Chapter Five of 'Starfall'- A Desperate Letter
Chapter Four.
Title: Starfall (5/?)
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairings: Harry/Draco, Harry/Ginny, past Draco/Astoria, Ron/Hermione
Rating: R
Warnings: Angst, manipulation
Summary: When the truth about a seemingly minor Dark hex Harry has suffered leads to the dissolution of his marriage with Ginny, Harry spins into a downward spiral. His private consolation is creating a fantasy life for himself in his journal as Ethan Starfall, a normal wizard with a big family. When he receives a random owl Draco Malfoy has cast into the void as a plea for help with his son Scorpius, Harry replies-as Ethan. There’s no reason, he thinks, for an epistolary friendship with Draco to go further. But Draco might have different ideas about that.
Author’s Note: This is likely to be a long story, updated fairly regularly. It is, however, very angsty.
Chapter One.
Thank you again for all the reviews!
Chapter Five-A Desperate Letter
“I don’t want to!”
Draco nearly didn’t manage to duck the full inkwell that Scorpius hurled at his head. He cast a hasty spell that caught it in midflight and sent the inkwell back to the desk instead of shattering, but by the time he turned around from casting it, Scorpius had got out of his chair. He was smearing his ink-blackened hands all over the tablecloth, too.
“Scorpius,” Draco began, anger rumbling in his gut, but Scorpius turned and ran out of the room.
Draco sat down in the chair Scorpius had been trying to learn to write at, staring sightlessly at the parchment. Scorpius had written a few blobby letters before he ran away. He could do well, Draco knew that. In the days before Draco had divorced Astoria, Scorpius had written out his name and Draco’s name and the names of several of his ancestors.
But now Astoria was gone, living on the Continent and pursuing a demanding job that meant she was only able to come and see Scorpius occasionally. She and Draco had agreed that of course Scorpius should stay here; he was the Malfoy heir, and he should be raised appropriately. Astoria could have afforded house-elves with the handsome settlement Draco had given her, but house-elves were no substitute for parents.
Scorpius, though, had taken the divorce a lot harder than Draco had thought he would. It made sense for his parents. They were both bored with each other, and when Astoria had confessed her desire to do magical research on an invention that might replace the Muggle-based Hogwarts Express, Draco had proposed separating. That was agreeable to her.
I never knew that he would miss Astoria so much, Draco thought, and stood up to go find Scorpius.
He found him on the grand staircase, prancing up and down and trying to rub the rest of the ink on his fingers against the wallpaper. He stopped when he saw Draco. Draco held back a snort. Scorpius wasn’t succeeding anyway, since the ink had dried too much by now.
“You need a bath,” Draco told him. He tried to make his voice nice, the way Astoria had told him he should do, but it was impossible. Scorpius just stood there looking more and more mutinous, and that made it hard for Draco to control his temper, too. “You need to get that ink off your fingers. You want to look nice for dinner, don’t you? Uncle Blaise is coming over.”
Scorpius adored Blaise, but at the moment, he looked as though he would have rather been eaten by wild horses than admit it. “No!”
“No, you don’t want to look nice?” Draco tried to raise his eyebrows and look imposing and non-threatening at the same time. He hadn’t mastered his father’s trick of raising his eyebrows and conveying disappointment with just a head-tilt yet. “Then I’m sure Uncle Blaise will be very disappointed.”
Most of the time, that worked on Scorpius, even now that Astoria was gone, but now, it only made tears fill his eyes. He turned and pounded his way up the stairs, yelling, “No!” at every step. A few seconds later, Draco heard the door of his room slam.
Draco sighed and sat down on the lowest step, since there was no one there to see him-except Izzy, the house-elf who appeared a few seconds later, bowing low enough to brush her ears against the floor. “Izzy is to be going and seeing about the young master Malfoy?” she asked, voice shrill enough to hurt Draco’s ears.
“Yes,” said Draco reluctantly. He really didn’t want to spoil Scorpius by sending house-elves to him when he was upset. Scorpius had had them bring him snacks in the past, and toys, and all sorts of other things that evaded the punishments Draco had set, unless Draco specifically remembered to tell the house-elves not to cater to Scorpius. “Just make sure that he hasn’t hurt himself or broken anything.”
Izzy gave him a grave look and vanished. Draco scowled. It was the same look the elves were always going him when he talked about broken objects, as if they thought Draco should place his son above objects.
And Draco did, but it was also true that one of Scorpius’s favorite games when he was angry was breaking heirlooms and delicate things and refusing to apologize. If the elves discovered something broken, they came squeaking to him in distress anyway. Draco just got out in front of Scorpius’s destructive tendencies by giving them orders about them first.
