I Do Not Love You

Posted originally on the Archive of Our Own at http://archiveofourown.org/works/34818550.

Rating: Mature
Archive Warning: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Category: M/M
Fandom: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Relationships: Draco Malfoy/Harry Potter, Hermione Granger/Ron Weasley, Luna
Lovegood/Pansy Parkinson, Blaise Zabini/having a good time, Neville
Longbottom/Plants
Characters: Harry Potter, Draco Malfoy, Hermione Granger, Ron Weasley, Blaise
Zabini, Pansy Parkinson, Neville Longbottom, Luna Lovegood, Teddy
Lupin, Rose Weasley, Hugo Weasley, Victoire Weasley, Bill Weasley,
Molly Weasley, Ginny Weasley
Additional Tags: Post-War, Slow Burn, but also fast burn, Indian Harry Potter, Black
Hermione Granger, Not Epilogue Compliant, Smart Draco Malfoy,
which should go without saying, Artistic Draco Malfoy, happy endings
only, Plotty, enemies to friends to lovers... to enemies to friends to
lovers?
Language: English
Collections: Harry Potter
Stats: Published: 2021-10-30 Completed: 2021-12-27 Words: 228,290
Chapters: 26/26
 I Do Not Love You
by Writ_and_romance

Summary

In 2013, a carefully-designed Obliviation leaves Harry reconfiguring his life and identity
without any memories of true love; an act that's essentially erased Draco Malfoy from his
mind despite a wedding band and shared home.

In 2000, Draco had expected Pansy's relationship with Luna to bring the Gryffindors a bit
closer to his orbit of quiet, carefully pacifistic existence, but he never expected to navigate
such a transparent embrace into a unit of family, friendship, and love.

A mystery, two love stories, and a reminder that learning to love never has an end date.

Notes

This is a fanwork, and all characters are the property of their respective copyright holders.
The story will not be epilogue-compliant, or support the personal opinions of J.K. Rowling.
 Tempesta for Two Pianos
Chapter Notes

I had the idea for this, but it was honestly the love on my first fic that gave me the push
and drive to write the second. For someone who prefers to write the story in its entirety
before posting, there’s a period of radio silence in the middle where I have to hope
there’s someone out there willing to read it later. So if you’re here after reading To Be
Like Geese, thank you, and you’re the reason I Do Not Love You exists! And if you’re
finding this fresh, I have another fic to stave you over between daily updates.

To Be Like Geese came to be largely rooted in miscommunication. I Do Not Love You

was born from asking myself what’s left to stand in the way if the love is straightforward
and beautifully simple, if communication is a nonissue. Plenty, apparently. Is that sad?
I’ll leave that to you.

The chapter title refers to 'Tempest for Two Pianos inspired by Coriolan, Op. 62 by
Beethoven' by Florian Christl. As you'll come to discover, there's a musical element to
this work (and to Draco as a character) that's hard to put into words, so expect a song per
chapter title that can help add an audio element, if you so choose.

Here's a link to a spotify playlist I've made which chronologically compiles all the
companion pieces for this fic, if you like to listen!

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0gqnhLZp6Ttkvql7EY3Ay2?si=b60da1631f594e04

See the end of the chapter for more notes

XVII (I do not love you...)

by Pablo Neruda

I do not love you as if you were salt-rose, or topaz,

or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off.

I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,

in secret, between the shadow and the soul.

I love you as the plant that never blooms

 but carries in itself the light of hidden flowers;

thanks to your love a certain solid fragrance,

risen from the earth, lives darkly in my body.

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where.

I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride;

so I love you because I know no other way

than this: where I does not exist, nor you,

so close that your hand on my chest is my hand,

so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep.

January 2013

Harry has no thoughts out of the ordinary the morning his world is turned upside down. He
swings his legs over the side of the bed, stretches tall with his elbows locked as his stomach
rumbles, and thinks regretfully, shit, I’m still out of eggs.

And when he sleepily itches at the waistband of his pyjamas and shuffles to Jules’ enclosure,
he drops breakfast in for the creature still lurking hidden under a hollowed-out dome and
thinks, well, I certainly am almost out of crickets.

In fact, he trails all the way down to the kitchen thinking perfectly normal thoughts; that the
hallway is cold, that he can’t stop yawning. Grimmauld Place is silent but for the clicking as
he starts the hob, which he does absentmindedly before even checking for the existence of
eggs. Then, in the white light of the fridge, he blinks momentarily at a full carton he can’t
remember buying, shrugs, and cracks a couple into the pan.

It’s less ordinary how sleepy he is. Perhaps feeling as though his eyes are heavier than stone
would make sense after a terrible rest, but he’d had an uneventful, dreamless night’s sleep.
That first turns him inquisitive. And his head aches—not at the scar, but in the back, by his
brain stem. He frowns at the eggs, poking at them as he starts to run a quick bodily analysis
top-down:

Grogginess. Headache. His shoulders are sore. There’s a twinge in his centre back. Did he
take a fall he doesn’t remember?

Lower still, in his gut—he’s hungry but a little queasy, too.

Did he have an entire night out that he doesn’t remember? It’s beginning to seem all-too
reminiscent of an early-twenties hangover. He humphs, stumped by the symptoms.

The eggs are coagulating when a new bodily analysis is needed:

Two hands, cold and thin, wrap themselves around his ribs.

And attached are two long arms, which pull a body closer to his from behind.

This takes a breath longer to comprehend than the knot in his back. He’s still blearily
registering whether it’s a dream when warm lips touch the skin of his neck, wet and so real,
and it works like a pinch, confirming his consciousness. He drops the spatula in his hand
straightaway, spinning, throwing the arms from around him and pushing—hard—for the
intrusion.

Draco Malfoy—Draco Malfoy?—falls roughly, wincing as his back hits the kitchen table
with the force of Harry’s panicked shove. He doesn’t catch himself before his feet tangle up
with the chair and table legs and send him flat onto the floor.

There’s a moment where his expression is pained just before it’s completely overwhelmed by
shock. It’s a look Harry mirrors, staring down in speechless surprise, but Draco’s the first to
speak and when he does his voice is terrifyingly even, as if much more dangerous emotions
are being held carefully at bay.

“Don’t you… ever touch me like that again,” he utters slowly and sharply. “I will be gone
before you can even attempt to justify yourself.”

Harry, who had been stuck wildly investigating the man on his floor, the familiar blonde hair
tossed in front of darkly shining grey eyes, pointed features drawn even sharper in
furiousness, feels a temper beyond comprehension flush through his system. The longer he
stares, the hotter he feels, and at the sound of the intruder’s voice, it seems to erupt into
uncontainable levels.

He lords over Draco’s fallen figure, one hand braced firmly on the table. “You put your hands
on me in my own fucking home and try to tell me what to do?” he spits. “I’ll hit harder if it
really makes you leave. You’re lucky I had a spatula in my hand and not a knife.”

Better than both of those would be his wand, which is undoubtedly sitting by his bed. Why
had he left his wand upstairs?

Because he reckoned he’d be safe in his own kitchen, surely, he thinks.

Draco’s face, which had been pinched in, slackens in perplexity. “Your home… Put my
hands…” he mutters, climbing to his feet. “Are you feeling alright? Answer wisely, because
it elects how I handle that… unbelievably upsetting show of nastiness just now.”

He lunges forward—deftly catching the wrist Harry throws up haphazardly in defence—and

leans past to turn off the hob.
Lunge, despite the pounding heartbeat he can feel in his throat, is maybe not the word. It was
only a step. A brush past. Something is happening to him. Harry frowns, wrenching his hand
away. He takes a step back and Draco does the same, holding his hands up in surrender.

“I’ll ask you again, Malfoy,” he recovers when their eyes meet, shaking off the strange
feeling. “What are you doing in my home? Who let you in?”

Draco is tall. He’d forgotten in the years since they’ve seen each other, but it’s making it
difficult to stand intimidatingly, and his lifted chin and hard expression seem to have a
limited effect on the man opposite. He tries to present a broadness instead, pulling his
shoulders back.

Draco acts unfazed. His brows furrow in. “Malfoy? I… Harry, tell me what’s happening.”

He speaks slowly, like to a child. It’s demeaning and Harry’s fists clench tight, nails biting
into his palm. He’s not afraid to take a non-magical approach to get an unwelcome prick out
of his home—Draco had once taken an extraordinarily non-magical approach to breaking his
nose once, after all.
“What’s ha-ppe-ning,” he answers, equally slow (Draco is the dunce, Draco doesn’t
understand the absurdity of breaking in and expecting a friendly tête-à-tête), “is you’ve
gotten past a Fidelius and into my kitchen, and now you’re standing there trying to hold a
two-sided conversation as if I shouldn’t be whacking you back across the threshold with the
end of a broom like vermin.”

Draco’s eyes widen, darting between his like he’s a riddle to solve. Harry’s had quite enough
of this. He needs his wand, so he can bind Draco, interrogate him, find out how he’d made it
through the door and why he would… Thinking about the specifics at the stove and the
wetness that had lingered on his neck for disconcertingly long sends his stomach flipping, so
he pushes the line of questioning away.

First, the upper hand. He makes sure to clip Draco’s shoulder as he passes him, pounding
quickly up the stairs.

“Wait! Where are you going?” the other man calls after.

Harry doesn’t answer. If he’s daft enough to break in and calmly let him run for a wand, he’s
deserved of anything that comes of Harry pointing it at him. A fist closes around the cotton of
his tee and the contact is like an electric shock. He has whirled around, grabbed at the thick
collar of Draco’s knit jumper, and tugged him by the neckline down onto the landing of the
stairs before he can even register how it all made him feel. Draco’s startled yelp at the action
hangs in the air.

“You have a lot of fucking nerve,” Harry hisses. Draco’s hands circle his wrist, gentle. Why
are they so gentle? It makes his throat tight. He pulls at the fabric in his hand, frustrated,
leaning down over him. “Fight back.”

“I’m not going to fight you!” Draco drops his arms with a sigh. “I just need you to stop and
talk—”
Harry shoves at his shirt as he lets go. The patience is maddening. “You don’t need shit.”

“Harry, look. Just look!”

Draco stands, wavering slightly, dishevelled, and moves his arms towards Harry. Harry
tenses, but the hand just points benevolently past him, where he follows it to a large bronze-
framed photo on the wall, centred above a thin table as though it’s meant to live there and has
lived there a long time.

Harry stands happy printed on the canvas, same in many ways to now except for the darkness
of his already-tan skin—a summer complexion—and the length of his hair the way he kept it
on top years ago and that he appears to be standing on the bright blue coast of what appears
to be Italy—a country he’s never visited.

This is enough to stop him in his tracks, just to wonder when he’d gone to the Italian seaside,
but the way his portrait-self looks at Draco Malfoy standing next to him is completely
baffling; it’s with love, or adoration, or something equally embarrassing and degrading.

That flash of temper rises again. This time, with it, comes a feeling long forgotten—fifteen,
frustrated, and feeling a fury well up in him unprovoked as he meets Dumbledore’s eyes.

He turns back to Draco, mouth drawn tight, but the expression that faces him only makes him
feel caught out, like a confused, enraged animal backed into a corner, scared more than it’s
letting on. He feels it all, for a moment, but worse, he can tell that Draco sees it all, too. That
hardens him, draws his face stony again. This was not unprovoked fury. Against Draco
Malfoy, even looking his way was a provocation.

“Can we firecall Ron?” Draco asks slowly. “You remember Ron?”

He scowls. “Of course I remember Ron.”

“Alright, so let’s go back downstairs, you can keep your eyes on me at all times, and we’ll
contact Ron.”

“My wand is upstairs,” he grunts out.

“A perfect reason to go downstairs.” Draco holds his hands up again. “I’m wandless, too,
alright? I was merely… I heard you in the kitchen so I came from the living room to say…
hello. Let’s go together and get Ron and Hermione.”

Harry agrees, brusquely with his arms folded, mostly because he’s speechlessly perplexed by
the framed portrait, and because he trusts himself to manage without his wand; there are
knives sharpened to culinary quality in the kitchen if Draco dares touch him a fourth time.
The sooner Hermione and Ron join them and set things straight, the better.

Sometimes it’s been so long since Grimmauld Place existed as it did under Black reign that
Harry forgets how it once looked. Only the top floor, Sirius’ floor, remains completely
untouched, like those historical homes preserved for education. All his senses shift when he
reaches the fourth storey; the musty smell returns from the untouched rooms, the cheerily
painted walls are replaced with peeling wallpaper, the landing begins to creak where it
transitions back into a flight of the original, sagging wood. And he’d swear the air feels thick,
tastes bitter and sad. He doesn’t go up often.

He was sure, however, that he knew all the renovations he had done on his own home, so he
stalls in the living room doorway while Draco moves through as if he owns the place—
shifting a doorstop in front of the too-well-oiled French doors, closing the lid to the piano
keys, moving an empty teacup from the couch and sinking into its cushions, setting the
saucer with a clack on the glass coffee table. He seems unsurprised by the overabundance of
instruments in the room.

Harry scans the walls; behind the piano hangs a guitar and two violins, plus two bookshelves
stocked with thin books and records. He doesn’t remember owning the record player sitting
beside them either.

He turns his head back towards the familiar stranger with further disbelief, but Draco looks
up with sharp grey eyes and Harry’s thoughts spin to the Italian coast, which is scary and
infuriating, so he thinks of Ron instead and tears his gaze away to kneel by the fireplace.

Ron.

He can’t decide if it’s stupid or deft that Draco recognised the value of having Ron and
Hermione there, outnumbering him. They’ll have answers—they always seem to—and
they’re a comfort either way. He reaches for the powder and calls their address, sticking his
head into the licking flames and reappearing in a sunny living room with tall windows. He’s
not alone.

“Uncle Harry!” Rose lounges on the rug with a sticky bun in her hands, but she sets it on a
plastic plate and rolls on her stomach to face him, hands propped on her chin. Her curls, wild
as Hermione’s with a hint of Ron’s ginger warmth, are kinky with bedhead. It’s impossible
not to smile back. “Good morning.”

“Morning, Rosie, er, are your mum and dad up and around yet?”

“Hugo’s fault,” she says with an eye roll. “Some sort of dinosaur exhibit to go to.” She sits up
again, turns away from the floo and shouts “MUM!” loud enough for Harry to wince, then
when there is no response, sighs and stands, leaving his view entirely.

He takes the moment to duck out of the fire and set his eyes on Draco. He’s still sitting on the
couch, tense but unmoving, chewing his lip, and he shows his palms again under Harry’s
watch. He’s gestured in surrender an awful lot.

Harry nods curtly. When he ducks back in Hermione’s staring back. He sighs audibly at the
sight of her. “Oh, Hermione, thank god. Draco Malfoy is in my living room.”

“Okay… he practically lives in there, this is what you rang for? Or is it a rescue mission to
get him out of the room? We’re off to the Natural History Museum if you two want to
come…”
Harry purses his lips. She’s not understanding. She’s in on it. Why does she sound like she’s
in on it?

“Draco Malfoy, Hermione,” he enunciates. “And there’s… there are pictures of us. There’s
one on the stairs where—it looks like I went on holiday? With him. And I was in the kitchen
and he came up behind me and…” He can’t speak it so he drifts past, aware that Hermione’s
brows have knit together considerably the longer he’s talked. “Something is wrong, I think. I
don’t mean to interrupt your plans.”

“Plans interrupted,” she says quietly. “Draco’s okay?”

The mention of his name with such care sends irritation through him. “Adequately shaken
when I threw him down on the stairs.”

Her eyes widen. “Why did you do that, Harry?” she asks, tender and careful again, with that
same primary school teacher tone Draco affected earlier.

“He’s in my home, Hermione, I reacted! I… when I look at him, I just want to… I want to…”

Images flash into his mind of things Draco deserves. Hexes and punches and hurting words.
Meanwhile, he can see her thoughts racing as she scrutinises his face. “If I leave you to get
everyone together and we come over in five, can you be alone with him?”

Harry glares.

“Okay, okay. Five minutes, Harry. For Circe’s sake, leave Draco alone until then. We’ll be
right over.”

He catches the look she lets slip then, as she turns from the fire, fading from friendly
gentleness to intense solemnity, as if she’s gravely aware of a seriousness that even Harry
hasn’t digested yet.

Draco has been miraculously obedient. He’s not moved an inch from his stiff position, though
his fingers tap a nervous melody on his knee that freezes when Harry extricates himself from
the hearth.

“Is he coming?”

He nods down at his feet—a safer subject of his attention if Hermione’s advice is to be
followed. “They all are.”

Draco makes a sound of approval. Eyes follow Harry as he sits in a chair furthest from the
couch. He doesn’t have to look up to feel them laser into his back. And yet it’s charitably
quiet for half a minute. In the silence, Harry can feel himself coming down again.

Coming down from what?

Draco clears his throat so Harry rolls his eyes preemptively.

“You don’t remember me at—”

“If you feel like clinging to life a while longer, you’ll stop talking,” he grumbles, massaging
circles on his temples. “Every word out of your mouth makes me want to strangle you.”

He says it diplomatically but Draco is stunned into silence. If it results in no more speaking,
Harry doesn’t quite care what the intermediary emotions are.

They sit in complete, tense muteness just waiting for the fire to light. Harry finally sneaks a
sidelong glance towards the other man fiddling his thumbs and registers the bottom half of
his attire—grey joggers with ‘Chudley Cannons’ in thick bright orange lettering down one
leg. They’re Harry’s.

And his appearance; Harry last remembers him in their early twenties, fresh off the war and
gaunt in the presence of trial attendances. At thirty-two, he looks healthier, his face perhaps a
little wider with age just as Harry’s had grown. His hair is a bit longer, like he could tuck the
front strands behind his ears from where they hang in his eyes, but he’s no less pale, no less
lanky, and certainly no less serious.

They’re still perched like wax statues when the entire Granger-Weasley family arrives
through the floo. The sudden presence of two children warms the room’s chill, especially
when they both run to hug Harry. He hisses a breath when they give an equally loving
reception to Draco, but Ron’s at his side with a hand on his shoulder before he can linger on
the interaction.

“Hi mate, ‘Mione said we’ve got a minor emergency on our hands.”

Harry gestures an open hand sharply to the blonde man on his sofa. Draco offers Ron a
hopeless shrug. This vie for sympathy seems audacious, but Ron simply returns it with a soft
commiserating frown.

