Adult-FanFiction.org : Harry Potter

Starfall	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 32486 -:- Recommendations : 3 -:- Currently Reading : 4
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I am making no money from this story.

Chapter List
- 34
- 35
- 36
Thank you again for all the reviews!
Chapter Thirty-Five—A Rare and Wondrous Thing
            “You don’t need to look as though I smacked you in the face with a hammer. Or even a wet fish.” Potter’s voice was loud and demanding, the way Draco once would have identified with a fight about to happen between them. “I’m just asking for an invitation to dinner at your house. That’s all I’m asking.”
            Maybe he intended to imply that he wasn’t asking for a date or even to spend time with Draco alone away from Scorpius. Draco didn’t much care. What mattered was the asking in the first place.
            Unless…
            “Your friends didn’t put you up to this, did they?” he demanded, leaning forwards, while Potter gave him such a blank look that it was clear he hadn’t followed Draco’s line of reasoning at all. “They probably think you need to get out more, just like I do. It wasn’t their idea? Or Andromeda’s?”
            Potter rolled his eyes. “If Ron thought I was in my right mind, or would listen to him, he would probably be urging me to run the other way. And Andromeda’s drawn her own conclusions about this, but she didn’t share them with me. I just wanted to ask you on my own, for my own reasons.” By the end of that little speech, his jaw was clenched, and his hand twitching off to the side. “Unless you would prefer I didn’t come over, of course. And you were just kidding when you said—”
            Draco surprised himself, and Potter he thought, by laughing. “Listen to us,” he said. “We are both a pair of suspicious, paranoid bastards, aren’t we? And only today I was calling you by you first name in front of Blaise, and now I’m back to thinking of you as Potter again.” He slumped back on his knees, chest aching with hilarity and exhaustion. “I’m beginning to think that maybe someone else should take over guiding us, because it’s clear neither of us has a clue as to our best interests.”
            It still took longer than it should, but Potter—Harry—smiled finally. “Fine,” he said. “Does that mean I can have a dinner invitation for tonight?”
            Draco thought about asking for tomorrow night instead. He hadn’t planned anything special for tonight, and he hadn’t thought about having Scorpius in a different place.
            But if Draco knew Harry (and he thought he was beginning to), then any hint of special treatment would only make him run away. He’d had enough of special treatment, he’d said. He would probably like a quiet, ordinary dinner with Draco and Scorpius best, the sort he’d had when Draco first asked him to come over and help with Scorpius.
            “Yes,” said Draco firmly. Harry’s smile, which had started to waver, came back. He nodded and said something Draco couldn’t make out in the sudden splutter of sparks and soot that meant the end of the Floo conversation. Something like, “I’ll bring…”
            Draco shook his head. He wondered what in the world Harry thought he could bring. It was on Draco to provide the food. That was what an invitation to dinner meant.
            I hope that he won’t come over and then spend the whole evening trying to be self-sufficient, Draco thought. He knew Harry was pretty good at standing in his own way, but that would be a new one even for him.
*
            Harry had passed the shop plenty of times, since it stood near one end of Diagon Alley, but he’d never gone in. Even now, he hesitated before he pushed open the door and stepped inside under the tinkling bell. The owner was supposedly an inveterate gossip. This would probably give him enough food for months.
            But Harry had learned, once, that it was polite to bring a bottle of wine with you when you were a guest. So he had to.
            The shop was called Wondrous Wines, and Harry stood there for a second, looking uncertainly around. There were shelves and barrels and pigeonholes like the ones where Snape used to store Potions vials. There were narrow aisles that led back into a sweetly-scented darkness. Harry wondered if it was the smell of wine. He wondered if he’d know how to tell.
            “How may I—well. Mr. Potter.”
            Harry hid a grimace and turned to face Hector Pincushion, the owner of Wondrous Wines. He was a tall man with a stomach that projected in front of him, but otherwise, he didn’t look fat at all. He had bottle-blue eyes and a hungry smile that widened as he looked at Harry. Harry wondered if he could tell how clueless Harry was.
