Adult-FanFiction.org : Harry Potter

Emergence	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 2816 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I am making no money from this story.

Chapter List
- 2
- 3
- 4
Thank you again for all the reviews!

            “Why does she keep trying to feed me?” Draco complained, digging into the fruit salad that Molly had put in front of him a few minutes ago.

            Harry hid his smile behind his own bowl of fruit salad, which he was having mostly because Molly had handed it to him with a very expressive glance. He knew his mission was to make Draco feel like he wasn’t being singled out, so he would eat more instead of resisting out of stubbornness.

            Harry had to wonder if Molly knew her experiment had already failed.

            “Because you look like you need it,” said Harry easily, and Draco promptly gave him a stare of outrage. Harry gestured at the fruit salad again with his fork. “Eat it, or she’ll come along and—”

            “Decide I’m an ungrateful brat?”

            Careful, your past is showing. But while Harry could say that kind of thing to George and not get hexed for it, he didn’t think he was there yet with Draco. He said only, “No. She’ll think you don’t like it, and start asking you what she can get for you instead.”

            He spoke with some sincerity, because precisely the same thing had happened to him when he was staying at the Burrow during the Death Eater trials. He had been sure he couldn’t eat a thing. Molly had been sure that he just didn’t like what was in front of him and she could tempt him.

            It had been a race against time and circumstance that, ultimately, Molly won. But only by making food that smelled unfairly good.

            Draco’s face took on a haunted expression. He toyed with his fork for a minute, and then he asked, not looking at Harry, “What do I say to make her leave me alone and convince her that I like the food?”

            “You can’t.”

            “But if I finish this, she just brings more!”

            Harry sat back and smiled a little. They were outside the Burrow, Draco on a small Transfigured bench with a tray on his lap and a blanket around his shoulders. He’d fought both things. Again, Molly won.

            “Tell her you need time to digest it,” Harry said, even though his eyes lingered on Draco’s wan face and he had to admit he would have been tempted to try and feed him up, too. “She understands that. She doesn’t want to make you throw up. She just wants to make sure that you have all you need.”

            Draco looked down at the fruit salad and spun his fork. Harry started eating again. He had to admit there was something about Molly’s cooking that made plain fruit piled together tempting, even without all the sauces and sweet toppings that Hogwarts’s house-elves used to add to it.

            “My father used to tell me stories,” Draco whispered suddenly. “About the things Weasleys did to Malfoys when they captured them.”

            Harry felt as if he was in a state of vibrating high alert, as if he’d seen the Snitch. This was the kind of thing he had been trying to get Draco to talk about for days. But on the other hand, showing too much interest would probably just make him fall silent again.

            Harry made his voice friendly but uninterested. “And what did he tell you they would do?”

            “Torture us. Cast Flaying Curses on us. Shove our heads under water in the bath until we drowned from sheer exhaustion. Starve us and then torment us with illusions of food that were really just disguising rocks, so we’d break our teeth when we bit into them.”

            The more Draco listed, the more Harry wanted to find Lucius Malfoy in Azkaban and slap him silly. What kind of ridiculous insanity was that?

And it wasn’t even that Lucius had been telling stories about the Weasleys, Harry realized suddenly. If Molly had been the kind of person to terrify Ron and Ginny with tales about what the Malfoys would do if they captured them, he would have been just as horrified.

You might yell at kids or scare them to get them to behave, but you didn’t tell them this kind of thing and make them think the world was full of lurking horrors. It was the kind of terror that Tom Riddle had tried to spread through letting the basilisk out of the Chamber of Secrets.

It was the kind of terror Aunt Petunia had tried to inspire in Harry when she used to yell at him that he was worthless, that he would never amount to anything, that no matter what happened he was destined to end up unemployed and a drunk and a freak.

“But…”

            Harry shook away his own memories. Empathy with Draco or not, which he was glad to have, he wasn’t supposed to get so involved in them he lost track of what was going on. “But what?” he asked encouragingly, wondering if Draco had started to realize that he didn’t need to be cautious around the Weasleys all the time.

            “None of them,” said Draco with some feeling, and held up his fork to stare at the glistening grapes and slices of pineapple that clung to the end of the tines, “mentioned the mounds and mounds of food.”

            It felt good to laugh, and to see from Draco’s hesitant smile that it had been meant to make him laugh, rather than Harry taking something serious the wrong way.

            It felt even better to watch the color creeping back into Draco’s cheeks, and to see the way he ate more slices of strawberry and started separating out what he didn’t want, and the way he faced down Molly when she cornered him and told her he needed time to digest.

            He needs to gain some confidence. He needs to come back to life. And we’re helping him do it.

*

            Draco ducked his head as he saw Weasley coming towards him. Well, the original Weasley, not one of the multiple people with that name who seemed to be determined to make his life--

            I suppose they're not making it miserable. They could be, and they're not doing that. I'm grateful, I really am.

