Harry Potter The Long Lost Malfoy

"How I feel." Harry peered at her around his hand, to see if she was joking, because he didn't think she'd been this stupid the last time. But the intense way Healer Letham stared at him said that she wanted to hear more about it, so Harry obliged. Grumpily. "It's there, and I don't like it, but it's just there, you know? Not bothering me from day to day. It's like living with my cousin and my uncle and aunt when they weren't bullying me or punishing me. I mean, the people I thought were my cousin and uncle and aunt. I don't like it, but I can endure it."

"You should speak to the Malfoys about your name if it bothers you that much."

"But like I said, I also understand why they don't want to call me Harry. And I can't come up with another name I like, anyway."

"Perhaps you could suggest the name of another star?"

Harry stared at her, appalled. "Do you want me to be called something like Famolhaut?"

"Famolhaut?" Healer Letham said it with the kind of delicacy that Harry knew meant she was trying not to burst out laughing.

"Mrs. Malfoy said that she thought of that name before she picked Aldebaran. She has terrible taste in names. Just terrible. She shouldn't be allowed to name children."

Healer Letham did snort this time, but she shook her head a second later. "I think that we should still talk about names, even if you don't want the Malfoys to go back to calling you Harry. You find your mother's taste in names terrible. And you call her Mrs. Malfoy."

Harry swallowed and looked down with a nod. "Yeah. I've tried to get more comfortable calling her Mother, but it's hard. Draco does it so naturally. And I look at her and I see a mother sometimes, but sometimes I see a woman who hates Muggles, and would have hated me if I didn't turn out to be her son."

"What could she do to get you to trust her more?"

Harry eyed her. "She said something the other day that made me think she'd talked to you. She is talking to you, isn't she? Do you go and tell her everything that I've said?" Harry shuddered a little. He could only imagine the earful he would get if Mrs. Malfoy heard that he thought she was terrible at picking out names.

"I will not tell her what you have said in these sessions," Healer Letham promised. "And I am only working with her in my capacity as your Healer. I am trying to make sure that she knows being the mother of a traumatized child is not the same as being the mother of the visionary child she hoped and dreamed about."

Harry slumped in his chair. "Because I'm such a disappointment."

"Not that at all. Simply, as I said, that she had mythologized how rescuing you would go. You would appear, and it would be as if the years had never passed at all and she would have the child she had dreamed of back. That is simply not the case, and she is beginning to accept it, Harry."

Harry studied her from under his fringe. "You don't hesitate to call me that name."

"Of course not, but I don't have the associations that the Malfoys do with it." Healer Letham shifted so another foot was dangling down near the floor again. "Now, think on the questions I've asked you for a few minutes. Is there anything Mrs. Malfoy could do that would make you more comfortable accepting her as your mother? And do you think you would prefer a name other than Henry?"

Harry opened his mouth to object about it, but Healer Letham said, "I don't think a few minutes have passed," and he shut his mouth again and sat back in the chair, thinking.

Mrs. Malfoy tried her best to act as a mother, he thought. She was trying. He didn't know what else she could try.

And he meant what he had said about the name. It was just there, and he would get used to it as more people called him that. In school he had sometimes felt like a Henry when he was reading the letters that the Malfoys sent him. Since he'd been home, he'd felt more like a Harry, simply because he didn't fit in with what the Malfoys expected of him.

He glanced up and shook his head.

Healer Letham didn't look upset, although Harry had braced himself for her disappointment. "Well, think on it. And I'm sure that if you did choose a name other than Henry that wasn't Harry, and you liked it enough to be going on with, then you could get the Malfoys to use it, as well."

Harry just nodded, although he was thinking that he would probably always be a Harry, and that was just the way it was. "Yes, Healer."

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