hug both Draco and him. “So much.”
Harry nodded and squirmed a little closer. He was finally beginning to believe that.
He knew it would take some time. For one thing, they hadn’t really interacted with his friends yet. Mr. Malfoy and Draco would have to stop talking about Hermione like she was worthless, and Draco would have to stop taunting Ron.
But maybe they could be a family in a shorter time than he’d thought.
*
“Shouldn’t I go back to Gryffindor Tower?” Harry asked, when he heard a distant rush of footsteps and realized it must be people going to dinner.
“We would like you to come home for tonight,” Mr. Malfoy said, quietly but firmly. “There are still some conversations we would like to have, and it’s better to have those conversations in the privacy of the Manor rather than at the school.”
“I-is that even allowed?” Harry blinked. He thought it was unusual enough for parents to be allowed to visit their children during the school year. He couldn’t remember ever seeing them here.
“It will be allowed because I request it.” Mr. Malfoy stood. “Headmaster Dumbledore is still somewhat distracted by the part he thought our child had to play.”
Harry frowned as he watched Mr. Malfoy go. “He’s taking advantage of Headmaster Dumbledore being upset because he put me with the wrong people,” he muttered.
“Of course he is.” Mrs. Malfoy was just holding him tighter. “If everything had fallen out as it should have, your father would not have that pull over the Headmaster, Henry. But it fell out this way, and the least of the debt the Headmaster owes you is letting you spend some time with your family.”
“Will Snape be upset with me?”
“What does Professor Snape have to say about it?” Mrs. Malfoy pulled back to stare at him.
“I don’t know, he said something about making a vow to protect me because he thought I was a Potter, and then he insisted on coming with me to the Headmaster’s office and saying that Professor Dumbledore should call me Henry.”
“And when were you intending to tell us that you visited the Headmaster’s office?”
“I just did,” Harry pointed out, and hated the way that he got all stiff. Then again, he also hated the way that Mrs. Malfoy made it sound like it was his fault for not telling them about something that had only happened a few hours ago.
“Why was he calling you Harry?” Draco interrupted.
“Because he said we were friends.” Harry would have said more, but Mrs. Malfoy drew in a sharp breath and shook her head. The tears had disappeared from her eyes, which Harry supposed was something to be grateful for.
“That man is trying to retain a degree of control over you that is inappropriate,” she said. “He needs to be reminded that he is your Headmaster and your abuser, not your friend and not your Head of House.”
“He’s not my-”
Mr. Malfoy stepped back into the hospital wing, wearing a small, satisfied smile. “We have permission for Henry to come home with us for the night. He’ll need to be back right after breakfast tomorrow, but with Floo, that’s no problem.”
“Ugh, I hate the Floo,” Harry muttered.
He hadn’t intended to be heard, but Mrs. Malfoy said, “All the more reason to get used to it, Henry. Something you haven’t experienced often is bound to be difficult.”
Like being told that I’m part of a family and my name is Henry? Harry thought, but he kept quiet as they escorted him over to the hospital wing’s Floo and asked Madam Pomfrey for the powder.
The last thought had actually struck a spark inside him. He thought about it all the way through the Floo, and the horrible whirling, and the way that it spat him out of the fireplace onto the floor and Draco laughed at him and Mr. Malfoy cast a charm that cleaned the soot off him.
Maybe being Henry Malfoy would be more natural when he heard it more often. Maybe he should try to be around the people who said it, too, as long as they were kind to his friends, and not just the people who called him Harry.
Maybe.
*
“How worried were you that I would seek out and kill the Muggles, son?”
Harry refused to meet Mr. Malfoy’s eyes for a few minutes. They were in the formal White Sitting Room where Harry had only been a few times, mostly for lessons in Malfoy history and wizarding politics. Mr. Malfoy had told him he didn’t have to study beyond a certain level, but there were things he had to know that Harry Potter wouldn’t have had any idea about.
“I was really convinced,” Harry finally said.
“Why?”
Harry looked up. “Because-you followed Voldemort during the first war. I know that. And I know you said it was the Imperius Curse, but I don’t believe you.”
