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“Reparo.”The two halves of Harry’s holly wand draw themselves together along the filament of phoenix feather, splintered ends fitting neatly into their places like two clasped hands. The seam where the break had been glows, the colour like the last sliver of sunset before it disappears below the horizon. It fades away like that, too, gone in a blink, leaving no sign of the damage behind. Red sparks shoot out from the tip. They had been red and gold a lifetime ago at Ollivanders.It makes a certain kind of sense. The holly wand is different now. So is Harry.He picks it up, and a familiar sudden warmth spreads through his palm, his fingers.He hasn’t lost this, at least.Hermione breathes out, her eyes on Harry’s wand, face emotionless. Ron rubs absently at her back. He’s looking in the direction of Harry’s wand, but not at it. After all those nights searching for Horcruxes, Harry knows when Ron’s mind is elsewhere.That’s that, he supposes. War, over. Wand, fixed. There’s nothing left to do but put the Elder Wand back where it belongs, and then…Then he lives.Then he’s the Boy Who Lived, Again.Harry rolls his wand in his fingers. They’re alone up here in the Headmaster’s office, besides the portraits. It might be nice to collapse into his friends and—He doesn’t know. Have a cry, or something.But there’s not much room between the two of them, on the other side of the desk. There’s not enough room for Harry.Ron and Hermione would make room. He knows that. It’s only that his nerves feel frayed, held together by a final filament of purpose, like the holly wand before he fixed it.Harry imagines the pressure of Ron’s arm slung across his shoulders and wants to scream.That’s the wrong impulse. What’s the matter with him? Besides the war, and the constant stress of being hunted, and his miserable childhood. Besides all that. Winning the war was supposed to feel good.It feels like nothing.Like running off the edge of a high cliff. Like his feet meeting thin air. Nothing to catch him. Nothing to cling to. Nothing.That nothing is in his head. Harry can feel it there. An empty space where something used to be. Where fucking Voldemort used to be. It doesn’t glow, golden and shining, like his wand knitting back together. It doesn’t even feel dark, like his four-poster with the curtains drawn, just before sleep. It’s colourless. Formless. Like a void.He wants a shower.Harry opens his mouth to say so, but the floor of the Headmaster’s office—Headmistress’s now, probably—rumbles.It’s faint, as far as rumbling goes, and all three of them look down at their shoes. It could be them, making that happen. Harry doesn’t know. He’s not sure he cares.“Harry.” Kingsley Shacklebolt appears at the top of the staircase. That was the rumble. The scrape of stone on stone. “I need you to come with me.”“What?” Harry can’t explain the burst of irritation, like sparks across his eyes and the inside of his chest. He had a plan. Return the Elder Wand. “What for?”A shout echoes from the hall below, and Kingsley’s eyes dart towards the sound. “Peace,” he says. “If you want a moment to breathe, it’s time to go. Otherwise they’ll put you on the war council.”“The war’s over.” Harry ended it. He ended it. What more can they want from him?“Plenty of fighting left to do.” Kingsley puts out his hand.He’s right. They’d named him temporary Minister for Magic earlier today, and Harry had had a vote. He’s seventeen, and he’s missed an entire year of school. And, yeah, he defeated the Dark Lord, but that doesn’t mean he knows anything about politics or the Ministry. Kingsley will do fine, he thinks, but he mostly voted for him because they need a Minister and Kingsley is a good man and they’d wanted him to vote.Harry doesn’t want to vote anymore. At least not now. He doesn’t want to sit in the Great Hall and let people touch him. That had been okay, for a while. He understood how much they needed it.These few minutes in the Headmaster’s office, with nobody’s hands on him, have made it easier to breathe.More shouting. Two people, maybe three.“You should go, mate.” Ron pushes his hand through his hair. “You deserve a rest.”“What about you?”“We’ll stay.” Hermione’s head comes up, her eyes bright again. “We’ll stay here, and that way we’ll be represented. They don’t need all of us.”Harry hears we don’t need you.He’s gone mental, because Hermione’s only giving him what he wants, and the emptiness in his head turns it ugly and backhanded.“Harry,” Kingsley says.The hug he throws around his friends’ necks is bone on bone and knocks the breath out of him. He hands the Elder Wand to Ron.“Could you—”“’Course we can.” Ron squeezes his shoulder. Harry imagines screaming, but doesn’t. “Get going before they crown you king. And send us an owl when you’re rested up.”One of the people at the foot of the stairs exclaims over the lopsided gargoyle. Hermione starts to lift her arm for one last hug.“Harry." Kingsley throws a nervous glance at the stairwell. “It’s now or never.” Harry flashes Hermione an apologetic look, his face feeling tight and worn, and takes Kingsley’s arm. He is inhaling the tang of magic that clings to his robes from the Battle when Apparition yanks them away. They land in the sitting room of a cosy Muggle flat, with a rug on the floor and a dark green sofa and a painting on the wall of two boys standing at the seaside, both of them in navy shorts and white shirts that have never been touched by Dark Magic or stained by battle wounds.“Mother.” The voice comes from behind them, and it’s not Kingsley’s. “You can’t. I won’t allow—”“Draco.” Harry knows the second voice. Won’t ever forget it. Is Draco alive? Is he in the castle?He lets go of Kingsley and turns, numb disbelief creeping over him.Draco Malfoy stands in the kitchen with his mother, shoulders slumped towards her. His eyes flick to Harry and Kingsley, and his mouth becomes a thin, wavering line.“I’m not doing this,” he says.“You are,” Narcissa insists, and reaches up to stroke her knuckles over his cheek. “A few days. A week, perhaps, while things settle.”“With him?” Malfoy’s voice is brittle around the words.Harry looks at Kingsley. Peace? This is what Kingsley meant by peace?“We’ll find another place in a day or two.” Kingsley lifts a hand and rubs at the back of his neck. “We had to ward it, and there was the Fidelius to think of, and—”“Fine.” Harry just wants quiet. He has no kingdom, but he’d give it for a minute or two without anyone talking to him.“Good man.” Kingsley claps Harry on the shoulder. His body tries to flinch away, and concern darts across Kingsley’s eyes. “I’d stay to make sure—”“Go,” Harry says. “Thanks, Kingsley. Just—you can go.”The crack of his Disapparition is double. Narcissa Malfoy Disapparates, too, leaving Malfoy alone in the kitchen.Harry’s ears ring in the silence. It seems weighted, almost pressurised.Malfoy doesn’t look at him.Harry can’t help looking.He’s taller than he was in sixth-year, and now that Harry’s not being dragged into a drawing room by Snatchers or fighting for his life, he can see how the war has hollowed Malfoy out. It’s given him a strange, sharp beauty, though Harry misses, in a fucked-up way, the colour he used to have in his cheeks during Quidditch matches or in the falling snow at Hogsmeade. His hair is like starlight, if the fallen streaks had come down to earth in a haphazard slide. Holes and scorch-marks decorate his robes.What is he supposed to do, in this silence with Malfoy?What is he supposed to say?Nothing comes to mind. Nothing that would be worth saying. Harry’s body aches, head to toe. His clothes stick to him in places they shouldn’t, and he can’t take it. He hadn’t felt the blood or the dirt or the sweat. Now it’s all he can feel.The flat is a one-bedroom—peace, he thinks, wanting to be bitter but too exhausted to muster it up. Harry kicks off his shoes and goes past the bed to the bathroom, ignoring the framed embroidery on the walls. Inspirational quotes or something. Nothing is going to inspire him right now. He tosses his wand onto the countertop, then picks it up and puts it down again, more carefully this time.He has Malfoy’s wand, too, in the back pocket of his jeans.That goes next to the sink with the holly wand.Then Harry strips off his shirt. It used to be green, but it’s covered in dust and grime and, yeah, a little blood, and there’s not much green left. He has to peel the long sleeves from his arms. His jeans are stiff in patches and land on the floor of the bathroom with a muffled crumpling sound. He takes off his glasses and rubs at them with a towel he finds near the sink, then sets them aside, too.He kneels down next to the bathtub, his spine protesting, a sharp ache across his shoulders, and reaches for the knob above the faucet.“You tosser,” he says to himself, something in his chest catching. “You’re a wizard.”Harry could have filled the tub with magic. He didn’t have to do this.The knob creaks under his hand, and water rushes from the faucet. Harry’s a bit dizzy, now, what with having died and come back to life and all the running and hiding and fighting, so he crosses his arms, streaked with all the evidence from the battle, on the side of the tub and rests his forehead.Through the circle of his arms, past one bruised knee and a set of battered, unkempt toes, he sees the bathmat.It has a snowy owl on it.The bird is perched on a branch, and in the distance there’s a house, or a cottage, its windows lit up. A Christmas scene. Snow on the rooftop. Red holly berries. Evergreens. Something they’d sell at Tesco. It would make Aunt Petunia turn up her nose.And it just.Kills him.The first sob out of Harry’s mouth is so unfamiliar that he doesn’t know where it’s coming from, and only realises it’s him crying like that, all raw and strangled and terrible, when he feels his belly heaving along with his chest and his mind puts them together.“Potter?” He’s too involved in crying his guts out to think much of the fact that Malfoy’s never sounded like this before. Like he might be worried about Harry. “Are you hurt?”Harry shrieks out a laugh, but it’s so twisted up in a sob that he does sound hurt, and then there’s a hand on his shoulder.The whole of Malfoy’s hand presses coolly against the plane of his shoulder blade, with no tickling, too-soft points of contact, and not digging in hard, either.“Potter,” he says again. “Do you have an injury? I can’t let you die of it. The Minister knows I’m the only one here with you.”“You—could,” Harry gasps. “Your wand is on the countertop.”“Let you die?”“Kill me. Do whatever you want.”There is a stunned near-silence, filled with the rush of water and Harry’s embarrassing, choking sobs. Malfoy’s hand lifts off his shoulder. His robes brush Harry’s right ankle. It disrupts the pattern of his sobs enough that he can take a full breath.And keep sobbing.“Are you sure you haven’t been injured?” Malfoy says, as if Harry isn’t making the worst, most guttural sounds he’s ever made in his life.“I was dead for a minute.”A pause.“You’re not dead now, I should hope.”“Don’t think so.”Robes brush the back of his ankle again, and Malfoy’s wand appears at the very top of Harry’s vision. He doesn’t hear an incantation, but bubbles pour out of it and down into the bath. The water stops running.“It would be more comfortable in the bath,” Malfoy mentions. “What do you say?”Harry hauls his head off his arms and pushes himself up. He’s so tired that there’s no way, there’s just no way that he climbs into the bath without slipping and cracking his skull. Also, he can’t stop crying, so he stands there, helpless, his stomach about to burst out of his throat, until that cool hand is on his arm, and—does Malfoy Vanish his pants?Yes. He does.And then he steadies Harry while he steps into the tub and sits, his face in his hands.“Merlin,” Malfoy says, and clicks his tongue.Robes swish, and something pops, and then there’s the scent of shampoo, clean and a bit floral, and warm water, along with Malfoy’s hands, in his hair.He’s just.
Too.
Too everything to put up a fight. Harry follows Malfoy’s instructions to tip his head this way and that and close his eyes. He accepts a cloth and washes up as much as he can, which isn’t much. It’s about when Malfoy rubs it over Harry’s back that he hiccups, finding himself abruptly at the end of his sobs.“I’m tired,” he says into his hands. “I’m so bloody tired.”Too tired, really, to refuse Malfoy’s hand to get out of the tub, and too tired to cast his own Drying Charm, and too tired to say what the hell are these? when Malfoy presents him with a pair of flannel pyjama trousers Harry’s never seen and a T-shirt with a cartoon of one of the Royal Guards on it.He should eat, but he doesn’t want to.Harry drags himself from the bathroom to the bed and gets under the covers on one side.It’s enough to close his eyes.He doesn’t sleep. He just listens to the flat. It’s quiet. Far off, he can hear the faint impression of someone’s telly, and closer in, Malfoy’s footsteps. He moves around the bathroom. Soft thumps say he’s getting undressed. The shower runs, and Harry thinks of what he must look like in there, naked and wet and lovely.And too thin. Too hollow.Harry owes him. He should go in and wash Malfoy’s hair.He can’t get up, though.And he might be hallucinating. Why aren’t they fighting? They should be fighting.The shower turns off.Malfoy’s footsteps leave the room. His scent lingers behind—shampoo and clean skin and silvery magic.Harry rolls over.A little while later, or maybe several hours, the other side of the bed dips, and Harry opens his eyes.“Oh, hello,” Malfoy says softly.He’s stretched out next to Harry, his head on the other pillow, his grey eyes catching the very last of the sunset as it bleeds gold fire out onto the horizon.He watches Harry.Harry watches him back.It’s the first time in months, maybe years, that his heart has settled to a normal rhythm.“Why?” he asks, his mouth sluggish.Malfoy lets out a soft breath. “It all seems so long ago, now.”“Yeah.” It does. The way they hated each other. Did Harry hate him? Was it real, or was it just something to pass the time?“I’m sorry,” Malfoy says. His mouth is a sweet shadow in the fading light.“For what?”“It can’t have been pleasant,” he answers, a bit tentative. “Dying.”“It was okay.” Harry shrugs. “It didn’t hurt.”“Something did.”The ache in his chest returns like Harry never sobbed it out. “My wand was broken.”Malfoy makes a sympathetic noise.“I fixed it,” Harry continues. “Nothing else seems fixed, though. I’m still…” Aunt Petunia’s voice reappears in his mind. “A freak.”“For the usual reasons, or are there new and exciting ones?”Harry laughs. It feels good. Better than sobbing. “I couldn’t stand for anyone else to touch me. That’s why I’m here, and not being the king.”“Whoever said you could be king?”“Ron.”“Oh, for Merlin’s sake. Don’t listen to him.”Harry can’t take his eyes off Malfoy. His T-shirt is plain, and Malfoy is ethereal in it. “Do we still hate each other?”Malfoy’s eyes search Harry’s. “I can’t quite summon the will, at the moment.”“I can’t, either.”In the quiet that follows, and the steady rhythm of Malfoy’s breathing, a soft glow, barely visible, threads through the empty space in Harry’s head. It’s tiny. Like a filament of phoenix feather, or starlight.“Did it bother you?” Malfoy asks.“Did what bother me?” Harry opens his eyes. When did he close them?“That I touched you. You said you couldn’t stand it.”“No.” The yawn that overtakes Harry is massive. “It didn’t bother me. I liked it.”He just.Can’t help saying it. It’s true, anyway, and what’s the point in lying?“Good,” Malfoy says.“I didn’t touch you.” Harry’s beginning to feel a bit drunk. Or over-exhausted. He closes his eyes again. “Didn’t—I mean. Wash your hair.”“My mother likes to run her fingers through it.”“Your hair?”“Yes.”“Want me to?” He’s so tired that all the syllables get jammed up together.“If you don’t mind,” Malfoy says, very posh.Harry inches himself over until his face is partway on Malfoy’s pillow and searches out his hair. He runs his fingers through it. Malfoy’s hair is damp at the ends.“Oh, God, that’s soft.”Malfoy laughs, but it’s more air than anything else. “So I’ve heard.”Harry strokes Malfoy’s hair until his arm is tired. His arm was already tired, though, so it doesn’t make much difference, except that his hand lingers on Malfoy’s head. One time, it lands on his neck. His shoulder.Malfoy’s shoulder shakes.It shakes again.“Are you injured?” Harry’s tongue doesn’t want to cooperate.“No, I’m quite all right.”“You’re crying.”“I’m sure I’m not.”Harry finds Malfoy’s face with the pad of his thumb. He doesn’t acknowledge the tears out loud. Waste of energy. But he does wipe them away, one by one.“Would you do something else for me?” Malfoy asks, somehow more posh than he was before.“Mmm?” Harry says.“Would you call me by my name?”“What, Draco?”“Yes. That.”“Okay.” It’s weird, isn’t it? They haven’t come to blows. They haven’t hexed each other. And Draco’s name feels like it’s always belonged in Harry’s mouth. “Okay, Draco.”He goes back to stroking Mal—Draco’s hair.“Draco.” It’s been a long time, Harry thinks. “Why are you crying?”“I’m not,” Draco answers.Sleep is tugging at him now. It wraps Harry in its arms. Holds him close.Harry finds that his arm is draped over Draco’s waist and can’t pick it up again.“What do you think—tomorrow? Tomorrow to do?”“Oh, tomorrow.” Draco sounds like he’s pulled out his fancy, posh-person diary. “We’ll get up and have tea. Toast, if you want it. We could walk down the street and see if there’s a flower shop.”“Flowers?”“A bit of colour couldn’t hurt.” Draco is teasing about it, as if Harry had scoffed at the idea of flowers. The spring flowers had come up in the Forest of Dean. He wouldn’t mind putting some in a vase. “Perhaps there’s a café, or a bookshop.”He can see it. The café, with its little round tables. The bookshop, with its neat shelves. New, fresh sun over all of it. A cat might live at the bookshop, a black one with white markings on its face. It comes to Draco and curls around his shins, and Draco bends down to stroke its back. Harry chooses a book from the shelf. It has nothing to do with war, or fighting, or dying, and he buys it to take home with him. They sit in the window at the café, and sunlight touches Draco’s hair as gently as he touched Harry’s. They have the best sandwich Harry’s ever tasted. They laugh about how foolish it was to hate each other when they could have been at a bookshop instead, and Draco looks a little less hollow, and Harry feels a little less empty, and when Draco touches him, he leans into it, and not away. He leans into the arms that come around him from behind, and Draco rests his chin on Harry’s shoulder and breathes.In and out.In and out.In and out.Harry wakes in the morning to new, fresh sunlight, the kind that shone through the window at the café.It shines down on the empty half of the bed, where Harry’s arm is draped over nothing. At the sight of his arm over rumpled blankets, there’s a twinge in Harry’s head, like the beginnings of pain.Harry finds Draco’s wand tucked next to Harry’s on the bathroom counter.The flat is empty.Draco is gone.
Art by Phantasmagoria
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
Harry begins his Tuesday afternoon like too many others in his recent past: by throwing up on a bush.He tries to straighten up afterwards, but it turns out it’s not afterwards yet. Another bolt of pain through his skull just behind his scar doubles him over.Merlin, fuck, it’s so bad. “Circe’s tit,” Pansy Parkinson says from somewhere above him and to the right, and then her footsteps clatter on stone. He can feel her reaching for him—in other words, feel her being a normal person, unlike Harry—and puts his hand up just in time to stop her. Pansy makes a frustrated ugh sound. “I’m not touching you. But you know you can’t continue on this way. It does not bode well for your health, Potter.”Harry stands, carefully, and manages to get fully upright without another incident. He pulls his glasses off to un-fog and Vanishes the mess he’s left in the bush. It wasn’t very much, given how many minutes he spent heaving, and though Harry would like to count it as a positive, he knows it just means he hasn’t been eating.Unfortunately, he didn’t move quickly enough to hide it from Pansy.“And I see you haven’t been eating.” She crosses her arms over her chest and taps her foot on a section of the gravel drive in front of the Malfoy Manor, the sound crisp and clear through the first thin snowfall of the year. “You know, a reasonable person would insist that you check yourself into St Mungo’s and refuse to leave until they’d come up with some way to help you.”“Lucky for me, you’re not a reasonable person, and we have a deal, Parkinson.” He puts his glasses back on. It’s true that Harry has headaches that sometimes cause him to throw up on bushes or, in one memorable incident, during an all-staff meeting. It’s also true that Pansy is six months pregnant, almost seven, and has been hiding her bump with increasingly complex Glamours to avoid being put on desk duty.She rolls her eyes and tugs a bit at the waist of her crimson Auror’s robes. “How bad is it this time?”Harry gestures towards the bush.Pansy mutters under her breath—sounds like Gryffindors and their bloody individualist attitudes—then sticks her hand into one of the pouches on her wand holster and takes out a tiny vial. A teal potion swims inside. She glances in every direction, then hands it to Harry surreptitiously, though there’s nobody watching.Harry uncorks it and swallows the contents in one. It leaves a soft, clean feeling on his tongue. The pain is gone before he can count to five. “Thanks, Pans.”He hands the empty vial back to Pansy, who puts it into her pouch with a sigh. “I don’t know how long I can keep this secret.”Harry narrows his eyes at her and casts a wandless Freshening Charm on his mouth, just to be safe. “Did you already forget that we have a deal? Because I swear, we just talked about this.”“I didn’t forget. What I mean is that you can’t ask me to take the fall for you when Ron finds out about the extras.”“I didn’t ask you to take the fall for me.”“He’s going to notice.”“And when he notices, tell him he can talk to me about it.” Harry puts a hand to the back of his neck and rubs. As long as he’s outside, he can do another scan of the area near the entrance of Malfoy Manor. Nothing about it is different. It looks the same as it has every winter for the last seven years. Harry has never seen a groundskeeper out on any of their visits, or the house-elves that take care of the Manor itself, but the marble fountain in the centre of the drive has been spelled for the cold season. New snow glistens on the hedges, not quite covering the expanse of grass. There’s no sign that anyone has been here at all.Harry hopes for a sign—a change in the wards, an attack on the gate, something—every time they come.There never is.“He’s worried about you.” Pansy’s voice softens from its usual razor-sharp precision, which means she’s really telling Harry that she herself is worried about him. She might be married to Ron, but he’s been one of Harry’s best friends for longer. He already knows Ron’s worried about him. Ron’s always worried about him. That’s what happens when your best mate becomes a Healer. He worries, even when he doesn’t need to.“I’ll look into it when we close this case.”Pansy pinches her lips together. This Case is half the reason Harry became an Auror and all of the reason Pansy did, and it’s why they fought tooth-and-nail to be partners. It surprised just about everybody, including Robards, who had been the one to sit them down after the blowout argument they’d had a few months into training. It had almost become a duel, and Robards hadn’t had any of it. He’d told them in no uncertain terms to put the past behind them or see themselves to the door.After that meeting, Harry and Pansy had stalked side-by-side all the way out of the Ministry. Pansy had thrown herself into the nearest pub in a huff, and Harry had ordered two Butterbeers and slammed them down on the table between them, and they’d both burst out into hissing rage at the same time.“—the past! Behind us! Who the hell does he think he is?”Pansy drew her wand and cast a Muffliato over their booth. “—thinks this is some ridiculous inter-house rivalry, for fuck’s sake—”“—not here to get revenge for what happened during a bloody war. I have more important things to find out, like—”“—I want to know where the fuck that bastard has been hiding Draco!”“Yes!” Harry shouted, and slammed his Butterbeer even harder, sloshing half of it onto the table.Pansy had stared, wide-eyed, open-mouthed, as Harry clapped both hands over his scar and tried to breathe out the splintering pain while Butterbeer dripped into his lap.Then she leaned over the table, Vanished the spilled drink, and dried Harry’s robes.“I apologise.” Her hands wrapped primly around her mug. “I think I might’ve had a stroke. Would you mind repeating yourself?”Harry had taken his hands down slowly, eased his eyes open to make sure he wasn’t tempting fate, and made direct eye contact with Pansy.“I’ve been looking for him for six months,” Harry said. “I’ve gone to the Manor. I even wrote to McGonagall, just to see if she’d heard from him. I can’t find anything. And—”“And there should have been a trial,” Pansy had whispered, despite the Silencing Charm.“Exactly.”They’d gone to file the missing persons report together, and made it their business to keep the case open, though everybody else brushed it aside. At least once a year, somebody in the administrative section tried to mark it CLOSED, and one of them would have to go fish it out of the Records Room and fill out the paperwork to re-open it again.Whoever keeps spelling that stamp on the paperwork had been at it again just last week, and Pansy had gone on a tirade in the administrative section that had left her out of breath for half an hour afterwards. She’d filled out the forms—again—practically stabbing at the parchment with her quill. The case file had been returned to their office just this morning, and they’d both silently agreed to have a look around the Manor.After this long without a sighting or a tip, they’re only supposed to come every three months, but fuck it.Pansy adjusts the hood of her winter cloak and must decide against having the argument. They might never close the case. She knows that. Harry knows that. It’s a card she hasn’t played yet, and he doesn’t think she will.Not today, anyway.“Shall we?” Pansy takes out her wand. “I only got as far as the foyer before I realised you were gone.”“Yeah. Let’s go.”They climb the wide, stone steps. As they approach the massive front doors of the Manor, they swing open to reveal a house-elf with an embroidered apron and drooping ears.“Hi, Bibsy,” Harry says. Bibsy had wailed for forty minutes the first time they’d come to follow up on their own missing persons report, and the resigned sadness in her eyes makes Harry wish the headache had rendered him unconscious. “How are you?”“Does Harry Potter need a Pain-Relieving Potion? Bibsy can find one for an upset stomach, also, if Harry Potter needs one.”“Thanks, Bibsy. I’m okay.” He ignores Pansy’s pointed look. They go past Bibsy, and Harry stomps the snow off his boots. Bibsy Vanishes it delicately before it can melt on the floor. “Has anyone been to the Manor since we were here last? Any of the Malfoys?”“The Malfoys are being in France,” Bibsy says, her ears drooping further.“We know Draco’s parents are in France, but thank you, Bibsy.” Pansy is always exceptionally gentle with house-elves. “What about Draco? He hasn’t been here, or sent a letter, has he?”“No.” Bibsy’s bottom lip quivers. “But Harry Potter and Pansy Parkinson are welcome to look. Call Bibsy if Harry Potter and Pansy Parkinson need anything.”She disappears with a pop.From far away, almost like the wind picking up, Bibsy starts to wail. They’re not fully in their office—still in the hallway, actually—when Pansy says, “I’ve had enough. We have to go to the Prophet.”At the other end of the hall, Percy Weasley loiters outside Robards’ office with a wix Harry vaguely recognises.“—unconscionably loud,” Percy’s saying. “It’s been a nightmare.”Percy’s eyes catch Harry’s, so Harry nods to him.Percy nods back, a second too late, like he’d been planning to ignore Harry. He hasn’t become less of a twat since Kingsley took him on as his assistant in some show of good faith and getting over people’s past mistakes or something.Harry focuses back on Pansy. “Yeah?”They’ve talked about when to go public many times. Harry has always been opposed to involving the press. Draco might have gone away by himself, and if Rita Skeeter scents a story about an ex-Death Eater, half the wizarding world could follow her, and Draco would never have peace.Pansy has always called this the option of last resort. In the first years after the war, they couldn’t have counted on favourable press. A missing Death Eater would only be cause for celebration.But then another month would go by without Draco, and they’d wonder if it was finally time. Pansy would say, in her posh, cavalier way, that it didn’t matter if the world didn’t care—at least they’d have tried everything.Harry knew better than to believe her. She wanted them to care, so much it kept her up nights.Bibsy’s wails ring in his ears. The potion he took at the Manor is wearing off. His jaw hurts from gritting his teeth. They’ve been over the pros and cons so many times that Harry knows all of them by heart, including Pansy’s interjections in the conversation.“Yes.” She packs all her explanations into one word.“Yeah,” he says. This way, they’ll know if the world cares or not, or if it’s too late.“I’ll write to Blaise,” Pansy says. Blaise has connections at the Prophet, plus the kind of face that makes people want to do things for him.They go into their office and shut the door behind them.Harry sits heavily at his desk, head throbbing, and nudges the box of magical objects on his desk out of his way. A corner scrapes on a stray piece of parchment. A few of the things inside—broken evidence from closed cases, or abandoned things Harry’s found on patrol—clink against one another.Pansy sighs. “Why keep them at all?”“I’ll get around to fixing them one day,” Harry answers.He will. Harry’s absolutely wretched by the time he steps through the gate at his home in Godric’s Hollow. His headache is in full force again, and his eyes burn from keeping them open and attentive all afternoon. They’d visited all the usual places—the Manor, the flat in Croydon where Harry had last seen Draco, several shops in Diagon Alley to see if he’d been spotted.They’d also followed up on another missing persons case. Harry’s least favourite kind. Missing kids. There were two, but now there are three, all from different care homes in London. They’ve been searching in shifts for eight days. After the first forty-eight hours, they start to think in terms of recovery, not rescue.Turns Harry’s stomach.He trudges up the walk feeling done in. Defeated. Angry at himself for feeling defeated in the first place.The repaired and refurbished cottage doesn’t give him any lift, like it usually does. Harry spent three years’ worth of evenings and weekends on it. He Charmed rotted wood to fix itself and asked the house to move the walls and scrubbed away every inch of any residual Dark Magic. He’d thought about doing the same for Grimmauld Place, but in the end, it was too unfamiliar. He’d come to an uneasy peace with it, after the war, but he didn’t know enough about the Black family history to go chucking things in bins. His family’s house in Godric’s Hollow had felt like a scar he was capable of healing.And maybe, if he was lucky, restoring the house would get rid of his headaches. He wasn’t lucky. It didn’t get rid of the headaches. But at least the cottage isn’t rubble now. It’s his. And Kreacher’s, he supposes, since the house-elf had flat-out refused to let Harry live alone, so Harry pays him twice the salary to do as he pleases at Potter Cottage and Grimmauld Place.Harry goes in through the front door, peels his boots off with a renewed pounding in his head, and covers his ears. “Kreacher.”Kreacher appears with a crack that’s only a little muffled by Harry’s hands.“Harry Potter!” At the sight of Harry, he hunches his shoulders, like that will make him quieter. “Harry Potter,” he whispers, and Harry takes his hands down. “Does Harry Potter need dinner?”“Pansy’s going to be unbearable if I don’t eat, so, yes. But I don’t feel like cooking.” Or eating, if he’s honest. “Listen, Kreacher…do you think there are any more of those pain potions in the pantry at Grimmauld?”Kreacher shakes his head. “Harry Potter had the last of them in September.”“Can you ask the house to make some more?”“Kreacher will have to go to the apothecary for ingredients, and it is not open until tomorrow morning, but after that, Kreacher can go to—”“You know what? Never mind. We’ll just—we’ll talk about it tomorrow. I should eat.”“Does Harry Potter want noodles?”No. Harry Potter does not want noodles. But his stomach feels both hollow and compressed, and it’s reaching the point where his hunger will make the headache worse, so there’s no winning.“That would be great, Kreacher. Thanks.”“Kreacher will be making the noodles quietly,” Kreacher says, then backs away into the kitchen.Harry’s halfway up the stairs to shower when Kreacher drops something—from the thud and the shriek, probably a pot, and probably onto his foot. Harry clutches at the bannister and pushes his other fist hard as he can into his scar.“Kreacher? You okay?”“Kreacher is—” Kreacher’s shriek cuts off. “Fine,” he finishes in a shout-whisper.“Good,” Harry whispers back. It doesn’t help.He does deep-breathing exercises in the shower so that when Ron inevitably forces him to see someone at St Mungo’s, he’ll be able to say that he tried.He puts on his favourite joggers and the jumper Molly Weasley made him three Christmases ago—dark green with a silver H on the front.He eats half a bowl of noodles shaped like little bow ties with butter and cheese. Kreacher makes three trips into the sitting room to tidy, which mainly consists of re-tidying the copy of the Prophet he tidied earlier and giving Harry concerned looks. The room is plenty tidy. Harry has things on his shelves and a rug on the floor and a perfectly fine fireplace. It’s a sitting room, like he’s seen at other people’s houses. A random throw pillow. A blanket over the back of the sofa. That sort of thing.Harry eats three more bites of the noodles. Kreacher appears the second he puts the bowl on the coffee table with another, more obvious expression of concern and leaves without Disapparating.Next item on the agenda: walk upstairs so he can lie very, very still in his bed until he falls asleep.It’s not much of a life, but it’s Harry’s life. He can’t change the fundamental structure without losing the entire structure. If he’s not an Auror, he can’t, for example, keep Draco’s missing persons case open. It would be down to Pansy, who wouldn’t forgive him, which might not have mattered to eighteen-year-old Harry Potter but definitely matters to him now, when he sees Pansy more than he sees Ron.He takes a deep breath, lets it out, and gets to his feet.A pounding, shattering knock on the door rattles through his skull, jarring the careful peace he’d made.“Stop,” Harry barks. The person keeps knocking—banging. “For Merlin’s fucking sake, I’m coming!”The knocking stops, but it takes Harry several breaths to get the pain to subside enough to go answer the door.Who the hell would knock like that? The buttered noodles sit uneasily in his stomach. Robards would send an owl or Floo-call. Ron and Hermione and Pansy are the only people who ever show up in person, and even then, if Harry doesn’t answer the door they send a Patronus to avoid having to knock. He gets to the front door and jerks it open. “What do you—”The rest of Harry’s sentence is cut off in a gasp, because there’s an Auror on his little front step, and Draco.Draco.Is on his front step.Wearing a threadbare cloak the same dingy grey colour as the clothes underneath. Draco’s taller than the Auror, but he looks small somehow. He’s drowning in those awful clothes, and a tear in his worn-out shirt exposes a slash of his collarbone. Harry can barely see his eyes but he’d know that face anywhere. It doesn’t matter that his hair is at least to his shoulders and he’s painfully thin and those clothes.
Anywhere.
