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Roses, Made by Hands	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 7790 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 2
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter, and I am making no money from this story.

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Thank you again for all the reviews!

Title: Leaves, Constructed to Make Anew

Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this for fun and not profit.

Warnings: Mild angst, bullying and a bit of violence, post-war but ignores the epilogue.

Pairings: Harry/Draco pre-slash.

Rating: PG-13

Wordcount: 1990

Summary: Draco knew that being back at Hogwarts wouldn’t necessarily be easy. But he never expected the particular form his distress would take one autumn afternoon.

Author’s Notes: Sequel to “Sculpted Light” and third in a series of one-shots that show Harry and Draco growing towards a relationship in the eighth year. Fluffy. Won’t make much sense without the other stories.

Leaves, Constructed to Make Anew

            It was ridiculous. It was silly. It was unsettling. It was exactly the kind of thing that Draco didn’t need distracting him when he tried to go to sleep at night. For fuck’s sake, it had been a fortnight.

            But he could still feel the smooth slide of the skin along Potter’s jaw beneath his hand, that night he had touched him outside the Great Hall, the night that Potter kept a Gryffindor from cursing a Slytherin.

            He’d said he would do it. That was all his justification when Draco cornered him and demanded to know why he had done it.

            Draco clenched the hand into a fist, and then rolled over and pounded the fist against his pillow. He kept the echoes muffled, though, because he didn’t want to wake the others. His relationship with Blaise in particular was strained since the war.

            Potter was so stupid. He thought he could overcome the years of hatred between Gryffindor and Slytherin by acting alone? He thought he could somehow make the war go away and never have been?

            But no, that wasn’t what he wanted, was it? He wanted to secure the future instead. Draco had watched him watching the first-years, and that was the way it was. Potter couldn’t bring back the dead, but he could try to ensure that these children never knew the depths of hatred that had made their parents and brothers and sisters fight each other.

            That he knew that kind of thing, without talking to Potter in detail, only made Draco all the angrier. He rolled over again and closed his eyes, relentlessly chasing down stillness. Maybe he would brew himself a Dreamless Sleep potion tomorrow.

            His mind still rang with echoes, and so did his hand, for endless moments before he fell asleep.

*

            Draco scowled down at the ingredients list, and kicked his way along the floor of the Forbidden Forest. It was high noon, on a bright day with sunlight striking down through the branches, but that hardly mattered, did it? They still had to go in here to find the ingredients for their potion—“their own potions,” as Slughorn had stressed—because the fat idiot thought everyone should find them fresh instead of purchasing them or getting them from the supply cupboard.

            The fat idiot also thought it was a wonderful idea for each student in the NEWT-level class to brew their own experimental potion, to be ready by the end of the year. Draco could only imagine what Professor Snape would have had to say to that.

            Except he didn’t have to imagine, did he? Because Professor Snape had a portrait in the Headmaster’s office now, and Draco could go and ask him if he really wanted to.

            Draco ducked his head and walked on, shuffling through the leaves for a while and then getting off on a path where there weren’t any so he could walk more quietly. He could go ask him, yes, if he wasn’t too much of a coward.

            And that was just another reason why Potter’s idea was such a stupid thing, and why nothing would ever change. If Draco, who saw the horrible things that happened at Hogwarts and Malfoy Manor during the war, still couldn’t go and face the portrait of the man who’d saved his life, then what hope was there for anyone else to be courageous?

            He heard a scuffle ahead of him, and warily lifted his head, letting his hand fall on his wand. Paranoia, probably, but this was still the Forbidden Forest, and he didn’t want a centaur or something else to surprise him.

            The scuffle repeated, and then there came a gasp that sounded distinctly human. Draco blinked, then grinned to himself. Catching some Hufflepuff snogging his little date in the forest would provide a way to forget about his own fear and might make him settle down enough to concentrate on the ingredients in Slughorn’s list. He crept forwards, listening to make sure that the sounds didn’t change in a way that would show they were aware of him, and then cautiously stuck his head around the tree.

            Pansy, of all people, stood there, staring down at someone lying on the forest floor. Draco wondered for a second if someone had tried to grope her and she had taught him better. They’d all had to watch out for things like that from the Death Eaters, during the war.

            But Pansy stepped to the side, and Draco saw the kid lying on the ground. Dennis Creevey, the little twit who had cast the curse at them the night of the Welcoming Feast.

            Or tried to cast it, Draco couldn’t help remembering. Potter had interfered in time, so that no magic had actually hit the Slytherins. Draco frowned and shifted to the side, wondering if he should really say anything. Yes, they hadn’t been hit, but there was no doubt that Creevey would have loved it if they had been.

            “Thought you’d say that about my mother?” Pansy hissed suddenly. “Here, then. Here’s the kind of thing that I wish I could subject all you Mudbloods to for the way you’ve jeered about us!”

            She wasn’t skilled enough to cast the spell nonverbally yet, or maybe she just wanted Creevey to hear what was coming and feel even more afraid. She raised her wand, smiled sweetly at him, and whispered, “Crucio.”

