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Chapter Text

Is it like this

In death’s other kingdom

Waking alone

At the hour when we are

Trembling with tenderness

Lips that would kiss

Form prayers to broken stone

—The Hollow Men by T.S. Eliot

Harry Potter was buried, but there was no coffin. He sensed the dirt packed tightly against his skin, unable even to deduce whether his eyes were open or shut for the black and disorienting earth around him. He must have laid there for hours or months until (like a slowly-creeping moisture, the soft suggestion of warmth in sunrise) something instinctual asked him to consider life.

His hands made the choice before his heart did. He fought to reach up, inching through the soil, wedging it under his fingernails with his lips pressed tight, his breath laboured in strong nostril wheezes.

Every microscopic ascension made his atrophied muscles scream. He felt a reckoning in his soul. Was life a thing that lay in wait on the surface? Or was this life already: the grunting and gasping and fighting for the promise of water and sunshine he could only feel the echo of this deep underground? Then, the daylight—so unexpectedly blinding that he thought he’d breached the surface, but he realised all he’d done was open his eyes and centre himself back into his body.

Often, nightmares dominated his unconsciousness this way. Always, they manifested as some form of death and returning from it. Never, though, had they imitated so closely the first motions of a germinated seedling. That was the result of where he’d dozed—at a table in the library, his chin resting on his hand, his elbow balancing on the pages of Advanced Herbology, with his face turned towards the large window.

Harry took a deep breath in and out his nose as if, were he to part his lips, he’d still eat dirt, and then he tried to focus on his textbook again inconspicuously as if he’d been daydreaming and not dreaming-dreaming.

‘Our world, while teeming with complex magical plants, is just as capable of sharing a more common appreciation with the Muggle world for the simplest and most crucial element of florae—the seedling. Even our most prevalent herbologists acknowledge that life’s ability to emerge and intricate from seed in soil is a magic grander than spell or potion. It is the magic of existence.’

A more thoughtful study of plants than their utilitarian novice books had been, Pomona Sprout had assigned the text to her eldest students—and Harry and his friends were certainly breaking records on the ‘eldest’ bit. At eighteen, returning to Hogwarts felt like discovering that one’s feet now hang off a familiar childhood bed. Somehow, an entire castle had grown small.

And at the too-tiny desk in the too-tight corner of the library, Ron and Hermione were holding hands under the table, pretending he couldn’t tell and probably convincing themselves it was necessary to keep him from feeling strange about it. He thought it was stranger that they felt the need to act discreet. He was the happiest one could be for them.

Then again, the ‘happiest he could be’ was a more muted benchmark than it once was.

Harry Potter was buried, but there was no coffin. He sensed the dirt packed tightly against—

He rubbed his eyes with his palms and stood quickly, shaking the dream away.

Was life a thing that lay in wait on the surface? Or was this life already: the grunting and gasping—

“Harry?” Hermione’s hands sprung into her lap. She, unlike Ron and Harry, was meant to return to Hogwarts as naturally as a river found the ocean. She thrived even with seven NEWTs under her belt, her dark skin flushed with warm-red undertones even in her sixth, eighth, or tenth hours of revision, while Harry looked and felt like death.

“I’m, erm, going to finish my weekend reading outside. Need some fresh air,” he said. “A little nature.”

The magic of existence—

Outside, the world was louder and his thoughts couldn’t match its volume. First years let off high-pitched screams of laughter in the open-air window ledges of the exterior corridors. The bell tolled. Crows cawed. Summer was dying, and Hogwarts’ collection of living things was drinking in the last moments of its vigour.

It wasn’t a sad thing, the end of summer. The end of summer had always meant the joy of leaving the Dursleys and seeing his friends again. September was perhaps his favourite month of the year. This year, the end of summer also meant the end of the same season that had seen a fierce battle and the deaths of many he loved.

Hogwarts, on its part, looked lovely in September despite the losses it had felt. The shortening days cast the mornings and evenings longer in an orange glow and left them thankful for the bright sun at the day’s centre, when it managed to glimpse through the clouds. The house-aligned scarves and hats and jumpers began to multiply, too, and talk of the Halloween festivities would pick up not long after.

Harry kept walking past the courtyard and down toward the greenhouses, thinking about the uniquely haunted reputation Halloween had garnered in his mind. It was the day his parents were murdered, the day he battled a troll with Ron and Hermione and became true best friends, the day the Chamber of Secrets was opened, the day Sirius entered the castle. It was the day he was marked as a fourth Triwizard champion. Always, it seemed to bring trouble, or at least ride on the coattails of some past trauma.As though reading his thoughts, a shrill scream cut the thin Scottish air in half, and without a moment’s hesitation, he ran towards the sound, past the first couple of greenhouses, and to the back of a third.

There was a boy, a girl, no weapons, and a salamander. Harry took a moment to breathe deeply as he registered the scene. Then he shot a stern look at the boy, who appeared to be about thirteen and was dangling the cold-blooded creature over the girl’s head. He dropped it and it scurried away in the grass.

“Don’t do that,” Harry said, as a sixth-year girl he recognised but couldn’t name came flying around the opposite side of the greenhouse. She’d been at the battle. Her expression was grim, too.

The boy shrugged. “She’s my sister.”

“I don’t care, don’t make your sister scream like that. Off you get.”

The children ran back up towards the school and Harry, his heart still stomping against his ribs, nodded at the girl. She nodded back.

He almost collided into Professor Sprout rounding the first greenhouse again. She squeaked in surprise and stepped backwards, grabbing his arms to steady him or calm herself. She spoke between gasping breaths. “Sorry… shouting… I heard…”

“Everyone’s fine,” he said. “Some young student tormenting his sister.”

Her hand touched her heart. “Thank heavens. I trust you took points away, at the least. Screaming like that, when it’s only been a month back in the school since…”

“I don’t have the power to take points, Professor. I, erm, told them not to do it again?”

“Fine, yes.” She nodded in distracted approval, glancing around like she didn’t quite believe his story, like danger still lurked in wait. Then her eyes travelled to the textbook tucked under his arm. “Studying?” she asked.

“Oh.” He glanced at it, too. “Yes.”

“Glad to see it. So glad. I worry about you second-time seventh years, as it were… about all the students, really. Of course, we—the professors—are more than happy to spread ourselves thinner than usual with extra class time to accommodate. We’ve all got to find our feet, even if I must let my hobbies fall to the wayside this year. I’d rather have a Halloween feast without pumpkins than students with Troll marks! Oh, I’m sorry, dear, I’m babbling.”

“No pumpkins?” Harry sounded more shocked than he meant to. It came out raw, like the disappointment of a child.

“Not in my greenhouses!” she said. “Too much student work with all you heroes back in my classroom. Not that there’s much practical work we can do on the ambulatory germination of socratea variations, is there, Mr Potter?”

She laughed heartily and Harry’s weakly followed. Her joke sounded familiar, as if he’d rested his head on a textbook open to the subject, but never read it completely.

“I should really get back to studying,” he said truthfully, tapping the bridge of the book. “Sorry to worry you with those students.”

“Nothing you can do about that, dear.” She patted his shoulder as he passed by. “Merlin knows, you’ve done plenty!”

Her words stuck with him as he traced his path back towards the school. Even for him, with a disgusting amount of leniency on his back, September was too early to be slacking off. Or to appear to be slacking off, because although he wasn’t getting much schoolwork done, he went to bed each night as tired of thinking and feeling as if he’d busied his mind with academics. It was like he spent so much time fighting to focus on being back at school that he ran out of time in the day to do the back-at-school work.

He resolved to sit in the courtyard, enjoy the cooling air, and read the chapter he was meant to have finished by Monday, socratea variations included. He would treat it like Occlumency, even, and work intentionally to clear his mind of any thought that wasn’t Advanced Herbology.

At the stone steps of the courtyard, however, a loud conversation amongst students just as small as the brother and sister simmered into a conspicuous hush when he walked past towards a free bench. He could feel a handful of small eyes on his back and, in whispered tones, his name, Ron’s, and Hermione’s. He didn’t even stop walking. Instead, he retreated even further, back through the Great Hall and into the grand main corridor, feeling utterly aimless in a school he’d once called home.

“Lost, first year?”

Ginny stood at the entrance to the Great Hall with her arms crossed and a wry half-smile on her face. He must have walked right by her.

A couple months ago, he wouldn’t have been able to drop the tension he’d been holding in his shoulders every time they ran into each other. It was guilt-based tenseness, erected after the war. It was just—she’d been so understanding as to why he couldn’t be with her while the war was being waged, and then all of the sudden the war had been over and he’d drug his feet anyway. Seeing her around the Burrow made his body lock up just like hers used to, an ironic mirror of their earliest interactions at ten and eleven.  

Then, three Saturdays ago, he’d experienced a rare flash of bravery and managed to say, “Don’t wait for me,” the night before they left for London.

Ginny had been in her bedroom doorway, her hand on the knob, ready to close the world out for the night. He hadn’t stepped foot inside since the summer after his sixth year, but he could picture it all the same. She tilted her head, wet hair soaking a semicircular patch of darkness into the chest of her dressing robe. It was too short on her wrists and too high on her calves—she’d worn the same one for years.

“I’m… not waiting for you. I’m going to bed, like, right now,” she’d said.

He shook his head and swallowed, and when his throat felt closed up and burned, his thoughts did not go psychosomatic or heartbreak but instead sped toward sickness, rotting, death.

“I meant, don’t wait for me. For us,” he’d said.

Ginny breathed sharply through her nose. Her eyes grew shiny, but whatever the sparkle signified was held much deeper than her sternum. Her chin jutted forward a little and she pulled absently at the drawstring of the robe, tightening it as she stared at him.

Strength was something Harry had always admired about Ginny—the youngest of many brothers, the youngest person he’d ever known to be possessed by Voldemort, a formidable dueler and a speaker of her mind. She held her cards as close to the chest or as splayed on the table as she wished, and as he shifted stance in the hallway, he came to the sad understanding that he’d just lost access to the deck completely. Whatever she was thinking, he had no right to know.

“Yeah. Alright,” she’d said, unreadably. “Take care of yourself.” Then she’d patted his head—not demeaning and not intimate—and closed her door.

Thank god she didn’t ask why, he’d thought later, listening to Ron snore. If I knew why I would’ve told her.

Questioned or not, he felt stupid for not being able to articulate an instinctual confidence that they weren’t right for each other, and he projected that stupidity any time he crossed her path. There was something so vulnerable about breaking up with someone and not knowing why. Ginny knew what most of the wizarding world didn’t; Harry Potter had not the foggiest sense of who he was or what he wanted without a war to win.

“Oh,” he said now, his voice echoing in the high-coffered hallway. He glanced toward the courtyard again, swinging his arms behind his back. The high register of the starstruck children now seemed preferable to this. “Not lost.” He chuckled hollowly. “Just looking for…”

“Ron? Hermione?”

“No, I—”

“Neville? Luna?”

“No…”

“Me?”

“No—I mean—” His eyes widened. “Not no, in the sense that I’m avoiding you, I mean not right now. I was looking for…”

She was grinning. “A sense of purpose?”

He laughed in surprise. “I’m looking for McGonagall.” He came up with it in the moment, but there was some subconscious truth to the matter. “I know where to find her. See you around, yeah?”

“Not if I see you first,” she called, dropping back into the Great Hall.

Hogwarts had been in tough shape at the end of the last school year. He felt forever changed by the history that had seeped into its stone skeleton. A walk to the headmistress passed the entrance hall flagstones he could still visualise splashed with blood. Ginny had met him at the entrance to a grand feast hall and he’d wanted, despite knowing he should never, to ask her how she ate breakfast without picturing the tables cleared away and her brother’s body on the floor. Lupin’s next to it. Tonks.

He felt that his mind was no longer a streamlined home for goals, but rather a place where half-concocted thoughts went to die. Tonks, Lupin, must read Herbology, did Ginny look cross, and Colin’s body was just there, a Halloween with no pumpkins, ask McGonagall…

He’d met the gargoyle at the headmaster’s office many times, and the last time he’d walked with it behind him, it had been knowingly to his death. He thought of that day and said “Dumbledore” as he faced it, and it opened for him again.

Inside, at the top of the steps, the headmistress was unsurprised to see him. Her smile, already a generous reaction he thought, was inviting. “Mr Potter,” she said, standing with her hands resting on the back of a mahogany chair which matched the hefty mahogany desk it stood behind. “To what do I owe this overdue pleasure?”

His eyes scanned the room. It was a mix of Dumbledore and McGonagall’s influence. He recognised his late mentor’s trinkets and gold-glinting apparatuses. But there, too, was much of McGonagall’s personal library, and the portrait of Dumbledore making it clear that he had passed. Harry looked away from the twinkling eyes quickly.

“Overdue, Professor?”

“You’ve been in class a fortnight already.”

He hadn’t imagined that he and Professor McGonagall were close enough that he was meant to visit on arrival as he did with Hagrid. He had only ever seen Dumbledore when he was beckoned or something was wrong. What if she’d been told how close he was to not returning at all? He’d been the last holdout of all the Weasleys. In fact, telling Mrs Weasley that he’d be going back had made her rush him and kiss his cheeks four times each.

“There was nothing I needed to speak to you about,” he said.

“But now?” She folded her arms, patient.

“It seems that the staff is stretched thin with extra students. I want to help.”

The headmistress nodded immediately. “This is what I’d expected you to speak to me about, but you surprised me by lasting two weeks as only a student. Professor Wilheard would be delighted to have you as a teaching assistant.”

“What? No.” He said it quickly and urgently. Professor Giltbert Wilheard had been imported from an early retirement and writing career in Cornwall to teach Defence Against the Dark Arts in the interim. It seemed that anyone who had been face-to-face with the Dark arts lately wanted distance. He was nice enough but spoke to Harry like he was a superior and it was off-putting. “I was thinking something less, erm, academic. More community building.”

“What would you suggest?”

“Pumpkins.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Professor Sprout said she didn’t have the time or space to grow pumpkins this year. I’d like to fix that.”

Professor McGonagall examined him for a quiet moment. He held his hands behind his back, squeezing them together. “You could make yourself much more useful to the school than resurrecting pumpkin juice for a Halloween feast,” she eventually said. “It is laughable that you are going to have to sit the Defence Against the Dark Arts NEWT at all. Your guidance, in the eyes of your peers, would be invaluable alongside Professor Wilheard.”

“And I’d get to spend my year being asked the same bloodthirsty questions about a single duel,” he said.  

Her lips were pressed in a thin line. He thought he saw her eyes glance behind him, to the portrait of Dumbledore, but he could be paranoid.

He stepped closer and mirrored her gesture, gripping the back of the plush chair facing her desk, which he’d sat in many times. “I’m not looking for career growth, Professor. It’s more—there’s still tragedy here. There were students who should have filled the tables at the sorting ceremony and didn’t. People are still jumpy. How are you going to tell them that everything is getting back to normal when there aren’t even pumpkins on Halloween? It sounds ridiculous, but I think every little thing is a glaring reminder of the ways we’re still broken.  I—we need this.”

He was rambling, trying to toe the line between ‘moving on’ from tragedy and honouring it. She held up a hand with a soft smile

“I understand, Potter. There was a shadow on the start of the year feast, certainly.”

“Really? Oh, good.” Harry let out a breath. “I mean, not good. Just good that you’ve felt it, too.” So often, the things he felt seemed independent to him.

“There’s land near Hagrid’s hut that he’s offered for anything we may need, though it is not an especially viable patch of soil. I’m sure that would be an adequate place to direct your attention, if you’re sure helping Professor Wilheard wouldn’t?”

“No, thank you,” he said.

“Nor Quidditch?”

Quidditch wouldn’t. It felt like folly after everything. And while he was sure the team would be stellar with Ginny as captain and Ron assisting with coaching, it felt to him like returning to a persona he was no longer fit to be.

“I’d rather focus on other things.”

“I’ll inform him that you’re to have the garden for your purposes,” Professor McGonagall said. “If you go now, he’ll be expecting you.”

And so Harry found himself ignoring his Herbology homework a while longer, swapping it for a trip to the gardens that lay just beyond Hagrid’s. He understood now what McGonagall had meant about the soil. If seeds were ‘the magic of life’, then these fields were Squib material. When Harry had passed them while visiting the groundskeeper already this year, he hadn’t cared about what now seemed like a pumpkin death sentence—dusty, dry, grey-toned ground, completely lacking the rich smell of fresh earth.

Someone was already on the edge of the field as it came within eyeshot and the sight stalled Harry entirely. It was Draco Malfoy, kneeling princely and pinching the dirt between two fingers. From his vantage point just out of the boy’s notice, Harry opened his mouth as if to say something and closed it again.

The door to the hut burst open. “’Arry!” Hagrid’s jovial voice boomed. Draco looked over his shoulder quickly, his eyes widening. Hagrid’s beaming face turned from Harry’s to his. “And Draco,” he added, voicing down a bit. “Good of yeh both to come. In yeh get! In yeh get!”

Draco stood, dusted his hands on his trousers, and flashed Harry a look as if he’d betrayed a greater world of conduct by not announcing his arrival. He may have returned on the same train as Harry but they’d kept their distance. Despite all their conflict—or, more likely, because of it—it felt like they could communicate without speaking and Harry thought they’d mutually decided that the best way forward was to live their lives and leave childish behaviour in the past. Avoiding each other had been the unspoken best way to accomplish that.

Since he’d glimpsed him at King’s Cross, he’d felt only pity for him, carrying the weight of his parents' actions even after they’d fled the country. He hadn’t seemed like someone Harry had known since eleven but like an unreadable new student. He seemed tragic. Self-punishing. Admittedly, Harry saw some of himself in the other boy.

Hagrid’s hut was small, but once ushered inside, the boys managed to seek out the ladder-back chairs furthest from each other while Hagrid lowered himself into a loveseat between them. He offered tea, which Harry accepted and Draco declined. Harry sipped it politely and observed his counterpart while Hagrid lay out the difficulties of the now-pumpkin patch post-battle. He’d been having trouble with the ground for admittedly longer—ever since their sixth year when the hut was sent into flames. Draco, who looked healthier and rosier than Harry had seen in years, paled significantly at this and Hagrid, sensing his mistake, trailed off quickly.

Draco cleared his throat. “I can see myself out if you’d prefer.” His voice had a smooth tambour, appeasing and polished, and sat a tad deeper than Harry remembered it being.

“Nonsense!” said Hagrid without pause. “Yeh both offer different know-how. Draco—yeh got more potioneerin’ in yeh than ‘arry here—unless yeh’ve still got that book on yeh, ‘arry.” He laughed heartily and clapped him on the back. It was Harry’s turn to pale a bit.

“I didn’t know you had the choice of a better gardener,” Harry said. “I’m not great at potions. Not herbology either. What do I offer?”

Hagrid put his large hand on Harry’s head with familial warmth. “Yer the persistence.”

“The persistence,” Harry repeated unsurely.

“The soil is the predominant obstacle, of course.” Draco looked only at Hagrid. His jaw clenched between sentences. “I’ll begin a potion to revive it. Goodbye.”

He stood and closed the door behind him before Harry or Hagrid could say another word. Through the window, Harry searched for meaning in his miniaturising silhouette but came away with nothing but bewilderment.

*****

The other students had begun calling them ‘eighth-years’ and it stuck. Returning to Hogwarts wasn’t mandatory—Dean hadn’t, Goyle hadn’t—but it made sense for many of their trajectories, and for many of them it softened the harsh transition from war to the workforce.

Harry, for his part, felt like they haunted the school and would be unoffended if the rest of the student body was secretly wishing to be done with this year and its strange eighth-year addendum, to return to true normalcy.

In practice, however, they were accepted graciously into seventh-year classes, into dormitories, and into their common rooms. He recognised his old self returning in small bursts. When he slept well enough, he could laugh with Ron and Hermione at breakfast, and he had quickly resumed the act of hurriedly finishing his homework in the back row of class when Flitwick started collecting it at the front.

Then he’d look in the mirror and catch sight of his adulthood like a jarring hallucination. He’d spent much of the last year in tents with limited time to consult his reflection. This year, he’d packed a razor with his toiletries. He heard the tiredness in his voice. The magic, he worried, was lost. And perhaps, if he was honest with himself, part of his endeavour to improve their Halloween feast was in regaining some of that magic for himself.

He was in the Gryffindor common room, sitting between Hermione and Ron. When he found them there, they’d been tucked in close, so he chose the reading chair next to Hermione, but they’d pulled apart and offered him a place on the couch with too much enthusiasm for him to rebuff.

“But what’s wrong with the pumpkin patch exactly?” Hermione asked. She had a finger bookmarking the closed pages of her NEWTs review book; speaking with Harry was a pause in her evening activities, not a change of course.

“I don’t know.” He knocked the toes of his shoes together on the coffee table. “Draco’s supposed to take care of the diagnosis. I’m just here for persistence.”

“You’ve got a mad work ethic, though, Harry, you’ve got to admit it,” said Ron.

“Only sometimes,” Harry amended. He looked at Hermione and her pile of books and smiled. “Should’ve paired ‘Mione with Malfoy instead.”

She rolled her eyes. “Keep writing Ron’s nightmare.”

“As if,” Ron huffed. “Hermione teaming up with our nemesis would have to be a real threat to be a nightmare. Never gonna happen.”

“He’s not exactly a ‘nemesis’ anymore,” said Hermione.

“Bollocks, what would you call him, then?”

“A stranger,” said Harry.

“I wonder where he was staying this summer.” Hermione tilted her head. “His parents went to France from what I’ve heard. But I saw him at least twice in Diagon Alley, very briefly.”

Harry didn’t care much where Draco had been that summer. He’d been busy spending it sleeping too much and treading carefully around the Burrow, helping Mrs Weasley with dinner (she never relinquished the task completely) and planning funerals. He had Ron’s room to himself when Ron and Hermione spent time together, and with it complete invisibility to laze sluggishly in bed to his heart’s content. The greatest loss of returning to school in his eyes was that their dormitory was occupied enough for his classmates to notice if he had his head on his pillow too often.

Thoughts of pumpkins, mixed with familiar visions of his own decomposition, kept him up enough of the night that, even though he was quick to leave Hermione and Ron to their revising that evening, he sleepwalked through classes the next day. In Defence, Professor Wilheard tried twice to coax an anecdote out of him and Ron elbowing him in the side was the only indication to him that he’d been spoken to at all.

“Mm? Oh, yes, harrowing,” he’d mumbled in response

Slughorn was no more engaging. Every Potions class, he made a point to remark that he was an adjunct professor and only there until a suitable replacement was found. The room, like every seventh-year class, was crowded with eighth-year additions, and from his tucked-in position at a table in the back with Ron, Hermione, Neville, and Parvati, he almost left upon dismissal without noticing that Malfoy, from his table with Pansy Parkinson, Blaise Zabini, and seventh-year Slytherins Harry didn’t recognise, had been waving him over.

“Hey,” he said, as everyone began to stand and collect their things. “You two… erm, go on without me.” He sounded distracted, and Hermione followed his line of sight to the Slytherin table.

“You’re positive you wouldn’t like us to wait?” she asked.

He shook his head. Ron had Quidditch practice to get to, anyway, and Hermione would inevitably sit in the stands and watch. He knew where to find them.

“What’s he going to do, hit me with a jelly legs jinx?” He only meant to poke fun at the immaturity of their youth, but Ron and Hermione stared at him like it was a viable possibility. He scowled. “He won’t do anything, Slughorn is still here. Go.”

He didn’t hesitate on his walk to the Slytherin students; it would look cowardly when he knew Ron and Hermione had idled like parents making sure their child got to a mate’s house alright. Before he could speak, Draco leaned close and said, under his breath, “Wait until the classroom empties, and then we can talk.”

Harry raised his eyebrows. “Top secret?”

“Don’t be ridiculous. It’s just pumpkins.”

Pansy Parkinson drifted past them, her gaze lingering on Harry too long for comfort. He cleared his throat and glanced back. Ron’s brows were drawn close in confusion. Harry nodded towards the door again and mouthed ‘Go’. Ron dragged a finger horizontally across his neck and Harry rolled his eyes until he turned and saw Draco staring stony towards the doorway, too.

“Do find me if you’re having trouble with the steeping, Mr Malloy.” Slughorn had approached the table, pulling their attention to the stout man. He gestured at Draco’s still-bubbling cauldron. Harry hadn’t noticed it, or that its contents were thicker and darker than the potion they’d just lectured on. “Unless, of course, it’s past six in the evening or before nine in the morning. Office hours are being strictly kept, I’m afraid.”

It was already half-five.

“Alright, thanks,” Draco told his departing professor through gritted teeth. Draco been a student of Slughorn’s for three years now. His family name had been printed large enough on every newsprint in Europe that the printmakers must have ordered extra ink for the task, and yet Slughorn said ‘Muh-loy’ with premeditated nonchalance. The potions professor did everything he could to visibly distance himself from the bad seeds of the war.

Harry’s childminders had left, Draco noticed. Harry stood awkwardly at the end of the table, waiting like he thought Draco was about to propose a duel, which was ridiculous. He sighed. “This is the growth potion I’m brewing.” He pushed a set of complicated measurements towards Harry in a show of civility, though he didn’t think he’d make heads or tails of it. “When it’s done, you can—”

“I can take over,” Harry interjected, nodding.

Draco stared into the cauldron while, in his periphery, Harry sat inelegantly on a stool.

“Take over?” Draco asked.

“Yeah. You—erm, you know, you don’t have to make amends forever,” Harry continued. “The war’s over; there’s no need to punish yourself further. What happened these last few years… you were in a bad situation. You were following the example of your parents and the orders of a powerful man. None of it was your fault.”

Draco stopped stirring entirely. The potion simmered noisily in the hush between them. “I know that.”

Harry sat up straighter. “…You—oh.” He cleared his throat and stood again. “Of course you know. I don’t know why I assumed…”

“That I needed to be freed from my guilt by Harry Potter himself?” he responded tightly.

“Not by me, exactly, I just—well you look like you, erm, feel…”

Draco snatched the notes from his hand. “You know, I could take the pumpkins off your hands. ‘The war is over’, so you don’t have to keep hunting for new things to save. Find a bloody hobby, Potter.”

Harry’s mouth opened and closed like one of those Muggle robots—the animatronics from amusement parks—and Draco took the opportunity to push past him and partake in a proper storming off. He was halfway down the hall before he thought of the simmering cauldron. Three right turns seemed easier than coming face to face with Harry on his retreat, so he circled the potions room and lingered longer in the shadowed hallways than he wanted to.

When he returned, the potions classroom was empty. And his concoction was already turning periwinkle blue, which meant he’d been another minute from ruining it entirely.

“Arrogant,” he muttered, mincing the dandelion roots erratically. “Nothing new. Nothing unexpected. Better that way. No…” He scooped each pile onto the broad side of the knife and tossed them in the cauldron. “…more… surprises.”

Building a potion did for Draco what he assumed cooking did for others. The work began to slow his frustrated breathing. It busied his hands with repetitive motion. And as it did so, he admitted to himself that he’d probably left the heat too high and scalded the bottom of the potion. After another minute of stirring he admitted, too, that Harry was more right than he’d acted—Draco was far less confident in his absolution of guilt than he’d let on.

The sun had long since set by the time the potion had turned cold and thick, so he picked a large vial from the storeroom—Snape wouldn’t have minded, and he felt it all still belonged to the man—and ladled it in to handle tomorrow.

Draco had scored well in Potions his entire academic life—earned an E on his OWL even—and, before his mentor was killed, had even considered the life of a potion master for himself. It had never been the position Severus Snape lobbied for, but he was exceptional at it nonetheless, and Draco took the lesson to be that one could be happier pursuing their actual talents than the talents they were predestined or had planned to have.

In his acquired skill, Draco could tell quite quickly that his potion was ineffective. Hagrid inconspicuously watched from the window of his hut the next morning while Draco knelt in the barren patch and carefully dolloped fertiliser onto the soil, shaking his head each time it pooled, then did it all again with a tragic optimism for different results.

“What’s meant to happen?”

Draco startled and lost his grip on the vial, spilling half the remaining potion into a pool in the dirt. He righted the glass and stood up before Harry could step back, almost breaking the other boy’s nose in the process. He glared at Harry from up close.

“What the fuck?!”

Harry’s eyebrows shot up. So did his hands. The first time Draco had seen him at school, he’d thought there was a tired maturity glued to his face, an all-knowing-ness that made him capable of receiving just a little compassion. In every interaction since he’d only looked disorganised or lost.

“Sorry,” he said, sounding defensive.

“Sorry doesn’t cut it, I slaved over that!” The viscous puddle was having absolutely no reaction to the ground below it. “Don’t sneak up on people.”

“I assumed my very visible five-minute walk past the hut would do the trick. I even tripped by the fence.”

Draco glanced back. Hagrid’s face was gone from the window, too. He may have been a bit focused.

“What was it meant to do?” Harry asked again, nodding at his feet.

“More than it managed to do.”

“You could show some open communication, they’re my pumpkins, too.”

“There are no pumpkins.”

Harry crossed his arms and cocked his head to the side. It was strangely reminiscent of the way Narcissa would wait silently for him to crack and confess something without ever having to say a word. Draco shivered and narrowed his eyes.

“If you must know, it was a potion to help make the soil more reactive to light. Enhance the capture of ultraviolet to stimulate the seeds, etcetera…”

Harry stooped down and poked a finger into the substance, then curled his lip in aversion to the texture, wagging his hand to flick it off. The act made Draco exhale through his nose, a covert laugh that he quickly pushed under a rug of continued annoyance. He just startled you and knocked your potion over. It's unforgivable. Even an accidental slip of endearment is off the table. He thought of, ‘The war is over; you don’t have to punish yourself’, and his skin turned prickly again.

“Hasn’t anyone ever told you not to touch unfamiliar potions?” he said.

Harry looked up, squinting into the sun with one eye shut. “Reckoned you would’ve told me to stop. Shouldn’t it be hot?”

“What, the potion?”

“Yeah, I’m asking.”

“I don’t—well, I—why do you ask?”

“You want the soil to absorb the sunlight, yeah? I’m pretty sure photons absorb more when they’re hotter. So maybe the potion needs to be hot, too. I don’t know, that could be really daft of me.”

Draco cocked his head. “Why do you know about photons?”

“Quidditch book Ron got me. Science of the sport. The Kildare Krackens notoriously overheated at the semi-finals when they switched to all-black away kits.”

“All-black away kits?”

He nodded earnestly, and Draco thought, it was just after ten, and it was Sunday. He had no plans besides revising with Pansy, which could be postponed easily because that was his plan every day.

“I’m reluctant to give you an inch, but I’m willing to try it,” he said. “What’s the harm?”

*****

“Get the door. The door, Potter—I can carry it alone if you—”

Harry wrapped his hands around one handle of the cauldron Draco was trying to lift without waiting for an invitation. They both had thick flannel wrapped around their wrists, on top of the thick mitts supplied by the potions shop. He walked backwards, whispering a spell with his hands full to open the heavy door behind him. Draco tried very hard not to be impressed.

“Step! Steps!” he said urgently as Harry’s heel wandered closer to the stone stairs that led from the dungeon to the main hall.

Harry wheezed a “Thanks,” and found his footing, backwards still.

They could have managed a hovering charm, but Draco was concerned about flying a boiling-hot cauldron through the corridors. Twice, a student almost collided with them rounding corners, and by the time they reached the grassy path to the hut and Harry asked, “What’s the plan?”, his heart was beating wildly and his grip on the cauldron was iron-clad.

“We probably should have discussed that before we picked up the cauldron.” Draco grunted as his foot slid on pebbles. “We’ll just tilt it into the seedlings as we walk. It’ll sink into the soil if it’s working.”

