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lomonaaerenI'm sorry, but I don't have a fic chapter to post today. So this is a list of my one-shots currently in progress, bar any that have to remain anonymous because of the fests they’re for. This is a sort of house-cleaning procedure, so that I can keep track of what I have, and stop getting distracted for a while by shiny new ideas.
“As Beautiful as the Day”: Epilogue-compliant, divorced, straight Harry gets a fleeting glimpse of Draco Malfoy and is suddenly crushing on him. So he tries to deal with what this says about his sexuality and sanity, if anything. This is already longer than it was supposed to be, and less episodic. Since I think the original idea works best in an episodic framework, I’m not quite sure what to do with it.
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Harry walked to the Apparition point outside the Quidditch Pitch, and then turned around as a shadow swept over him. The summons from Kingsley had been urgent, but not overwhelmingly so, and he thought he could spare a moment to see if Malfoy still flew as well as he remembered.
He tilted his head back, and—
There was Malfoy, dancing on his broom opposite from Ginny, his head tilted slightly to the side. Harry could see the sun catch and gleam on his gloves, which looked to be made of some bright leather, probably to make his hands show up more easily to the fans straining and screaming with breathless excitement from below. The sun caught in his hair, too, turning it into a mass of bright shadow.
That was it. That was all. But the vision landed in the middle of Harry’s heart, a flaming arrow, and stuck there burning for a moment before it exploded.
Harry pressed a hand to his chest, wondering for a moment whether one of his enemies had used a curse on him, and he’d been too busy gaping like a fool at Malfoy and his ex-wife to notice him Apparating in. But he knew, he knew, that his Auror-trained sense of hearing would have picked something like that up, and his hands shook, now, and his throat was so dry with his gulping that it hurt. His body shuddered with shock, but it was the shock of realization, not magic.
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“Carborundum”: Draco, Potions master at the Ministry, discovers that someone is stealing ingredients, but they’re taking a weird combination of them that can only be used to brew one particular potion: the Carborundum potion, which the guards at Azkaban use to keep from succumbing to despair when Dementors are around. And his investigation leads straight to Harry Potter, who is the flying coach at Hogwarts. I like the beginning of this; I’m just not sure whether it would be a good long one-shot or better broken into chapters.
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“There are only two clusters of dragonsbane leaves, sir,” Sharon said, with a small swallow.
Draco stepped forwards before he could stop himself, and then kept walking. He trusted Sharon, yes, and normally he wouldn’t double-check her work. But dragonsbane was expensive enough that he would be held accountable to the Ministry if it went missing. He had to look. Dragonsbane leaves made large and fluffy clusters. It was entirely possible that Sharon had overlooked where the first two ended and the third began.
He cast a small ward in the air above the box, to hold in any freshness that might escape, and saw Sharon observe his work with eagerness. He hid the smile, knowing she would probably take it for mockery of her or her concerns. She would make a fine Potions master once she stopped being so nervous.
The box opened, and Draco immediately saw why Sharon had been sure. The box had three separated layers of delicate wood and paper, each one meant to hold a separate clump. The leaves projected from the bottom two layers. The top was empty.
Draco swallowed air and shook his head. He could feel the skin on his forehead tightening. I do not like people stealing from me.
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“Each Man Kills The Thing He Loves”: In which Harry turns out to have a curse on him that slaughters, in indirect and apparently coincidental ways, people he loves. It’s responsible for Sirius and Dumbledore’s deaths, and now it’s killed Ron and Hermione, Ginny and their unborn child. Harry starts frantically working on a solution, and Draco, who is fascinated with the curse, comes to help him, because he wants to study how it operates.
Not working on it right now because, damn, is it depressing.
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By the time Harry arrived, it was already over.
There was the potion on the ground, spilled from the hands of a woman who had fetched it from the apothecary to cure her headache and was now in tears as the Aurors questioned her. There was a broken wand, stepped on by the wizard that had dropped it, and the stones blackened by the curse that had leaped from the broken wand and then reflected off the spilled potion.
And there was the body.
Harry shoved his way through the people around it. He might have cursed some of them. He didn’t know. His eyes were for Ginny, and not for them, and whether they melted away like mist or stood like boulders, they weren’t in his way by the time he could kneel down beside her and touch her shoulder with a shaking hand.
Ginny’s skin was as pale as wax, already. The curse had leaped from the potion and killed her with a strike straight through her pregnant belly. Harry stared at the blood on her chest and the blood on his hands and watched it drip, dark and slow, to the stone.
The blood that would have been their child. He had no idea what it was now, what they would call it, the Healers whose business it was to name such things.
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“Enter These Enchanted Woods”: The summary is probably best: “Harry has so many thoughts that he can’t deal with—immature thoughts, ones that would cost him his job, ones that would cost him his friends, ones that are inappropriate for the hero of the wizarding world. He tucks them away in one corner of his mind, a dark forest. And forests are alive.”
Not being worked on because it is goddamn weird. Stop being so goddamn weird and I may consider it, story.
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It’s cool and dark in here.
That’s the way that Harry thinks of it: not a friendly wood, not an open one, but one filled with lumpy roots, gnarled trunks, underbrush that snarls itself around both, vines that dangle in slime-encrusted bundles despite having died fifteen years ago. Darkness under leaves, breathing sunlight strangled by dark green, which is the real opposite of white. Flowers somewhere out of sight, and flowers need the sun and he might be able to fight his way towards them and thus towards daylight, but what is here doesn’t need the encouragement.
Clearings, sometimes, where the forest breaks into thoughts that need lots of room on their own. Streams, never anything more than a dim rushing noise under cover, and sometimes the sudden presence of willows. Banks, slotting down suddenly to nothing and nowhere. Declivities that rise higher as they lead forwards until they resemble ravines, and shadows like lean legs.
This is the place where Harry Potter puts all the thoughts that don’t need the warmth of the sun to survive, the thoughts that shouldn’t exist in the first place, the thoughts with teeth and claws that would eat his milder ones and then crack the bones. It’s not a nice place, he knows that, but he reasons that everyone needs somewhere like this in their minds. At least, people who are as fucked-up as he is do.
And it’s good practice, in a way. More than once since the war, he’s run into someone who knows Legilimency, and when he raises the thought of this forest, it acts like an Occlumency shield.
