[From Samhain to the Solstice]: A Godfather Like Him, gen, Malfoys series, 4/6, PG-13
Part Three.
Part One.
Title: A Godfather Like Him (4/6)
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 4000
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 again for all the reviews!
Part Four
“Isn’t this a bit extreme?”
“No.” Mrs. Malfoy fussed for a long moment before she clasped the silver bracelet around Harry’s wrist and stepped back with a nod. “There. That will disable most Portkeys, and make it impossible for someone to Apparate with you while you wear it unless they wear the complementary bracelet.” She held up her own wrist. “I want you to promise me that you won’t take it off, Henry.”
“Fine. But-I’m just going into the next room to meet Healer Letham.”
“I know. But I won’t let you be taken again.”
Harry swallowed uneasily. Mrs. Malfoy actually looked a little scary when she said that. He imagined what she would do to Sirius Black if the man tried to kidnap him again, and shivered.
Mrs. Malfoy smoothed back his hair and kissed the scar on his forehead. She seemed to like doing that, and Harry still hadn’t decided how he felt about it. “Now, be a good boy and come find me when you’re done with the healing session. We’re going to go to Diagon Alley today, just you and I.”
“All right,” Harry said, a bit intrigued. He had never gone shopping with someone alone to buy things for himself, except for Hagrid before his first year. Going with Aunt Petunia and being made to carry most of the shopping didn’t count.
He turned and walked into the grey room, only to find Healer Letham having a conversation with Dobby. Harry blinked and sat on the grey chair where he had last time. “I didn’t know that you two knew each other,” he said, and then could have smacked himself for how stupid that sounded.
But Healer Letham only smiled at him as if she didn’t find it stupid. “Good morning, Henry. Your elf was just introducing me and asking if I needed lemonade. He brought me some.” She held up the glass of lemonade.
“Oh. Thank you, Dobby,” Harry said, surprised to find that the elf was handing him a mug of hot chocolate. He didn’t even know how Dobby knew he liked that, unless he’d been spying on him at Hogwarts.
Dobby burst into tears of happiness, and it took Harry a while to soothe him and get him to leave. When he looked up, he found that Healer Letham’s smile was fainter but there.
“Did it work out like you wanted, asking for Dobby to be your personal elf?” Healer Letham asked, and finished her lemonade with another sip.
“I think so.” Harry tucked his feet under him, since Healer Letham didn’t seem to mind and it wasn’t like he was wearing trainers. Mrs. Malfoy had made him get rid of all his Muggle clothes when he was at Malfoy Manor for Christmas, except for a few pairs of pants and the like that Harry had hidden in the bottom of his trunk. It wasn’t like he liked wearing Dudley’s castoffs, but they were his. “They said in return that I should try to be happier and I have to let the elves call me Henry Malfoy. Oh, and I have to attend sessions with you.”
Healer Letham frowned. “I do not like that they made your attendance at these sessions a compromise.”
Harry shrugged at her. “They promised that they’d improve the house-elf quarters and they’d stop yelling at them and telling them to punish themselves. It was worth it.”
Healer Letham kept frowning. “And do you think it cost them as much as it cost you to give up what you did?”
“If it’s about cost, then I don’t think it cost me a lot, either. I can act happier now that Dobby is my elf. I wanted to come talk to you again, anyway. And they can call me Henry Malfoy all they want. It’s not my name if I don’t think of myself that way.”
“An interesting perspective.” Healer Letham tucked her feet like she had the other day and he was doing now, and Harry grinned. “We did not talk about the matter of your name the other day.”
Harry sighed. “No. Look-it’s a compromise, the best one I think I’m going to get. I can understand why they don’t want to call me Harry. It’s always going to remind them of the Potters.”
“But?”
“I think of myself as Harry. Not always as Harry Potter, now, but Harry. And I’m never going to call myself Aldebaran. That’s ridiculous.”
“Is Henry actively unpleasant to you?”
“Not really? It’s just sort of there. Like some slime I can’t rub off.”
“That sounds actively unpleasant to me.”
Healer Letham’s voice had got cool again. Harry sighed and rubbed his head across his brow, and his scar, and his eyes that no longer needed glasses. “This is the only thing I don’t like about coming to talk to you. I’m not good at this. I don’t know how to explain it.”
“Explain what?”
“How I feel.” Harry peered at her around his hand, to see if she was joking, because he didn’t think she’d been this stupid the last time. But the intense way Healer Letham stared at him said that she wanted to hear more about it, so Harry obliged. Grumpily. “It’s there, and I don’t like it, but it’s just there, you know? Not bothering me from day to day. It’s like living with my cousin and my uncle and aunt when they weren’t bullying me or punishing me. I mean, the people I thought were my cousin and uncle and aunt. I don’t like it, but I can endure it.”
