Chapter Thirty-Six of 'Starfall'- Like a Vampire's Bite

[lomonaaeren]

Chapter Thirty-Five.

Title: Starfall (36/?)
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 Thirty-Six-Like a Vampire’s Bite

“Do you want wine? More of the pudding we had at dinner?”

“Nothing, thanks,” said Harry, staring around the room that Draco had led him into. It was an incredibly wide room, looking as though it took up the whole ground floor of the house, although Harry had just walked through part of the ground floor that wasn’t taken up by it, so he knew that was only an illusion. The walls were dark blue and glittered with a spangle of silver stars.

So did the floor. Harry took only one swift glance down at what he thought were tiles, or smooth, slick flagstones beneath his feet, then turned his eyes away. It looked as if he was standing atop an abyss filled with stars.

“I want you to be comfortable,” said Draco, from near enough that Harry started and looked up. He’d thought Draco was on the other side of the enormous room, but instead, he stood not far in front of Harry, one hand on the back of an overstuffed chair, frowning. “You don’t look as if you are?”

Harry cleared his throat. “I feel like I’m falling through space. Could you…?”

Draco blinked once, and then his face cleared. He didn’t make fun of the way that Harry was reacting, the way Harry had thought he might. He simply drew his wand and tapped it once against the wall, and a softer version of blue flooded the room, making the floor opaque. “Better?”

“Yes, thanks,” said Harry, and took the chair in front of the one Draco held. Draco sat down in front of him, smiling a little anxiously. Harry eyed him sideways and wondered why he was so nervous when his secrets weren’t the ones on display.

Then he wanted to snort. As if it wouldn’t be a secret of a sort that he’s interested in me. He’s probably told some people, but it’s not something he’d expect to announce in the streets, either.

“Good,” said Draco softly, and leaned nearer. His eyes were avid on Harry’s face, making Harry clear his throat a little. He was used to people looking at him like that only when they wanted to sell him something, or buy him. Draco didn’t seem to notice his discomfort this time, though. “I want to know why you allowed me to stay when Healer Brandeis was talking to you.”

Harry blinked. “I thought I answered that. I didn’t think you’d spread the story around, and once I was talking, I got kind of caught up and didn’t think of anything else.”

Draco flushed, and Harry wondered if he should have admitted that. It made Draco sound like he wasn’t worth much to Harry. But Draco was the one who said, “Why did you trust me? How did you know you could trust me?”

“I just-thought I could,” said Harry, getting a little flustered. “You were the one who picked out the Mind-Healer for me. I thought you sincerely wanted to help me. Are you saying you didn’t and I shouldn’t trust you?”

“I’m saying that it’s a little strange for someone to trust the one who was his rival in school and then set warlocks on him a few weeks before,” said Draco in a soft voice, blinking rapidly. Harry decided that he wasn’t the only one insecure one here. “I thought-I hoped it proved that you felt the connection between us as strongly as I did, and you were reaching out to me. But it didn’t?”

“I wasn’t thinking of it in those terms,” said Harry. “Not at the time. Maybe now-yeah, now I can think of it that way.”

Draco relaxed and smiled at him. Then he said, “You don’t have to have a drink if you don’t want one, but I feel the need.” He snapped his fingers, and a house-elf popped up with a tray that held two glasses and a carafe of something the color of honey. Harry blinked a little when he saw it. It looked like juice, not wine.

“Will you join me?” Draco asked, as he laid his two fingers against the side of one sparkling, delicate-looking glass and the elf poured precisely that amount in.

Harry hesitated once. On the one hand, he wanted to. On the other, he didn’t know if it was the best idea to get drunk in front of Draco. Merlin knew what would come out of his mouth.

But if he could trust Draco with his deepest secrets, he could probably trust him with any drunken confessions he made. He nodded. “Yeah.”

The elf poured the same amount into the other glass, handed it to Harry, bowed solemnly to both of them, and vanished with the tray. Harry sipped at the wine and had to close his eyes for a moment, the intense taste of it washing around his mouth. It was sweet, though not as much as the honey it resembled.

“Good, isn’t it?” Draco asked. “That’s the kind of thing I want to give you if you’ll let me, the luxuries and the sweets alike.”

Harry opened his eyes and nodded. “I’ll be more comfortable asking you about them now. That matters.” He leaned back in his chair with his hands cupped around the glass and studied Draco. “What else did you want to talk about?”

“Whether you think you can date me. Whether you can be interested in a man.” Draco hesitated as if he was about to leap off a cliff, and then blurted, “And that means we need to talk about the failure of your marriage.”

