Chapter Text
Neville and Hermione had to wait a long while for Draco at the police station. Hermione read the book she brought, only now it was much smaller and had a gaudy cover. Neville sat beside her on the really hard and uncomfortable bench and tried to look at the people milling around without staring. And Harry said Muggles think Wizards look strange, he mused while watching a man with several metal rings in his eyebrows, nose and ears, and snakes circling up and down his bare arms, much like some of the foreign wizards and witches that he sometimes had seen assisting the healers at St Mungos.
When Draco finally came out, he was unusually quiet, and hardly said a word.
Hermione raised an eyebrow at his outfit. The Muggle clothes, black jeans and a long-sleeved t-shirt in the same colour, cut off just below his ribs and showing off a stretch of white skin, was apparently not what she had expected Draco to wear. It made him look both skinnier and paler than usual, and Neville understood why the police thought he was much younger than his actual age. Hermione didn’t say anything about it, only asked if he was okay.
He nodded, said: "Thanks, Granger" and took Neville's hand.
Hermione followed them back to Neville's house but didn’t want to come in, much to Neville's relief. (And probably Draco's as well.) Just before she left Neville thanked her again, and said that he hoped she would come back to visit soon. She gave him a hug and said she would.
"You have to tell me what happened," Neville said a while later as they were drinking tea in the kitchen.
"There's not much to tell, I was at this Muggle club, had managed to sell the stuff I brought and was just going to leave when everyone started to run around and shout. It was a good thing that I had gotten rid of everything since suddenly a lot of Muggle Policemen came in and rounded up everyone. I realised I didn’t have my wand and they grabbed me before I could get away and apparate home. They wouldn’t let me go since they thought I was underage. And I'm really grateful that I gave you a cell phone." Draco's face lit up in a grin and he patted his pocket. "But I do have money! Have to exchange it, though, so I can pay you back. I don’t suppose you'd want Muggle money."
"You don’t need to do that!" Neville said. "You don’t have to pay me anything. And you've helped me enough in the nursery. I'm just glad you're okay." He stopped, feeling suddenly like he had swallowed an ice-cube.
"What's the matter?" Draco said. "Why the sad face? I won't forget my wand again, I swear. You don’t have to tell me that."
Neville took a deep breath. Might as well let the kneazle out of the box.
"Will you leave now? I mean, you've finally sold your things and got your money." He looked down at his hands and felt really stupid. "And we fought before you left."
"Do you want me to leave?" Draco had moved around the table and scouted very close. The hair rose on the nape of Neville's neck as felt warm breath on his skin. He turned his head. Draco was smiling.
"Of course not," Neville said, "who else would get you out of a scrape in a hurry?"
"That is not why I want to stay," Draco said.
"I know," Neville said.
Neville was not giving in to Draco's plans on selling more wizard potions to Muggles. And he stubbornly refused, no matter how hard Draco tried to convince him.
"I don’t care if it's illegal or not! It's a hallucinogenic substance, which can be dangerous to people who don’t know what they are doing. I have no idea what it does to Muggles. And neither have you. Don’t look like that! I won't grow any more. What if some Muggle got hurt? What if the Ministry got wind of what you're doing? You're certainly breaking the code of Wizarding Secrecy or the Muggle Protection Act or something like that and I won't risk it and I don’t want you to take such foolish risks either."
"I'm not revealing Wizard secrets to Muggles! And it's nothing the Muggles couldn’t make themselves if they wanted to, I'm sure. It's not dangerous. And not addictive. Take coffee for instance – that's much worse."
"Coffee won't make you see things that aren't there!"
"But Neville, It's the only thing I can do! I won't be able to support myself," he whinged, trying his best to look like a puppy dog. "I don't know what I shall do, probably cry. A lot."
"Oh, poor baby," Neville said. "You can rant, rave and slam the doors all you like, but seriously, I won't have any more of those plants in the greenhouse. And you won't have to do that to earn a living. I could use a hand with the plants, and I can afford to pay you, probably not as much as you could make living as a criminal, but a bit. Or if you don’t want to work with me I could ask Mr Thistlethwaithe at the Crup and Kettle, he's always looking for help in the pub. I could ask my uncle, but I don’t believe you'd want to work with him. Or even Hermione - "
"Stop, Neville, stop. I like to work with you. I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else." Neville was secretly relieved that he hadn't had to ask the local pub-owner to give Draco a job. Mr Thistlethwaithe liked Neville enough, but he wasn’t known for his tact (thus, the constant need for new help) and combined with Draco's sometimes total lack thereof it could only have ended in disaster. Anyway, Draco's parents would probably relent someday. Maybe. Probably not. Lucius Malfoy didn’t come off as the forgiving kind. Neville couldn’t imagine that they ever would welcome him as their son's choice of partner. At least they hadn't disinherited Draco. Perhaps they couldn’t.
