(no subject)
HAPPY BIRTHDAY, sheafrotherdon! Seeing as how your actual gift is going to be a bit late due to uncontrollable forces, I was all, WHAT CAN I DO FOR CATE. And then, I schemed. And schemed some more. Since you are pretty much my favorite person in the universe, I felt whatever I did had to be at least minorly spectacular. I was originally thinking John Sheppard, but it proved mildly out of reach. Therefore. I went for the trusty staple of fic.
So. Though this was meant to be your get well fic, it is now your *birthday* fic, but I think the addition of art is well worth the wait. ;)
Everyone else: OMG THE DRACO FIC IS FINALLY DONE!
In which: Draco accidentally joins the Order, becomes a healer, wants to correct Remus Lupin's vision a lot, and generally is annoyed by Gryffindors. Also featuring DADA Professor!Ron, neurotic!Bill, and me forgetting Kingsley Shacklebolt.
As a word to the wise, this is like, only a little bit HBP compliant, because let's all be honest.
1. Bill is not mauled, or with Fleur.
2. Harry is really gay, because, come on, he grew up in a closet.
3. Sirius is still alive and Remus is keeping him in his study. Remus and Tonks are not together.
4. Draco is not an evil runaway.
5. NO ZOMBIES.
6. Horcrux? What's a horcrux?
Points in which this is HBP compliant:
1. Dumbledore is dead.
2. The prophecy is a little bit right.
So! Without further ado! The long awaited collab between linnpuzzle and myself, Draco/Ron, R, definite tiekissing, and HAPPY BIRTHDAY CATE. Like, 11,000 words. I sort of outdid myself. That's why this had to be in two posts. Sorry!
Part two is here.
Part one:
Fixed in a Morning Sun
The problem was, really, Draco had decided, that you couldn’t just defect from the forces of Voldemort without somehow ending up as part of the forces of collective-good-and-several-hundred-Weasleys. There hadn’t really been a middle ground - a sensible sort of middle ground, which involved fucking off to Majorca to wait out the war - or even an “I’m leaning toward your side, please keep away” sort of ground. He’d shown up at Snape’s metaphorical doorstep, because Snape had always been reliable, and, he found, a bit glumly, had managed to become the first accidental recruit of the Order of the Phoenix.
It was even a rather tacky name.
Snape had taken him to Lupin, who still looked frayed around the edges, who had looked him over and apparently decided that Draco had whatever he was looking for, because he’d taken him downstairs to a truly wretched sort of living room, and sat him firmly down between someone whose hair kept changing colors and a Weasley who smelled rather unfortunately of cinders. He’d wanted to make some sort of crack about muggle fairytales or quite possibly chimney sweeps and their brooms, but Lupin had launched into some convoluted speech, the end result of which was Draco realizing - too late - that Lupin was laboring under the delusion that he had fled to their precious shoddily-decorated lair for protection from his father, who somehow seemed to be outraged after Draco’s overwhelming change of heart.
It was rather insulting, Draco found, and the worst of it was, he felt oddly dishonest. He hadn’t really had any moral objection to Death Eaters, it had just been that no one seemed to notice that Bellatrix Lestrange was fucking insane. He hadn’t wanted to be thrown in Azkaban at seventeen, and furthermore, taking the Dark Mark seemed like such a profoundly stupid idea. He’d heard his father talking once, about how there were derivatives of both cruciatus and imperius bound up in the whole thing. Draco hadn’t really felt that binding unforgivables up in some sort of garish tattoo was necessarily a bad idea, objectively, but he’d felt quite strongly that being stupid enough to take the Mark was really sort of a low-class trait. So there was that.
At least, he’d thought the worst of it was feeling dishonest, until Hermione Granger had hugged him, and one of the Weasleys - the tall, vaguely attractive one who Draco felt it might be a bit of a bad idea to cross - had clapped him on the shoulder and said, “Good on you, Malfoy.”
That hadn’t been so bad, really, because no one on Voldemort’s side had ever actually said, “Good on you, Malfoy,” it was mostly just creepy werewolf grumbling (Fenrir), vague hissing (Voldemort, usually), and the occasional delighted shriek (Bellatrix, which Draco sort of felt underscored the burning need for a one-way ticket straight to St. Mungo’s insanity ward). Someone had given him an exceptionally large cup of coffee with something that he suspected was rather alcoholic in it, and then refilled. After three of those, Draco was feeling considerably warmer toward the minor changes in his plan. Majorca would be too hot, this time of year, and Majorca certainly didn’t have big, scary Weasleys who casually kept refilling your coffee while discussing some sort of quartering arrangements and could probably be counted upon to take down anyone who tried to curse you.
The forces of evil, Draco reflected, would never have given him firewhiskey in his coffee, largely because his father seemed to feel that getting drunk was a low-class thing to do, so really, maybe, the change in plans wouldn’t be so bad.
Then he realized that the quartering discussion had meant, objectively, that he had to share a room with Ron Weasley and stopped liking the changes entirely.
That was how Draco ended up in a second bed with two blankets, a glass of water, seventeen hideous orange Quidditch posters fluttering overhead, and Ron Weasley sleeping across the room.
Draco realized, about fifteen minutes after he’d crawled beneath the covers to hide, that he was sleeping in a house full of Gryffindors and was working up to a full-fledged panic attack when Weasley interrupted his hyperventilating.
“Are you going to try to spy on us, then?” Weasley said, a bit casually, sounding genuinely curious.
That would be stupid, Draco wanted to say, and I don’t do stupid things. What came out was, “No.” A rather small no, considering, but Draco felt it might be acceptable because of having been interrupted in thoughts about being eaten by lions.
“Okay,” Weasley agreed.
There was silence for almost five minutes, and then Draco said, finally, without really meaning to, “Aren’t you going to pitch a fit? Or stalk me for months? Or - try to convince someone?”
Weasley snorted, in the dark. “I’m not fifteen anymore.”
Draco wanted to point out that he had definitely done all those things at sixteen and quite probably at seventeen, and he really didn’t see any reason for him to go changing now, but instead he said, sort of accidentally, “I miss my mother.”
He waited in truly horrified silence for thirty-seven seconds, thirty-seven seconds in which he swore off drink forever, before Weasley said, “You really are sort of drunk, aren’t you?”
“No,” Draco protested, then realized that it meant having told Weasley something of his own accord, and promptly changed his answer. “Yes. Yes, obviously.”
There was another snorting laugh, which Draco found really horrifying, because Weasley was laughing at him.
“Sorry,” Weasley said, finally, and then there was the creak of bedsprings in the darkness and then a faint crack of light from the hallway as he let himself out, and Draco lay in bed for a full five minutes, convinced that he’d gone to tell the whole house - Draco Malfoy misses his mother, can you believe? - before Weasley returned.
He tossed something at the Draco - a lethifold! part of Draco’s mind shrieked, before he realized it was just a shirt - and climbed back into his own bed, with more creaking.
“I assure you,” Draco said, finally, a little confused, “I’m fully clothed.”
There was another soft huff of laughter in the dark, and Draco was really going to have to have words with Lupin about Weasley laughing at him, because it made him want to say more things, because he’d never really made anybody genuinely laugh before. For all he knew, it might be some dark curse, and then you’d become addicted and have to join the muggle circus.
“It’s Snape’s,” he said, and Draco thought that maybe he was just being drunk again, since his confusion was reaching epic levels.
Weasley leaned up on one elbow - Draco could faintly make out his outline in the dark, but not any of his features, though he knew the freckles were there.
