Chapter Text
January, 1999
“It’s more common than you might think,” Madam Pomfrey says.
Draco glances down at his belly. It’s flat, like normal. He’s always taken great pride in his figure.
“So there’s no need to be ashamed.”
What a joke. If his suspicions are correct, of course he should be ashamed.
“Alright,” she says, and then points her wand at his sternum. “Remember—a yellow light means you’ve tested negative. A violet light means the opposite.”
Positive, then. He nods and prays it won’t be.
Pomfrey murmurs an incantation that sounds like a song before stepping back. They wait for a long, tense moment.
Nothing happens.
Frowning, she tries again. Still, there’s nothing. No light, no fuzzy sensation, like what he expected.
Panic doesn’t immediately set in, but Draco feels it coming. “What’s wrong?”
“I don’t know,” Pomfrey admits, her eyebrows furrowed. “I’ve performed the HCG test on a thousand students before. It always works.”
Draco scowls. “What am I supposed to do, then?”
She sighs and tucks her wand into her pocket. “We’ll have to check for foetal tissue the old-fashioned way, I’m afraid. It’s not as reliable as the spell, but we’ll make do.”
“The… old-fashioned way?”
“Yes, Mr Malfoy,” she says, looking at him like he’s being obtuse on purpose. “Via a potion. I’ll request Headmistress McGonagall to order a batch from St. Mungo’s immediately. It should arrive by tomorrow evening, at the very latest. Once we’ve got it, the only ingredient we’ll need is a few millilitres of your blood. The liquid should transform as soon as it touches your DNA.”
“What?” Draco replies, fear settling in his veins. “Surely someone will notice a shipment of—of something like that and wonder who it’s for. I can’t have anyone finding out—”
“The school can be quite discreet when necessary, Mr Malfoy.”
“Oh, please! I’ve been here for seven years, I know how these things work.”
“Nobody at St. Mungo’s—or otherwise—will find out,” Pomfrey assures him. “Trust me. Unless you’d rather go about the next few months of your life not knowing?”
He blinks back tears. “Fine.”
Five minutes later, Draco runs into Potter, who’d been loitering outside the hospital wing for some reason. He looks dreadful, with his hair an even worse mess than usual and his uniform ruffled.
At the sight of Draco, he perks up. “Well?”
“Well, what?”
Potter rolls his eyes. “You know what.”
“Actually,” Draco retorts. “I don’t. Neither does Pomfrey, because the spell didn’t work. You’ll have to wait till tomorrow for the results. Sorry to disappoint.”
“You’re messing with me,” Potter says, frowning. “What d’you mean the spell didn’t work? She’s a bloody nurse. Did you let her do it properly?”
Draco glares. “Why on earth would I not ?”
“I don’t know! You’re mad! This whole thing is mad.”
“Wow,” Draco snaps. “Thanks a ton . That really helps.”
“Hold on. I didn’t mean it like that—!”
He storms off before Potter could do any more damage by apologising. Because if he does that, Draco might actually forgive him.
Draco heads to the Slytherin dormitories and collapses in his bed. He falls asleep almost immediately, relaxed into a slumber by the sound of Theo’s quill scratching paper on the opposite side of the room.
He absolutely does not dream about Potter’s huge cock. The cock in question, after all, is what had gotten him into this mess in the first place.
*
That evening at dinner, Potter keeps throwing him sad, pathetic looks across the Great Hall. Draco pretends it isn’t happening by spooning a bunch of food onto his plate.
Which leaves him stuck with way too many mushy peas. Seriously, nobody in their right mind would need the amount he scoops in front of him. Glumly, he picks at the pile of green paste and wonders what sort of cravings his mother had when she was pregnant with him. She probably wanted caviar all the time. Draco bet Potter’s mum spent nine months eating dirty potato skins. Would that happen to him?
“ Please ,” Pansy says at some point, “stop playing with your food. It’s disgusting.”
“I’m not—!” He glances down. The sausage is all hacked up like a murderer had gotten to it (or a deranged wife), and his mushy peas have spilled onto the table. “Did I do that?”
Pansy laughs and rubs his shoulder. “Oh, honey. We’ve all been there.”