The next morning Neville woke up when the sun streamed through a crack in the curtains. Draco snored happily, completely hidden under sheets, but he had and an arm and a leg slung over Neville like he wanted to keep him in place. It was strange, thought Neville, how quickly you could get used to sleeping with another person. He just enjoyed the moment and let the thoughts wander as they liked for a while until he realised that he would have to tell his friends about Draco. He wondered if he should tell each one separately, or simply invite everyone to dinner. Either way, the Draco issue would probably not sit well with all of them. He let out a sigh. The movement woke the sleeping Draco, who peeked out from under the sheet.
"Do you want some breakfast," Neville said.
"Coffee," Draco mumbled, "too early to eat." He scooted closer and put his head on Neville's shoulder. "Why are you moping?"
"Am not. I just realised I had to tell my friends that we're living together. Some might not like it."
"Weasley?"
"Among others."
Draco laughed. "I want to be there and see his face. And Potter's."
"No gloating." Draco shook his head. "And you have to try to be nice."
"'S my middle name. And Finnigan already knows. Don’t you think that he and Creevey have told people by now?"
"Did you tell Seamus?"
"He knows I'm here. And he knows me. Even likes me, strangely enough. He's much too nice to be a reporter. He called when you were out and I answered, remember?"
"I forgot about that. He didn’t say anything about it when I talked to him later that evening."
"Maybe he still feels bad about the plants, and that he tricked you."
"He should!"
"But it worked out all right, didn’t it?"
"Guess I have to thank him when I think about it."
A couple of hours later they were busy in the greenhouse. Draco took it upon himself to rearrange the part that served as a shop and Neville had a batch of new seedlings to plant. After a while, Draco came over to him.
"Can I help?" he asked.
"Give me one of those Marguerites. No, not those, the pink ones that smell like strawberries."
"Yuck. The scent is a little too sweet, almost queasy, don’t you think?"
Neville put the plant down on the bench, beside a cocktail glass filled with dark brown liquid.
"What's in the glass?"
"It's supposed to be something called a Black Bludger."
"And that is?"
"A drink," Neville said, "Vodka and Coffee liqueur."
"I thought that was a Dolohov's Delight," Draco said, "Can I have a taste?"
"No. Look at this."
The potted pink flower bowed down into the cocktail glass and sipped elegantly. At the same time, Neville explained, the scent, released by alcohol, would charm the guests into ordering more to drink.
"Cool!" Draco exclaimed.
"I don’t really like them," Neville said. "Uncle Algie brought me the first one. He usually brings me rare plants when he's travelling. It's from Japan. He brought some seeds with him, and instructions on how to charm them. But the scent charm borders on illegal here and I won't be surprised if it shows up on the Ministry's restricted list soon. And I can't really see what's so funny about a drinking flower."
"My mother would call them vulgar and common, no doubt. Maybe I should send her one?"
"Don’t. I don’t want to receive any more howlers. I thought my eardrums would split from the last one."
"She's quite impressive, don’t you think? But why do you grow them, if it's that dreary?"
"Lots of bars and pubs want them, so it would be stupid not to. The thing is that it takes several days to train them. First, you have to spell the flowers to drink. It must be real drinks, properly mixed. Then you do the charm that releases the scent. Afterwards, you add the spell that makes people thirsty. It's really too much of a bother.
"I can help you with the drinks. I couldn’t have been more than eight when my mother started teaching me how to do it," Draco said. "She always liked me to wake her up with a Fairy Oyster the day after a party. She didn't trust the house-elves to use the right proportions. Just a tad too much hangover potion – and you're worse off than before."
Draco decided that he should take care of the plants. Neville didn’t mind.
"I did have some problems with the last batch," Neville said. "I'm not very good with fancy drinks. I have this book called Lorna Lush's Guide to the Wizarding Cocktail World, but it's hard to get the proportions right."
"Oh I'll be happy to do it," Draco said. "It's far easier than potions and smells better too. The spellwork doesn’t seem too complicated. I'll even mix you some drinks that you'd like, don’t worry. Maybe we should keep the cocktail hour? A sacred time a day, not to be interfered with, at least according to my mother."
"What about your father?"
"I always thought my father's drinking habits was the pinnacle of sophistication: expensive wines, the best champagnes, a hundred years old cognac. That kind of stuff. But it was mostly a façade. Something he held up in front of others, I don’t even know what he really liked or what he merely flaunted to impress." He looked a little glum, probably thinking of his father, but soon perked up again. "Snape favours Absinthe, did you know that?"
