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Acts of Life	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 21189 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 2
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Chapter Twenty-Seven—Making
            “You’re the Draco Malfoy who’s setting up the shop here?”
            Why bother asking when you already know I’m setting up the shop? Draco wanted to say, but he couldn’t afford to drive away any clients who might take the initiative to approach him. He turned around with a simple inclination of his head, and waited to see who they were and what they wanted.
            The woman in the entrance of his shop stood there with a gaping mouth, as if she hadn’t expected to see the brand-new holes in the walls and the half-built shelves and the barrels of raw, just-Transfigured wood despite knowing he was only setting up now. Draco remained still until her eyes came back to him. Then he gestured her in.
            She came in, walking carefully, as if she thought the wood on the floor meant there would also be holes she could fall through. She was taller than Draco himself, with black hair tucked under a concealing hat a lot more old-fashioned than most people wore. Her robes were plain black, but old enough to have faded to grey in some patches.
            “I want—I want a special potion,” she whispered, when she was close enough that Draco would hear her.
            “I don’t brew anything illegal,” Draco warned her.
            “This one isn’t illegal!” Her voice flew up the scale, then back down. “Just—in a grey area.”
            “It would still depend on what it is, and the cost of the ingredients.” Draco also wondered if she might possibly be a spy from the Ministry come to tempt him into illegal activity. It would depend a lot on the request.
            “It’s a more powerful variation of the Wit-Sharpening Potion.” The woman licked her lips. “It lasts a longer time and gives you more ability to comprehend a subject instead of just remember information.”
            Draco raised his eyebrows. He knew exactly what she was talking about, although he was starting to wonder if she did, given that she hadn’t told him its proper name.
            And it wasn’t a more powerful version of the Wit-Sharpening Potion, either, unless you were talking purely about effect. They shared almost none of the same ingredients.
            “If you want it for a child of yours to pass their Hogwarts exams, you can forget it,” Draco said firmly. He couldn’t afford to become known as a source of potions like that when he was so near the school. Children would besiege him, and they had no discretion.
            “No! No, it’s for me.” The woman closed her eyes for a second, and then whispered, “Do you trust the Privacy Charms here? That no one will hear a word we say?”
            Draco waved his wand once and strengthened them, courtesy of a book popular at Hogwarts thirty years ago, then pulled out the chair he’d Transfigured for himself earlier. The woman collapsed into it and fanned her hand in front of her face, although it was chill enough that Draco was wearing his heaviest robes and scarf along with a Warming Charm. She glanced back at Draco, then away.
            “I work in the Department of Magical Games and Sports at the Ministry. I’m up for a promotion. I deserve it. I’ve worked hard. But I’m so nervous that whenever they send me out on a new task or ask me to interview someone, I mess up.” The woman’s head drooped. “I want to prove that I do know things when someone asks me questions.”
            “The Mind-Mirror would be the wrong potion for that. You already know the subject. What you need is a potion that boosts your confidence.”
            The woman blinked and focused on him. “You can tell that without me telling you anything else?”
            “I can tell that from the way you describe yourself. If you’re getting some of the details wrong, then the potion will be wrong, too.”
            “Oh.”
            They sat in silence long enough that Draco thought she would change her mind and get up, or that she’d already changed her mind about the potion. He couldn’t imagine why a confidence-boosting potion would concern someone when a potion that affected intelligence didn’t. But he had come to accept that most people had different perceptions than he did.
            For example, lots of people would think that Harry and I didn’t belong together. And they would be wrong.
            “I’ll still need to take it,” the woman said abruptly, and Draco had the answer to one of his questions when she turned abruptly towards him. “But I think—you can brew it, can’t you? I don’t have to go to someone else?”
            She was probably trying to decide whether she had to go to a barely legal Death Eater after all, Draco thought, but he felt no resentment. He would rather she make a decision now than when he was halfway through the brewing process. “Of course. The brewing itself is simple, but I’m afraid the major ingredient, gold dust, is rather expensive, and I’ll need a fee to compensate me for my labor.”
            “Of course you do!” The woman sounded as though she was shocked that he would even suggest she wouldn’t pay him. She reached into her robe pocket, and Draco tensed reflexively, but she brought out a large pouch and handed it to him. When Draco opened it, he smiled. There were enough Galleons in here to buy the gold dust and every other ingredient he didn’t have or that he would use up in creating the potion.
            “I’ll need to know a little more about you,” he told the woman. “Starting with your name. The potion needs to be attuned to you to do its best work.”
            The woman blinked. “I’ve never heard of a potion like that.”
            “They aren’t common in Hogwarts or in most apothecaries.”
            Draco expected her to ask again if this one was legal, but she didn’t, maybe because of what she’d already been prepared to do to get the Mind-Mirror potion. She nodded and bit her lip. “I’m Carina Simmons.” Muggleborn, then, Draco thought, which might be another reason she’d come to him; some pure-blood Potions brewers wouldn’t deal with her. “I’m twenty-seven years old. I was out of the country during the war, which is one reason that I think some of my colleagues distrust me. My wand is…”
            “Just a minute,” Draco said, and went for ink and parchment, his chest feeling as though he’d swallowed a balloon. This was wonderful. His first client, and she was a Muggleborn who needed a legal potion.
            And who would probably, if someone asked her where she’d got her confidence, tell them the truth, and lead more people to Draco’s shop.
            “Are you humming?” Simmons asked.
