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There's a Pure-Blood Custom For That	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 41050 -:- Recommendations : 2 -:- Currently Reading : 5
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. I am making no money from this story.

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Obtained With Difficulty
            “And so the wheel doesn’t explode when we use it,” said George, nodding wisely as he bent over their latest prank. He touched one finger to the wheel in the center, then jerked it back. Harry reckoned it was still hot from the speed of its spin.
            Harry ladled some crushed carrots into his mouth and grinned at George. “You can learn. Sometimes I don’t despair.”
            George grinned back at him and leaned down around the prank, a miniature model of a cannon, again. “You still haven’t told me why you knew to move out of the way and didn’t get thrown against the wall like I did,” he muttered. He reached up to touch the bandage on the back of his skull.
            Harry promptly swatted his hand away, using a spell. He didn’t want to move from the table or the delicious stew from the Leaky Cauldron that he and George got every Friday. “When I see sparks leaping out of something, I move. Surprising, isn’t it?”
            “I think the war gave you a survival instinct some of the rest of us don’t have,” George muttered.
            His face clouded a second later. It always did, because speaking of the war would bring Fred back to him. Harry checked a sigh and instead asked, “So, you think you know how to fix it so sparks won’t come out anymore?”
            “Of course not,” George said. “We should leave that in. Early warning system, see? Maybe next time, you’ll be the one bumping up against the wall.”
            Harry opened his mouth to retort when someone knocked on the shop door. He stood up, exchanging frowns with George. They always closed the shop up during their lunch hour, and their wards kept away particularly rude customers. It was probably an emergency, then.
            Harry already had his wand in hand as he rounded the corner of the counter, but a second later, he stopped. Malfoy stood outside the door. Alone this time, it looked like. Well, aside from the enormous gift with white wrapping and a silver bow in his hand. He was frowning at the door as though it and not his gift was the weird thing in this picture.
            Well, no, the strangest thing, if Harry thought about it, was that the wards had let Malfoy this close in the first place. He slid his wand into his holster and moved closer, studying Malfoy’s face. The wards would have picked up on hostile intent.
            But they would allow someone who had visited his home through them, he remembered belatedly. They’d had a bit of a problem with Neville and Luna when they had the wards set to only allow blood family through, so they’d altered them. Harry hadn’t thought of that particular fact when he invited Malfoy and Scorpius over to his house.
            He still wasn’t sorry he’d done it, though. No matter what kind of awkward conversation he would have to have with George later.
            He opened the door. Malfoy’s face relaxed when he saw Harry, and he held out the gift with a bow that Harry found irritatingly appealing. “I brought your gift,” he said. “My apologies for it taking more than a week. I had to search hard to find what I was looking for.”
            “Thank you,” said Harry, taking the box and staring at it curiously. When he hadn’t heard from Malfoy, he had pretty much decided he wouldn’t hear, and the box was almost as big as his head. When he shook it, it rattled.
            “Harry. What’s this, then?”
            George’s voice, near his right shoulder, was calm, but no one who had spent time around George in the past few years would have been reassured by hearing him speak like that. Harry just glanced at him, though, as though this was all perfectly normal. It would have to be, if he wanted to continue to see Scorpius, and if accepting the gift obligated him to Malfoy in some way. “I had Malfoy and his son over for lunch last week. He said he would bring me a gift, and now he has.”
            “If it’s presents you want, Mum would be delighted to give you some,” said George, and tried to trade glares with Malfoy. As seemed to be his nature, Malfoy refused to cooperate, instead looking at Harry as though he was the only person in the shop.
            “Don’t shake it too hard,” said Malfoy. “You’ll shatter it, and that would be unfortunate.”
            Harry looked up with a smile. “Is it a mirror?”
            Malfoy’s mouth fell open ungracefully. Harry chuckled and opened the box. “Just the way you worded it,” he explained.
            Inside was a small mirror, an oval of glass without a handle or a frame. Harry wasn’t sure how to pick it up, so he just scooped it up in one hand and looked at Malfoy. The mirror had begun to glow a soft, steady yellow when he touched it, but he didn’t feel any warmth or sparks from it.
            “It’s a mirror designed to tell you when you’ve gone too far,” said Malfoy, his tongue back under control again. “Magical exhaustion will make it glow green. Illness, red. If you’re simply physically exhausted, blue.”
            Harry nodded. “And yellow?”
            “It’s getting used to you.” The yellow glow vanished as Malfoy spoke the next words, and he nodded. “The enchantments I laid on it made it responsive only to the touch of one person. Otherwise, the balance of the magic gets thrown off, and it responds to too many people.”
