Were the Soil Not So Unforgiving My Love

I was unerringly unsatisfied by this chapter, so I've changed some stuff around, even if you've already read this chapter, you're going to want to read over it again, some plot points are different. It should be less grammatically displeasing, and on the whole, a better chapter to live in.
Thanks,
Lunatic Hero

Were the Soil Not So Unforgiving My Love


By: Lunatic with a Hero Complex


Chapter 4: Do Not Pass Go or We The People


Draco hated guilt. Despised it. Absolutely loathed it. However, all of this strong and severe dislike did nothing to prevent him from feeling it.


And he was most definitely feeling it.


He was ashamed to admit it, but he did not want to go back to Potter’s house. He’d set the man back, and he had no one to blame for it, but himself.


So he was sitting at a table, in a café, drinking coffee. Not because he was avoiding Harry, no of course not. He just really wanted coffee.


Sure.


He was so absorbed in convincing himself he really loved coffee that he didn’t notice immediately when his personal space was once again invaded by Granger.


This distraction alone was the reason he was unprepared when her voice cracked down the middle of his cerebrum.


“What did you do?”


Draco looked up in alarm, almost choking on his sip of coffee, “What do you mean, Granger?” He tried desperately to look blameless.


Apparently, he failed.


“Harry’s even farther gone than before!”


“I did say it would not be a speedy recovery.”


“Yes, but I didn’t expect him to go backwards!”


He grasped onto the first thing he could think of, “That’s why you came to me, Granger, you didn’t know what to do.”


Shame flitted across her face and inner Draco rejoiced.


“I just get so worried about him. This man is my best friend.”


He proceeded with caution, “Just because Potter and I aren’t exactly old chums doesn’t mean that I’m going to make him suffer, I’m not the villain in this story. I am doing what I can to help him, but as I told you, it will be a slow process.”


Granger seemed to deflate a little, “I understand Draco, I’m sorry for accusing you like that, have a good day.”


She began to turn around and leave, and Draco just felt so inescapably…sullied, shoving his guilt off on her, that he called out, “Wait, Granger, I suppose it can’t hurt if you have a few questions.”


She beamed at him and flounced around and took the seat across from him. She seemed comfortable in the space, and he found that he was not surprised. The shop was frequented throughout the school year by desperate scholars, striving to absorb more information in 12 hours than was humanly possible and needing caffeinated beverages to make that sponge-like behavior possible.


She seemed to assume the momentary guise of a ministry interrogator and appeared to be unfolding a mental list of questions.


“Do you think he’s getting better, and how can you tell?”


His reply.


“Steadily lengthening spans of coherence, an understanding of his situation, and a solid effort to understand his illness and get rid of it.”


Question.


“Do you know what’s causing it?”


His reply.


“ We think that he’s suffering adverse effects from repeated exposure to Avada Kedavra.”


Contemplative silence.


“That does make sense, I suppose. Its not exactly a spell that’s meant to make living easier, is it?”


A mutter.


“You’d be surprised.”


A look of hunger on her face, knowledge madness, an epidemic. Oh who was he kidding…Granger was a modern freak.


“I’m going to look into that.”


A snort, quickly muffled.


“I doubt there’s anything you can find that Potter hasn’t probably already pillaged for information.”


Granger nodded thoughtfully, not so much agreeing as considering, finally she smiled gently at him, and Draco could almost see what made her pleasant to be around. She nodded and rose, “Thank you, Draco. Have a good day.”


Interrogation Tape Ends.


Draco blinked at her dazedly for a moment, “You too, Granger.”


She left, and he returned to his coffee.


The coffee was slightly cold, and this annoyed him. What annoyed him more however, was that now, he was going to have to go to Potter’s house, just to feel respectable again.


Damn it.


*********

Malfoys did not need a college education. That was his father’s creed and motto, or at least one of them. Another one was that Malfoys did not work.


Unfortunately for Draco, despite the fact that his scholarships prevented the need for tuition or rent, it was still necessary for Draco to break the latter creed, in order for him to actually eat food while breaking the former.