“Afternoon!” Hagrid waved at them from the edge of the Forbidden Forest, where he stood with a basket of carrots.

“Hiya, Hagrid!” Harry shouted.

Draco winced at the volume. “Focus,” he muttered.

“Which way are we tilting?”

“Your left hand, my right.”

Together, they hefted the cauldron on its side and released a thin pool of the potion onto the soil. It sat, then sizzled and sunk in. Draco let out a breath of excitement and smiled until he remembered that it had been Harry’s idea.

It took a lot of tugging and a little communication, but they finished the task, shuffling back and forth until all but the dregs of the potion had joined the soil. It would only be a day or two before buds could prove if he’d done well or not. A combined growth potion with fertiliser like he’d brewed was ‘a risk with a high chance of failure’, as Professor Sprout had warned during the brief conversation she’d been able to spare for him yesterday, but high risk yielded high reward. He knew he didn’t have to convince Harry of that fact, either. It was true, too, that it would be their only way to have full home-grown pumpkins by Halloween.

Harry glanced at him often, likely thinking himself discreet, but Draco caught it every time. He knew it was strange to see him out here—Hagrid’s back garden wasn’t a place he’d ever been found without malice—but he refused to surrender something else to Harry, even if he had so brazenly offered to take the task off Draco’s hands. Harry, who already had renown, success, friendship, family, and a future. Harry, who scanned Draco with sadness when he thought the other boy was focused on planting seeds in the still-moist dirt. Harry, who wanted to gift Draco with the unrequested declaration that it wasn’t his fault, that he was just easy to mould and manipulate into being a murderous pawn.

Draco felt older and knew he looked it. They all did. Pansy was practically a woman. Blaise had assumed the poise of his father. And Harry, well, looked like a grown version of himself, too. He’d become wide and angular, with broader shoulders and a more defined jawline. It wasn’t as if he’d left Hogwarts with a baby face in May, but he’d come back a man. Draco was jealous of it; he felt his age had shown only in eye bags and an aura of mental exhaustion. Joy did not come naturally.

Halloween before Hogwarts was a stiff affair. His parents were of a generation and people who treated it with grave formality and baulked at the way Muggles had misappropriated the day with costumes and sweets and horror films. By comparison, the school’s treatment of the day felt brashly cheery. He wondered if his father—a man who would have happily seen him off to Durmstrang—would have let him stay if he knew about the merriment. 

Now, with his parents in Saint Paul de Vence, over a day of flight for an owl, something in him had grown both curious about the Muggles’ traditions and nostalgic for his own. It was as if homesickness for the familiar and curiosity for the unfamiliar were at odds in his heart.

He’d satiated both this summer, only once he’d finally left the small sublet flat he’d gotten somewhere off the Diagon Alley high street. He shuttered himself up completely at first, but Blaise and Pansy burrowed in with the comfort of a lifetime of friendship and eventually coaxed him onto populated pavement. Sometimes they were too familiar, the homesickness so satiated that he felt nauseous. Pansy smiled too much and Blaise was especially senseless. Always the optimist, he couldn’t see the world for the way it judged Draco. He spoke of school and beyond, focusing on the future, and gave blanket advice for Draco to do the same. He didn’t seem to grasp that Draco’s potential hung in the balance of public perception.

Wandering Diagon Alley alone squandered that trouble entirely and invited a realm of curiosity he’d never been able to investigate before. There was a small shop, just past the joke shop, through a door and up a walk to the first floor, full of mismatched wood bookshelves stuffed with trinkets and books that he’d been taken with immediately.

A bell caught on the door and jingled as he entered, perfectly quaint and unlike the silent entrance in the expensive shops his mother used to take him to, where a shop bell implied inattentive clerks. The shopkeeper here cast a long glance over Draco as he strolled soft-footed through the aisles, his hands held out of the way, behind his back. His heels rapped on the wood. He was the only customer.

“I’ll take these,” he said twenty minutes later, when he’d gone down every aisle. A history book on pure-blood traditions published before the Statute of Wizarding Secrecy, a Muggle travel book of activities across the United Kingdom, and a dark-wash denim jacket. Outside, he flipped the jacket over his head and down his arms, then hooked the paper bag in the crook of his elbow and put his hands in his pockets, head low. A paper brushed his fingertips in the left pocket, a torn piece of lined paper with slanted, dull pencil writing:

I don’t know what I want but I know how to get it.

Nonsense. He shoved it back in and hung his head even lower. He’d have horrible posture in old age at this rate, but he’d be happy to reach old age at all. Anyone who knew him would be surprised by his purchase, but that was the point. The jacket was the last thing someone like Draco Malfoy would wear and, in that way, would offer him more camouflage than usual walking through the wizarding shopping district.

If one thought that the wizarding world after Voldemort’s demise would be a kinder place, they were wrong. It was quite nastier, in his experience. The entire ordeal left people windswept with grief and terror, picking up the pieces of their community while remaining wary of people who looked like people who looked like him.

No, the beauty of the world was a subjective observation. Draco the Defector did not catch glimpses of it nearly as often as people like Harry did. Still, he did not follow his parents to France. He was ashamed, but he wasn’t a runner. And he had friends, still, like Pansy and Blaise, whose families had evaded allegiance during the war.

In the common room that evening, Pansy sat close, their shoulders brushing, and began colour-coding her class notes with a set of vibrant ink pots. She’d asked how he was and he’d said, “I’m fine,” which was two more syllables than he’d granted Harry when he’d left the pumpkin patch that afternoon. She accepted his answer but kept glancing at him under long eyelashes anyway.

“Okay—I’m sorry.” She dropped her quill and set her hands flat on the table. “I still don’t understand how the pumpkins are a two-person task.”

Draco shrugged. He was focused on a Slughorn assignment, a careful analysis of the effects of Wolfsbane potions on different phases of the lunar cycle, and distantly, he wondered what the Gryffindors thought of such an assignment, and whether it felt like salt in a wound despite being taken directly from the NEWT review book.

“Hm.” She clicked her tongue. “Do pumpkins even need that much oversight?”

“Magically-sped-up pumpkins might.”

“If they’re sped up, will they sprout sooner?”

“I don’t know, I’ve never grown pumpkins before.”

She tapped her quill against her lips. “What happens if they sprout tonight, but, like, they grow so fast that they’re done sprouting before the sun’s even come up tomorrow and then when you go out and check on them, they’re, like, all dead already because they’ve had a week’s worth of growth overnight and it’s like they’ve tried to live their full lives with no water and no sunlight?”

Draco blinked at her.

“Could they grow that fast?” she added innocently.

He stared at her a beat longer, then gave a slow, disbelieving shake of his head. He closed his textbook, folded his parchment, and dried and capped his quill.

“What are you doing?” she asked as he stood. “You’ve got six more inches to write at least!”

“Clearly,” he said, tapping her shoulder to retrieve his coat from her seat back, “I need to go check on the soil now that you’ve firmly planted the worst possible scenario in my head.”

“Curfew!”

“I’m eighteen.”

She threw her hands up. “Okay, and the seventh years are seventeen, but they still listen.”

He slid one arm into the coat. “Doesn’t it feel a bit ridiculous? Following all these rules like school children after everything we’ve been through? What’s my crime, anyway—checking on a project that the headmistress herself asked me to take care of?”

The common room was empty and it was almost midnight. Pansy stood and touched his cheek, a sisterly gesture that was noticeably tinged with sympathy. Her thumb pulled at the skin along his cheekbone and her eyes flitted back and forth between his.

“That’s the point,” she said, her voice calm and sure. “We’re in the act of being schoolchildren for just a little while longer. Curfews, homework, Quidditch… they know precisely what we’ve been through. They’re helping us pretend otherwise, but we’ve got to meet them halfway or the whole charade… it just doesn’t work.”

“So what’s Blaise doing, then?” He swatted her hand away from his face. He hadn’t anticipated the question arising, but as she spoke it was like she’d conjured it right off the tip of his tongue. “What’s Blaise doing here? Because it’s not pretending to be a seventh year with NEWTs coming up. It’s—it’s not fretting over tryouts or girls. He’s halfway to a big glass-walled office at the Ministry already. He spends his days networking and protecting his bloody assets. He may as well not have come back at all.”

A man’s voice spoke up from the stairs to the boys’ dormitory. “That’s how you feel then?” There stood Blaise in his pyjamas, his arms crossed, looking as lit from within as Draco felt diminished. He was warm, bright, lively, and, currently, rather stern-faced.

Draco wasn’t one to back down from something he’d said. If it left his mouth, he had to stand by it or risk embarrassment. “Yes, that’s how I feel,” he said. “We never see you.”

“I have class with you every day.”

“We never see you voluntarily.”

“I ate lunch with Pansy!”

“I don’t see you, then.”

“So where were you at lunch?”

He'd been re-brewing the growth potion, while Harry sat and awkwardly filled the silence from time to time with questions about herbology that he couldn’t answer, until finally Draco snapped and told him to shut up or be helpful.

Blaise nodded like he’d taken Draco’s silence as forfeit. “I’m planning for my future, Draco. It’s what you’re supposed to do during seventh year. It’s what I’ve been trying to get you to do all summer.”

“What you spent the summer doing was writing fairy tales.”

“You know, if you have a problem with me, I’d prefer you come to me with it instead of forcing poor Pans into the middle of it.”

“She doesn’t mind.”

“Yes, she does.”

“Pansy, do you mind?” Draco met her eyes, feeling an intensity growing within him, while she looked between the two of them. Blaise was watching her expectantly, too.

“I’ve never shied away from a good domestic,” she answered, high-pitched. “But you two should apologise and move on.”

“I’m sorry I disappointed you so much by not being depressed,” said Blaise, glaring.

“I’m sorry I haven’t been considerate of how your immaculately-planned future means you have to leave us behind prematurely.”

Draco had exuded all his anger with only one arm in his coat. Now, he shoved his second arm in and pulled at the collar to settle it on his shoulders.

“At least I’m thinking about life past Hogwarts at all!” Blaise called after him as he left. “Instead of focusing on a damn Halloween feast and pretending like I’m stuck here for eternity like the Bloody Baron!”

The halls were silent and the path to the garden was easy to reach without intervention, and thank Merlin for that because if Draco looked half as bad as he felt, he’d be ushered to the hospital wing instead of the common room by anyone who caught him wandering. Already, somewhere deep behind his ribs and tracing up to his throat, a hollow feeling grew, the kind that felt like only yelling or running,—brute shows of strength—could extinguish.

Lately, he’d always been one wrong move from caving in entirely. Giving up on the bullying and jeering that had filled his youth left him with nothing to do but look within, and what he’d found within left a lot to be desired thus far. If Pansy was right and the sprouts had already grown and died with unreached potential, he could start over tomorrow, but tonight it might be the last morsel of self-disappointment that managed to make him actually cry.

He pulled his coat tighter and ducked his head as he passed the castle’s doors. The further he got from the Slytherin common room, the more the feeling of dread in his chest subsided. Blaise could judge, but Draco knew that on a baser level they were the same, both chasing accomplishment. His was just a lot simpler than Blaise’s.

With his head ducked low and focused on the dark path before him, Draco didn’t notice Harry sneaking by the garden. He didn’t know that Harry had been out by the pumpkin patch already while Draco was still arguing with Blaise. He had no way of knowing that Harry had been escaping his common room, too, walking until the sound of his footsteps got muted, like his head was wrapped in cotton, like he was staring at himself through plexiglass, which had been pretty normal for him until it got blurry and colourless, too, and then he’d been basically standing on the steps of Hagrid’s hut hyperventilating, staring at his palms like a murderer caught red-handed, willing them to feel like his. He might have knocked if Draco hadn’t sniffed loudly on his way down the path. Instead, Harry hid behind the shed past the garden, sliding his back along the wood panelling until he was sat on the cold ground, and then he’d leaned his head back, closed his eyes, and slowed his breathing.

Letting Draco sneak up on him like that would’ve been funny two years ago, when he’d been obsessively tracking the boy’s activities, and it might be funny again by the onset of winter. By then he’d recognise Draco by the footfall that snapped a twig. For now, he held his breath and peeked around the shed. Draco was breathing noisily and shaking his head, hurtling down the last steps to the unofficial threshold of Hagrid’s plot of land so formidably that Harry decided he could sit in the leaves for however long it took to avoid another meeting.

At the still-bare plot of land, the paler boy crouched and put his palms on his cheeks.

“Thank Merlin,” Harry heard him say, as though he was grateful that the soil looked exactly the same. He stayed there, staring reverentially at the lifeless earth for one minute, then two, then three. Harry shifted on his knees. His shoe knocked the wood against his back, quietly, but not quietly enough. Draco looked up.

“Who’s there?” he called.

Harry pressed his lips tight, breathing slowly through his nose.

“Who is it?”

After a long pause, when Harry thought he’d made it clear of suspicion, Draco raised his wand towards the sound. “Show yourself!” he shouted, “or catch a babbling curse so mighty, you won’t even be able to cry for mummy!”

“You could use a better threat.” Harry spoke in a severe whisper, worried about the proximity to Hagrid’s one-room home. He stood up and sidestepped into the moonlight, his hands raised. “I was only babbling last I saw her, being a baby and all, so it shouldn’t feel too different…”

Draco sucked his teeth and lowered his wand. “What are you doing here?”

“Fresh air.”

“On the ground behind the shed?”

“As good a place as any.”

“You wouldn’t be hiding from me?”

Harry shook his head. “Not unless you’re Filch on the hunt for curfew-breakers. Why are you here? I thought you wanted to be done with this project and leave it to me.”

Draco baulked. “No. If you don’t want to work together, then I want you to leave it to me.”

“That’s not happening. I care about this.”

“So do I.” In the pale light, Draco’s skin looked almost translucent. Between the pallor and pain on his face, Harry felt as though he were speaking with a ghost. “You’ve got everything else, so show some altruism.”

Harry stepped closer. “What’s that mean?”

“Altruism? Please,” Draco said, rolling his eyes. “I think your picture is next to the definition in the dictionary.”

“No. What do you mean ‘everything’?”

“You really need me to explain your place in this brave new world? They’ve practically unfurled a red carpet for your grand return to school—the hero of the war. They say you’re here to get the marks for Aurorship, but we both know you could walk into the Ministry tomorrow and be offered a position. And do you see the way Professor Wilheard looks at you? Your very presence makes him feel unqualified to teach. It’s fine that you’re here, but you’re here because ‘why not?’ If you’re effectively done with school, then you should just go, the whole lot of you.”

What ‘lot’ he had just been grouped into escaped Harry’s understanding, but it was a false assumption no matter what. And he thought he’d been through rather a lot for a boy who’d spent years insulting him to stand here and tell him how the world had settled.

“You’re pretty brave for a Slytherin,” he said.

Draco jutted his head forward, furrowing his brow. “Brave?”

“I just mean, it’s brave to tell me how my life functions. Did you read it in some article? Are they reporting on me accurately? Did they spell Potter with two T’s? Are they still calling me the boy who lived or am I a man yet? You see, I’ve avoided reading a word about myself since May, but I don’t remember reassuring any journalists that I’ve got everything figured out.”

“Most of the articles just describe you as our ‘ascendant uncontested champion’.”

Ascendant—high expectations—uncontested—decidedly powerful—champion—the one who survived. He shook his head vigorously. “Precisely what I don’t like knowing.”

“If you’d prefer, The Sagacious Magus Magazine called you our ‘vernal victor’.”

“I feel dead,” Harry spat more than he said, wanting to shut up Draco and his string of media-driven misconceptions. The boy had been smirking, but it fell quickly.

“Sorry?”

“You don’t have the right to act as though you know an ounce of my life, Draco. But if it’ll cure your jealousy, I do not have my future figured out.”

“How do you mean, ‘I feel like I’m dead’?”

Harry waved his hand. “Nevermind. The point is to stop making assumptions.”

“Tell me.”

“Piss off. I don’t owe you anything.”

“Do you mean in the sense that you’re… apathetic… towards it? Like being human is difficult?”

Harry considered him for a moment. “Are you speaking from experience?”

“Maybe.”

“No,” he allowed, a small offering. “Apathy implies that I have a future to be hopeless about. It’s more… nothing at all.”

Draco attempted no interruption or judgement. His face was relaxed, interested. Harry wondered if he knew that this was already less discomfort with the topic than his own friends had shown. He decided to find its breaking point.

“I don’t know where I went after Voldemort used the Killing Curse,” he added. “I’ve asked every ghost I could, but it’s no use. I was halfway to dead, or maybe I was fully dead, or… I have these dreams—sometimes when I wake up they’re there—where I’m dead still.”

Draco hardly even blinked. He was unreadable.

“And maybe I am. Still dead. Maybe I was halfway to death and now I’m only halfway to life. Is that what you wanted to hear?”

“Contrary to what you may think, I don’t feed off your pain, Potter. I’ve just decided to be done with people wasting my time.”

“Well, I’m not wasting your time by joining this project. I know what my future is supposed to look like, but what good is that if I don’t even feel like I’m in my body?” He stepped closer and Draco stepped backwards at an even pace. “It’s not something you can blackmail me with. Tell anyone you want. They’ve all got selective hearing, anyway.”

“I’m not going to nark on you for dealing with the aftermath of a war.”

Harry laughed dryly. “‘Dealing with’,” he said. “The only thing I can imagine dealing with is Halloween. Halloween is a small enough bite to chew. I need it.”

Harry looked so genuine that it made Draco avert his eyes, so he focused on his feet. He’d spoken gently, like, despite a decent effort at appearing abrasive, the words were fragile like glass. I’m only halfway to life, is that what you want to hear? Draco knew vulnerability to be a weakness ripe for the taking, but Harry had shared his piece with all the naivety of a child. It was like someone had put a weapon back in Draco’s hands.  

Draco took a breath and stowed the weapon. “Halloween is about the convergence of life and death. Those who live in between the two. Sounds like you’ll fit right in.”

After a moment of blank-faced staring, something clicked and softened Harry’s face from offence to light annoyance. He rolled his eyes. “Oh—right, ha. I’ll let you—”

“Two things, Potter. First: I’ll say this once and never again. I’m sorry for drawing unfair conclusions about your life. It was far from the first time but I’d like to make it the last. It seems as though we both have much larger issues than some outdated feud. Second: I’m worried that the seeds will sprout too fast. We’ll need to observe them often. Say, every morning before breakfast and then again after afternoon classes? We can divide the work but tomorrow we’ll go together so I can give you an overview.”

This time, when Draco resumed his path to the school, Harry stepped up beside him. “Would you like to talk about the first bit more?” He walked quickly to keep up with Draco’s long pace. “That seemed momentous.”

“I’d rather leave it at that,” Draco said shortly. He didn’t know what there was to elaborate upon, anyway. He and Harry were both wronged by the people they trusted and sent to do the bloodstained work of their elders. They drew the short ends of the stick in separate lots. Draco thought the aftereffects had been unevenly distributed, but Harry seemed more fractured than he’d believed. Continuing to fight with each other would be misdirected wrath.

In the courtyard, they paused to split ways. There was a natural warmth to Harry—until tonight, Draco had falsely taken the tan skin and the pink cheeks to mean he was doing well—but the moonlight drew out the cold shadows of his face. His cheekbones seemed higher. The circles under his eyes were cavernous. How much of that was growing up and how much of it was growing ill?

Even the way he and Harry reacted to the same trauma was embarrassingly different. While Draco harnessed a meanness he couldn’t stop throwing at his friends, Harry turned inward, with whatever night terrors and other waking horrors occupied his brain.

Always, they had been two sides to one coin. If they were both half alive, they were the opposite halves, and perhaps, together, they could form one man and one corpse, one hero and one rotting body.

The living and the dead had one thing in common, Draco thought; both could fertilise the earth.

“Horrifying,” Harry said, startling Draco into worrying that he’d heard him somehow. But he was looking, instead, to the stone footing of the wall, where a crude penis had been carved into place. He surprised himself by feeling nothing but amusement as he considered the chiselled detail of the piece. Harry, meanwhile, was uncharacteristically scandalised.

“Don’t they know what we went through rebuilding this place?” he asked. “The blood in these halls? The-the lives lost?”

“The crux of wanting these kids to move on is that… we can’t dictate how they do it,” Draco offered. “If vandalising small corners of the school means they don’t think of it first as a place hallowed by death, then… so be it.”

Harry shook his head. “So be it?”

He shrugged. “I think… healing is a luxury neither of us knows intimately enough to critique.”

“Hear ye!” Harry shouted into the courtyard, stopping Draco’s heart and echoing in the silence. He shushed him harshly, but he only opened his arms wide and continued turning aimlessly in the square. “Hear ye! Draco Malfoy approves of male genitalia as a sign of community healing!”

Draco shoved his shoulder. “Will you quiet down? We shouldn’t even be out here.”

“We’re on the prowl because of an assignment McGonagall requested.”

“I agree, the curfew is immature, but I’d still rather not get caught so long as the faculty believes in it enough to impose punishment. Pansy got it in my head that the pumpkins would be dead already, but they’re not, so it’s time for bed.”

“You can’t lift the weight of a childhood grudge and not expect me to be a tad loud.”

“I said I didn’t want to talk about that anymore.” 



Harry lifted his hands in surrender. “We’ll only talk about pumpkins. Even if what you said about not judging the way people heal was very compelling.”

He nodded. “Pumpkins only.”

“Even if it makes me wonder what else I could be doing this Halloween to make them all happier.”

“Well, that’s less surprising than if the pumpkins turned out purple.”

“Yeah, ‘course,” Harry grumbled. “That nonsense you said about me needing a hobby instead of a fondness for saving things. Take it back, by the way; gardening is a hobby.

“I’m not convinced what we’re embarking on together will be enjoyable,” said Draco. “Hobbies are meant to be enjoyable.”

“McGonagall said I’d be pleased with the task,” Harry said. “Didn’t she promise you that?”

Draco hesitated, and for just a beat too long. If it had been Pansy, or Blaise even, they would have noticed the hint of dishonesty in the moment of silence. But Harry had looked at Draco like he was a stranger since they returned to King’s Cross. He saw nothing.

“Yes.” He spoke slowly and carefully. “The headmistress said… that I would enjoy this opportunity.”

He lasted for an agonising five seconds under Harry’s scrutinising gaze, and then the boy nodded, satisfied. “Maybe she’ll be right. Night. Eight tomorrow?”

“Six,” Draco said. “Goodnight.”

Then, without waiting for the protest he expected to appear on Harry’s face, he slipped through the door, leaving the other boy to climb up towards the Gryffindor tower while he descended underground like a seed in soil.

Chapter Text

Harry Potter in the morning was completely different from Harry Potter when the moon was high, right down to the sound of his voice. It was like he hadn’t had a drink in days. Draco wanted to conjure water into a glass and force it at him as they walked to the pumpkin patch, but instead, he continued trying to spot sprouts in the soil from too far away.

Harry’s hands were shoved in a large cotton hoodie with NIKE across the chest that looked anachronistically Muggle with the Hogwarts façade behind it. He spoke gravelly of plans to divide tending the garden and brewing more fertiliser while stumbling over the rocky estate like his legs hadn’t fully woken up yet. He was not a morning person, but he was visibly trying to fight that fact. It was the same ‘persistence’ that Hagrid had appreciated, applied to rising before the sun instead of winning a war.

The trees were growing skeletal. Their remains crunched beneath the heels of his shoes as he picked up stride over the last stone step that plateaued into Hagrid’s plot of land. Ahead, he could finally glimpse something rising from the soil: one stem and two leaves, green as the light from a killing curse. He walked faster.

“Hang on!” Harry hurried after him to the row of small sprouts.

Draco crouched down at the edge of the garden. “It grew,” he said incredulously, touching the tip of his finger to one of the leaves.

“Blimey. We were here not seven hours ago. There’ll be pumpkins by the end of the week.”

He shook his head. “We’ll take a leisurely pace from here. Getting the leaves in the sun had to happen fast. The rest needs to go slower—give the roots time to expand. It’s hard to explain. But experimental growth potions are unpredictable, so we’ll need to check often.”

“I can take afternoons if you’ll take the mornings.”

“Or we could come together.”

Harry clicked his tongue. “Draco, if you don’t trust me to do my part, this will never work. And did you hear how expertly I just got around ever getting up this early again?”

Draco froze with his fingers pinching a leaf. “God forbid you wake up thirty minutes earlier.”

“This is two hours earlier.”

“Your first class is at half eight, isn’t it? How do you manage to get dressed, eat breakfast, and be in your seat in that time?

Harry shrugged. “I’m a quick eater.”

“Fine. Come back this afternoon. Water the soil. Find me if there’s a problem.” He stood up. Last night, they’d walked back to the castle together, but now Draco gave himself a pointed and speedy head start. Reentering a crowded Great Hall at breakfast would be a much different affair than doing it alone in the ink of night.

Somehow, his eyes always found Pansy’s without trying, like he was the needle of a compass and she was this great planetary force of magnetism. It had always been that way, though last year, they had a brief stint of confusion worthy of the Bermuda Triangle. She sat with Blaise, speaking contently and poking at eggs. He wanted to avoid Blaise just as much as he wanted the familiarity of Pansy to wash off Harry’s scent, so he steeled himself and sat down beside her.

“Morning,” she said, smiling softly.

“Yeah, morning,” he mumbled, pouring a coffee. He’d taken to drinking it much more often than he used to, combatting mental fatigue and trying to distract it from becoming physical. Of course, then he’d crash in the afternoon, fall for more caffeine, and lay awake at night once the work had been done, incapable of sleeping. It wasn’t a healthy routine, but it was a routine.

“You were up early,” said Blaise.

Draco looked up, wrinkling his forehead in the unexpectedness of being spoken to. “Pumpkins,” he said. “They sprouted—alive,” he added, sensing Pansy’s curiousness. “They should be ripe in six weeks or so.”

“Not a moment too soon,” Blaise said. “The simple sort of person who thinks pumpkins make or break a holiday will be elated, I’m sure.”

Pansy laughed in the nervous cackle she used when she was uncomfortable, when she didn’t quite know how to navigate a social situation.

“Is he dreadful?” She glanced behind them, undoubtedly in Harry’s direction, but for once he didn’t follow her gaze. “I don’t know how you got dragged into this, but I can help you get out.”

“It’s fine,” he said quickly. “Harry aside, I enjoy the challenge of it. Severus always said the most difficult potions were the ones that tried to artificially imitate the natural world.”

Secretly, he thought there was a challenge to Harry, too, but sensed that his friends wouldn’t agree if he equated spending time with the boy to figuring out the right formula for a growth potion. Harry had talked his ear off on their shared expedition this morning, but Draco knew nervous chatter when he heard it. He prattled on to cut through the discomfort.

They didn’t speak for days after. The system—Draco observing the garden in the morning and fertilising, Harry watering in the afternoons—meant there was nothing to discuss. Until, on the fourth day, Draco cut through the morning mist and found, when the rudimentary wood posts of the garden came into view, green leaves, dark with jagged edges like saw blades.

“Growin’ well!” Hagrid stood on the front stoop of his home, his large bloodhound beside him. The dog who had once stood at the height of Draco’s shoulder now looked smaller.

“Yes!” he called back, too astonished to have subdued his excitement yet. “The leaves have shown!”

“Right on time.”

“I actually don’t know when each stage is going to present,” Draco called back. “Just that there should be pumpkins in a month or so.”

Hagrid waved a hand. “Whenever they’re ready to grow is the right time.”

Draco shrugged, pulled the stopper out of the bottle he’d brought, and walked carefully along the lines of leaves, pouring the growth serum. Halfway to the castle, just where the hill transitioned to courtyard, a loud bang echoed. Every muscle in his body tensed. Something deeply instinctual in him wanted to flee or hide, so he moved, but in the direction of the sound, reaching for his wand.

“…doesn’t concern you! It was a question of compassion meant for those who put their lives on the line! People we loved died, and he knows that!”

“People I love died! PEOPLE I LOVE DIED!"

Another bang, this one louder and closer. Draco broke into a run, rounding the corner of the high stone courtyard wall and finding two students, their arms locked straight with wands pointed, six paces from each other.

“ALRIGHT! ALRIGHT!” Draco rushed between them. He faced the smaller boy, Sam, a Slytherin student with dark, glinting eyes who kept his shaking wand pointed at Draco’s chest.

“Get out of the way,” he said through gritted teeth. His voice was small. “I want to hex him, not you.”

“I wouldn’t fret, Malfoy,” came a voice from behind Draco. “Because you keep missing, don’t you, Rodolf?”

Draco spun to face the other boy. “Stop! Both of you! Lower your wands.”

Neither did.

“Do as he said!” An older girl, a blue ribbon in her hair and a Head Girl badge on her lapel, stormed towards them, her hair bouncing with her quick steps. “Logan, are you mad?”

The Slytherin boy’s opponent dropped his wand and turned to her. “Rodolf here had something to say about what Slytherin deserves and doesn’t!”

Draco crammed his wand back into his pocket so he wouldn’t feel tempted to use it. “What’s that mean?” he asked tightly. “Sam?” He looked to the young boy, who did nothing more than squeak wordlessly and raise his shoulders to his ears. “Logan?”

For the first time, the older student looked intimidated that it was Draco who had come across them. He swallowed and looked vaguely past his shoulder instead of making eye contact. “Harry was asking us all questions. A survey, really. Rodolf was talking rather loud at breakfast about when Potter was going to come by his table and talk about how Slytherin was hurting.”

“Questions like what?” Draco asked, just as the girl said, “Did he come by?”

Logan shook his head at her in response, while Sam looked at Draco. “He asked if they were happy,” Sam answered. “And if they felt safe. And if they felt capable of celebrating Halloween and what could be done to make them feel even better about it.”

“And he asked no Slytherins at all? Maybe he ran out of time.”

Now both boys shook their heads in insidious agreement. “My mates were sitting with some Hufflepuff students. He skipped the whole lot,” said Sam.

“It was intentional,” Logan added. “But that doesn’t make it wrong.”

Draco inhaled sharply through his nose and cocked his head. He pushed past them and the head girl. “Give them ten points each for defending themselves,” he instructed. “Or take ten for duelling. I don’t care.”

The Great Hall was bustling with the hungry workings of students preparing for a day of classes. It was the last week of September, the week of hard grit when professors began to double down on the complexity of their lessons and the length of their assignments. He spotted Hermione first, her palms pressed to her temples to hold the curls back from her face while she poured over an open book. He’d heard she was taking seven NEWTs.

“Draco—” Pansy said lightly, like a bird singing in a tree canopy, as he passed by. By the time it reached his ears, he was far beyond their table.

He didn’t stop until he’d reached Harry’s seat, where he stood with his hands gripping his arms, staring unwaveringly at the trio. “We need to talk.”

Harry raised his eyebrows and glanced at Ron. “Talk then.”

“Alone.”

“Anything you need to say can be said in front of all of us. ‘Hello, good morning,’ exists by the way.”

“Yes, because Weasley wouldn’t be giving me that boorish look if I’d offered my salutations.”

“Maybe we should go,” Hermione said gently.

“Why? I don’t mind,” said Harry.

Draco leaned in more. “I’m not being thoughtful of your privacy, Potter, I’m being mindful that everyone will find interest in our interaction and it’s me they’ll set the rumours on.”

“Will you spit it out?” Ron groaned, rubbing his eyes. “What pumpkin’s got your knickers in a wad?”

“Were you surveying students on their emotional state? Asking about Halloween? Asking if they were happy?”

Harry blinked in surprise, but he nodded.

“And circumventing Slytherin students?”

