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Moaning Myrtle refuses to talk to him, so what other choice does Harry have than to find Draco in the infirmary and confront him? (It’s a rhetorical question. Harry knows better than to ask any of his friends for their opinion on the matter.)

The door creaks only slightly, but still, the noise gives him away in the otherwise quiet hospital wing. Draco’s bed is the only one occupied, and Harry glances at the dark corner where Madam Pomfrey’s office is located before he takes off the cloak. For a few seconds, there is no sound but their shallow breathing and the footfall of Harry’s second-favourite trainers (the ones not soaked in Draco’s blood).

Harry sinks into the chair, and Draco looks at him with the dull eyes of somebody recently slashed open, and says only, “Why?” 

Harry has no explanation, no excuse, no answer. He came to demand all of those from Draco, but all he ends up saying is, “I’m sorry.” 

It’s quiet for a while, and it feels strange. There’s not usually silence when they are anywhere near each other. Harry fiddles with his invisibility cloak, focuses on how his fingers flicker in and out of sight. Outside, trees rustle as a gust of wind blows through them. Clouds veil the moon, and for a few seconds, Harry can’t see anything anymore.

“Where did I go wrong?” Draco whispers into the darkness. 

Harry doesn’t know where to begin. He could list a million wrongdoings, starting with the day they first met and ending with Draco aiming an unforgivable curse at him not three hours ago. He isn’t sure if he should name them now that Draco has asked. 

Draco takes another shallow breath. Harry is pretty certain that the following pained whimper isn’t just his imagination, but before he can open his mouth to apologise a second time, Draco says, “What am I supposed to do now?” 

Harry is about to ask what exactly he means, but the next gust of wind hits the window façade with an obnoxious creak, and the words die in his throat, unheard.

Moonlight falls on Draco’s left arm, bared between them.

“Please.”

∞∞∞

The wind blows, the sun rises, and Draco Malfoy is no longer a Death Eater. 

∞∞∞

Harry knows that his chances of getting out of detention in time to catch the end of the match against Ravenclaw are practically non-existent, but that still doesn’t keep him from checking the clock every other minute. When Snape finally lets him go, it is after one. The Marauder’s Map confirms what the non-existent noise outside has told him already — the match is over, and the Gryffindor common room is packed. 

Harry points his wand at the map to erase it and falters. Just next to the point where his wand touches the parchment, up on the seventh floor, there is an inert dot labelled ‘Vincent Crabbe’.

Getting into the Room of Requirement is easy now that Harry knows what to ask for, but finding Draco is more of a challenge. He dimly remembers having passed the vanishing cabinet when he was hiding the Prince’s book, but when he locates it again after a good ten minutes of searching, Draco is nowhere to be seen. 

Still hidden underneath the cloak, Harry creeps along the valley of trinkets and rubbish, taking turns at random. Exactly what it is he’s looking for, Harry isn’t sure. He has already confirmed that Draco isn’t secretly continuing his work on the vanishing cabinet. (Also, Draco would have to be rather mental to reveal his plan to Dumbledore and nonetheless proceed with it.) 

Harry is just … well, curious. And also going in circles, it seems. If the human-sized statue of a Teenage Mutant Hero Turtle at this junction isn’t the same as the one he passed only a few minutes ago, he’ll eat one of its swords. Now, if only he could remember where he was coming from the first time he saw it. Great.

He draws his wand, places it on his flat palm and says, “Point me.” His wand does nothing at all, not even when he nudges it with his other hand or tries the spell two more times. All in all, it takes him an embarrassingly long time to realise that his wand has been pointing north from the very start. What comes quickly afterwards is the realisation that he has no idea in which direction the door is. The enchantment of the room has outfitted it with massive windows on all four sides, so that is no help either.

Maybe if he calls for Dobby …

Someone hiccups, and Harry flinches so hard that he nearly drops his wand. Drawing the invisibility cloak tighter around his body, he slinks into the direction of the noise. He finds Draco sitting in an armchair that’s in suspiciously pristine condition. Draco, on the other hand, is a mess. His face is pale, his eyes are red, and his expression is miserable.

“Get it together,” he hisses, presumably to himself. “It’s going to be fine … We’ll make it … Everything’s going to be fine.”

For a moment, Harry considers approaching him. He really doesn’t fancy another broken nose, though. 

∞∞∞

When he finally reaches the Fat Lady, Quidditch is the last thing on Harry’s mind. But then her portrait swings open, and he is being dragged into the common room by a horde of boisterous Gryffindors, and suddenly it is all he can think about, at least for a moment, at least until Ginny runs towards him with that look on her face — 

She kisses him, and he doesn’t think about Draco for the rest of the day. 

∞∞∞

Harry really isn’t keen on walking in on Draco crying a third time. So before he goes up to the Room of Requirement two weeks later, he checks the map to ensure Draco is at dinner. 

Locating the Prince’s book is easy, thanks to that ugly bust that Harry dressed in a wig and tiara. He doesn’t dare take it out of the room, though, so he finds a nearby couch, cleans it roughly and takes his quill and parchment from his bag.

Slughorn’s essay on the intricacies of brewing Amortentia practically writes itself now that Harry has access to all of the Prince’s additional insights again, and he is on his third scroll before he even knows it.

Hurried footsteps round a corner, and Harry upends his ink bottle as he shoots to his feet. 

“Merlin!” Draco yelps as he notices Harry with his wand drawn, and he flinches so hard that he careens into the tower of trinkets to his left, which immediately topples. 

Harry shoots forward and drags Draco out of the way just an instant before an enormous stash of books crashes to the ground, followed by a plethora of unidentifiable but noisy rubbish as well as what sounds like a sturdy grandfather clock. They stand stock-still for a moment, watching the nearest trinket tower wobble with bated breath to see if it will follow. 

When nothing happens, Draco wrenches his arm out of Harry’s hold and rubs it with a sour look. “You are aware you could’ve cast Protego?”  

Harry rolls his eyes and wades through the sea of rubbish to gather up his book and essay from the now ink-soaked couch. 

“You’re aware you could have cast Protego yourself?” he asks casually, aiming a kick at a fanged frisbee that’s snapping at his ankle.

Draco ignores this very valid objection and says, “We could have both ended up getting buried, and then who would get us out?”

“Dobby.”

“Dobby?” Draco asks, his voice unusually high. “Does he belong to you, then?”

Harry spins around on the spot. “He doesn’t belong —!” Harry pauses, leaning his head back so he doesn’t have to look at Draco’s uncomprehending face. “God,” he mutters. “He’s free, get it? He just happens to like me, so he helps me out when he can.”

Draco frowns. “Is that supposed to be a good thing? For him?”

“He is pretty happy, yeah.”

“House-elves don’t want to —”

“Why do you assume to know what makes Dobby happy? Have you ever actually asked him?”

Draco rolls his eyes and shakes his head like Harry is being absolutely ridiculous, but he doesn’t actually say anything. 

“Figures,” Harry says. “Now, if you would kindly fuck off? I had the room first.”

“I can’t leave,” Draco insists. “You leave.”

“Why not?” Harry crosses his arms and pretends like he has no clue that Draco only comes here to bawl his eyes out. Why, he’s not exactly sure. “No need to work on that cabinet anymore, remember?”

“Have you considered that it would be suspicious if I just stopped coming all of a sudden?” Draco asks. “Vince and Greg are not that oblivious. Both of their fathers are ...”

“Death Eaters,” Harry supplies as Draco says, “— in on it.”

They stare each other down for a moment, Harry with his arms still crossed, Draco with his wand gripped tightly. Out of the corner of his eyes, Harry thinks he sees the nearest trinket towers slide further away from them, but he refuses to break eye contact first. 

“Fine,” Draco snaps, eyes still fixed on Harry’s. “You can have this disgusting couch, and I’ll find a spot further back.”

“Fine,” Harry repeats. 

“Fine.” Draco turns on the spot, steps over an upset bird cage that’s aggressively flapping its door, and quickly vanishes. 

When Harry finally looks around, all the fallen trinkets have moved to form a ring around him and the empty spot where Draco stood. 

“Oh, don’t be dramatic.”

∞∞∞

Between Ginny, homework, Dumbledore’s lessons, and detention, Harry finds the time to go to the Room of Requirement about once a week. He only comes for his book, of course, but so far, Draco has been there every single time. Which isn’t actually all that surprising. According to the map, Draco is there most of the time. 

Harry strongly suspects that he comes up there to hide from the other Slytherins. And to cry some more, probably — which is precisely the reason why Harry has started to announce his presence by hitting the gong he’s found on a chest near the entrance. Although it is gigantic and looks like it would produce a bone-shaking sound, all that emerges as the mallet makes contact is a ridiculous bird song.

Today, Harry finds his couch occupied. Also, it’s not really his couch. One: it is not at all disgusting anymore. Two: it has gone from a worn out, patched-up two-seater to a … Harry doesn’t actually know the proper name for it. It’s got clubbed feet of gold and velvet upholstery with those squiggly lines of golden thread — in short, it looks insanely out of place. 

Harry comes to stand directly in front of this monstrosity and frowns down at Draco, who’s sprawled out with his arms crossed behind his head and his eyes closed. Harry doesn’t believe his casual façade for one second, but it does bring him some joy to imagine Draco coming here early to try out different poses. 

“What’s this, then?”

Draco must’ve decided that it makes him look more casual if he cracks open just one eye when really it just makes him look like a total wanker. Well, to be fair, he always looks like a wanker to Harry. 

“I’ve fixed your sofa,” Draco says indifferently. “Better, isn’t it?”

Harry scrunches up his nose. “I liked it better without some posh git all over it.”

“Well, I didn’t expect you to have taste. Like … what’s with that ridiculous gong you’re so obsessed with? I’ll never be able to hear another cuckoo without being reminded of this awful room.” Draco closes his eye again as if that will automatically make him the winner of the argument. 

“Really? That’s what you’re going with?” Harry considers insulting Draco’s stupid gelled hair in return and then decides that he really doesn’t have the energy. So he sighs instead and says, “You know what? I’m not even in the mood to fight right now. So just sod off, yeah? You’ve got the whole north half of the room for yourself.”

“What exactly is it that you’re even doing here, Potter?”

“None of your business.”

“Well, I see no reason to move, then.”

Harry sighs heavily, just to make clear how much of a burden Draco is. In general. “Homework, alright? This isn’t as crowded as the library or the common room. Usually.”

“Had enough of the She-Weasel already?”

Harry can’t help but scoff. “If I didn’t know better, I’d say you’re trying to rile me up.”

Again, Draco opens just one eye — the other one, this time — and turns one of his hands over to reveal a small box sitting on his palm. “Chocolate Frog?”

“Absolutely not.”

Draco shrugs and props himself up on his elbows rather unexpectedly. Harry takes a step back on instinct and only realises he has raised his wand when Draco’s eyes snap to it. 

The git grins. “There it is.”

∞∞∞

When Harry goes up to meet Draco next, it’s on purpose. 

By the time Draco enters the Room of Requirement, it looks exactly like it did when the D.A. last assembled there - plus the cuckoo gong, which doesn’t really serve any purpose other than to annoy Draco specifically. Which is to say, it is the most important item in the room.

It’s not the gong that draws Draco’s ire. His eyes fall on Ron and Hermione first, and his previously neutral expression turns into a sneer in an instant. 

“What are they doing here?”

“They’re training with us,” Harry says. “Obviously.”

“You told them?” Draco asks, voice icy.

“It would be stupid not to invite them. In case you haven’t noticed, we’re going to war. We could all use the practice.”

Draco’s face twists into something ugly. “You told them about me?”

Harry frowns. “Did you think I wouldn’t?”

“Don’t worry,” Hermione says in a remarkably civil voice. “We won’t tell anyone.”

“Yeah,” Ron adds flippantly. “Because we’re actually Harry’s friends and not just mindless lackeys.”

“They’re trustworthy,” Harry says. “You don’t need to worry about them.”

“No,” Draco snaps, turning on his heels.

“What are you gonna tell Goyle, then?” Harry asks. “That you worked on your top-secret life-or-death mission for a minute and then decided you weren’t in the mood?”

It can’t be easy to sulk for an hour and a half straight, but Draco somehow pulls it off. Well, his mood probably isn’t helped by the fact that he isn’t fast enough to disarm Harry even once. (Harry, on the other hand, hasn’t been this elated all week.) 

Draco kicks the gong on his way out, which earns him a cheerful ‘cuckoo’ and a limp that persists until breakfast the next day. 

∞∞∞

“Morning,” Ron says when Harry opens his curtains late one Sunday morning. He is lounging in the window seat of their otherwise deserted dormitory, and Harry gets the feeling that he has been waiting for him to wake up. 

“Did something happen?” Harry asks as he sits on the edge of his bed and summons a pair of socks. 

“What?” Ron rubs the back of his neck casually. “No. Why?”

“You’re acting weird.”

“Am not.”

Harry raises an eyebrow. “Sure …”

Ron’s eyes are fixed on a spot to Harry’s right. Harry can see the wheels turning inside his head, but he isn’t sure how to help the whole process along. When nothing else is said for a whole minute, Harry slaps his knees and gets up in search of a reasonably clean shirt. “Well, I’m going to see if they’re still serving breakfast.”

“Alright, fine!” Ron blurts out as he slides off the window seat. “I’m … well, it’s nothing, really …”

By the way Ron’s ears are turning red, Harry can tell that it’s definitely something. Any chances of catching breakfast recede into the distance. Harry knows better than to probe, though, so he merely hums and pretends to be very focused on buttoning his shirt straight. 

“It’s … well, I had this dream last night …”

Harry looks up sharply, and Ron quickly puts up his hands. 

“Not that kind of dream.” He pauses, and his ears turn even redder. “Not like your visions, I mean. Just a dream that got me thinking.”

“Okay,” Harry says and focuses back on his shirt. “What was it about?”

“Ah, well …” Ron turns around to look out of the window, revealing a neck that is just as red as his ears. “It wasn’t really anything specific, per se. But when I woke up, I … well, I could’ve sworn my arm was … burning.”

“Your arm?” 

“My forearm, yes.”

“Like … the Mark?”

“Exactly!” Ron exclaims, wheeling around to face him full-on now. “But when I checked, there was nothing there.”

Harry doesn’t make fun of Ron for actually checking whether a dream might have left him with the Dark Mark. Ron wouldn’t either. Besides, he knows perfectly well how realistic some dreams can be. 

“Can I … Do you think I could … see yours?” Ron asks suddenly, interrupting Harry’s thoughts. 

“My arm?” Harry asks, more than a little bit confused. Nevertheless, he extends his left arm as Ron approaches. 

“Other side,” Ron says, coming to stand just in front of him. 

Thoroughly puzzled now, Harry holds out his other arm and rolls up the sleeve to reveal the faint scar where Wormtail took his blood. Another year or two, and it will fade entirely if he’s lucky. Knowing his track record concerning luck, that’s a rather big if. 

Ron lifts his wand and taps Harry’s wrist. “Revelio.”

Harry opens his mouth to ask what the hell Ron is looking for, when it appears out of nowhere — just a fine line of golden ink at first, starting at Harry’s wrist and winding its way up and down, making his skin tingle with every stroke. It takes only a few seconds, and then they’re looking at a rough sketch of a horse, made of a single continuous line. 

“When did you know?” Ron asks, his voice husky. It dimly reminds Harry of that time when Ron accused him of putting his name in the Goblet of Fire. Jealous. 

“What?” Harry mutters, his eyes glued to the animal. “That I had a hidden tattoo?”

“That Ginny is your soulmate.”

Harry’s eyes snap up to meet Ron’s. “I’m sorry, what? What does that have to do with anything?”

“Her Patronus is a horse, mate. Who else would your mark refer to?”

“What?” Harry repeats. 

“Don’t tell me you’re dating somebody else who also has a horse Patronus.”

“Ron, you’re not making any sense.”

Ron grabs his wrist and shakes it, clearly growing impatient. “You’ve got this soulmark, right?”

“I don’t know! Is that what this is?”

“Yes!”

“Well, that’s the first I’ve heard about any of this! You’ll have to explain it to me.”

“Merlin’s pants, Harry!” Ron plops himself down on Harry’s bed and drags him along by his wrist so that they end up facing each other. There’s silence for a few seconds, during which Ron’s eyes search the canopy, and his long fingers flex around Harry’s wrist. Finally, he shakes his head and lets go. 

“All right,” he says slowly. “So, this is a soulmark. For it to appear, two things have to be true. You have to love someone. And the person you’re in love with has to be the right person for you — someone who’ll make you happy for the rest of your life. Usually, your soulmark and your soulmate’s Patronus take the same form.”

“Why?”

“You’re asking me?” Ron scoffs. “Supposedly, your Patronus is a reflection of your essence as a person or something, right?”

“What if your soulmate can’t produce a corporal Patronus?”

“Doesn’t matter; it’s not really supposed to be an identifying factor, seeing as you get your mark the moment you fall in love with your soulmate. Also, your arm gets all hot when it happens, so you know instantly. Didn’t you notice your arm burning?”

Harry shrugs. “I don’t know. Weird things happen to me all the time.” Sunlight falls on his knife scar as he turns his arm this way and that. “Sometimes this stupid scar gets all itchy. It might have burned, but I figured it was healing. I’m not keeping track.”

Nothing is said for a few seconds. Ron’s eyes are fixed on the mark, and he opens and closes his mouth several times before finally asking, “You seriously didn’t know about soulmarks?”

Harry can feel his eyebrows draw together. “You think the Dursleys told me?”

“No,” Ron says, sucking on his lower lip. “But this is our sixth year. Didn’t I tell you once that my parents are soulmates?”

“I thought that was a metaphor!”

“Nah, mate. It’s real.” Ron looks from Harry’s face to the mark and then out the window. His voice sounds bitter when he mutters, “Can’t believe you got yours and didn’t even notice.”

Determined not to respond to this remark, Harry lifts his wrist to take another look. Up close, he realises the mark is not just a line but a very fine chain made up of tiny golden links. He isn’t sure whether he actually likes it or not. Aesthetically. 

“So … this thing means we’re soulmates? Ginny and me?”

“Oh no,” Ron says. “Your soulmark only tells you who your soulmate is. It doesn’t mean you’re hers as well. She could have someone else entirely — theoretically, of course!” Ron adds after a quick look at Harry’s face. “They match most of the time, so long as you both love each other. And you know she’s had a pash on you since you first met.”

Harry twists his elbow so he can inspect his mark upside down, see if there’s something he’s missed. It seems to be straightforward, though. Clearly a horse. 

“But what if I’m not the right person for her?”

Ron gives him an incredulous look. “Sure, yeah. You’ve only faced off You-Know-Who about five times. You’re obviously inadequate.”

Harry scoffs. “Why would that matter when it comes to me and her?” 

“Don’t you want her to be your soulmate?” Ron asks, on the defence in an instant.

“Yes!” Harry says instantly. “No!” He pauses to contemplate, but Ron looks more than just slightly irritated now, and that makes it hard to think. “I don’t know. I want her to be with me because she likes me, not because this thing chains her to me.”

“What does it matter?” Ron asks, jumping to his feet. “If your marks match, that’s a guarantee that you’ll be together and happy until the end!”

“How do you know?” Harry shoots back, and now he’s on his feet as well. “What if this is just another bloody prophecy? What if it only comes true because people believe in it?”

Ron crosses his arms so tightly he might actually crack his ribcage. “Well, I’ve never heard of a couple with compatible marks separating, so I’d say the magic is pretty accurate.”

“Okay, let’s say I am her soulmate,” Harry says. “What if I die? Does that mean she’ll never meet anyone else who’s right for her? That’s terrible!”

“I don’t know, mate,” Ron says, rubbing the back of his neck. “I think I’ve got a distant cousin whose wife died, and he got another mark when he fell in love with his second wife? I don’t really like to think about that kind of stuff.”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” Harry demands. “That there could be a hundred girls who are right for me, but whoever I fall in love with first gets to be my soulmate?”

Ron throws his arms up in agitation and nearly slaps his own face in the process. “Why are you so narked about this? I thought you wanted to be with Ginny!”

“I do! But not because I’m prophesied to be!”

“Some people never meet their soulmate,” Ron snaps. “Just take the win.”

“But —” Harry says, a million different thoughts crashing through his head. None of them is likely to fix this rift building between him and Ron, who has clearly been raised to believe in the concept. They’ll never be seeing eye to eye on this. 

“Maybe you’re right,” Harry allows after a second of silence. “I guess I’m just penned up with everything that’s been going on. I’m happy about this! ‘Course I am. She’s brilliant!”

Ron nods stiffly but doesn’t say anything. 

Harry can only think of one thing that will appease him. “Hey, let’s go for a spin, yeah? We could take turns on the Firebolt.”

Instantly, Ron’s cloudy expression brightens. “Brilliant idea!” he shouts, already bent over his trunk in search of his gear. “But you’re explaining to Hermione why we’ve deviated from her bloody homework schedule.”

