Title: Retribution for the Rape of Chrysippus
Word Count: 9,600
Rating: R
Warnings: Mildly uncomfortable themes, including cruel language, physical confrontations, and slightly dubious consent. Un-beta’d. For a bit of background, see the Author’s Note below.
Summary: While British wizards mark Midsummer with bonfires and Maypoles, a mildly classist Scorpius teaches Albus something about tradition.


Author’s Note: [You might want to read this!] You know that scene from Fight Club in which Tyler Durden holds the sobbing Narrator down for a lye burn in order to give him a lesson in acceptance of suffering? This is sort of like that.

This fic is six months in the making. I think that the idea for this story came from a conversation I had with a few students who were under my charge this summer. One of the students, a young woman from Turkey, was explaining to another girl from the United States that, where she grew up, it’s quite common for uncles and older cousins to hire a prostitute for the young (thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen-year-old) men of their families as a sort of ‘practice try.’ While the Turkish girl explained this with an air of nonchalance, the American student absolutely could not get her head around the idea of a familial set-up that, in one way or another, encourages its boys to explore and experiment before marriage, and she… well, didn’t react too positively to the concept.

It’s this conflict that I hoped to get across in this story [with Scorpius occupying something of the Turkish boy’s position and Albus something of the American boy’s] though I’m not sure how well I’ve succeeded, since I didn’t want to spend too much time narrating, through Scorpius, what I imagine would be something quite natural to him. I’ve mixed in a few things about class and about blood, and though I’m a bit afraid that the entire thing is just too big a project, I can’t possibly work on this story any longer than I already have.

As always, I’d love to hear what you all think, especially regarding whether or not I’ve managed to communicate something worthwhile in this behemoth. Cheers.

Disclaimer: Jo’s characters. I own nothing.



— — —

“You spoil everything!”

It is one of Scorpius’ earliest memories. Atop a nothing-short-of-verdant western hill, in the gold-orange light of a Midsummer bonfire, a boy in old dress slashed and clawed the air in wild and furious pursuit of his younger brother.

“You spoil everything!”

The boys’ father, a weathered but gentle-looking man whom Scorpius recognized from both the newspapers and household conversation, had tucked his louder son under one arm; and while the position made it quite impossible for the boy to lay so much as a fingernail on his brother, who stood two arms’ lengths away looking quite alarmed, he kicked as though swimming, thrashing and slicing at the warm, smoky air, as though with every intent of knocking his smaller brother backwards into the fire if he ever got free.

“It isn’t fair,” this scrapper of a boy lamented bitterly, twisting and squirming against his father’s side as the dark-haired man drew out and disposed of a long, vaguely serpentine string of firecrackers that his elder son had been struggling to salvage— apparently the cause for all the fuss. “It isn’t fair at all! It would have been brilliant, and Al’s gone and spoiled it, the rotten little snitch!”

By this time, perhaps attracted by the gleam of the bonfire on the red and gold firecrackers or perhaps by the ever-mounting volume and pitch of the boy’s voice, people had begun to stare, looking around for the source of the squawking treble and the woeful hiccoughs. Revelers lowered their goblets long enough to watch the scene unfold, and the dance around the maypole slowed, slowed, slowed until the human ring had angles and the dancers’ ribbons, gorgeous ribbons in green and gold and white, went slack in their hands. The boy’s wailing had surmounted the singing and the chanting and the tinkling of the bells that some of the women wore about their necks and wrists. It had trumped the roar of the bonfire and rent the buoyant atmosphere that had, until his outburst, blanketed the festive gathering in liveliness and cheer.

The too-familiar father of the troublesome boy seemed to realise that his son was attracting far too much unwanted attention; finding himself in the middle of a crowd, he looked around without actually meeting any of the watching eyes from behind his spectacles, as though trying to will away the amused stares that had settled upon him. It was only when his elder son started spitting —literally spitting! Actually spitting at his brother!— and certain of the crowd began to chortle in response that the father’s face darkened. Only then did he reach out a large hand for his smaller son and tug him close— too close, in fact, for any sort of safety.

“I hate you!” the elder of the boys shrieked presently, taking advantage of his brother’s new proximity to grab a fistful of his dark curls, tugging hard enough to earn a plaintive wail from the smaller boy and a sharp shout of reprimand and alarm from their exasperated father. “I hate you, and I wish you’d never been born!”

The harder the crowd laughed, the more the boy thrashed and snarled, and the more his father knit his dark brows together in poorly-suppressed irritation. The more he knit, the harder he squeezed onto his younger son, who whimpered and wriggled all the more for the pressure on his tiny hand. The more he wriggled, the tighter his older brother yanked on his hair, and the more and more wretchedly comical the whole scene grew. It whirled and spiraled, gaining more and more momentum until the surprising specificity of one taunt brought the whole thing tumbling down:

“I wish you’d been born on Boxing Day, Albus,” the bigger boy practically howled, nothing but rage and desperation as the dark-haired father, with a bit of effort, disentangled his sons from one another and pinned them, one shouting and one weeping, under each arm, “so at least Mum and Dad could have taken you back straight away!”

That, apparently, had ended that. With a thunderous crack that belied the bespectacled man’s quiet sort of patience, the father-sons trio disapparated, their sudden exit so forceful that it momentarily stirred up a cloud of loose, parched dirt where their feet had been. The ensuing silence lasted only until the dust settled; then, with one monstrous, scornful voice, the revelers broke in.

‘Well, would you look at that?’ they said. ‘Who would have guessed?’ ‘What little hellions! What awful brats!’ ‘So much for good breeding,’ they said. ‘So much for old blood.’ ‘That’s what you get for sparing the rod.’

On and on the chatter went, punctuating the conversations even as the dancers re-formed their circle and the fiddlers took up their bows. Scorpius, standing attentively near his father’s side and listening gravely to the reproachful talk surrounding those boys, for the first time felt actual rage, felt a deep and boiling anger that bordered on nausea gurgling in the pit of his stomach. He wanted to go back and to strike those boys, to wallop them as hard as his short legs and little fists would let him. He wanted to knock them down, to embarrass them as they had embarrassed him, embarrassed their father, embarrassed any sensible person who had ever before been small. He didn’t know precisely why he felt as he did, but he felt it to the core of his small person, which shook and trembled in barely-suppressed fury.

