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Chapter Text

Harry’s hands are clasped around Dudley’s fat neck. He feels the pulse under his thumbs, the vibrations of his trachea as he screams, head crushed against the pavement. His eyes—white, dull, begging—are searching for someone behind Harry. 

Harry knows who they are. They’re watching from the upstairs windows. He should use his wand instead of his hands. 

The wand is gone. Panic creeps in. The people that were watching, they’re not people after all, and Dudley’s not a man. He’s a child. 

The child is dead, his body limp, Harry’s hands still clenched around his neck.

Somebody screams and Harry wakes up, panting. His throat is hoarse and his t-shirt is damp. He throws the duvet away and stands up heaving, Dudley’s dead eyes imprinted on his retina.

The rusty pipes rattle before the water spurts from the tap. Through the small window above the tub the first rays of grey light come in and from across the hallway Harry’s alarm goes off. 

Like clockwork, he thinks, splashing cold water on his face. 

Dudley’s eyes follow him as he moves around the old, crackling house, going from room to room, picking up something here, something there. They fade away only when he steps out into the cold morning. 

Grimmauld Place, with its rows of neatly stacked houses, vanishes from view. The entrance to the Ministry stands tall in its place. 

* * *

“Did you know Malfoy’s the prosecutor for the Quillweather case?”

Harry looks up at Ron as he moves some newspapers from one side of his desk to the other, searching for his last vial of Polyjuice potion. “I thought they were giving it to Abbot.”

“He must have snatched it for the publicity,” Ron shrugs, leaning against a file cabinet bursting at the seams, playing with the buttons of his red uniform. 

Harry bends down to check the bottom drawer of his desk. Following his arrest a couple months back, Quillweather was all everybody talked about. Already well known in high circles, the way the renowned antique collector chose to murder his main competitor proved so fascinating to the public his fame quickly reached new heights. The latter, a small, prickly man named Crook, was found dead on his floor shop; poisoned, according to the Healers brought at the scene. It took a whole other week to discover the source of the poison—a silver fountain pen whose ink released toxic fumes, given as a gift to Crook by Quillweather. 

Quillweather was arrested the next day and the entirety of his warehouse seized. He professed innocence, insisting he hadn’t known about the poison when he gave Crook the pen. Harry himself interrogated him under Veritaserum and the man kept to his story; with the new defences against it that doesn’t mean much these days. Since Quillweather had the motive and delivered the fatal blow, it will be an easy case for Malfoy. On top of that, the papers will cover the trial heavily, sending reporters to the courtroom on a daily basis. 

Harry can already picture it: Malfoy, tossing his head back with self-importance as he answers a reporter’s question in the same pedantic voice he uses when he thinks Harry doesn’t understand the legal terms he’s employing. Malfoy, gloating from behind a podium while the cameras are flashing, announcing yet another easy victory in a row of never ending easy victories. 

“Get ready to see this on every morning paper for a month,” Ron says, mirroring Harry’s train of thought by showing Harry his profile and pursing his lips into an exact replica of Malfoy’s characteristic frown. Harry snickers, then spots the Polyjuice potion at the bottom of the drawer. 

“I can’t wait,” he says, picking up the vial. 

* * *

The work is dull. He tails a suspect that spends his day in a dingy bar in the country, flirting with the waitress. Is he mocking me, Harry asks himself after two hours, hands wrapped around a glass of water bewitched to appear golden, his back sore from leaning against the hard wood of the corner bench. He finds himself wishing the man would turn around and curse him. His hands itch to reach for his wand and get this over with.

The wizard stands up. Harry’s hope withers away as he stretches and sits back down. He orders another cheap whiskey that tastes like syrup. Behind him, in the gilt edged mirror above the bar, Harry sees the rain splashing the windows. He puts his hands to his face but it’s not his face he finds. 

He misses the earlier years. The postwar years, when there was so much to do. When he had better things to do than waste away an afternoon in a muggle bar like one wastes a forgotten meal left to spoil on the kitchen counter, with nothing but the endless evening to look forward to. 

The waitress is looking at him—at Larry, for he’s wearing Larry’s face that day. For a beat he’s worried he’s been found but the woman quickly looks away and smiles under her breath. 

The idea of going home with her tires him more than anything else. Another mask to wear, another role to play. 

* * *

He bumps into Malfoy first thing in the morning; a sign this day is not going to be better than the last. He hasn’t slept much better either and hopes his morose expression will dissuade Malfoy from speaking with him. It doesn’t. 

“Potter, a word,” he says, waving away the flustered young woman he was talking to and striding across the packed Atrium towards Harry, who finds himself trapped between him and the lift that just won’t come. “What the hell happened with the Quillweather report?”

“What happened to it?” Harry echoes, irritated. He wants this conversation—and every conversation he has with Malfoy—to end as soon as possible but Malfoy doesn’t seem capable of ever saying whatever it is that he wants to say on the first go. 

His black robes fall straight to the floor. As he raises his hand to move a strand of hair out of his face, an expensive watch glistens from behind his sleeve. It probably cost more than Ron’s apartment. The thought alone angers Harry, raises his heartbeat. 

“There’s barely any information about what he had in his warehouse. Just a list of objects with no clarifications. A dozen lamps, three tea sets, a jewellery box. What am I supposed to do with that? Where are the details about them?”

“The Department of Mysteries requisitioned them before my team and I could go through them,” Harry says sullenly, recoiling both at Malfoy’s accusatory tone and at the memory. The Unspeakables have a habit of showing up when he least expects it and taking over Harry’s investigations with no regard for how much that complicates his work. 

Malfoy puffs impatiently as if Harry had a choice in the matter and made the wrong one, that one wild strand of hair falling back over his forehead.

“I have to go. Urgent meeting,” Harry lies before Malfoy can demand anything else, stepping into the lift as soon as the doors crack open. On the way up, squished between Ministry officials, he mulls over the unpleasantness of having to interact with Malfoy on a regular basis. 

After the war, they didn’t talk for years. To be more precise, they didn’t talk until Malfoy joined the Department of Law Enforcement three years ago. Before that, Harry learnt things about his life sparsely, without ever looking to learn. The papers had extensively covered his family’s trial, so there was no avoiding that. Harry hadn’t been surprised to read the verdict: life in prison for Lucius; vaults and lands confiscated, son and wife spared. 

The next piece of information reached him years later. A friend of Hermione studying law told them the young Malfoy had set up a private practice as a solicitor in one of London’s rich wizarding boroughs, his mother’s vaults proving sufficiently plentiful to allow him to open up his own business fresh out of law school. Harry remembers squirming at the news that Malfoy was in London. It seemed too close, even then. 

For years after that, he’d sometimes hear his name thrown around in conversations. “Malfoy’s representing him”, “It’s that Malfoy boy who got him out”, “You should go to Malfoy, he specialises in this sort of thing”. It was always followed by a jolt and an unidentifiable feeling, akin to walking into a turnstile confident it’ll let you through, only to be punched in the gut by the immovable bar.

Then he saw him. It was the first war memorial Malfoy attended in nine years and Harry hadn’t expected it. Hadn’t prepared for it. Malfoy was dressed in black and kept to the back of the room. He looked the same. Tall, skinny, arrogant. When their eyes met later, over brilliant champagne flutes and white clothed tables, Harry felt a surge of rage he hadn’t felt in years. Raw, unfiltered rage, the kind he thought he’d left behind between the ruins of their school. But Malfoy nodded at him and Harry found himself nodding back curtly: a tacit cease fire that made Harry’s voice thick when he turned to answer some question somebody’d asked him.

When Eloise Thornbur retired from the post she’d held for the last twenty years, there was a lot of speculation as to who would replace her as one of the Ministry’s three lead prosecutors. The list of candidates was long and packed with important names, so Harry wasn’t the only one surprised to find out Malfoy got the job. Rumours circulated. According to some, he’d emptied his account to get the post. According to others, he’d been courting the Departmental Heads for years. According to most, he’d done both. Whatever it was, Malfoy got his own office on the floor below Harry’s, outfitted with a large south facing window, and could presently be seen trotting up and down the Ministry corridors as if he owned them. 

Unsurprisingly, he hadn’t changed much in the ten years since the end of the war. He still acted as if he was the most intelligent person in any room he happened to walk into. Still had the same vicious look in his eyes. Sure, he had refined his arrogance. His body language was more contained, his tone more polite. He didn’t scowl anymore. He didn’t have his mouth set in a perpetual sneer. 

No, he did and said all the right things. Donated to the right charities, took the right cases; he even publicly supported SPEW’s latest bill on elf rights. It was all too perfect, too calculated to be genuine. Harry had had the chance to listen to some of his appearances, cross-armed against the panelled back wall of the courtroom, and he always cringed at the fake concern in his voice as he took the stand. Even his smiles were laboured, each one of them a measured response. 

“Any crime against muggles is a crime against what we stand for as a society,” he said once, and next day the papers quoted him as if he was some sort of ambassador for muggle rights. As if he doesn’t have a tattoo on his wrist—that he can only half hide with his expensive watches—that proves exactly what he thinks of muggles. 

It’s not that Harry believes Malfoy hates muggles in the villainous way his father did or that it had been his desire to join the Death Eaters. No, it’s somehow worse than that. Malfoy only cares about his own interests. At some point, it was in his interest to act as if he hated them. Right now, it’s in his interest to act as if he cares about them and Harry doesn’t see much of a difference between the two.

Harry makes his way to his office at the end of a narrow corridor lined with cabinet files, Malfoy’s words still ringing in his ears. What happened to the report, Potter? What am I supposed to do with that, Potter? He passes by the other offices and nods at the Aurors inside, hunched over maps or pointing their wands at evidence boards lined with red string. On his desk, he finds a new pile of reports. He picks up one at random and thinks of Malfoy’s first day on the job, three years ago. He had accosted him in the Atrium, just like that morning.

“Potter,” he said loudly, offering him his hand like one offers a precious gift. “I hope we’ll work well together.”

Harry stared at his outstretched hand, impressed by Malfoy’s instinct for optics and by the gravitas his voice had amassed in the years Harry hadn’t heard it. Nobody had stopped to look at them overtly, but Harry knew everybody was watching. It was the first of many perfectly timed, calculated moves on his part. 

“I hope so too,” Harry conceded, cornered. Malfoy’s hand was cold, just like the gesture, yet Harry found himself burning. 

They didn’t work well together. At first, they kept their conversations short and to the point. 

“Is this all the evidence related to this case?”

“Yes.”

“Thank you, I’m most grateful for it.”

“You’re welcome.”

Even that pushed Harry over the edge. He despised the way Malfoy was too polite, his words too rounded around the edges, his requests too indirect. And Malfoy seemed to despise Harry’s impatience with the paperwork, his proclivity for fieldwork. Amongst the ornate phrases he used to structure his speech, he sprinkled in jabs that felt distinctively targeted, things like “The only danger here is that it might bore you to death, but could you please look over these expenses for me?” or “It won’t try to kill you back so it might not be of too much interest but this report on last year’s arrests is very informative.” 

It all came to a head over Malfoy’s large mahogany desk, maybe a month after he’d started. He had summoned Harry like a schoolboy to complain about the way his team had filed their reports on a particularly complicated case. 

“It’s sloppy work. This won’t do, Potter, this simply won’t do,” he repeated, shoving papers in Harry’s face as if Harry hadn’t read the reports himself, as if his signature wasn’t staring at both of them from the bottom of the page. 

“My men work 12 hour shifts, Malfoy. We’re understaffed—”

“Writing reports is half the work, Potter. Without a legal trace I can’t put the men you catch in prison and then it’s all for nothing, isn’t it?”

He was giving him a lecture on his own job, Harry realised with a delay.  

“You take care of your side of the work, I’ll take care of mine,” he hissed, barely containing his anger as he slammed the door on his way out. 

The next time he wasn’t quite as contained. Two members of Harry’s team had requested Malfoy’s help with a complicated warrant and instead of drafting it for them like Eloise would have done, Malfoy sent them a law book by post. Harry summoned Malfoy this time and the fight took place over his small, metal desk overflowing with files and old newspapers. They were so loud Harry’s secretary came in to check if they were duelling. 

Harry stares at the door through which she came in three years ago. She doesn’t do that anymore. She’s used to it now. 

He can feel Malfoy won’t drop the Quillweather thing. Which is ridiculous, because Harry couldn’t have done anything to stop the Department of Mysteries from interfering. Angry at a request Malfoy hasn’t made yet, Harry wills himself to concentrate on the reports in front of him. It’s hard, because they’re dull. It’s always the same thing these days. The same crimes. The same criminals. The same people after them. 

* * *

Weekends are hard. The house itself complains about them, its floors creaking and squeaking as Harry wanders in the labyrinth of rooms, never staying in one for long, never quite sure what he’s looking for. 

The drawing room is too bright in the mornings and too dark in the afternoons. 

The kitchen is full of cobwebs and the fridge of food that’s always gone bad before Harry remembers to cook it. 

The dining room is empty, the bedroom infested with nightmares. 

Some days, he locks himself up in the study across the drawing room and stares at newspaper articles going back decades, searching for something he’s already searched for before. 

Some days, he moves around inconsolably until the sun sets and the house quiets down. He never bothers with the old lights in the hallway on his way to bed. He never picks up the telephone or opens the letters. 

* * *

He knows his prediction has come true when he finds a memo with the seal of the legal department on his desk on Wednesday morning. 

Potter, 

I would appreciate it if you could join me in my office at your earliest convenience. Before lunch, if your schedule allows it.

Best regards,
Draco Malfoy

Harry makes sure to drop by in the middle of lunch, before heading out to tail the whiskey drinking, muggle-bar hopping suspect. Malfoy's secretary is not at his desk so Harry goes right in. Even though outside the sky is grey and has been for the last two weeks, Malfoy’s office is flooded with warm, golden light. He's hunched over a piece of parchment so long it touches the floor. He looks too casual and Harry immediately understands why. For once, he’s not wearing the long, dark prosecutor’s robe.

Malfoy looks up and for a beat—before he recognises Harry—there's something different about him.

“What is it, Malfoy?” Harry says quickly, before he has the time to ponder exactly what makes Malfoy seem different when he doesn’t compose his face specifically for him. 

His mouth becomes scornful as he explains to Harry just how many ways he’s tried to go about Quillweather’s case without having to retort to this, his nose slightly raised in the air as he gets to the point at last.

“I need you to convince the Department of Mysteries to disclose something. Anything.”

“They’ll never agree to it,” Harry says and crosses his arms. He didn’t sit down, prefering to tower over Malfoy. It doesn’t give him the advantage he hoped it would. On the contrary, he feels awkward, laden under the heavy Auror robes while Malfoy’s lounging in a thin button-up. 

“Without the proof that this man had at least another dangerous object in his bloody warehouse, my hands are tied. His solicitor got him an iron-clad alibi—”

“If he’s guilty, you’ll find a way to prove it,” Harry says dryly, making for the door. 

“Merlin, I never ask you for anything. I’m asking now.”

“You always ask me for shit, Malfoy.”

“Asking you to do your job is not me asking for a favour.”

“So this is a favour, then?”

“Yes, it is.”

Harry studies Malfoy’s face from the doorpost. He doesn’t look like someone asking for a favour from a person that has no reason to grant him one. He looks relaxed, almost bored. He’s leaning back on his chair, hands resting cooly on the armrests. 

He looks like someone confident he knows exactly what to say to make Harry do what he wants. 

“What you’re asking for is illegal,” Harry says, stepping back into the room, accepting the dare. Malfoy twitches at the word like Harry knew he would because Malfoy would have never said it like that. Because he could never say things as they were, could he? 

“I’m asking you to inquire politely. Not steal the evidence.”

“Why don’t you inquire politely?”

“I did. My name’s not Harry Potter.”

“I have no jurisdiction—”

“Granger worked there.”

Ah, so the plan reveals itself. Harry lets out a dry laugh. “I see. You want me to use my connections to get you the proof you need to win your case.”

Malfoy looks at him as if Harry has just said the first reasonable thing since coming into his office. 

“Yes. Exactly.”

Harry huffs. He’s both angry that Malfoy admits it so easily and that he didn’t say so from the beginning. Malfoy sits straight on his chair and rests his arms on the desk. When he speaks, his voice is neither soft nor harsh. 

“Harry, the man’s guilty. I need something to put him behind bars. Anything. One object, that’s all I need. One other dangerous object he hoarded that can prove intent. Please.”

It’s when he quits the office having given his word that he’ll do his best that Harry realises with a start Malfoy called him by his first name. Another calculated tactic, he thinks bitterly. Another manipulation expertly led to its conclusion. 

He elects to ignore the part of him that’s relieved he has an excuse to delay discovering which muggle bar his suspect will choose to waste both of their time in today. He concentrates solely on the part that hates—yes, hates—Malfoy. 

* * *

Harry doesn’t go to Hermione. He doesn’t want her to know he’s been reduced to acting as Malfoy’s lapdog. She wouldn’t agree to that and she would never agree to what Malfoy asked for, even if it’s been five years since she quit the Department of Mysteries to work full time for SPEW. 

He takes out the invisibility cloak from the inside pocket of his uniform and throws it over himself before turning left to join the corridor that leads to the Department of Mysteries. He’s done this before, obviously. The Department of Mysteries takes itself too seriously in Harry’s opinion, seizing everything that seems remotely suspicious and never giving back what they don’t use. Harry can think of at least ten cases he wouldn’t have solved if he hadn’t done what he’s about to do right now.

The dim corridor is deserted and Harry represses a distant memory of old nightmares. He positions himself by the door and waits. After a while, footsteps echo from the end of the corridor. An Unspeakable Harry knows from view but not by name arrives. He appears stressed and in a hurry, which means he’s less likely to pay close attention to his surroundings. Perfect. 

Harry silently charms his soles so that they don’t make any noise and follows the man inside. He’s incredibly lucky, because once the doors have stopped spinning the man goes straight to the one Harry needs. From there, it’s a matter of waiting for the Unspeakable to leave. He does just that after picking up a file and Harry swallows the disappointment. 

Even breaking into the Department of Mysteries in broad daylight has become dull. 

He unlocks the door that leads to the Current Investigations sector with his wand and steps into a long, utilitarian hallway. He listens for any sign of activity; the Unspeakables keep odd hours and one never knows when they’re there. He doesn’t hear anything but just to make sure he casts Homenum revelio. He can tell the room he needs is empty and he hurries towards it. 

The room has been expanded since the last time Harry was there, and for good reasons. Quillweather’s warehouse was huge. On the shelfs lining the walls the objects are not organised by any apparent logic. Delicate looking china rests next to a set of antique chairs. Looking at them isn’t proving too useful. Harry needs to know their uses. 

The work table in the back is filled with an assortment of instruments. He’s surprised to see a muggle microscope on it. An ordinary looking magnifying glass is aimed at an ordinary looking gold ring, the kind Vernon and Petunia had for wedding bands. Harry skims through the documents on the table, opens up drawers. He shuffles through the papers until he finds what he’s looking for. 

He snatches a couple of reports that might help Malfoy—that git, he almost forgot that’s who he’s doing this for—and makes copies with his wand. Before he can turn around he’s distracted by a twinkle of light in his peripheral vision. From where he’s sitting at the edge of the table he has a direct view on the ring. It looks so much brighter than it did earlier. He hasn’t noticed before but there’s an inscription on it. He leans in to read the words that are carved into its sides. They’re written in an alphabet he doesn’t recognise. 

Before he can stop himself, he picks it up. Under his eyes, the ring enlarges. Just an inch. Just … just enough to slide it on his finger. 

He doesn’t do it. 

He wants to. The ring wants him to, he understands that much. He has enough experience with magical objects not to wear any piece of jewellery he encounters, especially the ones he really wants to. 

There’s a loud bang outside the door. In the moment of distraction, Harry’s will gives out. He slides the ring on his finger. 

Chapter Text

The pain turns everything white. There are no limbs to contain it, no mouth to scream of it—only pure, undistilled pain. 

Then, in waves, a different kind. Throbbing. Searing. Undifferentiated yet grounded, like a body turned inside out.

Head pierced by a million shards travelling at a million miles per hour. A deafening sound. Something cold under his hands, something sharp under his knees. 

Concrete. It’s concrete. He’s fallen down on the pavement and is staring at concrete. He lets himself tumble to the side; he leans on the nearest vertical surface he stumbles upon, breath choppy, head still ebbing. 

The checks. 

He must do the checks. 

First, himself. There is no blood and no identifiable wound, despite the pain. He’s not in his uniform anymore but he recognises the clothes he’s wearing as his own. He feels for his wand; it’s there, in the back pocket of his jeans. 

Then, his surroundings. A residential street. Muggle. Most likely London. Nobody in sight. He’s leaning on somebody’s fence. 

Third, how he got there—The ring. It’s still on his ring finger. He braces, takes it off. Nothing happens. The ring isn’t hot, or glowing, or doing anything out of the ordinary. The inscription has disappeared. He puts it in his pocket and uses the iron poles of the fence to lift himself up from the ground. 

He needs to go back to the Ministry and sort this out. Whatever the ring did, it must go beyond Apparating him somewhere random and giving him the worst headache of his life. 

Except, he realises with unease as the street around him comes into focus, it’s not that random. He’s in his own neighbourhood, a few streets away from Grimmauld Place. 

The first step sends a shockwave through his body that takes away his vision for an instant. He cannot Apparate back to the Ministry. 

By the time he reaches his front steps he’s seeing double. He manages to summon enough magic to open the front door then collapses against it. He’s been fighting the sensation of passing out for too long; he’s about to give in when the sound of footsteps upstairs snaps him back to consciousness. He looks up. Peering at him from the top of the stairs is Malfoy. 

“You’re back already? Did something happen?” he asks, putting a hand on the barrister and starting his descent towards Harry. 

Harry blinks. Out of everything that has been happening to him, this is by far the most troubling.  

“Harry? What’s wrong?” Malfoy asks in a concerned tone. He’s halfway down the stairs and now that he’s closer Harry can see he’s also wearing different clothes.

“What’s happening?” Harry says, panic rising in him like the waters of a river in a storm. “What are you doing in my house?”

Malfoy lets out a shocked chuckle. “What?”

There is only one explanation. This must be his doing. Malfoy sent him to the Department of Mysteries and now here he is, in his house. This must be his doing. “What is that ring?” Harry booms, the echo of his voice sending ripples of pain down his spine. 

“What ring?” 

Malfoy is now only steps away from him. Harry covers the distance between them, ignoring the pain. He shoves the ring in Malfoy’s face. “This! What is this?”

Malfoy looks alarmed, downright scared in fact, and that’s surprising and then he says something that Harry doesn’t understand and then the pain turns everything white again. 

* * *

It’s the weirdest thing. He remembers the taste of coins under his tongue and a panoply of faces around him, and amongst them there’s Malfoy’s face too and Harry doesn’t know why it’s there; it doesn’t belong, does it? 

He remembers Malfoy catching him as he fell, the way his arms felt against his body—like towers in a tempest, like a beam of light in the middle of the ocean, like one solitary plank against the black, bottomless water. 

He remembers the words It’s your ring, Harry, it’s just your wedding ring.

* * *

He stands up so fast the room starts spinning around him. His head feels like it’s going to explode. 

“Harry,” Hermione says, her hair taking up most of his field of vision, her hands firmly guiding him back to a lying position. He makes out Ron’s voice behind her and the sound of a door clicking shut. The fluorescent light flickers above him. 

He’s in the hospital. 

Maybe this is a new nightmare, he thinks, and the idea sends cold shivers down his back. It’s a very realistic nightmare if that’s what it is. 

“Where is my wand?” he asks just as Susan Bones walks in. Right behind her fluttering lime green robe is Malfoy.

“Your wand is here,” Hermione answers but Harry’s not looking at her anymore. He’s looking at Malfoy, coming towards him with the same expression he had before Harry fell, and it’s so improbable Harry’s pinned to the bed. Malfoy keeps getting closer and then he’s sitting on the edge of Harry’s bed and he’s taking his hand in his and speaking words that don’t make any sense. Harry jumps out of bed. 

“What the fuck are you doing?” he says, using a hand to steady himself on the wall while various threads connecting him to potion bags hang off of him. 

Everybody in the room looks at him as if he’s the crazy one. 

* * *

“What day is it?”

He hears the question with a lag. Susan blinks at him from behind a clipboard. They’re alone and he’s been given Draught of Peace. 

“Susan … ”

“It’s standard procedure, Harry,” she reassures, putting a gentle hand on his shoulder. He relaxes under her touch. She’s seen him through worse, after all. “Nothing to worry about,” she carries on. 

“It’s September fifteen two thousand ten,” he says sluggishly, taking his eyes off her. The tall window behind her has a view over the river; they must be in the new wing of St Mungos. Harry was there just days before to check on the victim of a robbery. The woman was kept in a room very similar to the one Harry is in and the sky was the same shade of ash it is today. 

“What’s your name?”

“Harry Potter.”

“Occupation?”

“Head Auror.”

The scratching of her pen feels like sharp needles against his skull. He shuts his eyes; it doesn’t help. 

“Spouse?”

“Sorry?”

“What’s the name of your spouse?”

Harry opens his eyes. “I’m not married, Susan.”

Susan jots something down. His fists close around the bedsheet. 

“I need to talk to Hermione. I was in the Department of Mysteries, I think I touched a cursed—”

“Take it easy, Harry. We’re working on it.”

He struggles to lift his head but the pain pins him back down. 

“I need Hermione and Ron. Please, Susan. Now.”

* * *

Harry tells them everything. Hermione listens attentively but then she takes Harry’s hand in hers and says, “Harry, you were with me all day long. When could you have gone to the Ministry?” 

Harry shakes his head. Cold sweat gathers at the nape of his neck. The pain is relentless, its sharp teeth tearing through his brain. 

“We were at work all morning, then you went to have lunch at home. You wanted to drop by Diagon Alley before coming back to the office, remember? Draco says you were gone ten minutes before you came back home and collapsed.”

For the third time that day, everything turns white. 

* * *

It’s the middle of the night. The clouds hang low. Against their washed out, orange glow, Harry makes out the silhouette of a man sleeping on a fold-out chair, head tilted to the side.  

Hands heavy, Harry pushes the covers away and feels for his wand in the dark. 

The man stands up. He’s coming towards Harry.  

