Chapter Twenty of 'There's a Pure-Blood Custom For That'- Blended Families
Chapter Nineteen.
Title: There’s a Pure-Blood Custom For That (20/?)
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Rating: R
Warnings: Partial AU after DH (Draco has Scorpius but is not married to Astoria, Harry is not married to Ginny), some angst, off-screen violence
Pairings: Harry/Draco, past Draco/Astoria, Ron/Hermione
Summary: The day that Harry stops Draco Malfoy and his son from being bothered in the middle of Diagon Alley starts a strange series of interactions between him and Malfoy. Who knew there was a pure-blood custom for every situation?
Author’s Notes: A series of loosely chronological, short “chapters” based on silly pure-blood customs, and a developing relationship between Harry and Draco. This is more humor and fluff than anything else, despite the angst warning.
Chapter One.
Thank you again for all the reviews!
Blended Families
“We thought you were never going to leave Malfoy Manor.”
Harry gave Ron a bland smile and shook his head. “I’ll go back if I need to. Draco will probably insist on it, because he thinks his wards are the ones that can protect me the best. But it doesn’t mean that I’m going to stay there for as long again.”
Ron gave a shudder that he seemed to think Harry didn’t see, and changed the subject, wandering over to the edge of Harry’s house and the broken wards. “What about these holes? I know you didn’t want to repair them fully, because they might give you clues that would lead you to these Risen Cobras, but…”
“I think it’s time, yes,” said Harry, and picked up his wand. He was so bloody grateful to be able to use it again. His time in Draco’s care had been wonderful, but he’d missed magic.
You should be grateful to Draco that you’re around to use it at all.
Harry refrained from rolling his eyes with an effort. That inner voice sounded like Hermione-Hermione as she used to be, when she had more lectures than nightmares. Yes, he knew he should be, and he had thanked Draco several times. He’d waved goodbye to Scorpius and promised Draco he would take it easy and come right back to the Manor if he saw another threat that he didn’t think he could handle by himself.
That didn’t make it any easier to accept that someone else had to do the simplest things for him, like using the Floo powder. But now the Healers at St. Mungo’s had declared their comfortable belief that the curse was gone, and that meant Harry could at least feel the power flow through his hands again.
“Reparo durus,” he murmured, and the magic tingled sharply as it sped through his hand and down the wand, but it didn’t make him burst into flames, as Draco had obviously feared it would. And it didn’t make his hands crack and drop off, either, the fate Scorpius was still convinced he’d saved Harry from.
The wards surged back together with a thunderclap of power that made Ron stagger. Harry grinned at him. “Sorry,” he said, and then spun around in the middle of the street and laughed aloud.
“Merlin, mate.” Ron rubbed his eyes, although Harry thought he had only felt and not seen the magic. “Warn a bloke next time when you’re going to do that.”
Harry smiled at him. “What did you expect, when I’ve been prevented from casting magic for more than a week?” It really had been more than a week, at least if you included the initial day he had spent in bed at Malfoy Manor before the Healers could confirm that the curse on his hands was unknown. “And you knew I was going to cast that spell.”
Ignoring the way Ron was still grumbling, Harry ran a loving hand down his wand. He had sometimes thought that maybe it would be for the best if he gave up the wizarding world and went back and lived in the Muggle one, where at least there were no Risen Cobras hunting him and he could pass unnoticed. He never had because his friends needed him, but now he knew there was more than one reason not to do it. He could never give up the magic that tore through him, the feeling of dancing on a stream of molten lava.
“Prevented,” Ron said suddenly.
Harry glanced at him curiously. “What? Are you thinking about the curse? I promise, I’ll cast that tracking spell and find out who did this to me.”
“Who prevented you from casting magic?” Ron jabbed a finger at him. “Not us. We barely saw you.”
“The Healers, because of the curse,” Harry said, confused. His friends should have understood this by the time he visited them, if they hadn’t before. “And then Draco, and even Scorpius, who tattled on me when I was going to firecall St. Mungo’s.”
“Oh,” said Ron abruptly, and then looked down at his hands. Harry sighed.
“You were going to say that Draco was the one preventing me,” he said. “Or you felt that way.”
Ron shrugged a little, not looking at him. “Hermione is the one who feels that way. And sometimes I think she’s right, mate.” He lifted his head and turned around, focusing on Harry in an intent, unnerving way. “You’ve gone full force into this Malfoy thing, as if you thought that you owed him something.”
“I don’t feel that way-”
“Isn’t that the reason you stick around us?” Ron asked, with the same intensity. “Because you feel that you owe us something for failing to cure our problems and you want to spend time supporting us instead?”
Harry stared at Ron, feeling as though the ground under his feet had cracked. He hadn’t fallen into the crack yet, but he was going to start falling soon, and it wasn’t going to be pretty.
