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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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Researches in Libraries
            “You know that you’re always welcome, mate.” Neville’s voice was low and slow, and he stood there with his arms folded behind his desk. Harry looked at him, wondering what was wrong, and Neville continued, “But you’re doing this for Malfoy? Because he’s been doing weird things around you?”
            “He’s been claiming these pure-blood customs give him the right to give me gifts and treat me to lunch and come to lunch at my house and confuse the hell out of me,” Harry corrected him. “He said that I should make the proper response to the last gift he gave me, and to do that, I need to look up pure-blood customs. This is the best place.”
            “What was the last gift?” Neville looked as if he was about to charge out and hunt Malfoy down at the point of a wand.
            Harry lifted a hand. Maybe Neville thought Malfoy had disturbed George too much. He was George’s friend, too, and Harry knew George often firecalled Neville to listen to the latest reports of pranks discovered in Hogwarts. “A mirror. He enchanted it so that I would know when I was exhausted or sick. Magically exhausted, too. He has a bee up his arse about that. He came to lunch at my house right after I’d been taking care of Ron because he got hit by that Disease Curse.”
            Neville slowly relaxed, muscle by muscle, in his shoulders. He had grown taller and stronger even than Ron, and Harry sometimes forgot what an intimidating sight he made. It probably helped him to subdue students who thought the youngest Hogwarts Headmaster in centuries was easy to get around, if they didn’t already respect him because Neville had put more labor into rebuilding and improving the school in the last ten years than everyone else put together. “A mirror is all right.”
            “All right?” Harry touched the pocket where he’d put the mirror. He was carrying it around with him, although he’d had to cast some protective enchantments on his clothes so it wouldn’t break if it jounced against something. “I think it’s pretty bloody impressive that he put so much work into it, actually.”
            “I mean, it’s not like it was jewelry,” said Neville. “That would be bad.”
            “Why?” Harry threw up his hands when Neville hesitated to tell him. “Are you saying that these customs really exist? I thought Malfoy was making them up as an excuse to spend time with me.”
            “He might have made up some of them,” said Neville, and sent Harry the look Harry would have bet he used on children caught with banned Wheezes. “But a gift that you use your own magic on is serious. A mirror is a good gift, a thoughtful one, but near the bottom.”
            “Of what?”
            “The hierarchy of gifts that you give someone you want to be intimate with,” Neville said. “Jewelry is near the top. It indicates that he would be contemplating—well, marriage or something of the kind. There are gifts that ask for protection over children, or for a truce, or an alliance, or deeper friendship. Maybe you were never the sort of friends who fought beside each other in battle. The gifts that you give can ask for that.”
            Harry shook his head, dazed. He had thought a present was just a present. Maybe Malfoy was giving it to be polite.
            But then again, Malfoy had said that he had seized on the chance to get close to one person who treated him decently. He had been telling the truth all along, but also teasing Harry, kind of enjoying the fact that he didn’t know anything about pure-blood customs and would accept anything Malfoy offered just because it was a gift.
            Thank fuck it wasn’t a ring, or anything. That was because, if Harry found out afterwards that he had accepted a weird marriage proposal or something, in Malfoy’s eyes and the eyes of some other people, just by accepting a gift, Scorpius would have been an orphan. And Harry would have hated that.
            “Fine,” said Harry. “What does a mirror ask for?”
            “A mirror that you used your own magic for?” Neville shrugged helplessly. “Honestly, I don’t know. It wasn’t something I ever expected to use. Gran made sure that I knew those customs more because she thought it was the sort of thing I should know.” Neville looked out the window for a second, which showed a steady fall of rain. “I know that Gran wants me to be proud of being a pure-blood and all, but I am going to choose my own spouse and my own friends.”
            Harry put a hand on Neville’s arm in silence. He knew that Neville had quarreled with his grandmother a few months ago and things had been bad between him and Augusta since, but Harry hadn’t known what about. This might be it.
            Neville shook himself and came back to the present. “But this is a combination of a mirror, which doesn’t mean much, traditionally, and his own magic, which is more special. You probably do need to go and look it up in a book to find out.”
            “Great,” Harry said, drawing the word out to make Neville grin. “Fine. Thanks for letting me use the library. I’ll see you later.” Then he paused dramatically and pointed his finger at Neville. “And part of you choosing your own friends is that they get to choose you, too. I hereby invite you to come over to my house tomorrow and watch one of those concerts you like on the telly. You’d better not be late.”
            Neville’s smile was a remarkable thing. “I won’t be late, if you tell me the time.”
            “Nine-o’clock,” Harry said, and waved his hand like Malfoy would, and left Neville laughing.
*
            Harry rolled his eyes and laid the book aside. I think a lot of these pure-bloods just made up these customs so they could laugh silently over Muggleborns taking them seriously.
            Why would a certain kind of dinner that lasted two hours count as a marriage proposal but one that lasted three hours was a declaration of hostilities between two families? Why would it matter if you were served chicken or fish? Why was a bracelet a more serious gift than a ring? The books Harry found explained the customs and what the gifts meant, but not why anyone would be mental enough to follow them, or how they had come to be in the first place.