“You should speak to the Malfoys about your name if it bothers you that much.”
“But like I said, I also understand why they don’t want to call me Harry. And I can’t come up with another name I like, anyway.”
“Perhaps you could suggest the name of another star?”
Harry stared at her, appalled. “Do you want me to be called something like Famolhaut?”
“Famolhaut?” Healer Letham said it with the kind of delicacy that Harry knew meant she was trying not to burst out laughing.
“Mrs. Malfoy said that she thought of that name before she picked Aldebaran. She has terrible taste in names. Just terrible. She shouldn’t be allowed to name children.”
Healer Letham did snort this time, but she shook her head a second later. “I think that we should still talk about names, even if you don’t want the Malfoys to go back to calling you Harry. You find your mother’s taste in names terrible. And you call her Mrs. Malfoy.”
Harry swallowed and looked down with a nod. “Yeah. I’ve tried to get more comfortable calling her Mother, but it’s hard. Draco does it so naturally. And I look at her and I see a mother sometimes, but sometimes I see a woman who hates Muggles, and would have hated me if I didn’t turn out to be her son.”
“What could she do to get you to trust her more?”
Harry eyed her. “She said something the other day that made me think she’d talked to you. She is talking to you, isn’t she? Do you go and tell her everything that I’ve said?” Harry shuddered a little. He could only imagine the earful he would get if Mrs. Malfoy heard that he thought she was terrible at picking out names.
“I will not tell her what you have said in these sessions,” Healer Letham promised. “And I am only working with her in my capacity as your Healer. I am trying to make sure that she knows being the mother of a traumatized child is not the same as being the mother of the visionary child she hoped and dreamed about.”
Harry slumped in his chair. “Because I’m such a disappointment.”
“Not that at all. Simply, as I said, that she had mythologized how rescuing you would go. You would appear, and it would be as if the years had never passed at all and she would have the child she had dreamed of back. That is simply not the case, and she is beginning to accept it, Harry.”
Harry studied her from under his fringe. “You don’t hesitate to call me that name.”
“Of course not, but I don’t have the associations that the Malfoys do with it.” Healer Letham shifted so another foot was dangling down near the floor again. “Now, think on the questions I’ve asked you for a few minutes. Is there anything Mrs. Malfoy could do that would make you more comfortable accepting her as your mother? And do you think you would prefer a name other than Henry?”
Harry opened his mouth to object about it, but Healer Letham said, “I don’t think a few minutes have passed,” and he shut his mouth again and sat back in the chair, thinking.
Mrs. Malfoy tried her best to act as a mother, he thought. She was trying. He didn’t know what else she could try.
And he meant what he had said about the name. It was just there, and he would get used to it as more people called him that. In school he had sometimes felt like a Henry when he was reading the letters that the Malfoys sent him. Since he’d been home, he’d felt more like a Harry, simply because he didn’t fit in with what the Malfoys expected of him.
He glanced up and shook his head.
Healer Letham didn’t look upset, although Harry had braced himself for her disappointment. “Well, think on it. And I’m sure that if you did choose a name other than Henry that wasn’t Harry, and you liked it enough to be going on with, then you could get the Malfoys to use it, as well.”
Harry just nodded, although he was thinking that he would probably always be a Harry, and that was just the way it was. “Yes, Healer.”
*
“Those robes look marvelous on you.”
Harry fidgeted as Mrs. Malfoy looked at him with a beaming smile on her face. He was glad that she was so happy, but honestly, over robes?
And they did not look marvelous on him. They were like the robes that the Malfoys had filled his cupboard with since he came to the Manor for the summer, all tight and uncomfortable and formal. And they all had silver on them somewhere, like silver trim, or they were just made of silver cloth. Harry didn’t know why the Malfoys were obsessed with silver, but he didn’t like it.
Mrs. Malfoy stepped in front of him, and abruptly stopped smiling. Harry looked at her warily. They were in the middle of a wizarding tailor’s called The Right Fit, and behind her was a huge expanse of red and green and blue silk formal robes that Harry hoped he never had to wear. They looked like he would trip over them if he took a step.
“Oh, Henry.” Mrs. Malfoy reached out to cup his cheek, and Harry found himself leaning into her hand without thinking about it. He did like spending time alone with her. He just didn’t like the way they were spending it. “You’re unhappy. What is it? The robes? The color?”
“Both,” Harry said, and ducked his head a little when he saw how stricken she looked. He didn’t like causing his mother pain like that. He didn’t like causing anyone pain. “I just-they’re too tight, and I don’t like them, and I think they wash me out.”
“On that last, you’re wrong,” Mrs. Malfoy responded gently. “They go with your coloration. Draco wears robes like that all the time.”
“And we’re identical twins, so what looks good on him has to look good on me. I know.” Harry sighed. “Forget I said anything.”
