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Chapter Text

CHAPTER ONE

Every pureblood in England knew about Bilius Weasley’s untimely demise.

It had happened back in the early 1970s, when he had been the shining star of the traitorous Weasley clan. The second-eldest of seven. A ne’er-do-well who charmed his way through both Muggle-loving and traditional circles with an ease and grace that had never before or since blessed their benighted blood.

Bilius Weasley had skipped out on spending the dark, early morning hours with Gwendolyn Selwyn. Instead, he took her virtue with him as he fled from Selwyn Estate into the misty night.

Had the droplets not obscured the window panes, he would have seen her sister cast the evil eye upon him.

He hadn’t seen the eye, but he had seen the Grim, not half a day later. He told whoever would listen that it was just a great shaggy mutt. His voice had rang reedy with an anxious thrum. He tried, hardest of all, to convince himself of his lies.

He was dead within the week.

Lucius had told Draco this story when he was seven years old, the most powerful magical number. Narcissa hadn’t cared one whit about arithmancy. Draco overheard her say so while he was pressed flat to the floor with his ear at the crack of his parents’ chamber’s door that night.

By the age of seven, Draco’s temper tantrums had increased in scale and abundance. He had set alight the skirt of Pansy’s frilly, floral party dress at their playdate that morning, because the sun had been too bright and the August air too humid and the starched collar of his scratchy dress robes too constricting. He shattered vases when the portraits of his ancestors gazed at him with flat unimpressed blue and grey eyes and chided him in overlapping voices about how he was failing to comport himself with dignity. His tutors scolded him and told Narcissa, each adult with a sour expression as Draco cringed beside them, that he was bright but distractible, smart but disruptive, clever but lazy.

Draco shouted when he should have spoken softly. He sprinted when he should have walked with grace. He demanded things from people with fists clenched on the table and elbows in his food when he should have asked nicely and sat politely with the same sort of small, engaging smile that always seemed to come so naturally to Mother.

Her small smiles and elegant laughter was why the other ladies loved her. Pansy’s smouldering petticoat and her accusatory tears were why the other children avoided him.

He learned that his presence was too big, but hadn’t yet learned how to contain it.

Amidst all their ancestors’ portraits, Lucius impressed upon Draco the importance of decorum . To be indecorous was to invite all sorts of animosity into one’s life. Take, for instance, Pansy’s mother, who for the rest of the morning had glared sharply at Draco and who he had been instructed to give his sincerest apologies, as the matron of Parkinson home. Notably, he had not been instructed to apologise to Pansy. She was an heir, like him, but in their circle of children, Draco held the most sway. Respect thy elders, until Draco was old enough to command them.

Lucius talked about the importance of respecting houses and names. He told Draco that to be slovenly with one’s affections, to be a carousing wastrel such as the least fortunate Weasley, was to put oneself in unnecessary jeopardy. Draco didn’t quite understand, but he got the gist: When one was looked on in spite, all sorts of cruel magic could be unleashed upon the victim.

That was why the Malfoys strove for elegance, poise, and above all, getting in with the right sort.

Lucius had been so confident about the right sort.

Draco was certain now, were he asked about his choices in his cell over a decade later, he would still defend his point of view.

Draco was not Bilius Weasley. He had learned that lying to oneself about fate only left one unprepared and stumbling when confronted with it. Trapped, with no way out, having spent too long looking in the other direction to fight it. Dead, just as Bilius Weasley had died.

In keeping with Lucius’ own paradoxical wishes, Draco had, most definitely, not fallen in with the right sort . Presciently, all sorts of cruel magic had indeed already been unleashed upon him, even before that crisp evening at the cusp between brittle autumn and the freeze of winter.

Therefore, when Draco saw the Grim, he called it what it was.

He stared at it from across the paddock where he had let the thestrals graze. It was half-hidden in the shadows of the underbrush. Its eyes flashed, luminous and white, even in the clouded, watery sunlight. White puffs of vapor curled around its jaws, the Grim the only heated body amongst the thriving thestral herd.

The skeletal horses were not spooked around it. Later, Draco would wonder if they could see it at all. A wolf in not so many words, shadowed between a herd of ghosts invisible to those more fortunate than Draco. A spectre, unseen even by those touched by a similar magic.

Draco left the gate open when he returned to the wilted roses of his mother’s overgrown garden.

Pinpricks of beaded blood, like tiny rubies, welled up on his pale skin as he pruned them. He still bled, alive amongst all the dead things. Despite all odds, alive.

But not for long.

~*~*~

Draco’s father was dead, and none of the portraits spoke anymore.

Draco liked to think he was not overburdened by this new, silent reality. Certainly he had always tired of his thrice Great-Uncle Septimus’ meandering, pointless stories, waffling for an hour or more while Draco stared blankly with slowly drying eyes at his skillfully painted mink coat, wondering if it would be too avant-garde to sport something of a similar fashion three hundred years later.

These stories, which often involved thrice Great-Uncle Septimus’ adventurous sexual liaisons with beautiful men and women in exotic locales, had seemed to become increasingly pointed as Draco had aged throughout Hogwarts. Thrice Great-Uncle Septimus had never been married, himself, being the seventh son and therefore fully within his obligations to be a wayward good-for-nothing ne’er-do-well, and thus Draco always felt the supposed takeaways from these critical anecdotes were egocentrically limited. But then, the same could be said for the entire Malfoy clan: Egocentrically limited, to a fault. Certainly Lucius had been.

Thrice-Great Uncle Septimus’ teaching clashed wildly with the foreboding warnings Lucius had bestowed upon Draco. Regardless of their opposed ideologies and irrespective of their outlooks, the one thing they had in common was both were no longer present in the Manor.

Without other evidence, Draco concluded that the simplest explanation must have been the most ready, and thus the swift, unspoken departure of almost all the portraits was of their own volition. When he passed the barren frames of his ancestors, he felt a petulant, uneasy jealousy well up within him.

Lucius refused to even set foot in his frame following his first fraught fifteen minutes of animation, which was curious if only because safehouses had to be in short supply for the disgraced Malfoy patriarch.

Draco wondered if perhaps there was a portrait of him at the dilapidated Lestrange hovel. He somehow couldn’t picture that his father would gaze dully at the mouldering chaise lounges and crumbling armoires in the water-damaged wreck under a crumbling roof for the rest of eternity. Draco figured with venom that his father would, however, find that preferable tenfold to confronting his son in conversation at the Manor. Witnessing something so disarming as his son’s unguarded feelings , naturally, had caused Lucius to flee like the self-centered coward he had revealed himself to be in the last years of his life.

The day Lucius Malfoy died had been a day of browns and greys. All the leaves of the woods around the Manor were aromatic in their slow deaths. The sky was that indistinguishable light grey that seemed not to know if it was threatening rain. The light breeze may have been comforting, if not for the chill it brought with it.

Draco had often looked to the portraits for some semblance of entertainment at the Manor, though in adulthood they were proving a far less loquacious bunch. As they had begun taking their leave, Draco’s selection had dwindled woefully. Unanimated, his mother still sat in her portrait outside her chambers with that lovely little smile on her painted face. His father looked stoic and firm in the portrait within his office, a mirror image placed across from the desk where Draco slouched.

When Draco was little, he had been punished for sneaking into his father’s office alone. Lucius had firmly warded it upon finding Draco at age nine attempting to reach a bust on the second-highest bookshelf. He had sent his son to stew sulkily in his chambers for a week, forbidden from venturing out of his own drawing room. The first day, he had cried and wailed loudly enough that Mother had cracked his door open sometime late in the night and told him wearily to stop his fussing and go to bed, for she would be casting a Silencing Charm on his door the next instant.

The elves had proven a far more malleable bunch, sneaking the little master into the kitchen to watch them cook and plying him with warm, freshly baked pastries, but it had been a terrible punishment all the same, to wilt under his father’s cold gaze at yet again doing something too audacious, too curious, too unruly.

As an adult and as Lord of the Manor, nobody could stop Draco from walking into his father’s office and sitting in the finely made leather seat. He did so with squirrely jumpiness, as though Lucius would at any moment stride through the door and send him to his chambers once more. But Lucius was in Azkaban for the rest of his life, and Mother was in France, and Draco was, for the first time, entirely alone.

The more Draco had ventured inside the office to investigate the forbidden objects on his father’s bookshelves and leaf through the arcane, crumbling old texts that he had become certain Lucius had only kept for show, the more his audacity had grown.

The day his father died, Draco had been contemplating his still painting, chewing his cucumber-and-cheese sandwich slowly. It was the same fare he had eaten for perhaps the millionth day in a row, despite how much he had grown to hate the taste.

Draco knew the Manor had years worth of food in its stores, hoarded away under Preserving Charms from the fields and farms the Malfoy family had owned for centuries. Even with the desecration the Dark Lord’s small but dedicatedly destructive army had wreaked, Draco could remain at the Manor for years well-fed, theoretically at least. But the Manor stubbornly would not give up its food, as though determined to rub this theory in Draco’s face. As though agreeing with the general masses he had not been punished enough by the Wizengamot, and in lieu of Azkaban, endless cucumber sandwiches would have to suffice as torment enough.

No matter how Draco admonished it, beguiling at first, then wheedling, and then, finally, insulting it in heated frustration, the only things it coughed up were cucumbers, cream cheese, bread, and the odd, withered apple. Draco should have felt fortunate it still gave him access to his tea. The last time he had eaten anything better was the last day he had seen Potter, right after his trial. How Potter had managed to procure the dripping cheese toasties and decadent soup they’d eaten remained a complete mystery to Draco.

Crumbs dropped onto the scratched mahogany of the antique desk and onto the stained Persian rug beneath his socked feet, because all the elves were gone and Draco did not know how to use the hob without magic. Even if he had, he’d never learnt how to cook or clean. He was sure that he’d set the Manor ablaze with more expediency than Aunt Bella had Hagrid’s thatched roof.

His father sat ramrod straight in the portrait. It was only in those last haggard months of the war that Lucius’ posture had folded in on itself, hunched and desperate. His comportment had less in common with the prideful aristocrat he was immortalised as, and more resembled the scuttling cower that Wormtail lurched into at the Dark Lord’s sinister side.

Lucius’ pale hair shone in a sleek sheet past his shoulders. Draco’s own was limp and ragged. It had grown out throughout the war, lank and artless, and fell out in clumps in the bath.

He had lost the will to care for himself: it had all felt so profoundly meaningless. Who would ever look at him again, anyway? If anyone did, it surely wouldn’t be to appreciate his looks. More likely, it would be a team of Aurors, come to clang the bars on the cell in Azkaban that Draco should have remained in for the rest of his life, if not for Harry Potter’s earnest testimony.

But no, Draco welcomed no guests, and he preferred it that way. His skin had become sallow and his ribs protruded from his scrawny chest like some picked-over carcass. There were only a few brief periods which interrupted his hazy everyday when his soul felt as though it was snapped back into his screaming body.

When these moments occurred, his vision suddenly, violently clearing, he wondered if he had made himself so unappealing on purpose. Perhaps unappetising was the word, more than unappealing. With the way Greyback’s yellow eyes had gleamed in the darkness beyond Draco’s bedroom, he’d clearly assessed Draco as prey—or food—rather than any sort of equal.

Draco was a shadow of his former self, whereas his father’s former self was still fully on display. Draco was gazing dully at the black cloak Lucius was wearing. It was Father’s favourite from around Draco’s third year, imported from the Americas and made from the hides of at least a dozen jackalopes. Irrespective, of course, of the animal’s endangered classification. If a creature was rare, it was all the more a collectible worthy of Lucius Malfoy. If a thing was forbidden, he loved to show the world that it was forbidden for everyone but him, flaunting his abundance of money and dearth of morals in one.

Lucius’ albino peafowl, another collectible of his, all prancing and bobbing with their ridiculous echoing calls, had been hunted for sport through the woodland before the Battle in the Department of Mysteries. His Abraxans had been ridden mercilessly until hobbled by Aunt Bella and those loutish Lestrange brothers while charging down Muggles for sport.

Like Lucius, the species never mattered to them. They would take them all and kill them: what mattered to them wasn’t how their hides decorated their bodies or homes. They cared not for rarity or intrigue. Only the strength of their suffering, and how they could revel in it.

Aunt Bella always made a spectacle of each of their deaths, taking her slow, cruel time to put each of Lucius’ prized herd out of its abject misery.

Draco, youthful and naive, had come running when he heard the first scream.

It was Yule of fifth year and Draco remembered himself as steeped in self-centered stupidity. He had not known the horrors that would befall his childhood home in a mere matter of months. This was before all that. This had been back when a loud noise was something to run to and stare at, a spectacle to gawk at and not for a moment fret fearfully that that writhing creature could easily have been himself on the frozen ground.

This was back when bad things did not happen to Draco.

Back before it became all that remained of his life.

Back then, Aunt Bella had scared him, with her yellowed, rotten grin and her dark eyes which ate all light, but he had been told that their family was special. Their family was better . This was back when he still believed what he was told, back when his parents and their opinions had felt important and meaningful.

If he could trade clenched-jaw jibes with Potter on a daily basis, or seethe at the blatant academic favouritism that hideous mudblood received, then he could endure a meal a day with his mother’s sister. Surely, she had not been so coarse before fifteen years in Azkaban. Surely her stately upbringing would return to her soon.

A shrill, agonised shriek had ripped through the frigid air of the gardens. The delicate fairies alighting the frosted pines had all dimmed out as one. Draco had bolted from Narcissa’s side despite her manicured nails clutching at his fine wool cloak like Veela talons. He didn't heed it for the warning it was. His mother had, after all, grown up alongside Bellatrix. She likely knew her sister’s capability for violence intimately, surpassed only by her victims.

Around the hedges and by the woodland treeline, the snow was torn and reddened around the awkward figure of the flailing winged horse.

Draco slowed as he saw the way the beast thrashed, pausing as he noted the pink foam dripping from its lips. His aunt had urged him forwards in that strange, cooing baby voice she preferred, thuggish smiles on the lips of both his uncles. It would be good practice, she said. The creature was already in pain.

At his elbow, Narcissa had protested. Draco didn’t recall her words, his attention too affixed on the frantic puffs of air released from the struggling creature’s flaring nostrils and the visible whites of its wide, rolling eyes.

“You never did like my presents, did you, Cissy?” Aunt Bella had mocked. “I only wanted to practice. The squirrels, the polecats, that Kneazle of our traitorous sister—you could never understand. I tried to show you, but you’ve always been weak ,” she sneered the last word, slanting her gaze from her sister to Draco, who stood, more frozen than any of the pines around them.

“What about you, little nephew?” she purred. “Are you as weak as your lovely little mama?”

Draco had learnt to run away from screams, not towards.

~*~*~

Draco knew his father had died in Azkaban when his icy painted eyes blinked awake.

The full weight of Draco’s shock did not hit him at that moment, however, because a gummy piece of soggy bread and curdling cream cheese hit the back of his throat on his sharp inhale.

Draco couldn’t see the furrow in his father’s brow through his teary eyes as he hacked and coughed, but he could hear clearly enough the disapproval in his crystalline tone.

“Draco, you’re not to come into my office without my express permission. You’ve run it to ruin, you foolish boy. I raised you to value the family name, not soak it in…” His upper lip curled in distaste. “Whatever has destroyed my mother’s Persian rug.”

“Ha!” Draco croaked painfully. He pounded on his chest, taking raspy lungfuls of air. The rest of his dubious lunch was now smeared onto grandmother Lucille’s rug, seeping into the ominous dark stains. Draco preferred to look at the white smears of the cream cheese, anyway. Perhaps then he could forget what was beneath it.

“And what are you wearing?” Lucius demanded, eyeing Draco’s wrinkled pyjamas. He wore one of Narcissa’s cashmere jumpers atop his sleep shirt. All his own jumpers reeked of ash and terror, and they were all singed and fraying from too many cleaning spells. He was straining the shoulder seams irreparably, but she would be in France for the next fifteen years, and surely periwinkle wouldn’t be in vogue again by the time she returned.

It had smelled like her floral perfume when he had put it on three days prior. Now, it smelled like the cold sweat of nightmares.

“The only place attire like that is acceptable are your bedchambers,” his father’s portrait admonished.

The portrait seemed unwilling, or more likely unable, to admit that his reanimation was due to his untimely demise. Perhaps unleashing his derision for his spoiled, ineffective son mattered more than even his own mortality.

“You and your school friends haven’t been destroying our ancestral home with your little celebrations, have you?” His glare was heedless of the grease in Draco’s unwashed hair and oblivious of the obvious fact that the office was ruined not from a drunken night of teenaged debauchery, but from mayhem and malice of the lowest and most evil degree.

Draco raised his face to the portrait, knuckling the tears from his eyes. Lucius had opened his mouth to continue his deluge of disapproval, but paused at the sight of his son’s splotchy, reddened face.

Draco knew he did not look well. The spectre in the mirror of late had looked like the condemned aftermath of his and Potter’s duel that Myrtle had hoped for. Another ghost to haunt her hellish toilets, this one a victim of Potter instead of the Dark Lord. Draco found himself wishing the spell had cut just a little deeper many times after he had, inconsolably, woken up. As he did now.

He felt his soul drop heavily out of his stomach as the shock crossed his father’s aristocratic features. For the first time in months, Draco finally felt something other than bloodchilling terror or dull, dispassionate acceptance of the destruction around him.

“What year is it, Father?” he rasped. His voice was hoarse and creaky from disuse. He meant for his voice to come out soft, sharp, the way his mother’s always had when Lucius was on the poorest side of her judgement and she wanted him to know it. The way it had sounded the night after Draco learned about the Grim for the very first time.

Instead, it tore itself from his throat, cracked and a little manic. He had never been good at being threatening. He always stood far from both Mother’s icy composure and Aunt Bella’s insane, wide-eyed glee. He inhabited a third corner of the emotional triangle— overwhelmed and fearful, in perpetuity.

“I…” Lucius paused, for the first time looking uncertain. “You’ve just been mauled by that repulsive oaf Rubeus Hagrid’s feral monstrosity.”

Ah, Draco thought, filled with sudden sorrow. This portrait had been commissioned in autumn, 1993. This Lucius knew nothing of the Dark Lord’s return, nothing of Draco’s impossible assignment, nothing of his own deathly stays in Azkaban. Imbued with the memories of the man who had stood for the painting, the Lucius of 1994 to his death day would remain a mystery to the portrait.

If only Draco could be so lucky.

He could feel an incredulous laugh bubbling in his scratchy throat. His father was dead. His father, dead , and the only thing remaining of him was a shell that didn’t even recall the worst of himself.

As always, the only witness to the worst of Lucius Malfoy would always be Draco. Forsaken as a child, told to be a liar, told to be deserving of it, told to be quiet. Forsaken as an adult, the only memory keeper in his tarnished gilded cage.

His father, dead, and Draco didn’t even know how, didn’t know if it was the Dementors or the guards or by his own hand somehow. Yet here he was, staring at his son as though Draco was the one who’d gone mad.

His father, who had betrayed him. Who had instilled within him the belief that he would never be good enough, no matter how much he strove. Who had, convinced of his own righteousness and steeped in his own arrogance, led their family to ruin. Who had caused them all unimaginable, irrevocable suffering.

His father, who Draco loved anyway.

“Do you know who destroyed our ancestral home, Father?” Draco asked rhetorically. His eyes felt wet again, but wide, now. “Do you know who threw this awful, years-long party? Do you know what’s ground into the embroidery of Grandmother Lucille’s Persian rugs, Father, because I do, and I had no say in it!”

The snake-head cane clicked on the shining oil-painted floor as Lucius took an indignant step back. “You are my son,” he hissed. “You have no right to address me with this tone.”

“No right?” Draco scoffed with a derisive laugh. A mocking smile remained on his twisted lips, a painful, ugly thing. “You can’t drag me to the cellars anymore, Father.” He brandished his wand, warm ever since it had left Potter’s hand in the aftermath of Draco’s trial, buzzing with energy as though Potter himself still held it around Draco’s grasp. “You’re nothing but canvas, oil, pigment, and enchantment.”

Draco had held the hawthorn wand close to his chest throughout the lonely, creaking nights in the Manor. Magic wafted off it as it never had done before. It was, for all accounts, an average wand for an average caster before it had struck Potter’s calloused palm.

When Draco held it close to his heart, he could almost pretend another living being had curled up to him, and that he was not alone but for the malignant spirits that haunted the old corridors, and the memories which lurked in every shadow.

The wand did not calm him, now. It only made him more aware that, for the first time in his life, he was more powerful than the man before him.

His father’s nostrils flared in anger. “Don’t speak to me that way,” he repeated, his voice filled with cold fury that would have filled Draco with dread, were he not saturated in it already. His father’s threats didn’t work anymore—Draco had lived with fear for years. It had become his only constant, and perversely, to feel it again was a comforting sort of thrill, one that kicked up a large wave of all the vitriol settled like silt in the depths of his untethered soul.

“You sold our family to a madman,” Draco accused, his voice raising to a volume he had never before thrown at any member of his family. “ You are the reason this house is ruined, you are the reason I’m stuck in this hovel, and you are the reason you’re dead, alone in some filthy cell beside the North Sea!” Draco blinked angrily, wiping his tears away with his wand hand so roughly his skin stung. “I have every right, and you should be on your knees with gratitude that I don’t set your canvas alight this instant.”

“I can’t speak to you like this,” his father sneered, though his face was paler, his eyes tighter than before. “Selfish, spoiled child. You always let your emotions rule you, no matter how many times I tried to teach you better.”

Draco barked a laugh, humorless and filled with fury. He remembered apologizing to Paulina Parkinson. He wondered if his father had ever apologised to anyone, and knew, with quiet grief, that it would never be him.

The hawthorn wand hummed in his hand.

“Incendio,” Draco cast, and Lucius had departed his frame before he could witness that it was the crumb-ridden pane of mahogany that Draco had set alight.

Chapter Text

CHAPTER TWO

The thestrals had begun arriving as the peafowl and Abraxans were slaughtered.

Aunt Bella paid them little heed, having at that point moved on to tormenting much more fascinating prey. She kept an ever-rotating roster of Muggle prisoners in the dungeons, refreshed by weekly raids on Salisbury and its environs.

Sometimes, Draco could hear their screams all the way up in the dubious sanctity of his bedroom. He had always thought of it as his sanctuary—the forested wallpaper teeming with inviting animals and lovely blooms, and the wyvern carved within his headboard, who sometimes slipped into the wallpaper to hunt but who always returned to Draco’s bed before he slept. It warmed the bedding with his enchanted fire-breath. When Draco had been very little, banished to his bedchambers or wincing, red-faced and tearful after a stint in the cellars, he had thought of the wyvern as his only true companion. He had wished he could have rode it into the wilderness of the wallpaper, so that they needn’t ever return.

Those childish flights of fancy felt no farther away than during the abhorrent insomniac nights throughout Draco’s summers between fifth and seventh year. His sanctuary had been ruined the very first night Greyback stood outside his bedroom’s threshold, scoring the wood as he slowly ran his claws up and down, whispering into the keyhole all the fun things they could do together when Draco inevitably lost the Dark Lord’s favour. On those nights, everything sentient in Draco’s room cowered: even his serpent area rug would quake beneath the bed and would refuse to come out for days.

Draco could not remember what specifically Greyback had said. A thin, tenuous membrane covered the memories, holding them away from the rest of him. Draco preferred it that way, unable to bring himself to wonder what had been so unmentionably horrid, and why.

Hogwarts had been overrun. His home had become a madhouse. He had no other sanctuary left, and so Draco took to wandering the Malfoy wood, and this is where he found the herd.

Throughout the war, he had thrown them chunks of frozen meat from the kitchens. He had tried not to think about the bodies that piled in the cellars as he watched them eat, bodies they would have no doubt scavenged, unhindered by the morals that kept springing up to cut Draco down at the knee, unnoticed until far, far too late.

Shaky and wan, shuddering with an ever-present chill, he had returned from his two-month stint in Azkaban after the Battle of Hogwarts to find them huddled by the treeline. He had wept from relief, feeling the weight of a fear he had not known he held dissipate.

He kept the stables open that the Abraxans used to use open useopen, which they all eschewed but the aged and the injured of the thestral herd. They came and went as they pleased, save for the eldest or the most crippled.

Draco had a favourite. Myrna, he had named her.

She was young, he thought by her high spirit and the energy with which she hobbled around the paddock. One of her back legs was shrunken and twisted. She barely seemed to notice until it became a nuisance to her, though as Draco observed them, he noted that many of the herd seemed to treat her with an abundance of suspicion.

Draco was no veterinarian, and only knew what he had taught himself, trying—and often, gut-wrenchingly, failing—to ease the suffering of the Muggles in the Malfoy dungeons while the most hateful members in the Dark Lord’s band of lunatics were otherwise occupied.

He told himself he did so only because their wails kept him up at night. But then Potter had arrived at the Manor, and Draco had lied for him and given him his wand.

Draco had to reckon with the truth, huddled in terror in the sharp corner between the armoire and the wall. He had clutched the obsidian pendant, inlaid with solid gold protection runes, and had desperately tried to forget what Greyback had saccharinely whispered to him through the crack in the door.

It was impossible, the idea that he hadn’t been healing the prisoners out of his own self-interest. That he had, so unforgivably selfishly, been endangering his life and the lives of his parents for something as naive as the guilt and shame of having the prisoners kept in his home. Yet the fact of it was insistent, niggling at every soft part of his mind left unprotected.

During the nights when the Manor was too filled with horror to remain within the dubious safety of his bedroom, the thestrals had taken him under their wings instead.

The midnight air had raised the hair on his shaking arms and his weak eyes had struggled in the moonlight, and yet every evening that he had been driven into the woods, they had found him. Draco had wondered, for so many nights, whether it was safer to be in his room, where Greyback surely knew to find him, or out in the wild, where he and his wolves could delight themselves with a chase before tearing into their prey.

But the wolves never found him in the woods, and Greyback always wafted his coppery, visceral stench before Draco’s withholding wards. Draco wondered if it was the curious magic of the winged, skeletal horses which had protected him, when he had no wand of his own with which to do the same.

Draco did what little he could to repay them.

He arrived at Myrna’s stable as the sun rose orange and yellow above the horizon, the air crisp and echoing with birdsong. A bucket of raw meat was in his right hand and a compress of dittany and murtlap oil for her twisted limb was in the left. His wand was tucked behind his ear, humming and warm, a comforting presence by his temple.

She snorted and stamped her foot impatiently while he approached, her tail swishing with eagerness. He smiled, unlocking the door to her stall as he set her meal down. He spoke to her gently, the sound hoarse and rusty—he only ever heard his voice now when he was with his thestrals. Weeks after his argument with his father, the fire that had ignited his voice was extinguished. Something seemed to press on his voice box, making anything above a whisper a near-impossible feat.

He let the meat slough, blood and viscera, into the manger. He stroked her side as she stepped eagerly up to it. Her skin was taut over the vertebrae of her spine, and it was, perhaps, not as warm as one would imagine a living being’s to be, but it was gently warm beneath his fingertips all the same.

Slowly, as not to spook her, he made his way to her crippled leg. But when he shuffled around her, his breath caught in his lungs.

In the dark shadows of the stable, laying amongst the hay with its head on its forelegs, a Grim watched Draco.

“Oh,” he breathed, his hands tightening around the compress. The murtlap oil soaked into the cracked skin of his hand.

He had known that seeing it at the wood’s edge hadn’t been a dream or a delusion, but much like Greyback’s awful promises, Draco had willed it away. He had put the memory in a place in his mind where it existed only behind the membrane, so that only its indistinct silhouette remained observable.

Myrna snorted into her bucket as she enjoyed her breakfast. She ate sloppily as ever, unaware of the gooseflesh on Draco’s arms beneath his woolen coat, or the constriction in his lungs, or the floaty feeling in his head, as though his soul had become untethered and he were about to drift away from his body.

His wand was warm in his pocket. The hum of it seemed friendly, inviting. But all Draco could see was his own demise, even as he surrounded himself with portents of other less fortunate creatures’ deaths.

Worse yet that his death was in the shape of a large animal, but of course it was. His nightmares come back to haunt him. Draco had only ever felt more like prey, stock still and quailing, before Nagini.

He took a shaky inhale, and then another. The Grim blinked slowly. Once, then twice. Neither moved.

Myrna ate. The cold air swirled around them, the strong scent of hay and copper carried amidst them all.

Finally, the Grim set its muzzle between its paws and heaved a great sigh, those luminous eyes closing in relaxation. In repose like this, he did not look so dissimilar from a great black dog, the likes of which Draco had seen at the periphery of the Forbidden Forest for a few of his middling Hogwarts years.

“Right,” Draco whispered. From the cold, from the way he lacked the ability to blink away from the Grim, and from an overabundance of emotion, Draco felt his eyes water.

Under his palm, he could feel Myrna’s heartbeat through her papery skin. Her flank was warm. She was not dead, not yet, and neither was Draco.

“Right.”

He closed his eyes for a slow exhale. The water in his eyes spilled over, curling towards his earlobes, and the cold prickling sensation in his wide eyes was replaced by the warmth of his closed lids.

When he opened them, the Grim was still there. It seemed, for now, that he would not move.

“I wish you had come two years earlier,” Draco told the Grim in an irascible, workmanlike way. Frustration spilled into his fear. “Would have saved everyone the hassle.”

The beast made no indication that it heard him.

Chapter Text

CHAPTER THREE

The thing about grief, Draco learned, was that it was dreadfully boring.

There was only so much wandering around the Manor that Draco could take. He felt himself to be a blight upon the home, like one of the less-friendly spectres who had relegated themselves to dark corners of the attics or cellars. They hadn’t had a ghoul, not in generations, but perhaps Draco would be someone’s Boggart. Likely his own, to haunt a happier, more foolhardy period in his youth.

Only so many soggy cucumber and cheese sandwiches he could gag on while they stuck glommily to the roof of his mouth. Only so many times he could run his hands through his greasy hair, grimace, and listen to the hateful little voice in the back of his head that told him he didn’t deserve to feel clean, because he wasn’t, and he never would be.

His limbs felt leaden, and his body bloated and dessicated at the same time, but his mind buzzed with brutal activity. He laid akimbo on the wrinkled bedding of his childhood bedroom, the sheets rumpled from yet another night locked in battle with them. His tapestry quilt, made by Grand-mère Druella depicting the Tales of Beedle the Bard, was in a disrespectful pile on the crumbly floor. His curtains were half-open, where he had flung them in some halfhearted endeavour to sun the room some weeks ago. The sunlight that sluggishly rolled in reminded Draco of being beneath the Great Lake, staring at the floor-to-ceiling glass from the common room.

Draco had existed through four months of dreadful nothing, rotting away in his ancestral home, paralysed by the terror of not knowing, the apprehension of thinking when will they come for me without knowing who that nebulous, threatening they was, the horror of the haunting past.

He did not know how to do anything of use. He did not know how to cook, his failing emphasised by the continued knobbiness of his adolescent knees and elbows, the rumbling hunger in his empty stomach that felt too distant to be urgent. He did not know how to clean, bloodstains and shattered glass remaining on the Manor floor after the final ransacking by Aurors and Death Eaters in their own post-bellum Final Battle twelve hours after the Battle of Hogwarts, complete with a siege of the grounds and a ruination of the front steps. Some of the stains, Draco suspected, were caused by the Manor itself, reacting with all the generations of Malfoy magic to defend itself and its inhabitants from the second hostile takeover it suffered in as many years.

He knew how to garden, sort of, thanks mightily to seven years of effort from Professor Sprout. His mother’s roses sorely needed it. Perhaps, when she returned a decade and change later, she would be delighted to find a veritable forest of roses, Damask and China and Fortune-Telling, that bathed the grounds in their sweet scent. If she returned at all.

Father wouldn’t, and Draco still did not know if that was a good thing, or the worst thing that had ever happened to him.

Draco knew how to care for the thestrals because of Hagrid. What an awful menace he had been to the half-giant who had taught him how to keep alive the very creatures that remained Draco’s only salvation from complete and total isolation. Draco thought to write him an apology for how he had treated him and his terrible nightmare creatures, hippogriffs and skrewts and dragons. Then, he had shuddered, and promptly plopped the idea in the place in his head where emotions didn’t exist.

He still thought about it, though.

He thought, maybe, if he could keep the idea in the place where emotions didn’t exist long enough, it would either wither away and die. Either that, or, with Father rolling in his unmarked grave, Draco just might disobey one of Father’s primary teachings, and bow the Head of House Malfoy to those Lucius had deemed lesser.

So the idea was added to the pile of debris in the back of his head, a veritable Room of Hidden Things in his mind where everything too overwhelming to fully contemplate went to languish. Therein laid mountains of intolerable memories and insane ideas and ominous future prospects all stacked higgledy-piggledy atop one another.

Amidst the chaos that was the Place of Hidden Thoughts lurked the Grim, skulking in the shadows of his mind as it did the shadows of the stables and the treeline of the woods. Thinking about it too long made his breath come in short pants and his pulse racket in his ears, so Draco did what he had learned to do throughout his past two years of existence, and ignored it with every fibre of his being.

He wrestled himself out of the sweaty bedcovers and trundled his way to what had been his mother’s morning room. It was one of the few rooms mostly spared from the carnage of the war, and Draco had thrown blankets over the large, stained-glass windows, because he wasn’t going to be doing any of his potioneering in the cellars. He wasn’t going to be doing anything in the cellars, except perhaps bricking them up.

Throughout all of seventh year, he had made himself Calming Draughts and Scar Salves. Severus had taught him how to make them.

Draco had thought it curious that Severus had taught him the latter. It was such a practice in vanity in which Severus surely had never indulged before. He’d worn a strange and puckered expression on his face whenever he caught a glimpse of the scar which coiled up Draco’s jaw, as though he had bitten into a lemon.

Draco had meant to ask, but there had always been more important things on his mind, such as survival, or where Severus’ true loyalties laid, or for how long Severus would shelter him in the Headmaster’s chambers when Draco refused to torture Longbottom and the other rabble rousing Gryffindors with the Carrows and the rest of the Marked at Hogwarts.

Recently, Draco had been working on a poultice-splint combination to try to get Myrna’s leg in some sort of working order without hurting her more. He was basing his experiments off of the stack of healing textbooks, magical creature care tomes (none of which, thankfully, bit him), and potion’s books he had read cover to cover and back again throughout the last year.

Back then, he’d brewed in his ensuite bathroom, protected by wards so no cruel hands could meddle. But the fumes had made his head spin, and he’d developed a persistent wet cough after only a few months.

At Hogwarts, Severus had let him use the Potions Professor’s office to brew. He had appointed Draco his Teaching Aid, who thus taught more classes than not while Severus was occupied with the Dark Lord’s bidding or various dubious actions of Headmastering.

Draco had not been a very good teacher. He was impatient and huffy, filled with scorn for those who couldn’t understand something so simple as following directions.

Potioneering was no Vanishing Cabinet—the dos and don’ts were spelled out in ink on a page. All they needed to do was read, which they had supposedly been taught to do long before blighting Hogwarts with their illiterate presence. Draco couldn’t understand how someone could cock up something so obvious.

But his teaching acumen had hardly mattered. The assignments he set were unsupervised by the Carrows, who had little interest in actual education, even less so than Umbridge two years before. So what if he had the children concocting Soothing Solution or Blood-Clotting Cream or Pain-Relief Potion? Most of their creations were nothing but rubbish. And once Draco’s own emergency stores were shored up, both at Hogwarts and the Manor, well. The Carrows never had to know who was supplying Pomfrey of almost all of her basic bottled remedies.

It wasn’t much, wasn’t anything, compared to Weasley or Granger or even his own mother. Nevertheless, between Poppy Pomfrey’s and Potter’s testimony at his trial two months after the Battle, Draco had evaded all corrective action save for a measly three months house arrest save for the time he’d already spent slowly freezing alive in Azkaban. He was the most astonished of every spectator.

The deadline for his imprisonment had come and gone with absolutely no fanfare. It was only addressed with Draco staring at the grandfather clock in the hallway leading towards his father’s office, listening to the claxon the bells and gears made. He hummed to himself noncommittally amidst the sound.

His father’s own trial, two days prior from Draco’s own, had surely bolstered the leniency of his sentence.

It had been so incongruous, for the man who had led him to the Dark Lord with lies and false promises to try to protect him now, when it was too late.

But it hadn’t been too late, because if Lucius hadn’t obfuscated under Veritaserum like he had in his first trial in 1981, Draco may still be in Azkaban. Regardless of whatever delusional nonsense Pomfrey or Potter had to say about him.

Draco had supplied the Hospital Wing with half the potions that Madam Pomfrey doled out to the casualties of the Battle. Draco had lied to Aunt Bella. Draco had tried to stop Vince from casting the Fiendfyre. But Draco had also taken the Mark. Willingly so, unlike what his father had sworn.

“I gave him no choice,” Lucius lied to the tribunal. He’d stared out to the middle distance, his gaze touching no one and nothing in the courtroom. Draco, seated in chains to the side of the stands, had paled at the words. His mother’s hand on his knee was a gripping claw, her chipped nails digging into the bony cap of it.

It wasn’t an outright falsehood. That was how he managed it, Draco was certain, both during this trial and back in 1981. Though this time, unlike before, he wasn’t twisting words to save himself, but someone else.

Lucius had indeed impressed upon Draco, in not so many words of course, that he’d never had a choice. Not quite in the spirit of what the Wizengamot had asked, of course, but there was nothing Veritaserum could do about a simple difference in interpretation.

The pressure to be the perfect pureblood heir had always been unrelenting. The terror of disappointing his parents had been all-consuming ever since he could remember.

When Granger had beaten him for first in class in first year, Draco had sequestered himself amongst his bedding and sobbed, feeling like he was the worst and most useless stain upon the family tree to ever exist. Woefully, he included thrice-Great Uncle Septimus in that miserable assessment.

Lucius, as his father before him and his father before that, had disciplined Draco with corporal punishment upon word of his failures. It was the done thing. The Malfoys were nothing if not traditionalists.

But the war plodded on and Draco had increasingly, unwittingly revealed to the horrors residing in their household that he was not talented, nor even particularly capable, at torture or torment or anything more than casual cruelty.

Afraid of his son’s safety, though not as much as he feared for his own, Lucius had become desperate.

“I went to my son’s bedchambers and threatened him with the Imperius Curse,” he continued to an audience of horrified gasps. A gruff walrus of a man with a prodigious moustache who Draco had seen at his father’s galas nearly a decade ago, exclaimed, “I say!”.

The light of the wall sconces fluttered, and Draco wondered if he imagined the scent of spring earth and petrichor that had always accompanied Potter throughout the halls of Hogwarts.

It was only Draco who knew that Lucius’ threat had been anything but cruelty.

“Draco, you must,” he had said in Draco’s ensuite bathroom. Bloodied gauze littered the space around the sink. Blood-Clotting Cream was smeared across the cut that Aunt Bella had slashed on Draco’s face, from temple to chin, when he had failed to cast Cruciatus yet again.

Lucius was wild-eyed, his fingers digging into Draco’s shoulders as he shook him. “You must, for yourself, for your mother and I.” His voice had thrummed with authority, underlaid with the breathlessness of terror.

Draco had blinked, hard.

He’d stared at the ceiling above his father’s head and tried not to break down, because he couldn’t. Not in another bathroom so like the first, not in front of another person whose opinion he so valued, not when the cut would be so much deeper than skin.

“I can’t,” he’d whispered around the boulder in his throat. The words had tasted vile.

“Do you need me to Imperius you?” his father had asked urgently, his voice a mere whisper under his breath. “I will. If that’s what you need, I will.”

Professor Moody—or the man who had masqueraded as Professor Moody, that year—had Imperiused Draco, one single time. He’d had him pirouette like he hadn’t done since his father had taken him out of ballet at age eight, telling Narcissa they needed to foster a more masculine sensibility in their son.

It had felt so good to sink into that golden haze. Just do as I say, and you will be perfect, it had whispered to him. Desperate to please, Draco had acquiesced immediately.

Such a good little puppet, the curse had caressed him.

Draco had finally felt safe and loved, for what felt like the first time in his life.

When Moody had stopped, the filaments of gold holding him in the curse’s web had festered to viscous black. The knowledge that he was less of the leader his father had raised him to be, no better than a dog begging for a lead, tarred the insides of his mind.

Two years later, he had proven it with a brand on his arm. Chattel, and useless at that, because he couldn’t even do what his poorly chosen master demanded.

It would have been so delightful to follow another leader. To cede control, to uncurl his grasping fingers, and trust that someone else would protect him.

But Father didn’t care about the things that Draco did. He didn’t care if Madam Pomfrey had her potions stores. He didn’t care if the elves had a safe place to huddle, on the chaise by the fireplace in Draco’s bedroom. He didn’t care if the firsties were tortured, and he didn’t care that Draco couldn’t stomach watching it.

His first action in a squalid string of forced bravery, Draco had refused.

The Wizengamot didn’t know that, though.

Lucius was already going to Azkaban. The certainty of it was etched into every line on his once-proud face. A hundred years or a thousand—what was one more Unforgivable Curse if he would never survive to pay his dues in entirety, anyway?

This was what had driven Draco to madness, seeing his father’s portrait blink awake.

How dare he, how dare he lead his family to ruination, only to cushion Draco’s fall.

How dare he lead him by the hand into the dark and then do something so hateful as make Draco unable to hate him. And then die, the awful, unforgivable bastard.

So Draco hardly bathed, and he hardly ate, and he hardly did anything at all except care for the thestrals and stare at the wilding roses.

When he returned to the stables, potion in one hand and food bucket in the other, the Grim was waiting for him.

~*~*~

“I don’t have food for you,” Draco told it.

It was laying in the back of Myrna’s stall again. He had changed her dressing, let her eat, and released her to the paddock with the rest of the thestrals to canter about in the sunlight. He could hear them snuffle and whinnye playfully as they chased one another.

The Grim blinked at him placidly, its great dark head rising from its paws.

“And you can’t have Myrna!” he huffed, placing his hands on his hips and levelling it with what he hoped was a fierce glower to cover the fear that still shook his bones when it gazed at him head-on.

Neither of them moved for a long enough time that Draco began to feel foolish. Heat rose to his face. He withdrew his wand from behind his ear with a bit of a sulk, though he was unsure, really, what he had expected. For the Grim to simply disappear after a robust scolding? To put its tail between its legs, bow its head, and lope back into the woodland?

No, of course not. Only Draco gave up so easily.

Huffing, he began to cast the cleaning spells he’d researched in the homemaking section of the Manor library, compiled generations beforehand when the Malfoy line had not been cursed to produce a sole heir. The stables were the only place he felt comfortable trying—if he made anything blow up out here, he could likely figure out a way to put it together again. If he blew up Great-Great-Great Grandmother Forsythia's tea sets, there would never be any getting them back, no matter how many repairing charms he cast.

The books contained all sorts of traditionalist waffle on how to best please one’s husband, as though any marriage involving the Malfoy line would involve neither an estate filled with house elves nor an illustrious chain of extramarital affairs. As far as Draco knew, his parents had been dedicated to one another, which was the exception to the rule according to their speckled and spotted bloodline. The family wreath, as Draco quietly called it, was filled with all sorts of blacked-out breaks.

Draco had tried to trace it one sleepless night when he had felt particularly self-pitying, trying to find some ancestor more disgraced than himself, and all he found was probable evidence that his Great-Grandmother Felicity had not been as faithful as her name suggested. Perhaps there was a spot of Veela blood tainting the purity of their pureblood line. Unlike Draco, however, Felicity’s shame had not reared up and crippled her in the prime of her life. Her sordid solicitations only came to light decades after her death.

Draco had never been one for such luck, it seemed.