He hesitated. Slowly, he lifted his chin and dropped it again.

“A duel just started outside because of the example you’ve set! Honestly, Potter, it’s shameful. It’s disrespectful and-and hypocritical—”

“Alright, settle down—”

“Harry Potter feels dead so the human decency rules of the living don’t apply—”

“That’s enough.” Harry jumped to his feet, provokingly close to Draco, his eyes dark and fearful.

“You said I could tell anyone,” Draco challenged.

Harry clenched his jaw. Neither of them blinked. Draco held his ground for two frighteningly-even breaths. Inhale. Exhale. Inhale. Exhale.

“Let’s go,” Harry said. He stood and walked past the staring students towards the main hallway and Draco followed, managing just enough decorum to wait until they were out of sight to yell again.

“Are there any neurons still firing in your brain? Do you honestly think it’s anything but offensive to visibly ignore Slytherin students while gadding around asking about healing processes? And it was meant to be just pumpkins! Now all of a sudden you’re messing with the heads of my classmates?”

“I can explain,” Harry urged.

“Then you best begin,” Draco bit back. Harry was too much of a stranger for him to admit that he felt hurt, even if he did feel it. He thought of the sad confusion on Sam’s face in the courtyard and the all-too-familiar look of a Slytherin student thinking he had to defend his placement in a school full of children.

“Look, you were right,” he started. “I have no idea what healing looks like to the other students, so I thought I’d ask. But then I didn’t think—I couldn’t… the conflict between Slytherin and the other houses is older than us—older than Voldemort. It all just sounded too big to fix. I’m not sure I could ever apologize enough for the way their house became representative of Death Eaters.” He cleared his throat, which had gotten thinner as he spoke. His next words were thick and hearty. “So ‘Are you healing? Are you fulfilled here?’ I thought asking an unanswerable question would be salt in the wound.”

It made sense in a terribly Gryffindor way. Worse than that, Draco couldn’t disagree completely; Slytherin’s reputation was harder to repair than a Halloween feast could handle. It was strange to hear Harry admit that he’d essentially given up, though. That the task was greater than he could imagine. This, from the boy who…

He understood at that moment how tiring it must be to be Harry Potter on the other end of the war, with a reputation so immense that everyone thought him to be capable of anything. It would make it nearly impossible to fail at something without everyone being disappointed. No wonder he wanted to focus on fixing up a garden.

Fingers wrapped around his arm—Harry had reached out to him. Without thinking, Draco snatched himself away. Instinctually, he’d decided the touch was antagonistic. Harry put his hands in his pockets.

“I’m sorry,” Harry said. “Genuinely, Draco. I thought I was saving students from pain, not causing it.” He chuckled, nervous. “And to think my legacy is as a peacemaker. I’ll ask them, I promise.”

“Why don’t you let me do damage control?” Draco suggested, still reeling from his bout with empathy. “You’re right about the largeness of Slytherin’s issues, but you don’t have to eliminate all prejudice at Hogwarts. You just have to invite people to try being open alongside you. I’ll help with this one.”

Harry nodded with downcast eyes. He glanced behind them as Ernie MacMillian turned down their corridor, and he stayed like that for a long beat after the Hufflepuff boy had disappeared, hiding his face.

“Also,” Draco said, trying to lighten the mood. “There are leaves on the pumpkin shoots. When each sprout has a few, I’ll change the growth formula again. No need to stop by this afternoon.”

“Oh. Alright.”

“Go to the match,” he suggested.

Harry looked back at him, flustered by the recommendation. Gryffindor would be playing Hufflepuff in the first game of the season. It was bound to be loud and impassioned—so brimming with life that it filled Harry with a clear sense of dread, which he presented for Draco to read easily on his face.

“Don’t look like that,” he said. “You’re deadset on healing—you want to know what it looks like? It’s Harry Potter in the stands of a Quidditch match. It’s not for your morale,” he added before Harry could protest. “It’s for everyone else’s. And consider it for the pumpkins’ sake, too; you look like you’d be a distracted gardener today.”

The other boy crossed his arms. His eyes were narrowed.

*****

Harry didn’t know what was in the punch, only that it tasted like the last ripe orange of summer and his friends were laughing at a pitch that could cut through the noise of the common room and burrow right into his brain.

Gryffindor had won. There had been a stunning save by their keeper, a fifth-year boy named Neve, who had crossed his ankles and held onto his broom tight enough to flip upside and block a goal with the top two inches of his right hand. Ginny, meanwhile, had been racing around the stands, tiring out Hufflepuff’s inexperienced Seeker so that, when she finally spotted the Snitch, it had been no contest. The crowd had roared before she even reached her hand out to grasp it.

Lately, Harry had felt removed from his life. It was like even in the moments where he was so present, he was watching from afar. Like, Hermione had gripped his arm tight enough to pinch skin when Ginny dove for the winning catch. And Neville whooped loud enough that his voice cracked. ‘Merlin’s saggy pants’, Hermione had gasped (though later, she would deny portraying such disbelief), ‘they did it!’ But even as it happened, while he felt the wood of the seat beneath him and the snap of coolness on his cheeks, it was as though he was only reminiscing in a Pensieve.

He was trying, now, to stop the party from feeling the same way. It was a celebration, after all, and his existence was enough to gain some undeserved reverence from younger students who knew he hadn’t flown in the match and yet continued to congratulate him as though he had.

“Your presence is on the field, mate,” Ron said after the third student stopped to tell Harry he was a great flyer and, therefore, a great loss to the winning team. “Knowing you were watching made them fly like they haven’t in practise.”

“Being in the first game of the season made them fly like they haven’t in practise.”

“No, it’s you, really. Ginny’s alternate kept asking about your techniques. It’s like you’re still haunting the…”

…team.

He’d trailed off before the sentence could finish, halting a run of easygoing conversation like they hadn’t had in a week. Harry had found that anything reminiscent of life before September 1st, 1998 could do that. Especially if it insinuated something about Harry and death or haunting or coming back to life.

Early on, he had led the way for joking about the forest. It was much easier than interrogating the subject. But the more his friends piled on, equally relieved to laugh off the horribleness, the closer he came to breaking.

It ended four weeks into the summer. They’d been sitting for supper in the homely-cramped kitchen of the Burrow when George said something about his mum’s steak and kidney pie being sent from heaven. “Harry must’ve brought you the recipe on his way back down,” he’d said.

Harry chuckled into his glass of water, though Mrs Weasley looked surprised by the joke. “Don’t say such a thing!” she said, her lips pressed tight.

“No one accused him of bringing it back up,” said Ron, insinuating Hell, while Hermione slapped his arm. “We’re calling him angelic. Don’t you think Harry looks positively angelic, Mum?”

Harry had smiled wanly at her. It would be another week before they got him to shave, three before a haircut. He still hadn’t slept through the night, which showed in the dark purple bags under his eyes. When Mrs Weasley finally looked in his direction, he caught the worry in her face before she conjured a distracted smile.

“You always look handsome, dear,” she said sweetly first, before taking a tense, reproachful tone with her sons. “But I won’t have this talk at my table.”

“Harry doesn’t mind!” Ron argued. “It’s good to laugh—he laughs with us. He makes the same jokes!”

“Actually, I do mind,” he mumbled into his pie. The table was sucked into silence. In his periphery, he felt seven heads focus on him. He flicked his eyes up to look at them over the top of his glasses. “I’d prefer it if you stopped,” he said. “I just couldn’t find a way to tell you.”

He hated how thin his voice sounded, as warbled as when he was younger and trying to tell Dudley’s mates to leave him alone with no intimidation behind the words. Back then, there wasn’t enough compassion in his world to make up the difference. Now, Hermione cleared her throat lightly.

“Of course,” she said. There was a nervousness in her voice. He’d looked back down, but he could hear her shifty eyes just in the way she spoke and imagined that she was glancing around the table, gauging the reaction and issuing a warning that kept everyone else’s mouths shut. “All you have to do is ask.”

Life had gotten a little lonely after that. Stopping them from joking made them scared of the topic entirely. He hadn’t thought there was a third option besides joking or avoiding until he’d told Draco how he felt and gotten an ‘I hear you’nod as casual and thoughtful as if he’d said ‘my birthday’s coming up and I hate getting older.’

Now, Ron was frozen like he hadn’t thought his foot could still fit in his mouth that well and Harry decided to save them all from awkwardness. “I’ll have to stop by a practise,” he said.

Ron’s body sank into comfort again. “You must! Ginny wants you to come by, too.”

“I’m sure she does,” he muttered. “I’m going to see if I can find Neville.”

“Oh, Neville? He’s right by the…”

But Harry had walked away without waiting to hear that Neville was in the opposite direction. The fireplace at the centre of the room was crackling and he was drawn towards its warmth and the calmer, more subdued groups that had gathered near it. He nodded and smiled at Seamus and a seventh-year girl, but chose to sit alone with his back against the side of a reading chair, close enough to the flame that it was uncomfortable.

It was only once he’d pulled his legs up that he felt the lump in his pocket. He pulled out a small cotton bag filled with hazelnuts. They weren’t a snack. He tossed one into the fire. It smoked and smouldered, slowly blackening until he couldn’t distinguish it from the ashy wood already choked up from the heat.

He tossed a second one. With a small pop, it burst into flames. He sat up in shock, too fast for the way his head was still spinning—first the punch, now the hotness—and stared unblinkingly into the fire. He tossed another and watched it become a small, firey ball again. He’d fished another nut out of the bag when a voice said, “Who are you thinking of?”

He looked up fast enough to break his neck, not expecting the company. Hermione had taken up the reading chair and was tilting her head, an interested half-smile on her face.

“No one,” he said quietly, looking back at the fire. “Just messing about.”

She hummed thoughtfully. “Of course.”

He tucked the bag back into his pocket.

“Thanks for coming to the match with me. I was worried you weren’t going to make it. Just for the camaraderie it produced, it was well worth it. If you’d seen the students’ faces… They looked at you like you’d given them permission to enjoy the sport again.”

“You’re not the only one to tell me I’m good for morale,” he said.

“You left pretty quickly once they called the match.”

He shrugged, watching the fire dance and resisting the urge to throw the entire back of hazelnuts into its heat. “There was going to be a party, I had to get to my homework early.”

“That makes sense. How did the biography of Copernicus treat you?”

“Oh, erm, great. Kind of a snore.”

She nodded. “The biography is on Giordano Bruno.”

Alright, so he hadn’t done homework. In fact, he’d been roaming the school trying to pick a suitably abandoned corner of the second floor that still had a window so he didn’t feel claustrophobic when he’d heard his name being called. Harry, they’d called once without him registering it. Then again, Harry. Then, finally, POTTER! And that, for some reason, had turned his head.

“That’s what I get for endeavouring towards familiarity,” Draco said, stopping in front of him and looking slightly out of breath. “Your brain is hardwired beyond recognising that I can be calling ‘Harry’ after you.”

“I suppose we’re perpetually on a last-name basis.”

“No, I’ll hammer it into you. You look pale.”

Harry ran a hand through his hair. “It was a crowded match. Gryffindor won."

“Then where’s everyone else?”

He grimaced. “I think I was halfway to the castle before the others stood up.”

“Well, while you were trying to fight an inner panic—”

“I was not pan—”

“—I took the chance to make conversation in the common room. The curmudgeons who have no interest in the first Quidditch game in almost two years are going to be your toughest audience for school spirit this Halloween.”

 Harry lifted his eyebrows. “Oh, you really asked them.”

“What, you think I go back on my word?”

He shook his head fast.

“Well, I got answers.” There was a shadow of a triumphant smile on his face, but only behind his eyes, and only if Harry looked very closely. He glanced down the hall instead, to where a couple Ravenclaw students were dragging their feet outside the girls’ lavatories, waiting on a friend.

“Well?”

“Tradition,” he said simply. “Pureblood tradition—and don’t make that face, Potter, you want to overcome prejudice? Pureblood tradition isn’t just about killing… Muggle babies or whatever you might presume we do for Halloween. It’s about the rituals of the old families.”

“Say Pureblood again.”

“I don’t mean it to sound that way.” Draco leaned closer. “What do you want me to say? It’s the traditions of the old families, and the oldest families are Pureblood. They’re one and the same. Ancient wizarding tradition is Pureblood tradition, like it or not.”

He had done too much work to save Harry’s standing with the Slytherin students to let him slip into such talk. That afternoon in the dim dungeon, the sunshine and cheering at the Quidditch pitch had seemed a world away. He’d spent a long minute hesitating before clearing his throat.

“Al-alright, erm, listen here,” he’d started, raising his voice slightly. Across the room, heads lifted confusedly from books or chessboards. Pansy looked up over the high back of a reading chair. They met each other’s gaze in mutual surprise—he’d thought she’d be outside on a nice day like today—until Blaise’s head appeared beside her.

“Erm, right, thanks. As you all know—if you can read a Gregorian calendar—Halloween is at the end of next month and it’s slated to include the usual trite activities—feasting, pumpkin juice… But this year I—we want to do it properly, in a way that would make Slytherin feel included. Any suggestions?”

He scanned the room. Faces as young as eleven and as old as eighteen stared hollow-eyed back at him.

“I love hazelnuts!” Pansy’s voice was a saving grace, breaking the silence with a natural charm. She reached into her purse and pulled out a small satchel.

“Thank you, Pansy,” he said calmly, though his eyes conveyed twice the gratefulness his voice did. “Elaborate?”

“It’s a traditional Samhain festivity from the holiday’s matchmaking days. If you speak the name of a lover and toss one in the fire, it will tell you whether they’re your soulmate or not. My mum sends them every year.”

She held one to her heart and closed her eyes, then tossed it in the fire, where it smouldered into blackness. She looked disappointed as she tossed the bag to Draco.

“The candle-lighting ceremony,” said a fifth-year girl named Willow. “Before any Hallow’s Eve celebration, a candle was lit to guide lost spirits home.”

“We did that one, too,” a boy to her left said, nodding his head. “Not just any candlesticks, not the ones levitating in the Great Hall. They had to be intentional.”

“We would acquire candles strictly for ceremonial purposes,” Draco ensured.

“Dumb Supper,” Theodore Nott spoke in a resonant tenor. A rousing chorus of ‘mm’s and nods rippled through the group. Draco had to agree. As a child wrapped up in his own family customs, he’d been surprised that there was nothing like a Dumb Supper at Hogwarts.

“My family has a tradition,” said a wiry boy Draco had never heard speak up. He sat in the corner, whittling something with four legs out of wood with a pocket knife.

Draco gestured for him to continue.

“We would pick a girl from Muggle London dressed as a witch and hex her as punishment for imitation. Our parents did the work until we were of age for magic outside of school of course.”

“Of course,” Blaise said sarcastically, side-eyeing the boy. “Wouldn’t want trouble with the Ministry.”

In the hallway with Harry, Draco intended to edit out the unsavory aspects of their little meeting. Across from him, Harry cocked his head curiously. “Let’s hear these completely harmless Pureblood traditions, then.”

Draco narrowed his eyes. “Will you take them seriously, though? Because my own family used to follow some of them, and I won’t have you disrespecting that.”

“Fine, I won’t disrespect your family.”

“Oh, no, you can disrespect my family, just not my childhood reminiscence.”

Harry smiled. “Go on.”

“The students I spoke to all said one thing: to hell with pumpkins, essentially.”

The other boy coughed a sound of indignance.

“They don’t mind them, but that’s not Halloween to them—nothing about the school’s feast says Halloween to them. It’s about… the candle lighting… And the Dumb Supper... The hazelnuts.”

Harry’s forehead drew in. “Dumb Supper? Hazelnuts?”


“Honestly, the last one is mostly Pansy. I’d forgotten it entirely. Halloween used to be a matchmaking event in some circles, so she pounced on that, of course. Gave me her pouch of nuts and has already requested an entire sack of them from the kitchens. I assume she also requested a class roster so she can be meticulous about it.”

“Matchmaking? Really?”

“It’s a wives’ tale. You think of someone and toss a nut into a fire… It’s all in here,” he said, handing over the book of Pureblood traditions he’d purchased in Diagon Alley that summer. Harry took it slowly, flipping to the back, then to the front, then opening to the first page.

“So I thought,” Draco said, as the sound of a populating school grew around them, “that if you were set on being more involved in Halloween and I had the expertise on Slytherin traditions, we might need to work together some more.”

“Seems unavoidable,” Harry said, tucking the book under his arm. He regarded Draco carefully. After the shouting of the Quidditch match, Draco’s aura felt calming, though it could just as easily be a quiet aura of restrained distaste. He kept his feelings close to his chest, offering very little in trade when Harry admitted to anything personal. The most excitement he’d seen in him was when he was angry. Did he have to be angry to be anything?

Trying to understand Draco by just looking at him felt like a caveman trying to decipher the mystery of fire through vision alone. But one had to be close enough to feel fire to know it was hot. And one had to reach out to know it was untouchable.

Back in Gryffindor tower hours later, he stared at the fire in the common room, thinking of all these things, without really hearing Hermione behind him at all.

“Did you hear me?” she asked again. “Where did you just go?”

“Nowhere,” he murmured.

“I said I’ll go to practise with you if you’d like.”

“Maybe,” he said, which meant no.

“Or at least to the next match. Gryffindor’s got rotten luck with the two matches in a row.”

“That’ll be good.”

For a long pause, neither said anything. Harry had come over to be alone, after all. The fire, the students, and the din of celebration all seemed to fade away if he was given more than five seconds without being prompted to engage in conversation. He began to feel a sense of distortion again, like fighting with Draco this morning or even being stopped by him late this afternoon were distant memories. And the longer he stared into the fire, the more he felt like his senses dulled in a big glass box again, like the warmth of the fire could no longer affect him, even if he reached his hand right into the—

“Remind me again,” Hermione said, a lilting nonchalance to her voice that was entirely artificial. “Is it your soulmate if the nut smoulders or if it burns up?”

“Burns up,” he said. That night, when he closed his eyes, he’d still see the licking flames on the backs of his lids.

*****

“So the ‘Dumb’ in ‘Dumb Supper’, then, refers to being mute, not being stupid. It’s a completely silent, erm—”

Draco was teaching Harry about Dumb Suppers while they weeded the garden together, but every time he glanced over, the other boy was staring into him like he had blue hair or something. It was completely disconcerting.

“—dinner, erm… from the moment you walk through the door until the minute you leave. It gives room for the spirits…”

Harry dug his spade into the ground without looking and snatched his hand back with a hissed curse. Draco looked away from it all, down towards the growing pile of chickweed in his left hand, and kept talking.

“I was going to host it the way my mum hosted them when I was a child because it’s the only way I’ve experienced it. Pansy never did them and Blaise bunked off because he has this strange thing about ghosts—though ghosts don’t usually show because the whole point is communing with the dead in the other realm, not our realm…”

“You did these every year?”

Draco glanced back up. The first knuckle of Harry’s left hand was to his lips like he was sucking the wound dry. That strangely tethered eye contact. It made Draco feel clumsy.

“Yes,” he finally responded. “Every Halloween. With some of the other families, usually.”

“We’ll have to hold it before the feast, in case students want to do both.”

“Sure.”

“And invite all the houses, so that there’s an exchange of tradition.”

“Of course,” he said. He pointed to the other boy’s lap. “You’re falling behind. That’s a quarter of the weeds I’ve pulled.”

“I had a run-in with a trowel,” Harry muttered, but he didn’t argue back as Draco expected. Instead, he began to work diligently.

“Smaller traditions I thought we could scatter into the other festivities. The candle lighting could be done by a few students with deep interest, on behalf of the school. We could place bowls of the hazelnuts at the tables with notes on the history of the activity, just for fun, not as serious—”

“OH—Merlin’s bloody fucking—”

Draco looked up in alarm. The shell-shocked expression that had covered Harry’s face all afternoon was gone, replaced with one of sheepishness and pain. He held up the back of his left hand again and Draco instinctively looked at the scraped knuckle until he twisted his palm out to face him.

His face had gone blank, if not inquisitive. “Is this okay?” he asked. The meat of his palm was sliced cleanly parallel to the skin, leaving a horrifying sliver of pink flesh flapping in the light autumnal breeze.

Draco inhaled, dropping his weeds and crossing the pumpkin patch. “For Salazar’s sake, Potter!” For a moment, the wound had been clean and dry, like it was too in shock to do the human thing and bleed. Now, dark blood ran down his forearm. “With the fucking spade?”

“I got distracted.”

“By what? Something shiny in a window?” He reached for the hand as he berated him. “Did you catch the glint of a Sickle like a fucking crow?”

“Oh, I meant to say—we need a scarecrow. I’ve been seeing crows out here in the afternoons. They haven’t done any harm yet, but Hagrid says to just give it time and they’ll be public enemy number one.” He cocked his head and stared off into the field. “Maybe the back corner? Or do they have to go centre?”

“Put it on the agenda, then. After Madame Pomfrey sees your hand, maybe? That is, if you can manage to make bleeding on my trousers a temporary priority.”

“Madame Pomfrey?” Harry winced and Draco thought he’d squeezed too tight until the bleeding boy continued. “She just said at breakfast on Sunday how delighted she was that I hadn’t visited yet. I hate disappointing her.”

“I can do it,” Draco heard himself suggest.

“Disappoint Madame Pomfrey?”

“Fix your hand up, dimwit.” The wound was deep but it was a clean cut. Draco gently turned his wrist. “It’s not even a magical wound. And I’m wholeheartedly intermediate at healing now.”

Harry offered him a sidelong glance. “Wholeheartedly intermediate?”

“But this is a very beginner accident.”

“Hm,” he said, staring into the distance and chewing his lip. He looked calm enough that he could just be considering the scarecrow again, but then he said, “Only if you promise not to tell anyone that I managed to do something so hapless.”

“So I heal you and I don’t get to tell anyone about it? Some deal.”

He used his free hand to extract his wand from within his robes, and Harry hissed louder at the movement it caused on their joined hands. His voice cracked when he spoke. “Professor Sprout sa—aid the pumpkins were looking healthy.”

“They’re just leaves,” Draco said.

“But you’ve got them looking full of potential.”

He narrowed his eyes, observing Harry. He was a bit colourless, but besides the unavoidable physical symptoms of the injury, it was as though it wasn’t even on his mind. He hadn’t looked down at it once since he presented it.

“Are you here?” he asked him. “Right now?”

Harry scratched the back of his head with his free hand, chuckling breathily. “Erm, yeah, I’m-I’m here. You’re touching me.” He wiggled their hands and something in his eyes admitted to pain again. “Have you been hallucinating, Malfoy?”

“You’re just reacting like someone who’s admitted they sometimes feel, well, dead inside.”

“I’m alive inside. Look. The blood.”

“Yes,” he sighed, “the blood. I’ll do something about it if you’re ready.”

Harry shrugged. “Sure.”

Without hesitating, Draco pointed his wand tip just above the surface of the wound and began to speak.

Learning healing spells had been a bit of a chore. They were often longer than charms or hexes, apart from episkey. Lucius Malfoy had always said the shortness of that spell was a sign of the barbaric way it seemed to slam bone back together within the body. The longer the spell, the more delicateness the magic was harnessing, and the more instruction the wizard was dispensing.

When he finished, the skin had seamed back together without so much as a scar. Only their stained clothes and the darkening, drying blood running down Harry’s forearm and over Draco’s hand showed that an accident had occurred at all.

“Let’s clean up at Hagrid’s,” Harry suggested tonelessly.

Draco pointed the wand again. “Scourgify,” he said, and the blood disappeared.

“Oh. Right,” Harry responded. He’d gotten extremely good at ignoring injury in his youth, but never so distracted that he forgot about magic entirely. Even the detachment from pain had never been like this. Yes, there had been an initial flare of it when the metal met his skin, but when it transitioned to a consistent throb, he’d felt nothing more than a mental numbness. It was like his mental state was trying to combat his physical.

This cut would be a problem… if you were fully alive, part of him was whispering. Stupid blood. Stupid body acting the part of life.

He had observed, quite impartially, the concern on Draco’s face. And then it felt like he didn’t even need to tend to his body—someone else was—and so his thoughts were free to return to gardening and to-do lists. It was that matter-of-fact.

“Most distracted gardener I’ve ever met,” Draco grumbled, standing and collecting the pulled weeds. “How did you survive Herbology?”

“Still surviving,” he sighed. Their class next week would cover venomous tentacula. Professor Sprout had spent the last fortnight warning them about it.

He watched, absently touching the seamless skin of his palm, as Draco returned to the final row of plants. The growth potion he’d concocted worked well on the pumpkins but did much for the weedy plants that had snaked their way under the soil, too. At this stage, they would blink and the weeds would appear. Occasionally, he glanced back at Harry.

“You just sit still,” he said. “If I don’t finish the weeds, they’ll double by tomorrow.”

Harry nodded and fiddled with his own collection of plant stems, twisting the long stalks together, imagining that, if he hadn’t thrown a few nuts into a fire yesterday, he might not have bled today.

Last night, at the party, he’d thought first of Ginny, of a brief era of kissing in corners of the castle and a feeling of completion in his heart, tossed a hazelnut into a fireplace, and watched it turn to charcoal and dust. Then he’d thought of his gardening partner, his nemesis, a boy who had caused him hurt and anger for as long as he’d had magic of his own, and watched as the sparks licked and caught onto the hazelnut.

He’d tossed a third in Draco’s name again, just to see.

Draco had been right—it was a wives’ tale. But the foolish way the hazelnuts reacted at least gave him an adjusted perspective as he watched the boy work today. It was entirely possible, he finally admitted, to know someone for eight years without taking the time to see them at all. Draco had needled his way into Harry’s life so early and so fully that he’d become a constant—never needing to be re-examined.

Now the hazelnut, though it meant nothing to him, had offered the belated opportunity to consider Draco as a complex person who experienced not just guilt but self-forgiveness, desire, excitement, passions. He couldn’t tear his eyes away today.

He’d never noticed, for example, that Draco had perfect posture like a steel rod had been implanted in his spine at birth. And when he pulled weeds, it was less of a yank like Harry was doing and more of a grasp-twist-pull. Elegant. Every row, he’d stop and roll his long neck like he held his body too tense. And he wrinkled his nose when Harry annoyed him, but—and the difference was small but observable—he wrinkled it when something was vaguely funny, too.

Harry watched him and felt the questions within him multiplying. Had he thrown hazelnuts in the fire as a child? The Malfoy manor was the site of horror for Harry, but he tried anyway to imagine Draco at ten thinking of some neighbour or classmate and tossing a nut with the hopes that it was fated love.

Each August, did he lay up at night with the anticipation of returning to Hogwarts? Did he write owls to his friends, misspell things, and cross them out with a quick scratch like Harry did? How human that would be. Did he put lemon in his water? Milk in his tea? Sugar in his coffee? Did his mum ever tell him it was time for a haircut? Did his father ever say he was proud? Ashamed? Worried? Loved?

Did he fold up his timetable and stick it in the front of a textbook, only to forget which textbook he’d misplaced it in? Harry did that every year. Did he forget due dates in his agenda? Did he shake with terror when Voldemort was holding his eye contact? Did he brace himself to be strong by imagining the people he loved dead? Did he wake in the night so often with a gasp that sleeping peacefully until morning garnered suspicion? Did Blaise Zabini resent him for helping plan a school celebration? Did Pansy Parkinson resent him for surviving a war and not asking her to be with him? Did he believe in the superiority of Pureblood parenthood? Did he believe that Hogwarts students could be whole again? Did he believe he could? Could Harry?

“Can I ask you something?” Draco swivelled in his crouch, wiping his brow with the back of a hand full of weeds.

“Erm, sure,” Harry answered, standing and shaking the thoughts away once more. He walked to Draco.

“How do you feel?”

He shifted his weight onto one leg, ruminating on the question. “How do I feel?”

“Yes, how do you feel?”

Harry flexed his hand as if to prove a point with the supple, unmarred skin. “Fine.”

Draco touched his hand gently to push it down from between them, then removed his quickly to rub at the nape of his neck. “Not your hand. You. How does… it feel?”

“What’s it?”

“It is… everything.”

He considered it for a moment. The question, he thought, was purposefully vague. It was a dance or a duel. Draco had stepped forward and struck out, but now leapt back to see if Harry would engage or take the defence.

“It’s nothing,” he answered. “It feels like nothing. All of it.”

And then there was the way he floated sometimes above his body, like just now with the shovel-induced cut. The way it had felt unimportant because he wasn’t fully alive as it was. In his dreams, sometimes he looked in the mirror and saw his own rotting corpse—greyed skin and sinking hollows of the cheeks, cloudy eyes like cataracts and cracked lips like the dried salt peeling off an old ship run aground. When he woke, he could still smell it.

He thought of the way even Hermione and Ron’s pity couldn’t pierce an exterior growing so hard that he worried it would soon be too thick to ever penetrate again. He thought of the satisfaction he felt because of that; they didn’t know how to navigate his complex situation and must feel relief at not being granted the opportunity to try.

“Ice cubes,” said Draco.

“Sorry?”

“Hold an ice cube in your hand. It helps bring you back to your body. How far away were you just now?”

“You want me to carry ice cubes around to preempt out-of-body experiences?”

Draco stood. “Aguamenti.” He jabbed it up and a thick gob of water jetted upwards. “Glacius,” he said quickly, and it froze in mid-air. He caught it deftly with a quick hand as it dropped, then tossed it to Harry who, in that flash in time, remembered that Draco was a great Seeker, too.

The ice was a sharp cold, so low in temperature that it almost felt hot, and he rolled it around between his fingers and his palm for as long as he could. He could feel where it had been even once he’d dropped it into the soil.

“Not bad, right?” Draco asked.

The way he spoke about the things Harry felt was so familiar, as if he was old friends with the feeling. “Do you get it, too?” Harry dared to ask. “Since the war?”

He shook his head and something akin to disappointment filled Harry’s chest.

“But I used to.”

Harry brightened. “Really?”

“Sixth year, mostly. Earlier, too. Sometimes as a child… But, erm, no, not anymore. To be candid, I’ve felt… too in touch with my body.”

“Too in touch?”

“Everything aches. I don’t know why. My joints. My back. My stomach—constant nerves with no explanation. Like pixies in your belly. No appetite, but always hungry, like I’m completely hollow inside. I’m just… heavy. As if gravity pulls at me more than it used to.” He shrugged. “I think I’m just tired, but I find it more impossible to ignore than in previous years. I was a little envious,” he admitted, chuckling, “watching the way you could abandon your body and leave me to deal with it.”


“That’s not funny.”

“No,” he said quickly. “It’s not. I was trying to make you smile. I don’t know why. Anyway, erm, ice cubes, cold showers, observing your surroundings like you’ll be asked to recite it later—name five green things or… describe something with all five senses.”

“Okay. Thanks.”

Draco wanted to ask him something else, but it seemed like doing so while the sun was high and the sky was blue would break the law. He tried to imagine an eclipse, like for the length of his question the sun would hide behind the moon and night would grow around them.

“I’ve got a question, but it’s rather sensitive,” he said.

Harry nodded, breathing in and out through his nose with controlled slowness. “You want to know what dying is like.”

Draco jerked his head back in surprise. “That was uncanny.”

“Nobody asks me, but I get the sense they all want to,” Harry said, scratching his temple. “I wish they would. Like, maybe that’s why I feel like I’m still there. Because I’ve never gotten to talk about it in the past tense.”

Draco waved his hands, sending chickweed fluttering. “Past tense away, Potter. I’m all ears.”

It was a little dizzying, the size of the question, or the blood loss, maybe, so he slowly sank back to the ground and Draco sank with him. When Harry spoke, it was like the eclipse had manifested. Draco would have sworn that it actually did grow dark around them.

