Adult-FanFiction.org : Harry Potter

There's a Pure-Blood Custom For That	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 41050 -:- Recommendations : 2 -:- Currently Reading : 5
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I am making no money from this story.

Chapter List
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Overprotectiveness
            “Where are you going, Mr. Potter?”
            Harry winced a little, but he had to turn around and smile at Scorpius. He’d been trying to sneak gently out of his bedroom. He knew Draco had gone to take a nap, wearied by the way that he’d been keeping watch over Harry and reinforcing his wards for the past few days.
            But Scorpius had come around the corner, and he stood behind Harry with a stuffed owl in his arms, his latest toy, eyes wide with something that could be betrayal or amazement.
            Harry crouched down in front of him. “I’m trying to help your Dad,” he explained, because he thought that was the best way to get through to Scorpius. “You know he’s sleeping because he’s so tired?”
            “That’s what Rizzi said.” Scorpius looked around as though Rizzi was going to pop up beside him and explain further, but focused on Harry again when no house-elf appeared. “But he said that Daddy would be fine soon.”
            “Oh, he will be,” Harry reassured Scorpius hastily. The last thing he wanted was for Scorpius to be worried about Draco, genuinely worried. He was such a precocious kid it would probably be devastating, and then they would have him in Draco’s bedroom offering to fetch and carry things. “But he needs some time to rest.”
            Scorpius accepted that without question, and then focused in on the thing that Harry had hoped he wouldn’t. “Where are you going, Mr. Potter?”
            “I’m going to firecall St. Mungo’s,” said Harry. It was true.
            But Scorpius gave him the kind of sharp, accusing glare that would probably stand him in good stead when he went to Hogwarts and was Sorted into Slytherin. “Daddy said you shouldn’t. He said your hands were hurt, and you shouldn’t.”
            Harry ran said hand through his hair. Not only a kid who wanted to take care of his father, but one who wanted to take care of Harry, too.
            How did I get so lucky?
            Harry shook the thought away. Yes, of course he was lucky to have Draco and Scorpius in his life, but at the moment, Scorpius was being a pain.
            “I know, but I think I’m better, now,” he said, and gave Scorpius a soothing smile that had never failed to work when he used it on children in George’s shop. They would accept that their particular toy didn’t work anymore, or was too old for them, and they should buy something else.
            Scorpius was precocious in more than one way, it seemed. “But Daddy said that you shouldn’t use magic for a week. Your hands. They could crack and fall off.”
            Harry reached out before he thought about it and put a hand on Scorpius’s head. “That’s not true,” he said, and made his voice softer when Scorpius peered at him. “Have you been going around worrying about that? It’s really not true. I promise.”
            Scorpius looked utterly unconvinced. “But you could make them fall off if you used magic.”
            “No,” said Harry. “Something bad would happen, but it’s not that.”
            “How do you know?”
            Faced with the fact that he didn’t really know what the effects of the curse would be—the Healers at St. Mungo’s hadn’t specified, much—Harry took refuge in the one certainty he did have. “Your Daddy and my friends are sort of fighting,” he explained carefully. “They both want to help me with my hands, but they don’t want to do it at the same time. So I want to get my hands and my magic back so they don’t have to fight.”
            Scorpius looked so puzzled that Harry wasn’t surprised by the next question that emerged. “But you can just ask them not to fight.”
            “It’s not that simple,” said Harry. “But, look, it’s okay. I promise I won’t do anything that makes my hands fall off.”
            Scorpius stood looking at him for another second. Harry wasn’t sure whether he would listen to reason or go and try to wake Draco up. He tried a reassuring smile, which only made Scorpius look more skeptical.
            A house-elf appeared, bowing to everybody and scraping its ears against the floor, before either of them could say anything else. “Master Harry Potter and Master Scorpius Malfoy are to be coming to Master Draco’s room!”
            Scorpius perked up, and suddenly he looked like a kid again, not like an obstacle. “Daddy’s awake!” he shouted, and tore down the corridor.
            Harry grimaced. The house-elf stood there and stared at him, wringing its hands together and making its skin squeak and rasp, and he knew that it wouldn’t leave him alone. “All right,” he said. “I’m coming.”
            “Come on, Mr. Potter!” Scorpius shouted from in front of him.
