Title: A Helping Handshake
Author: AristideCauquemaire
Pairing: Scorpius Malfoy/Albus Severus Potter
Rating: M for grown-up language and themes.
Warnings: Bunnies. Just kidding. Slash, actually.
Nice to see you again! :)
Hi Swiften and lovleydarkness! *waves*
Hi Guest! (I assume you're the same Guest from Helping Hand? The Weird one? :D) Thank you for your review ^^ I was never really gone, though, so I can't really be back as such... Anyway, thank you for reading! Hope you'll enjoy this thing. It's really sort of short, overall. Sorry about that.
I've finished dividing the story now, it'll be 6 chapters of wildly varying lengths. Sorry about that, too. Couldn't be helped.
Have a go at the distinctly-longer-than-chapter-1 chapter 2, y'all!
Chapter 2
/
"This has all to do with that spell Weasley put on you, doesn't it?" were the first words that came out of his father's mouth. "It addled your brain."
As first words went, it wasn't the worst Scorpius had imagined. He could have said something like 'That is disgusting' or 'You are not my son any more'. He knew that less fortunate boys all over the world had to hear those words out of their parents' mouths every day upon their confiding in them.
He knew that the least fortunate boys had to endure a damning silence that stretched all the way into their parents' graves, so he knew he was supposed to be glad that his father had said anything at all. Even if it had taken quite some time.
Then again, those words weren't exactly stellar, either. And who was to say that it would get any better from there?
Scorpius felt something inside of him wither a little, but he refused to be brought down so easily. Albus was worth it. He wanted this, his father's acknowledgement, his approval, too much to just cower now.
"Glad you finally decided to join the conversation," he quipped, almost, almost nailing the airy tone of voice. "As to your questions: Yes, it does, but not the way you think. And: No, it hasn't. The spell wore off in February already, like it was supposed to. My brain is fine and I am... I am... simply... in love with him."
His heart still did an odd little jerk that wasn't really part of the diastole-systole regimen when he said it out loud.
His father got up from his armchair, walked two paces toward the door – for a second Scorpius feared that he would walk out on him – then turned, walked four paces into the other direction, turned again. Only then did Scorpius realise that his father was pacing, which was another one of those things he thought no one actually did except in movies, books, and badly written slash fan fiction, and which he certainly had never seen his father do. It took a full minute, minute and a half until he finally came to rest behind the high back rest of his armchair.
Gripping the edge of the leather from behind in an obviously very tight clutch that made the material creak, he demanded, "How did that happen?"
Scorpius blinked. That was an oddly broad, unspecific sort of question. "How- How did what happen?"
"You told us you were friends." His tone was quite imperious, majestic plural and all, and his posh upper class accent was stronger than ever. "Now, suddenly, you say you're in love with him. How did that happen?"
"Dad, I..." really really cannot tell you about that. I cannot tell you about random boners at night and repeatedly being jerked off in one bathroom stall or another. Please don't make me. "It just did." Not so much an understatement, more of a flat-out lie. He rubbed the bridge of his nose. "People just fall in love with their best friends sometimes."
"Sort of," his father said, with an odd, sharp emphasis.
"Huh?" Scorpius sat up straighter, as if the two words had zapped him.
"You said you had 'sort of fallen in love' with Albus Potter."
"I... I did?" Oh yes. He dimly remembered.
"Yes, you did," his father said with the same emphasis. "And, quite frankly, I'd like you to elaborate on that."
"It just- slipped out of my mouth. I didn't mean anything by it." Oh wow. This was December last year all over again, just not in the South Wing Study.
"Are you sure about that?"
"I'm absolutely sure, Dad." Doesn't sound like it, his annoying inner voice remarked. Shut up, he mentally snapped at it. "Why are you-"
"Because people who are only 'sort of' in love shouldn't be in a relationship, son."
Scorpius' shoulder sagged a bit. This was one of the things he'd feared would happen. His father trying to talk him out of it. Fair enough, he thought. I handed that one to him. My own bloody fault.
"Dad," he said with all the truthfulness he could muster, speaking around the lump that tightened his throat, enunciating clearly, and looking him straight in the eye. "I am in love with him. I have been for quite some time. Truly. I know you'll need some time getting used to the idea, but... please, don't question my feelings, or my sincerity."
He held the eye contact and somehow tried to convey If I had a single doubt about it, I wouldn't have gone to all this trouble and told you because, quite frankly, telling you this is the scariest thing I think I've ever done and I would never be doing this to myself if I didn't think it was necessary and worth it with his gaze. He didn't want to say that out loud, though. He didn't want his father to think that he was afraid of talking to and opening up to him.
Truth be told, he was a bit – his pounding heart and sweaty hands attested to that –, but not really.
