Chapter Eight of 'The Parselmouth Promise'- Burdens
Chapter Seven.
Chapter One.
Title: The Parselmouth Promise (8/25)
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 Eight-Burdens
“Jamie. What’s wrong?”
Watching the way James’s shoulders tensed, Harry thought that perhaps he should have left this longer. But even though he’d seen the change in Jamie’s demeanor at once, he hadn’t intervened for a full day. He’d thought that James had just had some argument with the other kids at the school and would work through it.
But from the haunted way Jamie stared up at him now, Harry was cursing himself for waiting so long. He knelt next to Jamie beside the front door and ran his hand gently through his son’s hair.
If it was another child at the school who had done this, Harry would insist on it being properly addressed. If it was one of the adult Parselmouths who taught there…
Sela squeezed his arm where she was loosely looped. Harry took a deep breath and slowly released his anger. Sela was right. He had to hold back, because his anger might frighten his son.
“What happened, Jamie?”
“I like the school.” James was staring down at Sapphire, who lifted his head from the watery tank at James’s feet and looked up as though he was participating in the conversation. “I want to keep going.”
“All right.” Harry sat cross-legged on the floor and pulled James into his arms, ignoring the uncomfortable coolness of the tile against his arse. Sela slithered up to his shoulder, but she wasn’t saying anything, so Harry felt free to speak with Jamie. “That’s not a problem. I just need you to tell me what happened.”
James shifted so his head rested on Harry’s shoulder, and Harry received a sudden, intense memory of the way he had done that when he was a baby and full and sleepy. Such love flooded Harry that it was like trying to breathe fire. He clutched James close and waited, rubbing a hand up and down his back the way he had when James had needed help burping.
“Mr. Malfoy brought somebody to the school today,” James finally whispered.
“Who was it?”
“I don’t know. A lady. With a girl.”
Harry held back his sigh. He would have to talk to Malfoy and get the names. “What did they do?”
James swallowed and switched to Parseltongue, always a sign that he was feeling too upset to continue after he’d been talking in English for a while. “The lady talked to Mr. Malfoy about something. The girl came over to me. Scorpius and I were just playing, Daddy. And Charlie. And Sapphire.”
“I believe you, Jamie.”
“Daddy.”
With a sigh, Harry also switched to Parseltongue. “I believe you. What happened then?”
Some of the tension flowed out of James’s body, and Harry was sure he felt smugness from Sela. He ignored it. His son came before any sulky snakes and their irrelevant opinions.
“She asked what we were playing. Scorpius showed her. It’s the stone game with the shiny pieces where you move one and then you have to guess which-”
Harry listened calmly to a long description of the game. James was still only four. And then Jamie hesitated, and Harry was sure they were getting to the real problem. He rubbed his hand up and down James’s back again.
“She said-she asked me what my last name was. And I told her Potter. And she got all upset, and she said that Potters weren’t supposed to talk to snakes, and you should have killed You-Know-Who, and her mummy told her that. She said we were supposed to be heroes, and we weren’t, and I was terrible.”
From the sound of James’s words, Harry was sure that he was quoting verbatim. He obviously hadn’t understood everything the girl had, but enough to be bewildered and hurt.
Part of Harry burned with something more than love now.
They’ll hate me and despise me. I’ve given up on them doing anything else. But they can’t do it to my son.
Sela touched her tongue to his neck. Again, Harry let the anger go and focused on James, cradled in his arms, the most important person in the world.
“What did she mean, Daddy? She ran back to her mummy, and she wouldn’t look at me. And then the lady put up her nose and marched out of the school. Am I scaring people away from the school?”
That, Harry knew, would bother James even more than the idea that he had committed some unknown crime. He rubbed his hand gently up and down his son’s back, again and again, and finally James relaxed against him.
“No,” Harry told him quietly. “It’s all to do with the war, and me. People believe I should have done something different than I did-”
“But I know all about the war. I know you were a hero! Aunt Hermione told me. And you told me. And Uncle Ron told me. And Grandmama told me-”
“Yes. Well.” Harry stroked down James’s spine again while he tried to think about how to explain something that often made no sense even to him. “No matter what I did, people believed I should do something different. But it’s nothing to do with you. People just want to blame you for things you didn’t do, either.”
“I really didn’t do them?”
“You didn’t. I love you, Jamie.”
James sighed, and a few minutes later was drooping in his arms despite how hungry he’d said he was just a little while ago. Harry put him to bed, and stroked his head again as James yawned and snuggled under the covers. That was a prime sign of how tired he was, and how much he must have been carrying the burden of his fear and shame clutched tightly to himself.
Sapphire floated in the watery tank next to Jamie’s bed. Harry hesitated, glancing at him, and then spoke to his son’s snake directly, one of the few times he’d done so. “Would you like me to conjure a bag of water so that you may be close to him?”