He doesn’t think consciously of it, often. It’s not conscious in here.
It’s something worse.
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“Fading in the Sunlight”: Walking behind Harry Potter one day on the way home from the Ministry, Draco sees him simply fade into dust and sunlight. He doesn’t know what the fuck is going on, but he does know that apparently the Potter that’s been laughing and working and joking in the Ministry for the past four years isn’t real.
This story is going to be depressing as hell, because of what’s happened to the real Harry. I don’t wanna.
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He looked ahead, and that was when his life changed.
Potter was still walking with those same precisely measured strides, his head up and his spine almost military, although he hadn’t become an Auror like everyone else thought he would. He threw a shadow along the wall. Draco saw it shrink, and turned his head, wondering if Potter had stooped down to retrieve a fallen coin or something. Probably wouldn’t bend like that for anything less than a Galleon.
It wasn’t Potter bending down. It wasn’t Potter doing anything at all except walking straight on. Draco blinked and raised a hand to rub his eyes, wondering if dust was getting into them. It had been a long day.
But Potter went on walking. Potter was right there in front of Draco—
And then he wasn’t.
Between one step and another, his body became transparent, filled with drifting dust motes. Draco staggered to a stop and stood there, one hand reaching out as if he could find a hold on the wall and keep himself upright that way. His body shuddered. He wanted to say something, to call out, but Potter still gave no sign of noticing his presence, and there was no one else.
Later, Draco would think about that and decide it was typical. He saw something extraordinary, and no one else was around to see it. Just the way that there hadn’t been a lot of people here when he did things during the war that he personally felt redeemed him, like refusing to torture some of the victims that the Dark Lord put in front of him.
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“Familiarity Breeds”: Harry finds a strange snake being kept by a magical creature smuggler and bonds with it as his familiar. The snake is a forcibly transformed Draco Malfoy, who doesn’t remember who he is—and Harry doesn’t know, either. It’s going to be fun when he turns back to being human.
I thought this would be short. It doesn’t want to be. On hold for a while because I don’t have time for another 40,00-word story right now.
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“What are you?” he whispered, staring at the snake. It looked back, offering no help. Harry hesitated once more, then tried to recall the Parseltongue he’d gratefully neglected since Voldemort died. What are you?
The snake jerked back from him and curled into a corner of its cage, huddling like a mammal. Harry’s suspicion that Barney had enchanted this snake from something else came back strongly, but he doubted now it was a sculpture. Harry reached out and put a hand on the cage latch, intending to open it and render the snake harmless with a Stunner. This was something he wanted to have a closer look at before the Department for the Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures got their hands on it. The rumors that Barney was enhancing some of his catches to become weapons directed at Aurors might be true.
Before he could get the door fully open, the snake said, I don’t know what I am. I think I had a name once. I don’t know what it was. Who are you?
Harry blinked. Then he said, My name is Harry Potter. He had no idea how that translated into Parseltongue, but decided from the way the snake continued to stare that it didn’t have a salutary effect. I want to help you. Do you know why your magic reacts to mine when I touch you?
No. The snake slid towards him, neck stretched out and trembling. But I’m so tired of this cage. The man took me and forgot about me. I want to see what will happen if you take me out and give me something new to look at.
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“Generosity Ill-Dressed”: Harry finds a wounded Draco and takes him in to help him recover. Fordiagonfloo’s request. I want to work on this one, but there’s been a lot of pressure from other directions lately.
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Harry’s flat is a small, cheap place not far from Knockturn Alley. It’s not the place he intends to live in forever; among other things, he would rather not look at the cracks in the kitchen walls forever. But it’s a decent enough home to live in while he tries to sort himself out and think about what he wants to do after the nightmare of the war.
Other people are moving on. Starting families. Starting Auror training. Working on jokes. Begging Harry to join them.
But Harry isn’t ready yet. He’s still talking with Mind-Healers and exploring the artifacts at Grimmauld Place and listening to stories in the Godric’s Hollow pub that the people telling them don’t realize are about him. When he’s ready, he’ll pull the shattered pieces of his life together, but he doesn’t see a reason to rush. He’s only nineteen, after all.
He has only one bedroom, a small drawing room, an even smaller kitchen, and a bathroom. He puts Malfoy on the bed, casts Cleaning Charms on all the sheets and the blanket that held him, tucks the blanket into a cupboard, and then goes and fetches the small stock of Healing Potions he keeps for himself.
It’s harder to make someone limp and senseless swallow the pain potion than Harry had anticipated, especially since Malfoy makes nonsense noises and bats at him when Harry moves his arms around. Harry dodges and goes back at it, massaging Malfoy’s throat until he swallows. He defeated the Dark Lord. No bruised and unconscious Slytherin is going to defeat him.
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“Grow to Be a Man”: Summary again: Alone after the war, Draco struggles to grow up, to become the man he has to be in order to survive as a Malfoy and as a human being. Who knew that, out of everything, would suffice to make Harry Potter pay attention?
This is one that I wouldn’t mind working on again, but it’s been a long time since I have, and I’d have to get back into the groove again.
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“What are you doing, Malfoy?”
Draco marked his place in the book in front of him with one finger and then looked up, using a hand to shade his eyes so that he could look at Potter. He didn’t really need to do that, of course, but it might be a gesture that would persuade Potter his light shone so brilliantly that he would calm down a little and leave Draco alone.
That was all Draco wanted from his former enemies, really. Just leave him alone, and he would gladly leave them to their little fantasies of power and every first-year going into Gryffindor after the war. He wanted his life back.
“What do you mean?” Draco asked, as Potter stood there with his hands on his hips and glared at him, not even bothering to specify a crime.
“I mean,” Potter said, treating the verb as if it had offended him, “that you’re taking all the Transfiguration books that other people need to study.”
Draco shrugged and faced his page of notes again, finishing the quote from the book that he’d been copying down. “I can’t help it if I’m here when Granger’s not,” he said, and the slight start he saw from the corner of his eye confirmed that, yes, Potter was here to champion Granger’s cause, not the cause of random “other people.” “She can come in and take the books out if it means that much to her. Then I couldn’t use them. That’s the right and proper place of things, isn’t it? The Slytherin shoved down to the bottom, the Gryffindor promoted to the top?”
“Nobody’s saying that!”