“Were you - robbing the laundry?” Draco said, finally.
“No, I asked to borrow it,” Weasley said, thankfully with only the smallest of snickers, covered with some sort of cough.
“You asked Snape to borrow a shirt,” Draco repeated.
“It used to help Harry,” Ron said, finally, after a few moments, quiet. “To - have one of Lupin’s, when he was homesick.”
Draco almost protested that he wasn’t, but he pulled it on, instead. The collar smelled a little like soap and some sort of asphodel and the cuffs were threadbare, with a few little holes burned in, maybe from potions, and it felt good against his skin, broken-in and too large.
“Thanks,” he said, too softly to really be heard, and fell asleep thinking that it was really bloody unfair that Ron Weasley had grown up to be sort of, in a truly awful Gryffindor way that seemed to involve prying into everyone else’s business, maybe, a little - nice.
Draco arrived at Lupin’s office at two minutes to nine, still wearing Snape’s shirt, though the cuff had gotten a little stained when Harry Potter had accidentally-on-purpose jostled him while he was trying to add sugar to his tea. He reflected, a bit sadly, that everyone had gone insane, sort of like Bellatrix, because Granger and Weasley had said, in this really grating sort of unity, “Harry,” and Potter had said, with no small amount of grumbling, “Sorry, Malfoy.” Then they’d both said, “Harry,” again, like some sort of god awful Greek chorus, and Potter had said, “Sorry, Draco,” and then he’d stuck out his hand. Draco, not knowing what else to do and not having slept very well, tried to pass the sugar bowl.
Weasley had found that sort of funny, and Potter had gotten a really odd look on his face, like he was trying not to laugh too, and said, “You’re all right, then.” Then he’d sat down and eaten half of Draco’s toast while chatting about the Magpies. In that moment, Draco had decided that he really didn’t understand Gryffindors and probably never would, largely because they were all certifiably insane.
He knocked, tentatively, and the door swung open. Lupin was at his desk, reading over something, and Draco felt the odd urge, as he had many times at Hogwarts, to straighten his glasses and buy him a proper pair of robes. It was sort of sad, he reflected, that he felt more than a bit better about serving under a werewolf who always had ink on his sleeves and never tucked his shirt in quite right than he had about serving under Voldemort. Lupin seemed to be in possession of most of his right mind, even if it did seem to go astray a bit when it came to tea and large books. He was kind.
Draco cleared his throat, and Lupin shut his book and the door, gesturing to a large, rather comfortable looking armchair. “Sit down,” he said.
“Yes, Professor,” Draco managed, almost immediately, because that was, he thought, the trouble - that he almost rather liked him, now that he was allowed.
“Remus,” Lupin corrected, gently but firmly, as if he wasn’t probably aware that asking students to call their teachers by their first names was liable to cause complexes.
“All right,” Draco said, and examined his shoes.
“Do you -” Remus considered, finally, then laid his hands flat on his desk. “Why, then?”
Draco thought about all his reasons, some of which were small and others of which were large, and finally said, “The ministry really isn’t on anyone’s side, is it?”
“No,” Lupin said, mouth quirking up, and Draco said, honestly, “I didn’t really want to go to Azkaban.”
“No, I should think not,” Lupin murmured, and slid a photograph across the desk. It was a wizarding photograph, Draco decided, even though it was oddly still; he supposed that was what happened when you photographed dead people.
“She’s awfully bloody,” he said, finally.
“Yes,” Remus agreed, and waited.
“I suppose it depends,” Draco murmured, after a few moments. “Because if my father did it, it’s wrong, but if it was Potter, then -” He considered. “Should I say it’s all right?”
“No,” Lupin said, with a very quiet smile, and put his photograph away.
“You sort of lied,” Draco said, after another moment. “I - just didn’t want to be involved. Now they all -” He considered, a bit sharply, Weasley’s kindness and Potter’s toast-poaching. “Think I’m all right.”
“You would be surprised, Mr. Malfoy, what a war will do to schoolboy grudges,” Lupin said. He thought for a long moment. “You’ll be kept safe, Draco. Regardless of whether or not you decide to help us.”
“Bellatrix Lestrange was fucking insane,” Draco replied, finally. “Ron Weasley’s only sort of insane. I’ll stick with you lot.”
Lupin laughed rather harder than - Draco felt - had been strictly warranted, but when he’d passed a hand over his face to wipe away tears, still obviously amused, Draco felt a bit better, somehow. “Well, then,” he said. “I don’t imagine you’re very keen on field work.”
“No,” Draco said, a bit aghast.
“What can you do?” Lupin said, finally, honestly.
“Play Quidditch,” Draco replied, a bit abruptly. “Make tea.” Then, “That’s not what you meant.”
“I would keep you around solely for your tea making skills,” Lupin said, solemnly, and Draco found himself laughing. He stopped, a moment later, a little embarrassed.
“Potions,” he said, finally. “I’m very good at potions. And charms, I -” He thought, finally. “I’m good at healing,” he said, hesitantly, because that was the sort of thing that got you hexed at the Manor, and he hadn’t said.
“Healing,” Remus said, fingers against the corner of his mouth.
“I’ve read books,” Draco volunteered, a rather large part of himself realizing that - stupidly, abruptly - he rather wanted to make Lupin happy. It was not an entirely pleasant feeling. He thought perhaps the Gryffindors were infectious.
Lupin held a hand up, magic glimmering in the center of his palm. “Would you?” he said, and Draco conjured the same spell, though he’d thought it was almost divination, and reached across the desk to clasp their palms together. Lupin’s grip was warm and firm and he held on for a moment, and Draco got, all of a sudden, why he had taken over for Dumbledore, and also why their side was having more success now.
“I think,” Remus said, still thoughtful, “I might send you to Mungo’s for the weekend, to see what you could learn.”
“If I had a potions book,” he said, finally, hesitant, and Lupin gave him one of those rare, illuminating smiles and said, “Of course. And someplace to work, as well. Chocolate?”
Draco overheard a bit of a conversation that afternoon, Lupin with Snape, one of the strongest natural abilities I’ve seen since and then pity no one noticed because. He kept Snape’s shirt on all day, feeling oddly warm, and by supper he had four exceptionally nice, leather-bound volumes and a small washroom transfigured into a lab. He brewed a cauldron of pepper-up and presented a bottle to the Weasley who he’d learned worked with dragons, since he’d been sniffling (annoyingly) all morning. “Brilliant, thanks,” Weasley number two or three said, with another aggravating shoulder clap that almost knocked Draco into the kitchen table. It was oddly gratifying.
It wasn’t as if everyone liked him; the twins persisted in calling him ferret more often than not, and the girl - Ginny, he thought, or perhaps Jenny - refused to pass the salt. He didn’t feel entirely comfortable most of the time - Gryffindors were not to be trusted, he reminded himself - so it wasn’t entirely surprising that Potter caught him lurking outside the door to the living room with a book, wondering if he ought to go in. McGonagall and Lupin seemed to be playing a particularly involved game of wizard’s chess, and Granger and Weasley were reading. She was leaning back against his chest, between his legs, a hand propped on one of his draw-up knees. It looked oddly intimate, Draco thought, but then again, he wasn’t entirely sure that he knew much about intimate.
“What are you doing?” Potter said, almost a whisper, startling him.
“Are they -” he said, because Draco employed the basic tenant that it was better to have someone think you were spying than to think you’d been insecure.
“No,” Potter replied, with a slightly quirked smile. “No, I don’t think Ron’s interested.”