“I can’t speak for everyone,” he began. “It was such a unique situation, right? But it-it wasn’t painful, the killing curse part. The anticipation was the worst part, so I imagine that for people like parents who were caught off guard, it was relatively easy. It doesn’t hurt. You just are and then you aren’t. Like passing out.”

He put his palms under his glasses and over the sockets of his eyes, “And then I was at King’s Cross but everything was a bright light. I thought I might be in heaven until I saw… him—what was left of him, anyway. And Dumbledore spoke to me. He was real, or real to me at least. Sometimes I wonder if, next time I die, I’ll go to King’s Cross again. I wonder if everyone goes there, or if that was what my mind decided on.”

He pulled his hands down and waited for Draco’s response.

With a glint of warmth in his eye, Draco simply smiled. “’Next time I die’, he says. Do you know how mad it is that you said that so casually?”

“It can’t be madder than triage trowel-induced healing in the pumpkin patch I nurture with Draco Malfoy.”

Draco laughed bitterly. How could he argue? Eccentricity bled into life when it was spent with Harry. He hadn’t healed someone in years, but the way an intricate spell had just rolled off his lips as easily as the alphabet was a rush, endorphins telling him to pick and choose his memories.

Like perhaps if he remembered the feeling of Harry’s warm skin closing in his hands, he could forget a lifetime of cold, regimented healing lessons. Or perhaps, kneeling in roughly the same spot with nourished pumpkin leaves and a gardening partner, he could forget the dreadful potion that had left him kneeling there when Harry had first appeared two weeks ago. Memory was more faithless than people gave it credit for.

Chapter Text

Harry fastened the last button on one of his oldest shirts—one of Dudley’s that had somehow lasted through pure nostalgia—and took a step back.

“Blimey, you’re a handsome fellow,” he said, chewing his lip thoughtfully. The scarecrow looked like a macabre version of himself, dressed in his clothes and standing still in the field. It wasn’t much more than a leftover dummy from duelling practice that he’d found in a storeroom, but the wide smile and pinpoint eyes he’d drawn on seemed to give it life, albeit a haunting one.

Narcissistic of you to call me handsome, given you’ve made and dressed me in your things, he imagined the scarecrow would retort.

He stooped down to collect the discards of his crafting. “Ah,” he murmured in response, “but what is the line between narcissism and self-love?” He’d certainly always struggled to delineate the two when he saw them in Draco Malfoy.

The scarecrow had no response to this. It didn’t know the answer either, because it was Harry, and Harry was more lost on the concept of self-love and self-hate than ever.

Don’t you have real friends to chat up?

The scarecrow watched him blankly. Harry stared back.

“You avoided my question,” he sighed.

Now you’ve avoided mine.

He tilted his head, squinting at the scarecrow’s head as the sun rose behind it. “I have friends.”

Maybe sometimes. But you don’t get to write both sides of the conversation. They get to mould their own opinions and form their own thoughts. They say what’s on their minds—or worse, they don’t. How scary, not to know their every move, isn’t it? So much safer with the hollow man, stuffed with straw, stuck in the field, yes?

Safer even to join him?

If your voice was hoarse, your mouth dry like wheat, no one would ask you to speak up again. If your arms were stiff and bound to posts, your body strung like a crucifixion, your job as a martyr would be complete. Never again tasked with saving the world, saving the pumpkins, saving yourself. Sure, at night you can hear the students laughing from the castle, and the rats running through the grass try to nip at your heels, but it’s easier to avoid it all than to risk the bad with the good. You do your job. The crows do not like you. You are scary. You are scary. You are—

“NO!” Harry shouted, shaking his head and turning his back on the scarecrow only to find a flummoxed Ron staring back at him

“No?” Ron’s voice cracked.

“I was thinking out loud.”

“Yeah, certainly wasn’t in your head,” he responded, looking nervous.

Harry tried to laugh, feeling like he wanted to hide behind the scarecrow and let Ron speak to it instead. Ron gestured to the dummy. “I thought you were just growing pumpkins.”

“This is for the pumpkins. There’ve been crows.”

“Crows are a problem? There’s nothing to eat.”

Harry was well aware that there was nothing for the crows to eat. He’d been aware for days, and anyone who spent a second trying to decipher Draco’s disposition lately would have known it, too. Every day that they checked the garden and it had no vines he got crabbier, and the crabbier he got, the quieter he became. Gone were the days of speaking sensitively about how it felt to die.

“As soon as there are vines, the crows will be a problem,” Harry explained. “Besides, they’re too smart. They’ve been poking around for a week already. And then the hippogriffs will want to eat the crows and trample the crops…”

“But there’s a fence.”

“They’ve got wings.”

“Right.” Ron rocked on his heels. “You should tell Malfoy to work on whatever he’s feeding this dirt. It’s not working.”

“Tell him yourself,” Harry said sharply, nodding behind him. Draco was too far away to hear them, but he was coming up the path with his hands deep in the pockets of a dark denim jacket.

“I think that’s your job as co-party planners.” There was an edge of irritation in Ron’s voice, Harry thought, and perhaps a bit of fear at the idea of actually looking Draco Malfoy in the eye and telling him he was doing a bad job.

“Did you need something?” Harry asked. 

“Our last practise before tomorrow’s match is today. I thought I’d see if you wanted to come along.”

“Oh, I—”

“But I see you’re busy.”

“I’m finished here.”

“As if the simple task of watering a garden hasn’t been taking longer and longer by the day,” Ron said. He shrugged as if he’d come to peace with whatever unknown problem he was insinuating, and walked away. He didn’t so much as nod at Draco as they passed each other.

Harry couldn’t feel less prepared to exchange average salutations with Draco so quickly after Ron’s visit. It felt like he’d been spun in ten circles and then told to walk in a straight line. But Draco approached with surprising pleasantness in his expression.

“Good afternoon, I don’t believe we’ve met,” he spoke, stopping at the edge of the garden. He squinted, too, though the sun was rising steadily, one eye squeezed shut in an amusingly human gesture. It was possible, Harry kept discovering, for him not to live in stoicism.

“Erm, what?”

“Not you, Potter,” he scoffed, rolling his eyes. “Your friend?”

Harry glanced back at the scarecrow. “Oh. The crows.”

“The crows, I know.” He walked closer, until his left shoulder almost touched Harry’s left, looked up, and pinched the fabric of the scarecrow’s shirt appraisingly. He smelled of coffee. “Thinning flannel, discoloured, pilling… this isterrifying. Well done.”

He turned a sidelong glance on Harry, half his mouth quirked up, and Harry found that a real laugh still lived within him. “Fuck you,” he smiled. “It was my cousin’s.”

“No, you wore this fourth year.”

Harry’s smile fell in surprise. Draco’s mirrored it.

“It was just so ghastly; I could never forget it,” Draco said.

Harry’s mouth tipped up again. “Don’t talk like that. Eugene’s confidence is the key to his scariness.”

“Who?”

“The scarecrow. He’s called Eugene.”

“Good gracious, don’t tell me you’ll name the pumpkins, too.”

“Only if they’re notable,” he said. “Only if they ever grow.”

Draco grimaced and nodded, crouching by the nearest sprout. They’d all grown leaves, but none had begun crawling. “I thought today would be the day. Significant growth of some sort. It’s already the first week of October.”

“Ron noticed that, too.”

Draco shrugged. “I’m beginning to think we’ve overwatered.” He paused. “Is it possible to give something too much love?”

“I’m yet to see it,” Harry said, watching Draco’s fingers feel the leaves.

“He’s right about the garden, you know, but he only said that because he’s jealous.”

“Jealous of what?” Harry said quickly.

“Of us. We’re not even friends, but we’ve been spending our time on the same project. He’d hate that, especially because it’s me.” He stood and walked around the side of the garden to the shed and returned with a spade in hand.

“We’re not friends?”

Draco plunged the shovel into the earth and paused. He narrowed his eyes at Harry. “No,” he said. “We’re not friends.” With three more cuts, he’d carved out a cube of dirt, which he dumped in a pile to the side. As he poked a finger through the soil, spreading it out even more, earthworms squirmed to conceal themselves again. “The soil is healthy. It must be the potion.”

“He wanted me to come to practice. I would’ve gone. You scared him away.”

Draco visibly bristled. “And so you’re passing the blame to me?”

“No, I think I’m thanking you. I would’ve felt obliged to go, but I’m not sure Ginny would’ve been as happy to see me as her brother. He can be a bit… clueless… when it comes to other people’s relationships.”

The other boy stood with such unexpected urgency that Harry jumped. He snatched up the spade and chucked it towards the shed without caring much where it landed. “I’m going to the lake.”

He left the pumpkin patch quickly in his wake, leaving Harry bewildered to follow behind. He jogged to catch up. “Are you okay?” he asked.

“Yeah,” Draco sighed. “I’m completely fine.”

There wasn’t much truth to it. Last night, while working on the most ridiculous essay for Defence, Pansy had come to sit beside him and ask him too many questions about his NEWTs. It was a blatant attempt to deduce his plans without explicitly asking in the same way that had led him to blow up at Blaise already.

The amount of patience Draco had for most people was a puddle, but for Pansy, it was the seven seas, and so he’d almost finished the paper entirely before he finally snapped. He accused her of beating around the bush. She said that was just her being gentle with him. He hated the idea of being something to treat gently. It made him feel like wet luxury parchment—usually expensive and tough to tear, now possible to shred without even trying.

“Gentle?” he’d barked. “Why do I seem like something that needs to be treated gently?”

She’d tilted her head, face coloured in pity, saying oh sweetie, this is why, obviously.

“Ask me what you want to ask,” he’d ordered. “Get to it.”

“I was just trying to make conversation about your life!”

“I don’t have answers for you, Pansy. Go ask Blaise.”

“Well, we—I already know what he’s up to.”

“Right, pillow talk,” he muttered.

Why had he said it? Had any part of him ever worried about them together? The only thing he’d known for sure was that it would hurt Pansy to suggest it. Using her gender to other her in their trio had always been the untouchable, lowest form of attack.

“What was that?” she’d said, her voice already quivering, trying to stay even. “Say that again.”

Don’t say it, he’d thought. Look how shiny her eyes are.

“You already know every inch of Blaise,” he said.

She choked out a sound of pure hurt and offence, then stormed down the steps of the girls’ dormitory. Draco retired soon after, where he lay with his eyes open through the night, listening to Blaise’s snoring. He’d wondered what the boy would think once Pansy had updated him. They would be a united front.

He was still stuck wondering because he’d been too spineless to eat breakfast in the Great Hall. He’d taken a coffee and small plate up to one of the quieter towers, instead, from the window of which he’d spotted Harry tending to the inactive plants.

He wouldn’t be surprised if the negativity emanating from him this week had gone and gotten the pumpkins killed.

“What’s at the lake?” Harry asked, keeping in step no matter how fast Draco tried to walk. Every time he persevered conversationally, edging forward even though Draco had offered nothing in return, he was reminded of why McGonagall and Hagrid had given him the task. Persistence.

“A large body of water. Some sand. Some grass. Mermaids.”

“What do you seek by the lake?”

“Now you sound like the mermaids, asking riddles.”

“Erm, in my experience, they’re not very talkative,” said Harry.

Draco shook his head. “I meant mythologically.”

He glanced at him again, though, as they walked. Harry had been deeper in that lake than students risked, even when they were dared to. Unbelievable.

“Unlike you,” Harry said. “Mr Blabbermouth. Can’t let me get a word in.”

Draco said nothing as he walked.

“Must you be so mysterious?” Harry asked, and his tone, sharp, caught him by surprise. “We could skip all the mermaid banter if you’d just talk to me.”

“The banter’s the good part,” Draco offered.

“It’s not. It’s vapid. It’s meaningless. Shallow.”

“My,” he murmured, lifting his shoulders. “What’s got you in a mood?”

“Where are the vines?” He shook his head, crossing his arms. “And I just can’t get a straight answer out of you and it’s driving me mad.”

“Clearly.”

Harry snapped his head to glare, as if in a second, with another twitch, his wand might be to Draco’s throat.

“I’m going to get water from the lake,” Draco answered. “I’m trying something new for the pumpkins, but it needs to be from a magical natural body. So to the lake I go, and to the lake you follow.”

They spent a beat quietly while Harry pondered the information. “Sounds like potentially good news.”

“Hopefully.

“So why are you in a mood, then?”

Draco glared.

“Nevermind,” Harry murmured, and they spoke no further. It gave Draco a chance, as they approached the lake, to appreciate the season. His favourite aspect of autumn was the calmness of it. Spring was horrendously chirpy, with its baby animals, melting snow, and the advent of summer. Summer, of course, was synonymous with home lessons while Hogwarts was out of session, and with being a temporary thorn in the side of his busy parents.

By fall, the entire world was knackered. It was too soon to bustle about for gifts and fret over family spending holidays together. Autumn was a long breath one had forgotten to breathe. It was the first hot drinks of the season, the smell of fresh parchment torn from new packaging, the cracking bridge of unopened textbooks, the crunch of frosted grass and the first reddening noses.

He sat on the edge of the dock, pleased that the wood was a comfortable temperature beneath him and armed with the knowledge that dipping his hand into the water below was going to be much colder. When Harry sat beside him, it was without question. Something about Draco’s response earlier, the surrender of information, had quieted him.

Autumn looked strange on Harry. Draco was meant for layers—he’d been raised in button-down shirts and small tailored jackets—but Harry was meant for the opposite, as the two of them often were. He should be cotton t-shirts with the sleeves pushed over the shoulders when the sun beat too hard, not this oversized jumper he had on now.

Draco pulled his wand and summoned a silver goblet, then manoeuvred himself until he was laying on his stomach up to the edge of the dock. He reached below and scooped up the dark water, sucking in a short breath at the frigidity of the lake, then tried to reach up behind his back without spilling to set it down safely. A hand met him somewhere over the water and took the goblet.

“Thanks,” he said once he’d sat back up.

“No worries,” Harry said.

For a long pause, they sat in silence some more.

“So you’d go to practice for Ron Weasley, but not his sister?” Draco asked, leaning back on his hands. He watched Harry register the question with a slight click of the tongue, then stare over the lake and ruminate over his answer. Finally, he shrugged.

“I suppose the rumours that you two are getting back together are false, then.”

Harry met his eyes. “There are rumours?”

“Sure, I mean, I think Alice Stetler started it because she’s in love with you, but it’s believable enough to have picked up traction.”

“Who’s Alice Stetler?”

“Hufflepuff? Sixth year?”

Harry shook his head profusely. “That chapter with Ginny is finished.”

Draco hummed in response. He wondered what Pansy would say. She was better at talking about these things. He must’ve been possessed by her spirit to even ask.

In the quiet of the lake, he began to calculate how long the poor pumpkins would have to survive without the new potion. Because the plants had been thriving until they’d hit this new stage, he thought there was time. Three days, he decided: one to leave the chalice of water out in the moonlight by the garden, a second to add it to the potion and brew it, and then on the third day, he could feed it to the soil.

He remembered, quite randomly, the tension that had befallen the school in his second year when students were being petrified, and how their return to health had relied on unripe mandrakes. There were just some things, a flustered Professor Sprout had told her students, that couldn’t be rushed, and plants were one of them.

“I get the sense,” Harry said. It pulled Draco from his thoughts immediately. He waited for the rest of the sentence, but it never came. Harry stared through his glasses out at the flat line of the lake, his cheek moving like he was chewing it up from the inside, and said nothing else. Just ‘I get the sense’.

Draco nodded, reminding himself that the boy was quite odd and that, as he’d walked up from the castle that morning, he’d seen him shouting at a scarecrow. That he’d declared himself to be either half-dead or half-alive, and that he’d killed Lord Voldemort on a theory of dark magic he could only hope had been true and faith in a wizarding bedtime story.

When Draco was little, he’d always thought it was the Deathly Hollows, not ‘Hallows’. There wasn’t much his parents worshipped and God did not exist in his home, so there was no reason for him to know the second word even existed. And anyway, didn’t the moral of the story imply that the three brothers were hollow, eaten alive by the adventure? That they’d sought such grand things, only to find that the discoveries tore through their lives like decay in the walls of a rotting jack-o-lantern?

“I get the sense,” Harry said again. Draco took a deep breath through his nose, interested to see the thought through.

“I get the sense,” he said a third time, creasing his brow in deep thought. His eyes never left the lake. “That I was meant to be abnormal in every way possible. And that the kind of person I would fancy is no exception.”

Draco understood the implication immediately. He understood as though it was preset in his brain stem to decipher the vagueness, and that in itself was scary—that it had made sense like a language he’d already learned. He struggled to find something to say against such an admission, while wondering more cautiously what Harry wanted from him by saying it. Did he want him to admit something back? It wasn’t his fault that Harry kept sharing vulnerabilities. Draco had never agreed to some even trade of weaknesses.

“You’ve always handled ‘unusual’ well enough,” he settled on weakly, fighting not to look away.

“Oh, god, what am I saying—” Harry pulled his elbows in to throw his head into his hands, but knocked over the silver goblet. “Shit.” He tried to right it, but, with significantly shaky hands, let it tumble down into the lake with a quaint splash instead.

Draco stared at the ripple of water.

“Accio goblet,” Harry said, pointing his wand into the lake. Draco peered further over the edge expectantly.

“Accio goblet!”

“I don’t think it’s going to show itself,” he said easily.

Harry groaned. “Hopefully the school’s got plenty where that came from.”

“Oh.” He shrugged. “It was mine.”

“Yours?” Harry asked with wide eyes. “An heirloom?”

“No,” Draco smiled. “Though I’m sure you’re disappointed it’s not a Malfoy valuable lost to the lake. I used to drink out of it as a child, actually, which they never would have allowed if it was worth anything of symbolic value. When my parents left for France and they were packing up the manor, I just had to keep it. I succumbed to nostalgia, I suppose.”

In a beat, Harry had stood and crossed his arms over his chest. He pulled his jumper over his head and started to kick off his trainers.

“What’re you doing?”

Harry unbuttoned his trousers.

“What are you doing?”

“Would you mind holding these?” Harry asked. He thrust his glasses into Draco’s hand and slipped unceremoniously into the water of the lake before Draco could say another word. With a gasp, he disappeared under and the only remaining sound was a few bubbles left on the surface.

Draco sat speechless, fiddling with the boy’s glasses in his hand. The lake still looked empty, thankfully. No one to ask questions. He traced the curve of the glasses arms, the bend that fit around Harry’s ear.

A loud splash signalled Harry’s return, as sudden as his departure. He used one hand to wipe his eyes, the other still flailing under the water, but when it came out, the chalice was in it.

“Here,” he panted, tossing it onto the dock. “Oh, wait.” He grabbed it back, dipped it into the water, and replaced it, full to the brim, beside Draco and his clothes.

“It’s horribly cold!” Draco took in his soaked appearance, still wading in the water. “Get out, you madman.”

Harry shot him a toothy, contagious grin. “Draco, it’s like one enormous ice cube! I’ve never felt more alive!”

Draco scowled, though the corners of his mouth were undeniably turned upward. Harry was still smiling as he pulled himself out of the lake and then he stood, dripping onto the wood. His clothes clung to his shivering body and the October wind brushed over him, but he didn’t seem to care.

Draco was struck with the recognition that he’d happened upon Summer Harry, just as he’d been imagining him, stuck right in the middle of autumn. Here he stood in only a cotton t-shirt and the short inseam of his pants. He had half a mind to look away but knew just as well that one only looked away when there was a reason to be bashful. He refused to have a reason to be bashful and so he stared.

“That’s a very optimistic way to look at a frigid plunge,” he said, lifting his wand and casting a drying spell. It had become clear that Harry wasn’t even thinking of doing so.

Harry began stepping back into his clothes. He grinned again. “I’d leave a Malfoy heirloom at the lake bottom any day, but if there’s one thing I understand it’s holding onto scarce symbols of childhood happiness.”

“Only you would be stupid enough to do something unnecessary of personal risk for such a grandiose reason.”

Harry frowned, not in a joking way, but in a surprised one.

“Sorry,” Draco added, feeling a genuine pang of guilt. “Vulnerability makes me mean. The couple of times I’ve tried it at least. Have I said thank you yet?”

Harry smiled again and shook his head. Draco stood and, once Harry had straightened up from tying his shoes, handed him his glasses. Without overthinking it, he shrugged out of his denim jacket, too, and wrapped it around Harry’s shoulders.

They were inches apart. It was true, this was the most animated Harry had looked all year. The water had shocked him back to life.

“You look nice,” he said, very quietly, more like it had escaped his tongue than been called forth.

“What?” Harry tilted his head and shook it like he was trying to get water out. He dug his finger in his ear in a way that completely negated Draco’s impulsive statement anyway, so he took the opportunity to correct course.

“You look like ice.”

“Oh, well, yeah.” He shifted his shoulders, pulling the jacket tighter around his frame. “A drying spell doesn’t exactly warm up my insides.”

They began to walk back from the lake. Draco figured that Harry was dreaming of some warm shower he’d take when he got back to the castle, but in truth, Harry wasn’t sure he was ever going to take anything but a cold shower ever again.

“Don’t hate me,” Harry spoke. “This is going to sound like banter, but it’s so genuine.”

Draco groaned. “What?”

Harry held out his arms, the sleeves a few inches past his wrists. “This isn’t your fashion.”

“No.”

“So… this is how your mid-life crisis is going?”

Draco shook his head. “The style is the point, Potter. Think critically. That’s why I chose it. It’s—it’s my invisibility cloak.”

“Huh. It works, you know. Doesn’t make you look like you.”

“Today, it’s yours.”

“I keep getting gifted those, somehow,” Harry said, shaking his head.

Draco cracked a smile. “No gift. I need it back. Even if it suits you better."

*****

Gryffindor had drawn the short stick in the 1998 Quidditch bracket. The first two games of the season were theirs to play, after which they’d be subjected to a punishing dry spell while the other three houses competed. By the end of the season, they would find themselves competing for the cup against limbered-up teams who’d had months to dissect the Gryffindor players.

Their second game was set for early afternoon on Saturday, against Ravenclaw. Harry didn’t want to disappoint Hermione (after she’d pitiably told him they could go together at the last party) or Ron (after a tense invite to practise) so he clambered towards a clear expanse of stands with Hermione, Neville, and Luna with the rest of the school. Unsurprisingly, Neville had asked Harry every possible question he could about the state of the pumpkins. There was a hint of jealousy in his voice, perhaps, and if Luna wasn’t there to cushion the conversation with non-pumpkin things from time to time, Harry might have seceded his gardening responsibilities out of guilt.

“If the vines aren’t appearing, it could be the soil,” Neville suggested as their Beater swung a Bludger straight towards the Ravenclaw seeker. “That whole terrain was quite damaged after sixth year.”

Harry shook his head. “Draco fixed that first, I think. Seems healthy now. He’s figuring it out, I’m pretty sure.”

“Well, he’ll need to increase the hydration in the growth potion.”

“He’s working on that now, I think.”

“Well, did he set the water out last night to drink in the moonlight? The moon’s waxing, it’s the perfect time. It wouldn’t have said so in his recipe, but—”

“Yeah, he took care of it,” Harry said. Defending Draco to Neville hadn’t been on his agenda, but it seemed important. “He knows what he’s doing.”

“I think you know what you’re doing,” Luna added, beaming cheerfully. “So if you think he knows what he’s doing, and you know what you’re doing, then it must all be just fine.”

“Cheers, Luna,” he said with a smile.

“Can other things drink in the moonlight?” she asked Neville, leaning back on her arms. “And what does it do? For example, if I was to lay out there all night…”

A cheer broke out across the stadium—Ravenclaw had scored—and Harry’s shoulders shrugged up in defence against the noise. He shoved his hands back into the pockets of the denim jacket, which he’d worn again only so that it would be easy to return to Draco if they ran into each other—and felt something in the pocket. He pulled it out, soft like cloth from being washed, and found one line of faint writing on it:

I don’t know what I want but I know how to get it.

“Shit,” Hermione muttered to his left. He looked up at the pitch; her cussing always drew his attention. She was watching the game with her bottom lip between her teeth while the announcer, an honest observer from Slytherin whom Harry hadn’t met, described the perilous way that Ginny had just hung from her broom.

Harry’s focus shifted to the grassy edge of the pitch, where a tiny-looking Ron stood with his hands flat on his temples, shaking his head. He made some gesture to Ginny, now righted on her broom, and she nodded.

“That was close,” Hermione murmured.

“What happened?

“Watch, they’ll do it again,” she said confidently.

For a few minutes, gameplay went on as expected. Ginny circled above the flyers, searching for the Snitch. Her hair was in two long plaits, waving behind her like scarlet Gryffindor banners. Even from so far away, Harry swore he could see the concentration in her eyes. Her tongue would be pressed too tense against the roof of her mouth. Her hands would be gripping the broom handle tight enough to turn her knuckles white.

‘Ease up,’ Fred used to tell her in the summer-soaked back garden when school was far from their minds and the afternoons were something to fill up as aimlessly as possible. ‘If your broom was a horse, you’d have choked it to death.’

From separate ends of the field came both Ravenclaw beaters, targeting a Bludger Gryffindor’s keeper had just batted towards the centre. They met there, both raised their bats, and together with one swing sent the Bludger whistling towards Ginny. The crowd gasped as she ducked.

“Another score for Ravenclaw!” Alexander announced. Back by the goalposts, Gryffindor’s keeper Neve looked defeated while one of Ravenclaw’s Chasers pumped his fist in the air as he rounded the stadium.

“Oh.” Harry stood.

“What—where are you going?” Neville asked, shifting his knees so he could pass.

“I’ve got to talk to Ron.”

He shuffled quickly down the stadium steps, turning sideways to pass students meandering in the aisles around their friends, then took the familiar path around the side of the stadium towards the locker rooms and the entrance to the pitch. Ron was directly ahead of him, standing with his arms crossed. He looked meant for the role he’d moulded out for himself.

At the line where the shadow of the stadium’s underbelly gave way to the sunlit pitch, he almost turned back entirely. But there was still the love for the game and competition, and the love for winning. Also, if they didn’t change tactics soon, he was going to watch his ex-girlfriend take a Bludger to the head.

“Oi, call a timeout,” he said in greeting, turning Ron’s head. Ron looked instantly annoyed, probably residual stress from the game left on his face, but Harry winced at the bossiness of his own voice anyway.

“Sorry?”

“Erm, you should call a timeout.”

If there was any tension between them, both boys knew better than to put it above Quidditch. And if there was any tension, it existed on a smaller plane than the trust they had in each other. Without pressing for more information, Ron stepped out a little further, whistled to Ginny, and signalled. She did the same and Coach Hooch whistled a shrill signal that echoed through the stands. The players began to land.

“They’re after Ginny,” he told Ron.

“And owls hoot, Harry, blimey. She’s a great seeker. They should go after her.”

“They’re not going after her as seeker, they’re going after her as captain.”

Ron jerked his head back.

“It’s a distraction. They’re diverting her attention so she can’t mentor her team. Neve needs to be switched out, he cheats left. They’re bagging every goal because of it. Ginny would’ve noticed if they weren’t busy taking her head off. They’ve found a repeatable method, so long as she’s preoccupied.”

“But Neve was the star of our last game.”

“His method last game was stellar, and unfortunately he only has the one, it would appear.”

“Shame,” said Ron. “I like Neve. He’s got a dry sense of humour.”

“You don’t have to take him off the team, Ron, he just needs some training. He’s got potential.”

Ron’s brow furrowed, like he’d caught up to something. “I should’ve noticed,” he said. “No one was distracting me with Bludgers to the head and I’m coaching, too.”

Harry glanced toward the grass again. Ginny was shielding her eyes, walking across the pitch with her broom in hand, trying to confirm that it was Harry she saw standing with Ron.

“They’re sending Bludgers toward your sister’s head,” he pointed out. “That’s distracting.”

“So what would you have us do?”

“Yeah, what would you have us do?” Ginny clapped Ron’s back, looking windblown.

“At this point, you’re too behind on points to catch the Snitch anyway. Tell Neve to stay more centre and shadow Ravenclaw’s seeker. That way she can’t catch the Snitch before you’re ready, plus they’ll be too scared of hitting their own seeker to send Bludgers that way. But really, sub out your Keeper until he learns to fix his tells.”

She pouted. “I like Neve.”

“Yeah, he’s got a dry sense of humour,” Harry said. “And he’s going to cost you the match. Look, Gin, you would’ve seen the same thing I did—that’s why they’ve been targeting you."

Ginny chewed her cheek and looked at Ron. “Our only sub for Keeper is… And well… All you eighth-years are allowed to play. They made the announcement before we even held tryouts.”

Ron shook his head, reddening. “I’m only technically on the team. It’s more of a mentor role. Besides, it’s better for morale to have the new kids play.”

“It’s better for morale if we win,” Harry offered.

“You participated in the full tryout with everyone else,” Ginny added.

He sighed like they were putting him out. “I’m not even in uniform.”

“Better get to it, then,” she said.

Two minutes later, Ron was running onto the field with his wrist guards still unlaced while Ginny patted Neve’s shoulders consolingly. Harry had just made it back to his seat when the cheers let out and the flyers rose. Hermione’s eyes widened and her jaw dropped.

“What’s he doing?” she asked, her mouth tipping up into the start of a smile. She gripped his arm. “Harry, what’s he doing?”

Harry couldn’t help but grin proudly. “We put him in. He was a good sport about it.”

Without warning, she leaned in and kissed his cheek. “‘Good sport about it’? He’s been dying to fly,” she told him. “He’s just been a ‘good sport’ about giving the students their school back.”

Harry laughed, but it was drowned out by a rousing house-wide scream as Ron saved his first goal, not even a minute into gameplay. It seemed stupid now—he hadn’t even considered that there were ways his friends had been helping the school heal without the use of pumpkin seeds. And though he found it generous that Ron had wanted to leave the flying to Ginny and her non-eighth-years, it suited him to be up there. Selfishness, perhaps, was important, too.

*****

The thing was—Draco was already having a bad day. He’d fed the moon-charged water to the pumpkins (and whispered some soft verbal encouragement to them for good measure) but this morning there had been no change. And of course, the herbologist’s potion-making book he’d been using said nothing about the time frame in which the increased hydration potion would take effect, so he was left to return to the pumpkin patch every morning like a suitor whose beau was taking her time to return word on an engagement offer. Every day, he woke and walked sleepy-eyed to the garden with hope in his heart, only to be shot down again, told by the cruel, unfeeling pumpkins to respect their time and be patient.

He’d had a morning coffee, sipped grumpily while other students, Harry included, prepared for an afternoon of Quidditch. Then, when they all had gone to the match and the school quieted, he’d had a second. He was jittery and exhausted, but no more awake.

He straightened the sheets on his bed, the only one made up in their dormitory, and pushed his trunk back under the bedframe. When he’d come down here, Pansy had been in the common room and the sight of her had stalled him. His mouth had opened, but no words came forth, and after a furious moment she’d groaned in anger, collected her books, and charged out.

So he was already thinking about how good he was at making friends out of enemies and enemies out of friends when he walked to the other side of his bed and saw Sinister Spellwork and Powerful Potions sitting invitingly on the floor. He must have accidentally pushed it out the other side when he’d shoved the trunk under.

Like the book itself was cursed, he instantly could hear his heartbeat in his ears. He tripped on a leg of the bed, unfocused, as he walked around it again to take his wand from where he’d sat it by the wardrobe, then returned to shakily point it at the book. No. He knelt and shoved it back under the bed. Out of sight, out of mind. That’s what had worked for the last few weeks, right?