A cold gust of wind curls over Harry’s feet, and he tears his eyes off Draco to face his own bloody colleague, who has his hand on Draco’s arm like he might run off.“Williams, what in the—” Bloody fucking hell is this? “What is this?”Williams shifts his weight from one foot to the other, his Auror badge gleaming in the low light from Harry’s entryway, and takes a scroll out of his pocket. “I’m sorry to interrupt your evening. Can you confirm that you’re Harry James Potter of Potter—”Harry draws himself up to his full, indignant height. “Williams, for fuck’s sake, it’s me. Yes. Confirmed. Move on.”“Under Act One, Provision One of the SIRIUS Act, a convicted prisoner may shorten his or her sentence by a duration of up to three years, given—”“Williams, I swear to Merlin—” Harry doesn’t need a list of facts about the SIRIUS Act. He needs to know why he didn’t know Draco was in Azkaban. He knows that now, obviously, because of the clothes and the Auror escort, but he can’t believe nobody told him. Not Robards. Not anybody in administration.“Mr Malfoy provided your name as a possible sponsor. He did not provide any alternatives. If you choose not to proceed with the sponsorship, he will be returned to Azkaban for the duration of—”“Of course I’ll proceed with it!” The cold air is getting into Harry’s lungs, and it’s hurting his head, and he can’t stand this. He can’t bloody stand it. “What do I have to do? You want me to sign something? Give it to me.”Williams swallows, another layer of discomfort settling in like snow on his face. “You’ll also have to agree to a sponsorship bond, for the safety and security of—”“What the fuck.” Harry reaches out and grabs for Draco’s hand. Draco’s freezing, his bones brittle. His fingers tremble in Harry’s grip. “Do it, Williams. Hurry up.”Williams takes out his wand and fumbles his way through an incantation.Magic whispers over Harry’s skin, but there’s no force behind it, no real feeling. Nothing he’d associate with a bond.Williams clears his throat and tries again.Still nothing.“It’s, er…” Williams waves his wand, uselessly. “It’s not taking?” He forces the confusion off his face and puts on a stern Auror expression. “Right. I’ll have to take him—”Williams reaches for Draco’s arm, and Harry’s only going to tell him off, really, except next thing he knows, he’s got his arm between Draco and Williams and next after that he’s got Draco behind him in the entryway and Williams is staring at Harry with his mouth hanging open.Harry doesn’t know what he looks like—it feels like he might be baring his teeth at a man he’s shared several cordial cups of tea with over the years—but he makes an effort to seem a bit more calm.“Here’s what we’ll do.” Harry uses the practised, reasonable tone he saves for wix who need reassurance at crime scenes and ignores how his magic has gone hot and biting under his skin. “You’re not taking him anywhere, and there’s no reason to touch him again. Mark it down on your form that you performed the spell, no need to mention more details, and we’ll agree to the other terms. He lives with me for a year. He can use magic. No criminal activity, or I’m to answer for it. Otherwise, it’s a normal life. Isn’t that right?”“That’s—” Williams’s eyes dart behind Harry, and Harry wants to do something drastic, slap him, curse him, to get him to stop looking at Draco. “That’s right. I just need your signature—” He holds out the parchment to Harry, who scribbles his name on the line. The ink flashes purple and disappears. “The details of the assignment will remain strictly and absolutely confidential until such time that you decide—”“Thanks.” Harry slams the door in Williams’ face. He rounds on Draco, his heart hammering away, head pounding, and it makes no bloody difference because Draco’s taller, so Harry has to look up into his hollowed-out face and his enormous silver-grey eyes to hiss, “Prison? Draco, why didn’t you say—”Draco crumples midway through Harry’s sentence. He falls straight into Harry’s arms, and his headache becomes a sort of screaming panic that hasn’t got him since the war, and Harry’s so angry, he’s so furious, he’s so scared that the Patronus he sends to Ron is a broken-up mess that doesn’t make any sense at all and ends with hurry, hurry, please, help. It can’t be more than ten minutes before two quiet cracks sound near Harry’s house, but it seems like hours. Harry doesn’t remember how he brought them to the sofa in the sitting room. He’s got Draco in his lap, his head on Harry’s shoulder, and Harry’s afraid that if he lets go of him, they’ll both die.If he breathes too deep, his head wants to split apart, so he breathes as shallowly as possible and tries not to lose his mind.The front door closes with a soft snick. Harry can’t bring himself to turn towards the sound. Two pairs of shoes move quickly into his line of vision. Ron’s, blue and comfortable, the same colour as his Healer’s robes. Pansy’s, black and soft-soled, because that’s what she wears when she comes to Harry’s house.Ron crouches in front of Harry. “Hey, mate. Can you hear me?”“Yeah,” Harry answers, and he wants to be cool about this whole thing, but now that Ron’s looking at him with his soft Healer’s eyes and the open, calm expression that’s made him a favourite with little kids and elderly wix in the St Mungo’s A&E, he’s about ten seconds away from a nervous breakdown. He thought it might’ve been Draco who was shaking so hard, but it’s Harry, actually.“Anybody hurt?”“Williams brought him here.” Harry’s voice is pinched. He can’t do a thing about it. “To my door. For that early release program. I didn’t know he was in Azkaban, or I’d have—I don’t have—I don’t—” The headache is dull but huge, and that’s because Harry’s afraid, and ever since the end of the war—ever since Draco disappeared—it undoes him. He can ignore fear at work. Has to ignore it at work. Can’t ignore it now. A tear lands on Harry’s glasses, blurring Ron’s face. He thought he had more time before the crying started. “I have no idea what happened. Once I got him in here, he collapsed, and he hasn’t said a word, and he might—he might—he might be—”“Mate.” Ron reaches for Harry’s knee, but stops himself before his hand makes contact. The gesture, even incomplete, could be the only thing that keeps Harry from suffocating. “He’s alive. I can see his chest moving, and his colour isn't great, but it’s not nothing, either. Turn him this way, and I’ll have a closer look.”Harry shifts Draco off his shoulder. His head lands in the crook of Harry’s arm.Draco’s eyes are open and staring, like he’s not there. Like he might be dead.Pansy’s shrill gasp tears apart the shreds of Harry’s calm, and then he’s really lost it. He doesn’t recognize the terrified sobs that are so bloody loud in his ears as his own until Pansy snaps her fingers in front of his face.“Get him up, Harry. Sit him up. Right now. Be a Gryffindor about it.”He manages to get Draco into a mostly upright position. Pansy steps into the limited space between Harry’s knees, her un-Glamoured bump commandeering most of it, and takes Draco’s face in her hands.Ron’s on Harry’s other side, saying come on, mate, Draught of Peace, it’s going to be fine, I swear and Harry’s hand shakes so badly that the phial almost goes over and Ron has to pour it into his mouth with his fingertips barely touching the back of Harry’s head, so Harry doesn’t hear what Pansy says to Draco. She aims her wand at his temple and says something, then says it again, softer, and then, finally, Lumos.The Draught of Peace has had a few seconds to settle in, then, and Harry watches from underneath the first heavy wave as Pansy brushes Draco's hair back from his face. He seems more alive, thank God, but he still hasn't said anything, and looks into Pansy’s eyes with an urgency that hurts.“Draco says…” Pansy gives Harry a look like he might argue. He’s in no state to argue with anyone, least of all Pansy. “That his spoken words aren’t coming very easily, but should be back by tomorrow. He says not to cut his hair, because it’s his. And before you get carried away, Ronald, he wants a bath.”Ron laughs, the sound warm with relief. “I’m sure that can be arranged.” A bath used to be simple. Harry can’t remember the last time it felt simple to him—dragging himself out of the water makes his head hurt, and has for a long time. He goes to start the bath with a sense of deep suspicion.He thinks, as he taps the faucet with his wand and watches the water fill the tub, that the request might have been for him more than it was for Draco, which is…unacceptable. Harry can’t be the one who falls to pieces.And yet he is.He washes his face and dries it roughly with a clean towel, then makes his expression calm in the mirror until he believes it. The tub stops filling itself. He gets more towels and is setting them out when Ron and Pansy help Draco up the stairs. They’ve taken off the ragged grey cloak, but he’s still in the other clothes. Even with help, Draco’s steps are unsteady, like his bones aren’t strong enough to support his weight, like the floor is made of spikes. Pale lips and deep shadows under his eyes give Harry the impression he hasn’t slept in years.Harry’s chest hurts more than his head.He could be sick with how grateful he is for Ron. Harry’s supposed to be unshakable, with all his nervous edges filed away by Auror training, but Ron’s the one projecting an air of calm, like they’re coming upstairs to play wizard chess and chat. He steadies Draco with a professional touch—is my hand okay here, mate? you let me know if it’s not—while Pansy and Harry help him out of his clothes.The Draught of Peace feels thin on the ground, like it doesn’t exist, by the time Ron takes Draco to the tub to test the water.Harry hovers, useless, the most out-of-control he’s felt since the war. Or maybe it’s just that he’s never left that bathroom with the snowy owl bathmat under his knee. Part of him is still there, sobbing himself sick, all of his nerves scraped raw, falling apart. It still feels just that way. Somehow he didn’t notice that it’s felt that way all this time.But he can’t break, because Draco has been broken, abandoned on Harry’s doorstep worse off than Harry was left at the Dursleys’. Harry has always liked to think that if someone small and defenceless was deposited at his doorstep, he would become the adult they needed.He would know what the hell to do.Draco’s not small, though he is thin, his pale body horribly defenceless against the blue of Ron’s Healer’s robes, and Harry has not been transformed into a calm, competent adult. He’s been jarred out of that Muggle bathroom from seven years ago. He’s seventeen and helpless and out of his mind. He’s old and tired and awful, worn out and used up and good for absolutely nothing.His head hurts.And then Draco dips his hand into the water, jerks it back out, and screams.The sound snaps something in Harry. He pushes past Pansy, whose voice is a frantic rush.“What did you do, Potter, fill it with boiling water? Draco, what is it? What is it?”Harry bundles Draco into his arms. There. That’s all that feels right, even though it’s usually hellish, to have so much body next to his own, touching his own.Not Draco’s.“It’s just a normal bath.” Harry aims for soothing, but his voice breaks. He clears his throat and tries again. “The same temperature I’d use for Teddy.” Back when he could spend nights at Andromeda’s. Back before his headaches got too frequent and too painful to play with his godson. “I swear, it’s not too hot. Look.” They’re on the floor. Not that Harry has any memory of going there. He dips his own hand in the water, Draco trembling against his chest. “It’s not too hot.”This is not how he thought adulthood would be. He didn’t think it would be so awkward and painful and uncertain.Draco doesn’t say anything.“Look.” Harry plunges his hand back into the tub and thinks of snowfall and ice, of freezing charms and Fortescue’s, and the temperature lowers until it’s cool, the heat leaching out. “I took the heat out. I’ll—I’ll get in with you, and we can warm it back up. Okay? Is that okay?”It’s a full century, maybe more, before Draco nods.Which is how Harry ends up in his pants, in the bath with Draco, covered in goosebumps and trying mostly unsuccessfully to suppress shivers. Pansy sits on the edge of the tub and chats continuously to Draco while Harry heats the water in slow increments—bland updates about how Blaise Zabini has just returned from a month in Italy and Theodore Nott has become a curse-breaker, and isn’t that appropriate, because he’s a bit of a curse himself, and how in Draco’s absence Pansy has been forced quite against her will to become friends with Hermione Granger and Neville Longbottom. That gives Harry a pang. He doesn’t see any of his friends as much as he’d like to, because the pub gives him a headache. More of a headache. And he feels like utter shit most of the time.Harry can’t figure out why Pansy’s even talking about this stuff when Draco couldn’t be there for it—because he was in prison—until he gets the temperature of the bath to be actually bath-like, and Draco’s head gets heavy on Harry’s shoulder.He realises Draco’s asleep when Pansy covers her face with both hands and breathes out.The bright panic Harry had felt despite the Draught of Peace recedes.It had been in Draco’s magic. Harry hadn’t been able to separate it from his own. Now that he can, it’s so obvious that his face heats up. Of course he still knows Draco’s magic. He’s thought about it every day since he woke up in that Muggle flat. There had been traces of it in the room, light and clean, like a silver flash in the corner of Harry’s eye, and it’s still like that, if a bit dusty and smelling like damp stone.No—that’s just Draco’s hair. It feels dusty when Harry runs his fingertips over it. Part of him is still running his fingers through Draco’s hair seven and a half years ago. Part of him can feel how soft it was. Harry doesn’t panic, obviously. He is an adult and an Auror, so he draws a very cool and collected breath.“Pansy. Help me,” he chokes, in a very cool and collected way.She uncovers her face. “Ron,” she says in the same even tone she used to dispense a year’s worth of gentle gossip. “I think you’d better take the Glamour off and cast your diagnostics before we wash his hair.”“Glamour?” Harry slides a hand over Draco’s chest. He hadn’t felt it before. The thin layer of magic, close to the skin. It’s not Draco’s magic. “What the—”Ron sticks his hand out, but doesn’t touch Harry’s. “Mate. Let me do it.”Harry pulls his hand away from Draco’s skin and finds his fingers curled. He was going to tear the magic away with his fingernails. His heart fights against the Draught of Peace, beating harder.“Potter, look here.” Pansy sits very straight on the edge of the tub. She points at her eyes. “Here.”“I’m looking.”“Yes. Now. There are things we need to discuss. Firstly, one of us will need to submit a report regarding the missing persons case. Given the general state of your penmanship, I think I should be the one to complete the relevant forms.”“There’s no bloody way we’re just going to drop it. We should have known.” There should have been no such thing as an unrecorded prison sentence.“Did I say we were going to drop it?” She tilts her head to the side and narrows her eyes at him.“No, but—”“I am only saying that the DMLE at large and Robards in particular will likely frown upon any further investigation into this case, so we’ll have to conduct it secretly. You cannot break down doors and cause a great Gryffindor fuss until we know what we’re dealing with.”Ron leans past her, his wand out, and the Glamour goes with a tug of magic.Pansy’s eyes flick down to Draco, but then she hisses. “Potter, look at me.”Harry wants, very badly, to look down.He doesn’t.He doesn’t have to. Ron’s expression has gone very placid, almost remote, which is how he looks in the A&E when he’s confronted with what he calls—later, in private—a bad one.“Pans, love,” Ron says, soft, like he wants Harry not to notice even though he’s sitting right here underneath Draco. “Would you mind taking notes? Take down that the number went with the Glamour.”“Number?” Harry asks.“Prisoner tattoo,” Ron answers. “It’s gone.”There’s something deeply wrong about that, but Harry can’t freak out about it now.Pansy points her wand, and a few moments later, a quill and length of parchment float into the bathroom. Ron lists things off to her. Medical terms like contusions and fracture and blunt force and hex involvement. Pansy takes all of it down.Harry swallows a knot of fear and the sense that all his magic is stuck directly under his scar. That’s probably why Pansy’s being like this—so he doesn’t freak out again. Her protectiveness makes his skin feel too tight.It makes him feel like a snapped wand.But then Pansy blinks, her eyes shining with tears, and Harry’s fine, actually. He’s completely fine. If anyone’s a broken wand, it’s Draco, and they’re going to fix him.“Dealing with?” Harry says. “You think—”“I think that this—” Pansy tips her head towards Draco without breaking eye contact with Harry. A single tear drips down onto her cheek, and she swipes it away with her sleeve. “—is not the usual course of business. Someone had to sign off on this. Probably several someones. I, for one, would like to know who. Draco”—she’s never said his name any differently, all posh vowels, like it’s something shiny and precious. Dray-co—“might not have been the only one.”“Right.” A Diagnostic Charm glows just outside Harry’s vision. Ron murmurs to Pansy. He casts at Draco, gentle. Draco takes a deeper breath and relaxes against Harry, who aches and aches, palms and chest and head. He hadn’t known Draco’s breathing was laboured until it wasn’t anymore. Reparo, Harry thinks. “We’ve got to find out.”“Yes, I should think so.” Pansy glances, quick as a blink, over her parchment, over Draco. A tiny dimple appears in her chin and smooths out so quickly Harry thinks he might’ve imagined it. “I think, in fact, that we should be prepared for the possibility that—”It’s a long list of possibilities, and Harry watches her with no understanding that he is being gossiped to until Ron casts one more time. Another Diagnostic Charm glows over Draco’s chest, and partially over Harry. Ron studies it, his face the picture of serenity, then takes the parchment from Pansy and stands.“Lean up, Potter,” Pansy says. It’s like no time has passed. Like all that healing never happened. “Quite like that. You put your hand over Draco’s eyes, and I’ll wet his hair.” Draco doesn’t wake up, though Ron assures Harry multiple times that he’s just asleep, not on the verge of death. They dress him in a pair of joggers Ron happened to have in his bag, and one of Harry’s Weasley jumpers, and tuck him into Harry’s bed.Harry trails Ron and Pansy downstairs. Pansy detours into the kitchen. Ron faces Harry at the door. Something in Harry curls up in a defensive ball.“Ron, it’s not—”“Mate, you can’t keep on like this.”“He just got here.”“I don’t mean Malfoy. I mean you. I know you don’t like to think of how things were after—”“It isn’t the same!” Harry’s not empty, he’s full to bursting. With the pain in his head. With the dull panic of having no specific purpose. With the thudding sensation of loss, even though he hasn’t lost anything, he’s found him. “I’m fine. Took me by surprise, is all.”Ron holds one hand up. “I get it. You know I do. Getting him well again is going to be your top priority, and I don’t disagree. But once you have—” Pansy steps to Ron’s side, and he loops his arm around her. “Once you have, the sneaking around behind my back stops.”Pansy gasps. “What an incredible accusation!”Harry doesn’t bother.Ron gives them both a scolding look. “I know you’ve put pain potions in the kitchen, Pans—highly addictive, habit-forming, not meant for use like this—and I know you’re intending to take them and not say a bloody thing to anyone about how bad it is. You have to let them try again, Harry.”“Fine.” Harry catches himself reaching for his scar and stops. “Fine. But we have to—”“Oh, you’re going to find out what happened. That kind of shit isn’t supposed to go on at Azkaban anymore. Not since—” Ron clenches his jaw. “I’ve got records, now. If you have to take it to the Minister, or—” He shakes his head. “We’ll come back in the morning. Unless you need us to stay.”“No, I—” He’s fine. He’s fine. He’s fine. “Until then, what do I need to do?”Ron looks Harry dead in the eyes. “Stay as close as you can.”Harry’s stomach roils. “You mean—”“I mean, touch him as much as you can. Seven years in that place—” Ron cuts himself off. “It’s like a baby, yeah? They can’t regulate their body temperature very well, or their magic. He’ll get better quicker if you’re close.”“Okay. I’ll send a Patronus if—if anything happens.”Ron shifts forward. It looks like the start of a hug, and Harry’s whole body tenses. He tries to relax himself out of it, but it’s too late. Ron turns towards the door instead. He and Pansy say their goodbyes and go out into the night.Harry’s close enough to the door to hear it when Pansy lets out a high squeak and bursts into tears.He turns away from the sound, even though she can’t see him, and goes into the kitchen.Pansy’s put two pain potions in the empty cupboard above the cooker.Harry takes the first one.It’s three times the dose he had at the Manor, and works a hundred times better. The cracking pain in his head washes away, leaving behind a faint hunger that feels…Normal.Normal enough to ignore.And a nervous compulsion to get upstairs, back to where Draco is.Harry climbs the stairs without having to haul himself up on the bannister.His bedroom is soft with Draco’s breathing, and for a minute, he stands at the threshold, paralyzed by the fear that if he moves at all, he’ll open his eyes on a sunny morning and an empty bed.It’s exhaustion that gets him into the room in the end. Harry pads across the floor and takes off his glasses and eases himself under the covers, hardly breathing.He lays his head on the pillow.Moonlight shines bright through the window two nights after the full, only slightly obscured by a veil of clouds, and they’ve washed the dust out of Draco’s hair. Pansy dried it with a charm that reminded Harry of the one he’s seen Ron use when they’ve brought kids into the A&E. Gentle magic to keep them breathing. Draco’s hair is like starlight on the pillow.My mother likes to run her fingers through it, Draco says in his memory.
Your hair?
Yes.
He hadn’t been able to keep his eyes open.
Want me to?
If you don’t mind.
Harry had found Draco’s hair in the dark. Now he couldn’t close his eyes if he wanted to.A lock of white-blond hair has fallen over a cheekbone sharp as a knife, and Harry reaches, holding his breath, making no noise, pretending he doesn’t exist.It slips through his fingers, almost the same.He brushes it back and away from Draco’s face.“Reparo,” Harry whispers.He means to stop, to slide his hand under the pillow, but he can’t.He can’t.Because he knows what’s next. The battle ends. The sun rises over the wreckage. He’s empty and aching, the knowledge a fresh cut on tender skin: that winning the war means losing his place in it. Finding what was lost means that the search has been taken from him. There is no café with round tables. No black cat with white markings. No book in his arms. He never leans in.So he’ll do this, for now. His fingers in Draco’s hair. His eyes on the shadowed planes of his face as he breathes.In and out.In and out.In and out.Sleep takes him between one breath and the next.
Art by Phantasmagoria
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
Draco is quite certain—absolutely certain—that if he’d opened his eyes on anything but Harry Potter, he’d be screaming from the sheer onslaught of sensation.It hurts.It’s so very much that his body demands a scream, but he reconsiders, because Harry is asleep, and he is not well.Of course, Draco realises the irony of this perspective. He made a spectacle of himself last night, quite against his will, and any sane person would argue that Draco is in no position to pass judgement on the well-being of literally anyone else.But Harry has taken over half of Draco’s pillow at Draco’s most generous estimate, and he looks awful.Draco’s expectations for his own appearance are as low as they’ve ever been. He’s not comparing. However, Harry Potter’s face was one of the last ones he saw before he went to Azkaban, and he’s kept the memory clenched so hard in his fist that he has crescent-moon marks from his fingernails in the palm of his left hand.Despite having spent the last seven and a half years out of Azkaban, Harry looks no better off than he did immediately after the Battle of Hogwarts.He has the same bruise-coloured shadows under his eyes. A worried crease in his forehead, even in sleep. Pinched cheekbones, as if he’s been foraging for food instead of gainfully employed as an Auror.Fine. Draco is willing to admit that, in some aspects, Harry might be better off. His shoulders, for instance. Draco can’t see much under Harry’s jumper, but he remembers how Harry felt last night.In a general sort of way, cheekbones notwithstanding, he has…Filled out.Which Draco supposes can also be ascribed to the gainful employment portion of Harry’s life.Although now, watching him sleep, Draco is forced to wonder if he’s overstating the gainful bit.Merlin, the room.Draco’s heart rate has begun to rise in spite of himself. On the rare occasion he had allowed himself to imagine his release from Azkaban, he hadn’t imagined the outside world as an assault.That is, to his shock and disappointment, what it feels like. Aside from the occasional splash of red on Auror uniforms, he’s seen nothing but variations of grey for seven and a half years. The stone of his cell and the steely sea and the wisp-white of the clouds wore away even his ability to tolerate colour, for Merlin’s sake. Harry’s room isn’t particularly vivid, but even the muted green of his walls makes Draco’s eyes sting. A shaft of sunlight spills through the opened curtains on the bedroom window, warm on Harry’s skin and the brighter green of his jumper and his wild black hair.Utterly intolerable.And all that is to say nothing of the bed itself. The sheets and blankets and clothes. Softness surrounds Draco, and he’s shocked again by the instinctual drive to pull himself away from it. The pair of shoes he’d been assigned upon his arrival at Azkaban had disintegrated sometime in his second-year, and he was never assigned a replacement. He’s felt nothing but rough stone under half-frozen feet since then, and Harry’s sheets—They’re unbearable.On top of everything, Draco is bathed in Harry’s magic. It’s intensely clean, alive with lightning and a sweetness that reminds Draco of summer.A tear gathers at the corner of Draco’s eye and drips onto the pillow. He’s not crying. He simply has no other way to bear it.Except that Harry’s hand rests on his head.That keeps him from crawling out of his skin.There is no possible way that Harry chose these sheets for himself.The seventeen-year-old who’d sobbed like he’d been killed and not come back to life would never have chosen sheets like this, and Draco suspects that a man this worn wouldn’t, either.It must have been Pansy.Harry’s Auror partner.The guilt is almost as unbearable as the sheets.Just when it’s about to cut off Draco’s air supply and finish him once and for all, Harry gasps.His hand moves first in a searching pat at Draco’s head, and then his eyes fly open, and Draco is mortally wounded by the searing green and abject fear in Harry’s eyes.“Oh, God. Sorry. Sorry.” Harry rolls away from Draco and shoves his feet over the side of the bed, both hands flying to his hair. He stands up and almost immediately trips over his feet. Harry catches himself, then allows his momentum to carry him out of the bedroom. The bathroom door closes a moment later. Water runs.Draco uses the minute of privacy to sit up. The process is surprisingly pain-free, given that the guard who’d taken him out of his cell and to the transport boats had pushed him into an alcove out of view of the security charms and kicked at various places on Draco’s torso until things began to snap.He pulls up the borrowed jumper.No bruises.His memory of Weasley in Healer’s robes is almost like a hallucination—all Weasley had ever done in school was go on and on about becoming an Auror—but it couldn’t have been. Pansy was too real for Weasley to have been a symptom of a broken mind.Draco lets the jumper drop.Then again.There is a chance that none of this is real.The fear is like salt spray lodged in the back of his throat.It could be one of those times. They happened a few times a year, in Azkaban. He’d get so far behind his mental walls, wander so far from the path, that he’d leave his body behind and go…elsewhere. His parents’ home in France. The Slytherin dormitories. A Muggle flat somewhere in London, early in May.He never knew how long he’d been gone when they’d inevitably brought him back with a bucket of water and a backhand across the face. Perhaps more than one. Draco can’t be sure.There was never any point in calling for help at Azkaban, and it’s so ingrained that he doesn’t open his mouth, even as his shoulders round, bracing for the water. The beating is preferable to the full-bodied chunks of ice. He won’t even complain about it. But there’s a certain terrible cruelty in having to wait when the blanket beneath his hand is so soft, and the November sun is lemon-tinged and lovely, and he’s warm.He tries to get back behind his walls and only succeeds in squeezing his eyes shut.From a distance, as if it’s filtered through a dense thicket or a heavy antique door, someone calls to him. The sound has the shape of his name. He doesn’t dare to hope that it won’t slither into a new form—his prisoner number, or, more often, Death Eater. It’s not the back of a hand that touches his face, but a warm, solid palm.“Draco. Draco. Open your eyes.”He can’t, because breathing seems more important than having his eyes burned out by all the beautiful things in this room that can’t possibly be real, upon further consideration, it can’t possibly be—Two hands on his face. A forehead leaned against his.“Draco.” Harry. Draco hasn’t been able to think of him as Potter in seven and a half years, as if one night in a Muggle flat had picked them up and put them down again in different lives. Draco thinks that if Harry were to call him Malfoy right now, he’d be sick. “Open your eyes. It’s just my bedroom.”Thumbs swipe across Draco’s cheeks, and it’s simultaneously the most painful thing that’s ever been done to him and the most wonderful. He’s too overwhelmed by it to muster up mortification for the tears.If nothing else, he wants to get ahead of the frigid water and the backhand so as not to be devastated when they come, so Draco counts to three and opens his eyes.All he can see is green.Harry pulls back, and there’s the rest of his face, exhausted and young and naked without his glasses. He stares at Draco as if he’s shocked to see him, as if they haven’t been sleeping in bed together all night, as if he was quite certain Draco would be gone come morning.He’s beautiful.Unbearably so.Draco looks anyway.Harry’s hands stay on his face, and he doesn’t move other than to breathe. His filled-out shoulders rise and fall with every breath. They’re too involved with his breathing, in Draco’s ex-convict opinion. It’s not right.If Draco doesn’t speak soon, he’ll lose the will entirely. It’s difficult to get started, after he’s locked himself in. Most times, it feels impossible.He can’t stare silently at Harry Potter for the rest of his life, however.Draco clears his throat—hurts—and swallows some of his latent tears—hurts again, would you look at that—and dredges up a word from the depths of himself.“Hello.” Harry’s eyes widen in the silence, and Draco hears his voice the way Harry must. It’s rough and uncertain from disuse and nothing like he thought he’d sound. The greeting feels incomplete. Like a loose end. He is compelled to finish it, though when he opens his mouth again, he hasn’t the faintest idea what will come out. “Hogwarts, too?”Harry’s expression remains blank, devoid of recognition, for a moment that stops Draco’s heart.Then he blinks, and surprise lights up his face so brightly that the bruises under his eyes disappear. He lets out a laugh that sounds like it’s been stored at the back of a cupboard, waiting in the dark.Harry screws his face up, and Draco has no earthly idea what it’s supposed to mean until it becomes clear that Harry’s imitating the stranger he was when they were eleven years old in Madam Malkin’s, and a large portion of Draco’s mind insists that Harry has never been more of a stranger to Draco than he is right now.Oh, but he can’t be.“Yes,” Harry says, and Draco hears them both—the Harry that’s still a bit sleep-drunk and overtired and a grown man, and the boy who had seemed surprised to be addressed at all, and who had looked at Draco like he could see the core of him, anxious and excited and desperately unsure of himself and trying his best not to show it. They’d prodded against the soft, raw parts of each other, even then. They’d mutually decided to name the friction they felt dislike, perhaps even hate, and Draco, at least, had known that it would always feel like a risk to get Harry’s attention, because it would always hurt to be seen for exactly what he was, and he would never stop trying to get his attention anyway.This yes, all these years later, in a man’s voice, has a different resonance.It will hurt—there’s no doubt in Draco’s mind about that.But in this one small way, they can begin again. Beginning again is the silver lining of Draco’s new and unspeakably awkward life.He gets out of bed in what he thinks is a decently normal manner only to discover that he doesn’t have his balance. Or his feet don’t land on the floor the way he expected. He feels like he might tumble over at any moment and grabs for Harry before they’ve even left the bedroom.Then, the soles of his feet can’t decide whether the floor is burning up or freezing cold.He minces about three steps down the hall.“Stop. Just—stop. Here.”Draco’s words aren’t ready on the tip of his tongue, so what comes out of his mouth when Harry picks him up in his arms is a startled squeak.“Did I hurt you?” Harry asks, the worry in his voice as palpable as his magic in the air. It’s wound tight around both of them, Draco perhaps more so. Unlike everything else in the world, it doesn’t cause him any pain.“No,” Draco manages.“Do your feet hurt?”He’ll have to practise, whether he likes it or not. Harry’s arms tense around him while he waits. That hasn’t changed. The man still has no patience.“Not now.”“Just when they touch the floor?”And sheets, Draco thinks. And blankets. “Yes.”“I’ll get socks, then.”Harry takes him into the bathroom, props him against the tub, and brings socks. His knuckles brush against Draco’s calves while he pulls them over his feet.“I can put my socks on,” Draco says. Never mind that they are not his socks, and appear to have been knitted by a Weasley.Harry’s eyes snap to his, so green it knocks the breath out of Draco, but it’s quite obvious at the moment that Draco cannot put his socks on, since it takes all of his energy to keep his upper body from sliding down to the floor.For this, he gets another cupboard-laugh from Harry.They decide on another bath after he’s done his teeth—to start the day, Harry says.Draco is desperate for another bath, and almost equally desperate for it to be like hundreds of other baths and showers he’s taken in his life.He insists on doing it the regular way.Harry fills the tub. “It’s not very hot,” he promises.Draco dips his fingertips in.The water is scalding. He doesn’t scream, but he does cry, which is very nearly worse. The end result of his insistence is that Draco is carried into a tub of cool water by the Saviour of the wizarding world, who pretends not to shiver while he gradually warms the water around them.“This,” Draco forces out, as Harry wets his hair with a modified Aguamenti, “is mortifying.”“You should know better,” Harry answers.“What?”“That’s what you’d say.” Harry puts his hand over Draco’s forehead when he adds hair potion so it doesn’t get into his eyes. “Before. You’d say, you should know better than to wash my hair in such a mortifying way, Potter. Were you raised by wolves?”Draco’s throat hurts.“Would I really?”“Yeah.” Harry’s hands are so careful with his hair that Draco cries a bit more, but hides it in the general movement of the water. He doesn’t know what to say, so he says nothing and decides to count it as saving his strength.Harry bundles him in several towels post-bath and dries his hair with a charm, his bottom lip caught between his teeth, concentrating. He Summons clothes. Joggers, and another sweater with an H on the front, this one light blue. It smells like Harry’s magic and Harry’s skin, warm with a charge to it, clean like the air after a thunderstorm, and it makes Draco feel faint to be surrounded in it.He doesn’t argue when Harry carries him back out of the bathroom.“You’d be teasing,” Harry says on the way downstairs.“What?”“When I said—what you’d say, before. I meant—you’d be teasing when you said it. And I’d laugh.”Draco thinks there might be more to this admission, perhaps much more, but Harry doesn’t say anything else. Harry sits Draco at a table in the kitchen and sets about making tea.Normal, he says in his mind, firm and clear. This is normal. It is normal to sit at a carved-wood kitchen table in Harry Potter’s kitchen. It only feels like the apocalypse.If he makes an effort—a great effort—he can see how it would’ve been commonplace to him, once.Well. Not the kitchen table, perhaps. The kitchen table was for private conversations with his mother, not for breakfast. He’d eaten on his bed at Azkaban, which had been fitting—eating in one’s bed was for lazy people, or imprisoned criminals who were largely left in solitary confinement.“Nice chairs,” Draco says.Harry turns around from the kettle, the side of his face limned in that yellow-gold November light, and peers at Draco. “You think so?”“Yes.”There is a pause while Harry considers this. A faint pink darkens his cheeks.“I added Cushioning Charms,” he says, then turns back to the kettle.From the slope of Harry’s shoulders, Cushioning Charms are mortifying on the level of having to have one’s bathwater heated around him because the world has been made intolerable by his stint in prison.Draco would have to disagree.He’d like to say so, but the nature of the joke seems rather complicated and would require a sentence that he doesn’t have the energy for.He’s trying to come up with a shorter version that won’t involve additional explanation when Kreacher tiptoes into the kitchen.“Hello, Harry Potter,” he whispers in a rough, creaky whisper.“Hi, Kreacher,” Harry says. “Listen—”It’s too late. Kreacher has spotted Draco at the kitchen table, and the house-elf lets out an ear-splitting shriek.Harry slaps his hands over his ears, and Kreacher starts towards him, hands out, then jerks backward. Draco can’t decide if the scene is odd because Harry is an Auror who shouldn’t be taken off-guard by a sudden loud noise or if it’s odd because it seems more like the reaction he might have had at the end of the war, when it was all fresh and painful.Kreacher whispers a stream of apologies, his large eyes even wider than Draco remembers.“It’s fine,” Harry says, over Kreacher. “It’s fine, it’s fine.”It still takes him several moments to uncover his ears.“Master Draco,” Kreacher whispers, huge eyes shiny with tears. “Master Draco is here. In Harry Potter’s house.”“Yes,” Draco answers, the word a strange shape in his mouth.Because his teeth are chattering.“Oh.” Harry rushes across the kitchen, pulls Draco into his arms, and sits down in Draco’s seat. “Sorry. I thought—I dunno what I thought. If you wait a second, you should warm up again. I think. You can tell me if you’re cold, and I’ll—you know. I’ll come.”“I didn’t notice.” Draco does notice that his body has curled into Harry’s. It’s terrible, being held this way, terrible to feel magic that isn’t frozen and despairing. The Ministry got rid of the Dementors after the war, but it hadn’t mattered much—their sickening sadness had embedded itself deep into the stone. Draco had no choice but to sleep in it and breathe in it and stay alive in it. By comparison, Harry is a sunny day, and it burns, Merlin alive, it burns.He’d rather burn than freeze.“Kreacher will be making breakfast!” Kreacher whisper-cries. His knobby hands open cabinets and cupboards gingerly, shutting each one like it’s fragile.That’s not normal.Is it?House-elves do tiptoe, as Draco knows from experience, but this house-elf, tiptoeing around so as not to upset Harry Potter, makes little to no sense. Neither do Kreacher’s profuse apologies. And combined with Harry’s strange reaction…Draco adds it all to a column in his mind marked Proof that Something is Up with Harry Potter.“Is it me?” Draco hasn’t given enough context, but here they are.“Is what you?” Harry readjusts his hold on Draco’s body.“Have I…” Gathering the words is like picking flowers in a very large field with an ungainly body, but the more he tries, the easier it will get. It will. “…upset you in some way? Made you ill?”“Er…no? How would you do that?”“Some people…” Draco is one of them. “Don’t take kindly to change.”Harry laughs, a near-silent huff. “You think I look sick?”“Tired,” Draco corrects.“I’m always tired.”“This can’t be helping.”“What can’t be?”“Sitting on you.”Harry’s magic changes. Draco finds it hard to describe at first. It’s always been omnipresent, even when they were children, and over their time at school, Draco became so used to it that it’s second nature to consider it part of the environment, like the air or the light.A settling, perhaps.“It doesn’t bother me.” Yes. That’s exactly what it had been. A settling. Odd, because from what Draco can remember of Harry last night, he had not been settled. Not in the least. “I, er…I like it.”It’s not the first time Harry’s said this to him. The memory is clear as a photograph. The Muggle flat. Harry across the pillows. He’d looked so exhausted. I liked it, he’d said, about Draco washing his hair.His magic seems much the same now.It burns less. Draco might even call it bearable. The room is still much too bright, and all the colour and light scorches his eyes, but it’s tolerable, from within Harry’s magic.“Anyway, Ron said you’re like a giant baby.”His laugh sounds wrong and unpractised, but it comes from a place of genuine amusement, which is its own little fire. “A baby?”“He said you can’t regulate yourself. So I have to do it.” Harry moves a little. Draco doesn’t hear an incantation, but a few seconds later, the duvet from Harry’s bed floats into the kitchen. Harry wraps it around Draco’s shoulders.“Does that include swaddling?” Draco asks, nearly incandescent with embarrassment and relief.“What’s swaddling?”The front door of the house opens, and Harry sits up straighter. Draco braces to be put down.Harry does no such thing.“Kitchen,” he calls softly.The front door closes. Footsteps approach.Pansy comes first in her full Auror outfit. It’s a bit jarring, despite the fact that she told Draco about her career in such detail last night that he fell asleep in the bath. Weasley follows in his blue Healer’s robes. Both of them have taken off their shoes. Weasley looks taller in the robes, Draco notices, and is significantly more attractive. Not that he’s attracted to Weasley. It’s just that the longer hair, tied back from his face, suits him in a strange way. Perhaps that’s what drew Pansy to him in the first place.“Hey, mate.” Weasley didn’t look particularly happy when he came into the kitchen, and the creases on his forehead deepen. “Malfoy.”Draco gathers as much of his energy as possible. “Weasley, please. If you’re telling people I’m a giant baby, you can”—Summon the Gryffindor courage to—“call me by my first name.”Weasley cracks a smile, a laugh rumbling out of him. “I didn’t say you were a giant baby, Draco.”“That’s not what I heard.” Draco deserves an Order of Merlin for carrying on a full conversation when he is in someone’s lap and wrapped in a duvet, but he’s fairly certain they don’t give Orders of Merlin to criminals.“He said you were like a giant baby,” Harry says.“I said you were like a baby.” The corners of Ron’s mouth turn down. “There’s not much that’s giant about you at the moment. Have you—”“Kreacher is making breakfast right in front of your face, my darling, they haven’t eaten yet.” Pansy steps to the edge of the table, her expression cool, bordering on sharp. Oh, she’s not happy. “Something’s happened.”Before Harry can say what?, Pansy lifts a fresh copy of the Prophet above the table and lets it fall with a papery thump.Draco is on it.It’s an old photo of him, from just before seventh-year. He’s walking in front of Flourish & Blotts in a set of dark robes. He remembers the photographer’s voice but not her face. In the photo, he turns his head and gives the camera a self-satisfied smile, as if he has some secret the world will never be privy to, and looks away again.That had been a lie. He hadn’t been satisfied.He cannot comprehend why the Prophet would run such an old photo until Pansy unfolds the paper, and the headline comes into view.
DRACO MALFOY: MISSING OR DEAD?
“Missing?” he says through a suffocating bewilderment. If his emotions could calibrate themselves, that would be wonderful.“But,” Harry says, as if he hasn’t heard him. “You didn’t write to Blaise. Did you?”“I’d just started the letter when your Patronus came,” answers Pansy.“What does it mean, missing? I haven’t been missing.”“It had to be someone inside the Ministry.” Harry’s arms are too tight around Draco now, but Draco doesn’t think he notices. “Who else would want attention on this today?”“I don’t know if that’s true.” Pansy folds her arms over her chest. She was pregnant last night. Draco is sure of it. She doesn’t look pregnant now. A Glamour, probably.She’s married to Ron. They have matching gold rings.Why are you hiding it? Draco tries to ask, and can’t, because he can’t get the breath.“Not true that someone wants to influence public opinion, or not true that it’s definitely someone inside the Ministry?” Harry sounds different. The contrast between his voice when he’s just woken and this voice, the one he must use in the office with Pansy, is so harsh that it scrapes against Draco’s ears.“It could be someone else,” Pansy argues. “I agree that it’s likely to be—”“I’m not missing.” It hurts to yell, and Draco regrets it the moment he’s done it. His voice trips over the increased volume. “I wasn’t missing. They said—”Pansy and Ron are both looking at him now. Harry’s eyes burn into the side of his head.The problem, of course, is that Draco can’t remember who had said what, all those years ago. There’s a gap in his memory. He doesn’t know whether it’s been carved there by months in grey rock and sea or if it’s man-made.What matters, perhaps the only thing that matters, is that Draco was wrong.Pansy is very close to his face. “Who, darling?”He has to crane his neck to see around her to Harry, to green like a lightning strike, but a redeeming one.All that’s reflected in that green is his own horror.“I thought you knew.”Harry shakes his head, slowly, oddly, and Draco would add it to his Proof Something is Up With Harry Potter column if he could think at all, or breathe.“Nobody knew,” Harry tells him.It’s rather like being told that, in fact, all his attempted crimes had been actual ones. That he’d tricked himself into believing that his general cowardice had been, in some twisted way, a good thing, and that he hadn’t been a coward after all but a cold-blooded killer.If that had been the case, Azkaban itself was an act of cowardice. He’d have been braver to face the world and let them decide what should be done with him.That’s not what happened. Draco might have believed it more often than not in Azkaban, but they’d never have let him out again, if he had killed—He never killed anyone. That’s why he’d been able to trade himself.He thought Harry knew.That’s why he’d put Harry’s name down on that sheet of parchment the last time he held a quill. He thought Harry would have been informed. He thought that if he did survive Azkaban, Harry would have had a chance to come to terms with what had happened.Of course Harry looks unwell. Of course he’s madly uncomfortable and strange in his own home. Of course he’s jumpy and easily startled.He’s angry.Draco has just appeared in his life after nearly eight years. On top of that, he all but demanded to live in his house.His mind feints towards the Muggle flat and the plans he made with Harry, knowing he’d never be able to keep them but just as certain that Harry would forgive him, when he knew.He didn’t know.And now he’ll never forgive him.The reality of what he’s done hurts more than ice water or a backhand. It hurts more than muted green or morning sun. It hurts so much the walls push up from the earth of his mind like Azkaban juts from the sea. They come down from the sky like the bars of a cell. They snap together like teeth, like a jaw, and won’t come apart again.