“I see,” he murmurs. “We’ll have the monsters go out back and—”

“Does Jules want to come with us?” Hugo interrupts, two small hands on Harry’s arm. The
tenseness leaves him again, as it seems to any time the topic of Draco is completely ignored.

“I’m sure Jules would be happy to come outside with you. I know you were supposed to go
to the museum. He’s no dinosaur,” Harry leans in like he has a secret, “but his great-times-a-
bajillion grandparents likely were.”

“Yes!” Hugo grins, then turns on his heels and clomps up the stairs with excitement. Harry
looks back at Ron just as Hermione’s panicked call cuts off whatever would come next.

“DON’T TOUCH ANYTHING!” she shouts shrilly, sounding strained. Her hand’s dropped
from Rose and she’s across the room before he’s blinked. “HUGO! Come back down!”

He returns sullenly, a little shaken, into her clutches before she’s taken a step up the staircase,
not carried far on his little legs. All the adults but Harry seem to relax their shoulders. Her
hand moves with reverence into her son’s mop of tight curls, direction him back into the
room.
“I was thinking a cursed object, too.” Draco looks up like he knows her well enough to read
her mind. She nods back.

Watching these familiar—familial—interactions fills Harry with enough confusion and

aggravation to make him physically nauseous, so he seizes the excuse to walk out by standing
abruptly, watching the heads follow him, and saying, “I’ll get Jules.” He doesn’t wait for
responses.

“That’s not Harry…”

Draco’s voice floats dimly through as he turns into the hallway. He huffs, shifts it from his
mind, and focuses on his singular task. Upstairs, the crickets in his habitat are gone, and the
small leopard gecko himself lays sunning on a log under the heat lamp. Harry pops the lid off
and holds his hand out flat.

“The little ones are here,” he explains, waiting patiently as the little padded feet step onto his
palm. “They long for your entertainment.”

Too hungry to entertain, comes the squeaky, small reply. Crickets help.

“You had breakfast.”

No crickets from you, then ice queen will be persuaded.

Harry freezes, hand halfway to his shoulder. “Ice queen?”

Long one. Mate. You call ice queen.

Harry purses his lips. Jules corroborating this story is too much to swallow.

“No crickets,” he says shortly, finishing transferring Jules to his shoulder. “I know where the
cauldron’s kept.”

This quip hushes Jules as it always does—Harry had found the little lizard in a potions shop
while wandering Diagon Alley in the ingredients section. A small pipped, Where am I? had
stopped him and had him turning every which way searching for a snake. Instead, he’d seen
only its cousin.

“Was that you? Hello?” he asked, kneeling to peer into the small container.

Hello. Where am I?

“Why can you speak this language?”

It is what I speak.

Fair answer, he decided. His own response would likely be just as succinct.

Where am I?
“Er, potions shop.”

What for?

Harry stuttered, searching for easy words. How does one tell a small animal that it’s worth
two sickles, expendable, part of a recipe?

A joke, said the creature in his hesitation. I know my fate.

That had done it—either the discovery of a lizard with a sense of humour or a resolved
acceptance of impending death. Harry’d had both. He walked out of the shop with the little
reptile, where his friends had stood waiting with much less impulsive errand purchases.

“What are you called? Your name?” he’d asked that night, setting up the tank.

What is in a name?

Harry grinned. “Quite right, Juliet.”

What is Juliet?

“You.”

Jules does win a cricket, as he does every time Harry gets snarky enough to make a potions
comment, and when he gets back downstairs the adults are sitting crowded on the couch
together, Hugo and Rose waiting bored. They bound over when Harry returns. He kneels to
put his shoulder at eye level.

“Hello, Jules, how are you today?” Hugo asks with a toothy smile, holding his hands out. He
looks up at Harry expectantly, who is used to playing the role of translator.

“Hugo wants to know how you are today.”

Hungry. Proud.

“Proud?”

Little ones love properly. I am royalty.

Harry smiles at Hugo. “He’s good, he likes seeing you because you two love him so much.”

“Awwww,” Rose coos.

“Outside, please, and don’t touch anything.” Hermione’s hand is rubbing Draco’s back and
Harry stiffens. It had been nice upstairs, without the temper. In the children's absence, all eyes
train on him and he sits uncomfortably, waiting for someone with more answers than he—
with more memories than he, maybe—to begin fixing things.

Ron clears his throat. “So. Did you touch something, Harry?”

He thinks through this morning. “Eggs. Crickets.”

“All in a balanced meal,” Draco tries humourlessly. Harry snaps his head over with a glare,
clearly not the only one feeling more comfortable in his friends’ presence. The hands go up
again.

“Last night?” Ron starts again.

He shakes his head. “I don’t remember.”

“Maybe we search floor by floor,” Hermione suggests. “Do you feel okay otherwise?”

Like he slept on a rock bed, double-dosed on Dreamless Sleep, and woke up with an award-
winning hangover. With emotions he can’t even keep up with, much less comprehend.
Exhausted by the running of his mind, then warmed through with a brief reprieve from it all
the moment he makes Draco Malfoy upset.

He shrugs, because it’s easier.

Hermione scrunches up her mouth and nods slowly. They all stand, set in a mission, but
Harry stays seated. He feels stunted. Like his reactions have been condensed to Angry or
Not-Angry. And Draco’s face is Angry but, he thinks as he sits alone, he might be able to
scrounge up a third something called Hunger if he stays out of Harry’s way long enough. So
he moves in a trance back down to the eggs sitting cold in the kitchen and can’t even conjure
up the energy to remake them. They taste like elastic in his mouth as he stands there, listening
to the footsteps overhead. Just as he’s set his dishes in the sink, a sound of strangled anger
comes from somewhere above him.

“HARRY!”

It’s Draco.

Ron meets him on the first-floor landing, looking just as cautiously concerned. The steps
above them shake, then Draco appears with Hermione close on his heels. His wand levitates
something in front of him.

“Do you recognise this?” he snaps, dropping it on the hallway table.

It’s a lilac-coloured envelope with a broken gold seal, hardened with small flowers stuck in
the wax. There’s a letter sitting on top, just under the triangular tab and Harry leans down
awkwardly to read under it without touching.

Harry Potter,
I cannot begin to define just what you mean to me. I’m not special, of course—you mean
much to the entire wizarding world. We all praise your heroics, but I praise you beyond that!
I praise you for beautiful green eyes (Twentieth Century Wizards says you got them from your
mother, is that true?) and for a Quidditch physique… It’s a universal truth that you’ve been
wasted on the likes of Draco Malfoy. I read in the Prophet that you cook for him! You would
never have to cook for me. I’d make you a home-cooked meal every night.
You’ll forgive my methods, but if you’re reading this, I’m halfway to you already. I can’t make
you fall in love with me and I’m not fond of the falseness of love potions, but I can at least
help you reconsider what you deserve.

I hope you’ll understand, Harry. You do what you must for love.

Yours truly,
A Secret Admirer

Ron and Hermione had leaned in beside him to read too, and he straightens up just before
they follow suit. Draco’s arms are folded, his face severe.

“I haven’t seen this before,” Harry answers.

“And yet it was sitting opened on the dresser.”

“Well, then I suppose I—”

“You suppose you did it? Have you read it? You-you absolute imbecile! You halfwit, I can’t
—” Draco shakes his head and throws his arms up. He shouts with something dissimilar to
the cold-hearted anger Harry had traded him earlier. It’s strained, like Hermione calling for
Hugo, and his face is growing embarrassingly red. “HOW many times have I told you?! NO
bringing fan mail home and certainly no opening it yourself! This is why! THIS IS WHY! You
complete… oh for fuck’s sake!”

Harry looks away, to avoid both the awkwardness of watching his watery eyes and the
queasiness in his own chest when Hermione pulls Draco further away and begins to speak
appeasingly. Ron signals his head back towards the living room, so together they return. His
shoulders drop just to be a room away.

“Merlin, Harry,” Ron mutters, scrawling a fast note without looking up. All business. He’s a
great Auror, though this isn’t how Harry would choose to experience his expertise. “You’re
really in the doghouse once we get this fixed.”

“What’s the note?”

“For Bill. We’ll get the letter to him as soon as possible, so they can start diagnosing exactly
what’s happened. Between him on the curse remedy and me tracking this admirer down, we
can keep it in the family, file the case on a need-to-know basis… The world doesn’t need to
be aware that Harry Potter has partial amnesia.”

“This whole life. Together. It’s real,” Harry murmurs then, slowly sinking back down into the
armchair. If it wasn’t for the very real physical reactions he’s been having, he’d be inclined to
think it all a dream. The statement is more for himself—a reminder, not a discovery—but
Ron looks over quickly, face grave in a way he rarely sees it.

“Yes,” he says. When he leaves, he takes the note with him.

The living room is the largest on the floor, taking up half of the home’s girth and spanning its
length, so that the piano, sofa, and fireplace only fill a third of the room. Left alone, he
wanders it anew. The piano, when he lifts the cover and taps a key, doesn’t wail horribly out
of tune. He walks the length of the bookshelves, a finger dragging across titles he doesn’t
recognise, until he reaches the back window and its view of the garden. For a minute, he
stands and watches Rose and Hugo lay in the grass, occasionally reaching their hands out to
something deep in the greenery that must be Jules. He hopes the warming charm is enough
for the little creature.

He’s still standing with his arms crossed when he hears a processional return, then feels a
hand on his shoulder.

“Time to talk,” Hermione says gently.

Someone’s brought tea in. Placed begrudgingly back in his armchair like an interviewee
before a panel, he takes a mug gently, sipping slow and swallowing tiny in a way he hopes
won’t disrupt his unsettled stomach. Draco speaks first, sitting furthest from Harry. His face
is a little puffy. It’s unsightly against his angularity.

“What do you remember?”

“I remember most things. How to tie my shoes. Who’s Minister for Magic. How to get no-
good ex-Death Eaters out of my fucking—”

“Harry, what do you remember about Draco specifically?” Hermione interrupts

exasperatedly.

“Malfoy is an arsehole. A bigot.” It’s like a recitation. He doesn’t even have to think. Like the
questions trigger an algorithm in him that leads straight to his tongue. Words he feels strongly
and can’t fight. “A bigot who’s time and again proved he hates me, cursed me, called my best
friends horrible things, invited Death Eaters into—”

“What about after school?” she adds softly. Harry doesn’t miss the quick nervous glance to
her right, the way her hand begins moving up and down Draco’s back again. He’s tense, and
something deep in Harry decides good.

“After school… he came to clean up Hogwarts. Likely out of guilt. Shame.”

“Can we please keep it fact-based?”

“So far, so factual, ‘Mione,” Draco supplies quietly. It’s good to see, from the look she shoots
him, that he’s not immune to her chiding eyes. Harry smirks at him.

“I can’t actually, anyway,” he admits, “keep it objective.”

He looks at Ron as he says it. His position pushes Draco the furthest into his periphery. Ron
nods, a small but encouraging gesture which makes him feel slightly more strengthened to
continue without hesitation.

“Since then… I know he plays the piano. Professionally, I think. That it was the fact that he
plays piano that probably kept him from the post-war conviction he deserved because he’d
chosen a pitiably wandless career.”
“Draco—” Hermione again with that unending, painful compassion. “—maybe you should
leave.”

Draco, however, stares steely-eyed directly at Harry, who takes it as a challenge and meets
the glare with his own. “No. I want to hear.”

This seems like an invitation to continue.

“He only wormed his way back into our lives through Pansy and Luna. Love them. And
Blaise. Malfoy used to leech onto our dinners with them. Then nothing from him for a
decade, at least.”

“Nothing since when?” asks Ron. “When’s the last you remember him?”

Harry thinks hard, screwing up his face as he ignores the wave of nausea that comes with the
recollection. “Maybe… god, maybe 2001? 2002? I dunno.”

“Everything else in the last decade is fine?”

“Teddy’s fifteen. Rose is eight. Hugo’s six. The carrots in my garden should be ripe next
month and I keep the tea in the drawer to the left of the fridge with the little spoons and there
are two broom pickups on Tuesday.”

Ron leans back, tapping the quill against his chin. They’re tilting their heads, all three of
them, like he’s some sort of experiment. His grip on the mug tightens.

“Do you remember Draco moving in?”

“No.”

“Getting married?”

Harry’s breath hitches for a moment. “No.”

“Christmas dinner this year?”

“It’s… yes, it’s there. I remember. Some of it feels fuzzy.”

“My fault, then,” Draco interjects. “I attended.”

“Here’s one!” Ron’s voice picks up in interest like it’s a game, but Harry waves that off. He
saves all his Angry for Draco. “Just you and me now. No Draco. Your stag night, talking
about your wedding? Marriage and vows and all that?”

Harry shakes his head. The entire night is nonexistent.

“Last night, you sent me a note,” says Draco. “‘We need to talk. Wake me when you get
home.’ Do you know what that was?”
Risky, Harry thinks, to ask him something directly again. His mouth moves before his brain
catches up. “I don’t remember writing it, but it sounds like what I’d say if you’d fucked up.
Did you fuck something up?”

Draco opens his mouth soundlessly, paled well past what Harry would’ve calculated as a
success for the quick quip. Ron leans across his wife to meet Draco’s gaze. “Did you wake
him?”

“No, I—he was sleeping so peacefully… I assumed it could wait for morning.”

Harry stares at his feet. He doesn’t feel like he slept peacefully. He feels woozy. Perhaps in
part because he’s just been told someone watched him sleep last night.

“You must feel dreadful,” Hermione says.

He assumes she’s talking to Draco again, but when he looks up she’s gazing right at him. She
smiles sadly at his wide eyes. “Bad manners aside, you’ve been cursed, and a concoction,
too, clearly; there’s a memory charm in there, but it seems a hate spell on top. Which is the
opposite of a love spell, so it’ll surely make you feel a bit ill. You must be… confused,
nervous, not in control of your emotions, all of which can’t be sitting well physically, either.”

“A little nauseous,” Harry volunteers. “Especially when I look at his face.”

When he spares a glance at Draco, he scowls and rolls his eyes.

“Serious,” he adds, brows raised in sincerity.

Everyone is frowning and Harry’s frown feels comforted by the company. They finally all
seem stalled in shock of the morning, and truthfully he is feeling ill the more they talk
specifically about Draco. No one stops him when he takes one of his books on broom
mechanics from the shelf and joins the kids in the garden.

For a while, he sits against a tree and listens to Rose and Hugo screech loudly and run with
Jules deposited back on his knee. The fresh air is a godsend, as is the space from a certain
man in his living room who thinks it’s their living room. When Ron and Hermione finally
come to gather their brood, it’s clear that they’re only leaving because reinforcements have
been called in.

“Bill said hopefully tomorrow for some sort of emergency antidote,” Ron tells him, a hand on
his shoulder. “Hermione was right, of course. Hate spell and memory charm. So just take it
easy and get some rest.” And when he adds “Cheers for giving me work on the weekend,”
there’s a half-smile on his face. Harry returns it, grateful to be included in anything
lighthearted on such a dismal day.

Hermione leans down to hug him after and confirms his suspicions of backup in the process.
“Obviously, we’ve updated the group,” she says. “Sticking to your tree this afternoon?”

He nods into her hair. “Better out here.” It wasn’t until her arms were firmly wrapped around
him that he realised just how badly he needed them. There’s enough hatred coursing
unwarranted through his body perhaps for little gestures of love and care to feel like nectar of
the gods.

“They’ll know where to find you. Expect comfort food.”

Harry smiles gratefully and leans his head back against the trunk as he watches them go.
Through the window, he can just make out the shadow of Draco pacing the living room.

The tree steadying him mentally and physically is tall, light-coloured, and thick at the base,
with a curvature perfect for his back. He’s inclined to think that he’d imprinted a perfect
groove into the bark the same way rivers carved the Grand Canyon—years of making his
presence against its form tireless, eons of giving it no choice but to mould to him as it aged.

It’s a wiggentree, a magical rowan known for its many uses; potion-based, protection-based,
wand making-based. They have a long history of defence against evil, but also of
bowtruckles that like to emerge when Harry’s been sitting still long enough to become as
benign as the vegetation around him. He often rests under with a book or a broom handle to
carve or to watch Rose and Hugo run around or, once upon a time, to watch Teddy do his
own gallivanting. The teen is less energetic nowadays unless the children are here to
entertain, though sometimes he’ll join Harry under the shade on his back in the summer and
toss a snitch as he talks about school and classes and girls. It’s Harry’s favourite spot, and it’s
where Luna finds him even hours later, Pansy a step behind her. They’re both bundled
warmly, Luna with the addition of huge orange fuzzy earmuffs that’ll be regretfully
unnecessary under Harry’s charms.

“I bet someday you’ll die of old age and we’ll find you all sunken into that tree with the roots
meshed into your skeleton,” Pansy says as they approach. Her hands aren’t empty, Harry
notices, but rather busy balancing multiple thermoses and sandwiches.

He sits up further and sets the book down. “Pans, you don’t know what a thrill it is every time
someone mentions me dying of something as glorious as ‘old age’. Do say it again.”

“Ah, see, I know him!” she says, nudging Luna’s shoulder. “All that ‘not Harry’ business, but
that’s Harry.”

They’ve been talking about him, without him. There’s no time to linger, though, because
Luna’s uncapping a steaming thermos while Pansy unfolds a blanket to sit on the grass. His
stomach drives him over.

“Soup and toasties,” Luna smiles, handing him a bowl. “Couldn’t go wrong, we thought. And
hot chocolate. I wasn’t sure what you were feeling up to.”

“The longer I’m out here away from him, the better I feel.”

The first mouthful is wonderful, warm, heating his insides as it travels down. It’s followed
quickly by a second, then a third. He’s hardly eaten today. Now, he lets the girls talk while he
finally does. They’re good at reading his emotions and providing the right atmosphere, which
in this case is gifting him ten minutes of useless conversation that doesn’t involve today’s
crisis.
“So Harry, as you know Luna has insisted on modest living for the length of our romantic
contract—”

“Eternity,” Luna clarifies.

“—which means when she finally needed silver polish to buff some sort of fantasmical
fortune device—"

“A scrying mirror.”

“Right, so this mirror, it was old and dirty, and guess who comes flouncing into the bedroom
to ask if perhaps I’d saved some of the supplies from the house elves’ cleaning cupboard in
the old home…” Pansy affects large, blinking eyes and an endearing pout, then shakes her
head. “I had! Now I get fresh baked goods for a week instead of saying words that rhyme
with… ‘I sold you snow’. I’m thinking lemon squares, macarons…”

“I got the mirror at that tiny antiques shop a few blocks from the high street—you know the
one, Harry? With the stone gryphon out front? Bran something…”

“Bran’s Bibelots,” Harry supplies between bites. “One of my favourites. That’s where I found
that biting Bludger.”