            “I need a bottle of wine to take over to dinner tonight,” said Harry abruptly. His heart was hammering. He had forgotten how hard this was, these casual social interactions. He really hadn’t had many except with people he already knew in the past three years. All the strangers he had met were through work, and he knew how to behave there.
            “Certainly.” Pincushion made a little bow, touching the tips of his fingers together without taking his eyes from Harry. “What will the dish be?”
            “I don’t know,” said Harry. He was about to say house-elves were going to prepare it, but he managed to stop himself in time. Everyone—well, everyone that had ears—knew Hermione disapproved of house-elves by now, so this would reveal that he wasn’t dining with his friends.
            “That does make it harder,” said Pincushion, with such a disapproving smile at Harry that Harry opened his mouth to apologize before he thought about it. Then he clamped his lips shut and gave Pincushion a tight little shrug.
            “Well, that’s why I came to the best, right?” Harry murmured. He hoped he wouldn’t pay for this later, but right now, he mostly wanted Pincushion to stop staring at him and give him a bloody bottle of wine so he could get out of here. “You can match a wine to a nice dinner without knowing what kind of food it is.”
            “I might be able to do that,” Pincushion agreed, in a hoarse whisper. “But you understand, my best wines are expensive.”
            “I can pay,” Harry said with solid surety, touching his pouch of Galleons on his belt. In time, the pinch of resigning his job at the Ministry would catch up with him, but for now, he still had enough savings for something like this.
            “I wasn’t talking about that kind of payment,” Pincushion whispered, and gave him another disapproving look. “What I do here is magic, straightforward spells. It takes skill, of course, but part of the skill is knowing what spells to cast in the first place. And the use of those spells costs.”
            Harry stood straight and stiff. The look in Pincushion’s eyes made him, absurdly, want to snap that he already had one person interested in dating him, and that person was trouble enough.
            But Pincushion couldn’t possibly want him. Harry hadn’t met many people who did. What they wanted was the notoriety of being seen with him, or the ability to brag in front of their friends that they had slept with someone famous.
            Harry hadn’t met a whole lot of people, period, who wanted to cope with not only his fame but the mess in his head. He wondered if Malfoy would be one if he knew everything that Harry thought and reacted to.
            “I want a look into your head,” Pincushion murmured. “A private memory. It goes along with the wine. It goes into the wine, and adds to the exquisite taste.”
            Harry stared at Pincushion with his mouth open for a second. The only time he had heard of something even close to that was when Snape had handed Harry his memories as he was dying, and at least they had only come out partially through Snape’s mouth. Harry hadn’t had to drink them.
            “Are you mental?” Harry asked.
            Pincushion moved back and folded his arms. “You asked what the price would be for a good wine,” he said, his voice muffled. “What kind of shop do you think I run? There’s no way I can recommend a wine that would go well with everything without knowing the food. But the memory alters the wine’s taste to whatever it needs to be. It’s magical. Of course it is.”
            “I thought it was knowledge,” Harry said, feeling oddly disappointed. Ever since he had come into the wizarding world, he had loved and admired magic, but he didn’t want it in everything he touched. He’d like to have a free corner here and there.
            “No,” said Pincushion. “Unless you’d like to tell me what you’re eating, then I suppose you’ll be leaving without a bottle.”
            “I suppose I will,” said Harry, stiffening his back. He had wanted a bottle, and he still thought it was rude not to bring one; Vernon and Petunia had mentioned it often enough. On the other hand, maybe that was a Muggle tradition that had no particular force in the wizarding world. Harry would have to hope so, and that Malfoy wouldn’t think he was rude. “Good-bye.” He turned to the door.
            “Wait!”
            Harry looked back, curious. Maybe Pincushion was going to tell him asking for a memory had been a sales tactic and recommend a wine, after all.
            But Pincushion leaned towards him with his eyes shining and whispered, “It’s not much, is it? Just a memory? It doesn’t have to an intimate one. I want a memory no one knows about, except you. That’s the only requirement.”
