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Chapter Thirteen—Scandals

"Mr. Potter! Just the wizard I was looking for."

Harry felt as though someone had stabbed him in the back with a giant needle. But he knew showing weakness to this man would only make him more likely to exploit it, so he turned around slowly, one arm wrapping James close to him and the other shifting Sela back to his shoulder from where she had started to climb down.

"He's upsetting you. Who is he?"

Harry didn't reply in Parseltongue the way he ordinarily would have. The sharp, expectant smile on the face of the wizard in front of him said he thought that would happen, and he was looking forward to offering Harry faux concern about it should it happen.

"Hello, Mind-Healer Bandler," Harry said, as neutrally as possible.

James curled closer to him still. They were in one of the smaller, narrower alleys off Diagon where specialty shops and some homes were located, and at the moment, they were the only ones outside in the street. That could change so quickly if Bandler chose to call attention to them. And Harry would not have James in danger.

"Let me bite him."

Harry said nothing, but Sela seemed to have picked up from his tension that her particular brand of help wasn't welcome right now. She withdrew sulkily to curl around his neck.

"Fascinating," Bandler said, his eyes darting back and forth between James and Sela and Sapphire, who hung in a floating bag of water next to James, before they returned to Harry. "You went from being properly ashamed of your dirty gift to flaunting it in public."

"It's not dirty!"

Harry nearly crushed James with a one-armed hug, and James had the sense to shut up, too.

"Aren't you the least bit upset about passing that filth to your son?" Bandler took a step nearer, his hands clenching and unclenching. "Turning him into a Dark wizard without a choice about what he is? Making him into a sullied reflection of yourself?"

Rage ignited in Harry. He had felt some of it ever since he'd turned around to see who was behind him, but he'd been far more worried about Sela and Jamie and keeping them safe. He hadn't realized how much it would choke him as the flame rose.

"Don't have a thing to say, Potter? A damaged Dark Lord—"

Harry had intended to walk away and not say anything in return. With the way that people were so eager for scandal about him, so eager to hear that he was evil and broken, any attack on Bandler wouldn't be worth the fallout.

But his anger seemed to have grown or changed or become more awake since the last time he had seen the Mind-Healer. Harry found himself reaching out with giant invisible fingers and wrapping them around Bandler's throat.

Bandler's voice trailed off in a gurgle. Harry stepped closer to him, making sure that Jamie moved with him and Sela wasn't trying to crawl down his arm again, and drew his wand, enveloping them in a Privacy Charm. Someone could walk right down the middle of the alley and not see them unless they were expecting them to be there.

The problem was, someone might. Bandler might have brought someone along to be an audience.

So Harry had to handle this quickly.

"You won't bring your filthy accusations near me again," Harry said softly, "or near my son." Jamie wasn't saying anything, but he was trembling, and Sapphire had begun to swim in his container of water, trying to get to him, in a way that told Harry more clearly than anything else how distressed his son was. "If you do, then you'll simply die."

He released the constriction on Bandler's throat enough that the man could speak, and he promptly gasped, "You—if you killed me, you'd be the first suspect!"

"Sure," Harry agreed easily. "But that would be the case even if you died a completely natural death, with the way that you've made them look at me. So I might as well kill you, right? In a way that doesn't immediately trace back to me. Then I'll weather the Auror interrogation and go back to walking free."

"You c-can't—"

"You took away everything you could," Harry said softly. "My privacy, my public reputation. You would have taken away my son if you thought you could. And now I'm back to being a Parselmouth and someone who uses spells that others think are Dark Arts to defend what's left. So why shouldn't I?"

"Someone would find out!" Bandler managed to gasp all the words out in one string, which was impressive in a way.

"Oh, only if they really looked." Harry smiled a little wider. "And I think we all know that a real Parselmouth, and a real Dark wizard, would only make this kind of threat if he knew an undetectable way to kill you, wouldn't he?"

"You—someone would find out!"

"Let me bite him," Sela said, but wistfully, as if she just wanted to frighten Bandler with her hissing more than anything else.

Harry tightened his hold on Bandler's throat with magic, held it until his face was turning bright red and he looked as if he would pass out, and then released it and sent Bandler reeling away with a little contemptuous shove of pure force. "Go on."

"You—you're not going to kill me?" Bandler fell back a step, massaging his throat. He straightened a second later and put on his arrogance again as if it were a cloak that he had momentarily let drop on the floor. "Of course you aren't going to kill me! But what's going to stop me from reporting what you did to the Aurors?"

Harry smiled at him and gestured lazily with his wand. "Obliviate."

