FIC: Roses in the Garden (Harry/Draco, ~2000, PG-13)
Title: Roses in the Garden
Summary: To hold and to have are sometimes so very different. Protecting sometimes means you have to hurt.
Pairing and rating: Harry/Draco, PG-13.
Author's notes: ♥ for luciology :)
This is part fifth of the Angles of Refraction collection.
Snapshots of a War | Phoenix | Frame in Frame | Observance | Roses in the Garden | Picture Perfect | Back to main
Roses in the Garden
~(*)~
"Draco, that is not a particularly good idea," I said through clenched teeth while we were heading home.
"Hmm…" He was apparently too busy to register my comment, his forehead furrowed in thought.
"Harry Potter is not a responsibility to be taken lightly," I continued, trying not very successfully to control my annoyance at being ignored so blatantly.
"He won't run away," he snapped into focus, refusing to answer to my real comment. "The Manor is more than sufficiently guarded."
"He is taking a stupid schoolboy feud way too far," I told Narcissa afterwards, while pacing through her drawing room. "And he will do something stupid because of it."
When Harry Potter arrived in our parlour, he was shackled and kept in check by two men I recognised only faintly. I saw no obvious need for such precautions; he merely looked incredibly thin and so filthy, and acted surprisingly subdued. When he was released, he made no move, and I couldn't hold back my eyebrow from rising. Well, well.
The necessary documentary exchange was done maybe too rapidly, making my head spin with a thousand reasons why not. When Draco signed his name on the contract binding his obligation to provide secure confinement for Harry J. Potter and gained the full rights upon the prisoner, the room acquired the vague smell of catastrophe.
Afterwards, I would realise that the manner with which Draco prowled around Potter was not only slightly disturbing, but also potentially dangerous - very dangerous - in the long run. I stood behind my desk, frantically thinking how on Earth I could make things right again. But it was Draco's head in the noose this time, and when he opened his mouth, his voice spoke fluently of the wrongness of the whole situation.
He sounded almost tender. Almost.
"Welcome to my beautiful home, Potter," Draco said, stopping finally in front of the prisoner, obviously waiting for a reaction that just wasn't there.
"Look at me if you will." The request was quiet but firm, and this time Potter obeyed if not hurryingly.
Draco smiled. I could see only the edge of his mouth, but it was enough to restore some of my faith. "You will fulfil the duties of a gardener," he explained. "I'm sure you will like it."
I was sure that wouldn't be the case, which, of course was the point in the first place.
"You will sleep in the house elf wing," Draco continued. "You are not allowed to give the house elves orders, unless explicitly told to do so by a member of the Malfoy family. You are forbidden to ask for any help with your own tasks. You are not to leave the grounds of the Manor."
There was a click and Draco moved away a little, allowing me to see the brief flare of magic enveloping the pair of binding bracelets as they took; one on Potter's left wrist and one on Draco's right.
I cringed internally again. Technically, that was an efficient way to chain someone to yourself, but I had hardly seen anyone but lovers use such bracelets. After all, a particularly strict guard wouldn't be thrilled by the prospect of the two-way awareness channelled by the binding magic; sensations, emotions, control. Anger rose in me stronger than before, and I had to clench my hands until nails dug into the palm.
Everything was going to be fine in the end, I would see to it.
And as two house elves appeared, bearing a full set of clothes, I wondered whether now wasn't the time to stop the madness. I made a step forward, on time to hear Draco's quiet order:
"Undress."
It was actually amusing to see how little it took for Potter's uncharacteristic obedience and detachment to dissolve. He looked up, eyes brighter, and snapped something too low for me to hear. Draco laughed and took a deliberate step forward, making Potter back away.
Maybe, in the middle of what I was sure was soon going to spiral down into a lurid display, common sense would take no root. I turned around and exited.
~(*)~
"Draco, come to my study."
It was not an hour later, and behind him a once again detached Potter left the room wearing a uniform with the family crest on it.
They both looked at me, surprised, after which Potter snorted and followed the house elf somewhere to the left and Draco's features twisted in irritation.
By the time we actually reached the study it was fully-fledged rage, if the tensed jaw was anything to go by, and I was once again quickly heading there myself.