*
During his post-shower skincare routine a few hours later, Blaise knocks on the bathroom door to let Draco know that his ‘boyfriend’ is trying to sneak into the Slytherin dorms.
“I don’t have a boyfriend,” Draco says. His blonde hair is tied into a high bun at the top of his head—baby hairs fall unevenly above his eyebrows—and his hands are covered in moisturising potion. “You know I don’t have a boyfriend, right? Are you okay, Blaise? Did you hit your head in defence today and not tell anyone? ‘Cause the mere idea of it is preposterous—”
Blaise seems unamused. “ Potter . Saviour of the wizarding world. The boy who lived. Your boyfriend. He’s making a huge fuss at the door to the common-room.”
Draco very deliberately does not react. “Interesting. Perhaps you should find Professor Slughorn so he can escort Potter back to Gryffindor Tower.”
“Or,” Blaise drawls. “ You could take him back, instead. You’re the only Slytherin who knows where the Gryffindor Tower is, after all.”
“I’m sure I have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Don’t be coy, it doesn’t suit you.”
“Fine.” Draco dries his face and ventures out of the bathroom. “Fine. You want me to tell Potter to piss off? Fine! Fine. I don’t care. I’ll do it. In fact, I’d love to. Fine!”
Blaise laughs as Draco storms through the gloomy common-room and up the staircase, which then opens up into a passageway lined with dusty tapestries. At the end of the passageway is a stone wall and, on the other side of the wall waits—supposedly— the Chosen One.
“Potter?” Draco asks, somewhat tentatively.
“Malfoy!” Potter says. “Finally! I’ve been waiting here forever. Can you let me in?”
“ Certainly not! Who do you take me for?”
“Please.”
“No.”
“ Please ,” Potter repeats. “We need to talk.”
“We’re talking right now.”
“Face-to-face! We need to talk face-to-face !”
Draco rather likes that idea—Potter has a good face, you see. Very masculine and nice to look at—but he’d choose death over actually agreeing to it. Mainly because he’s currently wearing the fluffy pink dressing gown that Pansy had bought him as a gag Christmas gift. Potter would never let him live it down.
“That’s not going to happen,” he says firmly, still addressing the wall. “So how about you just stop begging and instead tell me what you’re doing here?”
Potter sighs. “I’m worried about you. If you really are, you know , I wanna make sure you’re taking care of yourself. Did Madam Pomfrey recommend any, like, vitamins or anything? Hermione said that you’ll need, I dunno, supplements from—”
“Oh, Merlin,” Draco interrupts. “I must have misheard you. Granger is giving you advice about a hypothetical pregnancy? You do know it’s not happening, don’t you? Seriously, there is no way you knocked me up. You! Hah! You’re not even Pureblood.”
There’s a pause. “You mean—? Are you sure? I thought the test didn’t work.”
“It didn’t. I just know myself well enough after being alive for, oh, around eighteen years to realise that I wasn’t thinking clearly when I went to get checked. I mean, I’ve always been a bit of a drama queen…”
“Baby,” Potter whispers, and he must’ve moved closer to the wall, because Draco can hear the sadness in his voice all too clearly. “I understand you’re in denial, but your symptoms were pretty convincing.”
“Hardly. Okay, so I vomited a few times. Big deal. I vomited all the time in sixth year—ask anyone in Slytherin. Blaise even thought I had bulimia; it was rather flattering of him to assume so.” He licks his lips. “And don’t call me baby.”
“You’re comparing this to sixth year? Are you kidding me? Malfoy, you were working for Voldemort, of course you felt sick all the time! It was the guilt. This is different. You must see that.”
Draco twitches. He can see the difference, if he’s being honest. Plus, nausea isn’t his only symptom. His back has been hurting all the time, and his magic feels uncharacteristically weak lately. All early warning signs of a male pregnancy, as the body carves out space for a womb. Pomfrey had agreed; that’s why she suggested the HCG test in the first place.
“Go away, Potter,” he says eventually. “I’ll talk to you later.”
“Draco, don’t you dare shut me out. That’s my kid you’re carrying.”