All the same, he was sure, as sure as he had ever been of anything, that if he ever had a little brother, especially a brother like that, he would pull his hair, too. He would tug on his ears and pinch the end of his nose. He would step on his feet and knock him down from behind. He would shove him and scratch him and make him cry. He would enjoy it, too, and what’s more, hewouldn’t be caught doing anything wrong.

He absolutely thrilled to think of it.

— — —

Now, on a similar Midsummer’s evening, with the sweet, smoky smell of the air and the happy songs of maypole dancers, Scorpius realises that that long-ago feeling, that stomach-clenching, blood-boiling emotion is not, nor had it ever actually been, anything at all like rage. That need to reach out and touch, to tug on hair and to elicit tears, to scrape and pin and kick, is suddenly rechanneled, redirected through ten more years’ worth of experience, through a new sort of knowledge, through an awareness that a child, even a precocious child, cannot possibly possess. In the thrum of the Midsummer evening, that crazed feeling returns, but it settles lower than it had that long-ago night, and Scorpius shivers pleasantly in spite of the balmy summertime air.

Albus Potter is seated barely three meters from him, perched upright and oblivious on a slab of rock while the rollicking orgy that is a Midsummer’s celebration unfolds colorfully before him. He’s in old dress, as is everyone, in the pagan costumes of the Midsummer reveler. The coarse tunic and sash suit him, Scorpius thinks, far better than the Muggle clothing that he normally wears, the denim trousers and the stripey shirts and multi-coloured trainers that all but the most conventional of families have adopted to one extent or another. He seems wholly distracted, fixed on some faraway point even as the raucous merrymakers trip and scuffle right before his eyes, or rib one another knowingly at the sight of him. Moreover, he’s completely alone.

Soaking the image in, Scorpius decides immediately how he plans to spend his night.

There are so many things he could say to catch the Potter boy’s diverted attention: he could be kind and ask after his thoughts; he could be civil and discuss the unfolding festival; he could be snide and belittle his family; or he could be juvenile and insult his hair, which has never, to his memory, lain flat at the top. Rather than fixating, though, on the boy’s hair, or the melancholic occupation of his thoughts, or the shameful misconduct of certain of the Potter clan, Scorpius seizes upon that decade-old memory, remembers the squabble and the taunt and the small child in tears, a fistful of hair caught in his brother’s tightened fist. And in remembering, he shivers again.

“Your parents never sent you back, I see.”

It’s a wholly unnecessary observation, as Scorpius, nearly every day for the past six years, has seen for himself that the Potters never did rid themselves of their second child, that spare second son; Albus Potter, like his uncouth elder brother and his spitfire sister, is all too visible in the Hogwarts corridors and grounds. Scorpius doesn’t know any of them personally, as the eldest and youngest are not in his year and the middle child, apart from being in a different house, hasn’t shared any of his classes since pre-O.W.L. Transfiguration in the Michaelmas half of Year Four, back when they had been turning hedgehogs into hair brushes and other such elementary nonsense.

But to say that Scorpius Malfoy isn’t aware of the Potters, and aware of Albus Potter in particular, would be a gross inaccuracy. Everyone is aware of the Potters, from the wizarding children who grow up hearing often hyperbolic Harry Potter tales, to the Muggleborn first years who hear them for the first time only when they demand to know why James Potter can so often get away with cherry-red trainers in class, or why the three Potter children are so quickly whisked off the train on returning home for Christmas. But Scorpius, without knowing any of the Potters at all, knows the house’s youngest son well enough to explain his presence at such a ceremony, on such a night, in such a distressed sort of posture and mindset.

He knows that, while Harry Potter is not, his sons and daughter are Pureblooded, the precious products of generations of good breeding. He knows that Albus Potter, a boy who can have anything, is missing something important, something linked ever so intimately to the quality of the blood that Scorpius, even as a child, had felt the need to shed and spill. And, seeing the void in the very aura of the boy, he resolves, as he mentally traces the lines of the Potter’s neck down to his collarbone, to fulfill him as only he himself can.

“I—” Gasping, Potter jumps at the sudden intrusion upon his thoughts, and as he whirls around to turn wide eyes on Scorpius, the Malfoy heir suddenly finds himself wondering just what sort of thoughts he had interrupted. “Bloody— I’m so—” He licks his lips, and Scorpius smirks. “I’m sorry. What did you—?”

“Boxing Day. Your parents never sent you back.”

“Oh, I— no.” Judging by the way in which Potter’s expression shifts fluidly from surprise to discomfort, it barely takes the boy the span of a heartbeat to recall that same memory, to remember the childhood taunt that his brother had likely hurled with a scowl for so many early birthdays and Christmases. Placing Scorpius, a near stranger, into the picture is apparently more difficult, though, and Potter’s dark brows furrow momentarily above almost unearthly green eyes while he tries to piece the situation together. “No, no they haven’t— yet, I mean. But how—”

“Oh, I remember your brother’s little charade with the string of fireworks,” Scorpius explains with a certain amount of contempt, pleased that the younger Potter has the good grace to look embarrassed. “Right here on Midsummer, maybe ten years ago; it’s something not so easily forgotten, really: He would have set the entire hill on fire, if it hadn’t been for you. Great fun, you rotten spoiler. Such a little snitch, to peach on your own brother. Wish you’d never been born. Go back on Boxing Day. Etcetera.”

“Oh, ehm—” the boy offers dully, rubbing idly at the nape of his neck as Scorpius bites back a smirk. “I— yeah, I— James could be a piece of work, I guess, sure.” Potter smiles sheepishly, and it is immediately clear how so many of their peers have confused his self-doubt with a special sort of Potter charm.

“You haven’t been back since.”