“You are sensible sometimes.”
Harry just grunted and didn’t say anything else to Sapphire, instead conjuring the floating bag, then conjuring water to fill it. Sapphire coiled his body before Harry could offer to Levitate him and floated from the tank to the bag under what had to be the push of his own magic. Harry blinked a little, then shook his head as he settled James with a charm so he’d be less likely to roll over on Sapphire no matter how much he tossed.
That could be my son’s future. Integrated with ritual magic and snake magic to the point that it’s natural for him to do all sorts of things in company.
It wasn’t his own future, though. Harry had accepted that. It was too late for him to become an accomplished Parselmouth, just the way it was too late for him to escape the taint of his past and Voldemort’s touch.
But it was going to be different for his son. Harry swore it.
*
“Can I speak with you, please, Malfoy?”
Potter’s eyes were hard and brilliant in a way that Draco hadn’t seen when they’d been interacting during the past few weeks. He frowned as he followed the man over to a corner of the school’s large central room, while James ran over to greet the other children. “If it’s quick. We have a ritual to conduct this morning that depends on the position of the sun, and we’ll miss it if you talk too long.”
“This doesn’t have to take too long.” Potter stared at him, and seemingly through him. He really did have amazing eyes, Draco thought. It was equally amazing that no one had snapped him up since Weasley had divorced him, dark rumors swirling around him or not. “James told me that a woman came here yesterday to talk about enrolling her daughter in the school.”
“Annabelle Selwyn, yes. She didn’t stay long. Ultimately she decided that this wasn’t the right school for her.” Draco restrained his sneer. It wasn’t as though she would be able to find another school for her daughter to learn the magic she’d inherited from her Marked father.
“The girl came over to James. She told him that he was supposed to be a hero, because of his last name. And that he shouldn’t be talking to snakes. That might have been a factor in her mother’s decision not to enroll her at the school.”
“I assure you that I’m not upset about losing her custom.” Draco let his voice shade cooler. “And if you intend to take James out of the school because of her, I must advise against it. He is thriving here.”
“Hell, no, Malfoy.” Sela shifted on Potter’s shoulder when he swore, while Edwina lifted her head from the loose coil she’d been collapsed in at Draco’s feet. “I want to advertise your school. To say that I don’t care about my son being a Parselmouth. No, wait, more. That I’m proud of it. And that I’m trusting you to take care of him.”
Draco gaped before he could stop himself. Then he studied him. “This is an extreme change of heart.”
“That bitch is telling her children lies about my son.” Potter whirled around and paced in a circle, coming back to him with one hand raised. Draco instinctively moved a step away, then realized Potter had done it to keep Sela in place on his shoulder, rather than fend Draco off. “They can hammer on me all they want. They can hate me all they want. But they’re not going after James.”
Draco understood it better then. Potter hadn’t suddenly decided that he did want to be companion to a snake or Draco’s partner in ritual magic. He was doing this to deflect criticism and hatred back to himself.
“Are you sure that’s wise?” Draco asked softly.
“It’s free publicity for your school, Malfoy. And me admitting that James is a Parselmouth. You’re going to turn it down?”
“I’m talking about the effect it will have on you, specifically. I don’t want to deal with any outbursts.”
“Don’t worry about me. It’s nothing but the kind of attention I’ve been dealing with for years, from practically anyone but the Weasleys and Hermione anyway. I’d do much worse than this in protection of my son.”
Draco studied him, and decided, reluctantly, that that was probably true. He could wish Potter would do things for other reasons, but for right now, that his defense of his son would be sturdy was for the best. Draco didn’t have to worry about defending Jamie. Instead, he would concentrate on his son, the school, and the other students.
“I did think you wanted to lie low and not attract that sort of attention,” he had to say.
Potter shrugged. “I can’t do that if people are applying the rumors about me to James. He is going to have a happy life.”
He sounded as if he was making a proclamation from on high, and his eyes were shining again. Draco wondered for a moment what it would be like to see them shine with something other than resignation or regret or guilt. Then he shook himself out of that. It was too tempting to follow that vision laid out like a path, and it also meant that he would end up dashing himself to pieces against the rock wall Potter had raised between himself and the world.
“What did you have in mind for the first step?” he asked.
*
Harry hated the sensation that was making its way up his skin, like thousands of spiders crawling in his veins. Over and over again, a voice bleated in the back of his head, asking what he thought he was doing by attracting the attention of the press.
And over and over, he answered it, Whatever I need to do to protect my son.
“You smell more of pain than ever,” Sela said sulkily. She was draped along his shoulders instead of encircling his neck as she usually did, and refused to lift her head when she spoke to him. Instead, she sprawled long and low, and might have looked like the edge of a shawl from a distance.