“Maybe it’s not! Maybe I’m a huge slag and the kid is half-Hufflepuff! You don’t know me!” Draco retorts, walking away fast enough that he doesn’t get to hear Potter’s response.
*
The next morning, Draco is summoned to the headmistress’s office before he has a chance to see Pomfrey about that potion.
McGonagall is even more wrinkled than usual, her mouth pinched as he enters. Opposite her are, unexpectedly, his parents. There’s Mother in a black dress and there’s Father sitting beside her, naturally, in a set of matching robes. The portraits hanging up around the office are whispering amongst themselves like a bunch of nosy no-good neighbours.
“Um,” Draco says eloquently. “Hi?”
“Son,” his father greets, jaw clenched.
“Darling!” his mother exclaims.
“Good morning, Mr Malfoy,” Headmistress McGonagall says, standing up from her spot behind her desk. She gestures at the empty chair between his parents. “Have a seat.”
He does, though not particularly willingly.
“What’s going on?” he asks. An ickle first-year had disturbed him at breakfast with McGonagall’s note, Mr Malfoy—come to my office immediately, so he didn’t have time to eat anything. “I don’t suppose someone has died?”
His mother smiles at him. “Quite the opposite, darling. Do you have something you wish to tell us?”
Draco glances at her, then at his father, then at McGonagall. They all stare back, waiting.
“No?” he answers. “Not that I can think of.”
“You can be honest,” his mother says, still smiling. Weird. She never smiles for this long—she claims it hurts her face, probably due to all the botoxium spells. “We won’t be mad. Will we, Lucius?”
“No, Narcissa, of course not.”
“I’m so confused right now,” Draco says, feeling annoyed. All he wants is to eat his stupid burnt bacon and poke his tongue out at stupid Potter from across the hall, not be forced to sit in on some weird family meeting with McGonagall acting as mediator. Last time he was in a situation like this, he’d ended up with a Dark Mark, though back then it’d been You-Know-Who in front of him instead of the headmistress. He’s not sure which of them is scarier. “What am I supposed to tell you?”
McGonagall leans forward, placing her weight onto her elbows. “Perhaps Madam Pomfrey might jog your memory. Mr Malfoy, yesterday afternoon you visited the Hospital Wing and—”
“Oh!” Draco says. His cheeks flush and his hands get very clammy very quickly. “Oh! Ha! No, no, no. There’s been a misunderstanding. Whatever Pomfrey told you, she’s exaggerating. Honestly! Mother, Father, I promise I’m not—”
“Pregnant,” his mother finishes, grinning even wider, like some kind of shark. Or lion. Or piranha. Or— “We’re going to be grandparents .”
He shakes his head. “No! No, you aren’t! Because the test didn’t work, see? We’re waiting on the potion to confirm… Why are you all looking at me like that?”
His father clears his throat, and Draco twists around so his body is directed at him. “What?”
“The test did work, son,” Lucius says, not making eye contact. “We have certain… protocols… in place so that the HCG spell delivers it’s results to us in the event that you attempt to cast it on yourself.”
“It glowed bright purple, darling!” Narcissa exclaims, tugging him sideways into a hug. He barely manages not to fall off his chair. “Your father and I—we were sitting in the parlour—suddenly there was this beautiful light—and we realised instantly that you were carrying our grandchild .”
A beat. Comprehension drips from his skin in the form of a cold sweat. Did McGonagall’s office always seem this small and suffocating?
Abruptly, Draco stands up, anger flooding his belly. “That is so an invasion of my privacy,” he hisses, wanting desperately to cry but unable to, not yet. Not with Headmistress McGonagall there. “Seriously. Not cool.”
“It isn’t proper for a Pureblood to hide the existence of their heir, Draco,” his father explains, attempting to calm him down. “There is history in our family of concealing pregnancies. We did not wish to repeat my grandmother’s mistakes.”
“Shut up, shut up, shut up,” Draco says. “ La la la la! I’m not listening!”
“Perhaps you should take a deep breath in, Mr Malfoy,” McGonagall suggests.
“No, thank you, I’m leaving,” he announces, rushing to the door. “Oh, and by the way, Father , there’s not going to be any ‘hiding’ of an heir because I. Am. Not. Pregnant.”