Of course they haven’t been. The wonderfully open-hearted and tolerant Harry Potter may not have been born with a single shred of decorum, but even the crudest of Muggles (or Muggle-lovers, as the case may be) knows it unwise to brazenly return to the place where he has been laughed down, where his children have brought humiliation upon themselves and upon him. Even the Potter the Younger seems to recognise this, and he becomes quiet all at once, rather conveniently interested in a caterpillar inching through the grass near his feet.

(Scorpius makes a point of treading on it, and the little creature dies, puncturing the silence between them with a barely audible pop as it buckles beneath the weight and power of his far superior human body.)

“So,” he begins again, nonchalantly grinding the remains of the insect beneath an inflexible sandal, quite pleased with himself indeed when Potter snaps his head up once more to fix on him with wide, incredulous eyes. “Here you are without your brother or your father, without, as far as I can tell, any of those dozens of Weasley relations—”

“They’re at home,” Potter interjects hastily, as though to defend his family for having failed to make their appearances. “My Uncle Charlie comes home for Midsummer every—”

“Well, that’s just grand for your Uncle Charlie.”

“Sorry,” the boy breathes, smiling sheepishly, fooled into apology for no true reason by the mere tone of Scorpius’ voice. “It’s—I’d be there— I mean, normally I would. I just— I just needed a bit of quiet tonight.” He swallows thickly, turning his eyes on Scorpius only so briefly, before losing his nerve and once more eyeing his feet. “To think.”

“Well,” Scorpius drawls, rolling his eyes towards a group of roaringly drunk twenty-something men and the laughing young women beside them. “You’ve picked a wonderful place for quiet, obviously. And—what? Can’t you think well enough in Somerset— or Devon, or wherever it is your family are celebrating in someone’s orchard? Or are you still afraid that they might send you back to Harrods for having the audacity to actually think about things?”

“They might just,” Potter confirms, his pleasant tenor verging on a melancholic hiccough even as he breaks into that awkward little smile of his. “That’s—isn’t that what you do with— you know— the things that don’t quite work properly? Defective things?”

“That is the general idea behind Boxing Day,” Scorpius hedges, raising one fine eyebrow in a brief but critical study of Potter’s wishy-washy expression, the defeated slump of his shoulders beneath his coarse canvas tunic. “And I suppose, since you’re fretting over Boxing Day in June, that you’re trying to tell me that you yourself are in some way defective?”

“Maybe a bit.”

“Defective,” Scorpius sniffs. “Really now.”

Staring down the bridge of his nose, Scorpius once-overs the Potter boy just leisurely enough to let the brunette catch him staring. He’s done it before, has been doing it more discreetly since first engaging the boy in conversation, really, but being found out is well worth the flush that overtakes the other youth’s freckled cheeks as grey eyes sweep down past shoulders and sash, until the boy, however unconsciously, fiddles with the hem of his tunic in defense of his modesty.

“Forgive the compliment, Potter, but from what I can see, you seem to be a fairly healthy specimen of a boy: a bit weedy yet, but far from unsightly; unique eyes to say the least; slim; a fine—”

“I, ah—” Potter cuts him short with the abruptness of his motion, as he stands swiftly to his feet and, in retreating, nearly stumbles backwards over the slab of rock he had been using as a seat. “Oh, no—” he assures him, his earlier blush absolutely erupting across his face and ears under the pressure of Scorpius’ perhaps-too-obvious advance. “I’m fairly sure I’m— I’m— defective is definitely what I am.” He swallows thickly and for the briefest of moments trains his glass-green eyes on Scorpius’ grey ones. “Really.”

“Defective—”

There is a moment of silence— or as close to silence as two still people standing amid two dozen revelers and a few fiddlers can hope to achieve. In the quiet, Scorpius takes in the image of the boy, the desperate eyes, the wrung out hands, the posture of a man waiting expectantly for a blow to the chest. And in that brief moment, be it from the sag of his shoulders or the look —half hopeful, half terrified— in his eyes, Scorpius understands just what and how much Albus Potter means and just what and how much he has to learn.

Additionally, he owes that absolute poufter Reginald Nott fifteen sickles.

“Ah. Defective.”

Unspoken recognition crackles in the balmy air between them, and Potter, anxiously raising a hand to the back of his neck, heaves a shaky sigh, the breath he hadn’t been aware of holding.

“Defective,” the boy repeats repeats, while seemingly unable to let his eyes rest solely on Scorpius or solely on the ground or solely on the blind space over one of his shoulders, where any member of the press or public could very well be waiting for the next big tabloid headline. “Yeah.”

“Well, isn’t that news, then.” News, indeed. Brilliant news. News that makes the plan just that much simpler. “How long have you known?” Scorpius hears himself asking after the appropriate moment of solemn quiet has elapsed, vaguely surprised at his own interest and at the fact that he is almost genuinely curious. “That you were— let’s call it ‘defective,’ since that’s the world you seem to prefer.”

“For as long— I mean—” Potter shuffles, drawing his lower lip between his teeth in a manner that makes Scorpius force down a smirk. “Not— that is, I’d never really— never thought about it, really. Not until the start of last year. Maybe.”

“Well, aren’t you a latebloomer, then,” Scorpius nearly chuckles, careful to check himself when his gentle ribbing earns him a look of discomfort from his melancholy companion. “But you’re fortunate, anyway,” he tries again, secretly amused by the look of total incredulity that momentarily replaces shame across the Potter boy’s lightly freckled face. “Being the second son, that is. Now, a defective first son— that would be a bit of trouble, wouldn’t it be?”

“James, you mean?” In thinking immediately of his own brother, Potter’s missed the point entirely, of course, unable to feel the whole weight of the idea as it applies to the two of them. (The whole thing would be selfish, really, if he weren’t so bloody naïve.) His lovely green eyes widen in surprise, before squinting a bit under the pressure of a furrowed brow. “But, James isn’t—”

“But if he were.”

“But he’s not.”

