Sweetly Collected
Summary: Draco's collection of Chocolate Frog Cards grows every week, but some are more important to him than others.
General Audiences, 2370 words - Read on ao3 here
A million thank yous to my wonderful beta and cheerleader, @deliciacite! You are wonderful!!! 💜💜💜
This has been sitting in my drafts for ages, and I thought it might be nice to post it in celebration of Harry's birthday. I hope you enjoy!
On their second date, Harry and Draco walked around Muggle London. Draco had protested being seen in Wizarding public with The Boy Who Lived, The Saviour, The Chosen One, and he kept listing off increasingly ridiculous epithets from the Daily Prophet until Harry finally agreed that, for the time being, they could keep their relationship quiet. It was while leaving a small, touristy souvenir shop that Draco bit into a poorly-cast chocolate Big Ben and declared that it tasted exactly like a Chocolate Frog.
“Do you collect the cards?” Harry had asked, his heart hammering with nerves at every change in conversation, so hopeful that whatever this was between them would work, that it wouldn’t destroy their still-delicate friendship.
“No, although I always wanted to,” Draco replied. “Of course, Father said it wasn’t suitable for a Malfoy to collect something so pedestrian. And then, when I still said I wanted to collect something, Mother’s friends started giving me the most horrible collectible figurines that I was supposed to catalogue instead—they were terrible, Potter, truly; all sorts of different magical beasts and every single one of them was apparently rendered worthless if the protective spellwork was removed so that a child might actually enjoy them. I wasn’t allowed to go flying for a week after I tried to take the little hippogriff down from its shelf to play with it.” “Ohh,” said Harry, not even trying to hide his smirk, “So that’s why you hated them so much in third year!”
“Clearly,” Draco said. “Obviously, it had nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that I was savaged by one and barely escaped with my life, on top of which I had to face the ignominy of being shown up by you, again!” He jostled Harry with his shoulder, but he was grinning too.
It was only a few hours after Draco had been dropped off at his flat (with a chaste, nervous kiss good night, and then a longer, far less chaste kiss to promise another date soon) that Harry apparated to Honeydukes and bought out half their Chocolate Frog display. Draco turned furiously pink with pleasure when Harry gave him the first frog at the end of their third date. Harry said that now Draco could collect all the Chocolate Frog cards he wanted, and then it was Harry’s turn to blush when Draco dramatically read out his first card.
“'Harry James Potter: 1980-present. After surviving a killing curse in 1981, Harry Potter became known as the Boy Who Lived. He is best known for his defeat of the dark wizard Voldemort, and is regarded as the Saviour of the Wizarding World.' Really, Potter, this is the card I have to start my collection with? If I didn’t know better I would think that you had planned this,” Draco drawled, and Harry turned redder still.
After a while, it became a part of their weekly routine. On Fridays, Harry would leave his apprenticeship at Ollivander’s early and buy two Chocolate Frogs on his way to pick up Draco from his shift at St. Mungos. They would eat their frogs and Draco would give a dramatic reading of his two newest cards as they walked to The Leaky Cauldron, and then after enjoying pub night with their friends, Draco would add the cards to his ridiculously organised collection. After two years of collecting, his album was nearly complete, and he had started getting increasingly frantic to find Mirabella Plunkett.
“Harry, you don’t understand! What if they stop making her card? I’ve left a spot in the album just for Mirabella and if they stop printing her card before I find one then my collection won’t be complete! I know it’s not as important to you, you don’t collect them, but I was reading an article just yesterday about what cards are rumoured to go out of circulation, and Mirabella was on the list!”
Harry just smiled, wrapped an arm around Draco’s shoulders, and kissed his frantically gesticulating boyfriend on the top of his head. “It’s important to me because it’s important to you, I know you’ve been looking for her for almost a year now. Tomorrow’s Friday though, maybe you’ll be lucky this week.”
Draco turned his face up to Harry for a kiss. “What if,” he said, pulling back slightly, “we have Chocolate Frogs for dinner tonight, just to improve my chances?”