Izzy’s expression lingered with him anyway. Draco stood up and walked rapidly in the direction of his study. It was nearly dinner-time, and he needed a drink to calm down.
*
By dinner-time itself, Scorpius had flung a clock at the head of the house-elf who came to tell him it was time to eat, tried to tear his curtains down and forced Izzy to repair them, and screamed through the door at Draco when Draco reminded him that Uncle Blaise would be here soon. Draco told the house-elves to take up a reasonable meal and clean up any food Scorpius dropped on the floor or dishes he broke, and then went to meet with Blaise.
In a way, it was a relief to have only adult conversation at the dining table, but Draco was brooding on Scorpius all the time, and not good company. Blaise noticed it, but manfully kept up the flow of small talk by chattering about the endless details of his mother’s latest wedding, until Draco’s fifth sigh, when he seemed to lose his temper.
“You need help to deal with that brat,” Blaise said, setting aside his fork and plate and giving Draco his full attention. Draco looked listlessly at Blaise’s plate. He had lost track of what they were eating. Duck, it looked like.
“Don’t call Scorpius a brat,” Draco said automatically. Lucius had done it last week, which was why Draco was in the middle of the not-talking-to-his-parents cycle, which happened regularly between them.
“I’ll call him what he is,” said Blaise. “I can understand that he’s upset about losing his mum, but there’s a point where a kid crosses the line. I was upset about losing my dad. My mum still told me I was being a brat. I didn’t have to attend her next wedding, but I did have to not break every single thing in my rooms in revenge.”
“He doesn’t break every single thing,” Draco said, but lifted his hand when Blaise gave him a pointed look. “Right, right, I know. But what can I do? My parents want to take him off my hands and raise him themselves. They say I’m not doing it right, and that you can’t raise a Malfoy this way. But I-I don’t want to let him go. I love him that much.”
He whispered the last words, not sure that Blaise wouldn’t roast him alive for them, but Blaise leaned back in his chair with that easy grace he had and sighed towards the ceiling. “Then you find someone else. Couldn’t you hire a nanny?”
Draco wrinkled his nose. He knew that some of his ancestors had had nannies for their children, but that was only before they had been able to afford house-elves. “No. I don’t want to leave the task of raising him to someone else.”
“I thought that was what we were discussing,” said Blaise, but subsided when Draco glared at him. “Yes, I understand the difference.”
“Then be serious for a second.” Draco placed one hand on his forehead and looked off to the side, where the dancing lights of the candles on the table wouldn’t hurt his eyes. “No nannies. No one who would live here and help me raise him.”
He fell silent, though, thinking, because that was basically what Astoria had done, and things had started to go wrong with Scorpius when she left. Maybe Scorpius did need two parents, and not only one, no matter how steeped in the Malfoys traditions that one was. But where was Draco going to find someone else who wanted to marry him and who wouldn’t bore him?
“You could write to the Prophet and ask for advice that way,” Blaise suggested. “I understand they have people whose whole job is to tell other people what they should do with their lives.”
Draco snorted bitterly. “Do you realize how many stories about my divorce the Prophet carried? I wouldn’t have a chance of remaining anonymous. Even if they published my letter anonymously, someone would link the stories together with my letter, and I don’t want Scorpius to be subject to rumors.”
“Kidnap a concubine. Only, instead of having sex with you, they have to deal with that hellion. They’ll probably be begging to have sex with you in a week.”
Draco dropped his hand and glared at Blaise again. “Serious, I know,” Blaise said, before Draco could say anything. He shrugged and drank off the rest of his glass of champagne. “That’s the best advice I can offer you. Hire someone to help you deal with him, write letters to get help, or read some books. And you already rejected books.”
“No, I didn’t, because you didn’t say anything about it before.” Draco found himself sitting up, his muscles quivering with delight. “That’s an idea. I can go to Flourish and Blotts, and choose books on parenting.” He did have to hesitate for a second, wondering if he would have the same problem with choosing books on parenting that he would writing to the Prophet for advice about it, but then shook his head decisively. If worst came to worst, he would always Obliviate the clerk. “Blaise, you’re a genius.”
“I’m going to treasure this Pensieve memory for the rest of my life,” Blaise said, holding up his champagne glass.
Draco ignored him, and started composing a list of subjects he wanted to look for in his head. It had been years since he was inside the bookshop; he and Astoria had ordered everything they wanted by owl. But he knew he couldn’t entrust a task this delicate to anyone else. He would have to go and see what was there.
*
“Are you looking for something specific?”
This clerk was the fifth person who had approached him with some well-meaning but vacant question, and Draco clenched his teeth. He went on staring at the shelves as if he hadn’t heard, then turned roughly when the clerk began to repeat himself. “No. I know that you’re trying to keep customers, but trust me, I’ll ask you if I want help, all right? And I’m not going to leave without buying something.”