*
Since returning to Hogwarts in September, Draco hasn’t done much except sulk in his dorm and procrastinate on his essays. He tried, once, to study in the library, but ran away when he saw that all the tables were already taken. No way was he gonna sit and do small talk with some nerdy stranger. That would be hitting rock bottom.
“What, you mean make friends?” Pansy snarked at the time, and Draco had resolved not to speak to her for the rest of the day.
After escaping the headmistress’s office, his instinct is to hide out in the Slytherin dormitories, which is what he normally does when something upsets him. (‘Something’ could, and had, ranged from getting a big fat T scrawled on his potions report, to losing his virginity to the saviour of the entire wizarding world, but that’s neither here nor there.)
He’s halfway to the dungeons when he remembers it’s Sunday, so everyone else will be down there, too. That’s why he turns right back around and heads to the Astronomy Tower—students rarely hang out there, especially after Dumbledore’s death, so he figures he’ll be able to cry in peace.
It’s like meditation. He breathes in, ignoring the flutter in his belly as he walks up the staircase. He breathes out, thinking about little fingers holding his thumb in nine months time. He breathes in again, out again, in, out, till finally he’s leaning against the tower’s ramparts, staring out over the vast grounds.
Silence surrounds him. Solitude, he thinks gratefully, is precisely what he needed.
Draco has always wanted children—tiny feet pattering on floors, shrieking cries of dada waking him in the night, broomsticks shaking under the weight of a toddler clumsily climbing atop it in the summer heat. And he wanted to do it all with a man that would cherish him. A man who wouldn’t care about what crimes Draco may or may not have committed between the ages of eleven and seventeen.
But now… it would never happen like that. Not with Potter in the picture, anyway, who hadn’t made any effort to reach out after Christmas Eve, at least until Draco sent him an owl with a short note attached that read, simply, Meet me on Quidditch field after lunch. We need to talk.
Draco supposes this is what he deserves for sleeping with someone who spent the last seven years hating him. It’s probably bad karma leftover from the war. Azkaban didn’t get to have him, so the universe is punishing him in a different way.
Fuck. His whole body is starting to tremble, and it isn’t even that cold.
“Malfoy?”
Draco flinches, not expecting the voice behind him, and turns around. It’s Weasley who he finds standing at the entrance to the tower.
“Oh,” Draco says. There’s disappointment stirring in his stomach, which he presses down, down, down, because he refuses to be disappointed that it wasn’t Potter who had come and found him. He has negative zero reasons to want that.
“Er,” Weasley says, scratching the back of his freckled neck. “Are you—”
“I’m fine.”
“Okay, good for you, I guess, not that I really care. I just wanted to know if you were using the tower? ‘Mione likes studying up here, right, and she has an astronomy exam coming up, so, er…”
Draco feels his cheeks flush pink. “Sure. Whatever. I’ll go.” He shoulders Weasley on the way out, feeling a spike of old vindictiveness in him. As he does so, a thought occurs to him —Granger doesn’t even take astronomy.
Without turning back, he yells, “Remember to use protection spells!”
After all, Draco thinks, he can’t have Granger getting pregnant too and stealing his thunder, especially this close to the N.E.W.T.s. She’d probably burn the school down in some sort of hormonal, mummy-fugue state. He imagines a Granger in her third trimester would be more dangerous than You-Know-Who.
Weasley makes sputtering noises, but he doesn’t deny the implication. Laughing, Draco feels his mood sufficiently lifted, and almost manages to forget why he went to the tower in the first place.
*
He tells Pansy everything, because Pansy would probably murder him in cold-blood if he didn’t. And since Draco now has a baby to think about, he can’t exactly let himself get murdered in cold blood, can he?
“ Potter is the father?” she says.
“Yes.”
“ Harry Potter?”
“Unfortunately.”
“Your arch-nemesis? Your rival going on eight-years? That Harry Potter? You’re absolutely sure?”
He crosses his arms. “You don’t need to make it sound so preposterous.”
“ When ,” she hisses, “did you even find the time to fuck him?”
