Title: China Roses

Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.

Pairing: Harry/Draco, past Harry/Ginny and Draco/Astoria

Rating: PG-13

Warnings: Slight angst, non-linear

Summary: After Scorpius is injured while apprenticing to Harry in his Countercurses business, Draco visits to determine how Scorpius is recovering—and whether he'll be staying. It also means the rekindling of a friendship that he had with Harry twenty-six years ago, which may become something more.

Author's Notes: This is another one of my Wednesday one-shots, inspired by a request from sandersyager:Scorpius apprenticing to Harry after Hogwarts as a spell inventor or other type of magical researcher. Draco turns up when Scorpius is injured in the course of his training. He and Harry haven't had much contact since 8th year at Hogwarts, but had the beginnings of a decent friendship that year and until Draco married Astoria and Harry went off to travel and train for his career outside of England. While Scorpius recovers (whether it's a day or weeks), Harry and Draco reconnect and realize they not only want a friendship but possibly a romance.This will likely have five parts, and each part will be told partially from Draco or Harry's perspective (in past tense) and Scorpius's (flashbacks, but in present tense). The title comes from Enya's song of the same name.

China Roses

Chapter One—Countercurses

Draco had to pause with one hand on the glass door before he entered the sunlit building that contained Harry Potter's business, and not because he was worried about Scorpius. The latest owl—which Draco had no reason to doubt—said Scorpius was improving all the time.

It seemed even twenty-six years wasn't enough to shake the haze from Draco. The haze Harry Potter had carried around with him during the year after the war, the golden haze of miracles achieved.

Draco quirked his mouth as he opened the door. I knew I was a fool. But I'm not as much a fool as my father.

Confidence re-established, Draco stepped into the light and looked around. The first thing he registered was the wall of roses climbing next to him. He could hardly breathe. They radiated their own haze, shimmering wildly cobalt and iris and hyacinth, bloodstone and alexandrite. Draco reached out one hand without realizing what he was doing.

Then he blinked, and realized they weren't real. They were made of some thin, transparent material, which vibrated with currents of magic cutting through them. Draco touched one anyway. It brushed against a perfectly-shaped leaf that turned and twisted as if in response to a wind, but the surface was too slick for that.

"Malfoy? Hello."

Draco turned, still dazed, away from the roses. Potter stood in front of him, and not even the small cuts and scars on his hands, nor the abrupt shagginess of his hair, nor the singed look of his face, all legacies of his profession, could dim the golden cloud around him.

"Potter." Draco cleared his throat brusquely, hoping it would force the renegade parts of him to behave. "I received your owl about Scorpius."

"And how he was missing his dad?" Potter smiled softly and nodded. "Well, I don't blame you for wanting to see him yourself." He turned on one heel towards the exit from this spacious, illuminated space, then hesitated. "One thing before you see him, Malfoy."

Draco, whose eyes had strayed again to the glory of the roses, tore them back hastily.

Potter looked at him and pushed the small silver glasses he wore up in front of his eyes. "Don't take him away unless you think his life is in danger," he breathed. "Please. He chose this work, and the work chooses him."

Draco narrowed his eyes. That comment knocked him back to his footing a little. Potter was charming and heroic and handsome and all that, but he was also someone who would submerge you if you let him. Draco had no intention of drowning. "What? You can't tell me you that I have to make the decision? I thought you would tell me the work was safe and of course he should stay."

Potter silently held up his hands. "It isn't safe," he said simply. "I think it can be safer. Scorpius made a beginner's mistake. He'll get past those." He paused. "But you have to do what you think is best for him. I understand that."

Draco shifted his cloak to his left shoulder. "Even as you're begging me to leave him here?"

"Even then."

Draco shook his head sharply. The contradiction of Potter's manners at the moment was too much for him, and he hadn't even seen Scorpius. "Lead on, Potter. Once I've seen my son, I'll make my decision."

Potter nodded, and opened the far door into another glorious workroom. Draco passed through it, eyes aimed straight ahead this time. As wondrous as some of the things Potter was building here were, his son was more important still.

But Draco did promise himself a lingering look when he left. There was no harm to Scorpius, or himself, in that.

Scorpius halts when he comes through the door and stares with his mouth open.