Mr. Malfoy gazed back at him thoughtfully. He looked a lot like Draco and less like him, Harry thought. Which was ridiculous, because he and Draco were identical, and he knew that. But it was the way it felt, anyway. As if Draco was closer to his father because he had grown up with him, and so his face was pointier and his eyes were colder like Mr. Malfoy’s.
“Perhaps some aspects of this discussion should wait until you are older,” Mr. Malfoy said. “But one thing I can tell you is that things have changed because of who people thought you were. I will no longer follow the Dark Lord, should he return. I will no longer freely use the word ‘Mudblood’ or attack Muggles.”
“Because of me.”
Mr. Malfoy nodded.
“Not because you decided on your own to be a good person.”
Mr. Malfoy settled back on the couch with his arm stretched over the back of it. He wore dove-grey robes that were only a few shades darker than the couch. Harry thought he looked elegant, and also that he himself would never look that way.
“What does good person mean?” Mr. Malfoy murmured. “I did things that I am not proud of. On the other hand, I promise you that Headmaster Dumbledore and Professor Snape have done the same. They were allowed to find redemption. From what you said about the meeting in the Headmaster’s office, you are even willing to allow Professor Snape a chance to reinvent himself with you, and he was horrible to you personally in a way that I was not. Why does he have the chance and I do not?”
“I-” Harry stopped, because when Mr. Malfoy put it that way, it didn’t make a lot of sense.
Mr. Malfoy nodded calmly. “I know that part of it might be because he is a professor at your school whom you only have to deal with at certain times, and not your Head of House. I, on the other hand, am your father. Our connection is permanent, and one that cannot help but distress you.”
“It’s weird,” Harry said firmly.
“I would like to ask you a question, Henry, and please answer me truthfully.”
“Is this about the Dursleys?”
“It touches on them only indirectly.” Mr. Malfoy sat there and was patient again until Harry nodded, at least. “Now. Did you have any adult who cared about you when you were younger? You mentioned that some of your teachers recognized something was wrong but your-keepers managed to talk themselves out of it. Was there anyone who maintained a relationship with you outside that? Any neighbor? Anyone who tried their best to teach you? Another Muggle, or even wizard or Squib, who watched over you?”
“Not unless you count Mrs. Figg. She was the neighbor that my rela-I mean, the Dursleys left me with when they didn’t want to be bothered with me.”
For some reason, Mr. Malfoy had gone absolutely still and tense, but Harry didn’t know why. That was one of the least objectionable things the Dursleys had done, all told. “You said her name was Figg? Do you know what her first name was?”
“Arabella, I think?” In Harry’s mind was a hazy memory of Aunt Petunia saying that once.
Mr. Malfoy closed his eyes. “I know her,” he explained, while Harry was still staring at him wondering exactly what was going on. “A Squib, one of Dumbledore’s followers. She was probably there to watch over to you.” He sneered. “And it did nothing, of course.”
“I never knew that,” Harry said softly. Mrs. Figg had never spoken to him about the Dursleys’ treatment of him. She might not know some of it, like the being in a cupboard part, but she would surely have seen him wearing big clothes and how thin he was?
There really hadn’t been anyone who had cared about him before he came to Hogwarts.
Harry sat there with a sinking sensation inside him, and almost missed Mr. Malfoy’s next question. “Sorry, sir, I didn’t hear you,” he said, shaking his head.
“You don’t need to call me sir. I would be pleased if you would refer to me as Father.”
Harry tightened his mouth and looked away. “Sorry. It’s too soon.”
Mr. Malfoy hesitated, then nodded. “All right. What happened during your first year at Hogwarts? Was there any adult who cared for you then? There were confusing rumors that, frankly, I didn’t pay much attention to. Draco was jealous of you then, in your former identity, and spouted so much nonsense that I shut my ears to it.”
Harry smiled fleetingly. Draco had been really different last year. “Well, I mean, Professor McGonagall cares, I think, but Ron and Hermione and I found out that someone was trying to steal the Philosopher’s Stone from under the school, and we told her about it, and she just told us it was fine and we shouldn’t worry about it. And of course it wasn’t fine, and someone really was trying to steal it.”