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
The light goes out of Draco’s eyes.He’s there, and then he’s gone.“Harry, mate, don’t move.” Ron nudges Pansy out of his way, crouches down next to Harry’s chair, and casts three spells in a row. The three diagnostic fields shimmer in the air until they’re locked in place.Harry concentrates on not moving. His magic is a thousand hot splinters doing serious damage to the inside of his veins. He wants to throw it somewhere, or tear it out.Drastic.He doesn’t, because Ron’s told him not to move, and Draco’s a shadow of himself but he’s not nothing in Harry’s arms. His weight in Harry’s lap feels okay.The blank, dull grey of his eyes does not feel okay.Ron’s red hair is tinted with the shades of the charms. He grew it out after the war. It’s not as long as Draco’s. It’s pulled back in a bun, and not for the first time, Harry thinks that Ron is the one who seems the most grown-up of all of them, except for Hermione, who regularly goes up in front of the Wizengamot and argues cases in robes that Madam Malkin’s had to consult history books on the details for.Pansy grits her teeth on Ron’s other side, her cheeks red and her eyes shining. She wipes at them, taking the kind of steady, even breaths that tell Harry she’s more upset than she was when they walked in, and he’d known then that it wasn’t good.In the photo on the paper, Draco turns his head, smiles at the camera, and looks away.He’s tall and confident and gorgeous, though Harry doesn’t quite believe the smile. He looks like he’s always had enough to eat. Like he’s never missed a meal. Like his clothes can’t possibly hurt him. Like he wouldn’t dream of the floor being too much for his feet.Turn.Smile.Turn.Smile.The pressure reaches Harry’s head, and he tries to lead himself through some of the useless breathing exercises the first Healer he saw taught him. They’d thought the headaches were down to stress. Once he got acclimated to his work as an Auror and he learned to handle the demands of the job, they were supposed to go away.They never did go away, and he never did find Draco.Draco came to him.Draco hadn’t known he was missing.What had he thought?Harry can’t ask him, because he’s staring sightlessly at nothing. Ron reaches up through his Diagnostic Charms and guides Draco’s head to Harry’s shoulder with a gentle push.Then he scans the fields again, his mouth moving silently.“What’s happening?” Harry manages to make it sound like a question and not the feral demand that’s in his head.“He’s Occluding,” Pansy says, the two words crisp as a knife’s edge.“That’s not Occluding. People who are Occluding—”“Draco,” Ron calls. “Mate. Can you hear us?”Harry can’t see Draco’s face with his head on his shoulder, but it stays heavy and listless. He doesn’t answer.Ron reaches in again. Harry can’t stop himself from flinching. He hates himself for it. He hates how his muscles bunch up like Ron would ever do anything to hurt either of them.“Not you,” Ron says to Harry, and another hot spike of hate for how he his, for how fucked-up he’s always been, flares up and gets snuffed out like a pathetic candle under a rain shower. Ron’s fingers slide between Draco’s jaw and Harry’s chest. Harry swallows more suspicion and fear than he has any right to with Ron of all bloody people. Ron shakes Draco’s face gently, like the Healer he is. Merlin’s balls, Harry’s useless.“Draco,” Ron says again, and takes his hand away. His charms hover in the air between them, and Harry thinks wildly, dramatically, that this has been his entire life—looking through gold and orange and blue magic, his vision obscured by a charm he can’t cancel. Ron takes out a bit of parchment and a short quill from his pocket, unfolds it onto his leg, and writes down a few notes.Harry wants to scream at him that there isn’t time for notes.That’s his life, since he was eleven. Running towards the next year, the next Task, the final walk to the Forbidden Forest, and Ron seeing the whole board.“It’s not regular Occluding.” Ron’s eyes meet Harry’s in a sort of agreement. Being right isn’t any comfort. “How long has it been involuntary, Pans?”“Sixth-year.” Her mouth twists.“Far as you can remember, was it like this?”“No.” Pansy stands straight and tall, folding her hands in front of her, as pure-blood as Harry’s ever seen her. “Not like this, and not in such…frequency. I only had to use the passphrase once.”“When was that?” Ron’s quill hovers over his parchment.Pansy glances at Harry and looks away.He averts his eyes, stares into a corner of the duvet, and bites back apologies that won’t help. Harry ignores the swell of pain in his head and the insidious thought, like a tendril of Dark Magic, that it might have been better if it had ended during the Triwizard Tournament, in that graveyard with Voldemort and all his Death Eaters, because if he’d killed Harry then, none of this would have happened. Draco wouldn’t have taken the Mark. He wouldn’t have walked away from that Muggle flat with incontrovertible evidence of someone’s guilt, though not necessarily his own, on his arm, and ended up in Azkaban.“Mate,” Ron says.Oh. He and Pansy kept talking.“Yeah?”“We think you should cast it.”“Cast what?”“The passphrase.” Pansy gives Harry a look that makes him think she could see inside his head. She can’t, though. If she could, she’d march into Robards’ office and demand a different partner. “We think you should be the one to cast it.”“Is that what you did last night?” Harry asks.“Yes.” Pansy’s wand is already out. “You’ll need to think of it like a modified Legilimens, but instead of—”“Does it hurt?”“What? No, of course not, Potter. It’s like casting anything else. As I said—”“Does it hurt him?” Harry isn’t casting some modified Legilimens at Draco when he can’t do anything to stop him, when he’s in his lap and wrapped in Harry’s blankets and like this because—Harry doesn’t know. Because Harry hadn’t woken Draco last night to tell him that, by the way, no one knew he was in Azkaban. Because he hadn’t said it first thing this morning, when he’d had to flee the bedroom to hyperventilate privately because he’d been so sure that Draco would be gone, and when he’d come back less than five minutes later to find Draco clutching the blankets with tears running down his face, like the blankets had bitten him. If the way he’d reacted to the floor was any indication, the blankets hadn’t been great.Pansy drops her wand to her side. “I don’t know.”Harry throws a look at Ron, who rubs his hand over his eyes with a sigh. “I can’t see anything that says he’s in pain right now. And I don’t think we should leave him in there.”“What if he comes out of it on his own?”Ron consults his diagnostics again. Harry’s seen the I-don’t-like-this slant of Ron’s mouth a thousand times. It’s a bit of advance warning for what he says next.“I don’t like it,” Ron says. He draws the tip of his wand over a darker spot in the diagnostics. “I don’t know enough about this to be sure, Harry. These kinds of cases would get triaged to Janus Thickey.”Harry bristles at the suggestion.“I don’t mean we should take him there now.” Ron soothes, gentle, and Harry wishes he didn’t have to be soothed all the bloody time. “What I mean is, this is where a specialist would step in. I’m not a specialist. All I can tell you is that, generally, you don’t want a buildup of magic in the brain, and that’s already started. It’s not the same as a curse or a hex, because it’s—” He frowns at the diagnostics. “It’s a protective response, yeah? He can’t control it, at least right now, which means he can’t control how much power’s behind it. I think it’s safest to get him out.”“Okay.”Ron doesn’t like this.Harry hates it.“It’s a modified Legilimens,” Pansy says again, her voice carefully even. “You form the intention for Legilimens, but use the passphrase in place of the incantation.”“What’s the passphrase?”Pansy says something in French, and another wave of frustration sends Harry’s magic crackling through his veins.“I didn’t catch any of that. Say it again?”She goes through it three more times, and Harry repeats it, feeling worse than useless. He knows, objectively, that he didn’t have time to learn a second language while he was trying to literally stay alive, but he can’t help feeling like he should’ve made the time.Whatever. He doesn’t have to understand what he’s saying to get the passphrase to work.Or so he hopes.After a fourth repetition, Pansy gives him a short nod. “Where’s your wand?”“I don’t need it.”He brushes Draco’s hair behind his ear and finds the soft, vulnerable indentation of his temple with two of his fingertips. Draco’s heartbeat is there at the surface of the skin. Harry’s comforted by it and terrified of it, all at the same time.“This is Legilimens,” Pansy says.“Yeah.”He gathers the intention into his fingers. It’s easy. Like breathing.“I thought you meant the everyday things.” There’s shaky, faux-offended surprise in Pansy’s voice. “I thought you meant—”“It’s everything, Pans. Do you want me to do this, or do you want me to make a show of Summoning my wand so we can pretend I need it?”“I don’t appreciate it when you’re snippy,” she sniffs.“Sorry.” Harry means it, mostly. Pansy means it, mostly. Sometimes, they’re both snippy at each other, which is nice, because most people are too afraid of Harry or too busy being deferential to treat him like a person, and if they’re not, it means his headaches have made him an object of pity, which is worse. “I’m casting now.”“If—” Pansy bites her lip. “If it doesn’t come open, you’ll have to turn on the light.”“What?”“Lumos. If it—you’ll see what I mean.”“Ron,” Harry says.“I’m watching. If anything looks funny, I’ll tell you.”In addition to being scared out of his wits, Harry is now deeply concerned about how bloody weird this is, and slightly offended that Pansy never told him about using a secret passphrase to get into Draco’s mind.He’s lost the intention, so he gathers it back into his fingertips and lets it hum there, comparing the shape of the magic to how he remembers Legilimens.It’s good. It’s the same.Harry closes his eyes and whispers the passphrase while he casts. When he first came to magic, he thought casting was like a toss, something that caught at the end of his wand and separated when he threw it off. Once he started casting wandless, he understood that it was more like…like a swing, or a push. Some spells do separate off like a pebble skipped on the surface of a pond, but most of them stay connected to him, if only by a thin filament.His magic enters Draco’s mind and comes up against a wall.It’s not totally outside of his experience, thanks to the hell of his sessions with Snape, but this wall feels much stronger than anything Harry had been able to sustain. He gets the sense of rock, or carved stone. It’s not an image, exactly, more of a feeling. His magic has bumped up against the wall. It shows him the flat of it, and the join.He can also feel how the shape of this modified spell is long and thin, like he’s supposed to use it to pry the wall apart.His stomach turns at the idea.Pansy says something he can’t hear, but he doesn’t pull away from the wall.Harry re-forms the spell instead with a whispered Lumos. It glows, somewhere in the depths, but it’s more heat than light. Harry lets it rest on the seam of the wall.An image appears in his mind.The last sliver of sunset on the horizon. That’s what his Lumos looks like, there in the narrow seam.But that’s not what they want. They don’t want sunset, they want sunrise.He thinks of dawn, of pale pink skies and translucent clouds, and puts more power into the spell.Slow, like he’d heat the bathwater.More light pools at the join in the wall and expands like a pair of wings, or a breath, or a wave. It rolls onto the sand and retreats.Rolls.Retreats.Rolls.Retreats.The wall doesn’t seem to resist. It’s not like prying, for Merlin’s bloody sake. A passphrase is supposed to undo a lock so you can go through, not blast the door off.Feelings start to slip through when the light is half-risen. Harry gets a whisper of mild confusion, a general warmth, and an undertone of guilt.“You’re in my kitchen,” he announces. “Ron and Pansy are here.”The wall starts to shut.Harry adds a bit more power, not enough to force it open, but enough to keep it from clamping down over Draco’s brain again.“No, don’t. It’s fine. We know you’re not missing now. And—” He casts around for something to keep Draco out of his head and in the world with them. “Kreacher has toast.”More feelings, these ones lighter and jumbled, come through the wall, which isn’t much of a wall anymore. Words and phrases, too fast for Harry to understand, and then magic shoos him out.“Toast?” Draco says.Kreacher squeezes past Pansy, glances at Ron, and goes down on one knee next to him. He bows his head and offers one of Harry’s plates to Draco like he’s presenting a king with a crown.Draco lifts his head off Harry’s chest. One of his arms emerges from the fold of the duvet. He brushes his hair off his face with an elegant forefinger, then accepts a piece of toast with the air of someone selecting a precious jewel.“Thank you, Kreacher,” he says.“Right.” Ron gets to his feet and cancels the Diagnostic Charms, a strange look on his face. “I have to get to Mungo’s.”“I’m going into the office to keep up appearances. You two…” She points her wand at Harry and Draco. “Will stay here and talk so we can figure out how to bring down the Ministry.”“You said it might not be the Ministry,” Harry argues automatically.Pansy puts her wand away and bends to kiss Draco’s cheek.“I’ve changed my mind,” she says, with finality, and sweeps from the house. Kreacher waits on the floor until Harry has also accepted a piece of toast, then climbs to his feet and begins making what he calls quiet eggs. Harry doesn’t know what he means by it, since eggs, in his experience, are usually quiet, but he doesn’t comment.Draco doesn’t comment, either, though he does sit in Harry’s lap, grey eyes following Kreacher’s movements.Harry can’t help watching him.His teeth, biting through the toast. His lips closing over it. His cheeks, flushing when he swallows.He just.He can’t be broken.Not Draco.He’s got days to fix this, more or less. Pansy’s bought him that long, but he doesn’t like the way Ron was talking about trying again.Harry pushes his own broken pieces into a cupboard and nudges the door shut with his toe.All that can wait. He’s got a plan for now, and that’ll get him through.He eats his own piece of toast.Kreacher Levitates two ramekins across the kitchen, settling one directly in Draco’s hands and the other on the table in front of Harry.“Quiet eggs for Harry Potter and Master Draco.”Draco shoots a glance at Harry, one eyebrow arched.Harry keeps his face carefully neutral. “Thanks, Kreacher.”Two forks follow.“Do you…” Draco pokes at the eggs with the tines of his fork. The bend in his wrist is the same as it was at Hogwarts. Harry likes that more than he ever expected he would. “Always eat like this?”“Dunno what you mean.”Draco turns his silver-grey eyes on Harry again. He’s so close, and so beautiful, and it hurts, honestly. Harry wants to stroke his face and tell him he’s lovely, just like this, and he never wants him to change as long as he stays in his lap.And he wants to go thundering through the Ministry until he finds out who did this, because of course Draco is lovely. He always has been, even—and maybe especially—if Harry didn’t want to admit it.What’s been done to him is a crime.Draco shakes his head, apparently deciding to be fine with the ramekins for now.“So.” Harry reaches behind Draco with his left hand to spear a bit of the eggs—warm, fluffy, with cheese—and hides his face in the process. “Talking.”“Mmm,” Draco says.Be a Gryffindor about it repeats in Harry’s head.“You didn’t know you were missing, and that’s—that’s upsetting. Obviously. Because maybe you thought everybody knew where you were, but we didn’t. Is that why you…went away?”Draco doesn’t look at him. He’s engrossed in his eggs. After a few more heartbreakingly small bites, he rests his fork across his ramekin.“I didn’t choose to…get locked in.”“Pansy said that happened sometimes in school.”The corner of Draco’s mouth turns down. “I was a natural Legilimens.” The words seem hard-won and carefully chosen. “My aunt Bellatrix has a natural affinity for extremes. When she taught me Occlumency…” A few short breaths. “She pushed me as far as I could go. Sometimes beyond that.”“So you can’t always stop it?”“No.”“Was it because of the Prophet?”Draco’s eyes flicker over Harry’s face, and he looks away again, colour rising in his cheeks. “You have to be angry with me. For leaving the way I did. And assuming I could stay with you after.”“Nope.”“Nope?” It sounds so clear in Draco’s voice. Harry got to hear it like this for one night—a few minutes, really—and he’s missed it ever since.“I’m not angry.” Harry squints at his ramekin. Hermione is always encouraging Harry to get in touch with his feelings. He spends most of his time not getting in touch with his feelings, mainly because he hasn’t had many beyond a general despair about not finding Draco and my head hurts. “Not about that.”“Convincing.” Draco steals a glance at him.“I’m not,” Harry insists. “I was upset. When I realised you’d gone. I was worried. And then you didn’t come back, and that just seemed wrong to me.”Draco makes a sound.It takes Harry a minute to identify it as a laugh.“I mean it. We had—” His throat closes up if he thinks about that handful of hours in Croydon. “It was nice. Talking to you that night. And even if it hadn’t been, you were there.”“Yes,” Draco agrees, with a hint of sarcasm. He seems to realise what he’s done and turns his face away, his body tense in the duvet.“No, don’t.”Draco’s forehead creases.“Don’t. I like you like that.”“Like a git?” Draco’s expression has turned into open suspicion.“I like it when you’re not afraid to tease me. You never were in school. Or that night.”“I’m sure I didn’t.”“I said I was a freak, and you said, for the usual reasons, or are there new and exciting ones?”A smile breaks across Draco’s face.Harry wants to cry.He doesn’t, because that would not be being a Gryffindor about this, and time is of the essence.“You want me to be a git to you?”“If you teased, I would laugh.”That might not actually be true. Harry’s not in the habit of laughing, but…He wants to be.“Should we get the hard part out of the way, then?” he asks.The smile fades from Draco’s face. “Which part is going to be easy?”“Some of it, I hope.”Draco settles his weight into Harry’s lap. “All right.”“What happened?”Draco’s shoulders round, and Harry hugs him tighter out of instincts he hasn’t used in years. He doesn’t let people get close to him anymore, hasn’t been able to since the war, so they keep their distance.“I was still sleeping when you left.” Harry starts the story for both of them. There’s never been another story. He only had his part, snapped in the centre.“I left.” Draco blinks down at the duvet, not meeting Harry’s eyes. “I didn’t go to the Ministry. We met somewhere else.” A frown shadows his face. “I can’t remember where.”“That’s okay.”“It was a trade.”“What kind of trade?”“Me, for my parents.”Harry has no thoughts at all for a few beats. His mind is a blank wash of white, like King’s Cross had been if he looked far enough past the tracks. This is why it’s not a good idea to be in touch with his feelings. If he let them into his body now, he’d implode.“Someone from the Ministry let you trade yourself to keep your parents out of prison?”“Yes.”That can’t be.It can’t.“I don’t know who it was,” Draco says, after a silent minute. “I don’t even know if—” His body jerks, just slightly. Harry reaches for his temple and fumbles his way into Draco’s mind. The wall’s halfway closed, but if Harry tries, he can curl that light around it and keep it steady.He doesn’t push.He thinks that might hurt Draco.But he holds it there, even as his magic buzzes and hums, his skin heating until he’s covered in a fine layer of sweat.Gradually, the wall opens again.“How—” Draco swallows. “How did you do that?”Harry drops his head forward, onto Draco’s duvet-covered shoulder. “I dunno. I just did. You mum and dad are really in France. Pansy and I went.”Draco breathes, his bones thin through the duvet, chest hitching.“They’re okay,” Harry says. “They’re fine. They wouldn’t talk to us or anything, but they’re fine, Draco. They’ve been in France the whole time.”Cushioning Charms or no, it’s not the most comfortable place in the house to hold a crying man in his arms, so Harry picks Draco up and takes them to the sitting room.It’s a long time later when Draco swipes the sleeve of his borrowed jumper over his eyes. Harry casts a wandless Drying Charm on the shoulder of his shirt, and Draco burrows back against it, obviously exhausted.“You’re going to be a Gryffindor about it, aren’t you?”Harry doesn’t know what he’s talking about. He was thinking of starting the day over again. Maybe with a bath, or a shower, if Draco can stand it. “About what?”“It was—was obviously—” Draco wipes his face again. “Fucked up.”He says this so precisely, each word beautiful in its precision, that Harry can’t stop himself from smiling. He has to let it fade away by itself.“It really was, Draco. This shouldn’t have happened.”“And there’s…” He takes a deep breath. “No chance you’ll let it go?”Harry wants to be the kind of person who would let it all go. Who would get up and walk out of his parents’ house in Godric’s Hollow and disappear, never to be seen again, if it’s what Draco wanted. His head is starting to hurt. He’s tired. He wants to be able to turn his back on the world.“No, there isn’t.” Draco sighs. “Because of the injustice.”“Yeah,” Harry agrees. “I really don’t like the injustice. That’s putting it mildly. And on top of that, I do feel a certain…you know. Obligation.”“To Pansy,” Draco says. It’s not a question.“If she wants to bring down the Ministry, that’s fine with me, but I don’t think she should kill anyone to do it.”“So…” Draco cuddles closer. “You’re fine with a coup, as long as it’s bloodless.”“Yeah.” Wait. “No, I—”“You want blood?”“No! No blood.”“I’ve got it,” says Draco. “You want to bring down the Ministry in your special, Chosen-One way.”“Which is how?”“With Expelliarmus,” Draco whispers.He laughs at his own joke until he loses his breath.
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
Draco’s first full day at Harry’s house mainly amounts to a long nap, followed by lunch, followed by another nap. He falls asleep halfway through dinner, which comprises oddly small bowls of soup, and wakes to the sound of tapping.Harry pulls his hand carefully out of Draco’s hair and shuffles himself out of the bed.Draco can’t actually recall Harry getting into the bed in the first place, but he must’ve brought them both here at some point during dinner.The sheets aren’t half as unbearable as they were yesterday.That’s a positive sign, yes? He hasn’t been permanently ruined by a near-decade on a frozen rock in the middle of the ocean. One day, he might even be able to lie in bed without convincing himself moment by moment that it feels good, actually.A bit of cold air from the window unfurls across Draco’s forehead. He pulls the duvet tighter around his shoulders.“Thanks, Pig,” Harry says. “Treat?”More pecking ensues, and some over-excited fluttering. Draco opens one eye. Harry stands in front of the open window in his pants, frowning at a letter while a tiny, greyish-brown owl hops about on the bedside table. He absently supplies the owl with a treat, then runs his hand through his hair. It does nothing to tame its sleepy disarray. Delicious, Draco’s mind supplies, totally unhelpfully, and he shuts his eye again.“Who’s written to you this early?” Draco asks. As long as he’s going to be weak and sad and prone to becoming overwhelmed by things like colours and Harry Potter’s hair, he might as well avoid the awkwardness where he can and not put Harry in the position of having to ask if he’s awake.“Pansy.”Harry doesn’t add anything else for so long that Draco opens his eyes again. He looks out the window, his eyes distant, deep in thought. A wrinkle from the pillow cuts across one of his cheeks. Every time he breathes, his abs become more defined.Too defined.He’s over-thin.“Bad news?”Harry glances over. The cloudy November light adds shadowed depth to his eyes. The colour still stings, but if Draco forces himself to keep looking, he can feel it subsiding.He can…feel that the sting might possibly subside, at some point in the future.“Dunno if it’s good or bad.” Harry folds the letter in his hands and runs pinched fingers over the crease. “Pansy talked to Williams yesterday at the office.”“Williams?”“The Auror who brought you here.”Shame burns across Draco’s face. His skin overheats in the blankets. “I can’t remember much about it.”In point of fact, he’d thought the guard was taking him somewhere to injure or otherwise torture him. That had turned out to be partially true. However, instead of coming to in his cell courtesy of a bucket of ice water, he’d come to in a boat, courtesy of the North Sea.“Yeah, that’s the thing.” Harry opens the door to his bedside table and takes out a quill. He scribbles on the letter in his hands, then digs about until he finds a scrap of parchment and writes on that, too. He ties both to the owl’s leg, pats its head, and says, “Pansy and Hermione. And…try to play it cool. You know?”The owl bounces around on the table several times before departing through the window at top speed and at a rather impossible angle.Harry closes the window with a sigh.“What’s the thing?” Draco asks. He doesn’t mention the all-consuming relief he feels when Harry crawls back onto the bed and takes his hand. Never mind that it shouldn’t be a relief, since this is the way you’d hold someone’s hand when delivering bad news.“The thing is…” Harry runs the pad of his thumb over Draco’s knuckles. It’s excruciating. He never wants it to stop. “Williams doesn’t remember anything about it. Pansy said she even put on lipstick.”“Pardon me?”“It’s one of her tactics.” Harry says it in exactly Pansy’s pronunciation, crisp like new frost. Hearing it is also excruciating. He’s missed her so much. “If she thinks somebody’s hiding something from her, she has this certain red lipstick she puts on. I guess she couldn’t get anything out of Williams at all. He thinks he was at a pub night with his friends.”“Do you mean to tell me…” Draco can feel it. That’s the frustrating part. One of the frustrating parts. He can feel how his mind used to work. How it didn’t need so much time to sort through the things people said to him and draw conclusions. “That no one knew I was in Azkaban…”Harry waits, his thumb on Draco’s knuckles, moving back and forth in that terrible, perfect pain.“And now nobody knows that I’m out?” Draco finishes.“Not nobody,” Harry says. “I know. Pansy knows. Ron knows. And…”Slow as it might be, Draco knows what’s coming next. He knows it with certainty. With clarity. With a sort of horror, and another sort of relief.“You’ve summoned Hermione Granger, haven’t you?”“Yes.” Harry’s solemn, as if he’s admitting infidelity or murder or some equally egregious crime. “I have.” It is one thing to have no balance, to have embarrassing and overwrought reactions to bathwater, to have to be wrapped in a duvet that Harry has surreptitiously cast Warming Charms on.It is quite another to be held in Harry Potter’s lap like a giant baby while he assembles the Golden Trio.Ron and Pansy arrive first, with Blaise Zabini. Blaise wears beautiful robes and leans down over Draco as if he is not in another man’s lap wrapped in a duvet, takes Draco’s face in his hands, and says, “Merlin’s tears, Draco, you look like shit.”“Thank you,” Draco answers, rather proud of how he doesn’t sound as shit as he did yesterday.Blaise shoots a glare over his shoulder at Pansy and Ron. “He sounds like shit. Didn’t you do anything for him, Weasley?”“Stand down, Blaise. We’re fine,” says Draco.“Yeah,” Ron agrees, coolly professional, which is not how Draco ever thought he’d see any Weasley, honestly. “We are. So you don’t have to take it out on me.”“Perhaps we could do some deep breathing exercises,” suggests Pansy.Blaise heaves an enormous sigh, stalks over to the armchair, and sags into it, resting his head on finger and thumb, a gesture that matches perfectly with his custom-tailored robes. “No. Someone tell me what the hell is happening here. Ministry’s gone corrupt again? Secret prison sentences? Did another Dark Lord crop up without anybody noticing?”“Two out of three,” Harry says. “Probably.”Blaise narrows his eyes at Harry, but it’s an assessing look, not quite a glare. “Potter, I meant to ask—”“We can save that for later,” Harry says. “Hermione should be here any second.”Save what? Draco wants to ask. It’s another entry in his Something is Up with Harry Potter column. That Blaise might know about it when Draco doesn’t is an interesting and frankly awful sensation. It’s better than thinking about his own general state, however, so he lingers in it while Blaise watches Harry, clearly trying to decide if he should push the issue.Before he can, the front door opens, then closes again. Soft footsteps come quickly down the hall.Granger enters the sitting room like a force of nature.A stirring breeze accompanies her, and though she’s found a way to style her hair into shining curls, it still crackles with magic. Tendrils escape onto dark blue robes in a cut that would be appropriate in front of the Wizengamot or a classroom, and would be equally intimidating in either place. Blaise stares, the corner of his mouth turned up in a way that suggests Granger is someone he’d like to have his mouth on, and then he can’t look at Blaise anymore because the whirlwind has planted her feet in the centre of the room and glares at Harry as if she might strike him down.“How dare you,” she says, her voice barely above a whisper but no less cutting for it.Harry tenses underneath Draco. “Hermione, I—”“I am angry with you,” Granger clips, as if it wasn’t obvious from the magic and her set, furious expression. “I have told you, time and again, that it was an oversight, Harry. It was a mistake. I apologised to you and I meant it. You are not teaching me anything by keeping me at arm’s length. You’re only hurting yourself, and I’m not going to stand for it a second longer, because—”“Hermione,” Ron says, in a lilting, jovial tone that he must’ve brought with him from Hogwarts. “That’s not what this is about.”“What?” Granger snaps, not taking her eyes off Harry.“It’s about Draco,” Ron says.She turns her entire body to face Ron, searches his face for a long minute, and whirls back to Harry.The change in her expression is significant. Draco isn’t entirely certain how she managed to overlook a man wrapped in a duvet who is partially blocking her view of Harry, but it’s yet another entry in his column if Granger could look past Draco, of all people.“What?” She comes closer, peering down at Draco as if he’s a textbook she hadn’t expected to come across.“He was in Azkaban,” Harry tells her.“Not according to the Wizengamot records, he wasn’t,” Granger argues. It sounds habitual. The rest of the world might’ve become too bright for Draco, too vivid and alive, but Hermione Granger hasn’t changed a bit. She still puts her faith in paperwork.“Not according to any records,” Pansy adds. “And what do you know? Out of the blue, he’s delivered to Harry’s doorstep, ostensibly under the SIRIUS program.”“No,” Granger says, not meeting Pansy’s eyes.“He was, though.” Harry’s arms have gone tight around Draco, as if the force of Granger’s gaze alone might pry them apart. “That’s what Williams said. I had to sign a paper. And he wanted a sponsorship bond.”“What?”Draco revises his opinion regarding whether Granger’s voice was cutting before. Now it could destroy wards and take lives.“He wanted a sponsorship bond. He said it didn’t take, or something. Dunno why it didn’t work.”Granger stares at Harry for several silent beats.Then she turns and walks away, circling the centre of the sitting room like a professor about to unleash hell.A flick of her wand Conjures a blackboard in midair. Pansy and Blaise watch her with a light in their eyes. Draco’s mind struggles to contextualise it. Ron is quite serious, his hand resting on Pansy’s lower back, and Draco can’t see Harry’s face when he’s watching Granger, but his friends look at her like…Like she’s quite dangerous indeed, and they’re looking forward to an impending attack.Granger pauses in her circling, finds a position where she can face them, and takes a deep breath. “Someone in the Ministry wants revenge.”Blaise scoffs. “Tell us something we don’t know, Granger.”She turns her glare on him.Blaise smiles back at her, unruffled.The amount of magic in Granger’s hair increases.“It’s made them foolish and sloppy,” Granger continues. She drags her eyes away from Blaise at last. “They had to know I’d become involved.”“Why?” Pansy asks, sounding genuinely curious.“The SIRIUS program was mine. I designed it, I fought for it, and I made certain it would be obsolete from the moment it was signed into law.”Ron blinks. “Obsolete?”Granger presses her lips together, as if to hold back the word obviously. “The problem of unfair, arbitrary sentencing was too large to resolve with just one program. No matter how I worded the SIRIUS Act, it would be open to vulnerabilities depending on the makeup of the Wizengamot. I took a two-pronged approach so that the laws themselves would be revisited at the same time SIRIUS went into effect.”Another pause, presumably for another obviously.“I insisted on provisions that would trigger the review of every inmate’s sentence at the time of the act’s passing by the Wizengamot and every two years afterward. Anything that needed review at the time got the review, and five people were released under updated sentencing guidelines. The SIRIUS program is a failsafe. Nobody has ever had to use it. If they had, there would be a paper trail. And there isn’t one.”“You’ve checked…recently?” Ron asks.“The SIRIUS Act also established a committee that oversees sentences handed down by the Wizengamot.”Blaise laughs out loud. “I wonder who would’ve been appointed to that committee.”Granger rolls her eyes. “It’s not just me, Zabini. It’s a committee, not a crown.”“There should be a crown,” Blaise says, under his breath. Then, louder: “So, someone has it out for Draco, then.”“I would say, given the article in the Prophet yesterday, someone’s lost control of their revenge plot.” Granger turns to the blackboard. “They want the Ministry to swoop in and find him like this, a complete mess—”Draco lets out a sound of disagreement, mainly on principle.“—then set someone up to take the fall.”“Who?” Harry asks.Everyone in the room looks at him, including Draco. He has to push down a corner of the duvet to do it. Harry looks so innocent from this vantage point that it’s hard to reconcile him with his Auror career and his status as the Saviour of the wizarding world.His eyes move from Granger to Ron and Pansy, then flick across to Blaise.Granger looks over her shoulder at Harry. “You,” she says.Harry flushes pink, then red, and then his teeth click together. His magic hums through the duvet. Draco’s heart pounds.“Well, fuck that,” Harry says finally.“Exactly.” Granger straightens up. “Fuck that. Now. Let’s all go around the room and say what we think is wrong with Malfoy. I don’t think we have long to fix him.” “I’ll go first,” Pansy says, and that snaps Draco out of his haze of disbelief. Not enough to say anything, but enough to be paying attention to this atrocious exercise that his very best friends in the world are going to participate in right in front of him. “Draco is an emotional wreck.”Emotional wreck, Granger writes with her wand across the top of the blackboard. “Thank you, Pansy. Ron?”Ron grimaces. “I don’t think—”“Starved for affection,” Blaise says over Ron, and Draco…loves him. Loves both of his oldest friends. If they were weepy and desperate about this, he might break down himself. “But that’s easy enough. Just have to pet him a bit, as long as he’s not stubborn about it.”“He very well might be,” muses Pansy.“I’d say Potter seems to have that well under control,” Blaise counters.Starved for affection, Granger writes, a little frown creasing her forehead. “It’s a classic effect of solitary confinement, I’m afraid, so best to put it on the list where we can deal with it head-on.”“Literally starving,” Harry says, and Draco glares at him.“You’re supposed to be on my side,” he hisses, the words seeming to come from nowhere, or else from the deep well of his past, when he would have said this without a second thought, only not about Harry.“I am on your side.” Harry’s eyes meet his. He’s so genuine that Draco can’t breathe, but there’s something else there, too, some…hesitancy, perhaps? His arms are quite tense around Draco’s duvet now. “If someone’s out to get you, then we can’t give them the satisfaction.”“Don’t you think they’ve had that already?”“Not all of it.” Harry looks back at Granger’s blackboard.“He’s withdrawn, and of course I say that out of love,” Pansy continues. “Difficulty with trusting others.”“I’m sitting right here in a duvet,” Draco says through a burst of hot indignation.Granger hums and writes down withdrawn and difficulty with trusting others. “Might not be fixable by Monday, but we can try.”“What’s on Monday?” Draco asks.“You might need to appear in public,” Granger says, her wand poised over the blackboard.Blaise raises his hand. “Reluctant to admit there’s a problem at all.”Harry’s magic turns blistering. If Draco didn’t know better, he’d think Harry had got a sudden fever.“Oh!” Blaise raises his hand higher into the air. “No clothes. He’s wearing one of those alarming Weasley jumpers and joggers. No offence, Weasley, but I’m pretty sure those are Potter’s clothes, which is its own separate issue.”Harry’s body shifts under Draco’s duvet, and he understands in a sort of belated, embarrassed way that Harry plans to stand up and carry him out of the room.And then he realises that something else is going on here.What, exactly, he doesn’t know, but he does know that Harry doesn’t like it, and whatever bizarre Gryffindor-Slytherin team meeting he’s called to deal with the problem of Draco is going to fall apart unless Draco intervenes.He leans closer to Harry’s ear. “It’s true, isn’t it?”Green peeks at him from the corner of Harry’s eye. “Probably. Yeah.”“Then why—”“All right.” Ron steps towards the blackboard. “Give it a rest. Draco, if you consent to share your medical information with…everybody here, we can cut to the chase. But you don’t have to if you don’t want to.”“No, go right ahead.” It’s not as if Draco doesn’t know he’s fucked up. Nearly eight years in Azkaban would do that to anyone. Draco’s own father…No.No, he doesn’t think that’s a good topic to dwell on at the moment.Harry settles back onto the sofa.Ron takes out his wand and mutters an incantation. A glowing field unfurls next to the blackboard. Streaks in different colours curl into knots in the centre. He clears his throat and points at the tangle with the tip of his wand.Then he’s off on an explanation involving the effects of magical suppression combined with solitary confinement and how those effects are expressed through the mind-magic connection, commonly visible via a number of symptoms, including Draco’s nonexistent balance, the sludge of his thoughts, and his body’s inability to regulate its own temperature.In the heavy silence after Ron finishes his lecture, Granger stares daggers at the knotted colours in the hovering charm. Pansy’s eyes are wet. Blaise has a carefully blank expression on his face that suggests he intends to commit murder in the near future.Harry’s face dispels any remaining illusions Draco might’ve had about the severity of the situation.He watches Ron’s charm with wide, desperate eyes, lips parted in a guilty slant that breaks Draco’s heart. And yes, yes, it’s his own body in this state. His own magic. Draco wants it to be better, of course he does.But he simply can’t tolerate the heavy, hopeless ache in Harry’s magic.He can’t let it go on, so he takes a deep breath. “I should hope this isn’t what it’s like to be a baby.”Pansy lets out a high, tittering laugh. Granger huffs along with her, and Blaise joins in, too.Ron narrows his eyes at the charm, and Draco strongly suspects that he’s about to add to his lecture.“No,” Ron decides, after a few moments. “No need.”“What?” Harry asks.Granger advances on the sofa, wand raised. She stops a few steps away, seeming to reconsider her plan of attack. “Is there anywhere you’d like us to start, Malfoy?”“Draco. Please, call me Draco.” He’s not going to have a team of Gryffindors doing things to his magic without being on a first-name basis. “Also, you have my sincere apologies for the—” It would be nice if they could fix his thought-sludge, however, and how he can still hear Granger’s screams with horrible clarity, and the sweat running down his spine, and how he’d wanted to stop it, but couldn’t. “—the unfortunate—the—”Her face softens, starting at the determined crease in her forehead and travelling all the way down to the set of her mouth.“Thank you,” she says. “Apology accepted, Draco. You can call me Hermione.” The energy in the room shifts, becoming grimly determined. Blaise leans forward in his chair. Pansy stands up tall, her hands resting on her bump. Harry holds Draco close to his body.Hermione pauses one more time to take off her outer cloak, then stands over the sofa with Ron at her side. She tips her head at him, which must mean cast another Diagnostic Charm, because that’s what he does.It floats in the air off to the side in a shade Draco’s never seen before. Not that many Diagnostic Charms had been cast on him while he was in Azkaban, but it’s an altogether different shade than the three he’d seen yesterday in Harry’s kitchen.Hermione and Ron both study it, their heads tilted slightly to the side.“Draco’s wand?” Hermione asks.“Oh.” Harry puts out his hand. “Accio Draco’s wand.”It floats into his palm a few moments later. He offers it to Draco, who instantly panics. He shoves both hands under the duvet, wanting to hide his whole body beneath it.“No, I don’t think so,” he says.“You’re allowed.” An expression Draco can’t name flits across Harry’s face. “Here.”“No.”Harry gathers him closer with the arm that still encircles the duvet, and Draco cannot begin to explain the ridiculous, childish fear that has subsumed him—that magic will be intolerable, like bedsheets. “I won’t let it burn you,” Harry says, so quiet that he doubts even Ron and Hermione can hear. “Put your hand over mine.”Draco’s arm aches with the effort of bringing it out from under the duvet. His heart beats painfully, inconsistently, in his chest. He thinks of the way Harry tries to hide that the bathwater is too cold for his Chosen skin when they first get in, and he hasn’t managed to do it yet.He doesn’t seem bothered by the wand.Draco puts his hand over Harry’s.The sudden warmth through his palm is the same as it was in Ollivander’s. The same. It’s as if no time has passed, and the old man has just offered it to Draco over the counter, and he’s just wrapped his fingers around it for the first time. He’d known from the moment his fingertips had touched the hawthorn wood that it was his, and his heart had felt light and luminous in his chest, and even before the sparks had shot out, green and silver in the dusty shop, something inside him had said mine.Draco had always known that he would grow up and go to Hogwarts. He had been raised in magic, steeped in it, and there was never any question about the trajectory of his life. He would go away to Hogwarts, and when he returned to the Manor after his seventh-year, he would be a man with the world at his feet. He could continue his studies or find work or dedicate himself to his interests and the business of running the Manor, but whatever he did, he’d do it from the pinnacle of his status, without fear or struggle, and nothing would ever be barred to him.He had known all of this, but knowing it had been like dreaming. Once he woke, the dream dissolved.Then Ollivander had offered him the hawthorn wand, and everything had snapped into focus around that singular feeling.Whatever he did, wherever he went, he’d do it with this wand. His wand.It hadn’t woken his magic, because his magic had always been part of him, and had been described to him often enough that he could separate it from his breath and his heartbeat and his thoughts.The wand—his wand—had awoken instead a sense of agency. His magic didn’t just flow through him. It could be directed, and would.Perhaps—Perhaps it is waking up his magic this time.He’s never felt it rush like this before, down to his toes and up to the top of his head. He’s never felt it so warm before, as if he’s been bathed in a sunbeam. He’s never felt its absence so keenly, only now that it’s back, or that—that it’s allowed out.Was it caged, like he was caged?Draco doesn’t know he’s crying until he blinks, and tears fall on Harry’s hand.Harry’s hand.“—look?” Harry’s saying, in a voice so soft and low that it almost escapes Draco’s notice. “Should I put my hand back under his?”At some point, he shifted his grip, allowing Draco’s fingers to make direct contact with the hawthorn. The heel of Draco’s hand rests on Harry’s fingers.“No,” Draco answers. Harry startles, but before he can worry, Draco takes Harry’s wrist and pulls his hand over his own.He’ll hold the wand as long as they want him to, but he wants Harry’s hand on his.“Oh, for Merlin’s sake.” Pansy’s voice is throaty and tense, like she’s been brought to tears herself. Draco treats her the way he would prefer to be treated and doesn’t say a word.Hermione sniffles nearby.Draco glances up at her, and she blinks hard.“An eyelash,” she lies, then shakes her head. “I think we should set him back in balance first. Yes? Come on, Ron. One, two, three.” Draco’s magic is what has caused the rest of him to be—what did Harry call it?—a giant baby.Setting Draco back in balance turns out to be a group activity. Hermione ties her hair in a voluminous bun on the top of her head, pushes up her sleeves, and takes charge of the casting.She and Ron cast several spells while Draco sits in his duvet, in Harry’s lap, with one of Harry’s hands over Draco’s on his wand, and the other over Draco’s chest. The magic, when it lands, tugs under his skin.Draco only realises that they’ve been filtering all of it through Harry when Harry hisses about an hour into the process.“I’m sorry!” Hermione’s wand moves quickly in the air. “We’ll take a break after this one. I promise, Harry.”Harry tenses at that, but doesn’t say anything else. His face is red when Hermione stops casting.“Everything okay, mate?” Ron leans down and shines a bit of wandlight into Harry’s eyes. “I could cast—”“Fine.” Harry jerks his head away from the light. “Fine. Just—a minute. Okay? Good.”He puts Draco gently on the sofa and steps out.Draco can’t round on Hermione, as he doesn’t trust his legs to keep him upright, but he can spear her with suspicion from his duvet. “If it was going to hurt him, you should have told me.”Hermione exchanges a look with Ron.“Oh, none of—of that. What is it you’re doing, exactly?”“It’s only a precaution,” Hermione says guiltily. “Because of your heightened sensitivity.”“Then why did it hurt him?”“I’m not sure. I’ll cast some additional diagnostics before we start again, okay?”“I don’t want any,” Harry says, returning to the sitting room with a book in his hands. “Got what you wanted, Hermione. Move on to what’s next.”All four of them—Pansy, Blaise, Hermione, and Ron—exchange a glance behind Harry’s back as he’s taking his place on the sofa.Something is up with Harry Potter, and Draco’s the only one being kept in the dark.Once they’ve resettled, Harry puts the book in Draco’s hands, then puts his hand back over Draco’s so they’re both holding his wand.“What am I supposed to do with this?”Harry’s breath is warm on his neck when he answers. “Read.”Draco should make a joke about it, but he hasn’t read anything other than the signs marking the blocks at Azkaban in seven and a half years.There’s a fifteen-minute delay on account of copious tears. Draco reads aloud from a romance novel about a wizard who falls in love with his Muggle gardener while Blaise makes repeated comments about how unrealistic it is that a wizard would ever need to hire a Muggle gardener between long intervals of listening with rapt attention.Whatever they’re doing involves a lot of casting by Ron and Hermione and Pansy. It doesn’t hurt, but the tug in his head is quite strong, and he would most certainly panic about it if Harry didn’t have his chin on Draco’s shoulder and his hand on Draco’s chest. Occasionally, he asks Draco to re-read a sentence or two.The more he reads, the more his thoughts un-sludge. The easier the words come. And the clearer it is that Hermione Granger is leading an act of extremely complex magic.One that…seems rather pointless, if he considers it in any depth.What’s he supposed to do with his magic? What does it matter? He kept his parents out of Azkaban. That was the only goal, and now he’s relatively worthless.Draco puts it out of his mind.When Hermione finishes, she steps back and wipes at her forehead, panting a little as Ron studies the Diagnostic Charm, his eyebrows raised in an attitude of pleasant surprise.“How does it feel?” Hermione’s eyes dart towards the Diagnostic Charm too, a tension at her lips as if the Golden Girl might be capable of doubt.“It feels…” Like a garden in bloom. Like his thoughts had been silenced, deadened, and he hadn’t known until they were all clamouring for space in his mind again. Most of them revolve around the plot of the romance novel he’s been reading, but other sparks of interest tease at the margins, growing larger by the moment. “It feels like I have a brain.”Pansy claps her hands. “Oh, darling, that’s wonderful.”It does not sound sarcastic in the least. About an hour after the reading exercise, Draco begins to see magic again.Not just the red-orange crackles in Hermione’s hair, but the faint tendrils that trail behind spells and hang in the air. The blue glow of Ron’s Healing magic. The pinkish sizzle of Pansy’s. Blaise’s, a deep green. When Draco was younger, he thought everyone could see magic the way he did—with a bit of concentration, since it’s rather faint, embedded in the world as it is.The filaments tend to be brighter in broken objects, like the Vanishing Cabinet.He’s learned to tune it out, to not see unless he wants to, and it’s probably a good thing that he’d pushed away the ability in Azkaban. The whole place was pitch-black and bone-white, rot spreading over every stone.The only person’s magic he can’t see is Harry’s. His physical balance is nearly as complex as the inner workings of Draco’s brain, which feels a bit ridiculous. Draco says so as he’s standing in the middle of the sitting room, the duvet hiked up to his shoulders and Harry’s hands on his hips so he doesn’t fall over.“It probably does feel that way.” Hermione swats a curl of her hair out of her face. “Pansy, move a bit to the left. Blaise, you’ll need to be directly across from Ron. But you have to consider, Draco, that the brain and body—”“And magic,” Ron interjects.“—and magic,” Hermione continues, “develop together, in fits and starts. It’s why—I was wrong, Pansy, a step to the right. It’s why sometimes, when babies are learning something new, like how to roll over, or how to crawl—Harry, take your hands away for a moment.”Harry’s hands leave Draco’s hips. His stomach drops. He’s going to fall, and has no way to catch himself, because he’s not sure which way he’ll fall, and it couldn’t get more embarrassing, honestly, unless he actually fell onto his face in the middle of the—Harry’s hands slide back onto his hips, and Harry steps in a bit closer. “Enough?” he asks Hermione.“That’s perfect.” Hermione’s wand moves in precise cuts. Her magic tugs at the back of his neck, and his ears, and midway through his torso. “It’s why sometimes, babies babble less when they’re on the precipice of a major development. And sometimes, just before or after, they’ll babble more. Everything is connected.” She makes a twisting motion with her wand. “Mind and body and magic. Like a wand core and the wood. Okay. Are we ready?”Pansy and Blaise give their confirmation. A minor panic ticks up with Draco’s pulse, but with his thoughts actively working and Harry’s hands on his hips, he can’t bring himself to be afraid.There’s a snap at the centre of him, like an X made of strings pulled through his ribs, and on his next breath his body makes sense in space again, and when Harry lets go, he doesn’t fall. There’s a limit to how much magical readjustment can be done in one day. They reach it five minutes into dinner, when Draco is struck by the urge to put his head down on Harry’s shoulder and doesn’t wake up until the next morning. Half an hour after lunch the next day, he becomes wretchedly overheated in the duvet and throws it off to a round of cheers.Draco keeps wearing Harry’s sweater, however. On Saturday morning—long and grey and reminding him of weekends in the Slytherin dormitory, albeit with added Gryffindors, Draco practices wandering.He finds he’s not fond of doorways. His throat closes when he has to walk through one and, though he is much less of a giant baby, he hates being apart from Harry with a passion.As it’s not a reasonable expectation to sit in his lap for the rest of their lives, Draco commits to the practice of moving aimlessly about Potter Cottage.Pansy and Harry have taken over Hermione’s blackboard for a preliminary secret investigation of who might’ve done what Pansy calls the most hideous and ridiculous crime of the fucking century. Hermione and Ron consult each other on Draco’s magical and physical health while Blaise inserts himself into the conversation. Draco revels in his thoughts.He is thinking of Harry in the stretch between breakfast and lunch when he wanders past the kitchen on his way to the bathroom and hears Harry’s voice.“—bond?”“The SIRIUS Act didn’t require any sort of bond. Certainly not a prisoner’s bond.”“He said it was a sponsorship bond.”“It sounds like a prisoner’s bond to me, and I would never have advocated for that. It’s a good thing it didn’t take.”Harry’s voice gets quieter, out of Draco’s hearing, and then:“—records, Hermione, and if it’s not real, then—”“No one on the Wizengamot or at the DMLE would argue for the enforcement of a fake sentence. Not after we bring it to their attention. He’ll be free to go.”Hermione is busy with the tea. She doesn’t see the way Harry’s face shutters and his shoulders round, but Draco does.He is past the kitchen doorway when her voice floats out into the hall.“Harry? Are you all right?”“Yeah,” Harry says. “I just—” In the pause after he speaks, a cupboard closes softly. “I’ll be fine.”Later, the Golden Trio is back in the kitchen, getting in Kreacher’s way, when Draco wanders past again.At first blush, he thinks Ron and Hermione are talking about him.Because they are.“I’m only saying. It’s not how it usually goes,” Ron says. Behind his back, Harry is writing on a piece of parchment, and doesn’t seem to be paying attention at all. “Seven years, call it eight, should have been worse. And I think it’s because—”Hermione makes a face at him. It must mean shut up, you great prat, because Ron sighs and folds his arms over his chest. “It could be connected. You have to admit it would be the most likely scenario.”“I’m not getting into that again.”“Oh yes you are, Hermione. We both are.” Ron turns around mid-sentence and casts so quietly that only his lips move. A smaller, less obtrusive Diagnostic Charm hovers just behind Harry’s head. There’s a lot of gold, and…black. Tendrils spiralling out from the centre. Ron sees Draco in the doorway and cancels the charm like he’d snap up a window shade. “Draco,” he says. “How are you, mate?”Harry turns, his face lighting up at the sight of Draco. A hint of longing creeps over his face like a shadow and disappears. After dinner, when Draco corners Ron in the kitchen—what is it with Gryffindors and kitchens?—Ron doesn’t bother to pretend.“It’s nothing,” he says. “I know that sounds like complete bollocks, but it’s not. It’s really and truly nothing.”“Why should eight years have been so much worse?” Draco asks instead.Ron blinks. “Oh. Er…your magic didn’t deteriorate following the normal pattern of decline.”“Why not?”“Dunno.” Ron purses his lips. “It’s weird, though. I did a bit of research last night. There’s not much, for obvious reasons, but when that kind of thing happens, it usually only happens with bonded pairs.”“I’m not bonded to anyone.”“Yeah.” Ron’s face smooths out. “Do you remember how to play wizard chess?”Draco scoffs at him. “Who do you take me for?”Ron grins at that, relief plain in his eyes. “Come on. I’ll give you a run for your money.” Draco thinks he’ll dedicate all his newly rediscovered brainpower to finding out what in Merlin’s name is happening to Harry Potter.Then, in the middle of Saturday night, another part of his body comes abruptly back to life and ruins everything.