He's seen a lot of unusual things in his life. Unicorns bowing to his friend, Al Potter, after Al saved one of their foals. Hagrid, the giant gamekeeper, actually mounted on a hippogriff. The collision of two spells in the Hogwarts Dueling Club that somehow turned the students who had fired them into floating, crystal statues.

But he's never seen a man standing with a rose coiled around his arm like a serpent, rearing up, waving its leaves in the air, and the man smiling at the rose as though it was a beloved pet.

The rose sags as Scorpius watches it, and the life seems to flee its leaves and roots, leaving it a glittering sculpture. The man shakes his head and sighs. Then he leans the rose carefully into a container made of shelves that seems purposely built to hold it, and looks up.

Scorpius blinks, and carefully closes his mouth. Green eyes like that aren't worth gaping at. He saw the same shade most days of his life for seven years in Al's face, after all.

But Al, while he's brilliant at all sorts of things and already making a name for himself as an Auror, doesn't have the same—weight? Scorpius puts that word to it as the man crosses the room to shake his head. Harry Potter has lived through a lot, but he reminds Scorpius of one of those unicorns, accepting the weight of the horn on its brow and the expectations humans have placed on them with shivering grace.

Harry—he's told Scorpius to call him that already, through the letters they've sent back and forth—smiles at him in perfect understanding. Scorpius ducks his head, a little embarrassed that he's fallen into the same exact gaping admiration Harry must be so tired of.

"It's all right," Harry says. "I think it's pretty common to be impressed when you meet someone legendary." He lets go of Scorpius's hand, waves his, and makes shimmering protections fall apart and more of the workshop appear. Scorpius is actually afraid until he sees the wand almost concealed in Harry's hand.

"I was deficient in that, sadly," Harry continues as they move through the workshop into areas ornamented with stained glass windows, and more roses, and stacks of what look like steel wands, and statues of unicorns with upraised hooves. "It's hard to meet someone legendary when you're supposed to be the autograph-signer yourself."

He grins at Scorpius over his shoulder, which gives Scorpius the courage to swallow and ask, "But, sir, weren't you impressed by Dumbledore? I think—I think Al told me that once."

Harry nods thoughtfully and reaches out to pick up one of the steel wands. It's open with a slit on the top, Scorpius sees, so that he can make out a core of crystal inside. "I was. But I wasn't impressed the way someone would have been who grew up in the wizarding world and knew who he was. I only knew what the Chocolate Frog card and older students told me, really."

Scorpius tenses in surprise. Al told him that, he remembers distantly, that his dad didn't grow up in the wizarding world. But it's still strange, watching the natural way Harry moves around magic now—

With a little grimace, Scorpius realizes he's still apparently clinging to some of those outmoded prejudices that Grandfather Lucius gave him, without realizing it. He'd thought he got rid of the ones about Muggleborns never being fully at home in their world because raised outside it, but maybe not.

Harry glances back at him, seems to know what he's thinking again, but, with a little smile, doesn't call him on it. "You know what my business does."

"Yes, sir, of course," Scorpius says, glad to be back on familiar ground. "You come up with new countercurses to spells that don't have them. Your theoretical articles on defensive magic are brilliant."

Harry looks a bit startled for an instant, then smiles back. "Oh, yes. Well, thank you. But more than develop new countercurses, I develop ways to reverse the damage even to spells that already have counters. I mean, what good are the counters unless you manage to cast them before the curse hits you, most of the time? You usually have to rely on someone else to free you or heal you if you're cursed."

There's a deep undercurrent in his voice that Scorpius doesn't understand. He cocks his head and asks, "So you're coming up with devices for people who aren't good at Defense on their own?"

"That's part of it." Harry looks at him again, and it's like being looked at by a falcon. Scorpius shakes his head a little, breaking that spell. "But what it is, most of all—"

He hesitates. Scorpius thinks for a minute that he must have heard someone about to come into the shop, but then he realizes what it must be.

"Oh, please tell me," he says. "Please. I promise—it can't be sillier than some of the things I was thinking."

Harry blinks again, then smiles. Superficially, it's no different than the smiles Scorpius has seen so far. But he knows it's deeper, more real, and he's being admitted into something that most people don't know about Harry Potter.