Draco sighed and marked his place with his quill this time, so that he could lean back and look at Potter in a more leisurely fashion. “You’re not that stupid, if you survived the Dark Lord,” he said. “Listen to the tones in the voices, Potter, not just the words they use.”
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“Hearts and Lions”: Harry throws a Snitch at Draco during his latest Quidditch game. It must be a plot! And Draco, as someone smart, will figure it out!
This needs to be silly, and it was getting too serious. We’ll see if I can get it straightened out again.
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It all started with a Quidditch game.
Draco knew he should never have gone. For one thing, the game was between two newly-organized Quidditch teams, junior teams really, formed to deal with “all the talent coming out of Hogwarts.” Draco knew there wasn’t that much of it, certainly not fourteen players. Besides, if the teams were meant for that talent they would have included him.
For another thing, Harry Potter was the Seeker for the Avalon Augureys, and that was just something that never should have happened, and not someone Draco wanted to watch. He wasn’t a Quidditch player—to the junior teams’ loss—and so he no longer needed to jealously watch Potter’s moves in the frantic hope that he could learn enough to win the Cup for Slytherin.
“Hogwarts was a long time ago,” he told Pansy loftily when she invited him to the game that the Augureys were playing against the Salisbury Sparrows.
“That means you should come, since it was so long ago that you obviously no longer have a grudge against Potter,” Pansy retorted.
Draco needed less clever friends.
So they were sitting in the stands at the game, which were brand new stands, in the middle of an enormous field that someone had bought from the Muggle government. Rumors circulated about who the someone was, but Draco was never undignified enough to repeat gossip. Besides, the people who mattered knew it was Potter, and that he was trying desperately to show that he could matter to the sport of Quidditch by buying equipment and buildings that other people would value him for.
“Why would he need to do that?” Blaise had asked when Draco had pointed that out. “He already matters because of his talent. Maybe he just wanted to buy something that would be a gift.”
Draco also needed friends who knew when to keep their mouths shut.
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“Houses of Autumn”: My God, this thing has been sitting on the hard drive for almost two years. Harry gets chosen to participate in a particular pure-blood ritual on Mabon, and so does Draco. They have to pass through the Houses of Autumn.
I wanted to finish it in time for the autumnal equinox one year, didn’t, and got sulky and put it away.
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“This is for you.”
Harry started as the envelope landed on his desk, and drew his eyes away from the list of statistics about how many Muggleborn candidates had been turned down for jobs in the Ministry last year to eye Hermione. She had her eyes on the stack of parchments in her arms, flipping through reports and memos and files with an abstracted air.
Not abstracted enough, not for someone who knew her well. Harry leaned back and snorted. “Good job, Hermione. But if you really wanted me to think it was something casual instead of something important to you, then you would have put it on the desk when I wasn’t in the room, instead of giving me time to observe you.” He glanced at the envelope again, and shook his head. The seal on it was a device he didn’t recognize, the outline of a flowing gold flame in bright wax, but that didn’t matter. Only pure-bloods and their organizations used seals on a regular basis, and where a member of the Office of Muggleborn Reparations was concerned, a pure-blood organization always meant trouble.
“Just open it,” Hermione snapped, with the tone in her voice that meant he had embarrassed her and she wanted revenge. “You don’t have to—you don’t have to be such a prick about it, Harry.”
Harry would have winced at that and apologized if the last letter she’d given him specially hadn’t come from a “nice young woman,” in Hermione’s description, who wanted to meet with him on business. The “nice young woman” had turned out to be a pure-blood witch who alternately harangued him on how he should pay more attention to the Potter side of his heritage and told him it was his duty to marry a nice witch so that he could have children and replenish the magical talent of the wizarding world. Harry had left as soon as he decently could. Hermione thought he needed to get out and meet people, but not that kind of person.
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“Makes Me Stronger”: Pansy uses a spell that reveals Harry’s abusive childhood, plus a lot of his other secrets, in front of the entire Great Hall at Hogwarts. Harry refuses to react the way anyone expects him to, and unwittingly impresses Draco.
This can’t decide if it wants chapters or to be a one-shot, and it has to decide before I write it again.
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The Dark Lord dissolved—into the next image. This was Potter, older now but still younger than Draco had ever seen him, pounding desperately towards the shelter of what looked like a Muggle house. Surely only a Muggle house could be that ugly, Draco thought, curling his lip.
A Muggle boy with flopping blond hair and other boys chased him, presumably whooping as they went, from the way their mouths opened and closed. They got close to Potter and seized him, sweeping him around on the ground and kicking him. Potter curled up with his arms around his face and his knees tucked into his belly.
It was the posture that Draco had seen some of the people he was torturing adopt. He shivered, and would have looked away if he could.
But that image went away, too, and what replaced it was a dark space that made Draco frown and look for cracks of daylight. Had Potter once hidden in a cave while fighting the Dark Lord?
Then a door moved, and a tall, thin, ugly woman who still looked like the blond boy who had chased Potter leaned in and screamed. Potter rolled away from a tiny bed, and Draco could make out that it was a small space under what was most likely a stairwell. Then Potter stepped out of it, and the door shut, and everyone could see that it was a cupboard.
Several people laughed; others gasped. Draco did manage to take his eyes away then, in order to look at Potter, and found him standing still with his arms folded, his gaze fixed on those images as though he had never seen them before.
Well, he hasn’t, not from this angle.
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“Partners Unpartnered”: In which I tried to envision a way of Harry and Draco getting together as Auror partners other than being assigned to be by the Ministry, and ended up shelving it because I didn’t like the way I was treating Ron. I’d probably have to delete 1000 words or so to get it going in the proper direction again.
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“Down!”
Ron’s warning came too late. Harry saw the witch turn to fire the curse over her shoulder, but he didn’t have the time to duck or raise a Shield Charm with her this close—or any space, really, with the crush of Auror bodies around him, struggling in an all-out battle with the Dark wizards who had attacked the Ministry. He braced himself for it, trying to arrange his body so that at least Ron was shielded.
Someone cast from the side. The witch’s wand soared out of her hand as she was speaking the last syllable of the incantation, and although Harry felt the temptation to freeze with shock flooding him, his training took over. He made sure that she was Stunned in the next moment and caught up in a rope net against the ceiling with the rest of the sudden prisoners they had taken.