“But if he were,” Scorpius insists. “Hypothetically. If he were, if any eldest son were— just think about it: no news-making courtship. No spectacular wedding. No celebrated heir— that’s the important thing. The first son of the first son…” He hedges momentarily, pausing to see whether the younger Potter is following. He isn’t. “Your famous father has no siblings, does he? So, that’s the end of the Potter line right there. One less wizarding family— and out of so few, too. One less ancient bloodline —a powerful, pureblooded line, at that— to survive the turning over of generations; that’s natural weakness there, isn’t it, a lack of survival?”

“Oh, it— it isn’t like that in my family,” the Potter boy answers abruptly, caught somewhere between defensiveness and discomfort, as he grinds the toe of one of his sandals into the parched dirt beneath his feet. “My mum and dad— well, they wouldn’t care about something like that, really.”

“Oh, I’m sure they wouldn’t,” Scorpius agrees, just the slightest bit of scorn slipping through his front teeth as he summons to mind the benevolent and broadminded Potters, model parents for a new generation of young wizards. “Not your parents, surely. But you’d be surprised at how many other people’s parents would go mad at the very idea that their only sons were shagging other men rather than planning for a nursery.”

It’s too much, too quickly. Potter, colored once more in a lovely shade of pomegranate, inhales sharply and, nearly swooning, casts an anxious look around to be sure that no-one has overheard. “I ought to go,” he murmurs suddenly, his trembling voice so tellingly thick as he nervously smoothes down the front of his tunic and bends down to take up his broom. “I— my family—”

“Are all outrageously drunk and won’t be missing you for hours yet.” Almost passionlessly, Scorpius pins the handle of the broomstick (a Nimbus Eleven; nothing but the best, of course, for Harry Potter’s lovable son) beneath the arch of his left foot and fixes determined eyes down on Potter, who looks up at him not in a dare, but in something akin to wonder. “You said you needed somewhere quiet to think,” Scorpius says in a manner more smooth than coy, that might have been earnest had he been totally without ulterior motives. “Somehow, I doubt that your Uncle’s party is going to be anything at all like peaceful.”

“It’s— not much quieter here,” Potter points out fairly enough, blinking around at the raucous crowd of revelers who have, blessedly, left them be. “I—”

“Come away from the fire, then,” Scorpius interrupts again, extending a seemingly friendly hand but leaving, in his tone of voice, very little room for argument. “I understand that you’re new to the celebration, Potter, but you’re not bound to the hilltop all night, you know. We’ll go down into the valley; it’s perfectly quiet, and you can think until you’re sore.”

“I really—”

“Really what? What have you got to lose?”

“Well—” Potter hedges, casting a long, apprehensive look first at the outstretched hand and then out over the endless, rolling landscape, which darkens to pitch as it flows farther and farther away from the fireside, “I— maybe just for a bit, if you know the way—”

Closing his fingers around Potter’s hand, just barely offered to him but fair enough game as far as he’s concerned, Scorpius smirks and hauls him swiftly to his feet. “Of course I know the way.”

— — —

And it is much quieter in the valley, cooler, down below the eastern slope of the great hill, where the bonfire burning at the summit might have been fit for a child’s marshmallow roast for all of its visible size. It’s far quieter, though the loudest of the revelers’ cheers manage to travel the span of the valley, breaking any illusion of total tranquility and solitude.

The nighttime quiet, or perhaps just the marked lack of total strangers, of potential gossips, has done its bit to open the Potter boy up some, to relax his taught shoulders and dispel that shade of worry that had been so thoroughly sullying his lovely green eyes. He’s taken it upon himself to make the obligatory sort of petty conversation, to ask after Scorpius’ marks and his home and his plans and hopes for their last year of formal schooling. He brings up Gobstones and Quidditch and the new Irish Seeker, gushes momentarily over the litter of Kneazle kittens born under his grandparents’ chicken coop, and admits under questioning that he’ll have no idea what to do if he’s made Head Boy— which Scorpius, along with every other halfway sensible person in their year, knows he certainly will be. It’s banal, really, but quaint on him, and Scorpius engages him with more gusto than he really ought to, in the hopes that their paltry talk may, with some patience, lead to something more revealing.

(It does; such is his plan, after all, and Scorpius Malfoy is not the sort of unfortunate fool to have his plans fail on him.)

“I always feel— I guess just a bit off at Midsummer,” Potter eventually sighs, confessing his troubled state of mind after an expertly-placed and over-earnest question about his stormy thoughts, or his distracted eyes— or some such rubbish. Barefooted, he’s reclining in the cool grass, staring up at the star-studded canopy of western sky, while Scorpius, seated at his left hand, takes advantage of his diverted attention to study the way in which he’s knotted his sage green sash, to suss out, for later, the quickest and most efficient manner of unknotting it. “That’s— I mean, off more than usual, what with being— you know.”

“Defective, yes. Well, I don’t doubt that,” Scorpius shrugs, averting his eyes from the boy’s narrow hips and managing to look inculpable by gesturing vaguely to the crown of the hill, where young men in their fern and mugwort garlands have begun to leap over the fire to the calls and crowing of their friends and agemates. “I’ve just caught you deep in thought during bacchanal celebrations, and I’m afraid you’ll find that Midsummer is really more about doing than about thinking; it’s no great wonder you feel out of place.”

“It isn’t that, though,” Potter pipes up, apparently surprised at his own haste, as he pauses long enough to chew on his lip, to wind a blade of grass around one finger before continuing. “Not really. I mean— I don’t mind feeling out of place, I suppose. Just— not like myself.”

“How, then, if unlike yourself?”

Potter clams up. “Nothing,” he mumbles, suddenly anxious again as he rather indiscreetly whirls his attention away from Scorpius, to some star that he undoubtedly recognises from his schoolwork. “It’s not a big thing.”

“Big enough to set you fretting away what should be a celebratory night.” Celebratory, indeed. “Come on, Potter; your twitchy little secret is safe with me.”

“I—” One dark eyebrow raises a bit as Potter searches for the right words to describe what Scorpius already recognises as a deeply physical and very nearly painful lust, the sort of pent-up need that can torment even the most saintly of young men come Midsummer. The Potter boy, significantly less aware, never quite manages this explanation, coming up instead with a sheepish smile and a vague sort of hand gesture that may or may not involve some sort of pantomime claws. “I can’t describe it, really.”

