What am the Blaise am I doing?
“Wait here. I’ll get the scriptures,” Harry said as he made his way towards the other door.
As Draco waited, he perused the area around him. The nearest table was cluttered with Teddy’s schoolwork, a mixture of basic Muggle topics, as well as fundamental level books for non-heated potions, herbology, mythology, astrology, and there was even a book on everyday spellwork. There were also a variety of language workbooks: French, German, Japanese, and a handwritten one that Draco was becoming familiar with—High Fae.
“What, no Latin?” Draco said as he heard Harry’s approaching footsteps.
“We’ll start that next year, along with an introduction to runes, Old English, and cooking.”
“With all of this, will Teddy even need to go to Hogwarts?”
“Of course, if that’s what he wants. I’m only giving him foundational tools, so that he can think for himself when he enters a standardized educational environment.”
Draco quirked a brow and looked to Harry. “Thought you loved Hogwarts?”
Harry grimaced, his eyes lowering. “Over the years I have come to realize the flaws in Hogwarts’ educational system,” Harry said carefully. “I know since we left that McGonagall has strived to work towards more unity between the houses, and the teachers, for the most part, are experts in their fields. However, considering what was at the core of the war and what I now know, I find that the system is imbalanced. It was easy to hate Purebloods because I thought they were unjustified in their animosity, and the school enforced that belief.
‘I was, in every way but blood, a Muggleborn entering the wizarding world—essentially a foreigner. Outside of the curriculum, it would have been natural for someone like myself to have to learn about wizarding culture, just like a Muggle moving from one country to the next. Yet, there was really very little, socially speaking, that I needed to learn.
‘We live in a society that has forgotten the natural balance and shuns itself. Magick requires the Dark to balance out the Light and visa versa, but that’s not the whole of it either.” Harry’s gaze connected with Draco’s. “You were persecuted for your religion as well, weren’t you? For celebrating what it meant to be a wizard, for practicing Yule instead of Christmas, Ostara instead of Easter, Samhain instead of Halloween-”
“And all the other traditional wizard celebrations,” Draco finished with a nod. “Part of the fear was always that we would lose all of our ways in favour of Muggle ones—particularly the Christian ones, you know, the group that has historically prosecuted us the most.”
Harry sighed. “Sometimes I wonder, if everyone had taken just a moment, an hour, and sat down and just talked… How many lives could have been saved? And not just in this last war, but over the centuries?” He shook his head, eyes darkening with a watery sadness, and shook his head. “So that’s why I want to give Teddy the tools to see the imbalance for himself, to understand it, but also to go looking for the answers if he so chooses. And maybe somewhere down the line, someone will change the social standard.”
“But it won’t be you?”
Harry shook his head. “I’ve given my life for them. There isn’t anything left in me to give.”
Draco had no response to that. Harry was absolutely right. The wizarding world had already stolen far too much, his entire childhood and adolescence. They had done so without even batting an eye. And yet, despite that sacrifice, their world was hardly any better. Sure, one Dark Lord was defeated, but it was society that had created Voldemort, that had given him power and purpose. That society had hardly changed at all. If anything, it was even harsher on traditional wizards than it was before. Draco was well aware that he could be arrested and sentenced to life in Azkaban merely for existing.
“Why Japanese?” Draco eventually asked, aiming for a lighter topic.
“We’re learning that one together,” Harry said. “I figured Europeans couldn’t hold all of the answers, and Japanese had less Kanji and Pokémon. Teddy likes card games and the show’s not too bad. We enjoy both in their native language.”
“Pokémon. That’s the one with the little animals in the balls, right?”
Harry laughed. “That’s the one.”
Smiling, Draco nodded to the thick, leather volumes in Harry’s hands. “Are those the scriptures?”
“Mhm,” Harry murmured affirmatively and gestured for them to take a seat at an empty table. They sat across from each other, and Harry set the two tomes down, facing Draco. One was a black volume, embossed with a howling wolf encircled by a winged serpent—a Norse depiction of a dragon, if Draco had to guess. The second book was just as old looking, but the leather was a burgundy color and the embossment was of the Celtic Tree of Life. Harry placed his hand first on the black volume and then on the burgundy one as he said, “The Black Family’s and the Potter’s.”
“May I?” Draco asked, gesturing to the Black’s scriptures. He wasn’t sure he had a right to look at the other since he had no familiar connection to the Potter bloodline.
Harry pushed that one toward him with a smile and then looked out the window where they could see Teddy chasing Granger’s Patronus. Delicately, Draco ran his fingers over the embossment. The leather was smooth, it had obviously been treated recently. He could feel the magick in the tome, old and heavy. Ancient magick, like that at Hogwarts, but this was more familiar to Draco, it was like meeting a long-lost relative.
Carefully, he opened it. The pages were yellowed and uneven, and the first page was a drawing of the Celtic Tree of Life, surrounded by the same wolf and Norse dragon that was on the cover. When Draco ran his finger over the image, it rippled like water and then he felt a sharp poke. Flinching away, a drop of his blood splattered on the page. Immediately it was absorbed and the faded brown ink was renewed. His eyes widened as the wolf and dragon chased each other around the tree, faster and faster as the image of the tree zoomed inwards, honing in on one of the branches.