Harry didn’t have time to thank the person, but he did jerk his head to the side, so he could look, a moment before the next masked would-be Death Eater charged at him.
Malfoy.
Malfoy raised an eyebrow and then turned back to his own battle, three wizards pressing in around him and his trembling partner Nott, without saying anything. Harry shook the temptation to do so when Malfoy hadn’t out of his head and then began to duel the man in front of him. Ron was on his feet behind him, one hand in the middle of his back, and Harry at least knew he had the support he had come to count on most since the war.
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“Signum Fidei”: Wherein Harry casts a spell on himself so that he’ll always be in love with Ginny and has a ring on his hand as a sign of his love, even though Ginny refuses to marry him. Draco has to step in because, frankly, the sight of Potter trailing around after Weasley with his tongue hanging out is an offense to all right-thinking people. The title is Latin for “Sign of Faith.”
I was having trouble thinking of enough silly scenes.
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“I thought you might say that,” Potter whispered, earnestly, the way he did everything, and let go of one of Weasley’s hands. She took a deep breath and smiled at him. Draco shook his head. Don’t look like that. You ought to know he hasn’t finished being stupid yet.
Sure enough, Potter brought a ring out from beneath his robes. It was large and made of stone and so obviously bought for its big, shiny ruby that Draco stifled a laugh. Weasley sat up when she saw it and stared at Potter, her hands writhing around each other in a most unattractive fashion.
“Harry,” she whispered. “No, I don’t want to marry you, either.”
“I just thought you might think that I’m not devoted enough to you, after what I said about not taking you along on the hunt,” Potter whispered. “So I wanted to prove to you that you could trust me, that I’ll never leave you again.” He raised his wand and tapped the ruby in the ring, which began to glow like a hot coal. Draco narrowed his eyes when he felt the magic drawing up in the night. Potter, you stupid—
“No, Harry!” Weasley squeaked, but Potter’s words overrode hers.
“Signum fidei!”
The garden flared as though someone had tossed a firework to the ground and it had gone off in the snapdragons. Draco covered his eyes with one hand, but squinted between his fingers to see how the ring fastened itself to Potter’s hand, the stone band flowing and reshaping as though melted by intense heat. And then there it sat, fixed immovably on his finger, while Potter gazed at Weasley with the cow-eyed devotion that was the other mark of that spell.
You’re supposed to cast love spells on other people, Draco thought, his heart pounding crazily as he lowered his hand. Not yourself.
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“Six-Point Time”: Snape/Harry/Draco one-shot forcheapriboflavin, about gift-giving. Stalled because I missed up the POV’s.
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“You can’t possibly think he would want something like that.”
Harry held firm in front of Draco’s pointed stare. “Why not? You can’t think that his life has been so great that he wouldn’t need comfort from somewhere.”
“He gets it from Potions.” Draco paced back and forth across their bedroom, jumping a little as he barked his shins on the bed. He always did that, as if after two years he still wasn’t used to the size. “He gets it from Firewhisky, sometimes. Us, most of the time.” He glanced over his shoulder. “He’ll think it’s a silly fantasy.”
“He might if he was talking about someone else,” Harry said. “But you know that he doesn’t apply the same standards to himself that he does to other people. Look, what’s the worst he could do? I mean,” he amended when he saw the wide-eyed way Draco stared at him, “the worst he would do to us.”
Draco paused to consider that, then nodded. “I suppose I can live with whip marks.”
Harry rolled his eyes. “Help me with the charms, won’t you?”
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“The Long Defeat”: Long one-shot forhelenadax, which uses her prompt of Harry being made a slave by the goblins for breaking into Gringotts during the war. The goblins threaten to destroy the wizarding world’s economy otherwise. The Malfoys take over and claim Harry as a slave instead, because of life-debts. 36,000 words long and no end in sight. I promise, helenadax, I will get back to this.
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“Mr. Malfoy.” The goblin holding the scroll moved so that the sound of crumpling parchment drifted around the room. “You have something to say?”
“Yes, I do.” Lucius’s voice was clear, and he stood up as though he were still the all-powerful Malfoy lord and governor of Hogwarts that he had been when Harry was in his second year. Harry just watched. He was almost going to enjoy the moment when Lucius found out that the goblins weren’t obliged to yield Harry to him. “I wish to make an offer on a certain slave, one that I will take into my home and punish as I see fit.”
There was a grumble around the cavern. Sarcastic laughter, protests because that might mean the goblins wouldn’t feel that their debt was fulfilled and take the bank away, cries of joy—it could have been all of those and none, and Harry wouldn’t have cared. He went back to looking at the stone wall.
Lucius was going to fail. That was all there was to it. And a good thing, too, because while the goblins would put Harry to back-breaking labor and probably starve him, they couldn’t use the Cruciatus on him. The Malfoys would.
Harry was sorry for what the Sectumsempra curse had turned out to be, the mess he’d made of Draco’s chest. But he wouldn’t forget, he wouldn’t ever forget, that Draco had been trying to use an Unforgivable Curse on him when it happened.
Never again. The goblins’ slavery was the last time Harry ever intended to submit to treatment of any kind.
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“Winter Is the Color”: A kind of surreal H/D fic where I can’t even remember what I was trying to do with it. WTF is this thing.
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Harry gets up each morning, eats a hearty breakfast, and goes to work. He enjoys his work, as a liaison between the Aurors, the Department of Mysteries, and the Department for the Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures, most of the time. He got himself involved in so many ongoing investigations simply by being in the wrong place at the wrong time during his first months at the Ministry that they plopped him here. So in the morning he adjudicates a dispute over whether the Unspeakables or the Aurors get possession of a Dark artifact, in the afternoon he listens to Hermione complaining about how many centaurs the Unspeakables have duped lately into giving up their hair to them and promises to speak with the Head of the Department, and in the evening he goes home and shares tales by Floo with George or Andromeda, Ginny or Molly.
His life is light, pleasant, crowded with incidents small and large. It’s the way he likes it. It’s the life that he once dreamed of—well, more like a life that he once dreamed of when on the run from Voldemort, a life that would be exciting and interesting but more normal than what he spent his first years at Hogwarts doing.
But because Harry is Harry and his life is nothing without some strangeness spilling over into it, there are also evenings when he comes home and catches a glimpse of something weirder, wilder, more sublime.