Luna’s eyebrows rocket up. “I knew something greater led me to that door! I’ll have to go
back. We’ll go back. Once… once this is all…”

Two inquisitive pairs of eyes meet over Harry’s bowed head.

“Go ahead and ask,” he sighs.

They shake their heads dismissively, and for a few minutes more they all eat in contentment.
Harry uncaps the thermos and pours hot cocoa into the cup-shaped lid. It smells of cinnamon
and rich dark chocolate.

Pansy breaks first. Definitively, she sets her sandwich down and places her hands flat in her
lap, brows drawn in.

“You don’t remember Draco at all?”

He takes another sip. “Certainly nothing… together… thank god. But I remember him
before… souring Hogwarts with his presence.” It’s like something he’s watching from afar,
how easily it all pours out. “Should’ve been done with him then and yet somehow he was still
a thorn in my side after. I mean, who let that happen? Wasn’t the war itself punishment
enough?”

Pansy pats his hand lightly. “Okay, Harry.”

They don’t ask him any more questions.

Sometime after the soup and sandwich have left him feeling better than he has all day he ends
up laying on the blanket with his knees bent up and his head in Pansy’s lap. Her hand sweeps
through his hair while he closes his eyes and focuses on the crisp air and easy conversation.
It’s returned to delightfully daily chatter.

For a while, Pansy tells them about a fellow journalist who’d gotten an unbelievably juicy
story just because her interviewee got ‘on’ and ‘off’ record confused (“Apparently he thought
‘off’ record meant ‘off to the press’… numbskull,” she says with a hungry grin). Her hands
intermittently leave Harry’s head and shoulder to gesticulate emphatically.

Luna competes with her publication woes and a mysterious print issue that’s turned all the
Quibbler ad pages for mirrors into actual mirror images (“I can’t tell if it’s a headache or the
world’s best accidental marketing scheme…”). They even ask Harry about the shop. He
brightens and talks a full five minutes uninterrupted about a book signing on the premises last
week.

It’s late afternoon but the winter sky above Pansy’s head is darkening around them and he
begins to come to terms with the fact that he’ll be forced to retreat inside soon or drop into
nightfall. Luna starts packing up their supplies as if she’s thinking the same, and Harry lifts
his head just as the back door opens again.

“My hare-brained friend! Usually, such a continual flurry of insults in Draco’s direction
would deserve my respect, but that sulky mess is absolutely no fun. We’ll still compare notes
when you’re better. Add to the arsenal.”

Blaise, loud with an incongruous smile for the circumstances, opens his arms as he walks to
where they’re slowly standing and brushing leaves from their trousers. Harry lets himself be
wrapped in his arms and expensive cologne.

“You remember me, don’t you?” Blaise asks, holding Harry at arm’s length while rotating his
head at all angles as if to jog some visual recollection.

He chuckles, shrugging from his grip. “You make yourself extremely difficult to forget.”

“Glad to hear all his obnoxiousness worked towards something,” says Pansy. “I take it your
late lunch was less enjoyable?”

Blaise’s eyes grow. “I’m always stuck with doom and gloom while you lot entertain
yourselves with Mister Ignorance is Bliss—no offence, Harry.”

Harry carves a smile when they all do, a little too preoccupied thinking about the evening and
tomorrow to fully participate. He’s glad they’ve come, glad that Ron and Hermione
summoned them when he might not have wanted to be a bother, glad that he’s spent some
time laying outside and feeling like himself, but being left home alone with so much to think
about is daunting.

At the door, he collects three more invitations to come calling at a moment’s notice, and he’s
already envisioning a quick stop in the kitchen for snacks before cosying up in bed for the
night when he turns to see Draco climbing the stairs from the kitchen.

“Did they go already?” He looks even more haggard than earlier, eyes ringed red.
“And you didn’t go with them?” Harry’s voice is hardened. Draco’s been the worst version of
a Russian doll set, cracking open at each turn to present a more complex and despondent
expression, but this one grows steadily more readable as Harry glowers.

“It’s my house, too!” He looks furiously surprised—eyes widening while his mouth pinches
even tighter.

Instead of answering, Harry groans in frustration, shoving past him up the stairs. So long as
he keeps him out of sight, the terrible feelings bubbling in his chest will disappear. He can be
like outside, like under the tree. ‘Not Harry’ replaced by ‘Harry’.

“It’s my house, too!”

“I worked hard to get the Dark energy out of Sirius’ home,” Harry shoots back as he goes.
“It’s useless with a Malfoy in these walls.”

“I painted these walls with you, arsehole! I got that ghastly portrait to unstick!”

Oh joy, Harry thinks, the voice is following him up the stairs. In a more fortunate world, it
would be growing fainter, not louder.

“Piss off,” he grumbles, stomping louder. “Absence makes the heart grow fonder, haven’t you
heard? So-so you’d fuck off if you were actually obsessed with me.”

“Harry, you’ve been cursed, we’d be mad to leave you alone. I—It’s-it’s okay, I know this
isn’t you, I know that... So I’m trying to keep calm, but Jesus, you don’t make it easy. Just
imagine how hard my day has been.”

Harry spins on the landing. Why do they keep stopping under this photo of the two of them?
Their sunny holiday smiles loom over him as he turns almost directly into Draco, who takes a
couple of cautious steps back.

“How hard your day has been?” he snaps. “I just woke up into a nightmare where Draco
fucking Malfoy lives in my home.”

He stamps up the rest of the stairs without stopping, certainly without engaging further, and
when he finally reaches his bedroom he slams the door behind him without turning—
hopefully in Draco’s face. He paces the room, taking it in with an alertness that had escaped
him this morning, and frantically turns the pictures of him and Draco on the bedside tables
down on their faces. Jules watches through slow blinking eyes, returned to his tank.

With anger-fueled adrenaline, Harry investigates further. A tall wardrobe he doesn’t quite
remember purchasing stands invitingly, and when he opens it he finds a complete set of
clothes he’s never seen before. Pressed slacks, expensive jumpers, so many button-down
shirts. But also a few t-shirts, a hoodie, and—at the end of a line of nice dress shoes—a pair
of trainers.

In the bathroom, too, are three times the toiletries he’d consider needing, an extra toothbrush,
too many towels.
 There’s a knock at the door. He startles and drops a shampoo bottle, ducking his head back
into the bedroom.

“Please,” he hears. “Just… my toothbrush. My pyjamas.” It’s embarrassingly small and

pitiful sounding.

Pyjamas would require opening the door. After a beat, though, Harry slides the toothbrush
under the crack, bristle side down, then watches until the shadows under the door walk away.

He locks the door and takes a hot shower. It’s not even six and all he wants to do is sleep, but
at the same time, the adrenaline is still rushing through his system, keeping him alert enough
to find it in him to be angry, and he thinks—in spite of everyone’s desire to fix this version of
Harry—that he’s lucky. If this is a second chance at life without Draco Malfoy, then maybe
it’s best not to look a gift Hippogriff in the mouth.

Chapter End Notes

Hope you've enjoyed it thus far!

Feel free to leave some words below in the comments, or find me at

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Each chapter is running around 5,000-8,000 words (sometimes 10k, oops), so prepare
for a fic coming in at at least 200k. It's almost all pre-written, so expect a daily update as
life allows.
 Liebestraum
Chapter Notes

The chapter title refers to 'Liebestraum (Love Dream)' by Franz Liszt.

See the end of the chapter for more notes

January 2000

The largest disadvantage in Draco-specific amnesia was a bittersweet one; the two had been
in love long enough for the curse to put over a decade of memories at risk.

They’d seen each other briefly, of course, after the battle. Draco attended the Hogwarts
rebuild sick with guilt and nerves, bolstered only by the presence of his friends, and hadn’t
spotted Harry until the afternoon, cleaning through the kicked-up dust alongside his usual
suspects. At the sight of the group, the stones he and Blaise had been trying to lift fell, his
wand lowered distractedly.

He hadn’t sought Potter out. He never had. As always, he noticed with a bitter scoff, it would
be next to impossible to miss him given the five cameras following his every move. At an
event that was meant to be unpublicised, no less. Tasteless. But Potter was exempt, privileged
to have the heroics of his charity captured for front pages across the country.

A while later, however, while Potter and Granger attempted to straighten a gargoyle on the
building’s façade, a camera flashed and he spun sharply. Draco was close enough to make out
their faces but too far to listen, though he read in his body language that he was ordering
them to leave—harshly based on Granger’s clear pacifying efforts. Instead of leaving, the
journalist focused on the Weasleys, who were working as a complete (or their new version of
complete, Draco thought, remembering the lists of deceased) set nearby, capturing them with
another jarring flash of light. Draco gave up all pretences of focusing on his work.

“Shit,” muttered Blaise behind him, now just as interested, as Potter stormed closer to the
photographers, joined by Ginny Weasley. Granger seemed done trying to mollify the
situation. If they knew better, that would have wiped the smug attitudes off the intruders’
faces; clearly they weren’t aware how often her interference was the last line of defence
before complete mayhem was allowed to reign supreme.

The pair ran the photographers off together, but it was Potter who followed all the way up the
drive and held his hand out to demand the film already taken. He didn’t walk back until he’d
received it all, tossed it high in the air, and pulverised it with his wand in a blast of sparks and
combustion and flakes of film negatives.

Interesting, Draco had thought. All interesting.

He had known Harry did good things. That was the day when he considered that Harry might
be a good person.

The Gryffindors stuck to the Great Hall area after that, so Draco moved to the east wing,
firmly out of sight. The restoration itself wasn’t too challenging magically, but it took a great
toll to spend the time in such mixed company. Eyes followed him more than they did his
friends, especially in the populated area where Harry worked. Eventually, he made his way
alone deeper into the school, down to the dungeons, to Severus’ classroom and office.

The cold had been a comfort once. It had felt like home to live in chilled stone and dark
hallways against the black underbelly of the lake. The atmosphere corroborated the feelings
which ran coldly through his body but now, his insides thawing and thoughts rearranging, it
made him shiver.

The headmaster’s office had never quite become Severus’ preferred space, clear from the
unaltered office in the dungeon he toured now. He walked around Severus’ old desk, fingers
tracing lightly over papers and books. Would anyone notice, he wondered, if an unhappy,
reformed Slytherin pinched something one last time? There was a textbook on the desk,
Alchemical Elements and Transmutation, and when he flipped the cover up he discovered it
to be Severus’ teaching edition, complete with his own notes. Always one to write in the
margins. He’d tucked it under his arm before moving deeper into storage.

It was strange to see the stores so depleted, inventory so ignored. In his last years, he’d spent
uncountable hours recording Severus’ personal inventory alone—a task of utmost trust—and
keeping the storage in order. He’d liked working in the storeroom. It was so closed off from
the life brewing thick in the castle, and the same sudden and complete refuge is what sunk
him to the floor again, sitting with his knees drawn up and the book clutched close.

There hadn’t been a single moment taken for himself completely since the battle, he
contemplated from the cold stone floor. No one thought to give time for grief to anyone busy
defending their morality in courtrooms and supermarkets alike. Somewhere close by the
sound of water dripped rhythmically, building up some limescale that would be scrubbed
away with all hints of the potion master by the time repairs were complete. A small jar of
bulbadox juice fizzed like shaken soda on a shelf above his head. Through the trapdoor, he
could see paper-thin slats of dim light.

Draco sat there alone until something felt clicked back into place within him, and then he
stood with a sharp breath and returned to his friends.

And there Harry was again at the Wizengamot, listening expressionless in the back of the
room while he speechified about how benign he was, how innocent he’d be if they just left
him alone to his Steingraeber and his sheet music.

Draco wore long sleeves and a high collar—looking as buttoned-up as he felt—and answered
the questions. He spoke honestly about his father and less honest about his mother. He
glanced at Harry once or twice, wondering whether he was aware how similar they were or
knew that he was used too, even if the fact was disguised under the lens of a good fight and a
moral high ground.
It went as well as could be expected, though he sat through some largely ignorant, biased
questions. His mother’s voice rang in his head when it became hardest to hold his tongue,
begging him to play peaceful. And that night, happily back home with Pansy asleep on his
bed and Blaise on his couch, he’d looked at the Dark Mark differently than ever before.

The flat was small. Pansy, with uncanny accuracy, labelled it an attempt to live as different
from his childhood as possible. It was self-punishment or guilt or desire to distance himself
from the past but whatever it was, his piano had been exempt. It was kept carefully, tuned
often, rang soundly. Tiptoeing past Blaise and into the sitting room, he placed a silencing
charm over the carefully shut doors, sat at the bench, and composed for the first time with
anything nearing accomplishment.

In the years since, he’d heard that piece played by others, though it never sounded with the
same emotions he’d fed into the keys that night. ‘A crisp and precise melodic debut’, the
Prophet’s music critic had written when he recorded it, ‘a disorienting walk through Malfoy’s
history with the aid of haunting flatted fifths. Proof that even those with ugly stories create
beautiful things’. He never decided if that was more complimentary or insulting.

That night, though, he hadn’t been thinking of anything but how the Ministry hearing had
twisted him up. He sat with his jumper sleeves pushed past the elbow, socked foot resting on
the pedal, a quill behind his ear until the sun came up.

He wasn’t sure whether he could have written it if his forearm wasn’t exposed, if he couldn’t
see the puffy red scar on his left arm as he played. He’d gotten his tattoo a week later.

It was vaguely notable that Draco seemed to have some sort of personal discovery every time
Harry appeared in the distance, but he was sure that was a side effect of what Harry
represented: the other side of a war, a childhood of hatred (self- and otherwise), an inability
to demolish the way he was built in the image of his parents. He was equally sure that he’d
only ever see Harry from afar—never again with continued eye contact, not once more with
volleyed words. Pansy’s Muggle Millennium Panic party in 2000, he’d stand to learn, would
flip everything he thought he understood on its head.

Pansy had been the first of them to move on completely from the business of the war and she
did it with grace. She lived in Chelsea, in a home with a back garden that emptied into an
enclosed neighbourhood park, plus a large ground floor perfect for entertaining and a rooftop
for more intimate evenings where she, Draco, Blaise, and now often Luna ate together.

Hers was the most comfortable and inviting home between them, and it had quickly turned
his flat into nothing more than the place with a bed and toothpaste, so despite the
overwhelming quantity of people that night, Draco felt comfortable enough in the space to
attempt participating in conversations if they came his way. Realistically, participating had
been reduced to standing with Blaise (as usual), who was talking to a young woman named
Concordia about the sex appeal of law practice (Draco had his doubts), and nodding
occasionally if they remembered he was there. So, when his attention gravitated towards the
back of another partygoer’s head, he wasn’t missed conversationally.

Draco’s type, if anyone forced him to stoop low enough to speak of such a thing, had been
coincidentally Harry-shaped that year; lean, tan, athletic but not hulking, and—so long as he
was already stooping low—a good smile. But it was nothing beyond a coincidence, even if,
besides what crossed the pages of tabloids, he hadn’t seen Harry for all of 1999 and still
thought of him often. It was strange to go from seeing and caring about what one was up to
unfailingly to never speaking their name.

He’d come to terms, too, with the razor’s edge difference between obsession and infatuation,
the fact that they could overlap, and when he realised belatedly through finally being
unpreoccupied with thoughts of war at the tail end of ’98 that he fancied men, there was a
moment where Harry’s face flashed into his consciousness again and he thought: oh. It was a
neutral oh, with no subsequent intentions or serious considerations. Simply a retrospective
interest in something that might have been more complex than he’d entertained.

It had been easier to talk of Hogwarts before that little discovery, when he’d assumed he’d
simply been jealous of Harry’s position in the war; that he had all the same stress and
growing pains as Draco, but also had love, more friends than he could count, camaraderie,
and idolatry. On the couple occasions where Pansy pointed out that the men Draco brought
home could’ve been Harry’s brothers she was joking, but he couldn’t forget it. Self-
awareness was a debilitating new experience. Certainly, her point was proven by Draco’s
captivation with the back of a stranger’s head.

He should’ve suspected that it might be Harry’s head. No doubt Luna had invited him—by
then she’d cemented herself firmly enough into Pansy’s life to have significant control over
the guest list. He was still staring a bit rudely when Harry appeared to feel his attention
burning into his skull and turned. Their eyes met and Draco hitched a surprised breath,
thinking, Of course, the Ockham’s razor of people watching: the simplest reason for the back
of a stranger to be Harry-shaped was for it to be Harry.

And at the risk of seeming cliché, Draco watched him at that moment and felt the opposite of
the Hogwart’s dungeons. On the contrary, Harry emanated a golden warmth. It was clear, the
way he was surrounded by party guests like moths to a flame. He looked better than he had at
Hogwarts or the trial. Happier. They were all a bit further down the road of recovery, he
supposed. He still had that strong nose, the wild hair, the wire-rimmed glasses that’d surely
been to hell and back.

Draco smiled quickly, caught out. Polite, firm. Then he gave a curt nod and turned back with
a sudden and intense interest in what Concordia had just insightfully suggested about
refashioning Muggle barristers’ wigs. Blaise side-eyed him, catching something telling in his
posture or expression, but it was dangerous to take his winning smile off Concordia for too
long, and Draco was safely shadowing again.

As they spoke, he kept up with them, but his thoughts were spinning. He’d offered a tight
smile. Harry had grinned.

It could have been for someone else, he decided. The room was rather crowded.

Whether it was thanks to the brain cell-killing conversation he was privy to, the fact that
Blaise was undoubtedly going to disappear soon, or the knowledge that Harry was in
attendance, Draco was quickly reaching the point of regret for attending. He’d agreed on a
number of conditions: that it would be held at Pansy’s, that Blaise was coming, and that he
was free to hex anyone who tried to strong-arm him into playing the grand piano that sat in
her parlour. They were feeling less worth it by the second.

“And there’ll be snobby coworkers we can have a go at,” Pansy had promised. “And canapés.
You love canapés. And that dreadful girl from marketing I keep mentioning who laughs like a
drain. My impressions don’t do it justice—see for yourself.”

Blaise poked Draco on the arm, pulling him back to the present, to say, “Oi, we’re off to…”
He made some sort of covert smoking gesture, then something cruder. The largest mistake
one could make with Blaise was befriending him enough for the polished exterior to
completely deteriorate into a truer, more authentic visage.

