Chapter Six of 'Hephaestus'- Feats of Might and Will
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Chapter Six-Feats of Might and Will
“Dwarves’ magical fire-cooked the nerves of the body-meant for beating metal-never meant to touch a human-“
Those were the words that exploded past Draco’s ears like fireworks as he sat at his son’s bedside and stared down at Scorpius. When he could, he held his son’s uninjured left hand. Once he had reached across to hold the right one, but the shiny and slimy skin of the fused fingers made him drop it again and rub his own fingers together.
“Don’t think we can-no, there’s a spell that we can try-really?-yes, read it about it once in Crabtree-“
The words sometimes burst on his mind like fireworks, too, and more than once he was on the point of jerking his head up and asking one of the Healers who swirled around him if they were true, if there was nothing that could be done for Scorpius. But he always gave up again and went back to looking at his son, imagining all the things that he wouldn’t be able to do in the future, all the adaptations that Draco himself would have to make.
The Healers hadn’t yet disturbed the sleep the elves had put him into; they seemed to be afraid to. That didn’t augur good things. Perhaps he would never be able to use the hand again, but, knowing the Malfoy family’s reputation for perfection and beauty, the Healers were afraid to tell Draco so. Perhaps he would never be able to lift his head.
Perhaps his face would always be marred, and Scorpius would even come to accept that, and never remember that once he had looked normal.
Draco heard himself snarling from a distance. No. He could not accept that. He would enable Scorpius to look normal again.
But beautiful? Could he enable that?
He didn’t know. The certainty of his life had been shattered the way that a tsunami sweeping into Morningswood would have shattered the walls and left the stones sinking. Draco was sinking himself. He had to make decisions, he had to prepare himself for the worst and think about how he could help Scorpius, but he didn’t know how.
He had never had to face something like this. All his life, he had been able to run away from the pressing, insistent truths of the world when they came too ugly. After the war, he and his family had withdrawn into Malfoy Manor for a time and lived only on food prepared by their house-elves-and thus verifiably without poison-and exercised only in their close and tightly-warded gardens. When he had seen the horror and ruin Harry’s face had become, he had run away, and he had managed to find Astoria in the next month. He had had a slight fear that their child might be born ugly, because some of the Greengrass relatives were cow-faced, but even that had not come to pass.
Draco had begun to believe that fortune favored him, and close contact with bad luck meant he wouldn’t catch it.
But he would have given everything for this particular luck to have fallen on and infected him, instead of Scorpius.
He was leaning forwards, not sure whether he was going to lie down on the bed with Scorpius or faint, when an arm curved around his shoulders and a voice whispered to him, “It’s all right, I’m here, it’s-“
Draco turned towards Harry, seized him, buried his face in the nearest available shoulder, and wept.
*
Harry had finally managed to soothe Draco to sleep, and now he sat in a chair at the side of Scorpius’s bed. The Healers had objected, at first, about someone who wasn’t related to the patient spending the night in the room, and had wanted even to remove Draco, but Harry had lifted his head and glared at them. The sight of his face made them shut up and then scurry to offer every possible courtesy to Harry Potter.
That’s another thing Ginny taught me, Harry thought, resting his wrinkled chin on top of Draco’s hair. To use my name when I have to, to win what privacy I can and wield the power to preserve the privacy of others.
The protective distraction fell away, and Harry had to face the thoughts he’d been avoiding since Draco came through the Floo into Ron and Hermione’s house.
Scorpius was scarred, perhaps irreparably. Draco would need help to recover from that, and to ensure that he didn’t reject his son. And Scorpius would need help learning how to live in a world that worshipped beauty, if not as strongly as Draco did, and tried to reject anyone who looked different.
Harry was the best candidate for teaching him that, perhaps the only one with the power to do so who would want to do it.
So he would work to help people. That wasn’t so different from what he’d done during the war or since, though most of the time the people he was trying to help with metal-dancing were Muggles rather than wizards. The sigils might protect wizarding estates, but the long-term effect of that was less brain damage among Muggles. And there had been a time-just yesterday-when Harry was content with that, and required no more concrete reward than the money his employers paid him, which he mostly used for paying the dwarves and buying new materials to make more protective patterns.
Now, though, he felt as strong a reluctance to take up Draco and Scorpius’s cause as he felt a compulsion to do so.
