Chapter Two of 'The Parselmouth Promise'- The Wonderful Thing
Chapter One.
Title: The Parselmouth Promise (2/20)
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairing: Harry/Draco, past Harry/Ginny and Draco/Astoria, other canon pairings mentioned
Content Notes: Angst, divorce, Parseltongue, brief violence, ritual magic, not epilogue-compliant
Rating: R
Summary: Voldemort’s influence lingers after his death in the form of Parseltongue passed on to the children of everyone with a Dark Mark-or, in Harry’s case, someone who once hosted a Horcrux. As Harry struggles to be a good single father to his son, James, he inevitably runs up against Draco Malfoy, who’s not only a Parselmouth now but attempting to create a whole ritual and school system to benefit himself, his friends, and his son, Scorpius. No matter how much some people don’t like that.
Author’s Notes: This is probably going to be a medium-length fic of around 10-20 chapters. Note that it’s fairly angsty.
Thank you for all the reviews!
Chapter Two-The Wonderful Thing
“Father, is there a child coming with the speaking man today?”
“There might be.” Draco cast a glance at his son, who sat next to the huge terrarium where their snakes slept. “Do you want to show Charlie to him?”
“Yes!” Scorpius reached into the terrarium, towards the small ball of green scales that marked Charlie’s curled, sleeping form.
“Don’t disturb him right now, then. You know that he won’t want to show off for guests at all if you irritate him by waking him up.”
Scorpius pulled his hand back reluctantly. “But I like it when Charlie’s awake.”
“He’ll be awake later. Now,” Draco continued in English, since it was important for Scorpius to get practice with both languages, “why don’t you go to your bedroom and have Kala help you dress?”
Scorpius gave a deep sigh, the way he usually did when he was asked to do something that didn’t involve snakes, and trotted off down the corridor that led to his room on the ground floor of the family wing in the Manor. Draco, meanwhile, turned in the chair he had modeled after a Muggle swivel one-a conjured serpent of wood and steel joined the seat to the foot-and stared down at the letter on the table.
He had to admit, he’d sent the letter he had only because he wasn’t about to leave such a prominent Parselmouth out of his community-building project. But he’d never expected Potter to actually respond.
Harry bloody Potter.
It had been almost eight years since Draco had seen him-since the Battle of Hogwarts, in fact. And two years since there was anything more than a fleeting picture in the paper snapped of Potter walking through Diagon Alley. He’d quit his Auror job, quit going into public, quit life, it seemed, when his wife left him and he had to take care of his son.
Draco was still surprised that Potter had got, and retained, sole custody of his son. The Weasleys were too rabid about their children to permit such a thing, normally. But it almost certainly had something to do with the boy’s Parseltongue.
As, in a different way, his divorce from Astoria had. She hadn’t been horrified at all that Scorpius was a Parselmouth or that Draco had developed the trait by the time they wed; she was a little proud, in fact. But what he wanted to do with it…
*
“You’re doing ritual magic.”
“Yes.” Draco glanced at his wife with a frown. They were in Draco’s study, which he had taken over from his father when Lucius had decided that enough was enough and he didn’t want to spend the rest of his life in Britain. Narcissa had been more than happy to “retire” with Father to France. “Is there something wrong with that?”
“You know that ritual magic is how he attained power.”
Astoria never referred to the Dark Lord any other way. She obviously didn’t want to use his title or his real name, but Draco would have liked her to do at least “You-Know-Who.” Sometimes he made embarrassing mistakes based on guesses. He turned in his chair, already a swivel one, to face her. “I know. But I don’t intend to practice the same rituals he did.”
“But you do mean to attain power.”
“Of course I do.” Draco sighed when she stared at him expectantly. “What would you have me do, Astoria? We’ve lost so much of our reputation and our money. We can’t even do good works without someone sneering at us for daring to do it for some ulterior motive. At least I can make sure that Scorpius has access to personal power and fulfillment.”
“You don’t have to do it with ritual magic.”
“I never intend to follow the same path that the Dark Lord did. How many times do I need to tell you that?”
“But you’re a Parselmouth.”
“What does that have to do with anything?”