It was one thing that he and his father were definitely agreed on. It was…unpleasant…to labor for 8 galleons an hour. He did not appreciate the satisfaction of earning your own money. He did not respect himself more for having put in an honest day’s work. And he most definitely did not feel unified with the rest of the world by being an honest member of the work force.


What he did feel was sick of having sore feet from moving constantly. He felt nauseated by the constant lingering aroma of pasta that seemed to occupy his skin. And he felt underappreciated by the dozens of people that came and went, leaving shoddy tips after he was perfectly and painfully courteous.


Simply stated, Draco Malfoy hated being a waiter.



Right now, he was simultaneously considering the best approach for when he returned to Potter’s house after work, remembering that the couple at table 12 needed a refill for a pumpkin juice and a coke, andddd…wondering what the hell Ronald Weasley was doing staring daggers at him from across the room.


Wait a minute.


It must be Ask Draco Day, he’d forgotten to check his calendar.


Pushing the Weasel temporarily out of his mind, he swiftly refilled the beverages, took the order for the couple at table 8, stopped a major waiter pile up in between tables 10 and 13, bullied one of the younger waiters into temporarily handling his tables, and grabbed a pack of fags. Turning, he gestured for Weasley to meet him out back.


When he got out there, it was a few minutes before the red headed wonder turned the corner. Draco patiently took a drag and waited for the lecture he was sure was about to come.


He was not disappointed.


“Listen, Malfoy, I know that you’re all ‘reformed’ now, and you may be helping Harry, but I just want you to remember, I’m keeping an eye on you.”


Draco took another lengthy drag and dropped the cigarette, twisting it out with his boot, “Weasley, what exactly do you imagine I am going to do to Potter that is so dastardly without having the entirety of the wizarding world, including your formidable self, collapse onto me in vengeance?”


When he felt that his speech had set in sufficiently, he slowly raised his right eyebrow for maximum sarcastic effect.


Weasley was quiet, his mouth slightly ajar. Draco leaned forward and placed a hand on the man’s shoulder, “Weasley, I work as a waiter, I attend a university on scholarship, its been 2 years, I’ve grown up, and so have you. I’m not going to do anything to Potter, well nothing that doesn’t actually need to be done to bring him back. So, let’s just agree to see as little of each other as possible in the process, yeah?”


Without waiting for a response, he turned around and made his way back into the kitchen of La Galaxie, coming back in just in time to catch the orders for Table 8 and relieve the rookie waiter before he lost him his job.

************


Without doubt, he should be ashamed of himself. At least last time, he’d spent 15 minutes in the kitchen. Right now, he was having trouble getting through the front door. He hated his fear. So he was going to have to get over it.

But, said the five year old setting up inside of his soul, he didn’t want to. Absently, he ran a sweaty palm over the rough weave of his jeans.


The sky was proud tonight, cloudless, the stars bright. It was laughing at him right now. He hated cocky horizons.


Finally, he opened the door and went in. The house was…not quiet. Faintly, Draco could hear a steady bass thumping. It sounded like a giant heartbeat. It definitely appeared to be coming from the study. Immediately, images of jettisoning desks ran behind his eyes, and he ran for the room.


Potter was sitting cross legged on top of his desk, another book open in his lap. However, his attention was not on the book, it was on the…well he supposed it could be called a mural…on the far wall. The wall that met up with the massive bookcase in the study had been bared of any and all previous decoration. In its place, Potter was assembling some form of chart, or art, that only he could truly interpret.


Draco discovered the source of the pounding at the same time. Every piece of wooden furniture that Harry was not currently sitting on was systematically being lifted, wandlessly no less, and slammed into the floor until all that was left was broken chunks of wood, splintered and separated from their mates by the ultimate hatred of opposing action. The shards flew, still bloody wandlessly, to join the seemingly random design building itself on the far wall.