"Draco, I want you to end this," I opted for my most level voice, attempting to calm the atmosphere.
"Father, I am not going to back away," he said, his voice going a tone higher in the last word.
"Draco, you will get yourself into serious trouble and nothing is going to be able to help you, do you realise this? If you put as much as a thought out of the line, it is going to cost you everything. And it is certainly not worth it! You are a Malfoy, for heaven's sake. Act like one!"
"All my life," he began, obviously holding onto his calm with much effort, "you have told me that my last name doesn't make me great, that you named me Draco because I was to fight and be strong on my own. Haven't you?"
I looked at his angry grey eyes, carbon copies of mine, yet totally different, and I knew that I was to lose on that one. "Draco…"
"Haven't you?" he repeated, even tighter.
"I have." I raked a hand through my hair, unable to hold myself any longer. It was such a nightmare to see him using my efforts to make him a strong person to push me away and head into destruction.
"Then back off. It's not your fight."
He turned and left, and I went to pour myself a stiff drink.
~(*)~
"He is not going to listen to me at all," I told Narcissa a few days after, while we were having breakfast in a room overlooking the garden. Potter was there, digging something with obvious effort, and I wanted more than anything to just spirit him away.
"Lucius, you can't leave him like that, either."
"I know that of course!" I couldn't help snapping and pushed my plate away just as Draco appeared under the window and began talking to Potter. "There is something highly obvious in Draco demeanour, something that is so easy to see that it's painful."
In the past days we both had watched Potter do errands for Draco, bringing him books from the library ten times a day, or putting flowers up in his bedroom, or even - just yesterday - serving Draco during lunch.
Outside, Draco ordered something with a sweetly-poisoned smile and the shrillness of Potter's answer was almost enough for us to be able to understand what he was saying.
I turned to her. "Can you try to pour some sense into him?" I asked, "Because he may listen to you whereas he's deaf to me."
"You shouldn't have ordered him outright, Lucius," her nose wrinkled and she sighed. "I can hardly recognise him lately. And what is he doing, that is Harry Potter here, the boy I must have heard a thousand rants about over the years. Draco has never had any business even thinking of him."
"I know," I agreed, hoping she'll succeed. "Thank God there is at least some opposition going on and not a warm welcome."
"Dear?" Her face was grim.
"Yes?"
"When you courted me, and I refused you so publicly at that ball because I thought you were arrogant, ill-mannered French new money, what did you do?"
Potter's legs caved under the relentless bout of Draco's magic, and he fell on his knees in the middle of the rose garden.
"I tried harder," I answered, and it hung between us like an unspoken scroll of doom.
A gardening tool flew at Draco's head while Potter hissed through visibly clenched teeth, and bounced off an invisible shield a few inches away from Draco's body.
"I will try as hard as I can," she concluded, "but it might all be useless."
Draco laughed outside, the sound coming slightly muted through the glass.
~(*)~
It wasn't a full month later that we received an owl bearing heavy, familiar insignia. The demand was polite, of course, but not a request at all. We were to show our new acquisition at a grand ball. Point blank.
The air in the room cooled with a considerable speed, and Draco paled in a way I'd rarely seen him do. "I thought he'd wait a bit longer," he said, face carefully expressionless.
"You can't have expected to receive Harry Potter simply as a gift, Draco," Narcissa pointed out in a perfectly composed, matter-of-fact manner. I had to admit that her veiled, mild and delicate appeals had up to that moment shown more effect than I had actually expected - if not those about common sense, at least the ones about basic discretion.
Draco's forehead furrowed, and he stayed completely silent while Narcissa called house elves and began giving directions about the menu she wanted and the number of guests expected. Half the world apparently.
By the time she was finished, Draco's eyes had died and he had pulled himself tight together. Visibly.
He called Potter, who appeared not as quickly as he could have, and began delivering instructions about the floral decoration of the ballroom, continuing without a pause to describe in clinical detail how exactly Potter was to present a rose to the Dark Lord.
I thought Potter would faint from the mere sound of what was required. I was coming close to falling apart with worry.