He looked up to find Mr. Malfoy with his hand over his face. “The Philosopher’s Stone,” he said flatly. “The thief was the Dark Lord?”
Harry nodded. “His spirit, anyway. He was possessing Professor Quirrell, the Defense Against the Dark Arts professor. No one noticed that, either,” he added, a little disgusted. How stupid were the professors?
“How did you stop him?”
Harry described getting through the obstacle course with Ron and Hermione, making sure to talk about how much they had contributed and especially how Hermione had solved the Potions riddle right away. He wanted his family to start respecting his friends. Mr. Malfoy listened with a frown and nodded several times.
“That will make you more of a target when the Dark Lord returns,” he said, when Harry had finished. “And that is all the more reason that I will not be going back to his service.”
Harry swallowed. “Then-I can trust you? Not like the other adults?”
“Of course.” Mr. Malfoy’s voice was soft and hurt. “You’re my son. I love you.”
Harry studied his hands intently, but then Mr. Malfoy got up and came and knelt down in front of him, which was just sort of embarrassing, and put his hands over Harry’s and looked him earnestly in the face.
“I know it’s hard for you to hear that, Henry. But I do love you, and nothing pains me more than not having been there for the first eleven years of your life. I will trust you, and believe in you if want to tell me something, and give you everything I can give you to make up for not being there. I made mistakes, and more than mistakes. I ask that you give me the chance to make up for them.”
Harry nodded. “All right. Thanks.” He leaned in and gave Mr. Malfoy a stiff hug, hoping it wasn’t too bad, thinking it probably was.
From the tight hug Mr. Malfoy gave him in return, he found nothing wrong with it. And Harry thought maybe, if things changed, that he could call the man “Father.”
*
“Father told you that you were part of the family, right?”
“Yes,” Harry said. He had left the dining room after dinner and promptly been ambushed by Draco. And his brother was clinging to him as if Harry was about to combust, or disappear, or something. Harry patted his back. “I mean, all of you have. You and Mother and Father.” The names tasted salty and sour in his mouth, but he said them to please Draco.
“What is this all about?” he added, pulling back to study Draco, because he seemed more upset than he had been so far.
“My little brother was abused.”
The way Draco said it should have made Harry feel strange again, like they were talking about someone who really wasn’t him, but the stormy look in Draco’s eyes made it different. He was staring at Harry, and he had his arms around him, and he really seemed tormented. Like he wanted to do something to help, but he knew there was no way he could go back in time and make the Dursleys be kind to Harry, the way he probably wanted. Or kidnap him back.
“You’re my little brother,” Draco said in a low voice. “I’m going to protect you, and I’m going to make up for what they did, and I’m going to show you that life is better now. All right? No matter what happens.”
“All right,” Harry said, touched despite himself. He had sometimes wanted siblings, but not often. Dealing with Dudley was enough trouble. But a sibling like this, he could want.
Draco hugged him again, fiercely, and then said, “Mother would like to see you in the little sitting room off her bedroom.”
Then Draco turned around and ran away towards a part of the house that Harry knew held the library. Harry just blinked after him. Maybe Draco was as embarrassed as Harry sometimes got because of hugging?
Maybe, Harry thought, and headed towards what he hoped wouldn’t be a confrontation.
*
Harry had privately wondered since he’d moved into Malfoy Manor during the Christmas holiday why Mr. and Mrs. Malfoy had separated bedrooms, but it didn’t seem like something he could ask about, so he hadn’t. Now he almost wished he had. Mrs. Malfoy was sitting in the little room-“little” meaning that it was almost the size of the Dursleys’ kitchen and drawing room combined-with a pale face.
Harry bit his lip. “Um, do you want me to call a house-elf?” The Malfoys kept the house-elves so strictly away from humans that she probably didn’t, but he didn’t know how to revive her if she fainted.
“No,” Mrs. Malfoy whispered. “Please, sit down.”
Harry took a seat on a huge fluffy white chair a few feet away from her. She went on watching him like she was going to faint. This was as far away as she could get from the happy woman who had taken pictures of him at Christmas just a few weeks ago, and Harry didn’t know what to do.
“I am so sorry,” Mrs. Malfoy whispered.
“Why? What the Dursleys did wasn’t your fault.”