Just as an innocent armchair rose and began to pound itself into the floor, Draco inched into the room, wary of the sheer amount of power that was circulating in this enclosed space. While he was wandlessly beating a thirty pound chair against the floor was not the time to test Harry’s docility.


He carefully made his way to Harry’s side, noting that once again, his charge was smelling less than fresh, and slowly eased himself up beside the man. He gently cast another cleansing spell and put his wand away. He was quiet for a moment, almost peacefully watching as the armchair finally gave up and let it go. The dismembered bits moved to the wall in a ballet of movement.


“It’s a little abstract, but I like the contrast.”


Little to nothing.


Okay, so speech wasn’t enough today. He reached down and jerked the book resting in Potter’s lap out of it, launching it across the room to an abrupt halt against the door, which was attempting to wrench itself from the hinges. He did not want that door to start bashing itself against the floor. Luckily, as the book sailed from Potter’s lap and hit that door, it abruptly stopped its struggle.

Draco turned to look at his face, his arm still vaguely outstretched from the throw, to watch the reaction. Harry turned to look at him, another uncomfortable jerking motion, and Draco saw the anger surfacing.


Briefly, he felt a wave of exasperation at himself for putting them back at the second session’s level, but he pushed it away to focus on the now. Reaching his hands out, he once again planted his hands on either side of that dark head of hair and jerked the face closer. The hair, despite the Scourgify, was still oily, but the eyes were once again that absorbing blankness.


“Focus.”


It was just one word, but Draco felt that it wasn’t really important what he was saying, so much as what he did and where he was looking while saying it. This game was dangerous, being so close to him. From 6 inches away, madness looked so inviting.


Never having to worry about more than one thing, complete and total understanding of everything that you needed to understand, the rest was silence. It was far more seductive than he’d ever anticipated insanity to be.


There was a sense of warmth, of desire, trickling along the back of his neck. He could just lean a little forward, and fall into that blankness, and he could be peaceful. It would be so easy.


Draco had gone forward an inch before he realized what he was doing and he jerked back, eyes widening. The air around him was thicker, muggier. Harry’s magic was happy being used, and it was attempting to keep Draco from stopping that.


He had not foreseen this. That Harry’s madness would join forces with Harry’s magic and attempt to pull him down too. That could be a problem. He tightened his grip, and tried again.


“Focus.”


Harry’s head tried to jerk away, and he began to look a little panicked, but Draco just kept holding, tightening his grip as needed, whispering fierce instructions to keep his mind in one place.


The air began to thin out, the eyes began to fill up again, with all the clutter that makes a man, and the tension between Draco’s fingers began to slip.


All of a sudden Harry gasped, and his eyes widened impossibly further, and a great crash resounded from across the room as all of the ‘artwork’ that he’d assembled fell to the floor without his magic to support it.


When he felt that there was enough of Harry there, Draco stood and pulled him from the room. He was followed compliantly all the way to the kitchen. Conjuring a wooden chair from a renegade liquor bottle, he sat the man in it and leaned against the counter, softly toning, “Kreacher.”


When the house elf appeared, obediently turned towards the person who’d called him, Draco absently asked him to prepare some food, of the same ilk as the last time, and then waited for Harry to gather his wits.


The elf gladly moved to the kitchen behind Draco and began rambling about, making broth and slicing bread.


Harry finally looked up, and he looked tired. Draco wasn’t really surprised, but he supposed it still wasn’t a good sign. Before Potter had a chance to speak, Draco asked his own question, “Do you know what you were working towards with your woodwork back there?”


Harry was quiet for a moment, his elbow resting on his knees. When he did finally speak, it was almost too low to be heard, “I’d convinced myself that if I made the wood form the right pentagram, then I would be able to exorcise the ‘green’ out. I think I got it from a Catholic book. The bookstore is running out of things to send me.”


Draco couldn’t really think of anything to say to that, so he just nodded and hummed, “Mmmhmm.”


The silence was broken when Draco spoke again, “We have a new complication.”