“Yeah,” Harry mutters as he strokes the chain with one finger, and instantly the mare rears up and launches into a gallop along Harry's arm. He wonders whether a soulmark is supposed to flee from its owner's touch. “Leave it to me.”

∞∞∞

For three days after Ron’s fateful dream, Harry ponders whether he should have a talk with Ginny about the whole soulmate business. By the time their schedules finally align for a half-hour stroll around the lake at lunchtime, he has decided firmly against the idea. 

For one, he is unsure how to go about the whole business. A crush is one thing, but basically asking her if she’s in love with him already, after only six weeks of dating? Harry thinks that would be a bit presumptuous. 

Besides … it doesn’t matter, does it? If Ginny wants to be with him, then that’s all Harry needs to know for this to work out — mark or no mark. 

∞∞∞

Dumbledore finds one of the Horcruxes. 

Retrieving the locket is nothing but a nightmare, and by the time they disapparate from the cliff sides, Dumbledore’s entire weight is on Harry. He collapses as soon as they reach Hogsmeade, and there is no way that Harry is going to be able to drag him all the way to the castle. 

It takes Harry three tries until he manages to produce his Patronus, and he grudgingly sends it to fetch Snape. Thankfully, that is when Madam Rosmerta spots them and helps Harry haul Dumbledore into the Three Broomsticks. Once they’re inside, she immediately scurries off in search of her first aid potions kit, which seems necessary, because Dumbledore is growing weaker by the moment. 

As Harry tries to manoeuvre Dumbledore’s limp body into a somewhat upright sitting position in one of the larger booths, he accidentally jostles him, causing Dumbledore to lose his hold on his wand. Harry is quick to gather it up and press it back into his good hand, but Dumbledore’s fingers won’t grip it. It seems like he doesn’t even realise he has dropped it, and Harry kneels down on the cold and unyielding stone floor in front of him, still clutching both wands desperately. 

“Don’t worry, Professor,” he says — like he isn’t sick with worry himself. “Snape will be here any second, and then we’ll get you to the hospital wing.”

Dumbledore wheezes and lifts his head slightly to look at him. “Get Draco,” he mutters, clearly delirious. “Moondew. The password.”

“I think that Madam Pomfrey —”

Dumbledore’s hand lifts slowly before falling down on Harry’s forearm with all the weight of a half-giant’s. “No. Draco.”

“But —”

“It is time.”

“Time for what, Professor?”

Dumbledore shakes his head minutely and makes an effort to lift his chin a bit higher. “Take him to Minerva,” he says, and Harry can tell how much care he puts into making every word as clear as possible. “Don’t let anyone see you. She needs to send someone for Narcissa. Take them both to Grimmauld Place.”

Madam Rosmerta is still upstairs, but Harry lowers his voice nonetheless. “Grimmauld — I don’t understand. I thought — You said Draco was safe here. That he doesn’t suspect him yet —”

“We’ve just stolen from him, Harry. I am weakened. We can’t take the risk. I want you to take the locket and go.”

“The locket?” Harry hisses, startled. “But why? Isn’t it safer with you?”

“Just a precaution, Harry.” Dumbledore coughs and presses the Horcrux into Harry’s hand. Even against Harry’s icy skin, Dumbledore’s fingertips are freezing. “Keep an eye on it while I am unwell. Go now.”

“But, Sir —”

“Now.”

“I should stay with —”

Dumbledore’s voice hardens. “You swore to obey me, Harry — go!” 

With one last look at Dumbledore’s face — strained but determined — Harry stuffs the Horcrux into his pocket and tears off towards the castle. 

∞∞∞

Harry casts a Muffliato around Draco’s bed and lowers himself onto the foot end. He draws the curtains shut around them before slipping off the cloak. Draco is fast asleep, snoring into his pillow. 

“Malfoy. Draco. Wake up.”

“Merlin, not this again,” Draco mumbles. He drags the corner of his blanket up to shield his face. 

“No, it’s me,” Harry whispers sternly, tugging on the blanket. The urge to string Draco up in the air by his ankle is strong, but Draco’s screams might just stretch the limits of his Muffliato.

“Not tonight, Potter,” Draco says firmly, his eyes still closed. “Come back another night.”

Maybe Harry will have to resort to dragging him out of bed with a spell after all. “It’s time,” he hisses. “Dumbledore wants me to take you and your mother to a safe house.”

“What?” Draco mumbles. 

“You’re leaving tonight,” Harry says, ripping the blanket off his body. “Come on.”

Draco jolts up instantly. “What happened?” he hisses, wide-eyed. “And why are you so wet?”

Harry leans back to escape Draco’s inquiring hands. “Midnight swim. Come on, we’re in a hurry. Pack a bag. Just what you can’t live without, understand? Don’t wake them up.”

“Is this a joke?” Draco asks, clearly hoping that Harry will say yes. 

“No. Come on, hurry.”

It takes Draco only thirty seconds and two spells to send all his stuff flying into his trunk and shrink it down to fit into the pocket of his dressing gown. (So much for packing just the bare necessities.) He sinks back onto the bed and closes the gap he’s made in between the curtains before asking, “Now what?”

“McGonagall’s office,” Harry whispers, pointing it out on the map he’s unfolded on the bed. “We’ll have to steer clear of Peeves in the Great Hall, and Mrs Norris seems to be patrolling the grand staircase.”

“Where did you get that map?” Draco asks. His breath hitches as he leans forward to take a closer look. “Is that blood on your hand?”

Instead of answering his questions, Harry indicates a path. “We should be alright to take the staircase up to the entrance hall if we’re quiet. Then we’ll take this secret passage here, which will lead us to this spot just outside her office.”

“Some of these dots are moving,” Draco says, tapping one of the girls’ dormitories. “Does that mean some of them are still up?”

“Yeah. Don’t worry.”

“Don’t worry?” Draco hisses. “What if someone comes up to the common room and sees us?”

“Don’t worry,” Harry repeats. “We’ll take my invisibility cloak.”

Draco looks very unimpressed. “Are you seriously telling me that this is Dumbledore’s plan? The two of us under one mingy cloak?” He makes a point of pulling the map closer and scrutinising it for several long seconds. Finally, he asks, sounding rather annoyed, “Where is he anyway?”

Harry wonders whether it wouldn’t be easier if he just knocked Draco out and dragged him all the way to McGonagall’s office. “It’s my plan, and it’s gonna work, alright? The three of us have managed to squeeze under the cloak countless times. And Ron’s a bit taller than you, I’d say. Now let’s go.”

“You’re dripping,” Draco says pointedly. “You’ll leave a trail from my bed straight to her office. Is that what you’re planning to do?”

“Lord, give me strength,” Harry mutters, tipping his head back so he doesn’t have to look at Draco’s irritating face anymore. The worst thing is that Draco has a point, and that Harry’s thoughts are too jumbled for him to remember how to do the stupid drying spell. “Fine,” he presses out through clenched teeth. “Do you think you could —”

The blast of warm air hits Harry before he can finish the sentence, and he is loath to admit even to himself that it feels nothing short of amazing. His shoulders drop instantly, and that’s when he realises that he’s been tied up in knots in the first place.

“Thanks,” he mutters. He can’t exactly bring himself to look at Draco while he says it, so he busies himself with folding the map instead. When it’s safe inside his pocket, he adds, “Come here, then.”

But Draco’s eyes are wide, and he stays rooted to his spot on the other end of the bed. He looks terrified, and Harry can’t blame him. If he were the one defecting from Voldemort’s service, he wouldn’t be calm either. 

They don’t have time for this, though. He needs to hand Draco over to McGonagall and then go back and make sure Dumbledore’s alright. It’s unlikely that Dumbledore has told anyone but him that they are hunting Horcruxes, but who knows what he could let slip to Snape in the state he’s in? If Dumbledore is wrong about him … If Voldemort finds out that they know …

Harry groans and scoots over until their legs are pressed together. Draco is incredibly tense against him, clearly fighting the urge to bolt. Harry throws the cloak over their heads and then tries to sort it out so all of their limbs are covered, which quickly turns out to be impossible while they’re still sitting.

“Alright,” Harry says, grabbing Draco’s upper arm. “I’ll count to three, and then we’ll get up. Our feet are gonna be visible, so we’ll have to make sure nobody looks our way. So, no talking.”

Draco simply nods, his lips pressed together tightly. They get up smoothly, and the cloak immediately rises up to their shins. 

“Of course,” Draco hisses, and Harry digs an elbow into his side to shut him up. Still, Draco mutters, “This is idiotic.”

Before Harry can shush him, Draco tears his arm from Harry’s grip and puts it around Harry’s back, rooting him to the spot. Draco’s hand settles on Harry’s far shoulder, pushing him a step forward, and then Draco is close behind him, taking hold of the other shoulder as well. Harry’s heart is beating an irregular, confused rhythm, but the cloak is now down to the top of his still-damp second-favourite trainers (the ones now sprinkled with his own blood).

“Go!” Draco whispers, and Harry can practically feel his lips moving against the top of his head. Well, maybe he is exaggerating just a bit, but they really are awfully close. He can definitely feel Draco breathing, and it makes the hair at his neck stand on end. 

One of Draco’s dorm mates turns around forcefully, and Draco’s fingers dig into Harry’s shoulders as they wait with bated breath for the bed frame to cease creaking. When silence falls again, Draco pushes Harry forward, and they make their way up to the common room, which is thankfully deserted. The way out of the dungeons and into the entrance hall is uneventful as well — not counting the resentment building in Harry at being pushed around by Draco fucking Malfoy — but then they enter the unlit secret passage leading to the first floor, and Harry can’t see a thing. 

“Lumos,” he whispers and once again Draco’s nails dig into his shoulders, wrenching him to a stop as he leans over Harry’s shoulder to have a closer look.

“Whose wand are you holding? Is that … Potter, is that Dumbledore’s?” 

Harry’s heart sinks. In his outstretched hand, there are two lit wands. 

Draco inhales sharply. “Merlin, no. He’s dead, isn’t he? I’m going to die.”

“No!” Harry insists firmly. “No. Shit. Alright, listen. I’ve got to return this. McGonagall’s office is right around the corner, so just go ahead without me, alright? Tell her that Dumbledore wants her to send someone for your mother, and to take the two of you to Sirius’ place. And tell her to send Pomfrey to the Three Broomsticks, yeah?” 

“What — Potter, wait!”

Harry breaks free of Draco’s grip, rounds him and reaches the bottom of the stairs before Draco even manages to turn around. He shouldn’t leave Draco to fend for himself, he knows, only this is more important right now. 

But the Dark Mark appears above the pub just as Harry makes it back to the village, and Draco is right after all. 

Harry’s fight with Snape lasts maybe a minute or two, and then the fucking traitor is gone, taking all of Harry’s tentative hopes for the future with him. 

∞∞∞

Harry knows it’s his fault that Dumbledore is dead. He’s the one who sent his Patronus to Snape. The one who took Dumbledore’s wand with him. The one who left him defenceless. Nobody wants to say it, but Harry knows they think it too. 

Even when Harry confesses his guilt to Professor McGonagall, she just takes the wand off his hands with a stony expression, and reassures him that it wouldn’t have made a difference, not if Dumbledore was as weakened as Harry tells her. Not against Snape, whom Dumbledore trusted with his life.

If Harry had just been a little bit faster, just a minute earlier! Maybe then he would have managed to save Dumbledore. Maybe then it wouldn’t be Dumbledore’s corpse holding his wand right now.

He breaks up with Ginny right there at the funeral.

“I never gave up on you,” she tells him, after reassuring him that she understands his reasons. “But I can’t say I haven’t been expecting this.”

“I don’t know what’s going to happen,” Harry says carefully, “— what kind of person I’ll be when this is all over … I don’t want you to cling to the idea of this, Ginny. If we make it through, and we’re still right for each other, we’ll know, won’t we? But not because of this.” Harry raises his right wrist slightly and wiggles it before taking hold of her hand. “Because of this.”

Up until then, Ginny's face was solemn, but she manages a crooked smile now. “Wow,” she mutters, punching his shoulder lightly. “That was incredibly soppy.”

“Sorry,” Harry mutters. “I guess what I’m trying to say is … I just can’t live my life by another prophecy.”

“You know, we never talked about this,” Ginny says, raising her own wrist.

“Sorry,” Harry repeats. “I know it’s important to most people.”

Ginny frowns. “Most people?”

“Well, Ron seems pretty obsessed with the whole idea,” Harry says, and instantly he knows how Ginny will react.

She makes a face and says, in a tone that suggests he has gone mental, “Please tell me you’re not looking to Ron as the paragon of healthy dating.”

Harry feels the corners of his mouth twitch upwards. “You might have a point there.”

“I do,” Ginny says, and then her arms are around him. “Don’t worry about me. You don’t owe me anything. Go do what you have to. I’ll be alright.”

There is nothing else to be said, so they embrace for a moment, silent. Then Harry presses his lips against the top of her head and leaves to get accosted by Scrimgeour.

∞∞∞

Just two weeks after Draco and Narcissa’s extraction, Lucius Malfoy dies in Azkaban. 

Harry isn’t sure if anyone thinks to go to Grimmauld Place and tell them. He himself hasn’t been there since the Christmas before Sirius’ death, and he has no desire to ever go back either. 

But then the Ministry falls, and the Burrow isn’t safe anymore, and with nowhere else to go, Harry finds himself standing in the gloomy hallway after all, getting insulted by Mrs Black’s portrait.

∞∞∞

They quickly fall into a kind of rhythm. Draco and his mother take their meals in the dining room. Harry, Ron and Hermione keep to the kitchen. On the rare occasions that they run into each other in the hallway, they grimace and keep moving. It’s a great arrangement, Harry thinks. 

That is until Draco bursts into one of their Ministry heist planning sessions. Harry has their notes gathered up and out of sight the moment the kitchen door slams against the wall, but Draco isn’t even trying to catch a glimpse. Instead, he’s staring at Harry, his hands balled into fists. 

“You’re planning to sneak into the Ministry.”

“Are we?” Harry asks, doing his level best to keep his face neutral.

“Yes,” Draco says, his eyebrow twitching. “I heard you talking.”

Harry crosses his arms. “You’ve been spying, you mean.”

In the background, he can only just make out Ron trying to convince Hermione that Draco is in dire need of a memory charm. 

Draco pretends not to hear them, but Harry notices him slipping his wand hand into his pocket as he says, “Oh, so you have never spied on me before, is that what you’re saying?”

“That was justified! You were working for —”

“I want to help!” Draco cuts in, startling all three of them. Harry exchanges glances with the other two — neither of them has been expecting this from Draco. Without Crabbe or Goyle to back him up, he’s never exactly been the fearless type.

Hermione leans forward, splaying her hands on the table. “How can you help us?”

“I know my way around the Ministry,” he argues. “And I know who all the important people are.”

“My dad works at the Ministry,” Ron says. “I’ve been there countless times. Why would you —?”

“I know which ones of them are Death Eaters.”

“Because you were a Death Eater!” Ron cries out. “We’d be mental —”

“They killed my father,” Draco presses out between clenched teeth. “We couldn’t even go to claim his body, so he was buried outside Azkaban by the dementors. I can help. Let me help.”

Ron’s chair scrapes across the floor as he jumps to his feet. “Your father was also a Death Eater! That’s why he was in Azkaban in the first place!” 

Harry pushes away from the table and makes his way over in three quick strides. Although Draco looks ready to throw jinxes at the drop of a hat, he barely resists when Harry grabs his arm and pushes him out of the door, which Harry then slams shut in his face. When he turns around, Hermione is chewing on her bottom lip, looking unsettled, and Ron is still seething. 

“Who does he think he is?” Ron hisses. “As if —”

“Just with this,” Harry says, looking from one to the other, and Ron’s mouth snaps shut. “Once we’re done at the Ministry, he’s out again. And we don’t tell him what we need the locket for.”

“I don’t know, Harry.”

“ I do know,” Ron says vehemently. “He’s trouble. We can’t trust him.”

Harry leans his back against the door and tries for a calm tone. “I think he could be useful. He was on the Inquisitorial Squad. He knows Umbridge.”

“That doesn’t exactly make me trust him, mate.”

“Then don’t. But I’d bet you anything that his father bribed someone in every single department at one point or another. Maybe he has some information about Level One. You’ve got to admit that we could stand to know more about that place.” 

Ron and Hermione grouse and grumble, but in the end, they have no choice but to relent. 

“Alright,” Harry says, opening the door to reveal Draco still standing where he left him, no doubt eavesdropping once again. Ron and Hermione really shouldn’t look so surprised. “Come on in, then.”

∞∞∞

Draco is useful. Ron refuses to acknowledge it, and Harry can’t blame him. Their chances of success depend on every bit of information they can gather, but a part of him wishes they wouldn’t have to rely on Malfoy, of all people. His accidental-hallway-meeting-face is getting a bit too smug for Harry’s taste.

Still, they’re all thrown once again, when, on the day before the heist, Draco declares, “I should come with you.”

No matter how loudly Ron protests and how many times Narcissa begs him to stay where they’re safe, Draco demands they take him with them. He doesn’t even know what exactly it is they’re trying to do, but that doesn’t seem to bother him. 

It reminds Harry of Sirius, desperate to leave this wretched house. Maybe that should be incentive enough to deny Draco, but Harry just can’t, because he does have a point — the Ministry will be crawling with pureblood supremacists, and he knows exactly how they think, talk and act.

∞∞∞

Draco helps, they get the locket, and everything goes down the pan. One moment they’re on the doorstep of Grimmauld Place, and the next, Ron is quickly bleeding out on a forest floor. Only when they’ve stopped the bleeding does Harry take notice of Draco, sitting on the ground in a near catatonic state, staring at Ron’s freshly-healed wound. 

Harry lets his shaky legs drop him to his knees in front of Draco, blocking his view of the bloody scenery. “Are you hurt?” 

Draco’s eyes snap to Harry’s face. “What happened?”

“Yaxley,” Hermione says, her voice trembling, and then she tells them exactly how fucked they are.

Draco is on his feet in an instant. “My mother! I need to go back! How do I get there?”

“Draco —” 

“No!” Draco turns on the spot in a panic, like he’s searching for a big neon sign that says, ‘Secret Safehouse This Way’. If he tries to apparate like this, he’ll surely end up splinched as well. “I’m not leaving my mother! They will kill her!”

“I know,” Harry says as he gets up and approaches him. He stumbles over the hem of Runcorn’s enormous robes, so he yanks them over his head and flings them in the general direction of Hermione and her bag, never breaking eye contact with Draco. “I’m going with you. We’ll take the cloak.”

“Harry!” Hermione has stopped dressing Ron’s wound and is now staring at the two of them with wide eyes. There’s a streak of blood on her cheek, and a strand of her bushy hair is sticking to it.

“Listen, Hermione —”

“You can’t! It’s too big a risk.”

“We’ll have to take it.” Harry pulls the invisibility cloak from the pocket of his jeans and marches over to grab Draco’s arm, who has stopped pacing and is now rapidly looking back and forth between them. “We’ll meet you here, Hermione. If we’re not back in an hour, you should move on; try to find a way to destroy the locket.”

Before Hermione can protest, before Harry can throw the cloak over their heads, a feeble patch of silvery mist descends into their midst. Hermione squeaks, Draco flinches, and Harry’s wand is up before he knows it. But then the mist forms into the vague, undefined shape of a peacock and speaks.

“Don’t come back — not safe,” Narcissa’s voice says, distant and barely audible, cutting out in between words. “I’ve fled. Stay —”

The Patronus disperses before it can finish its message, leaving them to stare at the space where it had just been in stunned silence. When Draco’s forearm grows unusually hot, all of a sudden, Harry realises he is still holding it. He lets go instantly, and Draco wrenches away at the same time. 

“Was that … the Dark Mark?”

“Don’t be daft,” Draco sneers. He has taken several steps back. “That’s on the other side.”

“Then what —”

“It hasn’t got anything to do with you,” Draco says coolly. “Or You-Know-Who. So, where are we going now?”

They don’t go anywhere. Ron’s not well enough to apparate, so they’re forced to muster some charms and put up the tent from Hermione’s bag. Transporting Ron into one of the lower bunks is a challenge, and Draco, who has claimed the top bunk of the second bed and turned his back to the room, is no help either. 

Harry isn’t sure why this surprises him. Maybe because he was prepared to risk his life for Draco’s mother, and Draco can’t even bring himself to carry Ron’s legs for thirty seconds. 

Probably that.

∞∞∞

Harry expects Draco to come creeping up on them when they finally get around to inspecting the Horcrux they got off Umbridge, but he stubbornly stays in his bunk, pretending to be asleep. Harry knows Draco is faking it because he hunches his shoulders ever so slightly when Harry casts a Muffliato for good measure. 

There is not really all that much to do, so they just leave Draco to himself while they pass the locket around and try to think of the next step. By the time Harry takes the first watch, he’s pretty sure that Draco has fallen asleep for real. That is, until Harry has his vision of Gregorovitch’s murder, and then the subsequent disagreement with Hermione, who seems to think there is some kind of handy off-switch inside Harry’s mind that he just hasn’t bothered to flip yet. 

