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China Roses	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 3053 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
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Chapter Three—A Crystal Dragon
            “What’s he doing?” Draco kept his words soundless. Potter was close enough that he should be able to read Draco’s lips, anyway. They stood together outside the silk curtain that marked the beginning of Scorpius’s sickroom.
            Potter bowed his head and concentrated senses that Draco couldn’t feel for a moment, then gave a breathy snort that mostly tickled Draco’s nostrils. “Trying to use magic again, pushing against the room’s spells. He’s such a wanker.”
            Draco jerked his head around in surprise. Potter winked at him. Draco found they were standing closer than he had thought they were, and found, too, that his curled hands were brushing against the front of Potter’s robes.
            He leaned back and closed his eyes. Potter didn’t chuckle or do anything else about his discomfort that would make him an arsehole. He just burned lightly along Draco’s front, then said, “All right, he’s stopped now. You remember your lines?”
            Draco found it easy to roll his eyes this time. “How many hours did we spend drilling?”
            “Only one, actually.”
            In the faint light through the curtain, Draco could easily spot Potter’s raised eyebrow. He flushed. He should have spoken in terms of times rather than hours. But it was too late to retrieve the situation now, and he would only make himself look stupid if he tried.
            “But I know them,” he said.
            “Good,” said Potter, and held the curtain away from the alcove the way that he had yesterday. Draco ducked through in a far different mood than he had then, however, his heart light and skipping around the inside of his chest.
            “I told you,” said Draco, and as he spoke the lines became fitted to the natural tones and dips of his voice, the way Potter had told him they would become, “you don’t need to create a countercurse for every Dark spell out there. In some cases, the existing counter serves just as well.”
            “And I told you,” said Potter, with a little sulky toss of his head that Draco immediately suspected him of copying from Scorpius, “that my countercurses go beyond holding the Dark spells back. They provide something extra. It’s not blocking Cruciatus pain, it’s leaving you deeply relaxed. It’s not blocking a spell that might have made delicate components explode, it’s preventing any magic so a patient can relax in peace.” He turned his head, inch by clockwork inch, and looked at Scorpius.
            His son was flushed in a way Draco had never seen him at home, but he was also lifted from the pillows on his elbows. “I need something to do here, Harry,” he explained. “And it might as well be working.”
            “I could have brought you books of theory!” Harry brought down his hand on the edge of the bed, and Scorpius jumped. “But no, you have to push and push and push at the boundaries.” He turned away from Scorpius and scowled at Draco. “At least your theory is correct, though.”
            “Of course it is,” said Scorpius, and his eyes darted between them as if he expected one of them to start firing hexes. “I’m an expert on defensive theory. You wouldn’t tolerate someone who wasn’t.”
            Draco marveled at how well Potter knew Scorpius. He had reassured Draco that his son would say something exactly like that, giving Potter an opening for his next line.
            “But it seems I’m forced to, given who I told he could stay as a guest here.” Potter scowled at Draco and turned away, launching a kick at the bed. “If I’d realized what I would be doing when I agreed to that…”
            “Um.” Scorpius laid his wrist on his forehead and peered at Harry around his fingers as if he thought something would pop up soon to make Harry change his mind. “Of course he’s not a defensive theory expert. He writes history.”
            And you don’t need to make it sound so dusty either, Scorpius. But Draco bit his tongue. He minded his son thinking he was a fool in front of Harry Potter more than he’d realized.
            More than he should, when he was the one who had come up with this plan. Potter was merely the one who’d figured out how to execute it.
            “He’s decided to tell me how I could correct my countercurses, though.” Potter folded his arms and turned so that most of his back was to Draco. “And which ones I don’t need to make. I suppose he knows all about that, now.”
            He does offended well. Better than he had in their practices upstairs. Draco only narrowed his eyes, though, instead of apologizing as his instincts told him to. “I don’t want my son to waste time or effort on things that aren’t needed.”
            “It wouldn’t be his time or effort.”
            “It would, if he could spend it learning with you and you instead waste it on making countercurses no one wants.” Draco moved to the side, keeping Potter in his sights. “I’ve paid for an apprenticeship that it seems, so far, has only endangered him. And not taught him nearly enough, if he thinks messing about with artifacts and countercurses at the same time is a good idea.”
