Chapter Forty-Eight of "Starfall'- Meeting at Andromeda's House
Chapter Forty-Seven.
Title: Starfall (48/50 or 52)
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 Forty-Eight-Meeting At Andromeda’s
“I suppose you’ll want me to leave you alone?”
Andromeda’s voice was low and amused, which Harry didn’t mind. He was mostly glad that she wasn’t getting upset about Harry asking to use her house, and then not being invited to the conversation that would actually take place there. He smiled at her and nodded, waving around the glass of water she’d given him. “I think we’ll be fine. It’s not like we can’t use Aguamenti to fill the carafe again if we get thirsty.”
He, Ron, and Hermione were in one of the downstairs drawing rooms, the one that had a smooth, shiny table in the middle of the room and the couches and chairs arranged around it in a small circle. A carafe of water now sat on the table as well, along with the glasses that Ron and Hermione hadn’t touched yet. They were too busy watching Harry.
“Very well,” said Andromeda. “Teddy has been wanting to go and examine the new brooms in Quality Quidditch Supplies. I suspect this is the perfect chance to take him.” She gently half-shut the door, and then paced away up the corridor outside. Harry could hear her calling to Teddy as she went.
Harry turned around and nodded to his friends. “Thank you for coming.”
“It wasn’t like we had a lot of choice,” Ron muttered, and ignored the way that Hermione shook her head chidingly at him. “Your invitation was pretty direct. Meet to talk about whether we still have a friendship, indeed.”
“You sound like Hermione, with the ‘indeed,’” Harry pointed out, and sipped his water. “Did you two take Polyjuice when I wasn’t looking?”
“We don’t want to lose your friendship,” Ron snapped, and Harry was glad that he wasn’t drinking his water yet, or probably Andromeda would have found one of her glasses smashed. “That ought to be pretty bloody obvious. What were you thinking?”
“That you might want to stop being friends with me because of me dating Draco,” Harry said. “And because of my fight with Ginny. It seemed obvious to me that you cared more about not stopping her than you did about her hurting me.”
That had been intended to provoke them, and Harry was glad to see it had worked. Hermione flushed, while Ron leaned forwards and jabbed one finger at Harry as if he was a Dark wizard in an interrogation Ron was conducting.
“You know that we don’t want to get involved, Harry,” Ron said. “Your fight with Gin was three years in the past. You could tell people that you couldn’t have children if you wanted. That was your right.”
“But then Ginny showed up and started wailing to the papers that I ‘betrayed’ her,” said Harry. “It did make me wonder why no one in your family was talking to her and telling her to stop embarrassing herself. Especially because of what you said last time we talked.”
“What was that?” Hermione asked.
Harry raised his eyebrows. He had assumed Ron would have told her, especially since Hermione was the one who had helped Harry coordinate that talk with the reporters where Ginny had showed up, but it seemed he hadn’t. And right now, Ron was flushing himself and avoiding her eyes a little.
“He told me that no one could stop Ginny,” Harry said. “That she could go around saying whatever she wanted, and no one could get in her way. That I’d betrayed one of her secrets with my announcement, and she had the right to talk about me.”
“I didn’t put it that way!” Ron sat up, and now he was the one who looked like a Dark wizard in the middle of an interrogation. “I just said that she had a right to talk, and the papers were saying some pretty awful things about her, and that Harry would always have a place with us when his relationship with Malfoy didn’t work out.”
“When,” Harry said, and rolled his eyes.
“If, fine, then,” Ron said, and waved his hand before he turned to Hermione. “I was only telling the truth! He should have consulted Ginny before he said that.”
Hermione gave what sounded like an exhausted sigh, which made Harry wonder if she’d argued about this with Ron and if it was the reason she was keeping so quiet now, and turned to Harry. “It would have been nice. It would have saved trouble in the long run.”
Harry gritted his teeth. “And if she’d told me that she didn’t want me to say anything about it, so that she could preserve her precious privacy and this illusion-which was apparently important to her-that we divorced for some other reason? Would I have to keep silent for the rest of my life and endure the rumors about me wanting to spend time with children for Dark reasons?” His frustration overwhelmed him suddenly, and he lashed out with his hand and made the table ring, and Hermione and Ron jump. “Why the fuck is Ginny’s privacy so fucking important? Does her being pregnant make everyone else mindlessly concerned about that kid in her belly?”
“You don’t have to say it that way, mate.” Ron’s voice was low and ugly now. “Not in front of Hermione.”
“I think I do.” Harry stared back and forth between them. “Well? You were supportive of me until Ginny got pregnant? Or until I started wanting to tell the truth about myself? Or until I got involved with Malfoy? Which one of them was it?”
