[From Samhain to the Solstice]: A Godfather Like Him, gen, Malfoys series, 2/6, PG-13
Part One.
Title: A Godfather Like Him (2/6)
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairing: Background Lucius/Narcissa and mentions of Lily/James, otherwise gen
Content Notes: Major AU (Harry is Draco’s twin), not compliant with PoA, violence, angst, drama, family, discussion of canonical child abuse
Rating: PG-13
Wordcount: This part 4500
Summary: Sequel to “How Like Hatred” and “A Name Like Henry.” Harry comes home for the summer, and it really is a relief to be at Malfoy Manor with his parents and brother-at first. But then he finds out a secret that they’ve been keeping from him, and gets the news that Sirius Black has broken out of Azkaban. Plus he has to go a Mind-Healer. Harry isn’t sure which one is worst, frankly.
Author’s Notes: Make sure you read the first two stories in the series before this one. I’m posting this as part of my “From Samhain to the Solstice” fic series, and it should have between four and six chapters.
Thank you for all the reviews!
Part Two
“You must know this is an unacceptable way to behave.’
Harry kept silent, staring over Mr. Malfoy’s head and out the window of the study. It was enchanted to give some kind of view of a winter forest under a blanket of silver snow. Harry wished that he could be like that. Frozen and still, instead of already sick and wanting to shout again. The numbness that had overcome him when they were on their way to the study had already left him again.
“Henry, are you listening to me?”
“Yes. It’s an unacceptable way to behave,” Harry droned.
That had always been enough to get him out of trouble with Uncle Vernon, but Mr. Malfoy narrowed his eyes and leaned forwards from behind the huge ebony desk where he probably plotted the kind of evil deeds that Dobby had tried to warn him about. “I want you to understand what I mean.”
“I understand that exploding your windows makes you angrier than endangering students at Hogwarts does, sure.”
Mr. Malfoy pursed his lips and closed his eyes, exhaling hard. Then, utterly startling Harry, he stood up from behind the desk and gestured to the sleek silver couch on the other side of the study, the same color as the image of the forest outside the window.
Harry went and sat on it, his face pinched. Maybe that made him look more like a real Malfoy. But he still didn’t feel that way.
Mr. Malfoy sat on the couch next to him. He bent down and peered into Harry’s eyes. Harry stared back and tried his best to put all his disgust and anger into the glare.
They treated Dobby the way the Dursleys used to treat him. If they thought one thing was wrong, they should think the other thing was wrong, too. But they weren’t falling all over themselves to tell Dobby that he had to see a Mind-Healer. And Harry thought they would have kept him from seeing Dobby forever if they could.
The anger built and beat under his breastbone, and Mr. Malfoy’s desk began to tremble.
“Listen to me, Henry,” Mr. Malfoy said softly, and took his hand. Harry started, and the magic faded away. Mr. Malfoy kept staring intently at him.
“Yes,” Mr. Malfoy said.
“Yes, what?”
“Yes, I was plotting something to do with the school,” Mr. Malfoy said, and sighed. “At the time, it-made sense. It would have caused the kind of chaos that would distract certain enemies in the Ministry from our family, and it would have discredited someone I hate. And it would have…” He hesitated for so long that Harry thought he wouldn’t start speaking again, but finally he did. “It would have made the Dark Lord look on us with favor.”
Harry ripped his hand away, but Mr. Malfoy didn’t move. He kept sitting there and staring, and Harry hated it. For the first time in his life, he appreciated the fact that the Dursleys had sent him to his cupboard when he got angry at them. It meant it was easier to think and unwind in the darkness.
He couldn’t get away with Mr. Malfoy staring at him like this. Harry clenched his hands into fists in his lap and threw his words like curses instead. “So, how soon are you going to turn me over to him?”
Mr. Malfoy’s eyes closed. “I would never do that to a child of mine, Henry.”
“Yes, you would.”
“I have asked you before to think before you speak-”
“You did your plot, whatever it was, with Draco right in the school,” Harry snapped at him. “How did you know it wouldn’t hurt him?”
Mr. Malfoy’s eyes opened, and he stared down at Harry for a long moment. He was probably thinking before he spoke, Harry thought, unable not to feel the boil of fury through his veins.
“I-was led to believe that the object would only hurt those who were of half blood or less,” said Mr. Malfoy at last.
“And you didn’t care about me when you thought I was the Potters’ child.”
“No.” Mr. Malfoy swallowed. “I hated you.”