“Christmas Eve,” Draco says. He’s rather embarrassed about this particular aspect of the story—it’s all well and good to claim that he managed to seduce the saviour of the wizarding world, but that isn’t how it happened at all. The reality was, they’d both gotten extremely drunk and, subsequently, extremely stupid , which was most evident in the fact that Potter ended up coming inside Draco after a measly thirty seconds of thrusting. Not exactly a one-night-stand that would go down in the history books.
Well, maybe it would, seeing as the Chosen’s One’s heir had resulted from it.
“Christmas Eve,” Pansy echoes, clearly thinking about her own memories of that night. The ball that Headmistress McGonagall had allowed the eighth-years to organise… the subsequent spiking of the punch by someone (it was Blaise. It was always Blaise)… everybody growing more and more drunk and horny as the evening progressed… “You whore !”
Draco rolls his eyes, then rolls them again, because he finds the notion that he was a ‘whore’ to be an incredibly ridiculous one. “Says the girl who gave her first blowjob when she was fourteen.”
“We promised to never talk about that.”
“Whatever. I slept with Potter, it was a mistake, and now it’s an even bigger mistake which my parents know about. Any more questions?”
Pansy tilts her head and says, “Can I be the godmother?”
*
That night, he experiences a serious case of deja vu. Water is dripping from his chin, there’s a towel tied loosely around his bony waist, and he’s about to start the next step of his skincare routine. In the same moment Draco straightens up to look at himself in the mirror, Potter’s face appears in the reflection behind him. The sense of deja vu comes from a dream he once had of a very, very similar scenario, though in that dream—fantasy, whatever— Potter had been naked, too.
“Merlin!” Draco squeals, the towel dropping to the floor, exposing him. His heart beats loudly in his chest. “What the fuck , Potter? How did you—?”
“Zabini let me in,” he explains, moving further into the Slytherin’s bathroom like this is an entirely normal situation for them to be in. Like they visit each other post-shower all the time. Potter grabs the towel from the floor and helps wrap it delicately around Draco’s hips. “There you go.”
“You are such a pervert,” Draco says, glaring and trying very hard to pretend that the sensation of Potter’s fingers gracing his waist hadn’t felt like a touch of heaven. “I’m definitely telling the Daily Prophet all about how much of a creep their beloved saviour is. The story will sell for millions , you know.”
Potter smiles. “I don’t mind if you do that, as long as you promise to mention that I’m gonna be a daddy real soon, too. I want them to have their facts straight about who I’m perving on and, you know, why. ”
Draco’s tongue glues itself to the roof of his mouth. Where a moment ago he didn’t care that Potter could see his entire torso and bare arms, he now feels very naked. Vulnerable. It’s a stupid feeling, because he isn’t even showing yet, he’s as beautifully skinny as he’s always been. Plus, Potter has seen it all before, in a much more intimate setting: the plethora of scars running diagonal across his chest, the freckle below his left nipple, the line of fine, white hair growing along the centre-bottom of his belly.
“It’s true, isn’t it?” Potter asks, unaware of Draco’s train of thought. “I am gonna be a daddy? Neville said he ran into your parents this morning, and there’s only one reason they’d have come all this way…”
“Can you—um.” Draco clears his throat. “Do you mind letting me, uh, get dressed?”
Potter blinks in surprise, glancing up and down at his naked figure. “Right. Of course. I’ll meet you in the hall.”
Once Draco has finished combing his hair, and pulled on his fluffy pink dressing gown, he exits the bathroom with a dry throat. As promised, Potter’s waiting for him outside, tapping his foot on the stone floor with his arms crossed. It’s such a bizarre sight—Potter in his red tie and too-tight uniform, huddled away in the cold Slytherin dungeons. Like if you saw a snake walking on two legs.
He raises his head when Draco approaches him. “There you are. You took forever.”
“I had to get clean.”
“Yeah, you’re super clean and pretty, I get it,” Potter says, nonsensically. He barrels on before Draco can try and comprehend his words. “I started reading this book on wizard pregnancies. It’s really fascinating. Did you know that your magic is going to create, like, a womb for you? Apparently it’s the same sort of magic that a Metamorphmagus uses, except since you’re not a Metamorphmagus, the process is gonna tire you out a lot…”
A second-year scoots past them on his way to the toilet. Draco closes his eyes and prays that the kid didn’t hear anything incriminating.
