Chapter Four of 'The Parselmouth Promise'- The Circle of Thought
Chapter Three.
Chapter One.
Title: The Parselmouth Promise (4/20)
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 again for all the reviews!
Chapter Four-The Circle of Thought
“I-didn’t know if you wanted to know that Ginny is getting married again. But it’ll be in the papers, so…”
Harry smiled at Hermione. Honestly, he loved his friends, but they went out of the way to protect him too much. Harry was more than capable of doing that for himself, and James, too. “It’s all right, Hermione. Life goes on. And we didn’t end things on good terms. She’s got a right to live.” He settled back against the huge wingback chair in Hermione’s drawing room with his mug of cider and subtly checked the charm glowing on the pocket watch that Molly had given him all those years ago. Yes, James was all right at the Burrow. “Who’s she getting married to?”
“Seamus.”
“Really? Huh. I thought he’d settled down with that French witch a while ago.”
Hermione relaxed so much she practically collapsed onto the Gryffindor-red couch in front of the fireplace. Harry shook his head fondly at her. Yes, it took a lot of self-control and practice, but he could restrain his temper.
“He had, but then they broke up when she wanted him to move to France, and Ginny met him when he went to a Holyhead Harpies game.”
Harry nodded. Ginny had rejoined the team after they got divorced, and she was succeeding brilliantly, from the little news that he’d heard. “Well, good for her. Is there some other reason you didn’t want to tell me?” he added, because he knew Hermione, and her face was too red now.
“Um.” Hermione spent so much time staring at the tattered thread hanging from one of her ink-splattered sleeves that Harry took pity on her.
“She’s pregnant, isn’t she?”
Hermione snapped her head up. “What? Did someone tell you? Did you write to her?” Ron and Hermione appeared incapable of understanding that Harry had resigned himself to the end of his marriage, and had thought he was writing to Ginny every day or something.
“No, I just guessed what would put that expression on your face.” Harry sighed when Hermione looked as unhappy as she had the last time she heard about a mistreated house-elf. “Listen, Hermione, the main thing I hope is that the pregnancy goes well and the baby and Ginny are healthy and that someday James can have a good relationship with his half-sibling. That’s all.”
“Mate!”
Ron had just come in through the door and was shedding his Auror robes. Harry leaned back to smile at him. “Hey. Have a good day chasing down villainous Dark wizards?”
Ron laughed. “The best. We caught a dragon egg smuggler, and then it turned out she was linked to several unicorn deaths…”
He kept up the flow of talk until Hermione pointed out, rather tartly, that Ron’s hair was dripping a substance that could only loosely be described by the word “mud,” and that he should go up and shower. Ron grinned and started up the stairs, but then pivoted around and stared hard at Harry. “You staying for dinner, mate?”
“Yes.”
“Good,” Ron said, and retreated backwards up the stairs, keeping a firm eye on Harry, as if he expected him to explode. The news about Ginny, Harry supposed.
Hermione sighed when Ron was out of sight. “He wants to discuss the Parselmouth school that you’re enrolling James in with you.”
Harry tensed despite himself, and noticed Hermione noticing it. He exhaled hard and looked in the other direction. “I appreciate his concern, but I’m the one with the right to make decisions about my son,” he said. “Since Ginny’s-not here.” He’d wanted to say “gave up all responsibility,” but that wouldn’t be fair.
“I know that you have the right to make that decision, Harry. Just-is it right for him to grow up with the children of Death Eaters?”
“He needs to know things about his Parseltongue, things I can’t teach him. And right now, he doesn’t have a lot of other friends like his cousins because of the continual delicate dance we have to do around the Burrow to make sure that we’re not there when Ginny is.”
Hermione winced. “You know that Molly wouldn’t-”
“Yes, but Ginny would,” Harry said, and that ended the conversation, as far as he was concerned. He would listen during dinner when Ron and Hermione talked to him again about the Parselmouth school, but his mind was made up. James adored being around Scorpius, he adored learning how to care for Sapphire, and from what Harry had seen when he toured the school, the teachers were doing a surprisingly good job.