Scourgify, and then a Sweeping Spell, and then a Warming Charm and another Scourgify for the stubborn bits. Draco Vanished the old hay and summoned the new from the stable beside them. He turned to the manger and tried not to catch a glance of the stomach-turning gore within before cleaning it as well. It felt good to do something useful, to see a task completed and done by his hands. Within his palm, his wand was warm, contented by the thrum of magic through its core.

Replacing his wand behind his ear and clapping his hands on the tops of his thighs, Draco surveyed his work and then turned his head to speak to the ceiling shafts, so as not to make eye contact with the beast laying so quietly below them.

“Well,” Draco said. “Stay there if you like, you stubborn creature.”

Had Draco been younger, more reckless and less wary, he may have insulted it like that great chicken from third year. On the off chance that it did understand him, however—and a very certain suspicion that was, indeed—Draco didn’t want to risk the maiming. He was sure that whatever a Grim would do had to be much worse than some lowly hippogriff.

Unfortunately, Draco’s self-possession did not stop the Grim from retaliating, if in a much less violent way than Buckbeak. Because when Draco plodded back to the Manor to make himself a cup of tea and scrounge himself a withered apple before retiring to concoct more Calming Draughts, he caught sight of something dark, moving slowly out of the corner of his eye.

The Grim was following him.

“Right,” Draco muttered. “Right. Peachy. Absolutely tip-top.” Nervously, he ran his fingers through his fringe.

It wouldn’t matter much, a sardonic voice in his head supplied. Father dead, Mother banished. Pansy, Blaise, and Theo to the continent. Vincent dead. Gregory in Azkaban. Even Father’s portrait ran away. The only ones who would notice Draco’s untimely demise were likely the thestrals.

He peered down at himself glumly. He’d made a few solid meals for Myrna, perhaps, if she managed to hobble her way out of her paddock in search of him. But if the rest of the herd followed, good luck. They’d have him stripped to the bone in mere minutes. And then where would she be?

Draco aired these musings over a cup of tea with three sugars in their finest china, passed down from Great-Great-Great Grandmother Forsythia, whose obsession with etiquette and fine dining bordered on neurosis. If it was to be his last meal, it would at least be something nice. No withered apples in his hand to indicate to the DMLE forensic cleanup crew how far the Malfoy heir had fallen.

If he even got a clean-up crew, that was. Perhaps his skeleton would lay in the kitchen forever, and there would be no blood-written proclamation on the wall outside Myrtle’s bathroom to direct anyone to it.

“If you intend to kill me,” Draco pointed out, staring down the creature who had quite politely tucked his forelegs between his back paws in a seat by the cabinets, “you will have to take up the helm as the herd caretaker and groundskeeper. Myrna needs her compress made fresh every morning, the Fortune-Telling Roses need to be replanted for clear view of the new moon within the next fortnight, and the Shrinking Violets need to be separated into their own pot before they retract into the earth or they’ll never be seen again. And that’s not to mention the Venomous Tentacula, that ghoulish thing.”

Draco shuddered, recalling that she—and he wasn’t sure where the gender of the blasted plant had sprung from, only that it felt right—needed to be pruned soon. He levelled a judgemental stare at the Grim. “I don’t see how you intend to keep this household running, for one because you lack thumbs. If you are here to whisk me away, I must demand you do so with at least a month’s notice, so I may get my affairs in order.”

The Grim yawned. It truly did look very doglike with its shining eyes closed.

For a moment, Draco feared he was going insane. He wouldn’t be the first of his bloodline, though he would surely be the last.

Draco leaned back in his chair contemplatively. The wood creaked under his weight. It had once been sturdy and ornamented, but it, like much of the Manor, had been weakened and drained from the years of hardship.

“If you are here to kill me,” he thought aloud, “And you do not intend to do so swiftly, and none of my ancestors in their terrible portraits are here to judge me, what is stopping me from simply offing myself right here and now?”

The Grim blinked at him. Draco blinked back.

He gave it a thought. A real, dedicated try. The house-elves stored the knives in a block by the sink. He wouldn’t even have to leave the room—he could swing one out and take one mighty slash to the gruesome brand which marred his forearm. Everything would float away.

The scent of blood would attract Myrna, surely. She would feast.

As it always had since last year, Draco’s stomach turned at the thought of blood and violence. He had never been talented at it, after all. That had been shown in crystalline transparency for the entire Wizengamot, and then the public, splashed in the front headlines of the Prophet the following day, detailing the scandalous intimacies of the Malfoy family’s downfall.

Though untalented at inflicting immediate physical pain, Draco knew he was quite good at Potions. That sort of long-range, extended-release offense was a tactic he could better wrap his head around. He knew he had some Deadly Nightshade stored away, back from when he had thought to harvest and bottle some where the wolves wouldn’t smell it out.

Having the poison made him feel more in control. If one tried to kill him, well, he would almost certainly die and would likely be lucky to do so, but he would at least make a good show of trying to kill them back.

He could take that, if he truly wanted, though the nausea and the convulsions did not seem at all pleasant. He hated pain, and detested discomfort. The very thought of seizing to death in his own vomit made him shudder so mightily that his tea sloshed from its delicate filigree rim.

Draco despaired. Every other solution he could think of would take at least two weeks to brew, and at that point, the Grim may well have decided Draco was wasting his time and would simply kill him itself.

“Oh, if I must!” Draco growled at the Grim, setting down his teacup with a definitive, resentful clink. He stood with a sweeping motion made terribly less dramatic by his lack of a cloak. “You horrible creature.”

Draco couldn’t off himself expediently, and he couldn’t just sit and wait. Patience had never been a virtue of his, and killing never a vice.

Killing time it was, then.

If only to forget about the dark figure loping by his heels.

Chapter Text

CHAPTER FOUR

Dear Professor Hagrid, Draco began.

Dear Hagrid.

To Rubeus Hagrid.

To the Hogwarts Groundskeeper, Professor of the Care of Magical Creatures.

Mr. Hagrid.

“Morgana’s accursed left tit,” Draco whispered venomously, crumpling the parchment and tossing it at his window. It bounced back and landed on his inkstained escritoire, uncaring of his frustration.

Good Day,

I am writing to inquire if you would be willing to advise me on a plan of care for a crippled Thestral and her herd.

Apologies for any

“Circe’s pigsty,” Draco swore, and held his quill up to scribble out the line and crumple up yet another page. A drop of ink beaded at the nib. Draco stared at the way the dark liquid caught the light.

He heaved a gigantic sigh and continued the sentence, scolding himself that a bad job finished was better than an endeavour never completed, even when it wounded his pride so. He had already spent thirty minutes hunched over his escritoire ruining his posture and no doubt furrowing premature wrinkles into his forehead. He pressed his right hand to the deep lines, taking deliberate, slow breaths.

Merlin knew Draco needed absolutely every asset he had available to him if he ever intended to make something of himself, marked as he was for both death and death-eating.

Apologies for any and all prior comportment. I respect your passion for magical creatures and defer to your expertise in their care. Whatever remuneration you require for your trouble, I am happy to provide it.

Regards,

D.L. Malfoy

“Merlin’s bloody pantaloons,” Draco cursed, and dabbed the ink with the side of his hand so it wouldn’t smear before rolling it up, sealing it, and whistling for Hermes to come to his perch.

He fed him two owl treats from the jar by his windowsill and scratched him behind the ear fondly. “Get this sickening thing out of my sight this instance,” he instructed, adding, “It’s for Rubeus Hagrid at Hogwarts.”

Hermes nipped his finger affectionately and took flight from the window. His wings caught the wind with graceful elegance, and Draco watched him go, reminded of how long it had been since he himself flew.

The Grim sat in the doorway of his room. Its body was turned towards the door, where it had been staring at the long scores down its height for the duration of the evening before, its head resting on its forelegs as what seemed its preferred stance. Now, however, it was looking straight at Draco, its luminous eyes blinking open and shut in a way that seemed off-puttingly normal for a dog.

It was so quiet, Draco could have forgotten it was there, if it had not been itself and therefore so intensely anxiety-provoking that hardly anything else existed at all.

“Is this what you want?” Draco asked scathingly, glowering at it. “You want me to make a fool of myself before those who would sooner draw and quarter me?”

The Grim merely sighed.

~*~*~

Draco did not like giants.

They had appeared in his storybooks as a child. Dobby had read to him, in his squeaky, high-pitched voice, tales of adventurous Wix who had traversed remote mountain ranges to observe them. He had heard about the earth-shaking battles their tribes had, how bloody the fights to become Gurg could end up. Boulders ripped from stone, heads ripped from shoulders, each hefted like nothing heavier than an apple plucked from a tree branch. The mountains, the adventurers would say, were awash in red like that of a deathly sunset.

Draco had always been more taken with the stories of the trolls they encountered in the far north, anticipating his father’s rule overriding that of his mother’s desire to send him to Hogwarts. He fantasised about encountering them while swathed in smart crimson, different from the Gryffindor’s brash scarlet, and defeating his fellow adventurers with all sorts of dark enchantments, taught to him by more competent and respectful a tutor of the dark arts than any found at Hogwarts.

But then, a troll had come to Hogwarts, and it hadn’t been Draco who had bewitched it. Hadn’t been Draco to do anything at all, in fact.

So, it was the giant Draco would have to settle on. Half-giant, even, for of course Draco would always do everything halfway.

And this half-giant peered at him through black, beetle-like eyes glinting with more intelligence than any Gurg Draco had read about in any of his savage storybooks.

“Got yerself a thestral herd, do yeh?” Hagrid asked, standing just outside the ornate wrought-iron gates of the Manor. He glanced at the small porcelain bowl of milk and honey Draco always left out, balanced on the flat surface between the trellis and the spire, and nodded approvingly. If there was one thing all classes in the Wixen world knew, it was to respect the Fae above all else.

Draco shifted uncomfortably, discomfited to receive any sort of approval from the creature he knew could rip his head off without a second thought. Even if Hagrid had been his professor, he had been thoughtless of his students’ pain. Draco himself had been slashed by one of his beasts. Blaise’s arm had been burnt, bubbling and weeping, by one of his mutant firecrabs in fourth year. A Frankenstinian creation of his own invention, no doubt.

Draco wondered if giants felt pain differently from humans, or were only more used to it. A fact of their brutal lives, rather than an outlier of them. Surely, they would have destroyed Hagrid if he ever tried to become Gurg of anything.

“Yes, sir,” he replied smartly, because the war had beaten his manners into him black and blue.

He’d had to kneel before Amycus Carrow and call him sir, after a torment he faced for refusing to torture a firstie. He would honorific a half-giant, whose palm could easily fit the entirety of Draco’s head, because Draco, despite his many flaws, had had his idiocy forcibly excised from his screaming person somewhere between sixth and seventh year.

“There’s around a dozen of them,” he continued nervously, reluctant to let the half-giant across the wards. “There’s a very young foal who’s just left the stables with her mother—the stables are where I keep those in need of more protection, if they trust me enough to stay. There are a few who I, well, I’m not sure because of the, ah…” Draco winced. He didn’t want to mention anything about the Death Eaters and their rampage through Malfoy Manor. “Well, there were a few who I believe suffered some curse damage, but I managed to fix them up enough to go on back to the paddock. I can call them from the woods if you’d like to see them, they usually come when I bring them their food for the day.”

Draco bit his lip, withering under the half-giant’s scrutiny. There was a hardness in his ruddy face, an unyielding shade of his countenance. Draco could tell he was suspicious of the invitation he had received, regardless of his acceptance of it.

“Myrna, she’s the one I worry after the most,” Draco supplied, because there was no use shielding her from the half-giant he had summoned, not when he had summoned him specifically to look after her. “She’s got a twisted limb, and I’ve tried poltuces with murtlap and dittany, I’ve tried wrapping it in a splint, but it doesn't help. I worry—” Draco didn’t want to say he worried they would have to break the limb and reset it, because he didn’t want to invite that violence into the air between them. “I worry.”

“Well, then,” the half-giant grunted, and Draco swallowed at his deep timbre, nervous and flighty as a foal himself. “Best be showin’ ‘er to me.”

The wards did nothing when Hagrid stepped through them, though Draco felt the small pinpricks of their porousness in the gooseflesh on his arms. He carried with him a mokeskin doctor’s bag, as though he would ever be a physician of any kind after the injuries he inflicted on the Hogwarts student body, and a tattered, incongruous pink umbrella.

Draco had seen him wield it before, peeking around surreptitiously before sending a spell from it onto his oversized pumpkins.

Draco considered both his former self and Hagrid fortunate that, at age thirteen, Draco had not put it together that Hagrid was likely not allowed a wand, as a registered half-creature. The only exceptions to that rule were werewolves, and even then only barely.

Their walk to the stables was eerily silent, and Draco missed the peacocks. He wished their trilling warbles would cut the tension between the two of them, but Aunt Bella had cut down the peacocks, and Draco was left only with his thoughts.

He thought perhaps that Remus Lupin had been exceptionally lucky, though he likely wouldn’t have felt so, to come in contact with a wand. He wondered what his family tree looked like, and what strings had been pulled to bring him into the magical world with the rest of them. His parents must have been painfully progressive, so like Dumbledore and his ilk, to send him off to Hogwarts instead of hidden away in attics or cellars or derelict wings of the estates, the way the old families shuttered away those who blighted their bloodline with lycanthropy.

Draco had been so afraid, that third year, with two dark creatures in the forms of their new professors presiding over them. The dread nightmares that hung in the air around the castle like deathly sentinels just worsened the horror in his spiralling thoughts. And then one of those dark creatures, the wolf in sheep’s clothing, had commanded him to face his worst fear, and then the half-giant had used its great beast to strike him down.

But Draco had called Rubeus Hagrid to his home not because he was a dark creature. He had called him to his home because he had proven himself capable of gentleness despite his nature. The Thestral herd of Hogwarts flocked to him like those of the Wiltshire woods flocked to Draco. He coaxed verdant green things to life in his garden. And, above all, he had the loyalty of Harry Potter, boy saviour of the Wixen world, their idol who stood between them and everything Dark and Evil.

The Dark Lord had not been a dark creature at first, not according to Potter’s testimony. Just a boy.

Draco wondered what he himself was, after the war. In the pale sunlight, he shivered.

The stables appeared before them faster than Draco had anticipated. He clicked his teeth and heard Myrna snort from her place amongst the wooden walls and hay.

“I don’t know how she is around strangers,” he warned, craning his neck to get a glance at Hagrid’s face.

Hagrid nodded, his expression softening, as far as Draco could tell, behind the unruly mess of untamed beard and hair.

“They’re not often territorial, Thestrals,” said Hagrid, brushing a wild curl out of his eyes with a forearm. Draco dodged his umbrella before it struck him on the shoulder. “Got a good sense o’ people, they do.”

Draco hummed, biting on his lips, and gingerly opened the door.

Myrna acquiesced to Draco’s fretting and Hagrid’s careful inspection. A wide, steadying hand was placed on her flank as he lifted her twisted limb carefully. Draco breathed in deep and did not think of Aunt Bella.

His breath stuttered and he pressed a handkerchief to his nose to muffle the sound of his sneeze. Motes of dust and hay floated through thin streams of sunlight shining as though through the clouded Great Lake.

“Wha’ did ya say you were usin’ to care for her?” the kneeling half-giant asked Draco softly, to keep Myrna from startling.

“A splint and a poultice,” Draco said, grimacing. He knew it wasn’t enough. He also knew he couldn’t stomach what had to be done. “Of murtlap oil and dittany.”

“For how long?”

“Since I returned to the Manor,” replied Draco, staring down at the hay between his loafers. He had dressed up today, and wouldn’t Father be rolling in his shallow Azkaban grave for that too. If he’d gotten a grave at all. “About five months ago, give or take.”

Hagrid nodded. “She’s a young ‘un. She’ll heal up well enough if yeh treat her properly, but a silly little poultice won’t be wha’ she’s needing.”

Draco thinned his lips, his worries now realized. He thought of Myrna’s bones breaking, a moment’s suffering for a lifetime with a healed limb, and heard the echoing crack of breaking limbs on the old oak dining table as Nagini constricted her prey. Draco had burnt that table where it stood when he returned to the Manor.

He couldn’t figure out how to get the scorch marks out of the hardwood floor. Nor the scuff marks. Nor the bloodstains.

He felt quite woozy, suddenly.

“Would you like a cup of tea?” Draco asked, because he had been a truly awful host in his haste to get Myrna seen to, and if Father was rolling in his grave, he may as well make him roll off the cliff and plummet into the North Sea. Mother had always taken her guests to the garden when the weather allowed. “Some of the more stubborn Fortune-Telling Roses are still in bloom. They haven’t told me anything, but perhaps they might interest you?”

The half-giant blinked from where he knelt. He wasn’t some fearsome creature from Draco’s storybooks for a moment. He was just a very large man, one who Draco had known peripherally for nearly half his life. He was looking at Draco as though he saw him for his eleven-year-old self, pretending not to be frightened as he was ferried onto a boat with Vincent and Gregory to marvel at the castle in the lantern light and pull his robes close to his small frame to avoid the damp.

“Go on an’ make the tea, lad,” Hagrid said softly. He gestured to his doctor’s bag. “I’ll find yer roses when I’m finished here.”

Draco’s hands shook as he handled the fine china. It was what Mother had always used when hosting guests, but Draco feared it wouldn’t be suited to Hagrid’s large hands. He didn’t want it to break—he prized everything which remained intact that his mother had loved in this place, few and far between—but he didn’t want to be rude.

He’d been rude enough for a lifetime. He could be scared. He could be stressed. He could be sad.

He could not, any longer, be impolite.

He couldn’t ride on Father’s name or money any more. He would have to try Mother’s tactics.

So, he served the fine china on a gleaming silver platter in the rose gardens, amidst the Damask roses and the mumbling Fortune-Telling blooms whose divinations Draco could not parse.

Draco wrung the front of his button-down between his hands as he waited. He buttoned and unbuttoned his cuffs. He kicked his feet out, pulled his knee up, and put it back down again. He felt like the day had become suddenly interminably long. He had learned how a second could stretch to infinity when in the Dark Lord’s presence, when he had thought Harry Potter was dead, and when the Dementors crept past his cell, but he had thought, naively, that this viscous slow move of time was past him.

Eventually, Hagrid made his way to the rose gardens. Draco was biting his cuticles in worry, a filthy habit he’d thought Father had broken him of back in fourth year but which had returned, full-force, by sixth.

Hagrid’s heavy footsteps approached, and Draco shook out his cuffs to hide his bleeding fingers. He looked tired as he rounded the overgrown hedge, but satisfied. The humming vibration within Draco fell free of its erratic edge, just slightly.

“She’ll be alright,” Hagrid assured him. Draco wasn’t sure what colour his face must’ve been, or what sickly expression he must’ve worn, to elicit such a gentle reaction. “You’ll need to change ‘er wrappings twice a day as you’ve bin doin’, and she should be righ’ as rain in a few weeks.”

“With the dittany and the murtlap oil?” Draco asked urgently, intent on getting it right. “Once in the morning and once in the evening? For fourteen days, or for longer?”

Hagrid chuckled, sitting down on the intricate iron garden chair. It creaked and strained ominously under his weight. Draco was certain no Malfoy in history had ever tested its endurance so.

“That’s right,” he said. He picked up the delicate teacup as though it were a baby bird with hollow bones. He held it gingerly in his palm as he sipped. Draco held himself tightly, waiting for a crack that never came. “I’ll be back next week to check on ‘er, if you want.”

Draco didn’t want him to. Not really. He felt hot and awkward and itchy, having Hagrid at the Manor. His mind supplied him with an endless stream of awful possibilities. Aunt Bella would emerge from the shrubbery to hex them both halfway to hell and back. That awful hippogriff would rear up to strike him across the face this time instead of the forearm. The Dark Lord would torture Hagrid instead of Charity Burbage on the dining room table.

“Thank you,” he said instead, his hands clasped in his lap. “That would be very kind of you.”

~*~*~

The last time the Manor had begrudgingly welcomed a regular visitor, it was for a different sort of home visit.

Draco had buried his head in his pillows, certain that he could hear the screams from the filthy, abhorrent cellars all the way up in his top-floor bedroom. He wished that he’d had a drawing room, like Mother in her wing, that he could barricade and brick up throughout the night. She had never done anything so uncouth—her wards were impeccable, and they were the same ones she had cast on his door. But Draco could hear the wet breathing of the monsters on the other side, could imagine how pungent and reeking of copper their breath must be. Even when they were not there, the sounds rang in Draco’s ears. Just as, even when Ollivander was not being tortured, his screams shook Draco to the core.

Before Ollivander came to stay at the Manor, Draco couldn’t say he’d had any strong feelings about the old man. He had been an odd, discomfiting person, who had made a shiver crawl up Draco’s young spine when his assessing bright blue gaze raked over him. Draco had been afraid to brush his fingers against the gnarled, barklike skin on Ollivander’s knuckles when he handed him his wand, the very first one he’d ever tried, the only one he’d ever need.

“Hawthorn and unicorn hair,” Garrick Ollivander had said in a knowing, creaky voice that had only made Draco more uncomfortable. He didn’t like spending time with the elderly. Grand-mère Druella had been beautiful until the day she died, evading the ravages of time with the prodigious wealth she spent on her treatments. To Draco, Ollivander looked like some haunting spectre even before he’d been tormented in his home.

“A temperamental wand,” Ollivander had continued. Draco watched his Father’s jaw bunch in discontent and winced.

Temperamental was not the word for a Malfoy. Unicorn Hair was not the core of a Malfoy. Strong, unyielding, dragon heartstring and oak like his father’s. That would have pleased him.

But Draco never could please him, no matter how hard he tried.

“But, in the right hands, fiercely loyal.” Olivander spoke as though Lucius’ disapproving glare was not burrowing into him. Draco was astounded that Ollivander had not cowered before it, as so many people at the Ministry and in the Alley always did. “A wand talented at curses and healing. Dichotomous, in its every component, and yet it has the capability to be great indeed, if only with the right guidance.”

Draco did not look at Ollivander’s face as he was handed the wandbox, too preoccupied watching his father’s hands curl and uncurl around the silver snake head of his cane. Had he looked up, he would have seen something like hope, mingled with something like pity.

“You may bill Gringotts the amount,” his father had said. He never carried a coin purse, sneering at those who did, which was everyone else except for Narcissa. He would never be caught rummaging around feeling for grubby Galleons like a common beggar, he would say with a curled lip. No, the Malfoys had such prodigious wealth that they needn’t even see their money unless they wanted to bask in the hoard of it like dragons.

He spoke with a resignation that cut Draco to the core. Anger would have been better. Anger would have meant Father expected Draco to be better, and Draco had failed. Resignation indicated that he never expected Draco to be anything other than a failure.

“Choose wisely, young Mr Malfoy,” Garrick Ollivander had said, and that had made Father mad. To be ignored for his infant son, so that the boy could be delivered a warning that would ultimately, Draco mourned in despair as he pressed the down pillow against his ears with such force his head ached, be ignored itself.

Draco would have asked Mipsy to silence the room, but the silence left him feeling too on-edge, as though at any moment, Greyback would tear through Mother’s wards the way he tried to tear through his door every night.

Hearing Ollivander scream was a good thing, awful and terrible as it was. It meant that the Dark Lord was preoccupied. It meant that he had nothing planned for Draco, that he was not bored and in need of entertainment watching the Malfoy heir tremble like one of Mother’s most fragile China roses beneath gale winds.

When Ollivander screamed, Draco was glad for it. It was perhaps this feeling of relief, and the swarming, buzzing guilt that pursued it swiftly, that dragged him reluctantly out of the safety of his room and to the cellars.

In sweating hands, in muffled pockets, he clutched two draughts from his personal stores. He did not think he could heal the old man without attracting someone’s notice. He did not think it would matter, anyway—a wound healed would mean another one created in the hell they found themselves in.

No, Draco brought with him a Calming Draught and a Sleeping Draught. Neither were supposed to be mixed together, but he thought, perhaps, if the worst were to happen, well—it would be a kinder fate than any other the old man would meet in the cellars. Perhaps then he would stop screaming. Perhaps then the Dark Lord would stop visiting.

Or perhaps the Dark Lord would continue to return, only this time, few but Draco would remain to entertain him.

Draco pushed this thought down with a mental crunch like bones breaking as he stepped from the hidden passage behind thrice-Great Uncle Septimus and crept down the oft-used cellar stairs to the hair-raising evil beneath.

He had never liked the cellars, even when it did not hold such haunting terrors. The shadows had seemed to stretch, when he was young and would sneak down here. The cobwebs would glisten in the candlelight. The dust and grime would feel greasy with age and menacing in its dinginess.

Now, Draco knew these threats were not simply imagined.

Ollivander was not alone in his cell, as Draco had imagined him.

And with this discovery, despite his robust sense of terrified self-interest, Draco became a regular visitor in the cellars.

~*~*~

The Grim, as always, fell into step close to Draco.

The great shaggy dog nearly came up to his knees, and when they swayed too close, Draco shivered from feeling the brush of its dark fur on his calves through his trousers. It never entered his bedchambers, instead gazing dispassionately from the warded threshold at the woodland wallpaper, the crumpled bedding, and the unkempt boy within. When it got its fill of staring down Draco and all his childhood belongings, the Grim would gaze down the corridor watchfully, as though it too was haunted by the thought of some unexplained them, waiting for the unnamed threat to materialise so it could sink his mighty jaws into its foes.

It followed Draco as he left his bedchambers, all the way to the front steps. Whenever Draco would open the doors to walk down the path to the gates, the Grim would peer out, snuffle, and then turn away in disinterest. It would pad back into the Manor in an intent trot that reminded Draco of the Abraxans.

Draco was not sure if this was an ill omen or not, the way the Grim eschewed greeting Hagrid. Perhaps it simply was not yet the half-giant’s time to be marked for death, unlike Draco. Yet another reminder of his unsavory fate.

Despite its bearing as a portent of doom, it was not a very threatening creature in its actions, all things considered. Most days, the Grim laid by Draco’s bedroom door, blinking at the scores in the wood with its unearthly eyes, ignoring the curious hisses from the serpent area rug. It padded quietly after him as he weaved through the silent corridors and panted by the threshold as Draco fixed himself another lacklustre meal. It sat a small distance away from him as Draco worked through his mother’s rose garden, preparing it for true winter. But when Hagrid came, it disappeared.

Hagrid visited every week. Draco would hover apprehensively outside the stable, wringing his hands while Hagrid checked his work. He would return to the kitchen to fill the kettle and stare at it while gnawing his lip until the water boiled, upon which time he would choose yet another of Great-Great-Great Grandmother Forsythia's fine china teapots to pour it in.

Draco was afraid of ruining them, the fine tea sets. Not because of Hagrid any longer—the half-giant always held the beautiful cups and dishes with a gentleness incongruous to his stature. Watching him handle them always filled Draco with an uncomfortable squirmy feeling that he had become far too familiar with over the past two years: guilt.

But Draco did not want to perseverate on that, and it was not for Hagrid that the kitchen counter had become a graveyard of used tea sets.

No, it was that Draco didn’t know how to clean them as the elves did. He could tell, based on the quality of the fiddly artwork, that Scouring Charms would damage the delicate filigree inlays. He thumbed at the old tannin stains which marred half a dozen porcelain sets and wondered if it was worth it to risk damaging them to clean them more thoroughly.

As always, after a frustrating series of stand-still dead-end suppositions, Draco would select another tea set to predictably enter the dirty queue on the kitchen counter not two hours later. So much of the Manor had been damaged that Draco couldn’t bear adding another thing to the junk pile.

Hagrid held the little tea cups like he knew how much they meant to Draco, too. That was the worst of it all.

How he cared for Myrna with real concern. How he cupped the saucers and the tiny little sugar spoons so carefully, though Draco knew after having watched him for so long that they must have been challenging for him to grasp.

How he had even begun smiling at Draco, hesitant and fleeting, self-conscious and gruff.

How long had it been since anyone had smiled at him?

Sixth year, perhaps, a week or two before the death of Professor Dumbledore. Draco, convalescing with his head on Pansy’s lap. Her, fawning over him in a way that he indulged in, despite the saccharine reek of falsehood her mannerisms gave off.

Mother had not smiled since the Dark Lord infested their home, his repugnant band of acolytes smearing unutterable substances all across the gilded wallpaper, tearing through silk and satin as though they were some unholy Muggle blend instead of fabric so fine that the bloodline of these vandals could never have afforded to even touch it if not for the war.

The only times Draco had seen Father smile since Draco reached adolescence, he had looked like a man possessed. Either his eyes were bright in panicked self-interest or his grin was macabre in smug schadenfreude. Whenever he looked at Draco, if he ever felt compelled to do more than give him a disapproving moue, he had reminded him of his duty, of their obligation as heads of the Malfoy line.

Draco would have thought his father hated him, except for his offer, that day in the bathroom ensuite watching Draco dab at his face with his Blood-Clotting Cream, the offer that had been recorded as one of his most egregious crimes by the Wizengamot.

And that’s what Draco thought he was worth, nothing but a lack of hatred, at the very best a lack of feeling altogether. But Hagrid defied his well-entrenched expectations and, miraculously, gave him a pleased, ready smile after so many weeks of visiting. He told Draco that he wouldn’t have believed it, but that Draco’d done a fine job, looking after Myrna.

It became too much.

“I’m so sorry,” Draco blurted. They had retreated indoors for their tea, the autumn breeze finally tipping into winter wind. They were sitting in what had been Mother’s solarium and the air felt thick and stifling. All her plants had withered save for menacingly waving fronds of Devil’s Snare in the corner and a hissing Venomous Tentacula beside it that Draco was certain Mother would have never selected herself. Only dreadful things seemed to survive in Malfoy Manor nowadays.

“I…you aren’t what I expected,” he continued, at a loss of how to voice the overwhelming emotion that had grown in him since that first visit. He set his teacup down, rattling in the saucer, and he thought that maybe he would have a broken tea set after all. “Thank you for helping me.”

Draco heard the Abraxan’s helpless shriek of agony echoing through the winter gardens. He stared into the black void eyes of Aunt Bella. Horses sounded the same as people, given enough pain.

“I’m so sorry,” Draco repeated, hands balled into fists at his lap to stop the trembling, clenched so tightly his nails would leave reddened crescent indentations in the skin of his palms. “I was so inexcusably cruel. I don’t understand why you keep returning to help every week.”

Hagrid’s eyes were dark like Aunt Bella’s, but they shone with a different sort of intensity as they blinked at Draco, surprised at first and then something else. Sympathy, perhaps, though Draco was unaccustomed to the look of it directed at him. He wanted to hate him for it, but found, all the more despairingly, that he couldn’t muster the feeling.

Draco shook, flinching as though waiting for a blow or an insult, a hateful shriek hissed through rotten teeth.

“Did I ever tell ye in class how Fang an’ I came about findin’ each other?” Hagrid asked.

Draco blinked in surprise. His eyes felt overly wide and dry, the way they always felt when he was trying hard to suppress an abundance of emotion. His eyelids stung slightly as they dragged across his corneas.

“No,” Draco answered warily.

“He was kept by a hunter before me,” Hagrid explained, slurping his steaming tea loudly. Draco had used the last of the loose Ceylon, brought from one of Mother’s visits to Sri Lanka nearly a decade ago now, kept in an ever-populating box whose Gemino charms had begun to fray. He didn’t know how to mend it. Draco had never learned how to mend anything, save for the Vanishing Cabinet.

“He left ’im tied up outside, or if the weather was rough, kept in a shed not half big enough for ’im. Kept ’im skinny, too. Fed ’im bread and leftovers and tol’ me it helped him hunt better for the wild boars, that hunger. Made ’im ruthless.”

Hagrid shook his head sadly. With his wild mane and untamed beard, he looked like he could have hunted a boar with no assistance, neither animal, magical, nor mechanical, save for the sorrowful expression on what remained visible of his ruddy face.

“Fang didn’t know wha’ it was like, livin’ in a home with someone he could trust. Bit me a good few times, he did, when I first brought ’im back.” He raised his hand, broad enough to wrap around Draco’s whole head. Ropy whitish scars ran across the rough, folded flesh of his palm.

“He did’n’ mean it, though,” he explained gently. “When an animal knows nothin’ but cruelty, it takes ’em a while to adjust to anythin’ else.”

Draco felt a frustrated tension well in his ribcage, constricting his lungs. “I’m not a dog,” he protested, so defiant and self-loathing he could taste it bitter like bile in his mouth. “My parents got me anything I wanted.”

“The opposite of cruelty isn’ having material things and givin’ them,” Hagrid said, in a voice that rumbled like thunder over the rolling hills of Wiltshire, warning of the tearing crack of lightning. “Not if it’s not what yeh really need.”

Draco could see why Myrna and the herd trusted him. He could hear it in his voice. He could feel it in the way that tone made his eyes prickle like the rain that threatened to fall.

If only Hagrid was not so awfully talented at underestimating how violent the creatures around him could be, Draco thought he could have been a good teacher, after all.

It was that underestimation, perhaps, that compelled Hagrid to continue. Underestimating the violence capable of the creature which sat before him.

“Givin’ some things to an animal while withholdin’ what they actually need is jus’ another type of cruelty,” he said. “Fang had a roof. He had food. But it wasn’ the righ’ shelter, and it wasn’t the righ’ fare.”

Draco could have taken that opportunity to once again prove his capability for cruelty.

He could have flung the last of Mother’s Ceylon tea into Hagrid’s shocked, ruddy face and ordered him to leave and never return. The Manor, crippled and groaning, would still have shuddered and rocked until he left.

The grotesque on the iron gates would no longer shriek in protest from opening upon his arrival. The flakes of rust from it would never again fall into Hagrid’s curly hair from their arduous movement.

Myrna and the herd would never see him again.

Draco thought of all the times he had aimed as low as he possibly could just to see hurt spiral across another person’s face. Weasley’s poverty, Granger’s strangeness, Potter’s misfortune. How dare these people, who he should have been better than, act like they were the ones capable of absolving him.

Hagrid was barely human for how far pure-bloodedness evaded him, casting half-cocked magic from a broken pink umbrella, lumbering through life with his ungraceful steps and his slovenly attire and his uncouth speech. He had no defences against the worst of the world. He had no shields to hide behind.

It could have been so easy for Draco to do as he had always done.

Instead, Draco felt the scars on his chest strain.

“My father is dead,” he confessed.

Hagrid was likely one of the worst people on earth to deliver this news to in sorrow. The half-giant had the most reason Draco could think of to rejoice at his father’s demise. Lucius had gotten Hagrid thrown into Azkaban, where, were it not for Potter, he would have languished for the rest of his life.

Draco’s words were oddly flat, strangely emotionless. But the roll of Hagrid’s deep voice had caused a cascade of rain, and Draco found his cheeks wet before he could try to stop the flood of it.

The feeling that overflowed from within him was tangled and dark. For the first time in perhaps his entire life, he held the emotion apart from the person in front of him, and instead let it roll down his cheeks and to the floor.

Draco flinched as Hagrid neared, expecting Sectumsempra or something like it for the flayed rawness of his emotion, so shamefully on display. But Draco had not cast a Cruciatus Curse, and Hagrid was not Potter, nor even was he like Draco’s father, so quick to anger at the sight of weakness in his heir.

Hagrid put a great hand on Draco’s shuddering back, hunched and bony like the spines of the thestrals. Another half-dead thing cared for by the half-giant, thrown away by society.

Hagrid was wrong to treat him with such stoic gentleness. But Hagrid had always preferred monsters.

Draco had honoured one dressed up in fine furs and silks with a silver cane all his life, had housed one reeking of distorted death during his adolescence, and was hunted by one every morning in the stables, every night by his doorway.

Draco thought then, with a thin, sharp curl of vindictiveness, that if he were to be a monster, as he no doubt must have been, that he preferred to actually choose upon whom he would unleash his monstrousness.

If Draco were to have a choice, as he thought he might finally have, Draco knew who he would pick.

The empty portraits on the wall, to start. All the way up the cursed family tree.

Chapter Text

CHAPTER FIVE

The frost crept up the windows in delicate filigree that matched the teacups to near perfection. They stacked on the kitchen counter by the dozens. Draco thought of Dobby, then of Mipsy, and then, with a resigned sigh, reached into Great-Great-Great Grandmother Forsythia's ever-expanding china cabinet to retrieve yet another set.

Hagrid asked Draco in the chilled solarium, as the frost crept up the windows in delicate lace, “Your Myrna is healin’ up well. Would yeh help me with the Hogwarts herd? There are some older members who need attention, and I could use an assistant.”

Draco didn’t really want to help care for the thestrals. Myrna was well, his herd was healthy. Draco did not want to leave the Manor. But the Manor was sepulchral, a living mausoleum, and he would not be able to unleash the monstrousness he had hoarded like dragon’s gold against his ancestral line if he stayed to wither in this silence.

Amidst it all, the Grim kept watch.

The Manor’s stained corridors were quiet save for Draco’s footsteps, but Draco knew the Grim followed him from the shadows.

The kitchen was always bare. He had switched from cucumber sandwiches to oatmeal on account of the never-ending chill, and the ease of making such a simple dish. He had oats, milk, cinnamon and sugar—he was afraid to contact their vendors to see if there remained any Malfoy credit on file, the sort upon which Father had prided himself.

Draco feared going to Gringotts, only to be told his fortune was no longer accessible. He feared going anywhere at all.

The portraits never spoke. Father seemed to have taken the whole army of them with him when he disappeared. He must have convinced them his heir was so shameful he required exile in their own ancestral home. Pity for them he was the only member of the line left. Perhaps if the infighting over inheritance hadn’t gotten quite so messy, and if the values of mercilessness and icy calculation had not run so deep, their bloodline would not have been cursed from within to cap birth rates at one a generation. Perhaps then Lucius may not have drilled into Draco’s head all the asinine ways he needed to prove himself worthy. Perhaps then, Draco could have done as his first cousin had and absconded, though without the financial support from Great-Uncle Alphard.

Perhaps lived forever in an evolving spiral in Draco’s thoughts. But Draco couldn’t reach the past. And today, the portraits were silent. His quarry was gone.

Draco looked at Hagrid and nodded.

He thought maybe the Grim would follow them, somehow, despite Hagrid’s Apparition into Hogsmeade, despite the implicit understanding that the spectral dog wouldn’t show itself to anyone but Draco, for he was the only one marked for death.

Still, Draco felt off-kilter as they walked to the castle without feeling the starry gaze of its eyes on his back.

He recalled the open-mouthed shock of his father’s portrait and banished the memory from his head.

Draco was not a noble person. He was no shining hero, not like Harry Potter. He was far more easily motivated by his baser instincts than any sense of greater good. Cowardice had been a primary motivator throughout the war. Fueled equally by guilt and despair. Before that, fury and indignation in equal measure, undercut by the cold drench of shame.

Now it was spite.

His father’s portrait had turned away from him, unable to bear witness to what his son had become, of what he had let the Manor fall into. But Draco hadn’t decided the houseguests, and Draco hadn’t had a choice in what happened, not after Father had gotten carted away to rot by the North Sea and Draco had a steaming brand on his arm.

If Father was disappointed in him before Draco had even made any choices, as he always had been from his son’s infancy to his own shady demise, then Draco may as well disappoint him deliberately for once.

Draco cringed as he entered the castle, fearing a flurry of Fiendfyre or at the very least a shower of water balloons filled with some foul substance from Peeves as a welcoming committee. Instead, his steps across the threshold were anticlimactic. The heels of his boots echoed against the stone doorway and Draco hurried after Hagrid feeling strangely chided.

He was relieved to note that classes were in session. He wasn’t sure what the student body would have done, all of whom save the firsties no doubt remembered his part in the ruination of Hogwarts. He stuck closely to Hagrid and tried not to look like he was cowering behind the very large man, never mind that was exactly what he was doing.

It all looked so similar. It had only been a handful of months, so there was no reason it shouldn’t have. And yet Draco thought it was so incongruous, that he should feel so changed and so many other important things remain the same.

The castle still had the scars of the Battle, but many had been mended in the interim. The worst of the damage had been cordoned off, in a way—walls appeared where there had been open doorways, corridors veered off at odd angles when they should have gone straight, and even the staircases avoided some floors altogether. It was as though the castle was embarrassed to show her inhabitants her scars, and did everything in her power to redirect them.

Draco thought he could understand. What he couldn’t understand was why the castle would trust him, after he had betrayed her so thoroughly before.

His feelings of guilt and unease tripled upon facing the gargoyle blocking the Headmistress’ office. With every step they took up the spiral staircase, that feeling, locked with grief, rose from his chest like bile, until he was veritably choking on it.

He had met Severus there many, many times throughout the Death Eater’s rule of Hogwarts. Had sheltered in his office when he otherwise would have been called out to torment the other students. Had huddled here when the screams became too overwhelming and he needed to hide, lest he illuminate for all to see how thoroughly the distaste for true evil ruined him. He had come here seeking solace, even in this man who he knew, logically, was not the most powerful, was not one of the mighty players of the war, and yet still Draco looked at with the same worshipful reverence he had once only reserved for Father.

Death Eaters were supposed to be acolytes for their Lord, but Draco had only ever thought of Father and Severus to have godlike infallibility.

And then Severus had died. And then Father had, too.

Draco wondered if it was better to live godlessly. He thought so, logically. He did not believe it.

Especially not as he looked into the steely eyes of Headmistress McGonagall.

“Draco’s offered t’be my new assistant fir the time bein’,” Hagrid explained, a little gruffly, from the seat beside him. This one had not shrieked in agony when he sat down like the one in Draco’s solarium. Either it expanded magically for his unique size and weight, or, more likely, Headmistress McGonagall had put her expertise at Transfiguration to good use with a flick of her wrist under the wide oak desk that had once belonged to Albus Dumbledore.

Hagrid seemed defensive of his decision to take Draco on. Draco didn’t have to wonder why. A large hand gripped the back of Draco’s chair, as though its owner was worried he would bolt and engage in yet more fraught and nefarious activities against the school. Certainly Hagrid knew what a risk it was, asking Draco to return.

Headmistress McGonagall peered at the two of them assessingly. Draco shrunk under her gaze, as he always had—she had never looked at him with approval the way Severus had, and he’d always seemed to do the wrong thing in front of her. He’d long since given up. For years, giving up had meant making himself as much of a menace for her and her Gryffindors as he could. Now, it just meant he wished she would look away.

“A volunteer position?” she asked eventually.

Draco hadn’t considered remuneration. Hagrid hadn’t asked for any when he saw the thestrals. A few years ago, he would have scoffed at believing in something like fairness. He still didn’t, really, but he believed in his own guilt, and that was enough to set his head nodding. Her grey eyebrows rose.

She pushed a tray to Draco. It was shaped like a shell and had her typical assortment on it. “Have a biscuit, Mr Malfoy.”

Draco gazed at them warily. They looked like the usual shortbread fare she favoured. He was reminded of Umbridge spiking her saccharine tea with Veritaserum, of the way Aunt Bella would whisper with rancid breath hot on his face that she had poisoned one of the plates at random on the table and they would have to see whose it was by the end of the meal.

Headmistress McGonagall, ever perceptive, noticed his reticence. Ever the Gryffindor, lacking tact, she noted it aloud. “I promise you there’s no stronger stuff in them than vanilla extract,” she encouraged, taking one for herself. “Eat. You look like a strong wind would knock you over.”

Hagrid took two and handed one to Draco. Draco nibbled it as crumbs dusted Hagrid’s curly beard. Sugar and a hint of cinnamon hit his tongue. He hadn’t eaten breakfast, too nervy at the prospect of returning to the castle, and his stomach rumbled at the idea of food.

Brushing past the sound, Professor McGonagall asked Hagrid, “How many hours a week will you need him for?”