“Are you -” Draco began, curious.
“No,” Potter said, suddenly flushed beneath his collar, and his eyes went a bit too quickly to the person on the other couch.
“Oh,” Draco said, finally, and while a very small part of his mind shouted blackmail! he didn’t particularly want to listen to it; Harry had taken the sugar dish. “So, is he good in bed then?” he said, after a moment, because he’d really never been sure how to deal with Harry Potter, who was famous and generally popular, when he wasn’t trying to hex him.
“Oh my god,” Potter hissed, suddenly scarlet, and before Draco could really stop him, he had been hauled by his collar into what appeared to be a linen cupboard.
“You can’t tell anyone -” he began, sounding a little panicked, and Draco thought maybe he was going to panic too, if all the towels fell on him.
“Don’t they know?” he said, muttering a stabilising spell behind his back, and by the time he’d pulled on the dingy light bulb cord, Potter was shaking his head a bit frantically.
“Well, does he know?” Draco continued, and Potter paused for a very long moment before nodding, minutely.
“So you’re - sleeping together?” he said, cautiously.
Potter went really sort of a funny shade of red, and nodded, again, and Draco thought that maybe the downside of joining the forces of good was not in fact having to share a bedroom with Ron Weasley, it was playing relationship counselor to the Savior of the Wizarding World.
Draco tried to think of what Granger was liable to say. “Well, does he -” He gestured, a bit dimly. “Do you -” He paused. “He’s sort of fit. For a Weasley.”
Harry sank down amongst some folded blankets. “Yeah,” he agreed.
“I bet he’s - ” Draco began, then decided that maybe that was a bad idea. “Ah, nice.”
“No,” Potter said, then amended. “Well, maybe. I think he thinks it’s just sex.”
Draco wondered if it was actually possible to kill oneself with a stack of flannels and some bed sheets. “Well that’s sort of,” he said. “You know. Quite bad. Getting laid. And all.”
“No,” Harry said, with a sort of stupid smile, and Draco was vaguely bitter for a moment, because that was a sort of smile that probably involved blowjobs.
“You’re really quite stupid,” Draco told him, considering a bit morosely the way Bill Weasley had looked at Harry across the dinner table and what you could probably do with dragonhide boots. “Just tell him you’re in love with him.”
Harry went absolutely scarlet. “I am not -” he began, then looked up at Draco. “We’re sort of having a conversation. In a cupboard.”
“I’d think you’d feel at home,” Draco said, but the trouble was, he had only sort of hated Harry Potter for seven years because Harry Potter had considered himself too good for him, and it seemed a bit stupid to carry on now that Potter wasn’t flinging hexes at him.
“Why did you go to Snape?” Harry said, finally.
“I got tired of doing something for nothing,” Draco said, and that was probably true, too. “Just - tell him.”
“Okay,” Harry said, finally, and let himself out.
Potter was glowing disgustingly at breakfast the next morning, and tall, intimidating Weasley took him aside later and managed an astonishingly awkward thank you - cursebreakers, Draco felt, should not be allowed to act awkward - and then he had to lock himself in his washroom and brew a potion to ease sore throats so as not to do anything else accidentally nice.
He spent an entire week at Mungo’s learning until his head spun and woke up one morning when he was through being trained to find that an unfortunate side effect of having healing magic that he could actually use was that he could suddenly tell just exactly what was wrong with everyone, and not only could he tell, it actually hurt, like having something deeply and personally wrong with his magic.
He set out after a rather excruciating breakfast to take care of a group of people who seemed totally incapable of taking care of themselves. He’d collected a rather large collection of basic household potions from a particularly kind pharmacist, so it was relatively easy to take care of Tonks’s problem. Draco decided he was rather thankful, because he had never actually wanted to know what cramps felt like, and he certainly didn’t want to go on knowing all afternoon. “Either go back to bed and sleep it off or take this,” he informed her, and then went off to take care of other pressing problems.
McGonagall’s hands were bothering her. Arthritis, Draco decided, and snuck in to her knitting basket to cast a cushioning spell on her needles, along with a tricky charm that would undo the damage to her bones as she did her knitting. She’d probably assume it was the weather, which rather suited him.
One of the twins had an upset stomach from ingesting some sort of uncalled for potion ingredient, and much as it galled Draco to help him, he was a bit tired of feeling queasy, so he convinced Molly that the boys needed tea and sneaked several drops of an antiemetic potion in while she was bustling about finding sugar.
Ginny-or-Jenny had broken her hand in two places and it hadn’t healed quite right, so he pretended to hex her in pink spots and took care of the lingering breaks. Hermione’s eyestrain made him wince when he got near her, but he transfigured a pair of glasses out of an opera monocle and handed them over when she began squinting at yet another page of documents. “Wear them,” he said, before she could protest, and it really rather made a world of difference.
Snape had spilled something up his forearm, and it had gotten into the edges of the Mark, infected. Draco waited until Snape was done stirring a Draught of Dreaming, shoved up his sleeve against sharp protests, and went to work. “You are extraordinarily stupid,” Draco informed him, when all that was left was a pale scar. “That might have gone to blood poisoning.”
He’d looked rather too startled to say much of anything, so Draco set off in pursuit of Lupin, who was almost - but not quite - the worst of them, with so much tension in his back that his vertebrae were pulling out of alignment, dark spots in several of his bones that Draco didn’t particularly like, and a hip joint that was painfully, awfully almost out of its socket. Draco lied and said he needed to practice some things he’d learned the day before, pushed and shoved the right way with a spell until half the tension drained immediately from Remus’s face. “Oh,” he said, a little startled, “that’s much better,” and Draco didn’t bother to keep the smugness out of his voice when he said, “Yes, I know.”
Bill - whose name Draco had grudgingly decided to remember, since he provided a great deal of coffee - sulked in around lunch, more of a mess than the rest of them put together, not having slept in three days (or slept well for what Draco thought was close to two weeks) with misery all up and down his spine. He wondered whether he was somehow getting skilled at mind reading or whether it was just stupidly obvious that problems were cropping up from not having slept for more than three or fours hours a night in a fortnight. It might have been endearing, the way he was worried about disappointing Harry, if it hadn’t been annoying and quite nearly given Draco a headache.
“I drugged your boyfriend,” he informed Harry, four moves into a game of Wizard’s Chess that he already knew he was going to win, so it didn’t really matter when Harry flailed about and knocked half the pieces off and said, “What?”
“I put a sleeping draft into his coffee ten minutes ago because he hasn’t slept in days,” Draco said, who was getting rather pleased at his skills in the stealth dosing of potions. “He’s alone in the library, go suggest a nap.”
Harry looked sort of awkwardly uncomfortable. “He hasn’t wanted to sleep in my bed.”
Draco straightened several pieces on the board and weighed the horror of having Potter think he was nice against the backache he was getting from Bill’s stupid, unnecessary nervous tension. The backache won out. “He thinks you’ll want sex,” Draco said, very blatantly, because embarrassing Potter was an added bonus.
“I, um,” Potter said, looking very red but also a bit crestfallen, and Draco took pity on him, because there was nothing more pathetic than a woebegone Gryffindor.
“I would imagine he might not feel up to it,” Draco gestured, to make things obvious even for the very dense Boy Who Never Quite Followed Subtle Points, “because he hasn’t slept in two weeks.”
Harry looked like he was going to say something.
“Just go talk him into a nap, Potter, let him sleep at least past dinner, and wake him up by going down on him. It’ll fix all your relationship problems,” Draco said, with a pointed eye roll, so Potter wouldn’t get any ideas.