*
“Oh, Mr. Malfoy! You startled me.”
Draco gave his best charming smile to the witch in charge of the Ministry Archives. “I’m sorry, Miss…”
“Clarissa.”
He had been asking for her last name, but Draco preserved his smile, and simply nodded. “Of course. Well, Clarissa-” she giggled “-I’m here to see about some of the old editions of the Daily Prophet.” He cast a helpless glance around at the maze of sapphire-colored shelving and the random cubbyholes and nooks that were as likely to hold ancient scrolls as rolled-up newspapers. “I don’t know where to start.”
“Well, you’re in the wrong part of the Archives for that, first of all, Mr. Malfoy! Come with me, and we’ll make sure that you’re set on the right path.”
Draco preserved his smile as he followed her down several aisles, but he was thinking, An interesting choice of words.
When they reached a section of the Archives that did smell like newsprint, Clarissa turned to face him and gave him a brilliant smile, twirling a curl of ginger hair around one finger. Too bad she didn’t know that ginger hair did nothing for Draco. “Now, to find a certain edition of the paper, you just say the date and swing your wand like this-” she traced a P-shape in the air “-and it’ll come to you. To return it to its place, recite date backwards, and trace this.” She made an R-shape with her wand this time.
“And to see all the editions for a particular month?”
“Oh, the same, except you’ll say the name of the month to retrieve them, and reverse them by saying the year first.”
“Thank you, Clarissa. You’ve been enormously helpful.”
Despite her obvious desire to linger, in the end, Clarissa had to sigh and retreat. Draco ignored the way that she was obviously attempting to draw his attention to her bum, and focused on the shelves in front of him.
“April 2005. May 2005.”
Dust shook into the air as the papers hurtled towards them. Draco stepped neatly aside and let them stack themselves on the only table in this section of the Archives, which had a chair in front of it. When the flights had stopped, he sat down and sorted through them slowly.
He hadn’t remembered the exact weeks or days, only the months, but in the end, that didn’t matter, because the Prophet always put everything relating to Potter on the front page, so Draco had only to glance and move on if a particular edition didn’t have anything.
And sure enough, there it was, beginning the third week of April. A picture of Potter flinching and trying to duck out of sight in an obscure corner of Diagon Alley, while the headline blared, MIND-HEALER TO HARRY POTTER TELLS ALL!
Draco skimmed quickly through the article, then nodded and flipped to another. Few had much to add to the original, but they repeated the details enough for Draco to build a coherent picture of something he’d barely thought about for years.
Potter had gone to a Mind-Healer called Leroy Bandler after, apparently, some kind of traumatic incident had happened to him on an Auror mission. Bandler had listened to Potter for three months, then sold the secrets Potter had told him to the papers. Bandler’s excuse, as listed in one article that included a photograph of him standing with his arms around his wife and children, was that his children were starving and he needed the money, and he believed Potter “a danger to our society.”
Draco, who knew very well what Mind-Healers were paid, snorted to himself.
The articles were filled with details about Potter casting the Unforgivables during the war, his childhood with the Muggles where apparently his cousin had chased him and bullied him and his aunt and uncle had called him a freak, his Parseltongue, and his confrontation with the basilisk at the end of his second year in school. Bandler said gravely that “Parselmouths are dangerous” and that he “wouldn’t be surprised if it turned out that Potter is an unwitting weapon of You-Know-Who.”
That had been the same year that details started out to come out about those who had been branded by the Dark Lord developing as Parselmouths, so outrage over that part of the story had died down fairly quickly. There were simply too many purebloods with money and good positions in society speaking Parseltongue for the prejudice to endure.
And Draco hadn’t paid attention to the articles about Potter since then. He’d immersed himself fully in the campaign to make Parselmouths more acceptable.
Now…
Shit. The perfect combination of circumstances to encourage him to distrust his gift. The prejudice against it when we were in school and he was the only publicly-known Parselmouth other than the Dark Lord, the trauma surrounding it, the betrayal by a Mind-Healer, the connection with the Dark Lord killing his parents, and now his wife leaving him.