Harry nodded. His fury had changed. He felt odd, light, floating, airy. It was as if a horrible thing had happened, but it was almost a relief, because he’d been anticipating the horrible thing so long and now it had happened and it couldn’t hurt him anymore.
“You hated me, and you hate me now.”
“What? No-”
“You tried to keep the fact that you treat house-elves horribly away from me.” Harry stared at him, and his eyes were bright and tearless, and he spoke the words without knowing he was going to speak them. “Instead of changing the way that you treat house-elves, or your opinion about people who are half-bloods or Muggleborns, you just tried to keep me away from the elves and took the object, whatever it was, out of the school. You didn’t really change at all. I should have known, I suppose.”
“I am turning away from the Dark Lord. For you.”
Harry kept talking, while Mr. Malfoy’s words were like a blow that he stepped aside from. “It doesn’t really matter. I never had anyone who loved me growing up. It turns out that my parents, I mean, the people I thought were my parents, were my kidnappers. And now you don’t really want to change. You’re making the smallest changes possible. That’s okay. I can live with this.”
“Henry. Please.”
Mr. Malfoy sounded agonized, but Harry just looked at him and shook his head. “I’m not important enough to make the big changes for.”
“That is not true.” Mr. Malfoy reached out and put his arms around Harry, but this time, it didn’t feel like a father hugging him. Nothing could get through the bright shell that had wrapped around Harry. “I love you. I have always longed for you. We told Draco stories of you when we thought that was all we would ever have, so that he could get to know you, too.”
“You loved the person you thought I was,” Harry corrected him. “Someone who was a pureblood and would be happy to live with the way you treated house-elves and whatever plot you were cooking up to put in the school. Something to do with Heir of Slytherin, I suppose?” he sighed, disappointed with himself for not seeing it earlier. “The Petrifications stopped after Christmas. When you took whatever it was out of the school.”
“Henry.”
“Are you going to treat house-elves better?”
Mr. Malfoy hesitated.
Harry stood up, and shrugged Mr. Malfoy’s arms off him, and walked out of the room.
*
“You can’t stay in there forever, Henry.”
“Watch me.”
Harry said the words flatly, staring up at the ceiling of his room. He hadn’t decorated it with all the things he would have liked, but so what? The Malfoys weren’t his family, not really.
“You have to eat something.”
“I’m using to doing without.”
From the sound of it, Draco had kicked the door. Harry entertained a brief fantasy of Mrs. Malfoy getting angry at him for the dent he had probably put in the door, and then snorted to himself. Who said it would last? The house-elves would come along and magic it away, and if it did stay for some weird reason, then Mrs. Malfoy would blame Harry.
Because they did. They blamed him for seeing Dobby and caring about him, instead of blaming themselves for not treating Dobby the right way and trying to hide him from Harry.
Footsteps down the corridor said that Draco was going away, and Harry tried to close his eyes and sleep, even though he was hungry. But a loud pop sounded in front of him, and Harry scrambled over and reached for the wand under his pillow.
Dobby was there, bowing, holding a tray full of what looked like bowls of soup and a covered platter that smelled like chicken. Harry licked his lips and said, “I’m not hungry,” while his stomach growled.
“Great Master Harry Potter is being hungry,” Dobby said, in a voice that sounded like experience, and set the tray down on the table next to his bed. “Perhaps Great Master Harry Potter can be eating something? For Dobby?”
House-elves sure had big green teary eyes when they wanted to use them, Harry thought grumpily. He lifted the cover off the platter and swallowed when he saw the chicken sitting there, in delicate bits draped with some kind of sauce that made them smell like a few meals he’d cooked for the Dursleys that he never got to eat.
“Do you swear that they haven’t put any curses or potions on the food?” he asked Dobby without taking his eyes from the chicken, or the fork that had materialized beside the platter. He was sure that it hadn’t been there a second before.
“They are not putting anything in the food! Theys never come in the kitchens.”
Well, at least that made sense, Harry thought as he picked up the fork. Preparing food was probably beneath a Malfoy.
And didn’t that prove that he wasn’t one?
Harry sighed, but he was hungry enough that he ate some of the chicken and a small piece of the treacle tart. As soon as he’d eaten enough food that he didn’t think his stomach would grumble, he put the fork down.
“Great Master Harry Potter is not wanting more?”
Harry shook his head as he turned to Dobby. “I have to show them they can’t manipulate me this way. And why are you calling me Harry Potter?”
Dobby froze and then clapped a hand over his eyes. “Does Great Master-does he not wants me to?”