When Harry stomps into the tent on Hermione's insistence, both Ron and Draco are watching him. For a moment, Harry considers taking the bunk above Ron’s, but ultimately he’s not mad enough to go so far as to condemn Hermione to the one underneath Draco’s. 

In his naiveté, Harry also believes that he doesn’t have to look at Draco’s stupidly irritating face anymore if he’s lying in the bunk beneath him, but that turns out to be wishful thinking. As soon as Harry flings himself onto the mattress, Draco’s pale face pops up from above.

“Did you really see into his mind?” he whispers, perhaps aiming to keep Ron out of the conversation.

“Yep,” Harry says, trying to peel himself out of his jacket without sitting up again. “Wouldn’t recommend it.”

Draco’s face vanishes, and Harry punches his lumpy pillow into shape before turning his back on the room. Suddenly, Draco whispers, “What did you see?”

“Murder,” Harry says bluntly. “He murdered a man.” When Draco inhales sharply, Harry adds, “What did you expect?”

“Fuck if I know,” Draco says, sounding hesitant. “For you to lie?”

“Why?” Harry asks, though, of course, he knows precisely why. He himself isn’t sure why he’s even telling Draco about his visions. Harry turns onto his stomach and adds, “Are you going to lecture me about it as well?”

Draco scoffs, and the reason is anyone’s guess. Maybe he realises he’s in no position to hand out advice on how to handle Voldemort. 

Harry buries his face in the pillow and tries to calm his pounding head. His bed clothes smell like mothballs, which vaguely reminds Harry of his cupboard under the stairs at Number Four, Privet Drive. It doesn’t particularly help with his headache. 

“How do you do it?” Draco whispers, and thankfully he can’t see Harry flinch. “Is it Legilimency?”

Harry snorts involuntarily. “Not on my part, no. Hermione thinks I ought to prevent it, but I can’t. Snape tried to teach me Occlumency, but … Well, who knows if he actually did try. Either way, it doesn’t make a difference now.”

“I’m pretty good at Occlumency,” Draco says after a beat of silence. What a prat. 

“Brilliant,” Harry mutters. “Tell me if that ever comes in handy for you, will you?”

It isn’t until much later that Harry stops to wonder whether Draco’s remark hasn’t been meant as an offer rather than a boast. Probably not, though. It’s Malfoy, after all.

∞∞∞

All of them are irritated, but Ron is the worst of them all. To the surprise of nobody at all, he clashes with Draco almost constantly, and most of the day is filled with noisy accusations and hissed threats. Morale is at its worst when it’s Ron’s turn to wear the locket. Harry and Hermione do their best to take the burden when they are able to, but they can only go so long. 

It would probably help if they could incorporate Draco into the rotation, but … well. By now, Draco has figured out that the locket is cursed, but if they’d ask him to wear it, they’d definitely have to tell him what exactly he’d be consenting to. 

Even Ron agrees that they shouldn’t tell Draco the truth, but that doesn’t stop him from complaining about the unfairness of it all, loudly and constantly. Not that Ron is likely to run out of things to hate about Draco anytime soon.

Harry supposes he should be grateful that there’s someone other than Hermione and him for Ron to take his anger out on, but somehow he just … isn’t. Instead, Harry finds himself secretly relieved when they decide on the second day to split into teams of two for watch duty and foraging trips through the forest or into nearby villages — because it’s Harry’s fault that Draco is there, which means, naturally, that Harry ends up with him. 

That is, of course, just another reason for Ron to threaten Draco, which spurs Harry, quite inexplicably, to snap right back at him. (Because honestly, does Ron still believe that Draco is just waiting for his chance to do Harry in?) 

What surprises Harry, however, is that Draco does not seem to revel in the fact that Harry is clashing with Ron almost as often as he is. He doesn’t even chaff Harry about Ron and Hermione’s secretive, hushed conversations, although Harry is sure he must notice them too. 

While the hunger and cold and helplessness bring out the worst in the rest of them, they just seem to rob Draco of the energy he needs to maintain his usual pratty self. Small mercies.

Chapter Text

“It’s a Horcrux?” Draco asks one night while they’re alone in the tent. 

Hermione is on watch outside, no doubt straining her ears for any sign of Ron, who has been gone for three days by that point. All of them know that it is impossible for Ron to find them again now that they’ve moved on to another spot, but Hermione still seems to be hoping for a miracle. 

Harry looks away from the locket floating in the air above his face and finds Draco once again peering over the edge of the top bunk. He doesn’t know why he thought that maybe Draco hadn’t grasped the full extent of their heated discussion the night Ron left. Perhaps because Draco hasn’t broached the topic until just now. 

Harry nods and doesn’t say anything.

Some of Draco’s hair falls into his eyes — styling gel is rather hard to come by at the moment — but Draco doesn’t brush it out of his face. He’s sucking on his lower lip, clearly thinking. Finally, Draco asks in a faux-casual tone, “What do you know about Horcruxes?”

Draco knows fuck-all about Horcruxes; that much is obvious. But Harry finds himself almost grinning at his attempt to fish for intel while making it sound like he might be able to provide further information on the matter. The locket’s chain tightens around Harry’s neck with the next turn of the pendant, and Harry nudges it to make it change its direction. 

They’ve agreed not to tell Draco what the locket is — Harry promised Ron and Hermione before their infiltration of the Ministry. But what does it matter if Harry does tell Draco now? Draco already knows they have the locket and that it is a Horcrux, even if he doesn’t understand what that means. Just this much is already enough to foil their plans if Voldemort gets his hands on Draco. 

And who knows? Maybe Draco will have an idea, a fresh perspective. He did spend some time around Voldemort, after all.

“It’s a piece of his soul,” Harry whispers, and the words waft against the underside of Draco’s bunk, tiny clouds in the freezing night air.

∞∞∞

When Harry finally wakes up from his fever pitch with fresh scars and a broken wand, Hermione is at his bedside, dabbing his forehead with a sponge. 

“Where’s Draco?” Harry asks about ten minutes after he’s come to, realising quite suddenly that Draco is nowhere to be seen. Hermione makes a face, and Harry’s stomach turns. “Is he hurt?”

Hermione shakes her head, lips pressed together. Harry’s heart is racing now. 

“We didn’t lose him in Godric’s Hollow,” Harry insists. “I grabbed his hand; I know I did. He came back with us. If Vol—” Harry closes his eyes and tries to calm his racing head. “If he had him, I would know. My scar — I saw him — Draco wasn’t there with him.”

“No,” Hermione says quickly, though she’s not meeting his eyes. “He left.”

Harry has trouble processing the information. He keeps turning the words over and over for several seconds, until they finally slot into place. “He left?”

“He was in a panic,” Hermione whispers. “I didn’t have time to calm him; I was busy trying to get the Horcrux off you. He kept rambling; I couldn’t tell you what it was. And then he just … ran off. Disapparated.”

“No,” Harry says numbly. “I know he’s … He got dragged into this; he didn’t choose to come with us … I … It’s just … Where would he even … Did he say where he’s going?”

“I don’t know,” Hermione says. “He might have, but I wasn’t exactly focused on him, you know? I’ve been trying to get your fever down. You’ve been so unwell.”

“Yeah, no,” Harry mutters, feeling numb all over. He tries not to imagine Draco returning to Grimmauld Place, searching for an indication of where his mother could have gone. Draco doesn’t even have a tent or food. Harry tries not to think. “Thank you, Hermione. Not just for patching me up … for staying as well.” 

“I’m sorry,” Hermione says carefully. “I know you and Draco have been getting along much better lately.”

“It’s alright,” Harry says silently. “I can’t blame him. We all just barely escaped You-Know-Who. I’d love to run, too, if I could.”

“You wouldn’t,” Hermione says fiercely. “You’d never turn your back on a friend — or anyone who needs help, for that matter.”

“I don’t know, Hermione. I really might.”

“No.” She drops the sponge into Harry’s lap and throws her arms around him, squeezing him tightly against her chest. “You couldn’t.”

Harry leans into the embrace, too exhausted to argue a moot point, and wishes he could fall asleep right then and there, sleep until all of this is over, sleep until he isn’t aching anymore, sleep until somebody else has taken care of the whole Horcrux business.

“Should I come back later?” a voice behind Hermione says, and they jump apart in alarm.

Harry gropes around for his wand, forgetting for a moment that it is useless now, while Hermione wheels around, raising her own wand. There at the entrance of the tent stands Draco, one eyebrow raised at them as he stuffs the invisibility cloak into Harry’s backpack.

“Well, you don’t look like you’re actively dying anymore,” Draco adds with a measuring look at Harry, his voice wavering slightly. “Don’t tell me I wasted all this time and effort for nothing.”

“I — what?”

“We thought you left!” Hermione staggers to her feet, and she sounds so relieved that, for just a second, Harry almost expects her to hug Draco too. But she stays where she is, right next to Harry’s bunk, and crosses her arms in an impressive imitation of Mrs Weasley. “You’ve been gone for three hours. Where have you been?”

“I left to get some potion to break Potter’s fever before it finishes him off,” Draco says slowly, fishing a small vial from the backpack. “I told you as much before I left. Did you honestly think I’d just steal your only invisibility cloak and leave for good?”

“Oh,” Hermione says, and she seems almost hesitant to take the potion Draco is now holding out to her. “I didn’t …. Well, honestly, I didn’t even notice you took it.”

“Unbelievable,” Draco mutters. “Four months on the run with you losers, and you still don’t trust me. Seems like I can count myself lucky that you didn’t move on without me and leave me stranded.”

“I don’t think we should move Harry tonight,” Hermione says, completely ignoring the accusation.

“Move me?” Harry raises an eyebrow. “I can still move myself, can’t I?”

“Oh, come on, Harry. You know what I mean. You’re still feverish, and I’d like to avoid another splinching.”

Harry crosses his arms in front of his aching chest. “I can apparate.”

“This isn’t a discussion,” Hermione snaps, and Harry has to remind himself that she, too, has gone through a traumatic ordeal just now. She drops the vial into his lap. 

Ron would have scrutinised the contents first, limited potions knowledge be damned; but he isn’t the one who returned to them — Draco is. And of course it is entirely possible that Hermione can tell the portion’s legitimacy at a glance. She shows no signs of mistrusting Draco’s good intentions, though. All she says is, “Drink this, then sleep. Draco and I will take turns keeping watch.”

There’s no point arguing with Hermione when she gets like this, so Harry empties the potion under her watchful eye. She nods once, apparently mollified, and then leaves the tent to take the first watch.

Harry waits for the potion to burn through his body. Then, when the last bout of steam has left his ears, he swings his legs over the edge of the bed. Draco is there in an instant.

“What are you doing? You are supposed to rest.”

“I’m drenched,” Harry says, peeling his sweaty T-shirt away from his body. “I really need a shower.”

“The last thing I need is you collapsing in the shower,” Draco says, his eyes flicking to the new scar on Harry’s chest. He flinches severely when Harry just grabs his arm and pulls himself to his feet. His voice sounds unusually high as he says, “What are you doing?”

“Come on; help me get to the bathroom. I promise I’ll be quick, and then you can tuck me in and everything.”

“I don’t — Why would I — I’m not tucking you in, Potter!”

Harry grins, more out of relief than amusement, and closes the bathroom door in Draco’s face.

There is no hot water in the tent, but Harry still feels a bit better when he leaves the bathroom, dressed in his pyjamas and frozen to the bones. He finds Draco lying in the top bunk, looking at the ceiling and pretending that he didn’t cast a cleaning charm on Harry’s blankets. 

Harry slips into his bed and stares at the place where the top bunk is sagging down, where Draco must be lying. Some unspoken thing hangs in the air between them, but Harry isn’t sure how to address it.

Draco wouldn’t even help them carry an injured Ron into the tent, but he risked capture to do this thing for Harry. And now, instead of boasting about it, instead of puffing himself up, Draco pretends that nipping into a small wizarding village on Christmas Eve to pinch some potion wasn’t even all that dangerous. (If it really had been plain sailing, it wouldn’t have taken him three hours, would it?) 

Harry knows this means something. He just isn’t sure what exactly.

“Thanks for the potion,” Harry finally says, because he can’t say what he’s really feeling, because he doesn’t even know what he’s feeling. “You didn’t have to.”

Draco harrumphs, and replies in an affected drawl that Harry doesn’t believe for a second, “I just figured: if you’re dead, we’re all scuppered as well.”

“You wouldn’t be,” Harry says, wishing that Draco would just be straight with him for once. “Anyone could destroy his Horcruxes. It doesn’t have to be me.”

“Who else would be mad enough to try?”

“Hermione,” Harry says. “Most of the Order, too, if they knew.”

“They don’t, though. If you died, all of this would be on Granger.”

“I don’t know,” Harry says slowly. “I’m glad you didn’t leave. I’m starting to think you might turn out just as mad as us.”

He almost expects Draco to laugh, but there is no reaction at all, apart from an abrupt shift of weight in the top bunk. Silence falls for several minutes, during which Harry tries to burrow deeper into his blankets and wishes he had a wand to cast a warming charm — however little those actually do to keep the biting chill of the forest at bay.

“It has to be you,” Draco says suddenly. Harry thinks he can hear his teeth chatter slightly. “Nobody else can look into his mind.”

“No,” Harry agrees. “But so far, it hasn’t helped us find any of the Horcruxes.”

Draco takes a stuttering breath. “You knew he was coming,” he says. “To Godric’s Hollow. I saw him. If we had left just a second later —” Draco falters. “He was right there.”

Harry shivers, and he could swear the whole bunk construction trembles. Before he can think of something dumb to say (or worse, think about the implications of Draco’s sentence), Harry gets up, drapes his bundle of blankets over his shoulder, and climbs the ladder. 

Draco throws himself around instantly, staring at Harry with wide eyes and a gaping mouth. “Potter, what are you —?”

“Budge over,” Harry says, trying to shove Draco away from the rails with one hand to make some room for himself.

“You can’t come up here!” Draco sounds almost hysterical, and Harry’s doubts — What even is he doing? — vanish in an instant. If nothing else, he has succeeded in bamboozling Draco.

“Move,” he says firmly. “I’m freezing, and you’re wearing my winter pyjamas.”

“You gave them to me!” Draco insists. “And for your information, they keep shrinking back, and I keep waking up with frozen wrists and ankles. To say nothing of the rest of your clothes.” 

Harry pulls himself up with a determined expression, and Draco has no other option but to scoot away before Harry plops himself down on Draco’s legs. 

“I’m so sorry your free pyjamas are not measuring up to your expectations,” Harry says as he throws his assortment of blankets over their bodies and nearly elbows Draco in the face in the process. “I’ll be sure to pack an extra pair of silk pyjamas next time you crash our mission without any sort of preparation.”

“I liked you better when you were thrashing around and screaming,” Draco presses out. With one last scathing look, he throws himself onto his other side, but there isn’t much space to spare, and the saggy mattress drags them both towards the middle of the bed. 

It takes Harry no time at all to fall asleep, feeling exhausted but also a bit warmer already, with his back pressed against Draco’s.

∞∞∞

They mostly entertain themselves by playing an endless game of ‘Would you rather?’, although Hermione doesn’t particularly like playing with them. She thinks they’re going about the game all wrong and that only ever getting to choose between two unpleasant options is dampening the mood even further. Harry finds it hard to imagine living in a world where he’s offered two good things to pick from. Maybe that does prove her point.

One night during Harry’s watch, instead of asking, ‘Would you rather be forced to read minds or see everyone’s future constantly?’ Draco asks, “If you had time — let’s say a year’s break, before you had to come back to this — what would you do?”

Harry throws another relatively dry twig into their campfire and waits until it catches before he says, “A bucket list, you mean?”

“I suppose so.”

“Try to find out more about his Horcruxes,” Harry says at once. “Learn more defensive spells, if I can. Definitely stock up on a whole lot more food. Also, pack more interesting books. Or some games.”

“That’s not what I mean.” Draco looks at him through the thick smoke their pitiful fire produces. His eyebrows are drawn together. “It can’t have anything to do with this. Just things you wish you had time for before …”

“We all die?” Harry offers. “Glad we brought you along to lighten the mood.”

“Just being realistic,” Draco says. “Well?”

“I don’t know.” One of the bigger logs splits, and Harry pokes it with a stick until it falls apart. “I’d like to find out more about my family, I guess. There’s got to be records, don’t you think?”

“Yes,” Draco says. “The Ministry keeps a registry of every witch and wizard dating back about three hundred years or so. It would be easy to put together a family tree, at least on your father’s side.”

“That sounds nice,” Harry says. “What about you?”

Draco looks away then, out into the forest. “Hm?”

“What’s on your bucket list?”

Draco shrugs. Harry can tell it’s an act because Draco has stopped blinking. He leans to the side so he can poke Draco’s knee with the stick, and Draco scowls. 

“Great. Now there’s soot on my trousers.”

“My trousers, you mean.”

“Will you ever let that go? You might remember that I lent you my wand while you were keeping watch yesterday?”

“Come on.” Harry tries to prod him a second time, but Draco moves his leg out of reach. 

“Will you stop that?”

“Come on,” Harry repeats. Since he still needs the stick to poke at the fire some more, he decides not to throw it at Draco. “I told you mine.”

“That’s why I can’t tell you,” Draco insists. “Yours is so profound, and mine … It’s just stupid things. Shallow.”

Harry tries to think of something a person like Malfoy might call ‘shallow’. Up until recently, Harry wouldn’t have been surprised if Draco didn't even know the meaning of the word. 

“You want to complete your Chocolate Frog card collection?”

Draco scoffs and says, “I got the full set for my seventh birthday.” He pauses for a second, worrying his bottom lip, and then adds, “It will be gone now, won’t it? They probably torched the Manor after Mother and I went to ground.”

“Sorry,” Harry says, desperate to change the topic before this turns into a moping session. He really can’t take any more of those. “So, bucket list. Do you want to dye your hair blue? Get an eyebrow piercing?”

“Are you sure that’s not your dream? It might actually distract from that massive scar.”

Harry ponders Draco’s counter question (blue hair: no; piercing: maybe) and then racks his brain for another suggestion. “Oh, I know,” he finally says. “You’d like to actually catch a Snitch for once in your life.”

“I have caught countless Snitches in my life,” Draco replies coolly. “You’re not funny.”

“Are you sure?” Harry asks, tugging on his collar so there’s room to pull the mokeskin pouch out from underneath the many layers he is wearing. “Because I’ve got one right here, you know. Be careful not to lose it, though, because Dumbledore left it to me, and it probably goes without saying that I still haven’t figured out how it’s supposed to be useful.”

“Maybe he knew you’d need it to make fun of me one day,” Draco suggests drily. “That seems to be awfully important to you, for some reason.”

His eyes snap to Harry when the latter bursts out laughing, and Harry would ogle himself, too, if he could. There really is no need to laugh — Draco isn’t that funny. Or funny at all, if he really thinks about it. It’s probably some kind of trauma reaction. One of those laugh-or-cry kinda situations; only that Harry feels like crying all the time now, if he’s honest. Not that he’s ever really honest with himself — not about these things, at least. Suppress-or-cry is also a kind of situation in which he finds himself increasingly often.

“I’d like to kiss someone,” Draco adds in passing, timing it so the word ‘kiss’ leaves his lips just as he drops another log into the fire. 

Unfortunately for him, Harry’s hearing is excellent, and he stops sniggering at once, wondering whether this is the moment Draco tells him that he’s been dating Pansy Parkinson all along. He doesn’t think he could stomach the mental image of someone snogging her. 

“Somebody specific?” he asks, hoping against hope he’ll name a somewhat decent person.

“Not exactly,” Draco says. He pauses, leans back on his hands and looks up into the starry sky. “Just someone I’m actually attracted to.”

“Huh,” Harry says, taken aback. “Did you ever kiss someone you weren’t attracted to?” 

Parkinson comes to mind, once again. Although Harry thinks she probably doesn’t seem as repulsive to someone she’s treating decently.

There is silence for a long moment, and just as Harry thinks he isn’t going to get an answer, Draco says, “Exclusively.”

Harry thinks about Ginny, about the sleepless nights during sixth year, spent on his warring feelings, caught between wanting to kiss Ginny and wanting to keep Ron. 

“What’s the point of kissing someone you’re not attracted to?”

Draco still isn’t looking in his direction. “How do you know what you like if you’ve never tried it?” he asks. 

“Fair,” Harry says. “Wouldn’t have taken you for the experimental type, though.”

“You don’t know me very well.”

Without really knowing what he’s doing, Harry gets up and rounds the fire. There is little space left on the stump Draco’s sitting on, but Harry manages to squeeze in, and Draco pretends like he doesn’t notice a thing, his face still turned towards the stars. 

“I don’t think that’s true,” Harry says, tapping Draco’s ankle with the stick. “I think at this point I probably know you better than Crabbe or Goyle do.”

“Perish the thought,” Draco mutters, but he doesn’t contradict Harry. 