“This is what I have to do for James,” Harry said absently as he eyed the small dots that had appeared at the end of the white stone path leading to the school. Those would be reporters, probably, or maybe people who had heard about this and come as spectators. “I wouldn’t expect you to understand.”
“Are you saying that I could not love a hatchling?”
“No. I mean that you wouldn’t understand compromising with other people.”
Sela hissed a meaningless sound, but then turned her head, flicking her tongue, as the door of the school opened behind Harry. All of Harry’s muscles tensed, but it was Malfoy who came out and stood beside him, not James, as he had been afraid of.
“You’ve made sure the children are out of the way?” Harry asked, without turning his head to look at Malfoy. The reporters were close enough that he could make out the gleam of the sun from the silver robes that many of them had started to wear after the war to identify themselves as official employees of the papers.
“Of course I have. Although I don’t know for sure why you wanted them out of the way. They might make the school seem more friendly.”
Harry snorted softly. “Or the reporters might ask them questions and twist their words. I have more experience of the press than you do.”
“I don’t know about that.”
That’s right, his association with Rita Skeeter in fourth year. Harry chose to shrug and wait. None of the people coming up to the path now were as bad as Skeeter, that was one consolation. They chose to salivate after him, but they reported the truth more often, and took delight in more things than scandal.
Just scandal the most.
“You don’t have to look as though you’re about to be devoured by a pack of werewolves, Potter,” Malfoy muttered out of the corner of his mouth.
“You’re right. That would be over more quickly.”
Before Malfoy could retort, Harry plastered a smile on his face and stepped forwards with a small bow of his head. “Welcome, welcome. I wanted to invite you personally to the Parselmouth School and explain why my son is attending.”
“Where is your son?” That was Thomasina Temperance, the reporter for Witch Weekly who had concocted a series of breathless articles about Harry and Ginny’s divorce. Her eyes darted back and forth as if expecting to find Jamie hiding in a corner. “When can we interview him?”
“You can’t.”
“Mr. Potter, the freedom of the press demands-”
Harry laughed, and watched both the reporters and Malfoy jump at the sound, which was a source of some satisfaction. “That’s a Muggle concept that demands the government not control the most prominent papers, Ms. Temperance. You saw how well that worked out with the Daily Prophet.” He deliberately hadn’t invited any Prophet reporters. They would have to get the news secondhand.
As Temperance stood there blinking and didn’t say anything else, Julian Keller from Wizarding Man’s Weekly cleared his throat. “But you wanted to talk about the Parselmouth School, and why your son is attending?”
Harry nodded to him. Keller was no more trustworthy than the others, but he had written some of the articles that were closest to the facts about the revelations from that bloody Mind-Healer. “Yes. Did you know that there are over three dozen Parselmouths just in Britain alone now?”
There was a sharp indrawing of breath from some of the reporters, and Temperance looked as if she was about to ask a question. But Harry kept his gaze locked on Keller, and he spoke first. “Do other nations on the Continent have as many?”
“No.” Harry let his mouth thin out in a smile. “They had more than we did for a long time, since they didn’t have the legacy of conflict with Parselmouths that Britain did, which made Parseltongue so feared. But we have the most now.”
“Only because You-Know-Who Marked so many people,” muttered Temperance. Her eyes were fastened obsessively on his scar. She had tried, over and over again, to interview him about the pain and the nightmares he used to get through it, and was still upset that Harry had refused to talk to her.
“Of course.” Harry shrugged. “But from tragedy can come a blessing, don’t you think? That’s certainly true enough in my own life.”
The whole crowd perked up at that. That was a perception they had pushed again and again in their writing, and which Harry had refused to agree with. Now, it seemed, he was ready to spin the narrative that painted him as the lucky Boy-Who-Lived, and the sacrifices along the way as necessary.
Forgive me, Mum, Dad, Harry thought briefly. This is for James. Better they feed on me than him.
“I wanted to introduce you to my snake, Sela,” Harry said, extending his arm, and at least Sela cooperated this time and lifted her head, slithering into view. There were a few gasps, one scream, but Harry didn’t allow them to take hold, rolling with his own momentum instead. “And to tell you the story of how I started to think better of my Parseltongue, and why the school appealed to me for my son…”
*
Draco watched in silence as Potter spun a masterful story, keeping every eye locked on him and his audience spellbound. He told them what they wanted to hear, flavored with just a few personal touches here and there, and told them nothing about his son and nothing that would make the school vulnerable to intruders. It was praise of the kind Draco could only have dreamed of, given the reputation of most of Parselmouths as former Death Eaters and their children being too young to make good interview subjects.
He could do this all the time, if he wanted. He could control them. He could make his image spotless.
Why doesn’t he?
And the obsession with finding out grew just a bit deeper.