“No!” His voice trembled. He shook his head and repeated himself more roughly, more strongly. “Merlin, Ron, is that the way you feel? I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to let it get to that point. I stay because I love you lot. And I’m your friend. And I help you because I understand that you don’t want to go to Healers.”
Ron looked away from him. “Maybe we should, though,” he murmured, so softly that Harry didn’t think he would have heard him if he didn’t have his ears stretched for exactly that, because every word that Ron said was important now. Even more important than it had been during the war.
“What? But you know what a disaster that was last time, when the Healers were trying to interview you or just didn’t believe some of what you told them, and that one Healer had that daughter who’d died in the war and spent five minutes yelling at Hermione because she was the one who’d survived-”
“I know,” said Ron, with a down-cutting gesture so abrupt that it shut Harry up all by itself. “But I know something else, mate, and it’s that your strength and your idealism just aren’t going to last forever. And that we were utterly lost last week, when you spent all that time with Malfoy.”
“What does Draco have to do with this?” Harry flexed his hands miserably. “If you felt neglected because I was with him.”
That sentence ended there, because Harry didn’t know what to do. There was some emotion even more powerful than guilt in his stomach and sitting on his shoulders. He had needed that holiday from concerns so much, he had wanted to be with Draco, but it seemed to have cost his friends the way failing them during the war had.
“No,” Ron said. This time it was gentle. Harry still found it hard to look up until Ron moved in front of him and shook his shoulders a little, though. “No, that’s not what I meant. Just that Hermione and I were lost without you. And it shouldn’t be that way. We’re parents. We have a little girl. We have jobs. We have responsibilities. We shouldn’t be depending on you to carry that much weight.”
Harry reached up and caught Ron’s wrists, holding them firmly. The crack in the street was still there, but now it had filled with something richer and deeper than light. He was smiling, and the words that floated off his tongue were the ones he had wanted to speak and hadn’t thought he would for the rest of his life. “I’ve been waiting to hear you say that.”
Ron gave him an embarrassed little smile and looked at the ground. “We depend on you too much. We want to stop.”
Harry shivered in pleasure and relief. He had shoved the thought away as a traitorous one every time it occurred to him, but now, he was in this new, blessed world, and he could say, “As long as you think that you and Hermione can find the right Mind-Healer.”
“I think it was a mistake to start looking so soon after the war,” Ron said, with a shake of his head. “Of course we were going to get people who were still angry and upset and all the rest of it. But there’s been some time to let their passions cool now, and they don’t focus on us as much as they used to.”
There were still stories about him and Hermione, Harry knew, stories about the war heroes that the press thought hadn’t lived up to the standards they should have. But he let that pass. He was happy enough that his friends seemed to have found their feet again. “All right. If you want some help, though, or you need me to bribe someone, you know you can count on me.”
Ron gave him a sweet, strange smile. “We can, but I don’t want to have to all the time.”
Harry only nodded. There was a heaviness in his mouth like the heaviness when he had knelt in the middle of Draco’s house with the paper in his hand, and worried about what Draco might or might not do when he saw it.
Then he stirred. He wondered if it was the right moment to tell his friends about the kiss, the moment he and Draco had shared, and the relationship that they might be forming.
But he dismissed the notion. While the mention of Draco and the time that Harry had spent over at his house had led to this moment, it was still not about him. It was about Ron, and Hermione, and maybe George someday, and the way they might be able to expand their lives. Besides, if Harry was going to commit himself to really talking to his friends about Draco, then he wanted both of them to be present.
“What do you say we go to that new pub in Diagon Alley, the one that makes you stand up to do the drinks?” Ron offered suddenly. “My shout.”
Harry eyed him silently. He knew Ron remembered as well as he did what had happened the last time they were in a pub together. Ron wasn’t always at his best in crowds.
“It’s a good thing you can do magic if you need to, to keep them off me,” said Ron, and offered him the smallest of daring smiles. “But you also shouldn’t have to.”
Harry accepted it a second later. Ron wanted to make the experiment, and the last thing Harry wanted to do to him was encourage him to give that up when it could be so healthy for him. “Okay.”
Ron’s smile roused old memories as they started towards the Apparition point, and none of them hurt.
*
“Harry.”
Harry paused. He knew that shy brilliance in Draco’s eyes, the way he was clutching the chair in front of him. He and Scorpius had spent five minutes over here, and already Scorpius had got distracted by one of the books Harry had bought right after the war, when he was trying to learn more about the wizarding world and replace some of the endless scars in his brain. Harry had reasoned he would think about things other than blood and torture if he could fill his mind with bright pictures.
Scorpius was peering at drawings of dragons and unicorns and making stories up about them in a soft voice to himself. Harry had expected him to turn around and want to tell those stories to either Harry or his father, but Draco shook his head when Harry caught his eye and said, “He doesn’t always do that. Sometimes he just wants to practice them first.”
Harry nodded. “All right.”
“Have you considered any of the other pure-blood customs you’ve been reading about?”