The memories glow in his mind when their cause isn’t present, etched there in all the colors of ice.
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“As Beautiful as the Day”: Epilogue-compliant, divorced, straight Harry gets a fleeting glimpse of Draco Malfoy and is suddenly crushing on him. So he tries to deal with what this says about his sexuality and sanity, if anything. This is already longer than it was supposed to be, and less episodic. Since I think the original idea works best in an episodic framework, I’m not quite sure what to do with it.
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Harry walked to the Apparition point outside the Quidditch Pitch, and then turned around as a shadow swept over him. The summons from Kingsley had been urgent, but not overwhelmingly so, and he thought he could spare a moment to see if Malfoy still flew as well as he remembered.
He tilted his head back, and—
There was Malfoy, dancing on his broom opposite from Ginny, his head tilted slightly to the side. Harry could see the sun catch and gleam on his gloves, which looked to be made of some bright leather, probably to make his hands show up more easily to the fans straining and screaming with breathless excitement from below. The sun caught in his hair, too, turning it into a mass of bright shadow.
That was it. That was all. But the vision landed in the middle of Harry’s heart, a flaming arrow, and stuck there burning for a moment before it exploded.
Harry pressed a hand to his chest, wondering for a moment whether one of his enemies had used a curse on him, and he’d been too busy gaping like a fool at Malfoy and his ex-wife to notice him Apparating in. But he knew, he knew, that his Auror-trained sense of hearing would have picked something like that up, and his hands shook, now, and his throat was so dry with his gulping that it hurt. His body shuddered with shock, but it was the shock of realization, not magic.
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“Carborundum”: Draco, Potions master at the Ministry, discovers that someone is stealing ingredients, but they’re taking a weird combination of them that can only be used to brew one particular potion: the Carborundum potion, which the guards at Azkaban use to keep from succumbing to despair when Dementors are around. And his investigation leads straight to Harry Potter, who is the flying coach at Hogwarts. I like the beginning of this; I’m just not sure whether it would be a good long one-shot or better broken into chapters.
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“There are only two clusters of dragonsbane leaves, sir,” Sharon said, with a small swallow.
Draco stepped forwards before he could stop himself, and then kept walking. He trusted Sharon, yes, and normally he wouldn’t double-check her work. But dragonsbane was expensive enough that he would be held accountable to the Ministry if it went missing. He had to look. Dragonsbane leaves made large and fluffy clusters. It was entirely possible that Sharon had overlooked where the first two ended and the third began.
He cast a small ward in the air above the box, to hold in any freshness that might escape, and saw Sharon observe his work with eagerness. He hid the smile, knowing she would probably take it for mockery of her or her concerns. She would make a fine Potions master once she stopped being so nervous.
The box opened, and Draco immediately saw why Sharon had been sure. The box had three separated layers of delicate wood and paper, each one meant to hold a separate clump. The leaves projected from the bottom two layers. The top was empty.
Draco swallowed air and shook his head. He could feel the skin on his forehead tightening. I do not like people stealing from me.
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“Each Man Kills The Thing He Loves”: In which Harry turns out to have a curse on him that slaughters, in indirect and apparently coincidental ways, people he loves. It’s responsible for Sirius and Dumbledore’s deaths, and now it’s killed Ron and Hermione, Ginny and their unborn child. Harry starts frantically working on a solution, and Draco, who is fascinated with the curse, comes to help him, because he wants to study how it operates.
Not working on it right now because, damn, is it depressing.
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By the time Harry arrived, it was already over.
There was the potion on the ground, spilled from the hands of a woman who had fetched it from the apothecary to cure her headache and was now in tears as the Aurors questioned her. There was a broken wand, stepped on by the wizard that had dropped it, and the stones blackened by the curse that had leaped from the broken wand and then reflected off the spilled potion.
And there was the body.
Harry shoved his way through the people around it. He might have cursed some of them. He didn’t know. His eyes were for Ginny, and not for them, and whether they melted away like mist or stood like boulders, they weren’t in his way by the time he could kneel down beside her and touch her shoulder with a shaking hand.
Ginny’s skin was as pale as wax, already. The curse had leaped from the potion and killed her with a strike straight through her pregnant belly. Harry stared at the blood on her chest and the blood on his hands and watched it drip, dark and slow, to the stone.
The blood that would have been their child. He had no idea what it was now, what they would call it, the Healers whose business it was to name such things.
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“Enter These Enchanted Woods”: The summary is probably best: “Harry has so many thoughts that he can’t deal with—immature thoughts, ones that would cost him his job, ones that would cost him his friends, ones that are inappropriate for the hero of the wizarding world. He tucks them away in one corner of his mind, a dark forest. And forests are alive.”
Not being worked on because it is goddamn weird. Stop being so goddamn weird and I may consider it, story.
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It’s cool and dark in here.
That’s the way that Harry thinks of it: not a friendly wood, not an open one, but one filled with lumpy roots, gnarled trunks, underbrush that snarls itself around both, vines that dangle in slime-encrusted bundles despite having died fifteen years ago. Darkness under leaves, breathing sunlight strangled by dark green, which is the real opposite of white. Flowers somewhere out of sight, and flowers need the sun and he might be able to fight his way towards them and thus towards daylight, but what is here doesn’t need the encouragement.
Clearings, sometimes, where the forest breaks into thoughts that need lots of room on their own. Streams, never anything more than a dim rushing noise under cover, and sometimes the sudden presence of willows. Banks, slotting down suddenly to nothing and nowhere. Declivities that rise higher as they lead forwards until they resemble ravines, and shadows like lean legs.
This is the place where Harry Potter puts all the thoughts that don’t need the warmth of the sun to survive, the thoughts that shouldn’t exist in the first place, the thoughts with teeth and claws that would eat his milder ones and then crack the bones. It’s not a nice place, he knows that, but he reasons that everyone needs somewhere like this in their minds. At least, people who are as fucked-up as he is do.
And it’s good practice, in a way. More than once since the war, he’s run into someone who knows Legilimency, and when he raises the thought of this forest, it acts like an Occlumency shield.
He doesn’t think consciously of it, often. It’s not conscious in here.
It’s something worse.