Harry just laughed and walked towards the kitchen. “You can have one from my stash for dessert, but I worked far too hard on this coq au vin for you to only eat chocolate instead!”
The next day dawned cold and dreary, and if Harry had been thinking about it at all when he woke up, he would have said that it didn’t feel like a day where anything lucky would occur. He had to deal with a toddler channelling accidental magic through five wands at once while their older sister bought her first wand (and set three shelves on fire in the process), an attempt at avoiding a puddle led to him tripping and accidentally summoning the Night Bus, which splashed through the same puddle he had been keen to avoid and drenched him entirely, and when he finally made it to Honeydukes there was only one Chocolate Frog left on the rack.
“We’ll be getting a new shipment in soon, they’ve just been delayed this week,” the young witch working the counter assured him, but that was a poor consolation for the break in tradition. Harry poked around the shop a bit more before returning to the empty display as if hoping it would have magically restocked in the last five minutes. It was still as empty as ever, even when Harry bent down to peer into the back of the shelves. He wobbled a bit when he went to stand back up (“and this is why I’m glad you’re not an Auror,” he could hear Draco saying, “all that grace would land you in St. Mungos at least once a week, and while I enjoy seeing you at work I would much prefer not having to patch you up and save your life with such regularity.”), and grabbed onto the rack to steady himself. It teetered back, and Harry caught a glimpse of blue and silver underneath for just a moment. Bending down again, he reached under the lowest shelf, feeling blindly for what he hoped wasn’t just a bit of trash or anything disgusting. His fingers hit a solid object and he swiped it towards him, letting out a small shout of triumph at the slightly dusty but still intact Chocolate Frog box. He could eat that one, Draco could have the one that didn’t look as if it had spent three months in the company of dust bunnies and discarded Droobles wrappers.
“There you are! I was beginning to worry that you drowned!” Draco softened his greeting with a quick kiss, but then pulled back to assess Harry’s clothes. “Although, it looks as though you might have come close.”
“The Night Bus splashed me,” Harry explained, as Draco expertly spelled the mud and wrinkles out of his clothing.
“And why, pray tell, were you waiting on the Night Bus?”
“I wasn’t waiting on it! I just summoned it. By accident. Oh, shut up. Stop laughing and take your Chocolate Frog, it was the last one left.”
He shoved the more presentable box into Draco’s hand and listened as he read off the card through a mouthful of frog. “Albus Dumbledore, again, as if we don’t already know everything about him. Maybe I should write a new series of cards for him, I could include some of the more scandalous things from that horrid novel, what do you think?”
“I think you just want an in with the Chocolate Frog people,” Harry said, handing over the second card as he shoved his own frog in his mouth.
“I do not! I am building my collection through my own skill and determination, and I would not sink so low as to—Salazar! I don’t believe it. Harry, look!”
Draco had come to a complete stop in the middle of the sidewalk so that Harry had to backtrack a few paces to see what he was staring at. There, cradled in Draco’s hand, was a card with a smiling, red-faced witch, bearing the title Mirabella Plunkett.
“Mirabella Plunkett,” Harry breathed, a smile slowly stealing across his face.
“Mirabella Plunkett,” Draco repeated, and then again, even louder, “Mirabella Plunkett! Mirabella Plunkett!” Pink-cheeked and delighted, he started walking again, practically skipping down the street. “‘Born in 1839, Mirabella Plunkett is best known for falling in love with a merman in Loch Lomond while on holiday. When her parents forbade her to marry him, she transfigured herself into a haddock and was never seen again.’ I can’t believe it, I didn’t think I would ever find her!”
He was still radiant and bouncing when they walked into the Leaky, not even bothering to say hello before announcing, “I got Mirabella Plunkett!”
Blaise, who still hadn’t managed to understand how anyone could find joy in collecting tiny pieces of cardboard, simply shook his head fondly, while Ron, Hermione, and Pansy all offered heart-warmingly genuine congratulations. Draco launched into a retelling of getting the card, talking a mile a minute about how the whole front half of his album was full now, and then bounced off to get a round of drinks without even pausing to sit down first.