            “You’re a little disgusting,” said Harry, and let his lip curl. He would never be doing business with the bloke again. He might as well. “What makes you think I wouldn’t have shared an intimate memory with my friends?”
            Except Malfoy, Harry thought then, and felt his gut twist a little. But he hasn’t been my friend as long as the others have.
            Pincushion seemed to have mistaken Harry’s hesitation for a desire to share the memory with him, because he preened and smiled and whispered, “Just a little one.”
            Harry shook his head. “No,” he said, a flat refusal that didn’t allow Pincushion the luxury of misinterpreting it this time, and then opened the door and stepped out into the street. Briskly, he made for the Apparition point he could use to go to Malfoy Manor.
            “You could have been a valued customer!” Pincushion shrieked down the street behind him. “But you aren’t now! I’ll make sure you can never buy a bottle of wine here again, Mr. Potter!”
            Harry sighed. The only thing he regretted, really, was that that outburst made a few people turn to stare after him, and so did his anonymity no good at all.
            Wines aren’t for me. I’ll go to Malfoy Manor and hope Malfoy and Scorpius are glad to just have me, without the bottle.
*
            Harry’s frown was deep enough, when Draco opened the door, to make him narrow his eyes and say, “You could have told me that tomorrow night was soon enough, if you were going to resent coming tonight.”
            “No, he has to be here tonight!” Scorpius cried out, and he flung himself at Harry. Harry looked a little uncomfortable as he caught Scorpius in his arms, but it was that or drop him on the front step. Scorpius looked up at Harry and began to babble. “I can write now, and you have to see the story that I wrote! And you need to try the ice cream that Izzy made for me, and you need to come see my room, and you need to see the rooms that you could stay in!”
            Harry blinked, maybe because of the force of the words—Draco knew Scorpius had never said so much to him at once before—and then looked at Draco. “You don’t need to set rooms aside for me,” he said hesitantly. “I mean, I know I might stay here eventually, but—”
            “Yes, you will,” said Draco, and it was easy to smile when Harry was giving him that bewildered look. “You might as well go ahead and choose them now, don’t you agree?” But when Harry looked at him as if Draco was about to make him fight another Dark Lord, Draco relented and added, “It’s a ritual all the guests go through. Blaise and Pansy have rooms here that they’ve chosen, too, although they practically never use them.”
            “Uncle Blaise does, sometimes,” said Scorpius, and grabbed Harry’s hand and tugged him hard in the direction of the dining room. “But you’re not like Uncle Blaise.”
            “Why am I different?” Harry was bending down near Scorpius again, his face softened and changed. Draco cocked his head as he followed them into the dining room. He would have to get Harry alone later in the evening and see whether a trace of that expression survived when Harry was looking at Draco by himself, or if he was here only for Draco’s son.
            Draco didn’t despair, though. Just because Harry started out wanting Draco for his son didn’t mean he would only want that by the end of their—dating. Courtship. Romance. Whatever Draco wanted to call it when so few terms had been settled yet.
            Or even by the end of the evening, Draco thought, and he could smile sincerely when Harry glanced at him.
*
            By the end of the meal—a bird Draco said was duck in a thick orange sauce—Draco still hadn’t said anything about the wine, and Harry had relaxed. If he had committed a social crime, it wasn’t a very serious one.
            Indeed, somehow Harry had relaxed enough to call him Draco in his head.
            But maybe that was because he didn’t look much like the man Harry had always called Malfoy in his head, Harry thought, as he made oohs and ahs at Scorpius’s room. It was big, a lot bigger than the rooms his kids with Ginny would have had, had they existed, or even than the rooms he had imagined for Ethan’s children.
            There had been a time when he could have described each and every dimension of those rooms.
            Harry sternly shook away that thought, and instead admired the fine oaken wood paneling and brilliant colors and mounds of toys in Scorpius’s room. There weren’t a lot of heirlooms around, vases and that sort of thing, although he would have thought a Malfoy would want his son to grow up around them. Draco met his eyes, appeared to know what he was thinking, and muttered, “He broke them in his fits of temper, and after Izzy repaired them, I thought it was best for everyone’s sake to move them out of here.”