Harry nudges him. “So, who have you been kissing?”

“Girls,” Draco says in a distant voice. 

“Yeah,” Harry says. “I’d gathered that. Anything more specific? A name, maybe?”

“No.”

“Brilliant. So, who’d you want to kiss?”

“Never mind,” Draco says, getting to his feet abruptly and taking with him the bit of warmth he’s been providing. “It’s stupid anyway. Wake me when it’s my turn to keep watch.”

If he’s honest, Harry probably wouldn’t have figured it out if he hadn’t been left alone in the freezing cold with nothing but his own thoughts to keep him company. By the time the epiphany hits him, Draco is already fast asleep. 

Harry sneaks a glance at Hermione’s sleeping form, curled up in Ron’s bunk — seeing as she has found Draco and him huddled together for warmth on several occasions, Harry isn’t in any position to judge — and thanks his lucky stars that she’s usually a heavy sleeper. 

“Draco,” Harry whispers urgently, shaking his shoulder. It takes a lot of skill to keep his toes balanced on the edge of the lower bunk, but Harry really needs to see Draco’s face for this. “Hey, Draco. Hey.”

Despite having done the same thing to Harry multiple times, Draco flinches back when he opens his eyes and finds Harry’s face hovering above him. 

“Merlin, fuck!” he hisses. “Don’t do that! Fuck, is it time already?” 

“What you said earlier,” Harry whispers, readjusting his grip on the rail. “Did you mean you’d want to kiss someone who … you know … who is not … a girl?”

“Piss off,” Draco presses out, but his eyes are wide. He probably notices it, too, because he turns his back and drags the blanket up over his head, uncovering his feet in the process. 

“Draco,” Harry whispers again, prising a corner of the blanket out of Draco’s fingers so his voice will carry through the gap. “Listen, I really don’t mind and —”

Draco jolts up like a jack-in-the-box, and Harry very nearly loses his grip. Looming over him, Draco’s face looks downright furious, reminding Harry strongly of one particular illustration of a bloodthirsty vampire in one of his school books. 

“I mind, Potter,” Draco hisses. “Piss. Off.”

For a moment, Harry experiences the overwhelming urge to just grab Draco’s stupid face and prove to him that he doesn’t care one bit whether he actually is gay or not because, what the hell, nothing ever happens out here, and Harry is so bloody tired of it. But the moment passes quickly, and when Harry does reach for Draco’s neck, it is to remove the locket. 

“Second watch starts in an hour,” Harry says as he steps off the lower bunk and back onto solid ground. “We should remember to pass the Horcrux on before going to bed.”

There is no response from Draco as he lowers himself back onto his pillow, but Harry can tell by the tentativeness of the action that his anger has passed. 

When Harry turns around, he meets Hermione’s concerned eyes across the tent. Knowing she’s going to ask either way, he makes his way over to the second bunk bed in seven long strides. She sits up, pulling her legs against her chest, and Harry sinks down at her feet. 

“What happened?” she whispers, casting a furtive but futile look in Draco’s direction. Now that Draco’s lying down again, she won’t be able to catch a glimpse of his face behind the bed rails. 

“The usual,” Harry says, holding the locket up for her to see before placing it around his neck. “It’ll be fine.”

“What did you fight about?” she asks, and Harry finds himself hesitating. 

Both of them flinch when one of Draco’s blankets rises up unexpectedly, stretches to triple its size and hangs itself from the tent’s ceiling like a shabby room curtain, dividing the space between the two beds. The unmistakable feeling of a strong Muffliato washes over them not a second later. 

For a moment, Harry considers telling Hermione the truth. Why should he keep Draco’s secret, especially one the prat is so bigoted about? But that’s the Horcrux at work, making Harry feel this irrational resentment over … well …

“Nothing really,” he finally says. “You know how it is with this bloody thing.”

“I’m honestly surprised it took this long for the two of you to clash,” she whispers despite the charm hanging in the air. “You used to rile each other up so easily.”

Harry shrugs. “It’s considerably harder to hate him now that he’s a miserable, dishevelled, homeless half-orphan wearing my clothes.”

“Well, there’s that, I suppose.” Hermione seems thoughtful as she looks from Harry to the blanket curtain and back again. “You’ll need to sort it out. You know what happened with … with Ron … Just fix it. Before the Horcrux makes it worse.”

∞∞∞

Breakfast, which consists of a pack of stale biscuits shared between the three of them, is spent in silence. 

Squeezing under the cloak to disapparate afterwards is uncomfortable, to say the least, but Hermione is nervous about the strange noises she heard during her watch. Seeing as she’s currently the one wearing the Horcrux, Harry thinks it best not to argue with her — even if it means ten awkward seconds of being sandwiched between the backs of a tense Hermione and an even tenser Draco, both of their wrists flexing in his freezing hands. 

They burst apart the second they arrive in the Forest of Dean, but once their charms are cast, Hermione seems dead set on forcing them to straighten matters out. 

“I’ll set up the tent,” she says as she thaws the ground at her feet with a series of elaborate wand gestures. “Could the two of you get some firewood?”

And so they set off in silence while the first rays of sunlight gradually break through the high conifer canopy. Harry picks up a small stick and tests it. It bends easily, which promises another smokey campfire, the smell of which he won’t be getting out of his clothes anytime soon. 

They march on, the only sound the crunch of the frozen ground underfoot and the noise the stick makes as Harry rhythmically taps it against his thigh. It only takes about a minute until Draco exhales noisily. Harry can tell he’s about to voice his irritation and is almost glad for it, as long as they go back to talking, when there’s a copious amount of rustling in the thicket somewhere to their right. 

With his wand raised high, Harry whips around to survey the area. Something bumps into him from behind, but it’s just Draco. With their backs pressed together, they slowly turn on the spot, trying to pinpoint a location, anxiously awaiting an attack. 

There’s a high-pitched squeal, and a black-brown animal the size of a dog breaks through the thicket. Both of them point their wands and turn their heads towards it, Draco’s cheek brushing Harry’s temple with every breath he takes. 

With a sigh, Harry lowers his wand and loosens his shoulders. “It’s just a piglet. God, for a moment —”

“Shush,” Draco hisses, still just as tense as he was before the revelation. “We need to get the hell away now.”

“What’s wrong?”

There’s another rustle on Draco’s side, but before Harry can turn to look, before he can raise his wand again, Draco’s clammy hand wraps around Harry’s wrist, and a second later, darkness closes in on them. 

They reappear in the middle of a small stream, instantly breaking through its frozen surface, and Draco has to steady himself on Harry’s shoulder so he doesn’t lose his footing on the slippery bed. His feet now wet and freezing, Harry quickly climbs onto the embankment, pulling Draco with him, and sits down on a fallen log to shake the water from his shoes. 

“What was that for?” 

“Never get between a wild boar and their young,” Draco says as he sits down next to Harry and starts unlacing his boots, once impeccable and shiny and long since scratched beyond recognition. “They’ll mess you up.” He looks up to frown at Harry and adds, “You do know you’ve been holding a regular old stick this whole time, don’t you?”

For a second, Harry is too startled to do anything but stare at the gnarly stick in his hand, which is very much not a wand. He can’t believe he has forgotten about the broken pieces stashed in the mokeskin pouch. Draco clears his throat. 

“Well,” Harry says, absolutely refusing to admit his lapse. “If it had been Death Eaters, they wouldn’t have known it’s not a wand, right?”

“It’s very green, isn’t it?”

“They wouldn’t expect me not to have a real wand, though.”

“Well,” says Draco. “It’s a pretty pathetic stick.”

“Yeah, but they would’ve been farther away than you are.”

“Well,” Draco says again, leaning in for a closer look. 

Before Draco can find anything else wrong with it, Harry tosses the stick over his shoulder and continues to shake ice water from his shoes. “So, how do you know anything about boars?”

“I grew up in a manor,” Draco says, and Harry shivers involuntarily when Draco scoots away again, leaving Harry’s side unprotected from the chill. 

Maybe it’s the cold, but Harry doesn’t understand this answer at all. “Do you want me to repeat the question?”

“Have you ever seen a manor in the city?” 

Draco’s got his boots off now and starts blow-drying them with his wand. Harry places his soggy trainers next to them and then tries to hold his wet-socked feet into the hot air stream as well before he finally says, “I’ve never seen a manor anywhere.”

Draco gives him nothing more than a side glance. “Well, they are typically in the country. Also, there’s not much to do inside a manor, so I spent a good portion of my childhood in the adjacent woods.” He pauses for a moment and then adds, “Well, at least until I turned ten and was suddenly expected to start behaving like a grown-up full-time.”

“Huh,” Harry says, and his toes tingle as some feeling returns to them. “I can’t picture you in wellies.”

“I would hope not,” Draco says, sticking his wand into each of their shoes, one after the other, and making them steam. “That’s what water-repellent charms are for.”

“Of course.” Harry nods and decides that it’s no use ignoring the elephant in the room any longer. After all, the last time he turned a blind eye, Ron walked out on them. He takes a deep breath and says, “I’m sorry about last night. I didn’t mean to insult you or whatever.”

Draco is suddenly very focused on drying their shoes evenly from all sides. When Harry bumps his shoulder, he merely hums but refuses to acknowledge what Harry has said. 

“Come on, Draco. This is a stupid thing to fight over.”

“I just don’t see why you felt the need to wake me up for that,” Draco says in a clipped tone as he stuffs his wand up his sleeve and puts his boots back on.

“Well, I got kinda excited.”

“Excited?” Draco echoes. “Why?”

“Well, ‘cause I kinda thought if that’s something that’s on your bucket list, it would be rather easy to cross off, right?”

“Would it?”

“Yeah. I mean — Alright, I know I wouldn’t be your first choice, but I’m definitely not a girl, so.”

“I’m sorry, what? Are you saying you would —” Draco turns to look over his shoulder, apparently to make sure nobody is eavesdropping on them in the middle of this freakishly dense forest, and then adds in a hushed voice, “— kiss me?”

“Yeah. If that’s something you’d like to try, then I wouldn’t mind,” Harry says, trying to make his voice sound casual and not at all like he is nervous about the thought of kissing his childhood nemesis. “Really, it’s the least I can do after you got me that fever potion. And you could just close your eyes and imagine someone else, right?”

Draco seems determined not to look at Harry as he laces his boots. “What about Weasley?”

“Ginny?” Harry asks, caught off guard. Draco nods minutely, so Harry says, “We broke up after Dumbledore’s funeral.”

“Oh.” There’s silence for a few seconds, and Harry almost expects Draco to make fun of his track record with girls. One disastrous date with Cho. Not even two full months with Ginny. Draco turns to face him abruptly. “Fine.” 

“Fine?”

“Go on, then.”

Harry stares at him. “What, kiss you?”

“Yes,” Draco says, not exactly looking like someone asking to be kissed. His shoulders are squared. His eyes are narrowed slightly. When Harry continues to gape at him, he lifts his chin with an air of defiance.

“Alright …” With one knee pulled up onto the log, Harry turns to fully face Draco now. “Okay.” 

Harry can absolutely do this. It’s just a kiss, not a big deal. Not at all different from kissing a girl, right? They both have lips, a tongue — Harry definitely isn’t ready to think about tongues right now. Surely Draco isn’t expecting an open-mouthed kiss?

Draco tilts his head, and Harry takes that as his cue to let go of his own ankle and place his hands on Draco’s shoulders instead. One of Draco’s eyebrows starts twitching, and Harry decides to focus on his eyes instead, which helps a little. They’re a very light bluish-grey, but his expression is just as fierce as Ginny’s.

Resisting the urge to ask if Draco is ready to do this, Harry finally leans in, trying hard to neither stall nor rush this thing. With every receding inch, Draco’s eyes grow wider. In his periphery, Harry notices Draco fiddling with the hem of his coat. Harry withstands the temptation of grabbing his hands and placing them on his own shoulders to make things less awkward. If Draco wanted to touch him, he would, right?

There’s hardly an inch left between them now. Their lips are nearly touching. Harry can feel Draco’s breath ebb against his face in puffy clouds. Any moment now, they’ll — 

Draco jumps to his feet at the last second, slipping out of Harry’s hands and nearly causing him to fall flat on his face. Once again, Draco isn’t even looking at Harry as he rubs his own shoulders — either for warmth or to erase the feeling of Harry’s hands on them — and says loftily, “Just wanted to see if you’d really do it.”

“Why wouldn’t I?” Harry asks, his voice tight. He can feel his heartbeat in his throat, in his stomach, in every single fingertip. His body hasn’t produced this much adrenaline since Godric’s Hollow. 

Draco raises an eyebrow. “Why would you?”

He’s kidding, right? Harry crosses his arms, digging his fingers into his biceps. “I told you already.”

“Well, in that case, I’ll have you know that you are in no way indebted to me. Consider the fever potion repayment for getting my mother and me out.”

“I really wouldn’t —”

“I said, ‘No, thank you’, Potter. Leave it.”

∞∞∞

The Horcrux opens when Harry commands it, and from its depths rises a voice. 

“Least loved, always, by the mother who craved a daughter … Least loved, now, by the girl who prefers your friend … Least loved even by your best friend, who would cast you aside for the boy who has always looked down on you.”

Three figures emerge from the locket — Hermione, Harry, and Draco — and Ron’s eyes flash red. He raises the sword.

∞∞∞

It was Harry’s turn to keep watch when the doe came, and his absence appears to have gone just as unnoticed as their return. Harry wakes Hermione first, and her ensuing rage does a better job of drawing Draco to the tent’s little kitchen corner than Harry ever could. They watch the spectacle from opposite sides — Harry still near the tent flap and Draco with one hand gripping the makeshift room curtain shielding their bunk bed from view. 

Hermione storms outside to keep watch, Ron drifts off to sleep as soon as his head hits the pillow, and Harry rounds the curtain to find Draco sitting on the lower bunk. He’s fiddling with the too-short sleeves of his borrowed pyjamas, but he looks up at Harry when the latter sits down beside him. 

“Congratulations on destroying the Horcrux,” Draco says, but his smile is thin, and his eyes are restless. He doesn’t comment on Ron’s miraculous reappearance. “Your hair is very wet. Also, your lips are blue.”

“Midnight swim,” Harry says. His own smile is genuine, even if his teeth are chattering and his lips are trembling. 

“You’ve got to stop with those,” Draco says gravely, and he’s got a sour look on his face as he throws three layers of blankets over Harry’s shoulders and starts to rub his arms roughly. “You look like a corpse.”

Warmth floods Harry’s body before he can protest, enveloping him like a loving embrace, pooling in his chest, and Harry is seized by a wave of emotions. He nearly suffocated. Ron came back. Someone out there is actively helping them. They finally destroyed that wretched Horcrux. He’s got a wand again. Draco … 

Draco cares. 

Feeling lighter, warmer, more optimistic than he has in a long time, Harry leans in and kisses him. 

∞∞∞

They can’t possibly take Draco to see Xenophilius Lovegood, so they leave him at the edge of a field with the tent and the promise to return before sundown. They very nearly break their promise, but Hermione’s quick thinking gets them out in the nick of time, even as the Lovegoods' house comes crashing down around them.

All the air leaves his body as Harry lands hard on his back. He needs to get up and make sure that the others are alright, but his head is swimming, and his vision is overcome with black, and he can’t do anything but lie there and try to breathe. But then someone lifts his upper body up with one hand around his shoulder and the other behind his back, and Harry groans as a bout of nausea grips him. 

“What happened?”  

“Death Eaters,” Harry mumbles. His eyes flutter open when Draco’s hand travels the length of his arms and down his chest, brushing a heavy layer of dust off his clothes. 

“You look horrible,” Draco says, his fingertips now hovering a few inches above Harry’s temple, which is hot and pounding. “Are you — is anyone hurt?”

“Dunno.” Harry manages to sit up properly now, without further support from Draco. He spots Ron and Hermione near the tent, already busy tending to each other’s cuts and bruises, which don’t seem to be too bad. “Help me up?”

Harry leans heavily on Draco as they make their way over to the tent, and, fine, maybe it isn’t strictly necessary. It’s just that Draco has been avoiding Harry’s eyes ever since The Kiss last night, and perhaps this is the push Draco needs to act normal again. 

Draco drops Harry into a chair and wordlessly starts patching up his head wound while they fill him in on everything that has happened with Xenophilius. He obviously doesn’t know what to make of the whole Hallows business but agrees with Harry that Voldemort would probably be after the Elder Wand if he believed in its existence. Which, given Harry’s past visions, he seems to do, so that’s a problem. 

When Hermione shuts down the debate regarding Horcruxes versus Hallows, Harry is the first to get up. As expected, Draco is on his feet not a second later. He’s still uncomfortable around Ron, which is honestly rather fun to watch now that Ron is trying not to actively antagonise him anymore. 

“I’m going to check out that farm down the road, see if I can find something decent to eat,” Harry says. 

Hermione just rolls her eyes, probably aware that he’s only offering so he can get away from them for a bit. Harry takes the invisibility cloak Ron hands him and heads towards the entrance. When he looks over his shoulder, Ron and Hermione are exchanging glances, and Draco is once again fumbling with his sleeve. 

Harry jerks his head at him. “You coming?”

Compared with the prospect of being left alone with Ron and Hermione, accompanying Harry seems to be the lesser evil. 

Although the chances of Draco leaving the cover of the cloak and walking back to camp without him are slim, Harry still endures a good five minutes of silence before he broaches the topic. “So, about that kiss —”

Draco drifts away from him, causing the cloak to ride up to their thighs. It’s dark enough that it probably won’t be an issue on this deserted dirt road, but Harry still closes the gap. 

“We don’t need to talk about that.”

“I think we oughta if the alternative is this,” Harry says, gesturing between the two of them. “I’m sorry you didn’t like it. I should’ve asked permission first.” Harry thinks it wise not to mention that Draco definitely kissed him back for a good minute or so. A minute. His kiss with Cho definitely did not last a whole minute.

“That’s not — I didn’t say I didn’t like it,” Draco stammers. “But I told you that you shouldn’t feel obligated just because —”

“I didn’t,” Harry says. “I just felt like it, alright?” When Draco does nothing but gape at him, Harry adds, “I felt like kissing you. I didn’t do it because I thought I had to.”

Harry’s head had, in fact, been pretty much completely empty at the time. 

“Oh.” Their hands brush against each other, closer together than they were five minutes ago, and Draco quickly crosses his arms. “What does that mean?”

Harry huffs. “Great question.”

“Do you have an answer?”

“I guess,” Harry says. He can finally see the farm — although, at the moment, it’s nothing more than a couple of lights in the distance. “I think it means that this whole quest is miserable, but having someone to be with makes it almost bearable.”

“You have Granger and Weasley with you,” Draco says, slightly out of breath. 

“I’d rather not kiss them, though.” The mere thought makes Harry shudder — or maybe it’s the cold. “They’re like a brother and sister to me.”

He can almost hear the thoughts racing through Draco’s head, but sadly, he voices none of them. So they continue down the road in silence, giving Harry ample time to notice that they’ve fallen into step somewhere along the way. 

“So,” Harry says as they reach the gate leading into the farmyard. “If you didn’t not like the kiss … Do you think you’d want to do it again?”

With one hand already on the gate, Draco turns to face him, an incredulous expression on his face. “Are you taking the piss?”

“No.”

The answer is wordless, delivered from Draco’s lips straight to Harry’s. 

∞∞∞

Flashes of golden light bounce off Draco’s hair whenever Hermione tilts the sword of Gryffindor at the right angle. His hair is longer than Harry has ever seen it, but so is Ron’s and Hermione’s and his own. Draco doesn’t mind it, he says, regarding his own hair. He doesn’t say anything about Harry’s, but the fact that he keeps running his hands through it whenever he gets a chance, no matter how often his fingers get tangled in Harry’s unruly curls, is pretty telling. Harry is sure the others would agree (if they knew about any of it).

“... could be worth a shot, don’t you think? Harry?”

“Yeah,” Harry mutters. Then, belatedly, and only because the talking has stopped abruptly, he wrenches his eyes away from the glittering top of Draco’s head and looks at Hermione instead. She frowns at him. As does Ron. And Draco. Perfect. Harry shakes his head slightly to try and clear it. “Sorry, what?”

“Are you alright? You’ve been awfully distracted lately.”

Harry nods slowly. “Yeah, sorry. Just hungry. My head’s a bit fuzzy, I guess.”

“Tell me about it!” Ron groans. “My stomach is digesting itself, I’m pretty sure.”

“Yeah,” Harry says. 

A cuckoo calls somewhere nearby, and Harry tells himself it isn’t in response to his stomach eliciting a very deep, very drawn-out growl. In a truly foolish move, Harry allows his mind to take him back to the castle for a moment, straight back to the Room of Requirement, where he first learned what a cuckoo even sounds like — and from Draco Malfoy, of all people. He wishes he could go back there now, return to that calm Thursday evening in early May. It’s not even a second chance at saving Dumbledore that he imagines. In his mind’s eye, Draco takes his hand and leads him out of the Room of Requirement, down several secret passages until they reach the Great Hall. Harry pictures the two of them sitting down next to his friends at the Gryffindor table and loading their plates with every dish within reach. 