"It's a way of taking away the evil of that curse," Harry says quietly. "And my devices can be used independently of curses, not just to counter them. So you can use one of my golden falcons not just to reverse the pain of the Cruciatus Curse but to ease someone into deep relaxation even if they've never had an Unforgivable cast on them." He pauses one more time, then adds, "It's a way of bringing beauty back to the world."

Scorpius never forgets that moment, standing there surrounded by china and glass and gems and silver, all the various materials that Harry Potter forges his Countercurses out of. It's the beginning, in many ways, of his real life.

"Right through here." Potter was in front of him, drawing back a sheer silk curtain. Draco blinked, especially when Potter added, "Scorpius, I told you to leave the unicorn alone for right now."

Draco half-expected to see a unicorn standing in the room as he strode in. But Scorpius was drawing his hand back penitently from a tiny statue instead, which stood in the center of what looked like a miniature dais.

"Sorry," he added to Potter, who shook his head in fond exasperation. Draco knew what that looked like, having gone through it many times himself.

"Here he is," Potter said to Draco, and waved his hand at the bed. "Nearly scalped alive by a crystal explosion because he's intemperate and thinks he can handle things that I needed to train years for."

Scorpius flushed. Draco studied him, reaching out to catch his son's hand in silence. Really, the worst injuries were on Scorpius's leg and not his head, long cuts that had smaller puncture holes next to them, but there was a deep scratch curling around Scorpius's ear that you could take as half-scalping if you were imaginative.

And Draco had a room full of roses as evidence that Potter was imaginative.

"And," Potter continued, in the same tone, so it wasn't immediately obvious what he was going to say, "the best apprentice I've had in fifteen years, with a natural feel for defensive magic that's going to make him famous someday." He glanced at Scorpius and shook his head. "Which is why I'd prefer not to see him scalped first."

Scorpius flushed and then smiled, a flood of color and light that rivaled anything Potter had produced, for Draco. He held out a hand to Potter this time, and Potter moved around the other side of the bed and took it.

"I'm sorry," Scorpius said. "I really thought I was holding the tension in the crystal in check."

"We all think lots of things," said Potter, but he was smiling again. "Which is why I need you to keep control of your thoughts and concentrate on your imagination instead. At least for right now."

Draco looked from Potter to his son, who was smiling much the same way. He and Potter still each held one of Scorpius's hands, one on either side of the bed.

A powerful movement stirred in Draco's chest like a thunderhead. He got rid of it by dropping Scorpius's hand and conjuring a chair that would appear by the side of the bed.

Trying to conjure a chair. Draco felt his magic sputter out against protective enchantments he hadn't even sensed.

"Oh, sorry." Potter gave a little frown and reached out to touch a different unicorn on a different dais. "I forgot that I'd guarded the room against magic." He turned the frown on Scorpius, who squirmed. "Because otherwise someone would be practicing it when he's supposed to be resting."

Draco glanced at the unicorns, but chose not to say anything for right now. He conjured his chair instead, and sat down in it. "Tell me how the accident happened," he said.

He put a tone in accident that Scorpius must still have known how to read, because he surged upright. "Oi!" he said. "You don't think Mr. Potter would have done this to me on purpose? I thought you two got over being enemies a long time ago."

Draco glanced at Potter before he responded. Potter only gave him an impish smile back, which wasn't the most reassuring response, and conjured a chair for himself.

"I didn't mean to imply that," said Draco stiffly, holding Potter's eyes for a second before he turned back to Scorpius. He felt off-balance. He spent most of his time in his library or his friends' libraries, researching the books he wrote on history, and books talked to him only inside his head. "I didn't."

"Then what?"

Scorpius was leaning forwards in a challenging way, and Draco clasped his shoulder this time. He might smell dust more than fresh air and hear silent words more than spoken ones, but his son was still the dearest thing in his world.

"I thought you might have pushed your boundaries deliberately, for an interesting result," said Draco. "Not lost control. Jumped."

A choked sound came from Potter, abruptly enough that Draco tensed. But it was only Potter rocking back and forth with a hand over his mouth and the other one pointing straight at Scorpius, who slumped against his pillows.