Not like he, Draco Malfoy, had been afraid of doing the same to his own father, the late Lucius Malfoy who sometimes still seemed to loom over him. Especially in moments like this.
Ever since his mum had told him about the whole mess his (really not so grand) grandfather had made of his own family, Scorpius had often spotted those little moments of hesitation in his dad, and he imagined him asking himself, with some amount of horror, if he was behaving, thinking or feeling like Lucius right then.
Just now, he saw him hesitate again, and swallow on a dry throat.
Then, he nodded and eased up on the armchair a bit, and Scorpius allowed himself a sigh of relief. It came out somewhat tremblingly. In turn, the lump eased up its grip on his windpipe a little.
They were both silent for a minute.
Eventually, his father spoke up again, his voice much quieter than before and with a bit more of what Scorpius called the 'Greengrass inflection' in it.
"For quite some time, eh?"
"Yeah," Scorpius nodded. "It's been six months." Technically and officially it had been five months and twenty seven days, but who was counting anyway?
His father made a noise that could be interpreted as perplexed, or surprised, or appreciative, or even dismayed.
"I'm sorry I didn't tell you and Mum earlier," Scorpius hastily explained, just in case it was a negative sort of noise. "I didn't mean to keep secrets from you. I just felt that it... wasn't something you should tell someone on a noisy Quidditch pitch, or even only via owl."
"That was very considerate," his father said slowly. He grimaced a little at the end of the sentence and added in a hurry, "Really. I mean it. Sounded sarcastic, but it wasn't."
Scorpius huffed a small laugh at that. Relief made his heart flutter like a tiny bird. "Got it."
His father cleared his throat. "Good."
Silence again. The companionable sort of silence this time.
"Well," Scorpius eventually said, acknowledging that they had run out of things to say, and that it would probably be considerate of him to just leave his father be for now, let him digest all that new information, "I'll just-" He made to get up.
"What about him?" The question came like a cough.
Scorpius froze mid-rising. "What about him?" he asked. He assumed that 'him' was Albus – one day, he would have to ask his father to actually say his name –, but didn't see the point of the question yet.
"Is he..." Draco gestured small loopings with his hand. "Is he sort of in love with you, then?"
Scorpius frowned at him. "He's-"
"Do you know that he's sincere?" he interrupted. "I mean, I don't want to imply that he's being malicious or anything-"
"... malicious...?"
"He might as well just be overwhelmed by your feelings and simply not know how to say 'no' for fear of alienating you-"
"Dad!" He held up his hands as if that would help stem that flood of well-meant if uncalled-for concern. If you had any idea about Albus and what he did for me...
On second thought: Boy, am I glad that you have no idea about Albus and what he did for me.
"Scorpius, I honestly don't mean to discredit this young man. I can see that you are- very fond of him. But tell me truthfully."
As if to emphasise the importance of the question, he walked around the armchair and sat down in it again, but on the edge, leaning towards his son, making unblinking eye contact and all.
"Do you think... Have you ever had any reason, no matter how small, to believe that he," he put a stress on the pronoun that slowed down his speech, before suddenly all the words rushed out of his mouth at once, "might only be together with you because he has a persistent helper complex?"
Scorpius gaped at him.
It sounded stupid. Really stupid.
He would have laughed.
Problem was that he had had the exact same idea five months and twenty seven days ago.
"Because," his father continued, speaking much more slowly again and illustrating the seriousness of his proposal with splayed fingers, "that wouldn't be surprising to me in the least. I- Let's just say that I know his type. Okay?"
His father leaned even further forward, scooting closer towards him so that he was only sitting on the very edge of the chair, about to fall down any second. It was all very conspiratorial. Scorpius even gave in to the urge to mirror his father's posture.
Of all the questions he had, the first one to jump off his tongue turned out to be, "What 'type' would that be, Dad?"
After some seconds of fishing for proper words, his father eventually said, with great urgency, "He's a Potter."
/
"He's a Malfoy!"
Albus rolled his eyes skyward. "Dad-"
He was sort of glad that this was literally his father's only point of contention. He had been vaguely afraid that there would be more general objections – say, on his whole being gay, maybe? – even though, deep in his heart, he had known those worries to be completely unfounded. His father was the most tolerant and kind-hearted person he knew, after all. He had been to Oliver Wood's wedding in Canada and everything.
Still, it would be nice if he could cease harping on about Scorpius like that. More specifically, his last name.
"No, son. You don't understand my meaning." He took Albus by the shoulders, looking him in the eye intensely. "He. Is. A Malfoy."
"I know, Dad-"
"A Malfoy."
"I'm perfectly aware that that's his last name, Dad."
"Do you know what this means?"
"Apart from the fact that we're very, very distantly related because our family tree is more of a family hedge?" he guessed.