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“Fading in the Sunlight”: Walking behind Harry Potter one day on the way home from the Ministry, Draco sees him simply fade into dust and sunlight. He doesn’t know what the fuck is going on, but he does know that apparently the Potter that’s been laughing and working and joking in the Ministry for the past four years isn’t real.
This story is going to be depressing as hell, because of what’s happened to the real Harry. I don’t wanna.
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He looked ahead, and that was when his life changed.
Potter was still walking with those same precisely measured strides, his head up and his spine almost military, although he hadn’t become an Auror like everyone else thought he would. He threw a shadow along the wall. Draco saw it shrink, and turned his head, wondering if Potter had stooped down to retrieve a fallen coin or something. Probably wouldn’t bend like that for anything less than a Galleon.
It wasn’t Potter bending down. It wasn’t Potter doing anything at all except walking straight on. Draco blinked and raised a hand to rub his eyes, wondering if dust was getting into them. It had been a long day.
But Potter went on walking. Potter was right there in front of Draco—
And then he wasn’t.
Between one step and another, his body became transparent, filled with drifting dust motes. Draco staggered to a stop and stood there, one hand reaching out as if he could find a hold on the wall and keep himself upright that way. His body shuddered. He wanted to say something, to call out, but Potter still gave no sign of noticing his presence, and there was no one else.
Later, Draco would think about that and decide it was typical. He saw something extraordinary, and no one else was around to see it. Just the way that there hadn’t been a lot of people here when he did things during the war that he personally felt redeemed him, like refusing to torture some of the victims that the Dark Lord put in front of him.
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“Familiarity Breeds”: Harry finds a strange snake being kept by a magical creature smuggler and bonds with it as his familiar. The snake is a forcibly transformed Draco Malfoy, who doesn’t remember who he is—and Harry doesn’t know, either. It’s going to be fun when he turns back to being human.
I thought this would be short. It doesn’t want to be. On hold for a while because I don’t have time for another 40,00-word story right now.
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“What are you?” he whispered, staring at the snake. It looked back, offering no help. Harry hesitated once more, then tried to recall the Parseltongue he’d gratefully neglected since Voldemort died. What are you?
The snake jerked back from him and curled into a corner of its cage, huddling like a mammal. Harry’s suspicion that Barney had enchanted this snake from something else came back strongly, but he doubted now it was a sculpture. Harry reached out and put a hand on the cage latch, intending to open it and render the snake harmless with a Stunner. This was something he wanted to have a closer look at before the Department for the Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures got their hands on it. The rumors that Barney was enhancing some of his catches to become weapons directed at Aurors might be true.
Before he could get the door fully open, the snake said, I don’t know what I am. I think I had a name once. I don’t know what it was. Who are you?
Harry blinked. Then he said, My name is Harry Potter. He had no idea how that translated into Parseltongue, but decided from the way the snake continued to stare that it didn’t have a salutary effect. I want to help you. Do you know why your magic reacts to mine when I touch you?
No. The snake slid towards him, neck stretched out and trembling. But I’m so tired of this cage. The man took me and forgot about me. I want to see what will happen if you take me out and give me something new to look at.
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“Generosity Ill-Dressed”: Harry finds a wounded Draco and takes him in to help him recover. For
diagonfloo’s request. I want to work on this one, but there’s been a lot of pressure from other directions lately.------------------------------------------
Harry’s flat is a small, cheap place not far from Knockturn Alley. It’s not the place he intends to live in forever; among other things, he would rather not look at the cracks in the kitchen walls forever. But it’s a decent enough home to live in while he tries to sort himself out and think about what he wants to do after the nightmare of the war.
Other people are moving on. Starting families. Starting Auror training. Working on jokes. Begging Harry to join them.
But Harry isn’t ready yet. He’s still talking with Mind-Healers and exploring the artifacts at Grimmauld Place and listening to stories in the Godric’s Hollow pub that the people telling them don’t realize are about him. When he’s ready, he’ll pull the shattered pieces of his life together, but he doesn’t see a reason to rush. He’s only nineteen, after all.
He has only one bedroom, a small drawing room, an even smaller kitchen, and a bathroom. He puts Malfoy on the bed, casts Cleaning Charms on all the sheets and the blanket that held him, tucks the blanket into a cupboard, and then goes and fetches the small stock of Healing Potions he keeps for himself.
It’s harder to make someone limp and senseless swallow the pain potion than Harry had anticipated, especially since Malfoy makes nonsense noises and bats at him when Harry moves his arms around. Harry dodges and goes back at it, massaging Malfoy’s throat until he swallows. He defeated the Dark Lord. No bruised and unconscious Slytherin is going to defeat him.
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“Grow to Be a Man”: Summary again: Alone after the war, Draco struggles to grow up, to become the man he has to be in order to survive as a Malfoy and as a human being. Who knew that, out of everything, would suffice to make Harry Potter pay attention?
This is one that I wouldn’t mind working on again, but it’s been a long time since I have, and I’d have to get back into the groove again.
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“What are you doing, Malfoy?”
Draco marked his place in the book in front of him with one finger and then looked up, using a hand to shade his eyes so that he could look at Potter. He didn’t really need to do that, of course, but it might be a gesture that would persuade Potter his light shone so brilliantly that he would calm down a little and leave Draco alone.
That was all Draco wanted from his former enemies, really. Just leave him alone, and he would gladly leave them to their little fantasies of power and every first-year going into Gryffindor after the war. He wanted his life back.
“What do you mean?” Draco asked, as Potter stood there with his hands on his hips and glared at him, not even bothering to specify a crime.
“I mean,” Potter said, treating the verb as if it had offended him, “that you’re taking all the Transfiguration books that other people need to study.”
Draco shrugged and faced his page of notes again, finishing the quote from the book that he’d been copying down. “I can’t help it if I’m here when Granger’s not,” he said, and the slight start he saw from the corner of his eye confirmed that, yes, Potter was here to champion Granger’s cause, not the cause of random “other people.” “She can come in and take the books out if it means that much to her. Then I couldn’t use them. That’s the right and proper place of things, isn’t it? The Slytherin shoved down to the bottom, the Gryffindor promoted to the top?”
“Nobody’s saying that!”
Draco sighed and marked his place with his quill this time, so that he could lean back and look at Potter in a more leisurely fashion. “You’re not that stupid, if you survived the Dark Lord,” he said. “Listen to the tones in the voices, Potter, not just the words they use.”