His stomach clenches painfully, and Harry shakes his head again, leaving him feeling hollow, dizzy, disoriented. “Sorry, what were we talking about?”

“Horcruxes,” Hermione says, because what else could they possibly be talking about?

With the sword acquired, the locket destroyed, and not many other leads to follow up on, their days have quickly fallen back into a well-trodden rhythm of rehashing everything they know about Voldemort, possible Horcruxes and likely hiding places. Three weeks since Ron came back, and they haven’t got anywhere.

It’s just the same every single day, except for when Harry manages to get some alone time with Draco. 

He doesn’t even care that those scarce half-hours of snogging like lovesick teenagers have become the highlight of his days. He’s just ecstatic he gets to feel like a teenager for once, elated that there is something to look forward to at all. Something different. Something exciting. Especially now that they’ve decided not to huddle together for warmth in Draco’s bed anymore, what with Ron back and all.

“... not Diagon Alley, of course, but Draco says he knows — Harry, are you listening?”

Harry’s elbow slips off his armrest, and Ron has to grab his shoulder to keep him from tumbling out of his camping chair.

“Sorry,” he mutters, rubbing his throbbing forehead. “I’m honestly trying to listen, I swear. You said something about a bookstore?”

Hermione nods, thoroughly scrutinising him now. Finally, she says, in a distinctly slow and clear voice, “Draco suggested that one or two of us could sneak into a bookstore under the cloak. Steal some books on Ravenclaw to see if we can find out more about any notable objects of hers that You-Know-Who might have gone after.”

Harry frowns. “Sneak into a wizarding village?”

“I managed to do it when I stole the fever potion,” Draco says, sounding much more confident than he looks.

“You were gone for three hours,” Harry points out. “I wouldn’t call that a doddle.”

“Yes, but that was during the evening rush on Christmas Eve. This time we can time it right.”

“You mean we should go at night? That sounds even more dangerous.” 

“Oh no,” Hermione interjects. “I don’t think we could safely get through their anti-burglary charms. But if we pick a smaller shop, stake it out beforehand to see when they're open but not usually heavily frequented? I think we could do it.” 

“What if You-Know-Who gets wind of it somehow? We can’t risk him finding out that we're looking into Ravenclaw.”

Ron flaps his hand. “I don’t think he cares about a random bookstore theft.”

“He might if every single book stolen is about Ravenclaw.”

“We’ll mix it up, then,” Hermione says. “Take a bunch of other books at random. And if we duplicate the books we take and leave the copies, that’ll probably buy us about a week or two before their absence gets noticed.”

Harry exchanges a long glance with Ron. Finally, Ron says what they’re both thinking. “Not to burst your bubble, but the longest my duplicates last is three days. Maybe four if I’m lucky.”

“Same,” Harry says. “And that’s on good days. You know, when I’m not starving and freezing.”

With a sigh, Hermione turns towards Draco, who shrugs and says, “I usually manage a week and a half.”

Hermione smiles, visibly relieved. “It’s decided, then. Draco and I will do it.”

Harry straightens in his chair, gripping both armrests tightly. “What? No. I’m coming with you.”

Hermione sighs, shaking her head. “Harry, the cloak really only fits two people.”

“The two of us should go, then! We’re smaller than Draco and Ron. We’ll be fully covered.”

“Potter thinks he should lead a dangerous mission even though he’s not qualified,” Draco says loftily. “What a surprise.”

And to think that Harry went out of his way to help with that prat’s bucket list! Harry would very much like to kick him for that remark, but the way Ron and Hermione glance at each other tells him that they apparently agree with Draco. 

Harry grits his teeth. “I’m the best at defence. I should come.”

“The goal is not to get ourselves into a situation where we have to defend ourselves,” Hermione points out. “No offence, but that isn’t exactly your strong suit. Draco and I are the most qualified.”

“But —”

“This isn’t just your quest,” Hermione says. “We all want You-Know-Who dead. That’s why you brought us along. Now trust us to do this.”

Ron raises his hand. “All in favour of Hermione and Draco going?”

Harry hates this new dynamic that seems to be developing right before his eyes. Why do all his friends always feel the need to band together against him? He starts to understand why Draco always hung around with Crabbe and Goyle. They sure as hell wouldn’t try to exclude him from robbing a bookstore.

At least there’s still some time for Harry to find a way to include himself in the final plan during the recon process.

∞∞∞

Somebody erupts from the tent and out into the flickering light, and Harry, who has been staring into the campfire for close to an hour by that point, nearly jumps out of his skin. 

“Blimey, Ron!”

“Sorry. I just …” Ron rubs the back of his neck and drops down on the log opposite Harry’s. Finally, he mutters, “Nightmare.”

Harry nods and decides not to pry. Ron is also silent as he stares out into the forest with an anxious expression. Every other second, his eyes flit across Harry. 

“It’s Ginny,” he finally says. “I dreamt they took her like they took Luna. Sent her to Azkaban.”

“I’m sure she’s alright,” Harry says, but his throat feels tight. “The Death Eaters don’t know you’re with us. And your whole family is looking after her.”

“They could be in Azkaban as well. We don’t know anything. It’s been ages since we last managed to tap into Potterwatch.”

“I’ll check the map.” Harry fumbles with the pouch and finally manages to seize the folded piece of parchment after nearly a whole minute. Ron has rounded the fire in an instant, hovering over Harry’s shoulder. Out of the corner of his eyes, Harry dimly registers Draco’s shape appearing at the entrance of the tent, but he’s focused on scanning the map for Ginny’s dot, getting more concerned by the second. 

“I can’t find her,” he says, voice hollow and heart racing. 

“What do you mean, you can’t find her? It’s the middle of the night. She should be in bed.”

“Maybe she’s home for the holidays?” Harry looks over at Draco, who has taken it upon himself to mark the days ever since Christmas Eve took them by surprise in Godric’s Hollow. 

Draco hesitates before shaking his head slightly. “Not for another two weeks,” he whispers.

“Harry,” Ron says in a strangled voice.

Harry shakes his head, hoping desperately for an explanation to pop up. “She could be in the Room of Requirement,” he finally says, not knowing what she could possibly be doing there at three in the morning. “The map doesn’t show it.” Unfortunately, neither does it show the Forbidden Forest, but Harry thinks it wise not to mention this. 

Ron’s hand clamps down on Harry’s shoulder. “Can you check?“

“Check?”

“Check that she’s alive, at least.”

“I’m thinking,” Harry mutters, searching desperately for a way to ensure that Ginny is alright. “Maybe we could ask Phineas —”

“The mark!” Ron all but yells, darting forward to grab Harry’s wrist. “Check the mark.”

“I don’t — What?”

“It changes colour if she …” Ron falters. “Just check it.”

Harry’s soulmark is as golden as the last (and only) time he saw it, and that is what keeps the two of them almost calm during the next hour — That’s how long it takes until Ginny’s dot pops up outside the Room of Requirement. Ron lets out a whoop at the sight, which he swallows not a second later. 

“Oh,” he says, sounding highly uncomfortable. “Sorry, mate. I’m sure it’s nothing. She wouldn’t.”

Harry looks down at the two dots occupying the seventh-floor corridor, proof that Ginny is out and about with Michael Corner, visiting the Room of Requirement at quarter to four in the morning. And why shouldn’t she? Harry told her not to wait for him. He does feel a pang of something at the thought of Ginny together with her ex, but the emotion isn’t easily named. There is no monster in his chest now. 

Ron goes back to bed, leaving Harry to ponder his feelings for the rest of his watch. It’s a fruitless effort. When he goes to wake Draco for his watch an hour later, he finds him sitting in their kitchen area, sipping water with maybe a hint of chamomile. They’ve already quadruple-steeped all five of their tea bags, and since Draco obviously did not boil his water at the campfire, the whole swill must be cold as well. Harry is in no position to judge, though. They’re all getting a bit desperate. 

“It’s four,” Harry says. “We’ll have to gather some more firewood tomorrow, but it should last you until the morning.”

Draco doesn’t even look up from his chipped and dented camping mug. “Terrific,” he says tonelessly and is gone not a second later. 

Even sleep-deprived and ravenous, Harry can tell that Draco is behaving oddly, so he follows after him. Draco is standing with his back to the forest, head tipped back so he is facing the canopy of conifers. When Harry reaches out for him, Draco steps back.

“What’s going on?”

“Seriously?” Draco hisses. 

Harry stuffs both hands into the pockets of his jeans. “Yes. I don’t know what’s happening right now. Did I do something?”

Draco actually gapes at him. “You’ve got — You’re — She is —” He folds his trembling hands in front of his mouth as if hoping they will catch any more words that might tumble out of his mouth. Finally, he whines in a low voice, “Why would you kiss me if you’ve got a soulmate waiting for you? Are you insane?”

It’s not what Harry’s been expecting at all. Why would Draco care about Ginny? They don’t even really know each other.

“She’s not waiting,” Harry says calmly. “I told you. We broke up after Dumbledore's funeral.”

“Broke up? What do you mean, you broke up?”

“I mean that we talked, and she agreed that we couldn’t be together anymore.”

“You can’t break up with your soulmate! You can’t. It’s fate.”

“Well, we did. Also, fate can go and get stuffed.”

“Merlin.” Draco buries both hands in his own hair and turns on the spot. There is a lot of pacing back and forth and muttering to himself that Harry watches with a hollow feeling and not a clue what to do. Finally, Draco drops down on the log near the fire, only to jump back to his feet almost immediately. Suddenly surrounded by an air of purpose, Draco strides out of the perimeter of their protective charms.

Harry moves to follow automatically. “Where are we going?”

Draco doesn’t even stop to look at him, just hisses over his shoulder, “I am going for some air.”

“We’re living in a shitty draughty tent. It’s your turn to keep watch out here for the next two hours. How much more air do you need?”

Draco speeds up. “I can’t deal with you right now.”

“We shouldn’t split up,” Harry implores. “What if you run into Snatchers?”

“I don’t care!” Draco yells, and he stomps another ten angry footprints into the muddy forest floor before he seems to decide that running into Snatchers would, in fact, be worse than having to tolerate Harry’s presence. He turns around sharply and narrowly avoids colliding with Harry on his way back.

There’s an awful ache in Harry’s stomach as he retreats into the tent to give Draco some space. He doesn’t sleep a wink for the rest of the night, but Draco doesn’t seem to either. So they just lie there in silence once Hermione takes over from Draco, and they listen to the wind howl and wait for the sun to rise. 

∞∞∞

It seems impossible for anyone to take the whole soulmark business more seriously than Ron, but Draco doesn’t talk to Harry for two whole days after the incident. If Harry had to put a name to it, he’d say that Draco is acting like he has been made an accomplice to some heinous crime. Harry would find it funny if he wasn’t the one being wrongfully accused of said transgression. 

Also, he is fucking lonely.

∞∞∞

Harry wakes when Ron places a cold hand on his shoulder. “God,” he groans into his pillow. “Is it my turn already? I swear it’s only been like an hour.”

It’s not Ron who answers, “It’s been two hours. Granger just took over from me.”

Harry’s head snaps up so he can squint at Draco’s silhouette. Unfortunately, it’s dark enough that even if Harry were wearing his glasses, he probably wouldn’t be able to see him. “Everything alright?”

“Brilliant,” Draco says curtly. He slips underneath Harry’s heap of blankets without another word. Harry lies there stock-still, too startled to move, and Draco ends up half on top of him, not enough space left for him on either side. 

Harry counts ten heartbeats, five shaky breaths, a million goosebumps erupting everywhere they’re pressed together before he finds his voice again. “I thought you didn’t —”

“Yes, well, I’m completely frozen,” Draco says, still in that terse, nonchalant voice. “That is not an exaggeration. I will literally shatter into a million pieces if I so much as stub my toe.”

He buries his icy face in the crook of Harry’s neck, and shoves his frozen hands into the space between the lumpy mattress and the small of Harry’s back. Harry can’t help but shiver violently, but Draco sighs against his throat, apparently content. 

“I, um —” Harry clears his throat, which does absolutely nothing for his strained voice. “I thought you were a firm believer in the sanctity of soulmarks.”

“That horse has bolted,” Draco mutters against Harry’s neck. His lips brush Harry’s skin, leaving it hot in the wake of their frozen touch. “How you get it back into the stable isn’t my problem. I’ll leave you to deal with that once all of this is over.”

“We could be out here for years,” Harry says, although he doesn’t believe they could actually survive that long. They’re constantly exhausted now, always freezing, about two missed meals away from starving to death.

“Exactly,” Draco says. “I’m not spending all that time freezing my tail off because you’re an idiot.” 

“Maybe I am an idiot. But not because of this,” Harry whispers, hoping dearly that Ron is still fast asleep. “Breaking up was the right decision. Either Ginny and I get back together, or we don’t.”

“Of course you will,” Draco says matter-of-factly. “She’s your soulmate. And you are hers as well, are you not?”

Harry shrugs, and Draco lifts his head, presumably to frown at him. “Is that a yes or no?”

“I think she implied it.”

“You didn’t ask her to clarify?”

“I didn’t want to know. Still don’t.”

Draco actually slaps Harry’s shoulder. “Potter, what the fuck?”

“I just — Honestly, I’m …” Harry can tell that Draco won’t understand. Still, he feels the need to try. “I just don't think that soulmarks are all that great. Like, ‘Hey, this magical tattoo says you’re my safest bet; wanna stay together forever?’ Isn’t it much more meaningful if someone loves you enough that they’re willing to take a chance with you?”

“They wouldn’t have the mark if they didn’t love you in the first place.”

“Still,” Harry says. “There’s already one prophecy dictating my life. If You-Know-Who didn’t believe in it, my parents might still be alive. I don’t need another prophecy on top.”

Draco rolls off him, squeezing into the space between Harry and the side of the tent. His face ends up smushed against Harry’s shoulder, who wonders if this means that Draco does not plan on leaving before Ron wakes Harry for his watch in four hours. 

“A soulmark is not a prophecy,” Draco says in an assertive tone. 

Harry turns his head towards the pale blur that is Draco’s face. “What else is it then?”

“It’s a guarantee. A promise.”

“Fuck that. It’s a bloody prophecy.”

“You’re hopeless.”

But then Draco kisses him, and Harry takes that to mean that the argument is over and done with for good. 

∞∞∞

Something hits Harry in the chest repeatedly, and he shoots up in bed, wand drawn and heart racing. A blurry shape is standing in front of his bunk.

“Easy,” Draco says, sounding like he’s grinning. 

His fair hair comes into Harry’s rather limited field of vision as he bends down and slides Harry’s glasses onto his face, resulting in a prime view of his smug face. To escape this sight, Harry looks down at his lap, where the projectiles have accumulated. It’s an assortment of shrunken books. At first glance, they all seem to be adventure stories. 

Harry frowns up at Draco and asks, “Where did you get these?”

“Stole them.”

Harry, still half-asleep and startled at the same time, takes a few seconds to process this. When he finally manages, his stomach does a summersault. “What? We agreed to wait until Thursday!”

“The shopkeeper was in a hurry. Forgot to activate his anti-burglary spells when he closed up. We just seized the opportunity.” Draco raises an eyebrow and adds, “Also, that way, there was no risk of you jumping in to ‘help’.”

“I — That’s — I wouldn’t —” Harry brushes some hair out of his face and huffs. “Yeah, alright. How did it go?”

“Piece of cake, honestly. In and out in twenty minutes.”

“And did you find something useful?”

“Too early to say,” Draco says. “We’ll start going through them in the morning. But I think there’s potential.”

They hold eye contact for a second, and Harry knows that they’re both feeling the same thing — a glimmer of hope, the delusional notion that maybe they might actually survive this. 

Harry fiddles with the tassel poking out the bottom of one of the books, and says, “Thank you.”

Draco shrugs, looking uncomfortable all of a sudden. “It was part of the plan, wasn’t it? We had to take some decoy books. I didn’t even really pay attention to what I was taking.”

But at the bottom of the stack is a bound collection of five years worth of issues of Seeker Weekly, and that makes it rather hard to believe Draco.

∞∞∞

A lot is riding on the contents of their haul, but no matter how hard he tries to concentrate, Harry’s focus keeps drifting away from the incredibly dull book he has been assigned. He’s cold. He’s hungry. He’s exhausted. He’s longing for Draco’s arms around him, for Draco’s hands in his hair, for his lips —

“I’ve seen that before,” Draco says sharply, almost unseating Hermione in his haste to lean over her shoulder and stab his finger at the book in her hands. “Her tiara. I know I’ve seen it somewhere.”

Unlike Harry, whose stomach feels like it might float away in excitement, Hermione just frowns. “Ravenclaw’s lost diadem?” she says, sounding distinctly sceptical. “It says here that the diadem hasn’t been seen for centuries.”

“So?” Harry places a small twig between the pages of his own book and snaps it shut. Not that he’d really need a marker to find the first page after the table of contents.

“Oh, come on, Harry. Don’t you think that it’s highly unlikely?”

“We should at least consider the possibility, shouldn’t we? It’s not like we have a load of other leads.”

“Oh, fine,” Hermione mutters. She looks up to raise an eyebrow at Draco, who has used the time to sit down on the folding chair next to hers. “Is it possible you saw a picture in another book?”

Draco is clearly miffed about Hermione’s incredulity. “No,” he says shortly, a sour look on his face. “I can picture it in my head. It was definitely a real, physical thing.”

“And you’re sure it wasn’t just a replica?” Ron chimes in from his place on the other side of the campfire. “Luna’s dad made one — it looked nothing like this one, obviously — but maybe someone less loony did a better job than him?”

“Well, I suppose it is possible,” Draco says slowly. “But it’s just as Potter said: We don’t have anything else to go on, do we? So let’s just assume what I saw was the real deal.”

There is silence for a moment, and Harry fully expects the others to jump on this opportunity to further discredit Draco’s claim. But then Hermione sighs and lifts her beaded bag onto her knees.

“Alright, let’s think,” she says, already producing some writing tools. She clicks her pen and adds, “Where could you have seen it? Hogwarts?”

Draco’s shoulders drop in visible relief at being taken seriously, and he leans back in his chair, tapping a finger against his chin. “I highly doubt that there’s a place in that castle that I’ve been to and Potter hasn’t.”

“Harry’s not exactly the most observant person,” Ron says. “He might have seen it and forgotten.”

“I can be observant,” Harry objects. “Just not for things that are irrelevant to me.”

Ron clicks his tongue. “My point.”

Hermione scribbles ‘Hogwarts?’ into her notebook. “I think we should just write down anything we can think of. Then we can go on and debate pros and cons.”

“The Manor? That’s where the diary was.” ‘At least until Lucius fucked that up,’ Harry wants to add, but that might just be one of those things that lead to Harry once again freezing his backside off later in bed. 

Draco shakes his head. “Believe me — if my father had Ravenclaw’s lost diadem, I would have known. He never would have shut up about it.”

“Yeah, that sounds like him,” Ron says, rolling his eyes. “What about Grimmauld Place? The locket was there at one point.”

Hermione frowns. “It was there because Kreacher hid it there after Regulus died. I doubt he found another Horcrux before that.”

“Besides, we turned that house on its head when we figured out that R.A.B. was Sirius’ brother,” Harry says. “The diadem definitely wasn’t there.”

“We might have thrown it out as well? Same as the locket. Or maybe Dung stole it too.”

Hermione taps the pen against her lips. “Then Draco wouldn’t have been able to see it, would he? He didn’t get to Grimmauld Place until last summer.”

“Oh, yeah. Right,” Ron rubs the back of his head and leans forward in his chair. “Guess we can rule that out, then. Maybe he saw it in another wizarding home? Another Death Eater’s house?”

Without a second thought, Draco shakes his head. “Anyone who found Ravenclaw’s diadem would either hide it or make sure that everyone knows they have it.” 

“And if You-Know-Who hands you something for safe-keeping, you definitely wouldn’t put it on display for anyone to see,” Harry adds.

“Mhhm,” Hermione says. “The Ministry?”

Harry shakes his head at once. “I can see him getting some kind of twisted satisfaction out of stashing a piece of his soul right under the Ministry’s nose, but once again: I doubt he’d put it someplace where people can just see it.”

Draco groans heavily and slumps back in his chair, grabbing his head with both hands. “Merlin, this is driving me mad,” he mutters. But no matter how much Draco rubs his temple, the answer doesn’t come. 

∞∞∞

Harry weaves in and out of the shadows, flinging jinxes over his shoulder, trying desperately not to lose sight of the others as the Snatchers close in, as the night comes down around them. 

It’s no use. All four of them are sleep-deprived and malnourished. The foreign wand in Harry’s hand is resistant and imprecise. Their options are limited by their desperate need not to get separated. 

