Chapter Eight of 'Hephaestus'- With a Full Heart
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Chapter Eight-With a Full Heart
“And you’re really going to do this?” Ron was staring down at the top of Rose’s head, as if he found it hard to meet Harry’s eyes. Rose was shifting restlessly in her dad’s arms; from the way her eyes darted around the hospital corridor, Harry thought she wanted to go exploring.
“Yeah, I am.” Harry leaned against the wall, gratefully using it to take some of the weight off his bad leg. He hadn’t been moving around as much in the last few days as he normally did when metal-dancing, but perhaps the emotional battles had taken their own toll; his leg hurt horribly. “I want to,” he added, when he saw the back of Ron’s neck turning red.
Ron let out several heavy sighs. He probably would have yelled if not for Rose’s presence, Harry thought. Well, this was one thing he could be grateful to Rose for, then. “Well,” he said. “Just know that you’ll always have a home with us, mate, and we’ll be here for you no matter what Malfoy does.”
Harry smiled and clasped Ron’s shoulder. “I know. Tell Hermione I said hello.”
Ron shuddered, as much to say that he didn’t look forwards to explaining to his wife why Harry had chosen to stay with Malfoy and his son, and then turned and set out. Harry watched him for long moments before he turned back to Scorpius’s room.
He was just in time to catch a flash of blond hair out of the corner of his eye, and by the time he stepped back into the room, Draco was sitting next to Scorpius’s bed with a polished innocence that didn’t fool Harry at all.
“I meant what I said,” Harry murmured, after a quick glance to make sure Scorpius was asleep. “I’m not leaving you.”
Draco gave a tiny nod, but didn’t look up. His fingers slid along Scorpius’s fused hand as if it were important for him to learn the texture of the skin by heart.
Harry swallowed his pleasure at seeing Draco touch one of his son’s wounds so unselfconsciously, and knelt down next to the chair. “This won’t work if you don’t trust me,” he said.
“Do you know how many times you’ve walked away?” Draco’s voice was as bitter as a bad onion. “Left me alone? I may have been the one to say things you couldn’t stand, but you were the one who walked away.”
Harry controlled the impulse to snap. This had been a trait of Draco’s when they were dating, too: he would have a moment of triumph when he believed in Harry completely, such as the morning he had made Rita Skeeter flee with a few well-timed insults, and then he would collapse in on himself and start violently doubting that anything could work. It exasperated Harry, but no doubt it was connected to other traits about Draco that he loved, traits without which Draco would not have been who he was.
So he shifted his weight, kept in the hiss he wanted to make as his bad leg twinged again, and said, “I’m not going to do that this time.”
“How do you know?” Draco finally lifted his head, his eyes haunted and full of anger because they were haunted. Draco had the strangest conviction that showing his own pain would make Harry laugh at him, although Harry had treated him as gently as he could at every opportunity. “Maybe I’ll slip up again and you’ll walk away again. You can’t know.”
Harry bit his tongue to keep from saying that he thought Draco’s calling him a monster had been an expression of what he really felt, rather than a slip. “But things are different now,” he said, and cocked his head at Scorpius.
Draco hunched his shoulders like a scorpion getting ready to sting. “So you’re only staying for him, and not for me?”
Harry shook his head. He wasn’t about to get distracted into one of the arguments Draco handled so well because he was expert at spinning distortions from simple words. “I don’t know that things will be different,” he said. “What should matter is that I’m willing to take the chance and try again.”
“If you can’t give me a guarantee of certainty-“
“No, I can’t,” Harry said sharply, and stood up abruptly enough that he would have wrung a cry of pain from his own mouth in a different mood. Right now, he needed some distance from Draco. “Just like I can’t guarantee that Scorpius or I will ever find a cure for our scars. Just like I can’t guarantee that you’ll ever care to have me in your bed again.”
“Harry-“
“No. If I make sacrifices, you have to too, Draco. Our love broke apart once, so I’m not comfortable saying it’ll be permanent this time. That’s what you have to understand.”