“No. Right now, I prefer it.” Harry sighed and looked off at the wall, at the enchanted window that showed a vision of the ocean. He’d set it that way thinking he might find the roll of the waves soothing, but it hadn’t happened.
“Dobby, what do they do to you?”
Dobby cautiously came forwards and stood staring up at him. Harry looked back down, and nodded encouragingly. “I know that you can’t tell me anything about the evil plot in the school. I’m not asking that. I’m just asking how the Malfoys treat you.”
Dobby swallowed. “They bes getting upset when Dobby be being stupid and slow. They tells Dobby to shut his ears in the oven and his fingers in doors. And they gets upset if Dobby spill the tea. They tells him that he’s a bad elf and send him off to sit in the elf quarters in the kitchen and think about what he’s done.”
“What are the elf quarters like?”
“Cold. And dark.”
Like the cupboard.
Harry felt the sickening spiral of emotion unfolding in the center of his chest again, but this time, it was a lot colder. Like the cupboard. Like the elf quarters. And ready to burst into flame again at a moment’s notice.
“Thank you, Dobby,” he said. “I’m going to try and do something to get this changed. They don’t have the right to treat you like that, or the other elves.”
“Master Harry Potter must not be doing that!” Dobby whispered at once, harshly, his eyes darting around as if he thought one of the walls was going to come to life and hurt him. “The Masters Malfoy would be knowing that you is knowing, and-and-”
“You think they would make it worse for you?” Harry asked. He could understand that. The Dursleys had reacted like that when they thought someone had figured out what Harry’s home life was like, even though no one had ever cared enough to actually help him.
Harry tried to stuff the bitterness back into its own cupboard in his mind, but it was hard.
Dobby bobbed his head so fast that the tears forming in his eyes flew away and landed on the floor.
“All right, I won’t do that,” Harry said, and reached out to pat Dobby on the head, ignoring the way that he immediately burst into wails of adoration. There was a time that he might have done the same thing, if someone had ever cared enough to pay attention. “But I’ll figure out some way, okay?”
“Master Harry Potter is being great,” Dobby breathed, and then he picked up the tray and vanished with it.
Harry lay back on his bed and scowled at the ceiling. Now he just had to figure out what the best thing to do would be. Should he ask for Dobby to be his personal elf? Or would it be better if Dobby was permanently free and could leave behind Malfoy Manor forever?
A wave of homesickness washed over him-for Hogwarts, nowhere else. The Dursleys’ house had never been home.
But more and more, it was seeming as if Malfoy Manor probably wasn’t, either.
*
“Mind-Healer Letham has been waiting on you for the past half-hour.”
Mrs. Malfoy’s words were probably meant to be a gentle scold, but Harry could only hear echoes of all the times that Aunt Petunia had ever said he’d disappointed her and the like. He nodded back to Mrs. Malfoy and walked into the small grey sitting room where it seemed the Mind-Healer was.
It was a surprise to find out that the Mind-Healer was a woman, even though Harry hadn’t heard her first name. He’d just assumed “Healer Letham” had to be a man. He took a deep breath and walked towards her through the low grey couches and stuffed chairs, trying not to compare her to Mrs. Figg, even though she looked about the same age and had grey hair.
No smell of cats around her, though. At least there was that.
And then the woman glanced up as Harry came to a halt in front of the couch where she was sitting, and he only barely kept from jerking back. Her eyes were a piercing, clear blue, and she looked at him as if she was going to use her eyes like spoons and scoop the inside of his head out.
No. Definitely not like Mrs. Figg.
“Mr. Malfoy? A pleasure to meet you.” The woman gave him an odd, shallow bow without rising from the couch. “My name is Marianna Letham. I’m pleased that you could join me.”
Harry flushed, although he didn’t actually hear sarcasm in those last words. “Um. Yes, Healer Letham. Thank you.”
He found himself glancing over his shoulder at Mrs. Malfoy for reassurance, then remembered that he was angry at all of them and he shouldn’t be doing that. He jerked his eyes back around, and heard his “mother” sigh a little and retreat. The door of the sitting room closed, and Harry stared at Healer Letham and wondered where she worked.
It occurred to him that that was a good question, especially if the Malfoys were paying her to be here and wanted her to “heal him” of certain things. So he sat down and asked.
“I used to work for St. Mungo’s,” said Healer Letham, rearranging herself a little so that she was sitting with one leg tucked up beneath her and the other dangling down towards the floor. It looked uncomfortable for a woman her age, but Harry wasn’t going to mention it if she wanted to sit that way. “But they wanted me to treat too many people who hadn’t a thing wrong with their heads, who were cursed and should have been seen by the Healers in the Spell Damage Ward. So I left and became a private Mind-Healer working with children.”