"I won't…" he began; angry, a little shaken and more helpless than he apparently imagined, and Draco cut him off so fast that it must have made his head spin:
"Oh, yes, you will. One way or the other. And I can force you to do anything I want you to in a number of interesting ways if you care to remember."
His voice was inexplicably tensed. The warning was high and ringing, and when Potter bit his lip and looked away, I had to wonder what games the two of them were playing in the imaginary privacy of my home.
"One more thing," Draco added and outstretched a hand. "Give me your glasses."
The answering gaze was pleading, shockingly noticeable, but wasn't taken into account at all, and when Potter gave them, his hand shook ever so slightly.
I fully expected Draco to crush them, throw them out, do the first reasonable and logical thing in over a month. But he didn't. He just put them on the table and backhanded Potter across the face, hard.
Potter's head rolled with the hit and he staggered a little from the force of it. When he looked up, his eyes burned with odd accusation and betrayal, his lip was split and across his cheek Draco's ring had carved a long gash.
"That will be all," Draco said in the ringing silence, and his voice was all glass - hard but brittle.
Potter left. So did Draco himself, and while I was watching the line of his shoulders, tensed as if in defence, I wished for the first time we had taught him that there were moments when he had to say no to himself and go with common sense.
"What are we going to do?" Narcissa asked, sounding frankly afraid beneath all the veneer for the first time since I had come to know her. "One wrong move, one display of what we’ve watched every day, and our son will be done for." Her hand came to rest on my shoulder, not saying that we would be done for as well. Irreversibly.
"We will play blind and pray that everyone else does, too," I answered her aloud, thinking that if Draco managed to make Potter look properly cowed and hurt and scared for one single second, things will be alright. "It is such an outrageous and stunning thing to see that people will be willing to write everything subtle enough off as imagination."
Her hand moved, a light touch up my throat, and her comment was quiet and thoughtful:
"Maybe, after all, we should hope that it is merely lust and not something graver."
If we survived the week, we would hope.
~(*)~
The End
Snapshots of a War | Phoenix | Frame in Frame | Observance | Roses in the Garden | Picture Perfect | Back to main
~(*)~
If you enjoyed thit fic, you can also go read
Spark Of Chaos' other fics
Remember that I thrive on your comments :)
Summary: To hold and to have are sometimes so very different. Protecting sometimes means you have to hurt.
Pairing and rating: Harry/Draco, PG-13.
Author's notes: ♥ for luciology :)
This is part fifth of the Angles of Refraction collection.
Snapshots of a War | Phoenix | Frame in Frame | Observance | Roses in the Garden | Picture Perfect | Back to main
Roses in the Garden
~(*)~
"Draco, that is not a particularly good idea," I said through clenched teeth while we were heading home.
"Hmm…" He was apparently too busy to register my comment, his forehead furrowed in thought.
"Harry Potter is not a responsibility to be taken lightly," I continued, trying not very successfully to control my annoyance at being ignored so blatantly.
"He won't run away," he snapped into focus, refusing to answer to my real comment. "The Manor is more than sufficiently guarded."
"He is taking a stupid schoolboy feud way too far," I told Narcissa afterwards, while pacing through her drawing room. "And he will do something stupid because of it."
When Harry Potter arrived in our parlour, he was shackled and kept in check by two men I recognised only faintly. I saw no obvious need for such precautions; he merely looked incredibly thin and so filthy, and acted surprisingly subdued. When he was released, he made no move, and I couldn't hold back my eyebrow from rising. Well, well.
The necessary documentary exchange was done maybe too rapidly, making my head spin with a thousand reasons why not. When Draco signed his name on the contract binding his obligation to provide secure confinement for Harry J. Potter and gained the full rights upon the prisoner, the room acquired the vague smell of catastrophe.
Afterwards, I would realise that the manner with which Draco prowled around Potter was not only slightly disturbing, but also potentially dangerous - very dangerous - in the long run. I stood behind my desk, frantically thinking how on Earth I could make things right again. But it was Draco's head in the noose this time, and when he opened his mouth, his voice spoke fluently of the wrongness of the whole situation.
He sounded almost tender. Almost.
"Welcome to my beautiful home, Potter," Draco said, stopping finally in front of the prisoner, obviously waiting for a reaction that just wasn't there.