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
Harry stands next to Dumbledore’s desk in the Headmaster’s office, wand in hand, and surveys the wreckage. His chest moves fast. He’s breathing hard, like he ran here, though he can’t recall coming up the stairs.The room has been turned over. He’s seen it like this before. He’s destroyed it like this before, in rage and grief, only it’s not quite the same as last time. All the objects are on the floor, except for a few forgotten pieces that huddle near the back of the shelves, one of them a boxy shape pressed tight to the corner. A gleaming brass armillary sphere lays crumpled in pieces at Harry’s feet, its rings still twitching feebly in their paths around the cracked sun at the centre. Light—Lumos, Harry thinks—flickers. The tendrils highlight an inscription that runs around the sun’s equator in a curling script. The star spins slowly, impossibly, allowing him to read the words. For, behold, I create new heavens and a new—Something tangles around Harry’s ankles.He checks for Devil’s Snare, or an Inferi’s hand, but whatever’s brushed against him doesn’t feel like that.It feels like sheets?The room dips a bit. One of the rings on the armillary sphere falls from one pole of the sun to the other with a wooden snap, like the bathroom door.He makes another full turn and finds himself sitting upright in an empty bed. “Draco?”Moonlight through the window cuts across the path Draco took from the bed to the bathroom. Harry’s feet are on the floor, the blankets thrown back, before he remembers that Draco can walk without falling over, thanks to Hermione and Ron and Pansy and Blaise.He pushes his hands through his hair. They’re all still in the house. He can feel their magic around him, and below him. Pansy and Ron are in one of his guest rooms down the hall. Hermione in another one.Or—no. Hermione’s downstairs. If Harry knows her, she’s working on something in the study. More to do with Draco’s magic, or one of her projects, or—Or Blaise Zabini, who is also downstairs.He decides it’s none of his business who’s downstairs and who isn’t and tucks his legs back under the sheets.It’s not right.Draco’s magic.The clean, silvery scent of it is cold and thin with a bright, anxious core. It reminds him of those brass rings, trying and trying to spin.Harry closes his eyes and tries to reassure himself that it’s just—you know. Everything. Being in prison, then being taken to Harry’s house, and the way his magic had been…Hermione had been horrified. She’d tried to hide it from Draco, and Harry thinks she did a decent job. He doesn’t think Draco knows that she stepped out three separate times to cry.God.What a weird dream.
For, behold, I create new heavens
Draco’s magic stretches thinner, and Harry can’t ignore it.Draco might not have to stay with Harry for a year. But until he’s fine enough to leave, until all of this is settled, until Harry has to find something else to cling to with his nails digging in, he has—He has a responsibility.Harry gets out of bed, pads to the bathroom door, and listens.There’s no sound from inside.He puts up a Silencing Charm over the door and nudges it down the hall so he won’t wake Ron and Pansy.Then he knocks gently at the bathroom door. “Draco?”Now there is a sound, but Harry can’t quite tell what it is. He listens closer. Is that wheezing?Harry knocks again. “Draco, are you okay?”Draco says something that Harry can’t understand.“What?”There’s a despairing noise, and then the bathroom door opens. About an inch of space appears between the door and the frame.He can’t see Draco in that space, but takes the open door as permission to enter, so he does.Draco stands by the tub, head tilted back, hands up to cover his face. The pained tension in the curve of his shoulders sets Harry’s heart racing. The only light in the bathroom is a small, silvery Lumos bobbing near the sink, and it gives the whole room an otherworldly glow. Draco’s wand rests on the countertop next to it. Harry flicks his fingers and a bit of warmth sinks into the light.That’s a bit better.“Was it a dream?” Harry asks. Draco looks like he’s had a nightmare, what with his tense trembling.“No,” Draco says miserably, from behind his hands. “It’s entirely real.”“What is?”“It’s fine.” Draco’s voice cracks off into a whisper, and Harry can’t take it. He can’t. He crosses the bathroom in two strides and wraps Draco in his arms, his heart pounding at the audacity of it.Just.Holding him like this, when he hasn’t already been in Harry’s arms, feels bold to the point of insanity.But Draco doesn’t pull away. Harry fits his chin onto the curve of Draco’s shoulder, trying his best to approach it like Draco’s reading on the sofa and none of this is out of the ordinary. It’s weird, obviously, the whole thing, like Harry’s been brushed sideways into another life by the hand of fate or something.And…it’s right.It’s right for Draco’s spine to fit against Harry’s chest through his pyjamas and Harry’s T-shirt. Draco’s body curves closer, and his magic warms by several degrees, calming a little.“This is mortifying,” whispers Draco. Harry’s not sure what, exactly, is mortifying, but a tiny knot of anxiety untwists at the way the word trips off Draco’s tongue, so much easier than it did before they’d untangled his magic. He felt every bit of that, and he’d felt Hermione search for the problem in Harry’s, too. She tries, every so often. He doesn’t blame her. It’s just that Draco’s magic had been crushed by Azkaban, crowded into the core of him until it could hardly breathe, and it’s not the same for Harry.He nudges Draco’s hair out of his face with his nose, inhaling the scent of Draco’s skin in the process. He smells like Harry’s bed and the almond soap Pansy brought for him and something that reminds Harry of a running stream. He’s warm under Harry’s hands, his heart beating fast.“I’m not looking at you,” Harry mentions, because he’d rather not look people in the eye when he has to tell them something’s really wrong, and he avoids that as a matter of course anyway. “You can just say it. I’m not going to—I dunno. Laugh. Or anything.”Draco does laugh, a short, brittle sound. “You might.”“I won’t.”“You don’t understand. You don’t understand how awful—how I know I must look to you, and of course I don’t expect—I would never—”It’s a lot of words at once. Harry likes them even as each one makes him more anxious that some disaster has befallen them in the middle of the night when he was sleeping, and if the rest of his life is any indication, it’s probably Harry’s fault, and if he just knew what it was, he could help, so—“Draco. Just say it. Whatever it is, just say it, and I’ll—”“You can’t. There’s nothing you can do.”“Why not?”“Because!”“Because what? You’ve been sleeping in my bed, and sitting in my lap for days, and I’ve—I haven’t had a single problem with any of it, and I honestly don’t know what could be—I’m not saying it’s bad, but I don’t know what could be worse than—”“This,” Draco hisses, and pushes Harry’s hand down from where it rests on his stomach, past the waistband of his pyjamas, and onto—“Oh.” All the air rushes out of Harry’s lungs. All the thoughts drain out of his head. Draco’s not breathing, only trembling, like trembling could actually sustain his life.Harry knows that he should move his hand. Let go of the curve of Draco’s cock underneath his clothes. The point has been demonstrated, and he—he gets it now. He knows what Draco’s talking about.Sort of.Draco’s fingers flex on Harry’s wrist, and he prepares to be pulled away through the heated haze of his completely unhelpful thoughts, but when Harry doesn’t let go, Draco grips his wrist and keeps his hand in place.Harry’s dying. He tries to subtly angle his hips. Maybe—Draco jerks Harry’s hand away from the front of his pyjama trousers with a sound of abject defeat.“See? This is a disaster. I can’t—I woke up like this. From lying next to you.”“I’m…sorry?”“And now,” Draco goes on, shaking harder. “There’s no one else to tell. Except you.”“Is that…d’you want me to leave?”“And what? Go back to the bedroom and lie there and pretend this never happened?”“Er…” No. That’s not what Harry would be doing, if he went back to the bedroom now. “If that’s what you want?”“I felt you try to hide your disgust.”“…what?”“You tried to pull away from me. I don’t know how we’re supposed to go on like this if—”“I’m not disgusted.”“I felt you—”Harry takes Draco by the hips and pulls him close.If this is mortifying, then fine. He’ll be mortified, too. Except he can’t quite manage it with all the blood in his body below his waistline. He meant for this to be an instructive moment, but what happens is that Draco’s arse fits over Harry’s incredibly, ridiculously hard cock, only a few layers of fabric between them, and it feels so good that he has to stifle a moan.“Oh,” Draco says, softer.Harry gathers all the self-control he can.“I don’t think you’re disgusting. I don’t know why you would think that. I mean.” He knows what he means, but can’t describe it. Harry’s never been great with words. Or feelings. He tries to smash the two of them together and commits to talking when that turns into a mess. “I mean—I know. I know why you would think that. I get why you would feel…weird. But you don’t look weird. To me. You look beautiful.”Harry flinches behind Draco’s head. Thank Merlin they’re not looking at each other. There’s no way Draco doesn’t argue.“Beautiful,” Draco repeats, not sounding sure of himself, but not questioning, either.Harry senses this is his chance to back out or qualify or change course.“Yeah,” he says.“In a…” Draco swallows. His left hand drops to Harry’s, on his hip. “Pitying way? Or…”There’s no point in suppressing his groan. He couldn’t, even if he wanted to. “Does it feel like a pitying way?”“No. But you—there are extenuating circumstances.”
Extenuating circumstances.
Harry knows, in the part of his brain that still has any reasonable blood flow, that this is very serious. All of it is serious. Draco was in prison. He’s been magically readjusted for the better part of three days because Hermione’s pretty sure that someone with connections at the Ministry and the Prophet wants the world to believe that Harry was hiding Draco in his basement for all these years.Which is…obviously not true. First of all, Potter Cottage doesn’t have a basement. A small cellar did appear while Harry was renovating, which is where Kreacher stores wine and extra vegetables.Second of all, he’s been searching for Draco for years. Harry didn’t hold him hostage. According to Pansy, the idea of a hostage situation smacks of panic and desperation.There are many extenuating circumstances.Harry keeps them in mind as best he can while his brain catches fire with how hot it is when Draco says things like extenuating circumstances.“Name the top three,” Harry says.“I didn’t tell anyone where I was.”“I don’t care. What’s the next one?”“Yes, you do.”“I don’t care right now.” Harry really is going to burst into flames. “What’s the next one?”“I’ve been in a cage for seven and a half years, so I don’t know—I don’t—”“I don’t care if you’re not a sex god, or whatever.”Draco bristles a little, but sags so quickly that Harry knows it’s true—he really is worried about not being a sex god.“I do have some experience.” Draco drags Harry’s right hand up from his hip to the centre of his chest, which has the effect of pushing his arse more firmly into Harry’s cock. It’s unbearable. It’s wonderful. “I wasn’t kept locked away for my entire life. I’m only out of practice.”“That’s fine. What’s the third one?”“We hate each other.”“We definitely decided we didn’t.”“That was a long time ago.”“I don’t care. I don’t care. I haven’t changed my mind about not hating you. Merlin’s balls, Draco, why do you think I spent all those years trying to find out where you’d gone?”“Your irrepressible hero complex.”A burst of emotion crosses Harry’s chest, a shooting star in the dark, and he presses his face into the side of Draco’s neck. This isn’t falling in love, or whatever. This weird setup is going to end, and when it does, he’ll lose Draco. That’s the way the story always goes. The force of his longing rises to his head, blooming like a thorned rose, and he flinches in spite of himself.“What was that?” Draco asks.“Nothing. Listen.” Harry takes a deep breath. It’s full of Draco and his silvery magic and his almond soap and the warm Draco scent of him, and he thinks it might be all he’s ever wanted, which is impossible, and he doesn’t care. “How d’you want to do this?”“Do what?”“Get you…” Hermione’s voice echoes in his memory. “Back in balance.”“You make it sound like bathwater.”Draco says this in a light, teasing tone that reaches Harry’s ears as anything but light and teasing. He can still hear Draco screaming the first time he touched the bath Harry had drawn for him, and probably always will hear it. He can see the tears in Draco’s eyes when he’d offered him his wand. And he understands in a sort of sudden, inevitable way that it really is everything. Draco’s panic is about feeling ruined and ugly and it’s about how overwhelmed he’d been even by a place like Harry’s house and this level of contact and pleasure might be as terrifying and overwhelming as all the rest, and Harry might not hate him now, but Draco thinks it’s possible, so—“Let’s get in the shower.”Harry lets go of Draco’s hips and starts it with a wave of his hand, stripping his T-shirt over his head in the same motion. He can feel Draco watching him—can even feel that he’s deciding whether to argue—and can’t think of another way to do this that’s not stupefyingly awkward for both of them. He steps into the tub first, taking up most of the space under the stream, and turns down the temperature. Warm, but nowhere near hot.Then, like Harry’s not also silently panicking about how good he is in bed—or in this case, in shower—he sticks his hand out the gap in the curtain.“Come on,” he says, and closes his eyes.A shuffling sound, barely louder than a whisper, says Draco is taking off his pyjamas.Harry’s arm is beginning to ache with holding it out in that odd position when a warm, dry hand slides into his, elegant fingers fitting into his palm like he wasn’t born to defeat a Dark Lord, he was born to help Draco Malfoy into the shower.The curtain scrapes, colder droplets of water landing on Harry’s shoulder. Draco doesn’t let go of his hand. He moves closer, changing the trajectory of the falling droplets so they bounce into Harry’s face.“Too hot?” he asks.“A—a bit too cold, actually,” Draco says.He is so bloody glad to hear that.Harry makes the water warmer, and Draco joins him under the stream. He drops Harry’s hand, and for a second, Harry’s convinced he’s disappeared.Then Draco’s hands find Harry’s face, soft and tentative, and it’s the sexiest non-sexy touch that Harry’s ever experienced. The pads of his thumbs trace gently over Harry’s cheekbones. Harry’s not planning to lean into it. He just does. And Draco doesn’t make him stop, so he must like it, which means it’s probably fine, and the whole shower thing is still about Draco, the way it’s supposed to be.“You were right,” Draco says.“’Bout what?”“It’s more comfortable in the water.”Harry laughs, the memory quiet in his head. It would be more comfortable in the bath. What do you say? “I heard that from someone once. Seemed like good advice.”“I never took you as the type.”“The type?”“To take advice.”“I usually don’t.” Harry’s ignored a lot of advice since Draco disappeared. It occurs to him that Draco might be the only person whose advice he wants to listen to at all. Maybe that’s what he’s been starved for all this time. With his eyes closed, he can see the Muggle flat and Draco lying on the next pillow and the sweet line of his mouth in aching detail. “Back then, I thought I should get into the shower with you.”“Oh, you couldn’t have done that. You were so tired.”“But if I had.”Draco’s thumbs pause on his face. “If you had…”“What would you have wanted? To happen. I know it’s not the same.” Nothing is ever the same. It always changes, the ground going out from beneath Harry’s feet, a yawning emptiness where there should have been victory. “But we weren’t fighting, even though…”“We should have been?”“I thought we should have been,” Harry admits. “But we weren’t.”“How very mature of us,” Draco says softly.“And we’re not fighting now, so we could—we could pretend—”Harry doesn’t get to say just for the sake of getting you back in balance, or into your body, or whatever, whatever you want, because Draco leans in and kisses him.It’s as soft and tentative as his hands until Harry grabs for his hips and pulls him close and kisses him back. Harry’s never soft, never tentative. He’s always pushing people away, literally, or going in so hard it hurts.It doesn’t feel wrong this time.He gets proof that it’s not wrong when Draco groans into his mouth, voice raw with desire. Harry’s never been prouder of anything than he is of being the one to make Draco make that sound. Every inch of him is wet and warm, warmer where their skin comes together, where Draco’s hands are on his face and his body is flush with Harry’s, and both of them angle in, desperate, and Harry has to pull away from Draco’s mouth just to gasp and keep himself from coming right then and there.He opens his eyes.Draco’s there, his white-blond hair darkened by the water, droplets running down pink cheeks, silver-grey eyes as bright as they were the first time Harry saw him. Draco’s always been on a pedestal, Harry thinks, always looked like art that came alive.Harry’s got enough self-control and breath to kiss Draco again. The feel of him is as vivid as the sight. The soft, wet mouth. The searching slip of his tongue. The taut muscles, hard hips.“Too much?” he asks into the kiss. “Don’t want—don’t want to burn you.”What Harry wants is to be burned. To be so wholly consumed by Draco that there’s nothing left of him to feel sick and hurt and empty.“No.” Draco’s tongue follows the word past Harry’s lips. His touch is bolder, or else he’s giving into the closest bit of fantasy on offer—that they never left the flat, that they woke up the next morning in the same bed, with Harry’s hand in Draco’s hair. The thought makes Harry’s cock twitch. Draco makes a low, needy sound, and Harry doesn’t care, actually, whether it’s because he can hear Harry’s thoughts or because Harry just feels that good to him. Doesn’t have enough blood in his brain to care. “No, no, it’s not too much at all. No. It’s not.”So many words, all at once. It feels like decades since Draco appeared on his doorstep. It feels like minutes. It’s a matter of heartbeats and almost eight long years of silence. Harry could never be sure if the search was mutual, if Draco thought of him, if he was chasing a shadow that would only ever disappear in the light.Now he can feel his desperation echoed back at him, reflected through his magic and Draco’s and water on skin.“Can I touch you?” he says, graceless. “I dunno if you want—how you want—”Draco’s hands slide up and into Harry’s hair, fingers folding into fists. He’s not pulling, not trying to hurt him, and Harry knows that touch for what it is. Permission. And maybe a plea.He gives it back with a slide of his own hand. Down Draco’s waist and his hip instead of up towards his hair. He finds Draco’s hipbones and follows the path around to his cock and Harry’s, too. They’ve been sliding against one another in a not-enough-not-enough way that would be torture if it wasn’t so much better than searching for him, empty-handed.Then Harry closes his fist around both of them, his fingertips not quite meeting, and Draco says something sibilant and hissing. Harry pauses, panting—has he burned him? Has he taken him too far, pushed too far, the way he always, always does?Draco tries again. “Silencing,” he manages.“Already cast them,” Harry answers, and strokes.It’s a bloody miracle. The kind he never quite believed in as a kid, because a true miracle would have taken him out of the cupboard before he was eleven. It would have put him down somewhere safe, and nothing and nobody ever did.This—his own hand around both of them—that’s the place to start. Harry can stand it, can take it, in a way he hasn’t been able to from other people for years, since the end of the war. Desire fills his lungs along with humid air. He grabs for Draco with his free hand, his fingers finding purchase on his nape, and it’s no smooth, sexy thing, how he presses his head to Draco’s shoulder and grits his teeth and keeps his hand moving slow and steady.Draco’s lips move over the exposed line of his neck, dragging gently through the water collecting on Harry’s skin, his breath hotter than the steam gathered around them. Both his hands drop to Harry’s waist. He’s all tucked in, a live wire against Harry’s body, and when the slim points of his teeth nip at Harry’s shoulder, a sound comes out of Harry that he’s never made before. He has no idea what it means. Has no way to explain it, or translate it.But Draco doesn’t need a translation. His hands grip Harry’s waist, pulling him in so close that Harry’s knuckles brush the wet, fluttering muscles of Draco’s abs and keep raking across them. Harry is hotly, hazily grateful for the water. His knuckles are rough and dry and he wouldn’t want them to scrape Draco’s skin.“Tell me how you like it,” Draco demands in his ear, and Harry has to hold on harder, because he goes weak in the knees. “Tell me. I want to know.”Harry closes his grip around the hot wet pulsing lengths in his fist and he lets up on instinct, not wanting to hurt Draco.But.
But.
“I like—”He can’t tell him.He just.Can’t.Not about the men he met in bars just after the war, when he couldn’t find Draco and the search had worn him thin and his head hurt. Harry had thought he could fuck the pain out.Or, more accurately, get someone to fuck it out of him.Draco’s hands flex on his hips. “Tell me. And don’t stop moving your hand.”Harry shudders.He doesn’t stop moving his hand.“I like to be—to be told. What to do. So I can stop thinking. I’m—” Pathetic, like he was in that flat in Croydon, like he has always been, as long as he can remember. Harry’s always been mad for someone to order him around, especially when he couldn’t have it. He’d almost lost his mind during those months on the run. Sometimes, he thinks he’d have given up the search, walked away from all of it, in exchange for a single hour of not having to decide. That’s never stopped. Not when the Snatchers found them in the Forest of Dean. Not when Voldemort fell to the floor of the Great Hall and they’d all seen he was nothing but Tom Riddle after all. Not when he thought he walked out of that flat, and not when he knew he’d never leave, not really, not ever. “I’m so bloody tired.”Draco’s magic warms, roils, like a great storm coming in. Harry made a mistake. He shouldn’t have said that out loud. Not when Draco’s been—he’s been—he can’t.“Just forget—forget that.” Harry’s hand moves over them, up and down, adding pressure, because his body wants what it wants. It doesn’t care about the emotion gathering in his chest, a dangerous, longing energy like a lightning strike. It just wants to get off. “Don’t think I’m asking—I’m not asking you to—”Draco gently dislodges Harry’s hand from his neck. His arms slide past Harry’s, rearranging them until Draco’s fingers are threaded through Harry’s hair, holding his face to Draco’s shoulder, and Draco’s other hand is over Harry’s.“That’s right,” Draco says, his voice level and encouraging. “That feels good. Doesn’t it?”“Yes,” Harry manages.Draco twists his grip so they’re both wanking themselves together now. Harry can’t tell where his hand ends and Draco’s begins.“I want you to make me come. Like this.”That was already Harry’s plan, but the wild emotion in his chest unclenches, and the feverish rattle of his thoughts goes quiet as if they’d been tucked in under a blanket and hushed.“Oh.” The noise comes from low in Draco’s throat. Harry would wonder at it, worry at it, let it burrow into him until he could pin down its meaning, but he can’t, not when he’s like this. It’s a good sound, backed up by a curl of desire in Draco’s magic.That’s all that matters.The hitch of Draco’s breath.The flutter of his muscles under Harry’s not-soft-enough knuckles.The jump of his cock in Harry’s hand.The task he’s been given is simple and easy and he wants it.For Draco.Making him come is all Harry cares about. He throws himself into the project, kissing sloppy and open-mouthed against Draco’s shoulder, babbling.“Good? What do you—Draco—” Is it good? Is this good? The filament between his mouth and his brain is thin to the point of breaking.“You are good,” Draco says.“Oh, God, oh, God.” It’s nothing Harry hasn’t heard before, from a thousand different people in a thousand different ways, but this way, this way, does something to him, something so hot and wonderful that it strips him down. “Please. Please. Please let me suck you. Please.”Draco’s hands on his shoulders urge Harry down. Harry licks him as he goes. Every faint scar he can reach. He catches Draco’s wrist in his hand and drags his tongue over the faded Mark on Draco’s left forearm. He wants this part of him, too. Every part of him. Draco lets out a heated groan at that, so Harry sucks at the spot while he lowers himself the last few inches, then pulls his mouth away with a pop. He can’t hear much over the rush of blood in his ears and the loud hum of magic and want but Draco’s fingers curl into his hair. Harry latches onto that touch like a promise.What matters is that Draco’s hands pull him in closer, wanting him. Draco is talking but Harry can’t hear a word. He feels the vibration in his mouth, on his tongue, and Draco’s fingers urge him on, begging Harry to take him deeper.He’s a lot.Harry had thought about how much of him there must be in the dead of night when he felt like his head would split in two and there was no point in imagining peace anymore, no point in imagining a life where there was no pain, and it felt dirty, didn’t it? It felt filthy to wonder what Draco would’ve looked like, naked in the shower, what he would’ve felt like.Now Harry knows.His cock is long and thick and hard, the skin on Harry’s tongue so soft he could cry, and he tastes clean and salty, almost citrus-sharp from the precum beading at his tip.Harry sucks him as filthy as his imagination.Because Draco’s perfect.He deserves focus and—And worship. He’d been close under the steady rhythm of Harry’s hand and Harry chases that high with his mouth and his tongue. Draco’s cock bumps against the back of his throat and he swallows in a sort of wild bliss, the long stretch of Draco’s pale skin and his scars blurred by the water and the heat. His vision is nothing without his glasses, but Harry can still see the point of Draco’s chin as he tips his head back. The hum of his voice is everywhere, in Harry’s blood, in his bones, between his legs. Harry licks the underside of Draco’s cock, keeping the rest of his mouth close and tight, and is rewarded by a jerk of Draco’s hips and gasp, and then his cock pulses and come spills onto Harry’s tongue, down his throat, hot and endless.Harry never wants it to end.Draco drops his head forward and looks into Harry’s eyes, and Harry doesn’t know how Draco could ever think Harry wouldn’t want him, or wouldn’t want to look at him, because.He’s just.Fucking gorgeous.His cheeks red and his eyes dark and his mouth glistening, half-open, wordless. Harry could drown in that sound—a long, low cry, like Draco thought he might never have this again.He’d stay right there for the rest of eternity, except Draco’s hands slip down to his face and bring him up, and it’s not until he’s on his feet that Harry understands he’s shaking, they’re both shaking, and Draco pins Harry to his body again. Only it’s Draco’s hand wrapped around him.Harry’s helpless against it. Desperate for it. He can’t tell why Draco’s hand feels so good on his cock. If it’s from practice. From before. Or if it’s because Draco’s the first person to touch him like this in at least five years. Or if Harry’s only ever wanted Draco to touch him like this.He’s never going to figure it out.Not when he’s hot, inside and out. Not with Draco’s voice in his ear. He can’t make out much of what he’s saying. Most of what he hears is good, and Draco’s hand does something incredible to his cock. He’ll never get over it. Harry rolls his hips into Draco’s hand in small, gasping movements because the last thing he wants is to pull away.Ever.For any reason.He wants Draco to keep talking, just for the sound of his voice, but he needs to kiss him so much that his cock aches. Harry must look mad, turning his head and searching like this, but his mouth finds Draco’s in the least coordinated kiss of his lifetime.That’s saying something.But Draco doesn’t laugh, or pull his face away. He somehow catches Harry mid-kiss, like gravity would catch him if he tripped over a root in the forest and came tumbling down.This is much nicer than falling on his face.It still feels like falling.Because all the heat and blood in his body concentrates in his cock and his balls draw up and he’s left clinging to Draco’s shoulders like he’s on the edge of a cliff while his need spirals out of control and his pleasure builds and builds and builds until it explodes out of him like sparks, like magic.It’s a good thing Harry’s Silencing Charms have been strong since he went hunting Horcruxes, because he can’t stop a single one of the noises he makes into Draco’s mouth, and they’re loud.Loud enough to hurt.Just a little.Just when the last of the pleasure spills out of Harry and he’s high on it, floating, empty in the only way that’s ever been good.Draco brings him down, slowly, carefully, saying that’s it, good boy, beautiful, breathe deeper, yes until Harry’s aware of his forehead on the slick curve of Draco’s shoulder and Draco stroking his hair.“Sorry,” Harry whispers.“Oh, hello,” Draco says, like Harry’s returned from a long time away. He says it with a sort of glee that Harry has no hope of understanding. Harry was supposed to be the one taking the lead. Or in charge. Or whatever. He’s doing a horrible job.Draco gets them both dry and into bed. Harry hums, oversensitive and sated. He stretches out on the mattress, naked and dry and shivering, and Draco curls up next to him, naked and dry and not shivering.He runs his hand down the entire length of Harry’s spine, then back up again.Down.Back up.Down.Back up.He leans over Harry’s ear and says things like are you all right? and do you want a glass of water? and here, drink, just a little, for me and pulls the blankets up over both of them.“You…” Harry’s eyelids are so heavy that he can’t keep them open, but he’s buzzing. Awake. “I didn’t ask if you like it that way.”“Mmm.” Draco’s lips rest on his earlobe, warm, and Harry can feel them move when he speaks. “I did like it.”“I wasn’t too much for you?”“No.”“Because I’m too much for some people. They don’t—” Harry yawns, his jaw aching from how big it is. “They don’t understand what I want.”“I thought it was quite clear.”“Did you?”“You want someone to take care of you. To make the decisions.”“Not all the time,” Harry says quickly, because he doesn’t want to put that on Draco, for the love of Merlin. “I can be—I can.”“I don’t doubt it.”“I just don’t want you to feel like you have to be—whatever way. You don’t have to push yourself.”“I wasn’t.”Harry’s knees start to curl up towards his chest. He’s not fully aware of it until Draco runs his hand over the outside of Harry’s thigh. “No, darling. Relax.”And Harry does.It’s easy, when Draco says it, and impossible when Harry demands it from himself.“Good,” Draco says, when his legs have let down, which makes Harry lightheaded all over again. “I like it. Very much. I didn’t have anyone, for anything, and I like this.”“Okay,” Harry whispers.“Tell me what else you like,” Draco whispers back.“Dunno. I don’t—I’ve never tried most of what—I didn’t have that long, after the war.”“No?”“No.”“Why not?”Harry shakes his head against the pillow. “It’s nothing.”He doesn’t think Draco believes him, but Draco doesn’t call him on it. A few beats of thoughtful silence pass.“Tell me,” Draco prompts. “While I have you like this.”“Like what?”There’s a longer pause, like Draco has to mount an extensive search for the right word. “Open.”“Been open the whole time.”Draco hums. “Tell me what you thought about while I was gone.”“I thought about you.”Harry waits for the terrible humiliation of admitting it out loud, when he didn’t really plan to, but it doesn’t come.A kiss does, dropped onto the spot below his ear.“What else?” Draco asks, his voice like soothing darkness.Harry just.Tells him.One fantasy after another. Most of them pathetic. Most of them involving Harry not having to be in control, for once, because he’s so bloody tired, he’s been tired for as long as he can remember and he thinks he might always be, even when Draco leaves.“That’s not going to happen,” Draco says, from far away.“Yeah. It is.” Harry sounds equally far away to himself.“Darling.” Draco’s fingers don’t feel far away. They’re close, in his hair. Draco’s close. The warmth and weight of him are perfect, curled around Harry’s back. “Go to sleep.”Harry’s in the depths now, but he rouses himself enough for a request.“Will you say it again?”“Say what?” There’s a laugh in Draco’s voice.“Extending circus.”“Extenuating circumstances,” Draco says, and Harry can hear the smile there, too. “Go to sleep.”Harry does.
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On Sunday, Draco wakes first. Harry sleeps so soundly on the pillow next to him that he doesn’t stir when Draco tugs his arm away from Harry’s waist.Merlin’s magic.If he doesn’t get up now, he’ll wake Harry.And…Draco doesn’t know what. Shag him senseless on the pillows? Be shagged senseless on the pillows? Harry had been quite concerned with whether Draco was up to it last night.And…Yes, it’s true. Harry’s concern was justified, given Draco’s recent and possibly fraudulent prison sentence.But the way Harry had been is confirmation:Something is up with Harry Potter, and Draco needs to understand what, and why, and soon.As far as Draco knows, it’s not strange for a person with real-world power and influence to want to shuck it off behind closed doors. There had been gossip enough in the Slytherin dormitories that most of them left with a decent enough education in what it meant to want things like that, and get them.He simply hadn’t expected for Harry Potter of all people to become boneless and trusting, and so deeply satisfied afterwards. Relieved, as if what they’d done had been more than sex and had, in fact, saved Harry’s life.Perhaps Draco should have expected that.After all, Harry wants to trust people. He wants for the world he saved to be one worth saving.Harry’s preferences aren’t shocking, but he’d let go so completely—he’d fallen asleep still trembling from the comedown—that it should’ve registered in his magic. Draco could feel Harry’s magic everywhere around them, the pull of it, the haze of it. The intensity should have rendered it visible.Why hadn’t it?Draco slips out of the bed. He’ll turn Harry over and kiss him until neither of them can breathe otherwise, and while he doesn’t object at all to that plan, he thinks it might be too much, this early in the morning.He tidies himself in the bathroom. He’d had the foresight to dry his hair with a charm last night, at least, though it takes a few more before he can twist it into a bun behind his head and secure it with an elastic Transfigured out of a length of dental floss. Using magic still makes him nervous, but he pretends his way through it, and it’s fine.Completely normal.Everything is normal. He can’t think too hard about the shower last night or he’ll run straight back to the bedroom and dive into the bed and scare Harry half to death.Draco surveys himself in the mirror.He’s less deathly thin after Hermione’s intervention, and he’s standing up all on his own, but beautiful?His cheeks turn pink in his reflection. Draco lets the elastic go with a soft snap. He must’ve been as grey as Azkaban when he got here. What a fright.Draco pads downstairs in his borrowed, knitted socks, in the joggers he’s been wearing and Harry’s blue jumper. The sleeves come down to the middle of his hands. It’s nice, having soft cloth to curl his fingertips into. Nice, having his wand.Nice, when Pansy’s in the sitting room, her hair rumpled and a cup of tea in her hand. She looks quite cosy, like something out of Draco’s childhood with her knees drawn up and a blanket over her legs, a sheaf of parchment propped on her round belly. She belongs in Harry’s sitting room, which is comfortable and lived-in, with photos on the shelves near the fireplace, and books, and a Snitch.“Good morning,” he says.Pansy gives him the same sleepy, half-irritated smile she used to when she woke up too early in the dormitories and wiggles her feet under the blankets. “The prodigal son returns.”“I wasn’t a prodigal son,” he argues, the old habit coming back to him. It feels just as natural to sit next to her feet, cross his legs, and pull part of her blanket over his lap. So natural, in fact, that his eyes sting. “There was nowhere to squander my inheritance at Azkaban.”“Draco, please.” Pansy tips her head back against the arm of the sofa. “It’s too early to cry.”“Who’s crying? I’m making jokes.”“Ha,” she says, long and posh. Draco laughs instead of weeping about how good the blanket feels, and even her toes wedged under his thigh.They sit for a moment in silence.Then Kreacher tiptoes out from the kitchen, Levitating a cup and saucer in front of him. He brings them both to Draco, who takes them out of the air.“Thank you, Kreacher.”“You are welcome, Master Draco.” Kreacher punctuates this with a bow so deep that his forehead nearly brushes the floor. The tips of his ears are on the rug.He stays like that for a beat.Then another.“Kreacher,” Draco says. “Is there something I can do for you?”Kreacher slowly draws himself up, meeting Draco’s eyes. “Not for me, Master Draco.”“For who, then?”“For—” Kreacher mouths something that Draco cannot make sense of.“What?”“For B—”“Kreacher,” Pansy says. “Not out loud!”“What can’t he say? I swear to Merlin, Pansy, if there really is another Dark Lord and none of you said a word to me, I’ll—”Pansy gives him a look, then turns her fierce gaze on Kreacher. “I know what you mean. Do not say it out loud,” she orders smoothly, her tone strangely soft. “Go and get her, and bring her to the Apparition point at the corner. No closer, Kreacher.”“Of course, of course!” Kreacher cries, then rushes out of the house, closing the door softly behind him.Draco spells sugar and milk into his tea, then sends the saucer to a round end table, then drinks.Pansy flips one of her parchments, then another.“We’re going to fight about it, you know,” she says, after a minute or two.“Of course I know,” Draco answers.He drinks more tea.“You were gone for a ghastly amount of time.” Pansy’s tone is the same as she’d use if she were telling him that it’s a bit cloudy today, not much sun.“I know, Pans.”“I suppose, in light of the circumstances, I’ll simply tell you that if you ever act so foolishly again, I will be forced to take drastic measures.”“From what I’ve heard, you did take drastic measures.”“I could have led protests in the streets.” Her parchment flips. “I could have set fires in the Ministry.”Draco was gone a ghastly amount of time.He still knows this for what it is.“But then you’d have deprived yourself of staging a coup. What’s the fun in that?”“I could have staged a coup earlier.”Pansy’s rather soft, where she appears over the top of the parchment. Her tousled hair. Her mouth, set in a guilty frown.“I could have sent a letter,” he offers.Pansy scoffs. “Then I would have staged a coup.”He pats at her knee with his free hand. “I know you would have.”“I don’t know who it was.” Pansy lets her head fall back on the arm of the sofa again. “Who could be so foolish, and so desperate? I can’t think of a single person in the DMLE who’d go that far. They had to know they’d get found out someday.”“It will come to you.”“Yes. It will.” She straightens up with a wince. “I’ll have plenty of extra time to consider the motive, since sleep is impossible with this one kicking and screaming like I’d asked them to wake up early in the winter.”“Can you blame them? Waking up early in the winter is wretched.”One of Draco’s least favourite things, waking up in the dark. It had always been dark at Azkaban, in one way or another.Pansy makes a face and drags his hand off her knee and onto the roundness of her belly. “I’m not placing blame, but feel. It’s unrelenting.”Draco holds completely still, his hand huge on the outline of her belly, covered under her blanket and her jumper. His heart does a funny twist, half-guilty, half-grateful.Something kicks at his palm.The baby kicks at his palm. It’s not very forceful. It reminds Draco of tapping at a Shield Charm. The give and bounce of the magic.“Merlin’s magic, that’s odd,” he says, his voice tight. “I didn’t realise it would be so hard, yet kickable.”“I know. Imagine what it feels like to be me.”“I can’t.” The baby kicks another part of his hand. Surprising, really. He’d expected the kick to be in the same spot as before. Fresh guilt spools in his chest. “I’m sorry I missed your wedding.”“You didn’t.”“Yes, I did.”“You missed my first wedding. The one we had at the Burrow. You didn’t miss the one you owe me. Don’t think I let you off the hook.”“Oh, Pans.” Draco doesn’t look at her, and she’s not looking at him. He knows without a glance that they’re both looking at their hands on her belly. “You don’t have to do that for me.”“It’s not for you,” she scolds. “It’s for me. You promised that I could get married in your mother’s rose gardens, and I intend to do it. Even if it is technically a vow renewal at this point.”“I promised that when you thought you were getting married to me.”“I don’t think it matters all that much. A promise is a promise.”He doesn’t know what to say, as he hasn’t spoken to his parents. Hasn’t sent an owl. Doesn’t want to, when things seem so precarious.“You’re right.” Draco’s beginning to lose his grip on the teacup. He pats at Pansy’s belly, and they resume their previous positions on the sofa. “When are you going to tell me?”“Tell you what?”“What’s wrong with Harry.”“Nothing’s wrong with Harry,” she answers. It’s an automatic answer, and patently untrue.Draco lifts his teacup to his lips and stares at Pansy over it.She stares back at him, her face neutral.Then she seems to remember that it’s him, and the better part of a decade in prison hasn’t robbed him of his ability to tell when she’s lying.Pansy gives a little sigh. Azkaban hasn’t robbed him of this, either. She prefers honesty. Not because it’s a virtue, but because it’s less stressful than managing stories.“Harry gets headaches.” It sounds so very simple, put like that, and Draco is engulfed by an immediate suspicion.“What kind of headaches?”“Bad ones.”Draco doesn’t think bad headaches explain that blooming black on Weasley’s Diagnostic Charm, but he didn’t become a Healer in Azkaban, so he has no smooth way to bring that into the conversation.Movement in the front garden, behind Pansy’s head, catches his attention.It’s Kreacher, holding Bibsy’s hand.Draco throws the blanket off, abandons his tea, and rushes out.“Draco, what—” Pansy says behind him.He runs into new snowfall, soaking his knitted socks and the ankles of his joggers, and intercepts a sobbing Bibsy halfway across the garden. She throws her spindly arms around his shins and can’t be detached for several minutes. They’re both in tears when he manages to get down on one knee to hug her.“Bibsy did not know where Master Draco was!” she wails, once she’s regained the power of speech.“I know. Forgive me. I would have—if I could have, Bibsy, I would have sent a letter.”“A letter,” she shrieks. “Bibsy is not forgiving Master Draco! Bibsy is not saying Master Draco needs Bibsy’s forgiveness!”“But I do. It was wrong, and—”“Master Draco was not wrong!”This escalates until they’re both shout-crying at each other, a scene that took place many times when Draco was much younger, though always behind closed doors and with the benefit of Bibsy’s Silencing Charms.“Bibsy,” Pansy calls over the fray, tiptoeing out onto Harry’s front walk with her blanket wrapped around her shoulders. “Why don’t you come inside and make Draco some toast?”“Kreacher will make quiet eggs,” Kreacher announces.“Toast,” Bibsy agrees. She wipes her eyes, straightens her back, and proceeds towards Harry’s house with her decorum mostly restored.She pauses a few steps past Pansy and turns back to watch Draco climb to his feet and brush off his joggers.“Master Draco,” she says, as if he’s the one who appeared in the front garden and caused what could have been a very public scene. Draco finds it almost absurdly comforting. “Come inside.” Kreacher takes Bibsy to the kitchen, and Pansy stands with Draco in the entryway, casting Drying Charms on his joggers.“On one knee in the front garden.” Her affection isn’t disguised in the slightest. “Honestly.”Ron appears at the top of the stairs, a bag over his shoulder and a notebook in the opposite hand. He’s actively writing in it as he descends, his feet landing lightly, almost silently, on the steps. He doesn’t stop when he gets to the bottom of the stairs, or when the closet opens and the house slides his cloak onto his shoulders, or when he slips his feet into his shoes.Pansy watches with open fondness until Ron snaps the notebook closed and shoves it, and his quill, into his bag.“Good morning to you,” she says, lifting her cheek to be kissed.Ron brushes a second kiss to her lips. “You should’ve woken me up, too.”“But you’re always so very busy and overworked. Why wake you up when you could sleep another hour?”“Could’ve had another hour with you.” Ron’s hand drops to Pansy’s belly, so gentle and affectionate that Draco has to look away. “You’re not in today, are you?”“Not today, no,” she answers. “I thought I might check on our house. See if it’s still standing, that sort of thing.”“Okay.” Ron kisses her again, then stands up straight. “Oh, hey, Draco. How are things this morning?” His forehead creases. “Pans, did you talk to him about—”“Go to the hospital,” she says. “Draco and I will chat before I leave.”“All right.” Ron glances around. “Where’s Hermione?”“The study. Ensconced in about fifty Silencing Charms.”Ron’s wife is visibly pregnant, right in front of him, and he still turns the colour of a tomato from his forehead to his chin. “Right. I won’t interrupt her, then.”“Ron?” Harry comes down the stairs with languid, half-awake strides, his hair sticking up in every direction. He pushes his hand through it, which does nothing. “Are you going?”“Got a shift.” Harry reaches the bottom of the stairs, and Ron begins to reach for him, as if he’s going to pat his shoulder, then drops his arm mid-reach and never makes contact with Harry at all. “Be back after. I think Hermione wants to go over everything, so—”A loud knock at the front door—directly behind Draco’s back—interrupts him.Draco freezes.Nobody has knocked at Harry’s door since he’s been here. Admittedly, it’s not long enough to say that no one ever does, but it takes him by complete surprise. His mind leaps forward into a nightmare scenario, then several stops past that, and Harry’s entryway starts to fade out.Before it can go completely, his mental walls snapping shut, Harry’s in Draco’s face, and his fingers are at Draco’s temple. It might be the strangest Legilimency Draco’s ever experienced, even—what is it, the second time now? The third? It’s diffuse in a way Draco has never understood Legilimency to be. Like a sunrise, which isn’t a description that applies to Legilimency.The walls don’t shut, but Draco’s words flee to somewhere in the back of his mind.“Come here.” Harry takes Draco’s hands in his and pulls him down the hall to the kitchen.Whoever it is knocks again. Harry sits Draco at the table and goes back out into the entryway.“Oh, hullo, Percy,” Ron says. “Did you come for breakfast?”Draco can’t hear what Percy says, but he knows from his tone that he’s declining to come inside. He catches Minister and children and standby.Bibsy tiptoes over to Draco with a plate of toast in her hands. “Here, Master Draco,” she whispers.He takes the plate, only to discover that he’s shaking too badly to hold it. Bibsy whisks it back out of his hands and slides it onto the table.“Master Draco, what—”“I’ll walk with you,” Ron says from the hall. “See you later, love. Bye, Harry.”The door closes.There are a few beats of silence.Then both Harry and Pansy talk at once.“Harry, don’t listen to—”“—think he is, ordering me around in my own house? He’s not my boss. I was going to go in for the shifts. No bloody need—”“Why don’t I go? That way, you won’t have a Gryffindor—”“—ward the front garden. Trip Jinxes aren’t illegal, and I’m going to lose my bloody mind if one more person—”The hot, angry push of Harry’s magic reaches Draco a second before Harry himself storms in front of the kitchen door, red-faced and furious. Pansy walks right next to him.“Not a chance, Potter. Sitting room,” she says, over the pitch and roll of his complaints. Pansy sticks both arms out and herds Harry without actually touching him—it’s beginning to be a disturbing pattern—in the opposite direction.Harry disappears from view.Draco gets to his feet and follows them into the sitting room, where Pansy has one arm out to corral Harry away from the bookshelves. A crack appears in one of the glassed-in fronts despite her efforts. Draco might be strange and silent and useless, but at least it’s not Azkaban, and Pansy’s here to intervene in…Whatever this is.Harry paces in front of the fireplace, the entire room bristling with irritated magic. Faint tendrils of light appear in the air around Harry as if Draco’s pressed his hands to his eyes for too long. It reminds him of the glowworms on the grounds at the Manor, if glowworms were dangerous. There’s something about the way that light moves, but he can’t focus on it enough to—“Percy Weasley is a twat,” Pansy says. Draco blinks. He is her brother-in-law. “Come on, Harry.”Harry takes a sharp breath. “Percy Weasley is a twat.”“He’s not in charge of you.”“Of course he’s not in charge of me.” Harry turns back to resume his pacing and stops, squeezing his eyes shut. “Curse it, Pans.”“I know,” Pansy says. “What do you think? Should I hex him for disturbing the peace? Tattle to the Minister? Send an anonymous note to the Prophet about what a twat he is?”“I dunno.” Harry presses both hands over his scar and paces in the other direction.Pansy’s shoulders go up, and Draco watches her purposefully relax them. “I think it would be better if I went into the office to find out what Weasley’s on about and you stayed here. What do you say?”“That’s not what he meant.”“Oh, I don’t care what he meant. Listen.” The careful calm in Pansy’s voice—along with the unidentifiable sensation in the air—is more than enough proof that Harry gets headaches was perhaps the understatement of the century. “Draco needs clothes.”Harry turns around and peers at her from behind his hands. “What?”“He needs clothes. Like Blaise said, he can’t keep wearing joggers and your jumpers indefinitely. Especially if we’re to make a public appearance. I’ll have some sent over.”“Fine.” Harry tips his chin up. “That’s fine.”“Harry?” Hermione enters the sitting room in a set of silk pyjamas, her curls riotous around her shoulders. “Harry, is it your head?”“Yes,” Harry says tightly.Hermione crosses the room in quick strides as Blaise sidles up next to Draco.He is also wearing silk pyjamas.“Harry. Here.” Hermione takes a phial from the pocket of her pyjamas and offers it to Harry, her hand far enough from his body that she doesn’t touch.That’s odd, too. Draco can’t remember a single person other than himself touching Harry, except in the course of touching Draco, in all this time.That’s not the Harry Potter that Draco remembers.Harry peeks out from behind his hands, snatches the phial from Hermione, and downs it in one swallow. Then he stands perfectly still, eyes closed, for another thirty seconds at least.No one moves.Draco’s heart beats harder, faster, as if it thinks it can reveal the explanation to What is Up with Harry Potter by forcing more blood through his veins.“Better?” Hermione asks, into a stillness like winter deep in the woods, crackling with cold and fresh snow and ozone.“Good,” Harry says.“I won’t tell Ronald if you won’t,” Pansy mentions to Hermione.“I’ll tell him when he needs to know,” Hermione answers, a determined light in her eyes.Pansy lets her head fall back as if this is the sexiest sentence she’s ever heard uttered in her life. “I’m genuinely shocked you weren’t in Slytherin with attitudes like that.”“They’re an acquired taste.”“Did you want to get dressed first, or should we visit Diagon like this?” Blaise asks, from next to Draco.Hermione rolls her eyes. “Don’t test me, Zabini.”“Dressing it is.” Blaise nudges Draco’s elbow with his and trails back in the direction of the study. His posture is that of a man who plans to spend a significant amount of time undressing from his silk pyjamas before he dresses again.“Forgot to—” Harry says, though he doesn’t elaborate on what he’s forgotten. “Upstairs. See you later, Hermione?”“Of course.” It’s even more conspicuous when Hermione doesn’t hug him goodbye.Harry goes out, and Pansy gives Hermione a significant look, which Hermione waves off without a word.“Fine.” Pansy’s voice is soft with resignation. “I need to change, too.”When they move to leave, Draco stands directly in the way, arms crossed, and stares them down. He can’t speak to demand they explain what in Merlin’s name just happened, so he lets his expression do the heavy lifting and hopes it’ll be enough.Pansy and Hermione exchange a glance.Water rushes through the pipes in the walls. Harry’s in the shower.“What was it?” Hermione asks, her hands going to her hair. “Did someone stop by?”“Percy.” Pansy says Weasley’s name like it has a sour taste. “Some personal reminder from the Minster about those missing kids.”Hermione makes a face that’s half-irritation, half-empathy.Draco makes a hurry-up gesture.“Oh, you know how he—” Pansy starts, her cheeks flushing when she realises mid-sentence that Draco doesn’t, in fact, know any of this, because he has been in prison for almost eight years. “He doesn’t like being told what to do. Not so different from school, really.”“No, it’s much different,” Hermione counters, with no animosity in her voice. “Yes, he had episodes in school, but they weren’t like this. It was always because—” She huffs, frustration clouding her eyes. “They weren’t like this. It wasn’t constant.”Draco spears Pansy with his best silent what the fuck, Pansy?Pansy grimaces. “They’re more like migraines. You remember how my mother used to get. Except worse. Random visits always set him off. Someone trying to give him orders. Being hungry. That sort of thing.”Draco intensifies his what the fuck expression.“Not you,” Pansy adds hurriedly. “You obviously don’t count as a random visitor. We’ll talk about it later, all right? I need to make a showing at the Ministry, and you were going to re-silence the study and go at it again, weren’t you?” She directs this last bit to Hermione, who goes pink in the face.“I have several errands.” Hermione heads towards the door of the sitting room. “And if there is widespread corruption in the Ministry that will necessitate a full-blown takeover, then we certainly don’t have time for more Silencing Charms.”“Certainly not,” Pansy agrees. She sidesteps Draco on her way out. “Shall we join forces? I’ll go to Diagon with you and Blaise, and we’ll all go to the Ministry afterwards.”They’re dressed and gone in a matter of minutes, the door closed and warded behind them.Which means he is alone in the house with Harry.Alone.In the house.With Harry.Draco is stricken, torn between sprinting up the stairs and barging into the shower with Harry and sitting down and getting his words back like a normal person.He retrieves his book from the sitting room table, his thoughts entirely consumed by Harry’s naked body in the shower. It’s clear now that no one hoped to reform Draco by trapping him in prison for so long, but even if they had, it was a lost cause. He’s not reformed. A reformed person wouldn’t be thinking of how the Saviour of the wizarding world looks naked when there is something secretly wrong with Harry Potter and there are children missing.Resolved to be at least slightly reformed, Draco finds his place in the book.Unfortunately, the place he finds is at the beginning of a detailed and explicit sex scene that takes place in the wizard’s garden. The garden, apparently, is not a metaphor. The sowing of seeds mentioned early on in the interlude, on the other hand…Harry comes down the stairs in a series of soft pats and swings himself into the sitting room, freshly showered and smelling good enough to make Draco feel faint.His eyes travel slowly from Draco’s face to the book in his hands, then back up.“Fancy a bit of reading?” Harry says.The word comes out of Draco like a shot. “No.”He has enough time to drop the book onto the table before Harry is on him. They land on the sofa, though Draco is too wrapped up in a filthy, open-mouthed kiss to discern the order of operations. The relevant detail is that Harry straddles him, his weight spread across Draco’s hips and his cock dragging across Draco’s through the fabric of his jeans and Draco’s joggers. The unidentifiable feeling in the air that surrounded Harry’s magic before is much less, though not gone, and seems to retreat further as Harry licks into his mouth.Harry picks up his head with a frustrated little sound, then drags his lips over the line of Draco’s jaw and the particularly tender skin at the side of his neck.“Are you up for this?” Harry’s voice is low and a little rough, as if he’s just woken. “Because if you’re not, we can—” He punctuates this by licking Draco’s neck with the full flat of his tongue, then follows it with a long, barely controlled suck. “We can stop.”“No.” Don’t stop.“I know Percy…” Harry rolls his hips into Draco’s and for a moment it’s all so very much again, it’s almost unbearable, but the sensation resolves into a heady want that might not be tolerable, exactly, but he doesn’t care. “Freaked you out. We can stop and read, or something, if that’s—”“Chat.”Harry groans against Draco’s neck. “Okay.”He moves to climb off, and Draco takes him by the hips and pins him. “Here,” he insists. “Just. Questions.”It would probably be easier to do this via reading the book, but Draco doesn’t want easy.He wants to be fucked.Among other things.Harry curls back into him, a quicksilver grin flashing onto his face. “Okay. Talk, then. You talk to me until you’ve forgotten about that tosser. What d’you want to talk about?”“You.”A disgruntled noise. “There’s nothing to know about me.”Draco rolls his hips, dragging Harry’s cock more firmly against his own. Merlin’s arse, that’s good.“Be,” he starts, distantly aware of how deeply unsexy it is not to be able to reliably form complete sentences and not altogether caring. “Be a good boy.” That has a dramatic effect on both Harry and his magic. It warms, everywhere, losing the strange tension it had before, and Harry wedges himself closer to Draco. All of his muscles strain, then relax in an effort to press his whole body along Draco’s. “And—why were you so angry?”Harry drops his face to Draco’s neck, breathing fast. “Dunno. Happens before I can stop it. When people give me orders.”“But you like this.”“This is different.” Harry pushes himself up, his hands braced on Draco’s chest, his lips pink and wet with their kiss and his glasses askew. “You’re different. I like it. From you. It feels…” He lets out a long breath. “Better.”Draco takes Harry’s glasses off and sets them aside, and then he puts his hands on Harry’s heated face and watches him.A part of his mind ticks towards understanding, even if he can’t see the ley lines of Harry’s magic the way he can other people’s. It’s like a little puzzle.Draco has always loved puzzles.Harry blinks, the haze in his eyes deepening as his pupils blow. There is some connection between the way he responds to Draco and his magic, invisible as it might be. Draco can feel it.“What do you want?” Harry’s tongue darts out to test his bottom lip. “From me.”“I want you,” Draco begins. It’s a complete sentence, and a true one, and makes Harry bear down on him a bit more. He thinks, for a heartbeat, of Pansy saying that Harry’s headaches get set off by being hungry and he’s clearly not eating enough and then a flawlessly formed vision of Harry literally eating out of Draco’s hand pops into his mind and that’s nearly the end of his self-control. “To fuck me. Like we’re in that Muggle flat.”“Oh,” Harry breathes, and then he’s kissing Draco like they’d just woken up in that bed and a good night’s sleep had been enough to undo all the hurt and pain and exhaustion and replace it with a raging hard-on.Between one gasp and the next, their clothes are gone. Harry waves his hand towards the entryway and the sound in the room shifts. A Silencing Charm. Perhaps a ward or two as well.Good. They won’t scandalise Bibsy.Kreacher, Draco is certain, has seen and heard far worse.Harry presses him down into the sofa and situates himself between Draco’s thighs. His eyes drag over Draco’s skin like firebrands and Draco forgets, for a few heartbeats, that he’s allowed to touch Harry.That Harry’s real and not some fevered figment of his imagination.Draco wonders if he’ll ever trust it again—the world, and its general reality—and then stops wondering and gets his hands on the closest available skin, which happens to be Harry’s wrists, because Harry touches him like Harry doesn’t think Draco’s real, either. His fingertips slide down Draco’s scars. He glances up into Draco’s eyes. “Sorry.” Harry swallows. “I’m sorry. About that.”It’s just so long ago. So many other things have hurt worse. “I forgive you,” Draco says. “Be a good boy and forget about it.”Harry’s eyes roll back in his head, and then he leans forward to get his mouth on Draco’s collarbone.Draco thinks his intention is actually to move down Draco’s body, but they end up kissing again, so long and deep that Harry becomes tongue and teeth and body heat and Merlin’s magic, he’s so hard. Draco hasn’t been this hard in all of his life.It seems to cause Harry genuine anguish to stop kissing Draco.He only does it long enough to pull away and turn him over, and then Draco is also as warm as he’s ever been in all of his life. Harry’s lips press against his nape and the ridges of his spine. The angle of his jaw. His temple. His hands are hot on Draco’s back. Is the sofa bigger? He thinks it must be, since Draco doesn’t think it’s possible for Harry to be curled on top of him—on the side of him?—like this without falling off.“This?” Harry says, low into Draco’s ear while he strokes his fingers down Draco’s spine. The words enter his mind with a sort of awe that Draco can’t pin down at first. And then he can. And nearly comes on the sofa.Because Harry’s magic hasn’t changed.Because be a good boy carries more weight than who’s doing the fucking.“So good. Keep going.”Harry brushes Draco’s hair aside and licks Draco’s nape, slow and filthy, and then some of his heat lifts off. Draco finds himself with his arms around a throw pillow and Harry back between his thighs.And Harry’s hands on his hips.And Harry canting them up so he can kiss the base of Draco’s spine.“Like this?” Magic washes through Draco like a breeze, followed by another kiss.“More of that,” Draco says.For that, he gets Harry’s tongue, and nips of his teeth, and an unbearably good suck.And more tongue.Until Harry’s fully eating him out.All Draco’s experience in the Slytherin dormitories never included this.Perhaps because he’s never known anyone who would commit himself to the task like Harry Potter.Draco can’t breathe, honestly, and has to focus on it to survive a pleasure that verges on overwhelming. It’s good on every plane of existence. The hot, desperate slide of Harry’s tongue on his most private place along with Harry’s fingers holding him open along with the sounds, Merlin’s tears, the sounds Harry licks into his skin make Azkaban feel like a distant memory shared from someone else. That can’t possibly have been real.This is real.This is real.Draco’s nerves have been replaced with raw magic. He can feel every one of them, all along his body, and doesn’t know that he’s babbling against the pillow until Harry’s warm weight appears at his side again.And then Harry.Harry.Starts begging.Begging to be able to touch Draco. Begging to be able to push one slick finger inside him, then two. Begging him to please, please, fuck his fingers, it’s all he wants in the world.Begging Draco to let Harry fuck him.“Please,” Harry says, his voice breaking. “I need it.”Draco gets a glimpse of the ceiling as Harry turns him onto his back, and then it’s obscured by Harry’s face. He kisses Draco with frequent breaks for more begging.Harry leans over Draco, hot-mouthed, hot-faced, shaking. “Can I put my cock inside you?”“Of course you can.” Draco can’t quite control his hands, but he must, he must. Because Harry’s too busy kissing him and licking him and biting at his collarbone to be in control of himself. “Harry. Be a good boy.”Harry all but falls over him, the thick head of him nudging at Draco’s opening.“Fuck,” Harry says into the dip at Draco’s shoulder, and pushes.Draco clings to the scraps of his control. It’s an underused muscle, kept dormant for so long that it hitches and stutters and only finds its place, really, because Harry gives his control up entirely.He begs relentlessly for every stroke.Admittedly—Merlin. He can’t think.Admittedly, Draco never once considered the possibility that anyone would ever beg him for the privilege of fucking him open another inch, and not in such a desperate voice, and not with so much power coiled between the two of them.Admittedly, it’s melting his mind.The power of it, yes.The heat.The sweetness.Harry seats himself with a helpless shudder, his cock a lovely stretch inside Draco, his mouth open on Draco’s shoulder, panting. His whole body shakes against Draco’s and the heat of his breath meets Draco’s skin in a shallow, jerky rhythm.“Please,” Harry begs, and Draco could never have dreamed this—the crack in Harry’s voice, the overwhelming need, the trust.“Come on,” Draco coaxes. “Don’t stop. Fuck me.”More magic crackles between every point they’re touching. Draco can’t tell whether it’s his or Harry’s or both. He never comes to a conclusion before Harry pulls out a few inches and fucks into him, slow and deep, and yes, yes, Draco’s been steering this, allowing it, and now they’ve come to a perfect balance in the roll and crash and fuck and please of it.Harry lets out a cry, hot on Draco’s shoulder, and pulses inside him. Strong hands pin Draco to the sofa. He pushes in deep deep deep and comes, the force and fire of it dragging Draco over the edge.Draco comes all over both of them and is reduced to hanging on as if Harry is the only anchor in a sea of slippery skin. He’s lost to Harry’s mouth on his, hauling in breaths tinged with sweet magic and clean sweat.He’s the first to resurface, and knows it because Harry rolls his forehead against Draco’s neck, senseless, and doesn’t say anything for a long time, his magic soft and hazy.Then he pushes up, the movement—so unfortunately, Merlin curse it—causing Harry to slip out of him, and Harry stares down at Draco like he’s not sure of the year or the day or any of it.Draco runs his fingers through Harry’s hair. “Oh, hello.”Harry smiles, his lips forming the words in a silent echo. Oh, hello. “I like when you say that.”“I can tell.”“What else—” Harry’s smile falters, but Draco can tell it’s only because his face is tired from all the activity. “Before they come back. Before to do.”Tomorrow to do, Draco remembers, and if he didn’t feel so blessedly good, his heart would break, because this—they could have had this. That part of Harry was the same, even then.“I want you to sit in my lap.”Admittedly, it’s more fun to get his words back by fucking. The wizard and his gardener are lovely, to be sure, but this is better.Harry arches an eyebrow. “Me? In your lap?”“I want you to eat out of my hand.”There’s an instant of hesitation, a tiny shadow in Harry’s eyes, but it disappears.“I’m hungry,” Harry whispers.He means yes.
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
Pigwidgeon shows up at dinnertime with two letters tied to his leg and flies around Harry’s kitchen for ten minutes before Draco finally reaches up and catches him in his hands.The letters aren’t a big deal.No way they could be, with the day Harry’s had with Draco.He tries to focus on Draco, who is breathtaking in joggers and one of Harry’s T-shirts. Every time he stretches his arms, his shirt tugs up to reveal the strip of skin above his joggers, and Harry doesn’t know how he’s supposed to look at anything else for the rest of his life.It works, until Draco hands over the letters. He lets Pig hop on his arm like the tiny maniac the owl has always been. Pig nips at the treats in Draco’s palm, chittering and chittering, delivering what Harry assumes is a load of owl gossip.
Harry,
Can’t make it back tonight. Granger and Blaise dragged me halfway around the world. I nearly went mad from my forcible inclusion in their inside jokes, and my feet are killing me. I’ve sent clothes for Draco by Floo.
I will see you at our office tomorrow, or else.
Pansy
The second letter is from Ron.Mungo’s needs him to work late.“Oh, no.” Draco glances up from offering Pig another treat. His eyes are silver in the fading winter sun, and a lock of his hair has escaped his bun and falls over his cheekbone, and it’s almost enough to chase away the nag of pain in Harry’s head. “Have we been stood up?”“By Pansy and Ron, anyway.” Harry tosses the letters into a drawer.The letter from Hermione shoots into Harry’s sitting room ten minutes later, along with a large parcel that hits the floor with a thud.Draco undoes the ties on the parcel while Harry reads the letter.
I’m so sorry, Harry. Something came up. Zabini and I will be there tomorrow morning before you go to the office.
Forgive me?
Hermione
Harry drops the letter onto the side table and relays the message to Draco.“What is her job, anyway?” Draco lifts a set of robes out of the parcel and shakes them out.“She’s an Unspeakable.” Harry rubs both hands over his face. It’s good. It’s very good. He gets more time alone with Draco. Which is better than good. It’s all he wanted in that flat, and it’s all he wants now. “That’s how she met Blaise.”Draco’s eyebrows go up. “Really? I thought she was a solicitor. Or a professor.”“She does those things, too. Writes laws. Argues in front of the Wizengamot. Teaches.”“Studies the mind-magic connection and child development and minor curse-breaking, if I had to guess.”“Yeah.”“Whatever does she do in her spare time?” A pleased smile flickers across Draco’s face. Harry’s heart wants to escape his body. Leap right into Draco’s happiness.“She volunteers at St Mungo’s,” Harry is compelled to say, and Draco tips his head back and laughs.He doesn’t want to feel like any part of it is wrong.It’s not wrong. Nothing’s wrong.Draco lifts items of clothing out of the parcel one by one, though he could send them all upstairs with a flick of his wand. His hands on the fabric are like magic. He knows Draco isn’t Summoning robes and shirts and trousers from nowhere, but he could believe it with orange firelight dancing over his fingers.If Harry knows Pansy—and he does—every piece is brand-new and outrageously expensive. Pansy Parkinson would never send anything less than perfect for Draco.Reparo, Harry thinks.He realises Draco is speaking to him when Draco’s face rises into view. He’s stood up from the parcel. The sets of clothes float up the stairs behind him.“Are you all right?” Draco asks.No, Harry doesn’t say, because he’s not any worse than he has been, and he doesn’t want to talk about it. Not tonight.“Come to bed with me,” he says instead. The ruined armillary sphere spasms on the floor of the Headmaster’s office like it’s dying. Harry’s chest heaves. A clammy palm ruins his grip on his wand, and his scar beats.Like his heart.It’s pressure to begin with, but the Lumos from the sun at the centre of the sphere carves into his head. Harry puts one hand up to shield his eyes.If he could read the whole inscription, maybe he’d know what to do.Only it’s brighter now. Too bright, and painful, even broken like this.
For, behold
Pain arcs through his head. Harry flinches in spite of himself. “Fuck.”He points his wand at the sphere. “Reparo.”Nothing happens.The pain shouldn’t be back already. Hermione gave him one of the good potions. The kind Ron doesn’t want him to use without consistent medical supervision. The last kind of potion that actually works.He should’ve had a day. Maybe a little less. Maybe twenty hours.But…Maybe this isn’t the same day. Maybe it’s not the same year. He’s alone in the office, struggling to read, in case it’ll solve this.
For, behold, I create
He hasn’t created anything in his entire life. Harry squints, his eyes burning. The letters blur out. One of the arms of the sphere jerks in its death throes. Harry’s stomach twists, acid rising to his throat, but he can’t stop looking, or he’ll never know.
For, behold, I create new heavens and a new earth
A new earth.More letters appear at the edge of the sun. He can’t read them.“Come on. Please.” Harry wills the entire inscription to show itself and the pain to leave him alone for a few minutes so he can sleep. The last thing he wants is to sick up in the Headmaster’s office this close to the end of the war. “What’s the rest?”The Lumos in the sun flares.It makes a high, ringing sound that sets Harry’s teeth on edge.It’s like a Horcrux.He’s like a Horcrux.Another burst of light spears into his eyes, cutting all the way to the back of his head. He has to use both hands now to keep his skull from splitting apart. Harry drops his wand. It falls into the shattered armillary sphere and catches on one of the rings. His vision blurs. Is that even his wand? The shape is wrong, and the colour, and it’s stuck in the rings, so—“Harry. Darling.”A hand on his shoulder pulls him up and up and up, lifting him until his head breaks through into the dark above the clouds and he’s in his bedroom, with Draco’s hand on his shoulder. With Draco’s body pressed all along his. With a tear dripping off his cheek and onto the pillow.Harry tries to curl up to—he doesn’t know. Fend off the pain, maybe.The pain doesn’t care that he’s curled up.Draco’s hand moves to his hip. He runs his palm down towards Harry’s knee.“Stretch out your legs,” he tells Harry. “Just try to relax.”“I can’t.”There’s a wand sharpened to a point in his head, throbbing with magic and emptiness, and it feels so awful he wants to die.It’s such a foolish thing to want. Harry knows firsthand that dying doesn’t make things easier. He’d still had to make a choice in King’s Cross, and it was complete bollocks. It wasn’t enough that he spent most of his childhood bearing up under the weight of his life. At King’s Cross, he had to take responsibility for his death, too.He pays for the moment of irritation with a deep, thudding pain in his head that goes down to his teeth.“Try,” Draco coaxes.Harry pushes his feet down as quickly as he can, which isn’t very quickly at all. Draco rests his hand on Harry’s hip and rocks him on his side, just a little, like a ripple in the bathtub. He stops when Harry’s feet are extended.He can’t believe that helped.“Okay,” Harry whispers. “Okay.”It’s hard to close his eyes when his head hurts this badly. It’s hard to keep them open.Fingertips brush his temple and the skin next to his eye, circling in a steady pattern. After a few minutes, Draco moves down to his jaw. Harry has no idea he’s gritting his teeth until Draco drags his thumb lightly over his cheek.His teeth unclench.“Good,” Draco says softly. “What can I bring you?”“Nothing. Just. Don’t move.”If Draco gets up and moves the mattress, Harry’s pretty sure everything will get worse.“All right.”Draco does not get up.He keeps moving his fingertips.That’s a relief. Harry doesn’t want him to stop.When he feels steadier, Harry takes a long, slow breath. “What time is it?”“I don’t know.” Draco shifts behind him. “Late, I think. It’s quite dark out.”“Okay.” Harry imagines that he’s part of the mattress. He imagines that his body doesn’t exist, and neither does his head, so he can’t be in any pain. “I’ll just lie here. It’ll be better in the morning.” It’s not better in the morning.Harry drifts in and out of the Headmaster’s office, never close enough to read the inscription and never far enough to escape his body. His head splits with every heartbeat by the time he senses daylight behind his eyelids.He doesn’t do anything about it. Draco’s asleep, his arm slung over Harry’s waist, and the only thing that feels good at all is how close he is, and warm, and not in fucking Azkaban.There’s nothing Harry can do about that right now, either, but he’s past the point where frustration can take him by surprise. He feels it far below the pain.It’s nice to count Draco’s breaths instead of his own heartbeat.Nicer than it has been in years.Still bad.His brain feels swollen, like it’s too big for his skull, which is a seriously disturbing sensation.Harry’s heart speeds up at the idea of his head exploding and doesn’t slow down again.It’s still so early that sleep would be the best idea. That’s what Hermione says. You should get more sleep, Harry. It might help.He tries to believe. If not in the restorative powers of sleep, then in Hermione. There’s not much he can do to force it, other than asking Draco to Stupefy him, which probably wouldn’t go over well, so Harry pretends instead.He pretends so hard. The last time he pretended to sleep this hard, he was in the Forbidden Forest, pretending to be dead.
For, behold, I create new heavens and a new earth; and the former things
“Harry.”Draco doesn’t move Harry at all this time, thank Merlin. Harry would die. Draco’s hand feels huge on his shoulder. Warm. Safe. Actually, if he died right now, that would be okay. There are worse places to have his head explode.Dying would freak Draco out, though, especially if any of Harry exploded, so he lives through another few seconds. The armillary sphere glints in the corner of his eye.“Are you awake?”Moving his mouth hurts. Harry’s teeth hurt. His jaw. All the bones in his head feel sucked in tight. His tongue is too dry, but he can’t imagine lifting his head off the pillow to drink anything.“Yeah,” he says.“You can’t go to work.” Draco isn’t asking him a question. He definitely can’t go to work like this. “Should I write to Pansy?”“Yes,” Harry rasps. He wants to tell Draco that it sounds worse than it is, but it’s exactly as bad as it sounds.Draco kisses his temple, which doesn’t hurt.Then he gets out of bed, which does.Harry lies very still and tries not to cry.He is unsuccessful. The crying turns out to be too much. He ends up back in a blurred, unsteady version of the Headmaster’s office. He can’t read the inscription at all. There’s someone else in the Headmaster’s office.Harry can’t move his head, but he can hear them talking. Pain radiates down his neck and into his shoulders. It splits the space between his temples and pulls.Is it the portraits?Could be.Though he seriously doubts Dumbledore will have any real advice to give him about this situation.He peeks out from under his eyelashes anyway, just in case. He wouldn’t turn down bad advice, at this point.Okay, fine. He would turn down some bad advice.Sorry, Ron.The voices come closer.Someone strokes his hair, very gentle, very soft.“Harry.” It’s Draco. “Are you awake?”“Wish I wasn’t.” It even hurts to breathe. This is a shoddy way to live. The heartbeat of pain has fully moved into Harry’s head now. That’s not how hearts are supposed to work. They’re supposed to stay in your chest, not bang around in your skull.If this is what it means to be Chosen, Harry would rather not, thanks.“Hi,” Hermione says. “Can you sit up, do you think?”He’d laugh, if the pain wouldn’t be apocalyptic. “No.”There’s more discussion above his head. It sounds like the whispers Harry heard on the other side of the Veil. There hadn’t been any whispers in King’s Cross. There had been Dumbledore, being as cryptic and mysterious as he was in life. If there had been more people to talk to, and hadn’t been so stark and white and strange, Harry would have considered staying.The bed dips.Arms slide smoothly underneath his body, and Merlin, fuck, the pain is unbelievable.“Let me move you,” Draco says. “Pretend you’re asleep. I know you can.” Harry thinks of the Forbidden Forest and the damp earth under his face, his heart crashing into his ribs. Cold dirt under his cheek. The fine edge of a fallen leaf. A pebble digs into the softness below his cheekbone, and he really doesn’t want to have to play dead while Voldemort Crucios him, he can’t, because it will hurt too much, he’ll never be able to—Draco shushes him at the same moment Harry realises he’s crying in the helpless, pathetic way that he does sometimes when he’s lost control of himself.It must be especially pathetic, because Draco takes the opportunity to lift him off the pillow so Harry’s half-sitting, leaned on Draco’s chest. Harry bangs his head against Draco’s collarbone several times in a row. Someone gasps. Hermione, he thinks. It’s not like he can stop it. Just happened. He doesn’t want to explode his own brain, but honestly, would it be so bad? The room turns around him, this way and that, upside down.“How long?” Draco puts his hand on Harry’s head and holds it to his chest so he can’t bang it anymore. Oh, no. Harry’s the giant baby now. Draco’s voice is like hot chocolate. Or a heavy blanket. Better than not hearing it.“Three hours? Four? The most I can leave is two phials. I’ll go back once you’ve—”The conversion blurs like the Headmaster’s office.Then there’s a phial at his lips, and Draco’s voice in his ear. He doesn’t hear a thing he says, but it’s clear enough what he’s supposed to do.The potion tastes like lemonade.He orders it at the Three Broomsticks a few times a year, when he can’t stand the thought of anything else. It’s lemony and sweet and sparkling and goes down easily, without turning his stomach.A glow appears behind his eyelids.Lemonade doesn’t glow, so it’s probably not that.“Thank God,” Hermione says.“Oh, for Merlin’s sake. When you said it was experimental, I didn’t think you meant as of this morning.” Draco’s voice is softer than most voices Harry’s ever heard, but it sparkles like the lemonade, except with worry. Maybe a bit of irritation.“Everything is experimental at one point or another.” Hermione’s voice shakes.Just a little.“Did you poison me?” Harry asks, without opening his eyes.“I love you so very much,” Hermione answers. “And most of all, I love your sense of humour.”“There’s an extending circus.”A beat of silence passes. Hermione mutters something under her breath that sounds like not the effect I was looking for. Draco’s shoulder shakes once or twice under Harry’s head.He’s laughing.“Extenuating circumstances,” he says, probably to Hermione.“God, that’s hot.” Harry lets his head fall more heavily onto Draco’s shoulder. It’s not much of a difference. He’s been lying on him pathetically since he picked him up. “That’s the hottest thing you’ve ever said.”“Oh, hello,” says Draco. “How are you feeling?”Harry thinks about it.“My head still hurts. And my mouth tastes like lemonade. I really want lemonade.”“How much does it hurt?” Hermione asks.“Like it’s on the moon.” Somewhere far. Ever-present. Always watching over him, or something. But not close enough to crush his skull and splat his brains all over Draco. That’s definitely better.“Good.” The glow behind his eyelids disappears. “I’ll come back later. If there’s anything you can think of—”“There wasn’t anything,” Draco insists. Judging by his tone, he and Hermione have already talked about this. “Nothing happened. The letters came. We went to bed. He was crying in his sleep.”“Was not,” Harry says.Draco shushes him again. “It was an ordinary evening. No curses. No spells. No hexes. Nothing.”“I don’t like that.” Harry can sense Hermione frowning.“You want me to be hexed?” he says. “Hermione, I told you. I’m the Chosen One. You can’t hex me. Not in the circus.”“I think we’ll be all right.” Draco pats Harry’s head. Surprisingly, it doesn’t kill him.“Don’t do anything reckless while I’m gone,” Hermione orders.Harry dares to open his eyes. Hermione’s not in his bedroom anymore. Everything has a sheen to it, like it’s been bathed in starlight or silvery memories from a Pensieve.“We’re not in a Pensieve, right?” That seems relevant, because if they are, then—“You’re high.” Draco’s voice is warm, affectionate. “Who knew the Department of Mysteries made illicit potions?”“I bet you did.”“You’re right. I did.” Draco laughs, this time out loud. “It would be more comfortable in the bath. What do you say?”“I’m really high.”“I will not let you drown under any extenuating circumstances,” Draco says, like a gallant prince.“That’s so hot.” Harry doesn’t mean to moan it, it just sort of happens. “Say it again.”“Extenuating circumstances.” Draco picks him up off the bed at the same time. It only hurts a little bit. So far away. “And no, we will not be fucking in the bathtub.”“What? Why not?”Draco kisses Harry’s nose. “Because your head is on the moon. We’ll discuss it again when you’re back.” Harry is high in the bathtub.Then Harry is high on the sofa in the sitting room, cuddled up to Draco, who reads to him from the wizard romance book until Pansy tiptoes in sometime mid-morning.“Isn’t this precious,” she coos, setting a familiar box on the table near the sofa. “I should take a photo.”Harry narrows his eyes at her. “And explode my brain? Where would you keep it, anyway?”“On my desk in our office.” She perches on the end of the sofa near Draco’s feet. “And you could close your eyes. I’m mainly interested in a photo of Draco.”“What did you bring us, Pans?” Draco asks, a laugh in his voice.“Toys,” she says.Harry points at her without lifting his head from Draco’s chest. “You’re funny.”“Yes, of course, darling.” Pansy points back at him and wriggles her finger in a warm sort of way. “It’s just a few things that have been in the office for an age. A way to pass the time while the Chosen One has chosen to be experimentally high as a kite.”“I like kites,” says Harry.He closes his eyes and thinks about kites, feeling rather than seeing the silent exchange that Draco must be having with Pansy about him.Well, whatever.Draco sits them up and leans over. Things click together. He’s rummaging about in the little box. “Are these evidence?”“Not anymore. Trinkets from closed cases.”“They’re all broken.”“Your boyfriend has an insufferably soft heart,” Pansy says with a sigh. “He collects them, even though he’s hopeless at Reparo.”Draco hums. “Don’t be unkind, Pansy. He was raised by Muggles. How would he know it’s the magic that’s out of alignment?”“Hey.” Harry pushes himself up to get eye-level with Draco.“Hello.” Draco’s cheeks have a faint flush, like a pink dawn. He is beautiful. It’s so much beauty in one place that Harry could throw up. Or cry. Or something. Harry’s original plan had been to point out that Draco hadn’t denied it when Pansy said Harry was his boyfriend, but it’s an idea that won’t arrange itself into a coherent sentence amidst his lemonade high. He settles for a ridiculous grin and puts his head back down, curling his hand on Draco’s chest.“Circe. Hermione wasn’t kidding, was she?”“No.” Harry closes his eyes again. “She’s very serious. A serious person. Serious witch.”“I miss pub nights,” Pansy says wistfully. “She was less serious when we had pub nights.”“I’m high,” Harry says.“What?” Pansy gasps. “Really?”“Yeah!”Harry forgets they’re having a conversation.“This is the worst I’ve seen.” Pansy sounds like she’s commenting on the weather, so Harry ignores it. There’s no weather on the moon.“If you were planning to tell me the relevant details, I should think now would be the time. And I know it’s not as simple as migraines.”“I didn’t mean to imply it was simple.” Pansy pauses. The moon spins under Harry, then switches directions. “I meant…they seemed random at first. Unpredictable. Then they became more predictable, but only because they were happening so often.”“When was it worst? Before now.”“Whenever we visited the Manor.”For a minute, all Harry can hear is the sound of Draco breathing.“How often was that?” His voice is very level, very even, very calm.“Five or six times a year.”“Upsetting memories, perhaps.”“Perhaps.” Harry can tell Pansy doesn’t agree, but it’s not a point she’s invested in arguing. Honestly, he doesn’t know why it was always so bad at the Manor. It isn’t as if he thought about the Snatchers when he and Pansy were looking for Draco. The Snatchers hadn’t been part of that.“Just…” Draco makes a soft sound that could be frustration, or it could be something else. “Tell me how it’s come to this. There are potions.”“None of them work for very long.”“There are Mind Healers.”“He won’t talk to them.”That is because Mind Healers are weird, and Harry doesn’t like how they stare at him. He’d attended a few sessions because Robards said he had to, when he joined the force, but after Harry walked out of the fourth one and refused to go back, Robards let it drop.“I saw Ronald cast a diagnostic in the kitchen,” Draco says. “I saw what was on it.”“It’s nothing.”“Pansy.”“Look.” There’s a sound like a whisper. Pansy rubbing her hands over her face, probably. “It’s literally nothing. A void. And it’s not really there. It doesn’t show up on any physical diagnostic. It’s entirely magical.”Draco’s magic goes taut and a bit cold. Harry burrows harder into his chest. Draco must consciously relax, because his magic warms up again almost instantly.“You didn’t wait this long to bring in a Legilimens,” he says finally. “When was it?”“Five years ago. It can’t be done.”“What do you mean, it can’t be done?”“I mean what I said. He can’t be touched.”“I’m touching him right now.” Draco is touching Harry right now. He likes it.“You, Draco. No one else. Not after that.”There’s a long silence.“No,” Draco says, his voice sharp. “No, Pansy.”“You might be able to look, at least, which is more than—”“Who am I to—why would you ever think that would be—”“Who else is it going to be? No one else can get within a foot of his body, much less his mind. How long do you think this can go on?”“And what happens when it doesn’t work? What happens when I fuck it up? For Merlin’s sake, Pansy, you can’t possibly think that’s worth the risk.”“Draco Lucius Malfoy, don’t you dare suggest that he of all people would send you back to—”“I’m not talking about that. I hear things, you know. I heard Hermione mention an oversight. And keeping her at arm’s length. I would bet every Galleon of my inheritance—that’s what she meant, didn’t she? This Legilimens incident.”“Yes.”“Oh, so it was horrific and painful and almost tore apart the Golden Trio. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, Pans, but I’m not in the Golden Trio. I’m a fucking ex-convict.”“Actually,” Pansy says, exceptionally prim, “you have no criminal record. There was no conviction.”“Well, I’m still—” Draco’s chest hitches. “I’m still—”Pansy’s hand brushes against Harry’s. He’s so high that he doesn’t even scream. She says something—a lot of somethings—to Draco, but Harry’s thinking about Hermione, and pub nights, and the moon.He opens his eyes, and Pansy’s right there on Draco’s other side, hugging him. She’s pulled her hand away so she doesn’t brush Harry again. She’s so nice.“We could go to a pub.” Harry smiles at her. “I feel great.”“You look great, Potter. What if you had a nap?”“Good,” Harry says, definitive. There was more to that thought, but he falls asleep before he can say another word. On the upside, Draco is still there when Harry wakes up, holding a second phial to his mouth and asking him in that soft middle-of-the-night voice to drink it.On the downside, Harry’s already crying.It’s just.Not great.But the lemonade potion is great, and it sends his head to the moon, leaving his body free to curl up on Draco’s.Harry drifts in outer space for a little while. He notices from somewhere in the stratosphere that Draco has moved the box from his office onto the sofa next to him and is taking out items one by one. He balances them on his leg, keeping his right arm around Harry and tapping them with his wand in his left hand.“I knew about the magic,” Harry mentions. “I knew they were broken. Magically.”“It was only a joke, darling.”“Reparo didn’t work.”“It doesn’t always, you know.”The object in Draco’s lap is an armillary sphere, small enough to fit in his palm. All the rings snarl around one another. Draco lifts one from the leg of his trousers with the tip of his finger.Harry’s momentarily distracted by the trousers. Draco put on one of the outfits Pansy sent after their bath and now he looks like he’s stepped out of an old-time painting with his white shirt and waistcoat. Harry understands intellectually why they shouldn’t fuck when he’s a moon-kite, but he wants it. He wants Draco to leave the outfit on, too.Draco picks up the sphere in his palm and turns it this way, then that, his wand held in his thumb and finger.“What are you looking for?”Draco’s exhale warms the top of Harry’s head. “My mother called them ley lines.”“I know all about those.”“Do you?”“Stonehenge,” Harry says.“Ah.” Draco laughs, mostly a breath. “Hermione told you that many magical ley lines are said to intersect at Stonehenge, didn’t she?”“Yeah. And I remembered.”“Of course you did, you lovely thing.” Draco puts the armillary sphere back on his thigh. Harry is momentarily distracted by the shape of his thigh in his trousers. “Each of these has a sort of…pattern. In the magic. Not always like a grid. When I described it to my mother, she said they were like ley lines, so I still think of them that way.”“You can see them?”“Yes.” Draco sounds slightly embarrassed about it. Harry doesn’t know why. That’s an actual skill, unlike being the Chosen One, which was just a weird honorary title he never wanted.Draco touches the armillary sphere again.It doesn’t twitch.“I keep dreaming about one of these.” When Harry’s awake, the Headmaster’s office hangs at the edge of his memory. He can’t quite see it.“Really?”“Yeah. A broken one. I bet I got the idea from this.”“Perhaps. Do you fix it in your dream?”“I tried, but nothing happened.”“Hmm.”“It has words on it.” When Harry’s awake, it’s hard to remember the inscription. “In this fancy writing.”“What does it say?”He closes his eyes and imagines that he’s in the Headmaster’s office, standing over the sphere, his heart pounding, his palms slick.“For, behold,” Harry starts, and Draco makes a low, interested sound. “I create new heavens, and a new earth. Then there’s a bit about former things. But I’ve never seen all the words. Always wake up too early.”“That sounds quite Muggle.”“Yeah,” Harry agrees.He opens his eyes. The miniature sphere is more mangled than the one in his dreams, but it doesn’t move. Harry doesn’t know if that’s better or worse. Draco runs the pad of his finger around one of the rings, his touch gentle. Maybe Harry should’ve tried touching the one in his dream.But that’s probably a foolish idea, since everything he touches always breaks, or dies, and no amount of holding on will bring it back to life again.“Do you wish it was fixed?”“What?” Harry’s momentarily distracted by the way Draco’s voice sounds when it comes to him through Draco’s chest and shirt and waistcoat.“In your dream. Do you wish it was fixed?”“The whole room is a mess.” It’s not really an answer. “Everything’s a mess.”“I’m sure there are extenuating circumstances.”Harry groans. “You’re really mean, when you say things like that to me. When you won’t even kiss me.”“Who said I wouldn’t kiss you?”“You did.”“Nonsense.” Draco sets the sphere back into the box, pulls Harry into his lap, and kisses him.It doesn’t feel like Harry’s on the moon.It feels like he’s got both feet on the ground, and nothing at all is broken. The afternoon light is dying when Draco takes the sphere back out of the box. Harry lies on several pillows, under a blanket, his legs bent over Draco’s lap.The end of his high approaches.Nothing hurts yet, but it will. It had been a steep drop out of the sky before. The lemonade potion had faded so fast it took him by surprise. He’d plummeted down to wakefulness, and Draco had been there.He’s not looking forward to being awake for all of it.Harry’s momentarily distracted by the shine of the little armillary sphere above his knees.Draco holds it in his right hand, taps it with his wand, and whispers incantations.On the last one, the rings pop apart with tiny metallic scrapes, the damage undoing itself.Draco taps it one more time.The sun in the middle of the sphere glows like Lumos, and then it’s hovering a few inches above Draco’s palm, the rings turning and turning, the universe back in alignment.Draco grins down at it, his eyes silvery in the light of the sun. He’s so happy that he has a dimple.Harry loves it.Loves it so much he reaches out to touch it.Draco turns his head, the smile still on his face, and leans towards Harry’s outstretched hand.His fingertips are an inch away when a Patronus hurtles through the window next to Harry’s head, shouting at the top of its lungs.
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
The Patronus is the loudest thing to enter Harry’s home since Draco arrived on the front porch. Harry slaps his hands over his ears, and his heels dig into Draco’s thigh, and honestly, Draco expects a collapse. Every single one of Harry’s friends, along with Kreacher and Bibsy, has a well-ingrained habit of literally tiptoeing around the cottage, and there is simply no chance Harry tolerates the bulldog Patronus bellowing its way across his chest and into the centre of the sitting room.“All hands,” the voice booms at an ear-splitting volume. “Repeat. All hands. Coordinates to follow.”But instead of rolling away from the Patronus, Harry flings himself to his feet and runs towards it.“Harry!”The armillary sphere falls into Draco’s hand as Harry sprints out of the room. His footsteps thud up the stairs. The Patronus howls, spitting out the list of coordinates in a clipped rush, then repeating. There are codes, after that. Draco commits the coordinates to memory, but he’s not going.They are not going.Harry’s in no state to report for Auror heroics. Or—he won’t be, in a matter of minutes.Draco gets to his feet. The Patronus faces him and barks out its message. He should send one back to—who’s Head Auror now?—Gawain Robards. Can Draco even cast a Patronus? He was never successful before he went to Azkaban, and the failure seems new and fresh with the silvery, translucent dog hovering in Harry’s sitting room.Of fucking course he can cast a Patronus.If he has to, he’ll do it, and he knows what memory he’ll use.Magic gathers in the fingers gripping his wand, the hawthorn warm and ready and waiting.Harry thunders back down the stairs and swings himself into the sitting room with one hand on the doorframe.The breath goes out of Draco, along with his plan to say Harry’s name softly, but firmly, and then demand that he sit down, that they discuss whatever’s happening. Adrenaline speeds through his veins in a cold wash. He’s frozen, then trembling, then weak in the knees.It’s a different person. Harry’s a different person.Red Auror robes hang open above Harry’s fitted uniform trousers and shirt. His wand is holstered, for Merlin’s sake, two bands of leather stretched around his thigh. Draco’s never seen him in black boots. He’s never seen him pulling on black gloves to cover his hands.The Patronus repeats the coordinates again, then the call for all hands to respond, then fades out of existence.Harry’s eyes snap up to Draco’s.It’s that first morning, all over again. The colour is too green, too intense, too much against the red of Harry’s robes. It hurts. He can’t breathe.Harry’s forehead creases. One moment, he’s in front of the grate, and the next his face is so close to Draco’s that he can’t see the robes. Harry takes Draco’s face in his hands. It doesn’t feel entirely wrong. It’s not as if Draco’s mother never put gloved hands to his face when he was a child. It simply doesn’t go. Harry’s hands are warm and slightly calloused, his fingers thicker than Draco’s, and Draco has the sudden and inappropriate urge to tear through the gloves with his teeth.“Draco.” Even Harry’s voice is different. He’s floated in and out of consciousness all day, dropping off to sleep with a blink and waking up again just as easily. Now he’s steady. In control. “It’s me. It’s me. You don’t have to be afraid.”“I’m not.” The words are accompanied by a tight whistling sound that marks them as a lie. “You can’t go.”“I have to.”Draco’s words scramble for the back of his mind, swept away by adrenaline, but a burst of frustration pushes them front and centre again. This is not the time.“You can’t. Your potion is about to wear off.”Harry studies him, eyes running along every part of Draco’s face, and then he leans in—up, really, onto the balls of his feet—and kisses Draco.It’s sweet, at first, ramping up quickly to a near-bite, and then Harry releases Draco and steps away into the centre of the room.“What are you doing?”“It’ll be okay.”“Harry—”Harry flings one hand above his head. A gold, glowing shield spell arcs over him, and Harry throws another bit of magic after it. The shield solidifies.Draco understands what he’s about to do the moment before the last spell leaves Harry’s hand.“Don’t. Harry, don’t.”He’s not fast enough.The spell, silent and wandless, hits the shield and ricochets back on Harry. He stumbles under the impact. The shield disappears. “Merlin, fuck.”“What spell was that?”Harry shakes his head, winces, and shakes it again. “I’ll be fine.”He’s lying. Harry’s eyes are flat, almost as if he’s Occluding, but he isn’t. If he had any sort of skill, he’d have done it when his headache started.“Stay here, okay?” Harry says. “I’ll be back soon.” He turns and disappears with a crack.The only sounds left in the sitting room are the hiss and pop of the fire in the grate and a tiny metallic whirr. A vibration in his hand. The armillary sphere buzzes in his fingers like a caught Snitch. Draco presses it into one corner of the box and stares down at it.There’s not enough air in here without Harry. What is he meant to do? Sit here and wait? Read a bloody romance novel and wonder when Harry’s makeshift Occlumency will shatter and leave him defenceless?The armillary sphere doesn’t stay put. It lifts itself an inch above the other objects, bumps into the corner of the box, and bounces off. The sun and all its planets rotate. Light glows from its centre, steady and unceasing.Draco picks it up again and closes it in his hands.It relaxes, the rings settling, but it beats and beats. Alive. Waiting.The universe doesn’t stop turning because Harry’s told him to stay here.What business does he have telling Draco to cower in his house?What business does he have telling Draco not to follow him absolutely everywhere?None.Draco will not stay here and wait. Not least because there’s a tug in his chest so strong it verges on painful. It’s not the urge to stay away from Harry. To his shame, Draco has never had the urge to stay away from Harry, even when it would have been better to keep his distance.He tucks the trembling sphere into the box and takes the stairs two at a time. A set of robes will make him less conspicuous. The boots Pansy sent are too lovely for a surprise Auror raid, but he pulls them on anyway.He catches a glimpse of himself in the wardrobe mirror and startles.Sometimes, it’s his father looking back at him from the glass.This time, it’s a star.The robes, twilight running to darkest blue with a soft, subtle shimmer, are cut from the sky.That’s a better way to think about it, surely. He’s not a reckless fool, rushing after Harry despite nearly eight years in confinement and a definite lack of any way to be useful, no matter what Pansy thinks.No one stops the sky from looking down at the earth. No one stops the constellations from turning overhead.He thinks of Harry crying into his pillow and Draco can’t possibly allow it to happen where he can’t see, with Harry surrounded by Aurors in red robes and Merlin knows who else.Draco grips his wand, thinks of the coordinates from the Patronus with as much clarity as he can summon, and Disapparates away from the cottage. The crush releases him at the edge of a forest near a wide, snowy lawn. Draco gasps for breath, panic filling his vision with dark spots. Draco pats himself down.What is he looking for?Right. Mortal injuries.No broken bones. No torn-apart limbs.He hasn’t Splinched himself.He does, however, brace to be caught, tackled, perhaps even killed.Only he hasn’t Apparated out of Azkaban. Couldn’t have, even if he wanted to.Draco straightens up and inhales. The air is crisp in his lungs, but it has a bitter aftertaste. It’s heavier than it’s supposed to be, settling low in his chest, and he wishes it wasn’t so familiar. He wishes he didn’t know how Dark Magic tastes in his mother’s rose garden or the Manor library or the Room of Hidden Things.But he does.He can’t forget.The trees face the back of the building. It’s not the Manor, though at first blush it seemed like it might be. It’s a manor. Not as large as his childhood home. Familiar in a disturbing sort of way. Draco should know whose house this is, but he doesn’t, and anyway, it’s part of a nightmare.The house is on fire with Dark Magic, and perhaps even ordinary flames. Draco can’t tell from the dark curls rising above the roof. Curses shriek, howling on the cold night breeze. They’re oddly muffled by the snowfall one moment, echoing the next, the sound distorted by the magic itself. It doesn’t take much focus to see the darker drifts, shot through with curses.The Aurors cast Stabilising Charms one after the other. They’re trying to keep the manor standing.He rushes forward a few steps, wand out, but the red robes bring him up short. A secret sentence might not have been secret to all the Aurors.Draco can’t see Pansy.He hopes she’s not here, and he knows she will be.A window overlooking the garden explodes. Shards glitter in the air and bounce off the shields put up by the nearest Aurors. They shout counter curses like their lives depend on it.Draco supposes they do.This is too big a problem for Reparo. This is too big a problem to make sense of the ley lines. The magic is a mess. Tangled lines criss-cross every part of the manor he can see, flickering in and out of view. The Dark Magic and the house magic tussle with each other, sending gusts of power out across the garden.He edges closer to the trees on his right and rounds the corner of the house. There are two more pairs of Aurors on that side. Reinforcing Charms streak through the dark. Tendrils of magic hang in the air between the tips of their wands and the walls.No Harry.No Pansy.Harry and Pansy should be together. That’s his one consolation. If Harry left, it was to be with Pansy, and the two of them wouldn’t do anything reckless.Draco barks out a short laugh.Yes. They would.There’s more noise towards the front of the house. Draco sticks to the shadows as much as he can. The snow is lit up by the moon, and every step he takes leaves a visible footprint. Anyone could see him. He pulls the hood of his robes up over his hair, which is his most recognisable feature by far, and keeps moving towards the front corner of the building.A jet of actual fire screams up from the roof, and Draco runs into the trees, his spine like ice, his heart racing.“It’s not Fiendfyre,” he says out loud. He knows it’s not. It isn’t the right colour, and isn’t contorting into magical beasts, and he only thought he heard Crabbe howling in terror.Because this is Crabbe’s house. He’d lived here with his father. Now they’re both dead, Crabbe in the Room of Hidden Things, his father in Azkaban. By morning, there will be nothing left of them.He steels himself, leaves the cover of the trees, and keeps going.There’s a crowd at the front of the house, their faces cast in orange, then purple as the manor throws magic off the roof. Some of the colour glances off bright hair in the circle drive.Ron Weasley.He’s with a group of other Healers, all of them dressed in blue robes with an oversized St Mungo’s cross on the back.Draco stares at Ron, then at the manor.A shadow crosses one of the windows. When it passes the next, it’s red against a backdrop of Dark Magic, and, yes, fire.Two shadows.He freezes near a hedge that must’ve marked the edge of the gardens.Harry.There’s no question. Harry is the kind of person who would run into a burning building, the structure seething with Dark Magic, curses bloody everywhere, to save someone. He’s the kind of person who would circle back into a room filled with Fiendfyre to save his childhood nemesis. Draco’s seen this before, and he never wanted to see it again.He opens his mouth to yell—what, he doesn’t know—when someone bursts out the front doors of the manor.It’s Harry, robes flying behind him, a child in his arms.Draco truly can’t breathe.It’s a toddler, Draco thinks, wrapped in a blanket and held against Harry’s chest. He has a gloved hand over the child’s head, the little face pale in the moonlight—wide, terrified eyes, mouth open in a cry.Harry sprints across the circle drive, directly to Ron, who takes the child from Harry. Draco sees Ron’s face, too, placid in the light of the burning building, talking as he turns around and lets the other Healers cast their spells.While Harry runs back to manor.Bits of moonlight cling to his robes, and his hair.No. Bits of magic.Draco’s stomach drops. The magic reminds him of the cracks in shattered porcelain or the spidering collapse of ice on a lake. The fact that it’s visible when Harry’s magic has not been suggests unbearable pressure. It suggests breaking.If his foolish makeshift shield is coming down, then—Harry’s shadow merges with someone else’s at the doors, and Pansy comes out onto the front steps. Ron runs to meet her, to take another child from her, this one perhaps four or five.The children.The missing ones.Ron ushers Pansy away from the house. Her voice carries across the stretch of snow.“—off, Ronald, I am perfectly capable of handling—”“You’re not going back in there,” Ron says, then turns his attention to the wailing, hysterical child in his arms. “None of us are, are we? ‘Course not. We’ll stay out here, where it’s safe. You’re safe. Let’s have a look at you, and then—”“You don’t understand,” Pansy clips. “I can’t leave—”A shout from the back of the house makes them all duck their heads. Several people cast Protego. The whole of the manor judders, bouncing on its foundation.Draco’s body jerks towards it.He’s gone three steps when all the windows blow out.He throws his arms over his head, wand clenched in his fist. Shards of glass land on his robes. It feels soft, like snow.Magic howls. He peeks out from behind his arms as the near wall of the manor crumples, wood and stone snapsnapsnaping, and Draco can’t see a single red shadow through the empty windows, only black and orange flames. All the Aurors have backed off. They’re still casting, but what can they save now? The building’s coming down.And Harry’s inside.The front doors bang open, throwing firelight onto the drive, and Harry runs out, a little bundle in his arms. Silver threads of light crackle all over his robes, and Draco feels a pull like all of the earth’s weight towards Harry, all the breath going out of his lungs with it.The Dark Magic in the manor and all the woven curses combust at the same time.Inky black rolls out from the splintering walls, shutting out Draco’s vision.Blinding light splits the darkness with a deafening crack, like a bolt of lightning touching down.Except so much bigger. So unfathomably large. A cloud of lightning, shooting out of Harry. He’s silhouetted against the white, the baby in his arms, his face tipped to the sky.The afterimage sears across his eyes, and with a terrible understanding, a sheer drop, Draco sees.He sees what he missed before.He understands what he couldn’t before.The lightning-magic isn’t coming from Harry. It’s coming to him. That’s the unbearable pull in the air. The sense that gravity has fallen out of alignment and tipped towards Harry. His magic is not invisible. Draco couldn’t see it in Harry’s house because it was everywhere.Absolutely everywhere.Harry draws more of it to him every second, and Draco knows where it’s going—to that dark void in his head, in a desperate attempt to fill it.It’s too much. It’s unsurvivable.A stiff breeze clears some of the Dark Magic. Blue robes flash through the shadowy aftermath. Bands of magic writhe over every inch of Harry. The rest hovers in the air around him, pulling and pulling and pulling. It hurts Draco’s ears, his jaw, everything.He runs towards Harry.Ron gets there first.Harry flinches away, trying to get out of Ron’s reach, but Ron presses in and takes the baby out of his arms. He locks his hand around Harry’s wrist. Harry opens his mouth in what looks like a scream.They’re gone before he can make a sound.Draco changes directions and collides with Pansy. He’s reaching for her when she throws her arms around his waist and they’re gone. It’s pandemonium in the St Mungo’s reception area.Several people are crying. There’s an enormous scorch mark on one wall. The welcomewix’s desk is cracked in half, and there’s no one behind it.Pansy charges through the gathered wixen in a deadly silence. She should be shouting at Draco for showing up at the Auror raid. No doubt she is furious. But she doesn’t say a word, and that can only mean—She speeds up at the other end of the reception area and drags Draco into one of the lifts, then stabs the button for the fourth floor until the lift moves.It lets them out into less pandemonium, but more shouting.“This way.” Pansy tugs at his elbow, and they go right, through a set of doors marked AUTHORISED PERSONNEL ONLY.On the other side of the doors, Harry screams and doesn’t stop. Pansy sprints down a second hallway at shocking speed, repeating fuck fuck fuck fuck in a thin voice that Draco knows to be out of real terror. A crowd of wizards surrounds a doorway at the far end. The door hangs off its hinges, the sign demolished so it only reads CURE NMENT. Draco can’t taste any more Dark Magic, but he can taste ozone, like the clean extracted flavour of strawberries. There’s so much lightning in the air that his teeth hurt.They’re bloody Hit Wizards in the little throng, all of them in black uniforms, all of them with wands out.Pansy throws an elbow into the nearest one without so much as a flinch, as if the wizard isn’t three times her size, and shoves past the next. The Hit Wizards hardly turn their heads until one of them notices Draco. He doesn’t care how they react to him, not when Harry’s making that sound, but registers distantly that none of them seem particularly shocked, the way one would be if an escaped prisoner of Azkaban appeared in the middle of the crowd.There are more wix inside the room. Two mediwixens, backs against the wall. A pair of Aurors—young, as if they’ve just left training.Ron Weasley.The Minister for Magic.The room isn’t enough.Draco understands why they’re here—why Harry’s here, being corralled into the far corner by Ron—but he also knows that it was a disastrous assumption to bring him into a confined space like this one. He has seen the scale of the magic Harry’s drawing in, and it’s not a bolt of lightning, it’s a lifetime’s worth of storms. Harry can’t stop it, or control it. The floor vibrates with excess power, and no matter how heavily this room is warded, no matter what kind of curses it’s meant to contain, it won’t contain Harry.The Auror in front of Draco jerks back as Harry lunges against Ron’s arm and screams through gritted teeth, his eyes blazing.It is abundantly clear, heartbreakingly clear, that everyone—except perhaps Ron—is afraid of what Harry or Harry’s magic might do.All Draco can feel is how much it hurts.It’s a lot of pain, though he knows he’s only feeling an echo. His teeth grind down, jaw splintering, skull banded with metal. None of the pain stays in one place. It radiates all down his neck and his shoulders and his back. Down to his toes. It’s everywhere, just like his skin and bones.Like magic.Harry’s magic, of all things, shouldn’t hurt.“Harry.” Kingsley Shacklebolt has his wand in one hand and the other raised placatingly. “Son—”“I’m not your fucking son,” Harry screams at him. He runs into Ron’s arm again, as if he’s not aware that his best friend of most of his life is there at all. “And all of this is because of you.”“Harry, I don’t understand,” Kingsley says. “What happened at the Crabbe—”“This isn’t about that. Why can’t anyone listen to anything I say?” All the walls bow out under the force of Harry’s rage and snap back into place with a crack louder than any Apparition Draco’s heard. “You’re a fucking liar. You’re a liar, Kingsley, and I fucking hate you.”“What did I lie about?” Kingsley’s grip tightens on his wand, and Draco will leap forward and break it, he will, if Kingsley makes any move to cast on Harry.“You said there would be peace.” Harry’s voice goes ragged with fury. “That’s what you said. So I went with you to that bloody Muggle flat and I’ve had nothing but pain every fucking day of my life since. I hate you. I hate you.”The walls bend again, the floor going with them. One of the mediwixens lets out a panicked shriek, and something clarifies in Draco’s mind. It’s not at the level of conscious thought. He doesn’t know what it means, not in words, but he can get there, if—He pushes past the Aurors, past the Minister. Pansy shouts his name. One of the Hit Wizards curses. The magic in the air is such a blinding white that it becomes an afterimage of itself, black at the edges. It’s a pressurised beat at Draco’s head. Ron has one hand over one ear as Draco comes level with him, but he’s too close to the epicentre.He’s too close to Harry, who has been taken wholly by the magic. His chin is up, but his eyes are squeezed shut, and tears run down his cheeks. His voice is going, almost gone. He still tries to scream.Draco has never seen someone get struck by lightning, but he knows that this is worse. In this small corner of the room, where all that magic concentrates on Harry, it’s crushing. It burns. It sears. It howls, the shrill desperation tearing at the fabric of him.And Draco can tolerate that. Will tolerate it. If he doesn’t, the building will come down, just like Crabbe’s house.Though in Draco’s heart of hearts—selfish, he’s never been more selfish—he’d choose Harry over the building, if it came to it.He puts a hand on Ron’s shoulder and moves him out of the way. Ron’s eyes go wide at the sight of Draco, but he recovers and jumps back towards the doors. There are more voices behind Draco—Hermione and Blaise, he thinks. The lighting spells flicker.Draco might very well be wrecked. He might very well be broken. He might be irretrievably behind the rest of his friends, forever out of step, forever off-balance.This is simple enough, even for him.A lightning storm needs grounding.“Harry,” Draco says.Harry’s eyes fly open as the last of the lighting spells fail. The bands of magic bracketing Harry are the only light in the room. They sink through his skin, more and more and more, and Draco only has a heartbeat to get a sense of them before Harry falls into his arms and clutches at his robes, his chest heaving with sobs.“Oh, darling.” Draco doesn’t care if he’s burned. He wraps Harry in his arms and holds him close. Harry’s magic surrounds him, pressure and heat and pain. “What can I do?”“Dunno.” Harry’s voice is a rasp, broken with tears. His hands flex, his nails digging in harder at Draco’s back, and up near his shoulder blade. “Kill me. Do whatever you want.”“I’m not going to kill you.”“I can’t take it. I can’t do it anymore. My head hurts so much. It hurts, it hurts.” I’m so bloody tired, Harry says in that Muggle flat, his face in his hands, water running in rivulets from his black hair.They’re in a column of moonlight that moves in a violent whirl around them. Bright spots hang in the crystalline white. Bolts of concentrated magic skate through at random intervals. Red. Green. Gold. Silver.It’s beautiful.It’s killing Harry.Draco’s thoughts are no longer sludge, but he hasn’t spent the last seven-odd years studying. He’s spent them hidden in his mind. Trying to stay alive. He isn’t the ideal person to solve this problem, but—
You, Draco. No one else.
He does some deep breathing.There are no ley lines. There are too many ley lines. There’s too much out here, which means the only place to go is in.Draco lifts Harry’s head off his shoulder and meets his eyes.“Would you let me have a look?”Harry jerks in his arms and shakes his head, the howl of his magic rising to a rending scream.Every instinct says to accept this, to back off, but Draco can’t do that, or else they’ll lose the building and Harry, and it won’t matter at all that he survived Azkaban.So Draco holds Harry’s chin a little tighter and draws himself to his full height. He looks down at Harry with all the authority he can muster.“I won’t hurt you. You know that. Now be a good boy and let me have a look.”Harry’s eyes widen. His pupils push at the green. Even here. Even sobbing, his face wet with tears. The whirl of moonlight slows, the magic dragging against the air, and hovers. The scream tapers to a particularly forceful rush, like the sea.Draco doesn’t so much as glance at it. He keeps his eyes on Harry’s as if he’d known all along that Harry’s magic would settle at his command.Harry swallows. “You can’t—can’t come in. It hurts too much.”“Of course not.” A fraction of a second to decide is all he has. Draco puts his hands on Harry’s face and pulls him in so their foreheads are together. Salt from Harry’s tears clings to the lenses of his glasses, his green eyes bright as a curse behind. “You’ll come to me. Cast your shield.”Harry exhales as if Draco’s said something wildly sexy, like extenuating circumstances. “Protego,” he whispers.The moonglow bends, pouring part of itself into a shield that surrounds Harry and turns invisible, except for a slight shimmer.Draco can Occlude without his wand, and he doesn’t want to draw it on Harry now, so he focuses on the opposite incantation, concentrates on the heat of his magic everywhere it exists and not just his fingertips, and whispers Legilimens against Harry’s lips.He has to prepare in a matter of moments as the spell hits Harry’s shield and pulls him into Draco’s head. It hurts a little, to welcome so much magic, but the space behind Draco’s mental walls is vast. It had to be if he was going to spend years wandering in it without losing his mind.And so, with a bit of effort on his part, he summons the image of Harry’s sofa, of his tidy rug, of the photographs on his mantel. The soft blanket. The Snitch.A familiar place.Harry touches down with a blink. “What is this?”“Your sitting room.”“This is what the inside of your head looks like?”“For now.”The corner of Harry’s mouth turns down. He fits himself into Draco’s arms, trembling. “How will you see inside mine, then? If we’re here.”Draco opens his mouth to say that he doesn’t know.But…He can feel it.Harry’s mind. His thoughts. The gold glow and the black void. He can feel it, but he doesn’t dare try to touch it. That would be the same as reaching in with magic and regular Legilimency. And he…He doesn’t have to, since Harry’s mind and magic are within his own.Draco staves off a tiny panic attack.He can’t afford panic. Not when he’s holding enough power to level St Mungo’s and perhaps all of wizarding London.It’s fine. Perfectly normal. Of course he’s capable of this, and much more besides.That space, that void—it’s just there, causing Harry’s pain and everything on the list Hermione had made in the sitting room. Harry had been angry because every item also applied to him.His friends had known it. They hadn’t found a way to help.Draco needs a way to see the void. The answer falls into his lap like a box of trinkets from closed cases.“Darling.” He tries his best not to let his nervousness show. “Why don’t you show me your dream?”“What dream?”“The dream you had about the armillary sphere. You said you keep dreaming about it.”“Yeah,” Harry says. “At least three times.”“Does the dream always happen in the same place?”“Mm-hmm.” Harry rests his head heavily on Draco’s shoulder. “The Headmaster’s office.”“Imagine it for me, would you?”Harry hums a tired sort of agreement, and Draco closes his eyes. A subtle shift in Harry’s magic laps against Draco’s consciousness like a wave on a shore. His chest aches, weighted with Harry’s trust. It’s safe enough here that Harry’s memories appear in Draco’s mind without strain or struggle. The curves and lines of the gargoyle that guards the staircase. The rough scrape of stone on stone. The shape of a password on his lips. A bone-deep exhaustion. A wand, held tightly in his fist.When he opens his eyes, the stairwell has appeared at the back of Harry’s sitting room, in place of his bookshelves. The added dimension rings with power. Goosebumps trickle down Draco’s spine, and the fine hair on the back of his neck lifts. The staircase shimmers, as if all of it is a ley line.It’s more than a memory of a dream.“Good,” Draco says, and Harry shivers, letting Draco take more of his weight. “I’d like to see more.”“What?”“Look.”Harry picks his head up and gives a short nod, as if he’d half-expected to see the entrance to the Headmaster’s office in his sitting room.“You want to go in?” Green eyes flick to Draco’s.“I do.” Draco hunts for more words to comfort Harry. A simple explanation of his theory, perhaps.But Harry takes a deep breath, steadies himself, and slots his fingers through Draco’s without another word.They take the stairs up.“Oh,” Harry says.There’s the broken armillary sphere, enormous and defeated on the floor. The rings twitch in a way that turns Draco’s stomach and makes his heart ache.The rest of the office is in similar disarray. Objects cover the floor in various states of brokenness. Harry’s box of discarded evidence writ large, or—Or his collection is the dream made small.Either way, it’s wrong. A chill spreads through Harry’s magic.“I don’t like it like this.” Harry squeezes Draco’s hand and lets go, his jaw set and his magic stirring. Draco’s lightheaded with the swirls and eddies, but he keeps his mind’s hold gentle around Harry’s. “I can’t—I have to do something.”Harry moves purposefully into the office and starts Levitating objects back onto the shelves. Shattered crystal phials draw back together with a crook of Harry’s fingers. He lays both hands on a snapped silver circlet, and the two halves re-join in a gold glow. The front of a cabinet lifts from the floor in a spray of stained glass and fits itself back into the frame. Draco follows him, and they work in silence until the room is set right again.The one thing Harry can’t lift is the armillary sphere. He stands over it, his face fallen.“I think I did this,” he says softly. “I don’t know how to fix it.”Draco stands at Harry’s side, the half-dead sphere sprawled at their feet.He concentrates in an absent sort of way. Lets his eyes travel over it without focusing on any one piece.The ley lines appear, and Draco barely manages to swallow a gasp.All of them are tangled, knotted around one another, and they don’t stop at the sphere. They reach out towards Harry in a shuddering mass—And towards Draco.And past both of them.“Well,” he says, as if it’s simple, as if it’s no trouble at all. “It’s quite tangled. Let me try to fix it.”Harry takes his hand again, quiet. Guilt radiates out of him. Pain. An omnipresent disappointment that feels heavy and inescapable. Draco would do anything to take it from him.He raises his wand.In his mind, he doesn’t need to rely on incantations, since the intention is so palpable. That leaves him free to speak to Harry.“There was one of these in the Manor library, but the earth was in the centre,” he mentions. “Not the sun. They’re supposed to represent the heavens.”He plucks at the tangled lines with his magic. They’re strung tight, pulling, but they want very much to be back in their places. Draco can feel that, too. He starts with as little power as possible, adding more as they resist.“The heavens,” Harry repeats. “People thought this was the whole universe.”“Do you think the whole universe is broken?” Draco’s wand catches a ley line, and it flies into place. A loud humming fills the Headmaster’s office, and Harry holds his hand in a firmer grip.“I feel like the whole universe is broken,” Harry says. “I…felt like that.”“You don’t now?”“I don’t know now.” A second line puts up a fight, but Draco keeps coaxing pressure on it until it swings back into its place. The sphere lifts, hovering a bit above the floor, its rings all twitching as if they’re coming back to life. Draco steals a glance at Harry. He’s watching the sphere with tears in his eyes. “The sun’s broken.”The sun is broken. It’s cracked in several places, the Lumos at the centre flickering out, dying, and the tension of the ley lines pinches Draco’s heart.“Why does it make you so sad?” Why does it bring tears to Harry’s eyes when Draco’s in the act of fixing it?A tear falls onto Harry’s cheek. “I dunno, I think—” He lets out a breath. “I think it’s because the sun is a star.”Draco’s throat aches so much he doubts his ability to speak, then pushes past his doubt. “You know, it still rises and sets. It’s not really broken.”Harry doesn’t say anything.“I’m not broken,” Draco says, and it’s only in that moment that he knows for sure it’s true. He is different. He can’t argue otherwise. But he’s not broken. He had his Occlumency, and his hope, and at the end of all of it he had Harry’s doorstep, and one day, his memories of Azkaban will fade until they’re nothing but shadows, until they’re nothing at all.“I couldn’t find you.” Harry’s voice drops to a whisper. “I never did find you.”“I’m forced to disagree.”“I didn’t do anything.”“Harry.” Draco wants to stop all this and sit Harry down and list out all the things he’s quite obviously done in the past near-eight years, but the magic is strong and could become volatile at any moment. “You opened the door. That’s more than enough.”Harry makes a soft sound. Despair or relief, or both.“I can fix it.” Draco pulls Harry a step closer to the sphere and aims his wand. He holds the sphere in his mind, the ley lines, the connections between the sun and the moon and the planets, and thinks of balance in every aspect, in the night and the day and the summer and winter. Sleeping and waking. Leaving home and returning. He lets it suffuse his magic, lets it warm his fingertips, and focuses on guiding it to the broken sun at the centre of the sphere.Then:“Reparo.”Light bursts from the sun, glowing with such bright intensity that Harry throws his arm over his eyes.Draco can’t look away.The cracks in the star close, and the sphere rises on a wave of power, above their heads, every piece spinning, glinting, catching the light. Sunbeams dance on the walls, the floor, everywhere. The inscription shows itself, letters clear and beautiful, repeating and repeating and repeating as the sun turns, bringing the planets with it. Draco’s spine tingles with magic and memory—the May morning sun on a piece of framed embroidery in a Muggle flat.“Can you see it?” Harry asks from behind his arm, his voice rough. “What does it say?”“For, behold,” Draco reads. “I create new heavens and a new earth; and the former things shall not be remembered, nor come into mind.”Harry drops his face into his hands and bursts into tears.Draco reaches for him, heart racing, and stops. To his side, there’s a soft clickclickclick as all the planets line up in a row, centred on the two of them.Harry’s in a shaft of light like dawn, and Draco can see what had appeared on Ron’s Diagnostic Charm.He takes Harry’s elbow and turns him, tugging his hands down. Harry gasps out another sob and lifts his chin so Draco can see his face.Slowly, because he is compelled, because he’s so close, Draco lifts his hand to Harry’s forehead and traces his scar with the pad of his thumb.The scar starts near his hairline and crackles down through his eyebrow and over his right eye. There are white tendrils through the green, fine as—Fine as filaments.The magic of the armillary sphere didn’t stop at the sphere, and the magic that had accompanied the scar didn’t stop at the scar. It went all the way through Harry’s head. It changed all of him.Draco traces it again. “Darling.”“It’s such shit.” Harry wipes furiously at his eyes, his face miserably red, at what must be the end of his endurance. “I thought it would tell me—it’s complete bollocks.”“What is?”“There’s no new world.” He makes a hollow, angry sound. “I didn’t forget. It still hurt. And I wanted you, and you were gone.”The ley lines from the sphere stretch to Harry, alive and aching, moving, and go past him, to—“Harry.” Draco puts a hand to Harry’s face, because he has to touch him, absolutely must. “Where is your wand?”Harry puts his hand out with an aggrieved sigh, and the holly wand flies into it.The lines snap. Straight between the sphere and Harry. Straight between the sphere and Draco. From above, they would be two points of a triangle.The heavens are aligned. The Headmaster’s office is fixed.Which should mean that Harry will be fine. It should mean the pain will stop.But Draco can still feel it.He scans all the lines again. The second line from the sphere disappears into Draco’s chest.His heart thunders. Two points of a triangle. The strong lines from the sphere to each of them.And:A single filament, stretched between the two of them, nearly translucent.Draco can’t believe he didn’t feel it before, but of course he did, didn’t he? He’s felt it every minute since he left Harry behind in that flat. But it was cold in Azkaban, and he was barely alive, so the hot, vibrant magic pouring into Draco through that filament faded to the background.And it is pouring into him. The magic only moves one way.All of it jolts into clarity.“Come here.” Draco doesn’t wait for Harry to move. He pulls him close, his heart pounding and breaking and healing again, and presses his forehead to Harry’s.Harry sighs, and it’s a sound of such relief that Draco almost sags to the floor.It’s not brute-force Legilimency when Harry is already in Draco’s mind and in alignment. It’s like wading into a stream. Draco disturbs nothing and sees everything.He sees the void where Voldemort’s Killing Curse had gone, and where the piece of his soul had taken root in Harry. Harry’s magic wells in that place, hungry and desperate, clawing more power from anywhere it can get. That power travels along the filament to Draco, and he can see—How he didn’t go insane in Azkaban, because he had this, and Harry—Harry didn’t have what he needed.There are whispers in the void, applying pressure, keeping it open and starving.Kingsley Shacklebolt saying If you want a moment to breathe, it’s time to go. Otherwise they’ll put you on the war council. Hermione saying They’ve assured me it will be painless, Harry, it won’t be like it was with Snape. Pansy saying I’m the only partner you’re ever going to have, Potter, and don’t you forget it. Ron saying Got a shift. Be back after. And, hanging in the air, shining in the letters in the sphere: the former things shall not be remembered, nor come into mind. Promises. Harry has taken all of them as promises. Because this is how he loves, reaching and reaching and reaching, waiting for someone to reach back.Draco knows, because there’s one voice louder than the others. Clearer.It’s his own voice.“What is it?” Harry whispers. “I can feel you looking.”“Do you hear that?”Harry’s quiet for a moment. “All I can hear is your heartbeat, I think.”Draco doesn’t let his heart break, but only because he knows what this is now. He knows why Harry didn’t know. Couldn’t know.“It’s a bond,” Draco tells him. “Between us.”“We’re not bonded.”“You’re bonded to me. And the magic—it’s been searching all this time. That’s why it hurts, Harry. It’s raw magic, looking for—” For him. For Draco. All this time. With everything Harry had. “For an answer.”Harry pauses, his arms going around Draco’s waist. “Can you fix it?”“Yes,” Draco promises. “Just stay where you are.”Harry kisses him.Which is not what Draco meant, though he’s not going to complain.He keeps kissing Draco while Draco sends magic gently, so gently, through the lightning-shaped void that stretches all through Harry’s mind. Reparo, he thinks, but his intention isn’t to force it back together, it’s to fill it with presence, with his presence, so that Harry’s magic can stop trying so hard. So the whispers can rest. Reparo. I’m right here. You don’t have to look any longer.When he’s finished, there’s no more black.It’s silver, the colour of Draco’s magic.He pulls back, breathing unsteady, knees weak. It took more energy than he expected, more power, and he’s not finished.“Does it still hurt?”Harry kisses him one more time. “No.”“There’s one final step, but we can’t do it here.”“We can’t?” Harry opens his eyes, his forehead creased. “What do I have to do?”“Do you trust me?”The pink in Harry’s cheeks says that he does, more than anyone. That he finds the idea of trusting Draco sexy. “Yes.”Draco spares one last glance for the tidied room. The heavens spin the way they should, the sun at the centre. It’s the old world, made new.“Are you tired?” he asks Harry.“I’m so bloody tired,” Harry answers.Draco takes Harry’s face in his hands, ready to catch him. He knows, from the way Harry’s mind feels, that it will happen the moment he says the words.“Then be a good boy and go to sleep.”Harry drops into his arms, and Draco drops them both out of his mind. He catches Harry on the floor of the room at St Mungo’s and finds Pansy and Blaise and Hermione and Ron all staring at him.“All done,” Draco announces. “I think I’m going to faint.”He is correct.
Art by Phantasmagoria
(BRB crying forever)
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
Harry wakes up slowly, staying as still as he can out of a half-asleep habit that’s never saved him from much pain before but might this time.After a while, he realises that there isn’t any.His head is fine.He opens one eye, then the other, then both, testing the light.Also fine.Good, even. Pale and grey with a hint of sun. Regular November light. Harry can’t feel the emptiness in his head anymore.There’s a quiet swish behind him. Paper on paper. A page, turning.He turns over onto his back and relief floods him, warming his chest, brightening the room, making his heart beat faster. It’s the kind of happiness that would normally give him a headache.Not this time.Draco sits on the other side of the bed, fully dressed in a shirt and trousers and waistcoat, a pillow propped behind him. He’s reading that romance novel, his lips pursed like he’s just come to an important point in the plot.Then he sees Harry, and his eyes light up, followed quickly by the rest of his face. Harry gets a flash of that dimple smile and his heart throws itself a little party in his chest.“Oh, hello,” Draco says. “I was wondering when you’d finally return to the land of the living.”“Hi.” He stretches out his toes under the sheets. “Did we dream the same dream last night?”“No, that was real.” Draco closes the book and rests it on his lap. “And it wasn’t last night. It was three days ago.”Harry grimaces. “Oh. That’s, er…that’s…cool. Not how those calls usually go, I guess.”“I should hope not.”It comes back to Harry. The Patronus, which had come at the bitter end of that potion from Hermione. The terrible fear he’d had for those missing kids The wild recklessness that had come over him as the building burned.How scared Draco had been, when he saw Harry in his Auror robes.How desperately he’d tried to get him to stay.How right he’d been, in the end.The pain, and more of the pain, and more. St Mungo’s is a blurry wash of a mediwix running away with the baby in her arms, and Harry screaming at Ron and, weirdly, Kingsley, and wanting to die, if only to make it stop.And the dream of the Headmaster’s office, which had taken place in his sitting room somehow.Draco fixing the armillary sphere. All the planets spinning around the sun.
For, behold, I create new heavens and a new earth
“I’m sorry.” Harry really shouldn’t have gone. “You know. About leaving. I know you didn’t want me to.”“I could say the same to you.”Draco doesn’t look away. His face falls into a thoughtful expression. Draco reaches over and strokes his fingers through his hair.“No, you couldn’t. You came after me.”“Here. Sit up.”Draco pulls Harry to sitting, and Merlin, that’s nice. It’s so nice sitting up without his head exploding. Harry turns to kiss Draco’s neck. While he does, Draco reaches for something.He’s holding it for Harry when he looks back again. A frisson trips down his spine, the goosebumps gathering at his nape.“You already made tea?” Harry takes the cup from Draco. We’ll get up and have tea. “You remembered how I take it?”Draco makes a soft, affectionate sound. “Presuming you still take it like you did in sixth-year.”“That was a whole project, you know.”“Your tea?”“Couldn’t stand it sweet, first-year. So I practised.”“That surprises me.” Draco purses his lips. “Considering I watched you inhale many times your body weight in treacle tart.”Harry wrinkles his nose. “Turns out, if you eat that much, it makes you sick. And then you have to add milk and sugar back to your tea little by little until you can stand it.”“Why not just take it without?”“Wasn’t going to give it up.” Harry doesn’t want to get into all the reasons behind that. Too many weird contradictions. He sips more tea instead. “This is perfect.”“Well, yes,” Draco says airily, but Harry can feel pride and nervousness, soft as his voice, radiating from him, carried on his magic.Harry drinks half the tea. Draco has his own cup, and they sit in bed and watch a light snowfall come down outside the bedroom.Until Draco sets his cup aside.“Toast?” He offers it on one of Harry’s plates. Two slices, cut into triangles.Another frisson. More goosebumps. A tiny filament—contentment, maybe, or magic—settles into Harry’s mind. Toast, if you want it.“Only if you have the other piece.”“If I must,” Draco sighs, resigned and haughty, and Harry laughs. It doesn’t hurt at all. Harry takes two triangles, and Draco puts the plate aside and takes his.Harry sags against Draco on the first bite. “Circe’s peaches. Holy shit.”“Is it good?”“What did you put on this? Magic?”“Cinnamon and sugar,” Draco laughs. “My mother used to make it like that for me. Well—she used to have the house-elves make it like that for me.”Eventually, they’ll have to decide what to do about Draco’s parents, but for now, Harry savours the toast.It’s perfect.It’s absolutely perfect.When it’s gone, Draco Vanishes the crumbs from the bed with a determined flick of his wand, then gets up and offers Harry his hand.Harry takes it, his heart racing. “We’re going somewhere, aren’t we?”Draco just smiles. Draco refuses to get in the shower with him—he’s already showered—so it takes Harry almost no time. It’s not twenty minutes before Bibsy and Kreacher see them off into the morning snowfall, looking suspiciously innocent.“Nice day for a walk,” Harry says as the gate closes behind them.Draco smiles, mysterious and hopeful. “Oh, certainly.”He’s unfairly beautiful in his navy coat. Pansy would describe it as simple but elegant, and Harry would describe it as stunning because it’s on Draco and brings out the silver in his eyes. Most of his white-blond hair, twisted back in a bun, is tucked underneath a grey hat with blue threads, like his coat. He has a matching scarf.It takes Harry’s breath away.Draco reaches over and adjusts Harry’s hat—green, with silver threads—and his scarf—also green, also with silver threads—and pats the front of his new coat, which Draco had pulled from the wardrobe with a flourish.Satisfied, Draco nods to himself, and takes Harry’s hand again.A third frisson moves through his whole body as they walk.The winter-cold air gusts around them. Every so often, snowflakes land on Draco’s long eyelashes. He watches the street ahead of them with bright excitement in his eyes.Harry’s lived in Godric’s Hollow for five years, but this morning, with Draco, it’s a new world.In a way, it…sort of is. It’s grown up a bit since Harry moved the last of his things from Grimmauld Place, though it still doesn’t take long to get from the edge of the village to the square.They pass by the cemetery—where the headstones are lightly dusted with snow—and the Charmed monument to Harry’s parents, and then Draco turns at one corner. They walk along in front of the shops.It’s surprisingly busy for a Thursday morning, with people coming in and out and calling to one another. Harry loves the sight of it. He loves the bells jingling on shop doors and a lady red-faced laughing at her friend and a mum chasing a kid in a striped coat down the pavement on the opposite side.He loves holding Draco’s hand.He loves that his head doesn’t hurt.He loves that—“Merlin, fuck, I’m supposed to be at work!”Draco squeezes his hand. “Not yet. Oh! Here we are.”He tugs Harry towards the door of a shop, and it’s not until they’re through the door, the bell still tinkling on the glass, that Harry realises what kind of shop it is.A flower shop.And not just a flower shop, but a magical one.
We could walk down the street and see if there’s a flower shop.
The place is sweet with Preservation Charms, with cases labelled by the season—Summer, Fall, Winter, Spring. In the centre of the shop, it’s a riot of red and green and white, holly berries and evergreen stems, and it’s all so bloody beautiful Harry could cry.“A bit of colour couldn’t hurt,” Draco murmurs in his ear, and that frisson feeling gets stronger, tugging at his heart. More gold glows. Another filament.Harry meets Draco’s eyes, face heating. “I like when you say that.”At that moment, the shopkeeper bustles out from a room in the back, wand in hand, delighted to see them. Draco steels himself, just for a heartbeat, and then he launches into a discussion that Harry only half-follows about winter bouquets and whether the flowers are imported and how the first arrangement of the season is more important than all the rest.Before he knows it, Draco is handing over a bouquet with red and white roses and sprigs of holly and a fresh evergreen scent, wrapped in paper and string that’s apparently Charmed to ensure that the flowers get home safe, and Draco’s handing over a fistful of Galleons and the shopkeeper is saying Oh, no, that’s too much, and Draco is insisting in a posh, pretty way, and they’re back in the snow with the bouquet in the crook of Harry’s arm, and he has no choice, really, he has to push Draco up against the shopfront next to the window full of flowers and kiss him.The scent of the shop clings faintly to Draco’s coat, and Harry can feel him smiling into the kiss.“You’ll scandalise the villagers,” Draco says, a bit breathless, when Harry can bring himself to break away. Draco’s hands are fists in the front of his coat, so Harry doesn’t think he cares that much. “And we have more to do, besides.”“Yeah.” Harry’s chest is tight under the burgeoning sensation that his entire life is about to begin. “Yeah. Yes.”They keep walking, and turn the next corner of the square.A girl in a red hat comes out of a shop door, her nose in a book, and Draco says ah! and Harry’s being spirited into a bookshop.The shelves up front are neat, the spines straight, but it devolves into a shabby, comfortable space towards the counter in the back. It smells like old parchment and the kind of subtle magic that Muggles mostly overlook. Draco inhales next to him, and as he lets out the breath, a man shouts, “Chiswick, for the love of Christ—” and a cat yowls back at him.A black shape streaks out from the backroom, disappears behind a shelf, and reappears a second later, moving with prim steps across the warm wooden floor.“Oh my God,” Harry says, the frisson like a bell.It’s a black cat with white markings on its face, and it continues in its weirdly stately progression all the way to Draco like it didn’t just have a massive spat with its owner.Draco watches it come with a crooked grin. The cat begins to ignore him as it gets closer, but it does a shoddy job, because it curls around Draco’s shins, circling.“Oh, hello,” Draco says, and reaches down to stroke the cat’s back. “Chiswick, is it?”“I should have named him Nightmare,” the bookshop owner grumbles, dropping a stack of books on the counter. “He’s not even mine. Just took up residence like he owns the bloody place.”“But you named him,” Harry says, his throat tight.The man rolls his eyes. “I got tired of shouting cat.”Chiswick the Cat circles Draco’s shins again, then curls up on his shoes and begins licking his paws.“Draco,” Harry says.“Yes?” Draco’s eyes are so very grey, so very silver. He’s smiling that smile, and Harry is never losing him again. Ever.“I’ve seen this cat before.”“Have you?”“When we were at the flat.”Draco straightens up, his eyes wide. “What?”“I—I dreamed it. When.” He can’t get the rest out. Harry’s too afraid to say it, stricken with terror out of nowhere. He feels it at the boundary where the emptiness used to be.“When I promised you tea and toast,” Draco says. “I promised you a flower shop and a bookshop and a café.”Harry should say I know it wasn’t really a promise. He should say I shouldn’t have expected that from you. He should say You never owed me tea and toast.But he can’t, because he’s spent too long wishing.He’s spent too long trying to stamp out a secret, sickening optimism.He’s spent too long trying to hide the childish, pathetic part of him that keeps taking people at their word, even when he knows they’ll break it.Draco takes Harry’s face in his hands, and all of Harry leans into his touch. Heart. Soul. Magic.“I’ll never break a promise like that again.” Draco is solemn. Serious. “You have my word.”Harry nods, speechless, vision blurry with tears.“I’d buy you a book,” Draco says in a low voice. “But there’s a cat on my feet, and he doesn’t seem to be interested in moving. I’m not surprised, honestly, because he looks just like you.”“Take the cat,” the owner shouts from behind some shelves.“Me?” Harry points to his chest. “He does not.”“Darling, he’s wearing glasses.”The cat looks up at Harry, and Merlin’s tits, he does have glasses. Those white markings are round circles around his eyes. He even has a nose bridge.“Chiswick the Chosen One,” Draco pronounces.Harry groans. “Please, no.”“Oh, yes.” Draco bends down and scoops Chiswick into his arms. “I think we’d be more comfortable at a café, Chiswick. What do you say?”“Wait.” Harry doesn’t know how he knows which section to go to. Maybe he recognises the spines of the books. It’s an easy pick, and the book slides right off the shelf with no resistance. The shopkeeper smiles a little when Harry pays and tucks the book into a paper bag.In addition to the bouquet, they leave with one romance book about two wizards with rival coffee shops and one black cat.
Chiswick by Phantasmagoria
The café is across the square, bright and busy, with a sign out front that says lunch when you want it.They sit in the front window, Chiswick lounging haughtily on Draco’s shoes. Sunlight breaks through the November clouds and touches Draco’s hair as gently as Draco holds Harry’s hand.They have the best sandwich Harry’s ever tasted.They laugh about buying a cat at a bookshop.“You didn’t have to do all this,” Harry says, as they’re sitting in front of empty plates and half-filled cups of tea. “I didn’t expect you to—I mean.”“There were extenuating circumstances.” Draco’s eyes glint, and Harry is instantly hard, and it’s really not fair how much Harry wants him. How much he likes him. “And yes. I did have to.”“But—”“Promises mean something different to you.” Draco shrugs a little. “Your magic has always been aligned with another person’s, hasn’t it?”Harry makes a face. “Voldemort was…he was in my head, I guess. And…” Oh, that’s not a nice thought. “He did follow through. He said he was going to kill me, and he did. For a second.”Draco pales, then shakes his shoulders like he’s ridding himself of the thought. “It’s just a theory, of course, but I think your magic responds especially strongly to promises. If I’d known how strongly, I never would have gone. And I’m not letting the Dark Lord, of all the atrocious people, be the only one to keep his word.”“You had to go, though. Didn’t you?”“I had to come back.” Draco’s eyes find Harry’s. “I had to do this.”“Do what?” There’s no more emptiness in Harry’s head, only a silver-and-gold feeling like sunrise over water and an excited hum.“This.” Draco grabs Harry’s hand and pulls him to his feet. Chiswick yowls furiously, but Draco doesn’t turn back. He drags them out into the square. There’s snow coming down, and neither of them have their hats, and it doesn’t matter, none of it matters. Draco hauls Harry in, Harry’s arms going around his waist, Draco’s hands finding Harry’s face.Draco grins, his teeth flashing, and Harry’s whole body goes hot with the promise of Draco’s lips on his. Harry opens his mouth for him, panting already—Merlin, he’s so gone—and Draco whispers Reparo onto his tongue and seals it with a kiss.It’s a sudden warmth and red and gold sparks and a high, clear song. Harry rings with it. Rings and rings and rings.The aching place inside of him seals up. The seam of the void in his head disappears. It’s quiet magic, but strong. It feels ancient and fresh and perfect.Harry would kiss him forever.Draco is the one to pull away in the end, laughing.“Oh my God,” Harry bursts out. “You were serious.”
It’s a bond. Between us.
We’re not bonded.
You’re bonded to me. And the magic—it’s been exposed all this time. That’s why it hurts, Harry. It’s raw magic, looking for an answer.
“But that means—that’s, like—you can’t break those.” Harry’s heart leaps into his throat. He’s hot all over. “You can’t undo it.”“There’s your answer. I don’t want to undo it.”“But—”“I want to stay with you.” Draco’s eyes are bright and sincere in the snowfall. They’re directly in the centre of the town square, in Godric’s Hollow, where Harry’s parents were alive and in love and he was with them, and it’s just the right place. “For as long as you’ll have me.”“Never leave,” Harry shouts, directly into Draco’s face. “Never leave again. Stay forever.”“I will never leave,” Draco shouts back. “Ever!”Harry kisses him again, there in the street, for so long that when he stops, several shopkeepers have come out to observe the scandal.Everyone in the café claps when they come back in to retrieve the flowers and the book and Chiswick, and Draco’s face turns as red as the holly berries, and it’s the best day of Harry’s life. The next morning, they go together to the Ministry and sit down for a meeting with Kingsley and Pansy and Ron and Hermione and Blaise.Harry wants to shout at Draco some more—I love you, I love you, I love you—but restrains himself for the sake of the meeting. Kingsley updates them on the now-found children—taken by copycat Death Eaters, returned safe and sound to their care homes. Then all six of them take turns attempting to explain what in Merlin’s name happened to Draco.“Also,” Harry puts in, as Pansy’s taking them through the scene at St Mungo’s. “I don’t actually hate you. I, er—I had a headache.”Kingsley waves off his apology. “We all say things we don’t mean when we’re in pain.”“I really don’t,” Harry insists. “I like you. A lot.”Kingsley shakes his head. “If I’d known all this was going on, I’d have—”The door to Kingsley’s office flies open so forcefully that it bangs against the Doorstop Charm, and Percy Weasley runs in, completely out of breath, already shouting.“Minister,” he gasps. “Draco Malfoy’s been found at Harry Potter’s—”He notices them all sitting there around Kingsley’s fireplace an eternity too late.“House,” he finishes.Harry doesn’t remember getting to his feet, but he has, and he lunges at Percy.A hand at the collar of his robes stops him in mid-air.If Percy’s announcement hadn’t been proof enough, the shock-white colour of his face would be.“Percy, you wanker,” Ron says, his voice sharper than Harry’s heard it in years.“Hello, Weasley.” Draco sounds amused. He sounds delighted. “What is it you were saying about me?”“I—” Percy backs up towards the door.Hermione’s wand flicks in the corner of Harry’s eye, and the door slams shut.“Now, let’s all take a moment.” Everybody’s standing now, Kingsley included. He raises both hands. “I’m sure there’s a perfectly reasonable explanation for—”“I did it,” Percy shouts, voice cracking. “All right? I confess! I did it! Tell the Prophet! Tell the world!” He falls to his knees, his hands to his chest. “Tell them all what I did.”Draco snorts.Everyone’s head whips around towards him, because it was such an elegant snort, and Harry’s still literally dangling from his robes, trying to get to Percy.“Tell everyone what?” Draco asks. “Tell them you were a hero who kept a Death Eater in Azkaban?”Percy glares at him, but remembers at the last moment that he is in trouble. He opens his mouth.“I would much prefer,” Draco continues. “If we kept it a secret. After all, I was a secret for eight years, so turnabout is fair play. No, I don’t want anyone to know what you did, Weasley.”“Well—” Percy starts. “Well, that’s not—”“If you insist.” Draco turns to Kingsley, his grip easy on Harry’s collar. “I want you to cast a Secrecy Charm on this information, to expire at noon on Christmas Day.”“Christmas Day?” Percy’s mouth twists in obvious confusion. “Why would you want to talk about it at Christmas?”“Because I’m quite sure I’ll be spending it at the Burrow,” Draco answers.Percy turns green.Then he really is cowering. The difference between fake-cowering and real is striking.“We can talk this out,” Percy says urgently, his eyes darting towards Hermione.She glares at him, her expression icy, and clicks her tongue. “Your mother is going to be so disappointed.” They all come to Godric’s Hollow, and it’s warm and loud and lovely. Chiswick flees from all the attention at first, then spends dinner zealously guarding Draco’s feet.Hermione and Blaise leave early, Blaise saying he forgot something at the Department of Mysteries, and nobody believes him.Pansy and Ron go next.Then they’re alone in Harry’s house, the fire crackling in the hearth and the scent of hot chocolate in the air.Harry thinks they’re probably going to shag.What happens instead is that Draco tugs the throw blanket off the back of the sofa, buries his face in it, and breaks down completely.It’s not that Harry’s relieved to see it. He hates it, actually. But it means something, now that the danger’s past and his head isn’t going to explode and Percy Weasley was an unforgivable twat and is now in a lot of trouble with Kingsley.Harry knows, maybe better than anyone, how you can’t lose it until you’re sure everything will be all right.He’s happy—well, not happy, but…content—to take his turn holding Draco. Nobody gets over seven and a half years in Azkaban in a single evening, or a single week.Harry takes a leave of absence from the DMLE.There’s a lot to get used to, and Draco seems determined to do it all before Christmas. They practise eating in cafés and going into shops and not having a panic attack when a sales clerk with an overabundance of holiday spirit takes Draco by the arm and tells him to come with her, because all she’s trying to do is show him a set of Charmed peppermint candles that rotate slowly in their glass holders, the red swirls sparkling.That goes for both of them—Draco, who flees the shop shaking and sicks up on the pavement outside, and Harry, who shoves himself between Draco and the sales clerk with entirely too much aggression and ends up buying twelve of the candles as penance.Draco admits that he can’t remember most of his time in Azkaban because he spent it in his mind, but that sometimes he does remember. Sometimes Draco’s memories pull him back behind the stone walls in his head, and they slam shut behind him, trapping him in. Then Harry has to use the passphrase. Afterwards, he wraps Draco in the duvet and holds him until he’s warm again and his words are back and he doesn’t have any more tears to cry.They sort out house-elf free hours every afternoon so that Harry and Draco can walk through the house without anyone looking at Draco with huge, teary eyes and bursting into loud sobs, which makes Draco burst into loud sobs, and he doesn’t fancy that, thank you.They feed Chiswick and shop for new brooms and go flying in the countryside until Draco’s nose is red from the cold and Harry has to take him inside and kiss him senseless.They practise being very normal.As normal as they can be, anyway. Harry’s never been normal ever in his life. Speaking of, Harry has never had anyone notice all the ways he’s not normal in such specific detail. He himself doesn’t realise how much of the past eight years he’s spent cheating off Pansy and his friends until he’s rather short of breath in Flourish and Blotts, where Draco has ordered in several books on the theory of magical repair.“What is it?” Draco asks, his hand on Harry’s lower back. His instinctual response is to say it’s nothing, because nothing’s happening—they’re visiting a bookshop.“Oh, it’s—” It’s really, really nothing. “Bright?”That doesn’t capture the oversensitised feeling he has all over his skin or the tension beating in his chest.They go to pay for the books. The manager recognises Harry, and they exchange the kind of platitudes that Harry always exchanges during this kind of conversation. He keeps his answers as short as possible and pretends to look at the items on display near the register. Draco meets Harry’s eyes several times during the transaction, and Harry raises his eyebrows, as if to say what?“Do you not like looking at shopkeepers?” Draco asks him when they’re out on the pavement in the falling snow. It’s coming down in big, fluffy flakes and landing on Draco’s hat.“What?”“He was talking to you, but you were looking at me.”“Oh.” A shudder runs through Harry’s body. He had thought, actually, that Draco was looking at him, not the other way around. “Er. I don’t usually like it, I guess? Makes my face hurt.”“Hmm,” Draco says. Harry doesn’t have headaches anymore, but Kreacher still insists on making quiet eggs.That’s good, because it turns out Harry still needs quiet eggs. And quiet noodles. And quiet toast and tea and everything else.Not all the time, but enough that if Kreacher drops a pot, Harry’s heart races for a long time afterwards. Sometimes, if Chiswick gets it into his head that Draco’s ignoring him, he’ll push something off a shelf that lands with a thud, and Harry’s breath gets short and wheezing and his pulse pounds in his ears.He assumed that happened because of the headaches, or maybe because of the war, but one thing was true about the inscription in his dream—the former things come to mind a lot less, now that Draco’s home. Harry’s come around to the idea that the inscription was probably a wish, or a hope, not a lie. Everybody hopes they’ll be new again someday, but that’s not how it goes.So, he doesn’t think it’s the war, necessarily, just…him. It’s just the way he is.Hermione can sit for hours doing research and ploughing through projects for the Department of Mysteries, but Harry can’t. If he and Draco don’t do enough, or sometimes if they do too much, visit too many places, he starts to feel unsettled and put-upon for no reason, his skin tight and the hair on the back of his neck standing, wanting to—to hide, or something. And then Draco notices he’s unsettled and put-upon and rubs the creases out of his forehead, wanting to know what he can do. And more than once, Harry finds himself fumbling at the clasps on Draco's coat or his cloak until he can get it open and step inside and let Draco wrap his arms around him, hold him close.They figure out that most of the time, Harry wants both more and less. More sensation. More contact.Less control.Draco says that what Harry needs is part and parcel of his magic, and the ley lines go everywhere, through everything. Harry believes him, but doesn’t understand exactly what he means until Draco starts taking little bits of power all through their days, not just in bed. Some mornings, he’ll gently order Harry to stand still and let him do the work in the shower. He’ll take Harry’s fork out of his hand and feed him every bite from his fingers while he reads to Harry from the romance they got from the bookshop or the Prophet. He chooses for Harry at pubs and cafés.One evening, Kreacher serves dinner on two regular plates instead of in ramekins, and Harry eats to his heart’s content. Giving Draco power is a virtuous circle. The more Harry gives him, the steadier he seems, and the more balanced Harry is. The whole world feels better. That’s a lovely thing to discover, especially because Draco spent close to eight years in a cage, so they’re aligned, in a way—Harry doesn’t want to decide anything, and Draco wants to decide everything. He’s delighted to have power handed to him, safely, when the stakes are low. It relaxes Draco, making his magic quiet and warm and sweet.Harry had known there were ways to get the peace that giving up control gave him, but before Draco, they always seemed to lead back to the whips-and-chains variety, and anyway, he’d had to stop exploring it when the headaches got to be too much.Lucky for him, Draco is very good at research.Harry decides on a safe word in the first week of December. Like many things between them, it ramps up fast, and thank Merlin, because Harry has been craving this sort of escalation his entire life.It just.Fits.As the days go by, Draco looks less and less hollow, and Harry stops feeling empty and off-balance, and when Draco touches him, he always, always leans in, and not away.He loves all of it. The give and take. The way Draco’s expression gets soft, but firm. Kneeling under the table with Draco’s cock in his mouth while Draco lingers over a cup of tea. How Draco will take Harry’s face in his hands in the middle of a shop and whisper What if made you wait to come? or How long do you think you could stay perfectly still? or How much do you want to fuck me?Harry finds all of this unbearably hot. It sends him into a blissful haze the colour of Draco’s eyes every single time.They talk about a lot in that haze. It’s where Harry tells Draco about the cupboard under the stairs, and Sirius in the Department of Mysteries, and the Astronomy Tower. He sobs with pleasure a lot there, too, and when he’s finished, some old grief has always gone with it. Draco finds places where Harry’s ley lines are tangled and coaxes out the knots, turning his oldest fears—being a dirty, unwanted freak, for example—into blinding pleasure. Harry’s going to die of desperation.In a good way. A hot one. It’s so hot that he can’t get a full breath in, and even if he managed it, he’d probably piss himself.Which…is the goal.Because when they’d got out of bed this morning, Draco shook his head and said wait.Harry’s been waiting.And drinking tea. And Butterbeer. And more tea. And, to top it off, lemonade Draco got from the Three Broomsticks as a surprise.This is probably the most out-there thing they’ve done yet, and Harry has gone through the full range of emotions about it over the course of the morning. He started out so hard he thought he’d come in his pants, then looped around to a sexy humiliation, and when he realised how far Draco meant to take it—the floor! In the sitting room!—he’d broken out in a fine sweat and almost lost it right then.Draco’s fingers circle his hole, slick with lube, pushing in and drawing out in a slow, steady rhythm that is driving Harry absolutely mad. The haze is like a lightning storm today. It’s soothing in a strange way, but every so often there’s a bolt—oh, fuck, what am I doing? or dirty freak or I have to, I can’t wait, I can’t wait.“You’re beautiful like this.” Draco’s free hand rests on the small of Harry’s back and he crooks his fingers. Harry squeezes his muscles, trying to wait, pleasure and need sloshing against one another like high waves. “I like you desperate.”“I like you,” Harry manages, because talking puts a wild amount of pressure on his bladder. Draco’s fingers withdraw, then push in again. “Draco. There’s only so long.”“Oh, I know. I can’t wait to find out how long.” He traces Harry’s spine with his fingertips. The fingers inside Harry spread out, stretching him, and Harry’s entire torso contracts. “You’ve done so very well. I’m so pleased. Did you know that?”Yes. Harry did know that. From the heat in Draco’s voice and how his magic is almost as desperate as Harry feels. He nods, shivering, breath short.Draco makes a low sound. “I simply must have you.” He takes his fingers away, and then his thighs are pressed to the backs of Harry’s. “Can you take me?”“Yes. Yes, I—but—if you fuck—”“You’ll lose control.”“Yeah.” Harry flexes his fingers on the floor, digging in.Draco strokes his back. “Do you need to stop?”“No.” Harry’s thighs burn. “Don’t want to stop.”“Tell me. Who has control over your body?”“You.”“Do you want it back?”“No,” Harry gasps.“Then it’s not yours to lose. Isn’t that right?”Harry makes a garbled sound that’s supposed to be yes.“I knew you’d agree.” Draco spreads his hands over Harry’s back. His cock slides between Harry’s cheeks, and he thrusts lightly against Harry a few times before he positions the head against Harry’s opening. Harry’s clenched tight, holding on with everything he has. “Good. Relax that perfect hole for me.”Draco starts to push in. A burst of panic flashes through Harry, but no, it’s not panic, it’s—it’s anticipation.Harry shakes harder with the effort he’s making, a whine escaping him as Draco pushes past what’s left of his resistance.“Draco,” he gasps. “I’m going to—I can’t hold—”“I know.” Draco soothes Harry’s lower back with the pads of his thumbs. “It’s all right. Be a good boy and breathe.”He opens Harry around his cock, slow and gentle, and Harry doesn’t breathe, actually, he holds his breath—then remembers he’s supposed to be breathing and gasps, on the edge of losing all his control, which would mean that Draco has all of it, and that’s right, Harry doesn’t want any of it, he only wants Draco, because he wants to feel like this forever, desperate and wanting and completely safe. Draco feels huge inside him, and so good, and his whole body trembles on this precipice that Draco’s brought them to, and Harry wants to stay there for as long as he can.Draco seats himself with a satisfied groan, hot inside Harry, and gives him a few shallow thrusts, like he can’t help himself. He’s so deep. Harry clenches around him, panting, glowing. He’s almost there. Almost flying.“Oh, I—” Draco says, soft, almost a whisper. He leans over Harry, covering him, and his lips brush Harry’s nape. “I love you.”It’s just the right place, on his hands and knees, on the rug in front of the fireplace, about to sob from how good he feels, in a house that was thought to be ruined forever and wasn’t ruined after all.“God, I love you,” Harry manages, and lets go, tumbling into euphoria like he’s never felt.Then peace. “They’re going to be here in five minutes.” Pansy claps her hands. “Are we prepared?”“What?” Ron looks up from his notebook. “Five minutes? I thought we had an hour.”Pansy pats his face. “You are my favourite person.”Draco claps a hand to his chest. “Betrayal!”“Oh, stop it, darling, you know I love you the best of anyone.” Pansy glances in the mirror in Harry’s entryway and fluffs her hair. “Harry, is that what you’re wearing?”He glares at her. “Betrayal!”“I chose his outfit.” Draco paces down the hall and back.It’s mid-December, and Draco’s parents are visiting for the first time, and even a long and involved shag this morning with Harry begging his arse off to be allowed to touch Draco and lick him and fuck him hadn’t been enough to calm Draco down.A loud crack outside announces the arrival of his parents’ Portkey, and Pansy shoves Harry bodily away from the door.Someone—Narcissa, he thinks—laughs on the other side.“I thought I was answering the door,” he shout-whispers, catching himself on Draco.“Last-minute change of plans.” She drags Draco into Harry’s place. “There. Go on, Draco.”“I can’t do this,” he hisses.“Just open the bloody door,” she whispers back.Draco opens the door.To reveal his parents, standing on Harry’s front steps, snogging each other like it’s their last minutes on earth or their first minutes as a dating couple. Maybe both.Lucius bends his head to suck Narcissa’s neck, which is when she notices the open door, and Draco.“Darling!” she squeaks. Lucius does not detach his mouth from her neck. “Draco!” she says, even louder, and Lucius finally lifts his head. He beams at Draco, but doesn’t say anything.The expression on Lucius’s face breaks Harry’s heart.He steps back to try to hide his shock, but it’s too much to hide, really. He’s not brokenhearted for Lucius, who was always an arsehole to him, but for Draco, who traded himself to Percy Weasley because of this.Because Lucius isn’t the same.A man with a wide-open grin like the one he’s wearing wouldn’t have survived a month in Azkaban, much less eight years. Much less a lifetime.“Circe’s tit.” Pansy’s voice is crystal clear. “Someone’s been murdered! Harry, we have to go.”She takes his elbow in one hand and Ron’s in the other and marches all three of them out of the house.The last thing Harry sees before Pansy Side-Alongs them away is Draco’s mother sobbing into his shirt and his father stroking his hair. Christmas at the Burrow is crowded and merry and bursting with love. Molly cries when Harry comes through with Draco. Harry spends at least twenty minutes reassuring her that the headaches haven’t come back. He doesn’t mention that, thanks to Draco, he didn’t spend half the morning with a sense of creeping, guilty dread, because his skin doesn’t feel stretched at the thought of being around so many people, even people he loves, when Draco’s had his way with him.Then Molly turns her attention to fussing over Draco, who blushes prettily and lies to her in a continuous stream about his studies abroad researching the repair and restoration of magical items, and then he’s dragged off to see some ancient magical garden decoration that stopped spinning.“What was it, Arthur? Ten years ago? Fifteen? I always thought it was so lovely out there in the garden, it’s a real shame if it can’t be helped…”When Harry turns around, Ron’s standing there with Hermione.He reaches for both of them without thinking, and it’s not until his face is buried in Hermione’s hair and he’s got Ron yanked down to his height and Hermione makes a squeaky little sound that Harry realises what he’s done.“Oh, Harry!” Hermione says, and clutches at him, her fingers curling into his jumper and holding on tight.Ron tries to say mate! and starts crying instead, and then Pansy and Blaise and George and Ginny and Bill and everybody else rushes in—even Percy, who keeps his distance, his back straight, looking suspicious and hunted—and Harry had forgotten this part. He’d forgotten what it was like to hug his friends and not have to pull himself away and hide in the bathroom and scream into a towel. This hug isn’t bone on bone. It’s heart on heart, and Harry doesn’t care how ridiculous that sounds.Reparo, he thinks, as he’s crushed between Pansy and Ron, Blaise’s arm around his neck, and Draco shouts you started without me! and shoves his way through to be the one closest to Harry in the end.
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
Harry Potter is absolutely precious.Draco will never tell him just how precious he is, because he thinks Harry would be rather shocked at how adorable Draco finds him, despite his being the Saviour of the wizarding world and a seasoned Auror and what have you.He finds that the easiest way to steady them both is to make a series of promises to Harry, then keep them. Harry doesn’t necessarily recognise them as promises, but the bond between them gets stronger and more solid every time Draco follows through.They’re the smallest things, really.
I’ll wake you up in the morning.
I’ll have Bibsy make you quiet eggs.
I’ll chat with the shopkeeper about the flowers.
And for this, for these tiny promises that most people would consider meaningless, Draco gets Harry.Draco has had Harry, actually, for seven and a half years without knowing it, and it was his mistake, thinking that Harry was like a regular wizard when he most certainly is not.In school, Draco had thought—with much disdain that was really jealousy in disguise—that Harry was the way he was because of some eternal font of goodness. A pure spirit or something.And though Harry is sometimes pure of spirit, and is always a good boy when Draco wants him to be, that’s not what makes him trust Draco so powerfully and love him with everything he has.It’s partially Draco’s stunning good looks.It’s mostly Harry’s endless capacity for hope.Draco will never tell him that, either, because Harry would scrunch up his nose and list all the ways he’s felt hopeless over the last decade or so, disproving himself even as he does it, because he’s still here, after all. Draco’s parents come home to the Manor, and without saying a word, Bibsy begins dividing her time to care for both houses.One day, he goes through to have tea with his mother and overhears Bibsy talking to one of the other house-elves.“The Master is not like that anymore,” Bibsy says in a quavering tone that Draco recognises as her most determined. He hangs back around the corner, because he’s sure they’re talking about him, but then Bibsy continues: “Now the Master is like Master Draco. Bibsy is not afraid of him, and you will not be afraid of him either.”For most of Draco’s life, he desperately wanted to be like his father. Then, in the space of two years, Lucius Malfoy had been broken so thoroughly by the Dark Lord that Draco could no longer fear him or worship him or believe that being like his father would spare him any pain. When it came down to it, all he could do was spare him from a cold, terrified death in Azkaban.When the crash of the ocean on the island’s rocks was so loud and unrelenting that all he could hear was his own thoughts, Draco wondered if it wasn’t just another brand of cowardice, making the trade with a man who had promptly Obliviated all but the bargain itself and the terms of secrecy Draco had agreed to.An argument could be made that Draco deserved to see his father sent to his confused, inhumane death and try to shepherd his mother through her grief afterwards.But no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t bring himself to sign on.Even if he went mad, even if he died from the cold or the lack of food or the all-too-frequent beatings, it would be better than allowing any of it to be done to a man who could no longer remember the crimes he’d committed. A man who, irony of ironies, would never commit such crimes in his new, gentler state.All this still didn’t make Draco good.He only accepts his own goodness in full shortly before the end of the year, when he touches Harry as they’re lying in bed and a delighted shiver runs through him, head to toe, and then Harry’s whole body relaxes into Draco’s, contented as a cat.Not their cat, because Chiswick is a finicky creature who spends half his time yowling at Harry for daring to interfere in his relationship with Draco and the other half stonily defending Draco’s feet from unseen dangers. Chiswick is barely content when he’s asleep on the cushion at the foot of their bed, which had cost an absurd fifty Galleons and from which Harry could not be parted when he saw it in the shop. He thinks it looks like it belongs in the Slytherin dungeons—fitting, since that cat is the most Slytherin twat I’ve ever seen—and Draco doesn’t have the heart to tell him that the silver tassels are far too ostentatious for the understated decor in the Slytherin common room.Harry, unlike Chiswick, would never take a shine to a person who was really and truly evil, and he’s taken such a shine to Draco that they spend virtually all their time together, and Harry spends half that time on his knees, testing out every possible way he can make Draco sated and boneless.Not that he’s complaining. They ring in the New Year by throwing a party at their house in Godric’s Hollow. Draco invites every Slytherin he can think of, and Harry invites every Gryffindor, and they add in anyone they can remember being decent for the hell of it.It’s a mad party. Draco orders too much food and Harry orders too much Butterbeer and Chiswick is royally pissed off that Draco keeps walking around to host. They put music on the wireless and the sitting room becomes a dance floor that’s so uninhibited that Draco fears it might become a rather half-dressed party, and then Luna Lovegood takes off her top and it does.In the middle of the evening, as snow is coming down from a starry sky, Pansy tugs at his elbow, then jerks her chin towards the garden.Draco knows what’s coming. They don’t have much of the year left, and they’re not taking this with them into the new one.He puts his wand on the table, and Pansy puts hers next to it, and Blaise appears from nowhere, his lips suspiciously swollen and shiny, and puts his wand down, too. They go out to the garden in the snow with a sort of solemn decorum, Pansy waddling only slightly under the weight of her belly.They face off in a triangle.Draco folds his hands in front of him.Pansy draws herself up to her full—though still not impressive, sorry Pans—height and shouts, “What the fuck were you thinking, Draco? I can’t believe you were such a sodding fool! How dare you!”And of course he shouts back, “I had to, Pansy, you of all people know that!”And then she and Blaise both have a go at him, making all kinds of well-thought-out arguments about how utterly ridiculous he’d been and the pain he’d caused and did he even think of them as friends, considering that he hadn’t bothered to send a letter and tell them he was alive?At some point, Draco notices Harry and Ron watching at the window, arms crossed over their chests, heads tilted at the same angle.Not long after, Ron comes out with the duvet from Draco and Harry’s bed and drapes it over Pansy. She pinches it under her chin with one hand and continues shouting at him like a duvet Virgin Mary as snow builds up on the top of her head.“—forgive you this time, but if you ever pull something like this again, we will not be spending eight years searching for you and becoming fucking Aurors about it, Draco. Do you have any idea how obnoxious it is to become an Auror? Do you have any possible—”“—not to mention becoming an Unspeakable!” Blaise throws his hands up in the air. “That’s twice as hard as flirting your way into the DMLE—”“Oh, fuck you, Blaise,” Pansy says, very precisely. “I didn’t have to flirt my way anywhere. And if you’re suggesting—”“Wait.” Draco makes a time-out sign with his hands. “You became an Unspeakable because I was missing?”“Of course he didn’t!” Pansy shouts. “He became an Unspeakable because he’s in love with Hermione Granger!”“What?” Hermione’s voice rings across the snow, and then she’s stomping out into the middle of their fight with a throw blanket wrapped around her shoulders and only a black bra and tight trousers underneath. “Pansy Parkinson, what did you just say?”“Blaise is in love with you!” Pansy shouts, her free hand cupped around her mouth. “Head over heels! Besotted! Can’t live without you! Moons over you constantly! It’s disgusting, Granger, and you should put a stop to it now that you know!”“In love?” Hermione’s mouth falls open, as if the words are just reaching her. “Love? I thought this was a strictly sexual arrangement!” Hermione turns very red indeed in the light pouring out of the sitting room window. “I thought—we agreed! We agreed we wouldn’t—”Blaise puts both hands to his chest. “What do you want from me, Granger? I am only a man. I can’t help falling for the only woman I’ve ever known who finds it hot to keep reading while she rides my—”Pansy shrieks, wordless, delighted.“That was one time.” Hermione points at Blaise. “It was one time, and we were on a deadline, and I seem to recall that you—”“I want to do it again,” bellows Blaise. “I want you to read like that every bloody night and tell me your hypotheses in that voice, and don’t you dare pretend not to know which one I’m talking about, Granger, you know exactly which one. I want to help you pack your ridiculous bloody bag with stacks and stacks of books for the weekend and wank to memories of you teaching classes—”Pansy shrieks again. Draco seconds the sentiment.“—and go on bloody vacation with you and shag you so thoroughly that you forget books even exist!” He shoves his hand into his pocket and comes up with a small box. “This is a Zabini fucking heirloom! I had it enchanted by the world’s foremost scholars in Magical Theory and Astronomy and Historical Influence—”“Oh my God,” Hermione says.“—even though it was bloody hard sneaking off to Merlin knows where to get it done when you’d send me those owls”—Blaise groans, as if even the memory of the owls is unbearable—“but I did! Because I love you! So will you please just shut up and marry me?”Hermione bites her lip, shaking a little in the cold, her eyes enormous and her hair even larger.Harry and Ron have crept out to the edge of the garden and are clutching each other like a pair of biddies.“Can we…” Hermione reaches up and pats at her hair. It sparkles with snow and will need several Drying Charms when they go inside. “Combine libraries?”Blaise tips his head back and gazes into the sky. Snow gets in his eyes, and he wipes it away with a long-suffering sigh. “We can turn the entire Zabini Estate into a library, if that’s what would make you happy.”“Okay,” Hermione says.Blaise stares at her. “Okay?”“Okay. Yes.”They’re simple words, but she’s grinning like a lovesick fool, and doesn’t seem to notice when Harry and Ron break into loud cheers like she’s just won the Quidditch World Cup right in front of them.Draco catches Pansy’s eye and shrugs. “I won’t go back to prison,” he calls, for closure.She rolls her eyes. “If you ever do, I’ll get you out and put you back in myself.” On New Year’s Day, it’s down to the six of them.Well—it’s down to Harry and Draco and Ron and Pansy in the sitting room. Blaise and Hermione have sealed themselves up in the study.Draco sips his tea, his arm around Harry’s shoulders and his feet pinned to the floor by a still-disgruntled Chiswick. “There’s no bed in there,” he wonders aloud. “Surely they can’t spend all their time on the floor.”“Advanced Transfiguration,” Pansy says with a yawn. “I’ve heard she can Transfigure any desk into a combination bed and study table.”Ron looks off to the side, lips pursed, as if he can’t quite imagine it. He has the day off from St Mungo’s, and they’ve all come to the easy conclusion that they should spend the first day of the year doing non-work things.“Harry.” Pansy’s tone has gone carefully casual, and Harry braces under his arm.“What?”“I wanted to tell you—I’m resigning my post at the DMLE.”Harry drops his tea, spilling it everywhere. “What?”Draco casts a quick Reparo to repair the broken cup, then Tergeos the tea from Harry’s joggers.“I’m too pregnant.” Pansy shrugs. “And now that Robards knows, it’s desk duty from here to forever, and anyway—”“Pansy!”“—anyway, the whole point of the endeavour was to find Draco and take the Ministry to task. We’ve done that, so I thought, instead of being Aurors—”Harry gets up and walks out of the room.Draco’s certain they all saw the tears gathering in Harry’s eyes.His footsteps stomp up the stairs, and then the bedroom door closes quietly, a beat too late, as if he wanted to slam it but stopped himself at the last moment.Pansy sighs. “Draco, set a timer, would you?”His heart is racing from the upset that came so quickly to Harry’s magic. “For how long?”“Ten minutes.”Draco does, then stands up, earning him a furious yowl from Chiswick.“Sit,” Pansy orders.He sits, not least because Chiswick has pinned the entirety of his body weight to Draco’s feet.“But,” he begins.Pansy gives him a meaningful look. “That’s how long you wait when he thinks you’ve broken a promise. Not seven and a half years, Draco. Ten minutes.”“You’re a twat,” he says poshly, but he stays seated, because somehow, in his absence, Pansy Parkinson and Harry Potter didn’t just become Auror Partners, they became close friends, and Draco has needed her more than he thought he would.It’s probably cheating, at least a little. It’s Pansy who told him that when Harry’s looking at him and not the shopkeeper, it’s because the pressure to say the right thing is too intense and he’s looking for an escape. It’s Pansy who told him that Harry secretly loves when other people order for him in restaurants, not because he can’t, but because he always gets tripped up by the extra surprise questions and spends the rest of the meal fretting that he sounded like a fool. It’s Pansy who told Draco that he couldn’t go burn 4 Privet Drive to the ground after he found out about the cupboard because it’s just the son who lives there now, and he and Harry have a fragile accord.And it’s Pansy who told him that the worst nightmares, the ones Harry won’t describe when he wakes up screaming, aren’t about the Forbidden Forest or even the Manor, but about a certain incident in sixth-year, and he doesn’t want Draco to feel sorry for him.They drink tea and chat idly about the Cannons—Draco teases Ron about the Cannons, and Ron asks him where he gets the nerve to judge if you haven’t been to a match in, what, a decade? a jab that Draco finds himself oddly proud of—until the timer runs out.Then Pansy leads them up the stairs, grips Ron’s arm for balance, and kicks the bedroom door in.Harry whirls around, caught mid-pace with the duvet pulled over his head and wrapped tightly around his body. Draco does not laugh. Because he loves Harry, and Harry’s eyes are red, and he obviously thinks he looks intimidating in a duvet and not abjectly adorable.“So I thought, instead of being Aurors,” Pansy continues, as if their conversation had never been interrupted, “we should quit and form our own agency.”Harry, the precious thing, lights up. “What?”“Our own agency. Oh, you know. Curse-breaking. Magical repair. Wit and charm. That sort of thing. That way, we wouldn’t have to take orders from Robards and spend all our time glaring at Percy in the corridor.”Harry opens his mouth.“Fine.” Pansy waves a hand, conceding. “Sometimes, we can consult with the Ministry, and then you can glare at him. Satisfied?”“Yeah!” Harry drops the duvet. “But where will we run it out of? We can’t do curse-breaking in the sitting room.”“That’s a matter of attitude, I should think,” Pansy says. “Probably Diagon Alley. Somewhere with a lot of foot traffic. And it’s not too far from St Mungo’s, in case—”Ron holds up a hand. “You are not getting cursed.”“In case we want to have lunch.” Pansy smiles, her face flushing, and gets on tiptoe to kiss his cheek. They call it Park and Sons Curse-Breaking and Magical Repair because they all agree that Parkinson, Potter, & Malfoy sounds like a solicitor’s office and Pansy laughs until she cries when Harry suggests Park and Sons.All three of them go in on the building, a narrow two-story place near Fortescue’s, where they go to celebrate immediately upon changing the wards.“I think…” Pansy raises her ice cream towards Draco’s. “This means you’re gainfully employed.”“Is it gainful?” Draco’s still researching Magical Theory and has vague plans to take some classes. Perhaps even an apprenticeship by owl. “We haven’t made any money.”Pansy sticks out her tongue at him. As it happens, that’s more or less how it goes at Park and Sons Curse-Breaking and Magical Repair. Pansy and Harry make nuisances of themselves. Chiswick flirts with all the customers and stares threateningly at Harry. Draco is the only true adult in the room, and finds himself coyly avoiding the question of who Park is, exactly, at least once a week.Harry lets slip one day at their office-slash-antique collection that the Sorting Hat wanted him for Slytherin, and Draco is simultaneously disappointed and relieved—disappointed because he and Harry might’ve been able to spend a lot more time together in school and might not have been mortal enemies, and relieved because Harry and Pansy together are…Not nightmarish. Draco would never call them that, except on private occasions when the paperwork is a wreck and he alone can salvage the situation.They’re a whirlwind, is what they are, and neither one of them seems to have any sense of self-preservation.Draco supposes this isn’t altogether surprising, given that Pansy hid her pregnancy from the Ministry for months and Harry made her swear not to tell Robards or Kingsley about his headaches. During their first week in business, Draco sternly tells them that such behaviour won’t be tolerated at Park and Sons Curse-Breaking and Magical Repair, and they both agree that it was irresponsible and shouldn’t be repeated.Then, naturally, they spend all their time egging each other on about finding more curse-breaking contracts and daring each other to go undercover to various wizarding estate sales just for the thrill of it and rushing purposefully down Diagon Alley at random intervals, both of them wearing serious expressions so that the Prophet goes into a frenzy about what they might have uncovered.Corralling the two of them is Draco’s primary and beloved role at their agency. He spends the rest of his time researching magical theory and repairing delicate magical objects for rather incredible sums of money.It’s certainly not what he imagined doing with his adulthood, but it is wonderful.One afternoon towards the end of January, Draco returns from a meeting with a potential client who wanted to discuss matters requiring discretion—a charmed frame that was supposed to hold a variety of nude photos of the couple but had broken and only showed one—to find Ron standing at an angle to the shop window, dabbing at his eyes.“Difficult day?” Draco asks, going to stand beside him.“Nah.” Ron nods his head towards the shop.Inside, Harry and Pansy have set up a spell field around a collection of objects that are beyond repair and are taking turns casting on them. The inside of the field is splattered with what looks like multicoloured paint, and as Draco watches, Pansy sends a miniature globe hurtling towards Harry’s side of the field. It pops like a bubble, throwing pure white glitter inches from his face, and Harry shrieks, and Pansy laughs at him, and Harry laughs back at her, and it might be the loveliest thing Draco’s ever seen.“Oh, Merlin, they’re eleven,” he says.Ron’s blue eyes meet Draco’s. “Mate, he was never like that when he was eleven. Didn’t get the chance.”Draco’s hand goes to his chest. Oh, Harry.He exhales the ache after a moment and drops his hand. “Do you fancy a drink, Weasley? I could use an hour at a decent pub.”“I do,” Ron says. “And some chips.”They leave before anyone’s the wiser. The day before Draco’s birthday, he goes to the Manor to have tea with his parents.It’s perfectly cordial, though not always polite. His father is utterly taken with his mother, and they excuse themselves more than once to—Draco assumes—snog in the corridor. Draco’s father never says much anymore, but Draco gets a hearty Wonderful! when he says they’ve had to make a waiting list for new clients and, shortly after, a shy request to fly on their brooms. Draco tells his father that Harry will want to come with them—he always does—and wonders, not for the first time, how it all turned out to be just this way.His mother returns from their fourth corridor trip by herself, walks to the edge of the table, and puts her hand to her forehead in the most transparent attempt at pretending to remember that he has ever had the pleasure of witnessing.“I’ve just remembered. I meant to have a bouquet of roses brought in. Would you get them for me, darling?”“Of course.”“Thank you.” She tries to maintain decorum when he kisses her cheek and leaves for the rose garden, but fails to keep a suspicious smile off her face.Draco walks through the Manor with a strangely deep sense of contentment. It’s different now that they’ve had it cleansed of Dark Magic and redecorated the rooms that the Death Eaters ruined and let the sun clear away the cold. In many ways, Draco’s life has been cleansed of Dark Magic, except for the curse-breaking. He has seen the heavens broken and helpless, and he has made them whole again.He has seen the way light begets light.He has seen how the magic of Harry Potter’s heart—Merlin, Draco is a sap—goes both ways. Harry is a mirror for the people he loves. Draco has seen Hermione’s frown of concentration and Ron’s open-mouthed astonishment and Pansy’s joking pout on Harry’s face. Just yesterday morning, Draco saw himself when Harry lifted his chin and looked down at Draco, teasing and haughty, despite not being tall enough to do it.The anticipation that hums in Draco’s chest on his trek through the house has a sweet, familiar tenor, and the faint scent of ozone and snow gathered on evergreen boughs hangs in the air.So he is not altogether surprised to find Harry in his mother’s rose garden in a set of green dress robes that are frankly breathtaking.Literally. Draco can’t breathe.His heart beats wildly just from the sight of Harry, who never stands this straight and tall and nervous, and whose cheeks are already pink.“Oh, hello,” Draco says. “Are you the bouquet I’m meant to bring inside?”“Er…” Harry glances down at himself. “Maybe?”He’s so precious, trembling with nerves, and Draco truly can’t help doing what he always does.He takes Harry’s face in his hands and kisses him.Harry settles instantly, all but melting into the kiss, and when Draco pulls back, Harry takes several beats to open his eyes.“Okay,” Harry says. “Right. Listen. I wrote down a list of things to say to you and I forgot it at home and there wasn’t time to go back, and I think I might die if I don’t get this all out, so. Just.” He takes a deep breath. “I love you. More than anyone. All I want for the rest of my life is to be with you. I was—ugh. I was going to say that so much better, Draco, I—”“Shhh.” Draco’s face already aches from how happy he is. “Be a good boy and tell me the rest.”Harry makes a hot, impatient sound. “I asked your mum and dad for your hand in marriage, since I guess that’s what pure-bloods do, and they said yes. Well, your mum said yes, and your dad patted my head and said caught the Snitch, so I figured that meant I could ask you. I mean, I would’ve asked you even if they said no, but—”“Harry.”“But you know. Something about the magic. This whole place feels different now, and you haven’t even said yes. Right! Merlin. What do you think—getting married? To me.”Draco loves this with such intensity that he is rendered speechless.But not for long.“Yes.”“Merlin, fuck, thank God!” Harry sags in his hands. He leans in for a kiss, one hand curling up into Draco’s hair. Draco can tell it’s going to be a long, involved kiss, the kind he loves best, the kind where Harry touches his hair the whole time. But just as their lips brush, Harry curses again. “The ring! These robes have so many pockets, and I can’t—”“Show me later,” Draco orders, and finishes what Harry started.
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
Harry’s thirtieth birthday party at the Burrow is so massive that even though Draco made him come three times this morning—or as Draco would say, thrice—Harry still gets overwhelmed by all of it and steals away to the kitchen under the pretence of getting more Butterbeer.From the kitchen window, he can look at the big white tent teeming with people who love him from a distance and get his heart under control. He’s been so happy all day that his chest aches. It’s so much that he’ll need even more tonight, thrice or not, and Harry knows just how Draco’s eyes will look when he tells him, all hot and silver and possessive.He watches Blaise spin Hermione on the dance floor, surrounded with fairy lights and some actual fairies, and he can’t wait for their wedding in September. On the other side of the dancers, Arthur flirts madly with Molly. And Harry bets—Yep. In one of the shadows at the side of the tent, Lucius is kissing Narcissa in a chaste sort of way that leads Harry to believe he’s trying to convince her of an early exit.Harry looks for Draco, but doesn’t spot his white-blond hair. He’s probably off participating in his favourite activity—gazing pensively at Percy, then saying You know, I was just thinking… in a slow drawl while Percy loses his mind.The tent is filled with Weasleys and every single friend they could think to invite, and Harry’s had the perfect amount of chocolate cake, and it doesn’t feel like five years, does it? The time has gone by so fast.Harry wouldn’t mind if it went by a bit slower.He wishes on one of the fairy lights. Maybe it’ll count, since it’s his birthday.The front door of the Burrow flies open with a bang and the sound of a child’s inconsolable wails.“Harry!” Draco shouts. “Harry, there’s been an emergency! Don’t worry, my darling, I know he’s here somewhere—we’ll find him, and it’ll only be a matter of moments, I promise.”He bursts into the kitchen a moment later, Pansy and Ron’s daughter Marigold a limp noodle in his arms, sobbing pitifully at an increasingly loud volume. She’s the picture of Pansy with Ron’s red hair, and her bow dangles from her ponytail, hanging at a defeated slump from her head. It seems like Marigold was an honest-to-Merlin baby just yesterday. She looks so grown up now, but sometimes Harry blinks, and she’s tiny again.“What is it? What happened?”Draco brings Marigold to Harry with a wink. Thank Merlin. She hasn’t been hurt.Harry knows firsthand that Marigold’s resilient. She was practically raised at Park and Sons Curse-Breaking and Magical Repair. She took her first steps at St Mungo’s A&E. She’s gone to wizarding estate sales with Harry and Draco and scouting expeditions with Pansy and has sat in on enough business meetings to know how to format a magically binding contract.He still worries about her.“There’s been an incident,” Draco intones. “We will need to perform the Secret Ritual.”“Slow down.” Harry holds both his hands up. “You know we can’t jump into complicated rituals without understanding the full scope of the problem.”Marigold’s sobs begin to quiet. The first time she put her hands on her hips and told Harry he couldn’t leave her behind at Park and Sons because he wouldn’t sand the soap of the problem he had almost died of how cute it was, and had spent that afternoon making up a fake-but-realistic curse-breaking assignment that involved visiting both Weasleys’ Wizard Wheezes and Fortescue’s.Draco cradles her closer to his chest. “Can you tell him what happened, Mari? Or should I make him aware of the difficulty before us?”Marigold gives a final, sad whimper and wipes her face with her sleeve. More fat tears roll down red cheeks, but she breathes through them.“My wand broke.”She turns her face to Draco’s shirt and lets out a long, dejected wail.Draco shifts her to one arm, then pulls the aforementioned wand from his pocket and holds it out to Harry in his palm.His heart beats faster at the sight of it.He and Draco gave Marigold her first play wand for her birthday earlier in the year, and it had been a more complicated project than either of them had anticipated. Mari had gone through a phase a few months earlier where she was obsessed with the makeup of everyone’s wands. She made Pansy write them all down in a little notebook she carried everywhere with her, despite not being able to read. Harry and Draco both have entries. Holly, 11 inches, phoenix feather core is right above Hawthorn, 10 inches, unicorn hair. No matter how many times they told Marigold that the wand chooses the wix, she insisted that she would be the first wix to choose her own.For about two months, she went back and forth on what she wanted. Most days, she wanted Draco’s wand, but then she’d feel sorry for Harry’s wand and change her allegiance. Pansy and Ron’s made the rotation, too.In the end, Draco hadn’t been satisfied with any of the play wands they’d found for sale and had insisted on making it himself. He spent a solid month on research alone, learning how to replicate the charm work, then improving upon it until his version was so much safer than the commercial play wands that he’d registered the charms and licensed them to the manufacturers.Harry found the whole thing to be extremely sexy. All that paperwork. Draco used the phrase extenuating circumstances a lot.Marigold’s play wand is made from willow and has carvings of pansies around the base, and it has been snapped in two.Almost.The two halves are still connected by a thin filament of the double core—unicorn hair and phoenix feather, twisted around one another, impossible to separate.“I see.” Harry surveys the damage carefully. “I’ll level with you, Marigold. We’re lucky. The wand isn’t completely broken. The core is still connected. It’ll take some doing, but with all three of us here, I’m confident we can fix it.”Marigold peeks out at him from behind a lock of red hair. “We can?”“Yes.” He considers her with real seriousness. This is serious. “But you should know—this kind of spellwork can’t be done alone. You should only attempt this kind of thing if your mum and dad are nearby.”“Or you and Uncle Draco,” she says. “Or Aunt Hermione and Uncle Blaise.”“That’s right.” Harry pushes up his nonexistent sleeves. “Marigold, we’ll need you in the middle.”“A moment, if you would. It’s a ritual, after all.” Draco puts Marigold down, takes the bow out of her hair, and fixes her ponytail. Then he picks her back up and shifts her to his other arm. She perches between the two of them, her eyes still wet, but without any tears falling.“Now.” Harry takes one half of the wand in his hand. His wedding ring glints on his finger. Draco holds the other half. “Marigold, one hand on each half, please.”She curls both hands, still chubby with baby fat, around the pieces of her wand.“Draco, please tell Marigold the ritual spell.”Draco whispers it into her ear, the pop of the p and the sigh of the o just reaching him.Harry gathers the intention into his fingertips. Light is already beginning to glow between his hand and the willow wood, and he adds to it slowly, letting it brighten like sparks in the air. Like a new dawn in a new world.“I’m ready,” Draco announces. “Marigold?”“Ready,” she says, her little face set with determination.“Loud and clear, okay?” The light from Harry’s fingers is nearly as bright as Lumos. It shines on Marigold’s face and in Draco’s hair. Behold, Harry thinks. A new heaven. “You can do this. On three. One, two, three.”