“That doesn’t make sense, though. Why would they want you to work with people who were cursed?”
Healer Letham snorted. “Politics. I had a high rate of success with my patients, so they thought that meant I should be willing to heal rich idiots, and idiots high in the Ministry. No matter what was wrong with them.”
“Oh.” Harry folded his arms. “Well, I don’t have anything wrong with me.”
Healer Letham studied him. “No, I don’t think that’s true.”
“How would you know? You didn’t cast a diagnostic charm or anything!”
“No. But I know the signs. You sit on that chair as though the whole world wronged you. And, well, at your age, that doesn’t usually happen unless you have some amount of trauma.”
“You know that Voldemort killed my adoptive parents when I was one, right?”
“And I know that you never received treatment or healing for it, if you’re sitting like that.”
Harry paused. She hadn’t flinched when he said Voldemort’s name. That was actually pretty good. Or good enough to make him give her a chance.
“Well, no,” he admitted. “I don’t think anyone thought I should. I didn’t even know I was a wizard until about two years ago. My relatives are Muggles. They wouldn’t have thought to take me to a Mind-Healer.”
“Or a Muggle equivalent? I know they exist. And I must admit I am curious how a Malfoy comes to have recent relatives in the Muggle world.”
Harry flushed. “I mean-they’re not really my aunt and uncle and cousin. I know that now. Not related by blood. But I thought they were at the time. I thought I was the child of James and Lily Potter.”
Healer Letham nodded as if that had clarified something for her. “Very well. So you didn’t receive treatment or healing from any trauma that you endured when your adoptive parents died. And what was living with your Muggles like?”
Harry flinched before he could stop himself. He knew Healer Letham would have seen it, but he still said, “Fine. Not great, but fine.”
Healer Letham gave him a direct stare. “You seem like an intelligent young man, so we both know that’s not true.”
“Well, here isn’t any better!” Harry snapped. “The Malfoys don’t make me do chores like the Dursleys did, but they make the house-elves do it! And the house-elves beat themselves! And they were going to do something, I don’t know what, at Hogwarts! And Mr. Malfoy followed Voldemort. He claims he was under Imperius, but I don’t believe it.”
Healer Letham leaned forwards. “Neither do I,” she said in a loud whisper.
Harry’s mouth fell open, and then he found himself giggling without thinking about it. He leaned back on the chair a little, and studied the Healer at more length. She smiled back at him, not entirely at ease, but calm. Calm was better than most people in the house had been for the last few days, Harry thought. Draco shouted every time he tried to talk to Harry, Mr. Malfoy kept making excuses, Mrs. Malfoy was sad and tried to make him talk about other things, and Dobby cried every time Harry saw him.
“Why are you saying that?” he asked. “Don’t you work for the Malfoys?”
“They’re paying me. I work for you. I’m on your side against them, if you need me to be. And I find it interesting that you don’t see yourself as one of them.”
Harry looked away for a second. Then he said, “They’ve been-they really want me, but it’s not the me I really am.”
“What do they want?”
“Someone who doesn’t sympathize with house-elves. Someone who didn’t grow up in the Muggle world. Someone who wasn’t adopted by the Potters. Someone who isn’t a Gryffindor. Someone who feels like a pureblood.” Harry rushed the words out, and then turned back to her. “Mr. Malfoy even said that he hated me when I was still Harry Potter.”
“Yes?”
Healer Letham seemed calm about it, which Harry couldn’t understand. He stared at her. “He hated me! How can he go from hating me and then start liking me in just a few months? He only likes the person he wants me to be.”
“Ah.” Healer Letham moved so that this time, her other foot was tucked up under her and the one that had been tucked was dangling towards the floor. “Well, keep in mind that they may have mythologized you in their own minds. In fact, from what your mother told me, that is exactly what happened. They didn’t know where you had gone or what had happened to you, so they told stories about you, about what you might have been like. It’s not easy to go from that to a living child, no matter how desperately happy you are to find him again.”
“So I should feel sorry for them?”
“Not exactly,” Healer Letham said, with that calmness that made Harry keep shutting up. “But let me say that I find it easy to believe both that your father could have hated you as a Potter, instantly loved you when he found out that you were his son, and now doesn’t know how to deal with the middle.”
“I don’t know how to deal with it, either.”
“I know. And I’m here to help you deal with it. We don’t have to do anything right away. I fully expect this to be a process of many months.”
“But you said that you work for me.”
