Harry looked up sharply the next morning at breakfast. Draco was walking into the Great Hall and straight towards the Gryffindor table. That would have been all right, if a little weird, except Mr. and Mrs. Malfoy were behind him.
"Oh, shit," Harry said under his breath.
"Harry, language!" Then Hermione looked in the direction he had, and blinked. "They—don't look like they're here to bring a book you lost."
"They'd send an owl to do that," Harry said, and then became aware that he sounded inane. He had been too happy with the fact that Draco hadn't confronted him at the end of Potions yesterday. He should have realized something was a little off about that. He cleared his throat and stood up. "If you'll excuse me?"
The Malfoys were close enough to hear him make the excuse. Harry thought that maybe Mrs. Malfoy would smile because he'd been polite, but she only gave him a strained look and said, "Henry, please, we need to talk."
Harry grimaced and followed her and Mr. Malfoy towards the stairs that he knew would lead to the hospital wing. Draco fell into place behind him, and Harry shuddered once and then refused to look back at him. It was like being guarded and escorted along, the way the Aurors had brought Sirius Black into the Ministry.
He did not want to talk about this, but if he had to, he could at least be reasonable about it, and then everyone else would be reasonable about it, too.
Hopefully.
…
"Why did you never tell us you were abused?"
Harry stared at Mr. Malfoy, who had begun the interrogation. Not reasonable in any fashion, no. "Because until this year I didn't know who I was? Why would I just randomly walk up to you in the Diagon Alley bookshop and start telling you?"
Mr. Malfoy's lips tightened. "You are being unreasonable, Henry. Please understood the question in the spirit it was meant."
"Then maybe you can sound less like you're accusing me of having abused myself and kept the secret just to annoy you. Sir."
There was a long pause. They were in the infirmary, the same place that Harry had had to find out he was Aldebaran Malfoy. At least that awful name was gone, but the tension in the air was the same as it had been then, and Mr. Malfoy had the same forbidding expression on his face that said he wouldn't be getting out of this.
Or maybe this was worse, because they looked hurt, but Harry didn't have the same feeling of anger to defend himself from their hurt. Before, he'd had no idea he was a Malfoy and he hadn't been delighted by the news, and he'd been sure that no one could blame him for not being delighted.
But now he felt the squirm in his stomach that said maybe he should have told them, maybe they would have understood.
"I know that you did not abuse yourself," Mrs. Malfoy said, her voice very soft. Mr. Malfoy sat back and seemed content to let her take over, but his eyes were still raking over Harry in a way that Harry very much did not like. "And I know this might seem unreasonable to you. You're not used to having adults care. But you're our son. We need to know."
Her voice was trembling by the time she got to the end of the sentence, and Harry glanced at her and—
Yeah. He was making his mother cry. Bloody hell.
Harry stared down at his pale hands and said, "I didn't tell you because I didn't want anyone to know. I didn't want to seem weak. And when people came near to guessing it before, they never did anything. They thought I was making things up. And I didn't know what you would do."
"If you thought we would not love you—"
Mrs. Malfoy had reached out for him. Harry sat back a little further, noting with some hope that Draco looked nearly as unhappy as he did. Good, big long emotional discussions weren't a Malfoy family thing.
"Not that. I didn't know what you would do to the Dursleys. I know you hate Muggles." He looked at Mr. Malfoy. "I thought you were going to torture or kill them. I know what it's like being an orphan, and I have a cousin—I mean, someone I thought was a cousin. I wouldn't want to have Dudley have that."
Mrs. Malfoy abruptly stopped reaching for him and sat back down. Harry watched her. He wondered if this was going to be one of those compromise things; Mrs. Malfoy had said over the Christmas holiday that Mr. Malfoy and Draco would try to compromise hating all Muggles and Muggleborns, and Harry would have to compromise, too. But Harry just couldn't compromise about making Dudley an orphan.
"It was your abuse," Mr. Malfoy said after a long moment of struggle where everyone watched him. "If you do not want me to harm your kidnapper's family, I will not." Harry nodded and kept quiet about the "kidnapper" thing. "But I do want to know what happened."
"Please, Henry," Mrs. Malfoy added. "When Draco sent us the letter yesterday—it was hard to sleep, thinking of all the horrible things that might have happened to you."
Harry sighed and glanced at Draco. He didn't look as if he'd been sleepless, but he caught Harry's eye and nodded emphatically in a way that said he wanted to know, too.
"They really hated me, and my magic," Harry said. "I didn't know about the magic part at first, though. I just knew that sometimes strange things would happen around me and I couldn't control them, and that was what got me called a freak."
Mrs. Malfoy's hand reached out and gripped Mr. Malfoy's tightly. Mr. Malfoy's lips looked as if they were on the verge of vanishing. "And what else happened?"
"They made me do chores." Harry didn't think that would be so bad given that the Malfoys had house-elves and they were all kept strictly away from the family. Draco probably didn't even know what the elves did on a daily basis. But they winced and gasped anyway. "Cooking and gardening and things like that. And they—well, I didn't have a bedroom for the first ten years I was there."
"Did you sleep in the kitchen?" Draco blurted, as if he had been on the verge of asking that for minutes.
Harry shook his head. "No. A cot in a cupboard under the stairs."
....
Can't wait to read ahead. Then Join my P@treon and get 60+ chapters.
Even Free members can enjoy 2+ advanced chapters FOR FREE.
Link: [email protected]/Divine_Quill
Join Right Now