And why?
Because there would be nothing just for him in it. Even if Draco learned to love him again, it would be because of obligation, and not on the noble and high-minded footing Harry had been dreaming of earlier that night. Of course Harry wouldn’t talk to Draco about having to accept that maybe no cure for Harry’s scars existed. Of course Harry wouldn’t have the luxury of walking away from him if he refused to accept that.
He was chained by compassion and necessity, and he could foresee times when he would hate his new life.
Harry closed his eyes wearily and rubbed his face with his free hand, the one that wasn’t tucked around Draco’s shoulders and under his chin. He was thinking nonsense. He shouldn’t be so selfish. He should rejoice in the chance to be around Draco, to hold him like this, without the other man flinching away from him automatically.
But the feelings remained, churning into a small chunk of ice in the back of his mind. He was dissatisfied with what had happened to Scorpius-and horrified, and unbearably sad-because of what it would mean for him.
He would bear it because he had to. He would bear it because both Scorpius and Draco would need him, and Harry would dare and do anything to keep Draco’s relationship with his son from souring the way that Draco’s relationship with him had. But the dream he had fashioned in his bed that night was dead, and the plea he had shaped in his mind before coming to hospital futile. He would never have a chance at a true and unfettered bond with Draco; he would never have someone to be strong for him.
*
Draco opened his eyes and sat up slowly. He was confused. For long hours, he thought, hours when he had drifted in and out of consciousness, he had sat close to a strong body that wrapped its warmth around him. And now that warmth had been stripped from him, and he sat alone and cold in a chair next to Scorpius’s bed.
“Daddy?”
Scorpius was awake.
Draco reached out and gripped both his son’s hands this time, his disgust at the feeling of burned skin overcome by the thought that Scorpius needed him. Scorpius blinked at him and turned his head fretfully from side to side, as if looking for his familiar bed and the house-elves of Morningswood. Then he focused on Draco again and said, “Daddy, I’m hurt.”
“I know.” Draco swallowed through a throat that felt clogged with sand. “But we’ll try to heal you, Scorpius, I promise.”
“Try?” Scorpius’s brow had bent, across the burn and the roasted part of his face, as though he had no idea what the words meant. Draco swallowed again. He could-sometimes-look at the right half of Scorpius’s face now, and the magical fire had made it a mask of charred bone, hanging black strips, and what looked like a cauldron of ashes and fat. It looked like Harry’s face, in fact, except that Harry’s face was sharper and projected more; Scorpius’s was bowl-shaped, the destruction contained.
“They don’t know if they can heal it.” Draco wondered if he should speak more tender words, but Scorpius had been intelligent enough to injure himself in the magical fire (that was Draco’s fault, too, if distantly). “They said that they’ll try, but they-“
“They know they can heal his neck.”
Draco spun around, his heart leaping in a great bound of sudden joy. Harry stood in the doorway of the room. He nodded to Draco and then focused on Scorpius, coming over to the bed and kneeling down. He showed no astonishment or anger or disgust at being so close to such a ruined face, Draco marveled. Of course, maybe looking at his own in the mirror had given him practice, but still. It was more than Draco himself could have done.
“Your neck was more distant from the fire,” Harry told Scorpius in a soft, clear tone that had not a trace of pity in it, “because you were bending down and gripping an ember in your hand, and so your face and your hand came in more direct contact with it. They know that you’ll hold your head up again.”
Scorpius lay still, considering that. Then he said, “I want a mirror.” His words slurred a little at the end, and he put out his tongue to probe curiously at the split and blackened remnant of the right corner of his upper lip.
“No!” Draco said sharply. God knew what would happen if his son saw what he looked like right at the moment. Harry could have borne it-he was an older man and a hero-but Scorpius was too young.
“I want one,” Scorpius insisted. “I have to see what I look like.”
“But why?” Draco bent closer to his son, raising one hand to touch his face. But his fingers halted a few inches short of Scorpius’s cheek. He tried to force himself to move closer, and physically couldn’t. “It’s not pleasant. Trust your Father when he says that and think about something else for right now.”
“I brought a pain potion,” said Harry. “You were hurting, I think you said.”