            Harry concealed a rueful chuckle as he followed him. It seemed that Draco and Scorpius kept intervening just when he was going to do something else, go somewhere, or make up some sort of plans. Kind of the way they had sent his life crazily off course in the last few weeks.
            But he was grateful for them, all the same. For the complications and the gifts they brought to his life alike.
            He stepped behind Scorpius into Draco’s bedroom, and found Draco sitting up against his pillows, smiling as he listened to Scorpius’s talk. Harry shut the door quietly behind him, glad that Scorpius was just telling Draco about a game that Teddy had probably helped him invent.
            Then Scorpius turned and gestured at him, and Harry braced himself, barely in time, as Scorpius said, “And Mr. Potter was going to use magic, and I made him stop! I saved his hands, Daddy! I stopped them from falling off!”
            Harry winced as he met Draco’s eyes, which were wide and arrested. Then Draco, without taking his gaze off Harry, tucked an arm around Scorpius and pulled him into bed with him.
            “Why don’t you go,” Draco whispered to Scorpius, “and recite all the rules of your game to Rizzi? Then Rizzi can come back here and tell me about them, and then I’ll understand what you’re talking about. I can’t follow it right now.”
            “You should be able to, Daddy,” said Scorpius, in a gently condescending way.
            Draco rubbed his shoulder. “I know, but my brain’s fuzzy from taking a nap right now. You know the way that you wake up from a nap and you can’t think right?”
            “That happens to babies. I’m not a baby.”
            “Well, maybe I am,” said Draco, grandly enough that Scorpius giggled again. “Go and do as I tell you, Scorpius, and then come back here and have Rizzi tell me all the rules.” Harry supposed that was a substitute for writing, which Scorpius wouldn’t be able to do with any facility yet.
            Scorpius giggled one more time, kissed his father on the cheek, slipped out of Draco’s bed, clapped Harry companionably on the hip, and then darted out the door. Draco drew his wand and quietly slid it shut the rest of the way. He didn’t let Harry escape from his gaze the entire time.
            “It’s not what you think it is,” said Harry.
            “That you deliberately tried to ruin your hands? No, I didn’t think it was.” Draco settled back against the pillow again, but still didn’t look away. “Scorpius has a vivid imagination, and not as much understanding of magic as he will in a few years. He also doesn’t understand the character of someone who will sacrifice so much of himself so readily to save other people a few moments’ inconvenience. Mind you,” he added, turning his head to the side and making his voice a breathy little whisper so that Harry was an inch away from writhing in discomfort, “he’s like his father in that.”
            “I just—I just didn’t want this to go on,” Harry said, and waved his hands before Draco could open his mouth. “Not being able to use magic. Not having my friends in the same room. Not being able to work with you and them. This is the only way I could think of to solve the problem, to contact the Healers at St. Mungo’s and ask them if they were sure about the curse on my hands lasting that long and if they couldn’t do something that would take effect before then.”
            Draco thought about that, so long and carefully that Harry could feel sharp nervousness bubbling up in him. He refused to let it affect his facial expression, though. Draco would just have to deal with his blank look.
            “Nothing in there,” Draco said, saying the words slowly as though they were in an unfamiliar language, “prohibits me from being the one to call St. Mungo’s for you, so you don’t have to risk your hands.”
            Harry winced and looked away.
            “Harry. I think I deserve more response than that.”
            He did, and Harry sighed and gave it. “I just—I don’t want anyone to suffer. I knew it would be difficult having you as a—an exclusive friend and having my friends at the same time, when they’re so hurt, but I didn’t anticipate something like this happening. I don’t want you to do more than you have already. You’ve done so much, and I feel like I’ve cost you so much, and I wanted to solve it on my own.”
            “The way you’ve solved so many problems?”
            Harry did look at Draco again, because he wasn’t sure what he meant by that. “I haven’t been able to solve Ron and Hermione’s problems, if that’s what you mean. And I don’t always have someone attack me in my own home and have to use a Portkey to escape, but I’ve been guarding myself since the war. For a long time.”
            Draco only nodded, his eyes so gentle that Harry knew the next words were going to be especially devastating. “But you would rather do this on your own, despite the prospect of ruining your magic or your hands forever, than cause me one more moment of inconvenience or grief.”
            “When you put it like that, of course it sounds bad.”
            “Harry.”