Draco didn’t like to admit it, but he supposed, in a way, that everyone involved was lucky Potter had sought training for his son at all, instead of trying to suppress James’s Parseltongue.
Draco returned the papers to their place in the shelves and headed thoughtfully towards the entrance. Clarissa giggled and fluttered at him. Draco nodded to her and kept going, mind turning towards the next planned class where he, Scorpius, James, and Potter would all be present, two days from now.
Well, technically, Potter wouldn’t be there until after the class, when he would come to retrieve James, but that didn’t matter much. Draco still had to speak to him.
*
“A moment of your time, Potter.”
Harry felt the wariness trying to stiffen all his muscles, but he only nodded and turned to James. “Why don’t you and Sapphire play with Scorpius and Charlie for a little while?” he suggested.
“Okay, Daddy,” James hissed happily, and trotted over to the other side of the broad classroom space, which was done in calming greens and blues. Harry wasn’t blind to the fact that the large space had a ritual circle sketched around it, but he did trust Malfoy when he said that no Parselmouth would be doing rituals this young.
Harry turned to Malfoy. The man was studying him thoughtfully, his cobra curled around his throat but silent. Harry shrugged to himself and asked, “Did James get in trouble in class today? He’s not good at sitting still for long periods of time, I’m afraid.”
“No. I wanted to let you know that I went to the Ministry Archives and sorted through the Daily Prophet articles covering the time of your-dispute with Healer Bandler.”
Harry bit back the stream of curses he wanted to unleash. Losing his temper was the cause of most of his past woes, at least the ones that Voldemort wasn’t directly responsible for. He’d lost his marriage with Ginny because of it, and he wouldn’t have driven Bandler to reveal all those facts about his past if Harry hadn’t screamed at the man for calling him a Dark wizard.
And, well, the Prophet was publicly available. Harry couldn’t be angry at someone for looking at it.
“I see.”
“I understand now why you want nothing to do with your Parseltongue.” Malfoy was scrutinizing him in a way that reminded Harry absurdly of Hermione. “And I wanted to let you know that if you became part of my Order, I would never betray your secrets like that.”
“The option isn’t on the table, so I’m not worried about that.”
Malfoy paused for a long moment. Harry looked longingly over his shoulder, almost wishing that James would have the kind of tantrum that he did when he went too long without a nap, but he was happily hissing away with Scorpius and their snakes.
“Have you been to another Mind-Healer since?”
Harry laughed, and then stopped when he saw how James had twisted around to stare at him. He tried not to bring the ugly, violent side of himself around his son. He faced Malfoy and shook his head. “And give them the chance to betray me again? Of course not.”
“I don’t understand why Bandler wasn’t punished for his misconduct.”
“Because I’m an evil Dark wizard, Malfoy, haven’t you heard? Going after him would have made me look more evil, and anyway, I’m a celebrity. The unhinged famous person persecuting the poor helpless little man who only did it because his children were starving.”
“They weren’t starving. He bought one of them a new racing broom with that money.”
“I know, Malfoy.” Merlin, Harry was so tired. He raked his hand through his hair and saw Malfoy focus on his scar for a moment, but Harry ignored that. “When I found out what he’d done, I did go to St. Mungo’s. But I came in with my magic storming, and-”
“What?”
Harry grimaced. Shit. He’d only ever used that term in his own head, and to bloody Bandler. “My magic out and playing around me. There was-lightning. Thunder. Serpents made of black light crawling next to me. It scared everyone out of their wits. Of course, after that they were perfectly willing to believe Bandler when he decreed that I was evil.”
Malfoy stared at him with his mouth slightly open. Harry ignored that, too. He would put up with a lot to have a competent teacher for James’s Parseltongue, and amazingly, it did seem that Malfoy was that. Of course, that might only be because his passion for making Parselmouths strong and achieving power through rituals had overruled his blood prejudice, but Harry would take it.
“I’ve never heard of the serpents made of light as an effect of Parselmouth magic.”
