Author's Note: Wow. Talk about random update of the DECADE. :smirks:
Okay, so I'll be honest. Most of this chapter had been completed waaaay before now, and the reason I've waited so long to post it is because I finally decided the chapter wasn't going to get any longer and wrote a proper ending for it. Updates for this one are going to be a little sparse because I focus most of my attention on other projects. (:coughs: HpatFH :coughs:) Rest assured that I WILL eventually finish this one because I simply refuse to leave it as it is. It's intolerable. I'll force the ending out if I have to make my fingers bleed to do it.
Thanks to all the people who still review. (At this point, I'm still surprised I'm getting reviews for it. :sweatdrops:) Heh. Onward!
He Was Just A Boy
Capricious Purple Clarity
Chapter Three
"Now where are they going?" Hermione overheard Aedri's son ask in amusement. She turned an eye on him, realizing he was watching Harry disappear with the children in tow. She narrowed her eyes at the speculative gleam in William Black's knowing blue eyes.
"Harry volunteered to take the children to the privy," Ginny answered, smiling quickly at Sinclair. Obviously the girl had taken a liking to the blond Malfoy.
"Privy?" Sin mumbled in question.
"British term for the john," William answered with a smirk at his friend. "You're so ignorant, Sin."
"Hey, am not," Sin protested in a grumble. "Bollocks, bloody, bleeding, pillock, git, prat -so I don't know the British term for the can. Sue me."
"I've got a feeling," Will announced with a smirk, sliding a sly gaze at Sin.
"Do you?" Sin murmured casually, leaning against a table and sipping at his champagne flute.
"I do," Will said in delight. "The unveiling is near. Can't you feel it in your bones? It's almost like Fate. Come on, young grasshopper, before we miss the climax."
Luna looked at Will with that same vague, lackadaisical expression she'd never quite lost since her Hogwarts days. "Do you mean this is the time Harry finds out he's actually the father of those two children?"
Obviously, Hermione had heard wrong. For a moment, she'd thought Luna had actually assumed that the Malfoy heir's children belonged to Harry. When she saw the surprised look on Sinclair's face and the narrowed, measuring eyes of Will, she felt her stomach drop. "What? Luna, you can't be serious..."
"How ever did you know... Luna, is it?" William almost purred, casually hooking his arm around Luna's elbow. Hermione was hard-pressed not to boggle outwardly at the brash young man whose attitude needed a fair readjustment by her standards.
"Isn't it obvious?" Luna asked coyly. "They have his eyes. Mrs. Malfoy informed us that her son had been the carrier, and that the other parent was male. You yourself implied that Mrs. Malfoy's son had been wooed by a green-eyed man. I'd noticed that Sinclair seemed to stare quite hard at Harry when you'd said it."
"You're deceptively clever, sweetheart," Will murmured in commendation. "You almost appear as if your in a constant dreamlike state, but obviously that's not the case, is it? I like that."
Luna smiled absently. "Most people find it irritating."
"Most people are ignorant," Will said in dismissal. "Like Sin, only at least he has his moments."
"Gee, thanks, asshole," Sin muttered, tossing back the rest of his champagne and setting the empty glass on the table. "We going to follow or what? I'm having second thoughts about not warning Drake about this at all."
Hermione almost raised her voice, almost asked just what the devil were these people drinking to get them to even fathom that those children were Harry's at all, despite perhaps the uncanny resemblance that weren't only Harry's eyes... but the moment Sinclair mentioned the name 'Drake' was the exact moment that it struck Hermione.
"Oh, my God," Hermione murmured, eyes wide. She glanced at Ginny and Ron and found them in similar states of upheaval.
"Are you all completely mad?" Ron whispered loudly. "Harry would have told me if he'd slept with anyone!"
"Ron," Hermione said quietly, "it was... the summer after Sirius..."
"You knew and you didn't tell me?" Ron asked, sounding betrayed.
"I accidently came across a note," Hermione murmured plaintively. "Harry never intended for any of us to know. I didn't quite believe everything could be so... but then Sinclair mentioned Drake, which is obviously a shortened form of Draco... The note was signed Drake, Ron. It all fits."
"When I said their eyes reminded me of Harry's, I never even contemplated that this..." Ginny shook her head. "We've got to follow them! Er, to ensure that everything goes... okay?" Hermione was sure Ginny's hasty excuse sounded flimsy even to her ears.
"You're nosy and you know it," Sin said with a grin. "C'mon -safe bet, the twins wanted to go to their room to use the john simply so they could play with their toys after they were finished."