“Like there’s something you’re missing,” Scorpius offers in the wake of the boy’s stumble, managing to sound far more invested than he honestly is. “Something that you need to have. Come on, then; just tell me I’m wrong.”

“I—yes.” Potter blinks in surprise and then actually smiles, not sheepishly or nervously, but a perfectly grateful smile that touches and lightens the green of his eyes. “Yes, actually; that’s— that’s exactly it.”

Of course that’s exactly it. Lacing his fingers and methodically popping each of his knuckles, Scorpius smirks knowingly.

“What?” Potter presses, that ghost of an actual smile catching and tugging at the corners of his fine mouth as he turns over one shoulder to face Scorpius. “How’d you know?”

“It’s just that— Well, it isn’t all that difficult to figure out, really,” Scorpius drawls casually, idly examining his perfectly-pared fingernails for the added affectation of total nonchalance, “Being as I am a fully-functioning young man, that is. And bearing in mind— oh.” A pause, for ultimate effect. “You do know what Midsummer is all about, I suppose?”

Actually, he supposes nothing of the sort; Potter, he can already tell, knows absolutely nothing. Because Albus Potter, in all of his moral angst and indescribable physical need, is the poor product of a broken system, a victim of the gap-ridden magical education earned at institutions such as Hogwarts. Acceptable for most; not so for people like them, for pure-blooded children, for those noble sons born with spectacular gifts and raised for superior futures. For them, a complete education, the sort of education to which Potter, ready or otherwise, will be introduced to this evening, must be sought outside of Hogwarts.

Scorpius may not share the clean-blooded fanaticism of his grandfather or the cold, grudging tolerance of halfbloods and Muggleborns that his father has worked so hard to assume; he knows full well that there aren’t even enough pureblooded children left in all of Britain and Ireland to fill a Hogwarts house, so he can’t sincerely advocate for Slytherin’s mission of house purity; those attitudes, it is more or less understood, belong to the past, relics of the pre- and interwar years that made everyone a bit too passionate about very nearly everything. That said, to equate his own tolerance with true impartiality might be to paint the Malfoy heir a bit too charitably. There is something to be said, he feels, for the segregated —or at the very least, augmented— education of Pureblooded children, for a supplementary sort of instruction to fill the gaps left by the fluffy, egalitarian Hogwarts curriculum. This youngest Potter son, pure in every sense of the word yet wholly and shamefully clueless, is the prime example of the failure of this system, this puppet education for a phony meritocracy.

Albus Potter may be a Pureblood in the eyes of the law, may be descended from some of most powerful magical families ever to grace English soil, but a stranger would never know it by the way he speaks or thinks or carries himself. He has been educated, at the very best, like the wizarding masses, like the so many children who grow up knowing how to brew a potion or to cast a disarming spell while remaining wholly ignorant of the fundamentals, of the primal, physical magic that sets them apart from the vast majority of the planet’s billions of human beings. He hasn’t been trained to feel the storm of magic in the air on this Midsummer evening. He hasn’t been taught to listen to the cues of his beautiful and unsual body, to submit to magic greater and more powerful than any sort of charm or curse. Albus Potter’s ignorance, Scorpius can already see, is to blame for the evening’s emotional unease, that self-deprecating, nonsensical rhetoric of defectiveness: unable to understand his blood, or his body, or his place in the wider world, the boy hasn’t a hope of understanding himself.

He deserves better, and Scorpius, his spotless blood boiling in the purely physical atmosphere of Midsummer, is more than willing to fill him in using the most valuable method available to him.

“Any guesses?”

“Well— it’s the Solstice, isn’t it?” Potter offers, predictably, falling back on the textbook answer without another thought. “The longest day of the year? It’s the day with most sunlight, so everyone celebrates for as long—”

No. Wrong.

The younger Potter is tops in Divination, or so they say; mysticism is his thing. Crowds of giggling girls flock to him, the humble seer, to have their dreams mapped out, or to talk nonsense about imagined omens, or find an excuse to have him, in his all-too-charming innocence, take their hands in his and trace the lines of their palms with his fingertips. His prowess in cups and palms and stars aside, though, they don’t teach the important things in school, and Albus Potter, kept in ignorance by the careless inattentions of his family and the willful censorship of his professors, has missed the point entirely.

“No,” Scorpius interrupts, impassively curling long fingers around the other boy’s wrist and, much to a wide-eyed Potter’s wriggling, drawing the arm out from beneath him, into his own cool line of scrutiny. “It’s not the Solstice, no; that’s just what they tell you in school to keep the Muggle parents at ease. Forget that. I want to know what it’s really about. Why these celebrations? Why the dancing?”

“I don’t— I don’t—” He’s barely listening, from the looks of it, too concerned is he with his captured hand, which now flexes and now clenches as Scorpius’ thumb ghosts over the heel of his palm. “I—ehm— what are you doing?”

“So sensitive,” Scorpius tuts, flattening out the boy’s clammy hand and jerking at his wrist perhaps a bit too earnestly when Albus, brow furrowed, tries to wrench himself free. “Take it easy, Potter,” he warns, his tone momentarily waxing dangerously to the sinister side despite his best attempt to keep the mood cool. “I’m only having a look at your palm, aren’t I? No need to be anxious over some elementary Divination. With all the experience you have, I thought surely this would be old hat for you.”

“Not like this,” the boy protests with a soft grunt, earning his arm another sharp tug when again he tries to recoil. His voice is suddenly pinched and breathy, his speech hurried as evenly trimmed fingernails trace the lines in his palm, rake lightly up and down his too-taught fingers. He’s really far, far too easy. “It’s— this is different.”

“Really?” Scorpius taunts gently, rolling over himself without relinquishing his hold, so that he pins Potter’s shins between his knees and sits lightly back on his bare ankles. “Different?”

Potter, who has gone suddenly pale and stiff in an attempt to hide the rapidness of his breathing, can only nod dumbly.