He crossed the room and hung his clean robes on hangers in the wardrobe. If the weather had decided there would be no more warm spells until spring, he’d really have to break out the warm textiles and—

No. He stopped everything, walked around the bed, pulled the book out, and pointed his wand. “Incendio,” he said before he could stop himself. Flames licked up. “Aguamenti! Reparo!” The fire hissed under water, then repaired its ember-eaten edges. Draco choked a cry of frustration and held the palm of his fist to his mouth. He began to pace.

Ten times, he crossed their small, empty dormitory, and then on the eleventh, he walked right out the door and up the steps, and though the cold when he hit the fresh air outside the castle was a shock, he didn’t notice that he’d forgotten his coat until he was at the exterior of the shrieking shack, all the way by Hogsmeade. He couldn’t have said whether he passed a single soul on his way, student or villager.

Not knowing a way in, Draco simply collapsed outside, landing in dry twigs and brown, slowly disintegrating leaves. He crossed his legs and put his elbows on his knees, burying his face in his hands. “I couldn’t get rid of it,” he said. “I’m spineless, either way.”

Not a single tear left his eyes, but it wasn’t for lack of emotion. Draco simply wasn’t a crier. Instead, it was like his body forgot its routine functions, like breathing and blinking. He stared into his hands without taking a breath until it had to come as a gasp, and he felt the lethargy of existence growing in every cell he was made of. His stomach was a battleground, his back ached in the curvature of his pathetic posture, and his exposed skin fought the chill of the autumn air through the loose knit of his jumper.

After a while, long after a huge roar had marked the end of the Quidditch match—in whose favour, Draco couldn’t tell—he thought of his own advice, which he’d imparted to Harry. But his entire body felt like an ice cube and it was not the enlightening experience the other boy seemed to have while emerging from the lake.

“This is the part where I get something out of coming all this way,” he said out loud to the place where Severus had died. “Something introspective and meaningful.”

The house creaked and towered, but it offered no epiphanies.

“Maybe next breakdown,” he muttered, standing up and feeling his body crack like wishbones. He took side streets back through Hogsmeade, trying to make up for the lack of discretion he’d entertained on his way through before. It took him a roundabout way up to the castle, on a path that put their pumpkin patch in plain sight.

Huh, he thought. Maybe it had been lucky that he’d been too blinded by emotion to tread carefully before—seeing the vineless leaves of their pumpkins might have been the last straw.

Just as he thought it, he stopped and stared carefully at the pumpkin patch. He walked closer, not believing it, but there they were. Vines, just starting to explore beyond their stations, trailing into the gaps between pumpkin plants. Vines. Vines.

Draco broke into a jog, not knowing what he planned to do. He imagined storming into a Gryffindor party after bribing the Fat Lady, shouting “VINES” to Harry over the chaotic sound of celebration. He imagined pretending the celebrating was for them.

But forget Gryffindor tower—he wouldn’t even make it inside with his news, because he was running right past the owlery, where Harry was listening to Hermione talk about the Quidditch match while concluding beyond reasonable doubt that Hermione Granger was in complete and utter love.

She’d written a detailed letter to Mrs Weasley about the match—Gryffindor’s second win—as if she were the sole reporter of a world-changing event. “Do you remember, Harry—did Ron sub in before or after Taylor dived over Hooch’s head for the Quaffle?” she’d asked at breakfast as she wrote it.

“He’s been carrying himself differently today. Have you noticed?” she asked as the two of them climbed the stairs to the owlery to deliver the letter. Ron and Ginny had eaten quickly, then run off to set a plan of action for the long spell until their next game. They had invited Harry and he had declined, though this time it was received with more niceness than before. He’d proved that he was still interested in their lives and sports, but he still didn’t think he was needed in that department.

Besides, he’d quite liked his quiet evening with Hermione. After the owlery, they were going to fill out their conversion charts for Potions together, then practice for a practical transfiguration exam the following week.

“I have noticed,” he said. “The King is back.” He smiled at her, and she beamed at the sight of it.

“I updated Mrs Weasley on what you’ve been up to, as well,” she said, as they passed a first-year girl at the top of the steps. They stood alone with a dozen owls. She walked up to them, but Harry backed himself up to the edge of the owlery, the cool air behind his back.

“Why did you do that?” he asked.

“Because she cares about you. And you haven’t been writing. I told her about helping Hagrid with the pumpkins. A little bit about the other events you’re preparing—which you’ve still not listed out for me.”

He’d been avoiding this because he knew how enthusiastic she’d be about resurrecting old wizarding traditions. The time spent with Draco felt strangely personal, and he wasn’t sure what it would look like if she became a part of it. He thought, at the very least, he’d catch himself acting differently, and he was enjoying the freedom of acting how he pleased around Draco without having it compared by onlookers to past performance.

“We’re still deciding what to do,” he said. “Did you tell her about…”

“I just said you were helping Hagrid.”

“Not that it’s anything not to mention. Even if it’s a pain to work with him.”

“HARRY!”

His name cut through their conversation. He turned in circles, recognising the voice but not able to place its origin. Hermione, holding her letter delicately in her hand, cleared her throat and nodded to their left.

Far below them, on the ground outside the castle, stood Draco. When Harry popped his head over the wall, Draco smiled, which was contagious in its scarcity, and so Harry smiled back.

“I SAW THE BACK OF YOUR HEAD!” he called. One long arm pointed back towards Eugene the scarecrow outside Hagrid’s hut. “VINES!”

“VINES?!” Harry shouted, grinning. Three owls squawked in surprise and fled the coop.

“VINES!”

“BRILLIANT!”

This time, the owl Hermione was tying her letter to cawed and startled. “Honestly, Harry,” she said, chasing the bird’s twitching leg with her fingers.

“Sorry.” He waved to Draco, then turned back to her, smiling. “There’s hope yet, it seems.”

Her expression was heavy-lidded—tired, but warm. “It would appear so.”

Chapter Text

Yellow, like honeycomb, like amber, like buttered popcorn, like a Burmese python, like Draco’s hair in gold dawn-light, like a raincoat, like an egg yolk, like lemons, like the Gryffindor crest. Never had Harry seen such a beautiful colour, but here it was, clear through the mist that crept towards school from the Great Lake. Flowers, blossoming from the vines of their pumpkins, days in advance.

Draco was in Arithmancy, however, while Harry spent his free period doing what he’d forgotten to do before lunch. He hoped the other boy, who was quickly growing a green thumb, couldn’t somehow tell that it had taken an extra few hours to wet the soil.

But how could he notice such a thing when there were flowers?

Once, it had been hard to imagine Draco’s face in anything but disdain. Glee, when it crossed his features in front of Harry, was only present at Harry’s expense. Somewhere along the way it had become possible for him to imagine—and hope for—Draco’s more pleasant expressions.

He looked forward to the way Draco would fight to keep a cool exterior, but slowly give in to his own excitement, which he more and more often allowed himself to feel and show. First his eyes would brighten, then he would nod and smooth his clothing as he bit down on a smile. He would walk to the garden with careful intent, like he was balancing books on his head, like if he let even a slight bounce slip into his step, he’d be ridiculed forever. It wouldn’t match the excitement he’d shown when they’d first seen vines, but it would be gratifying anyway.

Last night Harry didn’t sleep. Or rather, he’d slept horrifyingly deeply while swallowed up in a nightmare. He was digging up through the soil, buried again, and he could feel the sting of his fingertips where they’d dug first through the wood slats of his crude coffin. At some point, he’d discovered that it was a dream and thought hopelessly, wake up, wake up, wake up, but it hadn’t worked. And just as the light had begun filtering through the topsoil, a hand speared through it to cling tightly around his neck.

Draco’s face was especially angular, like a cracked mirror, a repugnant snarl, as he glared into Harry’s. Beneath his cold fingers, Harry gasped for the air he’d sought. “Do…on’t,” he wheezed.

“You cowardly fuck.”

The boy’s voice was horrid and entirely unlike himself, for he was known for a smooth drawl to his insults and this was barked out, growling and full of venom, hoarse like he meant it.

“You weakling,” he jeered. “You would die to save your friends just to beg for your life once more?”

By the time consciousness finally won out, he’d missed breakfast, Charms, lunch, and half of Defence. But the world had a funny way of evening out the good and the bad. And for the worst nightmare he’d had in a very long time, he’d been sent bright yellow flowers. And he wanted to know Draco—a good sign that he still knew the difference between dream and reality.

What he didn’t know was that he’d appeared in Draco’s dreams, too. In fact, he’d visited so vividly that when he was absent from Defence, Draco worried that he’d scared him off with thoughts alone.

Unlike Harry, Draco had always had a habit of forming perfectly ordinary dreams—he’d write an essay for Astronomy, then wake up and realise he had to do it all again, or he’d find himself picking up potion supplies at the Diagon Alley apothecary. So it wasn’t strange that he’d started dreaming of the pumpkin patch. This time he was weeding the garden, and the only giveaway that it wasn’t really happening was that he was doing it in the moonlight.

Still, dreams had a way of making everything make sense in the moment. He didn’t stop to wonder why he was weeding by night—it just made sense—and he didn’t stop to wonder what Harry was doing there either. He appeared like a postscript on the scene. Like, P.S. Harry is here after Draco had been weeding for five minutes. He didn’t walk up, and he hadn’t been there when Draco arrived, but it was like he’d always been there, just beyond view, in the periphery of his heart and mind.

“I think there will be flowers soon,” Dream Harry mused, because Draco had spent days now hoping for blooms, and Dream Harry answered his wishes.

“What do you know about when things will grow?” he challenged.

“I know when everything will grow. The flowers, tomorrow. Us, maybe sooner. We have to nurture this. It must grow.”

“What must grow, the pumpkins?”

Harry put a hand on Draco’s heart and ignored the question. “It has to grow. If not, I can’t breathe.”

Draco knew, in that osmosis of dreams, that Harry wanted him to kiss him. So, with a confidence only attainable in his sleep, he reached out, hooked a hand around the back of Harry’s head, and brought their mouths together.

They drifted down onto the dirt of the pumpkin patch with Draco on top, leaning over Harry without ever losing physical contact completely. If his lips had to break from Harry’s, then his hands were under the other boy’s coat. If his hands needed to steady himself in the dirt, then his knees were pinned right against Harry’s hips. If all three positions made contact at once, he was like a battery contacting metal at both its terminals, charged up, incapable of thought at all.

Harry rolled him over with great enthusiasm, his face flushed.

“Harry,” Draco gasped in the brief moment he was allowed to breathe. He could feel the vines poking into his back. “We have to be careful. The pumpkins.”

“Do you ever think of anything else?” Harry whispered in his ear, kissing the dip below his earlobe while he was there.

“What else is there to think about?”

He steeled himself to hear ‘your future’ or ‘your friends’ but instead, Harry pressed their bodies together with enough abrasion to send an electric signal through Draco’s nervous system.

“You tell me,” he said.

Elsewhere in the castle, enough students were dreaming of each other that Harry and Draco’s occupied minds were insignificant, but to the two boys, it was monumental and the impetus of two very different mornings. In the Gryffindor tower, Harry was fighting a nightmare and would come gasping back to life hours late. Draco, by contrast, was woken by careful jostling and he woke tamely, too dazed by the transition to figure out when he’d started dreaming at all. Blaise was peering at him, wearing the dressing robe he put on to bathe.

“You were having a nightmare,” he said.

The details were slowly filtering into Draco’s reality, and he found that he couldn’t argue. What the dream had revealed about his subconscious was terrifying, in a way, when it wasn’t busy being unbelievable. He pulled his sheets over himself like he’d really been caught in disarray in a garden.

“Sorry.”

“You were talking.”

His breath halted. “What did I say?”

“Something about pumpkins.”

“That’s all?”

Blaise sneered. “That’s plenty, thanks. I only woke you because I wanted it to stop.”

“It’s stopped,” Draco murmured, still holding the sheets to his chest in modesty.

Blaise didn’t say another word while he dressed for class and Draco sat there, tormented, trying to look like he had a good reason not to get up. Only when Blaise had left did he feel calm enough to stand and robe himself for the day.

In Defence Against the Dark Arts, he sat alone behind Pansy and Blaise, who never looked back at him, and tried to listen to the lecture. Harry wasn’t there. His mind repeated it back to him whenever it got too quiet. Harry isn’t here. Harry is missing.

He could still feel the scratch of denim when he hooked his index finger through a belt loop of Harry’s jeans. The wet of his lips was real to him. He’d never run his fingers through the curls of the other boy’s hair—never even thought of it—but now he recognised the feeling as if he’d done so just last night. Weren’t dreams supposed to fade from memory once one woke up? Why had he been so unlucky?

It was because of the lake. Yes, it had been a week since, but the sentiment of it all had stuck with him. Harry had spoken cryptically about his romantic interests and then dived into freezing waters to retrieve something of sentimental value for him. That was certain to affect his dreamscape. It was a nice thing to do, and the way the unconscious mind sorted through such a gallant act was not for him to understand.

The possibility that the dream had been building for weeks, since their meeting outside Hagrid’s hut, could not be considered without reckoning with other facts of that day. So it was decidedly the lake. It had to be the lake. And letting it be the lake meant framing it as some sort of teenage fleeting passion, the kind brought on by sudden skin and unexpected chivalry.

“Late,” said Professor Wilheard, turning thirty heads towards the back of the room. Draco lifted his eyes from the desk to the professor as Harry sat next to him. Pansy, always curious, turned too, and for the length of one hitched breath, their eyes met. She swivelled so he only had a view of her ponytail again.

“Sorry,” said Harry. He offered no excuse, and the professor didn’t wait for one. “Did you see the flowers?” he whispered to Draco the second the lecture resumed.

Draco leaned away from him as he leaned in. He smelled the same as he had in the dream. Either there was some truth and realness to the night’s mind wandering, or Draco had subconsciously learned his smell well enough to plant it in his dreams. Neither was ideal.

“You don’t sit here,” he whispered back, daring to look to his left.

Harry appeared crestfallen by the response. “Did you hear me? The vines are flowering. Ahead of schedule.”

“I heard you.”

For Salazar’s sake, he smelled like fresh soil and looked like fresh air. The dream had done something devious to Draco’s major organs—rearranging the squiggly bits of his brain so that he wanted to lean into his senses around Harry, and thinning the tubes of his heart so it beat much faster than necessary. It had torn down a wall he hadn’t scheduled for demolition. Draco shifted in his seat so that Harry was behind his left shoulder more, out of view.

Somewhere to his left, Ron leaned towards their desk and prodded Harry’s arm. Draco raised his shoulders and hunched further over his notes.

“Psst,” Ron whispered. “Harry. Harry.”

“What?” Harry snapped under his breath on the second name-calling.

“Are you ill? I couldn’t even wake you. Thought you were dead, mate.”

“How kind of you to leave my corpse there cooling, then,” he replied, biting and measured. Draco glanced cautiously in their direction just in time to catch the look of wonder on Ron’s face. “Just having a laugh,” Harry added. Draco didn’t believe him much.

The back of the room gave off an icy chill for the remainder of the lecture, with Harry avoiding Ron, Draco avoiding Harry, and Blaise and Pansy avoiding Draco. He felt like he was a hazelnut, hard and shelled, and Harry was a fire that could, if Draco so much as met his eyes today, make him burst into enlightening flames.

When Professor Wilheard dismissed them, Draco slipped through the rising students and marched himself down the stairs, through the grand hallway, through the back doors, through the courtyard, and down the path to the pumpkin patch. Harry had Transfiguration next, and so had no chance of following him to the threshold of the garden, where he stopped to take in the sight of the yellow flowers for himself.

The soil was still wet from what looked to be a belated watering, but Draco couldn’t judge—he’d skipped the morning entirely in his distraction. At the edge of the dirt was a perfectly pressed shoeprint, a ring of triangle-shaped tread, then the dip of the heel and the crosshatch pattern of the bottom of Harry’s trainers. Something about watching Harry act coldly to his oldest friends sat with him like a tack on a chair. Like the balance of the universe was off. Like there was love up in the air for the taking because Harry wasn’t giving it.

Delicately, Draco stepped forward and lined his own foot up within the footprint, his toes obscuring the top of Harry’s shoe mark. He pressed down and lined up his left foot with Harry’s left foot, then stood with his hands in the pockets of his coat and observed Eugene the scarecrow.

In the autumn air, surrounded by the orange of the season, staring at the macabre figure of the dressed-up duelling dummy, he thought about a poem he’d read long ago when he used to hole up in the library to avoid responsibility long after his homework was done. T.S. Eliot’s first verse arrived in his psyche as he gazed at Eugene.

We are the hollow men

We are the stuffed men

Leaning together

Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!

Our dried voices, when

We whisper together

Are quiet and meaningless

As wind in dry grass

Or rats’ feet over broken glass

In our dry cellar

Shape without form, shade without colour,

Paralysed force, gesture without motion

Those who have crossed

With direct eyes, to death’s other Kingdom

Remember us—if at all—not as lost

Violent souls, but only

As the hollow men

The stuffed men.

What had Draco become if not a lifeless, straw-stuffed version of the man he once imagined he could be? He’d been paralysed since the war ended and hollow long before, ever since the Dark Lord himself had tasked him with murder. While he may have forgiven himself for his role in Voldemort’s grand plan, he didn’t believe he deserved a redemption arc. And in that respect, he’d let a hollowness flood over him—a consolation prize for being too cowardly to commit to either side of the war.

He’d chosen not violence, not regret, not rage, not anguish. He’d settled on lovelessness. It was easy enough to do when his parents had left the manor (and him in it) so easily and hardly cared enough to write. They were scared to touch him, lest they ruin his life any more than they already had. Is that when he’d learned to be scared to reach out, too? Even to those who’d never considered not loving him? Pansy and Blaise had a loyalty fit for Gryffindors. The idea of receiving it made him think he needed to be worth something. If he had decided to be worthless, he would need to reject their love and loyalty, too.

A soft wind kicked up, fluttering the leaves of the pumpkin vines and waving the hem of Eugene’s long flannel shirt—Harry’s long flannel shirt—and Draco put his nose to the breeze as if he might be able to smell the other boy on the shirt’s tailwind, after all this time. His lungs filled only with the cool Scotland air and a faint scent of fertiliser.

How long had Draco been a scarecrow?

He lifted his foot. Now, in the packed wet soil, his shoe print overlaid Harry’s, creating a complex map of polygons. The dream he’d had now seemed worth repeating if he were being honest with himself.

And if he’d been hollowed out and stuffed into a mockery of life, only real enough to scare the crows, then perhaps Harry had always been the one meant to come around and dress him up and give him a name.

Or a better metaphor, he thought. Maybe Draco had planted a seed in the ground long ago only for the ground to freeze above it, and it was only now that Harry had come around to thaw the earth and let it germinate.

And maybe Draco wanted to thaw Harry, too. Maybe he recognised a similarity between them, like they’d been carved out in different ways but of the same material, and he wanted to be the one to flush Harry’s cheeks and breathe into him to make his lungs swell.

Or maybe he didn’t need to run in circles around analogies and poetry at all. Maybe Draco just needed to permit that he enjoyed who he was around Harry.

The flowers were so yellow, they looked like life itself. He could’ve cried at the sight of them. He loved them because he was suddenly full of love and they were in his line of sight. He wanted to love everything. He wanted to become the soft type of man his father would curl his lip at. He supposed he’d always been the soft type of man his father would curl his lip at and that’s why he’d hardened in the first place.

Draco left the garden, overcome, and walked vaguely towards the dungeons, but halfway there he spotted a familiar figure. Pansy was sitting on the floor against a half-recessed column, revising in the coloured light of a stained glass window. Her face was tinted the blue of a wizard’s robes, her parchment the red of his sparking spellwork. Since eleven, she’d had a penchant for sitting on the floor, and in that moment of maturing, it warmed his heart to know that some things didn’t change.

“Pansy,” he said. She looked up. Her eyebrows drew in like she was less than enthused to see him, but her head cocked to the side anyway—curiosity. “Can we talk?”

She patted the stone floor and he crouched, drawing his legs in and sharing the column against their backs.

“How are you?” he asked.

She sniffed bitterly and kept her eyes on her homework. “I’ve been better.”

“Yes, I should have guessed as much. It’s not often your best mate tries to say the worst things he can think to say about you.”

Pansy turned to look at him, her eyes wide and willing him to continue.

“I’ve been the biggest prat I could’ve possibly been,” he gushed. “I have no excuse for what I said—I know it’s not true, and even if you were together, I love you both, so I’d be happy about it—and I would understand if you never forgive me.”

She clicked her tongue. “Tell me more about being a prat.”

“I win the world record. Bonus points for misandry. Double bonus points for it being my absolute favourite person in the world. In the dictionary, under the word prat it says, ‘Pictured below: Draco Malfoy. See also: simpleton, dunce, imbecile.”

“You’ve been so hard to read lately.”

“It’s no more legible in my own head. But every now and then something decides to make for a healthy dose of clarity.”

“You’re smiling,” she accused, her lips curving upwards. He hadn’t realised it until she said so. He wiped it off his face with a flat hand that then smoothed his hair.

“The pumpkins are flowering,” he said. “When I saw it, I thought I might cry.”

“Yes, the pumpkins are making you smile.”

“They are.”

She shrugged innocently. “I’m agreeing with you.”

“I laid everything on those pumpkins. They felt manageable. I couldn’t mess them up. And when I thought I was losing them, when the vines wouldn’t grow, I thought, ‘What if I’m incapable of improving society in even the most minute ways?’ ”

“Pumpkins aren’t minute, and no one’s tasked you with improving society.”

“No one tasked Harry with that either, but he rose to the occasion.”

“Rubbish.” She patted his head and slotted her homework into a textbook. “Harry was very clearly tasked with his heroism. The way he embraced it just disguises it a bit. And anyway, I’d like not to return to a world where you’re comparing everything you are and do to that boy.”

Draco stood as she did. “Pansy, you know that I… love you,” he said. If she was surprised that he’d uttered the words, she held it in impeccably.

“I love you, too,” she said.

“You know, I was also wondering,” he said as she fixed the inseam of her tights. “What do you think of dreams?”

“They mean nothing, but also they mean e-ver-y-thing.” She narrowed her eyes. “Wait. Dreams or nightmares?”

“Dreams.”

She nodded, her point standing. “I’m getting the candles, by the way. For the ceremony. Don’t think I’ve forgotten.”

“Not with that horribly detailed, sequined diary of yours.”

“It’s rhinestones, not sequins.”

“Whichever.”

By the time he went to dinner, he felt so in favour of his dream and what it seemed to have revealed about himself that he looked around for Harry and, when he spotted him, watched as every characteristic of his Thursday-night-average being become something that supported Draco’s discovery.

Harry sat with his elbows off the table and his napkin in his lap, though he talked while he ate. See? I must have appreciated the entirely approachable way he still practices decent table etiquette.

Harry looked up often at the sky, one of the few students to relish in the distinctly wondrous magic that had been set upon the Great Hall’s ceiling. See? Someone who appreciates magic for magic’s sake. Not even a quarter of Purebloods do that anymore.

Harry was clearly not talking to his friends—he’d angled away from them and kept his head toward his own plate, but he still sat by them and had clearly trained an inconspicuous ear on what story Hermione Granger was telling the eighth years. See? He holds his ground but remains steadfastly loyal.

Harry also, as he’d often ignored or acknowledged only out of the jealousy of brotherhood, had a strong bend to his nose, intentional messiness to his hair, and a definable knot when he clenched his jaw, that coalesced into the sort of unordinary handsomeness that made much more to-do in circles of women than textbook handsomeness.

I get the sense that I was meant to be abnormal in every way possible.

That’s what he’d said on the waterfront. The thing was that Draco had always had a penchant for abnormality, too. Being an average Slytherin student had never been enough for him. He’d wanted the power. Being a good son had never been enough for him. He wanted to be a rightful successor. Coming back to school and being treated like a stranger by Harry had been enough—more than enough. It had been exactly what he wanted until he’d been crouching outside Hagrid’s and felt seen by him for the first time all year.

That day, Harry looked like he remembered him, and Draco forgot all about being forgotten.

“What are you thinking about?” Pansy asked, divorcing herself from a conversation with Blaise to poke him in the shoulder.

He was thinking that he’d been daft to follow the plans laid out by his parents for so long. And why had he been keen to settle for infamy? Was being remembered for cruelty better than not being remembered at all? And he’d always accepted without question that Harry would be remembered for good, so he must be the foil to it, the nemesis, the bad guy.

Returning to school, he’d wondered if it was too late to be remembered for good. Still, he wasn’t sure, but he was trying now, following Harry’s lead, his great idea to save the pumpkins, and his selfless attempts at reviving traditions to promote school healing.

And he was thinking that it was long overdue that he clarified to Harry that he did think of them as friends. He’d been spooked in class and had probably come off as cold, but now all he wanted to do was jump in mutual celebration of some yellow flowers like a couple of schoolgirls.

“Pumpkins,” he told her.

*****

“Pumpkins,” Harry said. “The Dumb Supper. The candle lighting. Hazelnuts. Classic feast.”

“That’s a heavy load on yer plates, just the two of yeh,” Hagrid said. Harry had just finished visiting for tea. Hermione and Ron had come by the day before, and when Hagrid inquired as to why they hadn’t all come together, Harry managed to circumvent a discussion on the strange distancing they’d been having.

“Well, we’ve been updating Professor McGonagall with everything needed. Pansy Parkinson is sourcing the proper candles, whatever that means. The kitchen is taking care of food for both meals.”

“I can’ wait. Seein’ all yer hard work. Yeh’d make a grand groundskeeper, I reckon.”

Harry pulled at the pocket of his hoodie, which his hands and two rock cakes were deeply hidden within. He looked at their pumpkin patch and Eugene lording over it. “I don’t know if I’ve got the right temperament for it.”

“Then yeh’ve given it an honest shot, at leas’. The plants’re lookin’ healthy. Yeh’ve got even the older students excited fer the holiday, what with the new activities. Then yeh can get back ter bein’ ‘arry.”

Harry huffed a breathy laugh and looked at his shoes. “I think I’ve been Harry this whole time, if you went back and checked.”

Hagrid shrugged, a bit of disagreement in his expression, somewhere under the beard and the thick hair.

“Draco’s the real groundskeeper-in-the-making, anyway. Don’t tell him I said that. He’d kill me. But he’s brilliant with plants. The potion-making is all him. The scheduling, the delegating. The… candle lighting, the supper…” He trailed off, his brows drawing close. “Blimey, everything is him. All I’ve done is suggest asking students what they want, and even that backfired until he took over the task for Slytherin.”

“Poppycock!” Hagrid hit him on the shoulder. He would have knocked him down the last step to his hut if Harry hadn’t been tensely gripping the knobby, wooden railing. “Yeh came right ter my door and asked to help!”

“And he got there first. He’s different. Better. Better than me, maybe.”

This must be the source of his nightmare. He’d known, deep down and all along, perhaps, that even in this latest earnest attempt to be a part of something important, he’d become little more than a follower. He was intimidated already by the composed way Draco could navigate school. It wasn’t Draco choking him in his sleep, it was the symbol of his own insecurity.

Hagrid looked stumped. “Well—but—it don’t detract from you doin’ the same. And yer face is a comfort to the students, eh? They’re happy to see you involved.”

“True,” he allowed, though he hated the inherent celebrity it implied. “I have worried about how the more ceremonial bits will look with the Slytherins at the helm. The Dumb Supper especially. It seems… extra witchy.”

“Ah, the oldest traditions always do, don’ they.”

“I’m biased.” He was on a self-reflection buzz. “Completely. I almost wish Ron had brought it up first, instead of Draco. When Draco talks about it, it gathers this… Darkness to it. It can’t help it. The history is there.”

The sound of young students chatting began to carry down the rolling hills beyond the castle’s doors. They were coming to learn about magical creatures, and Harry was glad they’d be learning it from someone who’d inject the topic with true appreciation. Hagrid saw them coming, too.

“Well, against all odds, the two of yeh ‘ave made a smashin’ show of the holiday. Yeh got enough to eat?”

“Plenty.” Harry smiled thankfully.


“Yeh’ve still been lookin’ a bit thin.”

“No Quidditch to bulk me up,” Harry joked. He waved once more, then parted ways with the half-giant.

It was Friday, the weather was cooling exponentially, and with each rustle of wind blown at them, the trees were shedding, revealing their veins and adding a crunch to the step of pink-cheeked children who traipsed between classes in the open air. Harry had developed a Pavlovian love for the autumn season given its lack of Dursleys, and so he took a moment to try and feel the coolness, just as he had in the icy water of the lake. He’d only been standing there a moment, drinking in the weather, when Draco emerged from the edge of the woods, just beyond Hagrid’s hut.

“Oi, Potter!”

His voice carried, sending up crows from Hagrid’s roof and startling Harry with its choice of words. He hadn’t been ‘Potter’ nearly as much as he’d been ‘Harry’ as of late. That, combined with the sternness of Draco’s features, the way his eyes pierced and his mouth tightened, put him on alert before the accusation even left the other boy’s lips.

“So you’re biased against me?” Draco asked, coming to a halt a duel's distance from him. The collar of his long black coat was flipped up, manually or by the wind, and it left him looking severe and portentous. “You still so naturally see me as bad that the very activities I suggest must have an aura of Dark Magic upon them?”

“What—wait, how did you—what are you doing here?”

Draco shook his head dismissively. “It doesn’t matter what I was doing here. I heard you talking to Hagrid just now.”

“Then obviously you heard the second half of a conversation you weren’t invited to. You’re getting unnecessarily angry over a second half.”

“I doubt the first half makes your subjective belief that I’m an unfixably Dark wizard sound better.”

“I talked highly of you,” Harry assured him. “I said you’re not like you used to be. That you act different. That all of this couldn’t have happened without you.”

“But you just say I act differently because it’s the diplomatic thing to say. Clearly, you don’t believe it.”

“I say it because I believe it.”

“No.” Draco shook his head with a wideness that looked troublesome, a full wagging of the neck, chin from one shoulder to the other, back and forth. Usually, he appeared so controlled in his movement. It was the first sign to Harry that he needed to move from mending the miscommunication to defending himself. The second was what came next.

“No?” Harry challenged.

“No. There’s a difference. For example, you could tell me you’re queer and I could call some hypothetical boyfriend of yours a he, I could say ‘whoever you court, he’s a sorry sod’—” Harry scoffed in complete astonishment. “—but deep down, I still see you snogging Ginny Weasley. I don’t believe you when you say you’re queer, but I act the part diplomatically by not saying all that. Get it?”

“Stop saying that word! What are you so angry about?” Harry couldn’t think of anything else to ask. He felt as though he couldn’t form words. He could barely keep up with what was being shot at him. As it was, the question came out like it squeezed its way through an exhausted exhale.

“It’s not fair.”

“What’s not fair?”

Draco stepped forward. The bottom lids of his eyes were squinted up. He looked like his twelve-year-old self through a fractured lens, protesting and expectorating because something hadn’t gone his way.

“That you can still have a bad opinion of me and I can’t do the same. You’re unquestionably a good person, it’s impossible to debate. Meanwhile, with my reputation, you have two options: Option A: Decide Draco’s a good person or Option B: Decide Draco’s never really changed on the inside.”

“I know you have.”

“Shall I turn my hair orange, add freckles, and then tell you how magically traditional a Dumb Supper is? That it was the only thing that brought my family peace when our loved ones died? That having an outlet to feed your departed people food and speak to them again is worth a little pretend and hopefulness? Does my family have to be bigger than the rabbit population of England like his for you to take my word for it?”

“Draco,” Harry said with gritted teeth. “Shut up.”