            “No, Father!” Scorpius was thrashing around now in the blankets, his face totally red. “That wasn’t Harry’s fault! It was my mistake!”
            Draco slowly shook his head. “Potter told me last night that it happened more than once. I don’t think so.” He faced Potter again and held out a stiff arm. “I’ll take my son from here. I’ll show him how he can live a life that incorporates magical theory and all the things he wants to do without creating useless countercurses.”
            “Ultimately, Scorpius is an adult.” Potter had achieved the cool tone that he’d told Draco he would use, but one hand opened and closed in a way that Draco knew Scorpius would note, or the boy had severely backslid in his lessons. “He can choose to stay.”
            “If I stop paying his apprenticeship fees?”
            Potter gave him a level stare, and Draco knew why. This wasn’t a part of the pretense they had tried on each other up in Potter’s rooms. On the other hand, Potter should have known better. Draco had to make the objection once he was in the room with Scorpius thrashing around making noises like a distressed seal and trying to get him to stop. It was obvious, even though Scorpius couldn’t get the words out, that he was mostly worried about the fees.
            “I think he has talent enough to train him without that.”
            Scorpius seemed to be torn between blubbing his gratitude to Potter and yelling at Draco not to take him away. Draco sniffed. “Well. Let me show you why you’ll need more common sense than you have to succeed. And so will he.”
            He gave Scorpius the kind of quelling glance that made him shut up for a bit, and in the meantime, Draco pulled out his wand and cast. Potter’s wand moved at the same instant, and so did his lips, but he had told Draco the major effort would come from one of his countercurses, slipped into his pocket. Scorpius wouldn’t immediately realize the effect was an illusion even if he saw Potter casting. He’d just think that Potter was trying to stop Draco’s spell.
            A shimmering curtain of silver light appeared in front of Draco. It was mostly illusion, but part of Draco’s conjuration, too. Draco had added the part that was hopefully going to scare Scorpius out of ever acting stupidly around powerful artifacts again.
            Draco gave Potter a triumphant look. “I suppose you know what this light does?”
            Potter folded his arms. “Shocks you by throwing you into the wall. But you don’t need to worry, Malfoy. I have a countercurse that can stop it.” This time, he drew out a small crystal dragon that he’d shaped into a coiling shape, reared on its tail and haunches. He held it up as if he was going to thrust it into the light.
            Draco smiled a little. “But I’m going to show you the countercurse, the actual spell, can work just as well. In fact, let’s have a little contest, academic theory against common sense. Bring your dragon to life.”
            “No, Father!”
            There was fear in Scorpius’s voice, but not enough. Draco was sure it was still fear of losing his place at Potter’s side, not fear of what might happen to someone using powerful, unpredictable magic against more unpredictable magic. Potter nodded, said, “You’re on,” and touched his wand to the inevitable slit in the dragon’s belly. It promptly whirred its wings and climbed up to hang above Potter’s head.
            “No!” This time, Scorpius’s voice was a bellow. “You told me you hadn’t tested that dragon yet, Harry!”
            “Well, this’ll be a test, then.” Potter’s eyes were on Draco and the light, and he didn’t even glance up at the dragon, the picture of confidence in his creation. “Since the tendency to think you can do things better than me runs in the family…”
            “I never—I never thought I was better than you, Harry—”
            Draco interrupted the fumbling apology before it could get started. Scorpius had to mean it. “On the count of three. Well, three for you and five for me. You need time to use the dragon, after all. Time I don’t need to cast the spell.”
            Potter’s face twisted in feigned hauteur, and he touched the dragon again and whispered something to it. It rose higher, and then Potter said, “Start counting, Malfoy.”
            “One,” Draco said, and the dragon soared straight towards the curtain of light.
            “Two.” The dragon was almost there, wings flapping harder and harder, small mouth opening.
            “Three.” The dragon’s tail whipped over its back and magic flowed out from that and from its jaws, expanding in a gleaming silver cone.
            “Four, five,” Draco counted quickly, and flung the “counter” at the curtain of light, nonverbal, because Scorpius didn’t need to know what spell he’d actually used.
            “No, Father! What that dragon’s supposed to do—”
            The explosion ate Scorpius’s warning, and the light, and Draco’s sight. He felt his legs leaving the floor, and hoped, as he flew, that Potter’s cushioning properties on the wall were all he had promised they were.