            I want to go along with this, Harry thought, as he took up yet another tome. I do want to be Malfoy’s friend. But fuck if I’m going to be his husband or his patsy or obey these customs if they actually go against something I believe in.
            He was no mental pure-blood. If Malfoy tried to say that he should be, Harry was going to wave his Muggle relatives around like a shield. Malfoy had once put a lot of emphasis on blood, even if he didn’t now. Harry would point out that he wasn’t “pure” day and night if it would get him out of a silly situation.
            The next book was at least about the “hierarchy” of gifts that Neville had mentioned, and had a whole chart of crossing possibilities, talking about what a gift meant when it was made of certain materials. Harry sat up more alertly and turned the pages. Here, he thought, he would find out what a mirror made of glass but also enchanted with the creator’s own magic meant.
            It still took him a long time to find it. At first, all the charts seemed to assume that the mirrors were made of glass, but then Harry caught a reference to silver and realized he was assuming that pure-bloods were sane. And more experience with the books ought to have taught him they weren’t. He sighed and went back.
            So. Glass mirrors where someone had enchanted them with their own magic but they had bought the glass. And no frame. That was what he was looking for.
            It still took him a long time to squeeze his way through the charts, but he finally found a little mention of it off to the side in one of the charts. A glass mirror without a frame was listed, and there were options for the magic, and the kinds of magic. Harry flipped pages, frowning and grumbling at the small type.
            The first line of description didn’t really reassure him.
            An exclusive friendship.
            Harry scowled. If that meant he wasn’t supposed to be friends with anyone else, then no, thank you.
            But he went ahead and read the description before he dismissed it. So far, several of the things Malfoy had done had turned out to be more reasonable and less capricious than Harry had thought they were.
            An exclusive friendship declares that the giver of the gift desires a friendship which will include certain aspects not covered by either the gifter’s or the giftee’s current friendships. If one has only casual friends, this is an invitation to a deep friendship. If one’s friends all live mostly on the other side of the world, this will be an invitation from someone who lives close. The enchantments placed on the mirror given as a gift will give a clue as to the nature of the relationship and closeness desired.
            Harry rolled his eyes. Even he, with his almost-zero knowledge of pure-blood culture, didn’t have to concentrate long to figure that out. Malfoy thought his friends didn’t care enough about his health, so he had given Harry a mirror that would.
            Not that that told Harry whether this was a friendship he really wanted, or what Malfoy wanted in return. Did he want to be the caretaker, or did he want Harry also to interest himself in Malfoy’s health? And what kind of basis was health for a friendship, anyway? Harry would have been bored as hell if his friendships had only concerned nightmares and trauma from the war. They might look that way to Malfoy because of what he had seen, but he was on the outside. He didn’t know the truth.
            And what kind of friendship is it to scold each other when we’re sick and say “Fine, thanks,” when we’re feeling well?
            Scowling a little, Harry began to flip through the pages of the book looking for the gift that he was supposed to give in return. He wondered if there was anything that would say, “I’d like to be your friend, but I don’t want to just talk about being sick all the time.”
            And then it turned out there was.
            Harry leaned back from the book and laughed long enough to make Madam Pince come around the corner and frown at him. Fucking pure-bloods.
*
            “Potter, you really shouldn’t have.”
            Harry paused. He had come to Malfoy Manor’s gates after owling to make sure that it was okay and Malfoy would be at home and willing to receive him. He’d thought that was the polite thing to do.
            And now Malfoy was standing at the gates, his lips twisting as he stared at the red box in Harry’s arms. He had one hand on the bars of the gates, but he hadn’t opened them yet. He gave a swift glance at Harry’s face, then turned away.
            Obviously, Harry had done something wrong. Maybe it was the size of the box. Maybe it was the day he had shown up; maybe the moon was in Scorpio or something. Maybe Malfoy had meant something else with that gift after all and Harry had been wrong that he wanted a present in return.
            Either way, any way, Harry was suddenly violently disgusted. Fucking pure-bloods.
            “Fine,” he said shortly, since Malfoy was walking away from him up the path that led to the Manor and showed no sign of opening the gates to let Harry in. “Then I’ll leave it here, and you can take it or burn it or fuck yourself with it. I don’t care.” He dropped the red-wrapped box on the ground and turned to Apparate.
            “Wait!”
            That was Malfoy, hurrying back towards him and wildly waving his hands. At least he looked like a human being instead of a polished statue now. Harry folded his arms and stared at him.
            “Saying that you shouldn’t have is a polite convention.” Malfoy’s face was pink. “It doesn’t mean I was rejecting you!”
            “And turning your back on me and walking away behind your locked gates, after you looked at my gift like it was a flobberworm?”
            Malfoy’s face turned from pink to red. “The gates are open,” he muttered. “I thought you’d open them and follow me.”
            Harry flung one hand across his brow. “Without an invitation? All those books said that was horribly rude, Malfoy. And you seem to care what books say.”