Bandler's mouth gaped open for a bit. Harry leaned nearer and murmured, "You came to find me, but you couldn't. Go back home and suffer from a headache and a vague fear that you can't account for for a few hours."

Bandler shivered, turned, and tottered off. Harry stepped back, shaking his head, and turned to face his son.

Jamie looked up at him. At some point, he'd started crying, and the tears had made small streaks on his face. Harry bent over and gently wiped them off, floating Sapphire's bag nearer so that Jamie could rest his hand in the water.

"You made him go away," Jamie whispered.

"Yes," Harry answered in Parseltongue. "He won't ever come back and bother us again, Jamie, or I'll make sure that something even worse happens to him. I promise." He hesitated, wondering if he had frightened James.

But Jamie just cuddled closer and whispered, "You're saving me, Daddy," and then held out his arms to be picked up.

Harry did it, and walked a little faster down the small alley towards the Apparition point at the end. He'd wanted to take Jamie to a restaurant here, a sort of test of whether they could stand to be around people—and whether people could stand it without immediately trying to accuse them or hex them—but they needed to be home right now.

"What did you do to him?"

"I Memory Charmed him."

Draco put down his silverware and frowned at Harry. It had proven hard to lure him into eating a meal with Draco and Scorpius, even though he was perfectly happy to let James do it. Harry had put Draco off with excuses a few times before Draco had pointed out that he was doing it, and Harry had laughed and admitted it and agreed to come to dinner.

And then he had casually mentioned that he'd run into Leroy Bandler, the Mind-Healer who had betrayed his secrets, and acted as if it was no big deal.

"Just that?"

"And half-choked him, and threatened to kill him."

"You should have killed him there," Draco said harshly, and glanced sideways only once at James and Scorpius. They didn't seem to have noticed. They were arguing in Parseltongue over the small Gobstones set that Draco had given Scorpius.

"As he pointed out, I would be the natural suspect in his murder." Harry had a sharp smile when he wanted to, one that reminded Draco of Edwina's fangs. "So I thought it best to threaten him into backing off, and then take the memory away so that he couldn't run to the Aurors the way he obviously wanted to."

Draco crossed his arms.

"What would you have done, O wise genius?"

"Hurt him in some way that would have made him reconsider ever coming near me again. I don't understand why he was confronting you anyway, if he thinks that you're a Dark Lord or someone so tainted by Dark Arts that you could hurt him with your mere presence."

"At a guess?" Harry tilted his chair back, hooking his feet under the table's edge. Draco opened his mouth to say something, then closed it. Harry wasn't a child. "His money's running out, and he's trying to come up with a new way that he can make more off me."

Draco blinked. "I thought Mind-Healers were paid well. And he would still have been, given that they didn't sack him when he exposed your secrets."

Harry shrugged with a long sigh. "He didn't receive the kind of negative reaction from the public when he exposed my secrets that I would have liked to see, or Hermione—"

Or me, Draco thought viciously.

"But it might have made other people think twice about going to him as a Healer. What's to say that he wouldn't decide to expose their secrets as well?" Harry stared past Draco's head for a second with his jaw twitching. "I wish I hadn't tried to talk to him, but I can't change that. I can keep him from bothering me and Jamie in the future, though."

"You'll have all the help with that you like."

Harry blinked as if the statement had surprised him and glanced at Draco with a small smile. "Thank you."

"Is there any particular spell you're thinking of?"

"Spell?"

"To get him to leave you alone," Draco said, as patiently as he could.

"I already used a Memory Charm."

"But you could use something more than that, something painful. Permanent." Draco discovered he was trembling a little, his hands clenched in front of him, and Harry eyed him cautiously. "I want to help you get vengeance on him for hurting you. You have no idea how much, Harry."

Harry's cheeks tinted with pink so sharply that he looked for a moment as if he might faint. He glanced away and swallowed. "Thank you, Draco. But I don't want news of that to somehow get out and damage the reputation of the school, or of Parselmouths."

"I would be the one to make that decision."

"If it got out?"

"If I was willing to take the risk."

Harry muttered something under his breath that Draco didn't catch, but which displeased Sela, if the sharp way she nudged Harry with her snout was any indication. Harry reached up and gently stroked her neck for a moment, not taking his eyes from Draco.

"The school is something larger than both of us," Harry said at last. "A place where Parselmouth children can feel safe in a world that will hate most of them for the language they speak. No, I'm not willing to risk its reputation, or yours, because you'd like to take vengeance on a man I already scared off."

"If I said that I was?"

"Then I would walk away, and you could find yourself another History teacher."

From the way Harry's eyes were narrowed, Draco knew it wasn't just the school Harry would walk away from. He swallowed and bowed his head. "I understand," he whispered. "I would have liked it to be different, but I understand."