"It figures. My Gran liked it too. She and her friends used to make it once a year. Every year she sent me to my Aunt and Uncle while they were harvesting the wormwood. Supposed to do it during the waxing moon or something. Probably involving dancing around naked in a sacred circle or something else I'm really glad I wasn’t there to see. Then they sold it at the Michaelmas Market, which is kind of a big deal for the Wizarding folk around here."
"Do you know how to make it? I would like to, but I never learned."
"No," Neville laughed. "If my Gran hadn’t thought I was so clumsy, practically a squib, she might have taught me and I might have done better in that class. She actually taught Potions at Hogwarts for a couple of years."
"Did Snape know?
"It was long before his time. And her name wasn’t Longbottom then, so I don’t think Snape knew. He probably would have treated me even worse, if I had a name to live up to, me being a Gryffindor and all."
"You'd be amazed how much sucking up Snape can do, believe me, I've seen it. He's really good. At sucking up, I mean."
Neville chuckled. Draco frowned. Then he too started to laugh.
"That didn’t come out right. Gah, not a picture I wanted in my mind. For years I did believe that he was so nice to me because I was so good at potions. But it was because of my father, of course. And I don’t want to think about that now. You don’t think your grandmother left any old recipes for Absinthe laying around, do you?"
It went well, except for those times when Draco himself happened to sample a little too much of the flower's training drinks and fell asleep on the little patch of grass he had grown in a corner, between the Mellifluous Miniature Magnolia tree and the little pool for water plants were the Dragonfly flowers liked to hover in the afternoons. Draco was really proud of the patch. He told Neville it was an experiment he had done because he was bored.
"So you cleared out the remains of that old Devil's snare, just because you were bored. Can't you be bored more often? I had postponed it as much as I could; those roots were really hard to get out. And you've managed to grow a patch of grass, unlike anything I've ever seen before. It's great."
The grass was soft as velvet, so deep green that it seemed to shift in blue, and very resilient, no matter how much you tried to flatten it, it straightened up right away. Draco often tried to flatten it. And whenever he thought Neville should have a break from work he dragged him along for a nap. At least that's what Draco called it, but it almost never included actual sleeping.
One day Neville was half asleep, leaning against the trunk of the Magnolia, idly stroking Draco's hair. Draco was sleeping with his head in Neville's lap. He had closed his eyes and listened to the sounds of the greenhouse and Draco's even breaths. Both awoke abruptly to a gasp and a thump. After getting up and hastily arranging their clothes they found old Mrs Korat from three houses down the street, sitting on the floor.
"Slippery stones on the floor here. My, my, Neville Longbottom, well I'd never," the little old lady said as they helped her into a chair, "No damage done. Brutus wanted some Catnip." Brutus was her old tabby, who followed her around like a dog. He probably sat beside the gate right now, patiently waiting, glaring menacingly at passers-by.
"He's a pale little slip of a thing, isn’t he?" Mrs Korat looked appraisingly at Draco. "I heard you had a young man staying here. No, no, Neville, I know it's not my business, and I don’t care, or speculate, like some that I shan't name, what your grandmother would have thought. You look happier now than you've had for a long time, and that cannot be a bad thing. Why don’t you both come over someday, I'll do a reading for you."
Draco looked suspicious. Neville smiled. He had known Mrs Korat all his life. She and his Gran knew each other from Hogwarts and Mrs Longbottom always called her little Kit. She was a well-known fortune-teller, but she had never offered to do a reading for Neville before.
Neville thought the patch of grass was brilliant and suggested that Draco could use it to earn some money. Some of the people who had houses with gardens in the Wizarding part of town would sell their grandmothers or firstborn children to have such a lawn.
"They can't," Draco said.
"Why not?" Neville asked. "It's a great idea. You could make a fortune." Draco slung an arm over Neville's shoulders and snickered. Neville felt a little glimpse of Draco like he was acting in school, with his friends. It warmed him a little, but he felt strangely guilty that it did.
"You cannot buy a lawn like this."
"You made one, so why not make the potion in larger quantities and sell it?"
"First of all. A lawn like this can't be bought. It can only be inherited. It takes hundreds of years of meticulous care for it to be like this. And I guess this is as big as I can make it." Neville wondered if Draco was joking. But he sounded completely serious. He thought he was becoming pretty good at reading Draco since he moved in.
"You know that I'm the sole heir to Malfoy Manor, right?"
"I do think you've mentioned it a couple of times," Neville said. A day.
"It's more than a house. If you wanted to, could you sell this house and move to Bora-Bora?"