“You-” Hermione began.
“You being involved with Malfoy doesn’t help!” Ron’s ears looked like embers under his hair. “You have to admit it looks weird, mate, you being so involved with him when he was your enemy for years! And when he bullied Hermione, and he wanted to torture Ginny, and he made fun of me all the time!”
“Look,” said Harry. “I’m in love with him. It’s hard to picture for you, but he has changed.” He paused as something occurred to him. “Would you believe him if he apologized?”
“No,” said Ron and Hermione simultaneously.
“If he tried to do something else to make up for what he did?”
“No.” That was Ron this time, while Hermione looked a little more uncertain.
“Then what’s the point of me apologizing for dating him or him doing anything?” Harry spread his hands. “Since you won’t believe it anyway.”
Ron looked at his hands. “He could try,” he muttered. “It says a lot, that he won’t even try.”
“He could have been worse about Ginny than he was, too,” Harry said, deciding that he might as well lay everything out there in case they objected. “He wanted to hurt her. He’s very protective of me.”
Ron bolted to his feet, and now his face was so flaming red that Harry might have been afraid he would have a heart attack if he didn’t know that Ron’s heart was fine. “If he lays a finger on my little sister-”
“You don’t have to worry about that.” Harry stared coolly at him. “He won’t. I asked him not to.”
Ron sat back down with a thump. “So he isn’t going to leave her alone because it’s the decent thing to do, but because you asked him to?”
“Yeah.” Harry leaned back on Andromeda’s couch and tried to remind himself to play it cool, not to let the angry tide sweep him away. For one thing, it would let him make his points better and not be affected the way Ron was. For another, there was Hermione, who hadn’t spoken yet. “Strange that leaving people alone is something decent people do, and yet Ginny can’t master it. Isn’t it?”
Ron’s face slowly cooled. He bowed his head and stirred his finger in his water glass and didn’t say a word. Hermione muttered, after a moment, “We are sorry about what happened with Ginny. But we can’t just-I don’t know, what do you want us to do, Harry, shut her up in a dungeon?”
“Make it clear that what she’s doing is stupid and you don’t approve of it,” said Harry clearly. “That doesn’t seem like a huge deal to me. She might stop if the united disapproval of her family came down on her. As it is, everyone, even her husband, just waves their hands and clucks and acts like she’s a chicken that needs be to shooed back to its pen. I know that you kept saying you couldn’t restrain her, but did anyone try?”
“I talked to her,” Hermione reluctantly. “She was so consumed with bitterness against you she didn’t listen.”
Harry nodded, and turned to Ron. “And you? I know you said I could come and stay with you if I broke up with Draco, but you also said that you could understand why Ginny got upset with me.”
Ron kept looking down. “He’s our enemy,” he whispered. “And Ginny’s my sister.”
Harry sighed, tiredly. “And I’m your friend. Look, Ron, if she takes sides, you’re going to have to, too. I stayed away from it for three years because I didn’t want to force you to take sides. But if you’re going to sit here and tell me endlessly that she can do whatever she wants because she’s your sister, then I will have to walk away. To me, that’s supporting her.”
Ron clenched his hand on the edge of the water glass. “She can’t do whatever she wants,” he muttered, voice low. “But you could have been nicer about it.”
“About what?” Harry snapped. “Making an announcement that will let me live my life? Or divorcing her because she wanted to fuck someone else and have his child?”
Ron recoiled. Hermione reached out and pressed down hard on his hand. Harry wasn’t sure if that was to reassure him or because she was trying to keep him from doing anything rash. She faced Harry and said, “We didn’t know that you’d put it like that.”
“It was like that,” Harry said, and ignored his usual impulse to say that it was more complicated and both he and Ginny had behaved badly. All that did was make Ron think that Harry wasn’t really angry at Ginny, and he could go on supporting and encouraging her. “We divorced for a bunch of reasons, but that was one of them. She was choosing to live her own life even before the marriage ended. You can’t sit there, and tell me that I-that I have to be happy with that.”
Hermione winced. “No,” she murmured, and she and Ron exchanged a private look. Harry hadn’t seen it often, but he thought he knew what it meant anyway. Hermione was telling Ron to let her handle this.
Ron turned the other way and flopped against the back of the couch, his arms folded and his face locked in a scowl. Hermione sighed and shook her head.
“No one tried to restrain Ginny because we have been worried about her,” she said. “We thought-well, most of us thought that she would get upset if someone argued with her. And that might have a bad effect on the baby.”
Harry relaxed a little. At least there was a reason for it, even if it was a stupid reason.
