"I'm sorry, Henry. The Healers have looked, but there's absolutely no material they can find explaining what the connection would be between the Mark and your scar."
Harry nodded slowly. He had reckoned that would be the case when Mother hadn't said anything about it for days after she'd asked the Healers to look, but it was still disappointing to hear. "Okay."
Mother hesitated. They were in the small library that she seemed to go to when she wanted to have time alone, a blindingly clean room where the shelves and the carpet and the chairs and even the spines of the books on the shelves were all white or silver. But Harry had been invited into it lately. He sat on the chair nearest the fireplace hoping he wouldn't smudge it.
"About your fight with Draco."
Harry grimaced a little. Draco had avoided him for the rest of that evening and then mumbled an apology at the breakfast table with Mother glaring at him the entire time. "It's all right."
"No, it's not." Mother sighed. "I think that your father and I may have played a part in this, unwittingly. For so many years, the only things we had to tell Draco about his brother were what had happened before you were stolen, and what we thought you might be like. I think Draco internalized the idea of a brother who would be exactly like him in every way, except comfortably a little inferior, since Draco would know about being a Malfoy and Aldebaran wouldn't."
Harry hoped he hid his wince at the sound of his old name. He still hated it, but it meant something to his family. "So I was right? He was jealous?"
"Not entirely right, Henry. Draco does find your insistence on allowing people to use your old name repugnant."
"I'm not going to stop."
"No, and I told Draco that. If anything, I think that his attempting to press you to use your, shall we say, family name would only make it seem more foreign to you, and make you likely to refuse harder."
Harry nodded. Sometimes he wished he wasn't so contrarian, the way that Hermione and the Dursleys and all sorts of people had told him he was, but he was, and it seemed he would be that way no matter what his name was or what he looked like.
"But I think Draco is starting to picture you as a contrast to the idealized picture of his twin brother he carried in his head for years. He thought that of course you would be a Slytherin, proud of your name—both your names—and like him in the way he thinks and behaves. And while you are certainly a talented Quidditch player, and so is Draco, I think that he finds your skills in Defense disturbing."
"Do you?"
Mother looked at him, and her eyes seemed to flash for a second. Harry shivered. She looked wild and fierce like that, and more than a little mad.
Could we have Dobby take the Black madness away from her, too? Would she agree to it?
"I think you are proceeding exactly as you should," Mother said softly. "Draco can receive extra Defense practice from Ted, however. Will that bother you?"
"No. Why would it?"
"I have wondered, to a certain extent, why you have not been jealous yourself. Of Draco's Potions skills, or the way that he had more years with us than you did."
Harry took a long, complicated breath. He wanted to say that he didn't care about Potions at all, but that would probably make her upset with him. And the other question was probably more important, anyway.
"I think he's just good at Potions, and I'm good at other things," he said, what he hoped was diplomatically. "And …it isn't his fault that I was the one who got kidnapped and he was the one who wasn't. I'm not going to blame him for being happy. Someone should get to be."
Mother leaned a little towards him, the madness fading entirely from her eyes. "Are you unhappy, Henry?'
Harry fidgeted on the chair, suddenly longing for the times when Aunt Petunia would simply ignore him and tell him to go to his cupboard.
"Henry?"
"I'm upset because I fought with Draco, and I still don't really understand why," Harry admitted. "And I'm upset that Black is somewhere out there and we don't know what he's going to do. And I don't know what happened with the Mark and my scar, and I'm upset Father got his arm cut off because of me, and—"
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