“No, I will not.” Mrs. Malfoy’s voice was quiet. “I want to know what you would like, Henry. What can I do for you? What kind of robes you would prefer to buy?”
Harry swallowed. She sounded like she meant it. And she wasn’t Aunt Petunia, who would pretend sometimes when he was really little that she was going to buy something just for Harry and then laugh at him for believing her.
No. Mrs. Malfoy just abuses house-elves.
Harry put aside those thoughts for a second, because he didn’t think they would help. He took a deep breath and said, “Just casual robes, like the ones that we wear at school. Can we do that? I don’t really care that much about the color, as long as they don’t have silver or gold everywhere. It-it makes me feel like I’m galloping around being royal or something. I hate it.”
“Malfoys are not royal, but we do have the money to buy you anything that you want, Henry. You have only to ask.”
“School robes and casual robes are different things,” added the tailor, Farthingale, abruptly appearing around a corner. He was a tall man with white hair and golden eyes who probably would have made a good Malfoy, Harry thought. “But we can certainly introduce the young master to a selection of casual robes, if that would work for both of you, Mrs. Malfoy.”
“It works very well for me.” Mrs. Malfoy’s voice was quiet. “What about for you, Henry?”
Harry nodded hesitantly a second later. It seemed that he might get rid of the horrible silver robes after all, and look more like a normal person. Even if nothing about his life had ever been or would ever be normal.
At least his clothes would be.
And the way Mrs. Malfoy smiled when she saw him smiling outdid all the beaming looks that she’d ever given him before.
*
“Is there anywhere else that you would like to go while we’re here on the Alley, Henry?”
Harry glanced around curiously as they came out of The Right Fit, with the huge collection of casual robes, in red and black and blue, that Mrs. Malfoy had bought shrunken and tucked in her pocket. He hadn’t seen much of this part of Diagon Alley, which was a sort of back street behind Gringotts. There were bookshops and broom shops and shops with magical toys in them.
“Can we just sort of wander around and look?”
“Of course.” Mrs. Malfoy smiled at him again. “I am more than happy to do that with my son.” She held out her hand.
“You don’t need to do that,” Harry muttered, even as he took it. “I’m thirteen, not three.”
“I was not there when you were three.”
Harry winced a little, and fell silent as they walked past a few shops that didn’t look interesting, selling what seemed to be more clothes and shoes and food that looked like it would melt if Harry breathed on it wrong. They halted in front of one of the bookshops, and Mrs. Malfoy glanced at him curiously.
Harry took a deep breath and faced her. “It wasn’t your fault.”
“What wasn’t?”
“Not being there when I was three.”
Mrs. Malfoy slowly shook her head. For a second, to Harry’s horror, tears glittered in her eyes, but luckily, they didn’t actually fall. “We should have had stronger wards. We should have had bracelets like the one you’re wearing now.” She nodded towards the silver bracelet Harry had almost forgotten about. It really was that light. “We should have known Sirius would be a security risk and we couldn’t invite him over just because he was family. I’m so sorry, Henry.”
Harry cleared his throat. “Still not your fault.”
“It was. And you will be safe, now, darling. I will do everything in the world to keep you safe.”
Harry looked away with his ears burning. He thought that at least a few people on the street were gaping at them, although how they knew the difference between Draco and the boy who used to be Harry Potter walking around with a Malfoy he wasn’t certain. “I’d like to go in here,” he said, and ducked into the bookshop.
Anything to get away from the sight of his mother nearly crying.
*
The bookshop actually did turn out to be a worthwhile distraction, though. Harry found all sorts of wizarding children’s books there that he’d never realized existed (and Mrs. Malfoy said something about him not growing up reading them or hearing them read to him, which meant she was willing to buy him as many as he wanted). There were also books on the history of Quidditch a lot longer than Quidditch Through the Ages, and a novel about a daring and brave Quidditch player who solved mysteries that looked interesting. And a book on famous Parselmouths that Mrs. Malfoy bought before Harry could even ask for it.
He did hope that the book wasn’t all about Salazar Slytherin and Voldemort, but from the length of it, it couldn’t be. And Harry got the chance to flip through it as they stood in the queue, and saw, to his satisfaction, lots of different names in the table of contents.
Even if he couldn’t pronounce all of them.
They stepped outside the bookshop and Mrs. Malfoy shrank the books, too, and asked Harry if he wanted an ice. Harry nodded at once, but then something caught his eye, and he turned his head.
A black dog crouched on the other side of the alley, watching him.
Harry swallowed and deliberately turned away from the dog. He wasn’t going to call Mrs. Malfoy’s attention to it. So far, it seemed no one had mistaken Black for a Grim, anyway. People just went on about their business and ignored the half-starving dog huddled on the ground.