Draco flushed, angry with himself for forgetting about that. Harry put a hand behind Scorpius’s head and supported him so that he could sit up enough to drink the potion. Draco watched anxiously as he gulped it. At least he appeared able to swallow without difficulty; it seemed that the magic must have affected mostly the ability of his neck to support his head, instead of his throat.
And then Harry conjured a mirror and held it up so that Scorpius could see his face in it. Draco’s outraged shriek and snatch at the corner of the glass came too late. Harry simply shifted so that one of his shoulders blocked Draco’s hand and tilted his head so that his cheek almost brushed Draco’s fingers. Though Draco thought he had earlier touched Harry without flinching, he couldn’t do it now, and he froze.
Scorpius stared at his face. Then he lifted his hand and traced the edge of his dented cheekbone, which formed the edge of the cauldron of simmering flesh. Draco had to look away because he couldn’t bear the expression on his son’s face. He was quiet, calculating, as if he were trying to think of what part the stranger in the mirror would play in his own life.
“This is you,” said Harry. “And I can tell you now that it’s no good hoping for a mirror that lies, or one that flatters you with pretty visions of what can never be. You can use glamours; you can research healing spells. Some of the Healers who talked to me are hopeful about eventually restoring some of the skin. But your face will always bend a little to the side even in their best projections, and they don’t think they can do anything about your hand, which was the worst burned because it was holding the ember. Learn reality.” His hand trembled where it clutched the mirror, or Draco would have struck him for his flat, cold, emotionless tone. “It’s the only way to become acquainted with the worst that can happen to you.”
Scorpius still said nothing. Draco finally managed to overcome his own shock, and took the mirror away. Then he grabbed Harry’s arm and hauled him to the far side of the room, making him stumble over his bad leg but not caring. How dare Harry act as if Draco had given him permission to talk to Scorpius like that?
“What was that?” he hissed, his voice shaking. “Why would you say things like that? Just because you had something bad happen to you doesn’t mean it’s going to be that bad for Scorpius.”
“I talked to the Healers, I said.” Harry’s voice was remote and cold as the moon hovering outside the bedroom window. “And that was what they said. Most of them are hopeful about restoring bits of Scorpius’s face, but they can’t agree on which bits. That says to me that they don’t really know what to do about the magical burns. They had the same kinds of disagreements about my leg, and eventually most of them had to drop their optimistic theories and go with the pessimistic ones. And his hand is a dead loss.” For a moment, he turned his head and looked at Scorpius, and Draco could have hit him with pleasure then, because of the look in his eyes. “There are spells and devices he can use to somewhat compensate, but he’ll have to learn to use his wand with his left hand.”
“You don’t need to tell him that-“
Harry whirled on him, and Draco saw the passion he had been missing behind his eyes then, fury and fear colliding in a crash like the lightning of two opposing storms. “I am trying to tell him the truth,” Harry hissed. “And I am trying to save your relationship with him. You can have false assumptions about me all you like. But not him. He’s your son. Your son, Draco.” His voice sank, shaking. “I want you to always be able to have him, even if you can’t have me.”
Draco stared at him with his mouth slightly open for long moments. Then he shook his head and said, “You think I would abandon Scorpius?”
Harry leaned towards him, and his breath traveling in soft puffs across Draco’s earlobe roused entirely inappropriate memories. “I saw you didn’t want to look at him or touch his hand. It could begin that way. And I remember that you wanted to stand by me at first, until you learned just how bad the damage was. I won’t let him experience that.”
Draco’s breath caught in his throat. Harry’s head was uplifted, and his eyes shone the way they had when he was relating the story of his torture, so that the important thing was the feelings reflected in them and not the devastated face that surrounded them. Harry would challenge the forces of prejudice and pity and Draco’s own instinctive revulsion in the face of ugliness for Scorpius’s sake-for the sake of a boy he hadn’t even known a week ago.
“You say that your main gift is accepting reality, but really, you’re all about challenging it,” he murmured.
Harry twitched a little, and then said, “I was trying to be cold and calm because I thought that was the only way Scorpius would listen to me. And I need you to realize the truth about him, even if you won’t about me. Look at what he’s become and love him anyway. He needs to have at least one person who he knows won’t turn against him, Draco.”