            Draco had conjured a chair behind him; Harry sank into it and put his hands in his hair. “Yeah,” he muttered, not looking at Draco. “When you put it like that, I reckon that’s what I was doing.”
            “You don’t need to,” Draco said, calm, gracious. “I made that Portkey for you and gave you the ring and invited you into my house of my own free will. You don’t need to pay me back.”
            “Except for when the pure-blood customs say I do, right?” Harry muttered.
            He hadn’t really meant for Draco to hear that part, but Draco stiffened proudly, and it looked as though his neck suddenly had ten extra cords. “You’re welcome to leave at any time and cease even trying to pay me back,” he said.
            “I didn’t,” Harry told his hands on his knees. He knew the way it came across, though, and sagged back in the chair, shaking his head. “I reckon I fucked up. I’m so used to either solving problems right away, the way I did with that Risen Cobra in Diagon Alley, or only doing things that make a little bit of difference. And then I walked into one where I could make some difference if I waited, and where someone was trying to help me, and I fucked it up.”
            Draco blinked once, twice. “Does that mean that you’re willing to wait until I can firecall St. Mungo’s for you?”
            “Yes,” Harry said, and sighed. It seemed so straightforward now. The way it had seemed straightforward a few years ago when Hermione had nightmares so bad that she needed an especially strong dose of Dreamless Sleep Potion and Harry thought he had to be the one to go and collect the dangerous ingredients from among the Hebridean Black dragons. Only after he had gone and come back did Hermione tell him that he could have requested some of those from the Dragon-Keepers. “I’m sorry. Too long being on my own, and then facing different kinds of problems, the way I had before.”
            Draco still had an odd expression on his face. Then it changed into a smug one. Harry suspected what he would say even before he did. “You know, according to custom, since you scared me like that, you have to do something for me now.”
            “What’s that? Bow down to you three times?” Harry slid to one knee on the carpet and fluttered his eyelashes at him. “O Great and Powerful Leader, forgive me for having disobeyed your orders.”
            “You have no idea how good you look on your knees,” murmured Draco.
            Harry felt a flush of heat travel up his body. It was surprising, and pleasant, and surprisingly pleasant. But he could only smile slightly and keep his eyes on Draco, who cleared his throat and hurried on. “No. And it’s not a gift this time, either. You have to show that you take this companionship between us seriously.”
            “How?”
            “That’s up to you.” Draco lay back on his pillows and lifted a hand at Harry in the kind of languid wave a king would use to dismiss a servant. “But you’re the one who has to come up with it, and it has to be in the next twenty-four hours.”
            “And in the meantime, you’ll firecall St. Mungo’s for me?”
            “I don’t know that that’s an equal exchange,” Draco drawled, but he smiled. “Of course I will.” Harry thought he might even have said something else, but the door opened then, and Scorpius came bouncing in, dragging Rizzi along behind him. The house-elf had his head down and his eyes shut tight. Harry wondered what he had thought he was interrupting.
            “Rizzi can tell you all about the rules of the game that we made up,” said Scorpius, which made Harry smile a little. He’d known that Teddy had to be one of the inspirations behind Scorpius’s game—not that Scorpius wasn’t creative, but he was just too young to come up with everything. “He’ll recite them all in order.” He hopped up into Draco’s bed again and beamed at Harry. “You’re going to stay and listen to them, Mr. Potter?”
            “Yes,” said Harry, not even having to glance at Draco’s face to know that he would be welcome. And it was the least he could do, to make sure that Scorpius knew he was okay and not sneaking off to do damage to himself. “I’d love to hear it.” He dragged the chair around so he was sitting with his back to the bed, and they could all watch Rizzi as he stood in the center of the room and nervously cleared his throat.
            A second later, Harry felt the touch of an arm on his shoulders. He would have started, but he knew what it was: Draco touching him, reaching out, making sure he was included.
            Harry leaned back, and gave himself up to the enjoyment of both Rizzi’s recitation of an enormously complex game and the fact that there was someone here who wanted to include him—to include him in everything.
*
SP777: Well, there might be more fight scenes later.
And I know about George and Angelina. But just like Harry isn’t together with Ginny in this story, I saw no reason for them to be together.
MoonlightVampiress: At least Draco is making him think more about the consequences of his actions now!
Winged-ashes: Why especially Hermione?
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There's a Pure-Blood Custom For That