Harry points his wand at him but then Malfoy is kneeling by his side and Harry’s too weak to push him away. 

“Shh,” he says, voice hoarse with sleep. “It’ll be alright.”

“The ring,” Harry says, before he slides back into oblivion. 

It was just a dream, he thinks in the morning as the empty room comes into focus. Then he sees the ring on his nightstand, next to his wand.

* * *

The next few days are a haze occasionally punctured by terrifying moments of lucidity. Nobody seems to know what’s happening to him. He doesn’t know what’s happening to him. 

When he asks Ron about who’s taken over his ongoing cases, he’s told Harry doesn’t work at the Ministry. 

“But … Quillweather’s trial … I was—”

Ron shows Harry today’s paper. Harry stares at the sentences that cite Ron as the lead investigator on Crook’s case, the tubes stuck to his arms pumping potions in his blood that make the letters melt into each other. There’s a cocktail of them just for the pain, and then there’s the constant supply of Draught of Peace. He pushes the newspaper to the edge of the bed.  

“This is happening because of Quillweather’s ring.”

Ron brings him the reports. There’s no mention of a ring on the list of confiscated items. Harry points to the words jewellery box and Hermione reluctantly accepts to use her status as a former Unspeakable to get information about its contents from the Department of Mysteries. 

“I’m sorry, Harry, but there was never any ring. I looked at the lists, I searched for it myself. It doesn’t exist.”

The ring is still resting on Harry’s nightstand, next to the wand he is too weak to use. He doesn’t point that out. He thinks he remembers people dressed in purple robes firing spells at it that illuminated the whole room. They brought instruments that clicked and ticked. 

“It’s just an ordinary ring,” they had said, placing it back on his nightstand like a beloved souvenir.

He doesn’t know when that was. He doesn’t know how long he’s been in the hospital, how many times he’s asked the same questions. When Ron, cross-armed against the night-lit Thames, tells him Quillweather testified under Veritaserum he never owned a gold ring inscribed with a foreign alphabet, Harry has the distinct impression he’s already been told that. 

Then there’s the Malfoy problem. He’s still there. He’s always there. Haunting the hospital hallways. Conspiring with Hermione and Ron in the doorpost. Hovering over the Healers when they come in to check on Harry. He inquires about the dosage of the painkillers Harry’s on, he directs the nurses, he taps his foot impatiently by the door while they perform cleaning spells. 

Sometimes, Harry tells him to leave. He screams until he does or until somebody injects him with more potions. Other times, the Draught of Peace takes the edge off the weirdness of it all and he simply follows the glimmer of his wedding ring as he runs a hand through his hair, as he pulls down the shades, as he fixes Harry’s pillows. 

Malfoy isn’t married. Harry would know if Malfoy was married. The news would have reached him somehow, like these things always do. He knows that Malfoy was in a relationship with a fellow solicitor for years. He saw them through the window of a sedate and expensive restaurant once, their soft, candle-lit smiles contrasting the storm that had picked up outside. He also knows they broke up recently and that Malfoy is dating some up and coming quidditch bloke. Ron had delivered the news, adding, “Maybe he’ll finally learn how to spot that snitch now,” and Harry had laughed at that loudly, throatily, mirthlessly. So no, Malfoy’s not married. He’s sure of it.

Except, he was also sure Malfoy’s a prosecutor but the Daily Prophet quoted Abbot in that article that said Ron was Head Auror. And Malfoy’s always there and Harry can’t remember a day Malfoy missed work before, not even one, not even the day his father died. 

* * *

The days turn into weeks. Harry gets acquainted with the pain. He learns what makes it thrive and what makes it whiter. Learns how to slide into the whiteness and even grows fond of it. 

* * *

Malfoy does other things. Things so far-removed from reality, Harry has trouble believing they’re not the fruit of his imagination when he’s lucid enough to contemplate them. 

He gazes at the rain-drenched city through the window, the reflection of the neon hospital light hanging over it like an artificial sun, and thinks about Malfoy.

Malfoy, bringing Harry new clothes and his favourite muggle magazines. 

Malfoy, asleep next to Harry’s bed, the magazines from which he’d read to Harry the night before spread across his chest.

Malfoy, taking Harry’s hand when the Healers gather around him and point their wands at his chest and the light is blinding and the only thing anchoring him to reality is Malfoy’s soft, hot hand. 

* * *

After four weeks, The Healers come up with a potion that helps with the pain and keeps him from passing out. 

He has been off the Draught of Peace for a whole twenty four hours when Susan comes into his room, the echoing clink-clunk of her heels waking him from a half-dream. Malfoy and Hermione are with her and they take a seat on each side of Harry and then Susan tells him that this is going to be hard to listen to, but that there’s no way around it—he’s suffered from an unknown traumatic brain injury that has provoked considerable memory damage. She goes on to tell him about muggle witnesses that saw him collapsing on the street, about an official inquiry that found muggle security footage showing him coming in and out of SPEW’s headquarters in Camden. She confirms he retired from the Auror force five years ago, that he’s been helping Hermione as a volunteer at her non-profit ever since. That he’s married. Harry doesn’t wince when she says he’s married to Draco Malfoy—it’s the logical conclusion of everything that’s been happening, the culmination of weeks of ruminations, the epitome of inductive reasoning. She says the amnesia seems to concern Malfoy specifically and that the Healers have been scratching their heads trying to figure out how that happened—they think it must be related to their souls, which makes no sense to Harry, but it seems to make sense to Malfoy, who leans in and squeezes Harry’s arm and tells him he’s contacted experts and that they will get to the bottom of this, and Harry thinks he might faint again but he doesn’t, and Susan doesn’t stop talking, no, she’s still talking. 

She’s saying there’s nothing more the Healers can do for him at the hospital, that they’ve exhausted all the diagnostic procedures they have and the pain can be managed from home just as well, that for now the best thing for him is to go home, and Harry wants to ask what home, the home Malfoy is in? but he doesn’t, and Hermione’s holding his other hand and she’s saying things and Malfoy says home again and Harry gasps for air and Susan snaps her fingers and somebody’s handing him a glass of Draught of Peace but he pushes it away.

“I need a moment,” he says, using his left hand to lift himself up. “I just need a moment.”

* * *

Malfoy is back. He’s sitting on his chair by the window, arms lightly placed over his knees. Harry stares at him, waiting. Waiting for him to give himself away. To laugh, to mock, to say this has all been a prank, the most elaborate prank ever. To say I got you. To say See what happens when you go and do what you want instead of what I asked you to?

Instead, he says, “I brought you something,” and hands Harry a heavy spiral book. In it, dozens of photographs of the two of them, going back more than a decade. Photos of them at Hogwarts. At the Burrow. At Grimmauld Place. Photos of them in the marriage hall at the Ministry, arms flung around each other.

Harry looks up. Behind Malfoy the sky has turned scarlet. 

“I know you don’t remember any of that. But I do. No matter how this turns out, no matter how you feel about me now, I’ll always be here for you. Together, we’ll get through this.”

Harry hands him the album then turns his back to him. 

Eventually, Malfoy leaves. The light dims. He reaches for his wand and spells the shades closed so that even the reflection of distant city lights disappears. In the dark, he mulls over Susan’s explanations, searching for fractures. He replays in his head the day it all started; the conversation with Malfoy in his sun-drenched office, the break-in, the moment he picked up the ring. 

He thinks about how Ginny used to say things like that to him—promises nobody can keep, declarations better left unsaid—before she grew tired of him never saying them back. He thinks about how, after that, he never stayed long enough for others to try. 

* * *

By morning his mind clears. Understanding flows back into actions suspended in between dreams. A plan begins to take shape. 

He stretches in front of the windows. His muscles ache from the prolonged bed-rest, his joints crack when he moves. Below him, the street is bustling with office workers and tourists.  

When Malfoy comes in he finds Harry leaning his forehead on the glass. 

“You’re out of bed,” he says, surprised. 

Harry turns to look at him. He can see his features clearly for the first time in weeks. He’s unmistakably Malfoy; it’s obvious in the way he carries himself, in the way his hair frames his face. In the way his mouth curves at the edges. 

Harry knows Malfoy. He would spot him from miles away, pick him up in a crowd. He’s seen him acting and he’s seen him gloating. He’s seen him winning and he’s seen him losing. Right now, Malfoy’s losing. He has dark circles under his eyes. His shirts are wrinkled. He’s lost the spring in his step. 

He can’t stand to see that look on him. It reminds him of something painful, of something shameful, of a long forgotten afternoon when their eyes met in the reflection of a bathroom mirror. He turns his back to him once more.  

Whatever is happening, it’s happening to Malfoy too. 

* * *  

Susan insists they monitor his pain levels for another day before he’s discharged. After that, everything happens too fast. 

He packs his bag, the ring safely stored in the inside pocket of his jacket. Malfoy and Hermione argue over which route to take to beat the traffic. Hermione’s at the wheel and nothing seems real. Not the endless rows of red lights in front of them. Not Ron’s attempt to lift everybody’s spirits by doing a running commentary of their ride from the passenger seat. Not Malfoy next to him in Hermione’s old car, stealing glances in his direction every time he thinks Harry’s not looking. 

* * *  

Once Malfoy walks Ron and Hermione to the door and Harry’s finally alone in his own kitchen, he goes straight to the liquor cabinet and pours himself a glass of the meanest firewhiskey he can find. It’s an expensive brand that he would never justify buying, so this must be one more addition to his home attributable to his husband.

The front door has been given a fresh coat of black paint. The old flickering lamps in the hallway replaced with modern fixtures that give off a soft glow. The bannister polished, the broken floorboards replaced. The kitchen is clean and airy, it smells like spices and there are herbs growing in little pots at the window and cookbooks in French lining the shelfs.

Each change conjures a different image in Harry’s mind. Malfoy, lamenting Harry’s lack of care for the antique furniture he inherited. Malfoy, berating him for his inability to keep a tidy home. Malfoy, going through Harry’s things, judging his clothes and his books and his assortment of spices. 

He pours a second glass. Malfoy clears his throat from the doorpost. 

“Oh,” Harry says, startled, spilling a few drops. “I was just …”

“I could use one, too,” Malfoy says and attempts a smile.  

Harry turns his back to him and fumbles for a new glass in the cabinet next to the window. 

“Here you go,” he says, sliding the glass towards Malfoy. He takes a sip while Harry gulps down the rest of his.  

“I’ll prepare dinner. Is pasta good?” 

Harry puzzles at this for a while, the hitherto unchallenged image of Malfoy being served dinner on silver platters carried by underpaid house elves shattering, as he reconciles Malfoy’s question with the French cookbooks he was just looking at. The firewhiskey burns his throat and he feels flushed and uncomfortable. “Er—Sure,” he answers flatly, eyes darting towards the door. Malfoy follows his gaze. 

“I wasn’t sure where you’d like to sleep, so I took all my things out of the master bedroom. But if you want another room I can—”

Harry slams the empty glass on the counter. 

“That’s fine. I’ll go take a shower.”

It’s all part of the plan, Harry tries to reassure himself as he goes up the stairs towards his bedroom, footfalls muffled by a thick runner that wasn’t there before. Now that he’s out of the hospital he’ll be able to investigate the ring on his own. 

Of course Ron and Hermione didn’t get far: the ring affected them, like it affected Susan and his medical records. Like it changed photographs and brought into existence marriage certificates and painted his door black. It made them forget who Malfoy is, just like it made Malfoy forget who Harry is. 

There must be a reason, a logical explanation for why Malfoy is so central in this, but he’ll figure that out once he understands what the ring actually did. Did it affect everybody’s memory but his? Did it change history? Until he gets some answers, he needs to keep him close by and safe. 

That’s why he’s there, Harry thinks. To keep him safe until he finds a way to undo everything. Even if it’s Malfoy, it’s Harry’s fault this is happening and therefore, his responsibility. 

He does a quick search of the room. He finds nothing suspicious, except maybe for how eerily tidy and put together everything looks. Cream linen curtains have been added to the windows. The bed is made, adorned with throw pillows and a duvet cover that looks like it belongs in a hotel. Harry fights off the urge to throw the pillows on the ground and mess up the bed. Does he have to be mocked in his own bedroom now? 

As he crosses the hallway to the bathroom the smell of pine nuts and basil reaches him from downstairs. He regrets not telling Malfoy not to bother. He regrets not having been clearer; under no circumstances will they play house until this is over.  

He takes his time taking off his clothes; it’s been a long month of cleaning charms and changing spells. He fills the tub, ignoring the fancy-looking bottles resting on its edge, and submerges himself in the hot water. 

The pain is still there, ebbing somewhere below the surface. The potions dull it but they don't make it go away.

He’ll find a way out of this. He has to.

* * *  

His clothes are damp and his hair is wet when he barges into the kitchen and shows Malfoy his forearm. 

“What the fuck is this?”

Malfoy takes a quick glance at it then picks up the pot of boiling water, carries it to the sink and strains the pasta. Harry follows him, arm still outstretched.

“Why is your name written on my arm?” 

“It’s your Amet.”

“My what?”

“It’s a magical birthmark. I have one too.” Malfoy drops the drained pasta in a pan filled with a bubbling sauce then rolls out his sleeve. “Look.” 

Harry stares open-mouthed at Malfoy's forearm. Red, skinny letters that seem carved out of Malfoy’s skin—much like his lightning scar—spell out Harry’s own name. But that’s not what startles Harry. 

“Your Mark. It’s gone.”

Malfoy looks down. “No, it’s there. It says Harry Potter.”

“Your Dark Mark.”

A shadow crosses Malfoy’s face. He retracts his arm brusquely but his voice is neutral as he brings a wooden spoon to the pan and stirs. 

“Is that what you remember? That I took the Dark Mark?” 

“I don’t know,” Harry lies automatically. He’d much rather not find out what Malfoy remembers instead. “Why do we have each other's names written on us?” he asks, to distract from his previous question. 

“Because we’re soulmates,” Malfoy says, grabbing the salt and adding a generous amount to the pan. When his eyes finally meet Harry’s, it is to say, “Set up the table, will you?”

* * * 

Harry tosses and turns. He can’t sleep. 

He thinks of earlier. Of how Malfoy’s words shocked him out of his resolve to eat alone, upstairs. Of how the silverware reflected the flames from the hearth Harry never uses. Of how the pasta was slightly undercooked, just as he likes it, and the sauce tasted fresh and bright. Of Malfoy’s demeanour, of his eyes floating over him as he told Harry all about soulmates and Amets. Of how disturbing the explanation was. 

Harry only half listened to it, mind racing. While Malfoy went on about wizards in the fifteenth century that studied souls and their breakthrough discoveries about the magic that binds them together, Harry thought about their shared history. 

Malfoy had been the first wizard his age Harry met. He’d made Harry feel unworthy and unwelcome from the very start. He had tried to talk him out of befriending Ron and bullied Hermione. He fought Harry every step of the way until the end of the war and then came back to fight him at work, challenging him over trivial, insignificant matters. 

“When Gavius Gallenius found a way to follow the strands of magic, wizards from all over the continent started going to him to find out who their soulmate was,” Malfoy was explaining tracing circles with his hands in the air while Harry relieved all the fights, all the things that had been said and done that can’t be taken back. “ ... so that’s how he got the idea to cast a curse on all witches and wizards that would create a birthmark with the name of their soulmate. The Amet. Of course, it took another couple of centuries for … ”

As Malfoy leaned over to fill Harry’s wine glass, his fire-lit features sharp and handsome, it struck Harry with incredible clarity that the man in front of him has always been his enemy and that this had to be what the ring did. 

It forced you to share a meal with the person you’d never share a meal with. It turned your nemesis into your husband, your enemy into a soulmate.

It was nothing more than a gimmick, some carnival magic gone wrong.  

He felt hot with excitement. Finally, an answer. Some semblance of logic. He craved to be alone, to figure out how this could play out, to get away from Malfoy’s smooth voice and towering face so he could think. 

Unfortunately, it turned out Malfoy has his own theory on the role of Amets in their predicament. He and Hermione think his amnesia might be related to a damaged soul bond. As soon as they realised Harry didn’t remember anything about soulmates they had written to experts on the subject, had arranged appointments with scholars in magical theory. 

“There had been similar cases, people who woke up one day having forgotten everything about their soulmate. Maybe if we—”

The table shook as Harry stood up and left without a word, Malfoy’s sentence left unfinished. 

He can’t afford to get confused by that nonsense, he thinks as he turns for the hundredth time between the heavy pillows. This is just another code to crack, just another job, and he needs to keep a clear head. He can’t let Malfoy’s words confuse him. 

He can’t let him confuse him. 

He closes his eyes and wills himself to stop thinking about Malfoy. 

Only he can’t, because his bedroom looks like him, all the furniture rounded around the edges, and it smells like him, the bedsheets impregnated with that deep scent that makes Harry’s chest fill with too much air when Malfoy’s around; and now that scent is everywhere—in the air, in the walls of his house, in the clothes he’s wearing—and what felt like a gimmick hours ago now feels like torture. What kind of magic makes you share a house with your enemy-turned-caring-husband that cooks your favourite meal? 

* * * 

The morning is cold and white, last night’s ruminations a bad dream. Harry turns away from the window. He casts Homenum revelio for the third time. It’s well past nine but Malfoy is still home. He’s only moved from the kitchen to the drawing room. Frustrated, Harry wonders if he’s ever going to go back to his job. If he even has a job. He disregards the thought. The less he knows, the better. 

He finds the Invisibility cloak in a box at the back of the wardrobe, next to his old Auror robes. Malfoy’s name emerges from under his sleeve as he reaches for it. 

He puts on the cloak, silently locks the bedroom door behind him and spells his soles so they don’t make any noise. When he arrives on the first floor landing, he’s stopped in his tracks by Hermione’s voice. It’s coming from the drawing room. 

“ ... that doesn’t mean anything, Draco … ”

The door is ajar and he can see Malfoy crouched in front of the fireplace, his blonde hair reflecting the green flames.

“He asked me where my Dark Mark is, Hermione.”

“That doesn’t mean Voldemort’s involved.”

“But what if it somehow damaged his soul? What if living with the soul of that maniac for sixteen years … ”

Harry steps away from their voices. 

* * * 

The doors of the shop have been boarded up since Quillweather’s arrest. The Department of Mysteries confiscated most of its contents, save for boxes upon boxes of customer records, purchase invoices and inventory records. 

He performs all the standard spells. When that doesn’t produce any results, he goes at it with his hands. His knees ache and his arms are sore but he doesn’t find anything that could lead to the origin of the ring. The light from the two overhead windows has long petered out when he gives up, body worn down by pain and hunger. 

He Apparates in the shadows of a muggle neighbourhood and goes into the first pub he stumbles upon. The food is disgusting, the grease runs down his fingers as he eats. He watches the game with the men stacked alongside him at the bar and he drinks cheap whiskey that tastes like syrup. 

* * * 

There’s a meal left out for him on the kitchen table, the halo of a warming charm around it. Harry looks at it from the brightly lit hallway, feeling like a moron under the Invisibility cloak. 

He finds Malfoy in what used to be Harry’s study, in the room across the drawing room. The cabinet files Harry kept there have been replaced by shelves that hold objects of all shapes and sizes, various types of tools and other contraptions. Malfoy is at the worktable in the middle of the room. He has spectacles on and he’s using tweezers to extract a minuscule piece from a silver pocket watch when Harry comes in. 

“Hey,” he says and there’s a controlled urgency in his voice that twists Harry’s stomach in an uncomfortable way. 

“I already ate,” Harry blurts out. He doesn’t know why he came in and he can’t leave soon enough. 

“That’s fine, Harry,” Malfoy says cautiously, taking off his glasses and placing them on the table next to the watch. “How was your day?”

Harry feigns interest in a hammer hung by the door while he thinks of an appropriate answer. He wonders if Malfoy can smell the cigarettes and the whiskey on him. He settles on, “Good.” 

Malfoy nods, opens his mouth, quickly closes it, then opens it again and says. “Very well.”

“I’m gonna go—,” Harry starts, letting go of the hammer and pointing to the stairs, but Malfoy’s words overlap with his. 

“Were you out investigating the ring?” 

The true meaning behind Malfoy’s question is not a matter of guesswork; Harry considers lying, but it seems counterproductive. 

“Yes.” 

“I see.” Malfoy rolls his chair to pick up a screwdriver from the back wall then rolls back to the worktable. “Next time,” he carries on, avoiding Harry’s eyes, “please let me know when you leave. Just so I don’t worry.”

Harry stares at the top of his head, the image of Malfoy worrying about him so remarkably foreign yet also so completely predictable in view of everything, that Harry immediately decides to never think about it again. 

“Sure. Er—sorry,” he mumbles. 

“There’s no need to be sorry, Harry. Should I go ahead and cancel tomorrow's appointment too?” 

With a jolt, Harry remembers Malfoy mentioning an appointment in the afternoon with a specialist in soul bonds. 

Malfoy looks up at last, looks at Harry as he stands there, one hand on the doorframe, incapable of finding anything to say other than sorry. His mouth turns into a weary smile, “I’ll cancel it then. Just let me know if you ever want to go and I’ll reschedule.” And then, looking back at the watch, “The anti hangover potion is in the medicine cabinet.”

* * * 

He wakes up with a start, like a man late for an important meeting. 

Flushed with last night’s embarrassment, he hesitates in front of the drawing room on his way out. White, blinding light frames the door. He breathes in; opens it. 

Malfoy’s sitting on the sofa reading the Daily Prophet, legs propped on the coffee table. He looks more comfortable than Harry’s ever felt in that room and the same can be said about the room itself. The French doors are clean, Sirius’s favourite armchair reupholstered. 

“I’m going,” he announces, a hand firmly on the handle to indicate the briefness of his visit. 

“Do you want some coffee before you go? I left some—”

“No, thanks.”

“Oh. Alright. Have a good day, then,” Malfoy says, smiling at him from behind the newspaper. 

“Yes-yeah,” Harry stutters. “You too.”

“Ron and Hermione are coming for dinner,” Malfoy adds, turning the page, “if you’re in the mood to join us.”

* * * 

Harry spends his day going through every nook and cranny of Quillweather’s flat. He flips through the books and checks under the floorboard. He reads Floo network bills and potion receipts. He has no more luck than the previous day. 

* * * 

A strong smell of garlic and ginger hits him when he comes through the front door. There’s laughter coming from the kitchen. He walks in like a stranger in his own life. 

“Harry!” Hermione screams, running towards the door and flinging her arms around him. 

“Hey there, mate,” Ron winks, head turned towards him from the back of the kitchen where he’s chopping carrots. “Looking good!”

Malfoy waves, hand covered in flour. “We’re making dumplings.”

Harry takes in the scene from the doorway. When Ginny used to live there, Ron and Hermione would come over and the house would be teeming with life just like this. Many years have passed since then. 

“You can knead the dough if you’d like,” Malfoy carries on, wiping his hands on an orange apron. He’s wearing it over a jumper that looks as if it could have been crocheted by Ron’s mum. 

Harry can't decide how to feel about that. Or about how much Malfoy seems to be into cooking. Is this the effect of the ring or does Malfoy actually enjoy it? “Sure,” he replies tentatively, eyeing Hermione and Ron. He doesn’t know how to act around them. Their closeness with Malfoy makes him uncomfortable. The other day in the car Hermione made a joke about Narcissa Malfoy’s displeasure of muggle London; Harry couldn’t get the image of Hermione being tortured in her house out of his head for the rest of the ride. 

In reality, Hermione hasn’t interacted with Malfoy since school and Ron is even worse than Harry at pretending to be civil towards him, mocking his posh accent and pompous words to his face every chance he gets. Malfoy’s too clever to respond in kind—everybody loves Ron while few people like him—so he crosses his arms and puts on one of his measured smiles until the topic of conversation changes. 

“Over here,” Malfoy says, snapping Harry back to the present and away from memories of him dressed in floor-length black robes. He demonstrates to Harry how to knead. It looks easy enough. 

“I think you can take it from here,” he says once Harry can perform the action to Malfoy’s exact instructions. He briefly puts a hand on Harry’s back as he leaves. The touch leaves a trace, a spot that’s hotter than the rest. 

Kneading is simple and repetitive and Harry has nothing to occupy his mind except for the background conversation about the upcoming Quidditch Championship. Ron’s unwavering support for the Chudley Cannons pales in comparison to Malfoy’s obsession with the Appleby Arrows, of which Harry was not aware. He doesn’t intervene—this is still too weird for him—until he does, crushing both Ron and Malfoy’s arguments by reminding them Puddlemere United has won the last three Championships and their team is only getting stronger. Malfoy laughs out loud. It’s an infectious, boisterous laughter that fills the whole room.  

He’s never heard Malfoy laugh like that before, Harry thinks, as he glances up at the unfamiliar sight. He doesn’t expect it to suit him so well. Laughter. Easygoingness.

“You didn’t forget the bloody Puddlemeres, I see,” Ron comments grumpily. 

“Oh, he never would,” Malfoy adds, voice hoarse from laughter.

“Even if I had,” Harry says, pulling at the dough, “their track record is there for everybody to see.”

Ron huffs. “There’s nothing I despise about you more than your love for that bunch of talentless—”

“Talentless?” Harry gasps. “Talentless??”

This goes on until Hermione threatens to leave.

“Great, we need to let it sit for thirty minutes,” Malfoy announces a while later, looking at Harry’s work over his shoulder. He places a damp cloth over the dough and Harry meanders over to Ron, unsure of what to do, now that he’s been stripped of his only role. 

“Welcome to the chopping squad. Grab a carrot and get to work,” Ron says, handing him a knife. 

“Isn’t this too much? There’s only four of us,” Harry asks, eyeing two bowls full of diced carrots. 

“We’ll only have a few, the rest are for the elves,” Ron explains. “There’s a big meeting tomorrow at SPEW.”

“Ah. Is there?”

“Don’t worry, Harry,” Hermine says from across the room, reading his thoughts. “You can come back to work when you’re ready.”

Harry doesn’t dare ask what this work consists of. It’s been five years since Hermione started working full-time for SPEW but Harry had never had the time or the inclination to find out what running it entails. 

When Hermione and Malfoy are deep in conversation over the recipe book, he asks Ron, “How’s Quillweather’s trial going? The papers aren’t saying much.” 

“Abbot says it’s not going well. She’s struggling to prove intent.”