“It sounds like he has two.” Draco was edging nearer, hardly aware that he was doing so. He didn’t think that he could touch Harry, not yet, but he wanted to be as close as possible to the fire that blazed through Harry’s words and gaze. Yes, there was a good reason that his mouth and eyes had been left undamaged, Draco thought. They were the conduits of the real beauty he still possessed.
How can I help but love anyone who fights for Scorpius?
Harry stared at him for long moments, then turned his head away. Draco was astonished to see his eyes close and to hear him take a breath as if he were fighting back tears. “Yes,” he murmured. “He does.”
“Harry?” Draco reached out to touch his shoulder-it was so much easier when he had that dreadful face turned away-but Harry stepped away from him without appearing to notice his hand and knelt down in front of Scorpius. Scorpius turned his head and looked up at him. Even the burned skin on his face looked pale, Draco thought.
“You’ve had some time to think about it,” said Harry. “I know you’re smarter than most other kids your age. What do you think?”
“I think,” said Scorpius, “that I can count.”
Harry blinked, and Draco was momentarily glad that he had someone else who showed he was bewildered by Scorpius with him. It was a matter of pride with his parents to never show surprise or any other emotion to the little boy but patience and, when Scorpius earned it, affection.
I’m thinking about Harry as if I need him.
Draco shivered, and swallowed, and made an admission he probably should have made years ago in the privacy of his own head. I do.
“Count?” Harry said, and his voice was helpless. He tilted his head to the side and looked at Scorpius as if he were the first being of a new magical species Harry had ever met. One of his hands had fallen to his side, Draco saw, massaging his bad leg. “Of course you count. You matter to both your father and me.” He darted Draco a venomous sidelong glance that said Scorpius had better matter to him.
“Yes, count,” said Scorpius. “I still have one hand that’s fine.” He looked complacently at his left hand. “That means I can pick up things. And my mouth is fine, so I can talk and cast magic and eat sweets. And the Healers will help my neck. And I have two sides of my face, and one isn’t burned.” He looked quizzically up at Harry, who was gaping at him. “What’s wrong with you? Do you need a healing potion and to lie down, too? You look like you hurt.”
*
Harry swallowed, and swallowed again. He had no other means of fighting back the tears, because blinking wasn’t strong enough to do it.
And then the tears came anyway, making their way slowly down the cracked and twisted seams of his face.
Draco still needs me only to care for Scorpius. I’ll never have him as a lover again, I have to acknowledge that now. If he can barely touch his son without flinching, what makes me think he’ll able to touch me?
But Scorpius is taking this better than I expected. He’ll-he’ll heal. He’ll heal in his mind, which is so much more important than the body.
Harry lifted a hand and wiped away his tears, hearing flakes of dead skin break off at his touch and rattle down like the bodies of crushed insects. He finally managed to open his eyes and look at Scorpius normally, and he said, “I’m in pain, but it’s the happy kind of pain you get when you-“
“When you eat too much ice cream,” Scorpius interrupted, nodding wisely. “I get that all the time.” He looked thoughtfully at Harry for another moment. “Can I have another pain potion?”
“Not right now.” Harry knew the potion he’d given Scorpius had a soporific component. He should be falling asleep soon.
“Oh.” Scorpius wrinkled his nose and seemed about to say something else, but then his eyes closed and he began to faintly snore. Harry reached out and gently stroked the fused-together fingers of his right hand before he turned away. The Healers might have more concrete information on Scorpius’s condition now than they’d managed to give him last time.
Draco stepped in front of him. Harry blinked, lost again for a moment. How in the world had Draco got in front of him?
But then he saw the pale face and the compressed lips, and he knew. Draco had always had a habit of moving faster when he was angry.
“I want to know why you pulled away from me just now,” Draco said, in a crisp voice that made it not much less than a demand. “What reason do you have to mourn, when Scorpius is taking this so well?”
“None,” Harry said, and gave him a watery smile. “Absolutely none. I just thought he wouldn’t, that’s all. And I’m glad he has so much strength. You must have raised him exceptionally well,” he added.
Draco flushed and coughed. But then he said, “That isn’t it. Surprise and worry about Scorpius shouldn’t make you snap at me.”
Harry raised an eyebrow, or at least arched the ridge of his forehead where his eyebrows would once have been. What he said next insisted on coming out, no matter how sternly he told himself to keep his emotions in check. “Believe it or not, Draco, even monsters have human emotions sometimes, and get frustrated at people who don’t deserve it, like everyone else.”