His mouth opened and closed several times, and Draco almost - but not quite - pointed out that he looked like a fish before Potter said, “Thanks, Draco,” and disappeared.
Draco rather resented being left to pick up the chess set, but his back loosened up ten minutes later, which Draco took as a sign that his espionage tactics had worked. He felt oddly pleased, at least until he decided to take a nap and got into his bedroom only to find that Ron was curled up in bed, nursing a migraine so bad that Draco felt sorry for him, rather than mad, as he had at everyone else.
He was asleep, but only barely, and when Draco sat on the edge of his bed, he woke, looking thoroughly miserable. “Did someone need something?” he managed, and Draco said, “Don’t be stupid, Weasley.”
He slid his hands back, behind Ron’s head, and pressed his thumbs into his temples, firm and gentle, until he went limp with relief. “How’d you know,” he said, sleepy and docile, vulnerable in Draco’s hands.
“I can feel other people’s problems, right now,” he said, because he’d realized, feeling foolish, that Ron - there were too many to call them all Weasley - would keep his mouth shut.
Draco smoothed out the tangled knot of magic at the base of his skull, closing his eyes as he widened blood vessels, nudged tension from his shoulders, and released enough endorphins to convince Ron he’d just gotten rather spectacularly laid by a veela.
When he opened his eyes, their noses were several inches apart, Ron’s head still cradled in his hands, and he noticed with a slightly giddy sort of panic that Ron’s eyelashes were actually a very dark red. He had a freckle right at the corner of his eye, and he’d been awful looking, fifth year, but he really wasn’t, anymore.
“That feels really - good,” Ron said, voice low and just a little bit rough.
Weasley! shouted certain parts of his brain, but there was a distinctly different portion of his brain shouting something that Draco thought was maybe blowjobs! He’d decided, maybe, somewhere along the line, that leaving Voldemort might mean actual sex instead of just kissing. The trouble was that the forces of good included Granger (too much hair), Ginny-or-Jenny (atrocious), and McGonagall (old).
Pureblood girls weren’t allowed to go very far, but maybe he’d been barking up the wrong tree entirely by actually considering Pansy Parkinson and Granger. When Ron curled a palm against the back of his neck and squeezed, gently, Draco came exceedingly close to coming without even having been touched anyplace that mattered, and by a Weasley.
“Ah,” Draco said, very, very softly, but then Ron took back his hand to scratch his nose.
“Thanks, mate,” he said, and drew back a little, suddenly looking very sleepy.
“You’re - you’re - not using your magic enough,” Draco managed, finally, and retreated back to his bed to contemplate the fact that he’d obviously gone completely fucking insane.
He’d been more tired than he’d thought, though, because he didn’t wake up until three AM, when he decided he hated Weasleys more than he’d ever hated anything else in his life. His father had obviously been right, he thought, stumbling across the room to wake Ron, who was tossing and turning and whose nightmare was half the uncomfortable pull on his magic.
“Stop fucking around,” he said, when Ron’s eyes opened, but not before he’d stopped panting. “Nothing’s going to happen to Potter.”
He fumbled in the bag in the chest at the foot of his bed, selecting a vile-looking purple potion, and went next door. Harry hadn’t locked his bedroom door, and Draco decided that he’d obviously been dropped on his head as a child, but he stomped across the room and shook Bill forcibly awake, ignoring Harry’s sleepy protests.
“Wake up,” he said, when Bill already had, and then forced two thirds of a vial of potion down his throat before he could really think about it, and thank god he was part of the forces of good or they’d all have been poisoned already. “Nothing’s going to happen to Potter,” he informed him, and at least with Bill awake the pressure had gone down.
“Put some trousers on,” he added as an afterthought, to Harry, before collecting his blanket from Ron’s room and going down on the couch to sleep, because his head hurt and he didn’t particularly want to deal with anyone else’s bad dreams.
He was nowhere close to asleep almost twenty minutes later when someone sat down on the couch, sliding a hand beneath his shoulders to make room, pushing a pillow beneath his head before settling down on the other side, so Draco was lying almost with his head in someone’s lap. He hurt too much to really care.
“Ron and Harry are talking,” Bill said, rather mildly, but Draco stayed quiet. Bill was sort of warm, he decided, even if he was too stupid to actually sleep.
“You’re rather green,” Bill observed, again, and Draco mumbled, tense, “I’ve got a headache.”
He still hated Weasleys, even when Bill reached, slow enough that Draco could protest if he wanted, and rubbed the back of his neck. It was uncomfortable, Draco thought, being touched just so by a stranger, but it was helping the headache a little.
“Thanks,” Bill murmured, after a couple of long minutes, when Draco was almost asleep, the pain having eased. “For noticing that I wasn’t sleeping.”
“Healer,” Draco said, shortly. “Could feel.”
“It must be strange,” Bill replied, finally. “We’re sort of different, aren’t we? Than your family?”
“Less brain cells,” Draco agreed, then, after a pause, “Sort of nicer.”
Bill laughed. “Harry says you’re all right.”
Draco had known he should’ve suffered through the backache. “Potter has less brain cells than anyone else,” he grumbled.
“Malfoy,” Bill murmured, finally, tilting his face up a little, so Draco had to meet his eyes. “You’re ours now, you know.”
“Means everyone likes me for no reason,” Draco said, tiredly. “I know.”
“No,” Weasley said, laughing. “It means everyone likes you because you did the right thing.”
“I’m not really a nice person,” Draco added, as an afterthought. “And I still don’t like Potter.”
“They’re just giving you a chance, is all,” Bill offered.
“I wasn’t -” Draco considered, drowsy. “Potter and I weren’t nice to each other. In school. Or Weasley.”
“Our family hates your father,” Bill said, “not necessarily you.”
“Oh,” Draco said, and maybe he’d been spending too much time around Gryffindors, because it sort of made sense, for no one to have hexed him.
“You overdid it on your magic,” Bill said, not unkindly. Draco had known that, in the back of his mind, but not stopping soon enough was the sort of mistake beginners made, so he hadn’t quite wanted to think about it.
“That’s why I’m cold, then,” Draco replied.
“Come on, back to bed,” Bill said, standing, and settled a blocking charm against Draco’s neck. “You won’t feel anything through that,” and Draco was surprised to find that his headache nearly went away, even though he was suddenly exhausted.
Bill all but pushed him back upstairs and tucked him back into his own bed, and then there was some sort of stupid whispering conversation between Potter and Weasley and the other Weasley, and then there was a dip in the mattress as his bed expanded a little and someone slid in behind him. “Sorry,” Ron said, close to his back. “Bill says you’re not feeling well and that I ought to keep you warm.”
“He and Harry are having it off,” Draco said, feeling rather triumphant at having figured out a great revenge upon Bill for sneaking Weasleys into his bed while he was defenseless.
“I sort of figured that out,” Ron said, a little dryly. “I went in to see where you’d gone and Harry was naked.”
“Told him to put trousers on,” Draco informed him, distinctly put out, and fell asleep while Ron was still readjusting his pillow.
In the end, he had to spend three days in bed, mostly just sleeping, but it was sort of all right because Bill forbid Mrs. Weasley to fuss over him, and Granger went to visit her muggle parents for a fortnight, so she wasn’t around to be annoying. Potter took to reading him muggle mystery novels, and his various character voices were awful, but usually when he woke up, Ron was sprawled across the other half of his expanded bed, doing ridiculous things like crosswords or working on intelligence information.