“If you’re going to ask me to ask students how they’d like to heal, you can’t hate their answers and you can’t hate the messenger. Dumb Supper is no more imaginary or morbid than you thinking a little garden and a dressed-up dummy is going to fix your traumatised, fried, sad excuse for a consciousness.”

“Fuck you.”

“Fuck you, too.”

“Sounding off diagnoses like you’re fine,” Harry laughed sharply. He could feel heat on the back of his neck. He clenched and unclenched his hands. “Want to know how well I know you now? You’re being an arsehole because you cracked something inside. You had a breakthrough and now we all must suffer. What was it, that you should say ‘thank you’ when someone opens a door? That it’s kind to offer your guest tea? The world of niceties is so fucking foreign to you that it breaks your sense of being every time the slightest thing makes sudden moral sense!”

Draco stepped even closer. They were now at a distance where their fists could easily meet the bones in each other’s faces. Or at least, that was how Harry was calculating distances at the moment. “At least I have a sense of being,” the ashen-faced boy uttered, “even if it’s misunderstood. What do you have? You’re withering away and why? Because you can’t handle the repercussions of winning a war? Give me a break.”

Harry plunged a finger into his chest. “That’s an oversimplification and you know it.”

Draco stepped back, leaving his finger standing in the cold air. He held his arms out wide. “I don’t know anything. I just fertilise the plants.”

Without waiting, he turned and walked back along the edge of the woods towards the greenhouses. Harry watched his figure go, feeling like he’d taken a time turner to an altered state of existence that had been inexplicably ruined. He didn’t know what he’d done wrong at all.

Harry pulled his hood over his head and began walking further from the castle. Ron and Hermione were spending their free hour together somewhere in the warmth and he knew if he let go of the chilly slap of wind out here, he’d completely go spare on them in an undeserved way. Much of the ways he’d been short with Ron lately were undeserved. None of them knew how to juggle their pain with their daily life—this replication of an old life.

No, he was much less volatile in the fresh air. He was partially dreaming of jumping into the lake again. He almost turned that direction when his eyes lingered on the Quidditch pitch instead, and before he could think better of it, he was stalking quickly towards the stadium. His broom was in the dormitory, but Ron’s was in the Gryffindor lockers. When he reached it, his hand hovered over it for a long pause before he grabbed Ginny’s instead.

In a perfect world, pushing off the grass could be compared to pushing his worldly problems away, grounding them while he flew skyward. Instead, they hounded him even in the air, but at least he was moving fast and the air was frightfully cold.

Problem : He had judged the messenger for reporting that Slytherin students enjoyed ancient, Pagan Halloween rituals that had subsequently given over to Dark magic tradition.

Problem : He couldn’t handle the repercussions of winning a war. He couldn’t shoulder the feeling of grief he had to put aside when a passerby wished to praise him like a one-dimensional hero in a storybook.

He leaned forward and sped up, weaving through the goalposts on each side of the stadium faster and faster. He was surprised to find that his eyes were leaking water, but he could barely feel it in the quick air he cut through.

Problem : He couldn’t think of a way to convince Draco that he believed he was a good man to the bone, to the marrow, to the white blood cells, even.

Problem : He was entirely livid with Draco right now—would draw his wand if they came face to face before the sun went down—but he still liked the slenderness of his wrists and the elegance of his gardening and the cupid’s bow of his lips and the roll of his shoulders when his posture slackened and the pointed toe of his shoes and the delicacy of his silhouette.

Problem : Draco was acting like someone who would not react positively if Harry somehow proved that there was a queerness to him.

He swerved tightly around the top goal and shot towards the centre, so distracted that he barely managed to stop short of the flyer hovering there. He bucked hard forward, almost headbutting her.

“Ginny?” he gasped.

She sat with her ankles crossed casually under her broom, her hair down and tucked under a knit cap. Her eyebrows were raised. “Someone took my broom,” she said.

He looked down. “Oh, yeah,” he said sheepishly. “Good brakes.”

Her smile, askew and fleeting, looked distracted while she read him. He caught the exact moment she saw the history of his flying under his eyes. “I know. Do you want to sit with me?”

“I’m flying.”

“I really think we should take a break from that. You’re scaring me.”

His mouth opened with the click of his tongue. He looked between her eyes, staring sincerely back at him, and nodded. She didn’t question him further until they were sitting in the grass, shoulder to shoulder, looking off in the direction of a stadium entrance, the one between the Ravenclaw and Hufflepuff locker rooms. She knew him well enough to let him gaze without trying to get his attention or eye contact. It was the only way to eke deep wells of feelings from him, the boy who’d spent much too long sequestered in his formative years.

“It’s just Draco,” he said to assuage her when it had been a worryingly long time. Just.


In his periphery, she nodded. “Oh,” she said easily, like the explanation was something to discard.

He waited for more, but she didn’t ask for it. Instead, she laid her head on the pitch. A second later, the front of his collar choked him as she dragged him down beside her. He instantly didn’t like it. It was cold, like an ice cube in his palm, but it was cold in all the wrong ways. Cold like a body, like packed soil froze over. Feeling it head to toe paralyzed him, and while she lay there cloud gazing, he embarked on a strenuous mental battle to toughen up or sit up, whichever he could manage.

Neither seemed possible. He squeezed his eyes shut and open again, pressed his palm to the earth for some sense of immediacy and life, and breathed steadily—abnormally steadily—until finally something gave way and he hinged at the hips, sitting up with a harsh breath of relief.

For a moment, he thought he’d been covert about it all, but when he looked back, Ginny was sitting with her arms behind her, a look of concern written clearly across her features. “See?” she said. “Scary.”

“Not scary,” he protested, still catching his breath.

“Do you see yourself?” she said. “Ron says you’re friendly as ever or you’re short with him, that you’re spending all your time with Draco Malfoy of all people. You’ve—well, you’ve lost weight, you’ve got bags under your eyes, you’re either apathetic to Quidditch, passionate about it, or whipping around the pitch high enough for me to spot you from the courtyard. Worst of all, every now and then you are one hundred per cent the Harry I know and it’s like a… a warming charm’s touched the whole school. But then you lay in the grass strangely and it’s all over again.”

“I’m not—”

“I don’t mean to blame you for… whatever you’re going through. I only mean to ask—do you see why we’re worried for you?”

Harry took a breath to respond.

“How’re classes going?” she continued.

He grimaced. A train of thought had been birthed around the time sprouts had formed, capable of convincing him that pumpkins were far superior to the triviality of Defence Against the Dark Arts essays.

“’Mione says the only reason McGonagall hasn’t removed you from the Halloween assignment is because we’re all just glad you’re alive.”

“Everyone being glad I’m alive is a lot more people than there used to be.”

She gave him a chuckle and knocked his shoulder. If autumn was a Pavlovian reminder of time away from the Dursleys, then she was a part of it, too. She reminded him of familiar hallways, of leaves losing their chlorophyll, and of the passage between autumn and winter just when the weather left one begging for warmth.

“I’ve been avoiding you,” he admitted, though it seemed obvious and she nodded like she’d known. “Not just because we dated, though.”

“Oh?” she asked softly.

“A lot of it’s because I don’t know what to do with the grief when I’m around you.”

“The grief?”

“Fred.”

She inhaled, the exact noise of sadness he dreaded when he was around her. “But you don’t have to avoid Ron?”

“Ron doesn’t talk about him. You were different. And I never knew what to say. You’d ask if we remembered a prank they pulled during their third year and I’d—” He stopped himself.

Ginny’s hand moved to rest on his left knee, the leg closest to her. He looked at it, then at her soft smile and sad eyes. “Go on,” she said.

“I shouldn’t.”

“You should.”

“I see him lifeless. I see Lupin lifeless. Tonks. Severus. Mys—myself.”

She squeezed his knee.

“Sometimes I dream that I’m eating in the Great Hall and I blink, and instead of lunch, they’re lined up on the table again.”

“Christ,” she murmured.

“Anyway, you deserve to heal, so I never want to invite that mood into your reminiscing.”

She shook her head. “Do you have any idea how comforting it would be to have someone admit that my brother’s death gives them nightmares?”

Harry exhaled shortly in surprise. She leaned closer and put both hands on his knees.

“Seriously,” she said. “You don’t get to decide what heals me. I don’t need to talk about Fred’s pranks, I just need to talk about Fred. The happy, the sad. Do you wonder if you feel worse because it’s all bottled up?”

He did feel better now, like he’d just taken off pounds of ceremonial wizard’s robes.

“One time he spent ten minutes as ‘George’ trying to goad me to say something bad about Fred, and it was only my second year but I could tell them apart of course, and I led him on this winding story that I kept hinting would end with a deeply-seated reason why I had a vendetta against Fred. I wasted his ten minutes right back. Had him thinking some rambling about the best type of jam in Muggle bakeries had to do with my impression of him if I’d just get to the point.”

She smiled. “They both used to try that all the time. But our opinions on them were such a joint venture, anyway, that using one to ask about the other would never have worked.”

“Fred-and-George, not Fred and George.”

“Precisely. And you should be thankful that you didn’t know our family before Hogwarts,” she said.

“Bite your tongue! I used to dream of it—a wizarding childhood, the Weasleys for neighbours.”

“Well, Fred turned my hair black.”

“Black? I can’t imagine it.”

She nodded gravely. “I looked like a lady of the lake. I’d never wanted my hair back so badly, so at least it gave me some self-love.”

“Maybe I need to start telling reminiscent stories about myself and that’s how I’ll overcome my dread over my owndeath.”

Ginny offered a sly smile. “Oh, entirely, that’s the missing piece of the puzzle. ‘Mm… Harry,’ I’d say. ‘One time, my brother almost killed him because he was so sure he was taking advantage of my lady’s sensibility, and his last words to me before following Ron to his sure death were See you later.’”

“What else was I meant to say!” he argued, though his face was bright and amused.

“See you later,” she repeated wistfully.

“Sod off!”

“‘Oh, yeah, Harry Potter, he was a nice bloke. Really into pumpkins. Spent a lot of time with Draco Malfoy just to get to see them, and then the pumpkin juice at the feast wasn’t even worth writing home about.”

Harry shoved her lightly, grinning. “You’re a nuisance.”

“So are you,” she poked him back. “You know, I hate you a lot, but I also care about you a lot.”

He nodded in agreement. They’d both come a long way. Neither had ever gotten weepy about their break up, but there was a growing process anyway, and he felt like they’d settled down where they were meant to be.

“I care about you, too. Much like—” He only go that far before she’d grabbed his face and kissed him. It was a quick kiss; if she hadn’t framed his mouth between her hands, one could argue it had been meant for a cheek. “A brother,” he finished weakly.

She instantly buried her head in her hands. “Oh god! I’m so sorry!”

“No!” He hovered over her arms, hesitating to touch her and deciding against it. “No,” he said again, putting them in his pockets instead. “It’s my fault, I was…”

“I severely misinterpreted banter for something else.”

“Gin, it’s not a big deal.”

“That’s a lie, I didn’t even misinterpret, though. I’d already grasped your dynamic with Draco.”

“What’s that mean?”

“Part of me just wanted to make sure there was nothing left between us.”

“Gin, there’s plenty left between us.”

She looked at him between her fingers, unamused. “Nothing romantic. I know. Can we talk about something else? I think you should talk to Ron, okay? Not about this. Just, about you. He feels left in the lurch.”

“He’s got Hermione.”

“He needs his best mate, too.”

“He doesn’t like what I’m doing with Dr—the pumpkins.”

“He doesn’t like that you’ve stopped seeing them as much.”

“If there’s one thing Ron doesn’t have to worry about, it’s losing my friendship to the likes of Draco Malfoy. It turns out the expiration date on getting on with him is about five weeks.”

Ginny laughed. “Showed his true colours, did he?”

“Vibrantly,” Harry muttered. He imagined the bright yellow of the pumpkin flowers bruising to a muddied ochre, the rich soil greying, and the grey of Draco’s eyes turning dark and stormy. Still, a thick knot lay in his chest that was different from the one he used to have after a row with Draco. It felt like the throbbing soreness of disappointment. And not too far away, the same feeling was pounding in another boy’s chest.

Draco stared at Eugene and Eugene stared back. The plants were flowering well, full of life, but now the garden seemed to be mocking him. He’d come to check on the plants like a parent going through the motions.

“Fuck are you looking at?” he muttered, stepping forward to knock the toe of his shoe against the wooden post. Eugene flinched.

“Can you feel that?”

Merlin, he must be going mad, but he said it aloud anyway, his pinched-in face glaring at the scarecrow. He kicked it again and Eugene flinched again.

“Can you feel that? Or are you too stuffed with straw to feel anything at all?”

Eugene stared at him.

“Do you feel anything?” he asked. His chin was quivering so he bit his lip. “Do you FEEL ANYTHING?”

He pulled his wand and pointed it right at Eugene’s nose, his left foot behind his right, a streamlined duelling stance, his chin raised above his right shoulder. “Stupefy!”

Eugene recoiled but didn’t fall.

“Relashio! Stupefy! Confringo!”

Eugene whipped back and forth, and on Draco’s last offensive spell, he collapsed backwards and exploded into pieces, wood splintering into the soil, the fabric of his body and clothes fluttering towards the ground. Draco fell to his knees. He felt satisfied by the debris, or possibly, he felt satisfied that it made him feel terrible. He wanted to yell in frustration, so he balled up the shirt and pushed it into his face, filling his vision with burnt orange flannel and muting the sound of his anger.

*****

The Gryffindor common room fire was crackling, so Harry sat in front of it, kicked off his shoes, and tucked his socked feet in close. Ginny’s words were still in his head—proving that his inability to consider his future had been more apparent than he thought. He opened his Herbology textbook to finish an assignment he’d meant to turn in at the end of September but he made little progress with the thoughts all swimming in his head.

Hermione and Ron didn’t notice him when they first walked in, arms still hooked together, so Harry took advantage of the moment to take a deep breath and look alive. He conjured a smile and hoped the warm light of the fire would do the rest.

“Harry!” Hermione was happy to see him. She pulled her arm from Ron’s and sat next to him, leaning forward to remove her coat. She leaned over his shoulder. “Herbology?”

“Trying,” he answered her, though he was looking up at Ron, who stood beside her, a bit removed from the conversation. “Hiya, Ron.”

“Hey, Harry,” he said.

“Sit.”

Ron sat. He glanced at Hermione and they shared something Harry couldn’t translate, a nonverbal message related to some conversation he hadn’t been privy to.

“Erm, how’s Halloween coming?” Ron asked.

“I actually wanted to talk to you about that.”

“Me?” Ron set his knapsack aside.

“I could use some help with the Dumb Supper, and I could use some company from my oldest mate. What do you think?”

Ron’s face settled into a disappointed expression. “What about Malfoy?”

“I’m… trying to remove the natural association between Dumb Suppers and Dark magic. Having another Gryffindor with experience would help. It sounds bad, but I think it’s probably beneficial towards bridging cultural gaps, really,” he added, looking at Hermione.

“Sure,” she said. “I’m not arguing.”

“Besides, Draco and I are going to be taking less collaborative roles from here on out, I think.”

Ron nodded. He wasn’t surprised. Despite his own frustrations with the Slytherin boy, Harry found himself getting angry by this; the reasons behind their conflict were more complex and deeply emotional than whatever old-harboured reason Ron was thinking of. But then he reached into his bag and pulled out the shirt Harry had dressed Eugene in, more tattered, wet, and mud-stained than he remembered.

“I reckoned things weren’t great when we saw this from the greenhouses.”

Harry took the shirt slowly, his lips parted in confusion. “Why were you at the greenhouses?” He traced the line of buttons on the shirt—a few were missing—and clenched it in his fist. He looked back up. Ron’s face was bright red.

“There’s not a lot of room at this school for privacy,” Hermione answered, prim as ever. She sniffed and dusted nonexistent dust from the hem of her skirt.

When they’d first gotten together, Harry had easily created an image of what his life was going to look like—knocking on every door, catching them stealing a kiss in hallways, at the burrow, in the common room. He’d thought he’d have to do everything in his power to avoid their necking, but he could still count on one hand the number of times he’d watched them be romantic towards each other, and that scarcity led to a complete inability to imagine them sneaking behind a greenhouse.

“Are you two avoiding each other around me?” he asked, looking between them. “Am I in your way?”

Hermione laughed too fast. “Harry, we never see you anymore, how could you possibly be in our way?”

“Was I in your way beforehand, then? Or do I—do I haunt your thoughts?” A ghost. A dead boy. A memory. Stuffed with straw. Hollow. Empty.

“Mate, haunt our thoughts?” Ron looked bemused.

“Like, even when we’re all in the library doing our own thing, is my silent presence enough to stop you from holding hands under the table?”

There was a beat of silence between the three of them. Ron was tapping his foot and looking up like he was contemplating an answer, but Harry knew he was waiting for Hermione’s. She spoke next.

“It’s not that your presence stopped us, it’s that we thought it would be rude to change the dynamic around you like that.”

“I’m mature enough to admit that you’re dating. I’m happy you’re dating.”

“That’s great,” she said softly.

“Ron?” he said.

Ron sat forward and fidgeted with his hands. He looked at Hermione more than he looked at Harry. “Yeah, no, I know you know that we’re… dating, yeah.”

Harry met Hermione’s eyes again, sincerely. “Do you want the impression you give off to be that anyone should be ashamed of who they love? Because with such uncalled-for discretion…”

Her eyes widened and, quickly, her hands found his and squeezed them, held there. “God, no, Harry. Never.”

“Then be your stupid, infatuated selves, please,” he said, glancing back at Ron, who was nodding.

Hermione laughed a sound of light relief and squeezed his hands again. “No shame, ever, yeah?”

“Never,” he managed, feeling strangely seen.

She kissed his cheek, then stood and crossed to Ron, draping her arms around his neck before kissing him on each freckled cheek and once more on the mouth, slow, sweet, and as comfortably as if she’d just returned home. Ron smiled at her and said something so quietly that Harry couldn’t hear it. She was back beside him and glancing over his Herbology essay before he could linger on it.

“Harry, this is horribly late and three shades of wrong to boot. Hand it over.”

He listened and watched the familiar practice of her switching to red ink and hunching forward on the coffee table in the firelight.

“So, Dumb suppers,” Ron stole his attention, moving closer. “What do you know?”

“We’ve—he’s barely mentioned it so far.”

“Probably too busy destroying scarecrows.” Ron nodded thoughtfully. “Preparation goes beyond the table settings and menu for this one. All the guests should have an idea of the past people they’d like to speak to before arriving. It’s even better if you’ve already decided who you want to write to and what you want to say…”

Harry listened with great interest as Ron described the occasion, letting the setting of the Burrow wash the event in a comforting light. The fast scratch of Hermione’s quill on his homework didn’t even bother him. Look alive, he’d ordered himself when he saw them coming. At some point, without realising it, he seemed to have gone from looking it to feeling it—no Draco Malfoy and no icy water required.

When they all walked to dinner together that evening, it was past another group of young students who, at the sight of the entire trio, hissed to each other from their circle on the floor until they were within earshot, then shut up completely. It had been so discomforting to Harry to think that he was being whispered about in every corner of the school, but the more he reckoned with his own growing up, the more patience he had for the youngest students.

“One second,” he told Ron and Hermione, doubling back. The smallest of the five, a boy with a fringe cut halfway up his forehead, let his mouth slacken at Harry’s tall approaching figure.

Harry lowered himself to sit crossed-legged facing them and exhaled, setting his palms flat on his knees. “Hiya,” he said, “I’m Harry.”

They gawked.

“What’re your names?”

“Marshall,” the fringe boy said. He jerked a small thumb from his right to his left. “Lucia, Danny, Gabriel, and Donna.”

“What’re you playing?”

“Ringy,” he said, gesturing to the collection of marbles in his hand. “It’s magic chalk,” he added hastily, glancing at the white circle drawn on the stone floor of the school corridor. “It disappears in half an hour.”

“I don’t mind a little vandalism now and—”

“You’re Harry Potter,” one of the girls, Lucia, interrupted to say.

He nodded noncommittally. As if it were up for interpretation. No big deal, he wanted it to mean. Before what would have been his seventh year, his presence was notable but easy to get over. It seemed harder for the new students to get used to him the same way. His reputation had grown immensely.

“Was he scary looking?” she pressed on.

Harry had approached them with this in mind. He’d felt their whispering to be symptomatic of some deeper fear of the unknown. And yet, when faced with it, he felt the pull into memory to be more upsetting than he’d expected. He felt, too, the insidious power of a dead man—Voldemort’s ability to still be insinuated just by ‘he’ even after his death. Notoriety was powerful.

“He sort of… just looked like a man.”

“He came back before.” The second voice was tiny and timid. Danny fidgeted with a marble that had been in play within the circle, but none of the children seemed to notice or care.

“No. This was different. Gone forever.”

“Were you scared?” Marshall asked.

He smiled, a tight one, but they didn’t notice that either. “Who wouldn’t be?” he said and watched as the honesty caught them off guard and, hopefully, told them that their heroes were people too, just like the villains. “But being brave is just doing something even though you’re scared.”

Chapter Text

Draco had always thought that who you are at your worst is who you really are. At his father’s worst, he was a murderer. At his worst, Draco was defensive and easily hurt. He lashed out with claws like a distrustful Kneazle. He said things he didn’t mean and he aimed to upset, but he’d never killed a soul.

It was a terrible way to be able to tell the difference between oneself and one’s paternity—murder.

Strangely enough, it was thinking of murder, cruelty, and the loneliness that had been his reward for not enjoying the first two which made him decide to send word to his parents for the first time all year.

He’d finished with his Charms exam early and spent the rest of class writing the letter. By the end, he had a painstakingly-created rough draft.

Dear Mother and Father,

Hello from Hogwarts. I’m doing well. Classes are going well. I hope you’ve settled nicely into your new accommodations home and every brittle item of grand family import made the journey safely.

You were right about Your warnings that returning to school to complete my studies would invite scrutiny did not go unfulfilled, but I have found contentment regardless. Much of my success comes from a growing theory that your influence and pressure were the main reasons for my actions, and that I deserve a second chance at being a good person. I am forging my own path, not separate from our family name, but despite it. Pansy Parkinson and Blaise Zabini are among the Slytherin students who have also returned, and their alliance has been crucial. I don’t deserve them. They’re good friends and even better people.

I know you will ask, so let me inform you that Harry Potter has also returned, though I’m confident you get The Prophet delivered even across international borders and the news broke before September that he would do so. You’d be happy to know that he seems very broken. I cannot foresee a version of British wizarding society that does not find him at the helm. How would you feel if I stood beside him? But, of course, that was to be expected of the Chosen One. It will be as difficult to write him out of our future as it would be our past. I think I’ve given up on fighting it.

When you moved house this summer, we spoke briefly of my potential visit at Christmas. Since then, I’ve taken it into deeper consideration and I would ask that you do not hold out hope for such a speedy reunion. Hogwarts is better for me than you are. This is a fragile point of transition for me and seeing you would undo everything I’ve built up inside of me I would hate to lose momentum. Hopefully, on the other side of this academic year is a life career I’d be proud of. I need to focus.

Love,

Sincerely,

All the best,

Best,

Draco Malfoy

Things with Pansy were great but things with Blaise were strained-but-tolerable, so Draco didn’t bother them when class was dismissed. Once upon a time, he would have needed their support just to tie this letter to the owl’s bloody leg, but he was filled up with something akin to foolhardy destruction when it came to his family this week, and so he walked across the castle alone in usual form—his hands in his pockets and his head angled down.

Pansy had a medium-sized grey owl called Darling whom he’d been free to use since his parents had claimed his own owl as one of their few assets while moving. He missed that eagle owl immensely. It made it doubly obvious that they hadn’t written him either, because he would have loved a visit from the creature. Instead, he found himself attaching his letter to a well-groomed, prissy little thing his friend had gotten at a rate based more on aesthetics than function. It always took Darling days to return.

“She’s just like you,” he’d teased her once, when his own owl was making frequent, dependable trips to the manor and back. “Gets distracted by every shiny thing on the way to her destination.”

The bird hopped along the stonework edging the owlery, then hefted air under her wings and lifted skyward. When he turned around, distantly contemplating striking her from the sky to save himself the torment of written exchange with his parents, he found that he’d been joined by Harry, who looked like he had just noticed the same and was trying to leave unnoticed.

“Scared to be alone with little old me, Potter?” Draco asked his back, feeling a bitterness returning, not knowing whether it was powered by the other boy or himself. Harry stopped and walked back up the last two steps, crossing his arms. There was a letter tucked under one of them.

“Just giving you the privacy you desire,” he said. “But as long as you’re here, you can pass a message along.”

“We’re surrounded by owls, I’m sure my services are unnecessary.”

Harry closed his eyes like he was gathering strength. He sighed. “Just tell Pansy that I need the candles. McGonagall wants to see them.”

“Why?”

“Because she does? I don’t know, Hermione is doing some sort of independent study with her and passed it along to me, so this is already twice removed from the source. I think she just needs to check that they’re not cursed or—”

“Right, because Pansy and I are taking care of them, there must be some Dark magic infused in their bloody cores.”

“Holy shit, Draco, it’s policy.” Harry’s face looked frozen in aggravation. He continued to speak, but tiredness exuded from every pore. “Anything acquired from off-school grounds for sanctioned events needs to be safe. Especially if they’re antique wizarding items.”

A chill cut through the owlery, causing the birds to adjust their stances like the wave at a sporting event. Draco wanted to adjust his, too. Harry made complete sense, but it was impossible not to argue with him. He wanted everything to be difficult so his own difficulty was less lonesome.

“Okay, well, fine,” he stammered. “I could just give them to her, you don’t need to retrieve them from me.”

“Adding additional events for school healing was my idea. I should give her the items for it. You can turn in the Dumb Supper tablecloth for all I care, but she asked me for the candles, so I’ll get them to her. She trusts me with it.”

“Oh, she trusts you with it?”

“Yeah, she does.”

“Thank Merlin that Harry Potter can oversee every aspect of my life in case I use these pumpkins to resurrect the Dark Lord.”

“I’m just saying—why send me like a childminder to watch over the pumpkin patch if she trusted you with it?”

Draco hesitated, then decided to circumvent the point entirely. “Have you even been minding the pumpkins? They’ve got fruits, you know.”

“Yeah, I know they’ve got fruits. They’ve had fruits for a whole day now,” Harry said angrily. “I’m very happy about it.”

“Maybe I should be doing the watering. I don’t know why I acted like we were close enough where I could trust you with such a crucial task.”

Harry rolled his eyes. “You can’t even admit that we were being friendly for a while? You’re regressing faster than I expected.”

“I’m regressing?”

“You call me names! You insult me! You make a laugh out of the things I told you as friends.”

“We. Were not. FRIENDS!”

“OI!”

A third voice echoed through the owlery, sending birds squawking in surprise. Just behind Harry, at the top of the stairs, stood Ginny Weasley.

Draco scowled. This was beginning to look like a tableau of the things that threatened his most vulnerable feelings. “You’re scaring the birds, Weasley,” he spat.

She raised her eyebrows and took a step forward with such a confrontational aura to her that he found himself regretting the statement and wanting to take his own step backwards.

“I’m scaring the birds?” she asked with incredulous amusement. “Youtwo are scaring the birds. Cut it out! There’s a line of first-years downstairs who are too intimidated to come up here and let their mummies know how they’re faring at school! The big boys are being too loud!”

“I didn’t know he was going to be up here, Gin,” Harry said.

“I don’t care!”

Harry’s mouth pressed thin. He wasn’t immune to her irritation.

“You two want to make this school a safe, comfortable place?” she asked. “Stop having it out in public settings! Sort your shit.”

“There’s nothing to sort,” said Draco, glaring at Harry.

Ginny groaned. “Draco, do you fancy Harry?”

His breath caught in his throat. In the fraction of a second that he kept his eyes meeting Harry’s, he was glad at least to see a mutual shock in their expressions. He looked at the youngest, most daring Weasley. “Sorry, I must have misheard you.”

“I’m sure you didn’t. Do you fancy Harry? Be honest. I’m not asking if you’re cross with him. That’s apparent. But do you think about him? Do you…” She paused to think of her words, then continued with a tinge of recitation and overdramatics in her voice. “like, throw walnuts in the fire and watch them burn up at the very thought of him?”

“Hazelnuts,” he murmured.

She threw her hands up. “Whatever. Do you? It’s not a trap. Not a trick question.”

Draco glanced back at the other boy and thought how funny it was that Harry worried so often about whether he was alive at all, when any moment that drew such a fear-stricken look on his face, so flushed red and filled with alarm, was proof that he was as alive as ever.

He thought, too, about denying vehemently the thing he’d been denying for a very long time, especially when he didn’t know Harry’s thoughts on the matter. But that seemed to be the opposite of being alive. Being alive, he was discovering, meant choosing the difficult thing over the cowardly, even if one was scared the whole way.

To Harry, Heaven—or Hell, or Purgatory, or whatever non-denominational limbo one found themselves in once their heart stopped—had been King’s Cross. But Draco hoped that death was less like the whitewashed train station and more like the cast courts at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London—a gargantuan, sun-drenched gallery he’d visited alone this year that housed reproductions of classical masterpieces.

And, when he died, he would wander between plaster-poured likenesses of the subjects of his own life, and his mum would be there, a tragic pieta, and his father’s face as a stony, heartless beheaded bust. Blaise and Pansy would be there and he’d behold the art and think, My, the playfulness this sculptor captured in their forms. The movement, the happiness.

And, with the finality of stepping off a pier into icy water, he knew he wanted Harry to be there, too, not marble but bronze, warm-toned and strong as metal. How gestural, he would think with a contemplative nod. Yes, I remember this one. So lifelike, you’d think he could breathe. Forget marble; here in the soft bronze of Harry is the magic of life.

Many bronze statues didn’t survive war. He’d learned that this summer, too. Even the most beautiful ones were melted down in times of desperation and moulded into weaponry. Draco feared what life might have looked like if, after being liquefied into a weapon of war, Harry had been left as a sharp object instead of reshaped in the plaster, back to the soft bronze hands he’d watch tend so carefully to the fruits of their labour.

He couldn’t have said whether one moment passed or fifty before he answered, but Harry was struck speechless and Ginny had the patience of a girl who seemed to know which answer she was waiting on. Almost imperceptibly, he lifted and lowered his chin. Yes, he fancied Harry. Of course he did.

At once, air reentered the space. Ginny took a breath and clapped her hands together definitively. “Brilliant,” she said, looking at Harry as if she’d solved everything. “There you are then.”

One more flash of red, and she was gone.

Draco wished she hadn’t. He stood with his feet concreted to the ground while Harry, ten paces away, looked equally immobile. The sounds of Hagrid’s chickens rose from the grounds beyond them. The birds made their small grooming hoots and coos. Harry cleared his throat.

“Well, you know, ‘fancy’ could mean a lot of things.”

Draco scowled. “Try using both halves of your brain at once, Harry.”

“You know, announcing that vulnerability makes you mean doesn’t make it an excuse to be mean.”

“Same to you.”

“How’ve I been mean?”

“You ganged up on me! You told her something!”

Harry searched the walls of the owlery like he was willing an objective judge to appear and weigh in on the ridiculousness. “How can you so consistently make assumptions about conversations you’ve heard half of—or none of at all?! You know, this doesn’t change anything. You’ve been such a prick this week. I don’t know what was the fluke, you being kind or you having this… reaction.”

“You’ve been a prick right back.”

“One of us made it too personal, though,” Harry said, broadening his chest and stepping closer.

Draco matched him. “Personal and true. Unless you aren’t ‘abnormal in who you love’ or however you danced around it.”

“Better than you calling me ‘queer’.”