The clerk retreated, glaring at him. Draco ignored that. He would much rather take the risk of angering a few people in Flourish and Blotts than let word get out that Draco Malfoy was looking up parenting advice so soon after he had divorced. Perhaps he would disguise the covers of the books when he took them up to the counter, too.
So far, he had seen nothing that interested him. There were surprisingly few books on parenting wizarding children. Mostly, the books seemed to be tales that the authors thought children would like, like Beedle the Bard, and observations of Muggle children compiled by world travelers. Draco had picked up one book that promised advice on getting children to behave politely, but it turned out to be exclusively for the parents of Muggleborns.
Draco put the book down, shaking his head. He did notice the worn cover, and wondered idly if the author had ever thought to attribute its lack of success to the fact that few parents of Muggleborns would find the book here, in the wizarding world.
By the time he had spent two hours in the shop, he was beginning to get desperate. He didn’t want to come here and leave with nothing, and not only because he had promised the clerks he wouldn’t. This was starting to seem like his last hope before he would have to give in and try one of Blaise’s other, less sensible suggestions.
He did finally see a fat book that might do, and when he took it down, he felt a little surge of excitement. Suggestions for Pure-Blood Family Life. It was one that his father had once mentioned reading. It wouldn’t have specific suggestions for how to raise a pure-blood heir after divorce, because divorce was still so rare among people of Draco’s kind, but it would contain many suggestions for making such an heir accept his place in life.
Draco carried the book up to the counter. The smiling woman at the counter turned sour and pale when she saw him, and fussed over the book for longer than necessary. Draco thought he might actually leave the shop without her seeing it and questioning the title, she was so busy focusing on Draco’s face.
Then she did happen to glance down at the book as she began to wrap it, and her fingers paused.
“What?” she whispered, looking up and into Draco’s eyes. “So you lost your wife, and now you’re going to put your son through the heartless training that this book recommends as well?” Her eyes were widening, and she had touched the counter as though she had some alarm spell there that would call out hidden assassins. “I won’t let you!”
Her rising voice was attracting attention. Draco sighed and aimed his wand at her under the counter, quickly murmuring a Memory Charm. Her face relaxed into imbecility and confusion, and Draco rounded the counter and helped her sit down on the stool behind it. “Some kind of fit,” he explained to the staring customers. “She’ll be all right in a few minutes.”
Most of them had already turned back to the shelves. Draco sneered under his breath. Some people persisted in hating him and his family, as this woman showed, but on the other hand, so many wizards were preoccupied with their own business since the war, not that many cared about him.
“What happened?”
Draco smiled and conjured a fan for the woman to hold, placing it in her hand. “I think you got overcome by the heat,” he said. “It’s very hot out today. And you came over all faint when you were wrapping up my book.” Another quick wave of his wand finished the wrapping on the book himself. “Here’s the coins.”
The woman glanced back and forth between the package and the Galleons for a second. “Did the book really cost that much?” she asked doubtfully. “Did I-”
“Call it payment for the trouble that my face appears to have caused you,” said Draco. She would forget the immediate occurrence, but it was asking for too much to hope that she would miraculously forget her hatred for Malfoys.
Her back straightened. “I don’t want to overcharge even people I dislike.”
“Think of it as the price for me clearing out quickly, then,” Draco snapped, and picked up the book, and exited the shop. For Merlin’s sake, people were divided between extreme ignoring of everything except their own concerns and then insistence on prying into what didn’t concern them. Draco wasn’t sure why he always seemed to run into the least convenient combination of the two.
He shook his head as he Apparated home. He had escaped without actual incident, and he had a book that promised to tell him what was wrong with Scorpius. He was about as happy as he could be, right now.
*
“No!”
Draco barely ducked the fork this time, and he didn’t duck the plate of fish. It smashed into his head, and juices dripped down his face and slid into his ears and eyes. He cursed and flailed wildly at the plate, which flew across the room and broke into more pieces against the wall. A house-elf appeared, squeaking in distress, then vanished again when Draco stared at Scorpius.
Scorpius quieted as he looked at Draco, too, but his head went up, and that stubborn little line formed at the corner of his mouth. “I don’t like fish,” he said. “I’m not going to eat it. Not going, not going, not going-”
His voice was building up, and Draco cut in, hoping to avoid another temper. “That’s fine, you don’t have to eat the fish. I just served it because it’s Grandfather’s favorite fish, you know.” One thing the book had suggested was putting the young pure-blood heir in touch with his ancestry by giving him food and toys and books that his ancestors had liked. So far, that was a failure with food that Draco and Narcissa had liked. Draco had hoped Lucius’s tastes would match Scorpius’s more closely.