"Look at me if you will." The request was quiet but firm, and this time Potter obeyed if not hurryingly.
Draco smiled. I could see only the edge of his mouth, but it was enough to restore some of my faith. "You will fulfil the duties of a gardener," he explained. "I'm sure you will like it."
I was sure that wouldn't be the case, which, of course was the point in the first place.
"You will sleep in the house elf wing," Draco continued. "You are not allowed to give the house elves orders, unless explicitly told to do so by a member of the Malfoy family. You are forbidden to ask for any help with your own tasks. You are not to leave the grounds of the Manor."
There was a click and Draco moved away a little, allowing me to see the brief flare of magic enveloping the pair of binding bracelets as they took; one on Potter's left wrist and one on Draco's right.
I cringed internally again. Technically, that was an efficient way to chain someone to yourself, but I had hardly seen anyone but lovers use such bracelets. After all, a particularly strict guard wouldn't be thrilled by the prospect of the two-way awareness channelled by the binding magic; sensations, emotions, control. Anger rose in me stronger than before, and I had to clench my hands until nails dug into the palm.
Everything was going to be fine in the end, I would see to it.
And as two house elves appeared, bearing a full set of clothes, I wondered whether now wasn't the time to stop the madness. I made a step forward, on time to hear Draco's quiet order:
"Undress."
It was actually amusing to see how little it took for Potter's uncharacteristic obedience and detachment to dissolve. He looked up, eyes brighter, and snapped something too low for me to hear. Draco laughed and took a deliberate step forward, making Potter back away.
Maybe, in the middle of what I was sure was soon going to spiral down into a lurid display, common sense would take no root. I turned around and exited.
~(*)~
"Draco, come to my study."
It was not an hour later, and behind him a once again detached Potter left the room wearing a uniform with the family crest on it.
They both looked at me, surprised, after which Potter snorted and followed the house elf somewhere to the left and Draco's features twisted in irritation.
By the time we actually reached the study it was fully-fledged rage, if the tensed jaw was anything to go by, and I was once again quickly heading there myself.
"Draco, I want you to end this," I opted for my most level voice, attempting to calm the atmosphere.
"Father, I am not going to back away," he said, his voice going a tone higher in the last word.
"Draco, you will get yourself into serious trouble and nothing is going to be able to help you, do you realise this? If you put as much as a thought out of the line, it is going to cost you everything. And it is certainly not worth it! You are a Malfoy, for heaven's sake. Act like one!"
"All my life," he began, obviously holding onto his calm with much effort, "you have told me that my last name doesn't make me great, that you named me Draco because I was to fight and be strong on my own. Haven't you?"
I looked at his angry grey eyes, carbon copies of mine, yet totally different, and I knew that I was to lose on that one. "Draco…"
"Haven't you?" he repeated, even tighter.
"I have." I raked a hand through my hair, unable to hold myself any longer. It was such a nightmare to see him using my efforts to make him a strong person to push me away and head into destruction.
"Then back off. It's not your fight."
He turned and left, and I went to pour myself a stiff drink.
~(*)~
"He is not going to listen to me at all," I told Narcissa a few days after, while we were having breakfast in a room overlooking the garden. Potter was there, digging something with obvious effort, and I wanted more than anything to just spirit him away.
"Lucius, you can't leave him like that, either."
"I know that of course!" I couldn't help snapping and pushed my plate away just as Draco appeared under the window and began talking to Potter. "There is something highly obvious in Draco demeanour, something that is so easy to see that it's painful."
In the past days we both had watched Potter do errands for Draco, bringing him books from the library ten times a day, or putting flowers up in his bedroom, or even - just yesterday - serving Draco during lunch.
Outside, Draco ordered something with a sweetly-poisoned smile and the shrillness of Potter's answer was almost enough for us to be able to understand what he was saying.
I turned to her. "Can you try to pour some sense into him?" I asked, "Because he may listen to you whereas he's deaf to me."
"You shouldn't have ordered him outright, Lucius," her nose wrinkled and she sighed. "I can hardly recognise him lately. And what is he doing, that is Harry Potter here, the boy I must have heard a thousand rants about over the years. Draco has never had any business even thinking of him."