Harry rubbed a hand along the back of his neck. It felt as though someone had dealt a burning slap to his cheek. “I don’t-my marriage didn’t fail because I was interested in another man, you know.”

He started to add that he wanted to discuss the failure of Draco’s marriage, too, if they were going to do this, but Draco was already speaking. “Was she?”

Harry took an angry swallow, realized there was nothing in his mouth and he looked like an idiot, and brought the wineglass to his lips. He allowed the wine to roll around on his tongue, not to “elaborate” the taste as one wine connoisseur had said to him at a party in the Ministry once, but to prevent himself from speaking too soon.

“She was,” he finally said. “I mean, a man who could give her children. Which I couldn’t. So you could see the basis of her interest.”

Draco gave him a keen, cutting glance. “This is going to be very tiresome if you insist on defending her, and we spend all evening talking about her instead of you and me,” he murmured.

Harry bristled. “Well, let’s talk about me, then. I didn’t want to adopt, although I did suggest it. I suggested Muggle methods. Ginny didn’t want to use those. She-we both went too fast. If we’d managed to wait and let some time pass and talk about it rationally, as a couple, I would still be with her.”

“Then I’m glad you didn’t.”

Harry whipped his head away. His voice came out dull and muffled, and he knew it. “Why are you doing this? We were getting along, and now-”

“Because we can’t avoid fights forever,” Draco said evenly. “And I want to make sure we can argue like normal people-like a couple, if you prefer to use that terminology-and not tear each other apart. If we can’t, then we have some more work to do.”

Harry nodded. “Right. I know that.” At Draco’s raised eyebrow, he scowled. “Honestly, I do. I just haven’t been part of a couple in so long that I forgot it.”

“I’m curious about that, too,” said Draco, and took a sip from the honey-colored wine that, damn him, he seemed to be handling a lot better than Harry was. “Why did you wait so long to date someone? I would have thought you would want at least company, since you couldn’t have blood children.”

That was like a blow, too, but this time, Harry thought he managed to take it on the chin without breaking stride. “I was interested in dating, but I couldn’t find what I was looking for.”

“Do tell.” Draco’s eyes glinted at him over the wine-glass.

When it’s my turn, then he’s going to get an interrogation, too, Harry thought fiercely. But for now, he wanted to answer as honestly as he could. Maybe then Draco would see that this was a problem they were dealing with, something knotty and complicated and without an easy solution. “Someone who would want me for me. Someone who would know the truth about me, all the truths, and not flinch from them.”

Draco frowned slightly. “How could someone do that if you didn’t tell them the truth?”

Harry shrugged. “I thought I’d get comfortable with them, they’d accept a few things about me that are uncomfortable but not as important as that, and then I could tell them the truth and they’d take it.”

“Even if they wanted children?”

Harry rolled his eyes. “Hell, I want children. I just couldn’t be with anyone who would want to do what Ginny had done.”

“Which was?’

“We’re going to end up talking about her, aren’t we?” Harry muttered, and drained most of the rest of his glass. “Fuck.”

Draco jumped into laughter as if stung there. “It doesn’t have to be a painful process. I won’t ask you to reveal any of her secrets. I just want to know what it was that really broke up your marriage. Only the revelation that you couldn’t have children?”

Harry closed his eyes and tried to think back on the matters that had seemed so tangled and so pressing only a short while ago. “She wanted to have a blood child, too,” he muttered. “But she wouldn’t-she wouldn’t consent to Muggle methods. What she wanted was to sleep with someone else, have his child, and then rear it as both of ours. With the other father involved, too. I think. Sometimes I think I misjudged that part.” He pinched his nose and forced out some air and, he hoped, some spite. “I just couldn’t do it.”

“I couldn’t, either,” said Draco, his voice low and ugly. “I wonder how long she’d had someone else in her eye?”

Harry glared at him. “We can talk about my problems until the morning comes. Merlin knows even that might not be enough time, but I won’t listen to you criticize her.”

Draco lifted his head as if he wanted to show his throat to Harry, but the look in his eyes was pure challenge. “Careful, Harry, or I might get jealous and think that you still want her, instead of being able to want me.”

“I would still be able to want someone else,” Harry snapped. “But if this hadn’t happened, I would still be with her. Hopefully the father of a big group of kids by now. You have to understand that.”

“I understand that reality intervened,” said Draco. “The way it did with my divorce, and the way that Astoria and I parted.”

Harry jumped gladly on the new distraction. “Yes. How did that happen? Obviously it wasn’t the same cause as broke up mine.” He thought enviously of Scorpius sleeping upstairs. No matter what else happened, Draco had that joy. He wanted to know about Scorpius, more than he did about Astoria.