The words echo in Harry’s mind, bring up an image of Malfoy at his desk, looking up at Harry. He waves that image away. 

“Is he being held at the Ministry during the trial?”

Ron puts the knife down. 

“Harry. If you want to speak to him, you only need to ask and I’ll arrange it.” When Harry shoots him a surprised look, Ron shrugs. “We both know if I don’t, you’ll just break into the Ministry. Better avoid that right now, I should think.”

“Thank you.”

“Don’t mention it. Just give me a few days, I need to find a good excuse.” 

Harry’s about to say something else when he feels Malfoy brushing by. 

“Merlin, Ron, that’s enough carrots for an army of elves,” he says, leaning in to look into one of the bowls. “We don’t have enough dough.”

“Sounds like a you problem to me, mate. You’re on dough duty, I’m on carrots.”

Harry lets out a chuckle, Malfoy mutters something about wasting food, Ron complains about never being appreciated for his just value and then the three of them are laughing together and it comes so naturally that for a brief moment this feels real, more real than memories of fights and blood and broken noses, than war and trials and Ministry hallways. 

But it’s not.

The evening stretches until Hermione’s head falls on Ron’s shoulder and Malfoy’s yawning by the fire. Harry walks them out, handing Hermione the bag of dumplings for the meeting—he’s learnt it’s a monthly event meant to offer elves that are still in service information about their rights. They linger on the front steps, their laughter reverberating in the empty square. Hermione holds him for a long time before she takes Ron’s hand and they disappear with a pop. 

The entrance hall is bright and he can hear the sound of plates being whisked away in the kitchen. He’s almost at the top of the stairs when he changes his mind. 

Malfoy’s using a deep cleaning spell on the chopping boards; a couple of pans are being scrubbed over the sink. 

“Do you need any help?”

Malfoy turns towards him. He smiles. It’s a genuine smile; a radiant, dazzling smile; the kind of smile Malfoy would never aim at Harry under normal circumstances. “I’ve got it, lo—Harry. But thank you. How’s your head?”

“It’s all right,” Harry lies, a sinking feeling in his stomach. Then, halfway in, halfway out, “Goodnight.” 

“Goodnight, Harry.”

Sleep doesn’t come. Susan said it might happen; a side effect of the treatment. He lifts up his arm and looks at the name written on his skin. He brushes the tips of his finger over it. 

Soulmates, he thinks. What the fuck is that supposed to mean? 

* * * 

Ron and Hermione come over for dinner the next evening. And the next. And the next. 

Once he gets accustomed to their friendship with Malfoy, once he understands which place to occupy in between them, their presence becomes a respite, a pocket of lightness in the otherwise long and dull days of searching for any trace of an object that persistently escapes him. 

The realisation is bittersweet. Watching them pouring drinks and throwing dice over muggle board games spelled to come alive, he’s forced to admit how far apart they’ve grown. If their job wouldn’t put them in the same room, he and Ron would barely talk. And Hermione …

He’s seen her more in the last week than in the last five years, he thinks, glancing at the top of the table from where she’s currently sipping from a glass of rosé. The previous night she brought him notebooks full of lesson plans that he supposedly wrote—he’s finally asked and it turns out he teaches self defence classes for newly freed elves. He skimmed through them that morning; they’re full of badly drawn wand movements and little notes written in his unreadable scrawl that say “Correct Sandy’s grip” or “Reminder final exam.”

Much like Ron, she also offered to help him with his investigation. He asked her what she knows about magical scars related to souls—maybe Malfoy was onto something that morning. Maybe the ring was supposed to work one way, but because Harry used to be a Hocrux it malfunctioned and that’s why he can’t find any trace of it. She said she’d make a list of titles for him to check out at the public library and sure enough, she did.  

She slides the parchment with the list between the wine glasses and the candles. Malfoy picks it up and offers it to Harry. He’s deep in conversation with Ron—they’re always gossiping about people only they seem to know; tonight they’re debating which faction got the best deal out of a divorce—but Harry sees him checking out the contents of the parchment before passing it on. 

Harry’s not naive. He recognises Malfoy’s signature scheming in every action he undertakes, in every throwaway glance. It’s obvious he has Ron and Hermione over every night to make sure Harry comes back home to eat with them, just like it’s obvious he stopped mentioning the Amets or the experts or anything that would make Harry stand up and leave the table. 

Harry doesn’t see a good reason to confront him about it. It’s not like Harry wants to talk about that or spend his evenings shut away in his bedroom, hiding from Malfoy. He does enough of that during the mornings.

* * * 

After many a Homenum revelio, Harry finally learns Malfoy’s morning routine. He wakes up around seven, has breakfast in the kitchen and then reads the newspaper in the drawing room. Around ten, he goes into his workshop, where he presumably spends the rest of his day. 

Harry soon falls into his own routine. He also wakes up early most days, then writes down what he did the day before in one of his old Auror notepads, keeping track of the places he’s searched, the people he’s talked to. He jots down the information he finds at the Public Wizarding Library. So far he’s learnt more about soul magic than about powerful rings. It’s weird—he doesn’t remember so many books on the subject readily available at Hogwarts. 

On his way out he stops by the drawing room to let Malfoy know he’s leaving and to be told, invariably, that Ron and Hermione will be joining them for dinner. Their conversations don’t go beyond that until one day, when Malfoy decides to have his coffee upstairs. He’s brought Harry a cup too. It smells so much better than the cheap one he gets from the corner shop Harry can’t think of a good enough reason to refuse, so he accepts. 

He sits down on the armchair by the French doors and picks up the pages Malfoy’s finished with. Malfoy doesn’t comment on the development; the only sound piercing the silence is the rustling of the newspaper, like trees in a forest. 

It’s dangerous, he thinks as he closes the drawing room door behind him, plunging the hallway into darkness. One can easily lose his head in this perverse magic.  

* * * 

Two days later, Malfoy’s already in the workshop by the time Harry comes down. The worktable has been pushed against a wall to make space for a large cabinet; Malfoy’s circling it, tracing it with his wand. 

“Your coffee’s in the drawing room,” he says as soon as he sees Harry, then explains, unprompted, “Work emergency. Somebody’s china cabinet started spitting out its contents. A plate almost decapitated one of their guests during supper.”

Harry lets out a chuckle despite himself. 

“So is this your job, then?” he asks, Accio-ing the coffee from the drawing room and leaning against the doorframe. He’s tired. Ron and Hermione left long after midnight. They drank too much wine—but not enough to warrant an anti-hangover potion—and it took him ages to fall asleep, the memory of Malfoy’s arms against his as they cleaned up afterwards popping up in his mind unbidden every time he closed his eyes.  

“Yes,” Malfoy says, moving around the cabinet. He must have gotten dressed in a hurry because his shirt is sticking out from under his jumper, a state of dishevelment Harry would have never imagined ever seeing Malfoy in.

He takes a sip of his coffee and takes a closer look at the contents of the room. “What is it exactly? Your job?”

“I fix broken magical objects.”

“Oh. And you were never interested in law?” 

Harry’s been having some unusual thoughts lately, and one of them is that maybe, just maybe, he liked his job so much because it kept him away from home for long stretches of time. It just became apparent in a way it hadn’t been before that a job with less hours, less unexpected calls in the middle of the night, simply left too much time Harry didn’t know how to fill. So the idea that he’d quit his high-stakes job if he was married to someone who turned his relic of a house into a comfortable home and who cooked as well as Malfoy did suddenly isn’t so outrageous anymore. Suddenly, it makes sense. But what doesn’t make sense is why Malfoy, so enamoured with the intricacies of judiciary procedures, would be spending his life locked away in Grimmauld Place, away from the spotlights he thrives in. 

“No,” Malfoy laughs. “And I don’t see what would ever make me interested in law. Such a bore.”

“Maybe a trial would,” Harry says without thinking.

“Maybe,” Malfoy shrugs, unbothered by Harry’s crass comment. Of course he is; he doesn’t know what Harry’s talking about. He doesn’t remember his trial, how scared he’d looked on the stand, how his eyes were red from crying and his lips trembled as he spoke. “In your memories I work as a prosecutor for the Ministry, right? It’s what you used to say in the hospital … ”

“Yeah.”

“Was I any good?”

Harry takes a long sip out of his coffee. It’s really good coffee. It doesn’t taste burnt; some mornings, it has a hint of caramel. Others, of citrus fruit. 

“You were brilliant.”

Malfoy beams at him from behind the cabinet door. Harry recognises the expression on his face. He’s seen it many times before, most recently when Harry promised him he’ll help him with Quillweather’s trial. For the first time, he considers the possibility that it doesn’t so much look like arrogance as it does relief. Relief that Harry’s being agreeable for once. 

* * * 

He tails Quillweather’s wife until lunch but the only remotely interesting thing she does is take a break from crying on the couch to walk the dog. After a quick bite under a sandwich shop’s awning dripping with rain, he goes to the Public Wizarding Library. He finds the testimony of a woman who claims to have travelled from a parallel universe with the help of a magical ring; she was diagnosed as schizophrenic by early 20th century Healers and her story deemed nothing more than delirious fabrication. He sends the book back to its shelf and gathers his notes.

That night, Ron tells him he managed to set up the meeting with Quillweather. Finally, a step forward. Lately, he’s only been taking them backwards. 

* * * 

It’s dark. He’s locked into a dark place, a small place. His hands are wet. It’s blood. He recognises it. It’s Petunia’s blood. 

A voice pierces through the thick fabric of his vision. “Wake up, Harry,”

Petunia’s hands reach into the darkness. He lets out a scream and Malfoy is there, kneeling by his bed, caressing his cheek. “It’s just a bad dream. Just a bad dream.”

Harry lifts himself up. He can’t breathe. He can feel the blood running down his back, pooling under his neck.

“It’s going to be all right, Harry. It was just a nightmare. You’re fine. You’re safe.” The bed jounces; Malfoy’s warmth surrounds him. “You’re safe, my love,” he whispers, his breath hot on his ear. “You’re not there anymore.”

Harry’s choppy breathing slows down. The room starts to take shape around him. The blood was just sweat, Petunia’s deadly grip just Malfoy’s gentle hands. 

“I’m fine now,” he says, heaving himself up from Malfoy’s embrace. “Sorry—sorry I woke you.”

He locks the bathroom door behind him, leans against it. His heart is throbbing as if it’s trying to jump out of his chest. He doesn’t dare move until Malfoy’s footsteps fade back into the heart of the house. 

* * * 

The drawing room door is open. The sofa is empty. A note’s leaning on a coffee mug, distorted by the warming charm. 

Harry, 

I had to leave early this morning. A door in an old wizarding house in Yorkshire has locked a family of five inside and I’ve been called on site. I should be back before dinner but told Hermione to bring take-out just in case. 

Please forgive me for entering your personal space without permission last night. It won’t happen again unless you instruct me otherwise. 

I hope your meeting goes well at the Ministry. Say hello to Ron. 

See you tonight,
Draco

Harry lets the Invisibility cloak slide off him. He folds the letter in the middle, presses it until it’s flat. Folds it again. 

* * * 

Quillweather is a lanky man with white, shoulder length hair. He keeps glancing towards Ron as he sits down across from Harry. 

They’re in Harry’s office, which is Ron’s office now. Other than the change of title, it looks very much the same. Harry tries not to think too much about how it feels to be back there. 

“I already told your friend over there I don’t know anything about any ring,” he says, then adds in mock respect, “Mister Potter.”

Harry leans back on his chair and considers the man in front of him. He’s already interrogated him once so he knows the best approach is a direct one.

“I want to hear it myself.” He places the ring between them, all too aware of how crazy this must look like to Ron. Quillweather stares down at it, then up at Ron. With a twist of his wand, Ron unshackles him. The man picks up the ring.

“Yellow gold. Eighteen carats. A classic metal wedding band, manufactured in France. No specific marks. Could probably be worth something if sold as Harry Potter’s wedding ring, but otherwise unremarkable in any way, shape or form. I wouldn’t acquire this piece.”

“All right,” Harry says, leaning forwards and grabbing the ring from Quillweather’s hands, who promptly puts them together so that the shackles can go back around them. “Then what can you tell me about magical rings?”

“In general?”

“Yes.”

“Not much. There are many rings that have special powers. There are rings that act like love potions. There are very rare rings that give their wearers increased magical ability. Most of them haven’t been seen for hundreds of years; if anybody has them, they’re smart enough not to advertise it.”

“What about a ring that would make you a soulmate with your enemy?”

Quillweather lets out a dry laugh. “I’ve never heard of such a thing. That would be impossible, anyway. Soulmates magic is innate; there’s nothing a witch or a wizard can do to break or change a soulmates bond. You and your soulmate are bound forever and without one another your life will be poorer for it.”

“Er—What about a ring that has an inscription that appears and disappears?”

“Mister Potter, with all due respect. I’m not well versed in magical rings. I can give you a list of people who are, if you wish. I am merely a collector of antiques. My profession is appraisal for commercial purposes. Which is why I didn’t know that fountain pen—”

Ron scoffs from the door; Harry signals that he’s done. 

“An enemy?” Ron asks while they’re crossing the Atrium towards the visitors entrance. “Is that what you think of Draco? That he’s your enemy?”

“No.” His voice sounds unexpectedly defensive. 

Ron looks like he’s trying very hard not to comment. “So, you talked to Quillweather. Now what?”

“I don’t know,” Harry says truthfully. “I think I’ll try to speak with some of the wizards he mentioned.”

“If you need anything, you let me know,” Ron says, stopping in front of the entrance and patting his shoulder. “You’re not alone in this, all right?”

“Thanks, Ron.”

Ron drags him into an embrace. “Anytime.” He lets go. Harry’s about to walk through the exit when Ron grabs him again. “Since you don’t remember, can I tell you why you quit five years ago?”

Harry opens his mouth to refuse, then changes his mind. He nods. 

“You quit because running around in circles, trying to solve mysteries and wearing yourself thin like you are now, reminded you too much of the war. Of Voldemort.”

“The war happened. Voldemort happened. I’ll never forget that,” he says acidly, jerking free of Ron’s grip.  

“That doesn’t mean you have to relieve it every single day.”

“Did Malfoy tell you to get me this meeting with Quillweather?” Harry asks, voicing a thought that’s been eating away at him. “Did he tell you both to humour me?”

Ron snorts. “Like I need Draco to tell me that. I know—we both know, and Hermione too—you’ll always do whatever you want. Whatever you think you have to do. Draco’s just trying his best to deal with the situation. He loves you, you know … ”

“That’s not what I remember,” Harry cuts him off, short of breath. 

“Then what do you remember?”

“I remember I’m an Auror and Malfoy and I never got along.” He stops himself from adding and neither did you. 

“So let me get this straight,” Ron says, voice laden with sarcasm. “You remember that your best friend, your husband, a man that would move mountains for you, is your enemy. Oh, and that you still have a job that makes you miserable. And that’s what you’re wasting your days on? Trying to go back to that?”

Harry blinks. “It doesn’t matter if I was miserable or not, what matters is that that’s what really happened. It’s what’s right.”

“Right?” Ron laughs. “Merlin, Harry. Right for whom?”

* * * 

Malfoy’s not back by dinner. He sends an owl and Hermione reads the message out loud while Ron puts his share back in the take-out container. 

The kitchen feels oddly empty. Ron’s cheerfulness is undermined by the memory of their earlier conversation. Hermione’s jokes fall flat. Nobody has bothered to start the fire in the hearth. 

When Draco comes back a bit after ten Harry has to stop himself from getting up, has to grab the chair so he doesn’t mirror Hermione and run into his arms.  

* * * 

When Draco laughs his grey eyes turn a shade deeper, like a cloud breaking into rain on the horizon, like pebbles under a mountain stream, like a moonlit mirror.

* * * 

They’re having their morning coffee in the drawing room and Harry makes an off hand comment about some trivial thing, something insignificant and not at all remarkable, and Draco bursts into laughter and this crazy idea goes through Harry’s head. The idea that he could just stay. He could spend all morning with him, then the afternoon too. If he so desires, he could spend all day with Draco, and tomorrow too, and the day after that and every day thereafter.

He doesn’t. He sips from his coffee until there’s only coffee grounds left in the mug, then closes the drawing room door behind him, plunging himself in darkness while all the light is left behind. 

* * * 

The courtroom is crowded. Harry manages to find a seat in the last row. Abbot’s doing a bad job, he thinks as he rests against the padded backrest. Draco would have known how to use Quillweather’s dispassionate attitude against him. He would have had a better line of questioning. He would have chosen his words so that they move, wouldn’t have gotten lost in drawn-out legal terms. He would have kept the public on its toes, turning towards them only as he arrived at the climax of his argument, showing his good side—his left side.

He would have had every pair of eyes on him, on the curve of his jaw as he spoke, on the grace of his movements as he waltzed in front of the judge’s bench. He would have made everybody’s stomach clench when he looked at them across the gallery, as if he knew exactly where they were, as if he was daring them to look away. 

Harry buries his head into his arms, not listening to Abbot anymore. He thinks of how it made him feel to watch Draco in court. Of how seeing him across the Atrium jump started his heart every single time. He remembers how Draco's undone top button made the blood rush to his face that day he touched the ring and he understands, once and for all, that it was not hate at all that had activated that goddamn ring.

* * *

The pages he’s been writing for weeks are spread around the floor of his bedroom. 

It doesn’t make any sense. He hasn’t found a single mention of the ring anywhere. On top of that, what kind of ring has the power to change everybody’s memory? Make an entire new branch of magic spring up out of nowhere, change society as a whole? Erase Dark Marks?

He’s never heard of magic that powerful. 

No, it doesn’t make any sense. But the alternative doesn’t either. He remembers it so clearly, touching a ring he shouldn’t have in the Department of Mysteries on a random Wednesday and everything turning white. He remembers everything that happened between him and Draco. Every accidental touch, every hurtful word. Every mistake. He remembers Draco’s Dark Mark and what it always meant. 

* * *

Harry gulps down his coffee. He’s going to be late. He hasn’t checked the time, distracted by an article about the sudden departure of Puddlemere United’s Keeper, and now he can’t find his wand. 

“Shit,” he says, eyes swooping over the drawing room. 

“It’s there,” Draco says, pointing to the dresser by the door. Harry snatches the wand and sprints down the stairs. He hears Draco shouting behind him, “Have a good day.”

He can only Apparate outside the vast grounds that surround the University building. It took a lot of connections to get a meeting with one of the most esteemed professors in magical objects and he’ll be furious with himself if he misses it. He’s halfway to the entrance when he realises he forgot to bring the ring. He swears; turns on his heel. By the time he Apparates back to the front steps of Grimmauld place he’s twenty minutes late. He runs up the stairs two at a time, muttering “Stupid, stupid, stupid.” 

He’s just reached the landing when he hears it. At first, his mind doesn’t register what it is.

He slowly pivots his head towards the light.

Through the door he left wide open as he rushed out he can see Draco’s body kneeled in front of the armchair Harry was just sitting in. He’s holding Harry’s coffee cup to his chest like a precious thing, whole body shaking with the wretched wailing coming out of his mouth. He’s moving back and forth, back and forth. 

Harry’s hands are made of clay. His feet weigh a thousand tons. 

The cup escapes Draco’s grip and rolls on the floor until it’s stopped by the feet of the coffee table. Draco buries his head in the seat cushion, his uncontrollable sobbing barely muffled by the thick fabric. 

Harry doesn’t breathe until he’s back downstairs. He takes off his shoes with trembling hands and leaves them scattered in front of the staircase, then silently closes the kitchen door behind him, shutting out Draco’s sobs. 

The kitchen smells like coffee and eggs, the pan Draco used to fix himself breakfast drying next to the sink. Harry hobbles to it; he grabs one of the English cookbooks from the shelf above and opens it to a random page. He has to focus so that the letters stop moving around, then fumbles for the ingredients. It’s a slow process; he looks for potatoes in the fridge, for butter under the sink. 

His heart rises to his throat when he hears the stairs creaking. He busies himself by taking out all the spices as the footsteps get closer. They stop in front of the kitchen door. Harry hears Draco picking up his shoes and sending them away with a spell. There’s a small pause then the handle turns and Draco enters, carrying their two coffee mugs.

His eyes are big and clear; his expression perfectly composed. 

“Hey … ” 

“The professor wasn’t there. I thought I’d come home and prepare lunch.”

“Oh.” Draco places the two cups in the sink with great care. 

“If that’s OK…”

“Of course it’s OK, Harry. This is your kitchen, too. Do you need help with that?” he asks, eyeing the mess Harry made with the spices. 

“No, no. I’m just looking for the turmeric.”

Draco stares at him. Harry attempts a smile. 

“When did you come back?”

“A few minutes ago.”

“Did you see me upstairs? Because—”

“I didn’t go upstairs,” Harry lies, turning his back to Draco. 

“—because if you did, Harry, I hope you understand that’s not your fault.”

“What do you mean? What were you doing upstairs?” Harry asks, crouching down. There’s a long silence while Harry pretends to look for something at the back of the cabinet. 

“Nothing. Are you sure you don’t need help?”

“I’ll be fine, Draco.” Harry stands up and turns towards Draco, displaying the casserole he randomly grabbed. “Don’t you have a pocket watch to fix?”

Draco’s piercing eyes move to Harry’s hands. “I do,” he concedes. 

“I’ll call you when it’s ready.”

* * *

“Hm,” Draco says, chewing methodically. “I like how you didn’t add too much cream to the mashed potatoes.”

“Pretty good for a first try, right?” Harry catches the small movement of Draco’s eyes. “Or was it not a first try?”

Draco shakes his head, smiling. “No, not really.”

“Damn,” Harry says, mirroring his smile. “So, did I cook as much as you, then?”

“We usually cooked together,” Malfoy says, voice sad all of a sudden. He turns towards the window; looks behind it, behind the lamppost and the neighbouring houses, at the cloudless sky. “I’m really sorry, Harry. I didn’t want you to see me like that. You never came back before—I didn’t think. I shouldn't have—the middle of the house—”

Harry swallows his food. He could try to deny it again, but he doesn’t. He leans in and puts a hand over Draco’s hand. Draco’s eyes turn back to him. They’re the colour of summer storms. The colour of the ash that’s left in the hearth after everybody’s gone and Harry puts out the fire. The colour of his daydreams and of his nightdreams and everything in between. 

“I don’t want you to feel—”

“I’d have stopped anyway. In a day or two, I’d have stopped.”

Draco looks down at Harry’s hand, slowly turns his palm up so that their fingers fall between each other. He nods. 

“And I was thinking,” Harry says, closing his hand around Draco’s. “Maybe you could finally make that appointment.” 

* * *

Harry walks Ron and Hermione to the door, then stumbles back into the kitchen. He’s had too many glasses of wine. 

“Hey."

“Hey yourself,” Draco smiles back, hands busy with the dishes. He’s had a couple more glasses of wine than usual too. Harry picks up the rest of the dishes from the table without magic; he doesn’t want to risk crashing them into the wall by mistake. 

“You can stop having Ron and Hermione over for dinner every night,” he says, struggling to lift the entire stack and bring it to the sink. 

“Oh, can I, now?” Draco laughs. “You’re making a lot of changes today.”

“Yeah, I guess I am.”

“That’s good,” Draco says, wiping his hands on a kitchen towel. “Change is good.”

Harry follows Draco up the stairs, watches the shape of his body as he moves. When they reach the second floor landing Harry stops while Draco advances towards the guest bedroom at the end of the hallway. 

“Goodnight, Harry.”

“Goodnight.” He waits until Draco’s door clicks shut then crawls between the cool sheets without changing out of his clothes. 

His head hurts in the morning—he really needs to stop drinking so much—but he revels in the slowness; the bed is warm and comfortable and the harshness of the cold November sun is softened by the linen curtains. He rolls to the side and fumbles in the drawer of his nightstand. He knew it was his nightstand the first night back because he found a stack of muggle magazines on it and because the other one was empty. It’s still empty. 

Harry takes out his notepads from his nightstand and puts them in a box in the wardrobe, next to his old Auror robes, then joins Draco downstairs. 

They leave the doors open between the drawing room and Draco’s workshop. If Harry wants to, he can lift his head from the sofa and look at Draco, hunched over his worktable. He falls asleep at some point and wakes up with Draco towering above him, paper bag in hand. 

“I ordered Chinese. Too lazy to cook,” he explains. 

Harry scoots over. They eat in silence. When they’re finished, Harry sends the leftovers to the kitchen while Draco lays down, head on the pleated arm, knees drawn up to his chest. 

“I think I’ll take a nap,” he says sluggishly, eyes already closed. 

“Take a nap,” Harry says, smiling. His heart is racing, his hands are sweaty. It’s the alcohol, he thinks, I really need to stop with all this alcohol, but then he puts a hand under Draco’s legs and positions them into his lap. Draco settles in without a word and Harry’s heart’s pumping and thumping as he rests a hand on Draco’s exposed ankle. He sees Draco’s eyes are open and before he can stop himself his hand is moving up Draco’s thigh, not much, just a little, just enough to make Draco turn around and look at him. 

“Come here,” Draco says, reaching out with his arm, and Harry’s already leaning in, settling in between the back of the sofa and Draco’s warm body. He puts his head on his chest and Draco’s arm closes around him like the cover of a book.

Harry traces the letters of his own name on Draco’s wrist. 

“What does it actually mean? Does it mean we had to—me and you?”

Draco lifts up his hand to look at the Amet, then tightens his grip around Harry. 

“No. It’s more subtle than that. It’s related to your magic. Your soulmate is the person you’re in tune with. That can mean different things for different people.”

“And us?”

“We were friends for a long time. You dated girls. A girl. Cho.”

“I remember Cho.” Then, after a while, “And you?”

“And I didn’t.”

“And when did we … ?”

“Between fifth and sixth year.”

Harry moves in closer, closes his eyes. 

“I was in love with you before that. You too—at least, that’s what you told me afterwards. But it’s hard to put names to these kinds of things as a teenager. It’s hard to come to terms with the fact that you’re gay. We’d get too close and then we’d get scared and run away. But then Father went to prison and Voldemort wanted me to take the Mark and well …”

Harry hides his face in the crook of Draco’s arm. 