"According to my Gran's will, I have to offer it to my cousins first. But I don’t think there would be anything stopping me. Are you telling me that you can't?"
"No, I couldn’t sell it. It's not like I would have to live there when I inherit, so don’t worry. I just have to stay there once in a while. Like during either winter or summer solstice and during lunar eclipses. It's a very complicated binding. I haven’t really thought about it for a long while, but I guess I thought about the gardens there more than usual, being surrounded by plants and flowers all day long. That patch of grass is like the lawns around the Manor. Or more exactly it IS that lawn. I drew power from my bond with the Manor and I had to use my blood to make it like that, so you see that it's not really something I could do in a larger scale."
"Isn't it dangerous?" Neville said. "I mean, to do magic with blood and bonds seems a little risky. Land bonds especially."
"Not really," Draco said. "I used it all the time at Hogwarts. To charm my bed so it felt like the one at home. Sometimes I did draw power from the bond when I wanted to make a spell last longer and be stronger. Like stench-proof our dorm. I did that in first year and the spell was still in full force when we left. I didn’t have to renew it once."
"Stench-proof. Wish I had known that spell back then," Neville laughed.
"Vincent Crabbe had the most vile-smelling feet you could imagine. I would have gone mad if I had to sleep with that odour all around me."
"The green ones look like they've had too much gin," Draco said when they were loading them into crates for the transport. "Do-do-do-do," he crooned. The flowers weren't happy, and in spite of Draco's singing efforts, the only reaction was a slight twitch in the drooping petals. Neville had found out that some plants perked up visibly when music was played in the room. (And that might have been the reason Professor Sprout always had some reggae music on when working in the small Greenhouse number five, come to think of it.) The WWN, which he usually listened to when working, was currently airing a program about a Chizpurfle infestation in Essex. That wasn’t exactly what they needed, but the only music he could find in a hurry (and bring to the greenhouse) was an old wooden music box. It had belonged to his Grandmother and she used to wind it up and sing along to the tune that had been popular in her youth. If he closed his eyes he could almost hear her over the ploinking sound. …Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do, I'm half crazy, all for the love of you…. He had to stop himself from humming along. Draco looked more and more pained.
After several hours of coaxing, extra nutritious fertiliser and lots of sweet-talking, the drinking flowers had sobered up enough to be delivered.
"Merlin be thanked," Draco said when they were done. He then offered to Incendio the Music box. Neville put his arms around him.
"It was Gran's," Neville whispered in his ear, "but I promise, you won't have to listen to it again."
Neville went in to have a fire-chat with the owner of the Whacky Wolverine bar in Liverpool, who had ordered the flowers. He told them he would bring them over himself since the delivery had been delayed. Draco said he was tired and was going to bed. He blew a kiss to Neville and went up the stairs, but turned around just before he reached the turn, just to give him a wink.
Whenever Draco had that expression, Neville felt a warm, happy glow in his stomach.
Several hours later when Neville came back, Draco met him in the hallway, looking upset.
"Neville, there is a Phoenix in the greenhouse."
Neville followed him out there. At the small patch of grass sat a beautiful bird with red and gold plumage.
"It's been sitting on my grass, Draco said. "Ruddy bird doesn’t want to move. It better not soil it."
"It's Fawkes, Dumbledore's Phoenix," Neville said. "Hello, Fawkes."
The phoenix looked up. Then it suddenly thrilled and disappeared in a flash of fire.
A small golden feather remained on the grass. Neville took it and held it carefully on his palm. It felt warm, but slightly metallic, not at all like a feather.
"Let me see?" Draco said, "Wow. It's beautiful. I haven’t seen anything like that up close before. Wait, hello? Does Dumbledore have a Phoenix? As a pet?"
"Well, yes. Not exactly like a pet. It's more like a familiar. I do think he can understand it. It can deliver messages. And warnings."
"They are very powerful creatures. Do you think it was supposed to warn us? Are we in danger?"
"I have to try to reach Dumbledore."
Before he had time to do anything someone banged the lion's head door-knocker at the front door. When the amplified sound reached them they quickly went back inside. Neville pocketed the feather and opened the door with a feeling of dread.
"Neville Longbottom, I presume." The voice wasn’t as menacing and haughty as it used to be, instead, he sounded tired and weary and the face was more lined than Neville remembered. In spite of that, he made a composed and elegant figure, dressed in a long swirling cape of black velvet. Neville thought he looked smaller than he used to, like he had shrunk, but realised it was he who had grown quite a bit since he was fifteen. Somehow that made the man less imposing. Still, it wasn’t someone Neville ever had expected to see on his doorstep.
"I've come to see my son," he said.