"That's an accurate description of him, all right," said Potter, and raised his voice into a falsetto. "What does the crystal do when I push on it? It explodes? Well, are you sure? Did you try it with a Blasting Curse? What about this one?"

Scorpius turned even brighter red. "Shut up," he muttered.

Draco sat straight up. He had raised Scorpius better than to speak to someone he'd apprenticed to that way.

But once again Potter didn't react how Draco had expected. He only shrugged. "I'll shut up if you do, and I never have to hear words like that out of your mouth again."

"I'm still waiting for a description of what exactly happened," Draco interjected, and tried making his voice plaintive, to see what effect it would have.

Potter reached out and picked up the small unicorn beside him in response. Draco automatically tensed, but apparently this one didn't control the room's magic when it wasn't on the dais. Potter turned it over and held it out to Draco. Draco found himself accepting it the way he would have a young Ashwinder.

"See the slit in the belly?"

Draco concentrated, and made out a sapphire-bright sparkle running between the unicorn's delicately molded, prancing legs. He nodded.

"I leave a slit like that on all my countercurses, to funnel magic into." Potter leaned back in his chair. "Each of them needs magic when I create them, to mimic the effect of whatever defensive or healing spell I'm designing them to imitate. You can strengthen the spell, and that strengthens the final creation."

Draco considered the slit for a moment. "A small aperture, to funnel all the magic."

"It works fine," Potter said, with a dismissiveness that Draco found irritating. "If you know what you're doing." He turned around abruptly and scowled at Scorpius.

Scorpius held his hands up. "I only wanted to test and see how much the crystal could hold. You are using smaller slits and smaller creations than you really need to, you know. You could strengthen them if you were willing to strengthen the magic—"

"I do, on a regular basis," said Potter, in a voice that made Draco picture sudden, common arguments, most of them over a mug of mead or something similar. "What I don't do is slam the magic through a slit too small to hold it, into a crystal structure that I'd already destabilized by casting spells directly on it, while holding an artifact that's supposed to pump more power through the core of my wand."

Draco found himself turning almost mechanically to Scorpius, feeling like a toy on a pivot. "You what," he said, and his voice was flat.

He knew exactly what artifact Scorpius must have used. He didn't really want to know it, but he did.

Scorpius squirmed worse than he had at any time since he was a child and Draco had caught him making the house-elves steal biscuits for him from the kitchen. "It's not—I sort of forgot I was holding onto it with one hand," he muttered. "I was so deep into the casting trance that I went with my instincts and used the incantation, and, well."

He gestured at the cuts that covered him. Draco sat back with a long, slow exhale through pursed lips that made Scorpius duck his head and peer up apprehensively.

"You're past the age when I could confine you to your room or take your wand away," Draco finally said. "I admit, I came because I wasn't sure whether I needed to stop the allowance I give you for your apprenticeship fees—"

"You can't! It wasn't his fault!" Scorpius flapped a hand at Potter while not removing his glare from Draco.

"Yes, I can see that now," Draco said, and pondered for a moment whether he should say what else had come to mind. He decided, with a glance at Potter, that he had to. Potter, watching him with calm, unsettlingly intelligent eyes, even made a small gesture as though encouraging him to go on. "But I thought that might force you to quit this apprenticeship and concentrate on less dangerous work."

Scorpius blinked, mouth open. Then he said, "So it was a punishment for me, not Harry."

"Yes." Draco clasped his hands in his lap. "I always thought it would be. Scorpius, I approve of what you want to do with your life. I don't approve of how you go about it."

"You told me there was no one finer to study with than Harry Potter," Scorpius whispered accusingly. "You were the one who encouraged me to apply for an apprenticeship!"

Draco felt as if he'd been dipped up to the neck in hot coals, but he didn't need to look at Potter right now. "I know," he said. "But perhaps I should have encouraged you to wait until you were older, and better able to control yourself."

"I'm nineteen!" Scorpius tried to sit up, but then winced and fell back against the pillows, probably because he'd rubbed his cheek in a way that made the cut around his ear pull.