“Depends,” Hagrid considered, brushing the sugar from his beard. “Calving season, maybe more’n not. There’s a couple of young ‘uns right now that could use a daily dose of Strengthening Solution. Yeh know Professor Kratchett is a fine substitute, but he seems overwhelmed enough jus’ with the marking. I reckon Draco ‘ere could help in the meantime.”

She nodded thoughtfully, turning to Draco. “It’s been a bit of a challenge filling the staff positions this year. Professor Kratchett is the new Potions Professor, but he’s not quite as efficient as Severus always was.” The Headmistress’ gaze became far away as she mentioned Draco’s godfather.

She was one of three people who had attended his funeral. Draco had arranged it, thinking he would be the sole attendee. He hadn’t expected Minerva McGonagall and Harry Potter to arrive, and had been too grief stricken to do much but stand there and wobble with emotion. They’d left at some point, leaving him standing over Severus’ grave and wishing he was underground with him.

“Do you know what you’d like to do, Mr Malfoy?” she asked. “For your career, that is.”

Draco blanched, peering up at her. Surely this is a trick question, he thought. She wouldn’t have been so ignorant of his reputation, not when she had witnessed the brunt of his downfall personally. As politely as he could with the bitterness souring his tongue, he replied, “I…I don’t expect to have one, Headmistress.”

Her tidy grey eyebrows rose towards her hair, pinned back in a perfect bun. Unwilling to look at the severity of her expression, Draco reflected on how she and Severus had always seemed to get on well despite the differences in their character. Perhaps those differences had never been so great, for Draco found himself unable to meet her gaze in a similar fashion to how he had never been able to meet Severus’ whenever he felt guilty.

“You plan to move forward traditionally?” she asked with understandable skepticism. If Draco weren’t to have a career, it would make sense that anyone would think he was pursuing the traditional pureblood route of marriage and wealth consolidation.

Draco knew, as surely did the Headmistress, that despite whatever his upbringing had instilled in him regarding his value, the Malfoy name was less than worthless in the current climate. Besides that, he reminded himself, he was marked for death. The memories of the Grim’s unearthly eyes produced within him a strange mix of anxiety and comfort.

Either way, his entire bloodline cursed with malice and poor judgement, spanning generations before him. He thought of Father’s gaudy penchant for the silver snakehead cane and vicious albino peacocks, Grandfather Abraxas’ narcissistic horses and terrible choice of compatriots which started their whole tainted enmeshment with the Dark Lord, even thrice-Great Uncle Septimus’ showily long mink coat. The men in his family were all brought together by their shared values of egotism and narcissism.

No, the blight would end with him. Likely in very short order. However, it was clear to Draco that in the practical, academic environment of Headmistress McGonagall’s office, saying he planned to lay down and die would not be an acceptable response.

“I hadn’t thought that far ahead,” Draco admitted, staring at his clasped hands. The skin was rough and chapped at the knuckles. His family was so filled with self-centredness, and yet he couldn’t even care for himself correctly.

He felt ashamed and embarrassed, the dark curl of it twisting within his ribcage. He was a Slytherin. He was supposed to have a plan. He was supposed to be resourceful, self-reliant, two steps ahead.

But, well. There was always death, he thought with grim, dark humor.

Perhaps he would return home, confront his shadow, and demand his penance be taken out of his own hide posthaste. At least then he wouldn’t have to stew on how yet again his mortifying flaws were illuminated for an audience to witness.

After a long pause, throughout which the Headmistress studied Draco’s bowed head, she finally said, “Well, then. Seeing as you have the free time, you’ll work with Hagrid during the busy periods. When there is not so much to do, you’ll work with Poppy in the infirmary to increase her stores.”

Draco looked up disbelievingly. “I’m sorry?”

The lines around Headmistress McGonagall’s stern lips twitched, as though she was suppressing an amused smile. Draco doubted it—she had never seemed amused by anything he’d ever done. “Will there be a problem with that?”

“I…” Draco began, at a loss. He thought of his Gringotts coffers, unchecked. How his father had so prided himself on their family’s wealth. Draco had learned how asking for help, accepting help, and admitting weakness was shameful. But he was already saturated in shame. He was already weak. And he was dying, anyway. A drop in an ocean of failure.

“I don’t know if I’ve the money for ingredients,” he admitted miserably.

On her desk, Headmistress McGonagall’s hands were stately and relaxed. Thin skinned, the veins stood out large and blue amidst the wrinkles, but they were relaxed and stately compared to the bunched fists in Draco’s lap. “I wouldn’t expect a volunteer to pay for the ingredients of the potions they’re making,” she assured him. “Poppy will give you a list to provide to the elves, since Professor Kratchett is too busy to go to the Alley. You should have everything you need by next week.”

Draco chanced a glance at Hagrid, who was nodding, apparently satisfied with the proceedings. “I’m in no rush,” he said. Draco was unsure when his coarse rumble had become a calming sound. “There is somethin’ else I’d like to talk to you abou’, though.”

Headmistress McGonagall hummed. “Mr Malfoy, I’d like you to see Poppy and let her know she’ll have the help. Hagrid will meet you there once he and I have finished our discussion.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Draco replied, cursing himself for how meek his voice sounded as he slunk out of his seat. Gathering the last shards of his self respect, he said, “Thank you.”

Before he turned away, she gave him a thin, tired smile. For the first time in their conversation, she seemed to look her age, the smile illuminating every wrinkle and grey hair. “You’re very welcome, Mr Malfoy.”

~*~*~

Draco likely could have thought of worse people to encounter in the Hospital Wing. Harry Potter, likely. Or Ronald Weasley. Fenrir Greyback was certainly a worse person. Draco would have to resubscribe to The Prophet soon, to see what had become of all his former ill-gotten fellows. He would have been happy to see Greyback hanging from the gallows. Certainly he would have been the worst one, back to terrorising Hogwarts.

However, Draco had none of these thoughts when he entered the Hospital Wing, because he was consumed with distress at his bad luck of finding anyone there at all who was not Madam Pomfrey.

Ginevra Weasley glared at him from her position upright on one of the beds diagonal from the entrance. Her foot was elevated in a sling and wrapped tightly. The heat in her scowl put her fiery hair to shame. Her creased face was a mass of freckles and frown lines.

“Oh, hello, Draco,” said an airy, familiar voice from beside her. Its owner, obscured until she moved from beside the redhead, was, of course, Luna Lovegood.

“Malfoy,” Ginevra growled. Draco winced, remembering the wet, chaotic slaps that struck across his face in fifth year as a result of her Bat Bogey hex. He was in no rush to orchestrate a similar altercation any time soon.

“Weasley,” he greeted warily, smart enough not to call her Girl Weasley to her face. Merlin knew she was fiercer than any of her brothers, barring of course the scarred Curse-Breaker, who Draco hoped never to encounter before the Grim whisked him away. “Lovegood.”

“Luna,” Lovegood corrected, but Draco was already gliding his gaze away from the only occupants of the wing in search of where Madam Pomfrey must have gone. The door to her office was closed, and within it, he could hear the faint sounds of small glass phials being moved, of fabric rustling around a body. Poppy Pomfrey always preferred full length robes and skirts. In an oppositional way, she had reminded Draco of all the Healers he had read about in his Wixen history books, except instead of the beaked masks and the dour black robes, she always wore white skirts with her hair pulled back with a kerchief, the angel to her historical colleagues’ demons.

Before coming to Hogwarts, whenever Draco had needed a checkup, a travelling doctor had come to the Manor with their magically expanded leather briefcase and sweets in their pockets. He’d sat on his bed, the wyvern crouching watchfully at the headboard, and would shift around restlessly as the doctor used a small hammer to check his knees or used a tongue depressor and a lumos to inspect the back of his throat.

Madam Pomfrey was the first Healer he had ever met in her rightful environment, and Draco had, before seventh year, masked his intimidation with a truly prodigious amount of whinging. Her patience had worn thin with him, and any spark of goodwill had taken a good bit of encouragement to catch flame in seventh year. Thankfully for Draco, she had been relieved for any help at all, drowning in ailing students sobbing from acting as target practice for the Carrows or hexed halfway to oblivion by their coerced, shaking fellows. Draco had slipped through crowds of invalids, so many some white-faced students sat on the end of their worse-off friends’ beds, dropped off an expanded messenger bag tinkling with unbreakable glass phials. He always skittered away with haste, too flighty and fretting he would be seen and reported to Filch or Carrow to linger.

“Madam Pomfrey is looking for Skele-gro,” Lovegood supplied. When Draco turned, Weasley was sporting her best betrayed expression. “Ginny and Morag crashed midair at Quidditch practice. Morag was fine, but Ginny landed funny.”

“Don’t tell him that,” Weasley hissed, as though her state was some great secret instead of self-evident.

“Skele-gro might be in short supply,” Draco mused quietly, remembering how much of it Madam Pomfrey had needed, and how time-consuming it was to brew. “If your Potions professor isn’t helping her, she might have to owl-order it.”

“Oh, shut up, Malfoy,” Weasley groaned, rolling her eyes. “Piss off. You’re just trying to wind me up.”

Lovegood cocked her head thoughtfully. “Draco always tried to give out healing solutions to the prisoners,” she said, and by the way Weasley’s mouth opened in surprise, Draco could tell her vacation in the idyllic Manor cellars was not a typical topic of conversation between them.

“S’the least he could’ve done,” spat Weasley after a moment, resting her hand on Lovegood’s shoulder protectively, as though it was not Ginevra herself who was the one convalescing.

Draco didn’t feel any satisfaction from meeting her angry glare, unlike all the times he had riled up her youngest brother. She was far more intimidating than he was, in both fury and in capability.

“And it wasn’t nearly enough,” he agreed. He wished he could have gleaned pleasure from finding he’d sent Weasley off-kilter with the remark, but all he felt was heavy.

“He already apologised to me,” Lovegood piped up, patting Weasley’s freckled hand. “During the Battle, when Voldemort’s forces retreated.”

Draco shuddered at the name, spoken so blithely and in such a delicate tone. Surely Lovegood had more reason to fear the name than Draco did, having been fully at the Dark Lord’s mercy for the best of four months. One of the many ways Draco failed to meet standard, he thought with a resigned sigh.

Weasley cocked her head. “Harry said your mother was in the Forbidden Forest with the rest of them.”

“Well, I wasn’t,” Draco answered sharply. “I was as far away from that madman as I could get without leaving the castle entirely.”

“Hiding in Filch’s broom closet, quivering in your dragonhide boots,” Weasley surmised acidly.

“He was giving out Strengthening Solutions to the Ravenclaws,” Lovegood elaborated. “We were the only ones who would accept them from him.”

“I was hedging my bets,” Draco muttered, gnawing on the inside of his cheek and wondering if it wouldn’t be better to simply sit outside the Hospital Wing, perhaps casually out of sight behind a suit of armor, until Hagrid finished his conference with Headmistress McGonagall. “If the Dark Lord won, I didn’t want anyone seeing me giving out potions to Potter’s personal army.”

“Draco often acts worse than he is,” Lovegood told Weasley, as though Draco was not there, and as if Weasley gave a shit what Draco’s inner world was like. “He’s a good friend.”

Both Draco and Weasley gaped at the pronouncement.

“That’s bullshit,” Weasley declared, and Draco mightily agreed with her. Still, she peered at him curiously, her head bending to him in interest while her shoulders squared as though ready to duel.

It was at that moment, thankfully, that Madam Pomfrey opened her office door.

“I haven’t got any Skele-gro, unfortunately,” she said, arranging the phials in her strong hands, “But I’ve a few other concoctions that should do the trick, albeit with a bit longer stay. Miss Weasley—” She looked up, met Draco’s eye through a stray curl fallen from her kerchief, and seemed completely and entirely unphased to see him there. For some reason that he couldn’t explain, her practical, predictable response rankled Draco. “Mr Malfoy. In my office please, I’ll talk to you after I’m finished with my patient.”

“Yes ma’am,” Draco said gratefully, and scurried away. He wished the Grim was beside him, if only to add a heaviness to his footsteps. The silence of his foot falls felt too similar to the scurrying rodent-like movements of Wormtail throughout all those ignoble evenings dining by the Dark Lord’s side as Draco’s blood slowly oozed away from his extremities, leaving his hands and feet tingling and numb, half-frozen in terror.

Unfortunately for him, the only person in the wing who wasn’t strapped down or otherwise occupied was the one with the most drive and capability to make Draco uncomfortable. He would have preferred it if Ginevra Weasley launched herself from her bed and slung ten hexes at him with greater force than what Lovegood asked him as his fingers brushed the handle of Madam Pomfrey’s private office.

“Could I come to visit?” she asked, and were Draco holding anything, it would have dropped to the ground in shock. As it was, his jaw dropped plainly enough. “I miss our chats,” she persisted, her cornflower blue eyes wide with sincerity.

“Our chats…” Draco said slowly. “Are you sure Weasley was the only one in a Quidditch accident recently? No bludgers to the back of the skull?”

Her laugh was warm as it always had been, even in the frigid dungeons. “No, Draco,” she said, smiling. She touched his arm with her small hand, just as she had Weasley, with gentle familiarity. When she gazed at him, there was something gut-wrenchingly like pity in the uptick of her eyebrows. “I know what it’s like to feel alone in that house.”

“I’m not a prisoner,” Draco protested, his mouth suddenly so dry he had to suppress the urge to cough.

Luna pursed her lips. “Nobody’s free with that amount of Wrackspurts,” she observed, and Draco reached up to touch one ear, as though he could catch whatever small winged creature she was envisioning. “I’ll bring cake. They hate sugar. It must be why you’ve such a sweet tooth,” she said with the weight of an expert.

“You don’t need to,” Draco replied, somewhat desperately. His hand found the door handle again, and he held it as though it could protect him from the fearsome idea of having to welcome Luna Lovegood back into the place where he’d held her captive against both of their wills. “Truly. I would, in fact, be overjoyed if you didn’t.”

She only giggled as though he had made a hilarious joke. “I’m looking forward to spending time with you again,” she told him earnestly, as though the matter was final. It seemed it might have been. Draco wasn’t certain how he’d accumulated such strong-willed women in his life, between Luna Lovegood, Headmistress McGonagall, and Madam Pomfrey. His mother had seemed to show her mettle only at the eleventh hour, whereas these three wore it around them like sweeping robes and radish earrings.

“I-I’ve got to go,” Draco stammered, as though Madam Pomfrey was not observably still in conversation with a sulking Ginevra Weasley. He pressed his shoulder against the door and pushed, swinging himself around to the other side of it as though it would protect him from the ferocious foe that was with the petite, elfin girl before him.

She waved cheerfully. “It’ll all be fine,” she told him as he closed the door, with a surety he couldn’t understand.

When the lock clicked shut, Draco heaved a sigh of relief, slumping next to it. Myrna and the herd had never taken up half so much energy. Even the Grim, in its own way, had become comforting in a way that other people, so opinionated and unpredictable, could never do.

There were more empty phials than not in Madam Pomfrey's office, arranged meticulously by ingredients and ailment. Shelves that ordinarily would have held books held all manner of medicines instead, wrappings and herbs and splints, powders and poultices. She was low on her Calming Draughts, and as she had stated, there was no Skele-gro to be found. Draco’s gaze swept over more of the shelves. Little had changed since he’d been there last, except the addition of another cabinet created from Wix-space in an impossible corner. An entire shelf of it was labelled Wolfsbane in Madam Pomfrey’s neat hand. Draco shuddered, remembering the sound of rough, malice-filled whispers at midnight through his bedroom door.

Awash in horrible memories, Draco was unsure how much time had passed. Behind his back, the door handle moved, and Draco quickle stumbled out of the way, his hands clasped primly behind his back. Shoulders straight, like he’d always been taught. He wasn’t in his father’s office, slouching and surly and unwashed. He was here to make a good impression on all of the most prominent women of Hogwarts, save Hermione Granger, though the long day was not through yet. She could threaten to appear at any moment, her bushy hair like a thundercloud ready to rain down even more stress upon Draco’s already too tightly wound form.

Madam Pomfrey stepped inside the office. Draco caught a glimpse of Lovegood chatting amiably with Weasley before the door shut, and was grateful for the privacy once more.

“It’s an unexpected pleasure to see you again, Mr Malfoy,” Madam Pomfrey said, businesslike but kind in a way that both threw Draco and made him feel a bit wobbly, a bit watery. She bustled through her office to sit in the chair beside her desk, which, unlike the Headmistress’, was messy and covered in strewn quills and haphazard notes. She motioned for him to sit as well, the seats less plush than the Headmistress’, the wood fashioned purely for function. “What can I do for you?”

“Hagrid is having me brew for him,” Draco explained, shifting in his seat. He’d never really said aloud what he’d done throughout seventh year.

Brewing helped him shut his brain off and quiet all the screaming voices in his head telling him to panic, telling him to flee, telling him on his darkest of nights how easy it would be to kill himself and how he would deserve it, how he had so many ways available to him just at the tips of his fingers. He had needed something to do to quiet them.

Draco knew he was weak. He knew if he lingered on the thoughts, they would overpower him. As his own stocks filled and his sleepless nights stretched before him, helping the Hospital Wing had begun not out of good hearted generosity, but out of practical necessity. That’s what Draco told himself, just as he had told himself about the Manor prisoners.

Just like Lovegood, Madam Pomfrey’s assessment of him seemed omniscient in comparison to his own. “I won’t say no to your assistantship again,” she said readily. “You were a big help. Tell me, Mr Malfoy, are you studying for your N.E.W.Ts?”

Draco hung his head. The stone beneath his loafers was cold. The hospital wing had always swung between clean silence and human suffering. “No,” he said, beginning to pick at his cuticles. He wished he was outside, coaxing the Hogwarts thestral herd out to be fed. He wished he was sitting in the solarium with a hot mug of tea and the Grim at his feet so he could stop thinking of what a failure he was. “Seems pointless.”

“I assure you it’s not,” Madam Pomfrey said. “You had a hard year last year, like so many other students here. But that’s no reason not to think about the future, Mr Malfoy. You’re still very young.” She leaned forward. Her lined face was soft and open in a way he had never seen on any of his relatives. Grand-Mère Druella had taken potions to preserve her youthfulness until she looked carved from stone, and she had the demeanor to match.

“It’s different,” Draco protested, because it was true. Nobody else had let the Death Eaters into the school. Nobody else had been Head Boy during a reign of terror. Nobody else had had the Dark Lord clutch their shoulder and order them to torture other people.

“I doubt that,” she said brusquely. “Look at your friend Mr Nott. He finished his N.E.W.T.s through owl post over the summer. From what I heard, he’s training to become an archivist at the Wixen section of Trinity College Library in Dublin.”

“He didn’t do the things that I did,” Draco argued.

“No, he didn’t,” she agreed, and the softness in her face held a steel within it. He was grateful not to see pity in her expression for the wound it would save from his pride, and then felt resentful of her stalwartness, because certainly he deserved pity more than someone like Ginevra Weasley, and then felt guilty for feeling resentful, all one after another.

Madam Pomfrey continued, “Mr Nott didn’t fix that Vanishing Cabinet of yours. He didn’t lie to Bellatrix Lestrange to save his classmates, nor did he risk retribution by skipping Alecto and Amycus Carrow’s classes last year. He didn’t brew life-saving potions for me, and he didn’t risk life and limb to help the Muggles and Muggle-borns who could not help themselves at your Manor.”

“Congratulations on reading coverage of my trial,” he mumbled rather mutinously. “I’m sure The Prophet got Potter’s good side when they made it all about him.”

Madam Pomfrey levelled him with a stern glance, ignoring the jab that was—mostly, save for the bitterness Draco felt at needing to be saved once again by Potter, and this time, unlike the Fiendfyre, the harrowing display that was his trial was written in everlasting ink—Draco’s attempt at deflection. “I knew your parents when they attended this school, Draco. I’m well aware of your family and their expectations.”

She sighed, and her lips pursed in an expression that seemed irked and sad both at once. “I know perfection was expected of you. And I’m sure you know, one can’t be perfect all the time.”

Draco winced as though struck. Of course he knew. It was the crux of his shame, how glaring of a failure he was. It bled out from him like the blood on Myrtle’s bathroom tiles, except that had been one instance locked in time, and Draco oozed it always. “I know,” he mumbled through a hard, angry lump in his throat.

“A willingness to fail, though, a willingness to take risks—that’s very brave. That’s the meaning of bravery, in fact,” Madam Pomfrey continued. “And out of anyone in your House, despite everything else, that’s what I saw in you last year.”

Draco scowled. She was in short order becoming his least favourite current inhabitant of the Hospital Wing. “I’m not a Gryffindor.”

“You’re certainly not,” Madam Pomfrey agreed readily, and amusement twitched the corner of her lined lips. “You don’t have to value bravery over all else—and you shouldn’t, if you ask me. But valuing other things and being brave for those things, specifically, takes a certain type of mettle. Especially,” and as she said this she met his gaze pointedly, “when you have been encouraged, from every angle, to never take risks.”

Draco shifted uncomfortably. He couldn’t stop the frown from tugging on his lips, as though some force had hooked him by the corner of his mouth and yanked it down. “Whatever,” he grumbled, and stared at his loafers.

One of them had mud on it from the trail up. He remembered how Ronald Weasley’s shoes always looked half in the grave. Potter had dressed similarly, though, when not in uniform. Maybe once Draco’s clothes matched how ill-kept his person was, Potter would finally extend that hand Draco had been counting on at age eleven.

“So you’ll be brewing for me, and I’ll arrange it with Minerva for you to take your N.E.W.T.s with the seventh years in June,” Madam Pomfrey stated, as though it wasn’t absurd. “I’ll be recommending you for either the Potions Institute of England or the Mungo’s Apothecarist track, depending on which one you’d prefer.”

Draco turned his neck so fast it cracked audibly. Rubbing the back of it, he winced as he asked, “I beg your pardon?”

“You’re a talented young man,” Madam Pomfrey encouraged brusquely, shuffling around the papers on her desk until she found a blank parchment. She rose from her seat and began peering into her shelves, noting down which ones looked particularly barren, of which there were many. “With an obvious interest in the subject. With two years of a potion’s assistantship experience and a formal recommendation from two Hogwarts staff members, you could attend either institution.”

Draco blinked. He felt quite slow-witted, like he had missed a crucial part of the conversation, if he’d ever truly been included in it. He followed her movements with his eyes and repeated his question, though, less politely the second time around. “What?”

Madam Pomfrey handed him the parchment, now with a list of a half-dozen different potions. “I’ll let Professor Kratchett know you’ll be using his classroom on the off hours, and I’ll send Kreacher out to the shops for your ingredients.” She smiled, her eyes crinkling in amusement. “I’m certain he’ll be pleased to help you in whatever way he can.”

Chapter Text

CHAPTER SIX

Draco lurched awake from a tug at his magical core, bolting upright. He threw off the heavy blankets, which tumbled to the rug with a rustling thud and had nearly enough momentum to take him with them. The wyvern who had been creeping in the wallpapered underbrush by his headboard took sudden flight. The Grim, from his position at Draco’s open bedroom door, snorted in surprise.

“Apologies,” Draco mumbled groggily, rubbing his chest where the insistent tugging sensation remained. The Grim blinked the sleep from his luminous eyes, making thoughtful mouth noises that had Draco grimacing in disgust.

“You haven’t even eaten anything,” he chided, half-present, stumbling out of bed and into his ensuite to tame his tangled hair and wash his face. Whoever was at the gates could wait until he made himself presentable and gathered what little courage he retained. “I’ve never seen you eat. Stop making those sounds, it’s unbecoming.”

The Grim snorted. Draco may not have learned much in Care of Magical Creatures, but he had learned that magical creatures understood everything that was said around them. He took the snort to be one of derision or perhaps light affront, though thankfully not enough to get him torn to shreds like with Hagrid’s murderous, outsized chicken.

His hair finger-combed, his teeth brushed, his bladder emptied, and his face washed, Draco threw on robes from the pile of clothing that he still could not manage to fold neatly as Mipsy and Dobby always could.

The Grim trailed Draco’s hasty footsteps through the quiet corridors, a welcome, steady presence at his heels as Draco’s nerves began to awaken with the rest of him.

Hagrid no longer entered via the front gates, having been given access to the Manor’s floo. Draco still received no deliveries, on account of ceaselessly putting off his voyage to Gringotts—he thought that at least if any of his fortune remained, it would be collecting interest in its disuse.

It couldn’t have been their grocer making conversation with the grotesque and the fairies—back before the Dark Lord had taken over their home, Narcissa had had the elves order deliveries on a weekly basis, and months had passed with no visitation. The lofty self-importance Draco had surrounding his own capability had been stripped away sometime between his sixteenth and eighteenth birthday, anyway, multiple times over. If Draco couldn’t even fold his clothes, how would he ever attempt a halfway decent bœuf bourguignon?

Better to stay with cucumber sandwiches, or plain apples, or black coffee. His figure would surely thank him, and if his fears regarding his vaults were ever to be realised, he fretted that he certainly would need all his other assets to be in peak condition.

His breath left his mouth in hazy clouds and hoarfrost crept across the ironwork of the front stairway. The gravel crunched beneath the Grim’s paws as they walked down the long path to greet whoever their most recent guest at the gate happened to be.

The great tangled mass of light blonde curls that eventually came into view gave Draco such pause he nearly stumbled straight into a hardened flowerbed. Clearly, none of his guests had ever encountered a hairbrush. Perhaps it was a heroic quirk, neglecting one’s locks until they formed something of a mane. Potter had set the trend, and then Hagrid, and now Luna Lovegood, at the iron gates.

Draco knew for a fact that Lovegood would have never passed muster as a Slytherin. For one thing, she lacked any semblance of self-preservation, whether in bone or instinct, more than anyone else Draco had ever met.

And Draco, unfortunately, had met Harry Potter. Far too many times.

Lovegood was an enigma to the world on whole and not just to Draco specifically. However, when she showed up at the front gates for tea wearing her glittering, swirling glasses, with her earlobes adorned by sprouting purple carrots, Draco couldn’t help thinking that he was especially ill-suited to her.

Had anyone invited him to the Manor home where he had been kept hostage for months, he would have set them alight and then stepped distinctly to the side to piss.

Instead, Lovegood had appeared at the arse-crack of dawn, a wholly uncouth 10am for tea time. Clearly she had never been given pureblood etiquette tutoring from age four to ten the way Draco had. She wouldn’t have known that the only polite time for tea was between the hours of one and four in the afternoon.

At least she had brought a gift.

“Hello, Draco,” she said in her airy, wandering way. “Hello, Harry.”

Draco whirled around, expecting to see Potter breaking through his wards once more, but nobody was behind him. Only the Grim, whose luminous eyes were wide in surprise at his sudden movement. Potter was nowhere to be seen.

Draco told Lovegood as much, turning back to her. “Unless he has an invisibility cloak,” Draco mused, which, although rare and invaluable, would have explained quite a lot about their Hogwarts years.

Lovegood replied with utmost, incongruous seriousness, “That’s exactly right.”

“He’s actually got an invisibility cloak?” Draco asked, blanching. If that fool had broken through the wards to trail Draco’s footsteps like sixth year, he’d…well. He would probably yell quite a lot, which Potter would ignore, as always. 

“Not right now, obviously,” she said, as though anything she ever said was obvious. Draco scowled with skepticism around the hardened, frosted-over ground, and doubted her powerfully.

She’d had the same sort of manner in the dungeons. On anyone else, it would have read as listlessness, hopelessness, disassociation. On Lovegood, it resembled more closely divine detachment.

With Draco in stumped silence, she raised the lump of carb she carried in her arms. “I’ve made us a dirigible plum cake. They’re ripe, this time of year.”

Draco raised his eyes to the icicles dangling from the fangs of the frowning iron grotesque and sighed, rubbing the bridge of his nose. Clinging to his etiquette lessons, for they were the only thing keeping him afloat in this conversation, he replied politely—if somewhat strained, “Thank you, Lovegood.”

By his ankles, the Grim snorted once more. Somehow, Draco felt as though the beast was laughing at him.

In the dungeons, Draco had called her Luna. He did so because she had directed him to do so, and he would have felt patently awful declining the one thing she had control over. He said her name like a supplicant apology, when he limped down to the dungeons empty handed, grimacing from whatever punishment he had endured at the hands of one of the more petulant Death Eaters and their aspirers like Greyback. He had always been able to hold his own against the general masses—he wasn’t a Black for nothing—but when Aunt Bella got it into her head that he needed some learning, well, he had learned, one way or another.

Draco had promised Luna, knowing it was a lie, that he would sneak her extra food and cast lasting warming charms. Sometimes he even managed to do so, despite his better judgement, albeit less than he would have liked to help alleviate his sharp sting of guilt whenever he saw her.

“Luna,” she reminded him, as she always had before. “You don’t quite have so many Wrackspurts as the last time I saw you. Do you feel more relaxed here than at Hogwarts?”

“Well,” Draco began, somewhat uncomfortably. Lovegood had always discussed these small creatures that only she could see. He had thought perhaps they'd been a sort of coping mechanism, some sort of psychological age regression in the dungeons to a time when it was acceptable for children to have imaginary friends, but perhaps he had misjudged her insanity. Or perhaps he had misjudged the damage her stay in the cells had inflicted. “The Manor is my home.”

Lovegood shrugged. “That doesn’t mean you’re relaxed here.”

At that, Draco could do nothing but sigh. “Yes, you have a point.”

She nodded thoughtfully and then smiled in her eminently benevolent way at the Grim which sat beside Draco’s awkwardly shifting figure, his tail curled around the weather-inappropriate loafers he had stumbled into before leaving the Manor. “Well, at least you’ve Harry to keep you company.”

Draco blinked at her, and then blinked down at the Grim, who seemed similarly surprised. “This is a Grim,” Draco told Luna, because he had thought it was self-evident. The only thing in common between Harry Potter and the spectre who had so stubbornly slunk around him was their prodigiously messy dark hair.

“Yes,” she agreed readily, as though that answer did not make sense. To the Grim, she said companionably, “Don’t worry, I’ve told the others you’re just doing what you’re meant to.”

The Grim shuffled uncomfortably. Draco sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose. If Luna was to be yet another insane woman flung into his life, she at least had the overwhelmingly positive quality of being eminently peaceful about it.

Suddenly, the ornate iron of the French gates seemed horribly menacing. The scowling grotesque certainly did not help, though its glower against Luna was not nearly so pronounced as it had been when Potter had deposited Draco at the Manor after his trial.

Draco should have considered the intricacies of their history before inviting her to tea, even though she had been unhinged enough to suggest it in the first place. “I am terribly sorry if meeting here has caused you any distress. I don’t quite…I would rather not venture to the Wixen Street of Salisbury or to Diagon Alley, but there is a lovely cafe in Muggle Salisbury if you would prefer.”

Luna blinked her wide, cornflower-blue eyes with dreamy interest. “Do you go to Muggle Salisbury often?”

Draco winced. He had only been a handful of times, when the Dark Lord had sent out his followers to wreak havoc, and Draco had sneakily apparated away from the crowd. While they had their fun in whichever parts of Britain Draco had not followed them to, Draco would hunch over in the second-story coffeeshop, huddled in the far corner between the cushions and the drapes. Draco had always expected such forays to be at night—all the more dramatic—but Aunt Bella seemed to have more fun committing her crimes against humanity in the light of day, where anyone could see them.

Draco would return to the Manor after a time, making sure to drink enough coffee to emulate in a pale, jittery way, the wide-eyed, frantic mania the other Death Eaters sported after their hunts. He apparated into the woods and set a few logs on fire so he smelled of ash and dirt. He thought of the Quidditch World Cup, and then he thought of Potter, and then he thought forcibly of nothing at all.

“I’ve been on occasion,” he offered weakly.

Lovegood smiled, looking as though she could read his thoughts. “We could go next time, if you’d like. I’ve made enough cake for Hagrid, whenever he comes by next.”

Next time, Draco thought, marvelling a bit. She was so confident there would be a next time, when Draco still wasn’t solid on the first time.

“I never got to see the gardens,” she prompted him, and Draco realised they had been standing under the mulish gaze of the sullen grotesque for what was no doubt a wholly impolite amount of time. “Or the solarium. Are they as lovely as you always said?”

Draco took a deep breath and ushered her in, though he shook his head. “Mother’s roses were all too damaged last year to preserve for the winter,” he explained. “I’ve been trying to patch them up for spring, though I suppose we’ll see how successful my efforts have been in a few months. I’m afraid it looks quite sparse, though there seems to be a Venomous Tentacula who’s taken root where the Shrinking Violets shrank away.” He paused, and then added thoughtfully, “I’m not quite sure how it got there.”

“Neville would probably know,” Lovegood said, as though Draco and Neville did not have an absolutely dastardly rapport. “You could ask him.”

“I think not,” Draco replied tartly, less aghast than he would have been had anyone else in the world posited a helpful interaction between the two of them. “A shame,” he conceded as he opened the door to the solarium and held it open for his guest. He decided, as he had long ago in the stale reek of the sunless dungeons, that the benignly insane would be as good a friend as any to share his honesty with. Nobody would take note, between her Wrackspurts and Nargles, and if they did, they were likely insane as well. “He became quite fit at the end there.”

Luna laughed, the sound like bells. The Grim sneezed.

“He is very handsome,” Luna said plainly, setting her dirigible plum cake on the small table where Hagrid and Draco had shared tea. The cake seemed to have deflated a bit in the centre, Draco noted with amusement—dirigible indeed. Suspicions of Luna’s insanity doubled and then tripled in his mind.

Her chair heaved a delighted sigh of relief when Luna slipped into it. Draco recalled the protestful, agonised whimper it had let out when Hagrid had sat on it the very first time. Each week after, it had seemed to tremble in fearful anticipation, bracing itself for whenever Hagrid came near.

Draco was terribly curious, and Luna must have seen it on his face. He had never been good at hiding his emotions unless his life was on the line. “You have a question,” she observed knowingly.

“Let me bring out the tea service,” Draco offered instead of asking. Whatever the glorious Gryffindors and their ilk got up to was none of his business. Draco didn’t have the right to ask after Luna’s romantic engagements, or why she named his companion after Harry Potter. He would likely ask all the same, but not until he had made a show to convince himself that he was still a halfway decent host, even while taken aback by lunacy at ten in the morning.

Haphazard, falling-apart slices of dirigible plum cake—which seemed soaked in texture, like a tiramisu, and one small nibble told Draco that instead of coffee it was, in fact, a truly monumental amount of brandy that Luna had doused the proffered cake in—lay wetly on what Draco thought was likely Great-Great-Great Grandmother Forsythia's twenty-fifth best tea set.

Draco eyed the alcoholic mush, and then eyed his delightfully lunatic companion, who was tucking in with gusto. Were it anyone else who had baked him a sopping cake, he would assume rightfully that it contained some sort of Veritaserum at the very best, and more likely some sort of deadly poison.

He removed a heaping forkful and placed it onto an unused saucer. “Would you like to partake?” he asked the Grim, because it was fun to indulge his whimsy every once in a while, and Merlin knew Draco hadn’t had fun in something like three years.

The Grim sniffed the saucer dubiously. Draco set it before the creature anyway, returning to his slice and helping himself. He did not drink on principle—the few times he had attempted to indulge that particular vice, he had felt more like a blundering, blubbering menace than the idyllic, romantic Victorian academic that he had envisioned himself. He’d sworn never to touch the stuff alone after waking up the next morning with gritty eyes, a pounding head, and a truly horrendous taste in his mouth.

But it was half past ten in the morning and Draco was not alone. The wintry sun shone through the frosted bay windows and Luna Lovegood sat across from him. The Grim grumbled at his feet, and even the waving fronds of the Devil’s Snare in the high corner seemed inviting.

It had been so very long since Draco had had any fun at all.

Draco took a tentative bite, and then another. And then, shockingly, another.

It really wasn’t terrible. Certainly it was better than anything Draco could have attempted, though, oddly…spicy, in a strange, back-of-the-nose sort of way. Not like ginger or cinnamon, as one would have thought in a plum cake. More like…horseradish?

Draco decided not to comment on the odd flavour. Were he to die, at the very least he knew Luna would be regretful. She did not seem to be too worried about his limited time on this mortal coil, what with the complete comfort she displayed at facing Draco’s canine demise.

“The cake is lovely,” Draco lied in a compassionate, earnest way that would have had him flayed alive in the Slytherin common room.

After a full slice of cake and a half-cup of strong, milky tea, Draco felt the dual effect of caffeine and brandy begin to swim nicely in his head.

Tactlessly, because Draco was hopelessly curious, he asked, “Are you and Longbottom an item?” He had neither the energy nor the patience for the hide-and-seek line of questioning he would ordinarily employ around such a delicate subject. And he reckoned, correctly, that as someone who spent the vast majority of her time socialising with bull-headed Gryffindors, such evasive tactics would not be necessary.

“No.” Luna smiled. “Neville has his plants. He’s started at PITIE, the Potion’s Institute of England, in their Herbology division.”

Draco blinked. “I never would have thought Longbottom would willfully subject himself to more Potions lessons.”

“Oh, it’s not much,” she said, waving him off. “He’s only there for a semester or so, until he can be paired as an apprentice with one of the Herbologists on staff.”

“That’s a good setup,” Draco mused. “Then the Potioneers and Herbologists have a network up and running for when they finish their apprenticeships.” He thought of Madam Pomfrey mentioning the institute, in their bizarre, forceful conversation in her office. Draco cringed. If he had to select one of the two that Madam Pomfrey had optioned—and Draco suspected that he might just—it seemed Longbottom had made his choice for him.

It was one thing, sending apology letters to all and sundry. It was quite another having to actually interact with their recipients, face to face, on what could quite possibly be a harrowingly regular basis.

Luna hummed. “Yes, Neville thought so too. It keeps him busy.” She peered at her teacup, still mostly full. Draco wondered if she was divining her own future, and what she might have seen in his. Certainly she’d have more of a talent for divination than he ever would, or likely anyone else Draco had ever met.

The fine china looked at home in her delicate hands. They weren’t meticulously manicured, as Narcissa’s always were. Instead, Luna looked like some sort of Muggle fairy, deigning to remove herself from her woodland to take tea with an unworthy acquaintance. She continued, “I can see why people may think he and I were together, but I’ve never thought of him like that.”

Draco’s face heated. Surely, he should have known not to pry in other peoples’ romantic engagements. His own, or lack thereof, were a sensitive topic. He blamed the brandy, and then, reluctantly, concluded that his isolation was a more likely culprit. “I’m sorry for assuming.”

“It’s alright.” Luna shrugged. “Nobody assumes that I’m gay.”

A movement stirred the air by Draco’s calf. The Grim had leaned up on its back legs to peer over the table at Luna as well, like a crup straining for table scraps.

Draco stuttered, “Oh, I–I apologise, Lovegood. I hadn’t realised.”

“It’s harder to tell with women, sometimes,” she replied airily, a small smile on her lips that grew when she met the Grim’s eyes. “We don’t have as rigid the gender norms. Not like pureblood gay men do,” she added, looking at Draco meaningfully, and Draco spluttered.

“I don’t—I’m not—I mean,” he started and stopped like a Wheeze’s Whizzing Fizzbang. “I…”

He couldn’t look at her or at the Grim, whose penetrating, curious gaze had turned from Lovegood to himself. He averted his gaze and instead stared at the small pink flowers painted onto Great-Great-Great Grandmother Forsythia's cup. They looked like Mother’s Fortune-Telling Roses, and had suddenly become infinitely fascinating.

Draco wondered if, once long ago, they too had been able to whisper fortunes. If so, they would tell him he was a fool.

His lips twisted into an unhappy little moue. “I thought I’d done a good job of hiding it, really,” he admitted, unable to keep the twist of shame from his voice.

It hadn’t really mattered that he was gay, ever. First, he’d sworn to never act on it. Then, he’d had more pressing things to manage than who he thought was the handsomest boy in school.

Draco had thought being gay would have mattered more, besides the feeling of fundamental wrongness that lived inside him anyway. He’d been devastated by it in third year, when his secret suspicions had begun.

He recalled pacing back and forth in the third year boy’s dormitory after everyone else had left. He’d warded the doors behind them, because it was far enough away from the Dementors that his mind was not fully occupied with every disgraceful thing he had ever done in a never-ending loop.

It was two days after Professor Lupin had stepped in front of the snakehead cane, the very moment it had clicked out of the wardrobe. He had asked Draco to stay after class as the white balloon flew flatulently around the room.

Draco had remained silent, with his back stock-straight, as Professor Lupin explained that he’d once had a friend with a very fraught relationship with his own strict pureblood mother.

“I never spent much time with your father,” Professor Lupin admitted. Draco hoped beyond hope that none of his classmates had made the connection between the snakehead cane and the pale hand that grasped the hilt with the person in the shadows behind it. “But I know what the culture can be like.”

Draco had shoved half the bar of chocolate he’d been given in his mouth to avoid Professor Lupin’s kind, serious, searching eyes.

He was everything Draco’s father was not. He was poor. He was shabby. He was tired and scarred and shaky with weakness. He was not intimidating in the slightest, every inch of him instead exuding patience and candor.

Like Draco’s father, Professor Lupin could be commanding, but without being ostentatious. Like Draco’s father, he was perceptive, but without being cruel.

As ridiculous as it seemed, Draco felt in that moment that Professor Lupin actually cared about him.

Prickling and hot all over from a new sort of shame, Draco had tried to extricate himself in a blundering, clumsy escape. He’d barked his shin on one of Lupin’s stacked briefcases and nearly knocked into the Grindylow tank.

Witnessing the near-destruction, Professor Lupin had risen from his seat. He had placed a hand on Draco’s bony shoulder with utmost professionalism, leading him to the corridor to keep Draco from causing unnecessary harm to his carefully tended, obviously worn belongings.

Even though he knew he shouldn’t have, Draco couldn’t stop thinking about that touch. Draco made it a point to never speak to him again if he could help it.

Professor Lupin may have caused the first of the prickling, hot, swooping feelings to overcome him, but certainly not the last. Draco soon found himself plagued by them with horrible, guilty regularity.

When Blaise winked at him playfully over the breakfast table in the Great Hall. When Adrian Pucey shoulder-checked him after practice, his jersey already off and tossed over one sweaty, muscled shoulder. When Potter scowled at him, bright eyes only on Draco, after a heated duel in the hall.

Draco paced and bargained with himself with fervent intensity.

“It’s alright, as long as no one knows,” he’d whispered to himself, clenching his fists until reddened half-moons marred his soft palms. “Mother and Father can’t know. I must be perfect. That’s what they deserve, I must be.”

It had all been one huge crisis, that year. Draco had stared at every Slytherin boy and girl in third year in an attempt to prove to himself that it wasn’t true.

What did Draco feel when he looked at Pansy’s glossy hair? Or Theo’s long-fingered hands? What about Gregory’s biceps? Certainly not the way he ate, that activity was foul. What about Daphne’s lips, which she slathered in a shiny gloss every morning before breakfast at the Great Hall? Could he imagine kissing them and ever not cringe, picturing the trail of snail slime they would leave behind?

When his unspoken experiments only served to make him more confused, he looked to the older years. They were all in each others’ pockets, all coupling up in dark corners and the Astronomy Tower. Did Draco appreciate the cloudlike curls of Faye Dunbar’s hair more than he did Marcus Flint’s strong jaw? He knew he was supposed to. And that’s what made it true, wasn’t it?

By fourth year, he knew the other boys his age had heard or seen things about romance and attraction, and knew they had sought out things about women and their bodies. Blaise had procured a filthy magazine from one of the older boys, and they had all passed it around the dorm like a game of Exploding Snap. Draco was abundantly blind to the appeal, valiantly hiding his discomfited wince when the mostly-naked ladies waggled their fingers at him and swayed their hips, caressing their scantily clad chests suggestively.