            Draco smiled at her over his shoulder. “I find it aids the brewing process.”
*
            “Can I help somehow?”
            Harry found it soothing, the way that Draco tossed him a quick look and nodded, then turned back to what looked like he was grinding gold dust in a huge blue eggshell. “Yes. Just clean the roses on the table and strip them of their thorns, will you? Use charms,” he added, as Harry started to reach towards them. “Any human skin dust that gets on them could affect the potion unpredictably.”
            Having been around Neville enough, Harry decided that he didn’t need to see any more “unpredictable” reactions, and began casting Diffindo on the thorns. The roses floated in the air and rolled over when he wanted them to. It was a bit more magic than he would normally use for such a simple task, but Draco had asked him to.
            Harry felt his gaze lingering on Draco more than the roses as he cast, except for when he had to absolutely pay attention to make sure he wasn’t cutting off the thorns instead of the petals. Draco’s face was set in concentration, but not the scowl Harry privately thought had been common for him when they were students at Hogwarts. His hands flickered and danced, and he gave a small smile when he could finally pick up the eggshell full of bright dust and scatter it across the surface of what looked like a block of ice.
            “I’m ready to make the potion,” he said, and turned around to smile at Harry in turn.
            “I thought you were making the potion.”
            “That was the preparation. Now it begins.”
            Harry indicated the large pile of cut roses to him. Draco floated them over with a single gesture of his wand and placed them, rotating in what seemed to be an invisible hand, over the cauldron. Then he began to cast spells that cut the petals off in turn. Harry watched them float down into the cauldron.
            “Is that empty?” he asked. “The rose petals go in before anything else?”
            “Shhh.”
            Harry obediently shut up, part of his concentration on the intense look on Draco’s face. He didn’t look as enthralled by potions as Snape had, but there was something similar there, Harry thought. Maybe Draco had discovered a love for Potions when he was shut up in the house right after the war and couldn’t do much of anything else.
            Draco abruptly heaved the cauldron up, and the rose petals all scattered down and into the cauldron. The stems dashed off to the side, and Draco began to plink in small scraps of dust-covered ice. He tilted his head at Harry without turning his eyes from the complicated sifting he apparently had to do with the gold dust. “Can you go get a flask of water? Make sure you don’t touch the water, again.”
            “What would you have done without me here?”
            “Ask the house-elves.”
            There’s that, Harry admitted to himself, although he was still intrigued that Draco had apparently started the potion without having the ingredients all carefully arranged around him already. He found an empty crystal flask waiting near the shelves in the back of Draco’s lab and conjured water that he carefully directed straight into the flask. Draco was whispering something over the cauldron now, something that could have been anything from a spell to some kind of good-luck charm.
            When Draco took the flask from Harry, he held three of his fingers widely out to the side so they couldn’t touch the water, and carefully poured it on. Harry supposed he should be used to potions by now, but he still blinked when a large puff of golden smoke rose from the cauldron.
            “Why do you have to be so careful not to handle the ingredients?” he asked, as Draco put the flask down on the table and leaned over to study the things in the cauldron with a faint frown.
            “Because this is a potion attuned to one specific person. Even the touch of someone else’s skin could ruin it.” Draco glanced at him, and Harry saw the soft shimmer of spells around his mouth and nose and hands that his mother had probably cast for him. “Now shhh.”
            Harry shushed. He enjoyed it, he thought, in a way he never had when he was sitting around in Potions waiting for his partner to do something, the flight of Draco’s hands like swallows and his expression as he poured in something else that looked like melted gems and then broke off a piece of the eggshell that had contained the gold dust and added that, too.
            Then there was a long time of stirring, and Draco whispering again. Harry sat back. He wondered if he could learn enough about Potions to pick it up as a relaxing hobby, at least.
            Although Draco’s face wasn’t really relaxed. It was, instead, folded into an expression of such intense concentration that Harry wondered if he should leave the lab. But Draco would have told him to if it was required, so Harry sat still.
            “There,” Draco said finally, and stepped back.
            Harry hesitated before he approached the cauldron. Draco, though, was already using a Finite on the spells around his hands and face. That had to mean he was done. He’d never jeopardize the potion like that if it wasn’t finished.
            The potion itself was one of the most attractive ones Harry had ever seen, next to Felix Felicis. It was the soft golden-peach color of dawn clouds, and there was a swirl of a crystal thread at the bottom of it. Harry leaned his elbow on the cauldron and smiled at Draco. “Is that what you wanted?”
            “What she’ll need. I’m sure I did it right.”
            “You don’t know from looking at it?”
            “All confidence-boosting potions are unique, at least if they’re brewed correctly. This looks different from one I’d make for myself.” Draco glanced sideways at Harry. “Or for you, assuming you needed it.”
            Harry laughed and grabbed Draco in his arms, nuzzling his chin against Draco’s hair. “Come on, master Potions brewer. I’m hungry, and I want to spend time with you and talk to you about Potions.”
            “See?” Draco muttered as Harry almost dragged him out of the lab. “You don’t need it.”
            Harry only ducked his head and said nothing. He could feel Draco muttering against him, but he didn’t pull away.
            Draco was more than happy to be taken care of, and Harry was simply more than happy.
*
Green-Extreme-Ninjetti13: Probably quite a while. And what do you mean by naïve?
SP777: Well, he did some of it off-screen.
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Acts of Life