“I wanted to do it. I thought it would make him forgive Father and spare Mother. But you didn’t let me. You made a whole scene. You talked to Dumbledore. You showed up at the Manor with Ron and Hermione. Eventually, I gave in. It was the worst time of my life, leaving Mother behind. I wouldn’t get out of Ron’s bedroom, I didn’t let anybody in. Except for you.”

His voice trails off, then picks up in a lighter tone. “Not the most romantic of stories,” he chuckles. “But we were both scared, we didn’t know what would happen when we went back to Hogwarts and that was enough to get over our fears about each other. The first time we kissed was in Ron’s closet; I hid there to cry, and you came in to comfort me and well … ”

“Wow.”

“Yeah,” Draco says, resting his chin on Harry’s head. “What about you? What do you remember?”

“Oh,” Harry says, throat closed up. “I remember—I don’t remember any of that, but …” Harry takes a deep breath, tries to find the right words and fails, then tries again. “I remember always wanting you. It was just … it was never possible.”

The confession breaks something in him. A wall, a barrier of sorts—something ancient, something filled to the brim. The truth of his desire floods him. He lifts up his head and meets Draco’s grey eyes. His lips are wet and open and Harry crawls on top of him and covers them with his mouth. Draco answers him readily, putting both his hands around him; Harry shakes them off. 

Draco’s had this before. He hasn’t. 

He pins down his arms and starts unbuttoning his shirt. As he does, he kisses every inch of skin he uncovers; the triangle at the base of his neck, the edge of his shoulders, the top of his chest. He’s saying things, things like “Oh, God,” and “I want you so badly,” and Draco’s answering him but his words are drowned out by the sound of Harry’s own heartbeat.

He spends the afternoon kissing every inch of his body—the skin between his fingers, the dimple in his knee; there isn’t one place that he doesn’t cover with his mouth, that he doesn’t take the time to adore—and that night he falls asleep easily on his side of the bed while Draco's naked body is wrapped around him, hot and wanting and most importantly, his. 

* * *

The heel of Draco’s shoe makes a clicking noise against the penny tile in the waiting room. Harry puts a hand on Draco’s knee and the sound ceases.  

Draco keeps his hand on the small of Harry’s back while he answers the witches’s questions. 

“A very strange case, indeed,” she mutters, following the strand of light connecting their wands. It reminds Harry of Voldemort and he asks her about it, but she dismisses his fears. “This is a standard soul spell, dear. Voldemort did not have a hold on those. No, what’s happening here has nothing to do with him and it has nothing to do with your bond either. Your bond is as strong as ever. You might be better off seeing an expert in memory charms.”

* * *

The expert in memory charms insists on separate interviews in order to assess the damage. He has a lot more questions than the witch and makes Harry talk about things Harry’s spent a considerable effort trying not to think about. After he goes through the ordeal of recounting sixth year he can’t hold it anymore and asks how come he has such vivid memories of things that supposedly never happened. 

“Mister Potter, there is no magic that comes even this close,” he explains, leaning forward across his desk and creating the smallest gap between his thumb and index finger, “to the incredible power of the human mind. When there’s a gap in our memories, our mind will fill it with something. Anything. Sense and order must always be preserved, even when they are objectively not there.”

“But why did I fill this … this gap with these awful memories? Why would my mind make up such vile things?” 

The man—Willowbrook—stands back and smiles. Behind him the branches of an ancient oak tree are dancing in the wind.

“That’s a wonderful question, Mister Potter. I’m not sure I’ll be able to do it justice, unfortunately. A philosopher might be of more help to you in this regard. What I can say, especially to someone with a reputation as remarkable as yours, is that it would be a grave mistake, a grave mistake indeed, to consider yourself free of vileness. There’s an inherent darkness in all of us. It’s our duty to guard over it and make sure it doesn’t cross the threshold of our mind, but to deny and reject the awfulness of our nature, that would be a crime against ourselves.”

Harry wrestles with Willowbrook’s words while he waits for Draco to be interviewed. There’s a draft in the hallway and he shudders, just like the trees outside. 

“I am sorry to have to be the bearer of bad news,” he tells them when Harry re-enters the solemn office, “but the memory damage is irreversible. However, since you are soulmates and therefore bonded by strong magic, I do have a suggestion.” 

* * *

“Ready?”

Draco nods. He’s sitting on the sofa—it was Harry’s idea, inspired by memories of falling down in Snape’s office. He doesn’t look scared even though Willowbrook gave them a list of instructions so long it feels like Harry’s about to perform open heart surgery on him. 

“Go for it.”

Harry casts. 

He's in Madam Malkin’s and a dishevelled boy sits down next to him. He knows he shouldn’t associate with people that look like that but he can’t help it. He introduces himself and the boy shrieks.

“That’s the name that’s written on my arm!” he screams.

He’s outside Madam Malkin’s, shaking hands with that horrible creature Father told him to stay away from. But Harry Potter says he’s alright, and Harry Potter’s his soulmate after all. 

He’s on the Hogwarts Express and Harry’s with a Weasley. Why is he always with people he’s been told not to talk to? He tries to warn Harry, to tell him what kind of people the Weasleys are, but Harry doesn’t understand. He sends him away.  

He’s in a corridor and Harry’s screaming at him, telling him he can’t speak like that to Weasley. 

He’s in a bathroom and he’s throwing his wand at a troll because the troll is aiming for Ron. 

He’s in front of a blood-drenched wall, telling Harry he’s not the heir of slytherin. Harry says, “I believe you.”

He’s at the Manor and Father is threatening to disown him if he doesn’t stop hanging out with a mudblood. Draco throws his plate on the ground and says, “Do it, then.”

He’s watching Goyle and Grabbe leaving for Hogsmade with Harry by his side, heart racing. 

He’s running towards Harry, crouched over Cedric’s corpse.

He’s in a broom closet, fighting with Harry because of Father.

He’s holding Harry while he cries, a broken mirror on the bed besides them. 

He’s looking at Mother and Dumbledore says “It’s time to go.” 

He’s kissing Harry in the dark. 

He’s in Grimmauld Place, saying goodbye to Harry, Ron and Hermione. He doesn’t know when he’ll see them again and he’s never been more scared in his life. Harry kisses him and says, “I love you.”

He’s lying next to Harry on the floor in an empty drawing room and they’re still drenched in blood and dust but they’re both alive and Voldemort is dead and it’s the best day of their lives.

He’s in an abandoned muggle home and Harry opens the door of the cupboard under the stairs. 

He’s just chosen the colour he wants to paint the bedroom in and Harry says, “Marry me.”

He’s fallen on the floor. Draco’s running towards him. 

“Harry? Are you alright? Harry?”

“I—I don’t—that’s not at all what I remember,” he stutters, choking on his words. “I want to remember all of that,” Harry carries on, clinging to Draco’s shirt. “I want to remember that.”

“Never mind all that,” Draco says, guiding Harry into his arms and kissing the top of his head. “We’ll make new memories.” 

* * *

It’s Harry's first day back at work. 

“Nervous?” Draco asks, accepting the mug of coffee from Harry and turning off the stove with a swift movement of his wand. 

“Pretty nervous,” Harry admits. “I haven’t taught a class in fifteen years. Not as far as I remember.”

“Ah, you’re a natural. Naturals like you have nothing to worry about.”

“We don’t?” Harry laughs, pulling Draco into his arms and kissing him. 

* * *

“Let’s dance.”

“I don’t know how to dance.” 

“Who cares? It’s just us here.”

“I do. I don’t want you to see how much I don’t know how to dance.”

“Fine. We’ll close our eyes.”

Harry knocks back his glass of wine and stands up. He’s never been one to say no to a dare. Outside the French doors, a solitary lamppost lights the windless snowfall.

Draco turns up the music. Harry waits for him to close his eyes, then mirrors him. When the music picks up the pace, so do they. 

“Is this something that we used to do?” Harry asks, eyes still closed, breath choppy from the effort. 

“No. It’s the first time.”

* * *

“Maybe we should get a divorce,” Draco says, looking up at his ring. They’re laying in bed, too lazy to get ready for the day. “And get married again.”

“I don’t want to get a divorce,” Harry says, looking up at his own ring. 

“Me neither,” Draco says, intertwining his fingers with Harry’s so that the two rings clink against each other. “But we should do something.”

“We could change our anniversary.”

“To what?”

“To September fifteenth.”

* * *

On September 15, 2011 they celebrate by going to Paris. It rains the whole time and they don’t leave their hotel room. 

On September 15, 2012 Harry gets Draco a kitten and they name it Gonflable. 

On September 15, 2013 they go out dancing and come home before midnight, swearing to never try to feel young ever again.

On September 15, 2014 they make sushi for the first time and it doesn’t turn out half bad. Gonflable appreciates the extra salmon with his usual dinner. 

On September 15, 2015 they’re in the hospital because Draco touched a cursed teacup and Harry smuggles in a bottle of champagne. 

On September 15, 2016 they miss their dinner reservation because every time Draco tries to get out of bed Harry drags him back in. They order take out. 

On September 15, 2017 Harry’s doing the washing up after lunch when everything turns white. 

Chapter Text

The pain is gone as if it was never there; the light dims until it’s only a flash against the dark redness of his eyelids. Harry opens his eyes. He’s in a low-ceilinged room; a strange, windowless room, lined with shelves overflowing with antiques. From behind the closed door come the stifled voices of two men. His robes hang heavy on him. They’re red. 

“No … ”

He takes a step back; bumps into something. A desk. A magnifying glass pointed at an empty stand shakes; almost falls over. Harry looks down at his hands and the image of his naked hands looks back at him. 

“No.” 

He turns his hands over. He checks his pockets, picks up the files on the desk. He throws himself on all fours. It can’t be. It can’t be. 

“Accio ring!” 

He holds his breath. The objects on the shelves are still. The drawers of the desk remain closed. The entire room is frozen, motionless. The alarm blasts. Harry jumps to his feet. The door bursts open. Two men are stopped in their tracks, wands out. 

“Mister Potter?” one of them asks. “Did you—”

Harry’s pushing them out of the way, running past them towards the end of the corridor. The fear tosses and rages inside him. The realisation of what’s happening—of where he is, of what it means—is a siege coming in waves. There’s no time to explain to the men following him why he’s running; no time to open doors or wait for rooms to stop spinning. He doesn’t feel the spells whiz by his ear, doesn’t notice the sea of people parting in his way. He’s blind to everything but the next step in front of him. There’s still hope. There’s still hope. 

The door swings open in his wake. Draco looks up from his desk, startled, the window behind him a pool of gold. He parts his lips in surprise, drops the quill he’s holding. Harry circles the desk and plunges at his feet. He grabs Draco’s hands; they’re cold.

“Are you alright?” 

“What?” Draco shrieks. His eyes turn towards the door where people are shouting. Harry tightens his grip, makes Draco look back at him. 

“Do you remember all of that too?”

“What?” Draco repeats, eyes big with fear as Harry pulls his hands forward and tugs at the sleeve of his shirt. This can’t be. This can’t be. “Potter, what the fuck are you doing?” 

Draco struggles to escape Harry’s grip but Harry’s stronger. He pushes up the sleeve and uncovers his forearm. Draco stops struggling. The red skull looks like a bruise on his pale skin.

The Protego spell crumbles around them. The muffled voices become louder. His wand is being whisked away; he lets it go. Somebody’s helping Draco up; his wrist slides away from Harry’s grip. Two sets of arms lift him from the ground; he obeys, body limp. 

They lead him to one of the interrogation rooms on the sixth floor. The metal chair scrapes the floor under his weight; an oppressive lamp dangles over him. They speak. He does not. 

The door opens and more people come in. Ron and Hermione rush to his side. The others are shouting at each other. He recognises their faces like walk-ins from a half-forgotten dream. Adler Knowles, the Head of the Department of Law Enforcement, is pointing a finger at Myriam Pierce, the Head of the Department of Mysteries. Behind them, other Aurors and Unspeakables whose names he has forgotten. 

“Harry! What happened?” Hermione asks. He shuts his eyes; wills them all away. 

“I’d like to be told that myself,” Adler booms. “What is that mess downstairs?”

“Mister Potter set off the alarm in Current Investigations and attacked us when we tried to stop him,” one voice says. “He cast a Protego so powerful it knocked down half of the people in the Atrium, then assaulted a prosecutor in his office.”

“Assaulted a prosecutor?” Ron asks. His hand is squishing Harry’s shoulder. 

“Mister Malfoy is fine,” another Unspeakable says. “Just a bit startled.”

“What I don’t understand,” Adler cuts him off, “is how two clerks dare raise their wands at the Head Auror! Bring him up here like a criminal—”

“They were just doing their job, Adler,” Pierce says calmly. 

“Their job? Since when is it your job to police the Ministry, Myriam?”

“He was an intruder and we have the right to arrest any person that breaks into our Department. Even the Head Auror.”

“If Harry Potter was in the Department of Mysteries then he had a bloody good reason to be there! I think I speak for everybody in this godforsaken building when I say we are all tired of you people thinking you are above the law—”

“Harry? What were you doing in the Department of Mysteries?” Ron asks, crouching in front of him and blocking Adler and Myriam from view. “Is it because of Malfoy?”

Harry blinks. This is the worst thing that has ever happened to him. 

“He was searching for something,” somebody says. 

“Whatever happened, it obviously did something to him. Maybe he was attacked—”

Myriam puffs impatiently. 

“He was not attacked. He’s in a state of shock. Who knows what he saw down there. There’s a reason nobody’s allowed inside without permission. We’ve called for the Unspeakable in charge of Current Investigations, he’s downstairs trying to figure out what Mister Potter was looking for. Ah, there he is—”

The door opens, casting long shadows on the concrete floor. The Unspeakable crosses the room with a long stride and whispers something in Myriam’s ear. Her eyes darken; she turns towards Harry. 

Harry inhales but no air comes in. She knows. It’s obvious in the tilt of her head, in the curve of her lips. She knows Harry found the ring and she knows what the ring did. She knows where he was and she knows where he came back from. And if somebody else can know it, then it must be real. He moves to the edge of his seat, escapes Ron’s grip on his shoulder. 

“Was it a dream?”

Everybody turns to him. The silence stretches on and on. 

“It was not a dream, Mister Potter,” Myriam says at last. 

“Was what a dream?” comes Ron’s high-pitched voice. “What happened?”

“Before I explain further, I need the room cleared. Adler, you can stay. It will help us decide what to do next.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” Ron says. 

“We’re family,” Hermione adds.

Myriam considers them for a beat. 

“Of course. Everybody else, out.”

Hurried footfalls are followed by the sound of the door clicking shut. Myriam puts up her hand and three rolls of parchment appear in midair. Adler, Ron and Hermione take turns signing them. 

“Now, will you tell us what in God’s name is going on with Harry?” 

“It is very likely that Mister Potter put on the Ring of Haan,” Myriam says flatly, making the parchments disappear with another flick of her wand.

Hermione lets out a cry of disbelief. Adler crosses his arms and mutters, “Merlin.” The only one who doesn’t react is Ron. 

“What is that?” 

“It’s one of the most powerful magical objects in the world. Lost for over twenty years. We recently confiscated an object that fit all the descriptors. My men were in the process of authenticating it. Based on mister Potter’s disorientation and the fact that the ring disappeared from the premises, we infer that it was indeed the real deal and not one of the many copies that occasionally spring up.”

“OK, but what did it do to him?”

Myriam purses her lips. “The ring of Haan deals with the affections of the heart.”

“Affections of the heart?” 

“Love,” Hermione whispers.

“Indeed. The ring sends the wearer to a parallel universe where they are married with the object of their desire. It grants the wearer seven years in this universe. Is that right, Mister Potter? Is that what happened to you?”

It’s as if a curtain has been drawn between him and the others. A door locked with a key that’s been thrown away, a line in the sand that he will forever be on the wrong side of. 

“Yes,” he says but the voice and the words it mutters seem to belong to someone else. 

“And,” Myriam continues, “am I correct in assuming you didn’t know what the ring would do when you put it on?”

“Yes,” he repeats.

“I see. Then what I’m about to tell you cannot wait. No matter how unpleasant, it’s better to say these things sooner rather than later and state them clearly so that there is no hint of doubt about what transpired here. Love is a dangerous thing, and our hearts more fragile than we’d like to think.”

She pauses, lets her words sink in. Harry’s stomach clenches. 

“First of all, the person you were married to in that universe is a version of the person you were enamoured with before putting on the ring. They are versions of each other, but they are not the same. The differences between them might be small or big, of great consequence or of no consequence at all. Whatever was the case, the person that exists here, in your own universe, has no recollection of what happened in the other universe. The first instinct seems to always be to seek them out, but I strongly advise against it going forward. Do you understand what I’m saying, Mister Potter?”

Harry’s throat is dry; no words will come out. He nods. 

“Good. As for the person you left behind, they don’t know you’re gone. The version of yourself you inhabited got all their memories back, while also retaining yours.”

“Wait. So, who was it?”

“Not now, Ron,” Hermione whispers. 

The whole room is spinning. Harry grips the armrests. 

“Finally, Mister Potter, the ring disappeared. It’s designed to do so in order to avoid … overuse. We don’t know where it went. It can be at the bottom of the ocean. It can be in some old lady’s pantry. Locked in the vault of a muggle. Some people wasted away their lives trying to find it again. They never did. I’m sorry, Mister Potter, but you will never be able to go back.”

Harry turns his left hand upwards. The skin around his wrist is smooth. There’s nothing written on it. There was never anything written on it. He looks up at Myriam. 

“There was an inscription on the ring.”

After a moment’s hesitation, Myriam brings her hands together and says, “The ring is inscribed with the first verse of an ancient poem. It roughly translates to Seven years of what your heart craves but cannot have; seven years of bliss before I drag you back to hell.”

* * *

Adler says something. Hermione asks a question, Ron looks at him. Myriam shrugs. Their voices get louder. Their words don’t mean anything to Harry. None of this means anything to him anymore. 

* * *

Hermione’s kneeling in front of him; she tells him they can go and Harry understands there’s a whole world outside the door Ron’s keeping open for them. A whole world with skies that change colour and trees with leaves that rustle in the wind and people that fill the streets and the buildings lining them. A whole world without him. 

“I can’t go home.”

* * *

They put him in their guest bedroom. He keeps the shades closed. 

* * *

The empty bed. The renewed ordeal of remembering what happened. Draco’s hair, spread around the pillow in the soft morning light. The finality of loss, over and over again. 

* * *

He’s never going to get over this. He knows it like the absolute truth that it is, like he knows where is up and where is down. This is the worst thing that has happened to anyone, ever. He’s never going to get over this. 

* * *

Hermione and Ron come into his room every evening. They push him into the shower. Give him new clothes. Leave food on his nightstand. Bring him Dreamless Sleep. Each day a perfect copy of the last until he’s living the same, endless day of mourning. 

* * *

“Harry.” It’s Hermione’s voice. He groans to let her know he’s awake. “It’s been ten days. You have to get out of bed. Please. At least have breakfast with us.”

Ron’s large t-shirt hangs on him. The kitchen is bright; he puts a hand over his eyes to block out the sun, then slips through the small gap between the oven and the round kitchen table. Ron sets a plate of poached eggs in front of him. 

“We’ve finally caught Strandmere.”

Harry blinks in Ron’s direction. 

“The man who used the Imperius curse on muggles. You were right. We arrested him yesterday.”

Vague memories of following a faceless man through muggle pubs float to the surface of his conscience; they don’t stick. The yolk of the egg is bleeding out. Harry pokes the opening with the fork’s tine and the memories come flooding out. Draco, choosing an egg carton in the store. Draco, inspecting an egg up close before breaking it on the edge of their periwinkle blue bowl. Draco, looking up at Harry while he’s stirring eggs for pancakes and smiling. 

Harry buries his face in his hands and bursts into tears. 

* * *

Hermione calls them little steps. For her, little steps are when he doesn’t close down the shades immediately after she opens them in the morning. When he uses soap instead of just standing under the jet of water. When he comes into the kitchen on his own. When he picks at his dinner instead of ignoring it. When he joins in their conversation, even if just with a “That’s weird” or “I hope not.”

Little steps is what Draco used to say when Harry’d become frustrated because he couldn’t say I love you back. 

“Little steps, Harry,” he’d say, removing the covers under which Harry had hid. “The first little step is to stop hiding when I tell you that I love you.” 

“And the second one?” Harry’d ask, finding Draco’s skin between the brilliant sheets, making himself small in his arms. 

“The second one is to understand that you’ve already told me—”

“But I don’t remember it—”

“Let me finish. You’ve already told me with everything you do.”

* * *

The rain falls in torrents. Ron’s looking at the crowded boulevard below the kitchen window, fingers wrapped around a steaming mug of coffee. 

“Poor souls, walking around in this mess when we can simply Apparate to work.”

“Did you see my wand?” Hermione asks, dumping the contents of her bag on the kitchen table. “And have you heard of the concept of umbrellas?”

Harry gives a low chuckle. He reaches for the salt but gets distracted by his own eyes staring back at him. He picks up the rolled newspaper that just fell out of Hermione’s bag. Underneath an old picture of him the headline reads Harry Potter, found not guilty. 

“I was—I had a trial?”

Hermione jerks when she sees what Harry’s looking at. “Oh, shit!”

“Not a trial,” Ron says, eyeing Hermione. “Just an internal inquiry.”

Harry skims the article, stunned. “And nobody told me? I wasn’t needed at my own inquiry?”

“It was just for show,” Hermione says. “We didn’t want to upset you.”

“Just for show?”

“They had to pretend to do an inquiry because you burnt a hole through the door of the Department of Mysteries and then burst into the Atrium surrounded by a shield of magic with at least fifty witnesses,” Ron shrugs. “But in reality Adler made a deal with Myriam and she declared Quillweather’s ring a fake so you wouldn’t go to court for losing it. They said you were confunded by an undisclosed event and that was that.”

“There was no need to lie,” Harry says, shocked.

“You would have lost your job if it had gone to court, mate.”

“My job?” Harry laughs. The idea that anything as unimportant as his job should be on anybody’s mind, let alone his, is ludicrous. “What job? I’m not coming back.”

Ron throws Hermione a concerned look. 

“You don’t have to make a decision right now, Harry.”

“Nobody expects you to come back until you feel better. There’s no pressure, alright?”

Harry’s about to argue with them, then changes his mind. He doesn’t have it in him, arguing. Explaining. He hides behind the newspaper, aimlessly turning the pages. The sound of rain hitting the window sill cheats the charged silence. 

He almost misses it. It’s a small picture in the corner of the current affairs section. The caption says Opening statements made in high profile trial.

That’s right. Quillweather’s trial is still going on. It hasn’t finished years ago. The photograph shows Draco speaking in front of a packed gallery. His back is straight, his shoulders rigid. He’s uncomfortable. He looks too skinny, his features too gaunt. Is he sleeping enough? Is he eating enough? Is he … ?

Ron snatches the newspaper from his hands, an appalled look on his face. 

“Ron,” Hermione says warily.

Ron waves her hand away. Harry holds back the urge to snatch the paper back and grabs his fork instead. 

“Who was it, then? Who were you married to?”

“Stop it, Ron, Harry’s still in shock—”

“Was it Ginny?

Harry shakes his head. 

“Was it Malfoy?”

Harry takes in air; exhales. Closes his eyes. 

“Yes.”

A pause, then the sound of elbows slamming the table.

“Is this why you don’t want to come back to work? Because he’s there?”

“No!” Harry says categorically. He means it, but only because he hasn’t given the idea of going back any thought. Could he, though? Go back to working only one floor above him? Risk the run of bumping into him every day? God forbid, have to ride the elevator with him? He would die. He would most certainly fall on the ground and die right there, at his feet. 

“I’m sure Adler can get rid of him. Fire him or find him a post somewhere in France or—”

Harry’s fork slides off the plate. It makes a sharp sound as it hits the tiled floor. 

“Why would Adler do that? He didn’t do anything wrong.”

“Didn’t do anything wrong? Didn’t do anything wrong?”

Ron’s chest is heaving. Hermione tries to put an arm over his shoulders but he shakes her off.  

“Did you forget who his Father was? Did you forget what he used to call Hermione?”

“We’ve all agreed to let bygones be bygones,” Hermione says tentatively. “That was many years ago.”

“Not nearly enough,” Ron says, standing up. “Not nearly enough for this.”

“No,” Harry agrees, summoning the fork from the floor and placing it next to his half-eaten eggs. “I suppose not.”

* * *

The cobwebs have taken over the oil lamps he doesn’t bother turning on. The floorboards squeak as he walks over them, up the stairs and across the landing, all the way up to the second floor where their bedroom waits like an empty mausoleum. 

So this is hell, he thinks as he rests his head against the pillow on his side of the bed. Unrelenting, the rain falls in torrents. 

* * *

The house is thick with loss. It hovers in the corners of the bookshelves, where Draco kept his paperbacks. It hides among the silverware, underneath the bathroom sink, around each corner. Yet Harry doesn’t have one t-shirt that smells like him to cry into. He doesn’t have clothes to hoard or to burn, doesn’t have books to donate to the charity shop. The only thing he has is the note he found in his Auror robes. 

Potter,
I would appreciate it if you could join me in my office at your earliest convenience. Before lunch, if …

He stares at the neat handwriting until the words don’t mean anything anymore and he can pretend the person that wrote them is the person that loved him. 

* * *

If the mornings are a funeral service on repeat, the afternoons are a breeding ground for novel forms of despair. He spends them sprawled across the sofa in the obscure drawing room. From there he can look towards the closed door of his study and pretend Draco’s inside, hunched over his work table. He can close his eyes and pretend he hears the hinges squeak and footfalls getting closer. Pretend to feel the weight of his body on himself. Pretend there’s a voice in his ear saying, “I’m real and everything else isn’t.”

With each day, Harry’s doubts on the accuracy of his delusions grow bigger, more terrifying. Is that what his voice sounded like in the morning? What about at night, after too many drinks? Is that what his face looked like when he smiled? When he frowned? 

He wrestles with these thoughts until the doorbell rings in the evening. Sometimes, he lets it ring. Other times, he gathers the strength to get off the sofa and open the front door. Hermione comes in, hands full of letters and newspapers that had been left on his front steps. She drops them off on the kitchen table on top of the rest while Harry stares into the empty hearth. 

He found that if they talk about SPEW he can power through an entire evening without breaking down. He talks abouts things she never told him, mentions people he never met. He can tell this disturbs her but she takes it in stride. She’s good at holding back, at letting Harry decide for himself how much he wants to share. 