One moment Draco is running just a step behind Harry, and a second later, he’s gone. Harry careens to a halt, already throwing a Protego at Draco, who’s being dragged across the frozen forest floor by a host of ropes wound around his body. The next jinx hits Harry in the face, knocking him back against something solid and clouding his vision with black. By the time he regains his senses, all four of them have been returned to the tent, bound together back to back with two other prisoners. 

For a moment, it seems like Harry’s disfigured face, some made-up names, and a bunch of luck might actually get them out of this — that is until Greyback gets around to Draco. There is no doubt the werewolf recognises him instantly. He crouches down in front of Draco, holds his face in place with one of his freakishly large hands, and whistles two appreciative notes. A nearby cuckoo answers the call, and it’s so absurd, so painfully inappropriate, that Harry nearly laughs in desperation. Draco’s breath catches. 

“Looks like we struck gold tonight,” Greyback announces loudly, and Harry’s bound hands get yanked in a bunch of different directions when all the captives flinch as one at the grating sound of his voice. “We caught the Malfoy brat.”

The other Snatchers roar in delight, and none of this bodes well. Harry desperately tries telling himself that maybe this could turn out to their advantage, seeing as nobody seems all that interested in verifying their fake identities anymore now that they’ve got Draco. Not that they could possibly hope to keep the ruse up for any extended period of time.

“Looks like you’re going home tonight,” Greyback says gleefully. He grabs the back of Draco’s head with his other hand and leans into the tight space left between Harry and Draco to whisper, “Can you believe he wants you almost as much as he wants Potter?” 

Draco is trembling terribly. A sharp pain shoots up Harry’s arm as he twists his bound wrist at an unnatural angle in search of Draco’s clammy hand and links their little fingers together.

Chapter Text

The wind blows, the sun rises, and Harry digs.

When he finally looks up, the sun has almost reached its zenith, and Draco sits on the ground a few feet away with his back propped up against a tree and his left arm cradled against his chest. Harry hasn’t even heard him coming, but he suspects that Draco has been there for some time — his eyes are glassy and unfocused. He doesn’t seem to have noticed that Harry has stopped digging in favour of scrutinising him. 

“You should be resting,” Harry says, and three whole seconds pass before Draco blinks, shakes his head and looks up into Harry’s face. Harry repeats himself. 

“So should you,” Draco finally croaks, and Harry can tell from his expression that every word is agony. 

“I’m fine. I got off easy. You and Hermione —” 

Harry looks at the shovel in his hands and recoils violently as he finds them stained with blood. Dobby’s, most likely, but not just. Harry hasn’t yet forgotten the feeling of Draco’s body going horribly limp in his arms, just seconds after whispering, “It’s in the Room of Requirement” — like Draco hadn’t expected to open his eyes ever again. Harry can’t imagine he will ever forget. 

He swallows and forces himself to look at Draco instead, battered but conscious. “I can’t even — I’m sorry.”

“You’re not the one who tortured us,” Draco says tightly.

“No,” Harry says, and forming the following words seems almost impossible. “But I’m the one who said his name and broke the taboo. It’s all my fault. I’m sorry.”

Draco doesn’t agree, but he doesn’t contradict him either. He just blinks at Harry, looking like he might not even have understood what Harry has said.

“I’m sorry,” Harry repeats, glad to hear that his voice sounds steady despite the hollow feeling in his gut. He doesn’t want to say this next thing either, but he knows it is the right decision. “You’ll be safe here. Luna and Dean will be staying as well, and maybe Bill can find a way to contact your mother.”

There’s no question that Draco understands this, at least. His whole body snaps to attention, the outrage clear on his face. “No,” he presses out, and this time Harry is sure that the pain in his voice isn’t caused by his abused vocal cords. Not solely, at least. “You’re not leaving me behind.”

“That’s not what this is,” Harry says slowly. “You were never meant to come along in the first place. This is your chance to get out.”

Draco’s shaggy hair whips him in the face as he shakes his head frantically. It must make him dizzy, and he is forced to close his eyes as he says, “I don’t want to get out.”

“Your own aunt tortured and mutilated you,” Harry points out.

“She’ll do that to anyone.”

“But she has it in for you. She obviously thinks that you betrayed the family, and she doesn’t seem like the kind to forgive easily. She killed Sirius. She tried to kill Tonks. I’d bet you anything that she killed your father as well. She’ll want to kill you too.”

“This is about defeating You-Know-Who,” Draco says. “Don’t tell me you think she’s worse than him.”

“But that’s my point! You-Know-Who will also want to make an example of you. You heard what Greyback said.”

“He said that he wants me almost as much as he wants you. So does that mean you’ll also hide here? Are Weasley and Granger to go on without you?”

“You know it’s different.”

“It’s not, Harry,” Draco insists, and Harry is acutely aware that it’s the first time Draco has called him by his given name. “It’s exactly the same, even if none of you will see it. I know Weasley will never accept that I have changed; he’ll never think I’ve done enough to atone for my sins, and he will be right. He’ll be right if you don’t give me a chance to at least try. I’m the one who figured out that the diadem might be a Horcrux, and where it is hidden! I should be there when you destroy it!”

“You have done enough, Draco! More than enough. Just look at what she’s done to you! Look at the mess she’s made of your arm.”

But Draco just pulls his heavily-bandaged arm closer to his body and refuses to look at it. “Hermione will keep scars as well. You’re not trying to make her stay out of this, are you?”

Harry presses his lips together tightly. “No.”

“Why me, then?” Draco asks, his monotone voice at odds with the crestfallen look on his face. “Can you still not trust me? After everything?” 

“I’m in love with you, you prat!” Harry shouts without meaning to, without even knowing what’s gonna come out of his mouth beforehand. “I can’t lose you!”

Draco recoils, gapes at him for a second before finally whispering, “You are not in love with me.”

“And how do you know?” Harry demands. Although he might not exactly have been aware of the extent of his feelings until just now, there’s no way in hell he will take it back. 

“Look at it, Harry!” Draco grabs Harry’s right wrist and drags the sleeve up to his elbow, brushes his wand over his skin to reveal the soulmark. The mare rears its head and dashes along Harry’s arm, and Harry wrenches his eyes away to find Draco’s. “It doesn’t matter. No matter what we do, we will never break this chain! You know this.”

“I don’t.”  

What weight does this stupid hidden mark carry compared to the terror Harry felt down in the Manor’s dungeons, forced to listen to Draco’s heart-wrenching, stomach-turning screams? None that Harry is willing to recognise. None at all.

But Draco just continues his speech. “It’s permanent! Once you get your mark, it won’t change as long as you both live!”

Harry’s blistered hand protests as he grips the handle of his shovel so hard it feels like it might crumble. “Don’t I get a say in the matter?”

“You can’t argue with your soulmark, Harry! It’s never wrong!” Draco squeezes Harry’s wrist. His fingers are trembling. “This is what you need. Not me.”

“I don’t want this,” Harry says, breaking out of Draco’s grip, throwing the shovel to the side, framing Draco’s face in both hands. “I want this.”

“You don’t know what you want,” Draco says. He could lean back, free himself from Harry’s blood-stained touch, but all he does is close his eyes and take a shaky breath. “You think it’s this, but it’s not.” 

“It is,” Harry insists. “I’ve never felt like this before —”

“I have,” Draco interrupts him, his voice just as cold as his eyes, leaning away now, disentangling himself from Harry after all. “This isn’t much different from any other fling I’ve had. It’s not us, Potter; it’s the circumstances. You’re reading into it because you don’t know who else might die tomorrow, and this is all you can hold on to right now.”

“I’m not reading into this,” Harry says vehemently. “This is real; I know it is!”

“If it were real, then I’d be your soulmate.” Draco picks himself up off the ground, his burned and mutilated arm cradled against his chest, and gives Harry a hard look. “I am not.”

∞∞∞

As he stands under the spray of his first hot shower in half a year, Harry allows himself a minute to cry in relief, in anger, in pain, in despair, a dozen more feelings he can’t even name. Then his minute is over, and Harry pulls himself together and scrubs his filthy skin until it’s just as raw as his insides feel.

When he makes it back to the small guest room Fleur has assigned him, dressed in a pair of freshly laundered pyjamas, also courtesy of Fleur, he finds Draco sitting cross-legged on the previously unoccupied second twin bed.

“Oh.” Harry freezes on the threshold, thrown for a loop by the sight of Draco’s bare legs, which are black and blue all over. After a second of staring, he finally regains his senses and quickly turns his back. “Sorry. I didn’t — I thought Ron would be sleeping in here.”

“He insisted on taking the sofa downstairs,” Draco says, sounding strangely casual, considering he gave Harry the brush-off less than two hours and a funeral ago. “Seems like all it took for him to not despise me anymore was me getting tortured. Who would have thought it could be so easy?”

“That’s …” Harry pauses, tries to get his thoughts into order and fails. Too much has happened since last night, and he doesn’t know what to focus on. Why didn’t Harry think of offering Draco his bed? It’s the least he could have done after the pain he has caused him. How Draco can talk about his ordeal so easily, he can’t fathom. 

“I’m, er — I’ll come back later? Or do you want the room to yourself? I can … I could sleep in the living room as well.”

“Don’t be daft,” Draco says in a tone that suggests it’s accompanied by an eye-roll. “Thomas has already claimed the armchair. So, unless you want to sleep on the floor —”

“Not particularly,” Harry tells the deserted hallway he’s facing. “But I could.”

“It’s settled, then,” Draco says lightly. “Now, if you could help me out of this jumper?” 

Harry doesn’t trust his voice right now, so he just nods slightly and approaches the bed.

Draco looks up at him, eyebrows drawn together. “Do you feel better now?” 

He may just be talking about the hot shower, but it’s not very likely. The walls are thin, and Harry knows his face is still puffy. 

Harry nods as he carefully sits down beside Draco. “How can you be so casual about everything?”

Draco extends his good arm so Harry can pull the sleeve off and says, “As I told you before, I am excellent at Occlumency.”

Harry pulls the jumper over Draco’s head next, careful not to unsettle Draco’s left arm, and replies, “Last year, I found you crying in a bathroom.”

“And look where that led me,” Draco says. “One of the reasons I worked to improve my compartmentalising skills.”

Packing all his emotions into tidy little boxes to shut away in the back of his head sounds exactly like the thing Harry would benefit from right now. Since he isn’t able to do that, he focuses on undressing Draco instead. Unfortunately, getting his injured arm out of its rolled-up sleeve soon proves impossible because the slightest movement seems to cause Draco immense pain, and he keeps flinching away from Harry.

“You should teach me some time,” Harry says conversationally as he picks up his wand from the bedside table. “How to suppress all this stuff.”

Draco eyes the wand warily but doesn’t protest when Harry taps the empty right sleeve. The wand obeys immediately, without even the slightest hint of the resistance Harry has come to expect of it, and Draco’s jumper (which is actually Harry’s, but who’s keeping track?) doubles in size. 

Harry holds the wand up and inspects it from all angles, almost expecting to find that this wand he snatched out of Greyback’s hand at the Manor isn’t actually the one Ron gave him. It is, though. It definitely is the wand Ron brought back from his desertion — only that it seems to work flawlessly all of a sudden.

“If you could free me from this tent sooner rather than later, that would be brilliant.”

“Sorry.” Harry stuffs the wand into the pocket of his pyjama trousers and easily manoeuvres Draco’s arm out of the now massive sleeve. He’s wearing two of Harry’s t-shirts underneath, but with his now trusty wand, Harry gets those off just as easily.

And then Draco sits next to him in nothing but his pants and some slightly dirty bandages, and suddenly Harry doesn’t know where to look anymore. 

No matter where they set up their camp, it was never mild enough to wear less than three layers, so he’s never seen Draco like this before. And now that Draco has turned him down, he is pretty sure he isn’t allowed to. So Harry just scoots away and looks around the room instead.

“Alright, er — so, did Fleur give you some pyjamas as well?”

“She did,” Draco says, grabbing a pair of dark blue pyjamas from underneath his pillow and dropping them into Harry’s lap. Instead of holding still so Harry can help him get dressed, he gets to his feet. “But I’ll definitely need to take a bath first. I’m pretty sure there’s blood in my hair.”

In all objectivity, Draco is right, of course. It is obvious that someone — probably Fleur — has wiped his face clean, but there is a visible border of grime and blood at his hairline and underneath his jaw. Still, Harry wasn’t expecting this answer. 

Now that Draco is standing, Harry’s eyes are level with his bare ribcage. He focuses on the pyjamas in his hands instead. They’re shiny and smooth, perhaps made of silk. Definitely something he’d expect Fleur to wear. She’s probably enlarged them to fit Draco.

Draco doesn’t say anything else, but he also doesn’t take his pyjamas from Harry, who gets the feeling that he’s supposed to say something.

“Right, yeah. I’ll, um …” Harry clears his throat and wishes this wasn’t so awfully awkward. “Can you manage, or …?”

Perhaps he shouldn’t have confessed his stupid feelings. Maybe, if he hadn’t, he’d be able to concentrate on helping Draco, instead of worrying about what he’s allowed to say or do or see or touch. Harry forces himself to look at Draco, who just went through hell because of Harry’s carelessness, and doesn’t deserve to be treated so poorly now just because Harry’s feelings are hurt.

Draco frowns down at his useless arm and then back at Harry. “Obviously not,” he says slowly.

Harry shakes the fog from his brain and rolls his shoulders. No more inhibitions. “Right, yeah. Sorry. I’ll help you if you want. Or I could ask —”

“You’ll do. Come on then.”

∞∞∞

Harry never thought he’d one day end up on his knees beside a bathtub, gently washing the blood out of Draco Malfoy’s hair. But here he is, trying to ignore the pins and needles slowly creeping up his legs, trying to ignore the smell of aloe and charred flesh emitting from Draco's arm leaning on the edge of the tub, trying to ignore … everything, really. 

He just keeps on running his hands through the tangled strands over and over and over again, until Draco’s hair is fair and smooth, until the water is rusty and cold, until Draco sits up, turns his head to look at Harry, and kisses him slowly. 

Harry is confused, and that first initial kiss ends quickly because of it. Draco leans over the edge of the tub and caresses the side of Harry’s face with his good hand.

“Just because I know it can’t last doesn’t mean I don’t want it now,” he says. 

∞∞∞

Harry still remembers vividly how nervous he was the first night he spent with Ginny. It’s nothing compared to this, though. 

His ears thrum with the heavy beating of his heart as Draco pushes in. He’s burning up with every touch. Draco kisses him, and Harry wants nothing more than to prove him wrong — there simply is no way that something as intense as this isn’t meant to last. Harry would rather die than willingly give this up. 

∞∞∞

“Weird, isn’t it?” says Ron. “Hermione working with Malfoy?”

Harry, who has been tasked with gathering mushrooms from Bill and Fleur’s vegetable patch, takes the opportunity to straighten up and have a proper look. He’s been sneaking glances every other minute or so, but now that he can really examine the two of them, it becomes clear that they’re making progress. 

Seemingly having moved on from general posture lessons, Draco is now correcting Hermione’s grip on Bellatrix’s wand. Even though they’re both still stiff and bruised, they’re looking healthier than they have in a long time. A change of clothes, a round of haircuts and a week of three square meals a day have really done wonders for all of them. 

Harry hums. “It’s a bit weird, yeah.”

“I didn’t think he could change this much.”

“Yeah.”

“Thank Merlin, or else Hermione might not …” Ron rubs both his eyes with one hand and mutters, “I don’t even wanna think about it.”

Clearly, Harry is missing some vital information here. “What do you mean?”

Ron shrugs and squints in Draco’s direction. “The old Malfoy would have done it, don’t you think?”

“Done what?” Harry asks, dreading the answer. 

“Put himself first,” Ron says, and the way he phrases it sets Harry on edge. Ron isn’t usually this cryptic, which suggests that he isn’t comfortable putting it plainly for once. 

Harry turns to face him now. “Ron, please. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Surprise flashes across Ron’s face, quickly replaced by distress. He scrutinises Harry for several long moments, his mouth opening and closing multiple times, before he finally presses out, “She tried to make him torture Hermione, but he wouldn’t do it. She was furious. Bellatrix.” 

The rush of blood in Harry’s ears is deafening all of a sudden, and the waves rolling onto the shore are a mere whisper. Harry’s eyes are magnets drawn towards Draco and Hermione. Two people whose hearts are in the right place. Two people who have suffered on his account. Two people he loves. 

A little quieter now, Ron asks, “Don’t tell me he didn’t brag about it?”

“No,” Harry whispers, barely hearing his own voice underneath the frantic beating of his heart. “He hasn’t mentioned that to me.”

Maybe Harry doesn’t do a good enough job at keeping his face neutral, and now, finally, Ron asks the question he’s been dreading for months. “Harry, what’s going on with you and Malfoy?”

“Nothing is going on,” Harry answers at once, forcing a frown onto his face, forcing himself to turn and look at Ron instead. “What do you mean?”

“You know … Back in the tent, I found you sleeping in the same bed a couple of times. I’ve just been wondering …”

But since Harry has been dreading the question, he has also been preparing the answer, and it comes smoothly now. “... wondering whether sharing four blankets with another person is more efficient than freezing alone under just two? Yeah, it is.”

“Right,” Ron says, but Harry can hear him thinking. Why Draco? Why would Harry choose Draco instead of one of his best friends?

“It’s not like I had options,” Harry says pointedly. “It’s just a thing that happened out of necessity. That night we ran into You-Know-Who in Godric’s Hollow and Nagini bit me, I caught a fever. I didn’t have a wand anymore, and Hermione was on watch, and you were gone, so who else was left?”

It’s a low blow, but Harry has always known that he isn’t above utilising those when necessary. 

Ron’s ears turn red right on cue, but he squares his shoulders and soldiers on through the awkwardness. “There’s … There isn’t something … between the two of you … Right?”

“No. There isn’t.”

Draco has made this very clear. There’s nothing between them. Nothing real, at least. And even if Draco caves more often than not, and slips into Harry’s bed in the dead of night, it still doesn’t mean anything. Not to Draco. 

It means a great deal to Harry, but those feelings are for him to bury, it seems. Nothing between the two of them. Just inside Harry.

“I’ve noticed you keep the door locked at night,” Ron adds tentatively. “And there’s this buzzing sound … like you’re casting a Muffliato …”

“He’s got nightmares,” Harry answers truthfully. “Would you want everyone in the house to hear you waking up screaming?”

Ron’s face shutters, and he sends Draco a pitiful look before he mutters, “You know I have to ask, right? Ginny’s my sister. I want her to be happy.”

“Don’t worry,” Harry says, bending down to pick another mushroom. “My feelings for her aren’t dependent on whatever Draco does.”

And they aren’t. Regardless of whether or not Draco wants him when all of this is over, Harry knows one thing for sure: He won’t be getting back together with Ginny. 

He loves her, truly. He has wanted her, too — at times enough to ache, even — but he has never needed her like he needs Draco now. It’s different in a way that is impossible to put into words, but nonetheless true. Now that Harry knows that he’s capable of feeling so deeply, he won’t be able to go back to anything less. It’s all or nothing. 

Harry knows he is obscuring the truth at best, but he remembers Ron’s obsession with soulmarks, remembers what the Horcrux whispered to him, about Harry preferring Draco over him. He fears the rift that might reopen if he were to be honest. They can’t afford it. Not now. 

Damn these lies. 

∞∞∞

Harry knows Draco isn’t entirely truthful, but no matter how hard he tries, he can’t tell which holds the lie: Draco’s words, asserting that he feels no affection for Harry, that all of this is just a distraction, a consequence of circumstance, or his actions, the warm looks and soft touches and deep kisses which let Harry believe, if only for an hour at a time, that maybe the opposite could be true. 

“You won’t leave me behind, will you?” Draco asks him one morning, his warm body draped around Harry’s as they listen to the waves lapping against the shore and watch the sunrise through the tilted window of their room. A pleasant breeze caresses Harry’s bare shoulder, and when his lips part for one deep breath, there is salt on his tongue. He shakes his head minutely. 

Draco’s hand slips into Harry’s hair, tugs at one of his curls to make it bounce. Even with his back turned, Harry can picture the stupid smile that’s sure to tug at Draco’s lips now. There are a million different ways for Draco to try and hide it from Harry, but that smile is always the same. Harry wishes he was allowed to see it properly, without Draco turning his head as soon as it emerges, without a hand shielding it from view, without a spell aimed at the curtains, shutting out all the light. 

Draco buries his nose in the crook of Harry’s neck and adds, “I’m not going to wake up one morning and find the three of you gone?”

And maybe that’s the reason why Draco hasn’t slept in his own bed for three whole weeks now. Maybe that’s why every morning, Harry seems to have a harder time untangling himself from Draco. Maybe that’s the intent behind the lingering looks Draco keeps sending his way. 

“No,” Harry whispers, knowing he is past the point of no return. 

It’s not like he hasn’t considered it. By now, Draco has taught Hermione everything there is to know about his aunt. They could pull off the Gringotts heist without him. Harry could never bear another night without Draco, though. So he’ll take what Draco’s offering, for as long as he is allowed to have it. 

One thing Harry knows for certain: If Draco doesn’t love him now, he never will. 