“Er, what was I saying?” Potter asks. “Oh, right, so the other parent is meant to support you with their own magic—”
“Do you think I’m an idiot?” Draco interrupts, narrowing his eyes. “ Obviously I know all that. Not everyone was raised by Muggles! That stuff is totally common-sense.”
Potter frowns. “Okay, you don’t have to yell. I just want to help you with this, so would you stop trying to pick fights?”
“I’m not trying to ‘do’ anything,” he says.
“Good.”
“Yes. Good.”
There’s a pause. The second-year returns from the bathroom and squeezes quickly past again.
“So?” Draco says, after he’s sure they’re alone.
“So… what?”
“So… did you have anything else you wanted to talk about, or are you done?” Draco asks.
Potter sends him an incredulous look. “Are you kidding me? We’re having a baby together. We’ll need to be communicating about everything all the time, now. That means no more shutting me out or keeping secrets or—or not letting me come to your appointments with Pomfrey.”
Frowning, Draco says, “You’re assuming a lot, you know. It’s impolite.”
“ What ?”
“Maybe I don’t want the baby,” he says, pleased when Potter’s face turns white with panic. “ Maybe my next ‘appointment’ with ‘Pomfrey’ will be to terminate the pregnancy.”
“You won’t. Tell me you won’t,” Potter says, grabbing Draco by the hands.
He wrenches out of Potter’s grip. The joke isn’t funny anymore, he thinks, not when the idea of it has clearly disturbed Potter so much. “Very well, I won’t. My parents would disown me if I did, anyway. Well, actually, they’re probably going to disown me no matter what, as soon as they realise the baby will be a bastard.”
Draco’s mind turned to that morning. His mother had seemed extremely happy with the news, and his father a bit more neutral. Their moods will certainly change over the coming few weeks, when the reality of his situation actually sets in. They’ll ask questions about who the other father is… when they’re getting married… why Draco put-out in the first place… Oh, Merlin. It’ll be a living nightmare.
“Don’t call our baby a bastard, okay? They’re not going to be a bastard, I promise,” Potter says. He attempts to hold Draco’s hand again— weird, super weird — and adds, “Hey, since you told your parents, do you mind if I start telling people? It’s only fair.”
“Uhhhh. It would depend on who, exactly.”
“I dunno. Everyone? Mr and Mrs Weasley, obviously, plus Ron and Hermione—that goes without saying—and maybe Luna. Hagrid, for sure. He’ll be over the moon. I suppose I should mention it to the other Weasley’s too, probably all at the same time, right? And then I’ll want to let Kreacher know, so he can baby-proof Grimmauld Place for us… Neville, Seamus and Dean as well, ‘cause it’d be rude if they found out from someone else… Dumbledore’s portrait, unless he already knows, somehow? The portraits are such gossips… Oh, and I’ve been keeping in touch with Stanley Shunpike since his trial. He’ll be really happy for me… Hey, do you reckon I should make a list?”
Draco realises, suddenly and profoundly, that he has made a huge mistake. The entire school is going to know by this time next week, because Gryffindor’s are notoriously incapable of keeping their mouths shut.
“I need to go to sleep. Good night,” he announces, while Potter is in the middle of predicting how Nearly-Headless Nick will react to the news.
“Wait, hold on.” Potter hesitates. “Can we go to Hogsmeade together in a few weeks? I’ll—I’ll buy you whatever sweets you want.”
Suspicious, Draco considers Potter. It sounds a lot like the proposal that had caused this situation in the first place. Should we go up to my room? I’ll take care of you if you want. “Why?”
“Because we need to be on good terms for this to work?”
Draco sighs. He can’t argue with that logic, although he does wish he had come up with it before Potter. Inwardly, he vows to be the smarter parent from hereon. Potter can’t continue to be the only one that has all the good ideas. “Yes, okay. But you need to take me to Madam Puddifoot’s tea shop. She’s recently invented a new lamington flavour that costs more than my weekly allowance.”
“Yes! Whatever you want! Wait, did you say Madam Puddifoot’s —?