"Do you?"

"I understand that you forgive people too easily, and that I wish it were different, but it's not," Draco snapped. "But I also want you to know that if someone insults you after this, and I'm around and able to do something about it, I'm not going to hold back."

Harry blinked for a long moment. Then a soft smile curled up the corner of his mouth. "I wouldn't expect you to."

"At least he understands that much," Edwina muttered from her sulky curl around Draco's throat. She hated it when he had anger that someone else forbade him from expressing, even if it was himself.

Draco touched her scales and nodded to Harry. "Let's discuss something else, then. Is it true that Oliver Wood is coming back to Puddlemere United? I thought there were rumors he was going to play for the Cannons if he ever returned to the game."

Harry laughed. "Rumors from the depths of Ron's fevered dreams, maybe."

And just like that, the conversation slid back into a gentle, normal place. Draco couldn't regret it. If Harry had been the revenge-obsessed person Draco had briefly wished he were, after all, he probably wouldn't have given Draco a second chance, either.

Harry stared at the Burrow for a second, and then sighed. He had avoided the house, and Molly and Arthur, since he'd begun teaching for Draco's school. He told Ron and Hermione it was because Ginny was over more often now that she was pregnant and he didn't want to run into her, but he knew what it was, really. A rejection that would only happen face-to-face couldn't happen if he refused to meet those people face-to-face.

But honestly, he did want to know if he had anything to fear, after all. He shifted Sela on his shoulder and reached out for Jamie's hand.

The door of the house opened before they got more than a few meters away from the Apparition point. Jamie let out a shout of glee and raced towards Molly, his hands outstretched. "Grandmama! Grandmama!"

Molly snatched Jamie up and spun him in circles, careful not to bump Sapphire, who Harry's magic had tugged after Jamie when he ran. "Who's my big boy? Look at you, Jamie! Those bright eyes of yours!"

"It's me!" Jamie said, laughing, and then held out his arms to Arthur, who scooped him up and bounced him high, probably with the aid of a charm. Harry didn't want to admit it, but both Molly and Arthur had more grey in their hair now, and less strength than to bounce a four-year-old without the aid of magic.

Molly turned around, beaming, and saw Harry. Harry supposed he was lingering awkwardly at the edge of the garden, and he took a deep breath when he saw Molly put her hands on her hips.

"Harry James Potter."

"I know, I should have brought Jamie sooner," Harry said softly, walking towards her and wondering if she would say something about the school right away or wait until Jamie was out of earshot.

"That is absolutely not what I was thinking—"

Arthur coughed loudly from behind Molly.

"It's only half of what I was thinking," Molly corrected herself, and wrapped her arms around Harry. He exhaled, surprised, but hugged her back. He hadn't even noticed her crossing the distance between them.

"We love you," Molly said softly into his ear. "We're your family."

Harry squirmed a little. He didn't want to make them choose between him and Ginny, and that was probably an even realer reason than worrying what they would say about the school and his friendship with Draco that had made him avoid the Burrow. "I never meant to cause so much trouble and upset."

Molly sighed deeply, hugged him once more so hard that Harry thought his ribs might liquefy, and stepped away from him. "I know you didn't. And neither you nor Jamie can help being Parselmouths. Both of you will always be welcome here. If you don't want to come when Ginny and Seamus are here, that's fine. You can tell me. But don't feel as if this isn't your home, too, or Jamie's home." She gripped his shoulders and shook him a little. "Do you understand?"

"Yeah," Harry said softly, awed despite himself. His worries turned to smoke and flew away.

Molly took a deep breath and turned to face Sela, on Harry's shoulder. "And who is this? Ron mentioned you had a snake, but not her name."

"My name is Sela, and tell her that she looks like a proper Gryffindor."

Harry smiled a little. He would bet that was Sela's preference for intense shades of red and gold making itself known. "Her name's Sela. She says that you look like a proper Gryffindor."

"Thank you, dear," Molly said, obviously talking directly to Sela. "We'll have to see if we can Summon a mouse or two for you to eat." She glanced at Harry, and Harry nodded. "Now, come inside and have tea."

"I like her," Sela said to Harry as they followed Molly into the house, after Arthur and Jamie. "Why were you so afraid to come here for so long?"

"I was afraid she would judge me for being a Parselmouth, because she's the mother of Jamie's mother."

Sela touched Harry's cheek with a soft flicker of her tongue. "That was stupid. They are separate people."

"Yeah," Harry said softly, watching the way that Arthur made silly faces at both Jamie and Sapphire, and reached out to tickle the side of the water bag and Jamie's hair at the same time, while Molly bustled about getting the tea things. "I'm beginning to see that."