Draco’s eyes narrowed. “I told you that calling you a monster was a mistake. Can’t you-“
Oh, God. Harry knew that he couldn’t have this conversation, or everything would come tumbling out, including the whole flood of his bitterness. And Draco might not be Scorpius, but he was still Scorpius’s father, and he was suffering. The last thing he needed right now or ever was an overload of Harry’s pain.
“I’ll forgive it eventually,” he said. “I brooded on it for three years, and then I learned that maybe I was wrong. I can’t just forget that in a day.” He hastily nodded to the bed where Scorpius lay sleeping and changed the subject. “I’m going to see what else they can tell me about his condition. Maybe someone will come up with a way to save his hand after all.”
Draco didn’t move. In fact, he planted his hands on his hips and gave Harry a distinctly unimpressed look. Harry’s heartbeat quickened. Once that look had been prelude to a lecture on hiding from the press or an announcement about how he wasn’t going to meekly accept an insult one of Harry’s friends had flung at him. Petulant, bratty, and obnoxious as some sides of Draco’s character were, other parts of it gave him the strength to stand up to anything.
Except me, Harry thought, and touched his face again.
“Is this about you and me?” Draco asked, lowly. “Scorpius won’t be sick forever. And I don’t see why we can’t combine the search for a cure for his injuries with the search for a cure for yours.”
It was too much like what Harry wanted. For a moment, he was tempted to surrender, to give in and live the life Draco was offering. He’d had so much trouble envisioning it earlier that night, but he could see it now: sitting in front of the fire whilst Scorpius practiced with his wand in his left hand not far away, Draco sitting in the chair next to him and dividing his attention between his son and the book spread open across the chair arms and Harry himself-
And the dream destroyed itself. Harry looked up at Draco. “I made up my mind tonight to give you an ultimatum,” he said. “If you can’t accept that maybe my injuries are permanent and we won’t find a cure, then I can’t be with you. I would only end up being more disappointed if we had to give up.”
“I don’t think they are permanent,” Draco said at once. “I think that someday you’ll look just like you do with the glamour on.”
Harry moved his fingers in a controlled spasm at his side, and the glamour took over his features again. “Like this?” he asked softly.
Draco stepped towards him at once, his movements swift and yet dreamy, as if he didn’t really realize what he was doing. He closed his eyes and leaned towards Harry, hands rising to cup the sides of his face.
Harry twitched his fingers again and Vanished the glamour.
Draco jumped back at once as if he had been burned, but Harry caught one of his hands and pressed it against the horned ridge that stuck up on his right cheek, let him feel the roughness and the edge that would cut him if not for the other spells Harry had already applied to his face. Draco struggled in a panic, the way Ron still reacted if a spider appeared, and lunged to the other side of the room the moment Harry let him go. He was rubbing his hands together frantically, his eyes locked in horrified fascination on Harry’s face.
“There,” Harry said. It felt as though a great crystal he had carried safely in his hands for years were breaking apart at last, but the feeling was weirdly relieving. Once the crystal breaks, maybe I’ll be able to look at the sun directly, instead of through it. “You can accept Scorpius the way he really is and love him no matter what, but not me. You can’t love me unless I’m beautiful. And there’s a very high chance that I might not be, Draco. I won’t-I won’t be your lover on a condition. I deserve unconditional love as much as the next person. I deserve someone who can actually give me strength as well as count on mine.”
His voice was shaking wildly by the end of the speech, but he knew he had said something important.
He added, just so that Draco couldn’t mistake him, “I won’t abandon you or Scorpius. I’ll see this through. But, like you said, Scorpius won’t be sick forever. And when he isn’t, it’s best if I just go.”
He limped out of the room, away from the horror-stricken look on Draco’s face.
*
Draco buried his face in his hands.
The revelation he had now didn’t help him come to terms with what had just happened. It didn’t make him able to overcome his revulsion. It was as hard and spiky and unpleasant as the touch of Harry’s skin. And he felt distant anger and irritation and helplessness.
But now, finally, he understood what his rejection had done to Harry.
And now, finally, he was feeling pain and grief that were not his own, and were not based solely on the loss of beauty.
And, given his earlier revelation that he needed Harry, that gave him rather a lot to think about.
Chapter 7.