Astoria put her hands on her hips. “You’ll have to do some of the same rituals he did, in order to achieve any level of power in using snake language when you weren’t born with it.”
Draco stared at her. Then he said, in a wonder that felt as if it had hollowed him out, “You don’t trust me.”
Astoria turned away and paced over to the window of the study to stare out of it. Draco didn’t know what she could see-green grass, white peacocks, blossoming trees-that was more fascinating than their argument, and wished she would turn around. But Astoria grew more stubborn when told to do something, so he stayed silent.
“I thought it would be different,” Astoria whispered. “When your parents left for France and you told me that you wanted to have a life out of their shadow. That it would be-quiet. Normal. Who cares what other people think about our charitable contributions? Let’s make the ones we want to make. Let’s do what we want to do. Travel. Take care of Scorpius. Teach him that all people are good.” She was rubbing her hands up and down her arms as if she was cold.
“Mistress is cold?”
Draco sighed and reached down to tickle his fingers against the hood of the young king cobra whom he had called to him not long after his Parselmouth powers began to grow. She had said she was named Edwina, and Draco found too much joy in her companionship to change her name. “I don’t know. I think she’s afraid.”
“Let us find and kill her enemies.”
Draco stifled a roll of his eyes, which Edwina had unfortunately learned to interpret. She wanted to kill everyone and everything except family and Parselmouths at all times. She had never understood why that didn’t translate to a larger human scale. When Draco had pointed out that he had many enemies from the war, Edwina had suggested saving her venom for months and then poisoning them in their sleep all at once.
“We’ll do that, of course,” Draco tried to soothe Astoria, although he retained some private doubt about whether teaching their son that all people were good was a good idea. “But I also want to practice the ritual magic and let Scorpius explore the fullest potential of his gift.”
“You say gift as if it wasn’t something passed along from the Dark Mark.”
“It is, but I can’t get rid of it, and I’m not going to teach my son to be ashamed of his potential.”
Astoria’s shoulders slumped for a moment, which made Draco wonder what she had hoped he would say. That it wasn’t potential? That neither he nor Scorpius had any interest in Parseltongue? Well, that would simply be wrong. Scorpius had been babbling in Parseltongue from the time he was nine months old, and it had been one of the best days of Draco’s life when he realized he could understand snakes.
“You want to be politically active, Draco,” Astoria said, and turned around to face him with her hands shaking. “That’s the exact opposite of what I want.”
Draco paused, his fingers smoothing along the back of Edwina’s hood while she hissed sleepy compliments about how good he was at this. “I have no desire to bribe people in the Ministry the way my father did.”
“That’s not what I meant. I mean that you want to change hearts and minds, that you’re going to go out there and court danger instead of-” Astoria looked off to the side. “Instead of staying here and being quiet.”
“I have to change hearts and minds to build the school system for Parselmouths and alter the beliefs about Parseltongue that so many people have, yes,” Draco said dryly. “I have to ask people for money. I have to find the other ones who have Parseltongue and encourage them not to be ashamed. I have to build a ritual circle so that we can practice the most powerful magic together. I’ve been talking about this for years, Astoria, ever since I heard about other people passing Parseltongue to their children and realized what would probably happen when I had a child. Why did you marry me if you disliked it so much?”
“I thought it was just talk.”
Draco flattened his mouth into a straight line and said nothing. Astoria folded her arms.
“So your talk that infuriated my parents about respecting Muggles and Muggleborns,” Draco began.
“I think they should be treated better. But I’m not out there campaigning for it. I want a quiet life.”
She said “campaigning” like it was a dirty word, and even though it was almost a year later before they divorced, Draco knew then that his marriage was over.
*
Now, Draco watched Harry Potter and his son walk towards him across the patterned floor of the great ballroom, and wondered that he had managed to come this far. Astoria would either have laughed or outright refused to believe it.
The years had hardened Potter in a way Draco hadn’t anticipated. He moved with his head up, his hand curled at his side, making no pretense that he wouldn’t go for his wand the instant someone presented a threat to his son. There was a new scar on the side of his face, a ripping red line that ran from the corner of his left eye to his jaw, but Draco had thought it would make him seem more vulnerable. It only made Potter look as if he had survived something that had tried to rip his face off, and that nothing else would faze him, either.