Draco stared up at him, breathing fast. Harry looked back at him, both love and exasperation wringing every fiber of his being.
“I’m going to fetch one of the Healers who worked on Scorpius,” he said. “Maybe he can tell us something new about his hand or his face.” And out he limped.
*
The next few days were ones of learning for Draco.
He learned how to be patient when one of the Healers tending Scorpius’s face sat back on her heels and simply cried over the pocket of pounded flesh in his cheekbone, which was the most resistant to Healing spells. Scorpius looked up at her in wonder and then stuck his thumb in his mouth, a childish habit Draco had thought him broken of six months ago. This place wasn’t good for his son, he thought, but on the other hand, there was no one whose knowledge he would trust if they went back to Morningswood.
Malfoy Manor was out of the question, for now, with his parents still burning to use Dark spells on Scorpius whether or not it was safe.
He learned how to watch Scorpius use his maimed hand as a scoop and a pincer, the way a seal might use its flipper, and not be disgusted. If he concentrated on the motions Scorpius made instead of the look of the thing he made it with, he could even be proud that a Malfoy was clever enough to get around an injury that would have defeated the ingenuity of many lesser wizards.
He learned to watch Harry, and bear it.
Harry hung over Scorpius’s bed, watching him eat and talk, and nodded constantly. He whispered advice in his ear when Scorpius had to begin coming off the potions he’d taken and whimpered with pain. He cramped his bad leg with the length of time he sat in one place, holding Scorpius’s hand, because that was the only way Scorpius consented to fall asleep.
He spoke to Draco with affection, with gentleness, with concern. He talked about the dark circles under Draco’s eyes, Scorpius’s progress, and the wonders that Healing spells could do now, which they hadn’t been able to perform when he was in hospital three years ago. He was encouraging and kind to the point that Draco wanted sometimes to vomit-
And sometimes to cling to him and never let him go.
He tried to come up with more plans for dealing with Harry over the days as they stretched into weeks, as the Healers strengthened Scorpius’s neck back to normal levels and managed to heal the burned left side of his face. But his attention was too much absorbed by his son, who, the Healers told him solemnly, would always have a fused hand and bear the marks of mutilation on the right side of his face.
Two years old, Draco thought, one night two weeks later, sitting at Scorpius’s side and staring numbly down at him. He’s two years old.
The thought of a world where someone that young could suffer like this made him want to weep with fury.
And then determination surged in him. Perhaps the British Healers thought that about Scorpius, but Draco had the money and the time to visit other countries and get other Healers’ opinions. He would find a cure for Scorpius if he spent the rest of his life doing it. Scorpius did not deserve to remain disfigured just because the dwarves were careless and-and because Draco had agreed to the spells that made him smart enough to evade protection.
And Harry?
Draco hesitated. Harry had promised to stay with them no matter what, but what if he didn’t want to go to Italy or Germany or Russia, or wherever else Draco’s journey to find a Healer took him? Draco dreaded his own reaction if Harry refused and stayed in Britain. And he had friends here, a job, a life. He’d already neglected a lot of that by staying with Draco and Scorpius as long as he had. Would he come with them for years? Could Draco ask Harry to give up his life for this quest?
When I’m going to be looking for a cure for him as well…
Draco sat up. He might have a hard time doing it, but yes, he would ask Harry for his companionship. At the least, it would settle the question quickly of whether Harry would walk away from them or stay. Harry would not have expected to be confronted with a choice that soon, and so he would respond without thinking-which meant Draco would get his real answer.
He was congratulating himself on coming up with such a clever plan when the door to Scorpius’s room opened, and Harry staggered in, looking triumphant.
“I think I can heal Scorpius partially,” he said.
*
“I don’t know why I didn’t think of this before,” Harry explained, ducking his head under the lintel of the shed as he passed into it. “After all, who are the ones who would know the most about dwarf magic? The dwarves themselves, of course.”