“So would getting upset and yelling at me,” he said. “She’s already upset. Didn’t any of you think of that?”
“There was a grandchild to think of,” Hermione whispered. “And a niece or nephew.”
Harry felt a small shard of ice stab into his heart. Hermione had probably been left out of that decision because she wasn’t a Weasley by blood and she was Harry’s friend, since she said that she had tried to reason with Ginny.
But it confirmed that he would never be as important to the Weasleys as Ginny was-and not even because she was their sister or daughter. Because she could have blood children, and he couldn’t. Because of something that wasn’t his fault.
Harry wondered bleakly, for a moment, what would have happened if he had convinced Ginny to adopt. Would their adopted child always have been less important to the Weasleys than a blood one?
“Right,” he said, standing up. “So, for reasons that don’t even make sense given that Ginny is already upset, none of you are going to stop her. Right.”
His heart was pounding, he was breathless, he was dizzy. He tried to take a step away from the couch and ended up leaning against it. It felt like he was losing his best friends.
Probably because I am.
“Damn it, mate-I didn’t mean-”
Harry flinched back from Ron’s reaching hand. “Don’t touch me,” he said quietly, and then laughed. “Why would you want to? I can’t have blood children like your precious little sister can. And I’m dating the enemy, you said. Well, that must make me the enemy, too. You might as well let me leave. I never wanted to hurt Ginny’s kid, either, but I’m not going to coo over it because it’s a Weasley and any children I adopted can’t be.”
Ron shook his head, mutely, and then turned around and looked at Hermione as if she was the one who could make this better. She probably was, Harry thought mutinously as she stood up and approached him around the couch. Because she wasn’t Ron, and she wasn’t a Weasley, and she said she had talked to Ginny. Those things were the only reasons Harry was willing to give her a chance.
Hermione gently took his hands. “No, we weren’t thinking like that,” she said, calm and sane. “I did try to talk to Ginny, but when I saw that no one else was going to, I thought I’d better stop. If her family couldn’t get her to stop, I couldn’t.”
“And you’re not her family because you’re not blood, just married into it,” Harry said, nodding to her. “You don’t need to explain things to me, Hermione. I see how it is.”
“No,” Ron said again, but Hermione turned and gave him a glare, and he shut up. Hermione sighed and turned back to Harry.
“I phrased that badly,” she said. “The same way Andromeda did when she accidentally drove you away.” Her hands squeezed comfortingly on Harry’s again. “The truth of it is-Harry, we felt sorry for her and for you, but it seemed as though you weren’t all that interested in coming to Weasley family gatherings, and she was pregnant, and Molly had given up hope of getting a grandchild from her daughter. So we let all of those things matter to us more than what you felt, and we told ourselves that it was probably all right with you anyway, since you weren’t coming around anymore. It was wrong of us. I’m sorry.”
Harry could at least listen to that, because it involved apologies instead of trying to defend Ginny like she was a saint. He nodded shortly. “But I think it’s probably still better to only visit you at prearranged times,” he said, “and without Draco and Scorpius, if you’re so insistent that you can’t ever see them.”
“It’s hard to think of you dating Malfoy,” Hermione agreed slowly. “But I think part of that is because it’s Malfoy-and only part of it. It would be hard to see you dating anyone, after Ginny.”
Harry ripped his hands away from hers. “But it’s not weird that she got married to someone else? She’s allowed to have a life, and I’m not?”
“I’m still phrasing this badly.” Hermione rubbed her forehead. “It was just-you didn’t seem to care that much for the last three years, Harry. And then suddenly you did, and wanted to date someone permanently, and adopt their child as your own, and strike back against the rumors surrounding you, and leave the Aurors, and all the rest of it. What changed?”
“No,” said Harry, although he was perfectly well-aware of what had. Ethan. “You don’t get to hear that without a promise that you’re not going to tell Ginny.”
Hermione blinked rapidly. “You think we would? Does it have something to do with her?”
Harry held her eyes, aware that his cheeks were flushing. “Even if it did, you should keep it secret because I asked you to. Just like I should be able to tell the truth about myself because I want to. You’re putting her feelings first, constantly, and that’s exactly why I don’t want to tell you. Because your world revolves around her more than mine did in the wake of the divorce.”
“She’s pregnant,” Ron muttered into his hands. “And she’s my little sister.”
Harry shrugged. “Then you can leave the room, and I’ll tell Hermione, if she can make that promise and you can’t.”
Ron jerked his head up, and from the way that the color was finally draining from his face, Harry thought he might have got through at last. “No,” Ron whispered. “You’re making it sound like I’m not even your friend.”