"I guess no one would listen to me if I suggested that we let the children sort it out between themselves," Aedri said casually, startling almost everyone except Will and Luna.
Will and Sin snorted derisively. "Get real, Dad."
Aedri shrugged. "Well, I tried."
"Rather half-assed attempt, but I give you points for unobtrusively including yourself in the party of observers," Will said wittily before, arm and arm with Luna, leading the group for a casual dash to the third floor.
"I have Extendible Ears for everyone," Ginny announced brightly.
"I know this nifty spell that allows a certain party to see through walls," Sin offered cheerfully.
"I can conjure popcorn I popped beforehand." Will smirked when everyone gave him looks. "What? Always be prepared, that's my motto. Right after 'Down with the Establishment.'"
"Just how long did you know in advance that Harry would even be here?" Hermione asked waspishly.
"Since yesterday," Sin replied with a smug grin. "We'll explain later."
"Or we'll just leave you wondering over our vast knowledge of the future," Will said nonchalantly. "Depends on my mood, I'm afraid."
----------
When Narcissa returned from dealing with the small catastrophe in the kitchens, she didn't really have time to wonder over where the American branch of her family disappeared to, nor why her muggleborn friend Hermione and the young woman's friends appeared to have gone missing with them. She fixed a polite smile on her face as she mingled with people she really had no desire to speak to -the Parkinsons and the Notts, two prominent pureblood families that escaped the wrath of the Ministry after the fall of the Dark Lord.
It wasn't until she managed to excuse herself from that circle that she realized she had not seen hide nor hair of her disgruntled son since the first guests arrived nearly two hours ago. It was then after a quick search that she found that Aedri and his family had somehow slipped away, which didn't surprise her in the least. It was the fact that Hermione, a young woman who wouldn't leave without a word unless there was a dire emergency to be handled, had disappeared along with them that shocked her. Even then, she would have made sure one of her friends stayed to inform Narcissa of the situation.
"Now where did everyone run off to?" she wondered out loud, thinking about going in search of them until someone else flagged her down. She sighed and pasted on a polite smile as she went to make sure her guests were comfortable, inwardly hoping that everything was all right with Hermione and her friends, and Aedri and his family...
----------
If Drake had gotten his way, he'd never have to go downstairs simply for the benefit of a bunch of his estranged parents' friends to parade around as the new Head of the Malfoy Lineage. The moment Narcissa had mentioned the event, he had done his best to shoot the idea down and let it lay dead and forgotten. Unfortunately his resolve was no match to his mother's hopeful eyes and pretty words asking him to allow her to prove that everything Drake had thought of his late father was superannuated. In the end he had relented... but he still wasn't quite happy about it.
His family. For the majority of his life, he had nothing but scornful words and scathing ire for his parents. After meeting them for a short time on his tenth birthday, he summed them up in four words. Standoffish. Purists. Elitists. Corrupt. His opinion of them decreased when, after demanding the truth, Aedri reluctantly admitted that Lucius Malfoy was a Death Eater, and the same was a possibility for his wife.
Death Eaters. Murderers, torturers, and the most feared kind of villain that haunted the British wizarding world. It shamed Drake to know that his so-called parents were nothing more than bigoted elitists that took hatred to an extreme level.
For years he strived to be nothing like them; thinking back on it now, Drake admitted that, in some cases, he went entirely too far. The hair, the clothes, the piercings, maybe even the smoking -those were the safe things, things he knew Narcissa and Lucius Malfoy would not approve of. Out of spite and an almost obsessive need to prove to himself that he would never be like them, he lost himself in a world of alcohol, drugs, raves, and all-night parties.
It wasn't until Drake was caught shoplifting and completely out of his mind on methamphetamine that Aedri slapped him with the cold, hard truth.
"In your efforts to prove you're nothing like them, Draco Malfoy," Aedri had said quietly to the sober, shame-faced fifteen year old, "you've proven that you could sink just as low, but on an entirely different scale. Congratulations. You are exactly what you didn't want to be."
Drake had decided, after a heart-rendering epiphany of epic proportions, that he needed to reevaluate and rebuild his entire character. He quickly and efficiently wrote the drugs and alcohol out of his life, did away with the raves and parties, and even took out the more extreme piercings. It was a constant but resilient uphill struggle... all up until the point he'd received word from Narcissa Malfoy that Lucius had been arrested and tried for Death Eater activities.