            Then he struck.
*
            “You have so much talent, Scorpius. But you need to learn how to restrain yourself.”
            Scorpius stares at his hands. Then he stares at Harry. But the flat look he gets in return encourages him to go back to looking at his hands.
            “I was only trying to help,” he whispers.
            “What’s the first theory you learn about finesse when studying defensive magic?”
            Scorpius looks up quickly, because the yielding tone in Harry’s voice might imply he’s going to forgive him. Harry, though, stares over Scorpius’s head at the far wall. His gaze is bored. Or unreadable. But either way, implacable.
            “You learn that finesse is important because there’s a fine line between defensive and offensive magic.” It’s Scorpius’s own answer, the right one but in his own words. He realized quickly when he first came for the apprenticeship that Harry doesn’t tolerate simple quotes from textbooks. “If you put too much power behind a Shield Charm, it could hit someone and kill them. Or fracture at the wrong place instead of bending and let a curse through and kill someone sheltering behind it.”
            Harry nods and turns a distant eye on him this time. Scorpius sits very still. They’re in Harry’s flat, a place Scorpius usually sees when they share a quick meal and then bolt back downstairs to work on another countercurse. This time, though, Harry stands in front of Scorpius as judge and jury, not sitting across from him and gulping tea the way he’s always done before.
            Scorpius thinks he’s seeing the Harry who was in the war for the first time. He doesn’t much like the experience.
            “You learn that,” Harry says. “All the students who go through defensive magic training during their lives learn that. But you don’t apply it.” His hand comes down in the middle of the table and makes Scorpius and teacups both leap backwards. “Do you.”
            Scorpius realizes a second later that this isn’t a question, but a statement. One Harry thinks is true of him.
            He straightens up and let his haughty Malfoy stare rest on Harry. It never worked on Grandfather, but it works sometimes on his parents. Mother seems more susceptible to it with every visit, in fact, as though living in France has got her far enough away from Malfoys to forget about it.
            Harry never flinches. In fact, a slight, cold smile touches his lips. Scorpius doesn’t ever want to see that smile again.
            “Your father used a better one on me, many times in school.” Harry takes a slight step forwards. “And I was never worried that he jumped headlong into danger. Try something other than looking like a sulky teenager to make me forgive you.”
            “I’m not a sulky teenager!” snaps Scorpius, firing up despite himself. He knows Harry gets him angry on purpose sometimes, to test how his reflexes and perceptions change under the threat of extreme danger. But he doesn’t deserve that test, not now, not when he’s been passing all the other exams Harry set him, even the impromptu ones. “You should know better! Would you let a—someone sulky play with all the countercurses you have?”
            “If I thought he was an adult.” Harry’s voice is low and precise. “Until he nearly killed himself experimenting with a shield that he knew wasn’t ready yet, and meant to deflect a spell he can’t cast yet.”
            Scorpius’s eyes drop. He did think Harry had forgiven him, the way he’d picked Scorpius up from the landing site and cared for him for a few days. He understands now that Harry didn’t want to yell at him until he wasn’t wounded any longer.
            Or until I could understand what I did.
            “I didn’t mean to,” Scorpius begins.
            “And someone not properly trained in defensive theory, or finesse, wouldn’t mean to cast a Shield Charm that hurt the people it was supposed to be protecting.” Harry moves closer and closer to him, never taking his eyes from Scorpius’s. It’s ruthless and terrifying, far worse than any Malfoy glare. “It wouldn’t change the nature of their deaths.”
            “I didn’t die! I didn’t hurt anyone—”
            “Anyone else,” Harry says, and his voice rings and rises in a clamor that reminds Scorpius of the noise of the shield hitting the floor. “I told you I never had to worry about your father jumping headlong into danger. Well, that’s a trait I’d wish you’d bloody inherited! You idiot, I sat by your bed pumping healing magic into you and wondering what in the world I was going to tell your parents, why I’d ever told you about the shield, why I’d taken you on as an apprentice—”
            “You did it because I was talented!” Scorpius protests. “You said so yourself.”