“So maybe it is. But different how, I wonder?” Scorpius leers, feeling his chest and stomach tighten pleasantly at the sight of Potter squirming beneath him in the grass. “Different because of who we are, you and I? Or different because I’m not actually reading your palm at all, and you know it? Or—” He pauses for effect, to give the thought a moment to hang, to ever-so-lightly drag his lips down Potter’s hand and wrist, just enough to make him shudder. “Or is it different because there’s just a bit of threat in this, suddenly? Because what’s a girl going to do to you, anyway, if she’s got your hand? Or do for you, for that matter?”

“I— just stop,” stammers Potter, who is doing his best to disappear into the ground beneath him. “Just— stop it, won’t you? You’re just taking the— It’s bad enough as it is, being a, a—” He can’t bring himself to speak the word, though, the poor nervous thing, and as Scorpius runs long fingers across the boy’s temple and back through his dark hair, Potter only descends further into his stammering. “There’s noth— this isn’t funny.”

“Who’s laughing?” Laughing, Scorpius reasons, is really quite different from smirking snarkily, which is, to speak more accurately, exactly what he is currently up to. Potter, by the look on his face and the rigidity of his shoulders, apparently wouldn’t agree. “What’s Midsummer about, Albus Potter?” he presses again, practically sing-songy, nearly giddy with the smell of the air, with the contact, with the other boy’s oh-so-predictable yet oh-so-satisfying responses. “Let’s have a guess. They say you’re bright, or bright for a Hufflepuff anyway, and for a Potter; just think about it.”

“I don’t—“

“Just think. Think about the herbs the dancers were wearing— how they might be used in a potion or an aphrodisiac. Or think about the dance itself, if you were even watching. Think about the maypole, Potter. Come on, now; it doesn’t get more obvious than the bloody maypole.”

“I can’t—I can’t think when you’re—.”

“You can’t think?” Scorpius almost does laugh this time, immensely pleased with himself when Potter, finding his shirtsleeve pushed back and long fingers traveling up the fishwhite underside of his arm, nearly jumps out of his fair and freckled skin. “Because I’m touching your hand; is that it? You can’t think because I’m stroking your arm a bit?”

“Bollocks,” Potter hiccoughs, straining against Scorpius’ hold as though there’s some way his entire hand will slip through the Malfoy’s clenched and determined fingers. “If that’s all you’re doing, then I’m—”

“—far too easily aroused,” Scorpius finishes for him with a wicked smirk, sliding up the length of the other boy’s body to avoid taking a frantic, retaliatory knee to the groin. “Really, Potter: a fellow might think you weren’t a painfully horny young homosexual, the way you’re wriggling.”

Potter’s stormy glare speaks volumes, but his fretful silence is louder still, and Scorpius couldn’t be more pleased.

“Fertility, Potter,” he nearly purrs, and as he presses his pelvis down against the brunette’s, poor Albus Potter’s lovely green eyes widen in something akin to horror before squeezing closed completely, as though being incapable of seeing Scorpius will somehow prevent Potter and his fragile ears from hearing the truth of it all, will prevent him from feeling Scorpius inching up the length of his rigid body. “Midsummer is all about fertility. Hormones. Pheromones. Moans in general.”

Potter himself almost moans to hear it, and Scorpius, detecting it, feels a cool rush of blood wash down the back of his neck, which he lowers slowly, slowly, until his nose nearly brushes the tip of Al Potter’s own.

“All about sex, Potter,” he whispers, punctuating this revelation with a meaningful press against the other boy’s groin, “About fucking, if you’ll pardon the crude word choice. About potency. Virulent male sexuality. Initiating virgins. About guiltlessly giving into the natural drive that’s been stirring the blood of witches and wizards for thousands of years, that primal need that takes hold of our bodies— your body and mine alike, Potter, the last vessels of clean blood and unpolluted power left in this changing world. Reveling in the things withheld from us— some of us— any other day of the year. It all comes out at Midsummer, Potter, and you’re not doing yourself any favours trying to ignore it.”

“That’s— that’s absolute rubbish,” Potter splutters, his voice breaking tellingly over certain of his vowels. “You’re— mad. You’re— listen to yourself! You’re bloody mental!”

“Mental, indeed,” Scorpius scoffs, dragging his lips and then his teeth ever so slightly across the boy’s parted lips and down his chin, inhaling in the salty taste that Potter’s skin adopts as he begins to sweat. “And I just suppose you came here, of all places, you in all your existential confusion and your precious purity, because you just needed a place to think. Because today of all days you’ve decided to lament the fact that you’re a great nelly queer with a woefully repressed sex drive— but you’ve decided to do it in front of two dozen overly-horny young blokes who’re only looking for somewhere to stick their pricks after a night of drinking and dancing.”

Potter, stunned, swallows hard and parts his lips to speak, but Scorpius, barely resisting the urge to close the gap between them in a more stimulating fashion, slips a cool hand down the side of the boy’s jaw and across his mouth, effectively choking the forthcoming protest before it gets the air on which to travel.

“Bollocks,” he breathes, “Bollocks, Potter. Play innocent all you want, but you know damn well what tonight’s about. All men do; all purebloods, Potter, even the thickest of them.”

Beneath the weight of his hand, Potter shakes his head in the negative, but Scorpius, unwilling to take any excuses, leans on the hand that’s covering the other boy’s mouth, pressing his head back against the ground as though he plans on squishing his skull as he had earlier squished the innocent caterpillar who had made the mistake of drawing just a bit too close.

“You know well enough, Potter,” he repeats, “Way down, you do; it’s in your blood. If you paid any attention at all to that twitchy little body of yours, you’d realise bloody quick indeed that you’re looking for something that you know you can find here. And you came here knowing that— with blood like yours, your body knew it, I’m sure, even if that confused head of yours didn’t.”

“But why does it even matter?”

“What?” Scorpius’ eyes go immediately slit-like, narrowing in a dare beneath furrowed brows. “What was that, Potter?”