            Harry snorted a laugh, and Scorpius, who was guiding Harry through the steps of a complicated spiral gameboard, glanced at him in what looked like exasperation. Harry coughed and tried to pay attention.
            “Well, that’s what happened,” Draco said, with a shake of his head Harry thought conveyed amusement as much as exasperation, and leaned back against the wall to watch them. That was what Harry remembered best of the evening, afterwards: Draco listening to a description of a game that he must be deeply familiar with, and always watching.
            Finally, Scorpius had almost exhausted the delights of his room, and his eyelids were drooping enough that Draco said, “I think we should save any more playing with Harry until after you’ve slept.”
            Harry jolted. He had known Draco was probably going to call him by his first name, but it was still like a flash of heat through his body when Draco actually did it. He eyed Draco sideways, and Draco gave him a small smile and turned away.
            “I want to,” Scorpius began indignantly, but his challenge didn’t last long. He was swaying on his feet, his head nodding down so his chin touched his chest. A second later, he sighed, and sat down next to his bed, his brow falling against his sheets.
            “Yeah, that’s what I thought,” said Draco, and turned his head. That in itself must have been a summons, because a few house-elves appeared and began to bustle around putting away the toys and turning down the bed. One picked up Scorpius and hovered him gently in the direction of the bedroom. Harry thought that elf was Izzy, the one who also tended to bring the pudding at dinner.
            “Come,” said Draco, and locked eyes with Harry.
            Harry opened his mouth to say that he’d thought Scorpius would be part of the tour, and he could wait, and even, wouldn’t it be better to wait until they had Draco’s son between them to break up the awkward intensity that burned there? He thought a child like Scorpius, who demanded constant attention from both his father and everyone else, was one of the best defenses he could have.
            But then Harry curled his lip at himself. He had come here, in part, to find out what the tension meant, not to hide from it. What would he be if he cringed away from it and whined now?
            He nodded. “Let’s go,” he said, and listened only a minute to make sure that Scorpius was snoring from the bathroom before he let Draco hold the door open for him.
*
            The way Harry climbed self-consciously through the splendor of the Manor was enough to confirm for Draco that he’d been right. Whether it was due to the childhood trauma he had confessed to Healer Brandeis or for another reason, Harry was reluctant to ask for things, potentially even to want them. He looked at the carvings on the walls and the gold and marble, the things Draco had thought would most attract his attention, and then pulled his eyes away from them and looked in another direction instead.
            Not that that helped much. The whole Manor was decorated (and over-decorated; Draco could admit that now as he would not have been able to when he was a child) with such magnificence that Harry usually only ended up gazing at some new item.
            “You know,” Draco said casually as he opened the door of the wing where the guest bedrooms and suites tended to lie, “you can have a room decorated any way you want.”
            Harry cast him a puzzled glance. “I assumed that. I mean, you didn’t say I had to choose a certain one.”
            “I mean,” said Draco, and abandoned subtlety, “you can have a big one. An expensive-looking one. A comfortable one. All those things you should have had when you were a child and were denied.”
            Harry stopped dead and turned around to face Draco. His eyes were so serious that Draco didn’t think he was about to get complimented on his choice of house. “Why would you say something like that?” Harry whispered.
            Draco blinked. “If you didn’t want me being insightful about you, you shouldn’t have let me sit in on that discussion you had with Healer Brandeis,” he said simply.
            Harry spent a moment with his eyes closed, his hand rubbing the back of his neck. Then he murmured, “Fine, but—I don’t want to take anything away from you or Scorpius.”
            Draco pretended to look around, at least until Harry opened his eyes, then gasped and said, “You’re right! I never thought about it before, but sacrificing one room in our obscenely large house will deprive us of some air that we might breathe each day.” He folded his arms and nodded seriously. “I’m afraid we’ll have to ask you to bring some bottled air with you the next time you visit.”