"And so, young and reckless by definition," Potter muttered, shaking his head. Draco finally felt safe to look at him again, only to find that Potter was gazing at Scorpius anyway, and didn't stare at Draco the way he'd expected. "Scorpius, I took you on because of your talent and because I do think you're going to make great discoveries. But I can't have you endangering yourself."

"It was an accident! I didn't mean to be touching the artifact at the same time!"

"It was a Malfoy heirloom, right?" Potter turned to Draco at that point. "One you lent him for his protection when he came here?"

Draco resisted the impulse to simply shrug. In truth, having seen how calm and peaceful Potter's sunlit studio was, he felt foolish for doing that. But then, London had seemed so different and dangerous from Hogwarts or Wiltshire, where Scorpius had spent most of his time, six months ago. "Yes."

Potter nodded once at Scorpius. "You might not have meant to be touching it when you cast the spell. But why did you have it out if you didn't intend to use it?"

Scorpius's head drooped a bit. Draco waited, blinking slowly to conceal his surprise. It was like, and yet not like, the way Scorpius usually reacted when Draco or his mother—on the rare occasions he still saw Astoria; she lived in Spain now—scolded him. It seemed as if he might repent more genuinely now, for one thing.

"I was only going to see how it worked with a small spell," Scorpius finally whispered. "Not a big one."

Potter nodded in a way that said that was the right answer. "And if someday you want to make your own creations with bigger slits for the magic, well, that's your responsibility and one that I hope to teach you enough theory to handle on your own," he said, and leaned forwards to pat Scorpius's knee. "But you can't create those things yet. You have to be careful. Even beyond the chances of an explosion when you use a powerful spell, you know what the Ministry regulations say."

"I don't," Draco interjected, while Scorpius only nodded and looked miserable. He'd been aware that Scorpius needed to fill out a lot of paperwork for the Ministry when he took on this apprenticeship, but that had been Scorpius's responsibility, and Draco had left him to it.

"Because I create things that counter curses," Potter explained, and turned to face Draco, "I have to know the actual effects of the curses. Sometimes I even have to cast them, because there are magical resonances that simply can't be learned from books or casting spells in the same classification. For some, like the Unforgivables, there are no spells of a similar classification. I need a special license from the Ministry to do that, and I have to swear an oath not to use them on living creatures, only enchanted dummies. So did Scorpius."

"And he will if he opens a similar business," Draco said. He frowned at his sneaky son. He hadn't known that, no.

"Not only that," said Potter. He swept back his hair from his scar, in a motion that Draco once would have seen as a need to distinguish himself and remind people of his fame, but now he thought he could see it for what it was: a simple means of showing who he was. "The backlash of a spell on a human being might count as casting the spell on a living subject."

"I'm sorry, Mr. Potter," said Scorpius, in a voice as small as the crystal unicorns. "Did I get you in trouble?'

"I still have friends in the Ministry." Potter smiled at Scorpius, gently again. "I didn't even have to pay much of a fine, once I'd explained what happened, and let a few key people study a Pensieve memory."

"I'll pay that fine back," said Draco, and frowned again at Scorpius.

"You don't have to, and don't look like that," said Potter. "Scorpius didn't know until just now." He stood up, slowly. "It might take another week for Scorpius to recover. Were you thinking of staying in London while he did, Malfoy?'

"I—" Draco was about to explain the convenient nature of Floos, in case Potter had forgotten it with not having one here, and then looked from Potter's face back to his son. "I understand there are some houses with lodgings in Diagon Alley. I could, couldn't I?" The notes he was taking on the rise of Grindelwald were safe under a complicated lock at home.

"Oh, no need for that," said Potter easily. "I was thinking you could stay with me in the flat upstairs. For now, Scorpius really needs to stay here." He reached down and touched the crystal unicorn in a way that seemed to make the air shift. Scorpius visibly slumped back and sulked.

"I," said Draco, and this time let it fade away on its own while he looked at Potter. Potter looked back, his gaze calm and steady.

Draco could read many messages in that gaze. Maybe not all of them were there, the same way he might open a history book hoping for confirmation of something that turned out to be his own imagination.

But enough was there that he nodded and said, "You're kind to offer, Potter. Thank you."

"You're welcome," said Potter, and smiled in a way that made Draco think again of those roses in the outer room, complex and glittering.