“Why does it matter?” the boy repeats fretfully, twisting out from beneath Scorpius’ hand in an attempt to make himself heard. “I wasn’t—”

“Why does it matter?” Scorpius stiffens, his entire countenance freezing over as, huffing, he drops his weight squarely onto the other boy’s chest. Biting back a snarl of mixed frustrations as Potter gasps, Scorpius bares down, gripping the boy’s lower ribs between his knees with enough force to make an ashen Albus Potter reach up and grab two desperate fistfuls of his tunic in retaliation. “Hell, Potter, but for people who imbue family with so much worth, you Weasley lot certainly haven’t got any sort of respect for tradition.”


The pinned boy opens his mouth to protest, but Scorpius cuts him off with a withering glare and a meaningful press at the hips.

“It matters, Potter, because some of us remember our past and care about our future in the broadest understanding of things. Because some of us don’t care to see our traditions die out alongside our bloodlines. Because some of us know that blood can only be so diluted before the magic thins too far, before it vanishes altogether and leaves us a nation of Muggles and Squibs. Because some of us understand what we were born to do. Because people like me see people like you, people with so much God-granted potential, people with blessed with ancient blood and ancient power, wasting away in modern ignorance and modern guilt. And it makes us sick.”

He doesn’t realise, until he pauses a moment for breath, that he’s been very nearly shaking the boy beneath him for the duration of his sermon, burying his greedy fingers in the ‘V’ of his neckline and yanking and tugging at the garment until it looks like the boy’s worn it through Hell and back.

“But I’m—”

“Torturing yourself,” Scorpius interjects. “You are torturing yourself, denying your body what it needs— what you, you in your bloody perfect position have every right to have.”

“I can’t—” the recoiling boy nearly moans. “I can’t. It’s—”

“It’s your right, is what it is. What the Hell else are you going to do, Potter? You don’t need a son. You don’t need an heir, Potter. You can have Midsummer every bloody night of the year.” He can practically taste the bitterness in his words, the barely-veiled jealousy that threatens to overcome him at the thought of Albus Potter so happily situated, and he nearly groans at the evil thought, at the base and wicked want to strip him of some of that happiness, just as he had once imagined doing as a child of six. “But you don’t understand, Potter, do you? And you should have no excuse; you, an odd month or so from seventeen. It’s no use blaming your father, I suppose, since we all know how he was raised, but a fucking shame on all of those so-called pureblooded uncles who would have let you come of age without knowing any of this.”

“Stop it,” Potter breathes, the low swipe at his family finally bringing that storminess to his lovely green eyes as he balls his fists in the front of Scorpius’ tunic, ruining the crisp lines and the neat press of the garment as he tries to make a show of shaking him. “Leave my family alone, will you? You have no right—”

“This is my right, Potter,” Scorpius growls back. “This is my right. You have yours, and I have mine. This is my right as the first son, and the only son, and the heir to my father’s position in life. You’ll have your time to have whatever it is that doe heart of yours desires, Potter, but tonight is my time, and your ignorance isn’t going to spoil this for me.”

“Shut up,” Potter babbles, making one last noble effort to wrench himself free, to buck Scorpius’ weight from atop him and to flee to the blissful ignorance and safety of his home. “Shut up, shut up—”

He barely registers the motion until it’s already happened, but once he does, the crack of his palm against the side of the boy’s cheek reverberates so sharply through the balmy nighttime air that, for the briefest instant, Scorpius fears that some overzealous reveler might come around, wand in hand, to investigate the noise.

No-one does.

“You shut up, Potter,” he bellows beneath his breath, the allegro of his heartbeat momentarily betraying the thrill of such empowering contact as he takes a fistful of mahogany colored curls between the fingers of one hand and wrenches the other boy’s head up by the roots of his hair. “You shut up. You’re acting like a child.”

His command for quiet is unnecessary, though; the Potter boy has shut up already. He’s gone silent entirely, in fact, to the point where Scorpius can no longer hear his ragged breathing over the far-away sounds of the bacchanal. Shocked and doubtlessly terrified, Albus Potter just stares up at him with his impossibly green eyes.

Scorpius wonders, looking down into those questioning eyes, if the Medusa, about to lose its head of serpentine curls, stared up at Perseus with such a look, or if the virgin Chrysippus might have been spared that first brutal crime by turning such a face on cursed Laius. Had he, that first unknowing victim, Scorpius is sure that he at least would have earned himself a kiss to check his agony. He himself will give his own reluctant Chrysippus this courtesy later that evening, over and over and again; for now, though, all he needs is a word.

“Potter,” he begins, trailing his fingertips ever so gently up the boy’s chin and across his lips, swirling fingernails against the warmth of his cheek in the manner of a nurse or a parent trying to coax a clueless infant into suckling. “Say something.”

Potter is a long time in responding, his struggle to overcome his own terror and want and awful desire choking down the words that, once, twice, three times attempt to bubble up from between gently parted lips. When he does find his voice, though, it is with surprising command, with a nearly steady tempo that belies the almost unbearable tempest wracking him, body and mind.

“You’re wrong, you know,” he eventually whispers, trembling palpably as he wets a swollen lower lip with the end of his tongue, and Scorpius feels his stomach turn pleasantly at this pale kind of confession, this oh-so-terribly-Potter-like steadfastness in the face of nigh-apocalyptic tumbling down of walls. “You— I don’t know about you, but I’m just what I ought to be.”

Were he any less fixed on his conquest, were he any less desperate for some reaffirming contact, Scorpius might have paused, may have faltered, may have reconsidered himself and his position relative to the frightened boy beneath him. As it stands, though, in the warm and dark of Midsummer, the body pinned between his knees might just as well be anyone’s, and Scorpius will be damned to Hell and back if he lets a hiccough of self-doubt stand in the way of his once-yearly conquest.

“Yes,” he murmurs, willing down the pang of guilt, of doubt, and sliding one long finger through he knot in Potter’s sash— watching keenly as, drawing his arm back, the whole garment peels smoothly away and pools in the grass beside him. “You’re right, Albus Potter; you’re just that. And you’d do well to count your blessings.”