            Harry smiled, pleased. A lot of the time, it was true, he did push himself too hard, and Malfoy wouldn’t always be around to tell him when he did, and sometimes his friends would tell him, but other times, they were too involved in the horrors of the war. “Thanks, Malfoy. This is pretty useful.”
            Malfoy squinted at Harry. Something was wrong or off with his reaction, Harry supposed. He didn’t know the pure-blood custom that he’d violated or not paid enough attention to this time, though, so he did the best he could to make up for it, and reached out and squeezed Malfoy’s hand. “You made this yourself?”
            “The magic. I bought the glass, of course.”
            Harry held back the remark he wanted to make about how apparently knowing how to Transfigure or make glass was beneath a Malfoy’s dignity, and said, “It must have taken you a long time. Thanks again.” He held the glass up to his face, but it didn’t glow at all. Good. There had been a bunch of sneezing kids in the shop yesterday, and he was afraid that he might have got a cold.
            “You’re welcome.” Malfoy still squinted at him, and didn’t say anything, and didn’t retreat, standing there with his arms folded, and George was humming away at Harry’s shoulder like one of those artificial beehives they’d invented last year, so Harry thought it was a good idea to just ask outright.
            “Why did you decide to give this to me in particular? And lay down all the spells and do all the work and stuff?”
            “Will you leave the shop if you’re going to talk to someone who nearly got my brother killed?” George asked loudly.
            “Yes,” said Harry, and dropped the mirror back into its box and stepped out the front door, leaving George to gape behind him. A second later, the door slammed. Harry didn’t care. He would do what he could to help George when he was suffering from grief for Fred, but there were other times that George pushed too far and needed to be reminded that the whole world didn’t revolve around him.
            Malfoy turned to walk down Diagon Alley beside him, one eye on him and one on the rest of the street. “Seriously, it’s a great gift,” said Harry. “And I don’t think I’d have the magical expertise to do it. But why?”
            Malfoy frowned at nothing, his fingers tapping on his leg. Finally, he said, “Because you were the first person who was nice to me in a normal way in a long time. To me. I know you like Scorpius, but I can tell the difference between people who only serve me because they think my son is adorable and people who help me because I’m a human being.”
            “You’re talking about defending you from Natalia? Because I haven’t really been nice to you other than that.”
            “You still had us over for lunch when you could have told us to fuck off,” Malfoy whispered. “You care for your friends, but you don’t let them control your life. As much as I had assumed,” he added, giving Harry a haughty look.
            Harry nodded back with a knowing grin. “You still think they control my life to a ridiculous extent.”
            “I’ve been reading newspaper stories on you in the intervals when I wasn’t caring for Scorpius or working on the mirror.” Malfoy turned to face him. “Why are your friends the ones who are still suffering from nightmares and illnesses and trouble from the war without being under the care of Mind-Healers or Healers? Don’t tell me they can’t afford the care.”
            “So, is there a pure-blood custom about rewarding bluntness with bluntness?” Harry carefully put the box with the mirror down next to him and looked Malfoy in the eye. “That seems to be what you’re doing.”
            Malfoy flushed, a long tide of crimson down from his neck to his shoulders, and looked away. “I still want to know the answer. And it seems to me that your friends are the only ones who never take advantage of Healers.”
            “Oh, they have,” said Harry. “But it’s hard to get excellent care from the Healers when you have mediwitches and mediwizards swooning, because they’re so excited to meet a war hero, or refusing to treat you because of the negative publicity St. Mungo’s might suffer if they do something wrong, or spending all their time officiously bustling around and trying to get you to donate to them.”
            A faint frown line appeared between Malfoy’s eyebrows. “You have the same problem I do, in reverse?”
            Harry nodded. “George tried to talk to a few people, friends of his, contacts he’d made through ordering ingredients for pranks, in the year after Fred’s death. A lot of them refused to talk to him about it at all. They only had business relationships. Or they blamed him for surviving when their family members had died. Or they had Death Eater relatives and they blamed him for them going to prison.”
            “They should blame you, if they were going to blame anyone.”
            “But George was the one they could get at,” said Harry. “The one who was in contact with them. And by then, the papers were already reporting that I didn’t give a fuck about the people who were trying to condemn me for not being a good little martyr and not sacrificing my life to save theirs. George was hurt, though. He was angry. He got in some fights with people and arrested several times. It was a lot more satisfying for people who wanted to see a reaction.”
            Harry looked away. It was still hard to remember that year after the war, the hardest one. George was being arrested constantly, there was the haunted look in Molly’s eyes, he and Ginny were going through everything that had happened between them, he was trying to explain being a Horcrux to Ron and Hermione when they were suffering from their own nightmares and problems, he had people yelling at him from left and right trying to make him fix things, he was testifying for some people like Malfoy, the Wizengamot and the Ministry wanted him to be their mascot, and he had ex-Death Eaters trying to see if they could assassinate him or hurt one of his friends.