No, the women in the dirty magazines simply couldn’t compete even with the well-muscled arm, half-tanned from the sun and zigzagged with scars, that wiped sweat from the brow of the dragon-tamer Weasley when he and his companions wrangled the Swedish Short-Snout out into the arena. Draco had sighed alongside Daphne as the dragon-tamer glanced to the stands filled with rapt students, sending them a blinding smile and a rough, good-natured wave.

And then, as if swooning over a Weasley wasn’t enough, the Fates That Be had made Potter dive through the air like he’d been born with wings, manoeuvring with such ease that Draco felt ashamed that he’d ever thought he could outfly him, and prickling all over with once again. He’d realised, after he’d blinked at the hot gusts of air from the Horntail’s angry fire, that he hadn’t taken his eyes off of Potter for even a second.

It was a harrowing realization. Thankfully—or not—the Dark Lord had appeared only a few short months thereafter to thoroughly ruin Draco’s life and destroy any chance at all of him finding even the most poorly-suited romantic prospect, whether male or female.

In the solarium, where the fronds of Devil’s Snare waved and the Grim pressed his cold nose to the sliver of ankle between Draco’s trouser hem and sock, Luna’s small hand was warm on his own.

“You don’t have to hide it,” she said, in that comforting way of hers. “Not unless you want to.”

Draco thought of his father’s empty portrait and his mother’s empty chambers. He thought of the few people he interacted with, of Hagrid, and of Madam Pomfrey, and of Luna herself. He thought of all the things he was always supposed to be, and how he had never measured up to all the “shoulds” foisted upon his shoulders.

“Has it made your life better?” he asked Luna, so earnest that in any other context, he would have slunk away, faked his death, and moved out of the country to avoid ever encountering those who witnessed him in his honesty. “Not hiding it?”

Luna graced him with a beaming smile. “Yes,” she replied, contentment in her voice and in the reassuring squeeze of her hand on his. “I love myself more for it. And my girlfriend does, too,” she grinned.

“Not Ginevra?” Draco gasped, but Luna was already nodding. Draco felt a slice of vindictive satisfaction at the thought, chased by something gloomier. He stared at the soggy clump of dirigible plum on his fork. “I should have known. Oh, that must’ve broken Potter’s heroic heart.”

“I wouldn’t say that,” Luna mused, the smile smaller but still present. She scooped another helping of plum cake onto her plate, and set it down beside her for the Grim. For the creature’s part, it gazed at her stonily, looking distinctly unimpressed. Draco wondered if the brandy had upset its stomach.

“What do you think, Harry?”

The Grim whuffed decisively, turning away from the cake to rest his chin on his paws with a grumble.

Chapter Text

CHAPTER SEVEN

Draco thought about Luna’s observations long after she left. He gazed at the stacks of unwashed china on the kitchen counter, and then sat back in the solarium to gaze at the waving fronds of the Devil’s Snare. He paused in front of his ancestors’ blank canvases, and then flopped back onto his bed, fully clothed, to gaze at the constellations on the ceiling. The curtains only partially obscured the glacial winter sunlight, which streamed in through the streaky window that Draco did not know how to clean. Every time he tried to Scourgify it, it just became streakier.

The Grim stared at him from the threshold.

“Do you think I look gay?” Draco asked the omen of death at his doorway. “I don’t think I look gay.”

The Grim huffed.

“Yes, well, you would say that,” Draco muttered nonsensically. “Maybe it’s just an aura that only Lovegood can tap into. She’s always been connected to higher vibrations.”

The Grim’s silence was deafening. Draco flung an arm across his eyes.

“Begone,” he commanded, even though he knew it was pointless. “I would like to mope about dramatically in peace. Hard enough that I’m to die young, now I’m to die young and, apparently, observably homosexual. No wonder the portraits have all absconded.”

He snorted derisively, thinking of one obscenely gilt ancestor who took pureblood flamboyancy to unique and staggering heights. “Thrice-Great Uncle Septimus is such a turncoat. Anyone with eyes could tell he was enormously bent. And he never even had the decency to tell me I was out for all and sundry to see.”

“I never thought it was a bad thing, if that helps any,” said a horribly familiar voice.

Behind the darkened crook of his arm, Draco’s eyes opened wide, and he scrambled to sit up, cursing the plushness of the bedding he sank into despite his best efforts at dignity.

Harry Potter stood at the scarred threshold to his bedroom, just where the Grim had sat moments before.

Draco gaped at him silently for long enough that Potter’s knowing smirk dropped into something more awkward and uncomfortable. He cleared his throat, and Draco straightened his spine, gathering his bedding to him as though he was not already fully clothed.

“Is it time?” Draco asked, his fingers shaking as they gripped the blankets.

Grim-Potter blinked, nonplussed. “What?”

The word sent a wash of irritation through Draco. He was so like him. What a truly terrible twist of fate, for death to take him in this form of all things. “Do you just turn into the absolute worst person your victim can think of when you’re ready to send them off?” Draco asked, scathing and scandalised, one part furious, two parts terrified.

“What?” Grim-Potter repeated, with more urgency this time.

“Is that why Lovegood referred to you by his name? She must’ve known,” he realised darkly. “What an awful final conversation to have.” He wrinkled his nose. “She didn’t even give me the chance to apologise again. Or to try to convince the masses of my heterosexuality.”

Draco looked the Grim up and down. Scruffy, as always, with his awful blue Muggle trousers ripped at one knee, his collarless shirt and a jacket made of some ignoble material not of this earth. His glasses were smudged with fingerprints. Draco was to be whisked away to the afterlife, and his undertaker wouldn’t even see his face properly.

“I suppose you do have an unfortunate air of…security,” Draco muttered, flushing at the admission.

Certainly, if he was to be brought to the other side, he would rather it be on the arm of someone who had already proven themselves to be a fearsome opponent. He thought of himself in the same position, acting as a sort of guide and protector for those in their darkest moments on the edge of life’s greatest transition, and very nearly scoffed aloud.

“Wait. I’m your worst person?” Grim-Potter asked, his brain working about as fast as real Potter’s always did, which was, to say, at a despairingly slow pace. He wore a very plausible impression of that indignant expression Potter almost always had whenever Draco was on a particularly good jag. Grim-Potter’s lip curled and lingered somewhere between disgusted, irate, and offended.

“That’s a fair impression,” acknowledged Draco, impressed despite himself. He had always enjoyed that rankled expression that Potter wore around him. Draco prodded, hoping the frown would deepen, “Though, was his scar always on that side?”

Grim-Potter slapped a hand to its forehead protectively. It made a hilarious slapstick sound that in more ordinary circumstances would have already had Draco rolling. To Draco’s delight, Grim-Potter’s expression had most definitely teetered into offended. “Yes, Malfoy. It’s always been on this side.”

“Are you quite certain?” Draco pursed his lips to stop from smiling. Perhaps Death had done him a kindness after all. If he were to be cut down, young, handsome, and observably homosexual, at least he could depart this mortal coil indulging in one of his favourite vices.

Draco knew the scar was on the correct side. He knew how Potter took his tea. He knew his favourite dessert. He knew that he wrote with his right hand but favoured his left in Quidditch.

He knew that the Grim was doing an excellent job of looking just like Potter when he got under his skin.

Draco had missed seeing that look. Winding Harry Potter up seemed to be the only thing Draco had been reliably good at for his whole life.

Hogwarts had started off auspiciously, salutatorian only because the Granger girl cheated somehow, because if Draco hadn’t had the means to bribe the Professors to give him the best grades, she certainly hadn’t. And then came the crushing realisation that there had been no subterfuge whatsoever, and that Draco simply wasn’t that smart.

That knowledge had been thoroughly ground into him, by the heel of Aunt Bella’s boot in fact, throughout his cringing sixth year trying and failing to fix the Vanishing Cabinet. Resolved only at the eleventh hour, and only to lead him to yet another, even greater, failure.

“Malfoy,” the Grim ground out, voice sharpened in exasperation. “It’s just me.” He sucked his teeth in irritation, scowling, as he lightly kicked one ratty trainer into the scarred moulding of Draco’s door. “And I know I’m not your worst person.”

“Sure.” Draco shrugged, waving his hands as he turned away. He peered through the trees of the forest on his wallpaper, wondering if he would see the wyvern who stood post over him as he slept for most of his childhood before he was whisked to his death. “I’m sure other people would find it very gallant, to be brought to the afterlife by a hero.”

Grim-Potter made a choked noise, a hacked-off laugh. “You never thought of me as a hero.”

Draco raised an amused eyebrow, looking back at the Grim and meeting his narrowed eyes behind the smudged lenses. “He quite literally pulled me from the fire. Very heroic white knight to a damsel in distress behavior. Though I’d be a demoiseau, I suppose, and I wasn’t what you’d call particularly grateful for the dashing rescue.” Draco pursed his lips, picking at a stray hangnail by his forefinger, using the small pain of it to help him stay grounded lest he fall into the flames in his memory. “Disappointed, if anything.”

“Don’t say that,” the Grim admonished roughly. He swallowed heavily, emotion clear in the rumbling edge to his voice. Draco watched his Adam’s apple bob in fascination. Grim-Potter fidgeted with his hands, adjusting his glasses on his nose, tugging at the cowlicks of hair at the crown of his head. “You lied to your aunt and gave me your wand.”

“He took it from me, actually,” Draco replied, as though that hadn’t been the worst thing amidst a slew of worse things. To cede his wand to Potter and then to be abandoned standing amidst the shards of shattered crystal, wondering if he was about to be killed for his betrayal.

The only time he had felt more helpless was when he had held two wands in the Astronomy Tower, listening to a liar offering help and tearfully knowing it was nothing but lip service.

“You gave it to me,” the Grim insisted, and though Draco had never admitted it to anyone else, he was right. Draco’s demise had been of his own machination.

“I tried to push it over the edge,” Draco said, because that’s what he had done.

He’d been done with the war. Done with the suffering. Done with quaking outside of Luna Lovegood’s cell, a cowardly protector if it wasn’t hubris to call himself such, shaking with terror from the fear of Greyback and his wolves, knowing that he was eschewing the dubious safety of his bedroom for sheer vulnerability only slightly less abject than those in chains.

Lovegood had been the only true friend to him in two years. She was gentle, perhaps foolishly so, where everyone else had been bladed. Soft as his mother’s wilted China roses.

Draco had only ever been raised for softness.

His admission was nothing but, when he whispered, “I’d hoped they would kill me.”

“I’m glad you survived,” said the Grim. He sounded honest, earnest, and fearsome in it, as only Harry Potter ever was.

Draco hummed. He would not get to wish the disappeared wallpaper wyvern goodbye. He did not think he would have time to give his best to Myrna, either. Mother hadn’t replied to any of his letters—he doubted she would reply to this one, either, if he sent one at all. “Yes, so you could have that dubious honour for yourself, I suppose.”

The Grim’s jaw firmed, the teeth beneath the flesh of his cheek set together. “I’m not killing you, Draco.”

Draco flopped backwards. “That’s really a shame,” he sighed. “You’re not going to fly me away on your broomstick?” He waved his wand around in circles in the air above him. “The real Potter already did that once. It was all very terrifying.”

The shock may not have worn off, exactly, but it now felt ebullient and bubbly in his veins, rather than electric. He could have laughed. In fact, he did.

“There’s a Celestina Warbeck song about that, I think,” he said, trying to recall the records that Pansy would play, misty-eyed as she told Draco all about what qualities her future husband would have, first and foremost his devotion to her. “Flying away on a broomstick of love.”

Grim-Potter scoffed. “That’s not what I did. That’s not what I’m doing.”

“Surely not,” Draco agreed airily. “It would be wholly uncouth to fuck death.” He sat up again, his fringe flopping into his eyes. He felt a bit drunk from the surprise of it all, the champagne relief that he would no longer have to continue on in this sepulchral mausoleum to a family he no longer loved.

Grim-Potter slid to the floor, looking deathly pale himself. He was still likely a good five shades darker than Draco, but on his normally tanned skin, the colour looked ashen. “I never said anything about that. Malfoy, I swear to Merlin. I’m not here to kill you. I never was.”

“You killed Bilius Weasley in the 1960s,” he reminded the Grim. “Or, well, one of you did. Nobody’s ever been able to ask if you’re each your own individual or more of a hive-mind, considering they all die on sight or shortly thereafter.” Draco slid off the bedcovers to join Grim-Potter on the floor. The Persian rug was plush beneath him, and he was reminded of when he was a small child.

He would roll around on the floor imagining wrestling with monsters, dueling with dark mages. Reality had been much more frightening, and much less victorious, in Draco’s personal experience. “You didn’t kill Potter though, back in third year.”

“That was my godfather,” Grim-Potter said, his face creasing with grief like a poorly folded paper crane. “Sirius Black. Your first cousin, actually.”

Draco blinked. “I beg your pardon?”

“He wasn’t a Grim,” Grim-Potter clarified. “He was just a big dog. You could tell in his eyes—they looked just like a normal dog’s.”

“Well.” Draco curled his legs in, wrapping his arms around his shins and propping his chin on his knees. Grim-Potter’s eyes were their normal, albeit arresting, shade of green behind his ugly smeared lenses. “Your eyes aren’t at all like a normal dog’s. They shine like a lit torch.”

“Yeah,” Grim-Potter sighed. “I’m not sure what that’s about. I didn’t choose it. I didn’t choose any of this.” He looked fairly miserable when he said it, his body language bent towards Draco entreatingly, as though pleading for some sort of understanding Draco couldn’t offer.

Draco cocked his head. “Is there some sort of draft system for Grims?” He furrowed his brow. “It is quite like indentured servitude, I suppose, if you think about it. The ritual involves the slaughter of a dog so that you can revive it to protect the hallowed ground upon which the ritual was conducted.” Draco felt that uncomfortable prickling sensation of being watched intently, and he peered up at Grim-Potter, whose gaze didn’t waver. “And then, of course, is the deathly reputation.”

“Well,” Potter began slowly, his gaze never leaving Draco’s face. “That explains some things.”

Squinting in confusion, Draco asked, “I beg your pardon?”

“I think something like that might’ve happened to me,” Grim-Potter said, looking pained. “I don’t know how. I don’t know why. I’m not here to kill you—I was never here to kill you.”

Draco pursed his lips thoughtfully. He couldn’t believe him, not when he’d only just realised that inevitability wasn’t nearly as terrifying as he’d expected. Perhaps, unfortunately, because he had known that some spectre of Potter would be there with him, guiding his way.

Reluctantly, he asked, “Then why were you here?”

Relieved, Grim-Potter leant back and replied, “That’s the only thing I do know.”

Chapter Text

PART TWO

CHAPTER EIGHT

Harry was sweating in his starched robes, despite the layered Cooling Charms which circulated the dimly lit courtroom. He wiped his brow with his sleeve and wished he was absolutely anywhere else.

He wasn’t, though, because he remembered what it was like to sit in that chair in front of the Wizengamot. And this time, unlike Harry, Malfoy didn’t have Professor Dumbledore to swoop in and save him.

Harry committed himself to being a better support system than Professor Dumbledore had, in this regard at least. When Malfoy was freed of his chains, Harry would meet his eye, give him his wand back, and make it known that he truly believed what Malfoy’d said.

Malfoy had been left in the dark enough these past few months, quite literally.

On the Black side of his family, Malfoy took after his mother more than his Aunt or Sirius under the tribunal’s scrutiny. Narcissa had endured her own sentence, fifteen years of exile from Wizarding Britain, with barely any expression crossing her stony face.

At Malfoy’s trial, there was no mad laughter, no thrashing in the chains. Just stillness, as stiff as though he’d been Petrified by a Basilisk’s monstrous reflection.

It looked wrong on him. Malfoy had nearly always been a flurry of sound and motion for the extent that Harry had known him. Even in the Astronomy Tower, shaking in terror, Malfoy had snarled and wept.

When Harry was called to the stand, the details of what he meant to say became a blur. He was unable to meet Malfoy’s gaze, for the despair that was poorly concealed within as he walked to the podium. His voice cracked as it echoed through the hushed hall.

He discussed Malfoy risking his life to save Harry, Hermione, and Ron from the Manor. He talked about those months in sixth year when Malfoy had looked less like he had one foot in the grave and more like a strong breeze would knock him straight down into it. He even revealed how Malfoy had broken down in Myrtle’s bathroom, clearly coerced into a task he had no business attempting.

It was a secret Harry knew he would never be forgiven for unearthing. He and Malfoy were supposed to hate each other, was the repetitive thought Harry picked at and picked at, trying to find comfort in it when there was none to be found. Harry wondered if he had felt hatred for Malfoy in a very long time. Having gone through the war and having felt true, all-consuming loathing, he wondered if it had ever been between them at all.

With ashamed reticence, Harry revealed how his reckless actions had inadvertently pushed Malfoy further to Voldemort’s side. He spoke so pleadingly that his voice shook when he admitted his belief that if he had only taken a moment to pause before lashing out, he could have convinced Malfoy to defect.

He knew he could have done it, because he would have. No matter what it would have taken.

He didn’t mention Draco’s Cruciatus, the limp thing it had been, but he did mention how he had seen Malfoy forced to torture others with Voldemort quite literally breathing demonically down his neck, and had still failed to cast the curse with any effectiveness.

He wondered who among the Wizengamot, none of whom had fought in the war, would have been able to withstand that sort of pressure, even at their ages. Would they have made any better decisions now? Would they have made any better decisions, at sixteen?

Harry didn’t think so. Those present in the Wizengamot had stayed neutral in a calculated play to save their own skin and their own power, an unspoken fact which he barely managed to refrain himself from saying out loud. He was sure if he had, his voice would have been filled with contempt.

Malfoy had tried, albeit in his hindered, hobbled way. These people had just stood back and let some maniac destroy their country and the lives of thousands of people with it. They’d pursed their lips and averted their gazes and retreated to their lavish homes in parts of the Wizarding World that did not have to deal with the riff raff affected by the consequences of their decisions.

Through it all, Harry remembered Lucius’ confession at his own trial two days before. I threatened to cast the Imperius on him, he’d said, the proclamation given with incongruous pride from an otherwise pathetic silhouette.

Harry wasn’t certain whether or not it was true. After spending so many years in proximity to Snape, he knew how Slytherins could twist their words to suit them when needs must.

He didn’t say that, though. Even if Harry hadn’t learned how to lie, he had learned, if only barely, how to keep silent.

Throughout the war, Harry had Dumbledore’s guidance. Dumbledore, the same man who had revealed himself to be untrustworthy in the time after his death. Where would Harry be if it had turned out Dumbledore was as much a madman as Voldemort?

Certainly not lauded as he was now. Perhaps even in chains, as Malfoy was.

They were victims of circumstance on either side of the coin. Out of the corner of Harry’s eye, he could just barely see the whitish scar that crawled up Malfoy’s bowed neck.

Harry was unsurprised when Malfoy was not given time in Azkaban, especially not after he had already spent months there with no trial.

He was surprised, however, when Malfoy was given no punishment at all, save for three months of house arrest.

Harry reckoned, observing the wan, woozy way Malfoy swayed as his chains released themselves, that it was sufficiently visible to even the blood-thirstiest in the tribunal that Malfoy had suffered enough.

Harry had to catch him by the elbow to keep him from tumbling off the stand. The guards of Azkaban loomed, thankfully human instead of Dementors. Even so, Harry dragged Malfoy away from them with a look of deep suspicion thrown over his shoulder. He led Malfoy to a secluded area of the cavernous tribunal.

Diagonally from them, the committee members filed out, lined up like pompous, swaggering birds. Their elaborate robes looked like outlandish plumage. Harry had been central to the Wixen World for nearly a decade now, and yet still, he never failed to be amused by what constituted the height of fashion in their circles.

No doubt, in another life, Malfoy would have been one of them. He would strut around in glittering fabrics with too many buttons and the priceless furs of some magical creature that was illegal to hunt, looking like a fairytale prince in his heeled boots and lacy necklines.

In this life, however, Malfoy was astonishingly docile to Harry’s lead. The spark of uncontainable wildness within him that Harry had always detested and been thrilled by in equal measure was quashed, hopefully not permanently, by Azkaban and ill-fortune.

When Harry gestured for him to do so, Malfoy slumped beside Harry with little but a leery, quizzical look on his exhausted face. He looked as though he would have liked to collapse but for the sinister presence of the guards across the room.

“I brought your wand,” Harry said quietly, fumbling around in the deep pocket of his robes to fish it out.

In the fist Harry finally closed around the Hawthorn wand, he also, unfortunately, snagged a crumpled Drooble’s Best wrapper, a receipt from the Muggle Cafe Nero around the corner from the Ministry for an Americano that had burnt his esophagus as he’d chugged it in the telephone booth ride to the visitor's foyer, and a mix of Muggle and magical coins that left a tacky residue on his fingers and smelled grimily of copper and age.

A flush crept across his cheeks, and Harry stowed the rubbish he’d unearthed hastily back beyond the light.

Malfoy didn’t seem to have noticed, or more likely didn’t care, blinking down at the Hawthorn wand in stunned silence. It seemed to take a few moments to process what he was staring at.

Harry wasn’t certain what he expected. A venomously hissed “thanks for nothing” perhaps, or even an “about bloody time,” grinding through his teeth like grain under a mill.

He certainly hadn’t anticipated Malfoy to breathe in wonderment, “I’m not going to Azkaban.”

He snatched the wand from Harry’s outstretched hand with such speed that his broken, uneven fingernails scraped along Harry’s palm.

As though it would be taken from him, Malfoy looked around the auditorium, twitchily and with haste, and stashed it in the waistband of his prisoner’s trousers. He untucked his dingy shirt—of course, even as an unwashed, ill-treated prisoner, Malfoy wouldn’t be caught dead looking less put together than he could possibly be–and fanned it out so the silhouette of the wand could not be seen.

“No,” Harry agreed, because it felt important that someone reiterate: “You’re not going to Azkaban.”

Malfoy nodded. He seemed to want to say something, so Harry waited, the weighted pause between them elongating until Malfoy, still so predictably unable to handle silence, broke it.

With effort, he pursed his cracked lips, and, grimly, allowed Harry a quiet, “Thank you.”

Malfoy’s gratitude filled Harry with an odd, unexpected wash of frustration, partially at him, but more so at the guards who remained long after the Council had filed out. They were still peering towards the two of them, unsubtly and impatiently.

Malfoy wasn’t supposed to be quiet. He wasn’t supposed to be meek. That’s not who he was, the infuriating, overdramatic nuisance that harassed and harangued him every year at Hogwarts.

So much had changed. Harry wasn’t sure if he wanted Malfoy to change. Not this much, at least.

It felt important.  

It felt insulting.

Harry didn’t know how to say that without sounding completely barmy, though. He grunted instead, which he felt would have to do, and stared at Malfoy’s dingy, Azkaban-standard slippers.

He wondered what it must have been like for Sirius, scaling the cold, damp, rocky cliffs by the North Sea in them, if not by paw.

Shifting self-consciously, Malfoy plucked at his robes, pulling his wand from his waistband once more and rolling it in his palms as though ready to set his uniform on fire with himself still in it.

“They confiscated my robes,” he told Harry, and Harry wasn’t sure if it was because he wanted him to know, or simply because Malfoy likely hadn’t spoken to anybody, at all, for months. “The ones I wore when the Aurors stormed the Manor.”

“Do you want them back?” Harry asked, beside himself to help this version of Malfoy and promptly return him to some semblance of the person he had been.

The laugh that emitted from Malfoy’s dry lips was the throaty caw of a crow, sardonic and mocking, and it made Harry smile, the cantankerous sharp thing it was. “Absolutely fucking not,” he barked. “They can burn them.”

Harry had met Malfoy’s weary but defiant eyes. They were reddened from the sleepless despair of Azkaban, the grey watered down from silvery steel to an overcast sky. As he watched, his gaze strayed over Harry’s shoulder.

When Harry peered behind him, he found the hulking figures of the two Azkaban guards approaching. Their badges glinted officiously in the flickering torchlight.

“We’re here to escort Mr Malfoy through his release routine and house arrest, Mr Potter,” the older of the two explained brusquely.

Harry was reminded forcefully of Crabbe and Goyle. It felt worse to be on this side of things, to be backed by two thuggish goons while a smaller, weaker person quailed before them. Harry wasn’t sure how Malfoy had revelled in it for all those years, and didn’t want to learn. “We can’t have him lingering here.”

“I’ll do it myself, then,” Harry replied defensively, glancing between Malfoy’s face, which had already drained of that small spark of life, and the glower of the guards. “He’s not going to do anything.”

“We’ve got to put a Tracking Charm on him,” the guard argued, and beside him, his colleague winced at Harry’s thunderous scowl.

“You can do it in front of me, then,” Harry said with finality. “I know where the Manor is. I can apparate Malfoy to the gates, and you can follow if you’ve got the coordinates.”

“These things take time,” the older guard protested. “We’ve got to get an official portkey set up, and Mr Malfoy must sign his release paperwork. We’ve got to bring him to the interim cells here at the Ministry before he can return to his place of residence.”

“Potter, it’s fine,” Malfoy hissed. He would have sounded angry to almost anyone else. But his voice was weak, and his hands shook around his hawthorn wand, and Harry knew that Malfoy was his angriest especially when he was most afraid.

Harry didn’t need much time to consider what to do next. “Alright,” he said jauntily, with an agreeableness that took both guards aback and had Malfoy raising his eyes to the vaulted ceilings with incredulous exasperation. “Lead the way, then.”

Clearly confused, the younger of the two hesitatingly asked, “Erm—Mr Potter?”

“Well?” Harry asked, laying a hand on Malfoy’s shoulder. He was so skinny that Harry could have sworn he could have felt the cartilaginous connections of the knobby bone beneath the prisoner’s uniform. “You seemed to be in a hurry. Where are we going?”

“There’s no need for you to come with us,” the older guard said, a tight expression on his face. His mustache twitched in irritation.

Harry beamed. Malfoy sighed in resignation.

“Not at all!” Harry grinned. “If I’m going to work for the DMLE, I should know how things function around here. Don’t you think?”

He could hear the edge in his own voice, the one that always sharpened when he talked back to Uncle Vernon. It felt good to stretch that atrophied muscle once more, and even better to know that now, he wouldn’t be cuffed around the ear or barred into his bedroom for doing so.

The younger guard looked towards his older counterpart nervously. He was narrowing his steely eyes at Harry, his moustache twitching in annoyance.

“Do you have the proper clearance?” the older guard asked Harry, and the younger one scoffed.

“He’s Harry Potter,” the younger guard explained to his colleague, as if that should have been answer enough. Ordinarily, it would have.

Nevertheless, the older guard maintained, “He needs approval from the Head of the Prisoner Compliance Division,” with a curmudgeonly stiffening about his upper lip that seemed to be a bit of a sulk. “Otherwise it’s a violation of prisoner privacy policy.”

“The PriC Division?” Harry offered, and Malfoy jammed a sharp elbow straight into his ribs. Harry batted it away ebulliently. “I need to speak to the Head PriC?”

Malfoy released a beleaguered huff of frustration. The younger guard covered his mouth with a hand as he snorted. He can’t have been much older than them, perhaps five years ahead of them at Hogwarts at most. Harry wondered which house he’d been in.

“S’fitting,” he muttered to Harry, rather conspiratorially.

“The Head of the Prisoner Compliance Division is Eloise Oakenburn,” the older guard glowered. “She reports directly to the Head of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement. Obtaining approval involves undergoing a background check as well as consenting to an interview under Veritaserum.”

“Yes, but I’m not anybody ordinary,” Harry argued, and he could hear Malfoy groaning into his hands behind his back. If he had been using this line in any other context, he too would have cringed.

In the empty, echoing courtroom, however, standing between Malfoy and two hulking thugs, a thrill of fizzy smugness sung through his veins as he elaborated, “I’m Harry Potter.”

The younger guard turned to his colleague and opined with what sounded like a bit of repentance, “He’s got a point.”

Despite the older guard’s thunderous expression, the younger one turned to Harry and appealed, “Look, we can bring you and Mr Malfoy to the interim cells, but we can’t process him for release until we get approval from Eloise. You can sit with us at the desk and watch over the box of his personal artefacts, which we’re having owled from the Azkaban office. It’ll mean more time incarcerated for Mr Malfoy, though, while we wait for that approval.”

“Tell her to expedite it,” Harry said, pleased that he’d gotten somewhere—despite the heavy glower that folded the older guard’s brow—but not ready to stop pressing his luck. “I can send a Patronus, if you want.”

“That’s not protocol,” the older guard muttered irascibly.

The younger guard grimaced. “I would prefer you didn’t,” he said. “She’d have me by the ear for it. I’ll go to her office in person once we’re at the holding cells. She might want to come down and speak to you.”

Harry shrugged amicably. “Whatever it takes.”

“Potter, this is quite enough,” Malfoy whispered sharply, trying valiantly not to attract the attention of the guards and, considering they were all huddled extremely close together, failing miserably. “This isn’t sixth year.”

“No,” Harry agreed. “We’re not students anymore, and this is more serious than detention.” He glared at Malfoy and added to the broader array of spectators, “I’m not going anywhere.”

Malfoy thinned his lips, shuffling uncomfortably. He wrapped his skinny arms around himself, what little flesh that had remained after the war whittled away by his two-month incarceration. The courtroom’s Cooling Charms had been too weak to stop Harry from sweating in the elaborate dress robes he had found in the closet of the squalid room he had onerously conquered as his own at Grimmauld. The charms were, however, clearly much too strong for comfort for Malfoy in his thin prisoner’s robes, designed with discomfort in mind.

Harry flicked his fingers, casting a subtle Warming Charm his way. By the way Malfoy flinched and glared, he noticed.

Despite everyone else’s protests, Harry ended up sitting at the guard’s station with Malfoy in his eyeline and the older guard beside him.

“What do you do on duty here?” Harry asked the guard. “D’you have any crosswords?”

He chuckled when the guard shot him a glower. It would have been equally suited on the face of one of the ill-fated Malfoys, the youngest of whom was sitting sourly on the bench in the interim prisoner’s cell with his elbows on his knees.

Much like the guard, Malfoy was staring daggers into Harry. If looks could kill, he would be on trial all over again.

Harry hadn’t had this much fun in a very long time.

The two months after the war had been an exercise in detachment. Harry wasn’t certain where the time had gone. Kreacher appeared on what he assumed was a thrice-daily basis to deliver food to the darkened room in which Harry kept the curtains tightly shut and rarely left. Every evening, they argued about Kreacher’s continued servitude and potential freedom or remuneration.

Kreacher remained, as always, aghast at the prospect. But, in one of the few errands he’d managed with all his Golden Boy might, Harry had rolled out of bed and oozed bonelessly to the floo, blinking around the grit in his eyes and wiping the grease from his forehead on the hem of his grotty, three-day-old shirt.

The goblins of Gringotts had scowled at him with malevolence as he tumbled out of the floo, skipping over the untied shoelaces of his left foot. His anglets clacked on the pristine marble floor and echoed through the vaulted ceilings, mixing with the sounds of the goblins’ claws clicking on their typewriters and sifting through their abaci.

He stumbled through the Probity Probes nervously, fretful he would be caught out as a fraud, even though he certainly wasn’t under any sort of enchantment this time. Avoiding eye contact with the security guard, he slouched across the ornate marble floor to the tall desks.

“Erm, hi?” Harry asked at the first one he found, craning his neck and squinting as the goblin pulled a lantern directly into his eyeline. “I’d like to make some changes to my account?”

The goblin’s baleful eyes were unblinking. “So you do understand the proper protocol for amendments,” he growled with a voice like tumbling river rocks. “One wouldn’t have thought so, Mr Potter.”

“Erm.” Harry scratched his head and winced as his fingers tugged at a knot of tangles. He had made a large donation to Gringotts upon the clearing of his own court case, despite the goblins’ attempt to sue for destruction of property and two counts of theft, one of an object and one of a magical creature.

He had needed to certify in court that he would hire a team of Dragonologists to find her in the Scottish highlands, where she was no doubt gamboling about happier than she had ever been in her miserable life far below the Earth’s surface. Once Charlie had found her, however, and had seen the scars and healed burns which littered her hide, he had taken up arms—and would do so literally, if pressed—against the courts on her behalf.

As this lengthy legal process was grinding on, Bill had told Harry not to offer anything more to the goblins than what he had already donated. Harry envisioned his single fanged earring and recalled his deep, confident timbre as he weakly said, “Yeah, sorry again.”

The goblin flicked his claws derisively. Harry felt a cold wave of magic wash invasively over his person and shuddered.

“Additional security protocol,” the goblin rasped. He looked anything but apologetic as he added dismissively, “Apologies for the discomfort. Follow me, Mr Potter.”

Despite the shaky reintroduction to Gringotts, which had fallen extremely short of his first impression of the bank back in first year, Harry had somehow managed through the harrowing debacle that was that day’s meeting to set up an account for Kreacher.

Every week Harry automatically transferred a portion of his own savings into Kreacher’s account. Harry was certain the house elf would have been deeply unimpressed if he knew about it, so Harry opted not to tell him.

If left to his own devices, Harry would have remained in the dank room at Grimmauld for perhaps forever after that. Five weeks after the war ended, and two days before Hermione left for Australia, she badgered him with pamphlet after pamphlet with beaming Wix on the cover. All eagerly extolled the benefits of their model’s chosen profession in a never-ending banner of text beneath their healthy, glowing faces. Looking at them made Harry feel vaguely disgusted.

“You don’t want me to come with you?” Harry had asked, blinking in the afternoon sun that streamed through the window Hermione had burst open. The window had refused to unlatch for any magic either of them tried, and only did so after the application of brute force. “To Australia?”

He had a sinking stone of dismay in his stomach at the thought. They had done absolutely everything together. Harry didn’t know Hermione’s parents, it was true, had barely even met them a sparse few times throughout Hogwarts. But he loved her. He wanted to help her in any way he could.

She grimaced. “I don’t want you to see them like this.” She winced, and shuddered. “I don’t want to see them like this.”

“I can help you,” Harry said, even though she was crisp as ever in her brand new tee shirt and jeans, and Harry had not changed his pyjama bottoms at all in recent memory. He was fairly certain, if he removed them, that they would have been able to stand up and walk away on their own. Maybe they would dance a jig with the empty chair to the left, which always grew a mouth between the woodwork and the cushion to bare its fangs and drool on Harry disconcertingly when he forgot himself and sat in it. “Please, Hermione. You’ve helped me so much.”

She sighed and patted his hand, reaching over the scattered, brightly-colored pamphlets. The gesture felt painfully condescending, and it stung. Harry resisted the urge to retract his hand from the tabletop. “It’s not a tit-for-tat, Harry,” she said.

“I know that,” he grumbled defensively. “I tried to go alone on the horcrux hunt, and you wouldn’t let me because you’re my best friend. I’m just doing the same.”

“It’s not the same,” Hermione snapped. Her curly hair crackled in upset. Her magic zinged through it in a way that fluffed it up like Crookshanks when he was furious.

Harry blinked at her, startled. She looked back with wide, wet brown eyes, deflating guiltily, and the amount of remorse her expression held was completely incongruous with the little outburst. “You never made any of our problems yourself,” she admitted, and her voice cracked with regret. “I don’t want you to see what I’m capable of.”

“Hermione,” Harry protested. “You’ve seen me cast Unforgivables.”

“It’s different. You needed to,” she argued. Harry thought of Carrow crumpling under his Cruciatus and quietly disagreed. “These are my parents. I love them.”

“That’s all the more reason for me to come with you,” he said, brushing the pamphlets off the table as he leaned over to her in earnestness. One of them crunched, and though Harry could not see it, he suspected the chair had caught it in its fanged mouth. “You’re going to need support.”

Harry wanted to yell when she shook her head. “I…probably,” she agreed with reluctance. “You’re probably right. But I need to do this alone. What if it’s more involved than just a spell? Harry,” she said firmly, stopping him as he opened his mouth. “You’ve done enough. Please. One of us should rest. One of us needs to stay here and keep an eye on Ron.”

“He’s got his whole family,” Harry argued, though of course, that wasn’t true. Ron’s family would never be whole again after Fred’s death.

Still, Harry couldn’t help but feel bitter about it, the way that somehow Ron became the priority in his grief, even though he was surrounded by the widest support network of the three of them.

Harry always had the Weasleys, yes, ever since he started at Hogwarts. But it wasn’t the same as being one of Ron’s brothers. Molly loved him, and he her, but she wasn’t his mother, and he wasn’t her blood. No matter how much she and Arthur and the rest of the Weasleys insisted, no matter how much their actions proved he was welcome, Harry always felt an uneasy level of removal from them, like one wrong move would send him into the cupboard once more.

He knew it wasn’t fair. It was, however, how he felt.

That feeling had driven him to lash out after Cedric’s death, after Sirius’. He’d never gotten to mourn Dumbledore’s death, and his feelings about him were a muddy, tangled mix. And then there were the others from the Battle, Tonks and Remus and all the rest, and Harry’s house wasn’t full of caring family members, only mouldering old portraits and a decrepit house elf in a stained loincloth who wheezed at him thrice daily to improve his hygiene.

Ron had plenty of people to take care of him, in Harry’s biased, bitter opinion. He and Hermione had no one but each other and the wetly grumbling chair beside them.

“Helping you is more important,” Harry said, because Hermione had never abandoned him in the wilderness with a price on their heads like Ron had. Hermione had never insisted that Harry must have put his name in the Goblet of Fire. Hermione had never strayed from Harry’s side, and it felt awful in some deep, unexplainable way that she suddenly didn’t have a use for him now that Voldemort was dead. “I don’t care how long it takes.”

Tears pricked at the corner of her eyes. “Please. It’s important to me that you don’t see this. If I need help, I’ll floo, I promise. I just—I need to fix this mistake myself.”

“It wasn’t a mistake,” Harry said hotly, defensive for her former self. He couldn’t understand why she was being so difficult. Certainly she’d made mistakes before—she turned herself into a gigantic cat in second year, although she had refused to show herself to him until long afterwards. She had…well.

Actually, that was the only time Harry could remember her making any sort of error, and even then it hadn’t been her own fault but because of failing to consider Millicent Bulstrode’s choice of pet. “You don’t know what could have happened to them if you hadn’t sent them away.”

She gave him a watery smile. “Maybe I’ll believe that more once they’re back here.”

When she left though the floo, Harry set fire to each uneaten pamphlet one by one over the tarnished kitchen sink. Watching the brilliant smiles smolder into ash gave him a sense of satisfaction that very little in recent memory had.

When Luna had appeared at his doorstep a week later and showed Harry the article written with voyeuristic glee in The Prophet, detailing when the Malfoy family members were to endure their trials, Harry rummaged through the piles of unopened mail that had made it past Grimmauld’s wards until he found the pleading missives from their personal solicitor.

Even if it wasn’t Hermione, at least someone needed him. Harry would be damned if he didn’t deliver.

Chapter Text

CHAPTER NINE

Harry had not expected to hate training at the DMLE.

Harry had assumed that he would be duelling every day, learning new variations of spells and hexes, testing his reflexes to the limits, improving his aim and his mental sharpness. And there was some of that—there were lofty fitness requirements that every Trainee Auror had to meet, culminating with a six-part test at the end of their eight-week course.

Unfortunately for Harry, sprinting until collapse and doing push-ups until muscle failure to surpass some board-ordered physical standard was the single part of the entire program that Harry halfway enjoyed.

The final test would involve sprinting, distance foot chases, push-ups, pull-ups, and grappling exercises for when they would be expected to physically apprehend suspects and criminals. After it all, when the trainees were winded, sweaty, and exhausted, they would be put through a practical duelling exam, where they would be expected to take down their instructors.

As such, they had two hours of physical training every day, which Harry enjoyed both for the routine and for the satisfying calm silence that always accompanied a hard run. This satisfaction was, however, undermined by the fatiguing timing of their training: 5am, every weekday.

Harry wasn’t certain how the other trainees did it. He did his two hours, halfway fell asleep in the showers on a pious day, toweled off and grabbed a truly eye-watering amount of coffee from the Nero around the corner from the Ministry. Every day, he claimed a shoddy seat on the threadbare plaid cushioned chair in a quiet corner and slouched over his homework for an hour and change.

He knew the others gathered at the cafe within the Ministry itself in the free period, but Harry simply couldn’t stomach it. Muggles at least left him alone. They never stared at him the way even his fellow trainees did. What little work he could focus on there was never interrupted by packs of tightly-clustered whisperers, or pointed fingers, or slack-jawed stares.

If Ron had decided to go into Auror training instead of joining George at the Wheezes, he may have been able to run interference between Harry and the general public. Likely, Ron would have settled on a solution that was somewhat less rancorous than the one Harry settled on.

As this was not the case, and Harry was thereby left entirely unsupervised, he was of the opinion that less rancour was not nearly so much fun.

When Harry encountered these worshipful masses, he couldn’t stop himself from unceremoniously dropping whatever he was doing to stare pugnaciously back at whoever it was all aflutter at his presence. There were some weirdos and creeps, probably a larger than average proportion of them, upon whom this tactic did not work. For them, Harry’s tried-and-true method of running into the bathroom and Apparating to Grimmauld did the trick.

Most ordinary people didn’t take to the treatment very well at all, however, and that’s exactly what Harry liked about it.

He would watch, as stone-faced and unblinking as he could manage, while their interest chipped away into uncertainty and eroded into discomfort. Eventually, as was Harry’s hope, the disheartened sycophants would shuffle away awkwardly with squeamish little frowns on their once-eager faces. Every time they did so, Harry had to remind himself of cupboard things in order not to burst into mocking laughter.

Antagonising the fawning hoipolloi was certainly more interesting than bureaucracy, which is another reason why Harry had to go to the Nero. He hadn’t known there was so much paperwork involved in Auroring, and so many rules about it that needed memorizing. Truly, he had never wanted to know.

If it were up to him, he would never see another piece of paperwork in his life. Instead, he was forced to fantasise about barging back to King’s Cross and demanding for Dumbledore to rescind his decision to return to the Forest every time Trainer Johnson shuffled another parchment full of convoluted acronyms and dotted lines in front of him.

He didn’t give a shit if his Freedom from Foreign Influence statement needed to be signed in triplicate. The fact that his Conflict of Interest form was so profoundly invasive was truly insulting, given his history. And the Background Investigation papers, asking after his closest blood-relatives’ home address, were filled out as “Hell, hopefully”.

If anything was more mind-numbingly boring than filling out paperwork, it was memorising instructions on how to fill out said paperwork. It made Harry want to tear out his hair. He didn’t, if only for fear that one of the crazier members of the mob would shove him down and seize the hank of it for themselves to do something perverted with. The fortitude it took to remind himself of this was a daily struggle.

With the most brain-melting part of his morning routine completed, Harry trudged back to the D.M.L.E.’s Training Classroom to stare with unfocused eyes at the projection of their bookwork component. As a matter of “strong internal policy and regulation”, the tenants of which Trainer Johnson had recited to them from the Auror Handbook in a monotonous voice that felt like Dark Magic or at the very least nefarious hypnosis, all trainees were forced to watch reruns of Auror memories. Upon their observation, they were then instructed to pick apart what the Aurors in the memory had done that was “up to code”, and what was not. Ad nauseum.

Harry didn’t have the strongest grasp on Latin, despite all his years at Hogwarts, but this memory observation portion certainly did make him feel nauseous. By the end of the session, he almost always found himself with bilious distaste for the abuses of power he’d witnessed, many of which Trainer Johnson even condoned.

When Harry had first heard they would be watching Auror memories from the field, he’d been mistaken by sunny illusions that they would be getting to watch Potions raids conducted under the cover of darkness and firefight duels throughout the maze of Knockturn and its closes. He’d thought of head-spinning Apparition chases and wrestling to the ground the clear-cut criminals, removing dangerous members of society off of the streets.