            But they were making his life complicated. And Draco wasn't really ready for that at the moment.

            Still, he would look stupid if he ran away. He was still sitting on the same bench in the middle of the garden that Potter had brought him to that morning to eat their breakfast, and it wasn't like Weasley was going to forget about him when he was looking straight at him. The best Draco could hope for was that Weasley would remember something he had to do that was more important and leave him alone.

            But Weasley plopped down on the bench and stared at him. Draco turned towards him and hoped his air of resignation was great enough to be insulting while not bad enough to provoke retaliation.

            "How are you doing, Malfoy?"

            Draco stared. He hadn't anticipated that beginning to the conversation even though he should have.

            It was becoming more and more obvious that these weren't the Weasleys of his father's stories. What they were, he wasn't sure he knew. But they weren't--that.

            "All right," Draco said, for lack of anything else to say.

            Weasley nodded and stared off into the distance for a moment. His air of desperate nonchalance began to get through to Draco, and he bit his lip to keep from laughing. Weasley was uncomfortable himself, was he? He probably didn't know what to do in the company of his hereditary enemy any more than Draco did.

            "Harry is going to make sure you can leave the Burrow," Weasley announced randomly.

            "But I thought the Wizengamot was strict about me not practicing magic and remaining in his custody," Draco said faintly. As much as he loathed being here, it was still better than Azkaban. He knew he would have died from his magic-draining fever, or at best woken up a Squib, in Azkaban.

            "Yeah, but they're not as strict on the rules about you being here, with us. You're here because Harry is living with us." Weasley ducked his head and rubbed at his ear. "If he leaves and moves somewhere else, then you can go with him. He's just trying to make sure that no one in the Wizengamot is watching that closely and won’t try to apply these rules so harshly as to mean that you can't move with him."

            Draco swallowed. A chance to be with Potter shouldn't sound like heaven, but it did. Never mind that the Weasleys weren't nearly as bad as he'd been led to believe; it would still be easier to recover if he was around one person alone.

            "Does he think he can really convince them?"

            "Dunno. That's where he is today. Has been the majority of the afternoon," Weasley added with a slight frown. "That might be a good thing or a bad thing. Maybe he has to see a lot of people, or maybe he's arguing and they're trying to turn him down flat. We'll see, I suppose."

            Then he turned and faced Draco, and held out his hand. Draco was so surprised that he took it before he knew what he was doing.

            "It hasn't always been a treat, having you here," said Weasley, and his jaw was set and his eyes steady, as if he was facing up to an unpleasant duty of the kind that made Father have to wear formal robes at the Ministry. "But it hasn't been horrible either."

            What a ringing endorsement. Then again, for a Weasley, Draco reckoned, it was. He dipped his head in response and murmured something that he hoped would be taken the same way, since he couldn't find his own words and he didn't really want to simply echo Weasley's.

            Weasley gave him another searching glance, then asked, "Do you want to leave?"

            "I want some peace and privacy," Draco said, the first thing he thought of, and saw Weasley nod in what could be understanding. That gave him the courage to continue. "I--trust Potter, more than I did. I think I could at least live with him. But you've been more than decent, all of you."

            There. It wasn't the most gracious thing he'd ever said, but on the other hand, he didn't think he'd given them anything to complain of, as far as Malfoy manners went.

            "Well. Good." Weasley didn't seem to know what to say any more than Draco did, and sat for a minute kicking his legs back and forth. Then he brightened. "Here comes Harry. Let's see what he has to say!"

            And he called across the distance, to Potter, while Draco blinked his eyes and tried to reconcile himself to the fact that he was having this conversation with Weasley, he really was, and it was going all right.

            As it turned out, he didn't need Weasley to tell him what Potter said. His voice came back, clear and true, and Draco knew he was smiling without having to look.

            "The Wizengamot said they don't care! As long as Draco lives with me, it can be the Burrow or Grimmauld Place or Godric's Hollow or a Muggle neighborhood!"

            Draco closed his eyes. In practice, he knew, he would probably still be spending a lot of time with the Weasleys, since Potter needed them to heal after the war, and Draco doubted Potter would leave him alone for very long--not because he didn't trust him, but to satisfy the sticklers in the Wizengamot who might be looking to indict them for any breaking of rules.

            But it felt different. Having that little bit of extra freedom was going to let him breathe more easily.

            And it had been Potter who fought and won it for him.

            When Potter came up and dropped a hand on his shoulder, Draco turned and smiled up at him.

            Potter looked taken off-guard for all of one second, before he smiled back.

            Draco's heart ached in satisfaction. There was something about that smile, something that passed between them in the scant second before Weasley demanded to know exactly what the Wizengamot had said, that he thought might be worth fighting for, too.
- 2
- 3
- 4
You need to be logged in to leave a review for this story.You need to be logged in to leave a review for this story.
Report Story

Emergence