“Yes. What of it?”
“What if I tell you to go away?”
Healer Letham smiled at him again. “I’m on your side, and I’ll fight for you-even against your own trauma that is keeping you from seeing how much you need healing.” She held up a hand when Harry glared at her. “But any particular session that you want to end, we can end. Do you want to be done with this one?”
Harry fidgeted back and forth on the chair. He did and he didn’t. He didn’t like the thought of a Mind-Healer talking to him like he was some broken doll she was trying to piece back together, but on the other hand, this was the only time that he’d really got to talk to someone since finding out about Dobby.
He sighed. “I want to tell you about Dobby, and have you help me figure out how to help him.”
“I can do that. Why don’t you tell me more?”
*
Harry wandered slowly away from the Manor into the beautiful gardens, and sat down near a pond that had a curving, graceful fountain of white stone in the middle of it. It was shaped almost like a dolphin, but not completely. Not really. Harry sighed and shook his head. Sometimes he couldn’t believe that he lived in a place so rich.
He looked out into the gardens, and watched darkness creeping up among the trees and the flowers. He kept turning over what had happened with Healer Letham this afternoon in his mind, and what he was going to do in the morning.
Healer Letham had agreed that it was a good idea to ask Dobby to be his personal elf. Freeing him was possible, but she thought it would lead to more tension between him and the Malfoys than it would solve, and Dobby would have a hard time finding another place that he could go or a job he could hold.
So Harry would have to talk to Mr. Malfoy in the morning and ask about having Dobby assigned to him. And never hurt by anyone else ever again, or ordered to hurt himself.
That was going to be a fun conversation.
He watched the sunlight sink further and further, and admitted to himself, finally, that he did feel better after talking with Healer Letham. She hadn’t miraculously cured him of anything-and he didn’t think there was any cure for thinking of himself as Harry Potter, and he wouldn’t want it if there was-but at least she agreed with him about some things.
And she had told him some things he could do about the Malfoys other than just getting Dobby for his elf. Harry was going to try that.
One of the white peacocks squawked and fled across the garden with its tail trailing behind it, beating its wings frantically and flying maybe a meter before landing again. Harry snickered. They really were ridiculous creatures, something Draco got defensive about every time Harry mentioned it.
“Are you Harry? Or the other one?”
Harry spun around, grabbing his wand from his robe pocket even though he knew he wasn’t supposed to use magic over the summer. But there was someone out here who wasn’t a house-elf or a Malfoy, and he knew that meant they weren’t supposed to be here.
“Who is it?” he asked, his eyes darting around, and wishing for once that it wasn’t so dark.
“Lumos.”
A wand lit up, and there was a man sitting on the grass maybe three meters away from him, a horribly thin man with black hair hanging around his face. He looked at Harry with a kind of desperate, crazed hunger that made Harry swallow. His first thought was Voldemort, but he didn’t look anything like the red eyes Harry had seen on the back of Professor Quirrell’s head.
“I think you have to be Harry,” whispered the man. “The other one would have run screaming for his Mummy and Daddy by now.” He spat the last words, and his grey eyes lit up with a terrible contempt. He looked exactly the way Uncle Vernon always had when talking about foreigners.
Harry didn’t know why he made the jump to the right conclusion. Except, maybe, that the eyes looked like Draco and Mrs. Malfoy’s, and his when he looked into the mirror and got taken by surprise, and he knew Mrs. Malfoy was a Black.
“Are you Sirius Black?” he asked.
The man leaped back and transformed, in the middle of the leap, into a giant black dog. He streaked away into the darkness before Harry could even close his mouth.
Harry stared at where he’d sat. So Sirius Black had somehow escaped from Azkaban and then come onto the Malfoy property-the one with wards that he wasn’t supposed to be able to cross, except did they keep dogs out?-and he’d betrayed the Potters and kidnapped Harry in the first place and he was here.
Harry drew his breath in to yell.
Then, slowly, he closed his mouth again.
For someone who was mad, the man hadn’t actually hurt him. And right now, Harry felt more like Harry Potter than he did a Malfoy.
Harry glanced back towards the Manor, and then got up and walked in that direction as he heard Mrs. Malfoy calling for him, but he kept his mouth shut and walked as though he hadn’t just seen a crazed man turn into a dog and run away.
It had felt good to talk to Healer Letham and get some secrets out. But the Malfoys still hadn’t apologized for keeping Dobby away from Harry, or lying to him about whatever the evil plot at Hogwarts had been.
Harry thought he was due a secret of his own.
Part Three.