Implementing them, he means. Harry met Draco’s eyes and gave the confession he would have been unable to imagine giving two months ago-hell, maybe a fortnight ago. “I’m afraid that I’ll get one wrong.”
Draco paused, then tilted his head slowly down until he looked like he was gazing at Harry over the top of a book himself. “I could help you with them.”
“But you don’t want me to, because they’re supposed to be done alone,” Harry surmised. “And you want to be courted in the traditional way by someone who’s familiar enough with them not to need his hand held all the time.”
Draco stared at him, as surprised as Scorpius the first time Golden flew. Then he turned his face away, and a burst of bright crimson covered his cheeks.
“You must think it’s stupid,” he murmured.
“I’ve done a lot worse than this for people I care for.” Harry wasn’t about to say the word “love” until he understood where this was going, how much he could give Draco, whether it would ever be what Draco wanted, whether he could integrate his friends into his life with Draco-things were confusing, and they would just have to stay confusing until they got themselves sorted out. “It’s going to wait for a bit while I study some more. Okay?”
“One would think that a week flat on your back would give you plenty of time to study.”
“I’ll have you know that I’ve spent lots of weeks flat on my back, and I always found something to do with my time other than study. Other than a few times I was in the infirmary at Hogwarts, and Hermione was there with my books right away.”
Draco had bristled when he was first speaking, and Harry wondered if Draco had thought he was being made fun of. But then he smiled, a little, and leaned forwards as if he would connect their hands with a simple touch. “I’m sure that we can find something more interesting for you to do the next time you’re flat on your back.”
Harry flushed up, the way that he wouldn’t have expected to. He and Draco were taking this so slowly, and the note that gave Draco permission to ask whatever he wanted had been his idea, and Draco seemed just as uncertain about how to deal with someone who didn’t know the pure-blood customs as Harry was how to deal with someone who did. So Harry should have been the more confident one, and Draco the more embarrassed one. It was the way that Harry was used to it working with his friends, anyway.
But now Draco pulled his hand back slowly, with a smirk that revealed how similar his thoughts were to Harry’s, just with a twist. Harry cleared his throat. “Well, we’ll get there. But it will take some time.”
“You’re worth waiting for.”
Harry was almost glad that Scorpius turned around and started telling them one of the stories he’d made up then, because there were only so many things he could say to that, and most of them would sound stupid. He settled for smiling some of them at Draco instead.
*
Harry leaned back and rubbed his aching head. He’d spent another evening in the study of the pure-blood books, and discovered yet another exception in the back of one to a custom he’d been sure he understood: how you were supposed to greet people when they arrived at your home for the first time. Apparently, besides weather, time of day, how well you knew them, degree of blood relation, and how formal the occasion was, it also depended on how recently they’d eaten.
“I just don’t know how to keep track of all these different things,” Harry told the walls of his library. “I spent my youth fighting a really simple and straightforward war, what do you expect?”
As if in response, his front door shuddered beneath a knock.
Harry promptly called his wand into his hand, with a flick that came from his Auror training. It was too late for his friends or Draco to come to the door; they would have called him through the Floo if it was an emergency, anyway, since that was the faster way to travel. That meant he could probably expect another attack.
Although he had to admit, he didn’t know a lot of his enemies who would bother with a polite knock first.
Harry eased up to the front door and tapped the wall with his wand, muttering a short phrase he’d added the other day after he finished repairing the hole in his wards. A section of the wall turned transparent, and let him see his front step as well as most of the street.
A single wizard stood there, in blue robes edged with silver. Harry didn’t recognize the trim, even from his books. On the other hand, there was also a glamour over the stranger’s face, a swirling, many-edged confusion of color that few honest people would wear.
“Harry Potter?” The wizard was staring at the transparent section of wall as though he could see Harry behind it, even though the spell ensured that the clarity only went one way.
Well, there are such things as spells that let someone hear a heartbeat. “Who’s asking?” Harry asked, in what he thought was a terribly polite way.
“Someone who used to belong to the Risen Cobras,” said the man. “Someone who thinks that he can solve the problems between you and them. Will you let me in?”
“No,” said Harry promptly.
“I dislike talking about my business in the street.”
“And I dislike people cursing me with magic that was intended to cripple me if I used any spells.”
The man hesitated. Then he said, “If I swear on my wand and magic not to harm you while I’m inside?”
“And my house, and my friends, and my books, and-”
The man sighed. “Very well. Perhaps a meeting in a neutral location will be more to your liking.” He dropped something on the step beside him, and then turned and walked away, Apparating well short of the actual Apparition point.
Harry Summoned the card from under the door instead of opening it. He thought Draco would be proud of his caution.
But the card didn’t really enlighten him. The Jackal’s Head, Friday, 1 PM.
Harry leaned back with a small snort. So he would probably go-as soon as he found out what the Jackal’s Head was supposed to be-but there was no way that he was going alone. He hoped his mysterious “friend” was okay with his real friends coming along.
Chapter Twenty-One.
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