“In that world,” Harry tells her one night after too many glasses of wine, “people have soulmates.”

“Soulmates?”

“A person whose magic matches yours and with whom you’re … in sync. Somebody who enriches your life, makes it whole. And everybody’s born with the name of this person on their arm. So when you meet, you know you’ll have a special relationship. It’s quite extraordinary. There’s a whole branch of magic dedicated to it. You’d have spent the seven years reading about it.”

Hermione chuckles. “Probably.”

“And I keep wondering,” Harry carries on, not really aware of Hermione’s presence anymore. “Do we have soulmates too?” 

Hermione shifts in her seat. She opens her mouth but Harry cuts her off. The questions he thought would never voice come spilling out.

“What if we do, and we just didn’t discover the spell that makes their name appear on our skin? Are we blindly going through life not knowing there’s a person out there that can make us whole? Not knowing who they are?”

“I don’t think so, Harry. I’m sorry.”

Harry remembers where he is, who he’s talking to. He gulps down the rest of his glass. It tastes like ash. 

* * *

With each passing day, the house becomes smaller, darker, louder. He hates the sad kitchen that only serves as a cemetery for unopened mail, hates the curtainless windows that let the harsh light in, hates the brittle feel of the hardwood floors under his naked feet when he goes to the bathroom in the middle of the night, drenched in nightmare sweat. 

* * *

Hermione’s left. He brushes past the kitchen table and a month’s worth of newspapers tumbles down like snow on the forest floor. Harry picks up the week old edition of the Daily Prophet that has fallen at his feet. The headline reads Things are looking up for Quillweather as prosecution struggles to build coherent case against him. Underneath, Draco’s walking away from an army of reporters when an unheard comment makes him turn around and glance at the camera.

Harry remembers the sadness in Draco’s eyes when he realised why Harry was pulling his sleeve. He remembers the last time Draco looked at him before everything turned white, smiling at him from the top of the stairs. He remembers a promise he made a long time ago, in a room filled with sunlight even though outside it was raining. 

* * *

One evening, Ron shows up on his doorstep instead of Hermione. They walk in silence to the dark kitchen. 

“I made soup. Do you want some?”

“Sure.”

He tries to offer some sort of explanation. Harry stops him. 

“I understand, Ron. There’s no need to apologise.”

“I still don’t get it,” he says, pointing his spoon at Harry. “But I guess it’s none of my business. I just hope he apologised to you.”

“It was different in that universe.”

“Different how?”

“The four of us had always been friends. There was never anything to apologise for.”

“Huh. Funny universe you were in.”

Harry brings a spoonful to his mouth. It burns his tongue. 

“How’s work?”

* * *

He’s staring at the door that leads to his study when he makes up his mind. 

He crosses the hallway and enters the room for the first time since coming back. The dust has settled over the newspaper clippings he had plastered on the walls. Over the mess on his desk. It floats on the surface of an abandoned cup of coffee. Harry looks inside the bottom drawer and takes out a stash of papers. They’re crumpled up and they’ve been thrown inside carleselly, but they’re all there. All the memos and letters Draco ever sent him. 

He tried. He really tried. He tried to tell himself that they’re not the same person. But they are—how are they not when they have the same nervous twitch in their eye when they hear something they don’t like? 

He tried to tell himself he can keep them separate in his mind. But he can’t—he never could. 

He tried to convince himself it was never this Draco he wanted. But it was always this Draco—wasn’t that the whole point? Wasn’t that why the ring had sent him there in the first place? 

So what if he doesn’t remember anything? So what if he doesn’t feel the same? He’s here. Harry can look at him from a distance. Hear his voice from time to time. That used to be enough. That has to be enough. 

He almost makes for the drawing room to firecall Adler when he remembers he’s not connected to the Floo network. He never was. 

Nevermind. He’ll send an owl. In fact, he’ll send a couple. 

* * *

His first day back is overbooked. He nods at the Aurors pointing at maps spread over his desk, agrees to plans that go right over his head. Smiles at Ron’s jokes during lunch. Taps his foot in Adler’s sumptuous office while he says, “I never doubted that you’d be back on your feet in no time. You’re one of a kind, Harry. One of a kind.”

His words echo in Harry’s head as he turns the corner towards the Department of Mysteries. Myriam’s office is smaller than Adler; less sumptuous too. She greets him with a brief handshake. 

“I’m happy to see you’re doing better, Mister Potter. I trust Mister Knowles informed you of our deal.”

“He did.”

“And do you consent?”

“I do.”

“Then I see no issue helping you out with the matter you wrote to me about.”

* * *

Despite being late for every other appointment, Harry’s early for his last meeting of the day. Draco’s secretary, who must be a couple of years fresh off Hogwarts, invites Harry to take a seat while he waits.

“Mister Malfoy has been held up at the courtroom but he should be here soon.”

Harry tries to remember the boy’s name but fails—all he remembers is him standing up, arms outstretched in an effort to stop Harry from entering Draco’s office. 

“I’m sorry about last time. I hope I didn’t frighten you too badly.”

“No worries, Mister Potter!” he squeaks, face bright with enthusiasm. 

Harry does his best attempt to smile back. He’s nervous and excited and terrified and he doesn’t know what to do with all the pent up energy that’s been building up in him. He sits down. After what feels like an eternity, footsteps echo on the marbled hallway. Harry and the secretary look up at the same time. The double doors open and Draco walks towards them, dark robes fluttering behind him. He throws Harry a sideways glance that pins him to his chair. 

“Mister Potter is here.”

“I can see that, Lucas, thank you very much.” His voice is flat, devoid of any indication of mood. Is he angry? Worried? Gleeful? “After you,” he says towards Harry, keeping the door to his office open.

Harry stands up with a delay. When Draco’s familiar scent hits his nose his knees turn to jelly. Two lamps spring to life as he stumbles into the office like a drunk man. 

“Make yourself comfortable,” comes Draco’s voice from behind him. 

Harry sits on the edge of one of the chairs placed in front of Draco’s desk, wipes his sweaty palms on the green velvet of its armrest.  The sound of ruffled fabric tells him Draco’s removing his prosecutor’s robes. He doesn’t dare turn around. Doesn’t dare utter a word. Doesn’t breathe until Draco comes into view, robeless and preoccupied. 

With a jolt, Harry recognises the shirt he’s wearing. He remembers it hung in their wardrobe. He remembers spilling red wine on it at Hermione’s birthday and Draco scolding him. He remembers Draco’s fingers buttoning it up in the morning. He remembers his own hands undoing all the work. 

He looks up, worried he’d been caught staring, but Draco’s not looking at Harry. If anything, he’s looking anywhere but at Harry; acting as if Harry’s keeping him from some important business by fumbling through his desk drawer. 

He’s anxious, Harry realises with a start. He’s anxious and he’s trying to hide it. How ridiculous to think that before, Harry would have fallen for this act. 

“Er—Thanks for seeing me.” 

The attempt to put Draco at ease fails. It only makes him shoot Harry a distrustful glance before looking back at the contents of his desk drawer. 

“To what do I owe the pleasure of this visit?”

Harry draws in a breath, tries to remember the speech he’s prepared. 

“First, I’d like to apologise about bursting into your office—”

Draco closes the drawer with a loud bang, making Harry stop mid sentence. 

“I’ve been told you were under a very powerful confundus charm when that happened.”

“Well … yes,” Harry lies. 

“So there’s no reason to apologise.”

Harry’s about to argue with that but Draco carries on. “What I’d like to know,” he says, voice gradually losing it’s apparent calm and becoming shakier, “is why the fuck you couldn’t answer one owl about the official inquiry going on about what you were doing in the Department of Mysteries. You know, five minutes after leaving my office telling me you’re going to talk to Granger about getting something out of there!”

Harry leans forward, anger and fear intertwined, indistinguishable. 

“Did they summon you for the inquiry? Did they try to blame you?”

Draco squints his eyes at him. “No.”

“Good. Because that wasn’t your fault.”

Draco crosses his arms. “I know it was not my fault. I thought—I mean—”

“I didn’t check my mail. I would have replied otherwise. I’m sorry you were stressed about that.”

Draco’s shoulders sag with bewilderment. 

“And I’m sorry it took me so long to get you these,” Harry continues, taking advantage of Draco’s puzzled state to produce two rolls of parchment adorned with the purple seal of the Department of Mysteries. Eyes filled with unrestrained wonder, Draco’s gaze moves from Harry to the parchments. 

“Are those … ?”

“Copies of the reports made on some of Quillweather’s confiscated items. With Pierce’s signature on them.”

With a sudden movement, Draco snatches the rolls from Harry’s hand. His eyes float over the contents of the first, then the second. 

“And you didn’t steal these?”

“I didn’t. I promise.”

Draco leans back on his chair. He takes Harry in for the first time. 

“Well … Thank you.”

Harry smothers the urge to jump over the desk and bury himself in his arms. 

“You’re welcome.”

He grows hot when Draco’s eyes move from his eyes to his fidgeting hands. Harry swiftly places them on his knees and Draco’s eyes shoot back up. 

“What happened to you? Where were you?” 

Harry blinks. “It’s a … it’s a long story.”

Draco’s back stiffens again. He nods; choses a quill from a jar full of quills and checks his watch. “Of course it is, it has you in it. I imagine you have somewhere to be so I won’t keep you any longer.” 

Harry remains still. The idea of leaving Draco’s presence so soon, on such cold terms, seems akin to dying. He watches as Draco starts reading the files Harry’s brought him with intense concentration, as if Harry was already gone. 

“There was an accident in the Department of Mysteries.”

He doesn’t know what he’s saying. He had no intention of telling Draco what happened when he came in, but why not tell him, after all? It’s wrong, isn’t it, that he knows so many things about him that were never willingly shared? He knows his mother gave him the watch he’s wearing, he knows he only writes with quills made from swan feathers, he knows he’s self conscious about wearing his glasses in public so that’s why he’s squinting at the documents. He knows he’s pursing his lips like that because he’s trying to hide his surprise that Harry’s making an effort to answer his question. 

“What kind of accident?”

Harry opens his mouth when the door creaks open behind him. 

“I’m sorry. Mister Knowles is here to see you and Mister Reed just owled. The match hasn’t started yet and he thinks it’s safer to move the dinner reservation to nine.”

Harry stands up and has to grab the jar of quills to keep it from tumbling over. Draco looks at him in surprise.

“You’re busy, er, I’ll let you be. I forgot I have a—a meeting,” he stutters before turning on his heel. Heart racing, he whizzes past Lucas and then Adler and only stops when he’s back in his own office. 

Stupid, stupid, stupid, he thinks, breathless against the door. You can’t just dump all that on a man. Especially a man that has a dinner date planned for later this evening. 

* * *

Even Harry’s surprised to see how seamlessly he falls into the old routine, as if he hasn’t missed a day of work. Mornings are dedicated to paperwork and meetings. Afternoons and evenings to field work. And if he gets someone to help him, the paperwork can be dealt with in record time and fieldwork can commence before his secretary leaves for lunch. 

This is what I’m made for, Harry thinks as he walks out of his hiding spot to cast a spell that will go on to disarm his opponent. The opponent in question seems to agree because he doesn’t put on much of a fight. Harry wishes he would. If I can fake it, so can you, he thinks bitterly. 

* * *

“Mister Malfoy’s wondering if you have five minutes.”

Harry’s focused on a report and it takes a beat to process his secretary’s words. He hasn’t seen Draco since their meeting a week ago and has been going crazy trying to figure out how to tell him about the ring. He’s started letters. He walked to his office only to turn around midway. He lingered in the Atrium. 

“Mister Potter?”

“Ah. Yes. Of course. Let him in.”

Harry stands up, worries he looks too eager and sits back down only to change his mind again so that when Draco comes in he’s suspended in mid air, neither sitting nor standing.

“I hope I’m not bothering you,” Draco says flatly, summoning all the formality and the distant civility he uses to guard himself against Harry. For once it’s not raining and his hair appears golden in the timid sunlight coming through the small window half hidden by two tall cabinet files. Harry has to make an effort to take his eyes off it.

“Not at all.” He circles his desk and extends his hand. Draco’s eyes linger on it but he shakes it as if it’s nothing. As if it isn’t the first time Harry’s done that. 

“I’ll only take a second of your time,” he says, pulling away too soon and offering him a creamy envelope instead. “To show my gratitude for your help. You did me a huge favour the other day.”

“Oh,” Harry says, taken aback. Countless images of similar envelopes flash in his mind. His Draco would slide one across the coffee table in the drawing room. Leave it on the kitchen counter for Harry to find. “My treat,” he’d say, dangling an envelope between two fingers. “My way to show you I love you.”

“It’s nothing,” the Draco in front of him says with a dismissive hand gesture.

Harry peers inside the envelope, heart racing. Just as he expected, it contains two shiny tickets. Top box seats for the next Puddlemere United match against the Appleby Arrows. 

“Puddlemere is my team,” Harry says stupidly, looking up.

Draco raises an eyebrow. “I know. I think they would sell t-shirts advertising it if they could.”

“Yes, of—of course,” Harry stutters, overwhelmed with memories of him and his Draco going to quidditch matches together. It was their thing, Quiditch. Professional, amateur, close to home or far away, it didn’t matter. His Draco always got them the best seats and Harry always paid for dinner afterwards. It was their thing. 

“Well. I’ll be on my way now—”

An idea presents itself to Harry. A wonderful, brilliant idea. 

“Wait. Are you—are you going?” 

Draco turns back to look at Harry. 

“Sorry?”

“Are you going to the match?”

“No, Potter,” Draco says, voice harsh all of sudden, “You needn’t worry about bumping into me. Enjoy.”

“No, I meant—you support the Arrows, right?”

Draco raises an eyebrow. “I do.”

“So aren’t you going to see them?”

“I haven’t planned on it, no.”

“Do you want to come with me then?”

Draco stares at Harry for a second, then rolls his eyes and sighs. 

“Potter,” he starts, drawing in breath as if he’s going to present a case in front of a judge. “I can see this is eating away at you so let me put your mind at ease. I don’t care that you looked at the tattoo on my wrist. It is what it is. You more than made up for it by helping me out with Quillweather.”

Harry’s stomach clenches. There was no doubt in his mind about how Draco interpreted Harry’s actions that day, but hearing it disproved so heartily only intensifies Harry’s guilt. How to explain to him he’d been looking for the Amet and not for his Dark Mark?

“It’s not like that. It’s my team versus your team. It’d be fun to go together.”

“Fun?” Draco crosses his arms. “I didn’t know you were interested in having fun in my presence.”

“I know,” Harry admits—to pretend otherwise would be too flagrant a lie. “But maybe we could … let bygones be bygones. Enjoy a game of Quidditch together. You know?”

Harry grows hot under Draco’s scrutinising gaze.

“Are you serious?” he asks at last.

“Yes. I’m serious, Draco. Come with me to the game. I won’t accept the tickets if you don’t.”

“Well, Merlin,” he says, uncrossing his arms. 

* * *

Harry can’t fall asleep. His heart is throbbing. He plays back the memory of Draco’s flushed complexion as they awkwardly talked through the logistics of meeting for the game, things like whether to Apparate or take a portkey from the Ministry. Of the moment he turned a shade redder when Harry said he’ll get dinner.

“ … since you got the tickets.” 

“You don’t need to—it was supposed to be a gift—”

“It’d be my pleasure,” Harry said swiftly, blushing because he wasn’t sure if maybe he had been too obvious, too blunt, too flustered by the hope that Draco’s own blush meant what he wanted it to mean. 

So it was settled. In a fortnight, Harry will pick Draco up from his office at seven o’clock and they’ll take a portkey to the London Quidditch stadium and then they’ll have dinner and Harry will tell Draco everything. 

* * *

The two weeks are endless but they’re made slightly more bearable by three accidental meetings. 

The first time, Harry sees Draco from a distance. He’s crossing the Atrium talking to Abbot and he doesn’t notice Harry, bolted in place between two marble columns. 

The second time they see each other is at the monthly departmental meeting that takes place in Adler’s office. Draco nods in Harry’s direction when their eyes meet over the long, narrow table. He doesn’t look at Harry again until the very end when Harry, used to being able to steal glances in his direction when he wants, is startled to find him staring at him. They both look away, flushed.  

The third time, Harry’s alone in the lift, drenched in rainwater because he’s been out all day tailing a suspect. He’s about to pick up some more Polyjuice potion and go right back so he sees no point in drying himself. The doors open on the second floor to reveal Draco and Draco alone. 

“Oh. Hey,” Harry says, unnerved by the sudden apparition. He moves aside so that Draco can come in.

Clutching his folder like a shield and taking in Harry’s state, Draco asks if he’s going up. Harry nods.

The doors swoosh closed and Draco lifts up the hem of his robes so they don’t touch the pool of water gathered in the middle of the floor. 

“How are you?” Harry asks, eyeing the mess he’s made.

“Quite well. And you?”

After a moment’s hesitation, Harry says, “Wet.”

“Yes. I take it, it's dreadful out again?”

Harry confirms it is indeed dreadful out again even though in that moment, watching Draco smile under his breath, dreadfulness feels like such a distant, foreign concept.

* * *

Harry spent all day in nervous anticipation. He woke up before the alarm rang and drank his coffee in the dark. He didn’t hear a word Ron said over lunch. Back in his office after an uneventful house call, he couldn’t breathe properly. The overstuffed room was closing in on him, the fake window a mockery designed specifically to torment him. So he took off his thick uniform thirty minutes earlier than planned and now he’s staring at the double doors leading to the Legal Department wondering if he should go in and be awfully early or keep walking up and down the corridor until the clock strikes seven. He takes a deep breath.  

Lucas greets him with a smile. Harry clenches and unclenches his fists while he waits for him to check if Draco’s ready. He empties his lungs when he’s told Mister Malfoy’ll be right out.

“Right. Great.”

Draco emerges soon after. He’s dressed in casual robes that make his eyes stand out. He’s holding a pile of documents that he consents to part with only once Lucas confirms he remembers all the alphabetisation spells. There’s a warm feeling in the pit of Harry’s stomach when Draco finally lets go of the files and turns to him. 

They talk about work on the way to the portkey room. Harry inquires about Quillweather’s trial. Draco concisely explains some of the legal hurdles he’s dealing with, then politely asks about Harry’s work. Harry doesn’t elaborate. He wants to hear Draco speak, wants to stare at his lips as he tells him everything about the latest witness he cross-examined or the newest tactic employed by Quillweather’s attorneys. Draco obliges him. 

Their hands almost touch on the handle of a copper pan as the swirl of light swallows them both. They make their way to the top box through the moving crowds. The conversation flows easily between them and Harry can tell Draco’s holding back his surprise. He can tell because he remembers how it felt when he made that particular discovery a long time ago, in a warm and inviting version of his drawing-room. 

By the time they sit down with two brimming pints of beer, the warm feeling has expanded to Harry’s entire body. He doesn’t feel the cold November air, doesn’t hear the crowd roaring all around him. He sees only Draco and the bright flood lights reflected in his eyes. 

“Let’s make a bet,” he says, letting himself get carried away by the exhilaration. “A hundred galleons that Puddlemere wins.”

Draco tries to wave him off. When Harry insists, he says, “In all honesty, I bought you tickets to this game because all the predictions say the Arrows will destroy Puddlemere. I couldn’t possibly bet on that in good conscience.”

Harry smiles and says that’s the most Slytherin thing he’s ever heard. Draco shrugs, says he also meant it as an opportunity for Harry to give up his old ways and support a team that’s actually worth something and Harry bursts into laughter because that’s exactly what he expected him to say and there’s this spark, this unmistakable glimmer in Draco’s eyes as they gloss over Harry’s lips and Harry’s laughter turns into a breathless sigh. 

They turn towards the stadium. They talk about the height of the hoops, they discuss the quality of the lawn, they point to people in the crowd but they do not look at each other. Except now their shoulders are lightly touching and Harry’s voice is shaky when he says, “Here we go.” 

It’s a tight game. At least it seems to be, judging on the crowd—Harry himself can barely keep up with it, much more preoccupied with the way their knees bump together when Draco leans towards the railing. Puddlemere suffers their worst humiliation in a decade but Harry cannot be persuaded to care. In fact, he’s pretty sure he read about this historical defeat already, many years ago, and how it will eventually lead to the Keeper’s resignation. 

They have dinner in one of the pubs across the Stadium. It’s loud and bright, full of Arrow fans celebrating their team’s victory. Harry and Draco have to lean in and scream to make themselves heard over the deafening hum and Draco covers his mouth when he laughs and Harry spills beer on himself and the waitress messes up their order but they don’t mind and Harry’s drunk and when Draco frowns at the desert menu Harry says, “I’ve got tiramisu at home if you’d much rather have that.”

* * *

Grimmauld Place comes into focus. It’s gotten chillier and Draco wraps his arms around himself while Harry searches his pockets. 

“Just a second, I need to—” Harry says, frantically checking everywhere for a loose piece of parchment. He thought of everything else but not of this? “I need to write down the address.”

“Your house is under the Fidelius Charm?” 

Harry can’t tell if there’s surprise or pity in Draco’s voice. He finds a quill and scribbles the address on the back of his hand. 

“I never bothered to stop the spell after the war. Keeps the spam away, you know?” 

“You lived here during the war?” 

“I didn’t live here, it’s—”

He’s about to say it’s complicated because he doesn’t feel like talking about the war but he remembers Draco would probably assume Harry doesn’t want to talk about the war with him. 

“This was the headquarters of the Order of the Phoenix,” he explains, making Draco read the address on his hand. Draco’s eyes move up to the house at number twelve. “That’s why it was under the Fidelius Charm.”

“Right.”

“Come.”

Harry turns on the oil lamps with his wand. He waits for Draco to notice the paintings on the wall, the crest on the dining room door. 

“This is my Mother’s aunt's house.” 

“Yes.”

“Huh,” Draco says, moving closer to inspect the washed out brocade wallpaper with an impenetrable stare. “Interesting.”

Despite spending two weeks trying to bring his house to a more acceptable state, Harry’s overwhelmed by dread when Draco’s gaze falls on a tear in the wallpaper. 

“In here,” he says, guiding him into the kitchen. 

Draco complies, letting his robe on the freshly dusted bannister—something Harry’s never seen Draco do in seven years of marriage. He points his wand at the hearth. 

“Wine?”

“Do you have firewhiskey?”

“I do.”

“I’ll take that if you don’t mind.”

Harry pours Draco a glass of his favourite firewhiskey—he bought it the day before, when he also bought Draco’s favourite wine and favourite dessert. When he did it, he told himself he’s being wishful but now it feels oddly calculating, like a hunter setting up a trap. He closes the cupboard door and finds Draco leaning against the sink, looking around. 

“Here,” Harry says, voice thick. 

Draco uses two fingers to extract the glass from Harry's grip. He smells it, then takes a sip. 

“Very interesting.”

Harry feels a flush going up his neck. They set the empty glasses on the counter at the same time. 

“Right, the cake—,” Harry stutters, taking a step towards the fridge. Draco’s arm stops him. “I can—The cake’s—”

Draco’s hand settles on his waist. Harry lets out a nervous chuckle that turns into a gasp when Draco pulls him towards him. He leans into the pull until their bodies are pressed together. With the other hand Draco cups Harry’s cheek. Their lips meet and Harry’s mind goes blank.

Nothing that mattered a second ago matters anymore; not the thought that somewhere in the city Draco’s boyfriend is sleeping peacefully, not the thought that Harry still hasn’t told him about the ring even though he promised himself he would as soon as the match ended, not the thought that Draco surely thinks Harry’s invited him over for a shag because his hand is already moving down Harry’s neck, undoing Harry’s top button.

His lips follow his hands and Harry finds himself staring at the empty shelves above his sink, panting, and Draco’s making himself smaller and smaller in his arms until he’s on his knees. Harry’s ears are ringing and he can’t think straight anymore, there’s a beast in his head instead of a brain and it’s pulsating like it’s going to explode and he stares at the top of Draco’s blonde head as he unbuckles his belt and Harry grabs Draco with both hands. 

“Let’s—let’s go upstairs,” he says breathlessly and, without waiting for Draco to reply, he Apparates them to the bedroom. He pushes Draco on the bed and crawls on top of him, pinning him down so he can’t move and do that anymore. Because it’s not that that Harry wants. He kisses him slowly but Draco’s moving underneath him, panting and moaning and once again Harry loses all sense of himself and before he knows it, Draco’s on top of him and he’s torn open his shirt and he’s kissing his chest. Harry puts his hand in Draco’s hair and says, against every fibre in his body, “Wait. Draco, wait a second.”

Draco stops moving instantaneously. He’s breathing heavily and he’s making visible efforts to calm himself down. Harry tries to pull him up but Draco resists. He rolls over next to Harry and covers his face with his hands. 

“I’m sorry.”

“No!” Harry exclaims, heaving himself up and turning on the reading lamp. “No, I just—I just—”

“You don’t have to explain anything. I’ll go—”

“Please don’t go,” Harry says frantically. “I just need to tell you something.”

Draco uses a pillow to cover his face but he doesn’t leave, which is permission enough for Harry.

“You remember,” Harry starts, gasping, “You remember I told you there was an accident in the Department of Mysteries. The day I burst into your office.”

Draco’s voice is muffled by the thick pillow. “Yeah?”

“Yeah. So, what happened is that I went there and I put on this ring. It was one of the objects they confiscated from Quillweather. I put it on and then I woke up a couple streets over from here and I was wearing different clothes because I was—I didn’t understand then, I never knew while I was there, but I had travelled to a parallel universe and—”

Draco removes the pillow from his face. His cheeks are red and his lips are bruised and he looks wild and ravished and Harry can’t believe he’s doing what he’s doing instead of kissing him. 

“Wait. What?”

“It’s—it’s this ring that can send you to a parallel universe and I—”

“You mean the Ring of Haan?!”

“Yes, exactly!” Harry shouts, relieved he doesn’t have to explain because he doesn’t think his heart can take it anymore. It’s beating like it’s going to jump out of his chest and his hands are trembling and he’s lost all command over language. 

“Jesus,” Draco exclaims. “Jesus Christ, Harry!”

“Yes … and … yes … ”

Draco stands up. He starts walking back and forth in front of the window. 