A solid thump sounded from the other room, startling the blond from his silent brooding. He smiled fondly when he heard the voice of his daughter followed by his son's trill reply, muffled through the solid oak door that separated him from the rest of the world. His precious children -probably the only thing he had ever done right in comparison with the rest of his tremulous teenage years. No matter his mood, his children, both fair of hair and skin and green of eyes, always filled his heart with warmth.
They reminded him of his elusive Green Eyes so much.
The man had been in the forefront of Drake's mind ever since he'd come to England, a constant worry over where and how Drake could find him niggling at him. Drake supposed that, when all things were said and done, he would probably peruse the extensive Malfoy Library in search of a tracking spell. It all seemed so extreme in retrospect, and who was to say his Green Eyes would even be interested in being visited by a one-night stand? He was almost certain that someone like his Green Eyes would have found somebody by now.
That didn't mean Drake could not or would not try. But rejection, no matter how kindly executed, was always a hard pill to swallow.
He snapped out of his silent musings, the blood in his body almost instantly freezing when he heard something that almost sent any father into blind panic.
Twin shrieks of terror.
In under a second he was bounding across the room, going as far as hurdling over an ottoman with his wand clutched firmly in his hand. He nearly pulled the door from its iron hinges in his hurry to get to his children.
"Valorie? Journey! What's-"
Twin blurs immediately hurdled themselves at him. "Daddy!"
----------
"This is it?"
"Un-huh," the little blonde girl nodded quickly, the loose ringlets of her hair bobbing at the motion. Harry suppressed a smile when she peaked up at him through her silvery eyelashes. Only moments before he had spotted Journey sneak the thumb of the hand Harry wasn't holding into his mouth, wrapping his small cherubic fingers around his nose like any true thumb sucker would. Both children seemed prone to sneaking quick peaks up at Harry and, in Journey's case, almost a minute's worth of a wide-eyed guileless stare of wonder.
"That's our daddy's room," the girl pointed out quietly as they entered the suite's private foyer, her outstretched finger indicating a closed door that emitted soft, muffled strains of music. "He's in there boo-ding."
"Boo-ding?" Harry inquired curiously.
"Uh-huh," Valorie said quickly. "Uncle Will says Daddy boods a lot and has dee-pessive psyo-ogical ish-shoes. I don't know what that means, though. I'm five." And she smartly held up that many fingers.
"Uncle Sin says it means Daddy is a sad, sad bastard," Journey said helpfully, "but I'm not supposed to say that."
Harry choked on his laughter. Charming imps, weren't they? Lucius would have been so proud... "I won't tell if you won't."
"'Kay," Valorie replied, sounding quite happy that Harry wasn't going to get her brother in trouble. "Are you gonna give us choc'late frogs now?"
Harry blinked at the abrupt turn in the conversation. "Am I meant to?"
"Uncle Will says that anyone worth respe'ting should give us choc'late frogs," the little girl responded boldly; clearly, the young Malfoy scion thought the world of her uncle Will, and his words were gold in her eyes.
"He says candy from strangers taste better," Journey added quietly, hiding a smile. "But Daddy an' Uncle Sin an' Papa Dri always hit him when he says it, so I think he's bein'... sa-cas-tic?" The boy looked to his twin sister for confirmation, uncertain as to whether he'd used the word correctly. His questioning look prompted a solemn nod from Valorie.
The girl seemed to realize at that moment that they'd left the party downstairs for a reason, and she ran to door that Harry could only assume was the lavatory. She shut the door behind her, leaving Journey and Harry to themselves. Harry turned to the boy, thinking of attempting to make some form of small conversation that was suitable for someone his age, but he immediately lost himself upon hearing a strange... humming?
"Na na nana na na nana na na nana na na nana... nanana... nanana... nana na na nana..."(1)
What in the world?...
He frowned, attempting to pinpoint the source of the strange, oddly familiar humming. "Do you hear that?"
"Hear what?" Journey mumbled, his words slurred around the thumb that had sneaked its way back into his mouth.
"You don't hear that humming?"
The boy tilted his head to the side. "You mean Daddy's music?"
Harry could honestly say that the strange humming was nothing like the throbbing music that was muffled by the closed door that Valorie had indicated was where her father was.
"Aha! Target sighted... Blast, where's the other lunchable?"
Lunchable?
The boy frowned suddenly, appearing wary as he started to look around, obviously ill at ease. "Satan?"
... Satan?
Before Harry could probe further, he could hear the toilet flush moments before the door to the bathroom flew open, and the little girl was making her way back to her twin's side. She didn't seem at all aware of the intruder that Harry could hear.