Draco Lucius Malfoy
His name appeared at the end of one of the branches. It was connected to his parents’ names, but another line only branched off from his mother’s name. He blinked.
“Is this a family tree?” he whispered, awed. “But, this book is too old to have me in it.”
“I haven’t had a chance to compare the magic to the Black Family Tapestry, but I think it’s self-sufficient, recording a true family tree, regardless of disinheritances. Andromeda and Sirius lines continue in this tree, whereas they’re pruned on the tapestry.” Using his fingers on the page, Harry zoomed out a little and scrolled over to Andromeda Tonks’ name, where it continued onward with Nymphadora and Edward Lupin.
“How’d you do that?”
With a soft chuckle, Harry showed Draco how to maneuver around the tree with his fingers, and soon he found himself completely distracted, studying an unaltered version of his family’s lineage—at least on his mother’s side. He made a mental note whilst he scrolled through it to go through the Malfoy vaults to see if they had one was well. It was nearly twenty minutes before he came to a curiosity. As far as anyone knew, Sirius Black had died a childless bachelor, naming his godson heir. However, a marital line connected his name to James Fleamont Potter and a child branch descended to H. ?. Potter-Black.
“Um, Harry?” Draco said slowly. Was this something he was allowed to ask? Hesitantly, his eyes fearfully rose to meet emerald green, but he was met with a soft smile and an open book. Harry had already rearranged the tree in the Potter book: James Fleamont Potter was connected to Lily J. Potter née Evans with a marital line, but he was also connected by marital line to Sirius Black III, and both unions had a childbearing line that descended to H. ?. Potter-Black.
“I don’t understand,” he said dumbly, looking from the two family trees to Harry and back.
“Neither did I, at first,” Harry admitted. “Their situation was certainly uncommon. The short version is that Sirius and my dad were magically bound by an ancient mating ritual, whilst my parents were legally married.”
“How is that even remotely possible? And how can you have three parents?”
Harry suddenly laughed, the sound deep and boisterous, reverberating off the bookcases. “The look on your face! It’s as if someone told you that the world was round or that the universe never ends, and your brain just stopped functioning.”
Draco flushed, but smiled. He loved the sound of Harry’s laugh. “Something like that.”
Sobering, but still with a warm smile, Harry closed the Black tome. “It’s possible because of Creature Inheritances.” He pointed to the embossed animals. “The Black line descended from the Wulf-kin and Dracan-kin unions, but in the case of Sirius, the Wulf-kin one is the one that matters. Of the Chosen Six, the two representatives of the Moon both had Tri-Sexes, that is, they were both species that had alphas, betas, and omegas.
‘Sirius, whilst still a human male, had enough magical wolf blood in him to also be genetically alpha. I don’t particularly want to get into wolf mating, but let’s just say it’s complicatedly simple and that wolves mate for life with a bonding ritual. Either way, his wolf blood allowed him to performed this ritual with James Potter, bonding their souls and magick together, and they considered each other mates.
‘The mating bond allowed them to perform another ritual on Lily Potter whilst pregnant, infusing Sirius’s magick with the fetus’s developing magical core. Therefore, making the baby—that is, me—biologically the child of James and Lily Potter, but magically the child of all three.”
Draco sat there stunned, his mouth opening and closing several times before he gave Harry a hard look, and asked, “So, just to be clear, you and I are not blood related?”
“Correct, we are not genetically related.”
Something within Draco relaxed at that and he gave a sharp nod. “Good.”
Silence settled between them again, and to be honest, Draco didn’t think of much of anything during that time. His brain hurt too much from the mind-bender Harry had just told him. He didn’t even have it in him to continue perusing either tome. Instead, he found himself watching out the window as Teddy continued to play. He couldn’t hear anything, but he could tell that the little cub was laughing, his chubby cheeks rosy and stretched in a gigantic grin. The kid had seemingly boundless energy, hardly ever stopping as he continued to chase the ghostly Patronus around the garden.
“Teddy calls me ‘alpha,’” Draco murmured after nearly a half hour of silence, his eyes remained on the cub outside.
Harry hummed in affirmative.
“Why?”
“You smell like one,” the werewolf said simply.
“Could I be like Sirius?”
Harry turned to him then, and he took a slow, deep breath, his eyes closing. He hummed softly and then shook his head. “You don’t smell like an alpha wolf.”
“But I smell like an alpha?” Draco tilted his head, his hair falling into his face.
Reaching across the table, Harry tucked the hair behind Draco’s ear, his fingers ghosting along Draco’s pale skin. “We’d have to see the Malfoy’s scriptures, but the Bakke-kin were also Tri-Sexed, and even though the Hafoc-kin and Fisċ-kin had only two sexes, they were highly disproportionate—vastly more women than men—and the scriptures describe some of their women to be alpha-like.”
Draco nodded along, half distracted by those tiny fingers. “When mixed with humans, what did those three make?”
“Bakke-kin became Vampires, Hafoc-kin became Harpies, but some books say that the Veela line might also come from them, and the Fisċ-kin are the Merfolk,” Harry said as his fingers followed the line of Draco’s jaw.
He paled a little. “I don’t really much fancy blood drinking.”
Harry chuckled, and his fingers fell away.