Harry wondered for a fleeting instant if he should do something about that-Black shouldn’t be starving-but then he put the notion away. It was really too much to ask that he take care of the man who’d kidnapped him.
If Mr. Malfoy hadn’t told Mrs. Malfoy about the Grim, he would have tried to buy something at one of the food shops and drop scraps for the dog. But Harry had been there when he warned her.
“Let’s go have an ice,” he said, when he noticed Mrs. Malfoy’s eyes trained on him, probably noticing his distraction.
She nodded to him and walked with him up the alley in the direction of Florean Fortescue’s. Harry trotted along at her side and held her hand, which for once he didn’t mind. Even though he was sure that even Sirius Black wouldn’t be mad enough to snatch him off Diagon Alley in broad daylight.
Then there came a rush from behind him, and apparently he was wrong about that.
People screamed as Black snatched Harry away from Mrs. Malfoy, his arms wrapping around Harry’s chest. Harry gasped and caught his breath. Black’s hold was so tight it was hurting him. Black spun away as if trying to hide from the curses or the Dementors that might be coming after him.
But a strange bumping sensation went through Harry, and Black snarled in a voice that was almost a dog’s voice, “What’s the hold-up?”
The bracelet. Mrs. Malfoy had said that no one could Apparate with Harry while he was wearing it unless they wore the complementary one. Black must have tried to Apparate with him, and been stopped by the bracelet.
Harry squirmed, got his legs under him, and kicked backwards as hard as he could. Black let out a loud pained sound and dropped him. Harry rolled to his feet and drew his wand. He didn’t care if he got in trouble for using magic during the summer, he wasn’t going to let Black take off with him again.
Sympathy only went so far.
“Sirius Black.”
Harry shivered. The air around them actually got colder and darker, at least he thought it did, and he turned around. He wondered if someone had already called for the Dementors and they were filling the alley.
But no, it was Mrs. Malfoy, standing with her wand drawn and-
Harry recoiled. There was a look of almost insane hatred in her eyes. Her blonde hair, as fair as his own, was floating around her from the power of the magic that was flaring out from her wand.
“Cissy.” Black’s voice was raspy. He did a ridiculous little bow and edged back as if he was trying to get hold of Harry again. Harry edged the other way. Black stopped and stared at him for a second, then back at Mrs. Malfoy. “Sorry not to have time to talk, but I’m trying to protect James’s legacy.”
That’s why he wants to kidnap me. Harry was suddenly sure. Maybe Black was a Death Eater who had betrayed the Potters, but the real reason he wanted to go after Harry now was to make him be a Potter again. That had to be it.
“You will not.” Mrs. Malfoy was using the scary voice again. She gestured with her wand. Harry ducked as the spell flew past him, but from what he felt, it never really had a chance of touching it.
It did touch Black.
Who screamed.
Harry whipped around, and stared as a huge panel of skin just…peeled off the front of Black’s chest and fell to the ground. He curled around the wound, still screaming, and Harry saw black tendrils coming out of it, grabbing other places on Black’s chest and tugging. It looked as if he was being eaten alive by some plant growing out of the middle of his body.
Mrs. Malfoy laughed softly. Harry looked back at her, and she still had the insane look on her face. She stalked towards them, and stopped, staring at Black.
“That is what you get,” she said. “For trying to take my child again.” Her eyes focused on Harry, and she reached out a hand. “Come here, Henry.”
Harry couldn’t help it. He flinched and shrank back. She had used a spell like that on Black, and now she wanted Harry to just walk up to her?
Mrs. Malfoy stared at him. “Henry, what’s wrong?”
It was as if some invisible barrier had dropped away from Harry’s ears, and now he could hear other people shouting and screaming and being sick and calling for the Aurors. He glanced back at Black, and caught his eye just as Black spun on the spot and vanished with a crack.
The man still looked crazed, and mouthed “James” at him before he went.
“You tortured him,” Harry said, and he sounded like the three-year-old she’d been talking about earlier, and he couldn’t help it. “You hurt him really bad.”
“He would have taken you. He did take you, once. I am going to hurt my cousin as much as I can.”
“But he didn’t take me this time.”
Harry swallowed for air, struggling to think. He didn’t want to touch her. She had-she had tortured Black. He couldn’t even think of his mother doing that. Not the kind mother he used to imagine when he didn’t believe the Dursleys’ lies. Not the stupid drunken mother he used to imagine when he did. Not Lily Potter as he’d imagined her.
“We must leave,” Mrs. Malfoy said crisply. “The Aurors will wish to talk to us, but they can do that at the Manor.”
She grabbed his hand and Apparated. Harry went with her, because he had no choice, but his pulse was hammering in his ears.
He felt as if he was going to be sick, and as if something else had broken and fallen to pieces around him, the way it had when he’d seen Dobby.
It was wrong.
Part Five.