            Draco felt his tongue stick to the roof of his mouth as Creevey began to writhe and scream. Pansy shouldn’t—no one should—not after what they had seen last year—

            Not to mention that Pansy was going to get herself sent to bloody Azkaban, something she’d barely dodged this summer when some people testified about the way that she had wanted to throw Potter to the Dark Lord.

            Draco bit his bottom lip for a long second, and then he stepped around the tree and said, “Finite Incantatem.”

            He didn’t know how much good it did, because he had never tried to use a Finite against one of the Unforgivable Curses. But he distracted Pansy, and that was the point. When she whirled around to face him, she wasn’t holding the spell on Creevey, and he relaxed with a loud gasp and tossed his head back, blood trailing out of his open mouth.

            Pansy had her mouth open in a snarl and one hand raised as though she was going to rake her nails down his face, but she stopped and blinked when she saw him. “Draco?” she whispered. “What the—what are you doing?”

            “Stopping you from sending us all to Azkaban,” Draco told her. “Because if you thought that they would think we didn’t have anything to do with it, you’re wrong. They judge and think of us as a group. So none of us can fuck up in any way, or people will start pressuring the Headmistress to get rid of us.”

            Pansy lifted her head haughtily and shook it so that her hair fanned out behind her. “He tried to curse us,” she argued in a voice so low and harsh that it made the ground seem to shake under Draco’s feet. “And I’m so tired of creeping around and smiling and pretending that I’m grateful when I’m not! They should have exiled us, they should have imprisoned us! Anything but expecting us to be bloody grateful all the time, and telling us that we’ll suffer the consequences if we break the rules!”

            “That’s the price of a second chance,” Draco said, glaring back at her. “And even if we weren’t who we are, do you think they would be lenient on someone using an Unforgivable Curse on another student? Now? Here?”

            “They wouldn’t. But I might be persuaded to.”

            Pansy whirled around, one hand flying up her throat as she gasped. Potter was leaning on the tree behind them that was closest to Creevey, his arms around the kid. He must have Levitated him off the ground, Draco thought, but he hadn’t heard it. Any more than he’d heard Potter come through the Forest in the first place.

            “Instead of going to Azkaban for the rest of your life,” Potter continued, staring at Pansy as if he was going to break her skull open with the sheer force of his eyes, “you might only lose this chance for a year at school. I can tell them about the stress you were under, and the way that no one can be expected to recover from that in a few months. And the fact that I’m the one saying it will make a difference. People will think I’ve forgiven you for what you said on the eve of the battle. Which is true.”

            Pansy drew herself up. “I don’t want any charity from you, Potter,” she said.

            “That’s all right,” Potter said, and smiled at her, a smile with a fierce edge that made Draco want to step away. “I’m not doing it for you so much as for others.” And he turned and walked over to Draco exactly as if Pansy wasn’t standing there and he wasn’t hauling Creevey’s limp body around.

            Draco found it as hard to meet Potter’s look as though he had cast the spell himself. He forced himself to, biting the inside of his cheek. Potter nodded, slowly, to him.

            “I told you that I would have to act against any of your friends who did something stupid,” he whispered. “I’m sorry it had to happen this way, and so soon.”

            “It wasn’t your fault,” Draco said, feeling as though he was pulling the words like teeth, one by one, out of his gums. “I—thanks, Potter.”

            Potter’s eyes were as bright and warm as some of the leaves still hanging on the trees around them. “You were the one who confronted her,” he said. “I think that you’re braver and more admirable than you ever gave yourself credit for.”

            And then he Disarmed Pansy and Stunned her, and took her away with Mobilicorpus. Draco stood there, watching, as Potter’s little procession left through the trees.

            He looked around, slowly, and recognized the shape of a leaf on a tree nearby. Or on the branch of a bush thrusting through the tree’s branches, he realized, when he walked closer. He picked it up and turned it over. Flamebush, one of the ingredients that Slughorn had assigned him to make a usable potion out of by the end of the year.

            As he stood there, looking at the leaf, his head still ringing from Potter’s words and the way he had looked at him, Draco suddenly smiled. A vision was coming to life in his head, slowly, the way the vision of a future had begun to come to him after Potter had brought McGonagall’s invitation to return for another year at Hogwarts.

            He might be able to make something out of this mess, after all, he thought, as he began to pull leaves from the flamebush.

            And his hand no longer itched. If he still carried the memory of touching Potter with him, it seemed content to lie, quietly, inside his skin, and wait for the future.

            The End.

*

            jujukitty: Thank you!

            unneeded: Draco is still puzzled by this notion, but after this fic, he probably has more of a sense of it.

            bugtree: Yeah, I think that cost him a lot to attain.

            SP777: No, this series won’t be.

            moodysavage: Thank you! Although it takes me a long time to post these stories because the central idea has to be just right, I really like writing them.
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Roses, Made by Hands