“It’s only a bad word if you make it one.”

“And it’s only a good word if you don’t spit it at someone you’re trying to hurt.”

They were close enough to feel each other’s breath with each tooth-gritted retort. Draco dared to lean even further in, until he was more in Harry’s personal space than his own, where black hair tickled his forehead and he had to go almost cross-eyed to keep glaring. “Did it? Hurt?” he whispered.

“No,” Harry whispered back. He was lying.

Their foreheads were almost touching. All Draco would have to do was level out his head and his lips would be touching Harry’s. But then, he knew all hell would break loose. Harry would be beyond offended that Draco had tried something like that in the middle of an argument. He’d never hear the end of how he’d tried to use affection to stall his own admonishment, like a basic man.

But then—Harry lifted his chin and compressed their mouths into a kiss more furious than Draco thought such a thing was capable of being. He inhaled through his nose in surprise. The tip of Harry’s nose was cold on his cheek, but his mouth was hot and soft, incongruous with the clear emotion powering the gesture.

You’re alive, Draco wanted to assure him again, if he could form thoughts.

Harry pulled away faster than he’d wanted, looking no less tense than when he’d leaned in. Draco had hoped that the affection, so significant in their aged history, would mollify the argument, but Harry seemed to know how to hold a grudge. He shook his head like he was trying to shake thoughts right out of his ears.

“No,” he said. “No—you know why? It’s been five weeks and you’ve—there are probably people who don’t want something out of me, but what are the chances it’s you?”

Draco spluttered, “Sorry?” in response, secretly relieved that he wasn’t the only one whose thoughts were arriving half-formed.

“You knew. You knew I fancied you. And Godric bless Ginny, she was trying to make me happy—probably guilt—” Draco didn’t have a moment’s pause to ask what she’d be guilty about. “—but she and I were playing right into—I should have known—you talked to Skeeter before. Your name’s been fading from the papers. You—”

“Potter,” Draco snapped, to shut it up. “What the hell are you going on about?”

“About you,” he said, jabbing a finger at Draco. “About how you-you blinded me with your niceness and with the pumpkins, the bloody pumpkins, so I couldn’t notice that I was sharing so much and you so little. Anything I’ve learned about you has been against your will because you’ve let yourself get emotional.”

“And that’s not exactly what you’ve done, too?”

Harry seemed to stumble over the question. “And-and so you’re using me and what you know about me just like you always have. You’re no better than the chickweeds in the pumpkin patch. I bet next week in the paper it’ll say ‘HARRY POTTER’S A POOF’ on the front page.”

“Harry, you have to trust me when I say, I have absolutely no interest in using you for clout. It’s been five weeks, wouldn’t I have done so already? Were you going to mail that?” He pointed to Harry’s hand.

The other boy looked mystified to find a letter still in his possession, as if it should have vanished at the first sign of more pressing matters. “Oh,” he said, calming slightly. “It’s to Mrs Weasley. I haven’t been writing to her like I should have. I’ll come back later. We’re done here.”

He turned and descended fast down the steps, so Draco followed him. “Like ‘we’re done’ as in, ‘I don’t want to see your face until Dumb Supper’ or…?”

“I need to think carefully about how to proceed with this project without you.” 



Draco thought he might be going mad. He had not instigated that kiss. He had not made his feelings clear enough to Ginny Weasley that she thought to go and do something about it. But here Harry was acting as though Draco had been scheming like a criminal to snog him in an owlery that smelled of bird droppings.

“Don’t you think it’s a bit late to think carefully when your tongue’s been—” Draco met five pairs of eyes at the bottom of the staircase. A group of patient first years stood waiting, all clutching parchment or parcel, with wide eyes. “Been, er, tasting the blackcurrant pie for years. You would know if it made a good Halloween dessert by now.”

Harry groaned in frustration and, before Draco could get another word in, took the nearest floating staircase away from him.

Draco went the opposite way, in hopes that Pansy was still working on the candles in the empty second floor classroom she’d mused about setting up shop in. Sure enough, she was visible through the ajar door, clipping the wicks shorter in a pile of a few dozen red candlesticks. Only once he’d knocked lightly to announce his presence and entered did he notice Blaise at a second table, carving into the candles Pansy placed down.

“Draco,” Pansy said. “Hiya.”

“Hello.”

“Are you staying to help?”

He shrugged, figuring they could talk later, and that the manual action might ease his tension anyway. “Sure.”

“Then I’ll go.” Blaise set a candle down, now with the wax peeled back in slivers and pressed into loops like waxen leaves around the cylindrical shape. It was quite pretty. Pansy was adding candles to his work pile much faster than he could complete them.

“No,” Draco said. “It would be a bit daft for me to yell at you for not participating in school matters and then be upset when you do.”

Blaise pressed his lips into a thin line and picked the candle back up.

“I’ll go then,” Pansy said. “I’m useless with the carving, I keep cutting right through to the centre. Here.” She took Draco’s hand and pressed the scissors she’d been using to trim the wicks into it. She patted the back of his hand and flipped her hair behind her shoulders. “Herbology in an hour, boys.”

Draco wasn’t convinced that she was orchestrating a confrontation between them until, this time, she shut the door completely behind her. Any noise from the hallway was gone, replaced with the quiet concentration of Blaise’s carving.

Draco cleared his throat and picked up a candle with a long wick. With the dense click of the scissors, he’d trimmed it and added it to Blaise’s collection once more. He did the same again, quickly depleting the remaining pile.

After a sizeable quietude (2 carved candles and 11 trimmed wicks), Blaise said, “So you’re friends with Harry now?”

For another carved candle and six trimmed wicks, Draco said nothing. He simply let the question hang in the air while he tried to surmise the tone behind it. In the end, he settled on the truth.

“I don’t know. What if I was? Would that be a problem?” 

Blaise shook his head, his eyes steadily trained only on the table in front of him. “No. No. Not a problem. Just… interesting.”

“Interesting?”

“It just makes more sense that we’ve drifted apart if I’m being replaced.”

Draco set the scissors down with a heavy metal clank. “Replaced?”

“Yeah, by Harry.”

“I know by who. But no one’s replacing anyone.”

Blaise dropped his potato peeler onto the table and crossed his arms. “So then it’s the other reason. I reckoned it was one of the two.”

“What other reason? Can’t people just drift apart without the need for a friendship postmortem?”

“You fancied me. You were interested in me, and I’m… well, decidedly heterosexual, so you’re distancing yourself. It’s okay, I don’t mind you being… you know.”

Draco stared at him, dumbfounded. “I’ve never said I was.”

“I reckoned it was an unspoken thing.”

“An unspoken—”

“Yeah. Clear enough anyway. An explanation for your wallowing and your reclusiveness.”

“And you thought that meant… about you… I felt…”

“Why else would you be so mean to Pansy? Insinuating that she was with me in the crudest way you could? You were envious.”

Draco gripped the width of the tabletop, thankful its surface was between them. “I am not envious. I have never been envious. And I could have been cruder. And I’ve apologised.”

Blaise rolled his eyes. “Hope your apology to her was better than ‘I could have been cruder’.”

“It was sincere and accepted. That’s all that you should concern yourself with.”

“I concern myself with anything you say to Pansy Parkinson.”

“Evidently.”

“She knows, too, by the way. Assuming I’m right. In my allusions.”

“You’re wrong.”

“You’re not—”

“—interested in you? No.” The confidence in his old friend, the surety that Draco must be attracted to him, was growing his temper faster than expected. “Look, I get it, Blaise. You’re wealthy and you wear it well. You’ve got expensive clothes and a handsomeness that can’t be bought, as you’re apt to flaunt. You’ve got the marks to prove you’re not just a pretty face, and the social connections that will launch the inevitable prosperous career that will tie it all together beautifully. But that doesn’t mean every creature with a pulse has an inbuilt desire to snog you!”

Blaise chuckled. “Yeah, Draco, because that really made you sound like you’re not jealous of Pansy.”

“I’m not jealous of Pansy! I’M JEALOUS OF YOU!” Draco shouted, surprising himself just as much as the other boy. The candle, which he hadn’t realised he was still holding in an exponentially tightening grip, snapped in half. “You are EVERYTHING I could’ve been if the cards were dealt differently! If I had different parents within the same social station! If we’d taken a decidedly neutral position in the war! If I’d not been left to waste away to almost-transparency in a manor all my youth while you got-got older and fitter and suntanned and—I AM NOT ATTRACTED TO YOU!”

Draco interrupted Blaise’s opening mouth with hasty loudness. Blaise’s mouth shut again.

“And sixth year while I wilted under Voldemort’s insane task of assassination, you flourished in the Slug Club, yucking it up with all the Successful-In-An-Apolitical-Way students. Seventh year you kept your head low by keeping it away from mine. Then you come back for an eighth year after I’ve dragged myself out of the grave to try at life again as if just to remind me that you will always be there doing it better than I could!”

Blaise was a picture of speechlessness, his arms dropped limply at his sides and his face slackened from brow to chin.

“So no, Blaise, I don’t want to snog you. It would be like snogging the very spectre of my unattainable success.”

Blaise’s chest rose mightily, then sunk with a staccato sigh. “‘Like snogging the very spectre of your unattainable success.’ For Salazar’s sake, Draco, you have always been one melodramatic sod.”

There was compassion to Blaise’s soft expression that simply didn’t leave room for any more anger between them. It was nothing more than the soft teasing of their youth. Draco laughed, despite a hard-to-beat natural habit of holding a grudge. It seemed what had been pent up inside him wasn’t something in need of a solution, but simply something that needed to be heard.

“I understand why you feel the way you do,” Blaise said, walking over to lean on the table beside him. He picked up half of the broken candlestick and twisted it in his hands. “But what was there for me to do about it? I thought I was leading by example, focusing on the future.”

“I’m glad that was easy for you—no, I’m sincere about that,” Draco said when the comment brought an insulted look back to his friend’s face. “I’ve not gotten there though. And I’ve… learned that if you try to press on without addressing the root issue, you’ll be planting viable seeds in dead soil for the rest of your life.”

“Alright, plant boy.” Blaise offered the candle piece. “I’m sorry if I belittled your Halloween activities, and anything else that’s helping you, erm, fix your soil.”

Draco took it. “I’m sorry that I’ve been cross with you for not being as sad as me. How astoundingly childish.”

Blaise pulled him into a hug, their first in years, their first for as long as Draco could remember. It made him think that there had come a day when he embraced his closest friends without knowing it would be his last. And there had been a day where he’d stopped desiring his mother’s love, and a day where he’d found no more love in him for his father, and all of these had happened not with a moment of traumatic change but instead so slowly that he hadn’t noticed the capacity for fondness leave his body.

“If you’re really not interested in me, then I suppose we could kiss,” Blaise said, pulling away.

Draco snorted. “What logic is that?”

“A test run, just so you can see if you’re gay.”

“Why do I need to see if I am?”

“Because you can’t even say the word. So you’re unsure.”

Draco groaned and turned towards the candlesticks, bracing his hands on the edge of the table and locking his elbows. He hung his head. “It’s not necessary, anyway. Harry and I kissed about half an hour ago.”

Blaise sucked in a breath and took Draco’s shoulders, manoeuvring him so they faced each other. “Draco,” he said. “Draco—wow—I—This feels like an important distinction to amend your previous statement. You said you were friends; that is not what friends are.”

Draco shoved his chest lightly. “It’s precisely what you just offered, actually.”


“So it was an entirely dispassionate endeavour?”

“I didn’t say that.” He considered it and tilted his head in a sideways nod. “Maybe too passionate.”

Blaise looked both intrigued and horrified.

“Erm, negatively passionate. As in, we fought before, and then we fought again.”

“About?”

Draco shrugged. “I’ve been tight-lipped and unexpressive. You’d recognise it.”

“Mm,” Blaise nodded. “Are you heading there next?”

“I think he’ll hex me if I even show at dinner.”

His friend clapped him on the shoulder. “I’ll nick you a sandwich.”

*****

The strangest part of what had happened in the owlery was how unwritten it was. Until now, Harry’s entire life had been set in course. The twists and turns were of his making, but the destination was meant to be.

In waiting for Draco’s answer to Ginny’s striking question, Harry had asked a question of himself: was the death he’d been feeling inside a death of personhood or a death of prophecy? Maybe his crippling immobility wasn’t rigour mortis, but the natural consequence of surviving a divination he’d never meant to see the other side of. Perhaps it was the expected response to fulfilling one’s life’s mission at seventeen.

In the moment between Ginny’s question and Draco’s answer had laid an endless perhaps and a world of maybes. He thought he’d be frightened, but he found himself wanting to drink them in. Then Draco had doubled the unknowns by confirming that he did fancy Harry, and Harry had doubled it again by kissing him. By curfew, he was overwhelmed. He’d never desired a prophetic answer so badly.

Harry couldn’t have been hiding very well that something was bothering him, because Ron and Hermione had stared at him all through dinner the night before while he’d looked across the Great Hall every two bites to see if Draco had shown. He never did. That night he had the dream where he was rising from his grave, again, and when he got his head through with a gasp, Draco’s pale hand was waiting to shove him back under.

He spent the rest of the night without sleeping, instead trying to configure what his brain was saying and how he was meant to listen. He thought of the note in the pocket of Draco’s coat. I don’t know what I want but I know how to get it.Draco thought something of the sentiment, apparently.

It made him think that perhaps he was going about it all wrong, trying to figure out what he wanted before figuring out a way to make it happen. The reverse way, Draco’s way, relied on instincts. Harry used to rely on instincts, too, before he’d gotten wrapped up in the ways his head had been tricking him since the battle.

Instinctually, he wanted Draco, even when he made him angry. He’d shared himself with him, spent time together, and desired him even, without quite knowing why. Perhaps it had been instinct after all. He didn’t know what he wanted—what his future should look like—but somehow he knew that Draco was the way to get it.

But what does one do when they’ve decided a boy is their way forward, but they haven’t decided to forgive him?

The sun came up before he could think of a solution. 

Breakfast was no better. Ron and Hermione glanced at each other so often that he wanted to tell them to just go ahead and have that silent conversation out loud.

“I have to, something is up,” Ron was whispering to her.

“He’ll volunteer it if he wants—”

“Harry,” Ron said, ignoring her. Harry watched her eyes darken in annoyance. “Are you back together with Ginny?”

He was so caught by surprise that he set his juice down on the lip of his plate, spilling it across their breakfast spread. “Shit,” he said, picking up the glass, “scourgify. Erm—Ron, mate, no way.” He glanced down the table. Sure enough, Ginny was staring right at him between Neville and Luna. He shook his head at her and her face fell.

“It’s just—she keeps looking at us, and you’ve been strange.”

“I’ve not been strange.”

Hermione nodded. “I know you’ve been preoccupied with—Draco.”

Harry coughed on his potatoes. “Preoccupied with Draco?”

“No, preoccupied with pumpkins—Draco’s behind you.”

Harry spun just in time for Draco to take the last few paces to put himself at the head of their table. He looked stern, his mouth in a determined pinch. “The lake. Now.”

“What?”

“We must go to the lake. I don’t want to hear any protest. We need to have it out and—”

“Yeah, okay.” Harry stood and Draco looked almost disappointed to not need to finish his defensive argument. He nodded, then averted his gaze from Ron and Hermione. Harry shrugged at them, then put a croissant in the pocket of his jacket and led the way.

The lake was busier than last time, but today the sun was out and though it did little to heat the air, it provided an atmosphere that begged for students to sit by the shore and skip rocks. Harry and Draco walked past them, back to the empty pier, and sat on the same edge.

“Pansy said she saw the giant squid eat a fish out the common room window a week or so ago.”

“Ergh. We don’t get views like that in the tower.” Harry swung his legs over the water.

“No, just sky… the real world… weather phenomena… sunlight…”

“I get it, the grass is always greener,” he said. “Or the kelp, rather.”

“Truer words you’ve never spoken. Envy is an original sin, but it should also be considered an original sin that Professor Sprout’s serpent plants in greenhouse two are already flitting their tongues when she planted them long after we started our pumpkins.”

“She didn’t have to fix the soil first.”

“At least we’ve got the early signs of fruit. As tiny and green as they are.”

“There’s the optimist.” Harry patted his back. Yesterday, he may not have thought much of it. Now every touch felt like an addendum to something entirely new.

“Once they grow larger, I suspect in a few days, we’ll begin turning the fruits so that they evenly—”

“I don’t see you as a Dark person,” Harry blurted, somehow maintaining a contemplative tone despite a hasty interruption.

Draco paused. “What?”

“What you overheard me saying about Dumb Supper wasn’t an observation of who I think you are, it was about what your public image is, and I’m sorry but your public reputation is still as a Dark wizard. You can’t pretend you don’t know that. I don’t like my public image either, okay? But I… sense you were prickly because you thought after everything I still saw the real you as Dark and that hurt your feelings.”

“I’m not soft. I’ve heard worse.”

“And you can’t admit that the severity of the words changes when someone you care about says them? Of course it got to you. Should’ve asked for the whole story, still,” he muttered.

“Alright.”

“Alright, he’s admitting he acted rashly?”

“Alright, he’s admitting that he could have asked follow-up questions,” Draco surrendered, a slight tilt to his mouth. “If Harry will also admit that he could have avoided saying niceness was so foreign to me that it broke me to try. I can be nice.”

“Hm.”

The children by the shore screamed and ran from the lake’s edge, drawing their attention as they scampered up the sand. One of a hundred things lurking in the water could have scared them. He thought again of how Harry didn’t feel he fit his courageous public image and yet had dived into the water for a cup. Draco had never been as brave. He took an immense breath.

“Harry, I’m going to tell you something and I need you to promise not to tell another soul—not Ron and Hermione, not even Pansy or Blaise.”

Harry hitched a breath and said, “Okay” as an exhale. His legs stopped swinging over the water.

“I was not assigned the pumpkins by McGonagall. She has no clue why I’m helping you besides whatever she’s heard word-of-mouth about my involvement.”

Harry covered his mouth with the palm of his hand. “No. No,” he said confidently. “Because Hagrid was glad to see us both and-and you were waiting for me to arrive. And you accepted the task immediately—began delegating!”

“I was at the pumpkin patch for an unrelated reason.”

“For what?”

“For a potion.”

“For what potion?”

“A bad one,” he answered shortly. “A drastic potion from a book of Dark Magic—see? you’ve been right about me—”

“Draco, come on.”

“To do something unfixable to myself. One of the last ingredients was the soil of a barren land, and what’s more poetic than the use of land I helped ruin?”

Harry asked something under his breath, his eyes incredibly wide.

“What?”

He put his hands over Draco’s and spoke only fractionally louder. “Were you going to kill yourself?”

“No.” He said it as firmly as he could, unquestionably. “Something far more cowardly.”

“What did you—”

“Shush, this is the good part,” Draco said, clasping their hands tighter. “Because, you see, there I was, investigating the dirt I needed to change my life forever, and Hagrid blasts a door open booming your name, and I turn around and there you are. And it’s like the world bloomed for me, Harry. It invited me into the hut with you and then it offered me ripe fruit—the chance to engage in some gardening with you.”

“You needed barren land, I walked up by chance, and you—so then, immediately you agree to a plan that includes revitalising the very soil you needed? You fixed the soil you needed to be barren?”

“I think just as much of me wanted an excuse not to follow through with the potion as wanted to see it through.”

“All because… because…”

“Because I saw the chance to be invited into a room with you, to examine you post-war, to do something with you, to spend time with you.”

“You’re here for the pumpkins.”

“Harry, forget the bloody pumpkins. I’m here for you.”

Harry made a sound of disbelief and looked out over the water, scanning it like something out there would make it make sense.

“Can I make an observation about you to make up for the… poor observations I made about you while I was angry?” Draco asked.

“Is it that you can now admit I look handsome?” Harry asked in a deadpan, like second nature, like the humor passed through him no matter his current emotions. Draco swallowed and looked down at the water.

“No,” he said. “I thought—”

“That you shouldn’t have been mean towards Ron when we were fighting?”

“No. Well, sure. Sorry,” he added without much sincerity.

“Is it—”

“It’s not a bad observation, Potter, just let me tell it.”

Harry shut his mouth. He did look a little dubious, so Draco, after glancing around the lake again, put a hand around his elbow. “I think more people feel dead than you know. I think everyone feels like a ghost now and again. And I think when you feel that way, you just need the proper help. Like my potion for the pumpkins. We resurrected them, Harry, really, we did. And you’re no different.”

Harry averted his gaze to the dock, so Draco leaned down to catch his eye line again, refusing to let him look away.

“I think you would have felt this way if absolutely nothing had happened in the forest at all. If you’d walked out without a scratch.”


Harry’s lips parted. “You do?”

“I think all the forest did was fuel your nightmares more than it would have. I think you’re traumatised and I think it’s because you were more entangled in the deaths of your family and friends than the rest of us can understand. I think it’s because your life had been building to a moment that’s passed and that you never expected to survive. I think it’s because you’ve never had the chance to live a life without prophecy. You’re frozen by the choices. You’ve never had so many.”

Harry glanced between his eyes. “So then what?”

“So choose some. Or write your own prophecy and pretend to follow that.”

“Write my own prophecy?”

Draco shrugged. “Why not? If you truly think you can’t live without one.”

“Huh.” Harry jutted his jaw to the side, staring thoughtfully towards the horizon.

“I’m not one to talk though. Starting a new life is still outside my range of skills.”

“Ah, you’re getting there. If you just stopped pelting insults at anyone who got close to you…”

“Blaise and I? It’s natural to grow apart, you know. Not everyone can be as forgiving towards my… occasional temper like Pansy... why are you looking at me like that?”

Harry kept grinning. “I was talking about myself. How many rows do you juggle at once?”

Draco leaned over and buried his forehead into Harry’s shoulder. “Too many.” He felt the gentle puff of air on his hair, the brief closeness of Harry’s nose on the top of his head. “I just thought I should explain myself to you, you know. We don’t have to be done with our row.”

“How kind,” Harry said above him. “What if I said I’d rather just forget it?”

“I’d tell you not to forgive me for half a lifetime of affronts so fast,” he said, lifting his head again.

“That would be reasonable if I hadn’t matched them well enough along the way.”

Draco shook his head. “You’re forgetting—there’s an inherent imbalance that puts you ahead of me by being on the right side of history.”

“Me? Right? I remember you bleeding out on the bathroom floor, no?”

“As clearly as I remember you working doubly hard to stop my misdirected attempts at the murder of our headmaster.”

“Which wouldn’t have happened if Voldemort himself hadn’t threatened your family,” Harry argued, his eyes bright with conviction.

“A situation we put ourselves in. Yours was no choice.”

“You were eleven at first too. That was no choice of yours.”

They’d leaned closer, breathing hard again, faces determined, but the children’s voices still carried over the water.

“Why does this keep happening?” Harry breathed. They were close enough that they might have gone and kissed, but Draco was relishing the in between, spending his observations on the dark eyelashes blinking at him. He was entranced.

“Photons,” he murmured softly, his thoughts abstracted halfway to fruition. “Charged by heat… erm, boiling potion to promote life in the ground… we—we run hot. Something about, er, the Kildare Krackens.”

“I was thinking more, erm… like the memory in the Samhain candles. There’s too much fighting in our wax. When we light, it burns right out into the same pattern again.” Harry’s eyes kept glancing downward, and then they closed and Draco leaned closer, enough to see on his own eyelids when Harry’s face blocked out the sun.

“HARRY!”

They sprang apart. The shrill voice carrying from the shore was Hermione’s and she waved her hands in the air. “WHAT ARE YOU DOING?” she cried. “CHARMS EXAM!”

“Oh shit.” Harry stood so fast that his right foot half-missed contact with the last plank before the water. He steadied himself on Draco’s shoulder. “Charms!”

“It was easy,” Draco said, breaking his neck to squint up at him in the sun. “I took it yesterday.”

“Easy for you to say, you’re much cleverer than me.”

“Don’t joke.”

“Coming?”

“I’ll stay.”

“HARRY!”

Harry hesitated, then touched Draco’s head quickly, his hand sweeping around the nape of his neck. “See you later.”

Draco sat on the pier long enough to watch Harry’s shrinking figure meet Hermione’s urgently beckoning one, then watched the two of them run off towards the castle. He walked back to the pumpkins, which were now some transitional colour between green and orange, and revelled at the fact that there were actual pumpkins again. He reckoned it wasn’t dissimilar to becoming a parent, seeing one’s infant every day, and thinking, ‘My god, it’s really a baby.’

He gave every pumpkin a good turn for the hell of it, though it was too early, imagining that he was gifting them all a new perspective, a chance to look at the sky, and then he slowly began to piece Eugene back together. Harry’s shirt was gone. Draco shrugged out of his coat and gave it to the watcher. It was a gift from his mum, anyway. He should get one that he likes on his own.

In the second-floor classroom that they’d taken over for candle carving, he found the box of candles Blaise had almost single-handedly carved and made his way to the headmistress’ office, steeling himself for an interaction he couldn’t even begin to predict.

She stood when he entered, adding to the strange formality of his arrival. “Good afternoon, Professor,” he said. “Harry said you needed the candles.” He set them on the side of her desk and procrastinated momentarily, unsure whether he was meant to immediately leave.

“Thank you for delivering them so promptly,” she said. “I apologise if it seems heavy-handed, but the peace of mind will be worth it for the students.”

“Sure,” he mumbled, feeling his ears heat remembering his overreaction to the request.

“I was pleasantly surprised to hear that you’d taken up the task with Harry.”

“Erm, yeah.”

“And the additional activities—how thoughtful.”

He nodded humbly, his hands clasped tightly behind his back.

She sighed. “Professor Dumbledore was so… whimsical with the holidays. I find myself struggling on occasion to fill his delightfully abnormal seat. How are your NEWTs?”

He shrugged. “Pretty good. I, erm, was wondering what the next steps would be if one was hypothetically interested in being a Healer.”

“Ah, is that a consideration of yours?” she asked, looking more engaged than she had since he entered.

“Maybe. It’s okay—I don’t know why I asked, it was a whim, really.”

She waved a hand. “An apprenticeship. St. Mungo’s perhaps, or with Madame Pomfrey if she was willing.”

“I think it’s time to go somewhere new,” he said.

“St. Mungo’s would be a place to look, then. Lots of concentrations to consider there. You’re taking Potions and Herbology?”

He nodded.

“Then you’re on the right track already.”

“Thank you, Professor. I better get back; I’ve got some things to sort.”

“I shouldn’t need the candles for more than a day. And Draco—” she said as he turned to leave. “I’ve always thought you had the potential for greatness. Wherever you go from here, I hope you feel intended for it.”

“Oh—I—well, the world would agree that I’m a bit too far gone for greatness.” Adequacy, maybe. Partial redemption.

“You’re eighteen, Mr Malfoy,” she said, sternly. “You have lived such a small portion of your life. There is plenty of time to impress or disappoint.”

His stomach turned in anxiety, but he put a thin smile on his face and nodded. “Thank you.” He paused in the doorway. “You know, I, for one, prefer the straightforwardness of your feast speeches.”

She cracked a smile.

*****

Harry didn’t think the Charms exam was easy, which only proved what he’d already known—everywhere he turned, his friends were better students than him. Ron, at least, was his kindred spirit in that they shared a look when Hermione cheerfully said, “Not too bad!” once the classroom door had shut behind them.

“You’re a nutter,” said Harry. “That was challenging.”

“I think we have different definitions of challenging,” she said. “For example, you’ve talked about your Dumb Supper notes like they were a breeze.”

They were—he’d had them done for days. Harry simply found that when he put quill to parchment, everything he wanted to say to the departed people in his life came flooding out without a problem.

“I just can’t find the perfect words,” Hermione had cried, throwing her fourth paper into the fire last night.

“Take a breath,” Ron had said, pulling her closer. “It doesn’t have to be perfect, it’s for people who’re already your friends and family. You don’t overanalyze every word you say to people in everyday conversation, do you?”

“Yes,” she said, looking no less stressed.

Charms behind him, Harry found his thoughts drifting naturally to Draco again, trying to reimagine his presence by Hagrid’s hut that first day, and whether he’d looked particularly tormented. Nothing in his memory gave it away. He’d still been a stranger. But now, finally, he’d felt that Draco had lit a candle in the hollows of his heart, glowing like a pumpkin. He’d let Harry in.

As it were, he was also physically drifting towards Draco, because, when they turned the corner at a set of floating stairs, Draco was leaning against a wall, talking to Blaise. They both turned and looked at the trio.

“Well, well, if it isn’t Harry Potter,” Blaise said with a strangely teasing tone to his voice. Draco smacked his arm.

“Yeah, hi,” Harry said, narrowing his eyes. “Hey—erm, Draco.” He gulped and sucked a deep breath through his nose. “Do you have a moment?”

Draco was regarding him softly, so tranquil compared to yesterday. “Of course,” he said, his eyes smiling, though his mouth remained expressionless.

“Brilliant. Oh, don’t wait for me,” he added. He’d just remembered that Ron and Hermione existed to his left.

“Thanks for the permission,” said Ron, rolling his eyes and taking Hermione’s hand.

Harry chose the hallway Draco and Blaise had been standing by and listened as the sound of Draco’s shoes followed him around one corner, then a second, and to the door of the unused classroom where they’d been carving candles.

“Oh, sorry, I should’ve mentioned that I took the candles to McGonagall,” Draco said as Harry pulled them through the door. “She said by tom—”

Harry grabbed his face and kissed him, relishing in a moment without anger or interruption. Draco’s cheeks were cold beneath his hands. He felt the shift in the other boy’s stature from surprise to acceptance, and in the relaxing of his body, Harry kissed him deeper. He pulled away and laughed at the blank expression on Draco’s face.

“Thanks for taking the candles, but I just wanted to do that properly.”

“That felt more improper than proper,” said Draco, his face melting into a smile.

He hummed and slid his hands around the back of Draco’s neck. “I didn’t get say by the lake, but I’ve been dreaming about you.”

“Oh yeah?” His smile widened, his hands testing their boundaries in Harry’s hair, distractedly pulling at curls. “I’ve been dreaming about you, too.”

“In mine, you strangle me and call me horrible things.”

Draco stopped the motion in Harry’s hair. His hand dropped to the boy’s side, instead. “Are you having me on?”

He shook his head. “But, you see, it’s actually symbolic of how you’re getting rid of the version of me who felt half dead. You’re bringing me back to life.”

Draco blinked. “By killing you,” he clarified tonelessly.

Harry smiled and nodded, still unfazed. “It makes sense. Why, what do you dream of me?”

“I’ve got to meet Blaise for dinner.” Draco leaned in and kissed Harry to distraction, slow and meaningful and, in its own way, an answer to his own dreams. “We’re writing our Dumb Supper letters.”

They were six days from Halloween, and to Draco, the world was orange and hot and ripe in all the best ways.

Chapter Text

“IT’S NASTY!”

“WHAT?”

Harry held the hood of his raincoat flat to the top of his head and leaned closer. The front of his hair was soaked, dripping onto his rain-sprayed face. Draco looked no dryer. “THE WEATHER’S NASTY! NO GOOD!”

“THIS AFTERNOON!” Draco shouted over the wind.

“IT WON’T BE BETTER THEN!”

“LESS WIND!”

Harry shook his head. “IT’S THE RAIN THAT’S OUR PROBLEM. NOT THE WIND.”

“ARE YOU HAVING A LAUGH? THE WIND IS WHAT’S MAKING THE RAIN HIT US SIDEWAYS!”

“IS THE DIRECTION THE RAIN HITS REALLY THE ISSUE HERE? IT COULD FALL UPSIDE DOWN AND STILL BE TOO HEAVY TO HARVEST IN!”