— — —

It’s a contemptible thing to do, really. Leaving him there. Honestly, for his lack of basic civility he ought to be ashamed— ashamed like Albus Potter will inevitably be when, in only a matter of hours, the nighttime revelers gather to watch the breaking of the dawn on the eastern side of the hill and instead encounter Harry Potter’s young son curled up naked in the grass.

It’s not that he could blame them for looking, though; the littler Potter’s really quite the sight. Only an hour earlier, he had flinched at the feeling of Scorpius’ fingertips on his arm, had lain beneath him trembling and flushed, too afraid to cry out and too troubled to keep quiet; yet now, asleep in the valley below the great hill, in the still pre-dawn hours of the night, Albus is quiet and tranquil and wholly at peace. Curled up upon himself in the grass, he’s like something born of the Earth itself. Maybe it’s a Hufflepuff thing. Maybe it’s a Potter thing. Maybe it’s the graceless but artful distribution of his freckles down the back of his neck and across his shoulders. Whatever it is, Albus Potter looks as though he absolutely belongs there, sprawled out in the summer grass beneath the flawless, starry sky. And though he tells himself that he’s had his fill, part of Scorpius wants to reach down and touch him again, to trace the planes and angles of a body still in bloom, to deck his damp and chaotic curls in ritual Klamath Weed and Yarrow, to repent, perhaps, for having so abused them.

For the briefest of moments, as he contemplates the shallow dip in Al Potter’s sternum and the lay of his dark eyelashes against one cheek, Scorpius considers bringing him along. It would be simple, mechanically speaking, to take him somewhere in side-along; a mere manner of taking his hand, and nothing more. Home to the Manor in Wiltshire, perhaps, where he himself will be retiring after the breaking of the Midsummer dawn over the heel stone, that final ceremonial cap on the night of ordained revelry. Or even straight to the Potters’ Devon home, where he might, if luck favours him, be able to dump the bleary boy into his own bed before his parents even miss him, before the boy even has a chance to consider the weight and meaning of his deliverance.

But after another fleeting look at Albus, who, blissfully unaware again, sighs a bit and smiles in his sleep, after a brief study of pink lips and rosy nipples and innocently exposed cock and bollocks, all the stuff of a graceful male nude, Scorpius gets his head about him. He toes his sandals back on, tightens the burgundy sash about his waist, smoothes his hair back behind his ears. No. No. Physically, it may be simple; psychologically, it simply can’t be done.

Because he doesn’t want to give him the wrong idea, after all. Scorpius may not truly know this boy (save Biblically, now, of course), but he knows this sort of a boy, this soft and sentimental kind of a child raised to believe in fallacies of perfect love and total tolerance. He knows how they tick. He knows how they think. He knows how to bend them to him, to ply them and play them, to make them believe, with a certain look or a certain touch, things that they had never before considered. After all, he’s known this sort of a boy every Midsummer for years.

When he eventually wakes up —and forever after that, God knows— Albus Potter will want a sort of instant and unfaltering harmony, a perfect resolution born of a night of discovery. He’ll want quiet, lazy kisses; perfect, starlit evenings; forceful hands gone gentle and steely eyes gone soft. He’ll want to be held. He’ll want understanding of the sort that Scorpius is unwilling or unable to give him.

Because understanding— that’s the problem, really. He never quite understood, Potter hadn’t. He never quite got it. He hadn’t relented, in the end, because of an appreciation for tradition or an understanding of millennia-old rituals. He hadn’t given himself out of any sort of awareness of his familial or fraternal place, out of the fortunate societal position that allows him to march to the proverbial beat of his own personal drummer without lasting consequence. He hadn’t even, as Scorpius once had, and as Midsummer revelers had always done, buckled beneath the purely physical needs of his body, the wonderful but torturous pulls of boyhood and adolescence and that particular sort of Midsummer need that can enslave even the most sensible of men to the selfish demands of their bodies.

He had submitted, when all was said and done, because Scorpius had told him he ought to, because Scorpius, in the end, hadn’t really left him any other option. It will be the only time, Scorpius is sure, that this boy, however swathed in naiveté he may continue to be, will be without an option; it’s no wonder he can’t understand.

Scorpius, by contrast, understands. Understands fully. He’s been born and raised to understand. His evening with Albus Potter, like all of his Midsummer evenings, had been practice for something still to come, for something looming with all the weight of total certainty just years on the horizon. The fortunate son, the coddled and blessed boy had been nothing less than a year’s worth of strangled fantasies, a momentary escape from the dull sureness of an incipient wife, an all-but-predestined heir, a life lived by rote, and, altogether, the absolute sham of a worthy home.

“Home,” he breathes, speaking the direction aloud for the sake of so many years of conditioning, for the familiarity of the Floo. He doesn’t feel like making the trip to Stonehenge, suddenly; feels as though the added trip, and the crowd, and the wait until daybreak might make his stomach drop out from under him. He’d much rather have his own bed. Maybe a bath. Maybe a wank. Certainly not the gatherings of drunk and sated young men, the shadows of his soul and mirrors to his mindset: guilty in the way that he himself is guilty, having sinned as he had sinned.

As a familiar pressure constricts his body and the woozy sort of lightness inherent to apparation washes over him, Scorpius remembers that Albus Potter doesn’t yet have his license, and he tries to calculate, almost guiltily, just how long a trip it is to Devon by broomstick. And as he disappears, barely disturbing the lay of the grass or the graceless fall of Potter’s bangs across his forehead as he vanishes, he finds himself wondering, however idly, just how much that far-famed Potter forgiveness might extend.

In the dewy grass, as the disturbed air settles, Albus Potter hums, sighs, and continues sleeping.

— — —

Final Notes: Whew. So, that was longer than I expected it to be. I feel like I tried to say too much about too many things and ultimately failed in most of them, but I hope that all you ‘uns enjoyed it, for what it’s worth.

It’s the strangest thing: I never wind up writing from behind the shoulder of the character I’d like to focus on. That’s to say, Scorpius takes the lead in my Albus-centric stories, and, for instance, Sirius does the same for my James-focused work. (I just hope that I was writing Scorpius, not Draco. Hmm.)

I will love you forever if you leave comments and concrit.