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English
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HP Fruit Fest 2023
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Published:
2023-03-11
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1,245
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1/1
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38
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120
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Taking Pear of Each Other

Summary:

Draco Malfoy has a boot full of pears and Harry Potter has a pub full of people who like eating them.

Notes:

Prompt:

 

Pears

 

Symbolism: Inner peace, affection, immortality and prosperity

Kudos if you do incorporate any culture mythology, but that's totally optional. Run with whatever idea you come up with, and have fun!

Work Text:

The entire war had been a waste. A waste of youth. A waste of life. A waste of time. 

It was in a new war against waste that Draco Malfoy had found himself outside the Crossed Wands in Trowbridge. He’d gotten a list from the ministry of all the wizarding pubs in Wiltshire and had been going from one to the next with a boot full of pears. 

He’d always liked pears. Their thin skin, rich flavour dripping down his chin. The way the pear in the portrait leading to the Hogwarts kitchens would laugh before turning into a knob to turn.

Learning to drive on the thin wizarding routes of Wootton Bassett had been its own challenge, but the charms he’d added on to his auto had made it impervious to crashes and spelled it straight on the road. The Crossed Wands was the last on his list and for a very good reason. 

The building that housed the pub had been built during the reign of the Tudors. All white plaster and dark timbers, lovingly restored by Harry Potter himself. Harry’d come out of the pub to stare at his lorry, parked jaggedly next to the street.

“Could you have found anything less noticeable, Malfoy?” He’d asked incredulously, his eyes round behind his glasses. “That’s a Thronycroft. From the 1930s. Muggles will stare.”

Draco had rolled his shoulder at Harry. Who cared about whether or not the muggles stared? The lorry had built-in muggle repellant spells so it wouldn’t be a true problem. 

The bushels in the back were bursting with pears from the manor orchard. Boscs, Nashis, Forelles, d’Anjou (both red and green), Comice, Glabras, Pyrusses and a golden-silver variety that Draco’s ancestors swore had come from the orchard of Alcinous from the Odyssey. They’d apparently been hiked across Europe in the early 400s and planted as the first trees in the orchard.

Harry’s green eyes had gone round and he’d called Ginny in to look at the bounty Draco had brought with him.

“We can take some of these, but have you thought about making scrumpy out of the rest?” was Ginny’s innocent suggestion, but it had been the beginning.

+++

Scrumpy wasn’t the only thing that Harry had started to stock at the pub. More requests followed in the first year of their partnership. Pear Brandy, Pear Ale and Pear wine became regular fixtures on the menu. 

No one outside of Harry, Ginny and Draco knew that he’d become their supplier. The press he’d bought second hand and refurbished lovingly squeezed out the windfalls and the harvest kept the pub in pears the rest of the year.

It was ten years after the war, when the fourth pastry chef in as many months quit that Harry and Ginny had proposed hiring Draco to take his place. 

It had happened in what Draco later learned was calculated but began as a light conversation over scones, clotted cream and pear jam. Ginny insisted that the jam go on first then the clotted cream. Draco’s own preference was murky, having had nannies both from Devon and Cornwall, but liked to rile her up by suggesting that the only way to eat scones was if the clotted cream be topped by pear jam. 

That a full jelly jar of jam was consumed between the two of them at every possible instance was a complication that no one remarked on. 

“You should give it a try, Draco,” Ginny had mumbled after Harry jabbed her in the ribs with his elbow. “If you don’t want to see the rest of the staff you can just come in Mondays. We use the day for a holiday and you’d have full run of the place.”

And so Draco started showing up at the Crossed Wands in his strange lorry from the 1930s every Monday morning, putting his pears to good use in a variety of different desserts.

+++ 

It was over the next year that the desserts became the thing that the town muggles and wizards from across England started to visit the pub for. Draco would come in dark and early, oftentimes with a bushel of pears in the back. Other times he’d scour the orange trees, the apple trees or go wading through the bog looking for cranberries. 

The novelty of watching the boy who lived pull a pint faded, but the taste of Draco’s sliced pears dipped in chocolate on a bed of vanilla ice cream stayed with their patrons long after their visit and kept them coming back.

Draco would use spells and cantrips to keep the ice cream frozen and the sliced fruit expertly placed across the plates, the swirls of chocolate, creme Anglaise and carmel drizzled by him at every instance. Sometimes a new dessert would take the whole day, and Harry blessed his foresight in making Draco’s walk-in a wizard space where they could expand it easily to hold a hundred plates or more.

+++

“Hermione is coming out this weekend.” It was unexpected for Harry to be in the kitchen on a Monday and Draco squeezed the icing bag far too hard, squirting a perfectly good buttercream on the ceiling. Spelling it away he raised his eyebrows at the man who was technically his boss, but rarely made any sort of demands on his time or creativity. ‘As long as there’s something to put on the menu’ was an oft repeated refrain.

“What?”

“Hermione is coming out next weekend. She’s the minister of her own department now, and she’s burnt out.” Harry chewed on his lip, his relaxed posture on the doorframe a lie. “She likes pears and I was hoping you could make her something special.”

“Fine.”

“I appreciate this, Draco.” The boys burst into the kitchen, skidding before staring at Draco, who scowled at them. It never lasted and they stole the candies he had ready for them in his jacket pockets and ran out into the sunshine behind their father. “Thanks again.”

Draco just grunted, applying himself to placing the charmed chocolate dipped carmel stars over the pear fairy cakes under his fingers.

+++

Pear is a delicate flavour. Overcook them and they become pulp. Oversugar them and they are too sweet. Bruise them and their taste fades to nothingness or, worse still, becomes commonplace like an apple.

That first weekend that Hermione relaxed with Harry, Ginny, James, Al and Lily on a picnic table under the oak tree outside the pub she’d finished off her meal with a pear cobbler with a dollop of a rich and tangy citrus-yoghourt ice cream atop it.

It had taken a month before she’d come again and Draco had made delicately caramelised pear tatin in a chocolate pastry.

It was only a week later that she caught him in the kitchen, putting the finishing flourishes on individual pear trifles, whipped cream standing on end as the topmost layer.

The request that she be able to come and work with him in the kitchen the next week was a surprise, though welcome. They’d worked together to poach pears in wine and stack the ladyfingers as they built the pears charlotte. He’d cut into the cake and wine-red pears, her eyes following the knife down, and lifted a forkful into her mouth.

It was to no one’s surprise that Hermione soon moved into Malfoy manor, where Draco spent the rest of his life finding new, surprising and intensely creative ways to take pear of each other.