"Your godmother punched his dad in the face once."
"I kno-What?"
His father brushed his question aside and tightened his grip on his shoulders a bit, even shaking him a little.
"I'm telling you, the whole family is bad news, Albus."
/
"It's all... politics with them. Politics and tabloid press. They're all famous – you know what I mean? Famous, mostly for being famous these days - the whole bunch, and you know how famous people can be..."
"Dad-"
/
"I really believe they're not trustworthy. I mean, no offence to the son, since I don't know him. I'm just saying that the apple rarely falls far from the tree..."
"But, Dad-"
/
"Frankly, I just wished you had picked any other boy..."
"Dad."
/
"Seriously, any other one would do. Well, not any other one. He'd have to be whip smart, talented, high principled, exceedingly handsome and drop dead sexy and all that, but... you know, what I mean..."
"Ugh, Dad, please-"
/
"I just want you to be happy. That sounds kitschy and more like something your mother would say without blushing, but it's still true..."
"Dad-"
/
"And I don't want you to get hurt, but I believe that with him, with that last name, it's pretty much inevitable that he will-"
"Dad!"
Albus very rarely raised his voice outside of a Quidditch pitch. He didn't think that he had been loud in this house since he had been four or so – Lily had been born then and both he and James had quickly understood that the rosy little thing in their mother's arms (which had resembled an angry potato with frizzy red hairs on top) needed a lot of peace and quiet lest it start wailing like a percussion drill for hours on end.
He had never fought with his dad – with his mum, yes, plenty, but his father simply never gave him proper reason – and thus had never yelled at him as long as he could remember.
This amplified the effect of yelling at him now quite a bit.
His father sat and looked at him, round-eyed, flabbergasted and – and this was the best part – wordless.
Al even thought he could hear people gasp in the kitchen.
"I understand your concern. I really do," he started, voice quiet and soothing. Fighting with his mum had taught him to always express empathy and understanding first. It calmed everyone's nerves, brought the blood pressure down and made the opposing side more susceptible for what he was about to say – even if what he was about to say flew in the face of his soothing words, or the other one's expressed opinion. He wasn't sure whether this tactic would work on his dad, too, since he had never fought with him before, but he reckoned that it couldn't hurt to try.
"You and Scorpius' father have some sort of an ugly history together, I know."
Sadly, he didn't really know. For some annoying reason, no one wanted to tell him anything much about that. His uncle George had once mentioned something about a ferret but then refused to explain it further. And just a few moments ago, his father had let slip something about aunt Hermione punching Mr Malfoy in the face, which was really confusing and practically begged for an extensive background story. Albus didn't doubt that it would fill seven books at least, and that it would be an engrossing, bestselling read.
He took a focussing breath. Back to the task at hand, as long as his father was still sitting there and listening readily.
"And I know that Mr Malfoy... Scorpius' father is a complicated person, and that his father was something of a fiend. I know there's a complicated family history."
Sadly, he really did know that.
In first year, there had been a student exchange with Durmstrang. Everyone was paired up with a Durmstrang student (who didn't speak any English) and made to accompany them on an excursion around the Hogwarts castle. A witch from the Ministry who was fluent in several eastern and northern European languages had lead the group, a neat little line of twos, stopping by certain rooms, portraits, statues and so on and telling them about the history, like a tourist guide in a museum.
They had halted in front of an otherwise blank wall, and the Ministry witch had explained that, according to several insider accounts, this had been the spot where the Room of Requirement had appeared when one Draco Lucius Malfoy, Death Eater of the Dark Lord Voldemort, had utilised the Vanishing Cabinet within to help Death Eaters infiltrate Hogwarts, an infiltration that had famously lead to the death of Albus Dumbledore some seventeen years before.
People had hushed, heads had turned – Al's included, because he hadn't known anything about any of that before. The Durmstrang boy who had been walking with Scorpius that day had stepped away, swearing in high-pitched Hungarian, and refused to keep walking next to him. So had all the other Durmstrang kids.
Scorpius had acted as if it didn't bother him and kept walking without a partner at the very tail end of the crocodile, but Albus had heard him cry later that night. It had taken a lot of patience to get him to talk about it all, and he had done some research, and so Albus had pieced together what the deal was with the former generations of the Malfoy family. Complicated indeed.
"But," he continued, "I am not together with Scorpius' father, or his grandfather. I'm together with Scorpius. And, sorry for pointing out the obvious, but... they are all different people, if you believe it or not," he added, trying to not sound too patronising.
"Albus-"
"Dad, please. I'm serious with him. It's serious with us. I simply ask you to give him a chance, that's all. You've never even exchanged a word with him."
His father's expression teetered on a knife's edge for a second, then finally softened a little. Albus let out a breath he hadn't noticed he'd been holding.