Lupin sorted out Bill’s blocking charm, so Draco would only be bothered by things he wanted to be bothered by or that were actually urgent.
“Let people come to you,” he told Draco, and gave him another few bars of chocolate.
Continue on to part two.
So. Though this was meant to be your get well fic, it is now your *birthday* fic, but I think the addition of art is well worth the wait. ;)
Everyone else: OMG THE DRACO FIC IS FINALLY DONE!
In which: Draco accidentally joins the Order, becomes a healer, wants to correct Remus Lupin's vision a lot, and generally is annoyed by Gryffindors. Also featuring DADA Professor!Ron, neurotic!Bill, and me forgetting Kingsley Shacklebolt.
As a word to the wise, this is like, only a little bit HBP compliant, because let's all be honest.
1. Bill is not mauled, or with Fleur.
2. Harry is really gay, because, come on, he grew up in a closet.
3. Sirius is still alive and Remus is keeping him in his study. Remus and Tonks are not together.
4. Draco is not an evil runaway.
5. NO ZOMBIES.
6. Horcrux? What's a horcrux?
Points in which this is HBP compliant:
1. Dumbledore is dead.
2. The prophecy is a little bit right.
So! Without further ado! The long awaited collab between linnpuzzle and myself, Draco/Ron, R, definite tiekissing, and HAPPY BIRTHDAY CATE. Like, 11,000 words. I sort of outdid myself. That's why this had to be in two posts. Sorry!
Part two is here.
Part one:
Fixed in a Morning Sun
The problem was, really, Draco had decided, that you couldn’t just defect from the forces of Voldemort without somehow ending up as part of the forces of collective-good-and-several-hundred-Weasleys. There hadn’t really been a middle ground - a sensible sort of middle ground, which involved fucking off to Majorca to wait out the war - or even an “I’m leaning toward your side, please keep away” sort of ground. He’d shown up at Snape’s metaphorical doorstep, because Snape had always been reliable, and, he found, a bit glumly, had managed to become the first accidental recruit of the Order of the Phoenix.
It was even a rather tacky name.
Snape had taken him to Lupin, who still looked frayed around the edges, who had looked him over and apparently decided that Draco had whatever he was looking for, because he’d taken him downstairs to a truly wretched sort of living room, and sat him firmly down between someone whose hair kept changing colors and a Weasley who smelled rather unfortunately of cinders. He’d wanted to make some sort of crack about muggle fairytales or quite possibly chimney sweeps and their brooms, but Lupin had launched into some convoluted speech, the end result of which was Draco realizing - too late - that Lupin was laboring under the delusion that he had fled to their precious shoddily-decorated lair for protection from his father, who somehow seemed to be outraged after Draco’s overwhelming change of heart.
It was rather insulting, Draco found, and the worst of it was, he felt oddly dishonest. He hadn’t really had any moral objection to Death Eaters, it had just been that no one seemed to notice that Bellatrix Lestrange was fucking insane. He hadn’t wanted to be thrown in Azkaban at seventeen, and furthermore, taking the Dark Mark seemed like such a profoundly stupid idea. He’d heard his father talking once, about how there were derivatives of both cruciatus and imperius bound up in the whole thing. Draco hadn’t really felt that binding unforgivables up in some sort of garish tattoo was necessarily a bad idea, objectively, but he’d felt quite strongly that being stupid enough to take the Mark was really sort of a low-class trait. So there was that.
At least, he’d thought the worst of it was feeling dishonest, until Hermione Granger had hugged him, and one of the Weasleys - the tall, vaguely attractive one who Draco felt it might be a bit of a bad idea to cross - had clapped him on the shoulder and said, “Good on you, Malfoy.”
That hadn’t been so bad, really, because no one on Voldemort’s side had ever actually said, “Good on you, Malfoy,” it was mostly just creepy werewolf grumbling (Fenrir), vague hissing (Voldemort, usually), and the occasional delighted shriek (Bellatrix, which Draco sort of felt underscored the burning need for a one-way ticket straight to St. Mungo’s insanity ward). Someone had given him an exceptionally large cup of coffee with something that he suspected was rather alcoholic in it, and then refilled. After three of those, Draco was feeling considerably warmer toward the minor changes in his plan. Majorca would be too hot, this time of year, and Majorca certainly didn’t have big, scary Weasleys who casually kept refilling your coffee while discussing some sort of quartering arrangements and could probably be counted upon to take down anyone who tried to curse you.
The forces of evil, Draco reflected, would never have given him firewhiskey in his coffee, largely because his father seemed to feel that getting drunk was a low-class thing to do, so really, maybe, the change in plans wouldn’t be so bad.
Then he realized that the quartering discussion had meant, objectively, that he had to share a room with Ron Weasley and stopped liking the changes entirely.
That was how Draco ended up in a second bed with two blankets, a glass of water, seventeen hideous orange Quidditch posters fluttering overhead, and Ron Weasley sleeping across the room.
Draco realized, about fifteen minutes after he’d crawled beneath the covers to hide, that he was sleeping in a house full of Gryffindors and was working up to a full-fledged panic attack when Weasley interrupted his hyperventilating.
“Are you going to try to spy on us, then?” Weasley said, a bit casually, sounding genuinely curious.
That would be stupid, Draco wanted to say, and I don’t do stupid things. What came out was, “No.” A rather small no, considering, but Draco felt it might be acceptable because of having been interrupted in thoughts about being eaten by lions.
“Okay,” Weasley agreed.
There was silence for almost five minutes, and then Draco said, finally, without really meaning to, “Aren’t you going to pitch a fit? Or stalk me for months? Or - try to convince someone?”
Weasley snorted, in the dark. “I’m not fifteen anymore.”
Draco wanted to point out that he had definitely done all those things at sixteen and quite probably at seventeen, and he really didn’t see any reason for him to go changing now, but instead he said, sort of accidentally, “I miss my mother.”
He waited in truly horrified silence for thirty-seven seconds, thirty-seven seconds in which he swore off drink forever, before Weasley said, “You really are sort of drunk, aren’t you?”
“No,” Draco protested, then realized that it meant having told Weasley something of his own accord, and promptly changed his answer. “Yes. Yes, obviously.”
There was another snorting laugh, which Draco found really horrifying, because Weasley was laughing at him.
“Sorry,” Weasley said, finally, and then there was the creak of bedsprings in the darkness and then a faint crack of light from the hallway as he let himself out, and Draco lay in bed for a full five minutes, convinced that he’d gone to tell the whole house - Draco Malfoy misses his mother, can you believe? - before Weasley returned.
He tossed something at the Draco - a lethifold! part of Draco’s mind shrieked, before he realized it was just a shirt - and climbed back into his own bed, with more creaking.
“I assure you,” Draco said, finally, a little confused, “I’m fully clothed.”
There was another soft huff of laughter in the dark, and Draco was really going to have to have words with Lupin about Weasley laughing at him, because it made him want to say more things, because he’d never really made anybody genuinely laugh before. For all he knew, it might be some dark curse, and then you’d become addicted and have to join the muggle circus.
“It’s Snape’s,” he said, and Draco thought that maybe he was just being drunk again, since his confusion was reaching epic levels.
Weasley leaned up on one elbow - Draco could faintly make out his outline in the dark, but not any of his features, though he knew the freckles were there.
“Were you - robbing the laundry?” Draco said, finally.
“No, I asked to borrow it,” Weasley said, thankfully with only the smallest of snickers, covered with some sort of cough.
“You asked Snape to borrow a shirt,” Draco repeated.