∞∞∞

They barely make it out of Gringotts, and things don’t slow down afterwards. Voldemort knows they are after his Horcruxes now, so their plan to wait for the summer holidays to go after the diadem is worthless. Before they know it, they’re inside the castle, getting ready to fight. 

Draco, who has spent most of their sixth year wandering the Room of Requirement, locates Ravenclaw’s diadem in under five minutes. When Ron and Hermione eventually reappear, clutching a bunch of basilisk teeth, it is finally Draco’s turn to pay Voldemort back for all his suffering. 

∞∞∞

Harry goes into the forest.

∞∞∞

The Death Eater forced to confirm Harry’s demise is shaking so badly he doesn’t even notice the rapidly beating heart underneath his fingertips, which are barely touching Harry’s chest. He seems to want to get away from Harry as quickly as possible. Harry wouldn’t be surprised if he wants to get away from everything else as well. 

Voldemort’s followers are getting agitated. Harry came into the forest wandless, and still Voldemort was knocked to the ground as his curse struck Harry. They are losing faith.

∞∞∞

It is Narcissa who cuts down Bellatrix in the final throes of the battle, and she does it in a cold fury. Harry’s shield charm protects Narcissa from the curse hurled her way, and she quickly darts aside as Harry sheds his cloak and faces Voldemort for the last time.

∞∞∞

Tom Riddle is no more.

Ron and Hermione are the first to reach him, and through the bushy mass of her hair, Harry can just barely make out two more red-heads, who throw their arms around the three of them as well. What follows after them is just a massive rush of people, all of them trying to reach Harry at the centre of the celebration. 

∞∞∞

For the first time in Harry’s life, there isn’t someone constantly plotting to kill him anymore — at least not that he knows of, and that’s good enough for him. 

The boys’ dormitory is as cosy and warm as it has ever been, and when Harry slips underneath his heavy blanket barely an hour after his resurrection, he finds that someone has even placed a hot water bottle at the foot end. It feels like coming home, and fatigue drags Harry deep into the mattress, promising hours of blissful oblivion. 

Harry starts from his sleep after merely an hour, feeling no longer calm and comfortable. 

Now that the worst of his exhaustion has been dulled, all the other sensations seem to crash in on him all at once. His chest throbs like it has made the acquaintance of a giant’s fist, and his forehead aches like it might split open any second now. Every move is agony, and his sore muscles are only half of it. 

Harry’s previously singed and ripped clothes have become saturated with dirt and blood in the hours since they escaped Gringotts, and the now stiff fabric is glued to his skin, making his moves even more uncomfortable. Even with his glasses on, Harry’s vision is still quite blurry. There is a hollow feeling in his stomach, and it has nothing to do with hunger.

Harry doesn’t know what happened to Draco.

He can’t recall seeing Draco after the final fight migrated into the Great Hall. He’d been there in front of the castle; Harry is certain his voice was amongst those anguished screams at the sight of his lifeless body, but after that — 

What kind of horrible person forgets to check on the one they claim to love? What the hell is wrong with Harry? To tell Draco he can’t lose him and then turn around and not even think of him in the aftermath of a bloody battle?

Harry’s hands are trembling as he rips the mokeskin pouch free of the fabric of his t-shirt and jumper, and he cuts his fingertips on the mirror shard when he rummages around for the map. There are drops of fresh blood on the parchment when he finally unfolds it on top of his blanket, but they vanish as soon as he activates the map. 

Harry’s eyes don’t seem to want to focus, so it takes an eternity to decipher the garbled mess of names in the Great Hall. Draco isn’t among them, and the Slytherin quarters are deserted apart from Parkinson, Zabini and Greengrass. But then — Harry’s heart lurches painfully — he finally finds Draco’s dot amongst another crowd of people. Down in the hospital wing. 

Harry doesn’t even think to put on his invisibility cloak. He just runs. 

∞∞∞

Draco’s white-blond hair is a beacon in the sea of people, and even with his blurry vision, Harry spots him immediately, talking to a girl who’s sitting on one of the hospital beds. The hospital wing is full of people dashing around, searching for their friends and family, shouting and crying and suffering, but Draco’s head still snaps up when Harry calls, “Draco!”

They start limping towards each other at the same moment, and when they finally meet in the middle, Harry doesn’t care how many people might be watching them. He just throws his arms around Draco and holds him like it’s the very last time. Because it might be. 

Their quest is over, and this really might be the end of everything else as well. And it didn’t take years — just a few months. An unbearably long time to starve and freeze and despair. Not nearly long enough for Harry to have gotten a lifetime’s worth of Draco. 

He feels awful for even thinking it, but deep down, Harry almost wishes they could have had a little bit more time. Draco will surely leave Hogwarts with his mother, and Harry — 

Harry frowns. “Where’s your mother?” he asks because he knows he would have noticed if she’d been on the map. She’s clearly not around.

Draco’s arms tighten around him for a split second, and then they’re gone. He takes a step back and says in a husky voice, “The healers transferred Nymphadora to St Mungo’s, so Mother went with them. Andromeda will meet her there.”

“She didn’t insist on taking you with her?” Harry has a hard time believing it. After everything that’s happened, he didn’t expect Narcissa to let Draco out of her sight ever again.

Draco shrugs and rubs his forearm absentmindedly. “I wouldn’t — I wanted to —” He closes his eyes for a second and finally adds, “She understood … that I couldn’t … couldn’t leave. I’m more useful here.”

“What are you doing here?” Harry asks, gripping the back of a nearby chair for support as his field of vision starts sliding to the side. “I thought you were … When I spotted you in here … I —”

Draco takes another step back and crosses his arms. And this is how it begins. Or, more accurately: This is how it ends. He’s already starting to distance himself from Harry, and Harry doesn’t think he can take it. He clenches the chair to keep himself from reaching out.

“Nothing major,” Draco says. “I’m just putting dittany on the wounds of people Madam Pomfrey has already examined. Handing out sandwiches and pyjamas. Whatever else I can do.”

“But you’re alright?”

“I — yes. Completely healed. Just a few bruises and a mild concussion left. Bit sore.”

“Good,” Harry says, nodding along mindlessly. Another nasty bout of nausea rushes over him, but Harry fights through the discomfort, and forces his legs to bear his weight a bit longer. “Good, good, good. That’s good. Good.”

Draco’s eyes narrow. “Has anyone taken a look at you yet?”

It takes a second for the meaning to get through to Harry, and Draco takes a step closer, his head cocked.

“I’m fine,” Harry says, but Draco is already reaching out. He carefully takes Harry’s face into his hands and turns it towards a nearby lamp. The light is too bright, and Harry squeezes his eyes shut as a sharp, stabbing pain flares up at the back of his head once again. “Just tired,” he mutters. “But I can help. Here, I mean. I could —”

“You are far from fine,” Draco says matter-of-factly, and then he’s got his hand around Harry’s wrist, pulling him towards one of the few unoccupied beds. “Sit.”

“I’ll be fine,” Harry insists, but he still does as he’s told. If Draco is willing to stand between his legs and inspect Harry for injuries, then Harry will take it gladly.

“Yes, you will,” Draco says softly now, brushing Harry’s filthy hair out of his face. Harry, feeling like he might keel over at any moment, can’t help but lean into the touch. Perhaps that is the reason it ends after barely a second. Draco takes a step back and clears his throat. “I’ll get Madam Pomfrey.”

Considering that there isn’t a part of his body that doesn’t hurt, Harry should probably take any help he can get — the more experienced, the better. But still, his first instinct is to protest. “I — No, Draco. She doesn’t need to —”

“You’re bloody all over,” Draco says. If he’s trying to trick Harry into mistaking him staring at Harry’s forehead for eye contact, he is failing miserably. He takes a step back for good measure and adds, “I can’t see whether you’re injured or not. She’ll be able to tell with a few spells. Don’t go anywhere.”

Harry doesn’t even consider disobeying. Once Draco puts him on Madam Pomfrey’s radar, there won’t be any hope of slipping out of her grasp. He’s in for it now.

She returns with Draco a few minutes later, presses her lips together at the sight of him and asks, “How do you feel?”

“Oh, um — I don’t know. Exhausted? Also pretty bruised, if I’m honest. Dizzy.”

Madam Pomfrey nods, raising her wand. “Were you hit by any hexes or curses?”

It’s probably wise not to mention in front of all these people that Harry has just managed to survive the Killing Curse a second time. He can just imagine the endless rounds of examination he’d have to endure. Also, he doesn’t want to give people any ideas. Like trying to find out whether he might actually be immune to the curse. 

Harry shakes his head. 

“You died,” Draco says tonelessly. 

And while that certainly is true, Harry never explicitly said so. As far as the general public is concerned, Voldemort might just have believed him to be dead. Everything about the whole Horcrux business is absolutely bonkers. Harry doubts anyone not acquainted with the concept knows what it takes to destroy one. And yeah, strictly speaking, Draco does know. But it’s complex magic, right? He won’t be able to prove that Harry is lying. 

“Do I look dead?” Harry asks. 

Draco’s expression hardens. “Do you take me for an idiot? You died.”

“It wasn’t —”

“Don’t lie to me,” Draco presses out. “Soulmarks don’t. I — We — Ginny told us —”

Madam Pomfrey places a hand on Draco’s shoulder, cutting his rant short, and says sternly, “I’ll need an honest answer, Mr Potter. Were you cursed or not?”

“I —” Harry hesitates. 

Draco glares. “We’re not going to tell anyone, alright? Just spit it out.”

Finally, Harry mumbles, “Yes.”

“Which curse was it?”

“It was, um … It was …” Harry pauses, glances around. Several people quickly avert their eyes, and Harry taps his lightning bolt scar instead of voicing the curse out loud for everyone to hear. 

∞∞∞

With his hands on Harry’s shoulders, Draco manoeuvres him to a spot directly underneath the already running shower. The hot water hits Harry’s back first, and his clothes are drenched in seconds. When they finally detach from his skin, it’s like being released from a vice. 

Underneath the pleasant fog of the pain potion that Madam Pomfrey gave him, Harry only just notices a series of cuts all over his body as they flare up upon contact with the water. He doesn’t particularly care. Once they’re clean, Draco will treat his wounds. 

Draco moves in, tips Harry’s head back with a cool hand on his forehead, and Harry closes his eyes as the water hits his face. Draco’s fingers catch in Harry’s hair like they always do. Harry doesn’t want it to be the last time. 

He places a hand at Draco’s neck and draws him in until their foreheads are pressed together. A stream of water runs along Harry’s bruised cheekbone, passes between them via the tips of their noses, travels down the side of Draco’s face.

“We did it.”

One of Draco’s hands disentangles from Harry’s hair to cup his face. “We did it.”

The first kiss of Harry’s new life feels like the last as well, and it tastes like blood and dirt and pain potion. 

“Your scar has grown,” Draco says quietly, brushing his fingertips along Harry’s eyebrow and then downwards, halting just above his cheekbone. “It’s down to here now; did you know?” 

Harry shakes his head. 

“Well, I reckon you can always grow out your hair again; try to hide it.”

“I knew you were into the long hair,” Harry says. It seems to be the wrong thing to say because Draco instantly lets go of him and takes a step back. 

“Can we talk?” Harry asks, and now he’s starting to feel the pain again after all. “About this — us?”

“Not right now,” Draco says. 

“But —”

“We’re both concussed and, at least in my case, slightly traumatised. This isn’t the time to make decisions. We should all just … just take a few days, at least.”

Harry feels like arguing, like grabbing Draco and demanding they sort it out right then and there. Unfortunately, that approach is almost guaranteed to drive Draco away for good. Harry isn’t that concussed. So he just nods. 

“Alright,” Draco says, and the barest hint of a smile tugs at his lips. He pulls on the frayed hem of Harry’s jumper. “Now, let’s see about getting you out of these rags and into a bed.”

Harry closes his eyes, relieved, and relinquishes control for a little while.

Draco never asks why Harry lied about dying. 

∞∞∞

Harry doesn’t blame Hermione for coming up each night to sleep in Dean’s empty bed, or Ron for moving their beds close enough together to hold hands as they doze off. He knows how difficult it can be to fall asleep, especially once you’ve gotten used to a certain sleeping environment. 

Unfortunately, this is not Harry’s. 

Halfway through his third sleepless night, Harry shuts his curtains and resigns himself to studying the map for an hour or two. He’s just curious to see what’s happening in the castle (at quarter to three). It’s not like he’s focused on any one dot in particular. 

Only after he’s checked every other part of the castle, does Harry allow himself to turn his attention towards the Slytherin quarters, and by that time, Draco’s dot is already making its way through his common room and out of the dungeons. For a few heady minutes, Harry has himself convinced that Draco is on his way up to the Gryffindor tower. But then he makes a turn and ends up in the seventh-floor corridor instead. 

∞∞∞

Harry almost hits the cuckoo gong as he enters the room but catches himself at the last moment. He sends his Patronus ahead instead, just in case Draco actually still cares whether Harry catches him crying once again. 

He follows the stag's silver glow down a rather familiar path and finds Draco draped across the couch he once transfigured into a hideous, pretentious thing. It has since gone back to its original beaten-down, ink-stained form, and Draco hasn’t bothered fixing it again. He exhales deeply as Harry sits down at his feet, but doesn’t open his eyes. 

“What are you doing here?” Harry asks softly. 

One of the rubbish towers creaks ominously, and some hidden thing flaps what sounds like wings. The Patronus raises its head, monitoring the area for potential threats, and starts glowing a little brighter. 

“Couldn’t sleep,” Draco says, eyes still closed. “Everybody else has gone home, so now I’m the only one down in the dungeons. It’s horribly quiet.”

Harry knows exactly what he means. “I’m surprised you’re still here,” he says, resisting the urge to place his hand on Draco’s knee. 

“Where would I go?” Draco asks as his eyebrows draw together. “I’d be no help with Nymphadora or Teddy. The last thing they need is another person cramming up Aunt Andromeda’s house. And even if the Manor wasn’t confiscated, I couldn’t —”

“I’m sorry,” Harry says, horrified with his overtired brain for suggesting that Draco go back to the house stolen from his family by a mass-murderer, the house in which he was tortured. 

Draco takes a shaky breath, and it’s hard to tell whether the vibrations reaching Harry are shivers or just Draco shrugging half-heartedly. Harry doesn’t think — he just scoots over so he can link his little finger with Draco’s. 

“It’s fine,” Draco says, but his voice is breathy, his pinkie nearly crushing Harry’s. “I’ll just stay here until I figure out where else to go.”

“Yeah, me too,” Harry mutters. There is silence for a moment. Then Draco tugs on Harry’s finger, and Harry frowns. “Wait, do you mean ‘here’ like in the castle or right here in this room?”

“I don’t know,” Draco says on an exhale. He stretches his bent legs and lets them dangle over the armrest of the loveseat. “I’m just so fucking exhausted. If I’m able to fall asleep here, I’ll take it.”

Harry doesn’t ask why Draco hasn’t made the room into something else — a cosy space full of calming noise and maybe some sleeping potions, for example. He’s glad he hasn’t because otherwise, Harry wouldn’t have been able to find him. 

“Well, if you miss Ron’s snoring …”

A startled laugh escapes Draco. “Weasley’s snoring most certainly is not what comes to mind first,” he says, peeking at Harry through his lashes. 

Harry pokes Draco’s side with his free hand. “No, no, be honest now. It’s excellent white noise to fall asleep to, isn’t it?”

“I’d say we did pretty well without Weasley,” Draco says. He must feel Harry tensing up at the reminder of Ron’s desertion, and quietly adds, “At Shell Cottage, I mean.”

“Yeah,” Harry says, softly now. He keeps their little fingers linked together as he gets up. “Come on, then.”

∞∞∞

As Harry stares at the emerald curtains surrounding the bed, both arms tightly wound around Draco’s gaunt body — as if that will drive off the constant vertigo that’s made a home inside Harry’s head — he tries convincing himself that this is fine — more than he could ever have hoped for, even. The war is over, Voldemort is dead, and Draco hasn’t put a stop to this yet. 

When Harry finally falls asleep, he dreams of first sunlight slipping through the curtains, a breeze caressing his shoulder, and salt on his lips. 

∞∞∞

“What are you working on?” Harry plops himself down on top of the desk, right next to the spreadsheet Draco is currently scribbling on. “Don’t say homework.”

Draco flinches and then tries to cover it up by shaking his arms out rather excessively, obscuring Harry’s view of his parchment in the process. 

“Nothing specific,” he says in a voice that’s a tad too high, and then he rolls the scrolls up and stuffs them into his bag. 

“That’s not suspicious.”

Draco nods along as he fastens the buckles. “Exactly.”

“Except it is.”

There’s a dull thud as Draco drops the bag onto the ground between his feet and crosses his arms. “Fine. I’m plotting a Veela romance novel.”

“Great. Love those. Can I read it?”

Draco raises an eyebrow. “You do not like romance novels. You’d rather read Lockhart’s whole bibliography.”

“So would you,” Harry says as he leans forward into Draco’s personal space. Draco turns his head to check that they’re still alone in the library, but he doesn’t scoot his chair away from him. Harry grins. “So … Whatcha working on?”

“My biography,” Draco says, quick as a whip now. “Two chapters about living amongst boars, another three about me excelling at school and then a whopping twenty chapters about listening to your deafening snores while freezing my arse off in a grotty tent for eight months. Instant bestseller.”

There’s another grin tugging at the corner of Harry’s mouth, but he manages to adopt a serious expression as he crosses his legs and leans back on one hand. “I assume you’ll want me to pose for the cover?”

“Don’t flatter yourself,” Draco says. He’s grinning now. “You’re not that —”

But Harry never learns what exactly he isn’t. At that moment, Ginny enters through the gap the library’s double doors have left when they were blown off their hinges, and Harry instinctively uncrosses his legs and straightens up. 

“There you are,“ she says. She’s addressing Draco, but her eyes keep flickering back to Harry. “Kingsley wanted to go over the Manor’s blueprints again if you’ve got time. Bill’s team is going in tomorrow. They’re waiting for you in McGonagall’s office.”

It seems that Draco can’t get away from them fast enough, and he straight up pretends like he doesn’t hear Harry yell after him, “This isn’t over! You have until dinner to think of a better lie!”

“It’s so weird,” Ginny says. She plonks herself down on Draco’s abandoned chair and folds one of her legs over the other at a right angle. “He tried to curse you less than a year ago. And now … If I didn’t know better, I’d say you’re actually his best friend. That spell you used to defend yourself —”

His stomach clenches painfully. “That was an accident,” he says in a tight voice. “You know I didn’t —”

Ginny leans forward to grab his forearm in comfort. Her foot brushes his shin, that’s how close she is, and Harry has to fight the urge to slide off the table and create some distance. If she notices his discomfort, she doesn’t mention it. 

“Yeah, I know. I just meant … It’s mental, isn’t it? When you stop to think about it?”

Harry drags both hands through his hair, mostly because she has to let go of him in the process. “A lot has happened since then,” he says, hoping she won’t ask him to elaborate.

“That’s an understatement,” she says. Her reassuring smile has turned wry. She takes a deep breath and scrutinises him for a long moment before she adds, “I think we should have that talk now.” 

And it’s exactly what Harry has been hoping to hear for a week now, but not in such a resigned tone, and not from her.

It isn’t like Harry has been avoiding her. He’s been treating her exactly like he treats all his friends. If McGonagall assigns them to the same repair team around the castle, they’ll work together easily. They’ve been sitting across from each other at dinner. Just this morning, Harry watched from the Astronomy Tower as she and the twins narrowly beat Ron, Charlie and Bill in a quick game of Quidditch. 

He just hasn’t gone out of his way to spend time alone with her. 

“About the mark …” she says as she grabs her propped-up ankle with both hands.

Harry’s mind is racing, but no appropriate response presents itself. “Alright,” he says after several uncomfortable seconds of silence. He feels like she’s expecting more from him, but he has nothing to say. Not about the mark, at least.

Ginny sighs and rolls her shoulders like she’s getting ready for a fistfight. “It’s … well, it’s gone, isn’t it?”

Harry’s stomach plummets through the floor, and now it really is a good thing he’s still sitting. “Gone?” he echoes in a voice that sounds like it belongs to someone else. “What do you mean, gone?”

“It faded,” she says. The grip on her ankle has turned white-knuckled. “I felt it. That night. When you went into the forest.”

Harry nods automatically, links his hands together behind his neck. He’s unsure what he should feel, unsure what he does feel. “Yeah,” he mutters, tipping his head back to face the high ceiling. “Draco told me about your mark fading. So it’s not … fixed? I just assumed … I mean, I’m not dead.”

“It’s gone,” Ginny says tonelessly. Her left hand flexes around her ankle, like she’s trying to decide whether to prove her claim by revealing the mark or not. She seems to decide against it in the end, and Harry is glad. “It’s turned silver,” she adds, “and it doesn’t move at all.”