The boy walking at his side, clinging to his leg, had unruly red hair and brilliant brown eyes when he shyly peered around his father at Draco, who stood with Edwina, Scorpius, and Charlie in the middle of the grand blue-and-white ballroom. Draco stifled disappointment he didn’t understand at the fact that the boy didn’t have green eyes. No reason he should inherit them.
“Hi,” the boy, James if Draco remembered correctly, said before Potter could say anything. “Are you that git Malfoy?”
Potter closed his eyes and took a long, slow breath. Draco blinked, and finally said, “My name is Draco Malfoy. This is my son, Scorpius.” He patted Scorpius’s shoulder, and Scorpius stood upright.
“Hi!” he chirped in Parseltongue.
“Hi,” James responded at once, and he focused on Charlie as Scorpius held him out. “Who is that? What’s his name? You have your own snake, that’s so brilliant! What’s his name?”
“Charlie,” Scorpius said, with the kind of smile that Draco knew meant his son was already planning to be lifelong friends with Potter’s. Someone who admired his snake always had a passport to his good will. “Where’s your snake? You could have brought him with you, I wouldn’t have minded.”
Charlie lifted his head and flicked his tongue out. Potter made a choked sound, and grabbed James’s hand when James would have run up to pet him. The boy gave his father what Draco thought was a long-suffering look, and said, “My daddy doesn’t let me have one. He thinks they’d be dangerous.”
“Your son has a bloody boomslang, Malfoy.” Potter’s voice hissed, but not in the good way. He turned his gaze on Draco, and Draco tensed. Edwina, coiled around his shoulders, at once lifted her head and flared her hood. “And you, a cobra, because of course you do. I wouldn’t have answered the letter if I’d known.”
“Venomous snakes would never hurt a Parselmouth, Potter,” Draco said, because Potter’s stupid prejudice against snakes as much as his speaking in English was irritating him. “Neither would constrictors. And your son will have to have a snake as a companion to participate in the exercises we’re going to be showing him.”
“Where’s your snake, Mr. Potter?” Scorpius added.
James tugged hard against his father’s hand, and Potter walked slowly with him over to Scorpius and Charlie, although Draco saw the way he still tensed when his son reached out to pet Charlie’s head. Charlie, the goofiest boomslang Draco had ever met, snuggled his head into James’s palm. “He has one, but he doesn’t let her in the house.”
“What?” Draco snapped. “It’s a Parselmouth’s duty to care for his snakes, Potter.”
Potter turned to face him, hostile magic rising up around him like steam. He ignored Edwina’s hissed warning and the way both children shrank away from him. “There was a snake who wanted to Match with me, or some other absurd name,” he said, voice clipped. “She came into the house without permission and into my son’s bedroom, specifically. I put her outside. I didn’t hurt her, and I didn’t bond with her. She’s not mine.”
“A snake came to you and offered herself as your Match, and you refused?” Draco looked away from Potter and breathed deeply to calm the swimming black-and-white dots in his vision. “Merlin, Potter, you’re an idiot.”
“She was pretty, too,” James said, from where he was stroking Charlie’s back. Charlie had rolled upside-down with what Draco privately thought of as his idiot expression on his face. “All gold with red stripes. She called herself a Gryffindor snake and said she wanted to Match herself with Daddy because there aren’t a lot of Gryffindor Parselmouths. Can your snake do tricks, Scorpius?”
Draco did his best to drive all his tension down into his body, because right now it was affecting Edwina and she had begun to hiss in agitation. “Potter, can I talk to you for a minute?”
“We’re talking.”
Draco jerked his head violently to the side, and Potter followed him to the right, far enough away from their children that Draco was fairly sure they wouldn’t hear, although Potter did still keep looking over his shoulder. Draco claimed his attention with another sharp jerk of his head. “A Gryffindor snake. Do you know how rare they are?”
“Malfoy-”
“Answer me in Parseltongue.”