Curiously enough, Draco did not want to add more problems onto Harry’s shoulders, but this was something that could not be left alone.


Potter’s shoulders hunched involuntarily, he seemed resigned to the constant flow of ‘new complications’ in his life, “What?”


“Your magic tried to break my mind.”


He really hadn’t meant to phrase it so bluntly, and he felt bad about it when Potter recoiled as though struck, “It…what?”


To his surprise, the reply was not in the form of a shout, more of a scared whisper.


“When I was working to bring you out, your magic tried to make me…” He struggled for a way to explain what he had felt, what had almost happened, “tried to…bring me in.”


The dark head looked up and they stared at each other for a few seconds.


“Any new ideas about the problems we already knew about?”


“None. I was interrogated by Granger, Weasley attempted to muscle me into good behavior, and my father discovered my…” he gestured vaguely in Harry’s direction, “…hobby. He was not happy.”


Harry giggled and seemed startled to hear the sound come out of his mouth, “Yeah, I guess the noble scion of the Malfoy line playing Freud to Harry Potter really wouldn’t be ideal.”


Draco simply lifted a golden eyebrow in response and only succeeded in eliciting another chuckle from the brunette.


“I’m sorry, you just look like such a ‘villain’ when you do that. Its almost funny.”


Beat.


“Po-Harry. It is true that a lot of your problems are simply side effects from the killing curse, but I think that it is safe to say that you would not be suffering so…severely…if there weren’t some issues that are…bothering you.”


“I’m not sure what you..”


“Gods Damn it, Potter, you’ve died two fucking times, and you’re creating folk art out of hardwood furniture. You systematically spot out of sanity and you can pull a 3 inch thick, solid wood door from its hinges wandlessly, without really trying, something is on you’re fucking mind! You can either talk to me about it, or you can talk to your friends, but for any other kind of treatment to work, you’re going to have to work out your hero complex.”


Again, silence paused and looked around the room before walking out, “I’m not sure how much I’ll be comfortable telling you, Malfoy…sharing has never exactly gotten me into the best of places…but…we’ll work on it.”


Potter stood up, gingerly, using his hands on his thighs to push himself to a standing position while he spoke. Draco shifted cautiously, not liking Potter moving around before he’d eaten. It was then that Draco noticed that Kreacher, due to a glaring and awkward lack of table, had set the food out on the counter behind him. Oh…so that’s why Potter…nevermind.


“What exactly do you propose, Potter?”


“I don’t know, I just…I don’t sit still well. You got lucky last time, I was hungrier than I was fidgety.”


Draco rolled his eyes and moved opposite the side of the counter that Harry was approaching. He had one more warning to make, and with it, he would be binding himself in responsibility to Potter’s ability to heal. This was irrevocable.


“Now, if you feel like you might be slipping, you have to tell me, I can’t help if I don’t catch it early. No matter what we’re doing, just tell me. For now though, just eat, I didn’t think it was possible, but you look even skinnier than you did last time, and it is so far past unhealthy it’s not even funny.”


They ate. Quietly.


When they were finished, Draco moved towards the exit to the livingroom, “Let’s move this back into your room, as it seems to be the only place left that you haven’t destroyed all of the furniture from…!” When Potter turned on his foot and attempted to follow him, some weakness in his leg, no doubt caused by weeks of sitting in one position, made it buckle, sending him towards the floor. However, before Harry could get intimately associated with the linoleum, Draco caught him.


When the man looked up at him, in surprise and…gratitude… Draco felt slightly paralyzed. He’d spent a good portion of the last few weeks of his life checking those eyes for clarity, and marveling at the seduction of madness. But never, had he simply stopped to admire the startling nature of their color. They were so very…green.


Harry blinked, and it brought Draco out of the side note he’d been constructing in his head, and he set the man to rights, and turned once more to go the master bedroom. It wasn’t unusual to find such a bright eye color so startling. The human eye was drawn to vivid color, it was natural.


That’s right…vivid. Because that green was in no way…beautiful.