“Okay,” he says. “I think … I —” 

He doesn’t know what to say. ‘It’s alright’? Does Ginny think it is alright to lose a soulmark? Did she hope it would return when he did? Is it gone because they’re not right for each other anymore, or has she simply fallen out of love? He’s not sure whether that’s something he can ask her. So, Harry just lets his sentence die there and doesn’t continue the thought. 

Ginny frowns, lets go of her ankle so she can firmly plant both feet on the floor. “You seem surprised,” she says, sounding truly anxious for the first time. “Does that mean … you’ve still got yours?”

“My … It’s —” Harry stammers. He hasn’t even checked, hasn’t looked at it once in the week since he died. Not in the who-knows-how-many months before that either — not until Draco — not since Draco — Harry hasn’t checked.

Ginny knows. There’s a wrinkle right between her eyes, and her lips have parted to release a shaky breath. She knows Harry hasn’t wasted one single thought on whether or not his death has affected her. She knows his soulmark has never been a source of reassurance or comfort to him.

“I thought it was because you died,” Ginny says. “Of course, I knew that that’s what happens if your soulmate dies, but I thought … And then, when you came back, I expected it to come back too, only it didn’t, and I thought … Well, people don’t usually get to come back, so maybe it just takes some time … ”

“Ginny …”

She shakes her head. “I thought it was just a technicality, you know? I thought it didn’t matter if we still had our marks or not, as long as we both knew — as long as we both wanted them to be there …”

Harry doesn’t say that he never wanted the mark. He told her as much a year ago. She knows, or maybe she is just now realising that he meant it. Either way, there is nothing he could say that would comfort her now.

“Can I —?”

Harry looks up from her clenched hands to find her eyes fixed on his arm. For a moment, he is frozen in place, blindsided by the request. Then he takes a deep breath, rolls up his sleeve, and turns his head as he extends his arm. A slight shiver grips him as her spell brushes his skin.

Ginny’s silent for a long moment, and for the duration of ten horrible heartbeats, Harry fears his soulmark might still be active, that she’ll feel obligated to get back together with him because of this wretched prophecy. Then she huffs in a truly ambiguous way, taps his arm and readjusts his sleeve for him.

“You’re good,” she says. She is trying to sound poised, but there is a wobbly smile on her face when Harry looks at her. If anything, it makes him feel worse. “Truly free to choose now.”

Knowing he will never look at his mark again, Harry cradles his arm against his chest. “I’m sorry,” he says, wishing he had never found out about the concept of soulmarks. Wishing he had never revealed its existence to anyone. Wishing he could spare her this pain.

“Don’t be,” Ginny says heavily. “I guess we’re different people now. Seems that we were only perfect for each other your first time around.” She gets up, comes to stand behind the chair and grips the back with both hands. “We’ll be alright.”

Harry has never exactly been good with words, never seems to know the right thing to say, so he just nods.

Ginny smiles a little brighter. “So … Draco, huh?”

Harry’s ears rush as all the blood leaves his head. In an undoubtedly suspicious voice, he asks, “What about Draco?”

“Come on, Harry. There’s no need to pretend for my sake. I’m happy for you.”

“What do you mean?” Harry asks, dimly aware that gripping the edge of the desk is probably not the way to prove his innocence.

Ginny rolls her eyes. “Come on,” she repeats. “The two of you are obviously into each other. I mean, you haven’t slept in the tower in days.” Harry’s ears have stopped rushing. Judging by the nausea, all his blood has ended up somewhere in his stomach, if that’s possible. Ginny seems to notice his discomfort and quickly adds, “It’s fine. I’m not angry. If you want to make it official, I won’t mind. Promise.”

“There’s nothing to make official,” Harry says numbly, blindsided by the sudden turn this conversation has taken. “He doesn’t have feelings for me. It’s just … It’s only a fling.”

Ginny shakes her head in obvious disbelief. “How do you know?”

“That’s what he told me!” Harry spits out. Her eyebrows twitch, and Harry quickly corrects his tone, grimacing. “Besides, he’s definitely into this whole soulmark business. I don’t think he’d want a serious relationship with anyone but his soulmate. So yeah, bully for me.”

“Have you actually talked to him about this?”

“I’ve been trying, but he clearly doesn’t want to hear it.” 

“Tell him how you feel,” she says assertively. “Plainly. Don’t beat about the bush.”

Harry really doesn’t know what she expects him to do.

∞∞∞

Draco hasn’t returned to his dorm yet, but Harry goes there anyway. Since Draco is the only Slytherin left at the castle, their quarters are always deserted, quiet, peaceful. A safe haven after a hectic day filled with people who all seem to want something from Harry. He is used to it by now — not that that has ever made things any easier to bear.

Draco turns up fifteen minutes later, covered in a thin layer of dust. He pushes Harry’s legs off the couch and squeezes into the tiny space next to him, and Harry leans his head against Draco’s shoulder. Now that the sun has set, the occasional Grindylow passes by the giant porthole, and they stare into the murky depths of the lake together. Draco likes the oversized water snails best, but Harry is still straining his eyes to catch another glimpse of a merperson’s grotesque face, as he did a few days ago. (Although Draco swears blind that all Harry saw was his own reflection.)

They’ve been sitting in front of the porthole for close to an hour when Draco finally stirs. He straightens in his place, shrugging Harry off more gently than expected, and bends to retrieve a scroll of parchment from his bag, which he drops into Harry’s lap.

“Is this your Veela romance novel?” Harry asks, snatching the scroll before Draco can change his mind. He’s got it unrolled in no time, and then he’s left staring at a half-finished family tree. Some of the names are accompanied by small portraits, and his own face frowns back at him from the bottom of the page.

“It’s safe to say that there is not a drop of Veela blood in you,” Draco says. “And that’s without doing any research at all. I can tell just by looking at you.” 

“This is … Draco —”

Draco sighs and turns away to face the lake again. “I’m afraid it’s only your father’s side of the family,” he says slowly, like this isn’t a big deal at all. “And I’m sorry, but I couldn’t find anyone who’s still alive.” 

Draco pauses, maybe to give Harry some time to process this. Harry can’t help but shrug. It’s not like he ever would’ve considered the possibility that anyone from his father’s side of the family could still be around. This isn’t a shock to him.

“I’m sure Hermione could help you research your mother’s side,” Draco says. “The Muggles have got to keep records as well, right?”

“Oh yeah,” Harry answers automatically, without even really processing what Draco has said. He’s busy scanning the contents of the scroll, taking in the names, his eyes jumping from portrait to portrait. Finally, he arrives at the photograph of a curly-haired woman who doesn’t seem to have any ancestors. “Who’s this?” 

Draco leans into him so he can have a proper look. “That’s your paternal grandmother. I’m afraid there isn’t much information about her in the British records.”

“She’s got my hair,” Harry says, unable to prise his eyes away from her.

“Clearly,” Draco says — as if he hasn’t spent most of their private time with his hands in Harry’s hair. “If I were to hazard a guess, I’d say she was likely the inspiration behind your grandfather’s invention of his patented hair potion.”

Harry doesn’t even really register the jab. “Do you think one of her parents had it as well?”

Draco turns to prop his back up against the armrest. With his long legs draped over Harry’s lap, he closes his eyes and sighs. By now, he has spread construction dust all over Harry and the furniture. 

“I think we could put in an information request at the Greek Ministry, but their reply could take months,” he mutters. “If they even react at all. Worth a shot, though.”

Harry places a hand on Draco’s ankle, strokes the skin showing between his socks and the hem of his trousers. “Let’s go to Greece, then,” he says without a second thought. “We’ve got plenty of time. The school year doesn’t start for another three months.” 

Draco’s eyes snap open. “We can’t just —”

“Why not?” Harry asks, desperate for this to work out despite only having come up with the idea a moment ago. He just needs Draco to say yes to something. “You said you’d stay here until you figure out where else to go. This is somewhere to go.” 

Another Grindylow passes them by. Out of the corner of his eye, Harry can tell that it makes a rude gesture at them, as is customary, but he refuses to acknowledge it. He keeps his eyes fixed on Draco’s, trying to sway him by sheer force of will.

“You know that’s not what I meant,” Draco finally says. “I was talking about somewhere to stay. A place where I belong.”

“Something will turn up,” Harry says. “But in the meantime, let’s go to Greece. We’ll make a holiday out of it. My treat. No tents, just the most outrageously extravagant hotels we can find. I’m talking about room service.”

Draco’s eyebrow twitches. “The most extravagant thing you can think of is room service?” he asks, sounding appalled.

“Fresh towels every time you take a bath.” Harry flings his hands into the air like he’s unravelling an imaginary ad banner. “Complimentary bathrobes.”

Draco’s mouth is hanging open just a smidge. “You can’t be serious.”

“Hot, running water every hour of the day.”

“You’re not serious.” Draco groans, dropping his head back against the armrest. “Why am I even listening to you?”

“Come on,” Harry says, energetically patting his ankles with both hands. “I’ve never left the island before. It’ll be great fun, I promise.”

Draco shakes his head and keeps facing the ceiling. “Why would you take me?”

“I told you already,” Harry says. “The day we …” His voice catches, and he has to take a deep breath and search for a way to put his feelings into words he can actually speak aloud. He just keeps coming up with things that are impossible to say.

The day we were captured. 

The day she burned the Dark Mark off your arm. 

The day Dobby died. 

The day you told me we would never break the chain.  

“That first morning at Shell Cottage,” Harry finally says. “I told you —”

“You don’t have feelings for me,” Draco says blankly.

Anger rises inside Harry, and he tamps down on it. Still, he sounds more than just irritated as he snaps, “Would you please stop telling me what I can and can’t feel?”

“Well, you don’t,” Draco says. He shrugs, like this is not a big deal at all, like this is not an important conversation. “You were just cold, desperate and lonely. Come on, we talked about this. You are a match, the two of you. You can’t go against that. It’s time you accept it.”

“We’re not, though,” Harry says, his hands tightening around Draco’s ankles, keeping them both chained together. “Not anymore. Her mark faded when I … when I died.”

Draco sighs, and although Harry can’t see it, he knows Draco is rolling his eyes in exasperation. “It will have returned,” Draco says firmly. “Has she really not checked since then?”

“She has, and it’s gone,” Harry says, and frustration settles around him like the layer of dust on Draco’s clothes. “And she confirmed that mine’s gone as well. She doesn’t want to get back together any more than I do.”

Draco tenses, and they are quiet for a very long time. Finally, Draco says in a strangled voice, “Well, you don’t have feelings for me, or you would —”

Harry throws his hands up in exasperation. “I’d what, Draco? What can I possibly do to convince you? Please tell me because I’d love to do it.”

Judging by Draco’s silence, there isn’t anything Harry can do.

They fall asleep with their backs pressed together that night, but when Harry wakes up, it is with Draco draped around and half on top of him, keeping him pinned to the mattress by the weight of his slack body. Harry buries his face in Draco’s soft hair, listens to his deep breaths, concentrates on the even rise and fall of Draco’s chest against his own, and pretends that Draco isn’t asleep, pretends that keeping Harry close with all his might is a conscious decision.

∞∞∞

Harry grabs Ginny’s arm the second she leaves the Great Hall, and she doesn’t even have the decency to look surprised. Or ashamed. Or something.

“Really?” she asks, both eyebrows raised. “And you wonder how I could tell you were into him.”

Harry ignores the jab, but only because he can’t seem to stop peeking through the open doors to try and decipher the expression on Draco’s face. Unfortunately, Draco has his head tipped back to face the enchanted ceiling, and Harry can’t get a good look. 

“What did you say to him?” he hisses. “Please tell me you didn’t —”

“Told him the same thing I told you,” Ginny interjects, arms akimbo. “That it shouldn’t matter whether you’re someone’s soulmate as long as you want to be and act like it.”

Harry stares at her, mortified. “You didn’t.”

“Yeah, I did. You’re both being ridiculous, and I can’t take this moping any longer.”

“Bloody hell,” he groans. The appropriate words are escaping him for the moment, so he just spins on the spot in frustration before gesturing at her with both hands. “This is none of your business,” he hisses. “Just look at him! He’s — oh no.”

Hermione has taken the vacated spot at Draco’s side and is now very clearly lecturing him. She’s got a notebook spread out on the table, wedged between Draco’s half-finished plate of cottage pie and his pumpkin juice, but no matter how often she gestures at it, Draco refuses to take a look. He just keeps his face directed at the ceiling like he can’t even hear her. If Harry couldn’t see his lips moving, he’d think that Draco was ignoring her.

Harry makes a dash for the doors, intent on freeing Draco from Hermione’s clutches and saving himself from further embarrassment. Quick as a Snitch, Ginny places herself in the doorway, both arms outstretched.

“Nope,” she says, grinning nastily. Harry comes to the horrible realisation that the two of them are most definitely in cahoots.

“Gin, please. I’m literally begging you.”

Her grin grows even wider as she shakes her head. “And I am thoroughly enjoying it, believe me.” She draws her wand and uses it to gesture at the far end of the hallway. “Now step away from the door, or I’ll hex you.”

Harry narrows his eyes. “You wouldn’t.”

“Bat-Bogey Hex, darling. Just try me.”

He knows better than to take her up on the offer, but that doesn’t stop him from jumping at Hermione when she leaves the Great Hall a few minutes later. She certainly doesn’t seem surprised either.

“What did you talk about?”

Hermione gives him a sly smile and keeps walking towards the entrance doors. Harry hurries after her, Ginny hot on his heels. When she hasn’t responded to his question by the time they make it down the stairs and onto the grass, he repeats the question. 

“Hermione. What did you and Draco talk about?”

“Oh, you know …” she says as she sets them onto the path towards Hagrid’s cabin. “We discussed which subjects we’ll be taking next year.”

“Really.”

“Draco’s my friend as well,” Hermione says, shaking her head at Ginny in an obvious act of girl telepathy. “Do I need a reason to talk to my friends? Besides, Draco actually takes his education seriously. And I think it’s about time he starts to look forward instead of back.”

“He looked like he might start crying,” Harry says, shaking his own head in retaliation. Since Ron isn’t here for it, he has to direct it at Hagrid’s hut instead, which they are steadily approaching now. Harry thinks that Hagrid might be on his side here. Surely he wouldn’t appreciate the girls meddling in Harry’s love life? 

“As I said. He takes his future very seriously.” 

∞∞∞

That evening in front of the porthole, instead of asking, ‘Would you rather hug the Giant Squid or snog a merperson?’ Draco asks, “Would you rather be able to breathe underwater or fly?”

Maybe it’s some kind of trick, and the consequence of a seemingly safe decision will be revealed after Harry has made it. He ponders the question, the ramifications of both options. Finally, he asks, “Would this require me to permanently turn into a fish or a bird or something?”

“No.” 

“Would I have to spend the rest of my life underwater or off the ground?”

“No.”

“Would everyone who can’t breathe underwater or fly have to die?”

“Fucking hell, Potter,” Draco mutters. “I’m not a genie. There is no catch. Just answer the question.”

Harry drags his legs up onto the couch and puts his arms around his knees, upon which he places his chin. “Well, I can just pick up a broom if I want to fly.”

Draco shakes his head in exasperation. “And as you may recall, there are also ways to breathe underwater. Just choose one you’d want to be able to do without spells or equipment and be done with it.”

Draco may put on a grumpy act, but there are wrinkles at the corners of his eyes as he looks at Harry once the latter chooses flight. He tries to hide his expression by tipping Harry over and pulling his upper body into his lap, but unfortunately for him, the way his fingers travel up and down Harry’s bare arms isn’t any less fond.

∞∞∞

When it’s like that, Harry thinks they could keep this thing going for years without ever talking about it. Sometimes, when Draco runs his hand down Harry’s side in one smooth motion, Harry is almost tempted to go for it. After all, what’s the worst that could happen? Sure, there’s the risk of Draco falling in love with someone else, finding his soulmate and leaving Harry for good. It wouldn’t be any worse than Draco refusing him right now, though. 

Harry tells himself that this is enough. 

He doesn’t need to call Draco his boyfriend to make this real. Not if he can spend hours kissing him in front of the porthole, for all the fish to see. He doesn’t need to profess his love for everyone to hear, as long as he can pull Draco into his arms late at night. Why would Harry need Draco to confess his feelings? His hands are buried in Harry’s hair, his lips are on Harry’s throat, and Harry’s heart threatens to overflow. 

It’s real, but only when they’re by themselves. 

∞∞∞

On the twentieth morning of waking up with all their limbs tangled beyond reason, during that moment in between sleep and consciousness, maybe a second before common sense sets in, Harry whispers against Draco’s temple, “I know this isn’t just a fling for you either.”

Draco presses his face deeper into the pillow, hiding his expression from view. “You can’t know that,” he says, his voice sleep-rumpled and faint.

Harry props his head up on one hand and strokes Draco’s hair with the other. “I do, though,” he says, praying he is right about this, praying he isn’t on the verge of ruining it. He hesitates for a moment and lets his hand glide along the warm plane of Draco’s shoulders. 

Draco’s tense muscles loosen with every feather-light stroke of Harry’s fingertips, and he pushes himself up slightly to turn his face away from Harry. “How so?” he whispers instead of telling Harry to shut up.

It’s hard to choose. There have been many moments that made Harry wonder whether this isn’t something real to Draco as well. After a few seconds of pondering, Harry picks the very first one.

“The night we found Gryffindor’s sword in that frozen pond,” he says, shivering slightly at the memory of ice-cold water weighing him down, the phantom feeling of a chain tightening around his throat. He leans forward and presses a kiss against Draco’s shoulder blade, and that helps a bit. “You could have cast a warming charm on me. But you wrapped me in a bunch of blankets instead and warmed me up yourself.”

“Warming charms are hard to pull off when you’re tired and hungry,” Draco says, but his voice is husky and unsure. “Maybe I just thought you weren’t worth the effort.”

“Maybe,” Harry allows. “But I think you do love me. Maybe just as much as I love you.”

“You don’t love me,” Draco says for the millionth time. “It’s the trauma that makes you think you do.”

“Maybe you are right,” Harry says, and underneath his hand, Draco freezes. Despite his constant insistence, he doesn’t seem to welcome Harry’s affirmation now. Harry sighs. “Maybe I did develop these feelings for you because we were going through hell together. But I do feel them, so who cares why?”

“I care,” Draco says. “I don’t want you to wake up one day and realise what a colossal mistake you’ve made. I want it to be real.”

“Nothing has ever been as real to me as this,” Harry says, letting his head fall back into his pillow so he can press his lips against Draco’s biceps. One of his hands comes to rest on the small of Draco’s back. “There’s nothing that could make it more so.”

Draco’s head whips around, his eyes narrowed. “Your soulmark —”

Harry groans and snatches his hand away from Draco so he can grab his suddenly throbbing forehead instead. “Will you shut up about that stupid thing?” Harry hisses. “I don’t know what it says now. I don’t want to know. If I could, I would just chop off my arm and be done with it, alright? This whole soulmark business … To you, it’s a promise, but to me, it’s … It’s —”

“A chain,” Draco mutters, squeezing his eyes shut. 

“A chain,” Harry repeats, his heart beating in his throat. “I can’t promise you that this will last. But who cares as long as we both want it now? That’s what you said back at Shell Cottage, right? Most honest you’ve ever been with me. Well, I’ll be honest with you now. I want this to work. I want it to be you. I’m asking you to take a chance on me.” 

∞∞∞

By the time the two of them find their way into the Great Hall, most of the Order is already there, halfway through their breakfast. Harry notices Hermione and Ginny exchange glances at their simultaneous appearance, but everybody else seems ready to attribute it to coincidence. They sit down next to each other and find their plates instantly laden with toast, sausages, and fried eggs. 

“I expect a clean plate today, dear,” Mrs Weasley says as she makes a generous helping of mushrooms fling themselves out of a floating serving tray and onto Harry’s plate. Her eyes snap towards a sniggering Draco, and the stream of mushrooms changes direction instantly. “That applies to you as well, Draco, dear. We’ll be tackling the collapsed part of the North Tower all week, so you’ll need your strength.”

“Oh, well,” Harry says, rubbing his neck. It suddenly occurs to him that he hasn’t really thought this part out. “Actually, we won’t exactly … be around the next two weeks or so?”

Mrs Weasley frowns, and it is like a switch gets flipped. Up and down the table, heads turn to face them, and all other chatter dies down. Ron’s mouth is still hanging open, caught in the middle of a sentence, and Fred uses the distraction to toss a piece of toast at him that bounces off his teeth and lands in Percy’s juice instead.

“Did your mother write?” Mrs Weasley asks, somehow managing to sound concerned while at the same time sending a scolding look in Fred’s direction. “Are Tonks and Teddy alright?”

“They’re doing fine,” Draco says, entirely focused on cutting his sausage into even pieces.

“Then where are you going, Harry?” Ginny asks, and he can tell from the way she grins that she knows — maybe not where, but certainly why.  

Harry really should’ve thought this through. “We are … well …”

“We are going to Greece,” Draco says. His hand finds Harry’s, and it’s shaking only slightly as he links their little fingers and squeezes. 

Not a chain, but a promise.