“It used to help Harry,” Ron said, finally, after a few moments, quiet. “To - have one of Lupin’s, when he was homesick.”
Draco almost protested that he wasn’t, but he pulled it on, instead. The collar smelled a little like soap and some sort of asphodel and the cuffs were threadbare, with a few little holes burned in, maybe from potions, and it felt good against his skin, broken-in and too large.
“Thanks,” he said, too softly to really be heard, and fell asleep thinking that it was really bloody unfair that Ron Weasley had grown up to be sort of, in a truly awful Gryffindor way that seemed to involve prying into everyone else’s business, maybe, a little - nice.
Draco arrived at Lupin’s office at two minutes to nine, still wearing Snape’s shirt, though the cuff had gotten a little stained when Harry Potter had accidentally-on-purpose jostled him while he was trying to add sugar to his tea. He reflected, a bit sadly, that everyone had gone insane, sort of like Bellatrix, because Granger and Weasley had said, in this really grating sort of unity, “Harry,” and Potter had said, with no small amount of grumbling, “Sorry, Malfoy.” Then they’d both said, “Harry,” again, like some sort of god awful Greek chorus, and Potter had said, “Sorry, Draco,” and then he’d stuck out his hand. Draco, not knowing what else to do and not having slept very well, tried to pass the sugar bowl.
Weasley had found that sort of funny, and Potter had gotten a really odd look on his face, like he was trying not to laugh too, and said, “You’re all right, then.” Then he’d sat down and eaten half of Draco’s toast while chatting about the Magpies. In that moment, Draco had decided that he really didn’t understand Gryffindors and probably never would, largely because they were all certifiably insane.
He knocked, tentatively, and the door swung open. Lupin was at his desk, reading over something, and Draco felt the odd urge, as he had many times at Hogwarts, to straighten his glasses and buy him a proper pair of robes. It was sort of sad, he reflected, that he felt more than a bit better about serving under a werewolf who always had ink on his sleeves and never tucked his shirt in quite right than he had about serving under Voldemort. Lupin seemed to be in possession of most of his right mind, even if it did seem to go astray a bit when it came to tea and large books. He was kind.
Draco cleared his throat, and Lupin shut his book and the door, gesturing to a large, rather comfortable looking armchair. “Sit down,” he said.
“Yes, Professor,” Draco managed, almost immediately, because that was, he thought, the trouble - that he almost rather liked him, now that he was allowed.
“Remus,” Lupin corrected, gently but firmly, as if he wasn’t probably aware that asking students to call their teachers by their first names was liable to cause complexes.
“All right,” Draco said, and examined his shoes.
“Do you -” Remus considered, finally, then laid his hands flat on his desk. “Why, then?”
Draco thought about all his reasons, some of which were small and others of which were large, and finally said, “The ministry really isn’t on anyone’s side, is it?”
“No,” Lupin said, mouth quirking up, and Draco said, honestly, “I didn’t really want to go to Azkaban.”
“No, I should think not,” Lupin murmured, and slid a photograph across the desk. It was a wizarding photograph, Draco decided, even though it was oddly still; he supposed that was what happened when you photographed dead people.
“She’s awfully bloody,” he said, finally.
“Yes,” Remus agreed, and waited.
“I suppose it depends,” Draco murmured, after a few moments. “Because if my father did it, it’s wrong, but if it was Potter, then -” He considered. “Should I say it’s all right?”
“No,” Lupin said, with a very quiet smile, and put his photograph away.
“You sort of lied,” Draco said, after another moment. “I - just didn’t want to be involved. Now they all -” He considered, a bit sharply, Weasley’s kindness and Potter’s toast-poaching. “Think I’m all right.”
“You would be surprised, Mr. Malfoy, what a war will do to schoolboy grudges,” Lupin said. He thought for a long moment. “You’ll be kept safe, Draco. Regardless of whether or not you decide to help us.”
“Bellatrix Lestrange was fucking insane,” Draco replied, finally. “Ron Weasley’s only sort of insane. I’ll stick with you lot.”
Lupin laughed rather harder than - Draco felt - had been strictly warranted, but when he’d passed a hand over his face to wipe away tears, still obviously amused, Draco felt a bit better, somehow. “Well, then,” he said. “I don’t imagine you’re very keen on field work.”
“No,” Draco said, a bit aghast.
“What can you do?” Lupin said, finally, honestly.
“Play Quidditch,” Draco replied, a bit abruptly. “Make tea.” Then, “That’s not what you meant.”
“I would keep you around solely for your tea making skills,” Lupin said, solemnly, and Draco found himself laughing. He stopped, a moment later, a little embarrassed.
“Potions,” he said, finally. “I’m very good at potions. And charms, I -” He thought, finally. “I’m good at healing,” he said, hesitantly, because that was the sort of thing that got you hexed at the Manor, and he hadn’t said.
“Healing,” Remus said, fingers against the corner of his mouth.
“I’ve read books,” Draco volunteered, a rather large part of himself realizing that - stupidly, abruptly - he rather wanted to make Lupin happy. It was not an entirely pleasant feeling. He thought perhaps the Gryffindors were infectious.
Lupin held a hand up, magic glimmering in the center of his palm. “Would you?” he said, and Draco conjured the same spell, though he’d thought it was almost divination, and reached across the desk to clasp their palms together. Lupin’s grip was warm and firm and he held on for a moment, and Draco got, all of a sudden, why he had taken over for Dumbledore, and also why their side was having more success now.
“I think,” Remus said, still thoughtful, “I might send you to Mungo’s for the weekend, to see what you could learn.”
“If I had a potions book,” he said, finally, hesitant, and Lupin gave him one of those rare, illuminating smiles and said, “Of course. And someplace to work, as well. Chocolate?”
Draco overheard a bit of a conversation that afternoon, Lupin with Snape, one of the strongest natural abilities I’ve seen since and then pity no one noticed because. He kept Snape’s shirt on all day, feeling oddly warm, and by supper he had four exceptionally nice, leather-bound volumes and a small washroom transfigured into a lab. He brewed a cauldron of pepper-up and presented a bottle to the Weasley who he’d learned worked with dragons, since he’d been sniffling (annoyingly) all morning. “Brilliant, thanks,” Weasley number two or three said, with another aggravating shoulder clap that almost knocked Draco into the kitchen table. It was oddly gratifying.
It wasn’t as if everyone liked him; the twins persisted in calling him ferret more often than not, and the girl - Ginny, he thought, or perhaps Jenny - refused to pass the salt. He didn’t feel entirely comfortable most of the time - Gryffindors were not to be trusted, he reminded himself - so it wasn’t entirely surprising that Potter caught him lurking outside the door to the living room with a book, wondering if he ought to go in. McGonagall and Lupin seemed to be playing a particularly involved game of wizard’s chess, and Granger and Weasley were reading. She was leaning back against his chest, between his legs, a hand propped on one of his draw-up knees. It looked oddly intimate, Draco thought, but then again, he wasn’t entirely sure that he knew much about intimate.
“What are you doing?” Potter said, almost a whisper, startling him.
“Are they -” he said, because Draco employed the basic tenant that it was better to have someone think you were spying than to think you’d been insecure.
“No,” Potter replied, with a slightly quirked smile. “No, I don’t think Ron’s interested.”
“Are you -” Draco began, curious.
“No,” Potter said, suddenly flushed beneath his collar, and his eyes went a bit too quickly to the person on the other couch.