Draco rolled his eyes with a growl and grabbed his arm. They ran for the castle. In the sky of the Great Hall, the rain had looked less intense. The maelstrom outside had caught them by surprise. Under the courtyard’s canopy, they caught their breath and shook the water off themselves.

Realistically, Harry knew he’d be in the garden that afternoon whether the rain and wind had lessened or not; the weather was only slated to worsen in the time leading up to the feast. They had been waiting patiently for the fruits to ripen only to feel like they were running out of time to harvest afterwards.

He trembled in a warm shower, possibly his first heated one since he’d jumped in the lake. He couldn’t imagine how much colder and wetter Draco would’ve been if he’d made good on his idea to sleep with the pumpkins overnight to watch the dropping temperature. Thankfully, by dinner last evening, Pansy had talked him out of it.

“She says me being well-rested was better for them than me childminding in the cold,” he’d said. “I really think we’ve got at least another day before the storm, but she said not to risk it.”

But the storm had come in the night, and when Harry woke, the sky was dark grey and the Ravenclaw-Slytherin match had been cancelled entirely. Between breakfast and lunch, the school was overpopulated with sour students itching for sport. Moroseness spread like Dragon Pox, infecting Harry even as he left the Gryffindor common room dressed for environmental war in as many layers as possible. He stood waiting for Draco by the Great Hall in a thick cream jumper, Draco’s denim jacket, a waterproof coat, and a slight frown. When he spotted his gardening partner, it grew into an unstoppable smirk.

“You are not wearing that,” he said when the boy joined him.

Draco looked down at his trousers, his knit jumper and his shiny oxfords. Without a word, he presented a black umbrella.

Harry scoffed. “Where’s your raincoat?”

“The hood blew off my head the entire time this morning anyway. I’ve got a strategy.” He looked him up and down. “Is that my jacket? Are you wearing it to give it back?”

Harry cleared his throat. “Let’s see your anti-rain plan in action,” he said. “Lead the way.”

The rain misted in the moment they were out the door as a cluster of students under the window beside it yelled at them to close it fast. Draco opened his umbrella and recited a spell too quiet to hear in the rainfall pattering on the plastic hood over Harry’s ears. It hovered on its own over Draco’s head and, when he took a step, followed him like a high noon shadow. On the walk to Hagrid’s, Harry found himself standing close to keep his head dry just a minute longer.

“Can’ wait any longer, can we?” Hagrid asked when he knocked on the door, already in a large pair of wellies.

Harry shook his head. “Reckon the weather won’t improve much.”

“Is tha’ Draco?” He waved and Harry glanced back to where Draco was already traipsing amongst the pumpkins.

“The one and only. All hands on deck.”

“I’ll grab the sheers.”

The work was careful despite the conditions. Harry sliced cleanly at the stems of gorgeously orange pumpkins, as unique as the crowd on a tube ride. He kept glancing at Draco and the way he moved calmly despite the sheet of rain, squinting in it, while his umbrella swivelled to brace against the torrent as he moved.

Hagrid loaded pumpkins into wheelbarrows already holding inches of water, hoisting a handful in his large arms with each sweep.

“Having yeh both here… growin’ the pumpkins,” the half-giant started as the two boys gripped the slippery handles of their wheelbarrows. “Fixin’ me field… Well, I should offer some words, yeh know, of gratitude.”

“Can they wait until tomorrow?” Draco asked, wiping his hair out of his eye. Umbrella or raincoats, there was only so much protection they had from the elements.

Hagrid waved a hand. “Alrigh’, alrigh’, best get on with it.”

Harry thanked him, then put force into the wheelbarrow, heaving it through the sodden grass. Draco was right behind him, grunting with the weight of the pumpkins.

“I don’t see why Hagrid couldn’t have cancelled his class and helped us get the pumpkins to the greenhouse,” he groaned. “Did you see how easily he picked them all up?”

“It’s fifth years,” said Harry, though he was envious, too, of the ease with which the groundskeeper had come to their aid. “They’ve got OWLs.”

At the greenhouses, Draco set his wheelbarrow down and raced to open the door before Harry got to it. They’d set their harvest in the corner, out of the way, for just a day or so. Harry thought, if things kept up the way they were, they should put a tarp over them, too, so they didn’t get too cold. He was shivering even as he thought it.

With a wave of his wand, Draco flew the pumpkins out of the wheelbarrows and into a line against the rain-spattered wall of the greenhouse. Harry pressed lightly on his shoulder, then let the hand linger. There was no one in the greenhouse but them, and it felt thrillingly foreign to be able to let a hand linger at all. “Why didn’t we do that the whole time?” he asked, gesturing hopelessly to the first fraction of the harvest.

“It only covers two metres’ distance.”

They made the trip several times, unquestionably wet by the end of it despite their best efforts, Draco’s shoes caked in mud and Harry’s glasses spotted with dried raindrops. Together, they stood back and regarded their pumpkins like art in a gallery. Harry had stopped counting at 200, but it could have been fifty more after that.

“Look at that one, I want that one.” He pointed to an oblong, sad-looking one at the front of the congregation, mottled with warts.

Draco glanced at him, pulling his head back to see him from standing so close. “Want it how?”

“For the dormitory.”

“What? No way.”

“Sure, one each for our bedrooms, a couple for the common room, one for Hagrid—he likes to put it in his window—and one for McGonagall.”

Harry waited expectantly for the rebuttal, but Draco just nodded and scanned the harvest. “I suppose we deserve the fruits of our labour. I’ll take that tall one.”

“Perfect choice. You know, it’s not how I pictured the harvest going.”

“Oh?” Draco asked, wiping a drop of water off Harry’s cheek with his thumb.

“I pictured the perfect autumn temperatures… an hour before sunset when the light’s all pretty… maybe some hot cocoa…”

“You know, it’s good luck to harvest in the rain.”

“Is that true?” Harry asked, narrowing his eyes.

“Really,” said Draco, though he was lying. He watched Harry’s face brighten.

“Huh,” he nodded, cracking a smile. “That’s brilliant, then. Absolute perfect work by the universe. Again,” he added, touching the other boy’s hand.

Draco worked very hard not to move his hand, considering how strange it had been to embark on a transition to… what this was, this October romance… and still press on with the rest of the chores of their lives. Volatility had left them, too. Draco noticed it immediately. It was as though he’d been hit overnight with a confidence that he and Harry would fight often, but never so seriously. Yesterday, they’d argued about the candle-lighting—whether to do it before the Dumb Supper or before the feast. Today, they’d argued about whether the rain was as bad as they thought. Draco’s heart rate hadn’t risen once in the process, except—he’d admit only to himself—in excitement.

“Don’t get all soft on me,” he said. “You grew on me in your more careworn, traumatic state.”

“I haven’t dreamt of you choking me in days, would you like that to change?”

“Do you need help making it change?”

The other boy turned rose red in an instant. Draco smirked. In the loving touches and kind words, Harry had the upper hand. Provocation felt like his chance to even out the frazzled feeling.

“Are you trying to shake me, Malfoy?” Harry asked in a low tone, teasing at his expense. “I hope you can take it if you can give it out.” He took both of Draco’s hands and pulled him further into the greenhouse. The workbenches were crowded with empty pots and spilt soil. One table, however, pushed up against the wall in disuse instead of arranged with the others like a classroom, was swept clean, no doubt by other students’ hurried hands. Harry walked until Draco’s back was against it, then leaned forward and kissed him.

It occurred to him that he should worry about associating wanting Harry too easily with the smell of dirt and the presence of plants, lest he never be able to garden undistracted again, but he kissed back without hesitation. Blueberry Danishes equaled the weekend his father first hexed him in anger. The smell of hard water or blood made him think of the bathroom sixth year. There were worse connections to have, he decided, and Harry sunk his hands into Draco’s hair and he figured he could sink into the soil itself and bloom like a flower.

“This is a bad idea,” he whispered when Harry pulled back just enough to press his lips to his neck instead.

“You mean eight years wasn’t a long enough wait?” Harry asked, framing Draco’s face between his thumbs. “Besides, this is greenhouse three. Everyone fools about in greenhouse three.”

His right hand left Draco’s face, tracing a gentle line with fingertips from the hinge of his jaw to his chest. It lay flat against his heart. Draco remembered, quite suddenly and stupidly, that he had hands, too, which were currently laying limp against his sides like a duelling dummy. He lifted them and drifted just under the collar of Harry’s multiple layers, slotting his fingers together against the nape of his neck. He pulled him back in and kissed with ardour, a thirsty plant.

Harry was warmer than life itself. He was the opposite of a corpse. He was pink-faced and working lungs and an organ-filled body that wanted things. He pushed against Draco and Draco, in his thoughtfulness, stood on his toes so that he could sit himself on the edge of the table and give Harry more room, but Harry only stepped between his knees again, close and hot.

“Autumn,” Draco said against Harry’s lips, giving himself no time to elaborate.

“And?” Harry mumbled, licking the straight edge of Draco’s teeth. They would devour each other in the greenhouse, a fungus that would speed up each other’s decomposition. They would waste away back into the ground here, Draco was sure.

Draco thought his one-word sentence was obvious. He couldn’t string more syllables together, anyway, so it would have to do. “Autumn,” he hummed, kissing the corners of Harry’s mouth, the bend of his nose, and the closed lids of his eyes. “Too… much…” He tugged at Harry’s jumper. “…Clothes.”

“Mm.” Harry’s breath was hot at his ear. “Okay, no kissing until spring.”

“Not what I meant.”

Draco opened his mouth into Harry’s, his hands searching for any skin. Neck and hands were not good enough. He wanted to be below the knit of Harry’s jumper and the cotton of his t-shirt. He wanted to feel the softness of flesh in areas less expected to brave the cold weather air. And he was so busy, then, with the sloppy sharing of tongues and teeth, the desperateness of his hands, that he hadn’t imagined Harry would be seeking the same until he felt it—hurried fingers working on the button of his trousers.

He felt his body respond at the very idea as if his heart hadn’t been beating until this moment and his blood had been sluggish. The cells at the core of his being-aliveness responded with frenzy and he made a sound he’d never heard himself emit, something in between a yelp and a moan, something that, translated even by a caveman with no syntax, clearly meant, ‘Oh please, yes, how did you know?’

“Damn, expensive slacks are such a challenge,” Harry muttered, pulling away slightly to look at the problem while his fingers fumbled. “You know, I’ve never done this before, so, erm, you’ll have to let me know if you’re enjoying yourself—or rather, if you’re not, because I hope I can tell if you are, I can tell what I’d like…” 

Draco just watched him speak, his downturned eyes, his round lips, the flush of his cheeks, awed by the intense focus he was portraying even as he rambled. Then he heard a voice and saw, through the stained and opaque doors of the greenhouse, an approaching shadow figure.

“…do have an imagination. I think I’m a creative problem solver. Not that there’s a problem to solve. Well, I suppose, problem: you’re aroused, solution—”

“Stop!” he hissed. Harry looked up, hurt until Draco stood, grabbed his collar, and pulled him under the table and behind a large collection of unused pots. They had only just crouched out of sight when the door opened and a draft of cold air swept in behind a pair of cracked brown loafers.

“River rocks… river rocks…” The voice almost chanted the words as shoes began to wander the greenhouse, like its owner might forget the one item on a list if it wasn’t repeated ad nauseam. “River rocks…”

Harry’s chest rose and fell quickly beside him, still trying to catch his breath. Draco did his best to breathe calmly through his nose.

“It’s Neville,” Harry whispered, and the shoes stopped for a second, halfway across the greenhouse.

Draco pressed his hand against Harry’s mouth, blazing a look into his green eyes that dared him to utter another syllable. He shook his head slowly.

It was entirely ridiculous, he realised, to be crouched in the pebbles of the greenhouse floor listening to his classmate rummage through chests of plant supplies. It was ridiculous that he’d hardly entered the greenhouses and now he’d been blinded enough by lust to let someone snog him in one. It was mad that it was a boy, and one that he’d hardly kissed at all and had now waited patiently and let work away at the button of his trousers. Had he been about to use his hands or mouth? something embarrassingly teenaged in his psyche wanted to know. He so often felt matured beyond his years that an age appropriate thought was scarce and surprising.

Neville was singing some old song to himself as he searched, the kind of number Draco’s grandmother might have known. Then, “ah!” he said softly, and one more trunk shut before the shoes walked—slower and more laboured this time—back to the door, which shut behind and left them alone again.

Against Draco’s hand, Harry burst into laughter. He pulled it away, joining him in chuckling at the adrenaline-inducing panic of it all. Harry laughed as he kissed him again, more chaste and joy-filled than the passion that preceded it.

“Have you ever felt so alive?” he asked, grinning, and then he licked his lips. “Would you like to feel more so?”

*****

By the eve of Halloween, thirty students wished to join in their first Dumb Supper, and so Harry and Draco called upon the help of their friends to set the long table. McGonagall had given them use of the large room adjacent to the faculty lounge. Once upon a time, it had been a swank space 19th-century professors used for midday sanctuary from students, but it had long been retired in preference for the current faculty lounge. This was obvious the moment they gained entry from its dust-covered red velvet drapings and the noticeable lack of furniture.

Hermione had helped by elongating the only table left in the room, a water-stained wooden side table pushed in the back corner, then procured an equally lengthy tablecloth to hide its ancient imperfections.

“Thank Merlin she came,” Harry said to Draco while they made a trip back and forth from the kitchen with chargers and napkins. “She made the table look spectacular.”

Draco grumbled something under his breath.

“Sorry?” Harry said.


“I said, I wish you’d warned me they’d be coming.”

Harry halted in the centre of the hallway, holding his box of chargers close to his chest. “You said, ‘I think we’ll need extra hands’, how was I to know you were referring to your friends and not mine?”

“Because when have I ever desired to spend time with Ron Weasley?”

He scoffed. “When have you ever desired to spend time with me? If one changes, so must the other.”

“I still wish I’d known. Then I wouldn’t have invited Pansy and Blaise.”

“You don’t think they can exist in the same place?”

Draco shot him an unbelievable look.

When they returned, Pansy was knocking the dust off the drapery, and Blaise was arranging chairs, trying to get Ron to remark upon her lack of a boyfriend, and how was it possible when she looked so good cleaning a home and didn’t he agree? Pansy was used to it—rolling her eyes and greatly ignoring it.

“Don’t say a word, Ron,” Harry sighed, setting his box down with a loud clatter. Hermione seemed to be trying her hardest to remain unflappable.

“I wasn’t going to!” he argued too defensively. “He’s just—he’s twice as crafty as Draco.”

“Hey Draco,” Blaise said, a chair tucked under his arm. “No offence, but I like Harry’s friends.”

Ron walked over to Harry and leaned close while everyone got back to work. “Honestly, I just watch ‘Mione and if she looks pissed off, I don’t respond.”

Harry clapped his back. “Foolproof method, mate.”

“You wouldn’t happen to know what part of ‘does your family serve chicken at Halloween?’ could mortally offend a woman?”

“Sorry. Beyond me.”

Ron bit his lip and glanced distractedly at his girlfriend. “Oh well. Better safe than sorry. Hey—did Neville talk to you?”

Across the room, Draco whacked a chair into the wall, swinging too wide as he placed it, and while their friends glanced over and away again, Harry felt he knew his expression and excellent hearing well enough to sense he was surprised, too. “No,” he said, feeling his own heart shudder arrhythmically. “Why? What did he say?”

“Just wanted to know if the garden was available. He has some spring planting he wants to plan for or something. Just wanted to know if the soil would still be good then.”

“Of course it would be. Wouldn’t it? Why would it just be unhealthy again out of the blue?”

Ron shrugged.

Harry finished preparing their Dumb Supper, but his thoughts were straying and focusing, strengthening again on the garden, which he hadn’t had reason to visit in days, after weeks of daily visits. At dinner, he picked at his food and answered belatedly when his friends talked to him.

The growing torment was kept acceptably discreet until Draco saw him walking out the back of the castle ten minutes from curfew. And so he followed out of curiosity, forgetting his plan to sneak a half-caffeinated coffee from the kitchens, and walked with his hands in the pocket of a coat he liked even less than the one he’d given Eugene (what an impulsive move of grandeur that had been) until he saw Harry in the garden on his knees. He broke into a sprint.

“Harry!” he said when he was close enough to do it in a loud whisper. Harry looked up with wide eyes, emotional and fragile-looking.

“Oh. Draco,” he said.

“Don’t sound so disappointed.”

Harry didn’t laugh. Instead, he leaned forward and pushed his hair off his forehead with his hands.

“Hey,” Draco tried, softer. His hand hovered over Harry’s back for a few seconds before it settled in the small. “What are you doing here?”

Harry shook his head and took a deep, ragged breath. He grabbed a random remnant of vine in his hand—the garden was empty but still strewn with the leftovers of their harvest—and began to fidget with it.

“Hey,” he tried again, feeling helpless.

“Can you answer honestly, please?” Harry said into his hands.

Though the question filled him with concern, Draco swallowed and kept his voice even. He was a little scared of these circumstances, so close on the heels of a happy harvest. “That seems like a large promise.”

“Maybe we shouldn’t have harvested the pumpkins.”

“What? They were ready. We tested it. All ripe. Salazar’s sake, Harry, are you this torn up about the pumpkins?”

“In a way. I just got to thinking…” He took a lung-filling breath and exhaled. “What counts as barren? You have to replant pumpkins every year, Hagrid told me that, which means the land’s not doing anything right now… And—would it be mad if I sat with Eugene until you graduate?”

Draco understood the connection at once. “Oh, Harry,” he said gently, “there’s other desolate land in England.”

Harry’s head whipped up, upset. “Draco! How’s that helping?!”

“I just mean, you can at least go get warm. Whether at school or in London or wherever, you’ll just have to trust that I’m doing okay.”

“But does it tempt you?”

Draco investigated his face with reckless abandon. He loved Harry’s face. It made him feel the way it felt to see the soil soak up their potion the first day or the way it felt to catch sight of the first sprouts, the vines, the emerging miniature fruits, the ripe ones. It was the feeling of organic happiness. If at any point he decided that pumpkins had been the most unexpected origin of such joy that autumn, it would only be because he’d forgotten about Harry.

Forgotten.

He had come to school with Sinister Spellwork and Powerful Potions for the simple reason that he’d never fully unpacked his trunk from the fractured year before. It had slid under the lining—the trunk was ageing—and he’d folded his trousers right on top of it. Insidious, it had slipped in the shadows of the new life he was packing up.

Then, it had reappeared when he was at the greatest risk of flipping through its pages. He’d made it a fortnight at school before deciding he was in entirely over his head. Sure, Harry Potter was quiet in class, but he was doing okay. They all were. Hermione Granger was excelling. Blaise practically had jobs lined up. The denim jacket in his closet was like a helpful, haunting reminder that he was at his best when his identity was masked.

He took to pacing hallways of less-populated storeys, tramping a route into his subconscious that would surely be the one he tread habitually if he became a ghost. He turned a corner suddenly, one day, not expecting to see anyone, and instead ran headfirst into a young girl.

“Shit,” he said in surprise, grabbing her shoulders in reflex. “Sorry.”

He watched as she recovered from the collision, looked up calmly to respond with her mouth open, and then scanned his face with her eyes. Never had he seen terror flash so quickly onto a face—or not since the manor had been abandoned by a certain political faction. Her face screwed up. He removed his hands quickly.

“Are you lost?” he asked.

Her elbows pressed into her sides like she was trying to make herself as small as science would allow. She whimpered, twisted on her heels, and ran away from him—ran.

He was no idiot. He knew what it felt like to be recognised and he remembered what it looked like to scare someone. He’d done it now just by existing. Her face hung in his mind for days, until, while looking for parchment to write his parents, he’d felt the lump of the book beneath the satin of the trunk.

In his memory, the book fell open to the potion, but he knew it was much more likely that he’d found it flipping through and resonated so strongly with its promise that he forgot everything else he saw printed on adjacent pages. It was a memory potion, but no average forgetfulness-maker. Instead, it promised to remove the potioneer’s existence from collective memory.

When he saw that girl outside Professor Flitwick’s classroom the next day, he felt as if it wrenched him out of his body, and he knew he wanted to feel that way all the time. He wanted to no longer be in Draco Malfoy’s body or at least a body that others perceived to be Draco Malfoy’s. He would become someone new, and his name would be something like Mark or Brandon, unremarkable, unmemorable. He’d be a shop clerk with a small flat in Manchester, or a man who sold rental brooms to tourists by the old World Cup stadium. There was nothing to lose and everything to gain, because he’d put so much work in already to ruin his chance of less-mediocre success.

His walk to the dry field by Hagrid’s hut was unemotional. Instead, he felt strangely calm, his mind made up. He hadn’t expected Harry to look at him like he was an entirely complex person, or to look at him with something other than blind hate.

And if Harry ever felt like admitting that he was ‘just looking’ at Draco that day and it ‘wasn’t that deep’, Draco said at this point in the story, their hands tightly weaved together, then he better reconsider. Ignorance was bliss; Draco knew this all too well. All that mattered wasn’t whether Harry had actually offered such a layered look in mid-September, but how it had made Draco feel.

“It was the first time since I returned to school that I felt something like a missed opportunity, if I was to do the potion,” he finished. “I reckoned I’d see it through—whatever I was getting into by joining you in Hagrid’s hut—and then get back on task. But it turns out I’ll never be done seeing this through. Not you or my friends or the big scary void of our futures. So consider the book gone.”

Harry had listened with effortful quietude, his hands slowly gripping Draco’s tighter and tighter. “It wouldn’t have worked on me,” he said, his voice raspy. “I would’ve remembered you.”

“By what, sheer force of willpower?”

He nodded like it was a fact of life. “Yep. Where’s the book?”

“Oh, erm, well, my bedroom.”

“Can you get it? I’ll wait.”

Draco ogled him. “You’ll wait… here?”

He nodded. Driven by the put-together way Harry had ingested the story, Draco found himself submitting far too quickly. He kissed his forehead, then left, walking stealthily through a school now under curfew, through the common room, and up to his room. Blaise was snoring. He got on all fours, pausing with a cringe when the floor creaked, then reached for the book.

Holding it on the way back to Harry was like holding hot coals, and he dropped it at the boy’s feet like it was searing the fingerprints off his hands, doing exactly what he’d once wanted it to do. Harry tucked it under an arm without a second glance, offering it a level of uninterest that stalled Draco completely, then said, “follow me,” and began down the path to the lake.

Draco kept up without a word, following him all the way to the pier and the especially midnight-coloured water, which would be an undeniable horror to fall into now. Harry stood two paces from the edge and gripped the book tightly in his hand. He reeled up, lifted his front left leg, and in one fell swoop lunged forward while orbiting his arm, sending the book plunging into the depths of the lake with the skilful power of a chaser.

“There,” he said simply. “Lots of dying gardens, but only one book.”

Draco wrapped a hand around the boy’s arm, feeling light. There was no reason Harry should know that the book was not out of print, that it was just down Knockturn Alley, within means, within reach. It wouldn’t matter.

“Mark doesn’t suit you anyway,” Harry said on their way back to the school. “Brandon?” he shook his head like he was getting a bad taste out. “You could only be Draco.”

*****

Draco watched Harry across the table. Fifteen minutes into Dumb Supper and he looked like he was going to explode if he couldn’t say a word. He’d never been particularly good about keeping his mouth shut.

The problem was, Harry wanted to talk so badly about how cool it was. It had really just begun, but already he felt like he understood its purpose on a deep level. The room chimed like the light work of a percussionist, the sound of silverware on plates and glasses on the tabletop. An empty seat alternated between each student, plenty of spaces for dead loved ones to sit.

Harry watched as the empty seats were offered dessert, then the entrée, then an appetiser, then rolls. Dinner worked backwards at a Dumb Supper. In the flickering light of their hand-carved candlesticks, Harry felt like he was watching life move backwards through the shutter and flash of a reversed slide projector. He tried to eat light, leaving room for the feast, but it didn’t take much work. The meal filled him with grief like a funeral, and he felt the letters to family in his pocket with every shift in his chair.

The somberness with which Draco ate was the work of a seasoned professional, and though he glanced often at the empty chairs beside him, Harry didn’t think it right to ask who he’d written to and invited to the table. Instead, he busied his eyes with observations around the table. A Hufflepuff girl three seats away from him was sniffling as she ate and, occasionally, spooned some of her own food on one of the plates for spirits beside her, an offering of seconds.

Ron ate so quietly that Harry thought someone might have told him that not even the sound of movement was allowed, though it wasn’t his first Dumb Supper either, but he also looked decidedly grim. Hermione had disclosed, when he’d gone off to talk to Ginny about the rescheduled Ravenlcaw-Slytherin match, that he was apprehensive about opening doors of sorrow that he’d closed in the summer. She reached across the empty seat between them intermittently to touch him with encouragement.

Without a word, Draco stood when the meal was finished, took a dripping candlestick, and lit a fire in the cauldron at the centre of the table. Those who had experienced a Dumb Supper knew from experience what the rest of them knew from Draco’s debriefing before they’d entered the sacred space: in the flames would go their notes to their loved ones.

Harry’s notes were brief, addressed to James and Lily, to Sirius, to Remus, to Fred, and, finally, a note to himself, or at least to the version of himself that had lived so fleetingly in the whitewashed King’s Cross. He had the extraordinary privilege of having spoken to many of them again already, when he’d been the short-lived—literally—owner of the resurrection stone.

Draco had just the one letter, which he’d addressed to Severus and which he had an immense difficulty letting go of for fire to take. He wondered if anyone else had invited the professor to sit at their table. He found peace in knowing that just one invite was enough.

They all stood, said a silent goodbye to the room and its guests, and then opened the door. The world was quiet, then—“HUSH, HUSH, HUSH, HERE COMES THE BOGIE MAN. DON’T LET HIM COME TOO CLOSE TO YOU, HE’LL CATCH YOU IF HE CAN…”

The noise of the ghost chorus was startling after so long in the quiet, but it was inviting, too, over the sound of students laughing and talking. The Dumb Supper guests began to separate, diversifying speed and direction, and Draco took the chance to catch up with Harry, walking so their shoulders brushed.

“Well?” he asked. “What did you make of it?”

The practice, with its Pagan origins, had felt older than Harry’s ancestry. Having sat through it, he now felt nonsensical worrying about it exuding Dark Magic. The entire ceremony felt too archaic to be anything but a true, ancient neutral.

“I was so daft,” he said, “saying what I did about Dumb Suppers. That felt… what’s the word?”

“Harmless? Wearisome?”

“Hallowed,” said Harry.

Draco looked quieted by the remark.

“You’ll have to invite me to the next one,” he said, this time earning the widest smile he might ever have from Draco. It reached the crow’s feet of his eyes and all the way to his back teeth. It caught Harry up like a tangle of roots in the dirt.

The Great Hall was dazzling with candles, glowing Jack-o-lanterns, black drapery, and an artful rendition of old Halloween tunes by the ghost choir Professor McGonagall had hired to perform. Harry was prouder of the pumpkins than he had any right to be. They looked magnificent. The food wasn’t out yet, so students meandered among the tables, occasionally tossing hazelnuts into the fireplaces on the ends of the hall and giggling.

Harry separated from his friends, wandering from table to table, observing the ceremonial candles that lined them, lit to shine like a lighthouse for the spirits, inviting them home for a night.

“Mr Potter,” he heard, and when he turned, he saw that it was Professor Wilheard, standing wide-shouldered with a bowl of hazelnuts in hand. He groaned internally, then pulled a smile across his face.


“Hello, sir,” he said. “Happy Halloween.”

“So this is the grand task that’s been keeping my star student from providing his utmost attention.”

Harry scratched his head. “I think I would’ve had to get good marks first to be your star student. I’m just your student.”

The professor shook his head dismissively. “Bah! Nonsense. You’ve had a clear case of Pyrrhic victory since we met, young man. Your presence exceeds expectations in my book.”

“A peer-a what?” Harry asked, mystified.

“A Pyrrhic victory. A victory of war that still manages to devastate its victor. I saw it in your eyes the second you sat in my class. I know the look in a man when he’s been face to face with the Dark Arts and lost only marginally less than he won.”

Harry regarded the man anew. “I… that sounds about right, sir.”

He nodded sympathetically. “Well, if you feel it fading and you need to busy your hands with something other than the festivities, you know where my office is. I’ve got to finish off this bowl of hazelnuts. It would appear I’m destined to love a fair number of women.”

Harry laughed as he walked away, feeling like they’d only met just now.

“What’s so funny?” Draco asked, appearing over his shoulder with two glasses of pumpkin juice. He handed one over. “Taste.”

“Professor Wilheard’s diagnosed me with a Pyrrhic victory,” Harry said, relishing the familiarity of the drink on his tongue.

The other boy crossed an arm over his chest, pressing a finger to his lips. “Hm,” he said. “How succinct of him.”

“I suppose all this time I should’ve just given Professor Wilheard the time of day instead of you.”

Draco scowled. “That’s not what you want.”

“No, I think I’ve made much greater realisations growing pumpkins with you than I will grading papers for him. And I’ve come to the conclusion—it’s not about what I want, anyway. Like your note says, right? ‘I don’t know what I want but I know how to get it’. You’re my ‘how’, not my ‘what’.”

Draco stared at Harry, thinking he might as well be speaking Parseltongue. “What note?”

“The—your note. The one you keep—here.” He reached into the denim jacket and pulled out a small, smooth piece of paper with fuzzy edges and fading writing. Draco read it twice. “What I mean is, you’re the second half, you see? I’ve always thought you were the what—the subject of hatred or-or desire, right? But you’re the how. You’re how my life turns out. You’re how I become happy, or… my god, I’ve come on immensely strong and horribly explained, haven’t I? Look at you.” Harry’s face was melting into concern.

Draco hadn’t noticed the grimace in his expression until it put worry on the other boy’s face. “No, wonderful sentiment, honestly, Harry,” he assured him. “I… you’ve put it into words better than I ever can. Because I can’t find any at all for what you—or this—The problem is, erm… those aren’t my words either. The ones in your hand.”

“It’s your jacket.”

“It’s your jacket,” Draco said meaningfully. “But I found the note when I bought it. I have no clue what it means.”

“What what means?” Blaise hooked an arm around Draco’s neck, dragging him into a momentary stumble, which he corrected with a grouse. He handed the note to Blaise.

“I don’t know… to get it…” He stared blankly for a moment, then his eyes lit, and he flicked the paper with his free hand in triumph. “Sex Pistols,” he said. “That one song about anarchy.”

Harry’s jaw slackened. “It’s the bloody Sex Pistols? Piss off—I reinterpreted anarchy for… for love?”

Draco smiled, a culmination of happiness surrounded by their friends, their harvest, and their classmates. It wasn’t perfect. Ron kept glancing at Harry and Draco’s careless camaraderie with confusion, and a fair number of students kept a wide birth of the Slytherin eighth years. The enormity of the Great Hall still dwarfed their supply of pumpkins. But things didn’t have to grow in perfect conditions, just decent ones.

“You keep finding love in the most unconventional places,” he said. And he took Harry’s face in his hands without hesitation or desire for invisibility and imagined kissing him there, before dinner had even been served. A whole meal for people to talk. He saw in Harry’s eyes no fear, just glinting greenness and anticipation. It was a welcome sign, a go ahead, if you dare.

Draco kissed him. He heard the conversations closest to them drift off in distraction, but he also heard the sounds of the party persisting past their corner of the Great Hall. The world was still turning; the ghosts were still singing. When they parted, Harry had broken into a wide smile. He shimmered like the sun bouncing against the Great Lake’s water. He tasted like pumpkin.