            Malfoy did some more scowling. Then he lowered his gaze to the box. “Did you discover what I was trying to say with the mirror?”
            “Something about an exclusive friendship and health.” Harry leaned one shoulder hard against the gates. They gave a little—they weren’t locked—but then straightened against his pressure. Yes, they were still blocked with magic. Harry rolled his eyes, and he didn’t do it subtly. “But I’m not interested in talking nothing but magical exhaustion and sicknesses with you. It sounds boring.”
            Malfoy winced a little, openly stricken. Harry watched him critically. So he was stricken. That didn’t mean he was the right choice for a friend. He might be stricken by the way that Harry was disparaging his precious pure-blood customs, instead of anything that related to Harry himself.
            “No,” Malfoy whispered. “It was a silver mirror. Not glass, Potter.”
            “You said it was glass!” Harry yelled. He could feel his temper waking up, something it didn’t do much anymore. But for Merlin’s sake, he was sick of these games. He had admired Malfoy’s courage in coming up to him and trying to claim a friendship, but he didn’t admire the way he hid behind customs and teased Harry to find out about them and then was horrified when he didn’t get it exactly right. “I don’t know what you want, Malfoy! Why can’t you say it like anyone else?”
            “Because it would sound silly.”
            That pulled Harry up a bit. Malfoy’s face did look as red as if he had taken a steam bath. But Harry couldn’t recall what he had read about silver mirrors, and he wasn’t about to go back to Hogwarts and look it up to make Malfoy comfortable.
            “Fine,” said Harry. “I promise I won’t laugh. But tell me what you want, because I looked up what a mirror made of glass you bought but didn’t enchant and used your own magic on would mean, and it wasn’t what you meant, and I’m sorry, but talking about glass was deliberately misleading me.”
            “Not deliberately.” Malfoy sighed and faced him, and at least Harry trusted the weary look in his eyes. “I want a friendship with you where you do things with me you don’t do with anyone else.”
            “That’s impossible,” said Harry automatically. “I visit with all of my friends and talk to them and connect with their kids when they have them. I can’t give you anything that I haven’t already given to someone else.”
            “But you haven’t started over with anyone else, have you?” Malfoy took a step up to the gates as though he was going to pass right through them without bothering to open them. “You haven’t reconciled with them and looked up pure-blood customs for them? You haven’t learned a new way of life with them?”
            Harry cocked his head, intrigued. “So you’re, what, asking for my pure-blood custom friendship-virginity?”
            Malfoy laughed, and then looked surprised at himself for laughing. You were probably only supposed to do it for two seconds and then at a certain pitch, Harry thought.
            “Yes,” said Malfoy. “I think—this is the best way that I know of reaching out to someone new, Potter. The customs guide certain things and mean certain things are true. Otherwise, I would be far too terrified of making a mistake to reach out to you at all.”
            Harry looked at him thoughtfully. “Fine, but I don’t think it’ll work anyway, if you get angry at me for not knowing things you already know.”
            “Get to know me as an adult,” said Malfoy. “The customs are—you can learn them, I’d like to teach them to you, but they’re a side-note. This is a chance to get to know someone who you knew as a child and didn’t really understand. For both of us,” he added, when Harry opened his mouth to contest who didn’t know who here.
            Harry held back the comment. He had known that Malfoy had grown up and paid his debt with a year in Azkaban. He had thought Malfoy was afraid of a lot of things when he was a kid, and Malfoy had just admitted that was still true as an adult.
            But he understood what Malfoy was saying. And honestly, it didn’t sound bad. It sounded interesting, getting to spend time with Scorpius and someone who was so different from any of Harry’s other friends that it was hard to predict how he’d react. More friends wasn’t a bad thing if he didn’t make Harry abandon any of the friends he already had.
            Harry wanted one thing to be clear, though.
            “As long as you don’t tease me with a custom again,” he said. “No more saying that mirrors are glass if they’re silver. No more being disappointed because I don’t understand something the first time. No more thinking I’ll know what to do when I’ve never heard of this custom in my life.” He paused, considering Malfoy. “No more acting like I should be pure-blood already, when I’m not.”
            Malfoy nodded once, firmly. “Then do you want to come in? I suppose I owe you something in return for not making the purpose of my gift clear.”
            “I suppose you do,” said Harry, and ambled through the gates. He refused to think of what Ron and Hermione and George would say when they found out that he’d visited Malfoy. They were a huge part of his life, but not the whole thing, and they weren’t here right now. Harry was the one on the spot, who had to make the decisions.
            And a little willingness on either side isn’t a bad thing.
*
delia cerrano: Draco, as you see, wanted to be mysterious to save himself some embarrassment. But now that he knows that doesn’t work, he’s more willing to take risks.
SP777: No, I haven’t seen that one.
Harry is going to have some conflicts with his friends, but the kind of mild stubbornness that he showed Draco also applies in his relationships with his friends. They just don’t do something that irritates him as often.
BAFan: Thanks! While people might not bother Ron and Hermione as much as Harry, I don’t think they would entirely escape the public eye.
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There's a Pure-Blood Custom For That