            “You have to be talented at staying alive, too.” Harry moves even closer and peers down at him like an angry owl. “I had to learn that after the war. To hold my life lightly when the prophecy and the hunt for Voldemort was on, because it turned out I might have to die to kill him. And then to hold onto it harder when that hunt was over, because my life had value.” He pauses. Scorpius is almost sick with the vertigo of his own heartbeat. Harry never talks about the war, never. “Has anyone ever taught you to hold hard to your life?”
            “I’m not suicidal,” Scorpius breathes. His throat burns as he says it.
            “Not in your mind,” Harry says, and his eyes have turned somber again. He reaches out and shakes Scorpius’s shoulder, hard enough to rattle his tongue in his mouth. Scorpius doesn’t mind, because it’s gentle compared to the way he shook Scorpius after he woke up. “Has anyone told you they’d grieve if you died? Anyone?”
            Scorpius tries to think over his life, whether a genuine announcement would have happened anywhere, and then he snorts. No, of course it hasn’t. Because his family and friends never assumed he was suicidal.
            But when he tells Harry that, with a little twist of his voice that he hopes will make Harry realize how stupid he is to assume Scorpius is suicidal, all that happens are Harry’s brows drawing together. Scorpius sighs and settles in for another lecture. At least, after this one, he thinks all Harry’s anger will be exhausted.
            Instead of lecturing, though, Harry gestures around the room. “Do you know when I learned enough to set up Countercurses?” he asks.
            Scorpius frowns. He doesn’t know the exact date, although of course he knows Harry has been in business long enough to train several apprentices and sell a lot of his counters. “No,” he finally says, when he’s kept silent long enough to convince Harry he’s searched his memory rather than simply never known.
            Harry leans forwards. “When I was thirty. That was the first age at which I felt I’d learned enough defensive magic. But it’s also the first one at which I felt as if I had a hard enough hold on life.”
            Scorpius blinks. “I don’t understand.” He hates it every time he has to say that, but at least Harry is generous with explanations.
            “If I had given up my life during the war, I wouldn’t have my three children,” Harry says, and his face glows with his smile. “But I also wouldn’t have lived long enough to do this.” He gestures around the shop again. “And if I had started the shop before I’d learned a proper respect for how powerful the magic was, I would have died during some of my first experiments.” He leans even closer, until his eyes look as large as the shield did. “To make those future artifacts, Scorpius, you have to survive your first encounters.”
            Scorpius hesitates. He knows that. He never had any intent of dying as he wrestled with the shield.
            But he realizes something else, suddenly.
            He never had any intent of not dying, either. He didn’t take the shield seriously. It couldn’t threaten him. He reckons that was what Harry meant when he talked about respecting the objects.
            While Scorpius is blinking at that and wondering why he never considered the shield a serious threat, Harry does something else to seal the moment in his mind. He reaches out and touches Scorpius in the hollow of his throat, almost compelling his attention. With a wizard as powerful as Harry that close to your pulse, you do, Scorpius has found.
            “And I would have lost the chance to train you for this apprenticeship,” Harry says quietly, “if you’d died early.”
            Scorpius can’t speak. He reaches up and catches hold of Harry’s hand, and they sit-stand there for a moment in silence. It’s a promise. Scorpius is never going to be so disrespectful of the shields again. He’ll leave up all development on them to Harry, at least until Scorpius gets good at the Killing Curse. He promises.
            And he does live up to his promise. He leaves the shields strictly alone.
*
            “Father. Father, please…”
            Draco blinked. He thought he was doing a pretty good job of imitating the dazed condition that would come from someone being cast into a wall. He groaned and touched his head slightly for that effect, too.
            “Father!”
            And maybe he had done too good a job of scaring Scorpius. Draco sat up, still blinking. Scorpius’s face swam into view above him.
            “Oh, thank Merlin,” Scorpius said, and then hugged Draco hard enough to make Draco instinctively hug him back.
            Of course, he wished he’d been a bit less demonstrative the next minute, because Scorpius turned on Harry with his wand drawn. “Why did you do that?” he shouted. “You know that you’re more powerful magically than Father is, and you—you know that he doesn’t know all the defensive magic theory that you do—”
            “Oh, no, Malfoy,” Potter said, and there was an audible grin in his voice. “Your theoretical competence has been impugned. However shall you cope?”
            “I’m sure I’ll manage somehow,” said Draco dryly, and stood up, stretching his neck back and forth so that the vertebrae popped with alarming sounds.