From the way that Scorpius’s eyes darkened, it wasn’t working. “I want to eat biscuits,” he said. “And chocolate. And milk and Muggle food and cheese and-”
Draco cringed at the “Muggle food,” but tried to sound as calm as he could when he interrupted again. “You can have some of those things, some of the time. But you need to eat meat and fish and vegetables so that you can be strong and handsome. That’s what you want, right? To be strong and handsome?”
“No,” said Scorpius, and he was gasping in the way that meant he was near tears. “I want Mummy back!”
“She’s not coming back,” said Draco. He and Astoria had agreed on this from the beginning. Astoria said the same thing to Scorpius during her firecalls. Neither of them would ever lie to Scorpius or pretend that they were getting married again. “That’s what you have to accept, Scorpius. She’s happy where she is, and she wants you to be happy, too.”
“Then she should come back!”
Scorpius shouted the last words, and Draco felt another drip of fish juice slide down his ear. He closed his eyes, his patience exhausted. “Go to your room, Scorpius,” he said. “Izzy?” The house-elf appeared. “Escort Master Scorpius to his room, and then come back and clean up this mess, please.”
Izzy looked at Draco so long and steadily that he thought she would disobey. House-elves could do that sometimes if they resented their owner’s orders enough. Draco found himself holding his breath.
But in the end, Izzy turned away without doing it, and instead put a hand on Scorpius’s wrist and escorted him towards his rooms, murmuring softly to him all the time. Draco didn’t bother listening to what she said. He cast Cleaning Charms on himself and stared at the ruin of the dinner.
He had tried hard all day to play the games that Scorpius liked, and alternate those with activities that would give him a good sense of what it was like to be a Malfoy. They’d spent half an hour in the gallery where the portraits of past Malfoys hung, and they’d looked at albums that held photographs of the heirlooms, mostly locked up in the Gringotts vaults, that Scorpius would inherit someday. Draco had thought it was going well.
Then-this.
Draco stooped down, picked up a piece of plate shard, and tossed it against the wall after the rest of the plate, where it broke, violently. Then he turned and walked out of the room with as much dignity as he could muster.
*
That evening, sitting in front of the fire with a glass of the wine that had been the favorite of several of his ancestors, Draco found himself returning to one of Blaise’s suggestions he had rejected in outrage at first.
Certainly, the thought of writing to the Daily Prophet and begging for advice was pathetic. Who knew whether the person who responded to him would even be a pure-blood, or have any experience raising children? Draco might get one of those pompous idiots who thought they knew better than parents precisely because they’d never been parents.
And he couldn’t ask his mother and father. They had been against Draco and Astoria divorcing, even though it had been the best thing for the family in so many respects. Draco didn’t want to listen to a lecture that would mostly consist of variations on, “I told you so.”
But there were other routes he might seek advice by, and some of them were unexpected. Draco Summoned a book on post-owls from the library that he had read during the long days of his house arrest, awaiting trial, after the war, when the Aurors had cleared most of the interesting books from Malfoy Manor and left only the ones that not even the most suspicious bastard could qualify as Dark.
Yes. The section he had thought was most interesting, and so read over and over again, was the one that the book still automatically fell open at. It talked about the process of breeding post-owls and how the wizards who bred them had managed to instill some almost mystic qualities. The way an owl could find a wizard even if they didn’t know their address. The way they could find even a Muggleborn student who had never been to Hogwarts and lived in the Muggle world.
The way that an owl could sometimes take a letter precisely to the person it needed to go to, if the writer’s need was strong enough, even if the writer didn’t know that that person existed.
Draco didn’t think further. He Summoned ink and quill, and seized the parchment he already had on the desk beside him, and began to write.
To whoever can help me,
Please help. I’m trying to raise my five-year-old son right after divorcing my wife, and although she sees him and talks to him regularly, my son is taking it very hard. He screams and breaks things, and won’t eat food he needs to be healthy, and has regressed in his writing and learning abilities. I don’t know how to raise him properly to be a pure-blood heir instead of the brat he’s becoming. If you have a lot of experience raising children, then please inform me how to do it. If not, please pass the letter along to someone who does.
Draco hesitated, then signed it simply M. No point in embarrassing himself until he knew whether the letter would even get a reply.
Then he stood up and called for his owl, and sent the letter off before he could think better of it, telling the bird, “Take this to someone who can help me raise Scorpius.”
For a second, the owl hesitated, and he feared it wouldn’t work. Then the bird gave a single excited hoot and shot away, heading straight and true for the horizon.
Draco gave a limp sigh and collapsed back against his chair. He would just have to hope this bloody business would work.
Chapter Six.
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