Harry relaxed a little. Yes, Malfoy’s fixation on power was annoying, but it really did defend him and James. “No one else had, either. Like I said, though, it became much easier to claim that I was Dark after that. Voldemort returned. Unhinged. Dangerous. All of that.”
Malfoy gave a shivering flinch and then ignored Voldemort’s name. “But you aren’t.”
“Try convincing the people who were willing to believe I was the Heir of Slytherin and a cheater in the Tri-Wizard Tournament and an insane liar of that.”
Malfoy was quiet, his eyebrows still bent as if he was trying to think of some way to make Harry’s words not be true. The cobra around his neck woke up and aimed her snout at Harry. Harry let his hands rest by his sides, where he could get to his wand and snap up a shield in seconds if he needed it.
“He is telling the truth,” the cobra said.
Harry sneered a little. “Need to rely on your snake to tell you that, Malfoy? When you went to the trouble of looking up all the details in the papers?”
Malfoy stroked the cobra’s back, once, a light touch of two fingers as if he did it every day. “Hush, Edwina.” He was considering Harry, his eyes traveling up and down. “I did not think he was lying.”
Harry sighed. “Is there a point to this interrogation? I should get James home.”
“I’d like to help you move forwards.”
Harry took a long step deliberately nearer Malfoy. “I don’t think I need your help.”
Malfoy’s shoulders tightened, but he kept meeting Harry’s eyes. “I mean, I’d like to help you become more comfortable with your Parseltongue and your Match.”
“No. Next question.”
“Have you considered that sooner or later, your attitude will affect your son? He’s already asked me why you insist on speaking English with him so often and why you don’t like to look straight at Sapphire.”
“Then I’ll work on becoming more comfortable with that. But part of the answer is just that parents and children don’t have to be exactly the same, and that’s what I‘ll tell him if he asks me.”
“Bold of you to assume he would be comfortable enough to ask in the first place.”
Harry rolled his eyes because he couldn’t help himself. “And if you actually cared, Malfoy, then maybe I would listen to you. But you don’t.”
“I care! I want every Parselmouth to be-”
“You want me to embrace my Parseltongue so that you can have someone powerful to add to your Order and your ritual circle. No. You can live without me, and I can live without you.”
Harry turned and began to walk away, but Malfoy called after him, “Haven’t you considered that your experiences with Parseltongue aren’t any more traumatic than mine are? I was Marked by him. I had to let Death Eaters into the school and try to assassinate Dumbledore under pressure that he would otherwise kill my family. I had to-”
Harry glanced over his shoulder, and whatever was in his eyes made Malfoy falter and fall silent, and Malfoy’s cobra rear up and hiss.
“Yeah,” Harry said. “And my parents were murdered by a Parselmouth. Because of that, I had to spend ten years with Muggles that the whole wizarding world knows now were abusive, I had to kill a giant basilisk in our second year and a man possessed by Voldemort in our first, I had to put up with opinion swinging back and forth on me constantly and people thinking I was mad and evil and dangerous, my godfather was innocent and then I lost him, I was used as a tool in Voldemort’s resurrection ritual, I spent a year with the Ministry trying to crush me and carving words into my hand with a Blood Quill, I spent another year hunting down ways to destroy Voldemort and in the end walked to my death. And then my Mind-Healer betrayed me and my wife divorced me.” He bared his teeth. “Don’t talk to me about how much harder you have it, Malfoy. You want to have a trauma competition? I’ll win.”
Malfoy was silent as Harry went to collect James and Sapphire. He renewed the water charm around the sea krait and nodded absently to James as he chattered, in a mixture of Parseltongue and English, about all the history and magic he had learned in class that day.
Yes, Harry knew he had trauma. But when everyone would side with the Healer if one betrayed him again, and people still flinched away from him in the streets when he went to the shops in Diagon Alley or Hogsmeade, Harry didn’t see what he could do about it.
This is just the way things are.
And then Harry forced himself to snap out of his thoughts, and pay attention to his son, who was more important than he was.
Chapter Five.