From his history with the Ministry, Harry should have known this was not the type of instruction he would receive. Clearly, if they struggled even with curtailing such outright militant, fascist groups twice over in two decades, they would fail even more mightily at containing more minor evil. Harry learned quickly that he had been Panglossian in his optimistic belief that they wouldn’t be the ones perpetrating it, in fact.

The most benign encounters included the Aurors haranguing a clearly drunk young Wix post-apparition, or Disillusioning and taking aside an old codger in full Warlock robes yelling about how magic was real and he would transfigure anyone who bumped into him into a toad in the middle if Piccadilly Circus, or going over what specific ingredients differentiated perfectly legal Dreamless Sleep from its other, more unsavoury counterparts.

The worst involved interrogating the overwhelmed witches and wizards about cursed artifacts they themselves had submitted to the DMLE, frogmarching a wizard with the same complexion as Harry to the PriC Division’s interim cells for unlicensed usage of Gillyweed tea, and escorting young Muggle-born Hogwarts firsties and their overwhelmed parents to the Center for Wizarding Children Supervisory Services after their Muggle parents were unable to stop them from casting accidental magic one too many times.

Harry couldn’t focus on any of it. Only a few moments after the projections began, Harry’s own personal cinema replayed behind his own eyes, remembering much more enticing goings-on than the last poorly-handled ticketing confrontation for the Misuse of some cheaply made, poorly charmed Muggle Artefact.

Today’s chosen memory centered around Draco Malfoy. Harry did not deign to reflect on how this choice of entertainment was not uncommon in the least. It hadn’t been in Hogwarts, either, but at least then the git had been right there, so Harry had some plausible deniability which he happily lurked behind.

There was no denying how often Harry thought of Malfoy anymore, in his best moments and in his worst, and in nearly all in between.

The moment that swam to the forefront of Harry’s mind was likely one that Malfoy himself would likely categorise as, “not as bad as Azkaban, possibly.” Harry gathered this assessment through the ungracious twitch of his bloodshot left eye in an otherwise painfully placid face when he was released from PriC custody.

He had been unceremoniously dumped on the overgrown grass outside the Manor gate by the older guard. Graceful even under duress, which no longer sent the same old frisson of annoyance down Harry's spine but rather something he would prefer not to examine, he managed to make himself look elegant in his prisoner’s slippers even as he stumbled through the rooted weeds.

The older guard, who’d had him by the elbow through the apparition, flourished his wand. Malfoy cast a weary, resigned eye to the polished length of oak, but did nothing to stop him. Harry, on the other hand, bristled like a Kneazle.

“I’m putting the Tracking Charm on him,” the older guard explained. They had told Harry their names at some point throughout the afternoon, both of them, but Harry couldn’t be arsed to remember them. Maybe if he was better at vengeance, like Malfoy or even Hermione, he would have remembered them to report them to Kingsley later on.

“Is that necessary?” Harry asked, and the older guard looked at him like he was shit on the bottom of his shoe.

“Yes,” he ground out, at the same time that Malfoy snapped, “Potter, just let them do it so I can end this bloody nightmare day.”

Harry would have protested, but the cadence of Malfoy’s voice had turned a corner from the nasally whine of the deeply hassled to the pleading urgency it got when he was truly desperate. Mulishly, Harry stared down the older guard as he cast. He committed the flourish of his wand to memory so he could ask Hermione about it later through the floo.

When the guard finally departed, Malfoy released a great exhale so large he seemed to have been holding onto it since languishing in Azkaban for how his skinny frame deflated.

He ran his fingers through his hair, tugging slightly at the crown. He took a few more breaths with his eyes screwed shut, the heels of his hands pressed into his forehead. Harry shifted where he stood, feeling like a voyeur into Malfoy’s private emotions, yet unwilling to leave.

Malfoy certainly had other opinions. When he finally lifted his head from his hands, he frowned at Harry, swept his judgemental gaze up and down the borrowed brocade robes that barely fit him, and spat, “Now get the fuck out of my house.”

The Manor sat down the gravel path, far enough away that it looked much smaller than Harry knew it to be. Even with his weak eyes, Harry could see that some of the windows were shattered. The hedges and ivy were overgrown, creeping along the facade like the legs of some spindly sea creature wrapped around the hull of a sinking ship. The wood looked weathered and grey. Harry wished briefly that when Hermione had hexed him in the face as the Snatchers took them, he had retained more of his vision than two hazy slits, if only so he could compare the husk of the Manor looming in the distance to what it had been during the active war.

“I’m not in it yet,” Harry pointed out.

Malfoy huffed. “And you won’t be.”

Behind him, the rust-spotted grotesque in the middle of the iron gates caught Harry’s gaze and blew him a smug raspberry.

Malfoy’s words were certain and his ire powerful, all the anger he couldn’t unleash on the PriC Division now ready to be turned onto Harry instead. But he swayed on his feet, exhausted and wobbly. The bags under his cloudy grey eyes had become the nasty purplish colour of the sky before a terrible storm. Harry could see the weather of Malfoy’s moods painted in the colours of his face.

Harry’s stomach was uncomfortably empty, the pack of crisps he’d loudly crunched on beside the sulking older guard and his hastily finished pre-trial americano not nearly enough to keep him satiated. Malfoy likely hadn’t eaten a meal in Merlin knew how long.

“I’m hungry,” Harry announced, because saying something like “let me help you” to a freshly armed and furious Draco Malfoy was certain to yield unpleasant results.

This proclamation instead yielded a bug-eyed stare from Malfoy, which had the dual benefits of both not being a Cruciatus Curse, and doing wonders at reminding Harry that there was still a fighting chance he could convince himself Malfoy was unattractive.

“Then go buy yourself dinner,” Malfoy ground out, twisting on his heel and raising his hands to the grotesque before Harry could reply. The iron half-beast half-man beamed at him from the metalwork. Its fangs flaked with the rust that coated its smile.

The gates opened for Malfoy with ready eagerness, though its hinges creaked painfully. Harry followed swift on his heels, only for the gate to swing into him with all its generations of dubious Malfoy might.

Harry managed to wrestle it back open with a Protego that he put some extra, grumpy umph into. He smiled nastily at the grotesque as he wiped the flaking rust off his palm and onto the hip of his brocade robes, striding onto the gravel path and directly into the wards. The grotesque curled its lip at him in distaste.

Though his voice was vaguely strangled with exertion as he felt the constriction of the wards slide around him, Harry still managed to observe loudly, “You need some serious dental work.”

His grin widened as the grotesque furrowed its mottled, pockmarked brow at him in confusion, even as he strained through step after plodding step against the resistant wards.

“Stop insulting my property,” snapped Malfoy. He looked torn between irritation and begrudging, reluctant humor, a small line pushing into one hollowed cheek. “You know full well the Muggle tooth Healers can’t do anything about him.”

Harry shrugged, and then decided to keep his shoulder up as he pushed. He felt like an ox with a yoke, struggling uphill. “Maybe it doesn’t know that,” he grunted above the crunch of the gravel path under his sliding trainers.

Harry kept moving forward, having to lean into his shoulders as he got farther and farther away from the gate. The Malfoy wards were elastic as they tried to draw him back. He felt them thin as they stretched over him like cling film, straining and breaking in small tears all over, until with one grunt of effort, Harry was through. He panted a bit and rubbed a slight sheen of sweat off his forehead.

Malfoy had crossed his arms as he watched him, looking mightily unimpressed as he did so. “Of course,” he tsked, sounding cross.

Harry looked up at him, ready to defend his storied abilities at breaking and entering, but the disapproval thick in Malfoy’s tone was not directed at Harry.

Instead, Malfoy was looking at the grotesque, which had twisted its neck at an impossible angle to peer towards the two of them. It shrunk abashedly under Malfoy’s glower, frowning guiltily for a moment before it caught sight of Harry.

Harry was panting with his arms slung above his head, sweating beside Malfoy. When it met his self-satisfied gaze, it unleashed a truly thunderous scowl.

Turning on his heel to stride down the lane with nary a glance in Harry’s direction, Malfoy muttered to himself, “He crosses wards imbued with thirty generations of Malfoy magic.” Hidden from his vision, Harry gestured rudely to the spluttering gate before jogging up to join Malfoy, meeting his side as he continued tetchily, “And he hardly breaks a sweat. Fucking ridiculous.”

The exasperation in his last statement was emphasised with a tired hand through his hair, tousling his fringe. Harry thought, were it not so greasy from the months in Azkaban, it might have looked nice at the length it had grown into. Not quite the artful standard Malfoy no doubt set himself, but long enough that Harry could see the wave in it that was characteristic of the Black family.

It brushed Malfoy’s cheekbones in a way that reminded Harry of the small portrait of Regulus he had first encountered on the Black family tapestry. Harry had seen much more of Regulus when, in an ill-fated attempt at peacemaking with Grimmauld, he had attempted to “walk the house”, as Hermione had suggested.

He had been walking from room to room for hours, and the townhouse was not big enough to justify the time spent. All the corridors seemed to have stretched themselves to Olympic lengths purely for Harry’s dissatisfaction. Every time he turned, there seemed to be a new door to open and a new room he had to faff about in for enough time that he could tenuously tell himself he knew it.

This tedious misadventure had ended when Harry had stumbled into what he could only assess to be Regulus’ shrine, constructed no doubt by Kreacher. It contained dozens of Regulus’ portraits at varying ages throughout his life. As one, they all turned to the open door and blinked at him in surprise. Harry stumbled into the door frame, having been completely taken aback by the sudden audience of what must’ve been at least two-dozen.

“James Potter?” echoed roughly five different portraits. They had an offended, protective edge to their voices when they asked accusingly, “Why are you in my ancestral home?”

The younger portraits did not seem so interested, turning back to one another to whisper. Two of the smallest ones picked up some sort of hand-clapping game, which they had presumably been occupied by before Harry had unwittingly stumbled in.

“Ah–Erm,” Harry had spluttered, completely at a loss. Rather than coming across as confident and collected, his voice cracked as he asked, “How many of you are there exactly?”

Harry had never seen even one portrait of Regulus in Grimmauld. From the way Sirius had spoken of him, it seemed Sirius, too, had never encountered his post-humourous likeness. Harry wondered if that was vindictively purposeful on the house-elf’s part, and wondered whether or not Kreacher would have allowed him access to this room, if only Sirius was kinder to him.

It would have been nice to have found this stockpile two years prior, Harry also realised, with quite the mutinous pout. It would have saved them months debating who RAB was, and maybe they could have ended the war with less bloodshed than what had ended up happening.

But, of course, they couldn’t have, because at that moment, the keeper of the shrine popped into existence and bowled into Harry with an incensed howl.

“Out!” Kreacher wailed, shoving Harry at the thighs and tripping him over the dusty, threadbare rugs. “OUT!”

Harry had not tried to make nice with Grimmauld since then. Clearly, his efforts were unappreciated. Considering that Malfoy was not shoving him away as Kreacher had done, nor howling in outrage, perhaps they would be appreciated rather more at the Manor.

Malfoy had turned away from Harry entirely, walking along the path back to his home with his skinny frame still ramrod straight in a way that Harry intuited meant he knew he had an audience.

Smiling a little, Harry followed.

~*~*~

“I’m going to cook us lunch,” Harry announced, even though lunch was long past. Cooking Malfoy dinner felt weird and unapproachable. Lunch, though? Anyone could make anyone else lunch. It wasn’t a thing. Not like cooking someone dinner was.

“Must you?” Malfoy sighed tiredly.

“I’m afraid I must,” he replied, gleefully imitating Malfoy’s posh drawl and dodging his pointy elbow as he did so. Grimmauld hadn’t let him cook at all since he’d sent Kreacher to Hogwarts. He relished the opportunity.

Malfoy wasn’t like the masses of adoring fans that swarmed the Ministry foyer for a glimpse of him, nor the nightmare stalkers who every few months seemed to crop up at his favourite Muggle spots, whereupon he would begrudgingly have to select a new one, even farther away from Grimmauld. Malfoy didn’t make weird cut-out posters of clippings from his photographs in the Prophet to hold over his head while Harry slunk past, pulling his hoodie down to the tip of his nose.

Malfoy was hardly like his mad admirers. And unlike the myriad others Harry had met who disliked him, Malfoy hardly ever acted like he didn’t want Harry around, either. Save of course for one exceptional altercation in a girl’s bathroom, but that was an extenuating case.

The Dursleys had done everything in their power to make it like Harry didn’t exist, and Voldemort, clearly, had done everything he could to wipe Harry from existence. Malfoy, though, always sought Harry out, and Harry had always done the same for him. He saw no reason why they should stop now, simply because the war was over.

Malfoy rolled his eyes. “It’s this way to the kitchens,” he muttered, his shoulders up around his earlobes as he peered shiftily around the Manor, his eyes lingering on the broken glass and the unnerving stains smeared across the woodwork. “I’ll lead you to them.”

“Are you sure you don’t want to, I dunno,” Harry began, gesturing to Malfoy and winced. He knew that criticising Malfoy’s appearance was a one-way ticket straight to an abominable tongue-lashing. “I would feel pretty grimy, and I don’t think a Cleaning Charm is going to cut it.”

The frown that dragged the corners of Malfoys lips had such a gravitational pull Harry was surprised his mouth didn’t slide straight off his face and fall to the floor with a fleshy, wet slap.

“The Manor doesn’t trust newcomers,” Malfoy warned. “Not after the Dark Lord, and especially not after the Aurors came.”

Though Harry knew it wasn’t meant as a threat—Malfoy’s thank you had been genuine, and Harry reckoned, from talking to Luna, that any lingering animosity between them had been thoroughly thrashed out of him by people who had deserved the beating more—he couldn’t help the prickling sensation on the back of his neck.

Harry let Malfoy lead the way.

The house was eerily silent, save for their footsteps. Harry could feel the dark magic, thick and humid in the air. When they turned some corners, the heavy stink of it made it hard to breathe. But Malfoy walked blithely through it, as though he didn’t feel it at all.

Harry wondered what Azkaban must have felt like, and if it had been worse.

Surely, it must have been worse.

The thought made Harry want to break something. Malfoy had rotted in that hellhole for two months, and he had come out shaking and skinny and half-dead. Sirius had spent thirteen years there. The whole, hale, rakish person he had been beforehand had been stripped away. Selfishly, Harry was filled with loathing and bitterness that he never had the chance to meet who he had been before.

Without Azkaban, Harry might have had a childhood.

But Sirius was no longer, and, terribly, Azkaban outlived him.

So Harry watched the blonde head in front of him sway slightly side to side with every exhausted step.

“The servant’s stairway is the only one still in service,” Malfoy told him, crouching down into the small space. It wasn’t sized for elves, thankfully, but it was still cramped in a way that made Harry feel jittery and nervous. He pressed his palms to the walls and tried not to give into the urge to push. “The Manor swallowed the Lord’s stairway after the elves began getting attacked.”

They descended the cramped and twisting stairway to the kitchens, into which Harry was profoundly grateful to be spat. He took a deep and steadying breath, feeling as though his ribcage itself had been constricted by the confined space.

Malfoy was staring at him with a “Well, what now?” sort of expression, expectant and impatient. The bags under his eyes were the darkest things in his pale face. Harry guided him to the kitchen table with a gentle hand on his shoulder, which tensed beneath his touch but didn’t shrug him off.

Harry pushed down, and Malfoy sank into one of the small chairs clustered around the table. It was a testament to how dead on his feet Malfoy was that he didn’t protest, just like in the trial chamber, and as before, Harry was filled with rage at the system which had stripped Malfoy’s vibrant fight from him.

Malfoy blinked tiredly through the gloom of the large room, which was gloomy with lack of light and stained with soot and reeked of rotten fruit. “Leedy would make me cinnamon buns when I snuck down here as a child,” he said quietly.

His voice sounded immeasurably sad. “I freed all our elves while Father was fighting off the Aurors. I didn’t…” He chewed his lip, staring down at the scuffed wood of the small table. The dark stain of it was peeling off in layers, and Malfoy began tugging at the curled bits, peeling them off. “Luna told me about Dobby, and I didn’t want that to happen again.”

Harry blinked. Luna had told Harry about her time becoming close to Malfoy in the Manor cellars, in that vague, airy way of hers. But there was one thing Harry didn’t understand: “When did she have time to talk to you? Dobby died when we escaped.”

Malfoy slumped in his chair, resting his elbows on the table. Harry was certain it was the first time he’d seen him do so, ever, in all the years he’d gazed at him from across the Great Hall. “The Battle,” he mumbled miserably. He buried his head in his arms.

Harry had never been taught how to care for someone in their suffering. He had never been shown. He only knew how to shove it down when he endured it, or how to awkwardly pretend it wasn’t there, like he had done with Cho after Cedric had died.

At the Burrow, the grief was unignorable. There was an ever-present miasma of it. Molly, much like Harry, seemed to deal with it best by a brusque appreciation for hard work.

Every time he visited, she could be found in the kitchen, hovering over a pot full of something that smelled heavenly, or sweating as she checked the oven, or chopping mountains of vegetables while her magic spun potatoes off their peels.

When her cheery matter-of-factness was inevitably interspersed with brief but intense periods of sorrow, she cast a humongous web of a Stasis Charm over the lot and shut herself in the bedroom she and Arthur shared. She would emerge some time later, puffy-eyed and sniffling, but when Harry’s worried face entered her sight line, she would send a bowl or a plate of whatever it was she’d most recently finished spinning his way.

She would say, “Now, you tell me if that needs anything else, love,” and that would be the end of it.

Pretending grief did not exist seemed to earn Harry a fifty percent success rate. Cho was no longer in Harry’s life, whereas Molly remained a staple. In this endeavour, Harry rather optimistically hoped that imitation was not only the sincerest form of flattery, but also the most effective way to remain on the good end of the newly returned hawthorn wand.

Harry cast one final glance at Malfoy, who was doing his best effort to become one with the table, and then surveyed what he had to work with.

The kitchen was covered in a thick layer of grime and choked in ominous gloom, but it didn’t seem hateful the way Grimmauld did. When Harry set his hands on the filthy countertop and breathed in, some horrific odour didn’t waft directly towards Harry in pointed defiance. Already, the improvements were in leaps and bounds.

It certainly didn’t smell good in the Manor, but beneath the scent of the rot, Harry could almost smell something like lilies. As though the Manor itself was in mourning, as filled with despair as the boy half-laying limply behind Harry.

Harry knew what to say to those with a half-step in death. He had had just that conversation, on the other side of it, just a few short months prior.

“It’s alright,” he whispered, stroking the countertop. He watched the filth fade away beneath his palm. “You’re safe now.”

~*~*~

Malfoy fell asleep while Harry cooked.

Harry hadn’t noticed. Not until, amongst the bubbling of the boiling water and the searing of the hot pan, Malfoy took a sharp, stuttering inhale.

When Harry looked over, he saw Malfoy’s face resting in the crook of his elbow. His eyes were closed and his pale brows were flung together.

Nightmares were a common thing for Harry, and though Grimmauld tried its best to make his life a living hell, he imagined even Grimmauld had nothing on the sheer torment that was Azkaban.

Harry didn’t want to wake him. Malfoy had looked so incredibly exhausted all throughout the trial and its aftermath. But he certainly didn’t want him to suffer through nightmares, and Harry especially did not want him to do so with an audience.

Harry surmised, less an educated guess than absolute knowledge taken from Voldemort’s own eyes, that Malfoy had seen the same sorts of horrors that Harry had and likely even worse. Screaming himself awake in a panic would undoubtedly be a mortifying experience, especially for someone as emotionally constipated as Draco Malfoy.

So Harry bit his lip, concentrated, and sent a small bit of magic spiralling his way.

He wasn’t quite sure what spell he was performing. He didn’t know any related enchantments to his exact efforts, though Hermione probably would.

All he knew was, Slughorn had taught them about intentional magic, back in sixth year, and Harry had an abundance of intent. He didn’t want Malfoy to suffer. He didn’t want him to be afraid. He wanted him to feel as safe as the kitchen did, which was slowly but surely brightening as Harry worked.

Gleaning knives, well-oiled wood cutting boards, and beautiful pans revealed themselves as though brought to the counter with a Summoning Charm. The fire on the stovetop illuminated the space in a warm glow that chased the dank shadows farther into their corners. The drawers became easier to open. Every time Harry peered in the pantry, it seemed as though more food was stocked than before. As Harry gained more confidence and he navigated the space, he felt the despair lessen, bit by little bit.

When the magic washed over Malfoy, Harry was relieved to see the furrow between his brows dissipate. He was a little panicked, however, when his flaxen hair began to shine once more. Perhaps when he woke up he wouldn’t notice that Harry had accidentally laundered him in his sleep.

Maybe Harry could pretend he didn’t know what he was talking about, if he did mention it. Harry grimaced. He was never good at lying to people he cared about, and Malfoy had made his way onto that list in indelible ink the moment he looked his insane, unpredictable, violent Aunt in the eyes and lied, “I can’t be sure.”

Harry certainly felt like a bit of a voyeur as he watched how, unencumbered by grease, Malfoy’s hair curled around his face in sleek waves. Selfishly, Harry was glad to see it, so different from the pin-straight locks of Malfoy senior.

Harry knew Malfoys senior and junior were two different people. Harry would never have been beside himself with the need to help Lucius Malfoy, except perhaps into the grave. Nevertheless it was so nice, so very satisfying, to see that difference represented both in mind and body. Even if it was only in the details for now.

The way Malfoy’s hair curled. The way the grey of his eyes reflected the blue of his mother’s, when they soared through the sky on the Quidditch pitch together. The way Malfoy’s clever hands were always moving, always picking or peeling or folding or twirling something.

Harry always paid attention to Malfoy’s details. He didn’t know how not to.

The dark crescents packed beneath Malfoy’s fingernails were replaced with clean white. His skin seemed to lose some of that greyish pallor, and Harry wondered if it was bloodlessness or the grime of the North Sea that had caused it. His prisoner’s outfit remained stiff and scratchy, but it was clean, now, likely cleaner than when Malfoy had first put it on.

As the magic touched him, he made a small noise of what Harry could only take for malcontent. Leave it to Malfoy to be perturbed by Harry helping him, even when he wasn’t fully conscious.

Harry turned back to his cooking and clicked his tongue appreciatively. The Malfoy pantry certainly hadn’t been stocked with anything as Muggle as tinned tomato soup or slices of individually packaged and dubiously labelled cheddar. That was what he had always made for himself when the Dursleys vacationed without him, the infrequent, luxurious times they’d actually left him food or money for it.

Nevertheless, Harry persisted. He made for himself and his weary host the most high-falutin cheese toastie and tomato soup he had ever laid eyes on. He’d had to puree the tomatoes himself with a knife and elbow grease, but Harry didn’t mind. He liked the mindless task of it.

Hermione had always likened cooking to potions, but Harry disagreed. Cooking was so much freer a craft. The only thing that mattered when he put a little more salt or added a sprig of rosemary was whether or not the end product tasted good. Potions, on the other hand, was a merciless science: one misstep and the whole thing was ruined.

Malfoy was talented at Potions, Harry knew. It was hard not to notice, with Snape doling out house points to him like hard candies every class. But his talent had been tested the year before, when he had basically run the Hogwarts apothecary for how the war had disrupted all their supply chains, and everything he made had worked brilliantly.

Harry thought it must have been difficult to maintain such exacting standards. Harry’s standards were limited to the simple but effective, “keep everyone alive”, and even then he had to reckon with the awful self-destroying guilt when he failed, again and again.

He stirred the aromatic pot and wondered what it must have been for Malfoy, to have that sort of “keep everyone alive” mentality, but with the same stakes added to every small thing he’d ever done. He’d done it too: he hadn’t been blasted off the tree like Sirius—he’d been a good little pureblood heir.

A gilded cage was certainly no cupboard under the stairs, but even so, they’d both been trapped.

Midway through cooking, an olive branch had appeared in the cold cupboard in the form of heavy cream, a repentant peace offering from the sullen kitchen. He had perhaps added more than strictly necessary, alongside a small mountain of pureed vegetables. But he figured he had never been so fortunate when he was younger, and they both could use the extra flesh on their bones. Harry was merely making up for lost time.

The plates and bowl, which were of some delicate porcelain with a fine pink-blossomed pattern no doubt hand-painted onto the sides, had likely never housed such common fare. At Hogwarts, Malfoy’s favourite food had always been dessert of just about any kind, but especially chocolate. Harry wasn’t about to get chocolates for him, though—it was quite enough that he’d made them both lunch.

No chocolates, and none of Malfoy’s favourite savoury dish, which was the entirely posh entrée of lamb in what had appeared to have been mint sauce, from the leaf on top. Malfoy had eaten second helpings of it whenever it had begun appearing in front of him from third year onwards. Belatedly, Harry wondered if Dobby had been making it especially for him, and if Malfoy had been aware that his family’s freed house-elf had taken up the helm in the Hogwarts kitchens.

He’d have to settle for Harry’s favourite instead. The bowls full of soup and the glasses filled with ice water and the plates stacked with sandwiches set themselves gently down in front of him, released from their Hovering Charm.

At the small rattle they made, Malfoy jolted awake, emitting a little sound halfway between a snort and an inhale.

“Morning,” Harry drawled, plonking himself into the chair across from him. “Eat.”

Malfoy rubbed one eye with the heel of his hand. He still looked exhausted as all get-out, but Harry was glad he had gotten even fifteen minutes of sleep kept away from the nightmares. Merlin knew more nights than not when he’d first come to Grimmauld, Harry hadn’t gotten even that.

Malfoy blinked forcibly, staring into his lunch. “I didn’t say you could make food for me.”

“I don’t listen to what you don’t say,” Harry replied, biting into his cheese toastie with a crispy, buttery crunch. He wiped crumbs from the corner of his mouth with the side of his thumb, and then rubbed that on his lapel, smirking when Malfoy winced. “Don’t really listen to what you do say, either.”

“Clearly,” Malfoy intoned with a wrinkled nose, sounding for all the world like his godfather. He cast a leery eye to Harry, who was chewing his toastie and slurping his soup with gusto, and delicately picked up his spoon.

“This is not a soup spoon,” he admonished Harry.

“S’a spoon.” Harry shrugged. “It scoops things. It scoops soup.” He demonstrated exaggeratedly. Some of his soup fell to the scuffed table in messy drops, and the wrinkle in Malfoy’s pointy nose deepened. “Thus, it’s a soup spoon.”

“It’s a dessert spoon,” Malfoy insisted. He had yet to take a mouthful, and seemed dedicated to educating Harry before he did so. “A soup spoon is round.”

“Alright, your highness,” Harry sighed. “Pretend it’s chocolate mousse cake, for all I care.”

Surprisingly, the sarcasm in Harry’s voice seemed to elicit something other than prickly defensiveness in the Malfoy. He stirred his soup with a thin-lipped expression that appeared almost remorseful, the repentance incongruous on his princely face.

Instead of doing anything as outlandish as apologising, as though this, amongst all the graver atrocities committed between them, would be the thing that broke the thestral’s back, Malfoy took a spoonful of tomato soup and ate it.

The moan he let out was ungodly. It made the hair on the back of Harry’s neck stand on end.

“Salazar, fuck,” he swore after he swallowed, and tucked in with vigour.

Harry cleared his throat. “The sandwich is better when you dip it,” he said, and washed the dryness out of his mouth with a swig from his glass.

Without answering, Malfoy picked up the sandwich, tore it apart with nimble fingers into precise little bite-sized bits, and ate every one with mechanical precision. Harry marveled that even when wolfing down his food, Malfoy didn’t spill a crumb on the weathered woodwork.

When Malfoy leaned back, Harry could see he practically glowed with health in comparison to the person he had been merely an hour before. Sparkling off a wavy lock towards the crown of his head, fizzing off the tip of his pinkie finger, Harry could see the sparks of his own magic, golden and shimmering. Something soft curled in his stomach at the sight.

“Thank you, Potter,” Malfoy said, and Harry would have scoffed had it not been said with the brusque politeness of a business transaction.

“Now, let me repeat myself,” he continued, and then paused. He met Harry’s eyes with intensity, a self-satisfied smirk tugging at his lips like he was already pleased with what he was about to say.

“Get the fuck out of my house.”

With the small, final-sounding click of Trainer Johnson’s wand to the drywall, the spell projecting whatever mishap some Aurors had been in the middle of worsening dissipated.

“Alright everybody,” Trainer Johnson called. “Pair up and discuss how you would have handled that differently.”

Harry closed his eyes and sighed, thinking of rusting gates and scuffed tables and smug, quarrelsome smiles.

Chapter Text

CHAPTER TEN

“Grimmauld feels spooky,” Harry told Hermione through a saucy mouthful of spicy noodles. He wiped his mouth on his sleeve and continued, “S’a lot like the Manor, actually.”

He gestured with his chopsticks to his general environs. There were cobwebs in every high corner, which he usually cleaned every week he noticed, or even, when feeling vindictive, blasted with a Ventus. Whenever he did so, the spiders seemed to return bigger and more baleful. They glared at him with all eight of their eyes from where they perched on their webs, bulbous and predatory.

They didn’t seem to be doing a particularly good job at catching their prey, though, for all they intimidated. Fruit flies buzzed around the squalid kitchen in a distracting haze, clustering eagerly around what Harry suspected used to be potted flowers, but now looked like some form of potions experiment gone wrong.

Harry would never admit that Kreacher had been right, but with him gone to Hogwarts, Harry’s diet had become even more limited. When he’d gone searching for any sort of cooking implement—pot, pan, cutting board, even a butter knife, Harry wasn’t picky—he’d been met with a disturbing array of possibilities from the kitchen cupboards, none of which had any relation to making meals.

The worst of the cabinets opened to what seemed to be simply a black void of nothingness, strangely compelling in a way only the Veil had been. Rather than whispers, however, a low tone had emanated from it, vibrating through Harry’s molars the moment the cabinet door was opened.

Hypnotised, Harry had reached out a curious hand. It was Sirius’ mother, of all unpredictable heroes, who saved him. Had Wallburga not taken that moment to emit a deluge of vitriol about whatever some such topic had wafted through her empty skull, Harry might have disappeared into the aether forever.

So, Harry ordered takeout every day of the week. It was a fine reprieve from eating foraged food in the tent with Hermione, or table scraps with the Dursleys like a poorly-kept dog.

That low bar was still no improvement. Kreacher, when he did not feel wretched towards Harry in rare and unsettling moments of tolerance, could prepare a fine roast. Remembering some of the most unappetising takeaways he had sampled in the past few months, Harry liked to believe that even he could cook better given the replacement of his appliances.

“The Manor?” asked Hermione. In the fire, her brown eyes flickered like the embers she was surrounded by. “Malfoy Manor?”

“Yeah.” Harry shrugged, swallowing the hefty mouthful with a forceful gulp. “I wasn’t in there for long, Malfoy kicked me out, obviously, but it feels similar.” He made a face. “It actually let me cook there, though.”

Hermione cocked her head. Harry cringed, stopping himself from brushing her curls away from the spitting logs. He could never get over the feeling that her hair was about to burst into flames when they spoke over their floo calls, even though it was very nearly a daily routine.

He had told her about his visit, back when he’d done it. Hermione had congratulated him for not letting school grudges get in the way of doing the right thing. She’d told him that she was proud of him, and it sent a wave of gratefulness for her crashing over him even as he felt vaguely shifty, like he’d gotten away with a minor crime or some major Hogwarts rule-breaking.

“Feels similar how?” she prompted. Harry hoped she wasn’t trying to recall her own visit to the Manor—that scene visited him regularly, straight in his worst nightmares, and Harry reckoned he’d suffered enough for both of them.

Harry chewed thoughtfully. “It’s like, you know when you could sort of tell that the Bloody Baron was somewhere nearby? Like, with Nick or Myrtle or any of the others, it was more of a nuisance than anything. But with the Bloody Baron it always felt sort of, I dunno, ominous?” Hermione nodded. “That’s how it feels, except there are no ghosts, as far as I can tell.”

Hermione furrowed her brow in recollection. “That first summer we all stayed in Grimmauld I felt that a little bit, so I did some research on magical homes. Over time, they sort of become…imbued with the energy of their inhabitants. Do you feel anything similar at the Burrow?”

Harry thought back to his recent visit to the Weasley family home. The atmosphere certainly hadn’t been the same as before Fred’s death, the hustle and bustle of it bowing under an invisible layer of woe.

Harry had always felt taken care of at the Burrow. He’d always felt like it was a safe place to exist, and Fred’s lack hadn’t changed that.

Weasley Sunday Brunch, for example, was just as chaotic an affair as always. When Harry entered the Burrow’s threshold, he’d had to duck to avoid getting brained right between the eyes by a frisbee, of all the surprising Muggle contraptions to encounter.

“Sorry, Harry!” Arthur apologised, hastening over and patting him on the shoulder. Harry handed him the frisbee, which he had caught without thinking, his Seeker’s reflexes well at the ready. “Albert from the office gave me this two days ago. It hasn’t got any fangs, but apparently someone cursed it to make whoever caught it break out in boils. Bert managed to undo it, though,” he added at Harry’s expression, and Harry thanked the stars for Bert and his curse-breaking acumen.

“Can your coworker come to Grimmauld?” Harry asked, only half joking. “I have some furniture I’d like him to speak to.”

Arthur laughed from deep within his belly, a warm rumble that seemed to Harry to be particular to fatherhood. He guided Harry inside, promising a lack of further projectiles. Ginny waved to him from where she was seated on the sofa, bedecked in mismatched blankets with Luna.

“Hi, Gin,” he greeted, pleased to see them both. “Hi Luna.”

Luna’s cornflower blue eyes were wide and appraising on his left ear, her arm comfortably around Ginny’s waist. “You should eat more turmeric, Harry,” she advised. “Your Wrackspurts are agitated.”

“I’ll do that,” Harry smiled, absolutely certain he would do no such thing.

Harry could hear the familiar clattering sounds from the kitchen, the water running in the sink and the soft sound of the brush soaping the dishes. He could see Molly’s back through the doorway, bent over a cutting board.

Harry weaved through a maze of overstuffed ottomans and mismatched chairs to the doorway. Ron was beside her, just out of sight, spelling the wooden spoon in a large pot. He grinned when he caught sight of Harry. His cheerful greeting was echoed by Molly, who put him work peeling potatoes.

Harry preferred to cook the Muggle way, even though it took longer. The Burrow’s kitchen was always warm and comforting, and smelled of spices and Molly’s inexpensive perfume. Harry thought, were he to make Amortentia over again, the aroma of the Burrow’s kitchen would contend for his favourite smell, among the newly cut grass of the Quidditch pitch under a summer sun.

“How’s training?” Ron asked, as Harry began turning a spud under his paring knife. Harry could hear how he forced his voice to be light, and the undercurrent of jealousy he was struggling to hide. When Ron had made the decision to remain at the Wheezes with George and Harry had continued on to training, they’d had a long conversation on the floo with Hermione.

Ron’s heart's desire had been to be Head Boy when he was eleven, star of the Quidditch team. Harry knew both their desires had no doubt changed as they had grown. Still, Harry was uncertain Ron’s had changed that much.

Hermione seemed of the same mind. “Are you sure you’re not self-sabotaging?” she’d asked dubiously, her dark skin made darker from the Australian sun, even through the winter of the Southern Hemisphere. “You could be a great Auror if you wanted to, Ron.”

The words seemed to sting, coming from Hermione. The two of them had decided to take a break while she was away, though Harry could see the decision pained both of them.

“I know that,” Ron said with a defensive edge to his voice that reminded Harry of the tent, of the locket. “But this is my family. And it’s not like Percy would take time off to be with George.”

“I’d sooner ask Percy to comfort a cauldron bottom than a human being,” Harry muttered, and Ron barked a laugh that was darker than it was amused.

“Yeah. Bill has enough on his plate still figuring out his lycanthropy issues, and Charlie’s always halfway around the world with his dragons.” He scowled, and then sighed. “When we were little, they were like our third and fourth parents. It sucks that they’re so busy and so far away. I dunno.” The freckles on his face shuffled as he grimaced. “It feels like a betrayal, anyway.”

“That’s not really fair to them,” Hermione protested, ever one to defend someone in their absence, and Ron shot her a glare.

“I know that, ‘Mione. It’s why I’m doing this. Besides them, Ginny’s at Hogwarts, and she’s already said she’s going to try out for the Harpies when she graduates. He’s not moving back in with Mum and Dad, and we’ve all been pretty worried he’ll do something stupid with their experiments, especially the exploding ones,” he said. He wore such a pained frown as he did so that Harry slung an arm around his broad shoulders and squeezed.

It wasn’t like George didn’t need the help. At Fred’s funeral, an open-casket affair, George had looked deader than his twin. Fred was Glamoured by the mortician to look as though he was merely sleeping in his velvet-lined coffin. The Weasleys hadn’t accepted any money from Harry, and Harry had no idea how many Galleons from the Wheezes business accounts had been diverted to cover the cost.

It had made sense, this argument, in the heat of the moment. But when Harry reflected on it, he wondered why it was always the three of them.

Why was Hermione the one throwing herself halfway across the world to hunt down the parents that wouldn’t recognise her, and then schedule a battery of Healers to work with them, instead of someone who hadn’t freshly turned eighteen?

Why was Ron the one shouldering the greatest burden for his grief-stricken brother, while he himself was in mourning, as all of his siblings and both of his parents did comparatively less?

Why had Harry had his entire childhood destroyed by a madman who no one else dared even stand up to? Why had he fought, why had he died, only for it to feel like not enough?

Harry thought of Lucius Malfoy telling the tribunal that he threatened his son with the Imperious Curse. He wondered if Malfoy had inadvertently gotten something right, being so steadfastly untalented at doing what he had been told by the adults around him that they’d had to threaten him with something like that. Resistance by non-compliance, even if he hadn’t meant it to be, even if that inability had caused him innumerable instances of grief like the one Harry had accidentally witnessed in Myrtle’s bathroom.

Was it better to fail at everything you tried until you came crashing down, face to teary face in the mirror of a girl’s loo, and begin to rebuild your life phial by small potion’s phial? Or better to push away one’s aspirations in service of others in perpetuity, the way the three of them seemed so talented at?

“S’fine,” Harry replied. He took off a chunk of potato larger than he’d meant to, the white flesh of it falling to the bowl beneath his hands. “Other than the workouts, the training is mind-numbing, mate. Can’t believe this is a months long program.”

“Can’t believe they still made you go through it,” Ron snorted, and Harry hummed in agreement. He had been incredulous when he’d first gotten his letter, waiving nothing but N.E.W.T.s. He’d figured out in short order that living lean in a tent in the wilderness and trading spells with Dark Wizards wasn’t exactly typical for the daily expectations of Auror work.

“It’s about as bad as Umbridge, without the Blood Quill,” he lamented. “It’s a bureaucratic nightmare, I swear. Everything's how to correctly file vouchers for expenses, or how to submit a request to the Potions division, or how to finalise your timecard to include days off. How to write-up an interaction with the public, what to include, what to do and not do, it’s mind-numbing. At least at the Wheezes, every day’s new, isn’t it?”

Ron smiled, and some of the tightness in his voice drained away as he answered. “Yeah. It’s good to see kids having fun. We’re working on this knock-off of Droobles that blows bubbles of all different colours. It’s not quite ready for the shelves yet—turns your tongue and teeth all these weird colours, George’s tongue has been orange for three days—but it’s fun to work on the sort of stuff that only exists to make people happy.”

Harry nodded. If he didn’t have such a belligerent attitude around crowds, he thought he might have liked to work at the Wheezes, too. Maybe one day, if George or someone in the Potions Division of the Ministry ever figured out a long-lasting version of Polyjuice.

Until that day, Harry would continue mumbling vaguely argumentative and likely incorrect responses to Trainer Johnson. He would bury his head in the crook of his elbow while they were instructed to pay attention to an Auror incorrectly assuming a Muggle was Wixen and needing to call in the Obliviation Squad.

Even with the air of tense uncertainty around the two of them, the kitchen had always been the beating heart of the Burrow, the warmth from it spreading its tendrils throughout the whole jumbled structure. Being there, enveloped in Molly’s magic that smelled like freshly-baked bread, feeling Arthur’s steady hand on his shoulder, sitting elbow to elbow with Ron, never failed to ease his tense shoulders away from his ears.

Within Grimmauld, Harry glanced up at the stain oozing across the crumbling living room ceiling. Harry still wasn’t certain if it was the ghoul who was leaving it, but he hoped so. Anything else was rather too disturbing to warrant contemplation.

“The Burrow definitely doesn’t feel like Grimmauld,” Harry mused. “But they both definitely have some sort of energy. An overabundance of it here, I’d say,” he opined over one of the portraits down the hall, which had emitted an echoing shriek as though to prove his point.

“Yes, that makes sense,” Hermione grimaced. “It seems to have gotten even less cooperative since Kreacher left.”

“Oh, for sure,” Harry said, thinking of the cabinet to nowhere, patting the carpet under him to determine if the damp on the seat of his jeans was from somewhere deep and foul in the house instead of the mist he’d walked through to get his takeaway. Unfortunately, his suspicions were validated.

He frowned over at the couch with skepticism. Ideally, he would be seated on a cushion, far away from any unsavoury substances. Much like the chair in the kitchen and to Harry’s immense perturbation, he had with horror spied a tongue lolling out from between the deck and the cushions of the mottled brown sofa one too many times for it to be a mere trick of the dim light.

He hoped mightily that this sort of sentience was confined to the first floor and nowhere near the bathrooms or, sweet Merlin, the bedrooms. Harry barely trusted the house enough to sleep in it already.

Anything more private had to be taken care of, paradoxically, in semi-public: the only time Harry wanked was furtively in the DMLE showers after everyone else left.

Every time he did so, he had too little time and too much determination to halt the memories that jockeyed to the forefront of his mind, elbowing much more acceptable recollections out of the way like just the pointy git who starred in them.

He thought of arms clasped around him tight enough to hurt while they sped through plummeting piles of fiery rubbish. He remembered challenging grey eyes meeting his in every single hallway Hogwarts had to offer. He recalled lips thinned in irritation and a sharp tongue that could be put to better use, if only one referred to some of the fantasies Harry’s imagination supplied. He thought of Malfoy’s arse riding a broomstick, of his ever-moving long-fingered hands and their fine bones and blue veins, of the scar that kissed his jaw, which Harry had left there.

He always Scourgified the results of those fantasies off the tiles, feeling more dirty than when he had entered the shower cubicle. He lamented, wondering why he couldn’t just wank off to quite literally anyone else who actually liked him, like a normal person. Though that question had given him fair cause to scowl into the middle distance throughout Trainer Johnson’s lessons, it had yet to stop him every shower.

Hermione would hopefully never know any of this, if only because then Harry would be known as the Boy Who Lived Twice Only to Die of Sheer Mortification, so instead he said, “D’you reckon the Manor is in a strop like Grimmauld?”

Hermione frowned. “It would make sense,” she replied contemplatively. “If you think about what those pureblood families do, I’m sure the Manor has been hosting festive galas and housing people with stuffy ideas about wallpaper and canapes for the vast majority of its existence. The past three years must have been a shock for it.”

It certainly seemed like it, from what Harry had seen of the kitchen. He remembered how it had begun to come back to life beneath his hands as he had cooked for Malfoy and smiled.

If only Grimmauld could be so receptive. Maybe then Harry wouldn’t be eating takeaway noodles for the third time that week.

“What about you, Harry?” Hermione eyed the viscous stain on the ceiling above Harry’s head. “Are you sure you shouldn’t spend some more time at the Burrow?”

Harry prodded at the sparse vegetables swimming in the sauce at the bottom of his takeaway container. He speared a sliced carrot with a chopstick, though he wasn’t hungry anymore. “M’fine,” he muttered, shoving it in his mouth. “I get tired after Auror training. How are your parents?”