“Quillweather had the ring of Haan? Who is this man?”

“Yeah, I don’t … I don’t know.”

“So you spent seven years—in a parallel universe? With—”

“Yes.”

“Jesus,” Draco repeats, scratching his head furiously. “Jesus.”

Harry follows Draco’s frantic pacing. He doesn’t know what to make of his reaction. He’s not sure Draco understood what Harry was trying to say, but there’s a lump in his throat and he can’t speak anymore so the best he can do right now is hope Draco’s going to work it out himself. 

“Harry, I don’t know what to say. But I—there’s no judgement here. No—no problem, really, don’t worry about it. The ring of—that’s—don’t worry, I understand. I should—er, I should probably go.”

“No, please, I—”

But Draco’s walking backwards towards the door, saying, “I’m just not sure I’m the right person to comfort you—I’m sorry but I was never of the opinion that sleeping around can help—it only makes it worse, really, so while I’d love to stay I’m not sure it would be best, I’m quite intoxicated and—I understand the urge to sleep around but—”

“Sleep around? Draco, I was …”

Harry takes in a big breath, grips his headboard like the edges of a sinking ship. 

“Draco, I was with you. The ring sent me to a universe in which I was married to you.” 

Draco stops like he hit a wall. 

“Excuse me?”

“We … We lived in this house,” Harry says, nonsensically. “This was your nightstand. That was … your side of the wardrobe.”

Draco looks where Harry’s pointing to as if the wardrobe itself could furnish the proof that what Harry’s saying is not completely insane. 

“We lived—”

“Wait. Just, wait, ” Draco says quietly. Harry stares at him, white with fear. “Let me get this straight. We talked in my office.”

“Yes.”

“Then you broke into the Department of Mysteries and touched the Ring of Haan which took you to a parallel universe in which you were married to me.”

“Yes.”

“You knew it would do that?”

“No!”

“And what, once you were there you just accepted it?”

“Well, not right away but … but eventually, yes. It was—it was confusing.”

“And you lived with me? For seven years?”

“Yes.”

“That’s how you knew I root for the Arrows? That I like Charred Oak whiskey?”

“Yes.”

“And this … version of myself you were married with, he didn’t have a Dark Mark?”

Harry blinks. 

“I—I—”

“Did he?”

“N—no.”

“All right. Makes sense to me. I’ll show myself out.”

“Wait,” Harry says, rushing after him. “Draco!”

The staircase trembles under their hurried steps. Harry catches up with Draco on the first floor landing. The light of the lamppost in Grimmauld Square is coming through the French doors and Harry grabs Draco’s arm and says, “Please, wait.”

Draco shakes free of his grip. His eyes are blank as they gloss over Harry.

“I need to … process this. We’ll talk tomorrow. Sober.”

* * *

Harry pours himself a second, then a third glass of Draco’s favourite firewhiskey. He remembers Draco’s gentleness when he thought his Harry had forgotten about them. His patience. His unwavering kindness in the face of Harry’s anger and resentment and confusion. He pours himself a forth glass. If only that Draco would be here to tell Harry what to do. 

* * *

Draco said they’ll talk about it the next day but Harry doesn’t know what that means. Did he mean he’ll reach out when he’s ready? Did he mean they’ll meet after work? Will he send an owl? A memo? 

When the last rays of sunlight peter out and he hasn’t heard from him, Harry puts down his quill. 

“Hi, Lucas. Is Draco in?”

“Hello, Mister Potter. He is, should I tell him you’d like to see him?”

“Please.”

Lucas pops his head in Draco’s office. Harry can hear Draco’s voice but does not understand what he’s saying. Then the door opens wide and Draco’s sitting next to Lucas, dressed in his tall black robes, staring at Harry. 

“I—” Harry starts but Draco closes the door behind him, grabs his nape and kisses him full on the lips. He backs away and looks at Harry, daring him to say something. Harry doesn’t, so Draco kisses him again. 

“I’m busy now,” he says, pulling away. “Adler asked me to look over an old case that’s being reopened.”

“Oh.”

“I’ll finish around ten. You can come over if you want. Ask Lucas for my home address. Unless you somehow know it already.”

“No, I—I don’t.”

“Then ask Lucas for it,” he says before pressing down on the handle he hadn’t let go of the entire two minutes Harry was there. 

* * *

It’s a one-bedroom apartment in a Victorian-style building on the border between muggle London and wizard London. The stairway is decrepit but the interior has been renovated. It’s comfortable but sleek; busy but tidy. There are no pictures on the mantel, just law books. 

“Anything you recognise?”

Draco’s tone is sarcastic but Harry’s made himself a promise and he intends to keep it. 

“A couple of things.”

“Like?”

“The rug. That lamp. All of the books. Except for the law ones.”

“No law, then?”

“No.”

“Then what?”

“You had your own business.”

“Doing what?”

“Fixing broken magical objects.”

Draco purses his lips. “Is this your idea of a joke?”

“No. I’m telling the truth.”

“So no vanishing cabinet either?”

Harry shakes his head. 

“But you were still an Auror?”

“I was a volunteer teacher at SPEW.”

“I thought the ring of Haan was supposed to send the wearer to the closest universe to ours.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“I did a bit of reading before bed last night. Weren’t you curious?”

“No. What difference would it make?”

“Right. Wine?”

“Please.”

Harry sinks into the sofa. The wine is deep and strong; leaves a sour aftertaste. Draco’s leaning against an arched doorway. On the wall behind him, the shadow of a tree flutters in the wind. 

Harry wipes his lips with the back of his sleeve. 

“Draco … ”

Draco turns towards the shadows. 

“Come.”

* * *

“You’ve done this before,” Draco says as he unbuttons Harry’s shirt with slow, deliberate movements.

Even though it was not a question, Harry nods. 

“That’s so … weird.”

“I know.” 

Draco takes off Harry’s shirt and carefully sets it on the edge of the bed. He caresses Harry’s chest briefly before moving on to his belt.

“That means you know everything I like.”

“There’s a … high probability.”

“I’ll let you know.”

* * *

Draco rolls over, panting. His shirt is covered in sweat. Their eyes meet and Draco laughs.

“Jesus fucking Christ.”

“So?” Harry smiles. 

“Shut up. Just—I don’t want to hear it.”

Harry laughs. He’s about to perform a cleaning spell on both of them when Draco stands up and disappears into a door to his left. He comes out dressed in house clothes over which he threw on a dressing gown. Harry instinctively covers himself while Draco crosses the room, a shadow against the double hung windows. Something clicks and light comes in through the arched doorway. 

When it becomes clear he’s not coming back to bed, Harry reaches for his clothes. He finds Draco reading from a parchment written in his neat handwriting. He’s put his spectacles on. 

“What are you doing?”

“I’m preparing for tomorrow's deposition.”

“Oh.”

“You can stay or you can leave, I don’t mind either way. Just close the door if you stay, I need quiet.”

Harry puzzles at this until Draco looks up from behind his glasses, annoyed. “I’m serious, Harry. I need to concentrate.”

* * *

The streets are wet and empty. The red lights of the car waiting to make a turn flicker, then disappear around the corner. Harry doesn’t know if he’s angry or hurt or in shock. 

Then again, what did he expect? Did he think Draco would open up from the very start? Did he, when the situations were reserved? 

His lips are swollen and tender and he fixes up his scarf in order to protect them from the cold. At least, he tells himself, whole body aching with the sudden separation after such a short-lived reunion, at least he likes me enough to sleep with me sober. And maybe next time, another voice chimes in, you won’t be such a fucking coward and you’ll take his shirt off.

* * *

“Let’s see,” Draco says, pulling Harry towards him with one hand. His office is filled with warm sunlight. “How did other me take his coffee?”

Draco’s lips brush over his mouth and it’s like Harry can finally breathe again. It’s been three days since they slept together. Harry reasoned he should give Draco some space, let him reach out. The first day he managed to distract himself with work. The second day, not so much. And this morning he swallowed his pride and showed up at his office with three cups of coffee—two for them and one for Lucas.

“Black.”

“What an uncanny coincidence.” He brings the cup to his lips. “Me too.” 

Harry lets out a chuckle. He gently removes Draco’s cup from his hand and puts it down then presses their lips together again, hungrily. “I’ll see you tonight?” 

“I can’t tonight,” Draco says flatly, taking off Harry’s glasses. “But tomorrow I’ll finish around seven.”

Harry answers Draco’s kiss with his whole body. “All right,” he sighs when Draco backs away, “Tomorrow at seven then.” 

“Thanks for the coffee,” Draco says with a smile, putting Harry’s glasses back on. 

* * *

The hours couldn’t pass fast enough but thankfully, they passed, and Harry’s at last running his fingers through Draco’s beautiful hair, kissing his lips, his eyes, his neck. The drizzle outside had turned into a downpour just as they stumbled into the bedroom and the splatter drowns out their moans and gasps and sighs and Draco’s eyes go wide with desire and there’s something distinctive about the way they do that, something Harry doesn’t remember from before, an insatiability he had never seen in his husband’s eyes but that he recognises in the man in front of him because he feels it too, has always felt it, and that makes him choke with want and touching isn’t enough, kissing isn’t enough, nothing could ever be enough to satisfy the ebbing need raging inside him. His tongue slides down Draco’s neck until it hits the dryness of cotton and he tugs at Draco’s top button but Draco’s hands guide him away from it so he changes tactics and puts his hands under his shirt but once again Draco stops him and now they’re wrestling again and Draco’s on top and Harry lets it go because he doesn’t really want to take it off, does he? 

* * *

Draco gets out of bed, takes some clothes out of a dresser and locks the bathroom door behind him. The shower runs for a long time, long enough for Harry to get the hint. He gets dressed and waits on the edge of the bed. Draco walks him to the door. They kiss on the threshold and Draco says, “I’m free on Monday,” and now Harry’s staring at his ceiling listening to the sound of rain hitting the roof wondering how to fill an entire weekend without him. 

* * *

Things get worse, not better. Draco doesn’t ask Harry to sleep over next time, nor the time after that. Nor the time after that. The waiting never shrinks, always expands, and Harry discovers a second toothbrush on Draco’s marbled counter. He has no idea what Draco does during the evenings he’s not with Harry, has no idea if he actually works after Harry leaves him at night. And not only does he barely consent to seeing Harry two or three times a week, he never takes the initiative either. He just waits until Harry, worn out by longing, comes begging for it, then systematically mocks the desperation with which Harry throws himself at him, telling him to “wait,” and “be patient,” and “let him finish the letter he’s working on,” asking him how the other Draco managed to get anything done with him around, laughing at his breathlessness when he’s teased, at his obfuscation when he’s left alone in the cold bed because Draco has to “work on his deposition.” 

He can’t actually work every night, can he? All weekend long too? And what the fuck is that second toothbrush still doing there after two weeks? 

* * *

He’s actually in. He’s actually at the Ministry on a Saturday. 

“I’ll let Mister Malfoy know you’d like to see him.”

Harry stares at Lucas. He had come prepared to revel in the agony of having been proven right about Draco avoiding him and now he has to come up with an excuse for showing up at his office at ten in the morning on a Saturday. 

Draco greets him with a brief kiss, then listens attentively to Harry’s incoherent question about house arrest regulations. 

“I’m not sure. I’ll have to look it up. Send a memo, otherwise I’ll forget.”

“Yeah, OK,” Harry says, dragging Draco into an embrace to distract from any lingering suspicion over his motives for showing up. Draco rests his head on Harry’s shoulder. He sighs as Harry’s hands move through his hair.

“You’re not hiding a coffee under your robes, are you?”

Harry’s heart contracts with guilt. 

“I’ll go get you one.”

“Don’t bother. I have to be in Azkaban in ten minutes anyway.”

* * *

It’s ten at night and Draco’s laughing in Harry’s arms and the first snowfall of the year comes early. Harry runs a hand through Draco’s hair and they watch the snowflakes melt on the naked branches of the elm tree in front of Draco's bedroom window and then Draco says, “Merlin. When did it get so late?” 

* * *

“Are you still seeing that quidditch player?” Harry blurts out after one more week.

Draco stops kissing his neck and looks up in surprise.

“Which Quidditch player?” 

Harry doesn’t provide further information, just stares at the ceiling until Draco exclaims, “Oh.” He rolls over. “First of all, he doesn’t play Quidditch, he’s a referee. And isn’t it a bit late to be asking this question if you knew about him?”

“Are you?”

Draco scoffs. “If you think I’d do something like that, what are you even doing here?”

Harry turns his back to Draco. He’s embarrassed and he’s angry and he doesn’t know if he’s angry with Draco or with himself.  

“No, Harry. I’m not seeing anybody else. Any other pressing questions?” Draco asks, kissing the back of his neck. “Or is the hissy fit over?” 

Harry doesn’t say anything. He feels like crying. He closes his eyes when Draco’s lips find that place behind his ear. 

“Did the other me kiss you here?” he whispers, continuing the interrogation he was leading before Harry interrupted him.

“Yes,” Harry answers, because he promised himself he always would.

“And here?”

“Yes.”

“And here?”

“Yes.”

* * *

Rudolph Quillweather is sentenced to twenty years in Azkaban for the premeditated murder of Joseph Crook. Harry comes over with a bottle of champagne.

“You shouldn’t have,” Draco smiles, moving aside so that Harry can come in. “There’s still the appeal.”

“Just wanted an excuse to drink champagne with you.”

“Now that’s a sentiment I can empathise with.”

The cork pops and the champagne flows. Draco hands Harry a flute then sends the bottle to the kitchen with a flick of his wand.

“To you,” Harry says when Draco sits down next to him on the brown sofa.  

“I’ll drink to not having to see that man’s face every day for at least five months,” Draco mutters, clinking their glasses together. 

“Here, here!”

Draco’s chuckle turns into a yawn. He still hasn’t changed out of his robes and there’s an open ink flask on his desk next to his spectacles. 

“Come here.” Harry opens up his arm so Draco can lean on him. He kisses the top of his head. Draco shifts in his arms but doesn’t leave, which is about the most Harry can hope for.

“I’m still curious how someone like Quillweather came in possession of the Ring of Haan,” Draco says, bringing the glass of champagne to his lips. 

Harry gulps down his drink. When will they stop talking about that bloody ring?

“The current theory is that he didn’t know he had it.”

“That seems unlikely. Is the Department of Mysteries looking into it?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Why not?”

Harry stalls, tries to distract, but Draco doesn’t let it go and Harry’s eventually forced to admit, “They can’t. Adler made a deal with Pierce to cover up the fact that I used it by mistake. So that I wouldn’t be charged for breaking in and forced to quit.”

“That’s illegal,” Draco says dryly. 

“Yes.”

“Yes? That’s all?”

“They didn’t ask me. I didn’t know about their deal until it was too late.”

Draco shots him a contemptful look. 

“Of course you didn’t. You never do, do you?”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

The floor creaks under Draco’s heavy steps. He comes back from the dark kitchen with the bottle of champagne. 

“I don’t understand why you’re mad at me.”

“Of course you don’t.”

Harry suppresses the desire to reply in kind. He drags Draco next to him. 

“If you want, I’ll turn myself in tomorrow. And then you can prosecute me.”

“Idiot,” Draco laughs, cupping his cheek. “I’ve got enough on my plate already.”

Harry considers Draco’s words while he crawls on top of him, champagne glasses forgotten on the floor. As far as Harry can tell, Draco’s telling the truth when he says that. He does seem to be working on a lot of cases at the same time. Still, Quillweather’s trial took up most of his time. It was so heavily covered that almost everything he said made it to the morning papers in one way or another. Maybe the pressure was too much. Maybe now, his schedule will open up a bit. Maybe he’ll have more time to spend with Harry. 

Stirred by the thought, Harry finds Draco’s wrists. He almost knocks over a lamp that used to be in his drawing room when he pins them above his head, then bites into his neck until he reaches the earlobe. Draco moans and arches his body and Harry whispers, “I miss you all the time, you know.”

Draco jerks under him, moves his head to the side so that Harry’s biting into air. 

“Don’t say shit like that.”

Harry lets go of his wrists but Draco keeps his hands above his head. 

“Don’t stop. Just don’t say shit like that anymore, all right?”

* * *

Even if it’s true that Harry had nothing to do with the deal Adler and Myriam struck, what Harry failed to tell Draco is that he’s the one paying for it. Every Tuesday morning he goes down to the Department of Mysteries, crosses the circular room and steps into Myriam’s stone-walled office where she’s waiting, pensive ready by her side. The two of them go in. Myriam takes notes while Harry gets to see over and over again how things could be between him and Draco, but aren't. 

* * *

“So,” Draco starts, moving his hand down Harry’s naked back, “what about Mother?”

“What about her?” Harry tries to turn back to look at Draco but Draco doesn’t let him. 

“Did you have supper with her on Sunday? Spend Christmas in France?”

“She usually,” Harry starts but his words fade out in a moan. 

“She usually what?”

“... came over for Christmas.”

Draco stops moving. He gets off Harry. 

“Are you fucking with me?”

“No!”

“You invited my Mother over for Christmas?”

“I didn’t, you did!”

“That wasn’t me, you fucking idiot!”

Draco slams the bathroom door so hard the windows shake. Two minutes later, Harry does the same with the front door. 

* * *

Of course the next day has to be a Tuesday. 

“You seem distracted, Mister Potter. Anything on your mind?”

“I’m just wondering,” he says bitterly, staring down the cloudy surface of the pensive, “why I ever touched that goddamn ring.”

“Based on what you’ve told me it appears you accidentally looked at it directly and not through the looking glass that was pointed at it to counteract its pull.”

“It was a rhetorical question, Myriam.”

“Of course. Excuse me for being pedantic then. If you’re not feeling well today we can leave it until next week.”

“I’d appreciate it. Thanks.”

Back in his office his secretary hands him a letter from Quillweather’s solicitor asking for a meeting. 

“They must be preparing his appeal,” Ron shrugs when Harry tells him about it. They’re in Adler’s office waiting for the rest of the people to show up for the monthly departmental meeting. Because of course that had to be today too. 

Harry tries not to glance at the door every two seconds but of course he’s looking straight at it when Draco comes in and of course Draco has the decency, the civility, the decorum to nod politely in his direction. Ron tenses up next to him and for once Harry’s glad he’s there to witness Harry not returning Draco’s nod. 

While Adler gives his usual speech, Harry's gaze inevitably glides over to Draco. His eyes are fixed on Adler, the little lines on his forehead proof of the fact that he at least is listening to what the man is saying. He’s leaning back on the wooden chair, cross armed so that his left hand—the marked one—is hidden by the right hand. From time to time, he removes it to scratch the back of his head in concentration. He then whispers something to Lucas, who scribbles it down immediately. 

If Harry wouldn’t know any better, he’d say the man in front of him is perfectly serene. That he’s unbothered by what transpired between them last night and unmoved by Harry’s most recent proof of immaturity. 

Only he does know better. Seven years is a long time to be married to someone, long enough to have all sorts of fights. So Harry knows that Draco hides his hurt, never shows it. He needs to live through it with dignity, like an ambassador carrying papers informing of imminent war quietly waiting to be received by the head of state. And the more he hides it, the worse it is. 

As soon as Adler stands up, Harry does the same. He brushes past Ron and blocks Draco’s way out. 

“Can we speak?”

Cornered and surrounded, Draco agrees. Ron’s eyes burn the back of Harry’s head as he follows Draco out of the meeting room. Since it’s only a couple doors over, they go to Harry’s office. Harry locks the door and for some reason this makes Draco laugh. 

“Do you want to speak or do you want to fuck?”

“What?”

“Personally, I’d much rather do the latter.”

Harry swallows the lump in his throat. There’s things he wants to say, things he has to say, things he should have said a long time ago. He does not say them. 

* * *

Harry’s knees are sore and his back hurts from repeatedly being slammed against Draco’s front door but he doesn’t let go. Even when Draco’s finished, he doesn’t let him go. 

* * *

Harry’s head is squished against the mahogany top of Draco’s desk. 

“Sorry,” Draco says, stopping to remove Harry’s glasses before placing his hand back on his head and continuing what he was doing before. 

* * *

Draco snatches his left hand away from Harry’s mouth. They’re on the floor and Draco’s sudden movement makes Harry bump his shoulder into the coffee table.

“Ouch!” 

“I can’t tell if that’s a weird kink of yours or if you’re making some sort of statement, but I assure you, Harry, I fucking assure you I do not want that part of myself kissed.”

“I’m sorry, then,” Harry says, turning Draco around with more force than necessary. “I won’t do it again.”

* * *

“Was the other me as good in bed?” Draco asks, pulling up his pants. 

“What?” Harry says breathlessly.

“Since he only slept with you all his miserable life, I imagine he wasn’t.”

Harry covers himself up with Draco’s duvet. He’s sore everywhere. They’ve been fucking non stop for a week, barely stoping to say hello and goodbye, and everytime Harry tells himself they’ve done enough fucking and it’s probably time for them to do some talking, Draco shoves him against a wall or throws him on the bed and Harry’s too weak to resist because he doesn’t really want to resist, does he? And now Draco’s started again with this bullshit and Harry’s ears are ringing with rage and he blurts out, “Maybe not, but at least he wasn’t an arse all the fucking time.”

He expects Draco to mock him for letting such a stupid remark get to him but he just stares at him.

“Of course he wasn’t an arse. Why would he be? You weren’t sleeping with him because you were in love with a perfect version of himself.” 

Without waiting for a response, he disappears into the bathroom. Shellshocked, Harry puts on his clothes and stumbles in after him. 

“Is that what you think I’m doing?”

Draco spits out a mouthful of toothpaste and looks at him in the gilded mirror. 

“It’s what you’re doing, whether I think it or not.”

“That’s not true.”

“I had a long day and I don’t want to fight,” Draco says, rinsing his toothbrush. “Maybe it’s better if you left.”

“Draco, surely you understood by now that I thought that was you. All the time I was there, I thought the ring had just erased your memories.”

Draco snickers.

“You thought that was me, huh?”

“Yes!”

“And is that supposed to make me feel better?”

“I—”

“What about me? I was here all along, wasn’t I?”

“It’s not—it wasn’t … that simple.”

“Really? It seemed pretty simple to me. As simple as you asking me out. If I remember correctly, I didn’t need a lot of convincing when you did do it. You didn’t even have to ask twice for me to agree to come home with you on the first date.”

“I …”

“You must have liked me a great deal to get the fucking Ring of Haan to send you to a universe where you’re married to me, Harry. Did you know it attracts you to it with a force equivalent to your desire? Did you know that, Harry, or have you never bothered to read about it because it wouldn’t change anything anyway?”

“I thought we’ve already settled that I like you very much.”

“Yet you never even hinted you’re into me before you put on that ring.”

“That’s not fair, Draco. Did you hint at it?”

Draco laughs. “Oh, yeah, because I was in a position to proposition you? Just admit it, Harry. That’s all I want you to do, admit it.”

“Admit what?”

“Admit that you would have never asked me out if you didn’t miss the other Draco. You know, the markless one.”

“For fuck’s sake, Draco, I though that was you!”

“Only without the memory of joining a terrorist organisation as a teenager and a Death Eater for a father.”

“Your father was still a Death Eater … ”

“Good for him. At least he was consistently stupid across universes.”

“ … and the only reason you didn’t accept the Mark in that universe was because I talked you out of it. I mean, not me. The version of me that belongs in that universe. The other me.”

“Oh, my saviour. Where were you all my life?”

“I’m only trying to say—”

“Oh, I understood very well what you were trying to say, Harry, and it’s as ridiculous as it is insulting. I’ve worked a lot to redeem myself—no, I’ve worked a lot to understand why I was wrong in the first place, so please don’t insinuate you could have solved all of my problems by being my boyfriend.”

“I’m not. This is all just very confusing for me—”

“And you think it isn’t confusing for me?”

“No, I know it is. That’s why I’m trying—I’m sorry I called you an arse—”

“Not once,” Draco cuts him off, “did you or your friends acknowledge that I’m not a racist, bigoted monster anymore. Not once. And that’s fine. Perfectly fine with me, Harry, because I guess I used to be one and that’s bad enough. But don’t try to convince me you didn’t hold back because of my past. That you still do.” 

“I don’t!”

“Oh, you don’t? Are you going to come with me to visit Mother in France at the end of the month or should we invite her to yours? Tell Weasley and Granger how you spent Christmas with Narcissa Malfoy and let’s see how they take it. Because here’s a good question for you,” he says, pointing his toothbrush at Harry like a weapon, “did you even tell your friends about us?”

“Tell them what, Draco? Do you want me to tell them we’re shagging twice a week? You don’t even let me sleep over!”

“I don’t let you sleep over?” Draco laughs incredulously. “You can sleep over when you want, Harry. I just need to work and apparently that’s a problem for you? I’m sorry I don’t have the time your husband with a work from home schedule had, but unlike him I didn’t grow up with the privilege of your affection so I’m still paying the price for the tattoo on my wrist you never convinced me not to take.”

“What price are you still paying, Draco? Who ever talks about your past other than you?”

“I knew you lived in your little bubble, but really? Why, do you think I actively choose to take three times more cases than my colleagues but get paid half of what they’re getting paid? Jump at the opportunity to do intern work because Adler wants to know what would happen if we decided to sue the Department of Mysteries in the middle of the night? Let me blow your mind, Harry, and inform you that no, I do not. It must be hard for you to comprehend the concept of getting fired since your bosses are actively breaking the law in order to avoid that ever happening to you, but the moment I step out of line I’m out of there and the little ounce of respectability I have managed to get back for my name is gone.”

“That’s not true.”

The toothbrush holder tumbles over under the force with which Draco throws his toothbrush in, knocks over some bottles Draco keeps by the sink. Yet when he speaks, his voice is calm and composed. 

“Please don’t tell me what’s true and what’s not true when it concerns my life, Harry. You’ve become acquainted with it very recently.”

Harry opens his mouth to answer but Draco walks past him. 

“Enough. I really need to work.”

He disappears through the arched doorway. Alone under the harsh light, Harry cleans up the mess Draco’s left on the counter. He stares at the second toothbrush until his eyes hurt, then picks it up and brushes his teeth with it. He lays still until two o’clock when Draco slides in under the covers. Harry puts an arm around him and he falls asleep instantly. 