Harry looked at him, and he knew his eyes were glittering and he probably looked less than pleasant. Well, Ron would have to live with that. “You’ll have to choose. Friend, or big brother? I didn’t want you to make the choice, but now I do.”
Ron looked at him, and opened his mouth, and closed it. He stood. For a second, Harry thought he would leave, and he tried to brace himself to bear the loss of Ron’s friendship. He knew he wouldn’t be able to imagine it, not until it was actually happening to him, but he also knew that if Ron and Hermione kept putting Ginny above him, their friendship was over anyway.
Then Ron whispered, “I promise that I won’t tell her. No matter what you tell us.”
“And I promise the same,” Hermione said. She had got hold of Harry’s hands again without him noticing. She squeezed to emphasize it.
“All right,” said Harry. He wasn’t trembling the way he once would have been at the thought of telling them about Ethan. He had confessed that, and worse, to Draco, and Draco was a calming and sustaining presence in his mind even if he was talking to his friends alone. “I started keeping a journal. A diary of another life. I pretended my name was Ethan Starfall, and I had a wife and three children and a perfect life.”
They both stared at him. Then tears filled Hermione’s eyes. “I never knew you were that lonely,” she whispered.
Harry made an awkward motion with his head. He had never expected Hermione to take it so much to heart. “It sustained me. I’m not that lonely anymore, because Draco found me, and I found Draco. And Scorpius,” he had to add, because he knew well enough that he and Draco would never have reached out for each other if not for Scorpius.
“I didn’t know,” Hermione whispered. “I saw you writing, but I never made the connection. How did I never make the connection?”
She seems more upset that she didn’t figure it out than that it existed in the first place, Harry thought, amused. “Listen,” he said, having thought of a way that might make certain things more acceptable to them. “I was crushed by my divorce from Ginny. I learned how to survive through writing as Ethan. Now, I don’t need that anymore. But that doesn’t mean that I’m ready to give up everything that you don’t approve of-or that she doesn’t approve of-and go back to being the Harry you knew. The Harry you knew is dead. He probably had enough of Ethan in him during the last few years that he started to fade once I gave up writing as Ethan, anyway. And I can’t be Ginny’s perfect husband, and I can’t be someone who pampers and puts her first the way her family and husband do. So. This is the way it has to be. I found someone who makes me happy. If you can’t accept that, fine. But I won’t accept the way you spoil Ginny, either.”
“Will we never get to spend time with you, mate?” Ron had his arms folded, but loosely, nothing like the tight clench they’d been in at first. “Because you’ll always be over there?”
“Draco has a name,” Harry told him pointedly. “So does ‘there.’ I’m living in Malfoy Manor now, practically. And no. I’ll come and see you privately, the way I’ve done. But I’m not going to spend time with the extended family. You’ll have to have Ginny and me over separately, the way you’ve always done.”
He hesitated, then shrugged. “If you want to spend more time with her once the baby’s born, that’s your choice, but it does mean that I’m going to spend more time with Draco. Her baby isn’t the center of my life.”
“I know,” said Hermione. “And I think we all drifted into putting her first mostly because you didn’t complain and we didn’t think about what you felt, because you seemed all right with it. And then this happened.”
“Right.” Harry crossed his gaze with hers. “I’m not going to put up with her saying whatever she wants about me in the papers, either.” He didn’t mention that he thought she probably wouldn’t do that anymore, thanks to Draco’s revenge. It was possible, and they had to know ahead of time what his reaction would be.
“I know,” said Hermione, and bowed her head. “I’ll talk to Molly. I can’t promise that she’ll see things from the same angle I do, but at least it’ll probably soften her.”
“Good,” said Harry, and turned to Ron.
Ron struggled for a second, and then burst out, “She’s my baby sister. And he’s Malfoy.”
“I’m not asking you to like him,” Harry told him bluntly. “Only to stop making her the center of the universe and feeling she can do no wrong. Or even feeling that she’s embarrassing but just standing back and letting her embarrass herself and you. She might feel differently about this someday, you know. Have you thought about the way that she’ll react if she does change her mind and discovers that you let her charge around doing stupid things because she was pregnant?”
Ron hesitated, then gave a short, choppy nod. “I didn’t know what it looked like from your point-of-view. I’m sorry, mate.”
Harry relaxed. An apology and an acknowledgment was all he’d really wanted. “Good.”
It remained to be seen how well his friends would keep their word, of course. But if a lot of it came from him not complaining and their not knowing that he’d had to turn to Ethan to survive the last three years…
A lot of it was understandable.
And I don’t owe Ginny anything. I think they finally understand that.
Chapter Forty-Nine.
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