He felt Draco give a shiver behind him, which he didn’t turn to see, and he heard the rustle of cloth as Scorpius squirmed in his father’s arms, trying to see better. Harry had expected that. Not even the Healers’ cautions-they’d been reluctant to release Scorpius from their care for any reason-and the trauma he had suffered in a place like this could dim the curiosity and intelligence that burned in the little boy.
Curiosity and intelligence that Draco almost certainly put there with his spells.
Harry shook his head. He’d never known Scorpius any other way, and he was not going to start thinking of him as warped or unnatural because of what his parents and grandparents had done.
“Can we trust them?” Draco’s voice was low, as if he imagined that his words would really go unnoticed in the clang of hammers around them. Harry could have told him how good dwarves’ ears were, but he decided not to bother; Grishnazk was already turning towards them and would make it clear in a moment. “They might be jealous of Scorpius-“
“You have a strange concept of jealousy, even for a human.”
Draco stiffened and clutched Scorpius tighter. Scorpius kicked to be let down, gazing at Grishnazk in fascination. The dwarf eyed them both with a mixture of amusement and contempt, then turned and looked at Harry.
“I don’t promise a complete cure,” he said. “There’s no way we can promise that.”
Harry nodded. Keeping his word was important to a dwarf. And Grishnazk was being pragmatic as well, in doing what he could to avoid the enraged disappointment of someone with Draco’s money and power. “We understand that,” he said. “We want hope. Not miracles.” He looked hard at Draco, to make sure Draco understood, too.
Draco’s hands turned white where they clutched around Scorpius’s waist. Then he nodded, looking as if each separate muscle in his neck needed to be coaxed into the motion, and knelt to put Scorpius on the ground.
Grishnazk reached out and put a hand on the boy’s head, tilting his face to the side. He stood a little taller than Scorpius, but his eyes weren’t brighter. Scorpius examined him with an intensity that made Harry suffer a single hopeless moment of pity for his future Hogwarts professors.
“Magic hurt you,” said Grishnazk. “Our magic. Do you trust it to help you?”
“Yes,” said Scorpius at once. “Magic isn’t evil. Even Dark Arts aren’t really evil,” he added, looking up at Harry and speaking with Lucius’s inflections for a moment. “It’s just about power and how you use it.”
Harry checked a sigh. Yes, his Hogwarts professors will have to create entire new classes just to handle him.
Grishnazk nodded and reached over his shoulder. Another dwarf had stepped forwards with a hammer; Harry hadn’t even seen him move. Any comparisons between him and the dwarves were off, really, he thought. They might both have twisted bodies by normal standards, but the dwarves were perfectly at home in theirs and moved with silent grace, whilst Harry had to struggle even when he stood for a few hours.
Grishnazk used the hammer to tap Scorpius on the left shoulder, lightly enough that although the boy staggered, no pain shone on his face. Draco, though, snarled under his breath and started forwards.
“Keep him from interfering,” Grishnazk told Harry, never taking his eyes from the ruined part of Scorpius’s right face. “Once the current of magic has been established in the boy’s body, it cannot be interrupted, or he is likely to end up worse than before.”
Harry nodded and grabbed Draco around the waist and shoulders. Draco struggled madly, making small grunts and whinges and whimpers beneath his breath. Harry tightened his hold, at once moved by how much he loved his son and irritated by the force of Draco’s prejudice.
“He’s only helping him,” Harry whispered back. “You let the Healers cast all kinds of spells on Scorpius that you didn’t understand, either. Wait and see what happens before you spring to conclusions.”
Draco stepped on his feet in reply. Harry grimaced; he was no longer capable of wrestling Draco to the ground as he once would have. But he thrust his face close, and Draco stiffened and blinked, the sight of Harry’s scars distracting his attention again.
Meanwhile, Grishnazk had tapped Scorpius under the ribs on his right side, in a rough diagonal from his left shoulder. Scorpius laughed and said, “That tickles. What are you doing?”