* * *

The first rays of sunlight meander through the immobile branches outside the window. They cast red shadows on the wall. Draco’s chest expands when he takes a deep breath, then another. Harry pulls him closer, kisses the back of his neck. 

“Did you sleep well?” Draco asks, voice husky from sleep. “Was it everything you hoped it would be, hearing me snore?”

Harry laughs and buries his face in Draco’s t-shirt. “You didn’t snore.”

“You got lucky,” he says, bringing Harry’s hand up to his lips and kissing it. He holds it there for a beat, then lets it go. “I’m sorry Harry, but I don’t think this was a good idea. I think maybe … I think maybe it’s time we stopped.”

* * *

The bed jounces and Harry’s left alone to make sense of Draco’s nonsensical words. The next thing he knows is the lift has stopped on the second floor and Draco’s using his hand to keep the doors from closing.

“I only ask you one thing, Harry. If you care about me even a little bit, leave me alone. Don’t try to change my mind. Don’t show up at my office. Don’t write.”

Harry doesn’t know how he gets through the rest of the day. He’s in a daze when the object his secretary hands him turns out to be a cup of coffee that’s now spilled all over his desk. He’s in a daze when the suspect he’s been chasing disappears around the corner and he’s still in a daze when he walks into the pitch-black hallway and trips on a broken floorboard. He grabs the wall to stop his fall and the wallpaper rips. The crinkling of paper echoes in the dark and he stumbles forward until he reaches the staircase and Harry finally turns on the lights. 

The bulbs in the attic turn on at the same time the chandelier in the drawing room does, the two bedside lamps shoot up and so do the oil lamps in the hallway and the sconce in his study and there’s light spilling out of every window that nobody can see and Harry doesn’t know why he’s crying as he collapses on the stairs, doesn’t know if he’s crying because Draco’s wrong or because he’s right, if he’s crying because of this Draco or because of the other one or because of both or because of neither. 

How did this happen? When did it happen? 

When did he turn into his sad, lonely man? This miserable man, coming home every night to a spider-infested house, dusty and mouldy and full of darkness in every corner? This wretched man, paralysed by fear? 

What’s the exact moment in time he promised himself he’ll always do what’s right and never what’s wrong? Stand for all the right things and never for the wrong ones? Follow duty before want, save everybody but himself? 

Was it when they gave him a uniform and a badge and told him to swear to always protect the weak? Was it before that, when they told him he must kill or be killed? Or was it even earlier, when they took him out of that spider-infested cupboard, mouldy and dusty and full of darkness in every corner? Was it then that he told himself that no matter what, no matter what, he won’t ever make a mistake or do anything wrong, oh no, he’ll be good, so good he’ll never give them a reason to send him back there again, so good he’ll never have to spend another night alone in that terrible darkness anymore? 

And here he is and so it goes.

He wipes away the tears with the back of his sleeve. 

 * * *

Adler puts on a fight. Harry stands his ground, cross-armed in front of Adler’s imposingly heavy desk.

“I’m not good, Adler. I let a suspect run away yesterday.”

“Take a break! A sabbatical! Take as much time as you want, we’ll get Weasley to fill in for you.”

“Just give him the job. I’m not coming back.”

“Harry, the people need you!”

“The world will go without me as Head Auror, Adler.”

 * * *

“We had a deal, Mister Potter.”

“And I’m breaking it. Sue me, Myriam. I’ll be waiting for a letter from your solicitor.”

 * * *

Ron’s eyes follow him as he gathers the few personal items scattered around the office: a picture of the three of them, a Quiditch ball signed by Puddlemere’s seeker, a coffee mug he got from his secretary on his birthday. 

“I’ll be fine,” he says when Ron sighs and leans against a cabinet file bursting at the seams.

“Oh, I know you will, Harry. I know you will.”

Chapter Text

It’s a mild, soggy winter. The snow that falls during the night melts under the sticky morning sun and Grimmauld Square turns into a muddy mess by late afternoon. Harry declines Ron and Hermione’s invitation. He spends the last two weeks of December in bed, venturing outside only to spell the snow off his front steps and check the mail.

Draco doesn't write.

As the days bleed into each other, he finds himself distracted by small projects here and there. He starts going on walks around the swampy neighbourhood. He tries new recipes he stumbles upon in muggle magazines. He installs new shelves in the pantry. While he’s at it, he paints the window sill and instals a spice rack next to the oven. It takes longer than it should, but it’s something to do. A reason to get out of bed. 

Around mid-January, Myriam’s letters start arriving. They’re not as aggressive as he feared. They’re mostly a plea for Harry to consider helping further the research into parallel universes by continuing their work. He drops them in the hearth. 

He’s worried Hermione might resent the years he’s been too absent so it takes him some time to talk to her about volunteering at SPEW. “That’s other Harry’s thing,” he says when she asks if he’d like to teach the defence classes. “I can do whatever you need help with.”

“I’m sure we’ll find something,” she replies with a smile. 

In the meantime, when he’s not cooking, renovating or walking aimlessly around London, he writes letters to Draco. To both versions of Draco. He drops them in the hearth alongside most mail he gets, including another envelope from Quillweather. 

* * *

“Guess who came into my office to ask about you today.”

The candles flicker when the three plates of pasta float by before settling in front of Harry, Ron and Hermione. 

“Who?”

“Malfoy.”

Harry’s heart drops. He hasn’t had any news about Draco since the last time Ron mentioned him off-handedly, and then he'd only learnt Draco had been rude to an intern. He moves the bottle of wine so he can see Ron better. 

“What did he say?” he asks in one breath. 

“Before I recount our conversation in excruciating detail, as I imagine you also want to know what he was wearing and how he styled his hair, why don’t you finally tell us what happened between you too?” 

“Nobody will judge you, Harry. If something did happen and that’s part of the reason you’ve been so sad, it’s ridiculous to hide it from us.”

“If? If? I’ve seen happier Dementors than Malfoy voluntarily exposing himself to my presence today.”

Harry’s eyes move from Hermione to Ron. He sighs. His food gets cold while he speaks. 

“I can’t believe you got dumped by Draco bloody Malfoy,” Ron says, clutching his head and staring out the window dramatically. “He’s an even bigger tosser than I thought, and I was already of the opinion that he’s a huge tosser.”

“I don’t know if that’s fair. I can understand where he’s coming from,” Hermione says, crossing her arms. 

“What? Not only are you not siding with your friend, who, on top of being heartbroken and in great need of moral support from his friends, has also clearly lost his mind because dating Malfoy in one universe wasn’t enough for him so he had to go ahead and try to replicate the experience, but you’re siding with Malfoy?”

“I’m not siding with him, I’m just capable of empathising with his position. Of course I’m on Harry’s side.”

“Great. Now that we’ve all taken sides,” Harry says grumpily, biting into the cold pasta, “will you tell me what he said?”

“He asked me if you’re well. I told him you’re partying it up every night and living your best life without his sorry arse in it.”

“Very funny.”

“Nah, I told him you’re training for a cooking contest. I think he actually believed me, which should be evidence enough he’s a moron who doesn’t deserve you. And then he asked me to give you this.”

 * * *

Dear Harry, 

Please forgive me for the manner in which this letter has gotten to you. It couldn’t be avoided since I was worried you might still be in the habit of not checking your mail. 

In these last few months I’ve had the time to reflect on our short time together. I am deeply ashamed to have behaved in a way that, so many times, bordered on viciousness. The only excuse I have is that I was very much overwhelmed by your sudden interest in me and I didn’t know how to communicate my feelings clearly. I hope you’ll give me the opportunity to right this wrong by reading the rest of my letter. 

I don’t even know where to start. I think it doesn’t take an Auror to see that I’ve always had a soft spot for you. Even as a teenager I was always doing my best to get you to notice me. I was very stupid and competing with people much better than me, so forgive me for doing it so poorly. But we were children then, and then the war came and well …

During the almost four years we worked together I had the privilege to get to know you better. I’m afraid my pride never let it show how much I respect the dedication and energy you put into running your department and your incredible loyalty to your friends, colleagues and staff. Lucas still talks about how you were always so kind to him.

Of course my feelings could only grow in such close proximity to you, but I hope you’ll believe me when I say I never even dared hope they’d ever be reciprocated. I was never brave, or kind, or intelligent—not when it came to the things that truly mattered, anyway. I made many terrible decisions in my life and despite considerable efforts I’m still too quick to anger and too proud. You can see how in my mind, there was never anything in me that someone like you could like. 

So when it turned out you were also interested in me, I was blinded by your attention. By you. I couldn’t think straight anymore. My attraction towards you left me feeling hollow when I was not with you and I craved your affection. Naturally, I was consumed by doubt. I couldn’t silence the voice in my head that said “It’s not you he wants.” I was jealous, I was cruel, I was the worst version of myself. I wanted to hurt you because I thought you had hurt me. 

With a clearer head, I can see now that it was never your intention to hurt me and that you were simply doing your best in a hopeless situation. And I sincerely think you did your best and that you were much too good and much too kind with me. It was terribly wrong of me to accuse you of holding my past against me. It’s my past and it’s my own fault if it’s there for people to hold against me. For this, and everything else, I apologise sincerely. 

If I’m writing this letter to you today, it is also to clarify something I should have clarified when you first asked me about it. I will once again blame my pride; I didn’t want to let you in on how deep my affection for you ran by admitting to it then. Following your invitation to the Puddlemere-Arrows game and the sudden but much hoped-for change in your attitude towards me, I was forced to take a closer look at my feelings. While I could only speculate as to your intentions, I realised mine were not unequivocally platonic in nature. I didn’t consider it fair to myself or to my partner at the time, Adam (the quidditch player), to continue our relationship under these circumstances so I put a stop to it before we attended the match together. 

I’m sure sooner or later it will reach you in some way that we are back together and I just want to reiterate that while we were seeing each other I have never been with him or with anybody else. Maybe it’s presumptuous of me to believe this information would still be of any interest to you, but I’d much rather you heard it from me than from someone else and assume the worst.

I’d also like to add that my moving on is not so much a reflection of the superficiality of my prior feelings as it is of a need to regain a semblance of balance in my life. It is one of my many flaws that I am terribly afraid of loneliness and cannot stand it any more than bats can stand daylight. 

As for us, I often think about something you said to me one evening. It was snowing outside. You seemed sad and I asked you how other Draco and other Harry became close. You stalled, for once you didn’t seem too keen to indulge the morbid curiosity that always got the better of me when I felt like I was not enough for you. But I insisted and in the end you admitted that in that universe, we were born bound to each other. Soulmates is the word you used, I think. 

I was of course very shocked to learn about this foreign magic. Shocked to hear how it affected the way we interacted with each other from the very start, how this was the real reason our histories differ so much. I immediately resented the fact that you had kept this from me for so long, but before I could express myself you put your arm around me and wondered, in the tone of voice of someone who’s pursuing an intellectual curiosity but who has no hope of ever finding the answer to their query, if the ring sends everybody to a universe where soulmates are real. 

You could have of course answered this question yourself by picking up the book on my nightstand entitled “The History of the Ring of Haan”. You could have gone to any bookstore and browsed the Magical Objects section and read the few testimonials from people that used the ring, and you would have found out that it was indeed just you the ring sent to such a bizarre universe. If only you would have looked, you would have learnt many incredible things. You would have learnt that there are as many universes as moments in time, a different one born each time we make a choice or draw a breath. There’s one where I’ve written this letter in blue ink instead o black and one where I’ve never written it and yet another one where I’ve written it exactly the same only in an entirely different language. And the incredible power of the Ring of Haan, the reason it is such an amazing piece of magic, is that it won’t throw you across the universe in a random world where you won’t recognise anything. It will always make the quickest jump to the closest world in which its one crucial condition is met—a wedding band linking the wearer to the object of their desire. 

And when one knows this, one understands that if the ring sent you so far away, to a universe where a whole new branch of magic had to come into being for us to give each other a chance, that can only mean that we are surrounded by an infinity of worlds that look just like ours in which we never did. It means that, since we weren’t fortunate enough to be born with each other’s names on our wrist, the chances were always stacked against us. So bad are our chances, in fact, that it never happened. Not even once. 

It’s a horrendous thought at first but, the more I think about it, the more oddly comforting it becomes. I find myself laying in bed thinking of all the other Harrys and Dracos in universes that look just like ours, circling each other and never touching and I think hey, at least we tried. Then I think of the only two who made it work and I hope they’re happy together. They seem like great people from what you’ve told me. 

But you didn’t need to read the book on my nightstand, nor go to any library to know the ring sent you to the closest possible universe to ours. You already knew it, because I had already told you as much the first night you came over. So it begs the question, what was the point of pretending? 

I resented your charade then, thought you a coward for it. It was months after, when the anger had finally passed, that I could see it for something else. An attempt to protect me, maybe, from a truth you deemed too ugly. But surely, I tell myself as the rain falls outside my window and I’m kept awake by memories of our time together, surely you would have lied if your intention had been to protect me. You’ve lied to me before. So the only other explanation I can think of is that you weren’t pretending for my sake, but for yours. And that saddens me, because I was so busy protecting myself that I never gave much thought to the fact that you needed to be protected too. For this too, I hope you’ll forgive me. 

Anyway, I hope that if we ever cross each other again we can shake hands and not walk by as if we were strangers. That would be, I think, the real tragedy. 

Yours,
Draco 

* * *

One would think there’s only a finite number of times somebody can read a goodbye letter and have their heart broken again and again, but one would be wrong. So, so terribly wrong. 

* * *

February comes and goes. 

* * *

Imperceptibly, life regains a certain structure. 

Two days a week, he helps Hermione with little things around the office. Sometimes, he needs to take a break to just breathe. Or cry. Or stare at his reflection in the bathroom mirror. But then he goes back to the letter he was writing, informing a certain Mister Sheen he has to offer five weeks of paid vacation to the elves in his employment, that he is very much forced by the law to do so and that unless he complies, he will soon be receiving a visit from a Ministry official, and the ache in his chest passes as if it was never there. 

The other days, he works on the house. Once he’s finished with the kitchen, he moves on to his study. Before he gets rid of the furniture he goes through the mountains of paperwork he’s amassed in the ten years he’s been living there. Draco’s memos are moved upstairs, to the drawer of his nightstand. Draco’s letter also lives there and every night before he goes to sleep he reads it. He knows it by heart yet, every time he reads it, it says something else. 

Ron and Hermione come over every Friday and they play muggle board games spelled to come alive. He cooks elaborate dinners for them. “It’s my pleasure,” he says when they deplore their lack of time to return the favour. “My way to say thank you.”

On Tuesdays he goes to the Ministry to do his part for the research into parallel universes. Sometimes, it’s hard to see himself with the other Draco. Other times, it’s like watching an old movie. But most times, the only thing he can think about is that his Draco is only a couple of floors above him. And that maybe, just maybe … 

* * *

Ron gets ridiculously skilled at Monopoly and for the whole month of March they only play that but that’s all right, because the new responsibilities at work are getting to him and he’s more stressed than usual. 

At the beginning of April, Harry gets somebody from the Ministry to dissolve the Fidelius Charm and to connect his house to the floo network so that Ron can firecall him when he needs help. Only instead of using it in emergencies, Ron takes this as an invitation to firecall him in the middle of the day just to relay the last office gossip whenever he has five minutes in between meetings. 

Harry doesn’t mind. The knife glides down the middle of the tomato while he laughs at Adler’s latest ploy to dissolve the Department of Mysteries and the window is open and the sun is shining through and there’s something in the air that changes with every gust of wind—something sweet, something bitter, something like hope and something like regret. 

* * *

Harry’s stomach clenches when he finds the fourth letter from Quillweather on his doorstep. He knows the man did not lodge an appeal, so what could he possibly want from Harry? What could warrant such a level of persistence? Surely … surely not that.  

He tears open the envelope with his thumb as he walks into the kitchen, heart racing. 

Mister Potter, 

It has come to my understanding you have recently travelled to a world far away from this one. I know how difficult it is to come back home. If you desire to go back to where you’ve been, I can help you for a fair price, all things considered.

Sincerely yours,
Rudolph Quillweather

Harry puts the letter back into the envelope with trembling hands. 

* * *

“How did he find out, Myriam?”

“That’s probably my fault. I told him somebody used the ring. He must have put two and two together, with your public inquiry and all.”

“Didn’t you say your men found it in a jewellery box, thrown together with dozens of other rings? I thought he didn’t know what it was. You told me he didn’t know.”

“All the evidence pointed towards this conclusion, but I had my doubts. How could a collector of antiques not recognise such a legendary magical object? I pulled a few strings so that I could talk to him when he was kept at the Ministry during the trial. Since I couldn’t actually start an investigation…”

Harry nods, aware Myriam’s referring to the deal Adler made to save his job.

“He became very agitated as soon as I mentioned the ring. He asked me if Crook had written to me to inform me of this, which I found very weird. When I told him we found it amongst his own possessions, he was adamant we were mistaken. I told him somebody had used it unintentionally so we were sure it was not a fake. His behaviour became even stranger and he asked his solicitor to get him out of the meeting. I didn’t find it necessary to inquire further.”

“And what do you make of his letter?”

“I think he truly didn’t know he had the ring before I told him and that he decided to try to use this to his advantage. There are many people who’d give a man everything for the Ring of Haan. Who knows who else he’s sending these letters to?”

“So you think he’s lying? That he doesn’t know where it is?”

“I think it’s not worth making a deal with a convicted murderer in order to find out if he’s lying or not. Don’t you agree?”

“Of course I agree. What kind of question is that?”

“Just a question I’d ask anybody who used the ring, Harry.” 

* * *

The inevitable happens on a warm, sunny day. He finished an early morning session with Myriam and he’s dragging his feet towards the visitors entrance through the crowded Atrium when, from a distance, he sees him. 

He’s walking towards Harry, squinting at a piece of parchment and muttering under his breath. For a second, the longest and most terrifying second of Harry’s life, he thinks Draco’ll just pass him by, a swoosh of dark robes on his peripheral vision, and leave him standing there, struck in place by the force of a whole sun with nobody to tell. 

He doesn’t. He looks up just in time and his eyes settle on Harry, the only person not moving in a sea of people rushing left and right. He must be a funny sight, dressed in a pair of washed out muggle jeans and an old t-shirt, because Draco stops so abruptly a witch bumps into him from behind. 

Harry swallows with difficulty. He’s forgotten how striking Draco looks in his black robes. How his narrow neck seems so fragile surrounded by the stiff collar, so fair and delicate and naked. He’s forgotten the depth in his eyes, the colour of his lips, the beauty of his hands as he runs one through his hair. Harry takes a step towards him and, voice trembling, says, “Hey.”

An Unspeakable walks between them, hiding Draco from view for a moment. 

“Harry. What a … what a surprise.” 

“I—I,” Harry stutters, overwhelmed. He’s dreamt of this moment for months, already lived it a hundred times over. He takes a deep breath, points to the door behind him. “I was in the Department of Mysteries. For research.”

“Research,” Draco echoes, looking at Harry’s hair, at his clothes, at his hands.

“Yes,” Harry says, mind blank. “And you?”

“And me?”

“Where are you going?”

“What?” Draco looks up. Blinks. Lets out a nervous laugh. “Oh, I’m going back to my office. I’m sorry—I didn’t expect to … bump into you today.”

“Yeah, no, I know,” Harry says, mirroring Draco’s laugh. “Me too.”

Draco smiles. He closes his eyes. When he opens them he doesn’t look agitated anymore. He looks radiant and bright and open. He narrows the distance between them and offers Harry his hand. 

“I’m really happy to see you, Harry. How are you?”

“I’m—I’m fine,” Harry says, shaking Draco’s hand. “And you?”

Draco folds the parchment he was reading and rolls his eyes towards the corridor leading to the courtrooms. “Cross with a judge.”

Harry laughs. “So business as usual, then.”

“Pretty much.”

“How’s Lucas?”

“He’s well. It’s his birthday actually,” Draco says, tucking a strand of hair behind his ear. Harry opens his mouth to ask another stupid question whose only purpose is to avoid the dreaded moment when Draco will tell him he’s got to go, but Draco looks up and asks, “Would you like to say hello to him?”

“I’d love to,” Harry says in one breath.

Draco smiles. They turn towards the lifts.

“So, I’ve heard you’re preparing for a cooking contest?”

The rest comes easy. Harry tells him about all the cooking and all the renovating and Draco listens attentively to Harry’s rambling, squished between Ministry officials and the lift panels, and then it’s his turn to talk about what he’s been doing while their steps echo against the marbled floor and Harry can barely keep up with his words because his lips are so distracting and before he knows it they’re already in front of Draco’s office and he’s shaking Lucas’s hand. 

Lucas’s desk is adorned with a Happy Birthday banner and he stammers excitedly when Harry inquires about his law studies. He speaks about final exams and other things Harry can’t really focus on, and then Harry asks if Draco’s still giving him a hard time because he forgot to alphabetize the files that one time and they all laugh at that. But then there’s not much else they can say to each other so Lucas excuses himself and sits back down at his desk and Harry and Draco are just awkwardly standing there until Draco mumbles, “I should probably—” and Harry can’t think of anything else to say to avoid the unavoidable, so he says, “Yes, of course. I’ll—I’ll go.” 

The hem of Draco’s robe flutters out of sight and the double doors swing closed behind Harry. He takes two steps towards the lifts, then turns around and goes back through the double doors.

He had meant to wait just a bit more—just enough to get back on his feet, finish renovating Grimmauld Place, maybe even find a real job—but what would that accomplish? He made up his mind months ago. He knows what he feels. He knows what he wants.

He flies by Lucas’s desk and barges into Draco’s office. 

“Have dinner with me.”

Draco looks up, startled.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea.” 

“I did what you asked me. I left you alone. For six months.”

“And I appreciate it—”

“One dinner. Please.”

* * *

Tight-chested and sweaty-palmed, Harry gives Draco a tour of the house. He points to the architectural details he’s restored and answers Draco’s pointed questions about wood grain and trim work. He tries not to think too much of how shaky his voice is or about how calm Draco’s is. He tries not to look at his lips when he smiles, or at the curve of his jaw when he looks up to inspect the ceiling medallions. 

On the way back down Draco asks about the empty room across the drawing room. White walled and bare, it stands out against the clutter of the rest of the house. Harry stops at the doorpost while Draco goes in.  

“It was my study. I’m still deciding what to do with it.”

Draco’s eyes linger on the empty walls, on the curtainless window that lets in the last rays of sunlight. 

“This used to be his office, right?”

“Draco …”

“I’m just making a calculating guess,” he shrugs. “It’s the best room in the house.”

“This was my study.” 

Draco smiles but does not add anything else. 

He lets out a gasp when he enters the kitchen. It’s warm enough to keep the window open and the wind carries inside the murmur of distant conversations. 

“Quite an impressive transformation. The first time I saw your kitchen, I asked myself if you survive on take-out and expensive whiskey.”

“What, you mean like you?”

Draco laughs, leaning in to take a closer look at the herb garden on the window sill. “Yeah. Like me.”

He sits down by the empty hearth and, chin propped on his hands, follows Harry as he puts on a pair of mittens and opens the oven door. He cracks a smile when Harry brings the lasagna over to the table.

“It looks very good on you. All this free time.”

A flush goes up Harry’s neck as he cuts into the crust and serves Draco. 

“Tell me if you like it. I took some creative liberties with the recipe.”

Draco makes a show of examining his plate from all sides, then takes the first bite.

“It’s outrageous! Who’s ever heard of cheese in a lasagna?”

Harry laughs, and the laughter seems to unlock something. He breathes out, feels the tension leaving his muscles as he sits down and mirrors Draco. 

“It’s delicious.”

“I’m glad you like it.”

“How could I not? Didn’t you cook it specifically for my tastes, which you know so well?” 

Harry looks down at his plate.

“I’m just messing with you. It really is delicious. When did you discover your passion for cooking?”

Harry takes his time answering.

“I’ve always liked cooking. Since I was a child.”

“Oh.” Draco wipes the corner of his mouth with a napkin. “Really?”

“What about you?”

“What about me?”

“Do you like cooking?”

“I don’t know. I don’t have the time to try it.” 

For a while, there’s only the sounds of the city coming in through the open window and the click of cutlery against the plates. 

“How’s Adam?”

“You invited me here to ask about Adam?”

“No, I—No.”

“Right.”

Harry looks up at the ceiling. He knows what he wants to say. He’s written tens of letters in which he’s said it. He’s fallen asleep to this very conversation taking place in his head. Only now that Draco’s sitting across from him, cross-legged and impatient, it’s like Harry’s forgotten all the words. Draco seems to pick up on the fact because he sighs and says, “Listen, Harry—”

Harry straightens his back and pushes his empty plate away. 

“I care about you. And from your letter, it seemed like you care about me, so—”

“Of course I care about you. That was never the issue, me not caring about you.”

“Yeah, so we both care about each other … and …  I think maybe the problem was that … maybe it was too soon, after what I’ve been through. It was hard to keep you two separate in my head. I shouldn’t have told you so much about him. I felt guilty about lying in the beginning and I thought you deserved to know everything that happened. But I think it just made everything even more confusing. For both of us.”

Draco raises an eyebrow. 

“Yeah. It probably did. So?”

“So, I won’t do it anymore. I’m not confused anymore. If you …” 

Harry grabs the edges of his chair and searches for his eyes. “If you’d like to try again, it won’t be like before.”

Draco crosses his arms. 

“Try again?” He pauses, lets Harry process just how ridiculous he finds the idea. “The only thing I’ve been thinking about since coming here is that this is the house in which you were happy with someone I can never be. I can’t live like that. It’s as simple as that.”

“You don’t have to live like that. I don’t want you to live like that. I can move—”

“Move?” Draco laughs. “No, Harry, I meant I can’t live my life comparing myself to this version of myself that made you let go of whatever it was that was holding you back.”

“He didn't make me—”

“Harry,” Draco says, voice laden with disappointment. “You asked me to come here so at least have the decency to listen to me. You never chose to be attracted to me. But you chose not to act on it. Until you met a Draco that didn’t make all the mistakes that I made. Those are the hard, cold facts. If I had been younger, maybe I would have taken advantage of your situation for longer than I did. But I’m not, and I can’t be with someone who’s been forced by a very unfortunate accident to have to settle for me. I can’t do this to myself. It’ll turn me into someone I hate. And I can’t do this to you. Precisely because I care about you.”