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“Hearts and Lions”: Harry throws a Snitch at Draco during his latest Quidditch game. It must be a plot! And Draco, as someone smart, will figure it out!
This needs to be silly, and it was getting too serious. We’ll see if I can get it straightened out again.
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It all started with a Quidditch game.
Draco knew he should never have gone. For one thing, the game was between two newly-organized Quidditch teams, junior teams really, formed to deal with “all the talent coming out of Hogwarts.” Draco knew there wasn’t that much of it, certainly not fourteen players. Besides, if the teams were meant for that talent they would have included him.
For another thing, Harry Potter was the Seeker for the Avalon Augureys, and that was just something that never should have happened, and not someone Draco wanted to watch. He wasn’t a Quidditch player—to the junior teams’ loss—and so he no longer needed to jealously watch Potter’s moves in the frantic hope that he could learn enough to win the Cup for Slytherin.
“Hogwarts was a long time ago,” he told Pansy loftily when she invited him to the game that the Augureys were playing against the Salisbury Sparrows.
“That means you should come, since it was so long ago that you obviously no longer have a grudge against Potter,” Pansy retorted.
Draco needed less clever friends.
So they were sitting in the stands at the game, which were brand new stands, in the middle of an enormous field that someone had bought from the Muggle government. Rumors circulated about who the someone was, but Draco was never undignified enough to repeat gossip. Besides, the people who mattered knew it was Potter, and that he was trying desperately to show that he could matter to the sport of Quidditch by buying equipment and buildings that other people would value him for.
“Why would he need to do that?” Blaise had asked when Draco had pointed that out. “He already matters because of his talent. Maybe he just wanted to buy something that would be a gift.”
Draco also needed friends who knew when to keep their mouths shut.
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“Houses of Autumn”: My God, this thing has been sitting on the hard drive for almost two years. Harry gets chosen to participate in a particular pure-blood ritual on Mabon, and so does Draco. They have to pass through the Houses of Autumn.
I wanted to finish it in time for the autumnal equinox one year, didn’t, and got sulky and put it away.
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“This is for you.”
Harry started as the envelope landed on his desk, and drew his eyes away from the list of statistics about how many Muggleborn candidates had been turned down for jobs in the Ministry last year to eye Hermione. She had her eyes on the stack of parchments in her arms, flipping through reports and memos and files with an abstracted air.
Not abstracted enough, not for someone who knew her well. Harry leaned back and snorted. “Good job, Hermione. But if you really wanted me to think it was something casual instead of something important to you, then you would have put it on the desk when I wasn’t in the room, instead of giving me time to observe you.” He glanced at the envelope again, and shook his head. The seal on it was a device he didn’t recognize, the outline of a flowing gold flame in bright wax, but that didn’t matter. Only pure-bloods and their organizations used seals on a regular basis, and where a member of the Office of Muggleborn Reparations was concerned, a pure-blood organization always meant trouble.
“Just open it,” Hermione snapped, with the tone in her voice that meant he had embarrassed her and she wanted revenge. “You don’t have to—you don’t have to be such a prick about it, Harry.”
Harry would have winced at that and apologized if the last letter she’d given him specially hadn’t come from a “nice young woman,” in Hermione’s description, who wanted to meet with him on business. The “nice young woman” had turned out to be a pure-blood witch who alternately harangued him on how he should pay more attention to the Potter side of his heritage and told him it was his duty to marry a nice witch so that he could have children and replenish the magical talent of the wizarding world. Harry had left as soon as he decently could. Hermione thought he needed to get out and meet people, but not that kind of person.
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“Makes Me Stronger”: Pansy uses a spell that reveals Harry’s abusive childhood, plus a lot of his other secrets, in front of the entire Great Hall at Hogwarts. Harry refuses to react the way anyone expects him to, and unwittingly impresses Draco.
This can’t decide if it wants chapters or to be a one-shot, and it has to decide before I write it again.
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The Dark Lord dissolved—into the next image. This was Potter, older now but still younger than Draco had ever seen him, pounding desperately towards the shelter of what looked like a Muggle house. Surely only a Muggle house could be that ugly, Draco thought, curling his lip.
A Muggle boy with flopping blond hair and other boys chased him, presumably whooping as they went, from the way their mouths opened and closed. They got close to Potter and seized him, sweeping him around on the ground and kicking him. Potter curled up with his arms around his face and his knees tucked into his belly.
It was the posture that Draco had seen some of the people he was torturing adopt. He shivered, and would have looked away if he could.
But that image went away, too, and what replaced it was a dark space that made Draco frown and look for cracks of daylight. Had Potter once hidden in a cave while fighting the Dark Lord?
Then a door moved, and a tall, thin, ugly woman who still looked like the blond boy who had chased Potter leaned in and screamed. Potter rolled away from a tiny bed, and Draco could make out that it was a small space under what was most likely a stairwell. Then Potter stepped out of it, and the door shut, and everyone could see that it was a cupboard.
Several people laughed; others gasped. Draco did manage to take his eyes away then, in order to look at Potter, and found him standing still with his arms folded, his gaze fixed on those images as though he had never seen them before.
Well, he hasn’t, not from this angle.
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“Partners Unpartnered”: In which I tried to envision a way of Harry and Draco getting together as Auror partners other than being assigned to be by the Ministry, and ended up shelving it because I didn’t like the way I was treating Ron. I’d probably have to delete 1000 words or so to get it going in the proper direction again.
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“Down!”
Ron’s warning came too late. Harry saw the witch turn to fire the curse over her shoulder, but he didn’t have the time to duck or raise a Shield Charm with her this close—or any space, really, with the crush of Auror bodies around him, struggling in an all-out battle with the Dark wizards who had attacked the Ministry. He braced himself for it, trying to arrange his body so that at least Ron was shielded.
Someone cast from the side. The witch’s wand soared out of her hand as she was speaking the last syllable of the incantation, and although Harry felt the temptation to freeze with shock flooding him, his training took over. He made sure that she was Stunned in the next moment and caught up in a rope net against the ceiling with the rest of the sudden prisoners they had taken.
Harry didn’t have time to thank the person, but he did jerk his head to the side, so he could look, a moment before the next masked would-be Death Eater charged at him.
Malfoy.