"I know," I agreed, hoping she'll succeed. "Thank God there is at least some opposition going on and not a warm welcome."
"Dear?" Her face was grim.
"Yes?"
"When you courted me, and I refused you so publicly at that ball because I thought you were arrogant, ill-mannered French new money, what did you do?"
Potter's legs caved under the relentless bout of Draco's magic, and he fell on his knees in the middle of the rose garden.
"I tried harder," I answered, and it hung between us like an unspoken scroll of doom.
A gardening tool flew at Draco's head while Potter hissed through visibly clenched teeth, and bounced off an invisible shield a few inches away from Draco's body.
"I will try as hard as I can," she concluded, "but it might all be useless."
Draco laughed outside, the sound coming slightly muted through the glass.
~(*)~
It wasn't a full month later that we received an owl bearing heavy, familiar insignia. The demand was polite, of course, but not a request at all. We were to show our new acquisition at a grand ball. Point blank.
The air in the room cooled with a considerable speed, and Draco paled in a way I'd rarely seen him do. "I thought he'd wait a bit longer," he said, face carefully expressionless.
"You can't have expected to receive Harry Potter simply as a gift, Draco," Narcissa pointed out in a perfectly composed, matter-of-fact manner. I had to admit that her veiled, mild and delicate appeals had up to that moment shown more effect than I had actually expected - if not those about common sense, at least the ones about basic discretion.
Draco's forehead furrowed, and he stayed completely silent while Narcissa called house elves and began giving directions about the menu she wanted and the number of guests expected. Half the world apparently.
By the time she was finished, Draco's eyes had died and he had pulled himself tight together. Visibly.
He called Potter, who appeared not as quickly as he could have, and began delivering instructions about the floral decoration of the ballroom, continuing without a pause to describe in clinical detail how exactly Potter was to present a rose to the Dark Lord.
I thought Potter would faint from the mere sound of what was required. I was coming close to falling apart with worry.
"I won't…" he began; angry, a little shaken and more helpless than he apparently imagined, and Draco cut him off so fast that it must have made his head spin:
"Oh, yes, you will. One way or the other. And I can force you to do anything I want you to in a number of interesting ways if you care to remember."
His voice was inexplicably tensed. The warning was high and ringing, and when Potter bit his lip and looked away, I had to wonder what games the two of them were playing in the imaginary privacy of my home.
"One more thing," Draco added and outstretched a hand. "Give me your glasses."
The answering gaze was pleading, shockingly noticeable, but wasn't taken into account at all, and when Potter gave them, his hand shook ever so slightly.
I fully expected Draco to crush them, throw them out, do the first reasonable and logical thing in over a month. But he didn't. He just put them on the table and backhanded Potter across the face, hard.
Potter's head rolled with the hit and he staggered a little from the force of it. When he looked up, his eyes burned with odd accusation and betrayal, his lip was split and across his cheek Draco's ring had carved a long gash.
"That will be all," Draco said in the ringing silence, and his voice was all glass - hard but brittle.
Potter left. So did Draco himself, and while I was watching the line of his shoulders, tensed as if in defence, I wished for the first time we had taught him that there were moments when he had to say no to himself and go with common sense.
"What are we going to do?" Narcissa asked, sounding frankly afraid beneath all the veneer for the first time since I had come to know her. "One wrong move, one display of what we’ve watched every day, and our son will be done for." Her hand came to rest on my shoulder, not saying that we would be done for as well. Irreversibly.
"We will play blind and pray that everyone else does, too," I answered her aloud, thinking that if Draco managed to make Potter look properly cowed and hurt and scared for one single second, things will be alright. "It is such an outrageous and stunning thing to see that people will be willing to write everything subtle enough off as imagination."
Her hand moved, a light touch up my throat, and her comment was quiet and thoughtful:
"Maybe, after all, we should hope that it is merely lust and not something graver."
If we survived the week, we would hope.
~(*)~
The End
Snapshots of a War | Phoenix | Frame in Frame | Observance | Roses in the Garden | Picture Perfect | Back to main
~(*)~
If you enjoyed thit fic, you can also go read
Spark Of Chaos' other fics
Remember that I thrive on your comments :)