Potter stared at him in silence, and Draco had the impression of a coiled, waiting will that would drive itself over and over again into a trap if that was what it took, in order to get free. Finally, Potter nodded abruptly and said, “I don’t like Parseltongue because it came from my parents’ murderer and it destroyed my marriage, Malfoy. I want James to get what he wants. But I’m not going to practice the magic myself, and bonding with a snake is out of the question.”
Edwina twisted the upper half of her body around Draco’s left arm and said, “He sounds like a snake.”
Draco stroked her hood to let her know that he’d heard. Yes, Potter’s Parseltongue did sound different from most voices he’d heard, including his own, his son’s, and his father’s. He sounded as if he became an animal when he spoke it. But now wasn’t the time to get into that. “It destroyed your marriage?”
“Ginny didn’t want to be a mother to children who had Parseltongue. She tried, but it was too much for her.”
Draco blinked and started to ask the obvious question, but then held it back. It wasn’t as though it would ever reach Weasley, after all, who was the one who really needed to hear it. “Very well. Hold your grudges. But I’m telling you now that those grudges are going to affect your son.”
Potter closed his eyes, and a weariness as heavy as his will rose up in his face. “I thought I could keep it separate from him.”
“Not if you refuse to speak the language as though it’s dirty. Not if you encourage him to fear snakes when you ought to know that no snake would ever harm him. Not when you refuse to let him have a snake.”
“Fine, then we’ll conduct the ritual to call him a snake. I suppose it’s a ritual?”
Draco nodded, still watching Potter, who hadn’t opened his eyes. “And you’ll need to find the snake that wanted to Match with you and apologize to her. She’s an incredible gift. A priceless one.”
“I told you that bonding with a snake is out of the question,” Potter said, opening his eyes and showing a flash of pure green that made Draco feel uneasy.
“You’ll need to be in the circles with your son, and for your sake, you’ll need a snake.”
“Why should I be in the circles?”
“How else is he going to learn?”
Potter gave him the strangest look, then seemed to realize that Draco wasn’t going to waste Legilimency on him and ground his teeth. “I assumed that you would teach him.”
“First-generation Parselmouths need their family connection to it. I had to call Scorpius’s snake at the same time he did, because he needs my support. Your son is the perfect age to bond with a snake and learn to use this power, but he’ll need you.”
Potter stared off into the distance. “Doesn’t it matter that I won’t be a good Parselmouth?” he whispered. “I can’t give that snake what she wants. I can’t give James what he’ll need, apparently. Isn’t there another way that he can learn from you? That he can call the snake?”
Draco hesitated, then sighed. He still thought Potter was an idiot for rejecting a gift as mighty as this one, but it was true that they’d accomplish nothing with him resisting every step of the way. “Fine. We can set up the calling circle with the help of two other Parselmouths. But it’ll mean that you and your son will be in the presence of some people I assumed you would want to avoid.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Potter said quietly. “As long as James gets what he needs.”
“And you should know,” Draco said, switching back to English, too, because he wanted to drive home the point, “that training for most Parselmouths and their children is free because I want to get this system off the ground and I want to see them embrace their gifts. That won’t be the case with you. I’m going to charge you all the Galleons I can get away with.”
Potter didn’t flinch. “It doesn’t matter,” he repeated, and then turned around and wandered back towards his son, as if he was unable to help himself.
Draco wrinkled his brow as he stared after him. Edwina leaned her mouth close to Draco’s neck. “He stinks of fear. And contempt.”
“Against us? Because if he does-”
“No. He hates himself the way wounded prey that knows it cannot survive hates the world.” Edwina flickered her tongue out. “He is very silly.”
He was, Draco agreed to himself. And he supposed the reasons why Potter hated himself didn’t matter that much. He would pay the money, and his son would receive the education that he needed, and Draco’s Order of Serpents would be more accepted in the future because of his association with the “Savior” and his son.
But Draco, with the curiosity that had driven him deep into Parseltongue and its mysteries, found that he did want to know. And, well, he had uncovered more than anyone else in the last hundred years. Who was to say that he couldn’t learn Potter’s secrets, too, even if Potter tried to keep them buried?
Chapter Three.