Concordia watched Blaise, then made a sound that must be laughing, but was closer to what
Draco would expect from a dolphin being subjected to the Cruciatus Curse. Ah. Well, that
was that—now he just needed to find the canapés.

He was honestly moving towards the food across the room when it happened—a loudly
laughing figure took a step back, smacking hard into a second oblivious man and sending him
slipping on the first figure’s spilt drink directly towards Draco.

Surprised by the series of arms and yelps beside him, Draco reached out reflexively, hooking
his hands under the falling man’s armpits with a grunt to keep him from dragging them both
to the floor. Instead of standing immediately to limit embarrassment, Harry grinned up at
Draco’s upside-down face.

“What a dramatic way to prove you’re not a prick anymore,” he said.

Draco scowled and hauled him to his feet. “What an insulting way to pronounce ‘thank
you’.”

“Thank you,” Harry replied, twisting at the cuffs of his shirt and adjusting his glasses. “Too
many drunk idiots. It’s only half ten.”

He nodded and waited for Harry to leave. Instead, he put a hand on the arm of Draco’s suit
jacket and pulled him slightly from the throng where they could talk without shouting, then
said, “How’ve you been?”

“How have… I been?”

“Lately. Yeah.”

“Fine.”

“Brilliant.” Another seemingly-genuine smile. He still had a good one, unfortunately. “You
know, I was just talking to Hermione about that music shop in Diagon. Your name came up,
obviously.”

“Did it?” Draco asked, fainter than he’d like.

“Still playing the piano, right?”

“And teaching it, yes.”

“That’s amazing! I was never good at piano, Hermione tried to teach Ron and me at some
point during the war, but my mind was a little preoccupied. Tone-deaf, anyway.” He made a
sort of guilty grimace gesture. Draco huffed before he could stop himself, surprised to be
invited into self-deprecation.

Why is he still here?

Harry adjusted his shirt again. It was too short—the sleeves. Clearly, Pansy’s cocktail attire
request was relayed and graciously followed by a man who didn’t have the closet for it. Still,
he couldn’t help but notice, it was a nice shirt, the green complemented him.

“That shop, it’s a few doors down from mine,” he was saying now. “I don’t know if you ever
need… more instruments? But, er, you know, if you’re there, stop by. If you want. I keep the
really interesting finds in a safe behind the counter, but I’d let you—”

“Sorry,” Draco interrupted without thinking. It stopped Harry with his mouth hanging open in
wait, while Draco took several seconds to find words to replace his impulsively created
silence. “Sorry,” he repeated. “Why… are we talking?”

Only a blink of surprise hinted to a more thoughtful train of thought in Harry, just before he
returned to a relaxed conversationalist. “Haven’t seen you in years,” he shrugged. “And if
Luna and Pansy stay together—and they are bizarrely compatible—I bet I’ll see you more.”

“Yes…” Draco frowned deeper. “Forgive the bluntness, but you’re not an amnesiac of some
sort? Or shall I remind you about how our interactions go, historically?”

“When we were both high-stressed young adults thrown into a war way bigger than us? I’d
forgiven you for the big things ages ago. Weirdly the little things were harder to get over, but
Luna’s been talking you up for a while now. Says you’re different. We’ve all said things we
regret. So long as you regret them…”

“I regret them.”

He shrugged. “Then I guess my energy is best spent hating people who don’t regret it. It
doesn’t need to be complicated.”

It doesn’t need to be complicated?

Harry didn’t even give him a chance to linger or argue that. He started back up once he felt it
was settled, or at least once he believed Draco didn’t plan to argue. Still more strangers than
friends and he’d already discovered that the best way to keep him from spiralling was to not
give his mind a second to start.

So Draco stood and listened to him talk and tried not to let his eyes investigate his face too
much. What he’d considered from afar he’d hoped would stay afar, but his mind was
wandering dangerously back to revelations made in the previous millennium. And where was
Blaise? Blaise always stood to his left and said, shortly after someone left, whether he’d been
imagining chemistry. But of course when Harry Potter kept casually touching his shoulder or
found an excuse to fix his tie, Blaise was busy.

He could think of only one time in recent history when he’d stood this close to Harry’s face
and not thought it was a nice one to see; in his own home, maybe two years ago now, staring
into bruised, swollen, but definitely Harry-green eyes, denying his identity to a room full of
Death Eaters. In retrospect, it’s amusing how long they let him look before expecting him to
issue a ruling. As if he could ever study Harry’s face and not know it instantly. He’d spent
much too long staring over the years—in aggravation, in interest, in curiousness, in
frustration.

Draco learned that Harry had just one dimple, on his left cheek when his smile stretched wide
enough, which happened exactly once when Draco mentioned the unsticking charm his mum
used for their ancestors’ most stubbornly-hung heirlooms. And he learned that he’d stayed a
Junior Auror long enough to collect some new scars, but not long enough to complete
training. Then, when that was unduly triggering, he’d opened a little Quidditch shop in a
storefront in Diagon Alley that used to belong to a magizoologist.

“The little skeletons I found in those walls,” he said wondrously, eyes full. “It’s a bit mad but
I like it.”

“Finding skeletons?”

“Opening a Quidditch shop.”

Harry was a Seeker. A good one. Harry liked Quidditch. “Wait, why would that be mad?”
Draco asked, his most keen participation yet.

“I mean, that’s not what ‘Harry Potter’ does, right? I tried to keep it out of the papers—the
transition. Neville said that was a terrible marketing strategy. But it’s like, that’s… what
societal good is a secondhand shop? Who’s that saving?”

“Sounds as though it’s saving your sanity,” he pointed out. Harry opened his mouth but
closed it into a soft frown. Draco smirked back, though his tone was genuine, in a way
somehow whittled out under the other man’s unpredictably kind gaze. “I’m familiar with
sanity-saving occupations,” he added. “Don’t undervalue them.”

He learned that Harry and Ginny had separated. That Harry was interested in men. Then he
relearned how to breathe. He learned that Harry thought about him, and could laugh about
their strange connection at Hogwarts in ways Draco had never managed organically, and that
doing so made him uncomfortable enough for Harry to notice and change the subject.

He learned that Hermione and Ron were still together, though he’d assumed as much. Harry
spoke of it with a sparkle in his eye. “You just have to know, sometimes, to take the leap,” he
said earnestly, eyes darting between his. Draco stood a little straighter, inhaled a little
shallower. “It just feels right. They danced around each other for years, but finally got the
nerve to do something and now here they are.”
Draco nodded, feeling suddenly a little lightheaded, thinking too much to think anything
substantial at all. He flitted his attention around Harry’s face and thought about their own
dance, then opened his mouth, but just what might have come out he’d never know for sure
because Harry’s deeply focused eyes flicked past Draco with a smile stretched enough to
show the dimple again as he said, “Oh, finally! Over here!” He stretched an arm high and
waved over Draco’s head.

A tall, sandy-blond man standing lost by the door discovered Harry with a smile of his own
just as Draco turned to follow his line of sight. He might have guessed reluctantly as he
began to weave through the crowd to them, but there was still no stopping his brows from
rising when the man leaned down to meet Harry’s lips.

“This is Draco,” Harry said, beaming up with an arm wrapping comfortably around his waist.
“Draco, this is Anthony.”

He had his head cocked at the man already, trying to gauge him; he was their age but didn’t
look familiar. His hand reached out, waiting to be accepted, so Draco tentatively took it.

“Hey-o, Draco! What’s shaking?” he grinned, shaking his hand aggressively. American.

Draco truly didn’t know the proper response to this, so he said nothing.

“Call me Tony,” he continued, finally letting go.

“We’ll see.”

“Tony went to Ilvermorny, a year above us,” Harry offered.

“How long have you two…”

“Eight months,” said Harry proudly.

“We’re rival intramural Quidditch coaches,” Tony said, unprompted. “For five-year-olds who
hover a foot off the ground, but you know. Something hot about being adversaries, right?”

Draco choked a scoff that he turned into a disingenuous chuckle. “You’re a Quidditch
coach?” he asked Harry.

“Yeah, they were looking for coaches and Teddy—Teddy Lupin, my godson—he’ll be old
enough to fly in the youth sports in a few years. Thought I’d participate before he goes to
Hogwarts.”

“I bet Harry’ll die before he lets Teddy be anything but the next Quidditch legend! Blood,
sweat, and tears!” Tony laughed loudly. Harry made a face of quick protest but seemed to
decide against vocalising it.

Draco didn’t like Tony. He called Harry things like ‘babe’ even when he grew red as a tomato
and whispered “stop” with a smile. He laughed too much at his own jokes and he whinged
until Harry agreed to go find Neville, yet despite the annoying personality, they left Draco
practically hanging off each other.
He spent the remainder of the night perching on Pansy’s shoulder, trying to shake the
embarrassment of how deeply her jokes about his Harry-shaped type had been proved right.
When Luna mentioned as they cleaned up that she’d seen them talking and asked what he
thought of Harry, Draco froze for a moment.

“I’ve known Harry since I was eleven,” he said quietly, focusing on the dishes he was
stacking.

Luna giggled. “I thought you might have a fresh opinion! He’s nice, what do you think?”

“Nice,” Draco echoed.

He tried not to think about Harry leaving the party without stopping to say goodbye. It
seemed uncouth when he’d given vulnerable advice about the importance of enjoying your
occupation and talked about friends and love and skeletons—or Harry talked and Draco
listened. But when you have friends and talk freely about these things, maybe that’s how
conversations were meant to go. Without batting an eye or saying goodbye.

Even if it was normal for Harry, Draco didn’t often speak freely like that. And he didn’t often
risk embarrassing himself by keeping a roaming eye on the room all night, just for the chance
to catch glimpse of a head of curls and glasses and a warm laugh a time or two again.

January 2013

Harry’s just finished celebrating that he’d tiptoed through the house all morning and shut the
creaky broom shed door in complete silence when he learns that he left his wand by the
kitchen sink. On the second trip downstairs, the broom left propped by the upper doorway, he
even remembers to skip the loud step two from the bottom, but as he turns past the final step
back into the entrance hall, he comes screeching to a halt—Draco stands waiting with a set
expression and the Firebolt propped like a staff in his hand.

“Going somewhere?” he asks thinly.

Harry sneers back, stepping close and snatching the broom. There have been many times in
his life where he’s felt a concoction of emotions strong enough to reduce his mind to ‘I need
to fly’ and been stopped in the process, but in his recollection, it hasn’t usually left him
feeling maternally smothered.

“What are you, my keeper?” he shoots back, pulling his hood up.

“Apparently one is needed! You can’t just disappear alone.”

“Why not?”

“Because you were cursed? Yesterday? Where were you going?”

Harry thinks, firstly, that it’s obvious where he was going, and secondly, that it’s none of his
fucking business. It’s worth noting, he realises, that he’s exchanged several words without his
physical symptoms of disdain becoming unmanageable. He’d eaten breakfast in peace but
could do it again even with Draco standing here now. He’s still seeing red, but it’s as though
the anger has settled deeper into his bones, surpassing his nervous system entirely. His body
had been fighting a virus, and now it’s given in. His friends would find the update
concerning, but he’s just happy to feel normal enough to crave the air.

He turns back toward the garden door without answering, but Draco steps in his path and
Harry instinctively raises a hand to push him out of the way. It’s caught, icily, in a tight grip.

“Don’t touch me,” Harry mutters low.

“I’m coming with you.”

He scoffs. “I’m not a child.”

“It’s dangerous to go out when someone’s managed to—”

“What’re they going to do exactly? I’m already cursed, moron.”

Draco closes his eyes and breathes deeply through his nose. “I’m not going to be… cross
because you have all these juvenile big emotions,” he says patiently. “But I’m not going to let
you run off. I’ll tell Ron and Hermione.” He raises his eyebrows, lips pressed in.

Unbelievable, Harry thinks. Tattling? To his best friends? It would be less offensive if it
wasn’t also an effective threat. Harry stares back hard.

“I’m going to that disguised pitch just north of Regent’s Park,” he finally offers. “It’s my—”

“Favorite flying plot in London, I know.”

Harry grunts and yanks his fist away. This time, Draco presses against the hallway wall
before Harry can shove him out of the way. He doesn’t wait for his chaperone to grab a
broom outside but instead twists on the spot and disappears, not to the pitch he’s announced
but to another location entirely—a field outside greater London.

It’s mostly hills and grass with some suburbia peppered on the horizon—a mostly-wizarding
village. The trek up from the apparition point that won’t leave one at risk of being hit by a
rogue flyer is steep and Harry soldiers it quickly, the wind pushing against him. It’s a cloudy,
grey day, but he doesn’t expect rain. The weather will hold, Draco is lost, and for the first
time in two days, his smile is completely organic. Some of his better Junior Auror weekends
with Ron come back to him when he squints through the wind at the empty expanse.

A couple of paces in, he’s only had about four seconds to take stock of the other flyers—a
group of children with a pair of mums sitting on a bench watching from afar, plus a group of
loud-but-distant teens—when a crack sounds to his right and Draco appears, looking
murderous. He’s got no broom, just two hands turned tightly to fists at his side.

“I knew you’d do that,” he bites instantly. “I hate that you did, but I expected nothing less.”
He points a finger fiercely at Harry as he walks past towards the edge of the community-built
pitch. “I’m going to call you such terrible things when that antidote is in.” And then, once
he’s sat squarely on the ground, he flicks his head to keep attention on Harry as his hair
blows into his eyes, and asks calmly, “How are you feeling today?”

Harry’s still trying to shake the strangeness of being predictable to an almost stranger. It feels
invasive, like Legilimency, and makes him completely disinterested in offering up further
information on himself. “You’re not flying,” he says instead, gesturing to Draco’s
groundedness.

“No,” he sighs. “I don’t fly anymore. I wouldn’t want to injure my hands.”

“Fantastic to know you’re still preoccupied with superficiality.”

Draco just scrunches his face. “You don’t mean that. How are you?”

Harry blinks back, then straddles the broom, kicks off and flies high until the other man is a
small bead of white hair. He watches him look up with a squint.

Ignoring him, Harry leans his head back, eyes closed, legs dangling, and takes some deep
breaths in the thinner air. It feels as refreshing as it did to go out back yesterday, to be free of
the walls they both moved within.

Briefly, he wonders what Ron’s doing and what Bill’s doing. He wonders what it’ll mean for
him. He’s not used to this—to sitting dormant and letting others do all the work. He can’t
imagine, though, that his presence would be anything but a hurdle when he doesn’t even feel
like he knows who he is. Luna, ever the thoughtful mediator, would tell him that he was
helping by staying out of the way, so he tells himself on her behalf.

A gust pushes at his hair and the strings of his hoodie. He could’ve added another layer of
clothing and been fine. But he shakes off the shivers and grips the front end of the
broomstick, leaning forward and coaxing it up to speed. Soon he’s flying laps, high above the
recreational players, feeling the wind whip past his face and redden his nose.

He does some dives, then, too, which bring him down to the height of the younger set of
flyers. By his fourth dive, they recognise him. After his sixth, a little boy no older than ten
asks to fly with him. His friends coast up behind him, grinning with starstruck nervousness,
but he needs no persuasion.

They have a snitch so Harry joins their play, though he doesn’t try much at all. Every fourth
play, he catches it or almost catches it, just enough to seem competitive and keep them
excited. It comes easily, reminiscent of his days coaching and his weekends out with Teddy.
They keep grinning over and calling him Mr Potter, which is horribly ageing, but they’re
sweet and enthusiastic, every bit the distraction he was coming to find anyway.

He manages to forget about Draco on the ground completely until one bad collision. He’s
flying towards the snitch, trying to count back to when he last caught it, when one of the
other boys, Ned, comes speeding towards it perpendicular to him. Harry sees him coming and
pulls up to avoid a hit, but Ned must think the glittery little ball has moved and Harry’s
redirected the chase, so he pulls up too.
The impact itself isn’t that hard but there’s a split second where Harry calculates, watching
Ned rebound shakily on his broom as Harry loses grip on his, that he can either use his hands
to catch himself or catch the boy. He just manages to lean forward and grip Ned’s jumper to
right him on his broom before he loses his own completely and finds himself tumbling
towards the ground.

On a better day, he would’ve performed with enviable reflexes, but as it stands he’s on the
waning side of a long, long weekend. And falling happens so fast. He fumbles with his wand
in his pocket as the ground speeds closer faster than he can comprehend and his hand is still
in his pocket when he feels his plummet cushion a bit just before his back hits the ground. It’s
a rough fall and he groans on impact, but nothing’s damaged past bruising and a lack of air in
his lungs.

“You alright?” he calls up hoarsely, even as the children fly down towards him.

“Mr Potter, I’m so sorry,” Ned says, face drawn weary.

Harry throws a smile on as if he won’t feel this in the morning. “Don’t worry about it, I’ve
had worse, yeah? Get back up there, go on! I’m fine and you’re fine.”

He bites his lip but nods once Harry’s sat up and kicks back off. His head ducks towards his
friends as they all begin whispering in urgent hushed tones.

Harry’s back is already twinging a little. Maybe Mr Potter sounds aged because he is aged, he
considers with dismay, laying back down and throwing his arms over his face.

“Harry? Harry!”

Oh, no.

He peeks between his forearms to see Draco approaching hastily, wand still in hand, face
pitiably worried.

“I’m fine!” he calls in hopes of stopping him. The footsteps continue. “I’m fine! I’m fine,” he
says again, wincing just a little as he sits up. Draco falls to his knees anyway, and his hand
brushes the back of Harry’s head where it hit the ground so gently—as gently as on the
landing yesterday morning—that Harry almost jumps. He’s spooked into shifting out of reach
completely, heart pumping faster than it has in twenty-four hours.

“Don’t touch me, I said!” he growls, stumbling to his feet.

Draco’s eyes are wide, his brows pulled low and close. “I’m just making sure—”

“It’s enough that I let you stay here with me, but I came for space, so give me SPACE.” Harry
reaches for his broom, breathing hard. “UP!” he barks unnecessarily, and it shoots into his
hand. A second, paler hand, grabs tightly to the other end and Harry snaps his head up from
the wood.

“We’re going home.” Draco speaks quietly, again, like he’s a child. A toddler with ‘big
emotions’ who needs to be watched.
“Ordering me around now?” Harry says. He can barely hear himself over his pounding blood.
“Unbelievable!”