“Oh,” Draco said, finally, and while a very small part of his mind shouted blackmail! he didn’t particularly want to listen to it; Harry had taken the sugar dish. “So, is he good in bed then?” he said, after a moment, because he’d really never been sure how to deal with Harry Potter, who was famous and generally popular, when he wasn’t trying to hex him.
“Oh my god,” Potter hissed, suddenly scarlet, and before Draco could really stop him, he had been hauled by his collar into what appeared to be a linen cupboard.
“You can’t tell anyone -” he began, sounding a little panicked, and Draco thought maybe he was going to panic too, if all the towels fell on him.
“Don’t they know?” he said, muttering a stabilising spell behind his back, and by the time he’d pulled on the dingy light bulb cord, Potter was shaking his head a bit frantically.
“Well, does he know?” Draco continued, and Potter paused for a very long moment before nodding, minutely.
“So you’re - sleeping together?” he said, cautiously.
Potter went really sort of a funny shade of red, and nodded, again, and Draco thought that maybe the downside of joining the forces of good was not in fact having to share a bedroom with Ron Weasley, it was playing relationship counselor to the Savior of the Wizarding World.
Draco tried to think of what Granger was liable to say. “Well, does he -” He gestured, a bit dimly. “Do you -” He paused. “He’s sort of fit. For a Weasley.”
Harry sank down amongst some folded blankets. “Yeah,” he agreed.
“I bet he’s - ” Draco began, then decided that maybe that was a bad idea. “Ah, nice.”
“No,” Potter said, then amended. “Well, maybe. I think he thinks it’s just sex.”
Draco wondered if it was actually possible to kill oneself with a stack of flannels and some bed sheets. “Well that’s sort of,” he said. “You know. Quite bad. Getting laid. And all.”
“No,” Harry said, with a sort of stupid smile, and Draco was vaguely bitter for a moment, because that was a sort of smile that probably involved blowjobs.
“You’re really quite stupid,” Draco told him, considering a bit morosely the way Bill Weasley had looked at Harry across the dinner table and what you could probably do with dragonhide boots. “Just tell him you’re in love with him.”
Harry went absolutely scarlet. “I am not -” he began, then looked up at Draco. “We’re sort of having a conversation. In a cupboard.”
“I’d think you’d feel at home,” Draco said, but the trouble was, he had only sort of hated Harry Potter for seven years because Harry Potter had considered himself too good for him, and it seemed a bit stupid to carry on now that Potter wasn’t flinging hexes at him.
“Why did you go to Snape?” Harry said, finally.
“I got tired of doing something for nothing,” Draco said, and that was probably true, too. “Just - tell him.”
“Okay,” Harry said, finally, and let himself out.
Potter was glowing disgustingly at breakfast the next morning, and tall, intimidating Weasley took him aside later and managed an astonishingly awkward thank you - cursebreakers, Draco felt, should not be allowed to act awkward - and then he had to lock himself in his washroom and brew a potion to ease sore throats so as not to do anything else accidentally nice.
He spent an entire week at Mungo’s learning until his head spun and woke up one morning when he was through being trained to find that an unfortunate side effect of having healing magic that he could actually use was that he could suddenly tell just exactly what was wrong with everyone, and not only could he tell, it actually hurt, like having something deeply and personally wrong with his magic.
He set out after a rather excruciating breakfast to take care of a group of people who seemed totally incapable of taking care of themselves. He’d collected a rather large collection of basic household potions from a particularly kind pharmacist, so it was relatively easy to take care of Tonks’s problem. Draco decided he was rather thankful, because he had never actually wanted to know what cramps felt like, and he certainly didn’t want to go on knowing all afternoon. “Either go back to bed and sleep it off or take this,” he informed her, and then went off to take care of other pressing problems.
McGonagall’s hands were bothering her. Arthritis, Draco decided, and snuck in to her knitting basket to cast a cushioning spell on her needles, along with a tricky charm that would undo the damage to her bones as she did her knitting. She’d probably assume it was the weather, which rather suited him.
One of the twins had an upset stomach from ingesting some sort of uncalled for potion ingredient, and much as it galled Draco to help him, he was a bit tired of feeling queasy, so he convinced Molly that the boys needed tea and sneaked several drops of an antiemetic potion in while she was bustling about finding sugar.
Ginny-or-Jenny had broken her hand in two places and it hadn’t healed quite right, so he pretended to hex her in pink spots and took care of the lingering breaks. Hermione’s eyestrain made him wince when he got near her, but he transfigured a pair of glasses out of an opera monocle and handed them over when she began squinting at yet another page of documents. “Wear them,” he said, before she could protest, and it really rather made a world of difference.
Snape had spilled something up his forearm, and it had gotten into the edges of the Mark, infected. Draco waited until Snape was done stirring a Draught of Dreaming, shoved up his sleeve against sharp protests, and went to work. “You are extraordinarily stupid,” Draco informed him, when all that was left was a pale scar. “That might have gone to blood poisoning.”
He’d looked rather too startled to say much of anything, so Draco set off in pursuit of Lupin, who was almost - but not quite - the worst of them, with so much tension in his back that his vertebrae were pulling out of alignment, dark spots in several of his bones that Draco didn’t particularly like, and a hip joint that was painfully, awfully almost out of its socket. Draco lied and said he needed to practice some things he’d learned the day before, pushed and shoved the right way with a spell until half the tension drained immediately from Remus’s face. “Oh,” he said, a little startled, “that’s much better,” and Draco didn’t bother to keep the smugness out of his voice when he said, “Yes, I know.”
Bill - whose name Draco had grudgingly decided to remember, since he provided a great deal of coffee - sulked in around lunch, more of a mess than the rest of them put together, not having slept in three days (or slept well for what Draco thought was close to two weeks) with misery all up and down his spine. He wondered whether he was somehow getting skilled at mind reading or whether it was just stupidly obvious that problems were cropping up from not having slept for more than three or fours hours a night in a fortnight. It might have been endearing, the way he was worried about disappointing Harry, if it hadn’t been annoying and quite nearly given Draco a headache.
“I drugged your boyfriend,” he informed Harry, four moves into a game of Wizard’s Chess that he already knew he was going to win, so it didn’t really matter when Harry flailed about and knocked half the pieces off and said, “What?”
“I put a sleeping draft into his coffee ten minutes ago because he hasn’t slept in days,” Draco said, who was getting rather pleased at his skills in the stealth dosing of potions. “He’s alone in the library, go suggest a nap.”
Harry looked sort of awkwardly uncomfortable. “He hasn’t wanted to sleep in my bed.”
Draco straightened several pieces on the board and weighed the horror of having Potter think he was nice against the backache he was getting from Bill’s stupid, unnecessary nervous tension. The backache won out. “He thinks you’ll want sex,” Draco said, very blatantly, because embarrassing Potter was an added bonus.
“I, um,” Potter said, looking very red but also a bit crestfallen, and Draco took pity on him, because there was nothing more pathetic than a woebegone Gryffindor.
“I would imagine he might not feel up to it,” Draco gestured, to make things obvious even for the very dense Boy Who Never Quite Followed Subtle Points, “because he hasn’t slept in two weeks.”
Harry looked like he was going to say something.
“Just go talk him into a nap, Potter, let him sleep at least past dinner, and wake him up by going down on him. It’ll fix all your relationship problems,” Draco said, with a pointed eye roll, so Potter wouldn’t get any ideas.
His mouth opened and closed several times, and Draco almost - but not quite - pointed out that he looked like a fish before Potter said, “Thanks, Draco,” and disappeared.