            He had his reward in the faint flicker of a smile over Harry’s face, but Harry shook his head and said, “You don’t have to give the room to me as a sort of reward, or bribe. I do want to explore what kind of—connection we might have. I’m not going to run away.”
            “I know that,” said Draco. “And it’s not a bribe. Didn’t you hear us say that our guests often stay here?”
            Harry lowered his head and spent a long second looking at his feet. “I know what Healer Brandeis would say about this,” he whispered. “Probably. She would say that I’m looking for rejection where none exists, and I should think more about myself and work on my perceptions.”
            “Yes, that’s what it is,” Draco agreed quietly.
            Harry looked at him piercingly, then relaxed and shrugged. “You’ll have to forgive me,” he said. “I simply—I’m not used to things like this.”
            “I got that,” Draco said, and managed it dryly enough that Harry laughed. “In the meantime, shall we get on with choosing you a set of rooms? I think you know what you like, when you allow yourself to think about it.”
            Harry nodded and turned to scan the ceiling above him, which had a mosaic of wizards on white horses hunting a black unicorn. “Yes, but not this. No offense, it’s just that it’s a bit—overwhelming.”
            Draco chuckled. “Then let me show you other rooms that are quieter,” he said, and led Harry down the corridor, introducing him to rooms as he went. “That’s Blaise’s room. That’s Pansy’s. You don’t want that one, it’s covered in silver and green. There’s plenty down here that you might want, though…”
*
            The moment Harry saw the room he knew he wanted, he fell in love.
            It was quiet, decorated in subdued shades of blue and green, as though it was resting on the floor of a pond. Harry looked around and blinked when he made out the slightly curved walls that arched overhead, and then he looked down and saw the softly whorled designs of the floor. It looked as though he was walking on seashells.
            “You like it,” Draco said from behind him. His tone was a little irritating, the smug self-confidence instead of simply a question, but Harry chose to ignore his irritation for now.
            “Yes,” he said, and explored further into it. There was a single window, with a single cabinet in front of it, one made of lacquered dark wood with golden handles for the drawers. There were no other pieces of furniture. Harry didn’t mind. That let him fill the room with his own imagined bed and pillows and tables.
            “Then you can take it,” said Draco, and something in the huskiness of his voice made Harry turn around.
            He had to swallow visibly at what he saw in Draco’s eyes. There was something so hot there, so heavy, clinging and pressing close, and only turning sharply away again to study the cabinet let Harry continue to stay in the same room with him. He wanted to run away from what that look promised.
            Not because it was another man, or not really, he told himself, while his heartbeat and his blush both felt as though they were burning him. Not really. It was because he had last seen a look that thick and real in Ginny’s eyes, and look how well that relationship had gone.
            “Harry?” Draco asked quietly. “Do you somehow doubt my hospitality, or my word?”
            “No,” Harry murmured, keeping his head turned away.
            “Well, then,” said Draco, and his voice became a shade cooler. “I think I deserve an explanation.”
            Harry sighed and turned back. If he didn’t want a useless argument—and it would be useless, since it was based on uncertainties of his own that he didn’t really believe in—he had to tell Draco the truth now. “Listen. My marriage collapsed. I haven’t seriously dated anyone since. Three years I’ve been—well, alone. Do you think I can really change that with you? Why would you? It’s kind of an awful record.”
            Draco did more than relax; he almost shone with understanding. He nodded. “Well,” he said. “Why don’t we consider this room as yours for the moment, and we’ll go downstairs and talk about this.”
            Harry hesitated once, then nodded in determination. They had to talk about it sooner or later, and this was the perfect time, without Scorpius to distract him.
            Or hide behind, he admitted, and passed out the door, walking beside Draco, who waited for him, and made no move towards the staircase until Harry accompanied him.
*
Meechypoo: Blaise will have to learn that sometimes, a joke goes too far. (But it is hilarious).
Severus1snape: I plan to! It’s updated every Monday.
delia cerrano: Having a private talk wasn’t in the original plans, but now it will be.
- 34
- 35
- 36
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

Starfall