There’s a bit of blood on Harry’s nail from how hard he’s scratched at it while listening to Draco. He wipes it with his thumb and looks up. 

“I did not settle for you.”

“Of course you did. Of course you did.”

“I didn’t.”

Draco sighs.

“Draco,” Harry begs. “What can I do to prove to you I didn’t? Tell me, and I’ll do it.”

“Prove?” Draco scoffs. “This isn’t a trial, Harry. You didn’t commit a crime, you just did whatever you thought was best for you. It is what it is. I’ve accepted it. And maybe it’s time you accepted it too, so you can move on and find somebody you will be thrilled to fall in love with.” He stands up. “Thank you for dinner.”

* * *

Draco’s silhouette melts into the shadows and a loud pop momentarily disturbs the peace that had settled over Grimmauld Square. Harry closes the kitchen window. If this was not a trial, why does he feel like he’s been tried, found guilty and executed, all in the span of a one course meal? 

He replays Draco’s words on the way upstairs. Under the jet of scalding water. While he tosses in bed, waiting for sleep. 

Draco was wrong, he thinks as the first rays of sunlight cast red shadows on his wall, it was a trial. From the very first kiss in Draco’s office, their story had been nothing but one long, agonising trial. And Harry’s lost at every hearing. But, another voice chimes in as he splashes cold water on his face, there’s still the appeal.

* * *

The sound of early morning traffic covers the swooshing of the coffee as it leaves the filter. 

“Hermione.” 

Hermione looks up from the registry she’s flipping through. Harry hands her a cup, then places his own on the edge of her desk. 

“Why do you think Ginny left me?”

She takes a sip of her coffee and fumbles with the registry on her desk; clears her throat.

“I think Ginny was quite clear as to her reasons, wasn’t she?”

Harry nods. It’s true, after all. He strolls over to the window. Somewhere out of sight a light has turned green and the cars start moving one by one. He crosses his arms and turns back to Hermione. He’s learnt very early on the job that for every case there’s often one question that unlocks all the right answers. The difficult part is finding that question.

“And do you think she was right? Do you think I don’t show people how I feel?”

Hermione brings her hands together and meets his eyes.  

“I think you don’t show people who you are, Harry. And at the end of the day, maybe that’s the same thing?”

* * *

Once you’ve asked the right questions you can start looking for evidence. 

“Is fifteen minutes enough?”

Harry nods. Myriam closes the door. Harry locks it with a flick of his wand, then points it towards his temples. At first glance, it looks like any other memory he shares with Myriam, just slightly blurrier around the edges. 

Harry’s just collapsed on the drawing room floor due to the force of the soul-reading spell. Draco rushes over to him. 

“Harry? Are you alright? Harry?”

“I—I don’t—that’s not at all what I remember. I want to remember all of that. I want to remember that!”

“Never mind all that. We’ll make new memories.”

The colours fade and melt into each other, as if Harry’s just fallen underwater. The Harry and Draco on the floor become moving shadows; their voices, distant whispers.

“I remember horrible things!”

“What do you mean, horrible things?”

“I remember doing horrible things to you. At school. You too, but I—I—there was blood everywhere and I—”

“Harry, those memories are not real. You heard Willowbrook, they’re things your mind made up. You never did anything horrible to me. On the contrary, you were extremely patient and kind with me from the day we met.”

“That’s not what happened, Draco! You’re the one who doesn’t remember things correctly! The ring, it must have—”

“Enough with this ring. You searched for it for months and didn’t find anything. The ring isn’t real, Harry. But this is real. Us. Our life together. My love for you. And you know what made it all possible?”

“The Amets?”

“No! Your kindness did. When we met you were a scared child, thrown into a world you knew nothing about, having been bullied all your life. And you met me, the biggest bully of them all, so sure of my ways and of my rightful place at the top. And I just so happened to idolise you. I could have spent my life thinking you were larger than life, Harry, because in so many ways you are.”

Harry closes his eyes. Somewhere in another part of the room, his old self is doing the same thing. 

“But then you told me about your life. About how you grew up hungry, cooking and cleaning for your muggle family like a house elf. That they made you sleep in a cupboard. You told me how it was for you to go to school dressed in your cousin’s old clothes. How it felt to be poor and unloved and different. You told me you’re scared they’ll send you back there because you’re not smart enough. Not good enough.”

Draco huffs. 

“You, not smart enough! Not good enough! I wanted to cry and I wanted to scream. I had never heard of anything more ridiculous in my entire life. And then you looked me in the eyes and asked me if I’ll judge you for it. If I’ll make fun of you for being poor, like I make fun of Ron. So I’ll let you say whatever you want to me, my love, but never repeat in my presence that you ever did anything horrible to me. You taught me kindness.”

* * *

The problem is that, sooner or later in any case, there comes a point when you know what your next step should be, but you don’t want to do it. You know the murder weapon is on the bottom of the river, but you don’t want to get your uniform wet retrieving it. You care too much about your uniform still. 

So naturally, you get drunk. Really drunk. So drunk there’s no way you won’t do something extremely stupid the moment you step outside the muggle pub you’ve been in since early afternoon.

* * *

There’s a sound of a metal mechanism at work and then the door opens. Draco shuts his eyes briefly when the fluorescent light hits him. Before Harry can draw in a breath and start enumerating all the reasons that have brought him there, Draco pushes him into the bright stairwell. He closes the door behind him, leaving only a narrow gap through which the light can slither through into Draco’s living room. 

“What the hell, Harry?”

“Oh,” Harry says as the curved bannister trembles with the force of his body slamming against it. “Is Adam in? I’m sorry. I didn’t know he’d be in.”

“You’re drunk,” Draco whispers angrily, wrapping his dressing gown around himself like an armour. “You’re drunk and you’re making a fool of yourself.”

“I wanted to …” Harry starts, then gets distracted by the expanse of Draco’s neck, broken up by the ornate hem of the dressing gown, “ ... speak with you.”

“Do you know what time it is?”

Harry shakes his head. He loses his balance and hobbles forward.

“All right. I’m taking you home.”

Home? Yes, he’d like to be taken home very much. There, he’d have all the time in the world to explain. All the time in the world to remove that gown. In fact, Harry thinks as Draco’s getting closer and he can make out two red sleep lines spanning the width of his cheek and continuing down his neck, he could get started on that particular project right now. 

The gap between the door and the frame lights up. Somebody’s turned on the light in Draco’s apartment. Adam turned on the light in Draco’s apartment. 

“We’ll go home,” Harry says, words stumbling out with an uneven cadence, “I just need to do something first.”

Harry fights off Draco’s attempts to keep him from going inside. The source of the light is easy to identify—child’s play, really—as it comes spilling out of the arched doorway leading to Draco’s bedroom. Harry goes in, ignoring Draco’s mortified whispers. 

From the middle of the bed, Adam squints at Harry. He still has one hand on the cord of the reading lamp. He’s shorter than Harry imagined and not as ugly as he’d hoped. He has a full beard, and large, strong arms. Harry wants to break them. 

“Er—”

“Adam, right? I’m Harry.”

“I’m sorry—I’m sorry, Adam, he’s really drunk.”

Adam’s panicked gaze moves from Harry’s forehead to Draco.  

“Is that … Draco, is that Harry Potter?”

Adam backs into the headboard when Harry takes a step towards him. 

“He didn’t tell you about me?” Harry asks in a low, sad voice. He sits down at the foot of the bed. “He told me about you.”

He lays on his back, making Adam move his legs out of the way, and takes off his glasses so he can rub his eyes. They hurt. 

“Why did he have to tell me about you? Was he trying to kill me?” 

He abandons the idea of keeping up with what’s happening around him. The bed moves, the sound of footsteps dies out and Adam’s hushed voice asking, “Is that the bloke you were talking about?” is the last thing Harry hears before sleep takes him.

* * *

The sound of a window slammed shut awakes Harry. Head throbbing, he jumps out of Draco’s bed. A blanket falls off him. He’s still dressed in last night's clothes and smells of last night’s mistakes. Next to an anti-hangover vial, he finds a succinct note asking him to never, ever, contact Draco again. 

Harry looks at the storm picking up outside. He’s pretty wet now; might as well get drenched. 

* * *

“He’s not in.”

“I know he’s in, Lucas.”

“I’m sorry, Mister Potter,” Lucas whispers, leaning in, “but he explicitly told me not to let you inside if you come by.”

Harry considers Lucas’s distressed expression. He performed a cleaning spell on himself in the lift but it couldn't have done much for his bloodshot eyes or wrinkled clothes. He nods, then turns towards the closed door leading to Draco's office. 

“Draco! I know you can hear me. I’ll just—”

The door opens wide and a furious Draco comes out. 

“Go into my office,” he screams at Lucas, who jumps out of his chair and does as he’s told. “Harry, you’ve crossed any limit of decency showing up here!”

“Can I please talk to you for five minutes?”

“Do you realise how inexcusable your behaviour is?”

Harry takes a step towards Draco. His heart is racing.

“You were right.”

Draco takes a step back as if they're rehearsing a dance. He shakes his head in disbelief. 

“I can’t believe you’re doing this to me.”

Harry swallows the lump in his throat. 

“I was too much of a coward to admit my feelings for you.”

“I don’t want to hear this, Harry.” 

“I was scared of what Ron and Hermione would say.”

“Enough.”

“Of what it said about me.”

“I said enough.”

“I’m sorry,” Harry carries on. “I’m sorry I put on that ring instead of asking you out.”

Draco lets out a mock laughter.

“But you did. It’s done.” 

“I wish I never had.”

Draco stops laughing.

“But you did.”

Harry tries to reduce the distance between them again but Draco backs further away.

“It was a mistake,” Harry says, voice small.

“You only believe that because you had to come back.”

It’s Harry’s turn to shake his head in disbelief. 

“That’s not true, Draco.” Draco’s back hit the wall behind Lucas’ office. “I'm in love—”

“You're in love with him. I'm not him.”

“I—”

“Please, Harry,” Draco cuts him off again. “Enough.” His voice breaks and he plasters a hand over his mouth while tears start rolling down his cheeks. “Enough.”

Harry’s heart stops. 

He’s on a landing, peering into somebody else’s drawing room. He’s sixteen, staring into a bathroom mirror. He’s alone in the cupboard under the stairs, face covered in tears, and he doesn’t know what to do. 

The double doors open. Ron comes strolling in, clean-shaved and bright-faced. His gaze travels from the weeping Draco to the dumbstruck Harry. 

“Er—What's going on?”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Draco whispers, turning away from Run and wiping his tears frantically. 

“What are you doing? Get out!” Harry shouts in Ron's direction, brought back to reality by Draco's words.

Draco turns to him, eyes red and full of tears. 

“No, Harry! You're the one who has to get out!”

“We’ll both get out, how about that?” Ron says in a low, panicked voice, dragging Harry towards the exit and eyeing Draco’s back with a concerned look. “Send Lucas with those papers when you want, all right?”

* * *

The doors close, hiding Draco from view. The corridor is dark. The storm clouds are reflected in the marble floor.

“Harry?”

Lighting strikes and everything turns white for an instant. He shakes free of Ron’s grip and starts walking towards the lifts. 

“Harry, mate. Er—what was that? Do you want to talk about it?”

Harry takes out his wand and picks up the pace. 

“No. I want a portkey to Azkaban and a visitor’s pass.”

Ron looks at his watch. 

“Give me five minutes.”

* * *

The sea is black. The rain falls like a thick curtain, cutting through Harry’s thin blouse. Dark shadows linger behind the wet rocks. He lifts up his wand and thinks of Draco, claping a hand over his mouth to hide his smile when Harry’s legs found his ankle under the long table in Adler’s office. 

The shadows retreat; he enters the prison. 

* * *

His clothes are soaked and he leaves a trail of muddy water on the marble floors. 

“Don’t even try, Lucas.”

Wide-eyed, the boy sits back down while Harry walks by his desk and enters Draco’s office with a determined stride. Before Draco can protest, Harry puts out his hand and drops the ring on the file in front of him. The ring wobbles on the brittle parchment, then becomes perfectly still. Eyes glued to it, Draco takes off his spectacles. 

“What the fuck is this?”

“It’s the Ring of Haan.”

In one smooth move, Draco stands up and backs away from his desk. A drop of water glides off the ring and dissolves into the paper as the contours of foreign letters start to take shape on its outer surface.

“Are you insane?” he screeches, grabbing the window ledge on both sides. Behind him, the rain splashes against the thin glass in waves. “Cover it up!”

Harry lays his palm over it.

“Don’t worry. It’s just the pull of the ring. I feel it too.”

Draco looks up at Harry, stunned. His eyes are still red and glossy, his entire expression lacking its usual composure. 

“I wish I never put this ring on. But you’re right. I did. And you should, too.”

Draco stares at him.

“It will take you to the same universe I was in. It should, right, since it’s the closest one? It should take you to the other Harry, the one I replaced for seven years.”

“Have you lost your mind?”

“It should take you to a Harry that’s not afraid to let people in. To let you in,” Harry carries on, trying to exert a control on his voice that he’s not really capable of exerting anymore. He closes his eyes. Swallows. Opens them again. “He’s not afraid to say I love you.”

“Harry …”

“It’s really quite amazing, how different he turned out because he grew up with your love,” Harry says quietly, gaze settled on the drenched glass. “I didn’t, so I’m not as good as him at … this. I don’t know how to open up. All I know is how to make you cry and how to lie.”

“Hey …”

“And I lie a lot,” he says, breaking into some sort of laughter. “To myself. To you. To the other Draco. I never told him about Sectumsempra. I thought he was you and the ring had wiped your memories and I was glad. It was easier to pretend I’d lost my memories than to face what I did that day. You see,” Harry says, using his other hand to wipe a tear escaping from the corner of his eye, “that’s who I am. A coward who couldn’t even take off your shirt.”

“Harry, I never let you take it off. You tried to—”

Harry shakes his head.

“I didn’t try. I pretended to try, just like I pretend to be someone I’m not. This … this good person all around. But I’m not a good person, Draco.”

“Of course you are, Harry, you’re a—”

“I’m not. I spent ten years of my life catching criminals but you know what I do at night? I dream of killing my muggle family. My cousin and my aunt and my uncle. I dream of killing them with my bare hands, without magic. And I’m scared that one day I’ll snap and actually do it. Because why else would I dream of it all the time, if not because I really want to do it?”

“I—”

“I’m not a good person, Draco. I really want to be one. But I’m not. I’m full of hate and spite and resentment and I live with the fear that one day, somebody will catch on to that. Everything I do, I do because I’m terrified people will find out just how rotten I am inside. Terrified that one day, I’ll make a mistake and everybody will leave me.”

Harry removes his glasses and rubs his eyes with his one free hand. 

“Harry,” Draco says, voice shaky, “please don’t talk like that about yourself—”

“And you … you’re the opposite. You made so many mistakes in your life but you didn’t hide or run. You owned up to them and turned your life around. You have to walk around with your biggest mistake tattooed on your arm and come to work surrounded by people who never forgave you and maybe never will, and you do it every day. You do it because you believe what you’re doing is good and important, and you do it even if it will never change their opinion of you. Yeah, you were a brat as a child. But then you grew up and became this amazing person, so brave and honest and self-aware. So ridiculously good at your job they hired you even with a Dark Mark on your wrist. And I’m sorry I was scared people would judge me for your mistakes. I’m sorry I couldn’t be as brave as you.”

“Harry …” Draco says, bottom lip trembling.

Harry takes a big breath and gulps down the air, struggling to regain some composure. He wipes his tears with the back of his hand and uncovers the ring.

“So, here. Put on the ring and we'll be equal. I know seven years sounds like a long time but it’s just a second of your life. And if you still want me after meeting the perfect version of myself, I’ll be here. Because I met your perfect version, Draco, and I don’t want him. Why would I? He’s nothing compared to you. He never got to make your mistakes so he never became the man I fell in love with.”

He closes his eyes—they’re so blurry they’re of no use to him anyway—and waits. For a while, he only hears the sound of rain violently hitting the windows. Then the floor creaks—is he doing it? Did he do it already?—and a rustle of fabric is getting closer and closer. 

Draco’s warmth surrounds him. Harry lets out a sob and throws himself into Draco’s arms. Draco’s chest is heaving and his shoulders are shaking. He’s crying. Harry opens his eyes. 

“Don’t cry,” he says, bursting into tears as well. “Don’t cry, please,” he begs, nestling Draco’s head to his chest.

Breath choppy, Draco inhales in an effort to calm himself. 

“I’m really in love with you, Harry,” he says into Harry’s drenched blouse, voice almost a whimper, “I’ve never been in love like this before. I don’t know … I don't know how to handle it.”

Harry tightens his embrace. Draco’s hair is in his mouth and eyes. He breathes him in, kisses his head. 

“You don’t know how to handle it?” Draco’s fingers sink into Harry’s back. “Have you seen me lately?”

Draco’s sobbing worsens. Harry grabs Draco’s chin and looks for his eyes. They’re the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen, even wretched like this. 

“What’s wrong?” he asks, tears rolling down his cheeks. “Why are you crying like this?”

“I just,” Draco chokes up, gasping, “I ca—can’t believe you just did that. I can’t believe you brought me the ring and … said all those things … and …” 

Harry cups Draco’s cheeks and wipes away his tears with his thumbs.

“Can’t believe it? Draco, I’d do anything for you.”

A sob escapes Draco’s mouth and Harry presses their lips together. Behind them, between reports, parchments and an assortment of swan quills, the ring reflects the rain-drenched windows.

* * *

“Mister Malfoy? Mister Potter? Is everything alright?” 

Draco pushes Harry away and whispers, “This is worse than we used to shag during lunch.”

Harry can’t contain the big, stupid grin on his face. He lifts himself from the floor and offers Draco a hand. “We’re fine, Lucas,” he shouts towards the closed door. “Just talking.”

“Crying and snogging under my desk,” Draco mutters, flattening his robes, “even teenagers have more sense than this.”

“That’s great! But—er, Mister Malfoy, you have that meeting in ten minutes—”

“Oh, shit.” And then, in a louder voice, “Thank you, Lucas!”

Harry wipes a dried tear from the corner of Draco’s eye.

“Is this my queue to let you get back to your professional self?”

“It is,” Draco says, putting Harry’s glasses back on. 

Harry grabs his hand and kisses it. 

“So be it. I need to go take care of the ring, anyway. Unless you want to—”

“I don’t.”

“All right. I’ll do that, then, while you go to your very important meeting. And when you’ve finished being a distinguished member of society, will you come over so that we can continue snogging and crying in peace?”

Draco laughs. He grabs an envelope from his drawer. He puts the ring inside, then slides it over to Harry.

“It’s a date.”

* * *

Harry’s only had the time to take a shower and start peeling the potatoes when the doorbell rings.

They don’t get hungry until after midnight, and so at midnight they turn on all the lights and the house echoes with their laughter as they make their way to the kitchen. Harry picks up the half-peeled potato abandoned on the counter while Draco makes himself comfortable in the chair by the hearth. The summer storm has passed but it’s chilly out so Harry starts a fire. Draco summons an apple from the fruit ball on the window sill and asks the question Harry’s been dying to be asked. 

Harry tells him about Quillweather's letters and unceremoniously informs Draco he went to Azkaban fully prepared to threaten Quillweather into telling him where the ring was. 

“But that’s extortion!”

“Yes. And if that didn’t work, I was going to break him out of prison.”

Draco crosses his arms. 

“I spent four months of my life putting him in there.”

“Thankfully, I didn’t have to. He didn’t want me to. He agreed to tell me where the ring is as long as I swore to give it back to him after I used it.”

“That doesn’t make any sense.”

“It will. It’s a complicated story, so let me start at the beginning. You see, Quillweather was in love with Crook.”

“In love with him? He killed him!”

“Yes. But that doesn’t mean he wasn’t in love with him. He fell in love with him in their youth but never dared admit it to anybody. They both ended up marrying other people. Quillweather spent ten years searching for the ring, hoping he’ll get Crook out of his system. Of course, it didn’t work as planned. The return was very hard. He was even more in love with him and, in a moment of weakness, he confessed everything to his wife. She consented to stay with him but never really forgave the betrayed.”

“Did Quillweather really tell you all of this?”

“Yeah, and you will see why. So, he went to—do you like mashed potatoes with a lot of cream or not too much?”

“Not too much.”

“Alright. So, Quillweather went on with his life until the beginning of last year, when Crook offered to sell him the Ring of Haan out of nowhere. Confused, Quillweather wanted to know how Crook came into its possession. Crook told him he found it in a teapot he bought years before. Somebody must have lost it, no doubt. But Quillweather knew that wasn’t possible. He had used the ring the year before, so it couldn’t have also been in Crook’s warehouse all this time. So he reached the only logical conclusion he could: his wife had taken her revenge and Crook knew everything. Embarrassed and hurt, he left without a word and never spoke with Crook again. After four months, he couldn’t take it anymore and poisoned him. He planned to kill himself too, but was too scared to do it when time came.” 

“He confessed the murder to you? After pleading not guilty?”

“He did. Because when Myriam told him they found the ring in his warehouse, in a random jewellery box, Quillweather finally understood how the ring had gotten to Crook in the first place.”

“How?”

Harry covers the steaming pot with a lid and turns to face Draco.

“Once somebody uses the ring, it goes to the last place they’d ever look for it. In the house of the person they’re in love with. When Quillweather used it, it went to Crook’s warehouse. And when it appeared back in Quillweather’s house, that could only mean Crook used it too.”

“Jesus … So Crook ...?"

“Yeah … you can imagine Quillweather’s state when he figured it all out.”

“And so you found the ring in … ?”

“The ring was in your apartment. It came to me through the open window of your bedroom when I summoned it from the street.”

“And you agreed to give it to him? After what he did?”

“Yes. I told him I’d let you put it on, then get it from my house and bring it to him. He cried when I went back.” 

“He’ll use it?”

“I imagine he already did.”

“And where did the ring go now? Since Crook’s dead?”

“Who knows?”

* * *

Harry traces one of the three white scars on Draco’s chest with his finger. He promised he won’t apologise about them—it was the one condition under which Draco let him take off his shirt the day he brought him the ring. 

“I’ve been meaning to say,” Draco says, lips pressed on Harry’s forehead, “I’m sorry about Adam.”

“I’m sorry about Adam. Was he upset?”

“He was convinced you came to beat him up. He dumped me on the spot.”

“Was I so scary?”

“No. You were sweet. I’ve never seen a sweeter drunk than you, politely introducing yourself to him as if you were making a new acquaintance.”

Harry laughs. He kisses Draco’s scars one by one, then looks up and smirks.

“Admit you’d have liked to see me start a fight for you.”

“I will admit to no such thing,” Draco chuckles, reaching for a glass of water on Harry’s nightstand.

“I’m sorry I got you dumped in the middle of the night.”

“To be fair,” Draco sighs, “he should have dumped me the first time I cried about you next to him. Or at least the fifth time it happened. Not my brightest moment, Adam. I’m sorry.”

“And I’m sorry about these,” Harry says, looking down at Draco’s chest.

Draco’s smile falters.

“You promised.”

“So sue me.”

“You’re the worst,” Draco laughs, rolling on top of Harry and kissing him. 

* * *

“Dinner’s ready.”

Harry watches from Draco's kitchen as Draco puts away his files and turns off the desk lamp. 

“I feel so spoiled,” he says when he sits down in front of the feast Harry’s prepared.

“As you should, because I’m spoiling you. How’s it coming along?”

“Not great. Weasley’s even worse than you at writing reports.”

“Do you summon him into your office to scream at him too?”

“No,” Draco says grumpily. “He’s a lot scarier than you.”

Harry laughs. “Speaking of Ron, I was wondering if maybe Friday night you’d like to join us for game night.”

“Game night?”

“If you don’t have too much work.”

“I can’t this Friday.”

“Oh.”

“But maybe the next one?”

* * *

Harry wakes up with Draco staring at him. He immediately understands why.

“I’m sorry,” he says, panting. 

“Don’t be sorry! What happened? Were you having a nightmare?”

Harry can still feel Dudley’s fingers scraping his face. He wants to get away from Draco’s penetrating gaze. He wants to hide somewhere until his heart stops racing. Wants to lock himself into Draco’s bathroom and spend the night on the cold tiles. But then Draco pulls him into his arms. 

“Is that what you were talking about? With your muggle family?”

Harry nods. 

“Oh, my darling. I’m so sorry.”

Harry buries his head in Draco’s chest. 

“Were they so horrible to you? I mean, I heard stories but …”

So Harry tells him. 

* * *

The Monopoly’s all set. The window is open. There’s a fan in the corner and the wine’s been submerged into a bucket of ice. 

Draco’s reading his deposition on a corner of the table and Harry’s putting the finishing touches on a cake—he’s been into baking lately—when the front door opens. Harry looks up at Draco, who looks at the door. The two sets of footsteps get closer and closer until Ron and Hermione are standing in the doorway. 

Draco stands up. The three of them look at each other. Harry can’t tell which one’s more awkward and he’s about to intervene when Draco removes his glasses and says, “I’m sorry I was a horrendous arse to both of you when we were at school.”

Ron lets out a dry laugh. “And Harry?”

“Ro—” Harry starts, but Draco shakes his head at him curtly.

“And to Harry too. I’m sorry.”

“It’s OK, Draco,” Hermione says, dropping her bag down next to Draco, “don’t mind Ron. It’s really nice to see you, it’s been too long.”

“It’s really nice to see you, too, Hermione,” he says, shaking her hand.

“If the majority has spoken, who am I to stand in the way of general happiness?” Ron sighs, advancing towards Draco. Draco offers him his hand but Ron waves it away.

Harry watches in awe as he puts an arm around Draco’s back and pulls him into an embrace. Draco mirrors him. Ron whispers something in Draco’s ear. Draco nods, then whispers something back and when they come apart Draco’s eyes are slightly wet. 

Later, after they eat and drink and laugh, after Ron beats everybody at Monopoly despite the alliance Draco made with Hermione halfway through, after Draco helps Harry do the washing up, as they make their way to bed, Harry asks, “What did Ron tell you earlier?”

Draco turns and peers down at Harry. His eyes are bright and wide and deep. 

“He told me we’re both very stupid, but that you’ll always be stupider than me because you tend to forget how much people love you. And that it’s up to me now to remind you everyday.”