Hermione blew a stray curl out of her eyes with a burst of frustrated hot air. “Oh, Harry,” she began, the corners of her mouth a mess of frown lines. “It’ll be a while.”

“Tell me about it,” Harry asked, adjusting to sit more comfortably on his heels, settling in for the long haul. “Please.”

The frown lines became less numerous, only noticeable because Harry knew every line of Hermione’s face like it was his own. And then she began.

Grimmauld did not interrupt them at all for the rest of their long conversation, even as its shadows stretched across the floor.

~*~*~

Harry felt strangely hunted when he thought about visiting the Burrow again, like a small prey animal surveilled by an eagle too far overhead to see. However, when the living room ceiling gave up with a moan and crumbled wearily onto the rug not a foot from where Harry was puzzling over his morning crossword, he felt like perhaps putting some space between Grimmauld and himself would be prudent.

He dumped out his coffee, now seasoned with plaster, dust, and goo from the ghoul who very evidently had oozed all over the rafters before departing for spookier locales. Shrugging on Sirius’ leather jacket, Harry shoved a baseball cap that he’d charmed with a Glamour over his tangled curls. It lightened them to an indistinct brown colour, and, layered with a Notice-Me-Not Charm, made his face forgettable and indistinct. He swapped his spectacles for dark sunglasses, even though the day was grey and overcast, and shoved his feet in his trainers. The heel of his left shoe got crushed beneath his sock foot, and he lurched over. Swearing and struggling, he knocked over the troll-leg umbrella stand as he adjusted his sock and finally managed to make himself presentable. He didn’t bother rightening the umbrella stand—he would have Vanished it, as he had done many times before, but the stubborn thing always managed to return somehow right on the landing where Harry had seen it last. The full-length mirror, when he caught sight of himself, seemed to reveal something odd and unnerving in the shadows behind him. When he whipped around, nothing was there.

“Fuck off,” Harry muttered, shoving his cap down further and shaking his head.

As he walked out, a board behind him sprung up with enough force to make him stumble onto the front steps, as if Grimmauld was saying, “Good riddance.” He slammed the door behind him with a grunt of annoyance, forcefully enough that the small, serpentine knocker scolded in a susurrus hiss, There’s no need to be so aggressive, young man.

Harry huffed, rolling his eyes, and made a break down the street.

~*~*~

“I love it when you come bearing gifts,” Ron called, grinning at him from behind the counter.

He clocked Harry the moment he entered the shop, even with the cap, Glamour and sunglasses. The fact that Ron could recognise him from his gait alone made something warm glow in his chest.

Harry levitated two coffees and a butter-stained paper bag of pastries beside him, dodging bubbles from one or another potion unstoppered by a group of curious teens and weaving past a father holding his struggling toddler away from the row of fizzing sparklers.

“Thanks, Harry,” George said gratefully, seizing a steaming cup out of midair. Harry winced. He didn’t think any of the children around them had heard, but one could never be too cautious—there was a laughing gaggle of Slytherin mid-years by the jars of prank candies, and Harry had history with Slytherin students selling him out to the press. He wouldn’t be surprised if a band of slavering reporters would be on the prowl for him upon his departure.

George amended over his shoulder, “Oh—Gary, sorry. Gary Porter, at your service, of course,” with a jaunty little salute.

“Gary is stupid,” Harry muttered, arriving at the counter. His opinion was only heard by Ron, as George was off consulting the Slytherins on the most effective ways to sneak a Puking Pastille into Professor Kratchett’s lunch, who seemed to be the most recent Potion’s substitute professor.

“S’not nearly subtle enough,” Ron agreed, taking a big swig of his coffee and groaning. “That shop by Grimmauld is heavenly.”

Harry nodded. He spent enough time there to know it for certain. He was basically on a first-name basis with every barista who’d ever even thought of working there. In the evenings when he couldn’t muster up the courage to return to Grimmauld just after training, the cafe became a bar, and Harry lingered there then too.

“You’ve got white on your shirt,” Ron said, pointing. Dust from the plaster had clung to him without him realising. He winced, feeling grimy and oily, as though the ghoul had just oozed past his back and left its residue behind.

“Ugh,” Harry groaned, removing his cap and burying his head in his arms. The frames of his sunglasses dug into his cheek. The pastry bag rustled beside him.

Harry heard a loud crunch and felt a jockular hand pat his bicep. “There, there,” Ron said consolingly through a mouthful of croissant. “Want to come with me upstairs? Less likely to, well,” he began, and hardly needed to finish his sentence, over the uproar that some explosion had created.

“Please,” Harry sighed thankfully.

Ron led him through the back room, which was stacked with phials and looked more like a Potion’s classroom than any space Harry had entered since leaving Hogwarts, and skipped up the rickety stairs. Ron’s long legs were able to manage hopping up every other. Harry lumbered behind him, feeling sluggish and sore as his muscles protested from the awful sprint-based training the day before. He fumbled in the magically enlarged pocket of his jeans, fishing for his glasses, and sighed in relief as the world brightened when he replaced his sunnies.

The flat that he and George shared was cramped and oddly vertical. The high ceilings didn’t really make up for the lack of width—they just made Harry feel like he was standing inside a bookcase. Nevertheless, George and Ron had decorated it “dubiously”, Harry couldn’t help thinking with a mischievous smile, in a mix of what may have been Snape’s derisive tones but what was far more likely Malfoy’s posh drawl.

Gryffindor banners clashed uproariously with the Chudley Cannons posters Ron had smeared across the wall. Every spare inch was plastered with moving photos, some framed but most not, stuck to the wall haphazardly with Sticking Charms and Spell-O Tape.

Ginny caught the Snitch as stand-in Seeker for Harry in fifth year, grinning victoriously as she brandished it. Charlie flew through the air on his Cleansweep, a wide berth from a Ukrainian Ironbelly’s great wingspan, hovering like a bumblebee as the dragon flapped beside him. Arthur gestured excitedly to the Ford Anglia, clearly trying to explain something or other that he had done to the car to finally fix it up.

Fleur held Victoire to the camera and beamed. Behind them, Bill rested his hands on her shoulders, looking strong and proud. His scars were mere shadows on his glowing face. Molly jerked away from her wand as it became a rubber chicken in her hands, bawling Fred and George’s names in frustration as she tossed it away.

There were others, too, not just Weasleys. Hermione looked up from her book, curled at the window on the couch in the Burrow’s living room, and smiled warmly. Angelina Johnson held up her acceptance letter to the London Cursebreaker’s Academy, pointing at her name and the “Congratulations!” written beneath it with boastful pride. Lee Jordan sat by the radio, chatting into the glowing tip of his wand, laughing with someone out of the frame. Harry stood back from the Christmas tree in Grimmauld place, admiring the glittering baubles and fairy lights.

Ron’s and George’s flat was oddly shaped, and maybe a little uncomfortable for that, but it had the same lovely, accepting atmosphere that the Burrow did. Their furniture was visibly secondhand, scrounged from the restaurants and shops on Diagon that couldn’t make it through the war and had to close down. Harry saw a chair from Fortescue's, cheerful and upright. A table from Eyelops, pockmarked with indents of innumerable beaks.

None of it fit together, and yet that was the thread that made the space feel whole. Harry felt vaguely envious about the whole thing.

“Hermione says Grimmauld’s horrendous because of its history,” Harry lamented to Ron, sinking into the Fortescue's chair and biting into his own croissant.

“Well,” Ron said, cocking his bright head thoughtfully. “I mean, yeah, I agree. ‘Mione’s brilliant. But I also don’t know that’s the whole of it.”

“Whaddya mean?” Harry asked, spraying crumbs incredulously and then Vanishing them with haste. He had hardly ever heard Ron disagree with Hermione since the war ended—in fact, he’d agreed with everything she said with ready repentance including her choice to move to Australia. If it was from the guilt of leaving the tent, or something more, Harry wasn’t sure. He didn’t ask.

Ron took a sip of his coffee. “It’s not just the history, I don’t think. I mean, yeah, that’s part of it, obviously. But like, everyone’s a person, you know? People are history too.” He leaned back in his chair. It looked like it had been pilfered from Twilfit and Tattings, Madam Malkins’ competitor who hadn’t been able to keep in business, now that their high-falutin clientele had all mostly left the country. The unfortunate reality of those who were wealthiest of the Wizarding world largely also being pureblooded, and thereby related to at least one if not many Death Eaters along their family trees, had struck Diagon’s luxury industry quite ruthlessly.

Harry wrinkled his nose, and then had to push his glasses back atop the bridge of it, to keep them from sliding off. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“It’s the people inside the house who make it the space that it is,” Ron clarified. Behind the closed door of the Wheeze’s small back room, Harry could hear the claxon of a chain of explosions, and the raucous din of children cheering. “Think of the Wheezes, right. Like, in your seat, close your eyes and feel the magic.”

Soliciting advice from Ron was so different from talking to Hermione. He loved them both, but the way they thought about things was so completely removed—Hermione had taught herself about magic through sheer determination, scouring her textbooks for logic and patterns and explanations. But it was natural to Ron. His comfort was visible in the way he held his wand, loosely in his hand as though it was a natural extension of his arm, and in the way he sat, relaxed and at peace as the space around him thrummed with the small vibration of magic.

Harry had always been better at feeling than thinking. Impulses came naturally, the need to act now and figure out the consequences later. When Harry closed his eyes and breathed in deep, it was like a whole invisible world became illuminated.

Harry could feel his magical core first, the shimmering tendrils of it that supported his whole body, centering in his chest, right in the middle of his sternum. He held onto the warmth of it, preparing himself to try to move his focus farther outwards.

The magic of the shop brushed against him like a summer’s breeze, warm and gentle. Happiness rode on it, and joy, and sheer, innocent delight. Harry opened his hands so he could feel it slide against the pads of his fingers, immaterial and light like his invisibility cloak.

He felt happy. He felt grounded.

The children laughed behind the door.

Harry opened his eyes.

“Does it always feel like that?”

Ron smiled and shrugged his broad shoulders. “Depends,” he said. “It picks up on how its inhabitants feel, like I said. Today’s a good day—lots of customers, not a lot of downtime. George loves the chaos. But when it’s slower and there’s more time to ruminate, the atmosphere gets a little heavier.” Ron shook his head, and then looked at Harry meaningfully. “Has Grimmauld gotten any better, now that Kreacher’s at Hogwarts?”

Harry frowned. Kreacher had left weeks ago. Incredulously, he asked, “You don’t think it’s because of me that it’s like that, do you?”

Ron grimaced, his blue eyes empathetic. “I just reckon maybe you’re not happy, mate.” He reached over and patted Harry’s leg. “You know Mum and Dad always have a room for you. Or, we could have Dad ask Perkins if he could come around and help us with the Extension Charms, if you wanted to move in with me and George,” Ron said so eagerly that Harry knew it wasn’t pity that was motivating him to make the offer.

“I miss you,” Harry said, because he did. They hadn’t spent nearly enough time together, not since the war, and the trials, and starting Auror Training. “But I just…”

Something made a gigantic thud on the underside of the floor beneath them. Through it, Harry could hear George call, “Nothing to worry about!”, his jaunty voice muffled through the wood.

“I’m just really tired,” he finished, and it wasn’t untrue. The Burrow, the Wheezes—they were both such bustling spaces, filled with light and sound and noise. The Wheezes even moreso, right at the entrance of Diagon Alley, filled to the brim with all of Wixen kind.

Often, Harry thought it was too much. He had seen enough. He had heard enough.

He hadn’t been raised in spaces such as these. He had been raised in a tiny dim cupboard, where the only noises he heard had been trouble.

He knew the motion and the claxon weren’t a bad thing. But sometimes, often, really, it made Harry want to retreat somewhere dark and dig down in solitude like a den animal.

He knew Ron, who had lived his entire life surrounded by people who loved and cared for him, wouldn’t understand Harry’s need to withdraw. He’d always tried to respect it, and somehow, in his failure to do so, that made it even worse. It was hard for him. It was hard for both of them.

Harry had had enough of everything being difficult. He just wanted to lay down and sleep. Barring that, he wanted to piss off as many people as possible.

At least then he could find some excitement in his life. And he wouldn’t be able to do either of those things at the Burrow or at the Wheezes, because both of those places were inhabited by people whose feelings Harry cared about deeply.

“Alright,” Ron said, and he was as forthright and agreeable as ever as he said it, though the cast of his mouth was doubtful. “But, like I said—the houses feel what the Wix inside them do.”

Harry stared into his coffee cup. There were no grinds to tell him his future, no tea leaves to divine. Only one last swirling, darkened mouthful.

“Sure,” Harry said, and drank it down.

Chapter Text

CHAPTER ELEVEN

When Harry returned to Grimmauld, everything was just as bad as he had left it. It was even worse, because now that Harry had tapped into how a magical space should feel, he couldn’t tune it out.

He noticed anew the black gunk which dripped down the walls from the seething portraits, all of whom Harry replenished Bubblehead Charms around daily to muffle their screams. The floorboards stuck up with nails at their peak, just quivering in anticipation for Harry to bark his shin and gash his heel. The troll-leg umbrella stand somehow leered at him menacingly, and the plaster dusted around the living room gave the entire thing the mockingly festive feel of a haunted house in a snowglobe.

“Fuck off,” Harry grumbled, taking off Sirius’ jacket and folding it over his arm protectively. His head hurt from the noise of the Wheezes and straining his eyes behind his sunglasses. He darted up the stairs, hopping over the biting step while it gnashed its teeth in frustrated bloodlust, and shut the door to the bedroom he had sourly claimed as his lair with a firm thud.

He toed off his trainers and collapsed into his bed without bothering to take off his clothes. He couldn’t stop feeling the soreness in his chest, right at his sternum. In the Wheezes, it had been warm and joyous. Here it was nothing but aching grief and unfulfilled, ancient rage.

Harry clenched his eyes shut, but that only made it worse. The swirling magic in his chest felt like it was coursing through every vein, through every limb, to the tips of each of his fingers and toes and back again.

He couldn’t help Hermione. He couldn’t live with Ron. He could never manage to pay attention in Auror Training, and most of the time he didn’t even want to be there. He couldn’t manage to go out in public without a half-dozen spells shrouding him, but he couldn’t stay in his house, either.

He couldn’t exist anywhere, never as he was. He was only ever allowed to exist as the person everyone else wanted him to be.

He just wanted to be left alone.

The tugging in his chest was impossible to ignore. He wouldn’t have wanted to even if he could. It felt like something was breaking, something necessary and important, like the cracking of a chrysalis for some creature to emerge through a film of sticky residue into the overwhelming light.

It was as if some great god had his heart on a fishing wire and was pulling, pulling, dragging him up to the surface.

The sensation of the magic within him, thrumming like a plucked violin string, bubbled up to his skin. He felt too hot, too tight.

Harry’s stomach roiled, and he recalled clutching the stall wall of Myrtle’s bathroom, of being hunched over in an alley near the entrance to the Ministry. He hadn’t taken Polyjuice Potion, but his skin was too small, his head split in two, and he wondered, feverishly, if this was how animagi felt the first time they transformed.

Harry’s glasses fell to the floor with a clatter. He followed them swiftly down. His body thudded against the hardwood, and, for once, the whole house seemed to have retreated from him. Even the ghostly hands which grabbed him from beneath the bed had retreated, out of sight. The buzzing in his ears was not the doxies in the curtains, but the blood rushing through his skull.

Harry’s body seized, and his vision went black.

~*~*~

When Harry woke up, he had a horrendous taste in his mouth and an awful crick in his neck.

Slowly, he gathered himself from the floor, breathing deeply. His body felt different, strange, more powerful and yet more vulnerable at once. The scents of Grimmauld coalesced into something putrid like a cornucopia of rotten fruit and assailed him with vengeance.

He reached a hand to cover his nose, only to find he had neither. Paw replaced hand; snout replaced jaw. When he blinked his eyes open in surprise, he found the colours around him muted, yet the silhouettes of everything were stark and crisp in a way not even his glasses could sharpen.

Fuck, Harry thought, and an anguished, angry little voice in his head wailed, Why is it always me?

It took a long time to quiet the rage and the fear within him, woeful, as he did so, with the thought that he had finished the war so strange, unexplainable things would stop happening to him.

It was an even longer, more arduous task figuring out how to walk on four legs. Harry found he did it best when he did not concentrate on walking. When he let his body do what it wanted, beneath the heavy blood-curdling thrum of anxiety that told him he was stuck, he’d never get back to himself, he’d be this way forever, he couldn’t even hold a wand, he felt a thrill of appreciation for his powerful back legs which sprang him across the bedroom in one leap, of the flexibility of his joints and of the sharpness of his vision and of the range of his hearing.

Firecall Hermione, he thought, single-minded in a way that blocked out all other thoughts. Hermione can fix this. She knows everything.

It was a tightrope balancing act trying to walk down the stairs, and Harry ended up tumbling arse over teakettle before he’d made it halfway to the landing. When he righted himself with a struggle, all a mess of tangled limbs and fur on end, he found himself face-first with the mirror that had seemed so contained with ill-will when he had left earlier that day.

There were no spectres behind him as he looked into the mirror this time, but his own reflection was haunting enough as it was.

The figure in the mirror was a big black dog, just as Sirius had been. A ghost, save for the eyes, which were otherworldly in a different sense.

They shone like lanterns through the dingy gloom of Grimmauld, bright white as though reflecting a light through the dark night.

Harry wanted to laugh, and then he wanted to cry. A Grim, and of course he would be, the embodiment of death and the picture of the first person he knew and cherished dearly, departed through the Veil. He’d loved his parents, but he’d never known them. He missed the hole in his life they left, but he hadn’t ever met them, not in waking memory.

He missed Sirius like a bleeding wound, one poorly sutured and breaking open every now and again with rough treatment.

This felt the roughest treatment of all. A surge of grief threatened to overwhelm him, making his limbs shake and buckle beneath him.

I have to get to Hermione, he thought, the insistence of it now reaching a fever pitch, because if he could get to Hermione, she could fix this, and if she could fix this, he wouldn’t have to feel this way, and then Harry could go back to melting into the decrepit plaster-covered floorboards like he was the house ghoul’s prodigal cousin.

But Harry couldn’t use floo powder, didn’t have the hands for it, and even if he did, he didn’t have the voice. He crouched before the fireplace, every muscle tense, and howled, the sound animal and primal for the panic and mournfulness which rang through it.

He only stopped, panting, when his vocal cords felt stretched out and frayed. His throat was dry. There was no water to be had that he could reach. His wand was somewhere upstairs. His friends were nowhere to be seen. His magic—

His magic.

Harry felt his magic, retreated back to his chest from where it had sprawled throughout him. It felt hot and insistent, every fibre of it pointed in urgency towards the door outside. He walked to the landing, and it tugged. He scrabbled at the door, and the latch undid itself with an acquiescing little snick, the first time Harry could remember the house ever cooperating with him. Perhaps it knew that he would stop at nothing to get it open, would claw until his nails were bleeding and the door had a gaping hole in its side. Because Harry couldn’t stay here, and his magic was telling him exactly where he needed to go.

He didn’t know where it was leading him, but he reckoned if feeling his magic had gotten him into this mess, perhaps feeling his magic could get him out of it, too.

~*~*~

In what may have been an overly optimistic guess, Harry thought that wherever he was being led, perhaps there, finally, he would feel able to breathe.

To not have to be anything for anyone, not the noble hero, nor the dedicated Auror, nor the grateful almost-son, nor the happy, healing roommate. He could be just as mired in annoyance and misery and anger and mourning as he wanted to be, and absolutely nobody would stop him.

At some point, he had begun running. London had been full of sour smells and pungent odours, of leaking dumpsters and coughing car exhaust and people, so many people, running and walking and jostling. Rats had skittered away from him. Cats had arched their backs and hissed. Horns had blared, the drivers yelling about people leashing their pets.

But Harry hadn’t taken the time to notice, hadn’t stopped to let these moments sink into his memory and take root there. He needed to leave.

The swift-footedness that had overcome him did not feel natural—it felt godlike, as though he were some Greek deity, a messenger with wings at his heels.

He felt that wherever he was being led would be right, somehow. The knowledge was rooted deep in his marrow, thrumming with magical life. Somewhere he could do what he wanted, act as he wanted. He wouldn’t feel like he was striving to be someone he wasn’t. He wouldn't feel like he was failing all the time.

There would be no cringing awkwardly next to some egocentric, self-aggrandising politician behind a podium with the Ministry insignia behind him, like at the galas he’d been forced to attend. He wouldn’t be handing an ill-fortuned Wix some pithy ticket while swathed in protective enchantments like he was being taught to do in Training. He would never be caught in a never-ending back-slapping Ouroboros of Aurors congratulating each other for hardly ever protecting and rarely serving, despite the vows they’d taken to swear onto the force.

The tall, grey buildings and the harsh rub of concrete beneath his paw pads gradually became suburban homes. Harry found himself racing through Levittowns like Privet Drive, his lungs pumping in his barrel chest, the muscles burning in his hindquarters. If only he’d been able to run like this when he’d lived with the Dursleys—he’d have never lived with them at all.

His paws could tear past the whole Earth. He would run forever. He was unstoppable.

Training had reminded him too much of the cupboard. Every time he was forced to try to turn his brain off in front of a memory of an Auror with a civilian on the ground, all Harry could think of was Dudley. Every time he overheard a snide conversation about how “some people were just born to be that way”, Harry remembered Aunt Marge saying “if there’s something wrong with the bitch, there’s something wrong with the pups”.

One of his superiors would say that some such person deserved their sentence in Azkaban, and Harry would remember Sirius’ hollow gaze in Grimmauld when he thought nobody was watching him. He’d remember the way Malfoy’s skinny, shaking arms hugged himself, and his father in chains, saying his son had had no choice.

Harry was even less impressed with the Auror Department than he had been of the PriC Division. There was no justice that Harry could see in the entire DMLE. He’d wanted to help people. He’d wanted to make the world feel safer, so maybe then he could finally feel safe too.

Maybe whatever he was being drawn to would feel safe, instead. It felt like it, the buzzing warmth in his chest.

Street after street of identical houses became a blur, until they were replaced with nothing but hills of green, sprawling on and on. Sheep dotted the pastures, huddled amongst one another with streaks of spray paint on their woolen sides to tell one farmer’s herd from another. They bleated with anxiety as Harry ran past, but Harry spared no moment to take a less precise route.

The tugging in his chest was a siren call, and he was helpless to do anything but move to it. He knew if he tried the panic would overwhelm him, and running felt right in a way he couldn’t describe.

His speed had to be magical. He was tired, yes, panting, his spittle frothy at the sides where his jaws met from dehydration. His pulse pounded. His lungs strained. But amongst the pain of it, running felt light. It felt free. It felt like he was finally himself, for the first time in his entire life.

Fields turned to woods, and there, finally, Harry slowed to a trot. It wouldn’t do him any good to run headlong into a tree trunk. Though the tugging on his chest was as present as before, it didn’t burn with as much urgent, punishing heat. It was a steady presence that beat in time with his pounding heart, and over and over it repeated, almost, almost, almost.

At first, it felt like cobwebs all around him, stringy and irritating but without any real weight. But as he continued on, the dry grass of early autumn crunching beneath his paw pads, they began to have some push back, like a hundred tiny elastic bands.

Harry pushed on, lowering his head and digging his claws into the dirt beneath him. The dense network of tree roots gave him purchase, and before long, he could begin to feel the cords of magic snap against his efforts.

It was a familiar sensation. One that made him feel a little cocky, a little vindictive, a little victorious. The magic, too, was familiar. It was rotten, stinking magic, decades of Dark Magic, soaked in more recent abomination still.

And yet, at the core of each thread, was a small, fledgeling glimmer, flickering in such a way that it took Harry’s more delicate canine senses to discover it. Running through the web of it all was a spark that smelled clean and piquant, the sharp acid of orange and the low smoke of cinnamon. It reminded Harry of Christmas, those first few at Hogwarts, delightful and warm.

The woods were emptier than he would have thought. The birdsong felt tentative here, as though the flocks were perched and ready for some catastrophe to send them spiralling upwards. The small creatures of the forest scurried without turning a single leaf. Even the trees held themselves tightly, their branches unyielding, afraid to make a single groan in the prodding wind.

Something terrible had blighted these woods, and Harry, stumbling through the underbrush in heavy footfalls and loud panting breath, felt too clumsy amongst the hush of fear. This was not the anxiety he was used to, the ever present need for perfection or yet more people would die. This was slow: this was silent: this was grieving.

It wasn’t until Harry reached the tree line, that he realised where exactly he’d been compelled.

Well, fuck, Harry thought, staring at Malfoy.

Malfoy, once he caught sight of him, clearly agreed.

Chapter Text

CHAPTER TWELVE

Harry hadn’t realised that Malfoy took such care with everything.

In retrospect, it should have been obvious. He was top of the class, bested only by Hermione. Every day except for the worst months of sixth year he entered the Great Hall for breakfast with not a hair out of place, his tie knotted precisely, his cloak perfectly pressed. When they duelled, Malfoy moved like dancing, every movement fluid and intentional.

The only times Harry had ever seen Malfoy careless was when the two of them interacted. In a way, it was special, triumphant, even. To crack the meticulously maintained shell and see the messy boy beneath.

Harry remembered the angry boy from Hogwarts, the bully, the antagonist. He recalled the shaking shade of him from sixth year, viperous and withdrawn. Harry had cooked for his exhausted husk after the trials, had wondered about him, about how Malfoy had said “I freed all our elves” and how he’d had that undercurrent of amusement, poorly concealed, through his fatigue as he’d scolded Harry to stop insulting his property.

Harry watched Malfoy calm the thestral, whispering meaningless endearments to her under his breath as he caressed her. He carried with him a compress of murtlap and dittany to wrap her twisted leg.

Harry wondered what it would be like to receive Malfoy’s care alongside his carelessness. To witness the press of that half-smile in his cheek as he felt those gentle, sure hands tending to an injury.

Harry thought of all the times he hadn’t had someone like that, and wanted with breathtaking intensity, the painful ache of grief and nostalgia nestled deep beside his organs, something new and visceral that his body did not have enough space for.

“Oh,” he heard Malfoy breathe, and he knew he’d been spotted.

Guiltily, Harry looked up. Malfoy was frozen with one hand on the thestral’s flank. Harry could smell the sweat, pungent with fear, beginning to collect. His breathing was shallow and rapid, like something wounded, or something that knew it would be shortly.

Setting his snout back down onto his paws, Harry tried to make himself as unassuming as possible. By the way Malfoy soothed himself, it did not seem to be successful.

“Right,” Malfoy whispered shakily, tilting his head back. The lines of his throat were stark, his Adam's apple bobbing as he swallowed, forcing his breathing to slow in purposeful, measured exhales.

Harry watched a tear chase the shell of Malfoy’s ear and did not know how to make it better. “Right.”

Harry thought of the last time he had seen Malfoy cry. He thought of Myrtle’s bathroom, dripping in sink water from a slashed pipe, the slow swirls of pink as Malfoy’s lifeblood drained from his body onto the tiles. He remembered her shriek, of voyeuristic horror and delight, as Myrtle tore from the room: Murder! Murder in the bathroom!

He’d only wanted to stop him. He’d only wanted to take him and shake him, ask him why he looked so haggard when every other time Harry had ever seen him, he’d looked immaculate, pristine, untouchable. He’d wanted to corner him, until there was no corner he could slither away to, and command his attention for the first time all year.

He’d wanted to be proven right, to know that it was wrong that Malfoy was unwell, that it wasn’t right for him to be tense and shaking and refusing to eat. He told himself, fleeing the loo while tightly packing the memory away and flinging it somewhere in the depths of himself where feelings could not reach, that he had gone after Malfoy because of a selfless desire to protect him. It almost tasted true behind his teeth.

But a sour film coated his tongue, and if Harry ever lingered on it, he knew he was telling himself a desperate lie. The most pride-stinging, clenched-jaw, curled-lip-in-disgust truth of it all, was that Harry had wanted proof that he had been important.

It felt like Malfoy had stolen something from him. Malfoy had always paid attention. Never mind that Malfoy’s attention was his own to dole out or rescind as he saw fit. Harry felt like one of Dudley’s toys, only appreciated when shiny and new, and now that Harry was battered and grieving, Malfoy had turned his gaze upon the next thing.

The jealousy had been a rageful heat within him. It had warred with that oh-so-selfless desire to protect. He and Malfoy had never been friends, but they had always been important to one another, in a cursed, poisonous way.

And then Malfoy had made it very clear they weren’t, anymore, and Harry hadn’t had any say in it at all.

It wasn’t fair. Not Harry’s dismissal, nor Harry’s loathing. When the vapours of his myriad of mixed feelings floated from the pit inside himself, Harry tried to justify them: Malfoy was a Dark Wizard, he was a Death Eater, he was conspiring against Hogwarts and Harry was protecting everyone around them by keeping him on a tight leash, by watching him around the clock.

And then it had all come to a head, and Harry couldn’t bear to think of Malfoy anymore at all, not without hearing that soft sound he had made, almost like a sigh of relief, as he hit the tiled floor.

That sound had made him feel like the worst sort of murderer.

“I wish you had come two years earlier,” said Malfoy, and Harry felt the guilt, the shame, the soul-sucking self-loathing all over again. “Would have saved everyone the hassle.”

This time, when he came for Malfoy, he would do things right. No blood on the tiles. No ghosts in the halls. No last exhausted exhales to greet death as a respite.

Just the life he should have gotten, and the help he should have received.

~*~*~

To the unpracticed eye, Malfoy seemed to get bored of terror fairly quickly.

Unfortunately for both of them, Harry’s eye was extremely, profoundly practiced in Draco Malfoy. Harry was more practiced in Malfoy studies than just about anything in his entire life up until this point.  Two notable outliers were perhaps getting screamed at by the Dursleys—that was a whole decade’s worth of practice, plus three months every summer break—and feeling like a hunted animal, between the slavering fans, Voldemort’s various murderous incarnations, fugitive stalkers who turned out to become beloved father figures, and myriad Death Eaters (save the one currently vacillating between ignoring him and chiding him, which was in Harry’s unbiased opinion a spectacularly bizarre way to manage fear. But then, this was Malfoy, and if anyone was bizarre in their shared predicament, it was undoubtedly Harry).

Malfoy had begun the impromptu tour of the Manor he was leading Harry on with a stop in the kitchens.

Harry hadn’t been naive enough to think that Malfoy would do something so unbearably plebeian as cook. He had eyed the dirty china gathering on the counter and wondered what was more gauche for the elite upper-crust: doing servant’s work or living in actual filth.

He had, of course, overestimated Malfoy in this regard. Harry was used to dramatics from Malfoy—he had dressed up as a Dementor in their third year and climbed a tree for him in fourth. He’d hoped that Malfoy’s dire, ill-tempered mutterings about wanting to die earlier had just been dour bouts of self-pity.

Malfoy would certainly be the type to languish in it. He wore his woe like a mud bath, rolled around in it like it was luxurious. He could even put cucumber slices on his eyes—they seemed to be the only ingredient the Manor trusted Malfoy with, from the smell of it. Harry whuffed in amusement: even the Manor kitchens knew Malfoy could not be trusted to cook anything edible.

No, Malfoy had not led Harry to the kitchens to cook for him. Malfoy didn’t even know Harry was Harry, so it wasn’t as though he was anticipating returning any sort of favour.

A very poor substitute, Malfoy eyed the knife block with all too much consideration. Harry didn’t like the faraway cast in his cloudy grey eyes. His fine eyebrows, nearly invisible for their lack of pigment, were creased in contemplation.

Harry didn’t move. He didn’t do anything at all but stare, afraid anything more would cause Malfoy to do something rash and terrible. He’d already seen Malfoy bleeding out at the end of his wand—he wanted nothing less than to experience a do-over.

Everything Malfoy did, he did well: Harry was certain if their act of theatre was to be replayed, it would end in tragedy.

Harry felt the magic well in him in fretful anticipation. Malfoy glanced back at him and leaned in his chair, throwing himself backwards with enough force that the back of his chair spirited a velvet cushion from nowhere to soften the blow.

“Oh, if I must!” Malfoy huffed, paying no heed to the furniture, because of course he wouldn’t. In Malfoy’s world, everything hastened to ease his every move, and accepting it was so gracefully natural for him that Harry marveled.

It was like the sun had broken from behind a stormy sky. If Harry’d had the muscles, he would have smiled, delighted to be insulted. “You horrible creature.”

Harry’s tongue lolled.

~*~*~

There was something in the Manor. It was an edginess like the thestrals, almost, as though not sure if they wanted to startle and spook around Harry.

None of the portraits were inhabited, not even the ones of Malfoys long dead, those who would have had no grudge against the current heir that Harry could conceive of. When Harry went stalking the halls, trying to find the locus of the rot which permeated the magic of the house, he found nothing but a tangled mat of Dark Magic over each portrait, threaded through with the scent that Harry had begun to recognise as Malfoy’s magical signature.

Harry would have asked Hermione, or possibly Ron, why it was that the portraits had gone silent. As he could contact neither of them, he had to do as Ron had suggested in the Wheezes. He had no choice but to practice feeling his magic, the terrible meditation that it was. Harry thought distastefully that he’d preferred meeting his foes on a battlefield—at least then they couldn’t take him on unawares, the way his emotions did. And those enemies stayed down once eradicated, with an exception or seven.

Slughorn had taught his sixth years about intention in potion-making. It was one of the few things Harry remembered, besides the scent of warm grass and treacle and the flowery scent of Ginny’s perfume. In sixth year, he had conflated that scent with desire, but that hadn’t been quite right. He loved Ginny, loved all the Weasleys—but Ginny’s blooming perfume had been about as romantic as recovering Ron from the depths of the Great Lake.

Harry had wanted to belong, with a desire so bone-deep, he would have done anything. If Ginny hadn’t told Harry, wincing as she did so three days after the Battle, that she and Luna had begun dating throughout the autumn while Harry was on the hunt for Voldemort’s Horcruxes—”Which, you broke up with me, so I don’t think I have any reason to feel guilty,” Gin interjected guiltily— Harry might have tried to recommence things with her, if only to justify his place in the family.

His place at the Weasley family table needed justification to nobody but himself, of course. Molly asked him every time he attended Weasley Sunday Brunch if he was certain he didn’t want to move into the bedroom that had once been Bill’s, then Charlie’s, then Percy’s, now empty. Ron had been so delighted at the prospect of Harry sharing a flat with him and George that he’d basically had one foot in the floo to call Perkins about the Expansion Charms before Harry’d put a stop to it. But Harry remembered the Dursleys, remembered Aunt Marge telling Uncle Vernon that something was intrinsically wrong with Harry, remembered Aunt Petunia telling all his teachers that Harry was a nightmare to live with, a terror of a boy, and the teachers all nodding along to her words as though he wasn’t sat beside her, staring at the splitting soles of his trainers.

Harry knew Aunt Marge’s intention had been to remind him of what she thought he deserved, just like Uncle Vernon and Aunt Petunia did every day he lived with them. He knew Molly’s and Ron’s and Ginny’s intentions were all to make sure he was welcomed in their family, whether through marriage or simply through the bond of their own combined affection.

The intention behind the festering Dark Magic cloying the air around the Manor was a mystery to Harry, but he knew the sharp sting of cloves and orange coalescing before each portrait had a distinct air of Keep Out.

He’d felt that petulant stubbornness, personally, directed at himself over and over throughout the course of sixth year.

It was such a small thread of magic, though, and surrounded by such an insidious miasma. Harry knew who it belonged to, and knew exactly how that owner would take it if he thought Harry thought he needed help. He would stick his pointy nose straight up in the air and harrumph “I don’t need your pity, Potter,” and then he would shut himself in his kitchen that was rapidly collecting stained china sets, strewn with the nibbled crusts of cucumber-and-cheese sandwiches, and stare at the knife block again.

So Harry gently poured some of his magic atop that thread. The small line of it sparked and glimmered as he did so, suddenly visible, a silver like the sun limning the clouds. The magic seemed to seize beneath him, and then gradually relax, like it had been anticipating a struggle and was surprised—even grateful—to meet an unexpected caress instead.

It made Harry feel good to know that he was helping Malfoy in this manner. He wasn’t so sure he was helpful, in all other ways that mattered. Malfoy seemed indescribably off, and Harry wasn’t certain what more he could do, other than coexist with him.

Harry was certain the presupposition the Wixen World believed to be true, that Grims were portents of doom for the beholder, was not helping that blond head retain any of its flaxen locks. If Harry could ever figure out how to transform back, he’d like to see that realisation cross Malfoy’s face, that yet again something he had taken for truth was completely wrong.

The thought didn’t give Harry any schadenfreude, as he might have expected—instead, he felt the fatigue deep in his bones that he knew Malfoy would feel, exhausted by every small stitch in a tapestry of lies.

Harry didn’t know if his presence was helping or hurting Malfoy, but he was absolutely certain that haunting the Manor alone in unwashed women’s jumpers would do nothing to improve anyone’s fraying mental health. So, with a grumble against how immensely vast this insane home was, Harry began to walk the house, as Hermione had instructed him to do with Grimmauld.

Delightfully, the Manor bloomed before him like an eager flower. It was nothing like Grimmauld, with its never-ending hallways and its nefarious funhouse rooms from nowhere, cantankerous and sour whenever Harry tried to coax it.

Harry had marvelled about the beautiful sense of peace that washed over him once he got to the Manor, but he hadn’t known anything could be as easy as lending his strength to the thin thread of Malfoy’s magic.

Harry knew on a cerebral level that he was a powerful wizard. He successfully cast a corporeal Patronus at age thirteen, which full-grown Examiners had marvelled at. He dueled Voldemort five times, if one included Riddle’s basilisk, which Harry certainly did. His parents and Neville’s, by contrast, had each only faced him thrice. He’d outflown one dragon and ridden another. He was the Boy Who Lived, the Man Who Won, the Bloke Who Just Wanted a Moment’s Peace.

Harry hadn’t believed any of those feats were really all that impressive, and it wasn’t modesty that undercut his accomplishments. It was the knowledge that he hadn’t had a choice.

He could have died, surely. But had that ever truly been an option? Not really, until dying had meant saving everyone else.

Harry endured. He endured the cupboard, he endured the Dursleys, he endured never feeling loved until receiving a poorly spelled, half-squashed birthday cake. He endured seeing his parents glow with pride behind another luckier version of himself, burning with envy and desperate grief, wishing he could break a hole in the glass, pull his other half through it, and then take his place.

Harry knew how to grit his teeth and get it over with. He had never known what the full extent of his power felt like, because the only times he had ever inhabited it were the moments he was scrabbling to survive.

He wasn’t merely surviving anymore. He was here, at the Manor, and he was here to do something he absolutely knew he was good at.

The Manor seemed to heave a sigh of relief as Harry’s magic weaved through Malfoy’s. The Dark, pushing magic of the portraits recoiled. The rotting scent recoiled. The grime from the windows receded, and the hardwood floors turned from a dingey, spotted grey to a warm, honeyed colour. The wallpaper, all discoloured sickly greens and yellows like the tobacco stains Miss Figg’s walls had been covered in, began to lighten. Cream colours and light blues spread along where Harry’s magic touched, moving with it fluidly.

Harry realised that Ron was right—it wasn’t that the Manor was in a strop.

It was that Malfoy was unwell, and in need of help, and the Manor was reacting to him.

The Manor thought it was doing what Draco wanted, and perhaps it did so gratefully, hoping that were it to make itself inhospitable, no madmen would want to claim it as their own. Self-sabotage as a protective measure. Holding itself tightly, until someone unexpected and trustworthy came along, someone who soothed it instead of antagonised it.

The Manor was easy, really. It was so easy to know, so easy to help. It acquiesced to his magic eagerly. Harry remembered the wards, nearly impossible to walk through at first, but ever thinning, understanding, slowly, that Harry could be worthy of its best parts.

He wondered if the Manor was anything like its Lord of the House in that regard.

Harry turned around and trotted through the corridors back to Malfoy’s scarred door, laying down at the threshold to keep watch against the vile magic that pushed against the warm, comforting web of Malfoy’s own.

~*~*~

Malfoy was weird. That wasn’t shocking—that was self-evident.

Malfoy had been the weirdest person Harry had ever met, ever since he first opened his mouth in Madam Malkins and caught Harry in a deluge of foreign words he didn’t understand and inexplicable standards he couldn’t comprehend.

If Harry were someone different, he would have also said it was weird of him to willingly spend time with what was, for all he knew, a surefire sign of his youthful demise. But Harry was not someone different, and he had walked into the Forest knowing his death was an inevitability. He had clutched the Resurrection Stone in one clammy hand and had asked his loved ones if it hurt. He had kept that memory in a Pensieve and cried over it whenever he needed to hear Sirius’ voice again.

Harry knew what it was like to find strange comfort in death.

But Malfoy was acting weirder than usual, and that was truly saying something.

Malfoy often engaged him in conversation, which felt unsurprisingly natural. Harry had always opined that, barring his adoring audience of Slytherins, Malfoy would talk at just about anyone. Ravenclaws would naturally be his second choice, then frightening the Hufflepuffs, then starting shit with the Gryffindors, all the way down to yammering into thin air and being mistaken for a madman by any Muggle within earshot.

Barring the living, Malfoy had, naturally, befriended the dead. If Myrtle hadn’t been floating in her cubicle for him to vent his woes, Harry thought Malfoy may have taken up arms with a shovel and unearthed her. An innovative take on a captive audience. Though Harry was certain other members of the Malfoy clan had spent time digging up bodies, he reckoned none would have done so for a more asinine reason.

Occasionally, though, he would break-off mid-thought, stiffening like he’d been hit with Hermione’s Petrificus Totalus. Harry hadn’t sensed much rhyme or reason to it, until the pattern emerged.

Malfoy had drifted off mid-sentence when Harry yawned, baring his white fangs. When Harry stood on all fours and barked at the window for no other reason than he had felt it the thing to do, Malfoy had clammed up and gripped his wand in the casting position.

The reason behind Malfoy’s bizarre behaviour became especially apparent when Harry felt a vibration, close next to his magical core. It was similar to the tugging feeling in his core that had brought him to the Manor. It did not have the same bone-deep ache, the need to be within the wards. Instead, it was strung-through with an instinctive territoriality, as though he truly was the dog in whose body he was stuck.

He jumped to standing in the rose garden, where Malfoy was pruning the Fortune-Telling Roses. While Harry had laid placidly beside him, he had told Harry they whispered the best of one’s future, if one had a clear path.

Malfoy confided that their whispers were always muffled for him, too muddled to understand. “Mother told me that means I have many meaningful choices in my life,” he had sighed, and looked back at Harry ruefully. “Was it all twaddle, do you think?”

But Harry couldn’t answer. Once standing, Harry followed the tugging sensation straight to the iron gates, where the grotesque was blowing a raspberry at an aspiring intruder. Even its spittle was rusty.

The intruder, who hooted in indignation, was a profoundly hassled owl with an official Ministry scroll attached to its leg. This time, when Harry passed the wards, he hardly felt any resistance at all.

Harry hoped the owl would intuit, somehow, that he was in fact a wizard in Grim’s clothing. He was rewarded for the polite woof he emitted, aiming at something akin to a canine Excuse me, by the fluffy creature fluttering down beside him and ruffling her feathers in profound offense. She glowered at the gate and nudged the most out-of-line feathers back into place with a fastidious beak.

You’re a beauty, Harry thought fondly. She wasn’t pristine white as Hedwig had been, but she had much the same dignified attitude.

Instead, he apologised to her in a low, apologetic bark that he had no treats to give her.

Puffing up her chest, she took a few fluttering hops and landed atop Harry’s shoulders. When she hooted, it sounded like “You shall deliver me to my recipient,” and who was Harry to deny her?