But he wanted to know about Draco, too, and so he sat back and sipped his wine and watched as Draco stared at his glass for a while, as if he would find the courage to speak in the side of the sparkling crystal.

*

This is harder than it looks.

Which made Draco appreciate Harry’s courage all the more, since he had launched into speaking with no preparation but Draco’s questions.

But Draco had courage of his own, and he wasn’t about to be defeated by something that he had known Harry would ask about. Maybe something that Draco even wanted to talk about, although he would have ignored the insinuation coming from anybody else.

So he drank the rest of his wine, and held out his glass so Izzy could pop up and fill it again, and then set it firmly down on the table beside him, instead of drinking from it anymore. Harry’s eyes followed it down, and then came back to his face, full of an oddly expectant hope.

“Astoria and I were a match made by families and parents and pure-blood society, not love,” Draco began. “I expect you know that.”

Harry nodded. His eyes said he couldn’t comprehend it, but then, even Draco still sometimes found it hard to believe he had been married for a while. As long as Harry understood what had happened and the sequence of events, that was all Draco really needed.

“So.” Draco’s throat ached, and he wanted to pick up the glass of wine again, but he had already had all he needed to tell the story fluently. “We quickly found out that we didn’t even share enough of the same interests to regularly appear in society together. We thought that we could dance and discuss politics and make the right kinds of noises at the right kinds of people. Or perhaps I was the only one who thought that, and Astoria was already pursuing her dream.”

“What does she do?” Harry asked.

“She runs a company called General Morgana, and works on all sorts of things. Research projects. Artifacts.” Draco waved his hand. “I know she cares about them, and she needed to be free to pursue her dream.”

“But what does that make of Scorpius?” Harry whispered. “And what about your dreams?”

Draco gave him a warm look that he thought Harry probably misunderstood, if the way he blinked and then checked the level of the wine in Draco’s glass was any indication. Draco was just glad that someone had thought about his side of it, and decided to ask the question, for once.

“My dream was raising Scorpius to Malfoy standards,” he said. “Pure-blood standards. And you saw how well that worked out. I was reduced to asking help from anyone who would respond to a desperate owl.”

Harry only smiled, and didn’t challenge Draco’s characterization of him. “So both your dream and mine died, a little bit.”

“Mine not as thoroughly as yours,” Draco acknowledged, and finally let himself pick up the wineglass again. “I know now that the standards I was trying to impose on Scorpius were too hard for such a young child. That doesn’t mean he can never live up to them or be a good Malfoy or a good heir or a good person, but I have to wait until he decides what he wants and see what place my standards have in his life.”

Harry’s eyes shone for a moment as though he was going to issue a challenge to that, and then he let his hand fall and only smiled. “True. Well.” He hesitated for a long moment, during which Draco refreshed himself, and Harry only toyed with the stem of his glass as though he’d lost his taste for the wine. “What are we going to do now?”

Draco paused himself, then put the glass aside again. He needed courage for this, yes, but not the liquid kind that he had a few times used to such disastrous effect, such as on the day that Astoria had finally told him they needed to get divorced. “I think we need to talk about whether our dreams can be fulfilled a different way.”

“How?” Harry blinked.

“You can’t be that oblivious,” said Draco flatly, and stood up. “The laws of the universe don’t allow it.”

Harry clutched the sides of the chair for a moment, looking at Draco as though he was stunned Draco was about to force the issue. Then he said, “Well, I mean, I don’t see how I can have blood children.”

“Not blood children,” Draco said. “A child. A family. That’s one of the things I can certainly offer you if you date me.” He became aware of an aching tension in the center of his chest, and tried to smile it away. “Although I hope that you would consider dating me as one of the perks of the business, not only a burden you need to shoulder or shrug off.”

Harry did freeze as though the laws of the universe had faltered, and then said softly, “Draco. You don’t need to-to share Scorpius with me, or anything. Just like you don’t need to invite me over. Or date me.”

“And again, this isn’t about needs, or some repayment,” said Draco, and he stood there and waited for Harry to understand things. “This is about wants, about things I don’t have to do, but want to do. About desires.” He reached out and brushed his thumb along Harry’s lips. “I want to know if you’re going to continue putting me off and muttering about things that we need to do, or if you’ll join me.”

“Join you?” Harry’s voice had gone up. “Where are you going?”