“Not unbelievable, necessary.”

“You know, I’m not your property, so YOU can go home!”

Draco’s eyes dart past them. “Quieter, Harry,” he hisses.

“Quieter?! My god, he’s a bloody conductor now, everybody! Is this what you’ve done the
past ten years? Conduct my life for me? Do I usually keel over by now?”

“Please, hush, you can—”

“I’m just baffled by all these reports that you care about me when you can’t even leave me be
long enough to improve my state of being with an hour on a broom!”

“God, you’re about to hate me.”

Harry laughs. “About to?! As if I don’t already—”

Draco grabs his arm and wrenches them into space before he can finish his sentence. It’s at
once everything terrible he could feel; Draco’s hand on his arm bringing back that sickening
hate spell-induced feeling, the dazed jarring anger of the argument compounding on it, plus
the surprise disapparition doing terrible things to his innards. By the time they land in the
garden he feels like he’s going to be sick and it takes a moment after he’s shoved out of
Draco’s grasp to stand straight.

Even furious, queasy, he’s still stubborn enough to store his broom properly, though he’s sure
to make a show of slamming the shed shut. He pushes by Draco where he stands appearing
appropriately nervous about the repercussions of his kidnapping stunt.

“Make yourself scarce,” he recommends generously, yanking the back door. Draco follows
him in and closes the door with a soft click. What happened, he wonders, to the Malfoy he
remembers, who was anything but mild?

Draco trails him through to the main hallway, clicking his tongue in judgement. “I knew we
shouldn’t have gone out,” he mutters.

Harry huffs bitterly. He throws open the French doors to the living room. “You shouldn’t
have gone out. I was fine. I was happy. You were hovering. You won’t leave me alone.”

“Because I lo—”

“Don’t even fucking breathe it, Malfoy,” Harry interrupts, spinning on a sickle halfway to the
bookshelves. He jabs an angry finger in the other man’s direction. “You’ll make me sick.”

His face is embarrassingly distraught, ashen and windswept from the weather. “I’m Draco,”
he mutters.
“You’re a thorn in my side is what you are.”

He waits for a retort, but Draco’s staring above his shoulder towards the back window where
an owl sits in wait. He watches, dissatisfied to be shelved mid-provocation, as he walks to the
window and slides it up to take the letter. His shoulders drop noticeably as he reads, and
when he turns back his face lights momentarily with a level of affection that stills Harry and
sends the hair standing on the back of his neck. He shivers and paces towards the
bookshelves full of books that don’t belong to him to try and spy one that does.

“It’ll be ready today,” Draco says. “The antidote. Bill’s coming himself. You have to take it
when it’s offered.”

“I don’t have to take orders from a man who barely existed to me before yesterday,” he
mumbles towards the books, pinching the top of a frosted-glass knight that sits still on a half-
played game of Muggle chess under the window.

“Look, dar—Harry, please be logical. If you could just consider my—”

A huge crash cuts him off. Harry doesn’t know quite what inspired him to topple the
chessboard, but Draco’s huge eyes looking down as a bishop rolls to a stop by his well-shined
shoe rights something in his stomach. The board was heavier than he expected, nicer and
thicker. Some pieces remain whole but others are halved and the chessboard itself is in four
pieces.

“For the one who hasn’t been cursed, you’ve done a lot of asking me to consider your
troubles,” he says, almost too quiet to be heard. “Everywhere I look, there’s—you’re
everywhere—you’ve made yourself at home here. Don’t get used to it.”

He steps over the pieces towards the door and the bedroom calling his name. The stairs shake
under his feet.

“FINE!” he hears behind him, a bit shaky. “Be prepared when they get here!”

*****

Harry chats with Jules about lizard things. He reckons if he were a gecko, he’d like someone
to ask after him, and it removes him from the weightiness of being human to look down at a
beady little pair of eyes and say something like ‘your skin shed nicely this month’.

Right now, he sits with the telly on. An old movie playing mostly as background noise, with
Jules on his propped-up knee in bed.

“Still enjoying crickets?” he asks, quite aware of how fickle Jules’ appetite is.

Crickets good. Mealworms maybe soon.

Harry nods, biting his lip and glueing his eyes to the screen again.

Your pattern shifted, he chirps, will mealtime shift?

“Everything’s normal.”

You have shifted.

He looks down sharply. “Me?”

No ice queen. Strange hours. Quiet.

“He is travelling.” It’s easier to say and to understand.

Jules flicks his tongue out. I know feelings of shedding. You will get used to this shift. Feel
clean. Renewed.

Harry stares at him without a response in mind. It’s always disconcerting when a reptile gives
good advice.

Soon, Jules requests his log and warmth and Harry returns him to it and sinks deeper into the
bed. Hugh Grant is stammering out a speech in a London park. He doesn’t remember which
DVD he’d put in, but it doesn’t quite matter. He nibbles on some biscuits and resists the urge
to make tea, which would require making his presence known in the unclaimed territory of
the kitchen. He’s still stewing glumly when a knock on the door punctuates the movie’s cut to
credits.

“Yeah, fuck right off,” he calls lazily, digging his hand into the biscuit sleeve.

“Rude to say to the man with the drugs!”

It’s Ron’s voice. He stands hastily, stumbling when his foot tangles in the sheets, and rushes
to open the door completely. Ron stands alone, arms crossed and an eyebrow quirked.

“Bill’s the man with the drugs, technically,” he says. “But he’s downstairs and I was sent for
safe retrieval of the victim. Most impervious to cutting remarks, I guess.”

Harry’s grimacing. “Sorry about that.”

“Not doing well, then?”

He shrugs.

“Want to fix that? Downstairs?”

“Yeah, alright.”

He follows Ron in a descent to the living room—a living room full of people. Hermione
smiles over to him from her seat beside Draco and Bill gives a focused but friendly wave
from where he stands meddling with some bottles like a Healer. He and Harry have spent
most of their holiday gatherings lately chatting about Teddy and Victoire. It’s strange to see
him in an un-festive atmosphere.

And on the other side of Draco—

 “Neville,” Harry says warmly. It comes out almost like a sigh.

He grins back. “Harry!” Neville’s embraced tweed since becoming a professor, all the neutral
shades and jumpers, the camel-toned slacks that come with it, and he looks no different this
afternoon. He gets to his feet quickly. The embrace is sincere and constricting. “Luna owled
me yesterday. I’d already agreed to help the students with some weekend repotting, but I’m
here today.”

“In time for the bad news, you mean,” Draco grumbles, causing Hermione to click her tongue
reproachfully. He looks back at her with a sour face. “What? It’s obvious. This is too many
people for good news.”

Harry hates to agree, but it’s a good point. Especially considering how earnestly Ron’s trying
to prod him into sitting down himself. His sceptical glance is met with an innocent dismissal
from his friend. Bill, too, had kept his head furtively down as Draco spoke.

“Harry, really, you should sit for this,” Hermione begins with a softness. He lowers himself
into his chair nervously. He can feel Ron’s hand on his shoulder tighten.

“The good news is, Bill has an antidote for the hate spell,” Ron takes over. “But… just the
hate spell.”

Draco’s head had been bowed, but it snaps over to Ron. “What do you mean?”

“Perhaps I can…” Bill sits back from a steaming mug from downstairs marked ‘His’ that he
suspects isn’t the tea he’d desired. He smiles kindly at Harry. “The curse was curses, really—
a hate spell, plus a memory charm based on a love potion. The latter’s more challenging…
Essentially, it’s much easier to defuse artificial hate than reinstate love. So this antidote,
countering just the hate curse, wasn’t too difficult to procure. It was the priority, as well,
given how it’s affecting you.”

“But he won’t remember,” Draco says.

“Not today,” replies Bill patiently. “We can watch and see this week whether removing hatred
influences memory. And obviously, we’ll keep working on the rest of the antidote, but I can’t
make any promises besides what I’ve brought with me today.”

“He won’t remember,” Draco says again.

Bill shakes his head.

Draco makes a strange choking noise.

Harry laughs.

Chapter End Notes

Thanks so much for the interest and comments! How rewarding, after months of
writing! Feel free to leave some words below in the comments, or find me at
writandromance.tumblr.com.

Hop you're enjoying thus far!

 Preludes in F-Sharp
Chapter Notes

The chapter title refers to Frederic Chopin's 'Preludes Op. 28: No. 13 in F-Sharp Major'.

Thanks for reading!

See the end of the chapter for more notes

JANUARY 2013

Harry’s laugh attracts every set of eyes in the room and a particularly tired expression from
Hermione.

“Sorry,” he says. “I… sorry. He looked sad.”

“I am sad,” Draco fires back. “Do we need to find a specialist? What can I do to make this
happen faster?”

“Bill is the specialist,” Ron says from over Harry’s head. “He doesn’t usually work on cases
like this. And not as the point of contact. He’s doing it for family.”

Bill nods, glancing up briefly from the potion. He does a double-take when he catches the
regret on Draco’s face. “No harm done. Anything a stressed loved one says goes in one ear
and out the other. Nothing taken to heart.”

Loved one. Harry crosses his arms and leans back in the armchair with disdain.

“I can tell you,” he continues, “I think Harry’s memory will return as love returns. That’s
what makes the antidote so complicated—it’s not based on the memory aspect but the love
aspect, you see?”

Draco nods. Bill looks to Harry so his head wobbles, too.

“You can begin to look out for flashes of memory once he’s taken this first potion. I don’t
especially expect any, but who knows without the hatred in his system.” He plinks a spoon
against the side of the mug and sets it on a tea towel. Harry decides he doesn’t want to know
what makes up the concoction. “During training, I did a cycle of study with memory charms
and we suggested in the homes of Obliterated individuals that photos of a few key events be
taken down, so the victim has something to report as evidence of real recovery.”

“That way if Harry recounts something from, say, your wedding day, we’ll know it’s
genuine,” Hermione adds. They’d spoke about this already, too. “Not that I think you’d lie,”
she says, looking quickly to Harry. “But you know how your parents tell you a story from
your childhood so much that you begin to think you remember it? Or—well, maybe you…
might not—I mean—”

“I get it, ‘Mione,” Harry speaks up to save her breath. “It’s fine, I haven’t been looking at
them anyway. They make me feel sick.”

This does well to kill any positivity in the room again. But Bill tries his best, speaking with a
professional brightness as he holds the coffee cup out. “That I can help with!”

Before Harry can stand, Neville reaches for it and rises to pass it on. He takes an inquiring
sniff and keeps an effortfully straight face. The smell hits Harry’s nose next without needing
a sommelier’s careful swirl and sniff. It’s olive green, smells of mud and sardines and…
cardamom?

“Hold on, I’ll get you a glass of water,” Draco says, glancing between his and Neville’s
expressions. He brushes past Harry’s seat, and though he doesn’t touch him, his hand rests
momentarily on the back of the chair as if it’s a proxy for his shoulder.

In his absence, they sit staring at anything but each other. Harry clears his throat, keeping the
mug far from his nose. “How are Fleur and Victoire? And little Louis?”

“Ah, doing well.” The eldest Weasley breaks into comfortable airs easily at their names.
“And I hear exhaustively from Victoire that Teddy’s good, too. I haven’t mentioned the crisis
at hand. Reckoned you’d rather Teddy hear it from you. Fleur sends her love, though.”

“Cheers, Bill.”

“We’re tracking down the letter’s origins,” Ron adds, willing to talk productively if they’re
twiddling their thumbs. “That could be a second possible solution. There’s no return address,
but I have anyone I could possibly need under Ministry pay at my disposal, yeah?”

Harry shrugs, pessimistic or apathetic or another ic that implies the sort of muted, grey-toned
emotions he’s felt this weekend. It makes Ron sigh.

A glass of water drops into Harry’s line of sight and he looks up to accept Draco’s tightly-
offered smile. The glass he takes simply. He’s too desperate to stop feeling exhaustingly
angry and sick to fight, much to the chagrin of some deeper, still-affected part of him. With
an enraptured audience, he lifts the mug to his mouth and begins to drink. It takes three
attempts, even when he tries to harness whatever strong-willed iron stomach got him through
his twenties. It’s spliced with big sips of water to get the full concoction down and when he
finishes everyone is watching him with bated breath like it’ll be instantaneous. He stares
back.

“Hey!” Ron exclaims, stealing the attention beautifully. “What the hell happened to the
chessboard?!”

Harry cranes his neck up. Ron’s brows are furrowed and his mouth is slack in offence,
looking past the sitting area to the bookshelves. Draco clearly hadn’t had it in him to clean. In
fact, he meets Ron with large eyes and a subtle shake of his head, glancing at Harry.
“Malfoy’s trying to subtly suggest that we shouldn’t talk about the fact that I broke the
chessboard. As if it might piss me off more to be held responsible for my actions. Unlike
him, I’m fine with taking responsibility for my meanness, especially when I’d do it again.”
Harry stands and runs a hand through his hair. “Thanks, Bill. I appreciate all you’ve done.
I’m going back to bed.”

Though Ron pats his shoulder warmly as he stands, no one follows.

“Guess it’s not instant, then,” he tells the room quieter than he thinks Harry can hear outside
the door. He rolls his eyes, and when he lingers a moment behind the closed doors, he can
hear Hermione consoling Draco. It sends an old familiar twist of disgust and jealousy through
him. Quite right, Ron, he thinks. Not instant.

When a knock sounds on the bedroom door an hour later, Harry doesn’t answer. He counts to
ninety, and once he’s extricated himself from the covers and slowly pulled the handle, he
finds a plate of biscuits and a cup of tea sitting under a warming charm. It’s made exactly
how he likes it. He sips it while a new movie starts that night, blankets drawn to his chest,
and discovers that he can slowly parse through his memories without feeling too ill. It’s
starting, he supposes—the clear-headedness to assess the damage himself.

Shopping through what he can recall has varied success. Anything involving Draco before
coupling up seems fine—all of school, the new millennium, seeing him at a party and
deciding his life will be better if he puts the past behind them (and look where that’s got
him). Early friendship—pub nights, evenings on Pansy’s roof—are there, but in them, Draco
sits almost silent. These are difficult, anyway, to contend with in his present state, so he
moves on.

Many post-Draco memories are still extremely clear—just about anything at his broom shop,
for example—though others are tragically fuzzy, enough to leave him feeling quite sad.
Rose’s birth feels like something on the tip of his tongue and looks, to his mind’s eye, like
he’s forgotten his glasses. It makes his eyes water angrily, directed partially towards Draco,
though he knows it’s not his fault if his presence is stealing even non-Draco memories. They
must have been very close in attendance at the hospital that day.

Hugo’s is the same, if not worse. Just for comfort, he lets himself recall visiting Hermione
again the next day, sighing in definitive relief when he can picture Ron asleep in a chair by
the window, Hermione holding a little bundle of cloth and pressing her finger to her lips with
a nod to her sleeping husband. He falls asleep to that, but it’s a restless night anyway.

So he stumbles downstairs the next morning with a familiar level of tunnel-vision for
breakfast and coffee that he’d had two days ago, just before it all went to shit. Not a single
thought is spared for potential company as he prepares coffee, pours his cereal greedily, and
pulls a chair at the table.

In the silence of the early morning, the woven wicker creaks under him. After the war, the
home had had an overhaul that made it livable without being cursed by inanimate objects
when finding the toilet in the night, but a few things stayed in each room. Harry hadn’t been
able to part with the original chairs, seats at a table the people he loved most once
surrounded.
The bowl is half empty when Draco reminds him he exists, reappearing and surprising a
version of Harry newly void of anger by demonstrating his own. He whacks a paper down
and stands waiting with his arms folded primly.

It’s some sort of tabloid, nothing prestigious. The Daily Wail. On the front page is a large—
old—picture of Harry and Draco walking through some farmer’s market, a tote bag
overflowing with produce and tulips slung over Draco’s shoulder. Harry’s too busy spotting
that seeing them holding hands doesn’t fill him with nausea or anger to immediately read the
headline, but once he does the irritated form looming above him makes a lot more sense:

‘TROUBLE IN POTTER PARADISE?’ the block text reads, then lower on the page,
‘SOURCE DESCRIBES ROW BETWEEN UNHAPPY COUPLE OVER THE WEEKEND.
DETAILS ON PAGE 4’.

“Happy?” Draco says, pointing an open hand at the page.

Harry eats another spoonful of cereal. He shrugs. “Least it’s not the Prophet.”

“Of course it’s not the Prophet, Pansy’s got a solid hold. Ron certainly won’t be happy with
us, anyway. This is meant to be kept quiet—he concurs with me that until we know more we
need to consider that this might not be an admirer.” Draco opens the fridge and fishes around
and when his hand reappears, it’s holding yoghurt. “He didn’t want to tell you until after…
until you weren’t…”

“Ready to hex you if you breathe too hard?”

Draco huffs, closing the cutlery drawer with his hip. “That is not the curse-exclusive
behaviour you think it is. Anyway, I’m worried that someone out there wants you to forget
something about us.”

“But you know everything about us, too.”

“I’m not omniscient.” He sticks the spoon in his mouth while he pops the yoghurt open.
When he pulls it out, he looks at Harry much more seriously. “How are you? You seem
different. We’ve both said at least twenty words.”

“I don’t feel like something’s overhauling my emotions.” Harry swirls his spoon around the
soggy cereal remains. “Like I’m myself.”

“Yourself?”

“Yeah, like how I felt before.”

The spoon dangles between Draco’s fingers. “Before,” he repeats, lips barely moving.

“Before the hate curse.”

There’s a clatter as he drops it completely. “Burying the bloody lede, you prat! Are you
serious?” His free hand moves to Harry’s cheek delicately, and it makes him jump and push
his seat backwards with a wooden screech. Draco pulls back quickly. Harry catches some of
the softness leaving his eyes.

“I mean the hate spell is over,” he corrects. “I don’t… I don’t remember us.” Draco’s gaze
seems accusatory. He bristles. “I didn’t say anything about remembering.”

Draco presses a hand to his forehead, eyes squeezed shut. “I know, I know, sorry. I’ve been
hanging to hope as though my life depends on it. I heard what I wanted to hear.” He pulls out
the chair next to Harry and peels the lid off his yoghurt. The fact that he doesn’t like the
inside of the lid gets banked diligently away with the sparse information Harry’s gathered on
him so far. “That’s great news anyway,” he says with forced cheerfulness. “I know we’ve still
got a way to go, but… this is good for us.”

“Us.”

“Yes.”

Harry sits straighter, the point where Draco touched him itching like poison ivy. “This isn’t
an us.”

“But you know that… we…” He drifts off in his response as Harry watches his face pull in
with concern again.

“You’re—I’m sorry, you’ve got to understand, you’re a stranger in my home.”

Draco raises his chin in a mutinous expression Harry’s quickly learning to associate with
personal grievance. “We’re married. You know that. You can’t just ignore—”

“We entered into a marriage I didn’t agree to,” Harry argues. “This me, at least. I know we
were mates. But this version is all I have keeping a complete identity crisis at bay, and this
version barely knows you. I’m managing a lot right now. I’d prefer—I’m not comfortable
here with you. If you could just give me some space. Stay at Pansy and Luna’s maybe.”

Draco looks utterly wrathful now. He’s set his spoon down with a frightening calmness and
sat back to look directly at him. His face is deceptively unreadable. “Tell me you’re taking
the piss.”

“No, I—”

“Do you mean leave… for the night?”

“For the indefinite future.”

“Unbelievable. You’re unbelievable! I have presented immeasurable patience this weekend.

Stressed with no sleep. Trying to solve this while you get a rise out of making my life a living
hell,” he hisses. “And it’s outstanding to know, by the way, that half of the heart-crushing
ways you’ve talked about me this weekend weren’t the hate spell like I told myself. No!
That’s just who you are when you don’t love me.”
They’re both a bit surprised, Harry thinks, by the way the conversation has turned. He only
meant to ask for some distance—if that’s offensive, it’s not his fault. In the brief reprieve
while Draco palms his eyes in exasperation, Harry listens to the dripping tap as though
disassociated from the entire conversation. Its slow pulse makes the room feel like a dying
thing.

Draco drops his hands back on the table, eyes dutifully rubbed raw. “I’ve already taken down
almost every picture of us, because it made you feel ill,” he says, tone even with decisiveness.
“And you’ve just called me a stranger. It’s like I’m disappearing from my own life. If I move
out too—of our home—then what if that’s all it takes for you to completely…” His muttering
expires as he stares at the wood grain of the table. “I’ve lived here for eleven years. I’m not
leaving now. That’s not how this is going to work.”

“Fine,” Harry manages through gritted teeth, preferring to be finished than to argue further.
He stands, dumps his bowl in the sink, and gets dressed to go into the shop. By the time he
comes back downstairs, the house is quiet.

April 2000

It was irregular that Pansy was at his flat instead of the other way around, but they’d been
busy and a sleepover had been planned to compensate. Spending the night at Draco’s always
harkened back to a school-era friendship, sitting in the small home cross-legged on his bed
and hunched over his left hand. She’d brought a pot of black nail polish along, half as a joke,
but Draco hadn’t dismissed her as vehemently as she might have expected.

“I only need one hand to read, Pans,” he said, waving his book. All he had to do then was
extend his arm to her and she jumped at the chance.

The radio played while she worked in steady concentration, some wizard pop. Draco read on
in the comfortable silence, feeling the cold sensation of the polish swiping over his nails.

“By the way,” she said casually two coats later. “You have to come over on Saturday.”

Draco spoke without looking up. “I’m there.”

“Sometimes I wish you’d take just a moment longer to agree. I want the thrill of the fight.”

“No. I can’t. I have other friends,” he said tonelessly. “What’s Saturday?”

“Switch hands.”

“Is it dry?”

“It’s charmed nail polish. Dries instantly.”

Draco set his book down, then poked his left fingernails with his right hand and hummed in
interest. “Clever,” he said, awkwardly crossing his right arm over his body onto Pansy’s knee.
“And I’m not telling about Saturday. You’ll just have to see.”

“Mm. Omne ignotum pro magnifico.”

She looked him up and down with a squint and a smile. “And what’s that one mean?”

“Every unknown thing is taken for great.”

“Hm.”

“It means tell me now if it’s bad news on Saturday.”

“Not bad news,” she replied. “Now stop twitching. Read your undead language.”

*****

Of course, Blaise was sauntering up the pavement from the opposite direction when Draco
arrived at Pansy’s home that weekend, his chief rival for well-known punctuality. He looked
especially debonair, in shiny black shoes and a charcoal suit. Draco thought he’d even gotten
a shape-up.

“Looking dashing, Blaise,” he greeted, clacking the door knocker. “Do you know more about
the afternoon than I?”

“Oh, I know fuck-all. But I choose to dress well irregardless of what’s coming my way.
Unlike you, apparently.”

Draco looked down at his slacks and dress shirt with an insulted scoff. Only Blaise would
think he’d dressed down.

“It’s regardless,” he jeered in retaliation. “Not irregardless.”

Blaise glowered sceptically. “Bollocks.”

“It’s regardless.”

“No, irregardless is a word. I’m in law, Draco, I know these things. You don’t even use
human language for your profession. Just sounds.”

“I speak three languages, you twat.”

The high double doors swung wide, stopping Blaise’s retort in its tracks. Hermione Granger
stood in the entrance, staring at them with a polite smile. “Irregardless is a nonstandard
synonym. Unwieldy, but valid. Hi Draco, hi Blaise. Doing well?”

The men shared a look of surprise.

“Fine. Yourself?” Draco replied slowly, following her in.

“Alright. Pansy and Luna have made themselves scarce. Come wait in confused anticipation
with us.”
She led them through to the parlour, where Ron sat stiffly on a settee behind a comically
large tower of tea sandwiches and baked goods. He ducked his head around to see who’d
arrived, then sat back with nothing more than a brisk nod.

It wasn’t a particularly warm atmosphere to walk into, but not cold either. There was, at least,
solidarity in their mutual confusion. They all seemed at a loss of what to say to each other
and were fine with electing to sit in silence, though Draco thought Hermione was shifting a
bit uncomfortably in that unspoken group decision. The only break from this was the sound
of her swatting Ron’s hand away from the food with a slow shake of the head.

Draco, for one, had no idea what those two thought of him. Optimistically, Harry had
appeared to be fine with him at the party and the three of them often seemed to be a hive
mind to outsiders.

“So,” Blaise said loudly, carving through the quiet like a knife. “Do you lot hate us?”

Draco could have died at the stunned looks on their faces and Hermione’s mutely opening
mouth, but Luna, always with a visionary’s timing, floated in at just that moment. Somehow,
she looked surprised to see them.

“Hi! Oh, fantastic! Help yourselves to food and the tea—” Ron needed no further instruction,
while Draco turned towards Luna with even more interest considering his present company
than he’d had on the doorstep. She met his curious eyes knowingly. “We just have to wait
until everyone is here,” she finished.

Everyone? Draco thought and, like clockwork, the doorknocker sounded again.

“I’ve got it!” She didn’t return, though. Instead, Draco spotted her cross the parlour entrance
and disappear further into the home, a moment before Harry and Neville wandered in.

Harry quirked a brow at the sight of Draco and Blaise and half-smiled. “What a pleasant
surprise,” he said.

Draco nodded and busied his eyes elsewhere. Neville budged in beside Hermione, so Harry
sat on the empty loveseat. “The food must be available?” he asked Ron, who nodded into a
bite.

“Don’t eat these ones,” he said, holding up a tea sandwich he’d swallowed half of in one
mouthful. “Cheese and chutney, I think. Tastes terrible.” The rest disappeared into his mouth.
Harry chuckled and leaned in for one of his own.

“Why do I feel like I’ve been shuttled to a stormy island and I’m about to be ordered to solve
a murder?” Blaise mused, earning a chuckle from Neville. “The last time someone was
murdered at the same dinner party as me it was hours of collecting testimony.”

“So histrionic, always, Blaise.” Pansy winked as she returned with Luna on her arm. She’d
already been dressed in black, but she’d since added a choker with the world’s smallest
accessorising bowtie. An interesting choice, even for her. Draco was the first to solve the
equation, glancing from her to Luna’s yellow and white dress, and the beaded white
headband holding back her blonde waves.

“Thanks for coming,” Luna added while he slowly sat back in quiet shock. “You may have
gathered we have some news.”

“So while we had you together,” said Pansy, “we wanted to tell you…”

They glanced at each other and spoke a millisecond apart. “We eloped!”

The room was quiet enough to hear Ron’s sponge cake drop. Pansy held out her hand, fresh
with an artisanal gnarled, branchlike bronze ring and wagged her fingers. Draco’s mouth had
dropped open and he didn’t need to look behind him to see what he already knew; everyone
else was equally shocked.

“You’re having us on,” Blaise whispered.

Pansy shook her head, still grinning.

“Congratulations!” It was Neville who struck the right mood first. He took the paces forward
to wrap them both in a hug. His action jarred most of them from shock. Hermione and Ron
stood too. Draco stayed seated, frozen still, watching the embraces. Harry hugged Luna so
enthusiastically that he lifted her off her feet and Pansy looked caught off guard to receive a
similarly passionate squeeze.

“You got married without me?” Draco heard himself say. As the group broke apart from their
circle of excitement to look at him, Pansy’s face was the guiltiest of all. There was no way
she hadn’t seen this coming.

“Oh, love…” she began with a sigh, twisting her hands together. “It was sudden. You know if
I’d planned it you’d be at the hen do and standing beside me at the altar and you’d be the
most beautiful bridesmaid…”

Draco’s mouth opened and sat there, waiting for words to come. He was happy for them,
obviously. Loved Luna, loved Pansy immensely—just so much that he wished he’d been
there. “It doesn’t take that long to send a Patronus!” he said, calm but insistent. “Blaise will
never get married, that was my last chance to see my best friend’s wedding.”

Blaise knocked his shoulder. “Oi, leave me out of it.”

“Why don’t we just recreate it?” said Harry, looking down at him from far too close.

“Pardon?”

“Just… really fast. The few minutes at the altar, yeah? That way we could all see.”

“Oh, that would be fun!” Luna was already wrestling the ring off her hand and pressing it
into Pansy’s palm. “The fastest vow renewal on record!”
Pansy quickly followed suit while Harry, suddenly a director, pushed the loveseat back to
open up the space, guiding them to the front of the room.

“Well,” Luna said, facing Pansy and holding her hands just minutes later. “First, I said
something about love finding you when and where you least expect it—”

“First, we got lunch and passed the courthouse and said fuck it,” Pansy corrected.

“I thought the vows might be more romantic than starting with ‘fuck it’ but I’m charmed by
your dedication to historical accuracy.”

Pansy kissed the air.

“Something about love finding you when and where you least expect it,” Luna continued.
“And then I gave an embarrassing retelling of re-meeting Pansy and instantly listening to her
harangue the man next to me about undervaluing women-published magazines like mine.
Love at first telling-off.”

“And then I said something very off the cuff about balance in the universe, balance within
ourselves, and how finally knowing Luna felt like finding a balance between myself and the
cosmos. She was what the stars knew I needed.”

“So I fell in love all over again,” Luna murmured.

“And then the bored senseless witch behind the desk asked if we were going to sign the
papers already, so we did, and I said ‘I’m staying over at Draco’s tonight, I already agreed,
the honeymoon must wait’ And Loons had that story about the snabberwitches to get out
anyway...”

Blaise sat forward. “Sorry—you spent your wedding night with Draco?”

“Luna is very serious about not breaking promises! She wouldn’t have let me make an
exception if I’d offered to.”

“True,” Luna said.

“Your wedding night?”

“We decided to tell everyone together.” Pansy met Draco’s eyes apologetically. “It tore me to
shreds withholding the best sleepover gossip I’d ever had.”

“Your wedding night.”

“So you didn’t exchange the rings?” Harry asked.

“Not technically.”

“Kiss the bride?”

Pansy frowned. “I’ve certainly kissed the bride since.”

“Well, there you go!” Harry sat directly next to Draco now that the loveseat was in the way of
the ‘wedding’. “You didn’t even miss the best part.” He grinned at him and patted his
shoulder. Draco shifted a little closer to Blaise.

“You may now exchange rings!” he called across the room, hands cupped around his mouth
like he was shouting up to Quidditch players, dizzyingly loud in Draco’s ear.

Luna turned Pansy’s hand palm-side down and slipped the ring back on beaming wide. Draco
watched with a patient smile, thinking that even if the performance didn’t feel properly
substitutional, the willingness to try was worth pardon. Trying said as much about character
to him as actually making him feel better. He looked to Harry, who’d glanced his way a
couple of times as if checking how his solution was fairing.

“Go on, then, snog her,” Blaise demanded brashly.

Luna giggled even as Pansy pulled her in at the waist, a hand cupping her cheek with the
sound of cheering behind them. When they collapsed back onto the loveseat together, Luna’s
legs draped over Pansy’s lap, Hermione and Ron had sat a little closer, too. Love on display
did that to people, Draco had noticed.

“I didn’t get you any wedding gifts,” Neville bemoaned.

Luna shook her head with a kind smile. “We don’t want gifts; we just want your friendship.”

“You have it!” said Hermione.

“Mm, between all of you.” Pansy eyed Harry and Draco pointedly. It would be embarrassing
if she didn’t stare Ron down next, too. “This is going to be an ‘us’. All of us. You have to get
along.”

A room full of people who loved Luna and/or Pansy couldn’t argue. It wasn’t an easy task at
first. The extravagant tea that afternoon wasn’t too challenging under exciting circumstances,
but after that week they’d all need to put work in. Finding rapport in adulthood, Draco had
discovered, wasn’t incidental but effortful. And so, while it didn’t come naturally, it grew to
feel natural enough.

Even Luna had taken some time to integrate into his small band of preexisting friends. With
her settled in at the Chelsea address now (temporary, she insisted—she needed a more
cluttered and ‘lived-in’ environment in a home) Draco was reminded of why she fell in with
his crowd so easily.

Pansy was loud but full of heart and Luna perfectly complemented her; equally thoughtful
but with a soft breathiness that felt like warmth and quiet determinism. Often, she would tell
Draco just what he needed to hear, but attest all the uncanniness of the advice to the stars.
This was more credit than the stars deserved, Draco thought. She was too modest to agree.

Draco hadn’t been sure how serious Pansy and Luna were at first. It was a strange coupling to
him. But they’d only gotten into one fight ever, a bad one born of miscommunication, and the
way Pansy had looked when she showed up at his door, like someone had died, was enough
to answer all his questions. They were the reason, perhaps, that he’d been so contemplative
lately about the possibility that opposites did attract.

He enjoyed sitting at the grand piano in Pansy’s parlour to rid his writer’s block—a different
piano in different acoustics did the trick when he was desperate. It was in travelling to or
from that piano that he first tracked an increase in the presence of Gryffindors at the home.
He’d arrive, composition book in hand, and find Ron and Hermione laughing with Luna over
tea, or Neville chatting with Harry and Pansy in the kitchen while some wonderful scent
filled the air.

He discovered with unfortunate speed in this way that Harry wasn’t just his type aesthetically.
It started the first time he arrived at Pansy’s to find a baby in her arms. I’m done for, he
thought mournfully, offering a polite smile when Harry returned and swept the two-year-old
from her arms and up into the air.

He’d known through conversing with his mother that Andromeda had taken over the care of
Teddy Lupin, but not just how involved Harry was. He held him on his hip like second
nature, rolled his eyes at tantrums, cooked with him sitting watchfully on the counter like he
wasn’t overwhelmingly intimidated by children in the way Draco was. It felt like a rare
admittance into his life that Draco never could have expected to receive, to see him in a mode
so shielded from his public persona. The Chosen One, with a child’s spittle on his shirt.

And then he’d come by a couple of weeks later only to walk in on Harry in the parlour
reaching high above his head on a stepladder, holding a shelf up and waiting on Luna to tell
him higher or lower. She was indecisive and apologetic. He’d hold the shelves up as long as
she needed, he’d said. Draco left them to it before he could think too long on the thin t-shirt
and jeans, the pencil behind his ear, the Muggle habits and wand forgotten in his back pocket,
the compassion and courteous attitude.

It felt wrong, terribly wrong, to be able to think that way about someone he’d hated.
Moreover, it felt like an invasion to have caused someone so much pain and then have the
nerve to wish for that person’s affection. So he kept his distance. It helped that, despite their
best efforts, he still felt separate from the newcomers. After the ‘wedding’, despite Harry’s
assurance that all was forgotten, it was hard in practice to act like nothing had happened
between them all. He walked around with a stiffness he wasn’t sure anything could loosen.

“You don’t have a piano at yours?” Harry asked once near the end of spring, his head
popping up from the oven when Draco walked by. It stalled him. He’d thought Neville was
cooking alone.

“You don’t have an oven at yours?”

Harry blinked, then lowered his eyes to his dishes.

“Er, if you ever need us out of your hair to play, just say the word,” Neville added. “We just
—”

“Neville and I like plants,” Harry interjected. Neville closed his mouth at the short words,
glancing between them.
Draco crossed his arms. “You like plants.”

“Well, I like cooking and Neville likes plants and Luna likes eating what we make so we’ve
been… experimenting.”

“Blaise will go spare if you make edibles without him.”

“What? No,” Harry said, jaw dropping into a surprised smirk. “We experiment with, like,
super vegetables and… magical herbs.”

“There are wizarding plants much more potent with fewer side effects than Muggle
marijuana, anyway,” Neville mused. He pulled out a rack in the oven with a loud squeak.
“Your work comes before our play, so just know you can be strict if you need space.”

“I know how to be strict,” Draco muttered, voice too severe. He corrected course. “No, I
mean... Thank you. Thanks. Good luck with your baking.” He caught Harry’s eyes earnestly
as he said it, watched him smile lightly and turn back to the sink.

When he returned to the parlour he cast a silencing charm on the tall doors and worked
uninterrupted long enough for the sky out the bay window to turn from blue to pink. Pansy
knocked a little later and sat quietly next to him on the bench without a word, listening. It
was a slow, wistful tune—full of aching.

“Is this one of yours?” she asked quietly, her head on his shoulder.

He nodded without stopping.

“It’s pretty,” she said. “It sounds… despondent.”

“Key of C minor,” Draco murmured, fingers hovered unmoving. “I’ve not meant it to be
sadness so much as…” He can’t say longing. Or lamenting. “It’s sighing.”

“Sighing.”

“Mmhm.”

“Play more.”

He does, until the part he’d stopped writing at, and the last notes linger into the silence.
“That’s all I have, no conclusion yet.”

Pansy slid out from the bench and put her hand to the back of his head affectionately, then
leaned in and kissed his cheek. “Give out a few apologies and I think it’ll come to you,” she
said. “Stop creeping around my house like a little mouse. And smile now and then. They
don’t know what a nice one it is.”

Draco clicked his tongue at her flattery but, after a few weeks of dragging his feet, he did end
up listening. He’d had one extremely tough conversation with Luna somewhere between her
and Pansy’s fifth and sixth dates. He could do a few more.
Ron was the solemnest audience, sceptical but open-minded. Hermione was quiet and
thoughtful. He lost track of his speech most with Neville, who—as Luna’s closest friend—
seemed to have made his mind up a while ago. With him, his apologies were especially
profuse and stammered and Neville shook his hand at the end.

Harry made him want to hex him. He sat with only thinly-veiled amusement through his
apology with an eyebrow raised.

“I made a lot of decisions that had consequences I hadn’t properly considered,” Draco was
saying, eyeing him suspiciously, “because I knew it would make me uncomfortable to
acknowledge—Harry, for the love of Merlin, this is serious.”

“I know it’s serious!” Harry said, hands raised innocently.

“Then—well, it’s a bit belittling if you smile through it.”

“Sorry, sorry. I already forgave you, though, so this is…”

“Entertaining?” Draco sneered. “Everyone else took me quite sincerely.”

Harry sat back in his seat. “Oh, I know it’s sincere. It’s just unnecessary. You’re wasting
words that you already ration so carefully around us.”

“Can you just let me say what I have to say, you absolute brick wall?”

This time, green eyes met him with sincerity. Harry, he would learn, knew exactly when to
stop joking and when to start again. “I’m listening, whatever you need to say. I’m just telling
you, you don’t need to say it for me.” He waved him on. “But please, say it for you, whatever
peace that’ll bring, yeah? You deserve that.”

See, that was exactly why Draco kept his distance. Because of how quickly Harry switched
from making people laugh to showing them someone was listening. He wondered what
would have happened if he’d seen the second side of that coin during school, instead of
thinking he only existed with a temper or snark.

But now he’d been staring at Harry thinking this too long, proving his point while proving his
point. Alone with Harry was dangerous. That constant battle between fascinated and
petrified. The apology was the only time they were alone and would stay the only time until
late that year.

He took a deep breath, and finished his speech evenly, uninterrupted. Harry nodded
throughout. He put a hand on his shoulder at one point but pulled back coolly when Draco
flinched, then sat back with his head tilted instead.

“Shall I cry?” he asked when he was finished. “Everyone expects this one to be the most
earth-shattering. I’m surprised they didn’t pack Extendable Ears.”

Draco offered to give him something to cry about. It was helpful, he thought, that throwing
jabs his way at least still came so easily. He would have been truly sad if that was lost in the
apologies.
It’s not as though Draco began cracking jokes in mixed company, or let his guard down when
he found himself sharing Pansy and Luna’s home with one or more Gryffindors. But the
atmosphere changed. The air wasn’t so thick. He didn’t groan when he came over to a non-
empty house.

This was a gift and a curse, because the more their motley band of Hogwarts alumni began to
assemble (quickly growing to once every week or two), the more it tended to involve Harry’s
boyfriend, Tony. No one dared gossip about the man—not even Pansy in private, to his great
disappointment—but the fact that he wasn’t often invited out with them hinted to Draco that
he couldn’t be the only one less than enthused by his presence.

He did come with them to the local pub a few times, but it was always awkward and not just
because Draco kept his distance, sitting closer still to Pansy and Blaise than to the
newcomers. Even in the fledgling stage of their group, Tony appeared out of place. He was,
seemingly, allergic to sleeves no matter the weather. He missed the timing on jokes, asked
questions about Hogwarts laced a little too strongly with judgment (though Draco was
inclined to agree with his cynicism towards Dumbledore’s famous protectiveness), and
offered ridiculous PDA that made even Harry seem uncomfortable.

And yet Harry continued to see something in him. He even went to America for a week that
summer, to Milwaukee to meet Tony’s parents. When he returned, he talked their ears off
about the trip and sightseeing, Fourth of July fireworks and funnel cake and Draco had to
work not to scowl outwardly at them the entire time.

He could get a boyfriend, he deliberated, not truly believing it for a second. He hadn’t
thought seriously about dating since he and Pansy split amicably in school years ago. None of
the men he’d known since came even close to worth inviting into his life. He put the idea
aside rather quickly. It was a much better use of his time, he decided bitterly, to sit and stew
in jealousy.

January 2013

The official word from Ron, and by extension from Bill, was to give it a week to see if
anything significant changed further. This does well to put Draco and Harry both in bad
moods from Monday on—Draco because it means Bill’s confident it’ll take at least a week to
create a second antidote and Harry because it means a week longer of living in limbo, not
knowing whether this new version of him is a semi-permanent one or a Harry he has to sit
with for a fortnight before his memories return.

Draco doesn’t leave Grimmauld Place, but he reluctantly gives Harry a wide birth within the
home, maybe only to avoid another spat. They entertain an uncomfortable coexistence all
week, and Harry compensates for the cohabitation petulantly. He makes sure to slam
cupboards and bang pots loudly from the kitchen when Draco plays the piano upstairs. If
you’re so desperate to live with me, he decides, it would be rude to let you forget I’m here. If
it distracts Draco, he says nothing in those first days.
Harry only cooks single servings of every meal, too, and sometimes hears Draco leave his
room to fuss about an hour or so after in some unspoken routine. On Tuesday when Draco
finally admits he needs all his clothes instead of nicking individual pieces when Harry leaves
for work, he dumps the entire wardrobe’s contents in a wrinkled mess outside the guest room
door.

In his defence, despite a persistently sour expression, Draco never strikes back. Each
interaction is taken in stride in complete discordance to the Draco Harry remembers until,
nearing the end of the week looking worn and irritated, he bursts into the kitchen where
Harry had been causing much more commotion making dinner than necessary.

“Excuse me,” he snaps loudly, startling him. “Can you put your pettiness on hold for thirty
minutes? I have a student upstairs and you’re being incredibly rude.”

Harry stands stunned and a little chastened. “I… didn’t know anyone could get through the
Fidelius.”

“You told me years ago that it was long past time to worry about the Fidelius with my
students. They’re individually cleared after background checks.” His chest rises and falls in a
deep sigh. “Bebe has been coming to lessons for three years and she’s just asked me whether
my husband’s gone mad and I’m not allowed to say yes, even if it’s true, so you need to make
yourself a ghost in this home until seven. I know you’re capable. After seven, feel free to
interrupt my practice however long will soothe your clearly-damaged psyche.”

“Okay,” Harry whispers. “Sorry.”

Draco nods sharply and leaves him standing alone, feeling mortified. He spends the
remainder of the week moving soundlessly through the house, one intimidating reprimand
away from putting his shoes on at the stoop every morning.

In the silence requested of him, he manages to catch a glimpse of Draco’s rehearsal without
detection, so there’s something to be said for respectful coexistence. His attention is drawn
first by the lack of a silencing spell. It happens Thursday, mid-afternoon, when he’s not
expected home for hours. This isn’t something he’d told Draco, but he’d discovered there
wasn’t much Draco needed telling, for better or worse. His general work schedule was
something preemptively known, so the silencing spell is forgotten and the French doors
cracked when he comes in.

Draco in rehearsal seems to be in a bubble susceptible to the un-rhythmic crashing of kitchen

cookery but resistant to footsteps and closing doors. His fingers glide across the keys, but
when he pauses and leans towards the music desk, the pages propped up aren’t sheet music;
it’s a thick book and when he disappears to his room that evening and Harry steals a look at
the cover, it’s a book on memory charms. He’d been multitasking.

In part, it grew easier that week to be calm and courteous at Grimmauld Place because the
shop acted like such an emotional equaliser. Collectors’ Quidditch sits on the west side of
Diagon Alley. It’s a good walk from Quality Quidditch Supplies, though Harry and Aldona
are closer to colleagues than competitors anyway. She’d taken over from her father around
the time Harry had opened his storefront, too.
“I thought it was a lie when Dad told me the new competition was Harry Potter,” she’d
announced the first time she ambled in. “But your shop is more than welcome. Anyone thick
enough to be on a Chocolate Frog card and not namedrop on their store sign doesn’t worry
me.”

Her closet must be brimming with vintage Quidditch shirts, because it’s all he’s ever seen her
dressed in, accompanied by hair he’s never seen worn down and an unending collection of
cargo pants. The day she introduced herself with an insult, it had been a mint colour jumper
with flowery embroidery reading ‘Bournemouth Senior Flyers: The Sky’s the Limit, Not Age’,
and she’d wasted two minutes insisting that she was 180 and a Bournemouth native herself.
Harry’s implications that she didn’t look a day over twenty-five were, she assured him, quite
the compliment. They’ve grown close.

That Monday, fresh off the argument, Harry walked the alley between his store and the
neighbouring café with his hands in his pockets and shoulders up high. He was still stewing
freshly in aggravation, muttering under his breath as he unlocked and entered the shop
through the workshop door in the back. It’s the smell, first, that calmed his nerves; it was
broom polish, sawdust, leather… all more comfortingly familiar than anything he’d
experienced at home that weekend.

The workshop is technically just a back room, but Harry had knocked out all walls but the
exterior and one to separate from the storeroom when he bought the space, then installed
windows with terrible views of the back alley but plenty of well-needed sunlight. The interior
wall is fitted with a long workbench covered in smaller projects—reupholstered Quaffles,
mismatched gloves, four or five unattached snitch wings—while a long, sturdy wood table in
the centre of the room sits buried under brooms. The opposite wall, with the door he’d come
through, holds racks of raw wood, and tools hang from the remaining blank space. It’s
cluttered, but perfectly so.

The main room of the shop is a tad disorderly, too, but Harry did that on purpose. He’d spent
a lot of time wandering through antique shops in Diagon Alley during the summer when he’d
stayed local for a few weeks, then again on days free from Auror training. In every shop, it
was the hunt that made it so enjoyable, the feeling of discovery. The atmosphere it created
made the spaces feel like an escape from the busy shopping district, where the aisles were too
thickly crammed for much noise to seep through.

He made sure to bring that organised chaos into Collector’s Quidditch, especially with
Quality Quidditch Supplies doing an exceptional job at handling the state-of-the-art
equipment across the way. His aisle full of vintage finds, in fact, features a handmade sign
fashioned by Luna that reads ‘BAD Quality Quidditch Supplies’ in a large script. Aldona
herself had had a good laugh when he’d shown her, and, more practically, it had actually
reduced the number of speeches he had to give shoppers about vintage items being worn and
less dependable.

Of course, he also supplies usable items—brooms, balls, starter sets, books, cleaning kits.
And he’s more than happy, if someone asks, to refurbish something old until it works like
new. He enjoys the puzzle of it.
On any given day, Harry is a mechanic, a conservator, a collector, a carpenter, a metalworker,
a teacher. It’s why he’s almost laughed out loud any time someone’s referred to him as a
‘shopkeeper’. That would be the understatement of the century.

There wasn’t much time for the workshop Monday—a shame because it was his best outlet
for the sort of stress the morning had engendered. Harry had always been a bit… flexible
with his hours, but when he closes the shop for an entire weekend or holiday, it’s never
without notice. So he was prepared for an influx of customers that morning and their
interrogations about the weekend’s dark windows.

He spent some time straightening the shelves, then noticed he must have left Friday without
counting the till when he closed, so he did some bookkeeping until the shadow of someone
cupping their hands against the window told him that he was supposed to open five minutes
ago.

The moment that sign turned to ‘open’ and the front door unlocked, it was a predictably
steady wave. There were a couple of broom orders to return that needed a final polish, which
dried just in time for their owners to pick up and some new arrivals to place a few more
custom orders.

As if all the busywork wasn’t enough to make him feel like himself for the first time in days,
one of the bespoke brooms was his favourite kind; an order for him to do as he pleases and
have fun with it. Like any good business owner, he always smiled good-naturedly when a
shopper would come in and rattle off wood type, bristle length, metalwork, engraving, special
features, but it was twice as fun to be left to his own devices.

He was still working up front contentedly when Ron came by, standing with his hands in the
pockets of his Auror robes and browsing casually until Harry was left alone at the till. He set
a paperback book about Quidditch around the world between them.

“And here I thought you just wanted to see me,” Harry pouted, watching him pull out his
wallet. “Just take it.”

“That’s a terrible business strategy.”

“This shop is a terrible business strategy. Take it.” He pushed the book back across the
counter. Ron eyed him but tucked it in the pocket of his robes.

“I’m a complex man with multiple missions, Harry,” he said. “Rose was eyeing that book last
week. But I may also be on the clock, here on serious business.”

Harry waggled his eyebrows. “Can we discuss in the back? This is my first customer-less
moment all morning.”

Ron gave a ‘be my guest’ gesture of deference, then waited for him to place a bell on the
counter and lead him to the back.

“You seem better. Happier,” he added, pulling a stool from the wall to sit at the centre table
while Harry dug for his binder of materials costs. He pushed the brooms across towards his
friend to make room for it, then began to flip through and tally up new commission costs for
the day’s orders.

“Closed all weekend,” he explained as he did so. “Insanely busy. Busy makes happy.”

“Well, Draco will be glad to hear it, I’d guess. I stopped by Grimmauld Place first and he said
you were grouchy this morning.”

Just like that, the shop’s escapism flew out the window like a repaired Snitch. His pencil
halted over the parchment for a quick moment before he began writing again. “Is that all he
said?”

“He said the hate antidote worked, but that you weren’t too happy anyway.”

“It’s hard to live with a stranger who… knows you intimately. Strange dynamics. Makes me
feel uneasy.”

“I honestly can’t begin to imagine,” Ron replied sympathetically. His hands swept along the
powdery surface of sanded wood, tracing swirls into the dust. “He also showed me the
tabloid.”

Harry groaned. “I was under influence; it wouldn’t happen again, you have to believe me. I’m
not an idiot.”

“I know,” he shrugged. Harry looked up in surprise and found himself face to face with a
friendly smile. It was a much better response than Draco seemed to have expected.

“Anyway,” Ron continued. “I’ve brought you some homework, now that you might be
feeling up to it.” He pulled a folded page from his robes and handed it across. “A testimony
would be really helpful. I know you don’t remember much, but everything you do remember
leading up to the curse. Reckoned you didn’t need me to physically ask you the basic
questions, you’ve been on the other end of interviews, so…”

There was a period, in their Junior Auror days, where he could have performed an initial
victim or witness interview with his eyes closed. Hermione used to say Ron would ask her
perfunctory questions in his sleep, needling her for her alibi and then waking with no
recollection.

“Yeah, brilliant. I’ll do it today. Got time for lunch?”

Ron shook his head. “Busy is happy, right?” he sighed, getting to his feet.

“So Hermione says.”

Harry worked on the testimony perched behind the till on and off for the rest of the afternoon,
feeling completely useless. Known stalkers? None. Any altercations? Threats? None. He
described any issues he’d had with fans in the past, though they were all resolved and
completely different from this—an overzealous history buff here, a passionate dueler there.
His report of the week leading to that morning was equally uneventful (or fuzzy), and he
wrote with an asterisk underneath:
 All testimony provided under active subjection to selective memory charm.

‘I’m aware that this is largely unusable’, he meant.

It put him in a strange mood, to see the lack of clarity in his memory on paper. He came
home late, made dinner and saw the sliver of yellow light under the guest room door, then
climbed the stairs to bed. Until Draco cracks through the ice between them enough to show a
semblance of real, human anger at his interrupted piano lesson, he carries that mood around
all week, leaving it outside the shop, picking it up again when he locks up. But the reprimand
leaves him thoughtful.

He doesn’t tell anyone that Draco’s outburst leads him to entertain—for exactly one day—
that he’d loved this man. Thursday is spent especially observational: Draco washes his dishes
before he eats his breakfast, even if it might go slightly cold, and he eats in tiny bites fit for
dining with the queen. Through the living room doors, cracked and leaking with beautiful
music, his fingers drift easily across the keys. Harry observes the way he cradles his forehead
in his hands while staring so closely at the notes that he must go cross-eyed every time he
stops playing. He’s great at piano. But that’s all Harry thinks; he’s a great musician.

They run into each other at dinner time again, too. Harry tilts his head, observing as he fills a
bag with extra food while stealing bites of toast like he’s late for something. He stops in the
mirror, rakes fingers through his hair and adjusts his robes on his shoulders. He has rehearsal.
Harry doesn’t ask for what. The way he swings his long coat over and onto his shoulders like
a bullfighter, too, is way too practised not to be normal behaviour.

Nothing.

It all comes down to nothing. Harry feels nothing the whole day through. When Draco’s left,
he stands on the stairs and looks up at the photo from Italy. It had been saved from
banishment thanks to his early sighting, and he studies it from the middle of the steps like
he’s at the V&A. He doesn’t recognise himself, this version of him leaning easily towards the
man who lives in his home.

He feels sorry for this Harry, but in the way he feels sorry for the Harry who lived at the
Dursleys, or the Harry who walked into the forest. Bits of himself sitting too far away to
touch.

It’s all too discouraging for the others to deserve hearing, he decides. So he sighs, for the
other Harrys, and climbs the stairs to bed.

Chapter End Notes

Hope you've enjoyed it thus far!

Feel free to leave some words below in the comments, or find me at

writandromance.tumblr.com
 Sibelius in A Minor
Chapter Notes

Now we're getting into the swing of things!

The chapter title refers to Jean Sibelius' fourth movement in Symphony No. 4 in A
Minor, Op. 63.

See the end of the chapter for more notes

February 2013

A loud sound, almost like an explosion, pulls Harry from the twilight between sleep and
waking. He jolts upright, waiting without breathing to hear something again, but no sounds
come. The house sits silent. He’s hard to please, though—deep down, silence feels equally
worrying.

He hadn’t dreamed it, no. His dream had been peaceful, colourful—him in the garden, alone.
Blissfully alone. Plus, he’s acutely aware that less than a week ago he’d been cursed, that
Ron is seeking out someone who’d wanted to disrupt his life. His heart is in his throat within
a breath. He snatches his glasses and his wand and takes the steps two at a time.

“Draco?” he calls, stopping a floor down to look over the bannisters to the entrance hall.

No response comes.

“Draco!”

“Yes!”

His voice sounds from above him, from the third floor and its spare rooms sitting unused, so
he frowns and runs back up. The first door on the left is ajar. Inside, all the panic in his
system swaps for confusion.