He wondered if he would spend his whole life indentured by demanding nuisances. It certainly seemed a post-war trend. Harry thought of Grimmauld, mouldering and petulant, and couldn’t feel too bothered.

Malfoy had dirt up to his elbows, the lacy Victorian nightshirt he sported rolled up tight by the crease of his arm. He had foregone his mother’s jumper for the messy work, having folded it carefully on the table of the solarium.

When Malfoy’s back had turned, Harry sent a wandless, wordless Cleaning Charm at it, followed by a Spongify to keep it soft. Harry’s magic was so forceful that often his Cleaned clothes turned out stiff as a board, singed fast into place.

Harry had never considered Malfoy’s bedclothes before, most of his fantasies involving a distinct lack of clothing altogether. When he wasn’t rather guiltily contemplating how Malfoy would react, knowing Harry had seen him once again vulnerable and unprotected, Harry thought it was a damn shame that he was never more creative with Malfoy’s outfits in his rushed shower wanks.

He never would have come up with anything similar, but the lacy, frilly shirts and trousers painted such a picture. Even if many of them, in heavy rotation, now were spotted with cream cheese stains and rumpled.

Harry had no height from which to judge: his pyjamas were ratty tee shirts with holes in them, if anything at all but boxers.

When Harry approached from behind, he barked to get Malfoy’s attention. Malfoy startled and crouched like an animal much, much smaller than his substantial height. Though whittled to the bone and crooked from the strain of Azkaban, Malfoy had remained at least an inch taller than Harry, likely more when he straightened his spine back out into its aristocratic poise.

Now, though, he reminded Harry of a chipmunk, quailing on his heels with his eyes wide and fearful. Harry was struck by understanding, too late as always: it wasn’t just that Harry was a Grim. Malfoy spent most of his lonesome time in the Manor with the thestrals, and they, too, were portents of death. No, more than anything, was that he was a large predator.

Malfoy was terrified of large animals. Not that he’d ever let a Grim know that, of course. The prideful, poncy little idiot.

It made sense. He’d played the antagonist to Buckbeak, no doubt brought up on Lucius’ metaphorical knee—Harry doubted that man had a paternal bone in his buried body—to believe, from an age far younger than Hogwarts, that to defend against the gravity of insecurity one must claw into anyone else on the fall down.

This had achieved a bloodied left arm that had Malfoy howling as though Buckbeak had dragged him by his bright helmet of hair.

Harry wondered if that altercation was the most frightened a thirteen-year-old Malfoy had ever been. He wondered if he had the scars from it on his delicate skin, or if they’d been covered by a worse one.

Harry hadn’t seen many visions with Malfoy in them, only two: the first, Voldemort pawing at Malfoy’s stiffened shoulders and whispering in his ear to cast the Cruciatus like he meant it, which, to recall, made Harry’s breathing stutter in loathing.

The second vision, in which Nagini swallowed Charity Burbage whole, left no room to wonder why Malfoy may not want a large and carnivorous companion making sudden moves around him.

Add in Fenrir Greyback, who could only tenuously be called a man, and only because he walked on two legs. The threshold to Malfoy’s bedroom was still awash in his vile scent, the viscous odour of grime and viscera and decaying tooth rot. Harry scowled at the scores in the wood, prodding at the disgusting mass of Greyback’s magic which blackened the wood, staining deep into the elaborately carved grain. The door would have been a beautiful thing, the Draco constellation artfully whittled into the wood, and Harry wondered who the Malfoy family had paid to do it, or if it was the magic of the Manor once more trying against all odds to show Malfoy how cherished he was.

Harry couldn’t quite do cherished, seeing as he was stuck as an omen of doom, but he could aim for repentance at least. He bowed his head and gazed up at Malfoy with wide eyes, hoping to look more puppy dog than Cerberus.

That small line of amusement pushed at Malfoy’s left cheek. “You don’t look cute when you do that,” he observed pointedly, though his sharp words shook a little. “Your eyes are too bright. They’re unnatural for a creature such as yourself.”

The owl on Harry’s back hooted importantly. She hopped off of him, not acknowledging the favour Harry had given her.

She flapped over to Malfoy, sticking out her leg regally as she perched on his knee. Surprised, he looked from her to Harry and back.

“The wards aren’t supposed to allow any correspondence that I haven’t personally instigated,” he murmured trepidatiously. The owl on his knee gave an insistent hoot. When Malfoy raised a distracted hand to smooth down her feathers, she pecked him.

“Augh!” he cried, wrenching his hand back and inspecting the small injury.

“You abominable beast,” he chided. “I never liked birds. Between my father’s chickens and that ferocious half-goose of Hagrid’s, you fellows are always out for my blood.”

Harry snorted. The owl glared and moved her leg in the air in a prodding way. Malfoy sighed.

Reluctantly, he untied the string from her leg. As she fluttered away, delighted to be free of her burden, Malfoy scowled at Harry.

“If this is filled with Bubotuber Pus or otherwise booby-trapped, I refuse to die until my burns have healed,” he intoned. Clearly he remembered Hermione’s hate mail from fourth-year and the bandages she wore for weeks after.

Harry nodded. This seemed quite reasonable to him. Harry refused to let Malfoy die at all, so he found it reassuring that Malfoy was too vain to stare at the knife block contemplatively until well-healed.

Malfoy crossed his legs, sitting on his frilly white trousers right there in the bed of the garden between the murmuring bushes of the Fortune Telling Roses and the much quieter Muggle blooms, all a delicate pink in harmony with the tones of Malfoy’s fair skin.

Harry had begun to think that he’d started looking healthier. The sickly, greyish pallor that had stricken him from sixth year to the trials was finally fading. It returned in full force, however, once Malfoy began reading the official scroll, tied off with a Ministry ribbon and wax seal. Harry squinted at the lettering on it.

The PriC Division. Naturally. Harry curled his lip, feeling the point of a fang with the tip of his tongue.

If they wanted Malfoy back, Harry would raise the wards himself. It didn’t matter that he wasn’t Lord of the House—the Manor would let him. They’d become friends, even if he and Malfoy hadn’t. He had a good feeling that all the Manor had sought was someone it could trust to look after them while they healed.

Harry peered at Malfoy’s wand, tucked securely behind his ear as the lines around his mouth deepened, and considered again that Malfoy might feel the same as his house.

Malfoy clenched his fist, crumpling the paper within it, and wore a matching expression. The pink flush that had replaced his waxy pallor was hectic and pained, running from the tip on one ear, across his high cheekbones to the other. He took one long, slow breath. Then he took another.

Then, he buried his face in his hands and screamed until his voice went hoarse. When he finally stopped, his eyes were red, his cheeks were wet, and his expression was resolute.

Harry followed him to the Manor at a very great and wary distance.

Harry’s paws sank into the plush carpet. They had not travelled this way before. Malfoy stuck to his routes: his bedroom ensuite, then the kitchens to collect the raw meat for the thestrals and prepare the bowl of milk and honey he inexplicably always left beside the glowering grotesque of the iron gates. He dropped off the bowl and moved onto the thestral paddock, where he cared for Myrna, tutted over her lack of progress, and stared out after the herd.

Then to the rose gardens, to tend to the dying petals, to sink his fingers into the soil and hum soft little lullabies in French as he did so which made Harry feel a nostalgic ache in his chest for the wanting of it. Repeat ad nauseum.

Very occasionally, they trod into what Harry understood to be Malfoy’s mother’s suite, so that he could poke around in her closet until he found another jumper to wear until threadbare. He had never deviated from these haunts throughout the duration of Harry’s stay.

Some of the hall still smelled rotten. The rug was likely unsalvageable, some spots coppery, others a morass of scents Harry preferred not to investigate. Harry wondered if the Manor had a grudge against it.

Throughout it all was the same fetid scent of Dark Magic, strung through with the thin, fighting thread, warm and comforting, caressed by Harry’s own. Malfoy’s magic became thinner and thinner as they approached the heavy black walnut door that they finally stopped in front of.

It was a work of art, like all the doors and wallpaper in the Manor. Serpents, vines, and twining tree branches twisted across the dark wood. It smelled of strong and sour magic, and without his conscious thought, Harry’s hackles rose.

One of the snakes flicked its tongue at Malfoy’s hand, which hovered a few hesitant inches from the carved wood. Malfoy’s fingers jerked back, but he remained facing it, chewing his cheek with a stony expression.

He huddled himself close to the door in a manner not dissimilar to the moves Harry had pulled back in first year, sneaking around without his Invisibility Cloak and trying to remain unseen. The brass of the handle turned silently, the metal rolling slowly in its joint, and Malfoy peered through the opening to the empty room beyond.

Finding it uninhabited, he released an exasperated huff at odds with the sinking of his shoulders from up beside his ears. In his now much more fluid grasp, the door swung open much farther, wafting a bitter scent towards Harry. He wrinkled his nose and sneezed thrice.

The room, when Harry had recovered from his sneezing fit enough to see it, was lined in shelves containing both books and objects of questionable character. In the center was a well crafted wingback chair made of a unique leather Harry had never seen before. In front of it was a wide, scorched desk that wept ash onto the rug, and behind it all, an empty portrait frame.

“I think it was the cruelest thing he ever did, to lie for me,” Malfoy said, in an oddly conversational tone. His eyes were no longer the troubled, faraway clouds they had been. They were slate grey, hard and flat and weathered as rock. “It would have been kinder if he had just let me hate him.”

It was Lucius Malfoy’s office, Harry realised, finally recognising the distasteful scent. It wafted through his nose from the interrupted Killing Curse of his second year. It carried with it the dust of the Battle at the Ministry before the worst thing in the world happened and threw the burgeoning war into stark relief.

“Of course I’m glad not to be in Azkaban,” Malfoy caveated, picking the skin around his nails in an absent way that looked entirely unintentional. The words were falsely casual. Beneath the veneer they were laced with desperation, as though Harry was the Supreme Mugwump instead of a vaguely muddy, disheveled dog crouched with his ears pinned back in anxiety. “I would have died there.”

Malfoy barked a harsh, ironic laugh. It ran in the family, that sardonic noise. Sirius had made similar sounds, when discussing similar topics.

It made Harry unutterably sad. There were too many similar people in the same withered family tree to be so close to Harry and to suffer so unjustly.

“Now I have to remember him, knowing that despite everything I tried, he could never love me until he had nothing left to lose.”

Malfoy stared at the stained rug and raked his nails down the pink cashmere sleeve of his mother’s jumper in a listless daze. It was too tight around the shoulders, the sleeves too short around the wrists, the Dark Mark concealed beneath.

With rancor, he spat, “Barely an afterthought.”

He dug the point of his thumbnail in as he turned his gaze onto the empty portrait frame. Harry pulled at his magic, wishing he had the hands to stop Malfoy from hurting himself. But the web of it at his core was stuck fast, and he knew that it was not time, not yet, to return to himself, for all he wished it was.

Malfoy, for his part, hardly seemed aware of the discomfort.

“The bleeding nitwit kept a portrait of himself in his own office,” he scoffed. Never in all their years of animosity had Malfoy’s voice dripped with such venomous disdain as it did now. “Self-centered to the point of becoming macabre. Always sitting in front of the enchantment he would inevitably leave behind.”

If Harry could have spoken, he would have wanted to say something comforting. But he didn’t know what in the world that would have been. Harry hated Lucius Malfoy, and he couldn’t remember his own parents. He couldn’t remember any guardian who cared about him, not until Hagrid, not until Sirius.

Snape’s memories had devastated him, seeing the cruel twist of Sirius’ lips, seeing the coldness in his dark eyes. Harry had thought Sirius was better. Harry had thought they all were better, until watching them congregate around the weakest of their class like a pack of hyenas to sole, sickly prey.

It had been awful. Harry had been that child, the one with no friends, the one who the other children avoided because of his poor hygiene and his bad manners and the way that he snatched food out of the garbage quickly enough to hide it from the teachers, but never subtly enough to avoid detection from the other children.

He had been inexcusably strange and Dudley had made sure he never forgot it. The other children all knew it too, as though unlovableness was an observable quality to everyone else but himself.

If Harry had never been that child, it would have been so easy to convince himself that Snape had deserved it. That his father and Sirius were simply better, and therefore, they deserved to make Snape suffer. It was the belief system that no doubt Lucius Malfoy had raised Draco with, in fact.

Harry hadn’t been raised by people who loved him. Harry hadn’t been raised by people who even gave him a chance to prove he was worthy of love.

The Manor suffered. It languished in pulsating hurt, in unending grief, in low-level fear sunk deep into the foundation and the support beams of the structure. He thought, if the Dursleys or anyone else had dangled the promise of being loved above him, he would have changed his entire self for them.

He would have shed his skin like a snake and become whoever they wanted him to be. For the chance to be loved he would have squeezed himself into any mould. He would have sacrificed himself like he had in the Forest, less final but no less painful. He would amputate the most important parts of himself until he did not know who he was, and he would have done so gladly, if only for a chance at belonging.

“They wrote to tell me his body cannot be recovered,” Malfoy said.

The words were as flat as his expression, but his silver eyes gleamed, chatoyant with repressed emotion. That awful laugh tore out of him again. “I don’t know whether to be relieved or enraged.”

Harry had seen Malfoy inhabit both emotions, sagging with relief as he slumped off of the Wizengamot’s stand and incandescent with fury more times than Harry could count, hurling hexes at him from across a Hogwarts hallway.

This person was heavier than any of his prior incarnations. He was filled with grief, which undercut every other feeling Harry could see play out in minute flickers across his graceful features. The scent of it rolled off of him in waves.

“Such a fool,” Draco whispered, his voice cracking on the last word.

Harry didn’t know if he was talking about his father, or about himself.

Chapter Text

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Harry worried the day after receiving the PriC Division’s owl would entail a focused bout of knife-block staring on Draco’s part.

The evening afterwards had been occupied with Draco curled up in the foetal position in his unwashed sheets. The wooden wyvern had hovered over him from his place at the headboard, crouching protectively and huffing smoke from his nostrils into the wilderness of the wallpaper behind him. Harry had laid at the threshold in equal protectiveness, glaring at the foul magic Greyback had worked into the wooden door, slowly picking away at it with his own.

Draco had been lethargic and teary that evening, and Harry expected more of the same upon waking. But when the sun rose, so did Draco, bolting out of bed with a frenetic energy that Harry had rarely seen him channel outside of school.

He threw his lacy nightclothes in a pile on the floor, which caused Harry to snort in surprise and clench his eyes tightly shut. He may have been stuck as a dog and had chosen Draco as his current haunt, but he’d be damned if he’d take advantage of him when they were both fairly compromised. He thought of his guilty shower wanks at the Ministry and gritted his teeth.

Draco bumped and banged around his room, swearing as he barked his shin on the bed frame and tumbled into the ensuite bathroom. Harry opened his eyes with a sigh of relief, and in short order, steam floated from the crack in the door.

Harry wasn’t sure when the last time was that Draco had cleaned himself without magic. He preferred not to try and calculate it, leaving Draco’s dignity intact by ignorance.

However long Harry expected him to take, he should have known to double it. The birds from the Manor woods had well and truly begun to sing by the time Draco stepped back into his bedroom. By the time he stepped to the threshold, he was wearing the sorts of garments Harry would never have chosen for himself in ten million years, which meant that Draco was in top form.

It was a huge diversion from the thin, scratchy cloth of the prisoner’s uniform and the soft shapelessness of his lacy nightclothes. He was wearing some sort of riding boots and breeches. The boots were made of a supple leather that hugged his feet and calves as though crafted specifically for his body. Likely, they had been, and had cost a fortune for it.

His breeches were a light beige, equally tight, and might have been unseemly indeed, Harry thought in Draco’s poncy voice, save for the embroidered green tunic which fell just above his knees that he sported under a flowing brown cloak of soft earth tones. The cloak was made of such a luxurious material that even Harry knew it wasn’t the sort of cloak one wore without another on top of it.

“Right,” he said, as he always did before facing something that intimidated him. “Father’s dead. I would be too, if you’d just hurry up and do your job.”

Draco shot a glare at Harry, as though he was about to ask the floo address of his manager and give them an earful about employee punctuality.

“Seeing as you’re a lazy sod, I can’t just sit here and wait until my body too cannot be recovered from the side of the North Sea,” he chattered along. His voice, though once again airy, was filled with morbid humour. “If you insist upon making a nuisance of yourself, the very least I can do is make such an endeavour challenging for you.”

Harry wasn’t certain what task Draco had set for himself, as he folded himself into the thin chair of his dusty secretary’s desk. Whatever it was, it certainly looked onerous. Draco tugged his freshly washed hair, he gnashed his newly brushed teeth, and he swore like the sailors Harry was certain he’d never met, having been sheltered his whole life from such ungodly riffraff.

After a half-dozen crumpled pieces of parchment flung around the already prodigiously messy bedroom, Malfoy cursed, “Merlin’s bloody pantaloons,” which was only one amidst a string of equally archaic expressions. He dabbed at the drying ink with the side of his hand, an air of finality to his actions, and rolled it up with brusque haste, as though one moment more and he would set the missive alight.

Harry’s ears pricked up in surprise as he heard Draco instruct his owl, “It’s for Rubeus Hagrid at Hogwarts.” When the owl took flight out of the window, the scroll tied tightly to its right leg, Draco turned to him. He was scowling ferociously.

“Is this what you want?” Draco asked, with an irascible lilt that Harry could tell, after so long spent in his presence, was a mask for a far more vulnerable emotion. “You want me to make a fool of myself before those who would sooner draw and quarter me?”

Harry released a breath of contentment. An angry, chiding Draco was not a giggling, screaming, weeping one, nor one curled in the foetal position staring listlessly at the wooded wallpaper as though he would like to become one with the trees.

Draco was a mess of huge emotions, unruly and poorly contained. And Harry, surprising as it was, basked in the opportunity to see each of them, even as the barbed end of his mood prodded Harry for a reciprocal reaction.

Harry couldn’t wait until he had the chance to speak again, if only to fling back the jabs the way he craved to. Less like a fight, now, and more like a dance.

Until then, Harry would stand sentinel at the door, would lend his magic to the wards, and would wait for Draco to heal.

~*~*~

Harry was thrilled to feel Hagrid’s magic at the rusty iron gate of the Manor.

It was nothing like the awful stink that permeated the Manor’s grounds, slowly lessening each day Harry lent his magic to Draco’s thin web. He watched the silvery threads of Draco’s magic multiply as the days passed and basked in the increase of it, the warm feeling of comfort it brought, the spicy smell of cinnamon, clove, and orange it brought, like Harry’s favourite Christmases at the Burrow.

Hagrid’s magic felt sturdy, no-nonsense, and overwhelmingly kind. It was so different from the way Draco’s magic zinged throughout the Manor, crackling with light. Even so, it was just as comforting, if not moreso: Hagrid had always been the person Harry had sought comfort from, ever since he burst down the door of the Dursley’s shack and demanded that Harry enjoy his very first, partially squashed, birthday cake.

It was this exact desire to see Hagrid that kept him slinking away, every time the wards chimed.

Harry knew he wanted to stay here. He knew the Manor wasn’t ready to protect itself from the old magic it was battling, and if Ron was right, that meant Draco wasn’t, either. They would be—Harry knew they would be, as Draco had never been anything if not obstinately mulish about completing any and every task he set for himself—but they weren’t ready yet to do so unassisted.

Harry fretted that if he could sense magic so easily, perhaps Hagrid could too, the man who had always been more in touch with the wildness of the magical world than anyone else Harry had known. And if Hagrid recognised him, well. It epuld all be over. Hagrid had never been able to keep a secret from anyone, not even three eager young eleven year olds with their feet dangling from the edge of his humongous chairs.

Draco at eighteen was a fair bit cleverer than three eleven year olds, even if one of those children had been Hermione Granger. Even if he lacked the personality to be as subtle and manipulative as his father had no doubt encouraged, Harry still had no doubt Draco’s skills would be far sharper than necessary to pry any information he wanted out of Hagrid.

So, sulkily, Harry made himself scarce whenever Hagrid visited. He slunk in between the Fortune-Telling Roses, whose muddled whispers had begun little by little to clarify themselves. If Harry strained his ears, he could make out the faint whisper of Draco’s name. Everything else was a mystery, no matter how hard Harry tried to listen.

From between the blooms, he watched Draco wring his hands outside of the stables while Hagrid worked with his favourite thestral, watched Draco bite his nails and pace before giving up and retreating into the Manor. He watched Hagrid gently pat the thestral with his great hand, watched him whisper something lovely into her ear. He gazed out appreciatively at the rest of the herd while they mulled around the tree line, the colts cantering playfully amongst one another as the elder members looked on watchfully from their empty sockets.

Harry was certain no one with a stature such as Hagrid’s had ever sat in the garden chairs within the Malfoy solarium, but he supposed no one such as Hagrid had ever been in the Manor at all, unless maybe to be sacrificed in some sort of dark ritual. Draco bit his lip and curled one ankle around the other in nervousness and Hagrid sipped his tea from a ludicrously delicate cup, tense and awkward but nevertheless as kind as always. It made Harry’s chest hurt to watch the two of them together, an old fondness shuffling to the side to make space for a newer, more fledgeling one.

Harry wasn’t sure if Draco noticed how Hagrid’s presence brightened the Manor. As the weather turned cold and the world outside withered, the house was slowly coming back to life.

When Harry walked the corridors, he could see patches of rug slowly rehabilitate itself, the stains or burns slowly disappearing with every week that passed. The wallpaper became brighter and more intricately decorative. The lighting, which had flickered ominously at best in many parts of the Manor, or, at worst, had thrown Harry’s surroundings in such an ominous cast that he was certain something loathsome and nefarious was waiting for him around the next turned corner, had now become dim and watery. It was still uncomfortable, for sure, but it wasn’t discomfiting, nor did it feel purposeful, the top layer of spite and venom eroding with every cheerful wave of Hagrid’s large hand as he waited beneath the baleful gaze of the iron grotesque.

Draco’s moods remained mercurial as always. Some days, he remained tense and anxious while Hagrid visited. Others, he became tearful and weepy, shutting himself in his bedroom upon Hagrid’s departure. He curled himself up into his mussed bedsheets with a sniffle and, with a wave of his wand, shut the scored door to his chambers straight into Harry’s rebuked snout.

Most recently, Draco joined Harry in the rose garden to sit cross-legged in the frozen soil. He cast a Warming Charm and a Cushioning Charm before placing his pampered derriere in the dirt, and then, blinking at Harry, belatedly cast the same for him.

“Hagrid has offered me an assistantship position,” he announced, narrowing his eyes. “It would be terribly rude for you to strike me down before my orientation.”

Harry dug his assent into the frozen ground with a determined paw. Terribly rude indeed, my good fellow, he thought, giving into the canine urge to dig. Shall we partake in a spot of afternoon tea to mull it over?

“No doubt the Headmistress would have some harsh words at my funeral, if you did so,” Draco continued, his chin propped on the palm of his hand as he mused, an elbow on the bony cap of his crossed knee. “She berated Severus about lying to her from beyond the veil, right over his coffin, while Potter gawped on like the gormless fool he is. She certainly does not believe in refraining from speaking ill of the dead. I wouldn’t stick around for an encore, if you choose haste over sense now,” he warned.

Harry huffed an offended breath through his nose. He’d been perfectly well composed at Snape’s funeral. He’d worn those brocade robes again and everything. He hadn’t even asked Draco if any of the PriCs had been back to harass him, nor had he invited himself over to make them both lunch once more.

He thought both of those achievements had been feats worth celebrating, personally. But instead of celebration, he had returned to Grimmauld, shucked off his fancy robes to puddle on the floor, and had stared glumly at his own awkward grimace in Witch Weekly before falling asleep on the dubious living room couch.

Draco was anxious as all get-out the morning before heading to Hogwarts, waking up at the very crack of dawn and spending a truly astronomical amount of time in his bathroom washing up. He had so many different potions in his hair that the steamy scents wafting off him made Harry sneeze for ages, even from the doorway. He tried on one perfectly good outfit, and then another, and then swapped it for yet another.

He fiddled around in one Harry thought he might actually select for a short while, holding his arms awkwardly out from his torso in a white silk top that looked more like a blouse than many garments Harry had seen the girls at Hogwarts wear, before releasing a full-throated groan of annoyance and struggling out of it ungracefully. He laid on his back, staring at the twinkling constellations which had begun reappearing on the nighttime sky of his ceiling, and sniffled poutily.

“It won’t matter what I wear,” he moped, morose with self-pity. “I doubt the castle will even let me in again. It’ll be a huge, mortifying palaver, and I’ll be in the papers again. The Prophet will headline me on the metaphorical spit and roast me for the slavering masses like a slaughtered hog.” He grabbed a pillow and brought it to his scarred chest, hugging it into himself. “You wouldn’t care,” he muttered accusingly at Harry.

Harry, for his part, felt mightily offended by that statement. What was he doing at the Manor, if not caring?

He barked reprovingly, the first time he could recall raising his voice in this form at Draco. He had been careful not to do so, firstly realising that his Grim form caused terror enough, and then, upon realising Draco’s fear of large animals, cautiously avoiding bringing attention to the strength in his canine form.

Thankfully, Draco had become at ease enough over the months of Harry’s companionship not to startle and grip his wand, pointed business end first at the creature before him, as Harry feared he might have when they had first come together.

He simply raised his thin eyebrows, pursed his lips, and retorted, “Well, you don’t have to get smart about it.”

While Draco was away, Harry walked the length of the wards around the Manor, which had always been so much more appreciative for it than Grimmauld.

Harry passed groundskeeper’s cottages, a whole village of them way out at the edges of the wards, and a small cemetery of Malfoys from hundreds of years beforehand. Harry wondered where the more recently deceased were buried. He wondered if Lucius had a gravestone somewhere, magicked with his date of death but never fulfilled with his remains.

Harry thought, with a vindictive twist near his heart, that to be laid to rest somewhere unnamed and unreachable was the least Lucius Malfoy deserved for all the suffering he had caused throughout his mistake of a life.

Harry’s foul mood redoubled when he reached the pile of bones.

They were hodgepodge strewn in what resembled a pyre, charred and blackened. Some of them were too large to be human, others too short, and Harry hoped fervently that none at all had once belonged to a human being. He wasn’t sure if it was naive or not to do so.

Some looked like the bones of the thestral herd, visible through their papery dark skin. As he continued past, a horse skull peered sightlessly out at him. He remembered the vague mentions of Bellatrix that Draco had made, the hollowness in his eyes as he had remembered her. When Harry had been Snatched to the Manor, there had been albino peacocks, sluggish and anaemic but still alive to roam the untended grounds. Harry hadn’t seen a single one since returning as the Grim.

Harry continued on, passing the grotesque and the bowl of milk and honey perched beside it. It was here that Harry could feel the wards, less tenuously thin than any other time he had sought them out. Harry could feel his magic humming alongside Draco’s. It felt good to know that his strength could be lent for something other than battle.

So often throughout the war it had felt like all Harry could do was get people killed. But the Manor was coming back to life, and Draco with it, and Harry wouldn’t take credit for it, not all of it. Draco certainly wouldn’t let him, if Harry ever managed to wrangle his magic back into shape and himself with it. But Harry had helped and tangibly so. It meant so much, for his own sake even more than Draco’s, that Harry had found an opportunity to prove that he truly was capable of doing something purely good. No matter that the papers, his peers, even his closest friends had tried to reassure him of this very capability for years on end. He hadn’t believed them. Not until he’d done something he’d truly wanted to do.

When Draco returned back from his first reunion with Hogwarts, his magic was frayed and overwhelmed. He headed straight to the kitchen and beelined to the knife block.

Harry raced after him, pulling his magic tight around him. He was ready to throw it all at Draco if need be, to freeze him fast with the force of a thousand Stupefies if it meant stopping him from hurting himself.

But, thank Merlin, Draco merely Summoned yet another cucumber from the cold cabinet. He sliced it up and put it on his eyes, sighing as he tilted his head back against the high cabinets and leaned his long body against the counter.

“Ginevra is an uncontained menace,” he mumbled.

Still trembling with unresolved terror, Harry shuffled from paw to paw anxiously. In short order, he aborted his ill-fated attempt at remaining still and began chasing his tail. He refused to let Draco out of his sight, not after the past frightful moments. But if he didn’t do something, Harry feared his magic would shatter all the elaborate crystal chandeliers that had only recently begun growing back.

Harry’s nails clacked against the tiles with urgency, scrabbling and scraping as he strained to seize his own tail in his jaws. “Goodness,” Draco noted mildly.

When Harry cast a dizzying glance at him, he found him peering down at him from one uncovered eye, his head still tilted back to balance the other slice on his face. “What’s gotten into you now?”

Harry grunted and redoubled his efforts. He had almost gotten it, the black fur at the end of his tail grazing his nose, when he careened into the kitchen table where Draco had slept the very first time Harry had walked into the unhappy space. The table and chairs fell to the floor with a clatter. Draco hopped onto the counter and out of the way, catching the second cucumber slice neatly in his open Seeker’s palm.

“Such a ruckus,” he mused, crossing one leg over the other. The trousers that he had selected for today seemed some type of suede that was likely more expensive than Harry’s entire wardrobe combined. They hugged his calves beautifully. Harry wasn’t staring. No, Harry was simply looking. It wasn’t his fault Draco’s legs were so long.

“Are you worried that Ginevra might usurp your position before you complete your duties? Fear not,” he advised, with that small half-smile of amusement which Harry adored.

He removed his wand from behind his ear and waved it at the cucumber, which burst into perfectly sliced rounds. Harry despaired that he hadn’t done that to begin with, and saved them both the hassle of his own barely-contained meltdown.

Draco Vanished the slices he already held and selected a fresh one to take a bite out of. “At the moment, that honour’s all yours.”

~*~*~

Harry snorted awake when Draco launched himself out of bed.

“Apologies,” he muttered groggily, rolling around on his mattress to untangle himself from the pile of duvet and sheets that had gotten wrapped around himself throughout the night. He slithered to the floor and kicked his unwashed clothing out of his way, slipping on a sock that had the same sort of ruffles on it that Ron’s second-hand dress robes had sported with unearned pride before Ron had untidily snipped them off.

He continued muttering throughout his prolonged time in the bathroom, as he was wont to do. The sound around Draco was continuous: he was always muttering something under his breath, or murmuring something, or humming something that had the peaceful rhythm of a lullaby, or whispering the lyrics of some song or another that Harry couldn’t understand in French, over and over to himself.

Harry found the sound comfortingly familiar, more grating than birdsong sometimes perhaps, but soothing in how it proved that Harry was not alone.

Harry took a deep breath and closed his eyes, feeling his magic twining through the wards. The magic at the gates felt fizzy and pleasant, nostalgic in a way that reminded Harry of what he thought other people’s childhoods might have been. It felt like sunshine and cherry cola, sweet and warm and bubbly.

Harry hadn’t ever expected Luna to return to the Manor. From the way Draco carried on, he hadn’t, either. He nearly stumbled straight into the dormant bed of Shrinking Violets when he recognised her behind the iron gates.

“Medea’s sunny arsecrack,” Draco swore, flattening his already well-styled hair back and straightening the lapels on his midnight blue winter cloak. It was strung through with twinkling, silvery constellations. Hercules grappled with the Hydra by Draco’s left knee. Up near his shoulder, Ursa Minor gambolled with Ursa Major. By his right hip, the Scorpius constellation scuttled, raising its fearsome stinger.

Harry loved how he always put his best clothes on for his guests, no matter who they were and no matter how difficult Draco found it ordinarily to do so, otherwise haunting the Manor in his frilly nightclothes alone at all hours of the day and night. With a small grimace of discomfort, Harry thought that it may not have been the clothes, not really, and instead he was simply taken with the prickly, prideful, poncy little weirdo.

Harry anticipated that Luna would likely recognise him. He wasn’t sure how, but she always seemed to know these things. Hearing her say, “Hello, Harry,” in such a serene way, while Draco whipped around in consternation, however, was still more of a shock than Harry had anticipated.

Nobody had called him by name, not since acquiring his current form. It made him feel a little teary, though he couldn’t cry in the Grim’s body.

The wobbly, watery feeling was thankfully replaced with mirth as he watched Draco attempt to dredge up the appropriate response for Luna’s dirigible plum cake, which Harry was certain that St Mungo’s would have rathered acquire and blend up as a remedy for their most constipated convalescents, if not for the truly flattening scent of alcohol wafting from it. He snorted in quiet amusement, already thinking of Draco’s strained politeness as he attempted to take only the smallest and most delicate of bites, and felt fortunate that he would not be expected to partake.

It was to Harry’s great surprise that Draco actually did offer him a forkful, which Harry sniffed delicately and decidedly refused. He was surprised even further when Draco actually began to eat.

Harry could tell Draco was trying very, very hard, when he said in an even, earnest tone, “The cake is lovely.” Harry knew this because it sounded like nothing that had come out of Draco’s mouth ever before in his entire life.

Harry was having a truly joyful time watching Draco struggle, right through their conversation about Neville, until Luna gently corrected Draco’s incorrect assumptions about her own sexuality. When she brought up Draco’s, Harry heard his voice turn small and sad and self-conscious as he admitted, “I thought I’d done a good job of hiding it, really.”

It wasn’t like Harry hadn’t known. A person only had to spend five minutes with Draco Malfoy to know that he was queer. Hermione said he talked like an Oscar Wilde protagonist. Though Harry had read hardly any literature, he was an expert in Dracology, when Hermione gave him a brief but illustrious summary of the author’s escapades, Harry conceded that it did sound fairly on the nose.

But there was a big difference between reckoning something about someone, and hearing it confirmed. Especially when it was important, in the earth-tilting way that it had no right to be. And especially when it seemed that that something caused that person such grief.

Harry wanted to drag Lucius up from his unmarked grave by the North Sea and crush his bones in his jaws until the creamy marrow was revealed. He wanted to go back to his ruined, opulent office, and slash his empty portrait the way Sirius had done the Fat Lady’s canvas. He wanted to travel back in time, to the first moment Draco had ever realised he was gay, and he wanted to shake him, wanted to take his face in his hands and tell him that whoever had made him believe any hateful thing about himself was stupid, and vile, and wrong.

Even ribbing Harry in absentia couldn’t blow away the air of malaise which had surrounded Draco upon this revelation. He picked at his piece of cake, subdued and wilted, and when Luna suggested that perhaps she take her leave, he hadn’t argued.

Grimmauld’s halls had lengthened interminably when Harry had walked the house, but now, the Manor’s seemed to have shortened. The three of them stood at the wide marble stairs from the entryway in no time at all, as though the Manor itself was ushering Luna out so its Lord could have a proper sulk in peace.

“I’d rather walk out of the gates alone,” Luna said, smiling softly at Draco. “Harry can escort me.”

Draco sighed. “I suppose he does look a bit like him,” he conceded, casting a critical eye towards Harry’s disheveled pelt. “His fur always looks half a mess. You’d think, for a portent of my demise, that he wouldn’t shed half so much.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t call him that,” Luna said vaguely. From the slant of Draco’s thinned lips, that was about all of Luna’s insights he could handle for the day. If Harry could have laughed, he would have—he’d seen that very expression pasted on Hermione’s face every time she and Luna had tried (and failed, more often than not) to converse.

“You’re sure you want to walk the path without my escort?” Draco asked nervously. From the entryway, he looked up at the clear white sky in anxiety, as though his maligned family members would come riding out of it on Nimbus 2000s to sweep Luna back into the dungeons.

Luna nodded. “You should lie down,” she advised. “Your Wrackspurts have gotten much worse.”

Scowling fiercely, Draco took a slow, deep breath that seemed to do nothing to alleviate his peevishness. “Right,” he said, pinching the bridge of his nose. “Right. It was lovely seeing you, Lovegood.”

“Luna,” she corrected, unbothered as always. “I’ll see you again soon, Draco.”

Draco muttered something disagreeable that not even Harry, with his advanced hearing, could pick up. His tone, however, was distinctly grumpy. He shut the door politely, though with an air of rankled cantankerousness, despite the prodigious amount of brandy he must have consumed even just nibbling on Luna’s plum cake.

For a moment, Harry could almost picture Draco as one of the elderly neighbors in No. 5, Privet Drive, whose resident old man toddled out to the porch every morning to read the paper in his house slippers, glaring grouchily whenever Dudley made too much noise. Draco wouldn’t wear the oversized tank-top and threadbare pyjama bottoms: he’d shuffle out with those same house slippers while in his frilly Victorian house clothes, dressing gown and all. Though he’d never used hair curlers before, Harry couldn’t help but suspect he’d be the type.

They walked side by side along the gravel path, he and Luna. For a moment, there was no sound but the gravel crunching loudly beneath their feet. The frigid winter wind weaving through the bare branches of the Malfoy woods. From a distance, Harry could hear the playful braying of the thestrals.

“Harry, do you care about Draco because he is good at brewing healing potions?” Luna asked Harry, apropos of nothing.

Harry startled, his ears pinned back. He was confused by the question, but even moreso, he was confused by how Luna guessed his feelings. They were still halfway indecipherable for Harry himself. He lowered his head and looked up at her guiltily, with his tail tucked between his legs.

Luna laughed. The sound reminded him of walking through the Hogwarts corridors, looking for her socks and shoes, how she had treated it all as a lovely little side adventure rather than the inconvenience it must have been to her. “Did you want me to pretend I couldn’t see all the Nargles around you? Of course you do. You have done for years, you just fought it.” She patted him on the head affectionately. “You’re very strong, and very stubborn. But you’ve always been very talented at loving people.”

Harry knew his face would have been bright red, if he’d had his body back. He was fiercely glad for the protection of his pelt. It would have been even worse to have Draco’s fair complexion, which flushed blotchy, hectic reds and pinks whenever he was the slightest bit upset. Despite all his training, his feelings were forever readable to anyone who truly looked.

Undeterred, Luna returned to her original, inexplicable train of thought. “Do you love Hermione because of all the potions she can make and all the spells she knows?”

Huffing a sigh, Harry kicked at a large piece of gravel. It skittered amongst the others, clicking and clacking until it reached a standstill.

Of course he didn’t. Hermione was brilliant, but she was also brave, and kind, and had a ferocious sense of justice, not half of which she poured into defending Harry on a regular basis. She was stubborn and prideful but she didn’t let either get in the way of her humanity. She tried so hard and did so much with so little. Harry thought about when he had first turned himself into the Grim, the panic that had consumed him alongside the resolute knowledge that Hermione could fix him if need be, and he knew he would always be a little in awe of her.

“Right. And none of us care if you save a single person ever again, you know? I care about who you are, not what you do, Harry.”

She crouched down on the gravel, and cupped her hand under his snout, moving his head beseechingly until they saw eye to eye. He felt her magic, so lovely but so piercing, reaching out for him.

“You think you need to save people and sacrifice yourself, in order to be loved,” she said, as though she was not speaking the darkest, foulest thoughts, which had taken root in Harry’s cupboard and multiplied there without light.

He wanted to say she was wrong. He wanted to lash out. But Luna wasn’t Draco, and she wouldn’t bare her teeth and claw him back, the way Draco so beautifully acquiesced each time to Harry’s instigation. To start a fight with Luna was like starting a fight with the sky and, somehow, starting a fight with Molly all at once: futile and shame-ridden, achieving no purpose but making Harry feel smaller and sadder than he had before.

He could run away, quite literally turn tail and bolt back to the Manor’s warm cinnamon and orange scented safety. Running away had brought him here, away from Auror Training and the Burrow and Grimmauld. It was safe. It wasn’t soft, necessarily, and it wasn’t gentle, but it was comforting and smelled more like somewhere Harry could call home with every day that the Dark Magic receded.

“Draco hates when you save him. What did he do after the Feindfyre?”

He’d shoved Harry and run away with an insult flung over his shoulder, that’s what.

Luna seemed to know it, too. Harry had no clue how she’d acquired that information. I wish you had come two years earlier, Draco had said to his death, so stubborn and so full of pride that he would rather die than reach out for help.

“I think he wants some help while he saves himself.” Luna gazed at him, cornflower blue eyes wide and searching. “But that’s why you stayed, isn’t it? You saw how hard he was trying.”

Harry whined. It was too much. Hardly anybody had ever seen him the way that Luna could see people, let alone tell him about it.

He wanted her to see him, so badly. This was the only thing he’d ever wanted throughout those awful, cold, uncomfortable nights in the cupboard. Now, he wanted to hide from it, all at once. He was too vulnerable, too open, too seen.

She knelt both knees onto the gravel, and through his distress, Harry distractedly cast a wordless, wandless Cushioning Charm.

She hummed in thanks, pressing her forehead to his, and Harry was so, so grateful to look away from those earnest blue eyes that saw so much. He wasn’t sure how Ginny could handle it, being with someone whose airy observations cut right to the core of things.

“He’s the sort of person who likes all his facts to be in order.” Luna’s hands were gentle as they scratched the scruff of his neck, sinking into the dense winter coat. Draco hardly ever touched him, and Harry had never initiated: it felt like overstepping, like taking advantage.

He’d tried so hard to be as respectful as he could while still remaining in proximity to Draco, hovering around the edges, and yet it was never enough. Harry despaired that he would never figure out how to make it enough. “He doesn’t like not knowing things.”

And then, Luna told him he didn’t have to figure it out, as though it was the easiest thing in the world. “Stop making his decisions for him.” She tilted her head thoughtfully. “He hasn’t felt like he’s had many choices. Can you trust him to make the decisions he needs?”

Harry looked away guiltily, his ears back and his head bowed. He hadn’t meant to strip Draco of anything. He’d been trying to help. Harry trusted him, he did—

Just not about accepting help from him.

Harry felt another sort of tugging in his chest begin again.

Luna moved to look him straight in the eyes once more, painfully insightful, even though she didn’t mean it to be. With immense gentleness, she said quietly, “None of the rest of us care what you choose to do with your life, either. Just as long as you’re happy, Harry.”

When Harry walked back to the Manor alone, he felt something unravel within him.

~*~*~

Draco had wasted no time shucking his formal wear off his body, to join the crumpled legions standing sentinels in small mountains around his bedroom. By the time Harry arrived back at the threshold, he was in a fresh set of his never-ending lacy pyjamas. This one had a high collar that would have had Harry tearing at the seams the moment he put it on, but Draco, no doubt acclimatised from years of pristinely starched clothing, clearly had other things on his mind.

“Do you think I look gay?” he asked, the question so pointed it was almost an accusation. “I don’t think I look gay.”

Harry wasn’t quite sure what the book definition of looking gay was, but if he had to guess, it would probably look like Draco. Perhaps Oscar Wilde had written it, in one of his many books that Harry would never read.

“Yes, well, you would say that,” Draco muttered nonsensically, though Harry hadn’t said anything. He hardly ever needed Harry’s input for his never-ending monologue.

If he was at all normal, it should have made Harry feel put-out. Instead, it made him feel warm. To know that Draco didn’t need Harry’s performance, didn’t need him to say or do anything at all, other than simply be. To hear the chatter and know the one talking was just content with him there and nothing else.

Just like Luna had said before she departed through the iron gates, the watchful grotesque mild-mannered for once. Luna, Draco, Hermione, Ron, Ginny—nobody who mattered cared what he did. Nobody who mattered would mind if Harry was just Harry, from now until the very end of time.

Hermione floo-called him nearly every night before his transformation. Ron offered him a room in the flat, nearly begged him to move in. Ginny cared enough about his feelings to nearly start a fight with herself over it, trying to convince herself she had no right to feel guilty when she clearly had done.

Draco had invited Harry in, even when it would have been easier to thread the wards. Even when it would have been routine to yell at him until he left.

But he hadn’t. He’d slept in his presence. And then, he’d eaten his food, too.

Stop making his choices for him, Luna had said, and she had been right. Draco had already begun making choices, from stringing the portraits away to inviting Hagrid over, from the lingering smell of healing balms in Draco’s room and the Manor cellar floor.