“Establishing a connection between one side of the body and another,” Grishnazk said, voice deep, and this time touched the head of the hammer to Scorpius’s face and then to his hand.
The magic was building now; Harry could feel it, that elusive power he sometimes experienced when he watched a forging and almost, almost grasped the sheer comprehension of the metal and the fire that drove it. Purple sparks whirled around Scorpius, quickly adopting the colors of fire and rising towards gold, then orange, then red, then blue and white. Grishnazk muttered a single harsh phrase that sounded like rocks rolling against each other and drew the hammer in a straight line from Scorpius’s mouth down his body.
Windy streaks of fire coiled around Scorpius like sunset clouds, hiding and cradling him in the midst of strands of pink and peach. Draco started and began to pull against Harry’s hold again; he seemed to have realized that he couldn’t see his son anymore. Harry pressed one hand against his chest and murmured into his ear, “I wouldn’t have trusted Grishnazk with Scorpius if I didn’t already trust him with my own life.”
Again came Draco’s startled pause. And then, clear across the air between them and the hidden dwarf and boy, came Grishnazk’s voice. “What fire has done, fire cannot always undo,” he said. “Instead this will be a new forging. I am the most skilled smith here, and yet this is fine and delicate work. I will only trust myself with part of it, so that I do not reshape parts of you that must stay the same. Which do you wish healed, your face or your hand?”
Draco drew in air. Harry clutched him again, forcing it out. He thought this had to be Scorpius’s choice and Scorpius’s choice alone.
All the same, his own heart was beating very hard at the thought of a little boy’s flesh being resculpted and manipulated the way that his own had been.
“My hand,” said Scorpius. “It gets in the way more than my face.” A thoughtful pause. “My father would like me to change my face, but it’s my face. And he and Harry will love me no matter what, and I’ll have lots of sweets after this because they’ll be worried, so it’s my hand.”
“The hand it shall be,” Grishnazk said, and although Harry couldn’t see them, he was certain the dwarf had bowed to Scorpius.
A ringing tone broke out from within the clouds, stirring them. They began to rotate, to the point where Harry’s eyes watered from trying to look at them.
So he looked at Draco instead.
His expression was so mixed, love and yearning and anger and despair, that Harry felt himself tremble as if he would collapse. How could his memory have painted Draco as emotionless or petty? Someone who could feel like this, and all at once, was far from the many apathetic people Harry had met during his life; even those who pretended to enthusiasm for metal-dancing tended to come across as faint and pale compared to Harry’s own commitment to it.
He wanted that passion for himself, again. And it wasn’t worth any sacrifice to have it, but it would be worth some struggle.
He laid his head on Draco’s shoulder and stroked his stomach comfortingly. The fire glowed and writhed and danced, and Grishnazk’s hammer made a sound as if it were striking metal, and Scorpius cried out in awe.
Draco sobbed, once, and his hands clenched into his chest as if he would tear himself apart.
And then the mist cleared, and revealed Scorpius standing with the handle of Grishnazk’s hammer in his hands. Magical intelligence or not, his family hadn’t increased his bodily strength, and so he couldn’t hold it aloft. But he turned to Draco and beamed with delight, fanning his fingers out carefully so that his father could make out his healed hand. Even his face, Harry thought, looked a bit better, the flesh on the cheekbone stretched and shiny and a uniform grey instead of the dripping, roasted fat it had resembled before.
“Look, Daddy!” Scorpius said proudly. “I’m holding it!”
Like his father, Harry discovered in that moment, Draco wept without tears.
*
Draco couldn’t stop holding Scorpius and smoothing his hair and kissing him. The moment he had vanished into the fire, Draco had been sure Harry was wrong, his instincts were right, and the dwarves wanted to harm his son. The ringing tone had made him think they were hammering Scorpius to pieces.
But Scorpius was alive and unharmed-and Draco would never touch the shiny skin of his fused fingers again.