"There's my favorite morsel! Operation: Eat the Pets will commence in three..."
Wait... The faint sound of a... hissing?
"... two..."
That could only mean...!
"One!"
And a mammoth-sized boa constrictor was suddenly charging from under the safety of the couch, jaw unhinged as it made a cry that translated into, "Come into my belly!"
The twins shrieked in genuine fright just before Harry swept in front of them, holding his wand to the gigantic snake as he hissed fiercely, "STOP!"
Amazingly, the snake did as he was told. "You've employed a bigger Parselmouth?" the snake hissed at the children, sounding both surprised and disgusted. "Cheaters!"
It was at that moment that the door leading to the children's father's room was nearly torn from its hinges, a man rushing out of the room as quickly as he could while gasping out, "Valorie? Journey! What–"
The twins immediately abandoned their safety behind Harry, both making a mad dash towards the young man with exalted cries of, "Daddy!"
"Curses!" the snake hissed. "Thwarted again!"
"Satan tried to eat us again!" Valorie cried, pointing accusingly at the sulking boa constrictor.
"Darling, you know I can't understand you when you do that," the man said gently, kneeling before his children and hugging them close. He had soft, silver eyes that seemed slightly strained, if the faint, premature crow's feet around the corners of his eyes were anything to go by; the mark of a doting father who worried often. He had hair the same shade as the twins' platinum locks, but instead of the normal neatly styled hair that Harry was so used to seeing befitting a Malfoy (what he privately referred to as the secret mark of a Malfoy -not a hair out of place and amazingly immaculate), this Malfoy's hair was a little shaggy, ending just shy of his earlobes.
And then the man seemed to notice Harry for the first time; their eyes locked, and Harry felt a strange tug at his heart when recognition immediately set in. It was like... like losing something important so long ago, only to finally find it after long years of searching...
"It's you," Harry whispered, barely audible against the sound of his own blood rushing madly in his ears.
The man Harry had come to think of as Drake seemed equally as shocked. "Green Eyes..."
----------
Meanwhile, unbeknownst to their audience secretly watching from outside of the bedroom suit (courtesy a nifty see-through spell, a delightfully new contraption called Extendable Ears, and a large bowl of warm buttery popcorn that was being passed around), Sin thwacked Will soundly on the back of his head with the meaty part of his palm, glaring at the other man.
"You let that menace out?"
"Satan is not a menace," Will said defensively, rubbing the abused area sullenly. "He's just playing. The bratlings just misinterpret his actions as him trying to eat them again."
"You named an eight-foot boa constrictor Satan?" Hermione hissed, aghast.
"I think the name fits," Luna murmured dreamily.
"There. See? Luna thinks it's a befitting name," Will said boastfully, his tone indicating that he was thoroughly convinced that Luna's opinion was the only one that counted, and screw what anybody else had to say about it. "I couldn't leave him in his habitat, could I? It's unfair to him! He should be aloud to roam free and plunder... Oh, Merlin, look at their faces...!" He broke down, pointing and laughing at the indignant expressions on the twins' cherubic faces.
"You're terrible," Hermione declared hotly. "Utterly and unrepentantly cruel!"
"Ah, Satan knows Drake would have him for breakfast if the snakey jerk ever did anything to the twins," Sin said casually, shifting in his seated position against the wall opposite of Draco Malfoy's suite. "And Will would be the one fricasseing his scaley hide."
"In other words," Aedri said oilily, slanting a sly glance at the dark-haired man, "this is just another classic example of William's poor parenting skills."
"What parenting skills?" Sin muttered caustically. "Drake's still pissed over him almost losing Lor in a poker game."
As one, everyone in the hallway silently turned incredulous (or, in Sin and Aedri's case, long-suffering) stares to the recalcitrant and, more importantly, unrepentant dark-haired man, who faced them all with a smug smirk and a cooly raised eyebrow.
"Say what you will," Will responded confidently, "I still say that last card would have been the ace I needed for my royal flush, and I would have been proven right if Draco hadn't thrown his little snit after he kicked the door in. I so had that in the bank."
Ron summed it up in one word. "Degenerate."
Will shrugged delicately. "I can live with that."
END CHAPTER THREE
(1) It's MEANT to be the theme song from Mission: Impossible... It's so hard getting auditory humor across to the reader when words aren't really being used... Heh.
Review, please! Who knows? It might inspire me. :cheerful grin: