Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

In a way, it’s the Ministry party that starts it all. 

Yet another interminable fucking awards ceremony, with speeches that go on longer than anyone could possibly want them to, and too many drinks, and an awkward buffet instead of a proper lunch, and Harry buttoned up to the neck and sweating in his Order of Merlin robes.

Usually he stays quiet at these things, just shows up and shuts up—smiles for the photos and drinks the booze, and then goes home as soon as he can. But maybe it’s the ten year anniversary thing, and the fact that Harry was at the memorial service in Hogwarts a few weeks ago, and was in all the papers (looking cross and queasy but not drunk, at least), and had even allowed an interview for once. He doesn’t usually, doesn’t like to talk at all, and especially not to the press, but he had thought that ten years felt like a big deal, that maybe the passing of so much time should be marked, somehow.

And that’s the problem, isn’t it? Harry gives an inch and they take a mile, the fuckers, with their handshakes and their sincerity and their thinking they know Harry just because he’s said a few disingenuous words to the reporter from the Prophet for the first time in a long time. 

They all have their sad stories of course, but Harry feels like none of them could possibly be as sad as he is, some of the time at least, and as the evening goes on he feels increasingly like telling them so. 

Which means it’s time to leave. 

So Harry does, tucking a bottle of pixie wine under his arm as he goes, giving a grim nod to the waiter whose tray he swipes it off. The kid looks fresh out of Hogwarts, and is ill-equipped to deal with the Saviour of the Wizarding World stealing Ministry booze, but he wisely just lets his mouth snap shut and his eyes wander to a point over Harry’s head, and says nothing at all as Harry steps through the Floo with the bottle.

The wine doesn’t help much though. 

Grimmauld Place is quiet, at least, and clean and warm and filled with memories—and though Harry hated the memories for a long time, these days they mostly feel like a good thing. He sits on the couch and drinks the wine steadily, and thinks about Sirius sitting here all those years ago, the kiss of firelight and an unsteady Lumos on his face as he smiled at Harry across the room. 

It’s still early, that’s the trouble. If it was any later, Harry could drink himself to sleep, and maybe even get most of the night out of it. But it’s barely dinnertime—not that Harry feels like eating, or has anything in the fridge even if he wanted to—and the nights are long enough already.

So maybe it’s actually the walk that starts it all.

He has to take a coat, because it’s wet out, the streets slick and greasy with rain. The light of the summer sky is fading slowly under the haze of evening drizzle. He also takes his rucksack, because he has a vague idea that he might be able to go and get a house-warming present for Ron and Hermione, something to wish them luck in the little cottage they’ve been talking about for years and have finally saved up enough to buy. The house that Harry is sure is very lovely, and very them, but that he hasn’t managed to get around to seeing just yet. They’re only a Floo away, he knows that, even if they are all the way down in Cornwall, but Harry just wants to wait a bit before he visits. He’s so happy for them, of course. But for the time being, he just feels like being happy for them from a distance.

Grimmauld is quiet without them all around, that’s all. Harry supposes it was a bit weird to live with his best friends for so long, but what would have been the point in rattling around in his huge house all alone? They were all happy, and it never mattered to any of them what the papers used to say about their arrangement. And yet, here he is after all these years, rattling indeed. It’ll just take a while to get used to, he tells himself. He doesn’t sleep so well without people around. Still, the least he can do is get them a proper present, show them he really is glad for them.

And the shopping trip starts out well. He walks for a bit, hops on the Tube at Finsbury Park. Harry loves the Tube; shoulder to shoulder with strangers, the curious intimacy of shared air and body heat and sameness. London is good like that. Somewhere out there, there’s always a light on.

Harry isn’t very good at buying presents. It’d been a bit of a joke between him and Ginny, before they broke up. He’d always meant well, but he’d either forget and then panic-buy something rubbish and clearly last-minute, or go utterly mad and splurge on something immoderate. 

Ginny always said he had more money than sense—she still does say that, in fact, because they’re still great friends. They don’t see each other as much as they’d like, but Harry loves her madly, even if he doesn’t fancy her the way he once thought he did, and they’re proper friends now, which they had never been before they got together. 

When she got engaged to Blaise, Harry bought her a red beryl pendant the size of a swallow’s egg, which she promptly sold and used as the deposit on a flat in Holyhead. And Harry likes that—likes that she can boss him around and tell him when he gets things wrong, while still so clearly loving him—and he’s happy she has her flat with its view of the water and its old casement windows that rattle when the wind blows in off the sea, so it had all worked out fine in the end.

Anyway, regardless of his tendencies towards rubbish present buying, Harry knows Ron and Hermione won’t mind what he buys them, that it only really matters that they know he’s thinking about them. He wonders what exactly he might buy that would say, I love you, and I miss you both, and I’m not happy you’re gone, and I don’t know when I’m going to get a proper night’s sleep without the feel of you both near me, but I know that someday I’ll be properly happy for you, so please just hang on for me? 

John Lewis seems like as good a place to start as any. 

It was where, Harry remembers, Petunia had always gone when she needed to get something fancy, something for someone important (never Harry, of course). She would get up early, get the train to Paddington and spend the day in London, leaving Dudley and Vernon at home to watch the footie, and Harry to keep as far out of their way as possible. She always returned home from her day out flushed with a secret sort of triumph, clutching the white and green bag like a shield, and for the rest of the day she always looked a little bit foreign, a bit unknowable, as though she had stepped out of herself a little bit, for a little while. Harry always liked her a bit better, those days. 

So John Lewis it is.

Harry rides the escalators up and down for a while, spends an inordinately long time inspecting bath towels before deciding that even he couldn’t realistically turn up with a pile of coordinating bathroom accessories and expect not to have the piss taken out of him for it. He ends up in the basement, looking at ruinously expensive glassware before deciding on a set of Waterford Crystal wine glasses. 

It reminds him of the time they went on holiday to Ireland together, just after the war—took the ferry to Rosslare and worked their way down and around Munster until they got to Kerry to visit Seamus. 

He mostly remembers the pubs—Waterford was a blur of sausage blaas and standing outside a bar on the quays singing Pink Floyd with a man who cried into his pint and had old scars running down the soft insides of his wrists. Harry had put his arm around the man and cried with him, just a little bit, as they sang about being two lost souls living in a fishbowl, running over the same old ground. It was a bit on the nose of course, but at the time that didn’t make it seem any less sad.

It’s twilight when he leaves John Lewis, and the sky has softened to an indistinct fuzz with the rain and the streetlights. Harry decides to walk, and he clutches his white and green bag as he goes. 

So maybe it’s the John Lewis bag that starts it all.

Harry’s on Great Titchfield Street when it happens, walking through the crowds of Bank Holiday drinkers outside The Crown and Sceptre, smiling backwards at the gang of drunk, pretty women who try to intercept him as he goes. They don’t seem to mind the rain, or the fact that the pub is too crowded to fit everyone in, and when he sees them huddled under the awning stretching their hands out to him and laughing, Harry is really tempted to just go over there and join them, to drink some more and forget about everything for a while. 

But he doesn’t, because he has his John Lewis bag of expensive presents and he’s tired finally, all of a sudden, so he thinks he’s just going to go home and lie down and maybe—maybe—get a bit of sleep.

Because he’s still smiling apologetically back at the women (who are now pouting ostentatiously at him), Harry isn’t anticipating the impact when it comes, and he ends up on his arse in a puddle as the John Lewis bag lands with an ominous crunching noise five feet away. The people Harry’s walked right into have managed to stay on their feet, though one of them is rubbing his calf with a decidedly cranky-sounding “oof”, and the other is laughing altogether too meanly for Harry’s taste.

He looks up at her first, only to find her looking back down at him, smiling like she’s very pleased that he’s ended up in a heap outside a pub full of people (most of whom are also laughing, though with less malice and more drunken enjoyment of the spectacle). She’s very beautiful, Harry registers, or she would be if she wasn’t looking at him with quite so much dislike in her narrowed eyes. She’s also wearing very high heels, holding herself with the wobbly dignity of someone who knows that remaining upright is a goal and not a certainty.

Harry had been going to apologise (though really, they can’t exactly have been looking where they were going either) but whatever he was going to say dies on his tongue when he looks at her companion, and realises that out of all the people on all the streets in all the cities in all the world, he’s just walked right into the one he was expecting least.

Because Harry isn’t sure exactly how this could be happening, but it’s absolutely, positively, definitely Draco Malfoy, just standing there on the street in a distinctly Muggle part of London, looking about as horrified as Harry feels, though at a distinct advantage to Harry as he’s still on his feet rather than sprawled on the pavement with a wet patch seeping through the seat of his jeans. Harry gets a small, vicious jolt of satisfaction when he sees that Malfoy is still rubbing his leg where Harry whacked him with the Waterford Crystal.

But how can this be possible, that he’s literally just walked into Malfoy—Malfoy, who fucked off to France years ago, and hasn’t been seen or heard of since? Not that Harry has been looking for him, or even thinking about him at all, really. Malfoy is just another in a long, long line of shitty memories, and not even the worst one, not by a long shot.

But Malfoy looks just the same as he did in school, almost. Or at least, Harry thinks, like he did before he got skinny and exhausted in Sixth Year: bright-eyed and smug and expensive-looking. Harry registers, somewhat distantly, that Malfoy is also, inexplicably and unexpectedly, a bit beautiful. Though where that thought comes from, he’s not exactly sure, because Malfoy is looking at him with what really should be quite an unattractive expression which again is familiar from school—an odd mixture of shock and disdain. He makes it work, though, somehow, even though he’s too pale and he’s still a bit pointy and cross-looking. 

It might be the bare arms—lean and strong-looking, and very... visible, because Malfoy’s wearing a t-shirt, despite the constant drizzle. It might be the flush of pink on each high cheekbone, like Malfoy has just come out of somewhere warm and crowded (a pub, no doubt, because judging by his slight lean and the loose roll of his shoulders he’s as pissed as a newt). It might be the cigarette that hangs loosely from the side of his mouth, a coil of smoke haloing his head, and the tip of the rollie a glowing starburst of heat. He looks like the kind of man Harry would watch across a dancefloor, the kind of man Harry might smile at over his drink, the kind of man Harry would like to touch. He hates himself a little for even noticing.

And then—thank fuck—Malfoy speaks, and Harry is forcibly and gratefully reminded that he’s an eternal dickhead and Harry would in fact like very much to not touch him at all, ever. 

“Nice work, Potter. That’s going to bruise.”

Malfoy’s friend snorts, and then she leans in and whispers something unpleasant-sounding to Malfoy, and they both cackle. Which is obviously completely unfair, because surely sympathy should be the natural response from two careless idiots towards the person they’ve knocked into a puddle? Harry scrambles to his feet and gives Malfoy and his friend a glare. His eyes, he’s pleased to notice, are exactly on a level with Malfoy’s. He’d seemed taller from Harry’s vantage point on the ground.

Because he’s the bigger person here (metaphorically if not physically), he nods.

“Malfoy. Fancy seeing you here.”

“And it has been an absolute pleasure, Potter. But now we must be off.” He offers an elbow to his friend. “Asma, to the pub!”

Which is a bit fucking rich, Harry thinks, to waltz off to the pub without a word of apology or even a backwards glance. Though Malfoy stops at the John Lewis bag and picks it up, gracefully, with one hooked finger, and then he whispers to his friend and gestures back at Harry. She casts one suspicious glance over before saying loudly, “Five minutes, Draco, or I’m coming back for you. That cake isn’t going to eat itself.”

And then she leaves, and Malfoy is walking back to Harry, and the bag is making a musical clinking sound with every step he takes. When he reaches Harry he grimaces, and looks into the bag.

“Potter, you’ve broken your new stuff.”

It’s really too much for him to have to bear, Harry thinks, and he shuts his eyes briefly. Unfortunately, when he opens them again, Malfoy is still there, holding out the John Lewis bag with an amused look on his face, swaying slightly and smelling of something sweet and boozy. 

“Actually, you and your friend broke my stuff,” Harry replies. “And it took me ages to choose it.” And you’re a twat, he adds silently, because it feels good to think it, bigger person be damned. “Anyway, I’m going to go home and spend the rest of my evening Reparoing these, so thanks a fucking million for that. Enjoy your night, won’t you.”

“Not if you’re going to actually use them, you can’t,” Malfoy says. “You can’t Reparo Muggle things, Potter. They’ll just fall apart again, especially if you’re using magic around them.” He doesn't quite say, Didn’t you learn anything in Charms but Harry can tell he's thinking it quite forcefully. 

“They’re not even for me,” Harry says a bit helplessly. He hadn’t realised that about Muggle things, actually, which is pretty fucking annoying. Because he can’t exactly go back to John Lewis and pick something else out now that he knows that. He feels the prickle of failure run down his spine. Wrong again, as usual. “They were supposed to be a house-warming present. For Ron and Hermione.” He doesn’t know if he’s mentioning them deliberately just to see what Malfoy will say, but Malfoy doesn’t react, just gets a little bit pinker when he hears their names. 

“Seems a bit pedestrian for a house-warming present, I would have thought. Wine glasses? Does Weasley even drink wine?”

And it’s utterly infuriating how Malfoy can still needle him like this, how swiftly and cruelly he gets to the heart of things and opens them out to leave Harry feeling inadequate. 

“It’s just a token.” He’s not even sure why he’s defending himself. “Anyway, I don’t suppose you could come up with something better.”

“I could come up with something that they can at least fucking use, Potter. So that’s one point to me. And whatever I picked would be a bit more meaningful then a set of bloody glasses, that’s for sure.”

And he doesn’t know quite why he says it—maybe it’s the secret sting of wanting to do something right for once, or maybe it’s Malfoy’s stupid, familiar, dismissive drawl, or maybe it’s just that he’s so bloody curious about what Malfoy has been up to—but Harry puts his hands on his hips and says, petulantly, “Fine then. Let’s do that. You can show me where to get something meaningful and heartfelt for Ron and Hermione. I’m sure you’ll come up with something really special.”

Maybe Malfoy’s not as cool as he thinks he is, because he gives a little start at that, and he fumbles for his cigarettes, tipping one out of a case and lighting it (not even offering one to Harry, the rude arsehole) before he answers. He exhales as he speaks, smoke writhing like a living thing around them both where they’re standing together, like this whole conversation isn’t one of the weirdest encounters of Harry’s life.

“Alright.” 

It’s not Harry’s finest hour, because he makes a sound that’s embarrassingly close to a squeak of surprise. Luckily, Malfoy is avoiding his eyes and has gone a bit red and blotchy himself, and looks as though he’s wondering exactly what the fuck they’re doing as much as Harry is.

“You know the Barclay’s opposite Clapham Junction?” Malfoy asks. Harry nods. “Meet me there tomorrow. Make it, oh I don’t know, two o’clock?”

Harry nods again, mutely, because he’s not entirely sure what sound will come out of his mouth if he tries to talk.

“Okay... Okay then.” Malfoy inhales feverishly on the cigarette. “I really must be off. It’s really bad form to be late to my own birthday party, you know.”

And because he’s a shitty person, he walks off without saying a proper goodbye, and leaves Harry feeling vaguely guilty about distracting him from his birthday party, even though Harry is the one with the damp arse and the bag full of smashed expensive crystal.

And that’s how it starts.

He’s waiting there the next day, just like he’d said he would be, though Harry had been so sure that he wouldn’t turn up. 

He’s leaning against the wall out of the sun, and his arms are bare again, the Mark nothing but a faded twist of colour,  and he’s smoking a cigarette like he has all the time in the world. Harry feels a bit sick when he sees him, and for a very real few seconds he debates turning around and just walking away, and avoiding Malfoy for basically ever more. It would be easy to do, he thinks. But then Malfoy looks up, eyes narrowed through the bloom of smoke, and he catches Harry’s eye. And for a second, he almost smiles, like it’s something he would just do, before he catches himself. His mouth gives a peculiar twist, and then his face settles into that same clean blank that’s just as unsettling as his almost-smile, in its own way.

So Harry goes to join him.

It’s about as awful as he’d imagined it would be. Malfoy greets him with a cool “Potter” and they stand and look at each other a little helplessly, the ghost of everything passing between them in a rush of perfect awkwardness. Harry isn’t sure why he thought this would be remotely bearable, let alone a good idea, but he takes consolation from the fact that Malfoy is obviously thinking the same thing. And then Malfoy takes a final drag from his cigarette, and looks around for somewhere to stub it out, and that gets them moving, finally. Thank fuck Harry thinks fervently. It’s easier to walk along side-by-side with Malfoy than to stand there staring at him as their faces get hot and their gazes skitter over each other.

Harry doesn’t know where they’re going but Malfoy seems to, because he’s fast and purposeful and he seems to assume that Harry is going to follow him. The pavement is crowded, and they bump shoulders once, twice, then draw apart to leave more space between them. Harry doesn’t think they’ve ever touched without violence before. He’s not sure he likes it. As they walk, Malfoy shoots questions at him—about Ron and Hermione, and what they’re up to, and what their house is like. Harry can answer most things fairly competently, he thinks, and it keeps them from awkward silence at the very least.

Malfoy leads him down past Clapham Junction, along wide Victorian streets, and into an old antiques shop that looks more Muggle than magical, and it’s absolutely perfect. Harry could spend hours in here, breathing in the smell of old wood and beeswax, poking through the piles. But Malfoy tells him to watch his coin purse and steers him straight up to the counter, where the woman on the high stool at the till is actually clapping her hands with glee at the sight of them.

“Draco Malfoy!” she crows. “It’s been a while. And is that Harry Potter you have with you?”

Malfoy’s eyes slide to Harry for just a second, and then he leans over the counter and grins at the woman, and it looks like it might be genuine. 

“If you know who he is,” he says, and Harry thinks he can hear the low rumble of a laugh in his voice, “then why is the door still unlocked? Come on, Fand, we want the good stuff today.”

The woman—Fand—pulls a wand out of her curls, shakes out her red hair, and laughs outright.

“Only for you,” she purrs, and flicks the door shut. Harry gets a whiff of her magic—seasalt borne on the crack of a west wind, and something green and fresh like new leaves—before, with one more whip of her curls, she rises, hovering impossibly for one breathless moment. And then she transforms into a bird—something long-winged and bright-eyed, with a tender sheet of white under her wings. She wheels and dips through the shop, wings grazing china and glass but never disturbing anything, and they follow her through to a back room.

“A shearwater, apparently,” Draco whispers as they go. “Watch her, she’s a tricky one.” 

Though once they get to the backroom, Harry is just about ready to hand his coin purse over and be done with it. Because this is where the magic is, and he can’t believe he didn’t notice it the second they walked in. It’s absolutely humming with it, the air dense and expectant with old spellwork. It feels like Hogwarts, and Harry lets it settle into his bones, basks in it.

Malfoy leans against the door jamb, hands shoved deep into the pockets of his jeans. His face is relaxed, inscrutable. He’s changed since school, Harry thinks. There was a time when Harry would have been able to read every flicker of his eyes, every curl of his mouth. Now, Harry can’t tell what he’s thinking. Doesn’t know what he wants.

Bird Fand swoops and transforms mid-air, landing with a hop and skip in the middle of the room.

“Show-off,” Malfoy jeers fondly, and she sticks her tongue out at him. 

“It’s not every day we get Harry Potter in,” she says, and Malfoy rolls his eyes when Harry grins at her. 

“I like the bird,” Harry says. “Very dramatic.”

“Be sure and tell all your friends, next time they need to buy a gift,” she replies, and then gestures with a flourish. “Well, what’ll it be, boys?”

Harry starts to move, careful not to touch anything, but wanting to look closer. Everything in the room is magical—portraits bristling with movement, wisps of smoke rising from enchanted candles, the rhythmic ticking of hundreds of magical clocks.

“House-warming present. I thought a proper dinner service,” Malfoy says. “It needs to be pristine though. Something a bit fancy. What have you got in at the moment?” 

Harry is very much not sure about the idea of a dinner service, and also about the idea of Malfoy choosing a present for Ron (not that Harry is ever going to tell anyone about this, of course), but he figures that Malfoy can’t get things much more wrong than Harry usually manages, so he leaves them to it and moves around the room, listening with half an ear as he inspects all of Fand’s beautiful, weird stock.

“If you’re looking for something a bit unusual, I have a gorgeous domovoy-patterned set from the 1920s. Absolutely perfect condition, the colours are exquisite.” Harry glances back to where Fand is showing Malfoy a side plate patterned in what looks to Harry to be a jumble of bright colours.

Malfoy, meanwhile, is gazing longingly at it. “Heavily influenced by orphism of course. That really is something else. Still, we’d better not. I think the person in question would prefer something more traditional.” He looks on wistfully as Fand carefully packs the plate away, and Harry shakes his head. No accounting for taste, he supposes.

Malfoy and Fand keep at it for a while, Malfoy alternately cooing over some of the suggestions, and scoffing at others (“Violets might work, yes. Though I think all the gilt is a bit too… much, even for them. The periwinkle would be perfect if it weren't so bloody repulsive”). Harry is desperately trying to justify a ninety galleon solid silver miniature elephant which squirts real water when Malfoy calls him back.

“Potter. I rather think we’ve got it. What do you think?”

Fand looks at Harry expectantly as she holds the plate out for him to take. It’s surprisingly simple, white with a silver-grey floral pattern, and he loves it. 

“Yes,” he tells Fand. “This is perfect.” 

She smiles. “It comes with an inbuilt replicating charm, so that there’ll always be enough pieces for everyone at the meal. Perfect for a growing family.” 

And Harry feels a little bit sick at the thought of that, though he’s not quite sure why. He manages to nod and smile, but he can’t quite seem to say anything like he’s supposed to (like normal people could), but then Malfoy steps in and says smoothly, “Would you gift wrap it, please? I don’t trust Potter with a roll of Spellotape,” and his eyes cut to Harry for just a second before he looks away again and starts fussing about the colour of the wrapping paper, and after a minute Harry starts to feel the lump in his throat subside a bit until he can talk again.

He buys the elephant too, of course, because Teddy will go crazy for it, and then Malfoy suggests the most exquisite desk set because Harry had mentioned Hermione’s new job on the walk over. And it will be nice to turn up with something specially for her, and really Harry should have thought of that himself. It’s weirdly thoughtful of Malfoy, Harry thinks, even if his mouth did go all tight and weird when he mentioned Hermione by name, carefully and warily, as though expecting Harry to punch him like Hermione had back in school.

Fand wraps everything by wand, and as she works she eyes Malfoy with speculation.

“Anything for you today, Draco?”

He’s back in the doorway, and he shakes his head at her, but she narrows her eyes at him and pauses to levitate something out of one of the overstuffed cupboards behind her.

“You’ll love this one,” she says, and Malfoy steps closer as though he can’t quite help himself.

It’s a toy of sorts—a mobile, maybe?—though it looks impossibly old and far too beautifully made to have ever been touched by an actual child. It’s mechanical, wooden, every piece hand-carved, if Harry is any judge. Three dragons circle a cloud, their wings dipping and soaring as they go round and round, the faintest tinkle of a tune accompanying them as they fly.

Malfoy kneels down to it, pokes a finger gently at the Opaleye and laughs out loud as she turns her head on the jointed seam of her neck and blows a gout of sparkling fire at his finger. He sees Harry watching and makes a face at him, just something small and discontented but so very expressive that Harry smiles to see it, despite himself. 

“It doesn’t hurt,” Malfoy says defensively. “It’s just a charm.”

“I didn’t think it did,” Harry knows he sounds too amused, but it’s all just a bit silly, smiling down at Draco Malfoy as he plays with a toy dragon. “You should buy it. It’s lovely.”

Malfoy’s face shutters. 

“Why would I want a child’s toy, Potter? Right, I have somewhere to be, can we get out of here now?”

Fand shoots him a look that’s more complicated than it should be, coming from a shopkeeper to a customer, and she sends Harry’s shrunken packages across the counter with one last whip of her wand. 

“Can I get you anything else before you go?” Her elbows on the counter, her eyes sharp, her hair a froth of fire. “If you need any help, you know you just have to ask, Draco?” Malfoy’s face crumples a little. “My husband is the king of the sea,” she says to Harry, “and if any friend of mine needs protection, Mac will be there for them.”

Malfoy groans, “I don’t need protecting, Fand!”

And Harry whispers what the fuck to himself, perhaps not as quietly as he had imagined, as both Fand and Draco shoot him dirty looks. 

But now they’re ignoring him again, and she’s whispering, sounding desperate. “Draco, you know whatever you need, we can help. Call Mac, he’ll send the mist if you need it.” (Harry barely resists the urge to utter more what the fucks). “You haven’t been around in so long. We miss you.”

“Shut up, Fand,” Malfoy tells her, but his voice is so fond that it sounds like he’s saying something else entirely. “I’m fine. I’m…”—and he throws a dirty look at Harry, who tries very hard to look like he’s not eavesdropping—”I’m happy. It’s good. I miss them, but they made their choice. And I’ll try to drop in to see you more often. It’s a bit of a fucking trek, that’s all.” He puts a hand on her arm, squeezes once. “I promise, okay?”

She smiles back at him and nods decisively, and then she turns the smile on Harry, a bit brittle maybe but genuine, he thinks.

“Don’t forget where we are, Harry,” she says. “Come back anytime.”

And just like that, she unlocks the door and they wave goodbye, and then he’s standing on Northcote Road next to Draco Malfoy, with an armful of packages and the beginnings of a headache.

“Right, Potter, I hope they like the gifts. I’m meeting someone now, so I’ll head off.”

And maybe it’s this moment that starts it all, because Harry turns to Malfoy and Malfoy turns to him and they look at each other, properly and without rancour, maybe for the first time.

“Thanks Malfoy. This was pretty appalling, but you’ve got a strong present game.”

And Malfoy laughs at that, sounding slightly shocked, and Harry gets to see the inky sweep of his lashes where his eyes squeeze shut, and the barest flush where freckles dapple his nose. They haven’t ever been this close before, and Malfoy looks like a normal person, just like any other man (okay, maybe handsomer than other men), not like someone Harry’s supposed to hate at all.

“It was appalling,” Malfoy agrees. “Let’s never do it again.”

Harry doesn’t know what makes him do it, but as he says, “Deal,” he shifts all his packages to his left arm and puts his hand out to Malfoy. Malfoy looks shocked now too, slightly pale under his flush of summer gold, but he takes Harry’s hand in his (firm, strong, a bit too warm from where it’s been in his pocket) and shakes it wonderingly.

And that is where it all starts, properly, on a street in Battersea with his hand in Malfoy’s and the feel of a London summer hot and restless under his skin.

They nod goodbye at each other, and Harry lets go of Malfoy’s hand. Malfoy doesn’t look back as he walks away.

Everything goes on like it always does, only Harry feels a little bit different, off-kilter, maybe.

He sees Teddy, gives him the elephant even though Andromeda tuts disapprovingly at it, and Teddy loves it. They spend the morning building an elaborate fort for it out of Turrim bricks, and Teddy takes the elephant to defend it, and Harry takes Teddy’s toy Ridgeback to attack, and by lunchtime the carpet is covered in tiny scorchmarks and soaked with spray. Teddy declares it a draw.

And Harry goes to dinner at Ron and Hermione’s new house, because it feels easier to go now that he can turn up with armfuls of presents. 

They're so transparently surprised and delighted when he actually shows up, that for the first ten minutes or so, he feels like an absolute shit. But then they give him a tour, and they laugh together over the horror that is the crocheted counterpane Molly made for their new bedroom, and Harry gets a bit choked up when Ron shows him the freshly-made bed in the spare room. And just like that, he realises that actually, things between them are pretty much the same as always, just… somewhere else. 

And it’s such a relief that he hugs Ron, right there in the doorway of the tiny second bedroom, and Ron responds like he always does, with the same careless, easy affection that comes from being a Weasley, and everything is fine all of a sudden.

Harry almost forgets to get them to open the presents, because they’re having such a nice time, and the curry is so good, and they’re so drunk. But then he remembers, and he’s so glad about Fand’s beautiful wrapping, because Hermione gets all pink and pleased, and as she undoes the ribbon he can catch the sharp salt smell of the sea in the air, and it feels special, somehow. 

And Hermione looks properly thrilled with the present, and says very quietly that she can’t believe he remembered, and how good they’re going to look on her new desk, and how she’ll think of him when she uses them. And Harry realises from the way she’s talking that she’s actually nervous about this new job. And he can hardly believe it, because she’s Hermione, but he does get it. The Ministry is still a bit of tricky place for all of them, after what they had to deal with during the war, and Harry can’t even imagine going into Level Nine every day after everything they went through there. So he tells Hermione that he’ll take her for lunch on her first day if she likes, and she says she really does like, and they all grin at each other a bit stupidly and Harry feels very, very lucky.

And then Ron unwraps the dinner service, and when he opens the box and looks inside he blanches white under his freckles and then goes red in blotches all of a sudden, for long enough that Harry imagines the worst and swears to himself, silently but viciously, that he’s going to hunt Malfoy down again, and punch him in the nose this time. 

But then Ron says, “Oh mate,” just like that, as though he can’t say any more, and his hands are reverent as he lifts the plates and bowls and serving dishes out of the box. And he keeps talking as he does it, saying things like, “Queen Anne’s lace pattern, Harry, it’s perfect,” and “Look at that giltwork”, and “Mate, you shouldn’t have,” until Harry understands that Ron really, really likes the present. And it turns out—and of course Malfoy would have known—a wizarding dinner service is a really special gift, traditionally passed along through families, and Ron wouldn’t ever say it but the Weasleys don’t have a proper matching set, and this is A Big Deal. 

Ron tries to make a bit of a speech about it, afterwards, when the whole thing is unpacked and sits gleaming and elegant on the table in front of them, about how much it means, and there will always be a seat at their table for Harry, but Harry and Hermione shout at him and throw bottle caps until he stops, and they drink some more. 

Harry stays the night, and the bed is so comfortable that he sleeps through without dreams or wakings, and when he gets up for breakfast, Ron has already arranged the dinner service in the dresser, and he smiles at Harry so proudly, and with so much love, that Harry has to hug him again. And it’s not like gifts are a magical way of fixing things, and when Harry goes home to Grimmauld he still doesn’t sleep very well, but things feel right, or at least more right, for the first time in ages.

Harry goes back to Fand’s shop a few times. He knows he’s probably not going to bump into Malfoy—not that he’d want to, of course—but he needs to get Andromeda a birthday present, and then Ginny’s birthday is coming up, and also whenever Harry visits the shop, he finds lovely things that he really wants for himself. He’s never bothered buying things before, because Grimmauld was already so well-kitted out when he inherited it, even if his first choice of interior decor style wouldn’t have necessarily been “bloodline-obsessed gloom-mongering”. It had always felt a bit wasteful, buying new things, for just himself. Between them, Harry and Kreacher keep the place clean and tidy, and if the place is a bit dreary, well… Harry doesn't need much. It's all so much better than the cupboard, after all.

But Fand’s place seems to bring out something in him, something he hadn’t known was there. It starts with a wand box, which seems like something no one really needs, like some sort of appalling luxury. But the engraved phoenix on the lid is so very intelligent-looking, and Harry loves how it stretches its long throat out under the brush of Harry’s fingers, and the inlay is just the right shade of dense red, and as soft as the inside of a mouth. He buys it, though he's hot with shame at his own extravagance (but he has the money—so much money), Fand nodding at him approvingly. And when he takes it home and sets it beside his bed, he loves how the heavy silver gleams dully under the lights like something no longer out of Harry’s reach. His wand fits perfectly.

The trouble is, once he has one nice thing, it makes the other things in his life seem less nice. His bedside table for instance—carved ebony, polished to a sheen so it looks like a spill of engine oil, or ink—seems clumsy, ugly. On his next visit, he asks Fand about it, and together they pace the back room and choose two new cabinets made from wickengreen wood, polished to a rosy gloss and perfectly balanced on elegant carved legs. On Fand’s advice, Harry gets rid of his bed too—the horrible old tester bed with the Black crest carved into every flat surface—and buys a Victorian brass bed that Fand has sourced instead. It has porcelain bed knobs painted with the most charming sheep Harry has ever seen, and he falls asleep most nights watching them gambol in soothing circuits. 

Fand seems to be taking an interest in him. She’d heard of the house, of course, because of all the war stuff. And Harry has her over once or twice. She breezes through the rooms, sizing up all the Black antiques, coaxing reluctant casements up, bringing with her the whip and lash of a sea wind. Harry gives her tea and Hob-Nobs, and determinedly tries to avoid asking her about Malfoy. He fails, for the most part. It's just that Malfoy is all they have in common, Harry thinks, and he is curious about how they know each other, and maybe even why Fand had seemed so worried about Malfoy.

She won’t talk much about it though. Just mentions that Malfoy used to come in a lot with his mum, what a little snot he used to be, what a good eye he has for nice things. She asks Harry if he’s seen him recently, and Harry laughs out loud at the very idea of anyone thinking that he and Malfoy seeing each other might be a thing that would happen. Fand flicks him on the ear and rolls her eyes at him, and then gets him to let her hold the Sword of Gryffindor and pretend to hit him with it while she compares it disparagingly to some magical sword of her husband’s with a funny name that can summon wind and conjure truth from lies, which Harry privately thinks sounds cool but like it wouldn’t have been much use against Voldemort.

But Harry and Fand seem to be friends all of a sudden, in a weird way, and it's nice to have someone who doesn't mind when he gets quiet, and who looks out for him. So he keeps going back to the shop, and most times he leaves with something pretty, or useful—raw silk curtains in a particularly mouth-watering shade of pale blue that filter the city light perfectly, a heat-adjusting rug that brings up the winking glossy grain of the cherrywood floors in the library so it looks like a new room—and everything Harry chooses makes his life a little bit nicer, and Grimmauld feel a bit more like somewhere special for him, and not just the in-betweeny sort of place it’s been for so long. 

He forgets about the guilt of it, soon enough. His vaults are so full, from his parents, and Sirius, and the endorsement deals and sponsorship and all the rest of it. It doesn't matter if he spends a bit on himself, here and there. He knows Hermione and Ron were always saving—for tuition fees, for their own place—and maybe he had felt a bit bad that he never had to worry about that stuff. 

But now he's making things so lovely, he wonders how he could have borne to live so long in the gloom of Grimmauld Place, preserved like a mausoleum of Harry’s bad memories. So he decides to make up for it a bit, and little by little Grimmauld brightens up, and Harry does too.

Though he can't quite explain why he buys the dragon mobile. He doesn't keep it in his room or anything weird like that, but sometimes he pops in to see it in the small back bedroom and lets the dragons tickle his fingers with their glittery flames, and laughs at their small mewling roars, and every so often he remembers Malfoy smiling, and wonders how he's doing.

Chapter Text

It isn't like things have changed completely, though. Harry still has to do the tiresome rounds of public appearances, and the Ministry salary comes with the same dull, wearing responsibilities it always has. No amount of lunches with Hermione can make up for the evenings where Harry has to stand in formalwear and shake hands, or make interminable small talk with foreign ambassadors, or just look into the slightly wet eyes of the grateful people who all lost something in the war and think that means they have something in common with Harry.

He still hates it, but he does it and he tries to be kind about it. He doesn’t have anything else to do, after all. It was too hard, after the war, to find a job he liked. He was so sad, at first—sad, and angry, and so fucking tired—and all he wanted to do was drink, and fuck (Ginny for a while, then Charlie, which should have been weird but somehow no one minded), and sleep. He couldn’t have imagined going back to school, even though Minerva had come round personally to ask him. He definitely couldn’t have imagined going into Auror training. His hands shook so badly for six months after the Battle that he’d barely been able to cast a Lumos, let alone even think about using battle spells again.

And it was easy to feel like the Ministry consultancy was useful, at the start. Harry didn’t have to go into an office—Kingsley came to him for the brainstorming sessions, for the most part, and from there it was all public appearances, and there was almost always free booze, and Harry didn’t have to do a lot, really. It didn’t even involve much talking—people wanted him to listen. People liked feeling heard, he found. And then there were the photoshoots and all the sponsorship deals—well, if people were going to pay Harry to ride a good broom, or give him free robes to wear to all the events he had to attend, why argue with that?

But mostly, Harry knows deep down in a small quiet corner of his heart that the Ministry job is some sort of penance. Because yes, he killed Voldemort, which is a point in his favour. And, you know, is definitely a good thing for the magical community and the world at large, Harry can admit that.

But he hadn’t done it quickly, or efficiently. There was so much mess along the way, so many people lost. He had been too young and too alone, and it had all been so very hard. And once it was all over, it hadn’t seemed like such a huge sacrifice to try to give something back. 

But after all these years of it, of listening to sad stories that never get any less sad, and of being reminded all the time of everyone that’s gone, well… Harry’s tired. 

And half the time, Harry doesn’t even know what he’s doing, or what charity he’s supporting, or what cause he’s promoting. Is it normal, he wonders, to care so little? Hermione thinks not—everything is political, she says, and Harry should be thinking about the things that mean something to him, the things that are important. Harry can’t tell her—because he can’t bear to make her sad—that things don’t really mean much to him anymore. It’s hard to care about the world when he knows how easily it all comes apart when you really look at it. Better to just keep pretending that things matter, and try to keep people happy.

Tonight doesn’t start badly. Hermione and Ron are there, for one thing, and that makes things much easier. And it’s a Hogwarts governors’ gala, so there isn’t as much horrible schmoozing, and anyway Hogwarts is one of the few things that Harry knows he really cares about. Minerva is even there. 

There’s no reason things should go wrong. It should have been one of the better nights, as these things go, but all Harry knows is that his skin feels too small inside his three-hundred galleon robes, and that the photos in the Prophet tomorrow are going to show him grim-faced and stern, like he’s never smiled and couldn’t if he tried. 

He drinks. It’s the way he handles these sorts of nights anyway, and he doesn’t think anyone notices the whiskey-roughness of his voice. Maybe it’s obvious from his eyes, entirely too green and glassy, but he can usually put that down to the camera flashes. But tonight he drinks until he knows he’s going to have to avoid saying goodbye to Minerva, and until he allows himself to get properly cross when Ron and Hermione say they’re going to Floo home instead of going on somewhere else, somewhere quieter, somewhere with more booze. After all, it wouldn’t kill them to stay out late for once, would it, and they could stay in Grimmauld for the night if they really wanted to.

And Hermione tells him that actually, he’s right, and they don’t want to stay with him when he’s being like this, and Harry tells her to piss off home then, and Ron tells him to Firecall when he’s ready to say sorry, and Harry says the only thing he’s sorry about is that his friends are such arseholes. And he knows as he says it that he’s gone too far, but a small mean part of him doesn’t care at all that Ron’s face crumples up a bit and Hermione gets white and cross around her mouth and that they just fuck off home through the Floo without even saying goodbye.

He Floos home for long enough to dump his robes and grab his Muggle wallet, and then he sets out for a walk, his blood hot with rage and Firewhiskey. He doesn’t even know what time it is; he had thought it was late, but the night sky is still filmy and uneven with light at the edge of the horizon. 

He walks until his jaw unclenches, and he needs a piss, and by the time he sees an unfamiliar church spire above him, and the rose-gold of the old stones glowing under the high moon, he knows he needs another drink. 

He finds an Irish bar on a corner, which looks full enough to keep him from thinking too much, but not so busy that he’ll have to talk to anyone, and when he walks in he can feel the barman look him over with that instinct for trouble that all bar staff learn after a while. Harry tries for a reassuring smile when he orders, and though he suspects it doesn’t quite hit the mark (because he feels it spreading thin and curved and dangerous over his face), the barman serves him anyway.

He drinks quietly and with intent, and he keeps his head down as a thank you to the barman who seems to relax as the night goes on. Anyway, it wouldn’t be an easy place to fight in, with its panelled walls and crowded tables wedged into every corner, and the warren of rooms leading into rooms that make the place seem smaller than it is. Despite himself, Harry is starting to relax, and the whiskey he’s drinking is starting to sing rather than burn through his bloodstream.

He’s on his way back from the toilet to the bar when he sees Malfoy.

It’s only by chance that he’s passing as the door to the snug swings open behind someone, but once he glances in there’s no mistaking what he sees. There’s a tableful of them, tucked away in the snug like they’re special, all laughing and shouting and drinking, and at the heart of the table sits Malfoy, his hair winking like a new Sickle in the pub’s halflight. 

Harry doesn’t know how this could be happening—how he’s sitting alone and heart-sick under a decorative mirror advertising Powers whiskey, and drinking that because he didn’t have the imagination or the energy to think of something else to order when the Muggle barman had asked. And all the while Malfoy, who was a bullying shit and never did anything that wasn’t entirely for his own benefit, is sitting with a bloody room full of friends, laughing and licking Guinness foam off his top lip like he’s happy. Like he never smiled around the word Mudblood, or worked himself half to death and used that bloody brain and focus of his just to let Fenrir Greyback into Hogwarts, or clutched at Harry’s ribcage so desperately as they flew out of the Room of Requirement that Harry felt the memory of his touch for far longer than it took for the plum-dark marks of his fingers on Harry’s skin to fade.

It doesn't seem fair, Harry thinks.

And why is Harry being plagued by him, after years of not having to think about him at all? Harry knows it’s probably the whiskey heightening his sense of injustice, but it’s just wrong, really. After all, Harry’s had many happy years without having to see Malfoy in any shape or form. He hasn’t even thought about him. Malfoy could have been dead for all he knew or cared (well, maybe Harry didn’t wish him dead, exactly. But somewhere safely far away from Harry, somewhere Harry didn’t have to think about him ever again). 

And now he's just… around, appearing out of nowhere after all these years and smashing Harry’s perfectly good John Lewis glassware, and smoking cigarettes like he thinks he's in a French film, and smiling at bloody toy dragons like a normal fucking human being and not a horrible bully with father issues. 

And of course it’s just a coincidence that he’s here, tonight of all nights, when Harry has lurched in off the street and is very intently drinking himself into a stupor. But it feels like an unfair quirk of fate, because Harry just wants to drink until he doesn't remember how angry he is with his friends, and then pour himself off his stool and walk home and hopefully get some actual sleep. But now he has something else to be angry about—Malfoy, and his friends, and that smile of his that seems to tell the world that he deserves to be happy—so Harry calls for another drink, and resolutely doesn't look anywhere near the door of the snug.

It doesn’t work, of course.

Sometime later, and Pádraig (the barman, who seemed to have decided that he quite likes Harry after all, despite himself) has finally cut him off. Harry knows it’s time to go home. Malfoy hasn’t emerged from the snug, and anyway Harry isn’t actually sure that he wants to see him. Besides, the last time they met, they left things on a civil note—Harry thinks of sharp summer dust in his throat and Malfoy’s warm, sure grip against his own—and maybe he should just put their weird shopping trip out of his mind and move on.

Moving on is proving to be more difficult than he could have imagined, though, because as soon as he gets outside the door of the pub and meets the cool kiss of night air, his legs decide that they’ve had quite enough and refuse to cooperate. 

It’s decidedly inconvenient, though there is a rather handy alleyway directly beside the pub which has a comfortable wall for sliding down, at least. Harry debates Splinching himself by Apparating, and comes to the conclusion that it’s probably, almost certainly, totally safe, and would at least mean passing out in his own bed rather than against the wall of an alley somewhere in Stoke Newington. It takes him far too long to realise that he doesn’t have his wand—his hands seem to have joined his legs in protest at the large quantity of whiskey sloshing around in his system—and then he remembers dumping his formal robes on the bannister of the stairs in Grimmauld and not even thinking to take his wand out of the pocket, like a twat.

He's not sure how long he sits there, but he sees a slice of light widen as the pub door opens and there's a spill of loud, laughing people out into the street. One shadowed figure peels off from the others and ducks down Harry's alley, and then there's the purr of a zipper and a hiss, and Harry catches the sharp hot smell of someone pissing not two feet away from him. Which is pretty fucking rude, and he tries to say as much, but the words seem to get stuck somewhere between his brain and his mouth, because his gums feel a bit numb and he makes a funny slurring sound. 

The shadow person must hear him though, because he jumps backwards like someone from a cartoon, and Harry hears the patter of droplets which probably means he's pissed on his own shoes. 

"What the fuck…"

Harry tries again but speaking just isn't working right now, so he just stays where he is and allows the person to zip up and then come over to peer at him. And then he hears laughter, and lots of footsteps ringing against the stones, and a woman's voice calls, "Billy? Are you going for a world record down there?" 

And with a clatter of expensive shoes, he's surrounded by people, and someone flicks a lighter on so there's a tremulous waver of light that he has to blink against blearily, and then the woman's voice comes again but this time it's sharp and unamused and she says, "Draco. You need to see this." 

And with a slow inevitability Harry hears someone else say, disbelievingly, "What did you say?" And then Malfoy is elbowing his way through the group until he's standing over Harry, his face a pale, troubled thing in the lighter flame, and he says flatly, "Harry fucking Potter."

They're all talking in hushed voices, and it's pretty obvious it's about him, so Harry decides to take what's left of his dignity and get out of there. Unfortunately, his attempt to heave himself up leads to a dangerous sideways list and stagger, and him back on his arse on the ground, and the whole gang of them going silent while they turn around to look at him.

"That's it, we're leaving," the woman says, and Harry sees that it's the beautiful, discontented-looking woman from the John Lewis night. "I'm not getting involved with this."

Malfoy looks over then, gaze oblique, shoulders high. He leans in, mutters something to his friends, and they all start whispering frantically again. Harry can hear snatches of it when things get heated—the state of him, no one with him, fucking Potter.

And then Malfoy sighs heavily and says, "I'll be quick, Asma. Why don’t you stop off at the Aslan on the way home? Pick me up a lamb kofta and a box of chips, and I'll be back before you know it, I promise."

And then mercifully they’re all leaving—all except for Malfoy, who does that sigh again as though Harry’s putting him out or something, when actually Harry was perfectly fine exactly as he was and definitely doesn’t need Malfoy leaning over him with that small worried furrow between his brows and a distinctly pissed-off expression.

“Let’s go, Potter,” he says, and that’s all the warning Harry has before Malfoy is touching him, grabbing his hands and hauling him up to standing. There’s a wobbly moment as Harry feels the swooping change in his centre of gravity, but then Malfoy is beside him, slinging Harry’s arm around his shoulders and wedging his own warm, solid body into Harry’s side. And then they’re walking out of the alleyway, Harry concentrating hard on keeping his feet moving as they ought to, and Malfoy has an arm around Harry’s waist and it’s all very, very weird. 

Harry says as much, out loud, and he’s very pleased that his mouth seems to be working again, because Malfoy laughs, though he doesn’t sound in the least bit amused really. 

“You’re telling me, Potter. Now, where to?”

And the thing is, Grimmauld Place is under a Fidelius Charm, mostly because Harry still has such awful trouble with the press. And part of him wonders what Malfoy will do with the information, and how safe it is to tell him, so he hesitates a bit and then says, “Islington”, because that could mean anything really.

And Malfoy looks at him in surprise and says, “You’re not still in the old Black place? I thought you’d have left that dump years ago.” This close, under the streetlamp, Malfoy’s eyes are flat and inscrutable, the same dense silver-grey as Harry’s wand box.

Harry shrugs, the movement making his arm slide closer further around Malfoy’s shoulders, and Malfoy hitches him closer almost unconsciously, picks up the pace. He seems determined to get Harry home safely, and tuts when Harry tells him about the wand. Malfoy wants to put him in a taxi but Harry’s got about a quid left in change and Malfoy tells him no Muggle car is going to get anywhere near Grimmauld anyway, and the 73 stopped running twenty minutes ago, which sounds so odd coming from Malfoy that Harry stops walking and just stares at him for a minute before Malfoy gets impatient and tugs at him.

“We’ll have to walk it,” Malfoy says, which sounds absolutely perfect and exactly what Harry was planning. Only Harry is feeling quite tired, all of a sudden, and even the bite of the night air isn’t helping. The shocking closeness of Malfoy isn't keeping him alert now that he’s leaning against such a warm body (even if it is Malfoy’s). His head droops, he jerks upright, and then starts to nod again until his face is jammed up against Malfoy’s neck. Which should be awful—is awful—but Malfoy is so warm, and the curling ends of his hair shift with Harry’s breath, and he smells of clean skin and the faintest malt of booze, and it’s all much more pleasant than it should be.

Malfoy pinches him ungently in the ribcage and says, meanly, “You’re a disaster, Potter.” But Harry is so heavy, and so tired—and it feels so unfamiliar to have someone taking care of him like this, and he hates that he likes it a little bit, and that he’s comforted by it—that he can’t stop his eyes closing, and the last thing he remembers is Malfoy holding him upright with a firm grip on his ribs, swearing vehemently but very quietly, as he wrestles with a key in the sticky lock of a red-painted front door.

When Harry opens his eyes, the pain in his head is so brutal that he wants to moan. He doesn’t, but only because he suspects it would do more harm than good. He’s somewhere very soft, and the room is cool and dim and restful, but he still feels a little bit like he wants to die. He tries moving, which is marginally successful in that he gets himself upright against a very comfortable mound of pillows, and from here he can see the rest of the room, which is small and cluttered with lots of things. He finally allows himself to acknowledge that this is almost certainly Malfoy’s room, and Malfoy’s sweet-smelling cosy bed that he’s corrupting with his whiskey hangover.

And it’s probably lucky that he allows himself to think about it, because it means he’s had a few seconds to prepare himself before the door clicks open quietly and Malfoy is there, freshly-showered with his hair falling in damp licks around his face. He looks infuriatingly healthy, though when he comes closer Harry can see the purplish smudges under his eyes and his pissed-off expression. He hands Harry a mug—tea so strong a mouse could tapdance on it—and Harry’s glasses, and Harry does moan then, as the strain of not being able to see properly lifts, and he takes a slurp of what even he can admit is an absolutely perfect cuppa. 

Malfoy sits heavily on the end of the bed and watches him as he drinks, and it doesn’t make for a relaxing experience, but the soothing powers of tea are worth it. 

“I’m so sorry,” Harry says eventually, because Malfoy deserves it and they have to get it over with sometime. “I wish I could say I didn’t remember, but I do. I owe you one, Malfoy.”

“Look,” Malfoy begins in a whisper. “It’s fine. I mean… it’s not great. But I couldn’t exactly leave you passed out in an alleyway.” Harry doesn’t think passed out is the most accurate expression, but then he remembers with hot shame his own eyes closing against Malfoy’s neck, and Malfoy’s hair like a ticklish curtain over his face, and prudently opts for silence. 

“I have to get you out of here. My housemates will kill me if they know I brought you back. We’re going to have to sneak. So get up.” And he bats at the mound of Harry’s feet under the duvet.

Harry’s whispering now too, it might be contagious. “Can’t you just Side-Along me to Islington? I know it’s a bit of a pain but it’d get us out of here quicker.”

It’s lucky he’s fully-dressed, because in one irritable motion Malfoy flicks the duvet off him. 

“I can’t use magic here, dickhead. Don’t you think I’d have done that last night if I could? Now let’s go.”

Harry thinks he probably should be feeling worse for the amount he drank (which actually might be something to worry about in itself), because after an unsteady nauseous moment when he gets out of the bed, he’s mostly ok. 

Malfoy skulks (the only word for it) out onto the landing, and gestures for Harry to follow him, and together they creep down the stairs and out the front door, Malfoy with their two pairs of shoes bundled in his arms for them to slip into on the doorstep. 

It’s disgustingly early, Harry can tell now, and stupid, shower-fresh Malfoy looks rosy and plump in the kiss of dawn sun, like a peach or some sort of dewy flower. Which is pretty unfair, as Harry suspects he looks mostly like he feels (sweaty, grey, and regretful). 

They wheel out onto the street at a fair clip, Malfoy trying to get out of view of the house as quickly as possible, Harry thinks. Despite himself, Harry starts to feel distinctly cheery; he’s always been a morning person, and the air is ripe and crisp with the promise of autumn sunshine, and Malfoy looks less disgruntled beside him.

“I’ll walk you to the bus stop,” he says. “Fuck, I thought they were definitely going to hear us. Asma would have had my bollocks if she’d known.”

“What’s her problem, anyway?” Harry remembers the gorgeous, disdainful woman who would definitely have happily left him languishing in the alleyway.

“She just has a low tolerance for idiots,” Malfoy answers shortly. “And I might have mentioned our old school rivalry to her the night of my birthday party. She’s protective, that’s all. Anyway, look, this is awkward. But. Can you not mention me? To anyone? You said you owe me so this is what I’m asking.” He raises an eyebrow at Harry. “I don’t want to talk about it, Potter. I’d just like you to promise.”

Harry starts to laugh, helplessly, stupidly, so that he actually has to stop walking for a minute. Malfoy’s face is a picture, and Harry remembers the day at Fand’s shop, and how he had thought Malfoy was so flat and unknowable. It seems a long time ago now, as Harry watches him cycle from confusion through to irritation and finally, reluctantly, to amusement. 

“Malfoy,” he manages. “Who do you think I’m going to tell? I was so drunk that Draco Malfoy—my old archnemesis, who I hate and who hates me, and who no one has seen or heard of in years—found me almost getting pissed on in an alleyway, and I fell asleep on him so he had to take me home to his shared house and hide me in his bed so his housemates, who inexplicably hate me despite never having met me, didn’t find out I was there.” Malfoy’s mouth works silently, before he starts to laugh too. “Who would even believe me?!”

“Potter, I’m flattered,” Malfoy replies, and Harry can hear the slightly flattened London vowels, the hint of a glottal stop muddying up his voice, taking away the crispness that Harry remembers from school, so he sounds warmer and a tiny bit less posh. “I worked very hard on those Potter Stinks badges. Glad to know they didn’t go to waste, I wouldn’t want you thinking that Voldemort was your true arch-nemesis.” And he laughs again, a delighted-sounding gurgle that bubbles out of him unselfconsciously, and Harry sniggers and wonders if he’s going a bit mad, and if so, if it’s catching.

Because it’s just so fucking ridiculous, standing on a quiet residential street at dawn with his shoelaces trailing and whiskey seeping from his pores, talking about Voldemort with Draco Malfoy, so Harry says, “I will do anything you ask if you buy me a coffee before you make me get on a bus,” and Malfoy rolls his eyes and nods like he can’t quite believe what he’s doing, and starts to walk again.

Malfoy knows the barista in the little coffee shop that vibrates with the sound of the morning bells from the church a few doors down. He laughs out loud when they walk in, and takes their orders with such a lascivious wink that even Harry blushes (and he’d sort of thought that he was beyond shame around Malfoy at this stage). Out of sheer spite, he orders a complicated iced coffee, but the barista gives him a flat stare and instead hands him a double espresso and a chocolate croissant, with the assurance that it’ll cure what ails him. 

They sit on a wall outside the church and watch the street’s slow waking, and then Harry asks Malfoy to loan him some money for the bus. Malfoy is digging in his pockets when Harry asks him where his wand is.

It should be a simple question, but Malfoy recoils, and he goes white then pink in a distracting quick succession. Because Harry’s not stupid. He may not have bothered with Auror training, but he knows how to watch people, and he especially knows how to watch Malfoy. Malfoy doesn’t have a wand on him, and he couldn’t Apparate Harry home, and he’s drinking in Muggle bars, and Harry doesn’t know what to make of it. So that’s why he asks.

“I don’t have it,” Malfoy says, “and I don’t want to talk about it. And I don’t want you to talk about it. Not to me, and not to anyone else.”

It would be so easy to push a bit. Malfoy was never more than a hand’s twitch away from his wand in school. He had been brimming with magic, back then. But this cool-eyed, tired-looking, wandless Malfoy has bought him a coffee and is sitting with him in the fresh quiet air of a new day, and Malfoy deserves his secrets too, Harry supposes. Fuck knows Harry has enough of his own to worry about.

“Okay.”

Malfoy’s head jerks up at that, and Harry realises he had been expecting an argument, and is suddenly very glad he hadn’t started one.

“Right. Okay then.” Malfoy’s hand moves convulsively, brushing pastry crumbs off his tummy and plucking at the front of his t-shirt. “I just… thank you. Right,” he adds again, nonsensically. “Shall we? I must get to the library before my lecture.”

Which is a sentence Harry could never have imagined coming out of Draco Malfoy’s mouth, even if he had been a massive swot back in school, so he politely asks Malfoy about his studies and Malfoy equally politely tells him about how he’s studying law as a mature student,  and Harry contains his multiple inner what the fucks quite admirably for the duration of the conversation. 

And then he’s at the bus stop with a handful of Malfoy’s change (warm from his pockets) and Malfoy says, “Well, I’d say see you around, but I hope I don’t,” and Harry replies cheerfully, “Just one more appalling event to add to our list of happy encounters. I’d say this one was worse than the Dementor costume but not as bad as the nose-breaking.” 

And Malfoy narrows his eyes and says, “Well for sheer awfulness I’d put it ahead of you stealing my wand at the Manor, but behind the time you tried to kill me in a bathroom.” Which isn’t really fair because Harry hadn’t meant to try to kill him, but then Harry remembers the blood scudding cloudy through the water and Malfoy crying even as he fell, and he decides not to say anything except, “Fair enough.” 

Malfoy smiles at that, properly this time, with crinkles at the corners of his eyes and a flash of his nice teeth, and he nods happily, like they were in some kind of competition and he thinks he’s won, the weirdo.

The bus comes then, and Harry clambers on and watches Malfoy walk down the road. He thinks about him going to the library, and his small bedroom full of books, and the way he keeps his hands in his pockets as though he’s used to not needing them to reach for a wand. And he wonders and wonders and wonders about it all, and before he knows it the bus is at Angel and he’s nearly home.

And that might have been the end of it all, if it weren’t for Narcissa Malfoy. 

It’s a Saturday night a couple of weeks later, and Harry arrives at Andromeda’s for babysitting duty. He’s doubly happy because he likes when Andromeda goes out and does nice things for herself (rare), and also being with Teddy is one of his favourite things, and it gives him the perfect excuse to legitimately but gleefully turn down the invitation to an undoubtedly gruesome Wizengamot initiation ceremony.

He’s felt a bit unsettled recently, so he’s glad to have to skip it. He always found these things dull, but they seem to have got worse recently. He’s not even drinking much, because nothing helps. He’s just… getting through. 

He’s made up with Ron and Hermione, though, which is a silver lining. He and Hermione have gone back to their weekly lunches, and he loves it, even if Hermione keeps talking about how he should think about moving away from the Ministry role. It feels like a big thing to think about—too big—so he keeps filling her up with sandwiches and asking leading questions about her new job, which usually gets her off the subject.

But even if he doesn’t talk about it, he thinks about it a lot. He even goes so far as to wonder what else he might do if he did leave the Ministry, because the itchy wandering sensation under his skin isn’t leaving him, and he can’t seem to stop thinking about something else, something more than his crappy job. It’s tiring though, and by the time his babysitting night rolls around, he’s looking forward to ignoring it all in favour of an evening of Teddy-induced exhaustion, which at least is a pleasant cause.

He Floos into Andromeda’s place right on time, but there’s no one there to welcome him. He can hear a series of ominous thumps from upstairs, but as he makes for the stairs he catches the low hum of voices coming from the kitchen. 

It’s Narcissa and Andy, and they’re sitting beside each other at the kitchen table, and Narcissa is crying a little bit, Harry thinks. He doesn’t exactly mean to eavesdrop, but when he looks into the room, Narcissa looks so serious and sad, and so like her son, that he can’t quite bring himself to interrupt.

“If he’d only come to see us,” Narcissa is saying, and her fingers are clenching and loosening hypnotically where Andy has them wrapped in her own hands. “Even if he’s insisting on this… this fad! He doesn’t have to cut us off entirely.”

Andromeda is soothing, but Harry thinks from the resigned tone of her voice that she may have had this conversation before.

“Cissa… it’s hardly a fad, it’s been years. But you know how badly he misses you, you just have to respect his choices. I’ll go with you, if you like.”

“It’s no use, Andy! How would I even find…? Muggles, Andy! If he’d only let me know that he’s… that everything… I could bear that. If I knew.”

It must be Malfoy they’re talking about, Harry thinks, Malfoy off in his weird house, studying at a Muggle university, and the hunted look in his eyes when he asked Harry not to mention him to anyone. And Harry feels a fresh bloom of that familiar Malfoy-related irritation, because how like Malfoy to have a mum who loves him so much that she’s crying in someone’s kitchen for missing him, yet he fucks off and cuts her off just like that. 

If Harry had someone who cried over him like that he wouldn’t ever leave them. 

It’s a bit of relief to know he can still hate Malfoy, because with all the shopping trips and croissants and sleepovers, Harry had worried he was starting to thaw a little bit towards Malfoy. It’s reassuring to be reminded that Malfoy is still a prick.

It does feel a bit shitty to be standing listening to this sort of raw emotional pain though, even if it is just over stupid Malfoy, but when Harry turns to sneak away he bashes shoulder first into the door jamb and knows the jig is up.

“I’m here,” he says unnecessarily. He even tries a smile at Narcissa but then remembers that she’s consistently unimpressed by him and that he’s perpetually mistrustful of her, and that polite disinterest has always been their best approach. 

They can’t hate each other, of course, because she saved his life that time and he saved her son’s life that other time, and it would feel rude. And she’s around a good bit with Andy even now that Lucius is out of Azkaban. He likes her a little bit though. It’s weirdly relaxing to know that he can just be completely normal around her, because nothing he does will ever make a good impression on her. And she’s good for Andy.

“How marvellous. It’s Harry,” she says flatly now, and then narrows her eyes at him. “How much of that did you hear?”

Andy heaves another sigh and gets up. “Leave off, you two. Harry, have you seen Teddy yet? Cissa, if we don’t go soon we’re going to lose our table.” She kisses Harry firmly on the cheek and sweeps out of the room. Narcissa stands too, and eyes Harry coolly. She’s as pale and composed as always, though Harry can see she’s a tiny bit soft around the edges, like having a cry has smudged all her aristocratic angles a little bit. He feels, unwillingly, a pang of sympathy for her. 

“I'm sure he’s fine, you know. Malfoy, I mean. If that’s what you’re worrying about.” And then hurriedly, because she whitens up and looks like she might be about to hex him. “I didn’t mean to listen. But I know he loves you a lot. If he was in trouble, he’d let you know.”

He wonders if Narcissa has ever been lost for words before as the silence stretches between them.

“Thank… you?” she says faintly, finally. And then reluctantly, like it pains her a little bit. “I just. I miss him.” And looking more horrified at herself by the second, she pauses next to Harry and touches him on the arm. “I appreciate the sentiment, Harry.” 

And Harry wants to laugh, because it’s such a Malfoy-ish look on her face, and then because he can, he leans in and presses a kiss to her cheek and says, “Don’t mention it, Cissa.” Which gets her out of the room faster than Harry has ever seen her move before.

Harry and Teddy have a brilliant night, and Harry even manages to get him to go to sleep just before Andy slips back through the Floo, pink-cheeked and smiling and smelling of brandy. But the whole night, Malfoy is there at the back of Harry’s mind, and he sticks there over the next few days. Thinking of him is like the constant edge of hunger. It’s not like he’s obsessing, but the feeling of thinking about Malfoy is just there, all the time. 

Harry lasts a week before he heads back to Stoke Newington. This time, he’s going to find Malfoy on purpose.

He can’t possibly remember his way back to Malfoy’s house, because all the streets look the same, but the cafe is easy to find where it sits in the shadow of the church spire, so Harry starts there.

The first morning he walks in, Malfoy’s barista friend isn’t there, and forty-five minutes of kicking his heels on the church wall while drinking a lukewarm flat white doesn’t turn up Malfoy either.

He tries again the next morning, and it’s marginally more successful.

“Look what the cat dragged in,” the barista says. “You didn’t actually die then, the other week. Because you looked like you were about to expire.” Which. Well, Harry can’t exactly argue with that, but it’s not the sort of thing people usually point out. 

“Well, you’re looking healthier today at least,” the barista—Emmanuel, his handy name tag reads—says disapprovingly. “Now let me see, it was an iced vanilla mochalatte, right?”

Harry wavers a bit between having to admit that he had only ordered that out of spite the last time, and having to actually drink the thing, but Emmanuel clicks his tongue dismissively and says, “Don’t look so horrified. You’ll have an espresso and you’ll like it. No Draco today?”

“That’s what I was going to ask you,” Harry shouts over the thump and hiss of the coffee machine. “Has he been in today?”

“Why are you asking me?” Emmanuel shoots him a severe look. “Hang on, are you some kind of stalker? If he’s not interested, he’s not interested, okay?”

“No—god—it’s not like that… look, we were at school together. Just a couple of old school friends.” Is his laugh always this nervous-sounding? “I just need to see him about something. And of course I’m not a bloody stalker. And if I was, I wouldn’t be stalking him.”

And, okay, thinking about it properly—that’s not exactly how Harry had wanted the conversation to go, especially since Emmanuel looks at him sceptically. Why, Harry has no idea. He couldn’t possibly know anything about Sixth Year and Malfoy wilting and bone-white and clearly up to something, and Harry feeling like he might very well go mad if he didn’t work out what it was, because none of the other terrible things in his life seemed quite as shocking as Malfoy losing interest in Quidditch. But anyway, none of that even counted as stalking, no matter what Ron and Hermione said, because Malfoy had been up to something. 

Emmanuel is still looking at him strangely, and Harry realises he’s been pacing silently, and scrubbing at his hair. Much like an anxious stalker might. 

“Right,” he says to Emmanuel. “I just… forgot to swap numbers with him the other day. If I left my number here, and he happened to come in, could you pass it along to him?” And Harry’s confident that’s not in the least bit stalkerish, because Emmanuel takes the piece of paper Harry scribbles his mobile number on with barely a hint of raised eyebrow. But just to be sure, when Harry hangs around outside for half an hour, he makes sure he goes down the road out of sight of the cafe window.

Anyway, he’s back three days later, and this time he’s there on purpose, to meet Malfoy. Because Malfoy has texted him, on the mobile that Harry bought ages ago but barely uses because the magic-muffling charms are such a pain in the arse to cast. Even Malfoy’s texts are annoying. 

Potter. What do you want? isn’t exactly a friendly overture, but Harry takes a deep satisfaction in replying Who is this? as though he wouldn’t be able to decipher the tone and origin of that dismissive Potter from a mile away. Malfoy doesn’t reply for eighteen hours, and when he does he signs his text Sincerely, D Malfoy, which Harry supposes he deserves. Harry’s not sure why he’s even still trying to annoy Malfoy. It’s like some kind of reflex.

Malfoy only agrees to meet him because Harry threatens to turn up at his house, which is a bit shitty of him, he knows, even if he can’t and wouldn’t actually do it. But it just feels like Malfoy—who had occupied precisely zero space in Harry’s brain since he left school—has turned up out of the blue, and with his cigarettes and his missing wand and his pints of Guinness, has just slotted right back into the part of Harry’s brain that he’d kept especially for Malfoy throughout all those years at Hogwarts. He’s as familiar and irritating as sunburn, or the maddening itch of a healing scab, and Harry knows it’s probably just because he’s bored with work and feeling a bit at sea himself since Hermione and Ron left, but Malfoy is something to think about.

Harry’s early, and Malfoy is late enough that Harry starts to worry that he’s not coming at all. When he shows up he’s quiet and a bit rumpled, with his hands swaddled in the sleeves of this thin black jumper. He takes the coffee Harry’s bought for him and jerks his head to the door, giving a laughing Emmanuel the finger as he goes. Wordlessly, he walks to their spot on the church wall and Harry follows.

“I knew this would happen,” he says, before taking a sip from his cup. “And I think it’s shitty of you, Potter. What happened to you owing me?”

At Harry’s questioning look, he gestures rudely with his coffee. “My wand? My house? The no magic thing? I saw that Potterish look in your eye when you were getting on the bus. Malfoy is clearly up to something, you were thinking. I shall not rest until I vanquish him and uncover his nefarious deeds! Well, I’m sick of it already, Potter. I’m not your problem anymore and it’s none of your fucking business.”

“Well, I think mostly Voldemort was my problem before,” Harry says in a reasonable tone, but he does feel a bit shit about it all, actually. Because Malfoy’s right, isn’t he? Harry does want to know what he’s up to. But it’s not like he’s on some weird campaign, or thinks there’s some sort of plot brewing. Anyone can see that Malfoy, with his jumpers and his rucksack full of books and his Oyster card, isn’t plotting anything. That’s the whole point. 

So he plays his trump card, feeling like a heel the whole time. “It’s just. I saw your mum. She was talking about you and… oh shit, Malfoy, okay, breathe.”

Malfoy’s coffee puddles at their feet and then it’s all over Harry’s jeans when he kneels in front of Malfoy, who’s turned a funny colour and looks like he can’t quite catch enough air. Harry tries to press Malfoy’s head down between his knees, which is what his friends used to do for him when he had panic attacks and dizzy spells after the war, but Malfoy knocks him away with a snarl.

“Fuck you, Potter. What did you say to her? Did you tell her where I’m living? You fucking promised, you prick.”

“Jesus, Malfoy, calm down. I didn’t say anything to her. Do you think I’d break a promise? Even to you?”

“Yes, well, I know relentlessly dependable was always kind of your brand, but I can’t say that ever included us Slytherins,” Draco says meanly. “In fact, the only thing about you I could depend on was how much of a sanctimonious hypocrite you were. So excuse me if I don’t rely on your word or judgement. I’ve got enough scars to remind me of exactly how much I can trust you, thanks.”

“Is this where I’m supposed to apologise for fighting with you? You are unbelievable. How’s your Dark Mark, by the way? What do your housemates think of living with Death Eater scum? Or do they just think it’s some sort of cool tattoo?”

Malfoy doesn’t flinch at that, just closes his eyes and breathes in, an urgent sip. Then he smiles, forces his eyes up to meet Harry’s, takes another deep breath. Harry wonders when he lost the ability to get under Malfoy’s skin. Because Malfoy’s under his, still; he can feel the prickle of discontent, the urge to fight, the twitch of his wand hand. His bloodstream is bright with the adrenaline of it. He hasn’t felt like this in years. 

“Fine, Potter. You win. Tell her whatever the fuck you want. I’m going.”

But it’s not what Harry had wanted when he came here, not really. He hadn’t meant to fight. It's just that it's been so long since he was curious about anything, so long since he’d been so interested in something in such an easy and uncomplicated way. Usually, things get a bit tangled up for him, because all his emotions are wound so tightly inside him. All the things that mean a lot to him (his friends, his Weasley family, Grimmauld Place) get a bit muddled up in his heart, and his feelings tend to take a lot of effort to unravel. 

Malfoy, on the other hand, is easy. Harry doesn’t care about him, doesn’t have to worry about hurting him. It’s nice to feel like that, for a change. But if they’re going to keep fighting like this, Harry isn’t going to get to ask him all the questions he wants to know the answers to. 

“Malfoy, look… I’m sorry. I didn’t say anything to her, I promise. It’s just… she’s alright, your mum. And she misses you a lot. I just wondered if I could pass a message on to her for you or something.”

When Malfoy starts to talk, his voice is very quiet. He tells Harry, carefully and clearly, that Harry knows nothing—nothing!—at all. That he’s sent messages to his mum, lots of times. That she has his mobile number, not that she knows how to use it even if she’d bother to look at the mobile he bought her. That he’s asked her loads of times to come and meet him. But that she has to come to him, no wand, no Apparition. It’s important, he says, and he can’t expect Harry to understand (and here he shoots Harry a vicious look that Harry thinks is quite unwarranted), but it’s just how it has to be. And Narcissa won’t accept it, can’t even fathom coming out into the world without her wand. Doesn’t get why Draco won’t just pop into Diagon, says she'll even go to Little Compton Street or Radik Alley if he insists, just as long as it’s somewhere Wizarding.

“It’s a proper stalemate, Potter. And of course, my fa— Lucius… has gone mad about the whole thing. Not that he wasn’t mad enough already after Azkaban. So, no, you can’t pass messages along for me, because none of it will make a difference. And if you tell them where I’m living, then you’ll be doing nothing but putting my friends in danger, because who knows what Lucius will do to get me back to the Manor. Surely even you wouldn’t do that just to get back at me.”

It’s definitely awkward. Because Malfoy is right, of course. Harry wouldn’t wish Lucius on his worst enemy, which Malfoy isn’t anymore, anyway. He certainly wouldn’t wish Lucius on innocent Muggles, even if they were particularly and inexplicably nasty to Harry (from what he can remember, anyway). 

“Look. Okay. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to argue.” And Malfoy looks properly surprised at that, those oddly dark eyebrows of his quizzical and bemused as he shoves a cigarette in his mouth. “I just… wondered if you might want to meet up sometimes? Like this. And I thought I could tell you about your mum, because I see her a bit, at Teddy’s place, you know. And you could maybe, show me around Muggle London a bit.”

“We could,” Malfoy says slowly, trying and failing to blow a smoke ring. “We definitely could. But the real question is, why the fuck would we ever want to?”

“What, you mean this isn’t your idea of a fun day out? Bloody hell, Malfoy, I don’t know? Because I don’t get out much, and that day you brought me to Fand’s… I’d never have found that on my own, you know? And you seem to be well up on Muggle stuff, I bet you know all sorts of good places to go.”

Malfoy looks slightly ruffled by the praise; though he’s clearly trying very hard not to care what Harry thinks of him, Harry suspects there’s a bit of the old, attention-seeking Malfoy in him somewhere. Harry presses on while he has the upper hand.

“My job… I work for the Ministry, it’s a bit shit actually, and there’s a lot of social events to attend which are… well, a pain in the arse. And Grimmauld Place is a bit quiet now that I’m living there alone. Not that... I mean, I see my friends a lot, it’s just…  I wanted to try something different for a change.”

“So. What I’m getting from all this—correct me if I’m wrong—is that you’re living in a mansion, getting paid to hang around drinking at parties, and you have loads of friends who love you. But you’re… what? Sad?”

“I wouldn’t exactly… I mean. It’s not really a mansion?” 

Malfoy’s eyes are bright with malice and something else, something a little bit softer underneath the sharp silver gleam. And Harry doesn’t want to say it when Malfoy’s looking at him like that—he doesn’t want to say it at all, actually, he doesn’t think he’s ever admitted it to anyone before. But still. It’s true. 

“Yeah. I’m just… sad. Pretty much all the time, really. I don’t sleep very well. I don’t like my job. Sometimes I feel a bit like there isn’t really any point, you know?” And at Malfoy’s mildly horrified look, “No, no, not like that. I mean, I died before so I know what it’s like and I’m not saying I want to go back there. It’s just, everything was supposed to be perfect after we won the war. I thought it would all be nice, you know? But it isn’t. And you’re here, not even using magic, and I can’t even imagine… how, Malfoy? How are you happy?” His words hang unspoken between them, why do you get to be happy when I don’t?, and Malfoy laughs, a small dry thing.

“I can’t believe I’m having to say this to you, Potter. But did you ever think you might be depressed? You could try a mind healer. They have potions. You could even go rogue and take the Muggle route, if you wanted. Goodness knows no one would blame you for being a bit down in the dumps after the childhood you had.”

There’s a beat of silence, a moment hanging between them when it could all go away, when Harry could say, yes, yes I’m depressed, good point Malfoy, I’ll look into potions for it and they could both go home and that would be that. 

Instead, he laughs. He laughs until Malfoy joins in and they end up wheezing a bit before Harry manages, “Fucking hell, Malfoy, lucky I’m not the sensitive sort. Okay, I am a bit sad and I am a bit bored, and yes, you’d be doing me a favour if you’d take me out and distract me. Happy now?”

“I must say, young Draco would have been over the moon about this development. Harry Potter, coming to me cap in hand, green eyes trembling with unshed tears—oh shut up, Potter, I’m taking poetic licence—unhappy, alone. And not only that, but needing my help. This would have been young Draco’s dream! Of course, young Draco would have laughed at first. Ha! Ha ha ha! Like that, a proper dramatic moment. But of course young Draco would have helped you in the end, I’m sure.” 

Harry thinks back to young Draco and is filled with a sense that young Draco would most certainly not have helped, and would rather have kept laughing in delight at Harry’s misery until he choked or fell over. But current Draco—Malfoy, his brain corrects hastily—is so delighted with himself that Harry thinks he’ll just leave him to it. He’s much easier to deal with when he’s pleased with himself—and far less likely to be rude to Harry.

“So consider me your personal guide to the Muggle world, Potter. Out of the goodness of my heart—and also in return for keeping an eye on my mum for me, and for buying me snacks and nice things to drink when we’re out—I’ll show you all the nice things I do and you can bask in my joie de vivre, such as it is. When was the last time you spent any time around Muggles?”

And that’s a bit embarrassing. Because Harry goes out for walks, and he uses the Tube a lot when he’s feeling bored or at a loose end, and when he was younger he used to go to Muggle clubs, sleep with Muggle men, sometimes even stay over in their Muggle bedrooms. Because of course he doesn’t look down on Muggles, or see them as less than himself. But, when it comes down to it, he loves magic—he always has, since that night Hagrid came to get him from the Dursleys and catapulted him into his world, the magical world—and he never wants to go back from that. So he just decides not to answer. Malfoy isn’t fazed in the least.

“Like I thought, Potter. You grew up Muggle, yet I bet you haven’t gone more than an hour or two without using magic any day in the last fifteen years. Do you deny it? Fine. Well, you won’t be using magic around me. You try, the deal’s off and you’ll have to go crawling back to your friends to help you through your little identity crisis.”

“Fine, Malfoy, god. Is this what it’s going to be like? Because I’m having a rethink.”

Malfoy’s already on the move.

“Too late, Potter. I’ve already been wooed by the promise of free food. And on that note, what are you doing this afternoon? Because I fancy a Nando’s.”

Harry isn’t sure what a Nando’s is, but it’s got to be better than lurking around Grimmauld eating toast and waiting for the day to go by. So he swigs the rest of his coffee and jumps off the wall to follow Malfoy, who isn’t exactly waiting for him, but is definitely taking his time walking to the bus stop.

And this is how it begins.

Chapter Text

Lunch is… surprisingly painless. Harry really likes the bright, bustling restaurant and the way the food comes with little flags stuck in it to tell him which spice level he chose, and the way he can refill his drink himself from the machine, and how everyone seems to be eating some variation on the same thing. Watching Draco Malfoy eating corn on the cob is not how Harry had imagined he’d spend his lunchtime, but the place is so jovial that he can’t help but enjoy the novelty of it.

And things go fine with Malfoy, too. He’s much more agreeable now he’s not actively bullying people (or Harry, specifically) though it’s tricky to find something that’s safe to talk about. Because anything magical is off the cards, of course, so no Quidditch and no Hogwarts chat and no stories of what went on at the Leaky last week, which are basically the only things that Harry does outside of work. 

But Harry tells Malfoy about visiting Fand’s shop, and Malfoy is interested in that, and he interrogates Harry about the furniture he’s been buying (and they carefully avoid the mention of any magical features) and Malfoy seems to approve of Harry offloading what he calls the “tatty overdesigned clutter” that he obviously remembers from childhood visits to Grimmauld. And then Harry gets very excited while telling Malfoy about the particular shade of grey-white that he’s trying to find for the drawing room, and Malfoy says, “Well Potter, if you’re into home decor, just wait until I show you Farrow and Ball,” and with that, lunch is finished and they make a date for the following week to go to a showroom in Islington to look at posh paint.

It’s so near to Grimmauld that Harry can walk it, and when he gets there he realises he’s walked past it a thousand times only he’s never noticed it because… well, it’s Muggle, isn’t it? 

And he finds everything he’s been imagining for sprucing up the sweeping Georgian proportions of the rooms in Grimmauld. Harry practically weeps over the perfection of a colour chart and Malfoy manages to suppress his revulsion at Harry’s choice of wallpaper for the downstairs bathroom, and afterwards they pop into a Wetherspoons on the corner and have a pint, and the conversation is hardly awkward at all.

It’s a quiet weekend for Harry, so he spends most of it decorating, and because he uses magic for the hard labour, he gets all of the downstairs done. He does all the coving and mouldings by hand (though he does use a levitation charm rather than a ladder), and it’s fiddly and exhausting, and oh-so-satisfying.  On Sunday night he sleeps for six hours straight after falling into bed still paint-splattered and aching from his shoulders to his finger tips. It’s the longest stretch of sleep he’s had since the war.

When he wakes up, he drinks his coffee standing up in the dining room, looking around and enjoying the slow creep of autumn light across walls of just the exactly right shade of blue. He manages to send a photo from his phone to Malfoy, and he keeps the magic-muffler up around the phone for two hours until he gets a reply. It says only, Very nice, Potter, but Harry feels like there’s genuine approval there.

He texts back and tells Malfoy that he’ll take him for a thank you drink at the weekend, if Malfoy’s around, and Malfoy replies nearly immediately this time, and he says, Fucking right you will. Outside the Troc 8pm Sat, and that’s that. 

It’s supposed to be a casual thing, but pretty soon they’re meeting every week. Partly because Harry is so clearly hungry for company, he thinks—he’s free most evenings, and a lot of daytime too, during the week, so he can pop to meet Malfoy for lunches or coffees whenever he wants. And because Malfoy is still studying—and being one of the only mature students, he doesn’t have much in common with the other people on his course—he’s at a loose end too, a lot of the time. 

And Harry was right about him—he does still love being the centre of attention, and he definitely loves bossing Harry around, and telling him about Muggle things, and bringing him on wild touristy jaunts around London. And when they’re doing all these things together, and Malfoy is off on one of his rants about linenfold carvings or sensitive restorations or Samuel bloody Pepys, then Harry forgets that he and Malfoy don’t get on, and that they’re not proper friends, and just enjoys himself immensely.

They still argue a lot. It turns out that Malfoy is pretty into footie, though he supports Chelsea, which Harry thinks is a completely arbitrary choice on his part and which is obviously a bit of a joke. Harry obviously supports West Ham, because he shared a dorm with Dean Thomas for six years, and that’s a perfectly good reason to follow a team, actually. Their first attempt at watching a game together ends with Harry storming out of the pub and Malfoy shouting after him about updating his prescription because he's clearly blind if he thinks that was a foul. 

And the few times that Harry slips up and mentions magic—and once or twice, without thinking, reaches for his wand—Malfoy gets all chilly and weird, and afterwards makes excuses not to meet until Harry wears him down via text. Eventually, Harry mostly stops even thinking about magic when he’s out with Malfoy. They never go anywhere that it’s needed, and it’s actually really nice to be able to go out and about without being harassed, or papped, like he is when he goes out in wizarding areas.

And they do go to the pub a good bit, because sometimes they need that emollient touch of a bit of alcohol and the buzz of lots of other people chatting. They’ve been strangers for years, after all, and it’s easy to catch up on things when they’re sitting side by side at the bar and only meeting each other’s eyes in the mirror.

Harry tells Malfoy about work, and Malfoy listens, which is all Harry wants, really. It means he gets to just complain about the dull, difficult bits, but doesn’t have to start thinking of how to fix things, or change things, or think too deeply about things at all. He always feels better after he’s had a proper moan. 

He talks about the Dursleys a little bit too. At first it’s more to make conversation than anything else, and to prove that he does know a bit about Muggles, even if he’s been away from them for years. But Malfoy, it turns out, is a good listener. He doesn’t say much, but he has very expressive eyebrows and does a good line in eye rolling, and both elements get a workout whenever Harry mentions some of the casual cruelties the Dursleys indulged themselves in. It’s not pity, by any means, so Harry doesn’t have to feel bad for himself, but when Malfoy says feelingly, “No wonder you quit Muggles if that’s what you had to deal with,” it makes Harry feel weirdly better about everything.

Malfoy in return tells Harry about his law course, which he’s very nearly finished, and he talks a lot about York because he lived there for years and seems to really love the place. It’s where he met all his housemates—they were all at uni together, though in different years, and they met in some club they all joined. He complains about them all, but with such fondness and over such petty things (washing up, biscuit stealing, never replacing the milk) that Harry can tell he really loves them. It sounds more like they’re a weird sort of family than a group of friends, Harry thinks, and when he says that once, Malfoy goes a bit pink and looks desperately sad for a moment before shaking it off and smiling and saying that he supposes that’s true.

Malfoy also insists on doing things, rather than just sitting around drinking. He thinks that if Harry wants to see how good the Muggle world is, he has to actually see some of it. They go to see Fand quite a bit. They don’t go into the back room anymore, but they shove together with their elbows on the counter and chat to Fand at her perch by the main till. She plays music on a proper old record player—I might write a song that makes you laugh, now that would be funny; when we were strangers, I watched you from afar; I saw you watching from the stairs, you're everyone that ever cared—and they listen to the fizz and crackle of it and chat during the quiet bits. Fand never talks about Malfoy to Harry, even when she pops around to Grimmauld with new pieces, but when they call in she always looks particularly pleased to see them.

Malfoy’s approach to exploring Muggle London means that Harry ends up seeing a lot of weird plays in small echoey rooms in Hoxton, or making the trek to Brixton for gigs that inevitably involve sludgy guitars and a lot of shouting, or trawling charity shops in Primrose Hill and Kensington for rich people’s cast-offs. It’s restful, is what it is. Malfoy is so used to Harry, so unaffected by him, and there’s no pressure to perform or behave. Harry just gets to enjoy himself.

Before Harry knows it, it’s almost Christmas time. He meets Malfoy for a walk in Highgate Cemetery and Malfoy’s bought actual hot chestnuts from a food cart. They walk and eat, and Malfoy manages to get one of the audacious grey squirrels to take a chestnut right out of his hand. The day is bitter with a cold creep of fog, and Malfoy is so bright against the winter grey, with his red sweater and his red cheeks and a pair of striped mittens that are so misshapen, they can only be handmade (by Marie, Malfoy tells him defensively). 

Malfoy nearly doesn’t mention the season at all, but finally he asks Harry what his plans are for Christmas Day, with a reluctant curl to his mouth that tells Harry he doesn’t really want to talk about it too much. Harry says he’ll be at the Burrow, as always, and at least this year he knows he’s got the present thing right, because Fand helped him choose everything. That makes Malfoy laugh, and then he tells Harry that he’s looking forward to the dinner because this year he’s managed to convince the others to go for goose instead of turkey. Which is such a Malfoyish concern—food first, always—that Harry feels sort of warm and fond. 

He thinks it’s time to admit that he’s not only getting to know Malfoy, but he’s getting to like him a bit. He decides then that he is going to give Malfoy the present that he chose, and wrapped, and then hid in his coat pocket indecisively earlier today.

It’s one he actually picked himself, that he found when he was picking through a box of jewellery that Fand had just acquired from someone on her murky list of antique dealer contacts. It had caught his eye because Malfoy loves the Tudor miniatures in the National Portrait Gallery—they’re his favourite, the curious little discs portraying long-dead faces with all their quirks and characterful features preserved for all to see, and he always ends up poring over them while Harry admires the Holbeins.

In the box, Harry had found a Victorian replica miniature—even Harry knows it would be weird and excessive to spend ten thousand pounds on an actual Tudor original—and by great good fortune it features a smug-looking fair-haired man in a green doublet, set into a locket. It’s not so fancy that it’s too much, but even so Harry had been a bit worried about whether they’re really at the present stage. But it’s something he’s always done, bought things for people he likes, and he wants Malfoy to have it, and to like it, he realises.

“Here,” he says, scrabbling through his pocket for the little package. Malfoy has to take his mittens off to open it, and in the chill air his knuckles look like they’re carved from bone. 

When he gets it open, he doesn’t say anything for a long moment, which gives Harry time to start feeling weird again, before Malfoy begins to laugh, closing his fist around the locket.

“Erm… I saw it and thought of you?” Harry says awkwardly, which makes Malfoy laugh harder, but he manages to pull himself together as he gets his mittens back on.

“Thank you, Potter, really,” he says, and his whole face is bright with amusement and something a little bit soft. “I love it, truly. He’s delightful.” And he looks back down at the locket clutched in his fist with what looks like real happiness.

“I got you something, too. It’s only something small, because I didn’t really think we were at the present stage yet—” but as he says it he looks at Harry from under his lashes and Harry knows he’s only teasing “—but it’s handmade, which everyone knows is the most thoughtful kind of present. Look, I even wrapped it.”

Harry snorts, because what Malfoy hands him is an ordinary CD box with a sparkly plastic bow stuck on. But when he turns it over to look at the cover, he can see that the square of card inside has been painted on—nothing elaborate, just a pale watercolour wash of green on white, a perfect simple winter forest scene. Trust bloody Malfoy to be good at painting, he thinks.

“It’s a Christmas mix,” Malfoy says, and Harry thinks he’s blushing a bit under the wind-bitten redness that was already there. Harry cracks the box open and reads the track listing—lots of songs he’s never heard of, most of which don’t sound like Christmas songs at all—and he wonders how long it had taken Malfoy to make it, at home in his tiny bedroom.

He brings his Discman to the Burrow, and at night when everyone’s asleep he puts in his headphones and lets the songs lull him—oh, I wish I had a river I could skate away on, snow had fallen, snow on snow, you fell asleep with blood on your teeth—and falls asleep to the music. The track listing is written in Malfoy’s distinctive scrawl, and Harry keeps it tucked under his pillow for fear Ron and Hermione would recognise it.

The title on the spine reads, Merry Christmas (I Don’t Want to Fight Tonight).

“How drunk is too drunk?” Malfoy wonders aloud, before staggering gracefully into Harry and nearly knocking him under an oncoming bus. 

Harry is wondering the same thing, because he suspects it wasn’t his lightning-sharp Seeker reflexes that saved him, but the fact that his body feels liquidy and sodden and slow, so he had time to pull himself back onto the pavement. He and Malfoy have been wandering around the Chelsea Physic Garden for the afternoon, freezing their arses off because apparently it’s a rare treat to get to see it in winter, and afterwards they need to warm up so they head to the pub.

It’s hard work drinking on empty stomachs like that, though, so now they’re in search of food and they wander towards the river. Harry trusts Malfoy’s instinct for finding good food, and he’s happy to follow along as Malfoy walks, and talks, and the smell of the river is ripe on the breeze.

They literally bump into Fand as soon as they go in the door of the little bistro pub that Malfoy likes the look of—she’s crossing the floor and laughing backwards at someone and Harry doesn’t even see her until he’s nose-deep in her hair and he knows it’s her straight away from the whiff of magic. 

“Harry!” she cries delightedly, and then, “Draco!” and she hugs them both and says, “Mac just arrived up the river, and we were going to have some dinner, will ye have a bite with us? But I forgot, Harry you haven’t even met Mac, have you?” 

And she turns Harry around until he’s face to face with possibly the most handsome man he’s ever seen, who also seems to be wearing a short wetsuit in the middle of a London pub in January. 

Fand draws herself up tall and splendid, and says seriously, “Harry, please kneel for the blessing of the lord of the sea, Manannán Mac Lir.” And the man inclines his head (and Harry can see that the dense inky black lengths of his hair are soaked through), and looks proud and stern, and Harry is already dipping his knee when Malfoy grabs his arm and tugs him backwards.

“Very funny, you arseholes,” he says, though he’s half-laughing, and then everyone else is laughing too, and Harry is being hugged—hugged!—by an unfairly attractive ancient deity and steered towards a waiting table that has somehow become available in the middle of a very crowded pub.

He glances back at Malfoy in a panic, and when Malfoy hisses, “What?!” in his ear—rudely, Harry thinks—Harry says, “You didn’t tell me he looked like that!” and Malfoy looks a bit petulant and says, “Oh get over yourself Potter,” and then, “Hang on, what?”

Mac goes to get the drinks in, and Fand just laughs when Harry sits down, still blushing a bit. 

“Don’t worry about it,” she tells Harry. “He gets that everywhere he goes. You should have seen this one—” and she gestures dismissively at Malfoy “—the first time he met Mac. I nearly had to scrape him off the floor, he melted so fast.”

Malfoy looks contemplative as he eyes up Mac’s rear aspect where he stands at the bar. “Ah yes, happy memories. I was going into Second Year, demented by hormones and fretting madly about getting to be on a certain team so I could beat a certain person at a certain sport. And then I met Mac and had to spend the rest of the school year coming to terms with the fact that I was definitely gay. In my defence, I had good taste in men even then.”

Mac comes back with the drinks then, which is a bit unfortunate as he arrives just as Harry says loudly, “I’m gay too,” which means that there are three people looking at him curiously as he adds, “Just thought I’d mention it…” and then trails off awkwardly.

“If we’d known at school we could have formed a club,” Malfoy says. “You, me, and Hooch.”

“And Dumbledore,” Harry says reasonably, as Malfoy’s mouth falls open. “Shame Charlie Weasley had already left school by then or he could have been in it too.”

“The dragon-taming Weasley?” Malfoy says incredulously. “I wish.”

“I can confirm,” Harry says happily, because he thinks that should be enough to keep Malfoy quiet for a while, and then Mac hands them all some sticky bar menus and Malfoy is distracted by the thought of food, though not before he sends Harry a narrow-eyed, considering look across the table.

It’s not until they’ve finished eating, and Malfoy is chatting to Mac, that Fand leans over to Harry and whispers a thank you to him.

“For what?” he asks, distracted by Malfoy idly swiping the last of Harry’s chips through the pool of vinegar on his plate. 

“For keeping an eye on him,” she replies, nodding sharply at Malfoy. “His mother is stone mad with missing him, and they were always so close. And I know he’s not using magic, even if he won’t talk about it. A Malfoy without magic—the poor child mustn’t have had a notion what to do. Not that he doesn’t seem to be getting on grand without it, mind you. But you’re good for him, I can see. He’s relaxed around you.”

Harry thinks that sixteen-year-old him would have laughed himself sick at the idea of being able to relax around horrible Malfoy, but it’s true for both of them really. Fand must know Malfoy well though, to be able to see it. 

“I don’t mind keeping an eye on him,” he says truthfully. “He’s not so bad, these days.”

Fand gives him a flat-eyed stare. “He’s a lovely young lad. But he’s gone a bit over the top with this no-magic malarkey. No magic indeed,” she tuts, and though she’s taller than Harry and looks like some sort of pearlescent sea creature in the murky pub light, she reminds him of nothing so much as Molly Weasley right at that moment.

“We’re very fond of him, you know. I’ve known him since he was a little boy. That father of his is a bad egg, and I know Draco has done some terrible things, things he’s so ashamed of. But he hasn’t turned out badly. I just hope he can let himself be happy.”

Her eyes are seafoam green and inscrutable, but then she turns and roars across the table to Mac.

“Oi! Didn’t you have something for Harry?”

Mac stands. “I did indeed, I only hope it didn’t fall out on the swim here.” He starts patting down his wetsuit, though Harry will be very surprised if he has managed to conceal anything under the form-fitting fabric. “Excuse the outfit, by the way. If I run into anyone out on the water, I can just pretend to be a stranded surfer. Saves me a lot of time and memory spells. The nakedness used to distract them.” 

“I can imagine,” Harry says faintly.

“Ah! Here is it.”

And he reaches into his long hair and pulls off a shell that’s woven into the strands. It’s just an ordinary shell, as far as Harry can see, no different from any of the others Mac is wearing threaded along his locks, or that Harry could find on any beach in Sussex.

“Just a little token,” Mac says, and he presses it into Harry's palm. As he does it, he makes a complicated little signal in the air over the shell, so minute that Harry barely notices it, except that he feels the shell give a little quiver of magic where he has it cupped in his hand.

“We weren’t involved in the war, I know,” Mac says. “The Irish tend to stay out of English business, these days. But we know what you did to get through it all.” There’s something kind in his eyes, but underneath it all Harry can feel something cool and ancient and appraising. For the first time, he realises just how old Mac and Fand are. “And you were nothing but a boy. For your courage, Harry. I hope if you ever need me, you’ll let me know.”

Harry pockets the shell, feeling like he should be a bit more ceremonial about the whole thing. “Erm… it was nothing?” he tries, and Malfoy stifles a snort. “Thanks for that.”

Malfoy starts fiddling in his pockets. “I need a cigarette after that touching scene,” he says. “Potter, fancy one? Anyone else?”

And because it’s late, they end up saying their goodbyes, and if Mac whispers an incantation into Harry’s ear when he hugs him goodbye, and the shell in Harry’s pockets vibrates with the magic of it—well, Malfoy need never know.

Malfoy and Harry are barrelling down the stairs of Malfoy’s house, and Harry’s stomach hurts from laughing. They’re not supposed to be here, because Malfoy says he can’t bring anyone magical into the house, only then they decided to go to the pub and they’re both all grassy from playing football in the park, and Malfoy says Harry can go to the pub looking like a barbarian if he wants, but that Malfoy is going to put on some clean jeans at least. It’s unseasonably warm, and they shared a bottle of wine in the park, and now they’re tipsy and sun-drunk and reckless.

The housemates are all out, so Malfoy said that Harry could come in and use the loo, but they’re trying to get out of the house again as quickly as possible. Malfoy has already very nearly fallen down the stairs while trying to pull a shoe on as he ran, and Harry thinks he’s so funny when he’s clumsy, and Malfoy thinks Harry is so funny when he’s hysterical about something, so they’re both howling when the front door opens and all three housemates stand there, silhouetted against the dying spring sun.

“Ah,” Malfoy says quietly, and very carefully lets go of Harry’s arm, which he has been clinging to while trying to get his other shoe on.

“What the fuck is he doing here?” Asma asks coldly.

“Well. That’s the thing,” Malfoy says. “Shall we… ummm… sitting room?”

They all file in and arrange themselves, Harry ending up over by the window while the rest of them stare at him from the couch. Malfoy moves around the room, antsily fiddling with the curtains, and then goes and puts some music on. Harry knows a distraction technique when he sees it.

Harry feels a bit weird. He’s known all along that Malfoy has been avoiding introducing him to the housemates, though Malfoy’s spoken enough about them that Harry feels like he knows them a bit already. And Harry gets it—it must be hard for Malfoy, keeping his magic a secret from Muggles all the time. 

Though the hostility is unsettling, considering they’ve never actually met Harry. But it's okay if these people don't like him. They’re Malfoy’s friends, he reasons, and Malfoy has probably told them about what a dick Harry was to him at school (and maybe he’s even told them about what a dick he was to Harry too). It’s only natural they’d be protective of Malfoy—just like Ron and Hermione would be if Malfoy suddenly started calling around to their house. He just has to be patient. They’ll come round. Probably. 

“Right,” Malfoy says. His voice is warm around the edges from the wine and laughter, but he sounds nervous.

“Potter, this is Asma, Marie, and Billy. My housemates. And… this is Harry Potter.”

Harry waves, but stops when he’s met with three unimpressed gazes in return.

“He looks taller on his posters,” the one called Billy says to the others, and they all laugh meanly. Which is a bit weird, Harry thinks, but then Malfoy continues.

“Here’s the thing. Potter and I have been seeing each other. I mean… Christ! No, not like that. Just, you know. Doing things. Together.” He puts his head in his hands. “Again, not like that.”

They all turn incredulous looks on Malfoy.

“What the fuck, man,” one of them, a small cross-looking woman with a shaved head,  says flatly. “Have you told him about our campaign? You haven’t, have you? Because I can’t believe even he would have the gall to come to our house if he knew how we feel about him and his sort.”

Malfoy answers carefully, “I was going to tell him, Marie,” which starts off another round of squabbling and Harry can’t work out what the actual fuck is going on, and he waits until there’s a lull and then breaks in with his own question for Malfoy.

“You couldn’t have been trying very hard to tell me whatever the fuck this is about, if you couldn’t manage to bring it up any of the multiple times we met over the last six months?”

And Marie shouts, “Aha!” triumphantly, and Billy says, “I knew you were up to something,” and Asma shrieks, “Six months? Vile, traitorous snake!” 

At which Malfoy laughs, so it’s clearly something he’s used to hearing from her, and he says, “Well, is it any wonder I didn’t tell you lot? I knew this would happen.” 

And between all of them talking over each other, and the music set just too loud for comfort—high as a kite I just might stop to check you out—and the flat blare of taxi horns from the street outside, Harry can’t think, can’t begin to understand what’s happening, and he stands up and stamps his foot like he was never allowed to back at Privet Drive, and shouts, “What. The. Fuck.”

It works.

“Please,” he says when he’s sure they’re all listening. “Tell me what’s going on.”

And Malfoy smiles at him over their shoulders with that small private kindness that comes naturally now, but that Harry could never have imagined back at school, and he says to his friends, “Listen, he’s alright, really. Be decent about it.”

And Asma sighs and rolls her eyes, and Marie sits down heavily on the couch and rubs at her shaved head under her hat, and says, “Harry? Why do you think we all hate you so much?”

“All of you. All of you are magical.”

They nod.

“None of you are Muggles. And that night outside the pub—you all knew who I was.”

They nod again, like Harry is some sort of idiot.

“And you’ve chosen to just… stop using magic. To make some kind of point.”

Marie looks pained, Asma rolls her eyes vigorously, and Billy takes a long gulp of his drink. Harry knows how he feels.

“And Malfoy. Malfoy has chosen to stop using magic. Draco Malfoy, just casually dropping out of the magical world?”

Malfoy has been uncharacteristically patient the whole time Marie was explaining everything—probably guilt-induced, because he hadn’t bothered telling Harry any of this stuff before—but now the little crease of irritation is back between his brows.

“Draco Malfoy is right here, Potter. What exactly are you struggling to understand? You know I don’t carry a wand.”

Harry splutters, which is not entirely dignified, but is justified, he thinks. 

“I thought… I thought you were living with Muggles and hiding your magic! Or… or… that something had happened, with Voldemort, you know—” Asma makes a noise of disgust “—and maybe you had become a Squib, or something? How could I have possibly guessed that you of all people would just stop using magic?”

Harry hasn’t forgotten that Malfoy can be nasty, as such, but it’s been so long since he’s actually seen it that it comes as a surprise when Malfoy does the old Hogwarts-era cold-eyed stare, and says meanly, “What the fuck is that supposed to mean, me of all people?”

“I just mean…” Harry starts, then falters helplessly. Because he can’t exactly say, in front of everyone, you’re so magical. But it’s true, isn’t it? Malfoy is like Hogwarts, or Quidditch, or a solid-gold cauldron. Harry can’t separate him from his magic. He didn’t think he’d ever have to try.

He decides for safety’s sake to change the subject.

“And everyone hates me?”

There’s a chorus of assent, and really it would be more polite of them to be a bit less enthusiastic about it. Even Malfoy is nodding along, though he does laugh a bit when he catches Harry’s eye.

“You are all mental. Not about hating me, though that too, fuck you all, but not to want to use magic? Why would you ever not?”

“Look, Harry, it’s not personal,” Billy supplies. “None of us even knows you, except Draco, and we can’t exactly trust his judgement when it comes to you, can we?” He ignores Malfoy’s offended “hey!”.

“Excuse you, Billy, but it is personal,” Marie interjects. “This guy—” she jabs a finger at Harry from her perch on the couch arm “—is everything that’s wrong with magical society in this country.” Which, Harry thinks, is a bit rich, considering that he’s sort of the entire reason for the continued survival of wizarding society as they know it. He toys with mentioning that but catches Marie’s eye as she gears up for a rant and decides that there’s a certain wisdom in silence.

“You’re a blinkered Ministry pawn so you probably haven’t a clue what’s going on outside of Diagon, but there’s a big Reformist movement in York—across the whole of the north of England, really. That’s where we all met. There’s a very different culture up there—so many more places where wizards and Muggles live side by side, and up until recently there wasn’t any real division between magical and Muggle folks. I grew up in Pickering, and I swear I didn’t realise that we were supposed to keep our magic secret from Muggles until I was a teenager and started going into Scarborough with my friends at weekends. I didn’t even go to Hogwarts—there was a whole gang of wizarding kids at our local comp, and we had a tutor for the magical stuff.”

Harry can’t believe what he’s hearing. After everything he’d been through with the Ministry and the Statute of Secrecy, he wouldn’t have imagined magical people just happily coexisting alongside Muggles.

“But just before I headed to university, which would have been when you were at Hogwarts, the Ministry started clamping down on Statute breaches. Every tiny casual bit of magic was punished—we didn’t know what was happening, the Ministry had never even looked our way before. And it was happening all over the country, my mum has sisters in Bristol and in Sunderland and they were seeing the same things. Have you any idea how hard it was for us? Generations of us living intertwined with Muggles, no one ever talking about things but everyone knowing—you need an arthritis potion that will really work, you go to Mrs Armitstead near the castle, if your pet is sick then pop around to the Beacon Hill Frobishers and they’ll sort you out. What harm was there in that, Harry?”

Harry feels a bit panicked. Is this a rhetorical question, he wonders? It doesn’t sound like there was any harm, but he’s not quite sure what all this has to do with him.

“All of a sudden we had Ministry owls arriving every time we did a bit of small magic in front of our neighbours. If we so much as set a breeze going down the gardens to dry all the washing, something we’d been doing all our lives, we’d get a fine. It broke our hearts. But we changed. We grit our teeth and we hid our wands, because we knew there was trouble coming, and dark wizards rising, and we thought our government was trying to protect us, and protect our Muggle friends.”

Marie had seemed like the quiet one before, but Harry can see now that she’s the kind of person who gets animated only when she really cares about something.

“We thought we just had to knuckle down, do our bit for the war, and that after everything was over we could go back to normal. And I was off in York at uni, so I didn’t see it for a while. But then the war ended and nothing changed. We still weren’t allowed to help our Muggle friends, weren’t allowed to go back to the old ways.”

Asma breaks in. “Tell him about the plants.”

“The Ministry started restricting access to magical ingredients. So all of a sudden we weren’t allowed to grow any potions ingredients within a hundred feet of a Muggle dwelling. I was home that summer, Harry. I watched Mrs Armitstead crying like a child when we had to dig up her Wiggentree. A hundred and fifty years that tree had been in her garden. It helped more people than any of the bloody post-war reforms the Ministry brought in. We moved it to Beacon Hill but it didn’t take to the soil there. And there were fifty Bowtruckles living in it and not one of them survived either.”

Asma shivers. “My family ran a magical nursery. My grandparents set it up when they moved here from Pakistan in the 1950s. Your friend Neville Longbottom used to buy his plants from us. But because we were based in wizarding space in the middle of Leeds we had to move our operations out of the city after the Bill was passed. Dad says they’re barely breaking even, still.”

Harry is confused, and feels guilty for reasons he doesn’t understand, and none of it is helping his mood. 

“This all sounds awful. But excuse my ignorance—what the fuck is all of this supposed to do with me?”

Marie is actually shaking now, and even Malfoy (who’s supposed to be on Harry’s side, for fuck’s sake, or at least not openly hostile) is looking troubled. Asma moves closer to Marie, wraps an arm around her pulled-up knees.

“Well, at least you admit you’re an ignorant prick,” Marie spits. “It was only a matter of time before they pushed things further, wasn’t it? It wasn’t enough to ruin livelihoods and destroy friendships. You’re telling me this is nothing to do with you, but your greasy little paws were all over the Magical Dwellings Reform bill.”

Harry desperately searches his memory—the name rings a bell, but he can’t think of why. 

“It’s all very well for you and your friends, with your big houses in wizarding areas. When they passed the Bill, what did you think would happen to all of us living alongside Muggles? Those of us who didn't have an old family pile with generations of Muggle-repelling charms that could slip through the historic homes loophole they wrote in to protect their own houses, I mean?”

Harry doesn’t understand, he doesn’t understand, and when he tells her, he sounds so strained and uncertain that even Asma looks at him curiously.

“You were all over the papers, Harry. It was the first big bill passed after you joined the Wizengamot. They had you splashed on the cover of every magical publication in Britain. Shaking hands with Edificio Covington, who oh-so-conveniently happened to get the tender for building the whole new wave of wizarding housing estates? What the fuck, Harry, are you telling me you didn’t know any of this?”

Harry shakes his head repeatedly, and he can feel the panic rising. He remembers Ed of course—he’d been so nice to Harry when Harry first started working for the Ministry. It was only a year after the Battle, and Hermione and Ron were still in Australia, and Harry hadn’t known what to do with himself. He remembered knowing for sure that he couldn’t sit around Grimmauld anymore, and his magic was almost back to normal, and he wanted to have something to focus on. He had tried working with George, but every time he stepped onto the shopfloor he caused a riot. 

And the Ministry had been sending all those owls, and he had thought that maybe joining the Wizengamot would mean that he could make a difference, somehow. But it was all so confusing, and long-winded, and all the legislative stuff was so fucking dull. Ed had taken Harry under his wing, helped him work out what was going on. And Harry does vaguely remember the Dwellings Reform bill, now that he thinks about it—something to do with creating new wizarding villages to ensure the safety of magical communities. It had sounded good to Harry. He had voted in favour of it.

“The Bill was the last brick in the wall that divided us completely from the Muggle world. No magical dwellings allowed within a hundred feet of Muggle-occupied buildings. For our own protection, they said. As if our Muggle neighbours were going to be any threat to us. So we either had to modify our homes—and of course, most of them were propped up by generations of family magic, they wouldn't have stood up by themselves without it—" Harry thinks uncomfortably of the Burrow, its teetering storeys barely upright, though tucked away from Ottery-St Catchpole in in its own cosy few acres of land "—or we had to move. Demand for housing in wizarding areas was already at a premium. Luckily for us, Ed Covington had already secured development rights on multiple sites around the country, was building brand new magical homes for any of us who could afford to pay." 

She practically spits. "Corrupt down to the heart of it, that's the modern Wizengamot. And you were there, front and centre in the photos, shaking hands with the man who had us put out of our homes to line his own pockets. Tinworth, Upper Flagly, Bourton-on-the-Water, even bloody Godric's Hollow. Decimated. All the old wizarding homes crumbling away, communities destroyed. You're a disgrace."

Harry feels sick. He thinks of Ed being so kind, explaining things to him so he wouldn't have to try to understand when his head always felt fuzzy, and he was still waking three times a night with screaming nightmares of the Battle. He thinks of his last visit to Godric's Hollow, a line of hollow-eyed cottages with the gardens wild and sprawling. He hadn't understood. 

"I didn't know," he says nonsensically. "I didn't know."

Marie shivers, a desperate, full body thing, and Malfoy moves to her side, drops to his knees, and lays a palm to her forehead.

"Well, then you're worse than I thought," she says tiredly. "Self-serving malice is understandable at least. But there's no excuse for doing dreadful things through sheer ignorance." And then quietly to Malfoy, "Draco, I don't feel very well."

Harry wants to Apparate out, but he knows it'll only make things worse. Instead, he carefully lets himself out the front door, closes the gate behind him. 

He doesn't think they even notice him leaving.

Harry doesn’t hear from Malfoy for a few days, and when he finally does, Malfoy texts him in a determinedly normal manner. He has clearly decided that they will not be talking about what happened with his housemates, or the fact that they’re all what Harry would politely call short-sighted ideologues with no grasp of how things work in the real world. Plus they hate Harry, which is pretty shit of them considering that he saved their arses from actual oppression by a noseless megalomaniac. 

But if Malfoy’s going to play it normal, Harry will too. Malfoy meets him for their usual Friday lunch with proper sandwiches from a deli, rather than the rubbish Tesco ones he usually brings, and Harry accepts them as the tacit peace-offering that Malfoy would never admit they are.

“Can you do brunch on Sunday morning?” Harrys asks through a mouthful of mozzarella. “I have a thing and I thought you might like to come along.”

Malfoy eyes him suspiciously. “You don’t have any things that aren’t truly hideous,” he says unsympathetically. “Are you trying to rope me into something awful just to keep you distracted?”

And Harry’s not, this time. It’s just he’s been feeling sorry for himself over Malfoy’s friends being complete and total dicks, but probably Harry’s friends would do the exact same to Malfoy. 

And that makes Harry realise that he doesn’t want his friends being dicks to Malfoy—or at least, no more than the level of dickishness they treat Harry to—and he also feels a bit bad about the fact that he has sort of, maybe, been hiding this new friendship with Malfoy from them. Not because it’s a secret, really. It’s just, they’ll probably think it’s a bit weird. Even Harry thinks it’s a bit weird, and he’s the one doing it.

“It’s not something awful, bloody hell. It’s a lovely brunch. With Ron and Hermione.”

Malfoy actually chokes on his ciabatta at that. Getting him to the point of being able to answer involves a good deal of thumping him on the back, and offering him generous gulps out of Harry’s bottle of Vimto. 

“Is this some delayed breakdown due to childhood trauma?" he says when he manages to catch his breath. "Why would you want me to go to brunch with your friends?"

Really, it’s because Harry’s a bit uneasy about how much time he’s been spending with Malfoy, without strictly mentioning to anyone that he’s been doing it. It’s not as though Ron and Hermione are around Grimmauld anymore to notice that he’s out a lot. And he’s been seeing his friends fairly regularly anyway—he has lunch with Hermione every week, and it’s proper quality time while they chat and eat, and Harry can tell that Hermione’s forgotten to be worried about him, or to wonder if he’s happy, because she doesn’t get that tight look of concern every time she’s around him anymore.

"Because you told me on a number of occasions that brunch is the best meal of the day, and you always say it's a travesty that it's considered a weekend indulgence?" Harry rolls his eyes. "I don't know, Malfoy, because I met your friends and now it would be nice for you to meet mine?"

"I've already met your friends," Malfoy mutters darkly. "You were there, you know how well that went for the whole six years of school. Anyway, I can't. I have a thing."

"Is this your thing that you go to on Sunday mornings, but that you won't tell me about?" Harry says with interest. 

"Yes," Malfoy says crisply, "and I'm not telling you this time either. Anyway I can't make it."

"Fine," Harry says. "But are you still free on Saturday night?" And when Malfoy nods, he says decisively, "Great. You can come out with us then instead. Muggle pub, one hour, polite chat, done."

“Are you going to let this go? No? Fine. One drink, and I doubt that there’ll be much chat but I’ll do my best to keep it civil. Deal?”

“Deal,” Harry says, and Malfoy narrows his eyes. 

“Is this one of those things where you asked me to do something awful first, and then got me to agree to something slightly less awful, which is actually what you wanted me to do all along?”

Harry shrugs and reaches for the other half of his sandwich. He has plenty of time to Floocall Ron and Hermione and tell them that Malfoy’s coming for Ron’s birthday drinks.

“It’s fine. This is fine,” Malfoy says when he and Harry arrive at the pub, and he has to stop to have another cigarette outside. 

“I didn’t ask,” Harry says gravely, and dances out of the way when Malfoy goes to poke him in the kidney region. “Of course it’s fine. It’s just, this is something I like doing. And it feels really weird to be out having fun with you all the time, and Ron and Hermione not knowing about it.”

“You could have just told them yourself,” Malfoy says through a feathery plume of smoke. “You didn’t have to wheel me out like a performing monkey.” But he looks the slightest bit mollified, and he resolutely crushes the glowing nub of the cigarette under the heel of his boot and makes for the door.

“I’ll get the peanuts in,” Harry smiles at him, and then they’re in the door and the Saturday night fug of the pub hits them like a Bludger, and Harry feels a bit breathless and excited in a way he doesn’t really recognise.

“It could have been worse,” Hermione says loudly, and Ron shushes her even more loudly. They’re staying at Grimmauld, and Neville has come back with them but is already asleep somewhere on the second floor, so Harry isn’t sure why Ron is attempting to be quiet.

“It was fine,” Harry says. “He was fine. Right?”

“Riiight,” Ron says uncertainly. “I mean. If I hadn’t known him from school I’d have said he was an alright bloke, you know? He bought me a drink, and he was friendly in that weird, posh way, and he didn’t try to murder anyone. Which is obviously an improvement on how he used to be, I suppose.”

“He was very nice,” Hermione says diplomatically, before ruining it by saying, “But I still hate him. Urgh, all that horrible hair, just like his dad.”

“Hey!” Harry says defensively, and when they both look at him oddly he wonders what exactly he had meant to say in reply to that. His hair is lovely? Obviously not that. “He’s nothing like his dad.”

Hermione looks thoughtful. “No,” she says with a meaningful look at Harry. “I suppose you don’t think so.” 

“Look,” Harry says, because he might as well press the advantage. “He’s really, really decent these days. He’s totally different. I should know. I mean, I knew him better than anyone when we were at school and now he’s completely… what?” 

Ron and Hermione are both looking at him speculatively now, which Harry thinks isn’t exactly fair. They must practice synchronised side-eye at home, or something.

“Did you, Harry? Did you really?” Ron asks innocently. 

And then Hermione chimes in, and this is definitely some weird double act thing they have going on, “Because I would have thought that maybe his best friends, the Slytherins who lived with him, would have known him best?”

Which. Well, they have a point, don’t they. Harry feels a bit confused, exposed, like he’s onstage in a show but he doesn’t know the lines. 

“Alright, enough Malfoy talk,” he says firmly. “Go to sleep, you drunken disgraces.”

They tangle him up in a threeway hug before he can escape the room. 

“We love you, you know,” Hermione says into his neck.

“And if you want Malfoy, have at him,” Ron says supportively. 

“Give me a break,” Harry says patiently. “He’s not my type. I like a redhead, you know that,” and he waggles his eyebrows at Ron lasciviously until Ron smacks him on the arse and sends him up the stairs to bed, where he sleeps almost the whole night through.

Harry is really, really drunk.

The housemates are still staring at him with dislike, but this is far better than the alternative, which would be to have them staring at him with hatred while he’s sober. And because most of them are quite drunk too, every so often they forget to glare at Harry, and instead they do normal things like laugh at nothing, or scream the chorus of Raspberry Beret at Marie (who is in fact wearing a red hat) even though by the third chorus she’s looking a bit pained. But then they remember Harry’s there and start being rude to him again.

He doesn’t mind, though. Because he could leave, of course. He could go home to Grimmauld, or see if anyone is around to pop to the Leaky, or even head out on Diagon and see who he runs into. But he was promised drinks with Malfoy, and he was looking forward to it, because Malfoy gets all loose and careless when he’s drunk, and talks a lot about lots of things, and makes Harry laugh, and Harry likes it. So he doesn’t see why, just because Malfoy’s housemates are arseholes and have managed to rope Malfoy into staying in for drinks, that Harry has to miss out on his night. He thinks maybe Malfoy wants him here, wants to show the housemates that Harry is important too. But maybe that's wishful thinking.

So he leans further out of the open bay window, exhales a plume of smoke from one of the cigarettes he’s cadged off Malfoy, and lets the music of their weird maudlin playlist of old songs wash over him (be running up the road, be running up that hill, and please be gentle with this heart of mine, and I remember long ago another starry night like this). 

There’s a shriek from across the room, and Harry spins around to see what’s going on. Malfoy is hovering while Asma dabs ineffectually at her pale blue jeans, which seem to have a rather large spreading stain of red wine down one leg (Malfoy looks vaguely guilty, so Harry is presuming it was something to do with him).

“That’s not going to get it out,” he shouts helpfully across to her. “Rubbing it will only make it worse.”

She pauses just to send him a particularly hate-filled look across the room, muttering “Thanks a fucking million for that, dickhead.” And then to Malfoy, “What I wouldn’t give for a good Scourgify right now.”

“Oh, don’t remind me,” Draco sighs as he picks up the empty wine glass from the carpet. “It’s the one I miss the most, I think. So convenient.” 

As Harry watches, Asma laughs, rolls her eyes fondly. “You’re trying to tell me you don’t miss Lubrico the most?”

“Don’t start this again, you two,” Billy says. You’ll only depress yourselves. And anyway, we all know the thing we really miss the most and it’s not a boring fucking domestic charm, or a wanking aid. Am I right?” 

They all sigh, “Flying,” as one, and then laugh wistfully, like it’s some weird fucking line from a play that they’ve all practiced many times before. It’s like they’ve forgotten Harry’s even there. Time to rectify that.

He takes a fortifying drag of his cigarette and clears his throat, loudly. “Excuse me. Not to interrupt this fascinating conversation. But really, what are you on about?”

They all look mildly irritated—maybe they really had forgotten he was there—though Malfoy is making covert shushing motions at him for some reason.

“Not that it’s any of your business,” Asma sneers (and Harry sees exactly why she and Malfoy are friends, and he’s utterly convinced that had she not been shipped off to Beauxbatons, she would have been a Slytherin), “but this is sort of a game we have where we think of our favourite magical things and how much we miss them. You can’t play. Obviously.”

“Right,” Harry replies while studiously ignoring Malfoy’s subtle but threatening throat-cutting motions. “I don’t want to play your weird game anyway. Obviously. Only. You all know you could just… use magic? If you miss it so much?”

Marie’s head snaps up at that. She’s sitting in an armchair on her own, looking increasingly irritated by the whole conversation, but her venom is directed at Harry.

“What part of ‘we don’t use magic’ are you finding hard to grasp, Harry?” she asks, sweetly. Harry hates her a bit.

“Erm, well, to be honest Marie, I would say… the whole fucking lot of it?” he replies, equally sweetly. “I can’t imagine what the point is.”

“No, I wouldn’t expect you to get it.” She’s sounding a bit less sweet now. “There are over two thousand magical citizens of this country who have pledged to relinquish their magic in protest at the draconian and unjust policies of the magical government. But of course if Harry Potter doesn’t get it—” and here she does a cruelly accurate impression of Harry, which he thinks is a bit unnecessary “—then of course it can’t be worth doing.”

And yes, she’s annoying, but even if Harry doesn’t like her, he likes how much she cares about this stuff, and he wants to understand. 

“Well, what exactly does it achieve?” 

He thinks he hears Billy choke a bit (on a laugh, maybe?) but he hides it behind his drink.

“It’s a point of principle. We’ve all been granted an immense gift, by sheer quirk of biology. And yet we hoard our power, keep ourselves locked away in our insular communities, treat Muggles like dangerous animals. Do you know that we’re one of the only nations in the world that has such a strict divide between Muggle and magical societies? So many other countries have a much more relaxed approach to Magico-Muggle relations, and there’s far more integration and sharing of resources.”

Harry wishes Hermione were here. She would really love this conversation.

“What sort of resources? And what would we do if Muggles decide to turn on us? We’re totally outnumbered." And because Harry would never admit it, but he’s actually done a bit of reading about this since their last conversation, “You know that Muggles actually stuck someone in jail for claiming to be a witch as recently as the 1940s? They were burning people at the stake only a couple of hundred years ago.” He thinks of the Dursleys with a shudder of revulsion. “I wonder… maybe you’ve just been lucky enough not to meet the wrong sort of Muggle.”

Marie makes a noise of disgust. “What a thing to say. Well the rest of us, who live in the real world and don’t shut ourselves away in Diagon Alley, know exactly how much Muggles have to offer us. Technology, primarily. Tell me, Harry—don’t you just love how efficient and subtle it is to use owl mail? And isn’t it brilliant to have to go to an actual library anytime you need information, rather than Googling? And of course, you have your fucking enormous stag for the very important communications.”

Harry has completely come round to mobile phones, actually. For one thing, he needs one to keep in touch with Malfoy. 

“I totally agree,” he says equably. “It’ll be great once we work out proper, permanent magic-dampening charms so we can use them safely without frying them every time we cast a Lumos.”

Marie’s sitting up now, hands flying. The others have started talking among themselves, clearly they’ve heard all this once or twice before.

“And what about what we can offer to the Muggles? Do you know that we’ve essentially eradicated physical diseases in the magical community? Unnatural deaths rates are significantly lower amongst magical people, and almost always occur as a result of a magically-induced cause—hexes, blood curses, and so on. We’ve fucking well cured cancer, Harry.” An odd expression flits over her face, something desperate and fleeting. “And yet we hide away, allowing millions of Muggles to die every year from something we can cure with a wave of a wand or a draught of potion? That’s not just selfish, Harry. It’s monstrous.”

And it is, of course, and Harry wonders why he’s never thought of it before. He decides he’s going to talk to Hermione about it soon. It feels like one of those weird shortsighted gaps in his thinking that comes from missing out on being taught to be decent, and having to learn it all by himself. Sometimes it takes him a while to notice when things are rotting under the surface.

“I agree completely, actually,” he says slowly. Marie takes a deep breath and coughs, and he rolls over on the carpet so that he’s near the open French doors and exhales smoke away from her.

“So, what are you all actually doing about it? Aside from arbitrarily refusing to use magic, I mean?”

“That’s a pretty radical act of protest, actually,” Asma interjects. “We’re saying we refuse to benefit from our magic until everyone can benefit. We’re trying to put everyone on a level playing field. My parents are so pissed off with me about it.”

Harry rolls his eyes, and catches himself just as he finds Marie doing the same thing.

“Yes, that’ll certainly show the Ministry. What next, a strongly-worded letter of protest to Kingsley?”

Marie laughs then, a bright merry sound that makes her look as though it’s been surprised out of her.

“That’s what I keep saying to them. It’s no use by itself—had you even heard about the Reformists, Harry?” And when he shakes his head, she continues, “That’s what I thought, the movement isn’t visible enough. The magic thing is incidental, it started when some of us downgraded our magical homes so that we could stay in our villages. And then it sort of… took off, I suppose? People started voluntarily refusing to use magic in solidarity with those of us who were being forced to give up our magic. But none of it’s any good unless it’s raising awareness.”

Draco breaks in (so he has been listening, Harry thinks). “The Pinkstones have been doing their best—surely even you’ve heard of them, Potter?” 

Harry has, though he only has the vaguest idea of their politics—something to do with wanting to find ways to pass magic along to Muggles? Completely ridiculous.

“They’re constantly campaigning—protests, hunger strikes, even Azkaban,” Malfoy continues. “But unfortunately they’ve been co-opted by a really radical wing, a bunch of nutters basically—oh don’t roll your eyes, Marie, you know they’re never going to get anywhere with all these mad plans to somehow transfer magic to Muggles. It’s a stupid, directionless concept and everyone knows it. And now they’ve been painted as a bunch of crackpot anti-magic campaigners by the press, so the real message is being lost. Magico-Muggle cooperation for the greater good, it’s pretty simple.”

“Marie was a founding member of the Pinkstones,” Billy says proudly. “She’s had to take a step back recently, but she came up with the mission statement and all the early campaigns. It’s how all of us met, on a Pinkstone march in York. And we moved to London together hoping to keep up the work, but then…”

“But then I got sick,” Marie interrupts. “But I’m doing well, and soon I’ll be back to organising higher-profile things. It would be nice if this lot would be a bit more proactive about things, but I suppose I’m the brains of the operation.”

“You know,” Harry says, blowing a smoke ring thoughtfully, “these things often work better when you work on taking them down from the inside. By taking yourself out of the magical world you’re sacrificing practicality to principle. And you’re isolating yourself from the people who can make the changes. You should be trying to get yourself further into the system, not moving outside of it.”

The conversation has become pretty civil, Harry thinks, but Marie seems to remember that she doesn’t approve of Harry, and gives him a glare. 

“Good point, Harry. I should just stroll on up to the Ministry and ask to speak to Shacklebolt, should I?”

And Malfoy gets it, Harry can tell by the sudden amused gleam in his eye as he says drily, “That’s true, Marie. If only we had someone from the Wizengamot on our side.”

Chapter Text

Harry’s in the City, and though he doesn’t often come all the way down here, he really loves it. There’s something about the soaring height of the buildings that makes him feel small and unimportant and free.

He’s meeting with his financial advisor, the one who has handled his estate ever since Gringotts shut down his account. It’s a Magico-Muggle financial institution, and Harry loves getting into the lift with all the Muggles and surreptitiously touching his wand to the Galleon symbol on the panel. 

Harry isn’t really bothered about his money, but after having had so little of his own for so long, just not having to think about money is a luxury in itself. His financial advisor—a very clever American witch called Elisabeth—insists on meeting him at least once a year. And he’s doing fine, just like he always is. Plenty of money—more than he could ever need—to be kept for Teddy and to be a nest egg for the day, sometime off in the misty future (that little beacon of hope that Harry has never mentioned to anyone) when maybe he’ll have a family of his own; someone to love, who’ll love him back, and might want a baby or two to love as well. 

When Harry comes all the way down from the 108th floor in the big glass elevator, it’s already mid-morning, and he has a strong fancy for a banana and Nutella muffin from his favourite nearby cafe. It’s already heaving in there, though he manages to snag one before they’re all gone, and then he takes his cake and his frothy coffee and wriggles through the crowds of City suits to see if he can find a seat. 

Through the sea of dark silk-wool mix, Harry sees a bright silver-gilt head, and for a moment he thinks it’s Malfoy. He’s just about to go up and say hello, but the man turns his head and Harry freezes at the sight of that profile. Because it’s Lucius Malfoy, sitting in the middle of Harry’s favourite Muggle cafe in EC 1. The hair is so like Malfoy’s—Lucius must have cut his shorter at some point, and even though Harry still hates him, he can appreciate the sheen of it—but the profile is wrong; his nose is shorter than Malfoy’s, less elegant, and his lips are thick and cruelly sensuous, nothing like Malfoy’s thin, crooked smile.

He’s sipping from an espresso cup, but he’s in full wizarding robes, high-necked and full-sleeved, trimmed in some sort of fur. He looks oddly uncomfortable in a way Harry has never seen him, and the City blokes with their expensive suits and takeaway cups and mobile phones are eyeing him with bemusement.

Harry wedges himself into a corner, well out of Lucius’ eyeline, but before he has time to do much more than wonder about what Lucius can be doing here, Malfoy slides into the seat opposite his father with a steaming cup of coffee.

It doesn’t exactly look like a merry father-son encounter. Malfoy doesn’t talk about his dad much, but Harry knows they haven’t seen each other in years. Harry hasn’t either, for that matter. Lucius keeps himself to himself these days, far away in Wiltshire, and he can stay there forever as far as Harry’s concerned.

They’re talking to each other now, low and intent and furious, Malfoy gesticulating across the table, drinks forgotten and cooling between them. Lucius seems to be shouting a bit—Harry can hear his familiar voice, still chilly and forbidding—and the people around them are starting to look at them warily. People don’t often make scenes in places like this.

Harry shouldn’t get involved—isn’t going to get involved—but then Lucius says something, and Malfoy recoils as though he’s been hit, face stricken, and Harry can’t bear it anymore. He stands, shoulders his way through the crowd. They don’t even notice him approaching, and he stands over them and says, “Hello, Malfoy.” They both look up.

“Not you,” Harry says to Lucius. “I was talking to him.” And he points at Malfoy, who still looks shocked, but is starting to regain his colour a bit. He gives Harry a meaningful glare, does a subtle but emphatic shooing motion at him under the table.

“Harry Potter,” Lucius says with hate in his voice. “Now I’m certain. This place really is hell.”

“I was just passing and noticed Malfoy here, and since I haven’t seen him at all, in any capacity, since our schooldays, I thought I’d come and catch up with him. That’s alright, isn’t it, Malfoy?”

Malfoy answers slowly, as though Harry is a babbling stranger who might turn dangerous at any moment. “That’s fine, Potter. Do you have time for a coffee? I’m positively itching to find out what you’ve been up to since we left school.”

Lucius stands, vibrating with fury, and sweeps his robes behind with a peremptory flick of a hand. Around him, the City traders start to titter. 

“Remember my words, Draco,” he says ominously. “Consider your honour as a Malfoy!” 

The laughter swells behind him as he storms out of the cafe, and someone mutters, “Posh twat” as he goes. Draco smiles at Harry, a lopsided tremulous thing, and says, “Well, that went well.” And Harry realises with a slow, distant sort of horror that Malfoy might be about to cry, and he has to get him out of there because if Malfoy cries in public Harry’s pretty sure he’ll never let Harry see him ever again.

“Right,” Harry says nonsensically, and he grabs Malfoy’s arm and pulls him out of his chair. “I know a place.”

It’s only a two minute walk to Postman’s Park, but Malfoy is quieter than Harry’s ever known him to be. They reach the park, possibly Harry’s favourite place in the whole city, just a little ring of benches and some flowers, and a small covered area with plaques all over the wall. It’s starting to spit rain, and Harry steers Malfoy under the loggia.

Malfoy still says nothing, just goes and leans against the wall, burying his face in his arm, shoulders quivering. He’s pressed up against the plaque for Alice Ayres, and his sad shaking body hides the words about her intrepid conduct and the cost of her own young life in 1885. Harry used to come here a lot, just after the war. He has most of the plaques memorised. Harry waits.

After a minute or two, Malfoy straightens. When he turns around, his eyes are dry, though his face is blotchy and exhausted.

“Thanks for bringing me to this jolly little place, Potter,” he says drily. “You really know how to cheer me up.”

“Well, you must be feeling a bit better if you can be a shit about it,” Harry says. “What were you doing with him?”

“Fucking things up, as usual,” Malfoy says bitterly. “I was so careful, keeping him away from me. Even when we moved to London, I thought I could avoid him. He texted me, if you can believe that. Must have found the phone I sent my mum and got it working. Said he had something important to tell me about her. I thought…” His throat works silently before he continues. “I thought maybe she was… during the war, the Crucios, you know?”

Harry does know, of course, and he doesn’t need to say anything to show he understands. 

“He wants me home. Or should I say, he threatened that if I don’t come home willingly, he’ll make me. He says it’s time I got married, told me he’ll disinherit me if I don’t. Like I give a fuck. I haven’t taken a penny from them since I left school.”

“But why does it matter, then?” Harry asks. He hates this, hates seeing Malfoy pale and a bit trembly, hates him looking like he cares so much about someone Harry hates.

“You wouldn’t understand,” Malfoy says, meanly. “He’s still my father. He told me he loved me, can you believe that? He never once said it to me before. Not that he doesn't love me, but… we just don’t talk about that stuff in my family. And he said it there, in a fucking cafe full of strangers.”

“The word love doesn’t mean anything if it’s not backed up by something, though.” Harry knows he sounds frustrated, hurt. “Yeah, yeah, I know I’m only a poor orphan who doesn’t know what it’s like to have a real dad, whatever. But I know what love feels like, and none of it involves breaking someone down like he does to you. Who are you supposed to marry?”

“A woman, alas. He hasn’t worked the details out yet. He said it can be an open marriage, as long as I keep it discreet. Plenty of gay Malfoys before, apparently. But all of them did their familial duty. No other children, you see. I’m the last in the line. And that’s a big thing, in my kind of family.” He leans back against the plaques (Herbert Maconoghu’s this time, Harry thinks) and closes his eyes tiredly. 

“What are you going to do?” Harry asks, though he’s not entirely sure he wants to know. The thought of Malfoy—funny, bright, sharp Malfoy—married to someone he doesn’t love, when he’s spent so long arranging his life just as he wants it. It’s intolerable.

“Maybe I’ll marry Asma,” Malfoy smiles with his eyes still shut, and laughs. It’s watery-sounding but genuine, Harry thinks. 

“Or me,” Harry says brightly. “That’d really give him something to disinherit you over.”

There’s a moment of shocked silence then, before the two of them start laughing properly, and when they finally stop Malfoy is looking bright-eyed and a bit pink, and altogether better than earlier.

“Seriously though, Potter, what is this place?” Malfoy asks, and he starts to walk, peering at the plaques. 

“It’s a sort of tribute to the bravery of ordinary people, I think,” Harry says. “I really love it here. I used to come here a lot. Afterwards, you know…”

Malfoy nods, traces a finger under the words on another plaque. “Heroic self-sacrifice. ‘Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.’ No wonder you feel at home here.”

Harry feels a bit stupid, then, because really that was why he’d done it, wasn’t it? So no one else he loved would have to die, so that all his friends could keep on living. But he wasn’t being heroic, he wasn’t. It was just that, when it all came down to it, it was the only thing to do.

Malfoy must know what he’s thinking, because he looks at Harry sharply and says, “You’re very fucking brave, you know. I know what you’re thinking. But you are. You’re just… you’re so good.”

And then he smiles, looking almost entirely like his old self again, and he doesn’t give Harry time to say anything at all in reply before he wheels around and starts for the gate. 

“Coming, Potter?” he asks. But Harry’s already following him.

They’re upstairs in Malfoy’s bedroom, and Harry is lying on Malfoy’s bed, and Malfoy is sitting on the windowsill smoking and talking intently about what ingredients he’d bring in a Classic Bag if he was to appear on Ready Steady Cook. Harry could listen to him forever.

“And obviously there would have to be a significant cheese component, though perhaps something like ricotta which then has potential for savoury and sweet. Oats, Potter! Oats are vastly underrated and, most importantly, good value. Every penny counts, you know. The real question would be whether I bring meat or not? I have to consider audience engagement of course—is a veggie course ever going to win their hearts? But I also need to keep an eye on the budget. The eternal conundrum.”

“And Phil Vickery would do that thing where he looks really doubtful as he takes every ingredient out, but you just know he’s actually loving the potential of every horrifying flavour combination that you’ve forced him into,” Harry says delightedly. He thinks Malfoy should go on the telly, actually. His hair would shine so prettily under the studio lights, and he’s so funny. “And Ainsley would definitely approve of the cheese.”

They both lapse into silent contemplation at the idea of Ainsley Harriott’s good opinion. 

That’s when they hear the noise. 

At first Harry thinks it must be the radio, or maybe an animal outside, but then it keeps going, a high agonised sound, and there’s something so desperately human in it that Harry knows there’s something horribly wrong. And then he and Draco look at each other and make a dash for the door, thumping into each other as they round the corner into the landing, and they follow that awful noise until they get to Marie’s door.

She’s made it to the bed, but she’s barely staying upright and her whole face is contorted. Harry doesn’t think he’s ever seen her without a hat on before, but in the afternoon sun her bare shaved head has a dense velvety gleam. 

She must have come home quietly, because she was out when Harry arrived, though he doesn’t know where. Though Malfoy knows, because he growls, “They let you home like this?”

“Draco, it hurts.”

He drops to his knees beside the bed, and as Harry watches with his heart hammering at his breastbone, folds her into him like it’s the easiest thing in the world. 

“I know, darling. Can you tell me where?” And swiftly, over his shoulder to Harry, “Potter, could you fetch the big bowl from the utility room, please? And then grab a clean flannel from the bathroom and soak it in cool water?”

Harry goes, and as he does he sees Draco lifting Marie’s arms like she’s a child, and gently pulling her top over her head. She’s red and raw from her throat all the way down the bumpy ridges of her breastbone to her vest.

Harry makes it back with the bowl before she starts vomiting, though only just. Malfoy gets the bowl to her in time, and he holds it under her gasping wet mouth until the waves pass, then wipes her face for her.

Harry goes out quietly, and gets a jug full of fresh water, a glass, and another stack of damp flannels. When he brings them upstairs, Marie is sitting up looking a little less green, and she takes one of the fresh flannels and presses it to the mottled skin of her chest with a hiss of relief.

“They wanted me to stay in,” she says to Malfoy, like Harry isn’t even in the room. “I insisted on coming home, you know I hate that place. Full of people dying.”

“You’re dying, you dick,” Malfoy says affectionately, and then they both laugh and laugh, though Marie has to break off with a cough and a wince.

Harry is hovering—and he’s aware he’s hovering—but he can’t seem to tear himself away. Marie rolls her eyes at him, though she does also give him a small smile with it.

“Cancer,” she says. “Didn’t you guess? Breast. Stage four, unfortunately. So they say it’s only a matter of time, but it hasn’t spread to my bones yet, which is a good thing. Radiotherapy absolutely fucks my skin up though.” She cringes as she dabs the flannel over the hot flesh.

“I’ve just been at the Homerton for combined treatments. It’s got a better outcome for my type of cancer, but the chemo makes me puke and the radiation burns me. It’s a winning combo.”

Harry doesn’t know what to say, or even how he’s going to say anything at all, because he feels like he’s been punched in the stomach.

“Don’t freak out, Harry, please,” she says tiredly. “It is what it is. And we don’t even like each other.”

That snaps him out of it, at least.

“I don’t like you. But that doesn’t mean I’m happy you’re dying. And no, I didn’t guess. I thought you just happened to have a vast collection of hats.” They laugh a bit at that, and Harry likes it, likes seeing the lines of tension on their faces lift a little bit. 

“I brought water,” he says. “And you probably don’t want a, what was it again, fence-sitting fascist mouthpiece watching you puke your guts up all afternoon, so I’ll wait outside. But if you need anything, just shout.”

He sits against the wall of the landing for the afternoon, watching the sun slide into the haze of a city evening. He can hear Marie being sick again, and Malfoy’s low soothing murmur, and then Malfoy turns some music on, so low Harry can only feel the lazy thud of the bass through the wall.

At some point, Asma comes home and when she sees him sitting outside Marie’s door, her face crumples. 

“She told you?” It’s a whisper.

Harry nods.

“Was it bad?”

“She’s okay now, I think. Malfoy’s in there with her. I just wanted to wait here. In case they need anything.”

She nods, slides down the wall until she’s sitting next to him.

“Good idea. Maybe I’ll wait here too. In case they need anything.”

It’s fully night before Malfoy emerges, but his smile when he sees them both there makes it worth the wait. And Marie manages to get some sleep.

It’s a bit worrying, being told to turn up in sportswear for their next meeting. Harry hasn’t done anything vaguely sporty in years. He still flies, not as often as he’d like to, but often enough that he keeps his seat in. And he tries to go for a run every few days, but that just involves wearing old jogging bottoms and whatever t-shirt is handy, and running until he gets a bit tired and then running home again. What does Malfoy mean by sportswear, Harry wonders. Should he be in lycra? Should things be… tighter? Shorter? And more to the point, what could they be doing that involves needing special clothes in the first place?

They meet outside an old Victorian terrace quite near to Malfoy’s house, and Harry is relieved to see that Malfoy looks relatively normal. Though he is wearing shorts, sort of silky ones in an eye-catching shade of royal blue, he doesn’t bat an eyelid at Harry’s altogether more restrained grey trackie bottoms.

“You asked me what I like to do,” Malfoy says, and then gestures impatiently at Harry’s look of incomprehension. “When we first met again, you asked me what I like to do in the Muggle world. This is one of the things I like to do.” And he ushers Harry up a steep stairs.

Harry can smell it before they get in the double door at that top—that particular whiff of bodies and warm rubber and hard work—and he’s expecting a gym. And it is, sort of. In the centre of the high-ceilinged room is a boxing ring, and all around the room are punching bags and weights and mirrors. 

“Boxing,” Harry says flatly. “You go boxing.” 

“You sound so fascinated,” Malfoy says absent-mindedly. “Come on, let’s say hello to Billy. This is his place.” And there’s Billy, sitting behind a desk that can barely contain his long legs, wearing a pair of glasses and peering at a computer screen. 

“Hi Draco,” he says happily, and then, “Potter,” in a more frosty tone. “Draco, do you have time for a quick sparring match later, or are you just here to train?”

“Just training for me today I think. Have to show Potter around. And speaking of which, don’t you have something you want to say to Potter?”

“He does?” Harry says sceptically.

“I do,” Billy says in a doomy tone. “We were wondering if you’d like to join us for dinner at the house this evening. We were going to have drinks afterwards too if you fancy it. There,” he looks beseechingly at Malfoy. “Now are you happy? We’re all being very friendly.”

Malfoy looks satisfied. “Very nice, I’m sure. I doubt Potter would even dream of refusing such a kind invitation. Potter?”

If this is Malfoy’s way of trying to get them all to be nice to each other, it has a certain charm, Harry thinks, not least because Malfoy looks so very smug. 

“I’d be delighted to join you,” he says resignedly. “Shall I bring anything?” 

“Oh, just yourself,” Billy says, looking pained. “And maybe some wine? Lots and lots of wine?”

Harry thinks there should probably be a better reward for sweating through a training session with Malfoy than an awkward dinner with people who dislike him so intensely. Because Malfoy looks like he shouldn’t be strong—he’s a bit willowy, really, and he has that sort of louche elegance that Harry associates with sitting around a lot and looking bored with a cigarette in his hand. Which, to be fair, Malfoy also does quite a bit of. 

But in his shorts, and a sort of sleeveless singlet thing which is apparently the uniform of the club, Harry can see how lean Malfoy is, how fast and strong his reactions are, how hard he keeps working, even when he’s sweating and tired-looking. Harry can barely keep up.

But when they’re finished, they shower in the cold changing room, and Harry thanks his lucky stars that he thought to bring a change of clothes. And they do stop off for lots and lots of wine, and they walk back to Malfoy’s house together for a meal that turns out to be not too bad at all.

They stay up so late that when Harry wakes the next morning and opens his eyes he feels as though he’s still hanging suspended in sleep. He’s on their couch, face burrowed into the plump padded arm with his feet sticking out over the other end. At some point in the night, someone has tucked a blanket around him. 

Malfoy is leaning over the back of the couch—over Harry—and he has his hand on Harry’s wrist. It’s dark enough in the room that Harry has to blink Malfoy into his line of vision until he’s more than just a denser shadow against the gloom. 

“Shhh,” Malfoy whispers into his ear, more breath than sound, then tugs at his wrist so Harry sits up. He shivers, pulls on his discarded jumper, and heads to the downstairs loo for a piss and tooth brushing and a quick standing wash. He takes a brief moment to mourn for a Freshening Charm.

At the front door, Malfoy pulls coats from the hallstand and bundles them both up before they step out into the first gasp of Sunday morning chill. Harry wonders, not for the first time, what the fuck they’re doing. They start to walk.

“I always forget how fucking cold May can be,” Malfoy whispers, hands cupped over his mouth like he’s telling them a secret. He breathes out, his exhalation a writhing stream of warm air.

“Will there even be coffee?” Harry asks pathetically. He doesn’t feel pathetic, though. He feels exhilarated, not rested enough to be hungover yet and so wired with adrenaline he doesn’t care how tired he is. “Where are you taking me at this hour on a Sunday?”

Malfoy slides a disapproving glance at him.

“It’s nine in the morning, Potter. Hardly the crack of dawn. This is what I do on Sundays. So buck up, would you? We’re going to miss the bus.”

So this is one of Malfoy’s secret Sunday trips, Harry thinks. 

He hurries to keep up, and they’re both quiet, but the whole way to the bus Harry thinks about how Malfoy had said that he didn’t have to tell Harry everything, and how he was keeping some secrets for himself. But now he’s just offering this one to Harry like it’s an ordinary day, like there’s nothing special about this at all. He smiles to himself, doesn’t even care when Malfoy catches him, and thinks about being the one to get to know this thing that Malfoy's never shown anyone else, whatever it is.

They get the front seat at the top of the 341, of course, because it’s that kind of morning, and they don’t talk much. Malfoy stretches his long legs into the aisle, and they undo their coats, and the inside of the bus is muggy and damp with condensation. Malfoy pulls out his iPod and hands Harry one of the earbuds. The sound is tinny and unbalanced, and sometimes Harry can hardly hear the music over the growl of the bus, but he closes his eyes and just listens to one of Malfoy’s interminable, incoherent playlists. 

Every rock of the bus lulls him further into an easy sort of peace, the rhythm of the road and Malfoy warm and solid at his side. And for the whole journey the music plays on, and it’s you can feel it all over, and they didn’t know he was panoramic, and though we are divided by lines of longitude, and has the Perrier gone straight to my head, and it’s not the way the springtime makes you feel, and will you stay in our lovers’ story, and Harry shuts his eyes and listens, and hopes they never get to wherever they’re going. 

When they get out at the Law Courts Harry is still bemused. Is this some work thing of Malfoy’s? They’ve already gone poking around the Law Courts before, though, trying door handles and meandering around the statue hall.

But Malfoy pulls him across the road, muttering, “We’ll just make it, come on,” and then a passing black cab blares its horn at them and drowns out Harry’s “You must be joking” when he sees the spire looming overhead as Malfoy pulls him through an arched doorway and into a church.

Harry hasn’t been inside a church since the Dursleys finally decided he was old enough to stay at home alone without injuring himself or burning the house down, so since he was about seven. He remembers St Mary’s, though, red brick the colour of dried blood, and Gothic windows, and Petunia’s pinches sharp and vicious every time he shifted in his seat. Against his will, he trembles.

Malfoy looks back at him briefly, from where he’s silhouetted against the inner doors. There’s the low hum of organ bellows and then the distant sound of music, and Malfoy reaches back and takes Harry by the wrist. “This is where I come on a Sunday,” he says. “You can meet me after, if you’d prefer. But I’d like you to come in.”

And just like that, it’s okay (or at least, okay enough), and they walk through the doors and all Harry can see are flags everywhere and the honeyed glow of wood panelling that can only come from decades of careful polishing, and above them a white and gold dome that catches the climbing sun and cups it like treasure.

A woman standing at a table just inside smiles at them, gives Malfoy a stern look and then a kiss, and passes them a green book and some sheaves of paper. All around them, the air is warm with the sound of the organ. Harry can feel it inside his skin.

They slip into an empty pew, near enough to the back that Harry can still feel the creep of cool air from the outside. Malfoy peers up at a board printed with numbers and starts leafing through the green book, and then the organ music changes to something more deliberate, and everyone stands, Harry scrambling to follow.

Malfoy holds the book open in front of them so they can both follow it, and Harry sees that it’s a hymnal—not that he would ever have been allowed to open his mouth in church with Petunia and Vernon. Today, the church isn’t full—not even half—but the collective inbreath before everyone starts to sing vibrates in the air. And Harry doesn’t know the hymn of course, but Malfoy does. Harry shouldn’t be surprised to hear Malfoy singing—he loves music, is always sliding around the kitchen humming along with the radio, and his iPod is like an appendage, but he doesn’t often sing out loud—not where anyone can hear him, anyway.

Harry doesn’t believe in a god—he just can’t, not after everything he’s seen. And he’s rather convinced that a lot of what Muggles think of as miracles were probably just wizarding people fucking with them. But he’s never been in a church that looks like this, with a dome stretching in a pretty arc above them, like a snow globe or a Faberge egg, and a rainbow flag hanging alongside all the military flags on the walls, and Malfoy beside him singing a hymn in a low, clear, tuneful voice. It’s so lovely, and so comforting, and after the first verse he’s confident enough to try joining in quietly with the hymn.

There’s something about the words of this one that makes him think of the things he’s been missing in his life, something sharp and wistful in the pit of his stomach when he sings about still dews of quietness, and the words and works that drown; and he knows it’s a bit cheap, a bit trite, this melancholic tug at the heartstrings. But he can’t help feeling it, right down in that same sad, private part of his heart that he never talks about to anyone, the bit that makes everything feel hard. Because there’s something beautiful in the simplicity of what the hymn is offering. What a luxury it would be, he thinks, to get to set all his worries at the feet of some all-powerful deity. To feel like there’s a wider plan, and it doesn’t involve him being the one who had to save the world that time. 

He gets quiet again towards the end, when the sound of the organ swells and dips around them and Malfoy’s voice is close to his ear, singing about breathing through the heats of desire, like that’s a totally normal thing to think about in church. And Harry does breathe it in—the quaver of the climbing notes, the sweet depth of Malfoy’s singing, the spin and dance of dust motes through the fingers of sunlight. He closes his eyes. “Speak through the earthquake, wind, and fire,” Malfoy croons, “O still small voice of calm.” 

And Harry thinks about that, about how he’d looked for peace for so long, and now he’s here thinking about God with the intimacy of Draco Malfoy’s unselfconscious singing in his ear, after they’ve worked so hard to learn to be kind to each other. And maybe that’s what peace is. Something small, and quiet, and easy once earned. Maybe it isn’t making things perfect, like Harry had always thought that they should be once his fight against Voldemort was finally over. Maybe just being able to recognise how to dig into these little pockets of peace is enough.

O still small voice of calm, indeed. It's a lot to think about for a Sunday morning. Bloody Malfoy and his bloody church.

There’s a handsome, serious young vicar, and everyone in the church shakes hands for the sign of peace bit, and at the end the vicar invites them all to adjourn to the back of the church for further fellowship. Harry realises that Draco is actually expecting them to go. And it’s one thing to find a few hymns moving, but it’s quite another thing to have to socialise with strangers, and religious ones at that. But Draco tells him that further fellowship basically just means sherry and biscuits (posh biscuits). And all the strangers are so nice, and so happy to meet Harry, that after a Duchy stem ginger biscuit and two proper M&S chocolate rounds, he’s actually starting to enjoy himself.

Everyone knows Draco, it seems. The woman who collects the hymnals—Sylvia—looks like a sweet old woman but flicks him around the ear and tells him that he’s missed the last two services. Malfoy starts to stack the hymnals for her and very slyly blames Harry, telling her that he’s a bad influence and keeps Malfoy up too late on Saturday nights. And then Harry has to counter her delighted grin and tell her that, no, actually, it's not like that, and she clearly doesn't believe him, and Malfoy doesn't help in least because he's too busy laughing at Harry.

Then the vicar comes over to say hello. Malfoy gets a bit shy and flustered, like Harry hasn’t ever seen him, and forgets entirely to introduce Harry, so the vicar has to hold his hand out and say, “Hello, I’m Andrew. And you are?” Harry shakes his hand, and says something about his church being lovely (and refrains from the resounding what the fuck that threatens to follow, because he has just this second realised that he has no idea how to talk to vicars). He wonders if all vicars are this handsome, and if it’s some kind of god-given perk of the job. 

The vicar is very serious and very kind, and he talks to Harry gently about the architectural features of the church despite the fact that Harry can’t really answer him for fear of showering him in crumbs from a large mouthful of chocolate round number three. He’s really very nice, and he doesn’t seem at all put out by the fact that Harry swigs an entire glass of sherry in one while trying to wash the biscuit down, or that he catches Harry surreptitiously trying to lick melted chocolate off his fingers when he’s supposed to be admiring the Welsh slate floor of the apse. 

Once Harry is feeling sufficiently welcomed, the vicar steers him back to Malfoy. It’s all very deftly done, and Harry is left feeling a touch dazed by all the attention, and more than a bit in love with Reverend Andrew. He’s relieved to see by Malfoy's starry-eyed smile that he’s not the only one, which proves it must be some bizarre authority figure kink. It’s probably the cassock. Lots of buttons, and all that. 

“Draco, so lovely to have you back with us. I wondered if you have a moment to talk about the parish fete? Marvellous, well…” and then Harry has the gleeful pleasure of listening to Malfoy talking earnestly about tea urns and white elephant stalls for ten minutes, and actually blushing when the vicar places a hand on his shoulder as he says goodbye.

They stand in silence together and watch the vicar work his way through the crowd. 

“Did I just volunteer to run the handmade craft stall at the parish fete?” Malfoy says wonderingly. “How did he manage to get me to do that?”

“You fancy the vicar,” Harry tells him. 

“I most certainly do not fancy the vicar. I mean, I don’t fancy fancy him. But everyone fancies the vicar a bit. Anyway, you fancy the vicar too!” 

From across the church floor, the vicar looks over at them and waves. They both wave back enthusiastically. Harry drops the end of his biscuit. 

“Well, that was smooth, Potter.”

“That’s just what I’m like when I fancy someone. Smooth is my middle name.”

“I knew it! You were altogether too interested in that Welsh slate. At least you admit it, I suppose.”

Sylvia appears with three fresh sherries and an unopened packet of Leibniz. “Only the duds left, I’m afraid. Now, who fancies the vicar?”

It’s such a warm day that they can allow the stalls to spill out into the square in front of the church, and someone’s hung bunting between the sparse-leafed city trees, and with the red-and-white checked tablecloths and the smell of vanilla and hot sugar from the cake stall, there’s a festive buzz of excitement.

“Remind me again why I’m helping out at a church fete?” Harry asks Malfoy plaintively, as they heave a giant tea urn out into the courtyard. “I’m an atheist! I thought that would automatically disqualify me from this sort of thing.”

“You’re helping out because I’ll be fucked if I’m doing this by myself,” Malfoy grins, then mouths a sorry at Andrew the vicar, who’s raising an eyebrow at him from the church doors. “Besides,” his voice drops to a whisper, “it’s not as if I believe in any god either. Fucking hell, Potter, you didn’t think I had fallen for all of that stuff?”

Harry drops his side of the urn onto a table with a clatter. “But, why? Why would you bother?”

Malfoy swears under his breath as he tries to get his side of the urn down without mashing his fingers. “Well, why have you been coming along to services with me for the last couple of months?” he asks in a reasonable tone. Harry can’t exactly tell him that it’s mostly because he likes getting to be with Malfoy, and having a secret that they both share.

Malfoy sighs. “I started going to Evensong at York Minster when we lived there. It started because I loved the music, but when you keep going to these things you get to know people eventually. And I was lonely, for ages. It was hard, trying to make new friends, and work out what I was going to do, and… and to work through all the things I did at school, you know?” He flushes. 

“Eventually, going to church started to feel soothing, like I was part of something bigger. And even after I met Marie and that lot, and had proper friends, I kept going. I just… like feeling a bit insignificant in the greater scheme of things, does that make sense? My friends don’t approve of organised religion, which is why I trek all the way into this church instead of going to our local one. I’d get shit for being a hypocrite if they knew I was attending services. And I suppose I am, really. But just because I don’t believe in Heaven or Hell or everlasting life, doesn’t mean that I can’t be a... a useful part of the community, right?”

“Right,” Harry agrees, and it’s true of course. He’s seen how fond people are of Malfoy here, when he chats to them as he passes the sherry around, or gossips with Sylvia, or helps Andrew rearrange the pews for Sunday school shows. “They’re lucky to have you. Even if you are a godless heathen.”

“Thanks, Potter. Now go and set up the folding chairs, or I’ll tell Andrew that you’ve been thinking about joining the choir.”

Harry ends up running the raffle with Sylvia, though really it looks more like a bar with the amount of bottles people have donated as prizes. 

“Harry, darling, will you go and ask Andrew for another book of tickets, please? Booze is always a good motivator when it comes to selling raffle tickets, I find,” Sylvia tells him in a satisfied tone. “He’s just inside, I think.”

When Harry steps into the church, he has to blink until his eyes adjust. There are a few people milling around, and at first he thinks Andrew isn’t in there, but then he catches sight of him halfway up the church, leaning against one of the big wooden pillars. Harry starts towards him, but then he sees that Malfoy’s there too, half-hidden by the pillar, with Andrew standing far too close to him. As Harry watches, Andrew places a hand on Malfoy’s arm, and it should be nothing at all, just a polite touch, but all of a sudden Harry sees it, sees that there’s something there, with all the clarity of a bell chiming. 

Malfoy smiles at whatever Andrew is saying, and it’s so uncomplicated and simple and open that Harry stops and turns away. He feels like he’d be interrupting something, though he’s not entirely sure what. 

“Sorry,” he says to Sylvia, feeling foolish all of a sudden. “Andrew was busy with Malfoy. I’ll go back in a minute.”

“Ah, those two,” Sylvia sighs. “We’re all wondering when Draco will give poor Andrew a chance. He’s a lovely boy, Draco, but he doesn’t know a good thing when he sees it.”

“So Malfoy doesn’t fancy Andrew, then?” Harry asks, not entirely sure why he cares, but feeling a bit discomfited by the whole thing anyway. 

“Well, he mustn't, I suppose,” Sylvia says disapprovingly. “Everyone knows that Andrew’s half-cracked over Draco. When we met you, we thought it might be because Draco had his eyes elsewhere, but you two insist that you’re just friends—” 

“We are just friends,” Harry says mutinously.

“Well, then,” Sylvia says. “I’m telling you, he could do worse than Andrew. A fine catch, that one.”

Harry nods, but this time when he goes in to get the raffle book, he smilingly interrupts Malfoy and Andrew’s chat, and doesn’t feel in the least bit guilty about it.

It’s just after sunset when the wyvern comes. 

The day has been a long one, slow and elastic with heat. Malfoy’s in the kitchen getting more drinks, and Harry is limp and sweaty from an excess of sun. He strips his t-shirt off to catch the lick of night air, and lies flat on his back under the trampoline in Draco’s back garden, where the grass is slick and cool under his bare skin. 

The summer moon is a distant, watchful eye, and the stars are out, and Malfoy’s music is playing—something slow and old that’s hardly a song at all (is this what you wanted, to live in a house that is haunted by the ghost of you and me). Harry doesn’t even notice the wingbeats at first, though the sound teases something at the edge of his memory. As he lies in the shadows he finds himself thinking of leaving Gringotts in a rush of broken glass and terror, hands scrabbling over the spiny ridges of the dragon’s back while the wind of each wingstroke roared around them.

It’s the movement in the sky that finally alerts him, that slow, intent trajectory of a hunting creature. The wyvern is huge, pale and opaque like milk or moonstone or a blinded eye. It moves with menace.

Harry skids in through the kitchen door as Malfoy is rummaging for a bottle opener, singing along with the music under his breath. When he sees Harry, he goes pink in a sudden flush, fumbles with the bottles.

“Put a top on, Potter, for Christ’s sake.” But then, once he raises his eyes from Harry’s bare torso and looks at his face, “Hang on, what’s wrong?”

“There’s a dragon. Flying around. In the sky? Like, a properly massive, great big fuck-off dragon. A white one. Is that… something that happens?”

“Fuck it. Fuck, fuck, fuck.” Malfoy swears a lot, but this is a bit much, even for him. He looks pale and queasy under the strip light. “Right, we need to draw it away from here before the others notice it.”

“Well, I think people have probably already noticed the massive glowing mythical creature in the sky, Malfoy?”

“Not people in general, Potter, just my friends. The Muggles aren’t going to notice anything. The Wiltshire Wyvern is basically made of ancient magic, no Muggle is going to be able to see past its natural wards. But if Marie happens to look out her window and sees that thing, she’ll murder me and then probably you as well, just to cheer herself up about me being dead. So it’s in your best interest to help.” He chucks a hoodie at Harry. “But please put some fucking clothes on first.”

Harry grumbles but does what he’s told.

“Why would Marie blame us, though? It’s not our fault there’s a massive dragon flying around Stoke Newington.”

“It’s a wyvern, Potter—the Wiltshire Wyvern? Does the name give you a clue? It’s my prick of a dad. I knew he wouldn't just let me be. He’s trying to find out where I live, probably so he can stage some sort of magical intervention and kidnap me back to the Manor. The wyvern is a Malfoy family familiar, so he’s sent it to track me down. It’ll be able to sense me when it gets close enough, if it hasn’t already.”

Harry remembers the desperate, hungry look on Lucius’ face in the cafe, and he knows that Malfoy is right, that Lucius would probably do anything to get Malfoy back. But that would be terrible. Malfoy would be miserable there, in the Manor, off in the middle of nowhere, with no takeaways and no Tube and no CD player. No weekend pain au chocolat from the Spence. No early morning bus rides to get the best spot in the library on uni days. And no Harry, not that Malfoy would care much about that, but Harry’s used to having him around now, used to having someone to do things with, and things to look forward to. He doesn’t want Malfoy to be taken away from him. A vague chill of horror washes over Harry at the very idea, and a thought forms, slowly but with perfect clarity. He doesn’t, he realises, ever want things to go back to the way they were before Malfoy. After getting to feel this sense of fullness, this richness, what would he do without it?

Shit, he thinks. Shit shit shit. When did that happen, that he started to depend on Malfoy, started to have these uncomplicated, easy feelings of fondness, and respect, and some weird kind of affection for him? Things have always been complicated between Malfoy and him. He doesn’t quite know what to do about finding this simple sort of happiness in another person. He realises that Malfoy is looking at him impatiently, and wonders if his internal crisis is showing.

“Right. Dragon. I mean, wyvern,” he says briskly. Distraction techniques tend to work.

Malfoy breathes out, hard. “Okay,” he says quietly. “We can do this. Only, how the fuck are we supposed to draw the wyvern away without him noticing me and bringing my father straight here?”

He flicks off the kitchen light, goes to the window. His face is troubled where it’s uptilted in the spill of moonlight, the barest tremble of strain in the lines of his mouth. Harry wants to take it all away for him. Keep him safe. 

And that’s all it takes—the memory of Fand hugging him goodbye, whispering keep him safe in Harry’s ear, and Mac telling Malfoy to mind himself, and Malfoy laughing like nothing could ever touch him. The shell, Harry thinks. He has it, somewhere in his bag under the spare underwear and toothbrush and clean t-shirt that he brings with him now in case he ends up on Malfoy’s couch again, and he digs the rucksack out from under the table and rummages through it.

There it is, the satin sheen of it cool under his fingers. It’s just an ordinary shell, a reddish brown whelk that sits like a stone in the palm of Harry’s hand. It doesn’t look magical at all.

“Right,” Malfoy says from the window. “It’s circling, but it’s not coming closer. That’s good. I just need a bit more time.” His voice is thin with frustration. “I just need to think about what to do.”

Harry doesn’t have to think, though. He has no compunction about using magic, he’s happy to use anything he can to ease that furrow of strain between Malfoy’s expressive eyebrows. Let Malfoy think about what to do for as long as he wants, Harry is going in hard on this one with everything he has in his arsenal. Lucius doesn’t get to ruin Malfoy’s life again, not if Harry can stop him. 

He’s not entirely sure the shell is going to do much of anything, but it’s worth a shot. Feeling a bit foolish, Harry raises the shell to his mouth, whispers into the delicate coiled chamber of it the spell Mac had taught him.

“Some forgotten part.”

Malfoy looks back at him sharply, and Harry tries to look innocent for a long, nerve-wracking moment before Malfoy tells him, narrow-eyed, that he’s going for a piss and then they’re sorting this out. The shell trembles in Harry’s palm as Malfoy leaves the room; gradually, Harry starts to notice the distant whisper of the sea; the low, soothing wash of water on stones; the dull roar of a breaking wave. The shell spits out a merry little spritz of spray; Harry can feel the salt trail of it drying tacky on his palm.

Slowly, a thread of mist starts to unfurl from the shell. It’s a cold, creeping thing, and it rolls through the room, filling it, spreading like smoke away and outwards. Harry follows it out into the garden, feels its chill kiss on his skin, watches as it coils and expands until the house is wreathed in it. Then Harry feels the shell crack in his palm; as he watches, it crumbles into fine sand and is borne away on a gust of sea air.

Malfoy steps out through the back door, looking perplexed. The mist eddies and swirls around him, and he shivers, wraps his arms tight across his chest. Above them, barely visible through the haze, the wyvern hovers; Harry puts a finger to his lips and he and Malfoy watch as it beats its great wings in a rush and then turns to leave, moving like a silent shadow against the sky as it disappears into the distance.

“It worked!” Harry whispers delightedly, and Malfoy closes his eyes as if he’s in some sort of pain, and breathes in a great shuddering breath, and asks, “What did you do, Potter?”

And Harry’s about to explain, to show Malfoy that it was just a small simple ancient thing, a spell to protect something precious—because surely even Malfoy can see that someone had to do something—but then an upstairs window is shoved open, and Malfoy says “fuck” very quietly, and Marie’s voice is sharp and angry when she says they need to talk.

Chapter Text

The whole house is gathered in the sitting room—the whole house, and Harry—and everyone is pissed off.

Asma can’t seem to get over the fact that Malfoy saw Lucius. She keeps repeating, “But why would you meet your dad?” until Malfoy gets cross and tells her that Lucius may be an absolute dick, but he’s still his father, and then she gets all hard-eyed and quiet and dangerous-looking and says, “That’s not the point.”

Marie can’t seem to get over the fact that Harry used magic in their house. She ignores Harry completely once he explains what he did, and instead talks to Malfoy about trust, and respect, and how she knew this would happen, and how he’d promised her that Harry understood their rules. Malfoy listens with narrowed eyes, and doesn’t say a single word, and Harry feels worse and worse the more Marie goes on and on.

"I was only trying to help!" he says crossly. "Do you want him taking Malfoy away?"

Everyone looks at him in silence, and he feels wretched and humiliated and so alone.

"I think you should leave," Marie says, and Harry isn't going to, but then he looks at Malfoy and Malfoy nods grimly. 

So Harry does. He doesn't hear from Malfoy for over a week.

Harry takes Fand and Mac out for dinner to thank them for their help with the wyvern, because after all, it wasn’t their fault that Malfoy and his stupid housemates are ungrateful arseholes who don’t recognise the beauty of a magical sea mist when they see it.

Mac claps his hands gleefully as Harry recounts the story of the mist to them, smiling despite himself at Mac’s delight.

“So it covered the whole house?” he asks incredulously. “That’s amazing! How long did it take?”

“About five minutes, start to finish,” Harry tells him. “Once I spoke the incantation, it started to trickle out of the shell, but it was so fast. I could never have imagined it if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes. It was right up over the roof.”

“Sorry, Harry,” Fand says indulgently. “He’s just excited because he’s never cast the mist remotely before.” She kisses Mac across the table. “We weren’t even sure it would work, were we, sweetheart?”

“We had high hopes, Fand, my love! And it did work!” Mac raises his arms above his head in triumph, and about four different people at nearby tables stop with forks halfway to their mouths at the unbridled display of sea-god biceps. “Though really, we have to give credit to Harry. He was the one who summoned the mist, after all. It couldn’t have worked so well without his energy in the spell. You must have really put your back into it, Harry.”

“Well,” Harry says dismally, “I just didn’t want anything to happen to Malfoy, you know. His dad is such a prick to him. And you hadn’t actually mentioned there would be a vast, enchanted sea mist, you know. I got in hot water with him over it.” Harry’s a bit horrified to feel his throat tighten. “You know what he’s like about magic.”

Mac looks stern. “That’s an ancient protection spell, Harry. No one has seen that mist since the days before the Tuatha De Danann went underground. You couldn’t hope to conjure stronger protection with that little stick of yours. His father won’t ever find his house now the mist has touched it. But you shouldn’t have called on it if you weren’t willing to invoke the protection of the sea.”

“No, no,” Harry hastens to soothe, wondering all the while why is my life so weird. “It was a brilliant mist. Delighted to have the protection of the sea. Much appreciated. And you should have seen how it befuddled the wyvern—sent it right back where it came from!”

And it’s true—because he’d do it again, if he had to. He’d do anything to keep Malfoy safe from Lucius.

Mac laughs, the tension breaking like the dash of a wave on shingle, and then their main course arrives and Harry gets to tuck into his scallops and listen to some of Mac’s stories, and through it all he has the small voice in the back of his mind telling him that he did the right thing.

Malfoy keeps ignoring his texts. 

It’s not unexpected. Harry knows what loyalty means to Malfoy. But it’s frustrating, knowing how wrong Malfoy is to be cross, and how much Harry was trying to help. And what else was he supposed to do? He knows Lucius Malfoy, knows what he’s capable of. So if Malfoy never speaks to him again, it was worth it to make sure that Malfoy can feel safe in his own home. Harry just wishes he could be sure.

The idea comes to him quickly, all at once, over lunch one day, when he’s eating a cheese sandwich and staring at his phone through the Magic-Muffling bubble. Malfoy still hasn’t texted. 

Harry’s not sure this will work, and maybe Malfoy will never forgive him for it. But Malfoy doesn’t seem to be forgiving him anyway, and anyway it’s mostly the magic that Malfoy was cross about. Surely a little visit to a family friend can’t be anything to complain about?

So Harry finishes his sandwich, goes upstairs to get changed, and Floos through to the Manor to see Lucius.

He’s wearing his Order of Merlin robes—Lucius would probably say it’s horribly gauche of him, but Lucius is always going to look down on Harry, so he figures he might as well use every weapon he has. Because if there’s one thing Lucius understands, it’s power. Harry just needs to remind him who holds the power here.

Narcissa is out, as Harry had known she would be, and Harry wanders through the Manor until he finds Lucius in the library. Lucius doesn’t even pretend to be surprised—Harry had felt the Manor wards wavering around him, had known that Lucius must have allowed him entry.

Lucius doesn’t get up, but he does extend a lazy hand to Harry in invitation, and Harry takes it. There’s a horrible moment when he thinks they’re just going to have to stay there all day, glaring at each other and trying to crush the other’s hand, but then Lucius releases him and gives him a brittle smile.

“A home visit, Potter? To what do I owe the pleasure? Please, sit.”

Harry figures they’re not exactly going to end up exchanging reminiscences over a glass of port, so he gets straight to the point.

“It’s about Mal— Draco.”

Lucius does look a bit surprised at that, in fact. Well, one of his dark eyebrows twitches, which Harry thinks is probably the same thing.

“He told me what you want from him, and I’ve come to tell you that you should forget about it. He doesn’t want to come back to the Manor. I don’t know what you’re plotting—” Lucius grants him a tiny smile at that “—but you should stop. Leave him alone.”

Lucius’ eyes narrow. “You seem very invested in my son, considering that you didn’t have the most amicable relationship at school, and you haven’t seen him since then. You must have had quite the catch up in the cafe that time, to be so concerned about him.”

“We’re friends,” Harry says. “We’ve been friends for ages. I was there when you sent that fucking dragon after him.” (“Wyvern,” Lucius mutters). “He’s happy. You need to leave him alone.”

“And what,” Lucius says deliberately, consideringly, “are you offering me in return for my… compliance? What bargain do you seek to make? I presume you have some sort of ghastly trade-off in mind to ensure my son’s future… happiness. Unfortunately for you, I’m not interested in anything you have to offer. My son is the sole heir to the Malfoy name. He will perform his duties.”

Harry smiles.

“Ah, you see, that’s where you’re wrong, Lucius. You think I’ve come here to bargain with you? You always were so pathetically short-sighted.” He leans forward, feels his magic pulse through him, roiling and chaotic. “This isn’t a negotiation. I’m telling you to leave Draco alone.”

“Or what?” Lucius scoffs, but his posture is a bit too rigid, his eyes too watchful. He’s nervous, Harry realises.

“Or I will destroy you,” Harry tells him, calmly. “I’ve kept my distance, because your wife saved my life, and she seems, inexplicably, to be fond of you. But now I’m friends with Draco, and I like him a lot more than I like Narcissa. So if there are sides, and lines being drawn, then you had better believe that I am on his side of the line. And if you want to go up against him, and me, then go ahead.” 

He sits back again, spreads his hands generously. He can actually hear the unsettling crackle of magic in his outstretched palms. “But it won’t end well for you. Remember who I am. Remember who kept your wife out of prison. Remember what I can do.”

Harry’s shaking with adrenaline, but he knows he sounds as cold and as serene as he needs to. He’s never done anything like this before, never used his name and his position so carelessly, so blatantly. But brute strength is the only currency that has any value with this type of man.

“I see,” Lucius says quietly, and Harry has to admire his self-possession. “Believe me when I tell you that I understand your sudden interest in my son. You always were fascinated by him, weren’t you?”

Harry laughs then, because he hadn’t expected it to be this easy. Lucius knows that he’s lost.

“Don’t cheapen this,” Harry says. His voice is gentle now, because he can afford to be. “Your son means a lot to me. I care about his happiness. It’s nothing more complicated than that. And he loves you, you know.” 

Lucius flinches, a small, involuntary thing. 

“Yeah. Unfortunately, he loves you. And I think you love him, in your own fucked up way. But if you go near him again, I won’t hesitate to take you on. And you know me, Lucius. You know what I can do. And you know you’ll never win against me.”

Harry stands, moves to leave.

Lucius’ voice is steady when he speaks. “Five years, Potter. It’s been five years since I’ve seen my son. Five years since he spoke to his mother. Five years since he stopped using magic completely. I didn’t get him through the war to lose him like this.”

Harry turns. “You didn’t get him through the war at all. You nearly got him killed. And if you force him to come back to you, you’ll lose him anyway. Have you tried, you know, not being a total shit to him? And maybe trying to understand why he’s doing what he’s doing? I don’t get it either. But I’ve learned to respect his decision.” He shrugs. “Anyway, I’m off. Just think about it. You don’t have to be a dickhead all your life, you know.”

All along the corridor to the Floo, ancestral portraits tut down at Harry disapprovingly. But most of them look a bit like Malfoy, so when Harry gives them the finger he does it with a smile.

Harry is the first to cave, like he always is. He wonders if Malfoy just needs more time to cool down, but then Malfoy keeps ignoring him, and when he doesn't turn up for their usual Friday lunch date for the second week in a row, Harry decides to go looking for him. He’s never been the patient type.

Malfoy’s at the boxing club, of course.

Billy is on the desk, and Harry thinks he must know that Malfoy is upset with Harry, because his glower is more pronounced than normal.

From the other side of the training room, Harry can hear the rhythmic thwap of gloves on bag. Malfoy ostentatiously ignores him when he crosses the floor, keeps hitting the bag with a ferocity that shows he’s not actually thinking about his punches at all. He’s cross and sweating, hair stuck to the nape of his neck, skin blotchy with exertion. 

“Fuck off, Potter,” he tells Harry as soon as Harry is close enough to hear over the noise. 

“I’ve been looking for you all day,” Harry says reasonably. “You never brought me a sandwich. I was supposed to be at the opening of a new Wizarding primary school this afternoon, you know. Why wouldn’t you think of the children?”

“I’m done with you, and fucking sandwiches, and every bit of this stupid fucking thing, whatever it is…”—Draco stops thumping the punchbag long enough to gesture furiously at Harry—”...because I’m not putting my friends through your shit anymore, you arrogant prick.”

Malfoy’s temper tantrums are tricky to navigate at the best of times, but he’s properly angry this time, vicious with rage in a way that Harry hasn’t seen him since school. Harry hates it. But back then he hadn’t known how to deal with Malfoy, hadn’t known how hard he feels about things and how deep things go with him. Now he does. He tries his usual tack of jollying Malfoy until he’s so irritated that he has to come out the other side of his snit, or perish in the process.

“Okay, I understand you’re angry with me. But don’t say you’re done with sandwiches. What did sandwiches ever do to you?”

Malfoy whacks the bag so hard that it spins on its chain, and then he turns to Harry and he actually stamps his foot in fury, a gesture so uncomplicated and transparent in its petulance that Harry smiles, before realising what he’s doing and bringing up his hands to cover his face. 

“You think this is funny? Because you fucking promised me. You promised.” 

His voice is flimsy, creaking dangerously, like a broken door. Harry drops his hands in horror, any thoughts of laughter forgotten. He thinks Malfoy might actually be crying, just the tiniest bit, though every part of him is so wet that it’s hard to tell—face slick with sweat, mouth spit-wet from shouting. He looks absolutely awful, and Harry puts a hand out to him, tries to gentle him.

He knocks Harry’s arm back with a sweeping jab from the heel of one wrapped hand, and the shock of it is worse than the pain (which is not insignificant, because he’s a scrappy fucker for all his leanness). Harry had thought—had really believed—that they didn’t do this stuff to each other anymore.

“Is this what we’re doing now? We’re going to fight? That’s not us, Malfoy. I’m not going to hit you.”

Malfoy does spit then, with a slow, deliberate, dismissive turn of the head.

“You,” he says, jabbing at Harry’s shoulder, “are not supposed to break your promises. What’s the point of being friends with Harry Potter if I can’t”—jab—“even”—jab—“trust him”—jab jab—“to keep his word? You’re supposed to be good!”

And that stings a bit. Harry hadn’t realised that Malfoy thinks of him like that. Like he’s always honourable, like he does the right thing. He had thought that Malfoy understood. That Malfoy, of all people, knows that Harry is just as wrong and stupid and selfish as anyone else. It made things so easy between them, knowing that he isn’t going to disappoint Malfoy, because Malfoy isn’t expecting anything from him.

“What’s the point of being friends if you’re thinking of me as Harry Potter? And stop fucking poking me. I did what I had to do. Would you prefer it if I’d just let him take you away?” 

He stops himself just in time, because he realises he was just about to saying something horrifying like “take you away from me” and really, now isn’t the time to have a crisis about Malfoy maybe having come to mean rather a lot to Harry. Thankfully, his brain has caught up with his mouth and though he’s seeing it all quite clearly, he's managing to keep himself from just saying it out loud.

“I would have preferred you to do what you promised. I said no magic, Potter. I vouched for you to my friends. I brought you into our home and I promised them we could trust you.” 

Harry stores that one up for later. He wonders when that conversation had taken place. Wonders what Draco had said about him, back when they were still, sort of, strangers to each other, still feeling out their weird little pact and figuring each other out.

“It was just a bit of fucking mist, Draco. The Muggles weren’t even able to see it. And it’s all very well for Marie to get up on her high horse about it, but what exactly would she suggest you do to keep Lucius from finding you? At least I did something useful!”

“I needed to handle this myself. You fucking know this, Potter. I had to be the one to sort it out. I needed to fix things, not hide from them. You should have given me the choice. Now get out of my sight. Arsehole.”

In hindsight, it’s a mistake, of course. But Harry can’t resist, because even though Draco tries to be clinical about these things, Harry can't play it cool. Draco goes to move past him, and he grabs him—just a loose bracelet of fingers at Draco’s wrist, over the battering rush of his pulsepoint—and Draco snaps.

His crooked elbow—wrist still clasped in Harry’s grip—jerks upwards, so swift and dangerous that it almost catches Harry under the chin with the snapping force of the upswing. Harry flinches, can almost feel his teeth clacking together in anticipation of that distinctive shock that only comes in the moment before a blow. He lets go of Malfoy’s wrist, and Malfoy rocks on the balls of his feet, hands curled up into fists, before he drops them to his sides despairingly.

“You were going to hit me!” Harry can hear his own shock and hurt bleeding through, almost winces with embarrassment at the naked pain that Malfoy, surely, must be able to hear.

“I told you to leave me alone.”

“You heard him.” Billy is leaning against the wall nearby, arms folded, face stern. Such a large man shouldn’t be able to move so silently, Harry thinks. “Why don’t you head out, Harry.” It’s an instruction, not a question. “Get some fresh air. Draco is trying to finish his work-out.”

Harry feels suddenly, unreasonably angry. And he knows it’s not with Billy, not really, it’s just the whole situation. Because he can’t be angry with Malfoy when Malfoy is so sad, it wouldn’t be right, and Billy is right there, sticking his nose in and talking to Harry in a reasonable voice like Harry is a toddler who needs managing.

“Fuck off, Billy,” he says, and that feels horribly good, so he says again, “Just fuck off.”

And then he looks at Malfoy. “I want to talk to you. So we can fix whatever this shit is. But you’re a selfish fucking arse if you’re just going to walk away.” And then, because he’s feeling vicious, “I thought you were… we were…" and his stupid throat is swallowing, swallowing, swallowing around the lump that his voice keeps catching and breaking on, “But you’re just the same pathetic coward you always were.”

Malfoy shivers, a full body tremble of pure misery, and Harry has a second to feel like total shit before Billy says matter-of-factly, “Alright, that’s it,” and punches Harry in the face. It’s not even that hard a blow, just a clinical smart rap designed to chasten, not injure. It still hurts like fuck, though. Harry feels the rattle of it in his bones before the pain blooms. His lower lip feels spongy under his tongue, wet and meaty and ruined from where his teeth came down on it.

“Christ, Billy,” Malfoy says wonderingly, and puts a hand up weakly between them. But Harry wasn’t ever going to fight back—he’s not angry anymore, just a bit queasy from the blood and misery of it all—and Billy’s already moving away.

“Consider this your warning, Harry,” he says. “This is Draco’s place. If he wants you out on your arse then you’re out. And no name-calling in here. You can’t make a clean fight out of dirty words. Draco, do you want me to get rid of him?”

Malfoy sighs and shakes his head. Harry feels limp with relief. Billy nods once, then heads back towards the desk, so there’s just Harry and Malfoy and the ringing silence of their argument left in the room.

“Come on.”

Malfoy takes a towel, pads towards the changing room without looking back. Harry follows anyway, as though he could do anything else. 

When they get there, Malfoy runs a shower until the water is hissing with heat, and the tiles sweat with condensation. He has a cloth, a square of clean muslin, and he rolls it and wets it and dabs it against the itchy trail of blood from Harry’s mouth. This close, he looks exhausted. Harry can see the thinly-sketched lines of tiredness in the fine skin under his eyes. 

“Do you think,” he says as he presses the cloth painstakingly to Harry’s mouth, “I would have left my mum if I didn’t really believe I had to?”

Harry can’t answer, because he’s essentially being muffled by the cloth, and he thinks maybe that’s why Malfoy is talking to him at all.

“Giving up my magic was the hardest thing I ever did. But it was a choice I made. You have to respect that. Because it’s hard enough, missing her the way I do, and missing… well, missing that part of myself. I can’t take you on over this. You have to just put up with it.”

Harry nods. He wonders if this means a second chance, if he can even bear to take the second chance if it means having to pretend that Malfoy cutting off his magic is remotely a good idea.

Malfoy jerks his head towards the shower.

“Get in,” he instructs Harry, as he disappears off into the utility room with the bloodied cloth. It seems as sensible an idea as any. Harry’s whole body is ringing with tension, and the steam is already thick enough to feel like an embrace. He strips, steps in, turns his face up to the lap of the water, and tries not to think about drowning himself in it.

He doesn’t hear Malfoy returning because of the noise of the spray, so the first he knows of it is when he feels Malfoy behind him, skin cooler than the water, and just as his brain catches up with the fact that Malfoy is in the shower with him, Malfoy steps in close to him (skin! Naked skin! Harry shrieks internally) and slides an arm around him. 

It’s not a caress. 

There’s nothing lingering or exploratory about it. It’s just Malfoy’s hand, the skin pitted and scored from his hand wrap, his bitten nails, the palm soft where there used to be wand calluses, moving from Harry’s flank, across and up his body until it comes to rest over his heart and stays there, steady. 

Malfoy sighs—Harry can’t hear it, but he feels the press of Malfoy’s chest against his back, and the flutter of the outbreath over the nape of his neck—and then Malfoy presses his face into Harry’s drenched curls, murmurs something small and incomprehensible, and settles there. And after a minute or two, when Harry’s thrumming heart slows and Malfoy’s skin heats up under the water, it feels easy. Like it’s not strange at all, this shocking intimacy; like it’s not some kind of admission from them both. 

At last, Malfoy speaks.

“Do you know,” he says conversationally, “when I was little, my mother used to wash my hair for me.”

“I did not know that,” Harry says gravely. “Though I can’t say I’m surprised. It was always particularly glossy-looking when we were at school.”

The disadvantage of Malfoy being so close, Harry discovers, is that it’s easy for him to find the softest bit of Harry’s tummy to pinch.

“I was actually quite a cosseted child. Spoiled rotten in fact. You may find that astonishing when you consider what a delight I was as a teenager. But my parents were busy people. My father ran the estate, and spent a lot of time in London, of course. So I didn't see them much in the evenings. The nursery was in its own wing, naturally, and my nanny was very attentive."

Harry snorts at that, but then thinks about tiny Draco with his face upturned toward Lucius, alight with worship, and feels a bit sad.

"So it was my favourite thing when I was small, having my mother give me a bath. It was always a very special treat. She'd sit on the floor with her sleeves rolled up and the front of her robes would get all wet and foamy from me splashing, but she never minded. And she'd keep spelling the water hot so I could stay in for as long as I wanted."

Harry can't imagine it. He vaguely remembers when he was tiny, standing shivering in the Dursleys' avocado-coloured bath while Petunia sprayed him with tepid water from the shower head, scrubbed him with carbolic soap. And then after a while, she stopped even doing that. Harry used to sneak in and wash when no one noticed, used to pile his clothes in with the rest of the laundry, since he was the one doing it anyway. But he knows that as a child he was probably never all that clean. How did no one ever notice, he wonders, not for the first time. Why did no one care?

"And when I was tired and wanted to get out, she'd turn me around with my back to the edge—" Harry hears the snap of a bottle lid, smells something fresh and sharp, like the crush of sun-hot meadow grass (like Malfoy, he thinks) "—and she'd wash my hair for me."

Then Malfoy’s hand is on Harry's hair, and he starts to rub gentle, workmanlike circles from Harry's crown down to his nape. He pulls his other hand back from around Harry's body, though he stays close enough that Harry can still feel him against his back, and then he starts to work through Harry's hair with both hands. His fingers are strong, raising bubbles at Harry's temples, moving with pure intent through the curls that are flattened and lengthened by water, resting at his nape for a moment, gathering the curls in his fist then releasing them as he lathers, sluices, strokes.

It's all Harry can do to keep quiet. Having Malfoy touch him like this—having anyone touch him like this—feels like too much. No one has ever laid hands on him like this, with such focus, like he’s the only thing that matters.

And he thinks of Narcissa crying at Andy’s kitchen table all those months ago, and how he had wondered why anyone would want to cry over Malfoy, of all people. How stupid he had been, how stupid and short-sighted, to think that Malfoy was unlovable just because Harry had him all neatly tidied away in his mind, relegated to uselessness by some weird little childhood rivalry. 

Malfoy is probably the most lovable person Harry can think of, it turns out—he just hadn’t known it before. And in the end, it was just a case of Malfoy deciding to let Harry love him, that was all. Once Malfoy made that decision, there was nothing Harry could have done.

And now he knows how Narcissa feels, because his eyes are smarting with the sour threat of unshed tears. He wants to cry over arguing with Malfoy, who is one of his best friends and who he’s pretty sure he’d do anything for, and when did that even happen?

Malfoy’s hands are still in Harry’s hair, and the lather is sliding down Harry’s body to puddle at their feet, and he doesn’t think anything has ever felt quite so intimate as the insistent pressure of Malfoy’s fingers on the hidden curves of bone behind Harry’s ears. Malfoy keeps talking.

“She was so gentle with me,” he says. His voice is nearly a whisper, but his mouth is so close to Harry’s ear that every word carries over the water. “She used to say, ‘I’ll take care of you, sweetheart. I’ll take care of you.’” 

He tugs his fingers through the lengths of Harry’s hair, lets the water rinse him clean, then lets his hands fall to Harry’s shoulders, his thumbs moving in restless circles over the notches of Harry’s spine.

“I’ll take care of you, sweetheart,” he says again, and it means something different this time—something for the now, rather than an echo of the past—and Harry hadn’t realised how long he’d been waiting to hear that. Usually, taking care of Harry is a duty. And some people hated him for it, and even the people who didn’t ended up getting hurt, dying.

Malfoy says it like it’s easy, like it’s a gift. Like it’s not a chore at all, just a simple pleasure.

Harry lets his head fall back onto Malfoy’s shoulder, so Malfoy’s face fits snug in the curve of Harry’s throat, and Malfoy’s arms drop down to fit around Harry’s waist again. Harry isn’t sure how long they stay there, but the water starts to run cool, and the creaking pipes make a resentful thumping sound when Harry fiddles with the dial to turn the heat up.

“When I came into the shower,” Malfoy murmurs, “I was going to kiss you.”

And Harry’s blood does that dizzying swoop that sometimes happens around Malfoy, only this time it all rushes straight to his wet naked cock, and he’s hard and getting harder at just the thought of a kiss, and he wonders distantly if instead of being mad about Malfoy, he’s just going a bit mad in general. It’s been a while since he’s been with anyone, after all. And it’s been even longer than that again since he’s been with someone he likes so much.

“Only I thought…” Malfoy’s low, amused voice is a torture device this close to his ear. “I thought if I kissed you, we would probably end up fucking, Which… you know. It might not be such a bad thing, to get it out of our systems. Right? And it would probably be really good.”

“Thanks,” Harry says distantly, absurdly.

“For you Potter, because it would be sex with me, please keep up. But then I got in here with you and I ended up talking about my fucking mother to you, telling you things I’ve never told anyone, and I could feel you getting all tense and weird about how those arsehole Muggles of yours never took care of you, let alone that prick Dumbledore who at least was supposed to be one of the good guys.”

He sighs again, moves his face away from where he’s still nuzzling Harry’s neck, and hooks his chin over Harry’s shoulder. His arms tighten around Harry’s middle.

“And I remembered that sex is easy. It’s so fucking easy, and because it would be good, it might feel like the right thing to do. But we’ve worked so hard at this, haven’t we? Yeah, I know it’s a horror to have to talk about it, but fuck it. We’re friends now, but it took so long to get here. Have you ever had to work so hard at something before?"

“Well. I mean, I did have to kill Voldemort when I was seventeen?”

“I’m including that, and I’m including your opening waltz at the Yule Ball because that was a study in despair for all concerned, including those of us who had to sit through it. Look, we took a while to get here, is what I’m saying. It probably felt like a terrible idea most of the time we were doing it. God, remember that first time at Fand’s? The first time my friends found out about you? Weasley’s birthday party? But then I didn’t even notice when the you part of it all started being something easy. And if we kiss, we have to figure the whole thing out again. So now I don’t know what to do. Because…” —the ghost of a hot breath against Harry’s ear, and the shivery feeling of Malfoy’s mouth moving close enough to touch Harry’s skin— “... I would really like to kiss you now, and I don’t know how to feel about that.”

And Harry thinks about it for a while, and Malfoy lets him (and Harry loves how he understands that Harry needs that little bit of time to get the big things straight in his head). He thinks about Malfoy, laughing and rolling drunk with a cigarette at a jaunty angle in the corner of his mouth, and Malfoy white-faced with a flannel pressed to Marie’s forehead and a bucket beside him for when she gets too sick, and Malfoy being quiet and kind when Harry expects it least, and imperfect playlists over shared earphones, and I’ll take care of you, sweetheart. 

And then he turns, moves out of the circle of Malfoy’s arms. This close, Malfoy looks exhausted, and pink with heat, and his hair is dimmed to a darker gold by the water. Harry determinedly doesn’t look down. 

Harry wants to take care of Malfoy. He likes him so much he doesn’t know what to do with himself. And that’s the important thing. He's allowed himself to get fancying Malfoy (and he does fancy Malfoy, probably always did, a bit, even when he wanted to punch him in the nose back in school), and being such good friends with him, muddled up with wanting to be with him. And that would be stupid, would probably ruin all the good stuff. They’re still learning how to just be around each other, after all—Harry just has to remember that he can be friends with Malfoy, and think he’s beautiful, but it doesn’t mean he wants more from him. It just means he’s not blind. Easy.

“Curry?” he asks, and Malfoy’s smile is so bright that Harry knows that the subject has been well and truly changed, and that Malfoy approves.

“Hand me my towel, Potter,” he says, and after he chucks one over, Harry walks away from the shower, knowing it’s the right thing to do, but feeling the slightest bit that he’s missing something important, all of a sudden.

Harry wonders what teenage him would have thought about not only being at Draco Malfoy’s end-of-the-summer, last-hurrah-before-uni-starts-again party, but willingly helping to organise it. He’s fairly sure he would have suspected an Imperius.

Still, it’s actually been quite fun. Harry’s gone for sheer quantity over aesthetics, for the most part, because he feels like if he has to be at a party with a number of people who sort of hate him, they should all have the option of getting well and truly pissed. They’ve reached an uneasy sort of truce after Malfoy pitched a fit over wanting them all present and civil, and Harry has sworn blind to Malfoy that he’ll never use magic anywhere near the house again.

Harry’s putting the finishing touches to the drinks table when the vicar arrives.

The table is bristling with bottles, and there isn’t much space to make the whole thing look very pretty, despite Marie looking at it despairingly and tacking some lacklustre leftover bunting along the table edge, and Billy wedging a jug full of chrysanthemums that someone brought into the middle.

Harry’s done his best with the Pimms, though—even bought a mint plant in Tesco which he’s mangled and chucked into the punchbowl, and with a fuckload of chopped fruit and cucumber, the whole thing looks rather festive. The bowl is sweating in the sun already, though, and Harry can see that the ice in the beer bucket is melting. Not for the first time, he thinks longingly of a convenient little Cooling Charm.

A shadow falls over the table, and Harry looks up, blinking, and it’s Reverend Andrew, though Harry doesn’t recognise him at first, when he’s standing there backlit by sun and wearing an open-necked shirt without his clerical collar. He looks like any other (unfairly handsome, irritatingly serene) man, and Harry wonders for a minute if he’s one of Draco’s work friends. But they’re all milling in a loud cluster by the crisps table, and then the man says, “Hello, Harry,” and Harry recognises the mellifluous voice that’s a mixture of comforting and commanding, and could only belong to someone who speaks to a deity for a living.

It is a bit of a shock. Draco hadn’t mentioned that he was inviting the vicar, not in all the hours of planning the playlists (currently blasting Poker Face, and Harry is intensely aware that Single Ladies by Beyonce is coming next because Malfoy insisted on playing songs at him for days on end in order to curate a classic modern pop list to get the party started), or in the two separate Tesco runs that Harry and Draco had done yesterday, or at any point today while Harry sweated out here moving tables and hanging fucking solar lanterns on the washing line to make the place nice for Malfoy’s party.

Not that Malfoy should have gone through the guest list with him, of course. It’s just Harry can’t shake the memory of the time he’d seen the vicar, at the parish fete, half-hidden in the shadow of a wooden column, with his hand on Malfoy’s arm, looking into Malfoy’s eyes with that same serious, focused look he gets when he’s on the altar. And worse was the way Malfoy was looking back, with that lovely blush high on his cheekbones, and all that bloody interest in his eyes.

“I didn’t know you were coming,” Harry says. It’s not his strongest moment, admittedly, but Andrew just smiles lazily at him as though he’s been perfectly polite, and says, “Draco invited me.” 

Harry resists saying what he’s thinking out loud, which mostly amounts to, yes I fucking worked that out, since it’s his bloody party. And instead he smiles, and through his teeth says, “Drink?”

And drink they do. 

Hours later—Harry’s not sure how much later, but Nina Simone is singing you found me just in time, and they’ve just had 90s REM (the photograph reflects, every streetlight a reminder), so they’ve definitely moved onto the wind-down playlist, and the only light is from the firepit and the solar lanterns and the stars and the hot points of people’s cigarettes—and everyone who’s still here is very, very drunk.

Harry is back at the crisp table, because they’ve run out of food for the barbecue and he’s dimly aware that if he keeps drinking like this he should probably try to keep eating, though there’s only Snack-a-Jacks left and someone’s even eaten the secret reserve pack of brown Hula Hoops that Harry had hidden in the herb pot on the windowsill. Harry suspects Andrew, who’s sitting in a deckchair looking remarkably satisfied with himself. He’s taken off his straw hat and opened another button of his stupid linen shirt, and Harry feels unreasonably annoyed with him.

Harry watches as Draco untangles himself from a group of people over by the trampoline and makes his way across the garden. He’s so easy to see, though from this distance he looks lunar-strange, a pale faraway figure orbiting Harry. Something to look towards, Harry supposes.

He stops by Andrew, and Harry makes a scoffing noise out loud (the tired-looking woman eating Snack-a-Jacks next to him gives him an odd look), because when Andrew sees Draco, he stands up and pulls a deckchair out for him, like they’re at fucking Buckingham Palace or something.

Draco sits, and Andrew leans into him, and they talk. And it’s only talking, they’re not even touching, nothing like that time in the church with their hands on each other and their eyes locked, but Harry thinks that anyone looking at them would know not to interrupt them, would know there was something potent and ripe between them. 

Draco looks up at Harry then, catches his eye, waves and beckons with that casual insolence he’s never lost—you can take the boy out of the Manor, but you can’t take the Manor out of the boy—then raises an eyebrow with a shrug when Harry shakes his head. Harry can’t explain it, but he doesn’t want to go over there, to where Draco and Andrew aren’t much more than shadows close together in the dark.

He drinks more instead, but when Draco gets up to say goodbye to his friends from the cafe, Harry goes and sits in the chair he’s left empty, next to Andrew. The music is quieter again, Bowie’s voice soaring as he sings you touch me, I hear the sound of mandolins, and Harry knows that he and Andrew are both watching Draco.

He doesn’t really want to ask, but he feels like he has to, though he shakes out a cigarette from the box Draco has left on the table before he speaks. When he talks through the haze of the first exhale, he’s glad to hear that he sounds steady.

“So are you serious about him, then?”

Andrew thinks before answering, and Harry understands that but he hates him a bit for it too, for that considered pause as he looks to the sky (maybe feeling like his god is watching him, who knows?).

“I have to be serious about him. With my job, there isn’t room for casual. I don't think he is, though. And I would need him to be… to be sure.”

Harry feels a bit sick. He knows just how serious Malfoy is when it comes to the things he likes, the things he wants. He knows just how sure Malfoy is when it comes to the most important stuff. He doesn’t think Malfoy needing to be serious, and sure, is going to be a problem.

“Just. Be careful with him.” His voice is night-cold and tired, and he knows Andrew must hear it. He probably has a good ear for sorrow. “Don’t ever hurt him.”

Andrew laughs, like Harry could be joking about this. “I’m a vicar, Harry. It’s sort of a requirement of the job not to hurt people. But I’ll keep it in mind.”

And then he reaches under his chair and pulls out a bag of brown Hula Hoops and offers it to Harry. "Crisp?"

What a shit, Harry thinks, though of course he’s not really at all. So he just nods, takes a handful of hoops from the bag and crunches them resentfully. At some point, Andrew wanders back over to Malfoy, and Asma comes and sits next to Harry, though he suspects it’s only because Malfoy had stern words with her about being nice to Harry.

“What’s wrong with you?” she says instantly, with that unerring instinct for Harry’s pain that makes him nervous.

“Nothing,” he says stoically, and she gives him a sceptical look, but at that point Malfoy reaches up and hugs Andrew hard around his neck, and Harry gets distracted.

“Oh,” Asma says, and then “oh,” again, meaningfully. “Shit. I mean, Draco is one of my best friends, but if I’d known his love life would involve a choice between Harry Potter and a vicar? I mean, where did he even find you both?” She shudders delicately, but Harry thinks there’s a hint of sympathy when she pushes the box of cigarettes across the table to him.

“Please shut up,” he says, and she does, surprisingly. And then Harry just drinks and smiles and smokes, and soon the party’s over.

The doorbell rings.

It’s odd, because they don’t often have people around unannounced, even Harry knows that. Malfoy pauses in the act of stirring the bolognese, spoon quirked and alert at the sound. Billy just shrugs and keeps laying the table.

“I’ll get it!” Asma roars from the next room, and Malfoy turns the music right down (Millie Jackson singing about hurting and suffering and being second best, because Malfoy never says it but he likes sad songs the most) so they can hear everything as Asma pads into the hall and wrestles with the chain on the front door. That’s how they know that Marie’s parents are at the door, and from her reaction, she’s very much not expecting them.

Asma calls out for her, and she comes to the top of the stairs, and when they hear her say disbelievingly, “Mum? Dad?” Malfoy says, “Oh shit” very quietly and drops the spoon back in the pan, and heads for the living room.

Marie has been napping, and she looks young and crumpled and insubstantial. Her parents are sitting on the small couch opposite her, still wearing their coats, and her mum is clutching her handbag. They both look broken.

“Marie, love, you look so thin,” her mum says, and then her dad tries to smile and says, “Ruddy train took forever, nothing runs on time these days,” as though he can possibly hide his agony behind the mundane. And at first Marie says nothing, but then she speaks, as slowly and wonderingly as though she’s waking from a dream. 

“What are you doing here?”

“It’s time, my darling. We’ve just come from St Mungo’s. There’s a space on the Targeted Healing ward, we had a meeting with the Head Healer. Please, Marie.”

Everyone freezes—Marie sitting small in the armchair, Billy and Asma who are hovering near the French doors, and Malfoy who’s in the doorway next to Harry.

“I thought you understood,” Marie says. 

And that opens the floodgates, because they don’t understand—and Harry gets it, he doesn’t understand either—and they’re breaking their hearts over their beloved girl who’s dying, though they don’t ever say the word. And Marie’s mother howls like a hurt animal, still holding her handbag like a shield in front of her, and she begs Marie to let the Healers make her better. 

Harry can’t bear it, and anyway he shouldn’t be here for this, and he goes to leave, but Malfoy grabs him by the forearm and holds him there with a grip that’s tense almost to the point of pain. 

Marie’s dad says, “Love, you can’t really mean to make a martyr of yourself for this cause. Think of all the good you can do if you get better,” and Marie’s mum says, “Those Muggle remedies are making you even sicker, and they’re not even working. You could live a long happy life, and why can’t you think of us, what would we do without you?” 

And Marie says, “This is the whole point. There are hundreds of Muggles in the oncology ward with me. Why should I get to live and they don’t? If healing magic works at a cellular level then there’s no reason why it shouldn’t be just as effective on Muggles. And if I give in now, nothing will ever change. Harry’s friend Luna is coming to interview me next week, I’m going to make headlines with this. I have a chance to make a difference. Please try to understand.”

Malfoy moves then, sits on the arm of Marie’s chair, takes her hand gently.

“I don’t know what we’re going to do without you either,” he tells her. “Seeing you getting sicker and sicker, knowing how much pain you’re in. I don’t know how we’re going to get through it. It’s so selfish of me, darling. But I wish—” he pauses, coughs a little “—I wish you’d let them make you better.”

Asma runs to the chair too, puts her head in Marie’s lap, and cries. Marie pats her head bewilderedly. “Me too. Please Marie. Please go with your mum and dad.”

Marie starts to cry too, and suddenly it’s like everyone in the room has been hit with a Lacrimosa curse. She’s hiccuping and bawling and snotty. Even Harry is wet-eyed. 

“I trusted you all,” she weeps. “I thought you understood. I’m scared—I’m so scared—and I don’t want to die, but I thought at least you believed in me. You utter bastards. I’m going to my room.”

She stands, and then her mum stands too, pulling her wand out of that big handbag of hers, and she says, “No,” just that one word tremulous and shaky, but it rings around the room and Marie goes white under her blotchy skin. And her mum says, like in a silly black and white crime film, “You’re coming with me, whether you like it or not,” and she goes to cast, and no one does anything. Harry can’t understand why they’re just sitting there.

So he steps into the middle of them all, and Marie’s dad says disbelievingly, “Harry Potter?” and Marie’s mum blinks, and her wand arm droops a bit.

“You know you can’t force her to do this?” Harry says, hating himself a little bit. 

“But… but you’re Harry Potter!” And suddenly he has an armful of wailing Yorkshire mother. “Harry, please. I know you’ll do the right thing. Help me get her to St Mungo’s!”

“I wish she would go with you. I think she’s bonkers. But you can’t make her. This has to be her choice. And she’s telling you what she’s decided. I think you should listen. And that goes for the rest of you too.”

He walks Marie’s parents to the end of the road. As they leave, all the housemates are crying, and the smell of burning tomato sauce is sharp in the air.

“And then you fold it in—Christ, Potter, what was that? Fold, I said—take it off the heat! It’s going to curdle!”

Harry gets out of the way, because he knows that tone and it means Malfoy is going to take over because he’s completely convinced that Harry has fucked things up. Harry has indeed fucked things up, but only on a minor level, as he doesn’t want to manoeuvre himself out of a nice meal, but it’s just so much nicer when Malfoy makes the roux because he gets it so smooth and velvety. Harry’s is always lumpy.

Harry hefts himself up onto the kitchen counter, safely out of the way of Malfoy skidding around in his socks from butcher’s block to oven. Malfoy’s housemates are all out for the night. Harry has his cup of tea and the packet of mint Viscounts that he stashed behind the fruit bowl earlier, and Johnny Cash is singing about how he keeps the ends out for the tie that binds while prisoners cheer, and Draco is swaying with the clunk of the guitar part, and the whole kitchen smells of delicious things, and Harry thinks this might be as happy as he can get.

He has a thing tonight—a shitty Ministry event, in honour of a visiting MACUSA delegation. It’s a big deal, having the US crowd over—it’s the first one of its kind, in fact. He’s had his formal robes pressed, and he’s expected for a gala dinner so he really shouldn’t be having macaroni cheese with Malfoy now because he’s going to be too full for five courses later. But it’s so much more tempting to stay here grating mountains of cheddar and crushing garlic and sneaking biscuits, than to go home to empty old Grimmauld and try to tame his hair into submission. Here, no one cares about his hair.

Malfoy is sprinkling Parmesan over the macaroni, because his policy is more cheese, always, and then he puts on the oven gloves that always make Harry’s heart clench with that slightly sick wanting feeling whenever he sees Malfoy in them. 

“In it goes,” he says, “Fire up the Quattro!”

The oven door is a bit bockety, so Harry wrenches it open while Malfoy loads the dish in, and when he straightens up Harry holds up an unwrapped Viscount as a reward. Malfoy takes it, though his eyes are narrowed and he asks suspiciously, “Where did you get these from? That’s not my new packet you’ve opened, you thieving bastard?”

Harry can’t answer for fear of incriminating himself, so he distracts Malfoy by telling him that they should do the dishes while they wait for dinner to cook, and Malfoy can toss for it. Malfoy wins the toss and chooses washing, of course, and Harry is stuck with drying, of course, but music fills the room and even though Malfoy’s been on a country music rampage recently, this album is soft and easy and Harry likes listening to Draco singing about no one falling asleep alone, and crooked streets shining gold, and a golden moment between day and night.

When it happens, Harry barely notices at first. Malfoy stops singing but the music plays on, some man with a sad voice singing about when it’s time from work to go, and in my boat I’ll row, and the water swishes gently in the sink, and the oven hums with heat. It’s only when Malfoy makes a little noise, a small, shocked oh that makes Harry drop the dish towel and turn to him, that Harry sees the blood. The water in the sink is cloudy with it already, the sudsy lather pink-flecked and foamy. 

He’s shaking, from shock, Harry thinks, and Harry fumbles in the middle drawer for a clean towel and then grips Malfoy firmly, gently, by his biceps and steers him away from the sink. He can hear the slick patter of blood against the lino as they go.

“I didn’t see the knife,” Malfoy stutters. “It was under the bubbles and I… I grabbed the blade.” The stupid new chef’s knife that he had picked up in M&S last week, Harry thought, with its cruel curved blade, and then he makes himself look.

It’s hard to see the damage, because Malfoy’s cupped palm swims in blood, but when Harry wipes it gently he can see the slit running deep under Malfoy’s little finger, all along his heart line, Harry thinks hysterically. 

Fresh blood is already swelling, oozing across his hand in a sick slick of crimson. Harry very nearly can't bear it. Malfoy looks down, then looks away very quickly. 

"I don't like blood. Ever since… in the Manor…"

"Yeah, no shit. I'm not a big fan myself." Which startles a laugh out of Malfoy at least.

Harry could fix this with a spell in a heartbeat, and he wants to, so badly that his hand twitches to his torso and he plucks at his t-shirt (because he keeps his wand holstered against his body when he's here. He doesn't want Malfoy to have to see it, but he won't—he can't—quite bring himself to leave it at home). 

But then he thinks of Malfoy that time in the shower all those months ago, talking about missing his mum and pointedly not talking about how much he misses magic, and asking Harry to respect him.

And it's stupid, so stupid, that Harry can't just make him better like he wants to, but he drops his hand away from where his wand is nestled wood to skin, and instead he folds the teatowel and presses hard against the skin until Malfoy hisses. 

"I'll ring a taxi," he says, instead of the Vulnera Sanentur his brain wants to supply, and that gets Malfoy smiling properly at him with gratitude and surprise and so much fondness that it feels like a little bit of its own kind of magic.

A&E at the Homerton is heaving.

“I feel pale,” Malfoy says distractedly, when they finally manage to snag two seats together. “Do I look pale? Is this the end of Draco Malfoy?”

He is a bit pale, Harry thinks, but he had stopped shaking around the time Harry brought him the second machine hot chocolate, and Harry had even been able to swap out the sodden tea-towel for a fresh one by distracting him with stories about the Dursleys (and a lengthy discourse on whether Young Draco or Young Dudley was king of the bullies, Malfoy claiming victory by virtue of the Inquisitorial Squad but then looking so desperately sad about it, suddenly, that Harry had to pull out the snake at the zoo story to distract him all over again). 

“You’re positively wan. I shouldn’t wonder if you’re on the way out. I bagsy the trampoline if you die.”

“Cut down in my prime. Literally, Potter,” Malfoy says sadly. “And to think it was my desire for a cleaner edge on my carrot batons that’s bringing about my demise.”

And Harry laughs at him, because Malfoy thinks he’s joking but he is neurotic about his vegetable chopping, and he does like an even, neat carrot baton, and now Harry has Malfoy’s blood all over his jeans, and the soles of his socks inside his trainers are tacky from it, and he’d still rather be here than anywhere else.

And it’s like Malfoy reads his mind, because he looks down at Harry’s jeans in horror and says, “Your thing! You have a Ministry thing, and you need to go!”

Harry wouldn’t say it becomes a squabble, but he tells Malfoy that it’s fine, and Malfoy says that it’s not, and Harry insists that this is more important, and Malfoy says he’s not disagreeing with that, but that Harry needs to get his arse to work if he said he was going to be there, and then Harry gets a bit cross and tells Malfoy he’s not leaving him to bleed to death in A&E, and Malfoy says “Fine!” crossly, and that’s that.

It’s only another two hours before they’re seen, and Harry reassures Malfoy that he was really very brave when he was getting stitched up, and then a harried junior doctor applies a clean dressing to the stitches and tells them they’re free to go. And actually, Harry would probably make the end of the drinks reception if he really hurried, but when they go outside it’s dark, and Malfoy opens his mouth to say something but it’s swallowed by a desperate yawn. So Harry just hails the next cab and they pile in and go home to Malfoy’s place, and they’re so hungry that they take the long-cold macaroni cheese out of the oven and eat it standing up, straight out of the oven dish.

“Please go to your party now, Potter,” Malfoy says indistinctly, as he shakes two ibuprofen straight into his mouth out of the bottle. And Harry says of course he will, and he sends Malfoy up to bed, but then he finishes the washing up because he imagines Malfoy having to do it all by himself tomorrow morning, and then he does a tidy up and wipes all the blood away and puts the good biscuits back where he found them, and he brings Malfoy up a glass of water. Only he’s already asleep, face blank and incurious in his exhaustion, and his bandaged hand is drawn up under his cheek like a sleeping child. Harry can’t bear to leave him.

He pulls a spare blanket out of the airing cupboard, and snags some couch cushions from downstairs, and he lies down beside the bed. The small room is velvety with night and sleep-warm bodies. 

Harry wants to say, “I’ll take care of you, sweetheart,” but he knows it’s too awful and cheesy for words. So instead he lies down and he thinks the words instead, thinks them so hard that soon he’s exhausted too, and when he finally drifts off, he’s swaddled and dazed by the nearness of Malfoy’s sleeping breaths.

Chapter Text

It’s morning time, and he has to go. He really has to go, because he’s going to be in the shit with Kingsley, and more importantly, if he hangs around here too long the owls are going to find him and Malfoy might take the M&S chopping knife and, now that its sharpness has been proven, actually murder him. He really has to go, but he doesn’t want to.

Malfoy is slack with sleep and pink and rumpled and he’s exactly like Harry had imagined he’d be, all those times he’d allowed himself, stupidly, to think of Malfoy sleeping. It’s horribly lovely.

He heaves himself up and pads downstairs to quietly put the couch back together. No one is here, or at least no one has emerged, so he uses Billy’s excellent ground coffee to make a proper cafetiere and he drinks his cup in the quiet of the kitchen with the dawn light filmy at the window, and it tastes perfect.

Malfoy wakes when he’s leaving a cup on the bedside cabinet, nose twitching in approval at the warmth of coffee in the air.

“My God,” he says, and he must be still woozy from painkillers or something because he grasps Harry’s wrist in his damaged hand, “I think I’m getting used to having you around.”

“You don’t even believe in God,” Harry replies, but he stills at the touch, feels a tremble threatening when Draco rolls closer, presses his face into the curl of Harry’s palm. The tips of Harry’s fingers prickle with the rasp of stubble. He feels a rush of heat, desire that starts with the brush of warm breath over his fluttering pulsepoint, and runs through every bit of him until he feels half-mad with it.

“I’m hedging my bets,” Draco says in a satisfied tone, then brightening, “and there must be a deity out there watching over me, because how else would you explain coffee? Anyway, your work is done here. So go on then, I can tell you’re bursting to rush off and be silently heroic somewhere.”

“I am going. And you’ll be sorry when I leave. Because who will bring you coffee then?”

Draco laughs, a small damp snuffle, and his mouth moves over Harry’s skin like the brush of a mothwing before he pulls away and reaches for the coffee.

“Not even a pain au chocolat for the invalid. I feel cheated.”

Harry waits until he gets to the door before he turns and chucks two mint Viscounts onto Draco’s bed, and Draco’s farewell smile to him is so electric that he feels the glow of it down to his very bones, and it powers him down the stairs and keeps him alight when he bumps into a murderous-looking Asma, who's just got in from wherever she was all night.

"Great, of course you're fucking here," she says nastily. "I thought you had to be a tool of oppression somewhere important last night?"

"At least I'm not just a tool," Harry replies agreeably, and then before she can argue more adds, "I stayed because Draco got hurt last night. It's just a cut hand but—"

"But he thinks he's undergone a tragic survival ordeal?"

"Pretty much. Anyway, I didn't want to leave him alone."

She eyes him speculatively, which at least is preferable to with hatred, he thinks. 

"Right. Well, thanks, I suppose. I can take it from here."

"Yeah, you can do his bidding for a while—I've got to go prop up a totalitarian regime of inequality for the morning. Oh, but just to let you know that all the mint Viscounts are gone. See you!"

She gives him the finger as he leaves, but he thinks it has less venom than usual. He takes that as a win.

“Mr Potter? Mr Potter! Jana Mendax from the Wizarding World News. Can you confirm the reason for your conspicuous absence from the Delegates' Gala last night?”

“Harry! Over here! For the Prophet!Is there any truth to the rumour that you’ve just had a meeting with Minister Shacklebolt to discuss your continuing consultancy role in the Ministry?”

“Hello Harry! Your aura is absolutely blinding today—do you have any tips for Quibbler readers to help them achieve such a lovely glow?”

Harry raises a hand to stop the barrage of questions, though he spares Philea Sneezewort a grateful smile, and vows to give the Quibbler a full exclusive on the Harry Potter aura-cleansing regime.

The press intrusion isn’t new—Harry suspects someone in Kingley’s office is tipping them off, because on the few occasions that he does go into the Ministry in the daytime, there’s always a scrum outside when he emerges. But this time, they have a point. The guest of honour doesn’t show to an important event, doesn’t even Owl his apologies. Harry is all too aware of the consternation that his no-show caused—Kingsley had given him the bollocking of all bollockings, and had gone through the diplomatic implications of such an insult in excruciating detail. Personally, Harry can’t see how it mattered too much—all he ever does is stand around with a drink in his hand—but Kingsley insists that his continued presence is essential at future events and (this in his sternest I-am-the-Minister-for-fucking-Magic voice) such flagrant disregard for etiquette shall not be tolerated. 

And Harry gets it. It is his job, after all, even if it is a bit of shit one. And of course he should have owled, or at least sent a Patronus. But when he thinks of Draco white as milk with his teeth chattering in shock, he knows he couldn’t have used a wand in front of him. And as he tried to explain to Kingsley, try finding a magical owl in Stoke Newington at nine o’ clock on a Friday night.

Still, he’s having to make a sizeable donation to the Foundation for International Cooperation and Kinship, and Kingsley wants him grovelling on the front page of every newspaper in Wizarding Britain. So he’s really going to have to turn it up.

He thinks he makes a pretty good job of it, all told. Luckily, it’s so rare for him to give a proper statement that the reporters mostly just let him talk, Quick-Quote Quills scribbling frantically in the air beside them. He talks about his regrettable absence, an unavoidable personal engagement, and yes, you could say it was something of an emergency. No, nothing to do with Ron and Hermione who were safely at home in their new house. 

They’re greedy for it, all of them—the novelty of having Harry within their reach—and camera flashes punctuate his speech. He knows he’s grimacing by the end, but he hopes it looks like regret for his actions rather than distaste for theirs.

“So in conclusion, I hope you will all understand that I would never have missed such a landmark event between our two magical nations were it not for something truly important. I deeply regret having to miss the chance to meet our friends and international colleagues from MACUSA on their trip, and I hope that I will get to rectify this disappointing occurrence in the future.” 

He pauses, attempting to look contrite while he scrambles to remember all the rest of what Kingsley’s aide had coached him to say.

Slyly, taking advantage of Harry’s beat of silence, the reporter from the WWN speaks up. 

“Mr Potter, was this important engagement to do with anyone of… special significance in your life?”

Harry shouldn’t be surprised, of course, they’re always trying to weasel information about his love life out of him, but the question takes him unawares. And for just a split second he thinks of Malfoy lying in bed, warm and creased from sleep, and the tentative feel of Malfoy’s lips moving over the hidden creases of his palm, but it’s long enough. Because he can’t help what his face does then, right in front of the whole press troupe and half the Ministry who have stopped to watch the show, and they see it, of course, trained vultures that they are. They know there’s something there, a story, and the camera flashes jitter at the edges of his vision and he feels himself start to blush.

The questions come at him like an assault. 

“Harry, Harry! Is there a special somebody…. Mr Potter, what was the nature of the emergency that caused… Harry, care to share more about who you were with last night?”

Kingsley is going to kill him. This is not how things were supposed to go. But Harry feels tired, all of a sudden, despite how well he’d slept on the narrow patch of floor in Draco’s bedroom. Everyone in the room is looking at him hungrily, expectantly. They want this, he realises. They want him to have someone, someone they can speculate about and try to dig up info on. But he wants to have someone, too. He wants someone to cook dinner with, and go on outings with; someone he can take care of when they get hurt; someone who’s perpetually interested in him. 

“Actually, yes.”

His voice is so loud that he startles even himself, and the clamour dies down immediately. Fuck it, it’s not as if Malfoy is ever going to see any of the news from the magical world. 

“Yes. I was with someone special, helping out in a moment of crisis.” Someone down the back awwwws—Harry suspects Christophe the welcome wizard, who always gets suspiciously misty-eyed when he sees Harry arriving, and who Harry is sure has the official Harry Potter charity calendar hung up on the inside wall of his cubicle.

“It’s not… I’m not in a romantic relationship. But a good friend needed help last night, and I had to be there. He is... well… he’s very important to me. So yes,” and he feels himself start to smile in a way he doesn’t think he ever has in front of a camera, “I suppose you would say that I was with someone special.”

There’s a small moment of silence then, Harry grinning properly now, before the camera flashes start their blinding strikes anew and a flood of shouting erupts.

Harry waves goodbye and beats a hasty retreat. Kingsley really is going to murder him, and he doesn’t want to be here when Kingsley realises that he’s hijacked the press conference. And also, Harry realises, with a fervent internal oh, fucking hell, he’s going to have to go and talk to Ron and Hermione.

“Mate.”

“I still don’t understand why you didn’t just tell us, Harry.”

Hermione sounds deeply disapproving, but Harry is used to this. This he can handle.

“Mate,” Ron interjects again, even more piteously.

“Hmmm, Hermione, I wonder why I didn’t say anything before,” Harry gestures irritably at Ron. “You can see how well it’s going.”

“Snap out of it, Ron. Harry, I’m just interested to find out how you could have been gallivanting around Muggle London being best friends with Draco bloody Malfoy for months without anyone knowing about it?”

“Someone special? Malfoy? Mate.”

“You knew I was meeting up with him! He came to your birthday party, Ron! He invited you both to his, only you were in Romania that weekend. Thanks for abandoning me there, by the way."

"We knew you were seeing him a bit. We didn’t know you were in love with him. With Malfoy! Mate!"

Hermione and Harry sigh at the same time, identical annoyed little breaths, and it reminds Harry so much of being at school and of how long he’s loved these two that it makes him smile despite himself.

“Look, I’m not in love with him—god, Ron—but he’s become… he’s important. To me. And I was worried about telling you because I know you both think he’s awful.”

“We really do,” Hermione says vehemently, “but that doesn’t mean that we wouldn’t understand. I mean, we’re just remembering him from school. He was more of a shit to you than he was to anyone else. So if you like him now, then he probably is fairly decent.”

“He did almost murder me?” Ron interjects.

“And I almost murdered him, Ron, and he’s not still harping on about it.” Harry pushes in beside Ron, wraps an arm around him. “I like him. I like being around him. But it felt shit not telling you both about it. So I’m sorry, okay?”

“Harry,” Hermione sighs. “You don’t have to tell us everything, you know. It’s fine to take time to… figure things out for yourself. I’m not upset about Malfoy.”

“I am a bit,” Ron adds.

Hermione smiles at them. “I’m just glad that you’re not sad anymore. It was awful, seeing you so miserable. But now you’re cheerful, and excited about things, and you’re coming around to see us after ignoring us for months…”

“Hey!” Harry feels wounded. “I wasn’t ignoring you. I was just a bit busy, that’s all.”

Hermione and Ron both eye him with those same sceptical looks.

“Okay, I was ignoring you a bit. I just missed you both. I really didn’t want to have to see you being happy without me. I know, I’m a bastard. I tried really hard not to let you know, but after you moved out I think I lost the plot a bit. I was lonely. And then I met Malfoy, and we went to get the dinner service and—”

“Malfoy went with you to get our dinner service?” Ron sounds dubious. “I did think it was very… tasteful. Too tasteful to be from you, no offence.”

“I picked it!” Harry lies. “He just showed me where to go. And, you know, helped narrow it down a bit. He liked the pattern.”

Ron nods. “I wondered when you had learned the symbolism of flowers! It makes much more sense now that I know Malfoy had a hand in it. I thought maybe you had just coincidentally picked something suitable.”

Harry must look baffled, because Hermione chimes in. “Queen Anne’s lace, Harry. It means sanctuary, home.”

“Malfoy would have known that,” Harry says, and thinks about Malfoy looking at plate after plate in Fand’s backroom, hemmed in by magic that he probably couldn’t bear to be around, trying to find the perfect pattern for Ron and Hermione because that’s the sort of thing he does nowadays. He tries to do the right thing, even if he doesn’t believe it about himself.

And he’s not sure what’s showing on his face, but Hermione doesn’t say any more, just puts her arm around his other side and presses close, and they all sit silently, and Harry hopes that it’s all going to be fine.

It starts off as an ordinary Sunday: waking on the couch to Malfoy’s hand on his wrist, and a perfect cup of tea on the side table; Malfoy laughing on the bus into town, eyes creased against the summer morning sun; hymns soaring in the quiet splendour of the church. 

Harry really should go home, because he’s supposed to be at the Burrow for Sunday lunch, and after that he has special sitting of the Wizengamot to go to, but the lure of the sherry is too strong, and someone’s brought proper Cornish fudge back from their holidays too, which Harry isn’t about to turn down. 

He only means to stay a while, but Sylvia ropes him into helping with the washing up, and she dries while telling him all the gossip about all the other members of the parish, because she knows everyone, and Harry’s having too nice a time to leave. 

He’s pushing it for time, though, even if he Apparates straight back to Grimmauld instead of getting the bus, so eventually he goes in search of Malfoy to say goodbye. He should be in the Sunday School classroom, cleaning up the art supplies. In fact, he is in the Sunday School classroom, but he’s not cleaning up the art supplies, and he’s not alone.

The vicar is with him, and they’re talking in low voices, and Harry nearly fucking walks in on them, and it’s only stealth brought on by the sheer horror of intruding on them that has him hanging back behind the half-open door. 

And he doesn’t mean to listen—he really doesn’t—but the vicar says, “Christ, Draco,” just those two words, just like that, and it sounds so obscene coming from him, so desperate and so at odds with the way he normally speaks about his god when he’s up at the altar, that Harry stills with shock on the other side of the door.

Malfoy says, “I need to think, Andrew,” but he doesn’t sound like he did when he was talking about all the other things he’s had to think about before, like the wyvern, or Lucius, or Marie and her chemotherapy. He sounds soft, like thinking about this is going to be something pleasurable. There’s something sweet and private in his voice. 

“It’s just a kiss, Draco,” the vicar says, and Harry moves fast, presses his eye to the crack in the door so he can see a slice of them, standing far too close together in the small room.

Malfoy looks very serious, and Harry can see him perfectly, because his face is tilted up to Andrew and he’s bathed in a wash of sunlight.

“I’m still not sure, though,” he’s saying, and, “I’m sorry,”, and “I don’t know…”, but the vicar doesn’t seem to care, because he’s moving even closer—how can Malfoy let him? Harry thinks in outrage, he’s supposed to be a man of god—and now, fuck, he’s touching Malfoy, hand splayed greedily over his face, stroking the skin dangerously close to Malfoy’s open mouth.

The vicar whispers, “Please,” and Malfoy—fuck—is quiet for a moment, but then he nods, and Harry feels horrible, like he can’t breathe, but he’s not really sure why. And the vicar leans down—stupid, tall vicar—and his mouth meets Malfoy’s for a long moment before he pulls away, but Malfoy’s hands come up to his shoulders before he can go far, and then he kisses the vicar this time, and it’s all Harry can see.

It’s a hungry kiss, Malfoy’s hands fluttering like pale birds over the stern lines of the cassock before landing in the vicar’s hair, clutching and tightening as he deepens the kiss. Andrew groans, the sound muffled by Malfoy’s mouth, and he pulls Malfoy right in with his fist clenched in the front of Malfoy’s shirt. They’re both breathing hard, already. Malfoy pulls away with a sigh, presses his forehead into Andrew’s. 

Harry turns to leave, because he knows he’s seen too much, and he definitely doesn’t want to hear what comes next. But it’s an old church, and there’s a creak of floorboard as he moves, and it’s as loud as a scream in the hush.

They both look to the door, and Harry forces a smile, then sticks his head into the room, because there’s no point in running away now. 

“Sorry to interrupt,” he says. “I was just coming to say goodbye.”

The vicar looks annoyed for a split-second, though he covers it with a smile and then moves back from Malfoy slowly, reluctantly. Malfoy is bright-eyed, his mouth red and perplexed.

“I’ll come with you, Potter,” he says, and Harry does nearly run at that, because he can’t talk about this to Malfoy, but how can he possibly hide the fact that he saw it all?

“No need, I’ve really got to dash!” He knows it sounds forced. “I have that thing anyway—I’ll text you, Malfoy.”

And he goes, leaves Malfoy there to do whatever he’s going to do with the vicar, and he barely hits the nearest alley before he twists into Apparition and lands, miserable and heartsick and not quite sure why, in the hall of Grimmauld Place.

He doesn’t go to the Burrow. He Floocalls to cancel, though, and he must look a bit peaky because Molly immediately tells him to have a little lie down and not to worry about lunch.

He doesn’t have a lie down, of course, because there’s nothing wrong with him. He just feels a bit weird about seeing Malfoy and the vicar like that today—probably because he’s worried, selfishly, that Malfoy seeing the vicar will mean less time for Harry. They’ve just managed to sort out this weird, impossibly lovely friendship of theirs. Harry finally feels like he has a space in Malfoy’s life. And now, he doesn’t know if there’ll be room left for him. Andrew had been pretty clear about it, when they spoke at Malfoy’s party. He has to be serious when it comes to relationships.

The doorbell comes as a bit of a shock. Harry doesn’t hear it often—everyone who knows where the house is just Floos in. It shouldn’t be surprising to see Malfoy on the top step when he opens the door, but it is. 

“You found the place alright?” is what he says, like a twat, because clearly. 

Malfoy gives him a funny look, and says patiently, “You gave me the address months ago, Potter. The Fidelius doesn’t work on me.”

“Would you like to come in?” Harry asks, carefully. Malfoy is still looking at him strangely, and he seems a bit pink and worried. Harry realises with horror that Malfoy has come to talk to him about the kiss, and in the spirit of the upcoming conversation he adds, “We can have a drink.”

“It’s two o’ clock in the afternoon, Potter. Even for you that’s a bit much. I won’t come in, thanks. Marie would have my guts for garters if she knew I was here at all.”

Harry shrugs at him a bit helplessly, and then sits down on the top step. Malfoy hovers for a moment, then sits down heavily next to him.

“I wondered if… well, is everything alright? You left pretty fast today.”

“I saw you.” Harry puts his face in his hands, because he knows he’s blushing. “I’m sorry.”

Malfoy looks a bit pinched and miserable about the whole thing. 

“Okay,” he says slowly. “A bit weird having to talk about this, but okay.”

“Believe me, nothing would make me happier than to not have to talk about it. It’s not like I wanted to see it. What kind of vicar goes around snogging his parishioners, anyway?”

“I don’t think he makes a habit of snogging parishioners in general. None of this explains why you’re being so weird about it, though. Is it because you fancy him?”

Harry can’t help himself, he makes a face of disgust which in hindsight might be a bit insulting to Malfoy (who clearly does actually fancy him), though Malfoy just laughs a little bit, quiet and fond.

“I told you, I don’t fancy him. Looks like you two have been getting along well, though. I see a lot of parish fetes and bad scones in your future."

"He's a nice man." Malfoy says it simply, like it says a lot. 

And Harry knows it does say a lot, not just about Andrew but about Malfoy too. Harry wishes that he could say, I'm a nice man, but knows he can't. He's done good things—he probably is good, if actions matter—but he's not very nice. He's petty and a bit selfish and too emotional in the wrong sort of way. Not the sort of way that lets him love people easily; just a clinging, too-much sort of emotional that only a handful of people have ever been able to stomach, and lots of them are dead now.

"Well, that's lovely. I hope you’ll be very happy together.” Harry feels a bit hot, all of a sudden, despite the breeze. “Does he know you don’t actually, you know, believe in God? And for that matter, does he know you’re magic? Surely he’ll have to do an exorcism on you before he fucks you. Bell, book, and candle, and all that.”

“Wow. I came over because I thought you seemed upset earlier. Turns out you're just being a right prick about this." Malfoy stretches, pulls out his box of cigarettes. "It’s none of your fucking business, actually."

“Oh yeah, I forgot. Because this is your new Muggle life with your new Muggle boyfriend, and no one gets a say in what you do unless they’re wandless lunatics with a death wish.”

“Right,” Malfoy, standing up and lighting the cigarette with an irritated click of his lighter. “Come and talk to me when you’re ready to stop being an arsehole.”

And even though Harry feels sick with himself and so cross, for no reason that he can understand, he doesn’t want Malfoy to go.

“I thought you were my friend,” he says, and even he can hear how pathetic he sounds, the curdled edge of need in his voice, and then because he’s so embarrassed he gets up and moves towards his front door, anything to get away from Malfoy who’s standing there squinting at him through a fresh blue haze of smoke.

“Are you jealous, Potter? Harry, is that it? Are you jealous?” Malfoy says tightly, but Harry doesn’t know how he’s supposed to answer that so he tells Malfoy that he needs to go and get ready and when Malfoy doesn’t say anything else, Harry goes in and shuts the door of Grimmauld firmly. Though he waits miserably, back pressed against the door for a good five minutes, the doorbell doesn’t ring again, and when Harry looks out the spyhole the step is empty.

Harry does go to his Wizengamot meeting, but he only lasts the first forty minutes or so before he finds himself standing outside the door to Level Two with hardly any recollection of how he got there. 

The admin committee has been running through all the upcoming proposals for the month ahead (dull), and the Chief Warlock keeps interrupting with what are no doubt very pertinent questions about the rolling out of some new legislation relating to death duties (duller), and Harry is really trying to listen. But the whole time, he can only wonder what Malfoy is up to now, and whether he’s seeing Andrew, and wondering how he’s going to apologise for being such a shit when a large part of him (the part that makes him not a nice man) doesn’t feel bad in the least for being so awful about the vicar.

And he thinks about Malfoy looking tense and unhappy on the steps of Grimmauld, saying “Harry, are you jealous?” as though they’ve ever used each other’s first names like that. And then he wonders about Malfoy having sex with the vicar, which makes him feel simultaneously miserable and turned on, only he thinks that really, the worst part of it all is thinking about Malfoy not being around anymore—that Malfoy might have someone else, just for him, and he’s not Harry’s anymore. 

Which is not the way a friend should think, Harry knows, and Malfoy might be completely horrified if he knew that Harry was thinking like that about him. And slowly, just as Hildegarde Bringbasket launches into a detailed breakdown of the increased tax-free thresholds on magical estates, Harry realises that maybe he really is jealous. And the more he thinks about it, the more he understands, and he can’t quite work out how he didn’t put the pieces together sooner.

He can’t be sure, because he doesn’t really know what he’s doing, but he’s very probably in love with Draco Malfoy.

The thought is so shocking that he can’t sit still for another moment, and he gets up—Hildegarde doesn’t spare him a glance, but the Chief Warlock casts him a baleful look—and he stumbles along the row of seats until he gets to the aisle, and almost sprints towards the door.

He spends a bit of time pacing the Atrium, still in his plum-coloured robes, and very almost heads to the Floo bank, thinking that perhaps a sanity-saving visit to Ron and Hermione is in order. But he’s pretty sure that now he’s realised that he’s utterly and completely gone over Malfoy, nothing is going to distract him from it. He’s been obsessing over Malfoy for over a year now, and that was without even knowing that he was half in love with him the whole time. So in the end he does the only thing he can think of that might help, and he heads towards the lifts.

He doesn’t go home to get his Muggle clothes, or his wand holster. Instead, he Apparates straight to Malfoy’s doorstep in a sort of madness of decisiveness, feeling like he can’t bear to wait another minute. He hammers on the door, breathing hard as though he’s run all the way here, like an absolute weirdo, and thankfully the silhouette that he can see coming to open the door is Malfoy’s, which means he’s home and not out with anyone else, kissing and being kissed, and whatever else.

Malfoy is not expecting him, clearly; when he opens the door his mouth does what can only be described as a gape of shock. He’s clutching what looks like an old jam jar full of red wine, and his mouth is stained the blackish purple of the skin of a plum. Harry, still standing on the doorstep, can only think about how much he wants to lick over the obscene discolouration of Malfoy’s lower lip, and then he wonders if this is what being in love is like, this helpless sort of distractedness, and if this is how it’s going to be forever whenever he sees Malfoy. 

“We need to talk,” he says, and before Malfoy can tell him to piss off in the horrible snide tone he doesn’t often use with Harry anymore, Harry sweeps past him into the house and stamps up the stairs to Malfoy’s bedroom. At least the bloody robes are good for something, even if it’s only for dramatic effect.

He can hear the low murmur of Malfoy’s voice from below, talking to the housemates presumably, and then he’s coming up the stairs and into the room and he’s right there, with his lurid mouth and his tired eyes and his quizzical eyebrows, and Harry’s heart sticks on a beat before knocking doubletime against the inside of his breastbone. He doesn’t want to do this.

“I have to tell you something,” is how he begins.

Malfoy looks very much as though he wants to tell Harry to fuck off, because he’s a grudge-holder, the little shit. He doesn’t, but Harry can tell he’s thinking it very hard.

“I’ve been thinking about what you said earlier,” he ploughs on, because there’s no guaranteeing how long Malfoy will manage to keep quiet. 

“Which part?” Malfoy says coldly, then takes a big gulp of his wine. Harry thinks that seems like a good idea, so he leans over and plucks the jar from Malfoy’s hand, takes a swallow. The wine is body-warm and darkly fruity, and he feels it burn all the way down.

“The part where you said I was jealous.”

Malfoy’s eyebrows go up further, and he wrestles the wine back from Harry before going to sit on the windowsill with a cigarette. 

“I didn’t say you were jealous. I asked if you were. There’s a difference.”

Harry knows what Malfoy is saying to him, even as Malfoy lights a cigarette so as to be able to avoid looking at him. Because they’re alike really, the two of them, in their own weird ways—both of them brought up knowing they shouldn’t ever show how they really feel, both of them learning the price that comes from caring too much about things.

Only, they’re safe now, aren’t they? No one’s trying to kill them, or hurt them. Nothing huge depends on them, like the fate of the wizarding world, or people’s lives. Surely it should be ok for them to care about things however much they want to, now?

“I am jealous,” Harry ventures, feeling a little bit like he wants to die the whole time. It’s so much easier to be brave about doing things, rather than showing all these feelings. “I’m jealous of the vicar, though. That he got to kiss you, I mean. Because I thought about it all day, and I realised that I want to kiss you.” 

When Malfoy looks vaguely insulted, Harry hurriedly adds, “I mean, I already wanted to kiss you. But I realised why I want to kiss you. And it’s not just because I fancy you. Which—” and he swallows hard, because Malfoy has stubbed out his cigarette and has turned to look at Harry, and the weight of his stare is like a physical thing “—I do. I really, really fancy you. But I want to kiss you because I… erm… that is to say, I care about you. A lot. Is that okay? I think I was just all muddled up with fancying you and being friends with you, and I didn’t realise what feeling both of those things together meant until I thought about it properly today.”

Malfoy takes a swig of wine as though it’s a life-saving potion, and he closes his eyes briefly. 

“Are you telling me, Potter, that after over a year of this—” Malfoy gestures wildly between them with the almost-empty jar “—whatever this is, you’ve suddenly decided on some sort of wild whim that you—what? Want to fuck me? Want to be my boyfriend? Want me to throw over Andrew for you? What are you saying?”

And Harry wants to reply, yes, yes to all of that. Because he does want Malfoy to dump Andrew, with his soulful brown eyes and his endless patience and his good deeds. And he does want to fuck Malfoy, bloody hell does he want to fuck Malfoy. But that’s nothing new, Malfoy is beautiful and stupidly fit and everyone wants to fuck Malfoy, probably. And yes, he does want Malfoy to be his boyfriend. He’s not sure he can just ask that, though. He has a vague idea that there’s probably some sort of formula that he’s supposed to follow to get to that point, only he’s Harry Potter so he’s never been able to do the things that normal people are supposed to do. 

But it's more than all that. Really, all he wants is to be able to make Malfoy happy; to get to make him laugh, and to maybe get breakfast with him every weekend, and wake him up with kisses, and to feel like they’re part of a team, just the two of them. 

It’s not so different from what they already have, really. But Harry thinks that maybe, the one important difference would be to say it, to make some sort of declaration to Malfoy, and their friends, and the world. Something that would show everyone, we choose each other. 

“Yes to all of the above?” he says instead, hoping he doesn’t sound as terrified as he feels. “Except it’s not a whim. I’ve felt like this for ages, only I just didn’t know it.”

In hindsight, that probably sounds worse than it was meant to.

“Right.” Malfoy’s voice is chilly. “And now you’ve realised how you feel, that’s that?”

Harry has the sinking feeling that this conversation isn’t going exactly as he had hoped it would.

“I thought we could talk about it? See how you feel? I mean… I don’t even know if you’re interested in…”

“In you? Oh, I’m interested in you, alright. I always have been, and that’s the problem, isn’t it, Potter? Much too interested. I was doing great. And then you came along, and even that wasn’t too bad—” Harry debates intejecting with a thanks a fucking million but he suspects it wouldn’t go down very well “—and everything was nice! I love my course, and I love my housemates and our weird old house and our trampoline and our complete lack of proper fucking wine glasses.” He brandishes the jar at Harry and then drains it fully. “And then you were there, and we were friends. And I love… well, anyway. Everything. Everything was good. And now you’ve gone and fucked it up.”

Harry does say it then, “Thanks a fucking million, Malfoy,” soft and bitter, and Malfoy does that awful sneer of his which usually Harry just ignores but today infuriates him beyond measure. 

“Well, what am I supposed to say to you?” Malfoy demands. “Months and months ago, in the shower after Billy clocked you one, I asked you if we should fuck and you turned me down.” Which is not how it happened, and Harry shouts as much, because it wasn’t him turning Malfoy down as far as he could see, it was both of them agreeing to set aside any… attraction there might have been, in the name of friendship. 

Malfoy says, with a particularly sour twist of his mouth, “Attraction, Potter? What are we, magnets?” 

And Harry answers crossly, “Yes, Malfoy, attraction, what’s wrong with that? In that I’m attracted to you, like I want to be near you and… and… touch you…” 

And then Malfoy does that dangerous narrow-eyed stare of his and hops off the windowsill which means he’s close now, standing in the tiny strip of space in that narrow little room, and Harry is suddenly extremely conscious of how close the bed is, and how much of the room it takes up. And Malfoy says, “You want to be close to me, do you? Well then, here you go.” 

And his mouth is just there, that familiar insolent curl of the upper lip, and the wine-stained lure of the inside of the lower lip, and Harry almost leans in the last half a foot and kisses it, because he can hardly think about anything else now that he’s imagining how Malfoy might taste. 

But then Malfoy glitters at him a bit, smiles a dark private smile, and his breath gets lower, slower, and Harry realises that he’s expecting Harry to kiss him, hard and angry and wanting something he can’t have. And that’s not how they do things, not anymore anyway. Everything they are to each other has been freely given, generous, sweet in its own weird way. If this is their first—their only—kiss, Harry doesn’t want it to be like this. 

He steps back.

“I see,” Malfoy says flatly. “So, how do you expect that this will work? You see me kissing someone else, and all of a sudden you decide you want me. So what was the plan? Come over here, kiss me, we—what? Start using each other’s first names?” 

“I would actually quite like that, for the record. Draco.” Harry says.

“Oh piss off, Potter. And then we go on dates, and hold hands on the couch in front of all my housemates, and then we get married?”

“Well… I was thinking, dinner and drinks?” Harry says helpfully, determinedly not blushing at the thought of holding Draco’s hand (kissing the imperious ridge of knuckles, chasing the scar left by the vegetable knife with the point of his tongue, feeling the buzz of Draco’s pulse under his mouth).

“And you’d move in here and sleep in my single bed, and never use magic again? Because I can’t see how that’s going to work. Would you leave magic behind, like I did? Because that’s what it would take, you know. Losing it all, giving it up—however you want to think of it, that’s what you’d need to do. I chose to leave it all behind me, Potter. I left my mother. You can’t even leave your wand at home.”

“We’re doing fine so far, though.” Which they are, Harry thinks, he barely even notices not being able to use magic around Draco anymore. And yes, of course he'd miss it if he had to give it up completely. He wonders how Draco bears it. But they could make it work.

Draco scoffs.

"It may surprise you, Potter, considering what a delight I was at school. But I find it hard to make friends, or at least proper friends. I suppose some might say that I'm a bit much sometimes." (Harry very wisely refrains from saying that he's pretty sure he could never get enough of Draco, because even he can see that it would be very close to a declaration of something he's not sure they're ready for yet). "But now I finally have proper people, good people, people who know what I'm really like, and care about me anyway. People who accept me. And yes, astonishingly, you're one of them. I don't want to lose something so…" his throat works on a swallow " ...so important."

And Harry can't argue with that. He doesn't want to argue with it, because the only thing he really wants is for Draco to want him back and things to be simple. And if that's not what's happening then Harry isn't going to make a fuss.

"Okay," he says. "I get it. I don't have many proper friends either, you know. And I don't want to fuck this up. And I know you're happy. That was what made me want to get to know you, that first time at Fand's place. I was so pissed off by how happy you seemed. I wanted to know how you did it, when I couldn't seem to manage it."

"I remember," Draco says, and there's a hint of his real smile there now. "You seemed like a right miserable bastard. You're much better now. Because back then, you just thought I was happy, and you were sad. No wonder you were miserable, if that's the way you looked at it. People aren't either happy or sad with nothing in between, you know. The trick is to learn how to be happy for as much time as possible, and then you deal with the not-happy bits when you have to."

"It was the magic thing really, though," Harry says truthfully. "Not just how you could be happy. How you could even bear it. I couldn't stop thinking about it."

"This is exactly what I'm talking about, Potter. You think I'm happy without magic. I'm happy despite not having magic, you twat. Sometimes it itches under my skin until I think I'm going to go mad. And you show up like this—" he gestures wildly at Harry's Wizengamot robes "—and you Apparated here, didn't you? I could smell it off you when I opened the door, Potter." He sways closer to Harry, and he looks angry again all of a sudden. "You reek of magic, Potter, and you don't even know it. And it's so hard sometimes, being around that. It's just as well you didn't take me up on the offer of a fuck, I suppose. I’d probably have been able to feel your magic when you were inside me. Pretty hard to go back from that."

Harry, having never been in love properly, wonders if this is what it’s always like—feeling simultaneously pissed off and turned on and, through it all, endlessly fond—but suspects it might be just down to it being him, and Draco, and how they are together.

“So what do you intend to do if you ever fall for a magical person?” he asks. “Are you just going to rule them out straight away because they’re not Muggle?”

“Pretty much.” Draco shrugs. “It wouldn’t work out. It would be fine at the start. But then I’d get jealous and they’d get frustrated, and it would be completely impossible to make a full life together out of two half lives, you know? And that’s what it would be, with me out here in the Muggle world and y— him in the wizarding world.”

Harry wants to stamp his feet. 

“You’re so obtuse,” he says. “What if… what if he was really nice, and loved you a lot?” He feels, suddenly, dangerously close to crying. “Like the magical version of Andrew the vicar? You’d just throw it all away because you can’t compromise on your stupid ideology? It’s the most idiotic thing I’ve ever heard.”

“Potter, I’m not even sure I want the Muggle version of Andrew the vicar,” Draco sighs. “I've tried to. It would be so simple if I did. But I’ve never been very good with nice. I’m not very nice myself a lot of the time, so how would it even work? But I can’t compromise on the magic thing.” His voice is low and careful. “Sometimes I wish… well, it doesn’t really matter. But I had my chance, you know? With magic I mean. It’s better this way.”

And maybe it’s what he says, and maybe it’s the wistful way he says it, but it hits Harry then what Draco’s been doing this whole time, and it’s even more appallingly idiotic than he thought.

“You’re punishing yourself,” he whispers, but Draco’s head snaps up as though he’s shouted it. “That’s what this is all about, some weird sort of self-flagellation. Are you completely mental, Draco? Is this something to do with the war?”

Draco goes very white, then red, then sort of settles into angry-looking blotches. For possibly the first time ever that Harry can remember, he seems lost for words.

“I didn’t… I wouldn’t… I’m not lying Potter, I really believe we should be sharing our power with Muggles.”

“Yes, yes, very open-minded of you. But you could work on that without having rejected everything to do with the magical world, you know. You’d be better off if you worked on it from the inside, probably. And you’re the most pragmatic person I know about this stuff, Draco. You know what you’re doing is idealistic and completely impractical. I know you do. I see you biting your tongue when Marie is talking about it. No, this is something else. This is personal for you.”

Draco starts talking really fast, eyes on the ground.

“Look Potter, I know this isn’t how we’re supposed to think, but I do think that magic is a gift. It makes us special, it does, you know it does. Everyone knows it does. It’s just not kind to say it. Because it’s not fair, is it? A quirk of genetics, an accident of birth. It’s what Andrew would probably call a blessing. And then you have people like my father, and Voldemort and… and me… and we just took this beautiful gift we’d been given and fucked it right up.”

Harry very nearly touches him, only he doesn’t quite trust that he’ll be able to do it without giving away everything that’s in his heart. “You were a child, Draco. A shitty child, granted. You made shitty decisions. You did shitty things. But you don’t have to make yourself suffer for it for the rest of your life! You could just… get on with things. Make things better without being a fucking martyr forever.”

“I can’t,” Draco says, looking shocked at himself. “I know I can’t, because I’ve tried. But I did all those awful things, and if I had stayed, afterwards, I would have had to live with them every day. And my parents don’t understand—they think I should just get over it, move on and stop worrying about it. ‘Twas ever the Malfoy way, after all. But I can’t, Potter. I don’t… I don’t deserve my magic. I lost the right to it long ago.”

“I never thought I’d find myself agreeing with Lucius Malfoy, but fucking hell. You could just get over it. Start, I don’t know, charity work for war orphans, or go into philanthropy or something. Just do what the rest of us do, try to be good. But to cut yourself off from magic completely, and leave your mum, and refuse to try… well, to see if there’s anything with us, just to punish yourself for something you did ten years ago. Well, that’s just selfish.”

“Oh shut up, Potter. It’s easy for you to say be good, isn’t it? You’ve never done a bad thing in your life, you arsehole. And why shouldn’t I be punished? You got me off with the Wizengamot, and Dumbledore got me off murdering him—people have been saving me from myself my whole life, and where did it get me? I should have to be a bit miserable about this one thing. I’ve lost hardly anything in comparison to most people. This is how it should be.”

“How fucking noble of you,” Harry snarls. “Well done, Draco. You’ve made yourself miserable, and you’ve made your mum cry, and you haven’t actually fixed anything or made anything better. You’re just coasting along on your own self-pity. Nice fucking work, you coward.”

“Get out,” Draco says, but Harry is in a rage and he pulls his wand, spins a Lumos out of it to gild the room with its warmth. Draco shivers. 

“You want it, don’t you?” Harry says. “You’re desperate. How long has it been since you’ve held a wand, Draco? Go on, take it.”

Draco shakes his head. 

“I don’t fucking want it, Potter. I barely even missed it until you. I didn’t even think about my wand, didn’t think about magic. And then you came along and you remind me of it every fucking day. And I’m sick of it, sick of you upsetting everything and making me remember… making me think… just, fuck off!”

“Liar.” Harry looks around the tiny room. “It would be much more convenient to blame all this on me. But I don’t believe you. I know you, Draco. Accio Draco’s wand.”

And Draco is really furious now, and Harry can hear a thumping sound coming from inside the wardrobe. He feels a pull at his magic, and when he gives a yank with his wand, the wardrobe doors open and a small box whizzes out and flies towards them. It’s right on track to brain Harry, but Draco throws out one panicked arm and hits it off course so it bashes into the wall and bursts open onto the bed.

Harry doesn’t mean to look, he doesn’t, but there’s the hawthorn wand on the bed, looking like an old friend, just as it did the day he gave it back to Draco outside the Wizengamot courtroom ten years ago. But there are more things too, that Draco has kept tucked away alongside his wand in the little box that should be much too small to fit them all. A single narcissus flower, looking so fresh and dewy that Harry knows it must be preserved by magic. A white peacock feather. Something flashes weakly, and Harry nearly laughs when he sees that it’s a Potter Stinks badge. A coil of green and silver silk—”Your Slytherin tie, Draco, you saddo!”—and a tiny model of a dragon, curled up asleep with a trail of smoke pouring from its nostrils. And there, right in the middle of it all, Harry’s own face grinning up at him.

It’s a newspaper clipping—an article from the Prophet, a fairly recent one, though the paper is soft with wear and the ink is furred around the edges of the letters, like it’s lost all its crispness through too much reading. Harry recognises the article straight away. It’s from the press conference he gave after he missed the MACUSA gala, the night he slept like a sentry on the floor beside Draco’s bed, the night that he had to scrub runnels of Draco’s blood out of the creases in his own palms. 

“Someone Special for our Saviour!” the headline reads, and Harry flushes hot with shame as he remembers his words to the press, sees the stupid, besotted smile spread across his own face in a loop, over and over. He looks absolutely gone; no one who looked at the photo could mistake it for anything other than a person in love. He had thought—he had been so sure—that Draco would never see the coverage.

“You knew,” he says flatly. “All along, you had read this. You knew how I felt.”

Draco shrugs again, that loose careless motion that’s so familiar to Harry from school. 

“I take the Prophet, sometimes. Hardly ever. Just when I feel like I’m really missing… missing home. I just happened to come across this one.”

They’re both silent then, for a long moment. Harry’s Lumos wavers and blinks out, and Draco moves to the bed, starts to put his things back in the box. His hands are slow and careful.

“I have to go,” Harry says, and Draco doesn’t try to stop him, doesn’t say anything at all, just keeps on tucking all his secrets away as Harry leaves him in the half-dark of his tiny room.

Chapter Text

Harry thinks about Draco all week, and the next week. He thinks about him and thinks about him until he wonders if he’s gone a bit mad. It might be because it’s almost the longest he’s gone without seeing Draco since that first week exploring Muggle London together, and it’s horrible. 

He texts Draco once or twice; tentative, sorry little messages that say nothing much. Draco answers him, asks him how he’s feeling. He tells Harry he’s been doing some thinking. He says he’s been to see his mum. Harry can hardly believe it, but later that day Ron owls to say he saw Draco and Narcissa having tea and scones at Rosy Lee’s on Little Compton Street when he was in getting his morning coffee. Harry plays it cool for about five minutes before giving up and Flooing Ron, who bemusedly assures him that yes, Draco looked fine. In fact, he was laughing quite a bit, and Narcissa kept holding his hand across the table, and she was smiling too, which Ron seemed to find particularly terrifying.

Harry texts back to say he hopes Draco had fun with his mum, then worries for twenty minutes that he sounded passive-aggressive, so texts again to say that he really means it. Draco waits for a full day and a half before replying in the middle of the night—Harry’s awake, of course—and he just says thank you, followed by an x, and Harry gets up and drinks a full tumbler of Firewhiskey before reading the message again and then switching the phone off.

He lies on the couch and listens to one of the weird mix CDs Draco made for him (I came home unexpectedly, found her crying needlessly in the middle of the day; if I can save you any time, come on, give it to me, I'll keep it with mine; nothing much could happen, nothing we can't shake, oh, we're absolute beginners, with nothing much at stake) and his life feels just like it did before Draco, and it’s so bloody lonely.

He almost manages to wallow for a whole fortnight, but on Sunday morning he wakes before first light to the sound of distant church bells and he feels a bit better. 

He drinks a cup of proper coffee looking out the sash window of his big bedroom, and he wonders what he’s going to do for the day, and every option ends up with see Draco. Because even though he’s embarrassed—about falling in love with Draco so unconsciously, so easily, especially if Draco doesn’t feel the same—he’s not ashamed. Draco’s stuck around this long, after all. He must love Harry a bit, to be so fierce about him. To want to have him close. Draco doesn’t do that stuff lightly, Harry knows that much. So if Harry never gets to kiss him, or to fuck and be fucked by him, or to know the taste of his skin; so what. It might have to be a different kind of love, but it’s still enough. And if it’s not enough, well… Harry has had a lot of experience of wanting what he can’t have. He’ll manage. 

But he won’t manage without Draco as his friend, probably. He misses him in the same way that he misses Ron and Hermione when he doesn’t see them for a while; like some vital part of him is on hold. 

It’s still early, so he walks into town, through the Sunday-slow streets, around the edge of Coram’s Fields, through Russell Square. He stops on the steps of the British Museum and has a cigarette—yet another bad habit that he doesn’t want to quit—and hums the song that’s stuck in his head (look for the shafts of light on the road where the heat goes), until some Spanish students nearby start to laugh at him and he hauls himself up and starts walking again.

The service has already started by the time he gets there, and he slips in right at the back, searching through the rows until he sees the back of Draco’s bright head bent over his hymnal, kissed by slices of coloured light from the high windows. He watches Draco the whole time, even listens to Andrew’s sermon in the spirit of goodwill, and lets the hymns wash over him. Lo, there breaks a yet more glorious day; be thou my breastplate, my sword for the fight; speak through the earthquake, wind, and fire, O still, small voice of calm. Sylvia slides into the pew next to him, and presses her shoulder against his, and Harry hums along with the hymns, and feels small and safe and hopeful.

After the service, Harry waits.

Draco gives a proper start of surprise when he sees him, but he smiles a little bit, and he holds up a hand to Harry as if to say, wait. And then Harry sees him go up to Andrew, and they talk for a little while, very seriously, and all the while Harry sips at his sherry and tries not to watch them too closely. But finally Draco draws away, and Andrew looks sorrowful and noble even as he smiles sadly down at Draco (though he manages to look far more human when he sends Harry a narrow-eyed look of dislike across the church). 

Beside Harry, Sylvia sighs. “He’s thrown the vicar over, then. And I thought you said you two were just friends?”

Harry nudges her. “We are just friends. Only I realised that I’ve been in love with him all along without knowing it. Very embarrassing. I’m not sure that he’s into it, really, but I thought he needed to know anyway.”

Sylvia clicks her tongue. “Well, it’s probably for the best. Draco’s a lovely boy, but he’s not the slow and steady type, really. Maybe I should introduce Andrew to my grandson, Edward.”

Harry’s not sure she’s right, actually. Because Draco is steady, he thinks; or steadfast, at least, which might have been the worst of his problems back in school, when he couldn’t see beyond the blinkers his parents had placed on him. He’s dogged, and determined, loyal to a fault. Not that different from Harry himself, really, when it comes down to it. 

And now he’s here, suddenly, right beside Harry, and he says quietly, “Can we talk?”, and they walk together right up the aisle of the church and into the south transept.

Draco begins. “I know you went to see my dad.”

Which is... well, not what Harry had been expecting. 

“My mum told me. Well, I had guessed when he didn’t try to find me again. He’s never been known for his restraint. You should have told me, you know.”

Harry nods. “I should have. I wanted to make sure he left you alone, though.”

Draco sighs. “Look, I like it, okay? I like that you get involved, and that you’re… well, you’re protective of me. And I should have known that being friends with you would mean having to, I don’t know, open up more of myself. Just… talk to me about it next time, would you?”

“What about everything else?” Harry asks. 

Draco replies carefully. “The magic thing—you were right about that. For a long time, I felt like I didn’t deserve it anymore. And I was ashamed of myself. I’m not sure I’m ready to go back to living in that world again, with all those people who know who I am, and what I did.”

“They don’t know you,” Harry says gently. 

Draco bats his hands impatiently. “Maybe that's true. But either way, we’re not making a difference by giving up our magic. It’s a legitimate form of protest, but it’s not effective. And I hate all that wasted energy. I had a big talk with Marie this week. We sat down and really discussed our plans, and how we want to go about things. I think she’s disillusioned too, you know. She was so idealistic back in uni, and now she’s worn down. I told her that I’m thinking of training as a Wizarding Counsel. It would only take a year, if they convert my Muggle degree.” His eyes are bright with excitement. 

“It’s a chance to make a real difference. The Wizengamot rushed so many laws through in those first few years after the war. I know that I could help dismantle all those shoddy frameworks they put up back then. But I can only do it from the inside. And if you're in, you’re going to have to pull your weight with the Wizengamot too.”

Harry wants to tell him that he's been thinking about this a lot himself, for months now. He wants to be able to finally talk about all the reading he’s been doing, and how he’s been researching all the legal structures surrounding the Statute, and how Hermione has been helping him with his research, and even making noises about running for the Wizengamot herself. That can all come later, he thinks.

Draco keeps talking, face serious. “But you know that all of this—seeing my mum, and thinking about work, and talking to Marie—it’s all for me? I’m not doing this for you. Do you get that, Harry?”

Harry grins at Draco, and he knows his entire heart is probably on show in that smile. And Draco smiles back at him, though it’s slow-blossoming and reluctant, like he can’t quite help himself.

“Stop looking at me like that! This is important. Because if we’re going to do this, if we’re going to take on the Ministry over the Statute, you need to know that I’m doing it all on my own terms. You don’t have to feel responsible for any of it, this is all me. And I can’t be sure if it’ll even work out. It really might not, and if it doesn’t, you have to be alright with me going Muggle again. Okay?”

“Okay,” Harry says, “that’s okay.”

“And,” Draco continues, “I spoke to Andrew.”

“I saw,” Harry says, and Draco laughs aloud at that.

“Not today,” he says. “Weeks ago, after he kissed me, and then you barged in. I told him then, I didn’t think it was going to work out.”

“But… you never said!” Harry remembers Draco outside Grimmauld, cigarette in his mouth, grim-faced and tired-looking. “And, not being weird about it, but it looked like you were into the kiss.”

“He’s a good kisser,” Draco says. “But my heart wasn’t in it, sadly. I did try. And I didn’t tell you because you were such a terrible arsehole when I called over. But here’s the thing.” He sighs. “I don’t really know how to deal with any of this—” and he waves his hand vaguely between them. “I hated you for so long. And now… how am I supposed to know how to feel differently about you? How are you supposed to feel differently about me?”

Harry hadn’t been allowing himself to hope, really, because in his experience things don’t always work out. But he allows himself to hope now, just the tiniest flutter of it, because if that’s all Draco is worried about, well they can handle that.

“Is that all it is?” he asks. “Is that really the only thing you’re worried about? Because that’s easy, you twat. Do you hate me now?” Draco shakes his head. “Do you feel differently about me?” And Draco does nod, though he rolls his eyes vigorously with it. “Well then,” Harry shrugs. “You don’t need to learn how you feel about me. It’s not a test, or a challenge. You just let yourself feel it. It is what it is.”

Draco starts to laugh. “Are pearls of wisdom like this the reason they wanted you on the Wizengamot? Christ, Harry. How can it be that simple?”

“But it already is that simple. We’ve done all the hard stuff. Just… let yourself want what you want. That’s it. The feelings are there anyway. There’s no point in worrying about them.” Draco looks at him, gaze soft and exasperated and so bloody fond. “What do you want, Draco? It’s that easy. Just tell me what you want.”

“So much. I want an ice-cream from Fortescue’s. And I want to go for a fly—oh fuck, I want to fly so badly! I want to fly with you.” His eyes are shining. “And I want to kiss you.”

Harry shrugs again. “Okay,” he says. “Those are all easy. Can we start with the last one, please?” 

Draco’s still laughing when he steps closer. “The first kiss is important,” he says. “It’s how we’ll know if we’re… compatible.” He lifts his hand, slides it along the soft, sensitive skin just under Harry’s jaw, into Harry’s hair. He tugs, gently, pulling Harry’s head back just a fraction.

“It might be awful,” Harry says, trying for solemn, but even he can hear the low gritty sound of need in his own voice. “This might all be a huge mistake.”

Draco’s fingers tighten in Harry’s hair, and he leans in. “It might be awful,” he agrees, and Harry clutches at him then, digs his fingers into the clean tapering lines of his hips. Through Draco’s shirt, he can feel the solid shift of muscle as Draco shivers under his hands. 

“It’s not going to be awful,” Harry says, and Draco answers low and desperate, “It’s going to be so fucking good.” And his mouth is right there, and this time he wants Harry properly, and it is so fucking good already, just getting to be this near to him. Harry’s not sure that anything could be better, really. 

Until Draco kisses him.

It’s just a kiss, of course, just Draco’s mouth on his, and the slow, maddening slide of his tongue, and the disarming warmth of his other hand when it comes to rest on Harry’s cheek. But it feels like magic, like there’s something under Harry’s skin, something hot and foreign and intoxicating moving through his bloodstream. He can’t quite catch a breath, and when Draco’s hand moves down from his hair in a slow exploratory trail along his spine, Harry can hear the hitch and judder of his own gasp, loud in the quiet of the transept. 

Draco presses into him, and Harry can feel the answering press of the altar rail behind his thighs, and Draco bends him backwards so his body is a tightly-strung bow, and Draco is leaning over him, holding him up, and they’re still kissing, kissing, kissing.

“Harry,” Draco wrenches his mouth away, pulls him upright, and presses his face into Harry’s neck instead. “Even for me,” he mutters, and Harry swallows, then closes his eyes at the shivery feel of Draco’s mouth moving against the flexing line of his throat. “Even for me this is callous. We can’t… we shouldn’t… not here, I mean.”

“No,” Harry says, and his voice is raw and ragged. Just from a kiss he thinks, wonderingly. Above their heads, the serene blank face of the plaster Christ on the side altar looks down on them impassively. “We should leave.”

“Can you…” Draco says tentatively, “can you Apparate us? It’s just. I don’t want to wait any more.”

“Are you sure?” Harry asks, though he can’t quite stop looking at Draco’s mouth, the kiss-ravaged swell of it, the small wet gleam where his tongue touches the lower lip. “We can get the bus if you prefer.”

Draco groans, slides his hand up inside Harry’s t-shirt. “Your wand, Harry. Can we go to yours? It’s bound to be more private.” And all the while, his fingertips scrabble like points of fire until he frees Harry’s wand from the holster, and he presses it flat into Harry’s palm.

And Harry gathers Draco to him, and Draco smiles as Harry casts, and then there’s that extended moment of the dizzying hurtle through space, and then they land, together.

He means to Apparate them into the drawing room, or the hall, or even the kitchen—he really does—but his magic is too eager, too unsubtle. They land with barely a bump in front of the fireplace in Harry’s bedroom, and because he’s left his curtains half-closed, the light is low and sultry. The bed is rumpled and unmade. 

They both look towards the bed, then at each other, and the room is very quiet. Then Draco throws his head back and laughs again, still holding onto Harry’s forearms from the Side-Along, and it makes Harry laugh too, out of relief as much as anything, and he drops his head down onto Draco’s shoulder, because he thinks he’s probably allowed to do that now that they’ve been doing so much kissing.

“Sorry,” he says, and he turns his face so that his lips brush the smooth muscle at the side of Draco’s neck as he speaks. Draco shivers, and this close Harry can hear the minute hitch in his breathing. “We don’t have to… do anything? In the bed, I mean.” And then, when Draco keeps laughing at him, “God, alright, I’m a bit shit at this, okay?”

“I would quite like to do lots of things, actually,” Draco says, voice amused and gleeful. “In the bed, I mean.”

And it’s an excellent idea, Harry thinks, so he starts walking Draco towards the bed, and he kisses him as they go; up the column of his throat in a gentle, possessive trail, along the sharp flexing line of his jaw. He takes his teeth to the softest part of Draco’s earlobe, and Draco makes a tiny noise at that, part protest, part gasp, and Harry likes it—he likes it so much—and he works his way back to Draco’s mouth to try to capture the small desperate sounds Draco makes when Harry kisses him, hot and sweet and open-mouthed.

And it’s funny how fast he can get Draco to go from laughing at Harry to clutching at him, hands sure and decisive along Harry’s ribcage (he’s going to be bruised tomorrow, and he can’t wait), grabbing fistfuls of Harry’s curls so confidently and demandingly that it feels like something he’s thought about before, using them as leverage to move Harry’s mouth where he wants it. They can’t seem to let go of each other long enough to take their clothes off, so it’s all a muddle of tangled shirt tails and the urgent pop of buttons, and then Draco is pressing Harry’s mouth to one pinked-up nipple and making a soft, contented-sounding sigh when Harry tongues it into a peak.

Harry has wanted people before, but he hasn’t known what it’s like to be really desperate for someone. He hadn’t even really believed that people really felt like that, like they do in books and films and songs (London ice cracks on a seamless line; did I see a moment with you in a half-lit world; we can stay together, two hearts under the skyscrapers).

But he gets it now, the purity of that sort of need, the single-minded driving force of it. Right now, with Draco on the bed under him, his own hand pressing under Draco to assist the desperate arching jolt of his spine, to get his skin closer and closer still to Harry’s eager mouth—well, Harry can’t even begin to imagine anything more important, more essential than this. He thinks the room could burn down around them and he’d still be chasing Draco’s pulse with his tongue.

It feels like discovery, is the thing. Harry’s fucked a lot of people over the years—Muggles mostly, because it’s more private, easier to navigate the bars and dancefloors when people don’t know him—but Draco’s body under his hands is a revelation. He tries to undo the top button of Draco’s jeans, but gets distracted by the straining shape of Draco’s hard cock under the fabric; he tries to stroke Draco through his jeans but gets distracted by the taut, translucent skin that stretches over his hipbones. Every part of him deserves exploration. 

Draco moves under him, mutters, “Fuck,” and “Potter,” and “There, yes, fuck, there”, twists his fingers back into Harry’s hair and tugs at it until he has Harry lying half-across him and they’re both blinking into a narrow blade of sunlight that spears them through a gap in the curtains. This close, Harry can see the darker gold of his stubble, the arresting sweep of his startlingly black lashes, the faint fuzz of faded summer freckles across the bridge of his nose. His mouth is swollen, kiss-reddened, and Harry has to stifle a groan as he leans in to lick back into it.

And Draco’s into this too, Harry thinks joyfully. He had wondered if he’d be a bit much for Draco, if seeing Harry this desperate—seeing Harry needing him this way—would turn him off. But it’s the opposite, Harry thinks. Draco’s never seemed more sure of anything, maybe—he pulls Harry to him like it’s all he can think about, makes a path along his own body for Harry’s mouth to follow, and when Harry wriggles lower and finally slides his zip down, the muscles of his stomach tense and tremble against Harry’s cheek.

He groans then, and says, “Wait,” and Harry does—he stills against Draco, pauses where he had been pressing the heel of his hand against the base of Draco’s cock, rests his face against the fan of Draco’s ribcage.

Draco says, “Can we…” and then plucks helplessly at the neck of Harry’s t-shirt, which he’s still wearing even though at some point Draco’s frantic hands have tugged it right up into his armpits. And it’s a good idea, because they have time of course, and nowhere to be except here in this bed, together. There’s no need to rush.

So Harry starts from the bottom—unlaces Draco’s big boots, pulls off the striped woollen socks that Harry’s pretty sure were handknit by Marie during chemo. Draco’s jeans are already gaping and undone, so Harry gets him to lift his hips and eases them down and off. 

Underneath, Draco isn’t wearing any underwear, and his cock is flushed and heavy with blood when it thumps onto his stomach as he lies back down. There’s a sticky gleam where he's leaking a bit onto his stomach.

“I know Muggles wear boxers, but I can’t get used to them,” he tells Harry breathlessly. “Better to just go without and let them think I’m a bit kinky.”

“I wonder,” Harry says, “if this is going to be what it’s like with you? Wanting to fuck you, like, all the time, but also wanting to laugh at you? Because that is so sad. Pretending that you’re a bit filthy, but actually you just… what? Find underwear uncomfortable?” 

As he speaks, he kicks off his own trainers, wriggles out of his jeans and his own—perfectly comfortable—boxers, yanks his t-shirt off. From the bed, Draco shifts slightly, sits up a bit and just looks for a long moment. Neither of them speaks. Harry should probably be embarrassed, while Draco is still partly-dressed and Harry’s standing naked, hair askew, cock hard and leaking, but he’s not. It’s hopeless to try and hide how he feels about Draco, after all. This is just more of the whole helplessly in love thing, Harry thinks. He might as well let Draco see. He clasps himself, just a lazy fist looped at the base of his cock, strokes once and then again, let his back arch just a fraction into the slow, spiralling need his touch creates. And Draco—Draco actually makes a noise, a broken-off, stifled thing, barely more than a sigh, but it’s enough. 

Harry goes back to the bed.

“Enough, sit up, get this off,” Harry says, tugging at Draco’s half-unbuttoned shirt. “I want to… I need…” and he leans down over Draco again, kisses him hard, just once.

“Okay, okay,” Draco says, and Harry knows him so well by now, can tell by the pink flush at his throat, and the twitch of his cock, and his cross tone, that he’s deeply, irritatedly turned on. “Only, here’s the thing—and I hope you’re not going to get all weird about them…”

He sits up fully, pulls his shirt over his head without bothering to unbutton it properly, raises his left arm above his head, then looks at Harry and waits. Harry is distracted by the ruffled sweep of his hair, and the lean lines of his shoulders, and then his heart does that clenchy thing when he sees the silver locket he gave Draco last Christmas, on a long chain around Draco’s neck. But then he notices what he’s supposed to be looking at.

Draco’s all scarred up, it turns out, with scars he got at the end of Harry’s wand. They sweep along his left flank where Harry’s curse had hit him as he turned to run; they mark notches along the rack of his ribcage. One even cuts a swathe through the soft, dark gold hair under his left arm. They look like they must have hurt. 

“Shit,” Harry says. “I should probably apologise for that.”

Draco shrugs, lowers his arm and hugs it to his body (though he’s still hard, Harry notes), and in the defensive set of his jaw Harry can see that Draco thinks that Harry might be put off by the scars. 

“I am really sorry,” he says, as gently as he can without sounding creepy. “But I’m afraid I probably am going to be a bit weird about them.” 

And he lowers his head, puts his mouth to the lowest tail of a scar, just at Draco’s waist, kisses it, looks up and catches Draco’s eye as he does it. He feels wanton, completely unrepentant, and he slides a hand up to grab Draco’s arm right where the faded stain of the Dark Mark still sits, and then pushes his arm above his head. It means he gets to follow the scars the whole way up, marking out the trail with his teeth and his tongue until Draco groans, properly, shamelessly, out loud. He laps into Draco’s underarm, presses his nose against the concave hollow of warm skin and soft hair, tastes the salt tang of him along the naked slash of skin the scar has left there. 

Because he likes the scars, so much—likes the way the roughened red of them disrupts the creamy expanse of Draco’s skin, likes the fact that Draco’s been walking around all these years with the signature of Harry’s magic scribbled on his skin. He thinks the scars are so, so hot, actually, and he’s vaguely horrified at himself, and he knows he can’t ever admit it to anyone, not even Draco. 

Instead he speaks into Draco’s skin, the brush of his moving lips a constant kiss, and he says, “They remind me that this is us, do you know what I mean?” And Draco hesitates, then nods, and Harry says, “We’re still who we were, even though we get to have this now too,” and then Draco says, “Right, okay, so we’re good?” 

And Harry tells him that they’re good, they’re so good, and Draco laughs then and says, “Come on then, fuck, come up here,” and Harry does, straddles Draco’s thighs, and they kiss again until they’re both breathless and rocking against each other.

And at this stage Harry’s not worried about anything anymore. It’s so easy to see what they both want, and Harry gets lube out of his bedside cabinet and he doesn’t even feel a little bit shy about smoothing it over Draco’s cock, and pouring some into Draco’s hand so he can reach behind Harry and pet at him, dip in and out of him until Harry has to push back a bit into his touch, demandingly.

“Now,” he says to Draco, and “Please,” and then, “Yes” in a rush of breath when Draco takes him by the hips and lowers him down until there’s a fresh bloom of heat and delicious, intrusive shock as Draco pushes up and into him, ever so slowly.

When Draco’s all the way inside him—and Harry’s imagined it before, of course he has, but nothing could come close to this satisfied fullness—Harry smiles down at Draco, wanting to move but also wanting to hold still for a moment, to savour this feeling of ripeness, of potential. 

Draco hands are wide and capable on the jut of Harry’s hipbones, fingers clenching reflexively as though to keep him anchored. His eyes are wide and alert, fever-bright.

“Potter,” he says, then quieter, “Harry. You know how I feel? About you, I mean.” And when Harry nods, he asks, “When did you realise?”

“When did I know for sure? In the church today, up at the top there by the altar. When you told me you didn’t go to see your mum for me. You were so cross about it, and you looked so fucking tired—ow, so beautiful I mean, fuck, stop poking me!—and when I said I knew that already you smiled at me like you didn’t want to but you couldn’t help it. And then I knew. You’re very cute, and very easy to read, you know.”

“Not so easy to read,” Draco grumbles, “if you couldn’t guess that I was driving myself mad over you for months. But anyway, I wanted to make sure you knew.”

“I do know,” Harry replies, and then he moves—just a tentative clench of his muscles, a gentle tensing and release of his thighs—and Draco’s head falls back, throat bared like an offering, and he lets go of Harry’s hips. Harry thinks of him at the top of the church, hair glinting the gold of the tabernacle, head bowed under the sorrowful eyes of the statue of a crucified Jesus as he talked to Harry about magic. He had seemed so untouchable then, marmoreal and ascetic and resolute. And now Harry has him, and there’s nothing sacred about it, just this desperate, filthy, entirely human need.

Harry moves again, upwards in a glorious ascension, and Draco follows with his hips so they meet hard on Harry’s downward arc, and it wrenches groans out of both of them. Draco’s arms are flung outwards now, elbows planted on the bed, shoulders winged and trembling with tension. He’s hot to the touch, coiled with muscle and sheened with sweat already as he fucks up into Harry, and there’s nothing reverent about the way Harry touches him.

This is his body, Harry thinks with a rush of pure desire so strong that it borders on disbelief, and he touches all the parts that he can reach: throat; nipple; soaring arch of the ribcage; curve of bicep; open, panting mouth.

It’s so good, all of it, and Harry tells Draco how much he likes it, breathlessly, with his hand curled around Draco’s jaw. So good, so lovely, I’ve waited so long.

“I should have known,” Draco says, “that you’d be like this. I mean, I wanked over it so many times.”

“Did you?” Harry says delightedly, just as Draco’s hand closes over his cock and he has to shut his eyes as the thought and touch collide in an assault of pleasure.

“Of course I fucking did.” Draco’s panting properly now, and his thighs are shaking where they’re pressed up behind Harry. “All those nights with you on my couch, or lying on my bed, and that time you came in from the garden with no top on. You were driving me crazy. Did you—”  and he tightens his grip on Harry, starts to wank him in earnest, and when Harry whispers a wandless lube charm he laughs out loud “—did you think about me?”

“Yes, fuck, yes,” Harry says, and it’s true of course, but he doesn’t want to say that, for all the times he thought about fucking Draco, he also thought about sitting across from Draco at the kitchen table drinking coffee, or Draco unwrapping a supermarket sandwich and pulling out all the slices of tomato to pass to Harry, or Draco standing in the pew in church singing hymns, cool and gracious and serene in the spill of winter light from the windows (breathe through the heat of our desire). 

He wants to tell Draco, but then Draco goes very still for a second, gasps, “I’m so close,” and then shudders hard as he thrusts once, twice, before he starts to come. 

Inside me, Harry thinks, he’s coming inside me, and he shuts his eyes, thinks of nothing but the soaring pleasure of Draco’s hand moving over his cock, stuttering and loosening at first before Harry wraps his own hand around Draco’s, Draco’s other hand coming up to rest over Harry’s juddering heart like a benediction until Harry curls in on himself and comes, shaking, over their interlocked fingers.

It’s the best thing he’s ever felt.

They lie together until their sweat cools, and then Draco starts making discontented noises about showering until Harry gets his wand out of the wand box and performs a full range of Cleaning Charms. When his magic washes over Draco, Draco shivers and his softened cock twitches. Harry’s enchanted by the whole thing. He’s never used magic towards Draco in a gentle way before, and he knows his spellwork probably feels like a caress.

Draco looks exhausted now, fucked out and drained, but they’re still smiling stupidly at each other in the shelter of Harry’s big bed.

“Sleep now,” Harry says, and swallows Draco’s yawn with yet another kiss, gathers him up so they’re bundled together in a cocoon of blankets. Because they can do it all again when they wake up, he thinks, and they can talk, and make plans. But for now, there’s nothing but the peaceful slide into sleep, the comfort that comes with safety, and Draco slack and sleep-heavy against his skin.

Oh, still small voice of calm, Harry thinks, and he closes his eyes.

Chapter Text

Harry’s lying on the floor of the small back bedroom, under the dragon mobile, when Draco gets home. 

It’s only early evening, but the sky is a lowering bank of clouds, and the room is full of the cool, flat light that comes along with the first snowfall of winter.

Draco finds him quickly, like he always does, and though he doesn’t say anything, he comes and lies down next to him. He sets the dragons to spinning with a neat little jab of his wand, and they both close their eyes against the shower of glittery sparks the Opaleye sends their way.

“I’m so tired,” Harry groans, and Draco finds his hand and squeezes it, then keeps it tucked in his own. “I don’t know why we thought we could get all this legislation ironed out before Christmas. Ron is going to divorce Hermione and find a new best friend if he doesn’t see us properly soon.”

There’s a clatter of feet from downstairs, and a loud gust of laughter, and Harry sends a half-hearted Silencing Charm at the door. 

“Sorry,” he says. “I just can’t do any more work talk today. Why are they even still here? It’s Christmas week, for fuck’s sake.”

It’s been nice having Grimmauld busy this past year, but when Harry had set up Witches and Wizards for a Wider World, and converted the front drawing room into his office, he hadn’t expected that it would soon be the centre of operations for a thriving organisation with a full-time staff of four people (and Harry as manager and head of Wizengamot relations, much to his horror). But it feels good to be doing something useful, and Grimmauld is spacious and central and a perfect base for the organisation, really.

But Harry needs to talk to Draco about the living situation, because he’s been thinking recently that it might be nice to find somewhere new—maybe somewhere Muggle, somewhere with a bit of flying room and a proper garden, somewhere that they can make all their own memories from scratch. Somewhere that they can officially call their own. 

Draco laughs. “I’ve just come from my meeting with Hermione,” he says, “and I think we’ve managed to tweak the last few clauses that were giving us trouble. We’ll have this bill ready for the first sitting of the Wizengamot in the new year, don’t worry. So I’m officially declaring this the start of the Christmas holidays.” He flicks his wand to cancel Harry’s Silencio, then bellows, “Oi, you lot! Bugger off home. See you bright and early on the third of January!”

There’s more laughter from downstairs (most likely because of the copious amounts of alcohol they’d all drunk on their staff lunch earlier, though Harry had abstained), and then they all leave with a chorus of goodbyes and Happy Christmases.

Harry yawns, then rolls over and presses his face into Draco’s shoulder. “Shopping tomorrow?” 

“Nope. Marie has chemo so I said I’d collect her afterwards and spend the afternoon with her. We could go somewhere for breakfast beforehand though, if you fancy it.”

“I do, I really do. And then I’ll go to Fand’s and pick up the last of the presents.”

Draco grins, then they both look up as the Welsh Green on the mobile whips her tail and mewls irritably. 

“I still can’t believe you bought that thing,” Draco says fondly. 

“I think,” Harry says, and lets his mouth linger on the curve of Draco’s Adam’s apple, “I knew you were important, even then. Like that song, you know?” He starts to sing tunelessly and Draco snorts and puts a hot palm over his mouth. Harry bites it, gently, and when Draco pulls his hand away, Harry sits up. “When we woke up that morning we had no way of knowing that in a matter of hours we'd change the way we were going. It’s like, something made me buy it, even though I thought you were a total wanker back then.”

“Well, I do love it,” Draco says, and then, “but please never sing at me again. Right, dinner?” Harry flops over him limply and lies draped across his chest. 

“I’m too tired for dinner,” he says pathetically, and Draco’s hand is in his hair, stroking at him like he’s precious. 

“Fine, no dinner. I can suck you off if that’ll help?” His hand tightens just a fraction as he tugs on a coil of Harry’s hair.

“Not in front of the dragons, surely?” Harry says, but he’s a bit hard already just from the idea of Draco's mouth on him, and he knows Draco can hear that thin edge of dark need in his voice.

Draco lies him back, arranges him with care, strips him efficiently. He takes his time, like Harry is something he wants to savour, and when he has Harry naked under his hands, he does that same smile, the one that Harry loves, the one that shows he can’t help himself when it comes to Harry. He slides a thumb into Harry’s mouth so he can curl his tongue around the whorled pad of it. Harry lets his eyes flutter shut, all the better to give into the feel of Draco moving over him, moving down him, mouth to mouth, then neck, then nipple, and further down like he has all the time in the world.

It’s nearly Christmas, Harry thinks, I must get some mistletoe. And he remembers that first Christmas, their first Christmas, before they even knew there was a them, Draco’s music his lullaby when he lay alone in Ron’s room at The Burrow. And last Christmas, spending the day at Draco’s house and Marie feeling too sick for goose, so all of them having tea and toast for Christmas dinner. Afterwards, Draco had taken him outside onto the cold front porch and kissed him for so long that their fingers went numb and they had to spend the evening warming up in Draco’s tiny single bed.

This Christmas, Harry has bought a ring. 

“Draco,” he says desperately, then makes a small, wanting noise as Draco stops what he’s doing, mouth hot and greedy around his cock. “Draco, you’re so good.” 

Draco pulls off him and smiles. “Keep telling me that,” he says, “and someday I might end up believing you.”

Harry smiles back. He doesn’t think he’ll ever stop.