Harry slid in next to Ron who was admiring the card and watching Mirabella wave up at him from her tiny gold frame.
“I can’t believe you finally got Plunkett,” Ron said, flipping the card over to read the back.
“It’s Draco’s, not mine,” Harry replied immediately.
Ron looked up at once. “But you’ve been collecting for twelve years, isn’t this the only card you still need?”
“Yeah,” Harry said with a shrug, “but Draco doesn’t know that. He’s so excited about his own collection, I didn’t want to spoil it by telling him that I have all the cards he’s still looking for hidden under the bed. He’s having fun tracking them down on his own.”
Ron just looked at him for a moment, then shook his head in bemusement. ���You have all the cards but one. And I heard that they’re going to stop printing this one, you’ll probably never find another.”
Just then, Draco came back with the drinks, and he slid in to join Harry in the booth. He leaned across Harry’s chest to reclaim his card from Ron, casually settling a hand on Harry’s thigh.
“I know,” Harry replied, before turning to look at Draco, “but I think I’ve already got everything I need.”
“Sap,” Ron said, shoving him lightly.
“What are you being sappy about, darling?” Draco asked, looking up from admiring Mirabella again.
“Nothing,” Harry answered. “Just talking about how much I love you,” and he leaned over and kissed Draco on the cheek, watching him turn slightly pink as he read the description on the card once more.
Epilogue
June 5th, 2003
“Harry, they’ll be here any minute! What’s taking you so long?” Draco called, walking into the bedroom to find Harry fully dressed for the party, fiddling with a bow on a tiny package.
“I’m ready,” Harry replied, “but I thought that you might like to open one present before your guests arrive.” He held out the silver-wrapped box, and Draco took it at once.
“Fine, I suppose our friends can wait on me, it is my birthday after all, you should be allowed to spoil me and make me late for my own party if it means I get more presents.” Harry couldn’t believe how much he’d come to love Draco’s sarcastic little grin, and he was delighted to see it appear even as Draco’s cheeks turned slightly pink as he pulled off the wrapping.
“A chocolate frog, really Harry? Do you already know what the card is, or is this just in case I don’t have enough sugar waiting for me with all the refreshments downstairs?”
“Just open it,” Harry said with an affectionate eye roll.
As always, Draco pulled out the card and started to raise the frog to his mouth as he read, but then he stopped. The frog squirmed in his grip, but he ignored it in favour of looking at Harry.
“Did you have this specially made?”
“I dunno,” Harry said, “Why don’t you read it?”
With one last quirked eyebrow directed at Harry, Draco flipped the card over and read:
“‘Draco Lucius Malfoy, 1980-present. Former student at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, this Slytherin went on to pioneer an additive for the Wolfsbane Potion, in order to reduce pain during full-moon transformations.’
“You left out the part about improving the taste too, I’m very proud of that,” Draco said, interrupting himself.
“I’m proud of you for that too,” Harry said immediately. “Now keep reading.”
“‘Malfoy also campaigned to introduce mind healers to all departments in St. Mungos, allowing all patients to receive a full spectrum of care while admitted. In his free time, Draco Malfoy enjoys playing quidditch, collecting Chocolate Frog cards, and spending time with Harry Potter, who loves him and wants to spend the rest of his life with him, and-” Draco’s eyes grew wide, and he drew in a shaky breath. “-who hopes Draco will say yes to the next question that he is asked.’”
Draco looked up, already blinking against the tears threatening to blur his vision. Harry was down on one knee in front of him, holding out a silver ring.
“Will you marry me?”
Draco hardly let him finish asking before cutting him off and crying, “Yes, yes! Yes, I’ll marry you, I love you so much, you ridiculous man,” and flinging his arms around Harry’s neck as Harry stood to slide the ring on his finger. The Chocolate Frog Draco had been holding took advantage of his loosened grip to make a bid for freedom, but neither Harry nor Draco noticed, far too preoccupied with their own happiness to care about a Chocolate Frog for once.
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