He looked up finally, over his son’s head, and into the measuring eyes of the dwarf who had done this for them. The dwarf looked a lot like a Malfoy at that moment, Draco thought reluctantly, his face cool, reflecting only the satisfaction of a job well done.
“Thank you,” he said, the words harsh and foreign in his mouth.
The dwarf nodded. “Work on the sigils should be done in a week,” he said, and turned away. He did pause long enough to look at Harry. “You’re returning to work?”
“Yes, I think so.” Harry gave Draco a small smile with so much emotion hiding in it that Draco started. “After all, we did find a partial cure for Scorpius, and dancing out the protective patterns for Morningswood was what Draco originally hired me for.”
“Idiot,” Draco said.
Harry blinked and retreated a defensive step. His leg spasmed as he did so, almost enough to throw him off-balance. Draco hated to see the way he resigned himself to a graceless stumble instead of reaching out for help. “Well, that was what you hired me for, and I could hardly practice the craft whilst we were in hospital, so-“
“No,” Draco said. “Why did you think I wanted you to leave? Why did you think this was enough?”
“You can, of course, look out for a further cure,” Harry said with great care. “But I spoke with Grishnazk before I fetched you, and you heard what he said himself. He doesn’t think it likely that he can cure more of Scorpius’s injuries, and Healers who work with dwarf magic would be rare.”
“There’s you,” said Draco. “I was talking about you. Why would you leave before we started looking for a cure for your injuries?”
“I’ve been asking around, actually, the last few weeks,” Harry said, his voice tight. “I’ve been told that this spell is one no Healer in St. Mungo’s has ever seen before. Because it was me-“ God, what inexpressible bitterness in his voice “-they wrote abroad. No one else they contacted can identify it, either. The secret of healing me died with Greyback.”
“But we’ll look,” said Draco. “And dear Merlin, Harry-“ He flushed for a moment as he realized he was making this confession in front of a bored dwarf and his far-too-interested son, but he went on, because he needed to speak the words no matter how little Harry needed to hear them. “Don’t you know I want you to stay because you’re you?”
The look Harry turned towards him then was so raw that Draco stood up, put one hand on Scorpius’s shoulder, and reached out with the other. The dwarf had turned to his work, he noted dimly. Well, good. At least he had less of an audience for this.
Harry caught himself and closed his face in the next moment. His voice was low and so harsh that Draco almost thought he was angry. “There’s a limit to how much I need to do for other people, Draco. I did what I could to cheer you up and heal Scorpius. I did more than those Healers could. I prevented your parents from scarring him further. I managed your affairs for you during the past fortnight. What do you want of me other than that? What can you give me? I know there’s no chance you’ll ever be my lover again-“
“You don’t know that,” Draco said.
Hope cracked like lightning across Harry’s face. “Then-“
“I don’t know it, either,” Draco said stubbornly. God, his embarrassment wanted to drown him, and so did memories. Once he had reached his hand towards Harry like this, and it had been rejected. He didn’t know what he would do if that happened again. “Just like you didn’t know whether you would stay with me or walk away again. The future isn’t certain. I have to learn to live with things that aren’t certain. Well, so do you, bloody Harry Potter.”
“So.” Harry shifted his weight and grimaced with pain as his bad leg no doubt responded. Draco had to stop himself from drawing his wand, because he knew it would look to Harry like he was taking his hand away, but honestly, something could be done with pain spells to relieve his suffering. He just needed to look. “You’re-willing to try?”
“Yes.” Draco still flinched when he looked at Harry’s face; he didn’t think he could touch it yet, but he didn’t feel he had to turn away, either. “I am.”
Harry stepped forwards and clasped his hand.
Draco closed his eyes; the clinging emotions fell away, and he had one moment of perfect peace.
“I knew you would stay,” said Scorpius, his voice so ineffably smug that Draco felt a sudden moment of pity for his Hogwarts teachers. “Because Daddy and I are special like that.”
Chapter 9.