He had made so many wonderful choices. Harry just wasn’t sure if he would choose him, next.

Harry took a deep breath and gathered his magic around him, alongside every bit of courage he could muster.

“Begone,” Draco commanded, burying himself even further in the rumpled fabric of his duvet and pillows, until nothing showed of him but a shock of flaxen hair. “I would like to mope about dramatically in peace.”

And so, of course, that’s when Harry did the exact opposite.

Chapter Text

PART THREE

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

“I was never here to kill you,” Potter repeated finally, his voice hoarse from the strain of explaining. The shadows had lengthened while he talked, the sun moving across the Manor grounds like it revolved around Potter, just as everything and everyone else in the world.

“I wish you had fucking told me that,” Draco muttered crossly. He felt hysterical, like he wanted to laugh and cry and scream all at once, much like when he had when he received the perfunctory letter from Eloise Oakenburn and read the canned language informing him as soullessly as a Dementor that his father’s body could not be recovered. “I did all this shit thinking I was dying and now I don’t even get to die about it.”

He flopped backwards into his pillows, relishing in the soft feeling of the down beneath the tensed muscles all around his shoulder blades. He had to take measured breaths to forcibly unclench the bunching muscles in his jaw.

“You would have done it all eventually,” Potter said, and he seemed certain. It made Draco want to refute him just to be contrary. “Maybe not exactly this, but something like it.”

Pursing his lips, Draco picked at his cuticles miserably. He thought of the Potion’s Institute, of Madam Pomfrey, of Headmistress McGonagall and Hagrid. Of Luna. Of Myrna. Of—

“Did you chase away the portraits?” he asked abruptly, and the thought of it filled Draco with rage. “Is that why you’re never around when Hagrid shows up?”

He had spent months thinking his father had run from him out of sheer cowardice. Had he been trying to return to Draco all this time, only to be stopped by some meddling interloper? Draco couldn’t figure out what that thought made him feel. Relief, rage, guilt, shame, and fear all warred within his roiling stomach, so melded together they had become one acidic mass. His chest hurt like he had just run, hard and long.

“No,” Potter said, and quelled the storm within him before it moved from his upset stomach to sharpen his tongue. “I don’t want to see Hagrid because I didn’t want him to take me away, or worse, recognise me—I know almost everyone is aware that I’m missing by now.”

The anger and frustration that had been stirred up lingered. “I didn’t know,” Draco said, rather petulantly.

“You don’t get the Prophet,” Potter pointed out. “You don’t even get groceries.”

Putting extra emphasis on his last syllables, Draco harrumphed, “I’ve been unwell.” He tugged his blankets more securely around him, and told himself it didn’t matter if Potter saw him in his night clothes, because Potter had apparently been living with him for months. The thought sent an uncomfortable shiver down his spine. He thought he might have a little panic. “You’re being rude to an invalid, and my life is onerous enough.”

“Alright,” Potter replied, happy to beckon Draco’s area rug out from under the bed instead of ushering Draco’s well-earned temper tantrum on further.

Draco glared. He didn’t want Potter to agree. He wanted an argument. He wanted a fight: that was what they were best at, the two of them.

“Fuck you,” Draco spat, because he was so full of venom, begging for a victim to sink his fangs into like the serpent his House idolised. “Stop being agreeable. I’m not ready for you to be agreeable. You were in my house. Without my consent.” His body felt prickly and hot. His eyes even moreso.

He rubbed them roughly. “I’m sure I don’t need to remind you what other sorts of people gallivanted about the Manor without my invitation.”

Potter at least had the good grace to look abashed. “I can leave, now, if you’d prefer,” he hastened, the words tripping over themselves to fall out his mouth.

The expression that crossed his anguished face was more pained than any he’d worn throughout his entire elongated explanation, from his conversation with an astonishingly insightful Weasley to his realisation with Lovegood. “I’m so sorry I couldn’t tell you. I was stuck, and my magic wouldn’t let me turn back. It felt like…it felt like something was pulling me here, and when I got here, it just—it just felt right, being here, so I stopped struggling against it.”

Draco remembered the way his wand had vibrated, overflowing with magic, the first few times he had seen the Grim. Potter spoke so much of his magic being intuitive, this force that he simply rolled with like waves in an ocean and he a mere buoy. But Draco wasn’t like that. Draco was orderly, and controlled, and precise. He needed to be, because he needed to be perfect, now more than ever.

“I didn’t ask for you to be here,” he said, but he couldn’t stop crying.

“I can leave,” Potter repeated. The words were filled to bursting with regret. Draco could practically taste them, his woodland bedroom awash in the mournful scent of rain.

Draco exhaled, and pretended it was rain rolling down his cheeks. “No,” he whispered, the word thick and heavy in his throat.

“Stay.”

~*~*~

The Manor kitchen opened for Potter like a Fortune-Telling Rose in bloom. From his seat at the table, Draco slouched moodily and glared into the sagging corners of the wall, which had sunk inward, much like Draco himself, from the exhaustion that dragged deep in his bones. The pull was so intense it was likely felt all the way to the Manor’s foundation.

“It’s not fair that the Manor likes you so much,” Draco complained.

Potter sported a secretive, smug little smile at the comment. “Everyone likes me,” he retorted, arrogant enough to give Cormac McLaggen a run for his second-rate money. “I’m the Chosen One.”

Draco rolled his eyes. “You’re a Horklump,” he mumbled, because it was the first thing that came to his mind. He flushed almost immediately as he said it, the childish thing it was, remembering the insults he and Theo used to trade when they were tiny, the only other pureblood boy who could keep up and didn’t mind verbally mudslinging with him, instead of the physical sort. “Or a Blibbering Humdinger, Luna would like that.”

Potter stood at the counter, surrounded by vegetables Draco recognised—he wasn’t so poorly versed that he couldn’t identify an onion, for Merlin and Morgana’s sake—and doing things with them that Draco could not follow. Even without any recipe, Potter seemed to be following some sort of internal rhythm as he pulled a marbled beef chuck from the cold cupboard, which acquiesced to Potter as it never did for Draco.

Draco wouldn’t ask what he was making. He didn’t care. He could subsist just fine on his own. Cucumber sandwiches weren’t terrible, he failed to convince himself, feeling nauseated for even trying. The remainder of Luna’s dirigible plum cake in his stomach flipped in offence.

“I’m not some bizarre, creepy project of yours,” Draco admonished as a way to distract himself. Potter thought he had the run of the house, but he didn’t have the run of Draco yet, and Draco would let him know it.

“I know,” Potter replied airily, looking over his shoulder to Draco as he poured the cut carrots into the boiling broth. “You’re bizarre and creepy without any of my input.”

Draco heaved a beleaguered sigh and slunk deeper in his seat, pulling a knee in tight to his chest onto which to rest his scarred forearm, the ugly skull covered by white cotton. He plucked at a small thread on his sleeve, pulling it from its weave and wrapping it around his finger to snap it free from the fray. He watched his skin turn whitish from the pressure and then blotchy pink, before releasing the string without pulling.

“Do you intend to deceive me again?”

Potter paused, tongs raised above a pot of searing meat. The smell made Draco’s mouth water, and he told himself it was out of revulsion, the flood of saliva that always occurred whenever he thought of the liver spread Grand-mère Druella preferred on toast, or the slaughtered Abraxans Aunt Bella took such joy in tormenting.

“I didn’t intend to deceive you the first time,” Potter said, eye to intentional eye with him. Draco knew it was an invitation to look if he wanted: Potter’s mind would be undefended against him. Never had he met someone so naturally untalented at Occlumency.

“But it was easier to let it happen, than to fight against it,” Draco said, repeating Potter’s own words back to him.

Potter waved a hand at the pot. The fire lessened, the sound of the sear lessening and he hadn’t even a wand in sight.

He looked contemplative, which wasn’t an expression Draco was used to observing on his heroic face. So often, Potter left the contemplation to others around him. Draco wished the same trait had served him half as well.

“Yeah,” he admitted. Draco swallowed his shock. Down his esophagus, the emotion fistfought at least one dirigible plum. He was so unused to being agreed with by those that mattered to him, without having to twist and mould his point into something more palatable for them.

“I was using you as an escape, and I’m sorry I did,” Potter said. “It wasn’t fair to you. I don’t intend to do it again. I’m going to try to—to make a life that’s not so overwhelming for myself, I think.”

“You came here because you were overwhelmed?” Draco asked incredulously. He would have laughed if not for the dryness in his sore throat.

“Yeah,” Potter chuckled, sounding like he understood just how ludicrous he was being. “I know. But I knew you’d help me, too.”

“I haven’t been helping anybody,” Draco scoffed. “I’ve been mouldering around in three-day-old pyjamas like the family members my ancestors made the Disillusioned wing for.”

Potter’s brows furrowed. “You’ve got a Disillusioned wing?”

“Yes, the northernmost one,” Draco explained, waving his hand dismissively. “It’s the least attractive, and it gets the worst sun. It’s for the members of my family tree too insane or otherwise unsociable to languish about in, away from the public eye. Or anyone’s eye, really, save perhaps the house-elves,” Draco mused, and Potter looked aghast and furious.

He began to bluster, spluttering something righteous and just, when Draco interrupted him. “Yes, a very cruel practice—it was constructed before Thrice-Great Uncle Septimus cursed my Thrice-Great Grandfather with the whole infertility debacle. One son and done, after that—with the upside of both less infighting and less inbreeding. A two-for-one special, so to speak.”

“Well,” Potter said, looking rather spun off-kilter. “Anyway. You’ve been helping me.”

With a raised eyebrow, Draco waved his lacy, fraying sleeve. Two more threads had fallen to sway with the first. “You’ll excuse me if I remain unconvinced, I’m sure.”

“Draco,” Potter sighed, and Draco almost did not hear the rest of his statement, so arrested he was to hear his first name in that mouth. “Hermione, Ron and I…we didn’t have any of this to fight against.”

Blinking slowly, with furrowed brow, Draco said, “I didn’t give you permission to address me by my first name.”

Potter scoffed. “Would you rather I call you m’lord?”

“I didn’t say it was bad,” scowled Draco, straightening his spine. “I just said I didn’t give you permission.”

“M’lord, I beseech thee,” Potter teased, waving the fire back under the pot with an overly elaborate motion, ending in a gesture like sweeping a hat from his messy head to clutch to his chest like pearls. “Wouldst thou allow me the honour of referring to his Majesty by his proper name?”

Draco raised his chin and looked down his nose at Potter snidely. “I suppose,” he drawled, and added, “it’s not like you won’t do as you please anyway.”

Potter hummed, noncommittal, and Draco knew he’d got it in one.

The rest of their time spent in the kitchen fell into a peaceful, easy silence. It felt like a reversal of their roles, Draco watching as Potter puttered around. His movements were deft as he chopped, the bones on the back of his hands in relief from the tanned skin. His nails were short and blunt, his fingers rough and workmanlike, alluringly different from Draco’s own. His shoulders had broadened since they had last eaten together, and he wondered what Potter had done, those months when Draco had haunted the Manor alone with the thestral herd and the memory of a hundred ghosts.

Potter had a confidence as he cooked that mirrored the grace with which he flew across the Quidditch pitch, but in this endeavour, Draco was more than happy to sit back and spectate. It wasn’t the rolling green fields and magnificent heights of the Highlands from above, but the view was eye-catching nonetheless.

It wasn’t until they had the pot of  boeuf bourguignon on the trivet before them that Draco felt brave enough to press Potter for clarification.

“What did you mean, the three of you didn’t have any of this to fight against?”

The stew was steaming and fragrant, and the intoxicating smell of it alone crumbled all of Draco’s former resolve to spend a tasteless life languishing amongst the cucumber-and-cheese sandwiches. The cutlery shuffled itself from their drawers, gleaming as though freshly polished, though Draco had not even thought of them in months. The bowls were a different style than Great-Aunt Forsythia’s china, an older and more expensive variation.

Potter thought about his response as he ladled the stew into one bowl, which he handed to Draco, and then the other. Draco wondered what the state of Potter’s kitchen was, that he cooked here so readily. He dared not believe that Potter cooked Draco instead of himself, as he had insisted he did.

If he did, he might turn fourteen again, blushing furiously as he watched Potter dive through the air, consumed by an awful heat that he hurriedly swept back behind his subconscious Occlumency walls to the Place of Hidden Thoughts.

“I got here, and I realised that you were doing everything I’d been too afraid to do,” Potter said, staring at the chunks of potato and carrot on his spoon. He dumped the contents back into his bowl without taking a bite, stirring them as he picked through his words with observable care.

“Doubtful,” Draco muttered. “I’m an awful coward.” He couldn’t keep his lip from curling in self-loathing as he said it. He pursed his lips and observed the beef, cooked to perfection, which crowded his bowl amongst the potatoes and thyme. “Both of us already know that, Potter.”

“You were,” Potter agreed, maybe just to hear Draco’s disgruntled noise of protest. He reached his hands out as though he wanted to take one of Draco’s in them, and Draco hurriedly occupied himself with his own spoon and stew, blushing fiercely and cursing his complexion. “But I don’t think you are anymore.”

Draco scoffed. He felt the urge to sling-shot a pea from his spoon straight into the centre of Potter’s forehead—clearly it protected nothing but an empty cavern behind it, with nothing but cobwebs and a few lonesome spiders for decoration. “What could I have possibly done, in the past few months, to abuse you of that absurd notion?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Potter began facetiously, waving his dripping spoon. Drops of the soup, red-tinted from the wine Potter had used, spilled onto the tabletop. “You cared for a whole herd of creatures that needed help, despite being afraid of large animals. You invited Hagrid into your house, despite being scared of him and despite having so much fear around strangers in the Manor. You apologised to Hagrid, which I never thought I would hear you do for anyone, and then you agreed to be his assistant. Not only that, but you’re trying to be a Healer—”

“Apothecarist,” Draco corrected, because if he were to be incorrectly lauded for such notions as the bare minimum, then at least Potter would get his facts right. “Not a Healer.”

“—and you’ve cut off your whole family. You’ve befriended Luna!” Potter shook his head wonderingly. “And that’s besides everything you did during the war, lying for me and giving potions to Madam Pomfrey and all the Hogwarts students who would take them in the Battle.”

“I didn’t cut off my family,” Draco said, because Potter was incorrect again. “Honestly, Potter, get your facts straight before you sing my praises.”

Cocking his head, Potter asked, “What do you mean?” 

“They left,” Draco elaborated, gesturing around the kitchen at large, as though the barren portraits were arranged on the far wall all in a line. “They just went quiet, the day after Father died. They left me.”

Like a fish, Potter’s mouth opened and closed. He looked hesitant, pained even, when he finally began finding the words to say. “They didn’t leave you, Draco,” he grimaced. “I can feel your magic, strung around every portrait, warding them off.”

Draco blinked. “I…what?”

“You’re keeping them out,” Potter clarified, and then his expression softened, taking in Draco’s astonishment. “You…didn’t know?”

Draco felt his mouth make a complicated, unhappy moue, quite without his consent. He halved a potato cube with the side of his spoon. It disintegrated into the soup. “I didn’t realise.” His chest hurt, and he felt even more leaden than when he had shuffled down to the kitchens in the first place.

Hidden within the heaviness, however, was a small spark of defiance. “They would hate what I’ve been up to,” he said, clutching his spoon as he clenched his fists on the table. A fierceness he hadn’t thought himself capable of permeated his voice as he declared, “I’m glad for it. This is my house. I’m the Lord of the Manor.”

Potter nodded. “That you are.”

Through the grief of it, Draco felt triumphant and more than a little vindictive to realise he had done something so fully in his own power. Something that his family would so disparage, were they given the chance to do so. “Even Thrice-Great Uncle Septimus would balk at inviting a half-giant to the Manor as a guest.”

“And working for him,” Potter added through a mouthful of stew. Draco wrinkled his nose delicately. Even when he himself made the meal, it seemed, he still had the manners of a baboon only just sat up and pushed in for the first time. Yet another thing his ancestors would have griped about, and though Draco wasn’t about to join him in his poor etiquette, he smiled at the thought.

“Him and Madam Pomfrey,” Draco amended. He couldn’t help the hint of pride that shone through in his tone, and he found he didn’t quite want to, either. “They’ll be recommending me for the Potion’s Institute, come next year.”

Potter raised his bushy eyebrows. “The same one Neville’s in?” he asked, grinning. “You’re not going to muck up his potions, are you?”

“Not now that he’s good-looking,” retorted Draco, a thrill zinging up his spine at admitting his observation to anyone, but especially Potter. “It would be horribly gauche of me now.”

Potter nodded sagely, humming. “But when he wasn’t good-looking, then it was acceptable,” he said seriously, completing Draco’s thought.

Draco would have never known what Potter sounded like, when he teased instead of fought, bantered instead of duelled, if he hadn’t spent the past few months here. Draco may have never let him in to show it.

He didn’t like that Potter had deceived him. But, were Draco not to deceive himself, a small part of him admitted that perhaps this deception had been necessary to allow Potter into his life as fully as he was.

That didn’t mean Draco was going to forgive him, not without due repentance. But Draco had some tantalising ideas which skirted the border of the Place of Hidden Thoughts, and they didn’t involve cooking as their primary act.

“Correct,” Draco replied gravely. “Why do you think I always bullied you?”

Potter laughed, ebullient.

~*~*~

“Billius Weasley died after he saw a Grim,” Draco said, staring at the legion of dirty china which stood sentinel on the kitchen counter next to Potter’s cooking refuse, judging Draco mightily as though the spirits of his exiled ancestors had possessed them instead of the silent portraits.

“S’at so?” Potter asked above the rim of his teacup. Draco had made them both an English Breakfast blend, because he wasn’t sure what happened after the meal and the scent of the leaves calmed him with its familiarity. He was afraid of ending this meal the same way he’d done so before, sending Potter off with an abruptness that tasted sweet for a moment and then soured. He was afraid of not doing so, as well, for so many different, jumbled, apprehensive reasons.

So he made tea, as he always did when he didn’t know how to manage the unruly guests of the Manor.

Draco hummed, tracing the blooming painted iris on his gilded saucer with his thumbnail. “He ran away from one of the Selwyn sisters, after a debaucherous night. The other one cursed him. Died within a week. Everyone knows.”

“I didn’t know,” Potter said, taking a swig of his drink.

“You wouldn’t.” Draco shrugged. “Aside from your awful Muggle upbringing, the Selwyn sisters left England after the first war. Their cousin on an outer branch of their family tree was a Death Eater, though. You probably met him once or twice.”

Potter nodded, his gaze on the woodgrain of the table as he considered. “Think I might have tried to Cruciate him,” he mused thoughtfully.

Draco narrowed his eyes. “Did you do that often?” he asked, because it hadn’t been mentioned in the trials, and he figured even with the papers slavering after anything to do with the Great Harry Potter, a penchant for Unforgivables would be kept tightly under wraps.

Potter shrugged. “Maybe about as much as you,” he said, peering into his milky tea and then looking up with a rakish grin. “Probably with more success, though.”

“Don’t brag about your ability to channel hatred effectively,” Draco chided primly. “It’s unbecoming to rub your success in the face of others.”

He thought of all the times he had wished he could cast an Unforgivable, any of them at all. He had tried to cast them on so many people and failed each time. Not even the Imperius Curse had been within his reach—he’d had to meet Mother for tea in Hogsmeade, and she’d performed it on Madam Rosmerta for him while her back was turned.

The idea that Potter, the Wizarding World’s bastion of all things good and right, was more capable than Draco at Dark Magic shouldn’t have been a surprise. The scars on Draco’s torso were the scrawl of Potter’s signature, like an artist signing his canvas.

It was a surprise, though. An alluring one, at that.

To know the secret that his famous goodness was strung through with something dark and powerful, strong enough to overcome Potter’s need for righteousness, felt like a succulent, dripping pomegranate found only in the Underworld.

Morbid thoughts and desire swirled.

Draco was surprised when it was Potter who asked, “D’you think it was the Grim, the curse, or the sex that killed him?”

“Billius?“ Draco furrowed his brow, fiddling with the tiny sugar spoon. It clinked on the side of his teacup, and he poured another heap of sugar into his already sweet tea. “It’s a cautionary tale, more than anything. Father told me about him when I was very young. Don’t go gallivanting around, offending those who would see you undone. I’m sure it was to ensure I acted like the model pureblood heir, decorum and decency intact throughout the courting process until wedlock.”

“So he didn’t tell you the story so you’d be afraid of Grims,” Harry reasoned, rolling onto his side to look at Draco through his lenses. His expression was thoughtful, a little sly. “He told you that story to keep you from…” He grinned mockingly. “Maidens’ bedchambers, was it?”

Draco barked a laugh. “Yes, well. Misguided advice.”

He looked down at his hands, at the small raw patch by his middle fingernail where he had dug his nail in earlier. He pressed it with the thumb of the same hand, watching the pink skin whiten. “My deviant sexuality was never of value enough to discuss, if he ever did notice.”

“My deviant sexuality was of quite a lot of value to The Prophet,” Harry offered lightly, as though Draco was not flabbergasted by the admission. Potter looked at him with a strange, amused calculation as Draco’s expression ran the gamut of emotion.

Draco settled on glaring, as he often did in Potter’s presence. “I don’t get the Prophet,” he muttered mutinously.

He would have very much liked to, just for that article. It would have been a much better one to pass around through the fourth-year Slytherin boy’s dorms, than that dirty magazine Blaise had stolen off the older years.

“Your loss,” Potter observed mildly. Unnecessarily, he added, “I’m also a Grim.”

Draco wrinkled his brow. “Are you still one?” he asked, gesturing to the lot of him. “You look like a man now.”

“Well,” Potter said, and he looked rather thrown. Draco felt satisfied to have derailed whatever conversation  to which Potter had been driving them. “My magic turned me into a Grim, and I still have my magic. I think it picked that shape because of a Master of Death thing.”

Draco blinked. “A ‘Master of Death thing’?”

Potter grimaced, waving his hand. “It’s a really, really long story, and I don’t want to get into it.”

“I think I’d quite like to get into it, actually,” Draco protested, but Potter spoke over him, whiningly protesting, “You’re messing up where I was trying to go with this.”

“I know,” Draco crowed smugly, stirring his tea with a dainty little clink of porcelain. He took a loud, purposeful sip. “It’s very satisfying.”

“I was going to say we could test out Billius’ story.” Potter raised his eyebrows, looking mightily pleased with himself. “No Selwyn sister to curse us, but two out of three isn’t bad.”

Draco put down his teacup and stared. “Are you actually going to kill me?”

“What?” Potter squawked. The chair legs screeched in protest on the tiled floor, and he yelped as the chair’s hand emerged to pinch his side in admonition. “No!”

“You should be clearer when you speak,” scolded Draco, picking his teacup up once more and pulling it close to his chest as though it needed to be protected. Its unwashed, distinctly vulnerable brethren watched on impassively. “I can’t follow a single thought in that messy, vacuous head of yours.”

“I’m trying to ask if you want to have sex,” Potter despaired.

Draco laughed at him, loud and incredulous. The sound of it echoed around the kitchen walls, no longer slouching for how they stood straight at attention.

“You’re doing a horrible job of propositioning me,” he criticised, because the other option was to actually contemplate what Potter had just said, and that was a horrible, pulse-pounding, face-reddening, stomach-fluttering thing to do. “You can’t just sleep with the Lord of the House like some half-Sickle harlot after threatening his life for four months.”

“That’s not what I was doing,” Potter protested, but Draco was unstoppable. Words were, after all, his most successful defence mechanism.

“If we were to sleep together,” he said, forcing the words out without contemplation of their meaning, “by official pureblood standards, you would have to ask permission from the standing Patriarch of the House, which is myself. Then, you would have to prove your devotion to me in some sort of magical display. You would have to make it clear that your values align with my aspirations for the House. Finally, you would have to walk the House and seek its approval, though, clearly,” Draco sneered, eyeing the corners of the kitchen as though the spirit of the Manor lived within them, “that, at least, seems no impossible task.”

“I killed Voldemort,” Potter said, and if Draco hadn’t had the teacup grasped in both his hands, he would have pinched him too. “I reckon that was a halfway decent magical display.”

“You did that before you wanted to sleep with me,” Draco muttered.

Potter shrugged. “I dunno if I’d go that far,” he said, a cocky half-smile rakishly twisting his features.

Draco wanted to melt acidly through his chair, through the kitchen tile floor, and into the storerooms the Manor didn’t allow him access to beneath.

Draco would not tell him about fourth year. He would not tell him about the stupid Hungarian Horntail realisation, and the subsequent harrowing mental images for which he’d had to reinforce the walls of the Place of Hidden Thoughts.

Draco would also do nothing so stupid as deny that such things existed, when Potter could surely name quite a few receipts of bizarre activity that surely only pointed to some version of their current conversation. Draco had climbed a bloody tree. The only reason he’d done so—and Draco covered his face in sheer mortification—was so that now, miraculously, he’d have the potential opportunity to climb Potter instead.

If he didn’t squander it, as he seemed intent on doing.

“Right,” Draco breathed from behind the cage of his fingers, tilting his head back to look at the ceiling, which had become higher and brighter than he remembered it to be.

“Okay,” Potter said, sunlit laughter in his voice. “And the Manor already likes me, like you said. What are your aspirations for the House?”

Draco pursed his lips. Morgana’s beard and Merlin’s bollocks, he hadn’t expected Potter to actually take him seriously.

Well, Draco wouldn’t. He couldn’t, not if he wanted to maintain some semblance of the upper hand in this back-and-forth. “You see, Potter,” he said conspiratorially, as though sharing a great secret, “I don’t know if you’re aware, but I’ve been depressed.”

Potter leaned back, a challenge in his voice as he retorted, “That’s never stopped you before.”

Draco eyed the lean lines of his body and thought of Auror training. “What are your aspirations?” he shot back instead of answering. He told him, “You could have done anything you wanted,” as though it was an accusation. “You could still do anything you wanted.”

“I wanted to be here,” Potter replied simply, and Draco argued, “You wanted to be an Auror.”

Potter was already shaking his messy head. “I was supposed to be an Auror,” he explained, and he looked wistful as he did so. “There’s a difference.”

Draco glared, resting his cheek on his knee cap instead as though doing so would release the pressure deep in the muscle of his jaw, which always seemed to twitch around Potter. The chair beneath him groaned in protest. From its arm, it grew an impatient hand, which tugged at the leg of his pyjamas to put his foot back down and sit properly, as it always had when he was a child. He slapped it away with impatience. The hand skulked back into the arm of the chair in mutinous dissatisfaction, gesturing to Draco rudely as it did so.

“Auror or omen of death?” Draco asked caustically. “One wasn’t intimidating enough for the Boy Who Lived?”

“Not omen of death,” he argued, shifting so Draco had no choice but to meet his eyes behind the smeared lenses of those horribly unfashionable frames. “A protector. Like you said.”

“For hallowed ground,” Draco clarified stoutly. Potter had propositioned him, which was a ludicrous event that Draco could not fully grasp, and yet here he was, antagonising him still. Unable to accept a good thing when it fell into his lap, and not half for all the unsaid things between them. “This, Potter, and I’m not sure you’re aware, is the once-opulent embodiment of the classist destruction my ancestors wreaked upon all of Wizarding Britain, and is now a ruined hovel where helpless people were tormented for sport.”

“I mean, yeah, your whole family sucks,” he said, with enough alacrity that he earned himself a warning glance. He simply shrugged, unrepentant, and then continued, “But. Does a church matter, or what’s in it?”

Draco blinked. “Pardon?”

“Do people go to a church because it’s a church?” Potter asked, his brows drawn down low over his bright eyes, his gaze intense.

Draco could see it in his mind’s eye, that glare that he had always thought was anger reflected back at him in Myrtle’s mirror. Draco thought perhaps he had seen ire only because he had expected to.

He wondered now if that expression had been the fury he’d taken it for. He wondered if that was just what Potter looked like, when Draco was upset.

Potter insisted softly, “Or do they gather because of who’s inside it?”

“The Manor is not hallowed ground,” Draco persisted, feeling fragile, feeling angry. His fingers clenched the blankets in helpless bunches. “It’s not sacred.”

“I know.” The small dimple on Potter’s cheek was a crime. “It’s what’s inside that matters.”

He leaned forward, forearms on the table, and stilled Draco’s hands from fiddling with his own war-torn nail beds. Potter’s fingers were warm wrapped around his wrists, gentle and solid. “Whatever aspirations you have, Draco, for the House or for yourself, I’ll support them.”

“That’s not an acceptable answer,” Draco protested, despite finding himself leaning forward, compelled to Potter as he had been to the Manor itself. “You can’t just say you’ll do whatever I want.”

“I would never do whatever you want,” Potter agreed readily, a mischievous smirk twisting his full lips. The table seemed to have shrunk between them. It was the only explanation for how close his face had come to Draco’s own. “I’ll do whatever I want.”

His voice lowered, warm and honeyed, like he was telling Draco a beloved secret. “What I want to do is support you, even when you’d prefer to hide yourself away from anyone who’d help.”

Draco glowered, focusing on the light spray of freckles that were just barely visible across the bent bridge of Potter’s nose, hidden beneath the gold of his tan. Yet more secrets, in a man so surprisingly layered with them.

“Has that been your grand plan this whole time?” he asked, feigning dispassion.

Potter beamed, a dazzling smile that would have put prancing, peacocking Gilderoy Lockhart to shame, if Potter had ever had reason to turn it on him. “You see, Draco,” he grinned. “I don’t know if you’re aware, but I never have a plan.”

Draco didn’t want to feel fond of such an asinine answer. It was humiliating. Lucius, Grandmother Lucille, and ten generations of Malfoys past would be rolling in their graves if they could see him now.

“Idiot,” whispered Draco. He could feel the warm huff of Potter’s laughter on his cheek.

Draco leaned forwards the extra inch, and kissed him.

~*~*~

For a crescendo that had been built up seven years in the making, Draco would have thought at least one of the two of them would be less awkward at the climax of it all.

For example:

“Why are your pyjamas so fiddly?” Potter asked in exasperation. His fingers fumbled around Draco’s throat for the buttons on the collar, not realising they were at his nape instead. “They’re pyjamas!”

Draco batted his hands away before he managed to choke him in possibly the least erotic way Draco could contrive. “Stop, stop, you’ll rip the lace if you keep tugging, you bumbling oaf.”

“That would be kind of hot,” Potter observed. He sounded vaguely breathless.

“I’m not succumbing to your anti-classist agenda,” Draco retorted, muffled under the layer of cotton and lace. “I like my luxury items intact, thank you. I’m not the sort of person who wears athletic shoes with antique dress robes to their nemesis’ court trial.”

And another:

“Oh, wow,” Draco said, his throat dry but his mouth watering, because of the muscular thighs he revealed from beneath those awful scratchy blue Muggle trousers. He held his hands out between them, hesitant from sheer indecision, his fingers twitching with eagerness to touch, burning with need.

“Is this the first time you’re actually speechless?” Potter laughed, grinning.

And also:

The skin of Potter’s balls was delicate and velvety, drawn up tight with desire. Draco palmed him with a light touch that caused Potter’s breath to stutter.

“You shall never deceive me again,” Draco ordered, placing his hand more firmly. A light squeeze: not to hurt, but to warn that he could.

Potter’s erection throbbed with his pulse, pre-come beading at the tip. “Christ, fuck,” he groaned. “It’s stupid hot when you try to be intimidating.”

“This is a threat!” Draco scowled. He pressed his fingers into the hard flesh of Potter’s chest with perhaps unnecessary force, scratching his nail over a nipple in warning.

“Yeah, do it again,” Potter gasped eagerly, lifting his hips and grabbing Draco’s bicep insistently.

And yet another:

“You’re pulling my hair,” Draco complained, batting Potter’s hand away. He pinned it by the wrist to the mattress.

“Sorry, sorry!” Potter said, and then lost his breath when Draco lightly scratched his nails into his thatch of dark pubic hair. Potter’s hips twitched as Draco ignored his erection to lick a pebbled nipple instead, spreading his hand over the meat of Potter’s outer thigh and squeezing with a groan of heated satisfaction. “Fuck.”

“That’s the idea,” Draco drawled smugly.

Fucking Potter was exquisite. He had filled out since the lean years of the Dark Lord’s extended chase. He had a powerful body, of beautiful hard muscle and soft flesh that Draco wanted to sink his fingers and then his teeth into. He had never felt such hunger.

He stared at Potter’s face as his eyelids fluttered and his mouth went slack in pleasure while Draco’s free hand wrapped around his erection, the other still on his wrist. “Look at me,” he said, twisting his wrist, slicking his palm with the precome that beaded from the slit of Potter’s cock.

Potter threw his head into the pillows in pleasure. It was like a game, to see how he struggled to obey Draco’s request while Draco made it all the more difficult for him. Like duelling, except both of them won, Potter sprawled on his back and Draco slowly undulating over him, so eager to fuck him he’d begun rutting against his magnificent thigh.

“That’s it,” Draco whispered, and Potter whimpered. “You want my mouth on you?”

Potter groaned. He didn’t pull Draco’s hair this time, but the insistent hand on his shoulder guiding him downwards made Draco chuckle, his voice low and gravely with lust.

Draco took his time with it, raking his teeth along the lines of Potter’s ribs, biting into the softness at his belly, licking the jut of the bone at his hip. He relished the sound of Potter’s laboured breathing in his ears, and the loud beat of his pulse thrumming inside his own heated body. He relished the idea that the imprint of his teeth would mar the inside of Potter’s thigh long after Draco had left it.

The first long stripe he licked up Potter’s hard cock had Potter arching his back and swearing, his free hand, unpinned by Draco’s own, tearing at his unruly hair. Draco removed his grasp on his wrist to press down on his hip instead.

“We go at my pace,” he told him. He paused long enough that Potter looked down his torso to meet Draco’s eyes. Smirking, he made sure Potter saw everything as Draco took him in his mouth. Potter was gasping once Draco’s stretching lips met his fist at the base of Potter’s erection, his thighs and hips twitching as he tried to avoid thrusting to Draco’s throat and causing him to gag. The thought of that, too, had Draco’s pulse roaring in his ears.

Draco took his time with it, revelling in the salty taste of Potter at his most intimate, the musk of the secret flesh beneath, the velvety feel of it on the flat of his tongue. It was no comparison to the hasty, aborted blowjob he’d given Smith—Zachary? Zachariah? His name was fuck you very much, for all Draco considered—in the broom shed in sixth year, which had ended with Smith at half-mast, muttering, “Yeah, I’m flattered, but I actually think I might not be all that into blokes,” and Draco kneeling with his dick in his hand, horny and offended.

When Potter began gasping garbled warnings, Draco pulled off of him. A string of spit and precome connected his bottom lip with the head of Potter’s cock, which he kept pumping languidly in his hand. He wiped it off with the pad of his thumb and smeared it on one of Potter’s hard nipples. Draco bit his lip, grinning, as he moaned about it.

“If I let you come in my mouth,” Draco wagered, “will you let me spit it into yours?”

“What?” Potter asked, first vague, and then baffled as he clarified, “Wait. What?”

Draco tightened his grip slightly on Potter’s cock, stilling his hand. “Can I spit your come in your mouth?”

“Erm,” Potter said, still twitching a bit in Draco’s grasp. “No.”

Draco pouted. “Damn.” He sighed, relegating that particular fantasy to the back of his mind, and cocked his head slyly. “Well, I’m sure I can find another way to entertain myself with you.”

“Do you think that’s hot?” Potter asked curiously, gasping as Draco’s hand started moving once more.

“Yeah,” Draco replied breathily, feeling the frisson of lust running down his spine from the nape of his neck to his tailbone and back. He leaned further into Potter’s thigh, revelling in the friction it provided on his throbbing erection. “It’s nasty. I’m so into it.”

Potter looked contemplative for a moment, before Draco rolled his wrist again and his eyes rolled back with it. “Maybe–” Potter gasped, and then tried again. “Maybe…a different time.”

Draco felt a smile curl into his cheeks. Like the besotted fool he was, he heard himself say, “You want there to be a next time?”

“Are you…” Potter panted, his face flushed but his eyebrows creased with incredulity. “...a fucking idiot?”

“I’m not going to finish your blow job, just because of that,” Draco retorted, sitting on his heels, and as Potter began to protest, he continued, “Turn around. I’m going to fuck you instead.”

“Oh, yeah you are,” Potter agreed eagerly, and Draco thanked Medea, Morgana, and Merlin three for the blessed view he was given.

~*~*~

The sweat had not yet cooled on Draco’s forehead when Potter said, his words slurred from pleasure, satiation, and the pillow in which his face was buried, “I won’t lie to you again.”

He sighed heavily. He had one hand flung out tracing the thin white line of Draco’s largest scar from navel to collarbone. Draco wondered if he remembered how talented they had always been at hurting one another, and wondered if he hoped, as Draco did in the Place of Hidden Thoughts, that perhaps they would be as good at healing one another, too. “I promise.”

Draco wanted to feel pleased. Instead, he felt an awful guilt claw its way up his throat like burning bile any longer.

“My father lied,” Draco burst out.

Draco’s body felt hot and syrupy, but his mind was buzzing with the deception he had kept within him like a kicked hornet’s nest. Beside him, Potter removed his face from the pillow and squinted at him.

His forehead was still shiny with sweat from their activities, though his body was relaxed and limp. He laid on his stomach over the wet patch they had left, in which he had collapsed into post-climax languor.

“I know I brought it up, but I think we should work on your pillow talk,” he said, raising his hand from Draco’s torso to clean the bedding beneath him.

Draco frowned, huffing petulantly on his exhale. A lock of hair, darkened from platinum to gold by perspiration, fell loose from behind his ear and into his face. “Shut up.”

“Okay,” Potter groaned effortfully, turning to face him fully. “So your father lied.”

He still didn’t have his glasses on, his face open and uncovered as he squinted into Draco’s face. That felt wrong. It all sort of felt wrong, to be discussing Father’s dearth of virtues post-coital with Potter, but Draco had never been good at timing. It felt like now or never.

Hastily, Draco grabbed Potter’s lenses from the bedside table where he’d placed them, grateful for a moment away from his gaze, however myopic. He spelled them clean of fingerprints and handed them to Potter with dignity.

He put them on and pulled Draco’s duvet over his bare torso, clearly waiting for Draco to explain further.

Draco Summoned his pyjamas, cast a Cleaning Charm over himself and Potter for good measure, and slowly put them back on, thinking about the best way to go about beginning his explanation. Draco would have preferred a bath, but then he would have urged Potter in with him, and then he would never confess how much guilter he actually was.

It would hang between them like a Sword of Damocles, and they had already had enough treachery between them, committed by the most unexpected and accidental of sources. “Before the council, for me. At his trial. The one before mine—you were there.”

Potter cocked his head, a line of confusion spearing through the very edge of his scar. “I thought they made him take Veritaserum?”

“He’s an Occlumens,” Draco explained, beginning to worry at his fingers. He tore at a long stripe of dry skin by the nail of his middle finger. “When one knows mind magic as well as he did, you can often answer a question in a truth that’s unrelated to the crux of the matter being asked after, if the question posed is vague enough.”

Nodding slowly, Potter rested his head on his hand. Draco wondered if it was purposeful, to put those well-toned biceps on display. From the way Potter caught his distracted eye and smirked, it seemed likely.

“When he said he threatened me with the Imperius Curse,” Draco sighed, turning to stare at the gilded ceiling and hugging a pillow into his chest, digging his name into the skin of his finger until he felt it give with the pressure. “He never forced me to do anything,” he continued. “He was still—it was still awful, the pressure, knowing that any misstep would cause the ruin of our family, but…he never forced me, not like that.” Draco couldn’t look at Potter as he muttered, “You can put away your Savior complex, if that’s why you returned. I deserved a punishment far harsher than the one I received.”

Potter sucked his teeth. Draco glared at his constellation in the turning midnight blues and soft oranges of sunset, bracing himself for Saint Potter to realise what he’d thought was hallowed ground was instead razed and useless soil, tainted by the rot of Draco’s bloodline.

“I reckon Lucius didn’t lie, then,” he said with finality. “And I reckon you’re full of shit.”

When Draco turned to glare at him, there was a light like Greek fire in the green of his eyes.

When Potter didn’t elaborate, Draco pressed his hands together to keep himself from doing something stupid, like shaking the broad shoulders of the Chosen One until he saw sense or otherwise stars, or perhaps simply tearing out his own hair and leaving it in flaxen clumps for his serpent area rug’s nest hidden beneath the bed.

“I wanted to take the Mark,” Draco pointed out, rolling his sleeve and brandishing his arm in front of Potter’s disgruntled face. “I wanted to become a Death Eater. I was excited!”

Potter took Draco’s forearm and licked it, right in the middle of the skull. “I’ll let you spit come in my mouth if you let me come on your Mark, next time,” he bargained. His hand squeezed Draco’s flesh posessively, his thumb pressing into the wet skin his tongue had left behind.

“You perverted menace,” Draco blurted, not rendered quite speechless as when he’d first seen Potter’s thighs, though it was a near thing. “My Mark shouldn’t turn you on.”

“It’s not the Mark that turns me on.” Potter shrugged, still with Draco’s forearm in his grasp. He brushed the outline of the ugly brand with gentled fingers. “You’re just really sexy. The way I see it, your Mark represents the things you had to overcome to do what you really wanted.” Potter grinned impishly. “It’ll be like we’re telling Tom to fuck off all over again.”

“It’s not just some tattoo,” Draco muttered, feeling watery and vulnerable, like his whole body was a whirlpool studded with bits of glass, and at any moment he would be cut to shreds.

“I know. You were a Death Eater,” Potter agreed, plodding through a conversation that Draco was combusting under. “And then you hated it. Draco, you lied to Bellatrix Lestrange to keep me, Ron, and Hermione safe. You and Ron have a blood feud running, I don’t know, like, seven generations? Lying for him alone could have probably gotten you blasted off the tapestry!”

“The Malfoys don’t have a tapestry,” Draco muttered, though it was beside the point. “We have a stained glass mural. It’s in the southernmost wing.”

“Whatever,” Potter said, because that’s the sort of undeterrable person he was. “You snuck healing potions to the prisoners. You stocked Madam Pomfrey’s shelves all seventh year, and without you, so many people at the Battle wouldn’t have had the medical care they needed. I don’t really give a shit that you wanted to follow your father at first—he was your dad, and you were his kid.”

Potter glared at Draco, fire and brimstone, and Draco wondered if he had worked himself up so much purely for Draco’s defense. They had always been connected by such strong invisible threads: Potter had been nothing but a child, too.

“I don’t know what it’s like to be raised by people who love you,” he said, and it was so blunt it took Draco’s breath away. It made him want to destroy the Manor grounds and then all of Britain after that. “But if anyone had loved me when I was little, or even told me they could have, I would have followed them anywhere.”

Draco felt Potter’s fingers caress his branded skin.

The gloom of the Manor still sprawled out before him in Draco’s mind’s eye, mournful and washed of its colour. Hogwarts and its bustling halls of people who had every right to hate him had not gotten quieter in the spare few hours that Harry Potter had revealed himself in Draco’s life. Enduring the consequences of his past decisions, no matter how coerced they had been, would be a daily yoke, heavy and painful, for the entirety of the future Draco could foresee.

But here, for just a moment and maybe many more moments to come, it all seemed to become less overwhelming.

“Even into the dark?” Draco asked quietly. Because that was the depths into which he had traveled, and the journey wasn’t finished with him yet.

The stars above them turned slowly with the spinning of the earth. The Draco constellation undulated as though in gentle flight. Hercules raised his fist at the Hydra from across the sky. Scorpius lowered his stinger, relaxing into the midnight blue.

“Into the dark,” Potter confirmed, reaching out to brush a lock of hair back behind Draco’s ear. “And back out of it, too.”