            “You did suffer, after all.”
            “I never denied I did. It just wasn’t as much as some of my friends did.”
            “How can that be?” Malfoy shifted his weight, and brought Harry’s eyes back to him. “You were the one who mostly fought the Dark Lord.”
            Harry snorted. “I wasn’t on that quest alone, you know. Ron and Hermione were with me every step of the way.” So, all right, there was the Forest of Dean, but Ron had already acknowledged and apologized for that numerous times, the way that George had for getting arrested, and Harry didn’t want to stir up old ghosts. “Snape got me information that was vital to the war and my survival. Dumbledore manipulated a lot from behind the scenes, but he was also the one who left instructions with Snape for what I had to do in the end. I won the war with the help of a lot of people. Including you, and your connection with the Elder Wand.”
            “Let’s say that I believe you. You and your friends should be equally affected.”
            “What, do you have money on one of those stupid bets about when I’m going to go mental and start killing people or something?” Harry asked, and shook his head. “I can be affected as much as them without being affected in the same way, you know. And so can the rest of the wizarding world. The war was this huge psychic wound. The first war was probably the same way, but I didn’t grow up with it and see the scars that one left. I think a lot of people are like me. They were luckier or they were more resilient or whatever, and they’re living life and caring for their families who weren’t as lucky.”
            Malfoy’s face wrinkled into a new kind of frown. “I suppose that you could describe me that way. I have been raising Scorpius on my own, without much advice from my parents.”
            “Well, they’re abroad. What advice could they give you? Unless they send you owl post.”
            “Post by mynah and parrot, more often,” said Malfoy absently, and then shook his head. “But I don’t think we’re the same. When I saw the chance for something new, someone who might treat me and Scorpius the way I wanted, I took it. You would have ignored the chance.”
            Harry shrugged. “I try not to cause my friends pain. I think this is going to. That doesn’t mean that I’ll let them make me stop talking to you or Scorpius. But it does mean that I wasn’t going to seek you out.”
            More deep-eyed squinting at him. Harry endured that patiently. He thought he understood Malfoy now. He was lonely. He had his son, but his wife had divorced him years ago, maybe the year Scorpius was born, and he wanted friends. It was natural that if he really did think Harry had been treating him normally, he would reach out. He probably wouldn’t if he’d had had as many friends left as Harry had.
            “You should know,” said Malfoy abruptly, “that Scorpius wanted very much to come with me today. But I wanted to see what you would do if you saw me alone, without him. If you would really be as cordial.”
            “Does blunt and uncomfortable count as cordial?”
            “You know what I mean.”
            “Yeah. But I don’t know if you see it the same way. You’re a bit of a mystery, Malfoy, pure-blood customs and all that.”
            “The pure-blood customs aren’t followed very often anymore,” Malfoy said in a low voice, his eyes going deeper than ever. At least he was no longer squinting, which Harry was glad about. He was afraid that Malfoy’s eyes might stick that way. “But they’re real, and I’m curious to see if you will follow the next one.”
            “What next one?” Harry held up his hands. “I’m not looking things up so that I can give you the right gift now, or what the fuck ever.”
            “Even if it’s important to me?”
            The words were quiet, but the emotion behind them wasn’t, and Harry would have to be shallower than Hermione had once accused Ron of being to miss it. He sighed. “All right, yes, fine. But it’s not like I have books of pure-blood customs sitting around my house. Where am I supposed to look?”
            “I understand that you have standing access to Hogwarts’s library,” said Malfoy, looking satisfied, “based on your friendship with the Headmaster. I would begin there.” He nodded to Harry. “I will tell Scorpius you wished to see him. Thank you for accepting the gift.”
            He Apparated before Harry could ask whether not accepting was even an option. Harry picked up the box with the mirror again and looked at it thoughtfully.
            Malfoy was a little weird, sure. Him and his customs and his wild ability to take a chance on something so small that Harry would have thought he’d give it up long before now. But Harry also thought that he could honor that daring and that fierce devotion to raising his son and trying to find some space for himself at the same time. He didn’t want to discourage it. Malfoy could be a good person, and there were too few good people in the world. Harry firmly believed that was a large part of the reason the war had happened.
            And he could be a good role model for Scorpius, besides.
            So Harry went to owl Neville and ask when he could come by Hogwarts and look at the library books for pure-blood customs. As a favor to a friend.
*
HEARTSTAR: Thank you! I think both Harry and Draco agree with you. ;)
SP777: No, I actually don’t watch much TV at all. My main form of entertainment is reading.
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There's a Pure-Blood Custom For That