“Into the country beyond our broken marriages,” said Draco softly. “Into the land where desires are the things that matter, and we fulfill them.” He reached down and curled a warm hand around Harry’s, a hand he knew was warm, and tugged a little, but not enough to lift Harry to his feet. “Will you join me?”

*

Harry stared at their joined hands, and for a second, the fear blew through him like a windstorm and he wanted to run away.

It was true that he’d faced more frightening things, including the end of his marriage to Ginny and what he had thought was a lifetime of being alone, without a family, but he had done those because he had to. Draco kept shoving away all thoughts of duty or necessity. He wanted Harry to do this because of desire.

Did Harry have the desire to do it? That was the question.

He looked slowly up at Draco’s face, at the faint, steady smile that beamed there, and the hand he had stretched out to the side as though he couldn’t wait for Harry to clasp it and already wanted to beckon him on. But his other hand had stayed on Harry’s, and he didn’t act as though he was trying to hurry Harry up or as though he would be disappointed by Harry taking a while to decide.

That’s because he knows it can’t be hurried. It has to be as slow as it takes. For as long as it takes.

Harry was shaking a little when he leaned forwards and left the couch of his own free will, when he let Draco pull him up. But he did it because he knew he wanted to.

And while he didn’t know if this would work out or if it was the smartest move he’d ever made, he did know that he would regret it for the rest of his life if he let it go past. He’d had enough of wondering and mourning about things he couldn’t change.

When they were face-to-face, Draco raised an eyebrow. “I believe it’s traditional to do something with moments like these other than stand staring into each other’s eyes,” he said lightly.

Harry bristled a little and opened his mouth to say something, but Draco leaned in and kissed him lightly on the lips.

It was brilliant and hot and wondrous. Harry actually staggered a little from the force of it, and lifted his hand to touch Draco’s hair, and then he had to touch it and hold onto it, because he thought he would have fallen over if not for the grip he had on it.

Draco pulled back a moment later, though, not seeming to care that Harry was tottering and wobbling where he stood. His eyes were full of challenge. It didn’t take Harry as long to figure out why as he thought it once would have.

Because he wants me to kiss him back. He wants me to want it.

And Harry didn’t have much trouble proving that, not when his chest was aching and he had thoughts of-well, of lots of things that didn’t include Scorpius or Ginny or blood children. For the first time in three years, he thought he wanted something more than he did the ability to have children.

He turned so that he could brace the back of his legs against the arm of his chair and kissed Draco thoroughly again. Draco made a sound that could have been amused or encouraging. Harry disliked the possibility that it was amused. He kissed him harder, sliding one arm into place around the back of his neck and not simply holding onto Draco’s hair.

Draco swayed into it with his mouth open and his tongue reaching, longing. Harry felt a trickle of amazement thrill through him at that. Draco wanted him that much? He couldn’t remember the last time someone had wanted him that much.

He tightened his grip, and licked Draco’s tongue.

Draco moaned and suddenly pulled back from him, shaking his head a little, his eyes wide. “I didn’t-I didn’t think that you’d take it up that fast,” he gasped.

“What can I say? I’m a quick study.” Harry managed to smile and move back to run a hand through his hair. He felt a little winded. Maybe it wasn’t a bad thing that Draco had ended this here for now, although Harry couldn’t deny the disappointment that had flashed through him, either. “I-I think I might want to try this. Maybe being your-date.” There was no other word he felt comfortable saying about it for now. “Helping you with Scorpius. Visiting the Manor sometimes.”

“And Scorpius and I can come over to your house?” There was a shadow of challenge in Draco’s eyes.

“You have been,” Harry said, confused, thinking of their visit to Grimmauld Place.

“The place that you live,” Draco said, and Harry snorted at himself and reached back for his wineglass. His hand was shaking. He steadied it for a moment, and then nodded.

“Of course. Come whenever you like.”

Draco gave him a thin smile. “I might just take advantage of that invitation.” He hesitated. “You’re free to stay in your rooms for tonight.”

Rooms, plural, Harry thought. Only in Malfoy Manor would he have that distinction. But that wasn’t a bad thing, either. Only a different thing from what he was used to.

He spent a moment thinking about it, the amount of wine he’d consumed and the distance of the rooms Draco had given him from the wing where Draco and Scorpius slept, and then nodded. “I’d like that.”

Draco’s eyes flamed with triumph, and he inclined his head. “Then I’ll see you in the morning.” He kissed Harry chastely on the cheek and retreated out of the room as if he didn’t trust himself.

But as Harry felt the wine burn down his throat and thought about what else had burned on his lips, he wasn’t sure that it was himself Draco should distrust.

Chapter Thirty-Seven.

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