Draco rather resented being left to pick up the chess set, but his back loosened up ten minutes later, which Draco took as a sign that his espionage tactics had worked. He felt oddly pleased, at least until he decided to take a nap and got into his bedroom only to find that Ron was curled up in bed, nursing a migraine so bad that Draco felt sorry for him, rather than mad, as he had at everyone else.
He was asleep, but only barely, and when Draco sat on the edge of his bed, he woke, looking thoroughly miserable. “Did someone need something?” he managed, and Draco said, “Don’t be stupid, Weasley.”
He slid his hands back, behind Ron’s head, and pressed his thumbs into his temples, firm and gentle, until he went limp with relief. “How’d you know,” he said, sleepy and docile, vulnerable in Draco’s hands.
“I can feel other people’s problems, right now,” he said, because he’d realized, feeling foolish, that Ron - there were too many to call them all Weasley - would keep his mouth shut.
Draco smoothed out the tangled knot of magic at the base of his skull, closing his eyes as he widened blood vessels, nudged tension from his shoulders, and released enough endorphins to convince Ron he’d just gotten rather spectacularly laid by a veela.
When he opened his eyes, their noses were several inches apart, Ron’s head still cradled in his hands, and he noticed with a slightly giddy sort of panic that Ron’s eyelashes were actually a very dark red. He had a freckle right at the corner of his eye, and he’d been awful looking, fifth year, but he really wasn’t, anymore.
“That feels really - good,” Ron said, voice low and just a little bit rough.
Weasley! shouted certain parts of his brain, but there was a distinctly different portion of his brain shouting something that Draco thought was maybe blowjobs! He’d decided, maybe, somewhere along the line, that leaving Voldemort might mean actual sex instead of just kissing. The trouble was that the forces of good included Granger (too much hair), Ginny-or-Jenny (atrocious), and McGonagall (old).
Pureblood girls weren’t allowed to go very far, but maybe he’d been barking up the wrong tree entirely by actually considering Pansy Parkinson and Granger. When Ron curled a palm against the back of his neck and squeezed, gently, Draco came exceedingly close to coming without even having been touched anyplace that mattered, and by a Weasley.
“Ah,” Draco said, very, very softly, but then Ron took back his hand to scratch his nose.
“Thanks, mate,” he said, and drew back a little, suddenly looking very sleepy.
“You’re - you’re - not using your magic enough,” Draco managed, finally, and retreated back to his bed to contemplate the fact that he’d obviously gone completely fucking insane.
He’d been more tired than he’d thought, though, because he didn’t wake up until three AM, when he decided he hated Weasleys more than he’d ever hated anything else in his life. His father had obviously been right, he thought, stumbling across the room to wake Ron, who was tossing and turning and whose nightmare was half the uncomfortable pull on his magic.
“Stop fucking around,” he said, when Ron’s eyes opened, but not before he’d stopped panting. “Nothing’s going to happen to Potter.”
He fumbled in the bag in the chest at the foot of his bed, selecting a vile-looking purple potion, and went next door. Harry hadn’t locked his bedroom door, and Draco decided that he’d obviously been dropped on his head as a child, but he stomped across the room and shook Bill forcibly awake, ignoring Harry’s sleepy protests.
“Wake up,” he said, when Bill already had, and then forced two thirds of a vial of potion down his throat before he could really think about it, and thank god he was part of the forces of good or they’d all have been poisoned already. “Nothing’s going to happen to Potter,” he informed him, and at least with Bill awake the pressure had gone down.
“Put some trousers on,” he added as an afterthought, to Harry, before collecting his blanket from Ron’s room and going down on the couch to sleep, because his head hurt and he didn’t particularly want to deal with anyone else’s bad dreams.
He was nowhere close to asleep almost twenty minutes later when someone sat down on the couch, sliding a hand beneath his shoulders to make room, pushing a pillow beneath his head before settling down on the other side, so Draco was lying almost with his head in someone’s lap. He hurt too much to really care.
“Ron and Harry are talking,” Bill said, rather mildly, but Draco stayed quiet. Bill was sort of warm, he decided, even if he was too stupid to actually sleep.
“You’re rather green,” Bill observed, again, and Draco mumbled, tense, “I’ve got a headache.”
He still hated Weasleys, even when Bill reached, slow enough that Draco could protest if he wanted, and rubbed the back of his neck. It was uncomfortable, Draco thought, being touched just so by a stranger, but it was helping the headache a little.
“Thanks,” Bill murmured, after a couple of long minutes, when Draco was almost asleep, the pain having eased. “For noticing that I wasn’t sleeping.”
“Healer,” Draco said, shortly. “Could feel.”
“It must be strange,” Bill replied, finally. “We’re sort of different, aren’t we? Than your family?”
“Less brain cells,” Draco agreed, then, after a pause, “Sort of nicer.”
Bill laughed. “Harry says you’re all right.”
Draco had known he should’ve suffered through the backache. “Potter has less brain cells than anyone else,” he grumbled.
“Malfoy,” Bill murmured, finally, tilting his face up a little, so Draco had to meet his eyes. “You’re ours now, you know.”
“Means everyone likes me for no reason,” Draco said, tiredly. “I know.”
“No,” Weasley said, laughing. “It means everyone likes you because you did the right thing.”
“I’m not really a nice person,” Draco added, as an afterthought. “And I still don’t like Potter.”
“They’re just giving you a chance, is all,” Bill offered.
“I wasn’t -” Draco considered, drowsy. “Potter and I weren’t nice to each other. In school. Or Weasley.”
“Our family hates your father,” Bill said, “not necessarily you.”
“Oh,” Draco said, and maybe he’d been spending too much time around Gryffindors, because it sort of made sense, for no one to have hexed him.
“You overdid it on your magic,” Bill said, not unkindly. Draco had known that, in the back of his mind, but not stopping soon enough was the sort of mistake beginners made, so he hadn’t quite wanted to think about it.
“That’s why I’m cold, then,” Draco replied.
“Come on, back to bed,” Bill said, standing, and settled a blocking charm against Draco’s neck. “You won’t feel anything through that,” and Draco was surprised to find that his headache nearly went away, even though he was suddenly exhausted.
Bill all but pushed him back upstairs and tucked him back into his own bed, and then there was some sort of stupid whispering conversation between Potter and Weasley and the other Weasley, and then there was a dip in the mattress as his bed expanded a little and someone slid in behind him. “Sorry,” Ron said, close to his back. “Bill says you’re not feeling well and that I ought to keep you warm.”
“He and Harry are having it off,” Draco said, feeling rather triumphant at having figured out a great revenge upon Bill for sneaking Weasleys into his bed while he was defenseless.
“I sort of figured that out,” Ron said, a little dryly. “I went in to see where you’d gone and Harry was naked.”
“Told him to put trousers on,” Draco informed him, distinctly put out, and fell asleep while Ron was still readjusting his pillow.
In the end, he had to spend three days in bed, mostly just sleeping, but it was sort of all right because Bill forbid Mrs. Weasley to fuss over him, and Granger went to visit her muggle parents for a fortnight, so she wasn’t around to be annoying. Potter took to reading him muggle mystery novels, and his various character voices were awful, but usually when he woke up, Ron was sprawled across the other half of his expanded bed, doing ridiculous things like crosswords or working on intelligence information.
Lupin sorted out Bill’s blocking charm, so Draco would only be bothered by things he wanted to be bothered by or that were actually urgent.
“Let people come to you,” he told Draco, and gave him another few bars of chocolate.
Continue on to part two.