One thing I found
cutsceneaddict.tumblr.com/post/84632602109/the-psychology-of-writing-5-ways-to-make-yourHaving read through the story and the reviews I find myself agreeing at least partially with reviewers tenga and Curlism. Admittedly much of that is simply the fact that your fic is just not to my taste and isn't something I would have read outside of this.
I guess part of it is that Harry doesn't read like a sixteen year old boy who's just had his entire world ripped out from under him. He's sort of placidly going around and doing what people say with some token resistance (he tells Narcissa to call him Harry once but otherwise accepts it - this from a boy who wouldn't admit he was lying while being tortured by Umbridge seems a little off) and some of it seems a little childish (kicking Snape in the shins?). We never seem him think about James and Lily - especially when it turns out Lily is alive - and for somebody who seems so certain that Ron and Hermione would never betray him he doesn't seem to want to contact them or escape and go on the run with them. In fact he seems to have very muted reactions. The woman he thought died for him was a. not his mother and b. alive and his reaction is a gasp. He finds out that his beloved godfather faked his own death, kept up the illusion for a year and a bit and his reaction is relatively mild.
With regard to the Harry/Draco friendship - the fact that they've spent the past five years arguing, fighting, attempting to screw each other over and have each tried to kill the other (3rd year, Draco tried to get Harry to fall off his broom. Harry used Sectumsempra less than a month before) seems to be glossed over. They only talk about the origin of the rivalry (which was also to do with the fact that Draco insulted Hagrid and muggles the first time they met) rather than it's outcomes.
I think a large part of the problem is that, although you've given a somewhat reasonable timetable of a few weeks in Chapter 7, it's entirely summarised. I can understand that, in that it cuts down writing which could otherwise be monotonous, tangential or reveal information before you want the reader to know it but we get all of two sentences on what must be substantial relationship developments and that isn't enough. As much as 'show don't tell' is somewhat trite, in this case it's warranted. If you're going to turn characters who already have a bad history together into people who actually get on well in a fashion that is believable and organic for the reader you need to actually show that on screen (so to speak). What common ground do they have? What do they like about each other? What do they actually talk about? When was the first time one of them made the other laugh genuinely? What happened the first time Draco reflexively said something derogatory about muggles/muggle borns?
As far as father/son relationships go there doesn't seem to be much of one. For somebody who can apparently care about people Voldemort doesn't actually spend any time with his long lost son. People keep telling Harry not to call him Voldemort but Harry's never actually told what to call him. We see more of a parent-child relationship between Harry and Snape - which I'm given to understand can be an outcome when one sibling is substantially older than the other - than we do between Harry and Voldemort.
Writing a character who does have a soft side but doesn't show it can be hard. Again, my advice would be that you would need to show it to the reader because having the characters just talk about it doesn't make it so. Maybe photos of Lucinda appear in Harry's room. Maybe Harry is actually called to see Voldemort and talk wth Voldemort trying to see behind the glamour and Boy-Who-Lived-Chosen-One to see his youngest son.
To speak more succinctly and more generally - if you want to show developing relationships actually put them on screen and allow them to develop as well as having it happen over a period of time which is reasonable. Show the good bits, like finding out that somebody else likes the thing you like, but also the awkward bits (one person is touchy-feely, the other doesn't like being touched), the new-people-getting-to-know-each-other mess ups, the things they'll
never get about each other, the things they could talk about for hours.
Now for romantic relationships you can do this and work it up a notch or add some sexual tension or you can discount it entirely and focus solely on the sexual tension, possibly adding in the getting to know each other later. Really it all depends on how you want the relationship to come across.
Parental relationships are somewhat different - especially if you're adding in the 'character finds out that character B rather than character A is their mother/father' because (speaking as somebody who did find one bio parent later in life) it takes a while to adjust and you lose a dimension of child/parent. Age is a factor since the older you are (especially somebody at Harry's age, on the cusp of legal adulthood) adding a new parental figure to the one/s you already have can be a nightmare in terms of parenting styles. If Parent 1 is very lenient, allowing the child to run free, and Parent 2 comes in and has all sorts of expectations and rules there can be a lot of tension. That can happen in homes where both parents have been present since birth, but the contrast tends to be more dramatic with the newness and the elevated age of the child. Especially given that there's often some difficulties around the time a child becomes a legal adult since it takes some parents a very long time to recognise that their baby is actually now a legal adult with no obligation to them.
One thing you also have to consider is that just because somebody is biologically related to you that doesn't mean you're obligated to let them be in your life. So it's perfectly understandable for a character to decide 'I don't give a fuck if I'm related to them by blood, my family are these people here'.