Malfoy raised an eyebrow and then turned back to his own battle, three wizards pressing in around him and his trembling partner Nott, without saying anything. Harry shook the temptation to do so when Malfoy hadn’t out of his head and then began to duel the man in front of him. Ron was on his feet behind him, one hand in the middle of his back, and Harry at least knew he had the support he had come to count on most since the war.
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“Signum Fidei”: Wherein Harry casts a spell on himself so that he’ll always be in love with Ginny and has a ring on his hand as a sign of his love, even though Ginny refuses to marry him. Draco has to step in because, frankly, the sight of Potter trailing around after Weasley with his tongue hanging out is an offense to all right-thinking people. The title is Latin for “Sign of Faith.”
I was having trouble thinking of enough silly scenes.
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“I thought you might say that,” Potter whispered, earnestly, the way he did everything, and let go of one of Weasley’s hands. She took a deep breath and smiled at him. Draco shook his head. Don’t look like that. You ought to know he hasn’t finished being stupid yet.
Sure enough, Potter brought a ring out from beneath his robes. It was large and made of stone and so obviously bought for its big, shiny ruby that Draco stifled a laugh. Weasley sat up when she saw it and stared at Potter, her hands writhing around each other in a most unattractive fashion.
“Harry,” she whispered. “No, I don’t want to marry you, either.”
“I just thought you might think that I’m not devoted enough to you, after what I said about not taking you along on the hunt,” Potter whispered. “So I wanted to prove to you that you could trust me, that I’ll never leave you again.” He raised his wand and tapped the ruby in the ring, which began to glow like a hot coal. Draco narrowed his eyes when he felt the magic drawing up in the night. Potter, you stupid—
“No, Harry!” Weasley squeaked, but Potter’s words overrode hers.
“Signum fidei!”
The garden flared as though someone had tossed a firework to the ground and it had gone off in the snapdragons. Draco covered his eyes with one hand, but squinted between his fingers to see how the ring fastened itself to Potter’s hand, the stone band flowing and reshaping as though melted by intense heat. And then there it sat, fixed immovably on his finger, while Potter gazed at Weasley with the cow-eyed devotion that was the other mark of that spell.
You’re supposed to cast love spells on other people, Draco thought, his heart pounding crazily as he lowered his hand. Not yourself.
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“Six-Point Time”: Snape/Harry/Draco one-shot for
cheapriboflavin, about gift-giving. Stalled because I missed up the POV’s.---------------------------------------
“You can’t possibly think he would want something like that.”
Harry held firm in front of Draco’s pointed stare. “Why not? You can’t think that his life has been so great that he wouldn’t need comfort from somewhere.”
“He gets it from Potions.” Draco paced back and forth across their bedroom, jumping a little as he barked his shins on the bed. He always did that, as if after two years he still wasn’t used to the size. “He gets it from Firewhisky, sometimes. Us, most of the time.” He glanced over his shoulder. “He’ll think it’s a silly fantasy.”
“He might if he was talking about someone else,” Harry said. “But you know that he doesn’t apply the same standards to himself that he does to other people. Look, what’s the worst he could do? I mean,” he amended when he saw the wide-eyed way Draco stared at him, “the worst he would do to us.”
Draco paused to consider that, then nodded. “I suppose I can live with whip marks.”
Harry rolled his eyes. “Help me with the charms, won’t you?”
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“The Long Defeat”: Long one-shot for
helenadax, which uses her prompt of Harry being made a slave by the goblins for breaking into Gringotts during the war. The goblins threaten to destroy the wizarding world’s economy otherwise. The Malfoys take over and claim Harry as a slave instead, because of life-debts. 36,000 words long and no end in sight. I promise, helenadax, I will get back to this.----------------------------------------
“Mr. Malfoy.” The goblin holding the scroll moved so that the sound of crumpling parchment drifted around the room. “You have something to say?”
“Yes, I do.” Lucius’s voice was clear, and he stood up as though he were still the all-powerful Malfoy lord and governor of Hogwarts that he had been when Harry was in his second year. Harry just watched. He was almost going to enjoy the moment when Lucius found out that the goblins weren’t obliged to yield Harry to him. “I wish to make an offer on a certain slave, one that I will take into my home and punish as I see fit.”
There was a grumble around the cavern. Sarcastic laughter, protests because that might mean the goblins wouldn’t feel that their debt was fulfilled and take the bank away, cries of joy—it could have been all of those and none, and Harry wouldn’t have cared. He went back to looking at the stone wall.
Lucius was going to fail. That was all there was to it. And a good thing, too, because while the goblins would put Harry to back-breaking labor and probably starve him, they couldn’t use the Cruciatus on him. The Malfoys would.
Harry was sorry for what the Sectumsempra curse had turned out to be, the mess he’d made of Draco’s chest. But he wouldn’t forget, he wouldn’t ever forget, that Draco had been trying to use an Unforgivable Curse on him when it happened.
Never again. The goblins’ slavery was the last time Harry ever intended to submit to treatment of any kind.
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“Winter Is the Color”: A kind of surreal H/D fic where I can’t even remember what I was trying to do with it. WTF is this thing.
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Harry gets up each morning, eats a hearty breakfast, and goes to work. He enjoys his work, as a liaison between the Aurors, the Department of Mysteries, and the Department for the Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures, most of the time. He got himself involved in so many ongoing investigations simply by being in the wrong place at the wrong time during his first months at the Ministry that they plopped him here. So in the morning he adjudicates a dispute over whether the Unspeakables or the Aurors get possession of a Dark artifact, in the afternoon he listens to Hermione complaining about how many centaurs the Unspeakables have duped lately into giving up their hair to them and promises to speak with the Head of the Department, and in the evening he goes home and shares tales by Floo with George or Andromeda, Ginny or Molly.
His life is light, pleasant, crowded with incidents small and large. It’s the way he likes it. It’s the life that he once dreamed of—well, more like a life that he once dreamed of when on the run from Voldemort, a life that would be exciting and interesting but more normal than what he spent his first years at Hogwarts doing.
But because Harry is Harry and his life is nothing without some strangeness spilling over into it, there are also evenings when he comes home and catches a glimpse of something weirder, wilder, more sublime.
The memories glow in his mind when their cause isn’t present, etched there in all the colors of ice.
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