"Alright. Alright," his father mumbled in defeat, giving him a fatherly pat on the arm. "I'm sorry, Albus. It's just... I am... concerned." He smiled wryly. "Maybe overly so."
"So, uhm." Al bit his lip. That had been the hard hard part, now came the slightly easier hard part. "The problem is, really, that you don't know Scorpius, yeah? Vice versa, Mr Malfoy also doesn't know me. But we don't want to lie to anyone, or keep secrets from you, or even alienate anyone. No one should be uncomfortable. So Scorpius and I have been thinking..."
/
"Why don't we invite them over? So you'll get to know Al personally? See for yourself?"
"Them?!" Naturally, his dad had caught on to that plural pronoun like a shark smelling that one drop of blood in the ocean.
"Well, yes," Scorpius explained with a sigh, knowing that the stretch of road ahead would be a rocky one again. "Them. Al and his parents."
His father's eyes went wider at that than he had ever seen them and his mouth made a thin, flat line. Oh Merlin. That bad. One of these days, he swore to himself, he would somehow find out what exactly had transpired between his father and Harry Potter (and possibly Ginny Weasley) in the past.
Scorpius feigned nonchalance, though, thinking that if he didn't acknowledge his dad's imminent raptus potterphobicus, it might go away by itself.
"I'm just saying." He shrugged. "Mum said we should invite them. She wants to get to know Al personally, too, of course. And his parents, if only for some autographs and a selfie or ten, and to make the Shrewsburys jealous. She said it would make more sense to invite them all, instead of just Al by himself, because that would be awkward, wouldn't it?"
His mum had never said anything of the sort, but he knew she'd be thrilled and back the idea as if it were her own the moment he suggested it.
"When we talked about it," he went on casually, still ignoring the horror-struck look on his father's paling face, "she said that Saturday next week would be good."
Since he really hadn't talked to her about it, she had never said that, either.
She had, however, told him on another occasion that she and his father were planning to visit her aunt and uncle in London for a day, taking a portkey next week's Saturday evening around ten.
Which made that Saturday the ideal day for a dinner with the Potters, given that it would be over before ten one way or another, thus dramatically minimising the potential for escalation. Giving the whole enterprise an absolute time frame should, by rights, give his father something to cling to even if things turned sour.
Incidentally, this constellation of plans furthermore presented the ideal opportunity for Al to... stay over for the night. Surreptitiously, so to say. As a serendipitous by-product. Which, of course, he didn't need to mention at this point. He and Albus had rather planned to confront his parents and Al's parents with the fact and then send them on their long ways to London and Godric's Hollow respectively. Let them rage and spit hundreds of kilometres over yonder.
"Yes," his father mumbled with a strangely hollow sort of voice. "Yes, Saturday next week would be good, I'm sure. If your mum says so. Yes." He nodded slowly, reminding Scorpius of a bobblehead doll.
Scorpius pressed his lips together to stifle a pleased smirk.
He finished the conversation – his father was rather helpful in this regard, too, quite eager indeed to urgently go do something else somewhere else – and went to find his mum, to fill her in on recent developments and make sure that she thought it was all her idea. Just like the Coming-Out-Conversation with her, it was easier than he would have dared to believe. She practically embraced the plan like a second child.
Still gleefully smiling to himself, he made his way to his room to compose a letter to a certain Albus Severus Potter with whom he had an ongoing, now fifteen-day-old bet – for two sickles and the privilege of being the little spoon for a whole night – about which of them would manage to have The Talk with their respective father first. He was already mentally crowning himself the winner as he entered his bedroom and headed straight for the desk.
Much to his startled surprise, followed by much disgruntlement, gnashing of teeth and some creative swearing, he found his desk already occupied, though. Albus' tiny, snowy owl (whose name – Anchy, short for Angry Inch – was another one of those muggle references he didn't get because he had not elected to take Muggle Studies in fifth year) sat there, looking decidedly smug. A short, rolled-up letter was tied to his leg.
"Can't win them all, I guess," Scorpius sighed to himself as he moved to take Albus' note, already knowing what it would contain. Dearest Scorpius. Guess who just came out to his father and won a bet? Get ready to gently cradle me while you have my hair in your face aaall night long.
"Just you wait," he told the owl. "One day, we'll get to spoon the crap out of each other, for a whole night instead of just from half past midnight to four o'clock, and then I'll be the little spoon. Eventually."
Anchy simply stared at him, thinking owly thoughts.
/
TBC (tomorrow)
Shout-out to ChiffonShock for the family hedge, again! Thanks!
Double points for anyone who spots the bit I shamelessly stole from Dogma.
Triple points for reviewing! (Now there's a hint full of subtlety and grace...)