            “Father?”
            Draco turned towards him and said, “That was meant to be a vivid demonstration of what happens when you use a lot of power and direct it towards something you don’t understand. Did it bring the point home?”
            Scorpius froze for a second with his mouth open in a vivid kind of protest. Then he slammed it shut and scowled at Draco. Draco stared innocently back, but with something lifting in his heart. That was more acknowledgement, more open emotion and less respect, than he’d had from Scorpius in years.
            He could see why Potter valued the relationship that he’d built with Scorpius.
            “You were testing me? Fooling me?” Scorpius’s voice was dangerously low, and he stared back and forth between Potter and Draco as though he was deciding who was to blame for this betrayal. “Why—”
            “Because I finally realized an important distinction you must have made when you promised that you wouldn’t interfere with the shields again.”
            Potter’s voice was stern. Draco turned around and studied him. He stood tall and sturdy, all his attention and discipline on Scorpius, and Draco found himself disinclined to interfere. His son wouldn’t collapse because of a little scolding.
            “You only promised not to interfere with the shields, right?” Potter continued. “You never said anything about crystal unicorns, or all the other countercurses that I have around the place.”
            Scorpius’s face turned an absurdly shiny, reflective pink. Draco hoped that he hadn’t looked the same when he was blushing last night.
            “I just—I knew what I did wrong with the shields,” Scorpius mumbled. “I didn’t think I would do the same sort of thing again.”
            “And if this situation had been real, I’m sure that your father wouldn’t have meant to respond to the Lightning Gate with a charm that would cause it to strike out,” said Potter severely. “But he did.”
            “That wasn’t a Lightning Gate?” Scorpius gaped at both of them. Draco found himself smiling before he thought about it. It wasn’t for this purpose that he had suggested the game, but he found himself thinking it was rather fun to fool someone who knew more defensive theory than he did.
            Potter shook his head. “No. I had a countercurse in my pocket, one of the lions, that raised a curtain of light that will simply bounce someone who touches it into a corner without the shocking effect of the Lightning Gate. Your father cast an illusion spell at the same time that would make it look a little more like an actual Gate. Then he used a spell that mimics the human touch and so bounced him into a corner. And my dragon…” He reached up and touched the small crystal dragon that had returned to his shoulder. Draco hadn’t seen it do so, but then, he’d been rather busy having his view blocked by Scorpius’s concerned face. “That provided another illusion full of explosions and sparks.”
            “That’s defensive?” Scorpius looked more than a little outraged.
            “It’s meant to give the effect of fireworks at parties, more cheaply than buying actual fireworks would do.” Potter’s face went remote again, and he turned to Scorpius with his arms folded. “How did it feel to see your father bounced into a corner with no control over what was going on, and in fact, no knowledge of whether he was dead or alive at first?”
            There was a silence. Then Scorpius went red. “Oh.”
            Potter nodded. “I would have been impressed if you had recognized the differences between the illusion and a real Lightning Gate and therefore neglected to be concerned. But you didn’t.” He was really staring Scorpius down now, although Scorpius seemed to be writhing more from his own thoughts than from that. “Neither did I recognize that you weren’t badly wounded from the crystal unicorn you tore apart at first.”
            “I’m sorry,” Scorpius mumbled.
            Potter smiled, and his tone became lighter. “Not only do you endanger yourself and worry me and your father when you do that, but you set back my work, and you neglect your own defensive theory. You should have known more about the shield and the crystal unicorn and the artifacts you use than to think they’ll work when you do something mad. Do you promise to be more careful now with all the objects you’ll encounter in this line of work, not just the shields?”
            “I promise.” Scorpius smiled. “If you’ll show me what spell the dragon is supposed to be a countercurse to.”
            Potter laughed. Draco saw the way Scorpius’s eyes shone, and found it hard, for that matter, to take his own eyes from Potter.
            He did look away before he could be caught staring. At least, he thought so. But he found himself, as Potter herded Scorpius gently back to bed and started scolding him for not even noticing when Potter had touched the crystal unicorn on the right side of his bed to permit magic in the room, wishing that he could stay longer than the few days it would probably take Scorpius to recover.
*
starr: Thank you! I think the lesson was pretty effective.
SP777: I hope they’ll end up complementing each other here and making you go “aww” at the same time. ;)
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