“If I’d protected you better, if I’d made sure that the nursery was warded even against people who I trusted, then you would have grown up where you were supposed to grow up.”
“It wasn’t your fault,” Harry repeated more strongly. “I think lots of people trusted Sirius Black, even when they shouldn’t have. It was like-everything was just a joke to him.” He swallowed. “And I hope that I’m not a disappointment to you because of where I was raised.”
Mrs. Malfoy abruptly seemed to see him again, instead of just stare dreadfully at the wall. She gasped and got up to wrap her arms around him again, cradling him close. “No, of course not,” she whispered. “Never, ever, Henry. Of course I wish you had been safe and known all along who you were and never been abused. But I could never be disappointed that you lived and that you are who you are.”
Yes, she is, or she would have let me keep the name Harry.
But even that voice wasn’t as strong as it would have been a little while ago. Harry leaned himself against her, his mother, and let himself feel her. The warm arms hugging him and the warm breath against his hair. The fierce way she held him.
Would Lily Potter have held him like that, if she’d lived?
Harry didn’t know, and he didn’t want to think about it. He hugged Mrs. Malfoy back and tried not to think about “real” families and who he “really” was and whether he wanted to be Harry Potter or Henry Malfoy more. What mattered was that he was here, and he had a mother, and she was hugging him.
It was enough, for a while.
*
“Are you all right, Harry?”
Hermione’s eyes were warm and sympathetic. Harry smiled at her and sat down next to her in Transfiguration. Ron was on the other side of the classroom saying something forceful to Seamus. Apparently he’d played some kind of prank on Ron at breakfast this morning, and Ron was saying he already had enough pranks from the twins to deal with.
“I am,” Harry said, and opened his book. He’d done his Transfiguration essay over the Christmas holidays, and had Mr. Malfoy read it over and Mrs. Malfoy give him some tips that he could add in. He didn’t think it was perfect, but it was better than a lot of the essays he’d written in the past.
“Why did you leave the school like that yesterday?”
“The remark Ron made in Potions,” Harry said, lowering his voice. The last thing he wanted was to have the other students who seemed to have forgotten about it staring at him again. “Draco figured out from it that I’d been abused, and he went and told his parents. Then they wanted to talk to me, and, well, I got to spend the night at Malfoy Manor.”
“They’re your parents, too, aren’t they?”
Hermione just meant the question to help him think, Harry knew, but he found himself pausing and staring down at his Transfiguration essay again. The words that Mr. Malfoy had read over with him. The information that Mrs. Malfoy had helped him add. The reminder of the chapters that Draco had talked about while sitting next to him.
Were they? Did he think of them that way?
He wanted to, was the answer. While at the same time he wanted to remain Harry Potter. He wanted to have a family and a brother and a home, but he also wanted his old name and his old looks and his old friends.
It seemed like he would get to keep “Harry” and his friends, if not the way he used to look. But what would happen with the family and the brother and the home, if he kept pushing them away? If he never got used to them?
Maybe, just like he needed to hear “Henry” more often to get used to that name, he needed to think of Mr. and Mrs. Malfoy as “Father” and “Mother” and Malfoy Manor as “home” to make them more familiar.
“Harry? I didn’t mean to upset you. I know it’s really fraught-”
“No, Hermione, it’s okay,” Harry reassured her, touching her shoulder. “You just gave me something to think about.”
He watched Professor McGonagall sweep into the room. She began calling the roll just as she always did in the first class after a holiday, and she met his eyes and pronounced the name “Mr. Malfoy” without hesitation.
Could he do the same thing?
I want to try, Harry thought, and looked across the room to where Draco was sitting with the other Slytherins. Draco caught his eye and nodded, although Harry doubted he knew what he was really agreeing to. His brother just supported him because he was his brother, and Harry probably seemed to be looking for reassurance.
Maybe Harry would start relying on him for that reassurance.
Maybe, the next time a stranger introduced themselves to him, Harry would say that his name was “Henry Malfoy.”
Maybe, tonight, he would write a letter with the names “Mother” and “Father” in it, and mean it.
He would try it. And see what happened.
The End.
A Godfather Like Him, sequel.