It might have once been a bedroom, but it’s since been reimagined; there’s a long workbench
but no bed, and more beakers, bottles, glass jars filled with powders and liquids than he can
count. There’s a row of books, none of which appear to be English. And the ceiling—tools
hang like charred chandeliers or non-food-safe kitchen supplies.

“Explosion. This is. What am I…” Sentence structure escapes him as he takes inventory, a
hand falling limply from the doorknob. Draco looks him up and down, hair out of place and
spotted grey, hands blackened like ash. His eyes dart around Harry’s face in patient interest.

“How long has there been an entire potions lab in my home?” Harry manages.
“Alchemy, technically, but close. Apologies about the loud noise. You look like you jumped
right out of bed.”

He wiggles a finger towards Harry’s hair. His jaunty tone of voice and the casual way he’s
regarding him feels atypically easygoing. Harry crosses his arms guardedly in response,
feeling examined. Draco’s expression is impartial, but the longer Harry’s spent acting
courteously this week, the more he’s thought he could feel it, somewhere behind the other
man’s eyes—the fondness. If ‘Don’t forget that I don’t know or care much for you’ wasn’t an
entirely rude way to greet someone, he’d double-check that Draco remembered.

“Are you wearing a black lab coat?” he asks instead, laced in judgement to shoo that look
away.

“Well-spotted,” Draco mumbles, plunging a cork stopper onto a bottle of fiery red liquid. “I
hope I didn’t scare you. An ‘explosion’—if you had somehow been Obliviated and not
immediately reinvestigated every inch of your home—would be quite the shock.”

Harry narrows his eyes. Is this teasing? Is that what remaining civil earns him? And why
would he bother with a tour of his own home when he’d had no reason to expect it to have
been so completely dismantled? He can imagine any version of himself yielding to a few
extra instruments in the living room, but can’t summon an ounce of understanding for a part
of him that would surrender a room of Grimmauld Place to harbouring fire hazards.

“For the record, I don’t usually err enough to cause a minor blast,” Draco continues when he
says nothing. “I work from original Latin texts and just had the most humiliating
mistranslation on heating for Dutch tears, but alas, I don’t have lava on hand for
comparison... that creates inherent guesswork. Anyway, Old Harry would call me very
talented in alchemy, I swear.”

“I thought you played piano for a living.”

“Some of us,” he sighs, reaching high for a balance that sits on a shelf above him. “Don’t eat,
sleep, and breathe broomsticks.” He sets it down on the table and turns to Harry with an arm
locked leaning against the table’s edge. “It’s called a hobby.”

“I… garden.”

Draco stares at him, then nods with his eyebrows lifted. There’s a smudge on his chin, ash
like the black on his hands. Harry doesn’t know him well enough to discern whether to read
his look as ‘I know you garden, husband of mine’ or ‘if you want to call that a hobby’.

“It’s Friday,” Draco points out.

“Oh. Er, yes, I’m aware.”

“So everybody will be over around seven.” His voice perks up again and at once their entire
interaction feels a bit clearer to Harry. He’s in a good mood because there will finally be
company—intermediaries. People besides Harry who are not there just to talk about Harry.
He’s quiet for too long again. Draco’s content expression falls away into worry. “You
remember Friday dinners?”

“Course.”

He presents confidence with a scoff, a bit intimidated by Draco’s cheerfulness, but in reality,
the tradition is like a dodgy channel on the radio—crystal clear and then moments later
incoherent white noise. Clear signs of Draco’s presence. He can tell, for example, that he
tends to sit right beside him because the evenings have a sort of tunnel vision over them as if
he can’t look to his right. But the important moments are there: the time he burnt an entire
beef wellington black; the night Hermione presented her engagement ring; Blaise summoning
the last roll from Pansy’s hand and instead sending it soaring through the open window.

He taps the doorknob distractedly with his hand. “I’ll make a shopping list.”

“Only if you’re up to it.”

“Yeah,” Harry exhales. He turns to leave but Draco calls his name quickly to stop him and
then, when he hangs back in wait, opens his mouth once or twice like he’s trying to get
something into the air between them.

“I… I don’t like peas,” he finally says.

“You… don’t like peas?”

“No.”

In a stunning example of mature, calm cohabitation, Harry presses his lips together and lifts
his chin inquisitively. “I won’t buy peas.”

*****

Harry’s mind is so focused on a Friday night dinner and Draco’s alien-like cheerfulness that
he practically looks straight through the customer tapping on the counter to get his attention.

“Mr Potter?” she says, not for the first time. “Should I come back later?”

He blinks hard, sheepishly dropping his hands from the Beater’s bat he’d been sanding at a
sloth’s speed behind the till. “Sorry, I was… I must have been elsewhere.” He flashes his
most crowd-pleasing and least-genuine smile.

Thankfully, her mouth tips up at the apology. When she leans forward, he notices the glasses
hanging around her neck and the pad of paper in her hand.

“Ready?” she asks.

“Sorry, do you have a pick-up today?”

There’s a birch broom ready in the back, but he’s sure it’s for a man in Surrey and not the
well-dressed witch about his age before him. He searches his mind for any repairs he’s
forgotten. Or maybe she’d like to put one in. Even walking up and asking if he was ready to
take an order was more courteous than the customers who spouted off broom specifications
like he was a drive-through.

“Seeker Weekly?” she tries again, tilting her head. “I’m Raya Nikol. We’d owled to set a date
to discuss the custom broom for next year’s Cup. If today doesn’t work after all, then…”

“Oh! Of course, yes, so sorry,” he stumbles through wide-eyed. He’d forgotten, though a non-
magical, non-Obliviated form of forgetting was refreshing in its own right. “Yes, I’m ready.
So ready. Let me just flip the sign and we can go in the workshop if that would be best?”

“A perfect atmosphere!” She grins.

He waves his wand towards the door then leads the way back, steeling himself. He’s been
hounded by his fair share of reporters, but a Quidditch magazine had seemed like low stakes,
especially when he’d made the appointment expecting a completely uneventful January. She
seems aggressively keen, regardless. Sure enough, she’s chirped out, “Quite an honour, I’m
sure, to have been chosen to be tasked with the broom!” while he’s still pulling a stool out for
each of them across the centre workbench.

“Yeah,” he exhales only once he’s settled in, sitting straighter. “Of course, it was only
through Ginny—Weasley—that I got the gig. I’m lucky to have connections.”

“Too humble, Mr Potter. I’m sure your reputation precedes you.”

“Well, Ginny precedes my reputation.”

She smiles as she writes, quill feather dancing in the air. “Can you tell me a bit about the
commission specifications?”

“Sure. There’re certain specifications required of all brooms in play, even the referee’s, so
first and foremost, the broom was made to meet those standards. From there, the ICWQC
wanted it to represent the 2014 finale however I saw fit, so the broom handle is made from a
ceibo tree. The national tree of Argentina.”

“Next year’s match location.”

“Yeah. It’s a beautiful tree,” Harry says. “A solid hardwood, as well. I supply it in the shop
already. They grow well in the UK.”

“Did the finale referee have any say in their broom?”

“From what I understand, the referee for that match hasn’t been chosen yet. So I worked
directly with the ICWQC. They’re who are currently testing it against those broom-handling
parameters. That’s fine though, the broom is more to represent the games than the actual
rider.”

“You root for England?”

“I don’t get my hopes up.”

“Any fears from the ICWQC that you’ll sabotage the referee to benefit the teams you like?”
she asks, a twinkle in her eye.

He chuckles good-naturedly. “I won’t see that broom for months. It wouldn’t make it through
with a charm that gives the referee minty-fresh breath. They take impartiality quite
seriously.”

The reporter writes quickly by hand, affording Harry a moment to shift in his seat. Secretly,
he’s just waiting for the moment where Draco sticks his lily-white hands into his
occupational memory, but it hasn’t come. She looks back up with a professional smile.

“You were a little busy at Hogwarts to meddle with brooms, weren’t you? How did you
transition into broom making?”

“Ah… This feels suspiciously like a loophole into the Features piece I wouldn’t sit for last
time Seeker Weekly reached out,” Harry says, letting his charm smooth over the accusation in
his tone.

“Just a little background for the readers,” she evades, voice just as deadly sweet and
professional.

They stare unblinkingly, but it’s Harry who caves. “Yeah, alright,” he sighs. “It’s more than
‘meddling with brooms’ anyway. I played Quidditch and read on the subject to keep my own
broom in good shape, so I already had decent theoretical knowledge for broom making. It
was mostly a matter of getting my hands dirty, reading more… talking to other broom
makers. Loads of experimenting. I kept the shop front running as I practised, then began to
offer orders.”

“The group phase to pick the sixteen qualifiers started last year. The Holyhead Harpies
captain Gwenog Jones brought Ginny Weasley along as Chaser when she became manager of
the Welsh National Quidditch Team, which seem a certainty in the Cup. Any jealousy? Hard
feelings? Wish it was you out there instead?”

Harry’s sure his face shows his amusement at the question. It had taken another decade of life
in the wizarding world for the shock of people thinking they knew him to begin to wear off.
They ask questions like this, so sure they know him because they know his public persona,
have read a book or two, heard a radio program.

“Hard feelings?” he chuckles. “No, never. I’m so proud of her.”

“You two get along, then?”

“Of course. I mean, we’ve been apart much longer than we were together. And dating at
eighteen is so different—you’re just kids. She’ll always be family. She recommended me for
this project, right?”

“And she and Draco Malfoy get along?”

There it is. Harry scrunches his face up in a way he hopes looks playfully friendly, though
he’s quickly losing patience. “Feel like we’ve gotten a bit distracted from the Cup…”

“Can’t fault me for trying!” she says with a wink.

Can, he thinks, smiling back. Will. Four minutes of talking, and he’s confident the plastic
politeness he’s emanating beats the amount he’s had to eke out with Draco at home all week.

“Now,” she exhales, setting her quill down. “Do you have a birthmark, strange mole, or third
nipple?”

Harry’s foot loses purchase on the rung of the stool. He shifts quickly in his seat. “What?”

“I like to remark upon whether my interviewees are especially witchy.”

He blinks, a hand drifting to his scar.

“Doesn’t count,” she says uncaringly, pinching her nose up and joining the ranks of few
who’ve been underwhelmed by the lightning bolt.

“Just the usual… amount of… nipples,” he answers slowly.

For a fleeting moment, he misses Rita Skeeter.

December 2000

In all honesty, Draco had grown tired of feeling obligated to attend group pub nights on an
almost-weekly basis, so he was happy to instead receive an invite to dinner at Pansy and
Luna’s for Friday night in lieu of their usual plans. A deep-seated introversion in him missed
their nights on the rooftop, which had drifted into oblivion as the group grew.

This evening had potential, however, to not involve him sitting quietly at Pansy’s side,
staying mostly out of the conversation unless provoked, then going home the soberest of the
bunch to heat something from his fridge an hour before midnight.

Yes, a home-cooked meal, without the loudness and visibility of any of their wizarding
haunts, was enticing enough to leave him much more excited than usual. Excited enough to
arrive early with the intent of leaning against a counter in the kitchen and peering over
Pansy’s shoulder to aggravate her with veiled judgments about her cooking they’d both know
to be unfounded.

So when he let himself in and sauntered past the parlour with a smirk, he was sure he looked
absurd in his shock when he stopped mid-stride to stare into the less than empty room.

“Jesus, you don’t have to look that disappointed,” Harry said from the couch.

Draco tried to lift his face into something neutral. “Sorry. I… I was very confident that I’d be
early enough to beat everyone here.”
“I’ve been over for a while. Luna and I went antiquing.”

Merlin, he’s an old crone, he thought.

“I see. Well. Good to see you. I should… Pansy’s probably in the kitchen,” he said, pointing
over his shoulder. He took a step back with a polite smile.

“No, of course!” Harry’s eyebrows rose as he sat up a bit, waving his hands at Draco as if to
shoo him. His smile was insidiously charming. “It’s easier to avoid me from another room.”

“What?” Draco choked out with an incredulous huff.

“Sitting alone with me would be a terrible avoidance tactic. Escaping to Pansy’s shoulder is
more comfortable.”

He scoffed, crossing his arms tightly even as his nose pinched up involuntarily. “I’m not
avoiding you.” And with a stiff stubbornness, he crossed the parlour and sat opposite Harry.

“Mm. Sure.” Harry spoke with a chillingly exacting expression. “We can decide that you’re
not. But if you were, hypothetically, I think I know why.”

“What—why?”

‘Because you’re ashamed to even want my attention’, maybe he’d say. Or ‘Because I’ve seen
the glances you quite literally count to make sure aren’t longer than five seconds’, if he was
especially observant. ‘Because the more time we spend apart, the easier it is for you to fall
asleep’, if he was a mind reader.

Instead, Harry swallowed and said, “You apologised to me, but I’ve completely disregarded
the fact that you might need one, too. It’s all I’ve been thinking about, honestly.”

How ridiculous that his predictions hadn’t accounted for Harry’s own aptitude for a guilt trip.

“Oh,” he said simply. “I don’t need one.” Nor, he thought, did he deserve one, when there
was such inequity to their sins.

Harry seemed off, in part because of how quickly he shrugged and returned to fiddling with
some sort of ancient-looking whistle in his hands without arguing the point further. The
silence was awkward, though he either didn’t realise or pretended it wasn’t. That was easier
to do with a prop in his hand, Draco thought jealously, practically sitting on his own
fingertips.

The notion that Harry had noticed the way he carried himself around him, even if it was
misdiagnosed, itched at the back of his mind. It was thanks to that insecurity that he cleared
his throat. Harry looked up.

“So you and… you and your American boy are sweet together.”

He tilted his head sceptically, frowning. “Did Blaise tell you to say that? He thinks he’s so
funny.”
“No, no one did,” Draco assured him quickly. “You just—I can tell you really fancy him.”

Harry looked back down at the whistle with a hollow laugh. “Er, not anymore.”

“Not anymore?”

“He’s been shagging someone else? Kills the romance.”

Draco’s lips parted, at a loss for words, watching him twist the string around his fingers too
tightly. His hands, which had so far evaded close examination, now stole Draco’s attention.
They were everything his weren’t—stained, nails clipped short, rimmed with dirt. It should
have made him grimace judgmentally, but he found himself not caring, or rather wishing to
witness the work that made them that way.

Tony was gone. Tony was no more. Tony betrayed Harry.

For half a minute, he took in the information as if he sat alone in the room, staring at his
knees, wondering what level of excitement was impolite. Not that he’d show it. Then he
lifted his eyes to the other man’s bowed head, trying to gauge his face.

“What an ungrateful tosser,” he finally sighed. Harry looked up quickly. “Anyone who
exclusively wears vests must make more bad decisions than good, anyway. Truly, Harry,
you’ve dodged a Bludger in the shape of a sartorially-challenged arsehole.”

Harry’s eyes grew instantly. The corners of his mouth, if tracked for long enough, would
likely have evolved into the sort of surprised smile that was already showing in his eyes, but
he broke away from Draco’s gaze before it could reach his lips.

“Then I’d hate to think what you thought of my dressing,” he said lightly in response,
swivelling to lay on the couch with his shoes hanging off. “Anyway, this is sort of a pity
dinner.”

Draco didn’t ask any follow-up questions. Harry didn’t seem like he’d be thrilled to answer.
Blaise, on arrival, caught wind that the night had been christened a Pity Dinner and took it to
heart.

“Oh, dear Harry!” he cried, collapsing next to him on the settee. “You have my full support
this evening. Whatever you need, I’m your man.”

“Don’t lie to me, Zabini,” Harry said as he patted his shoulder pacifyingly.

“Not a lie, my friend.”

“Then how come you’re wearing that dangly earring? The one you think makes you look so
fit. It’s your going-out earring.”

Blaise did indeed have one dangly chain earring in. Draco barked a low laugh at his caught-
out face.
“You’re too observant for my wellbeing,” he muttered, fiddling with it self-consciously.
“There’s a warehouse in Shoreditch that you can’t enter unless you can prove you’ve illegally
—Wait, think makes me look fit? Doesn’t it, though? Aren’t I?”

“Don’t encourage him,” said Draco.

Harry smiled over at him, looked to the ceiling and back to Blaise. “Sculpted by the gods. A
picture.”

“Merlin, Harry, enough, I will not be your rebound.” Blaise pretended to scramble for
distance. Harry laughed heartily.

Draco might have been a bit jealous that Blaise’s arrival did more for Harry’s frown than his
awkward five minutes of conversation, but he found it easy to fall back into his usual position
of quietude. They all may as well have been wallpaper anyway once Ron and Hermione
arrived.

Dinner was served on the rooftop, stacked under warming and shield charms that made Draco
feel like he was eating in a snow globe. Conversation swam between easy topics, and though
Harry participated and joked, Draco caught the couple of times that Hermione set a loving
hand on his back, where they shared a momentary sad smile. Then Ron would say something
goading towards Blaise—they were developing to be a very intriguing duo—and he would
leap back in.

“This is nice,” Luna said when a happy, full-stomached lull hit the group. “Every week
should have a Pity Dinner.”

“Surely one of us deserves pity on a weekly basis. Bunch of tragic post-war twenty-
somethings with issues,” Blaise mused.

Ron snorted, scraping another bite onto his fork. “You forgot to mention the victim
complexes.”

Blaise lifted his chin with a smirk. “I enjoy you.”

“I feel like we don’t get to talk on pub nights,” Harry added with a decisive nod. “I see you
all every week or two and all I’ve learned in the past half-year is that Pansy would rather die
than drink something on tap and Neville hiccups like a girl. It’s just too loud. I’ve spent
months trying to get to the bottom of when on earth Draco suddenly became a talented
pianist.”

He straightened at his name as if he’d been called on in class. “Sorry?”

Harry locked eyes across the table and shrugged. “All you did at school was stalk around and
cause problems. I just felt I would’ve heard if you were in the bloody orchestra club.”

“You don’t know the story about Draco and pianos?” Pansy asked, laying her hands flat on
the table with incredulous gravity. There was a reverence in her voice that made Draco
squirm in his seat.
“It just reached the point where I’d gone embarrassingly long without asking. Like when you
forget someone’s name, but it would be weird now to ask them?”

“It’s practically a legend,” Blaise proclaimed, clearing his throat.

“Dear god,” Draco muttered.

“Once, a miserable little blonde-haired lad was roped into piano lessons. He was decent, but
it was dreadfully strict and he thought—”

“’I’m never going to play the piano again once I leave my parents for Hogwarts’,” Pansy
continued in a high-pitched voice he knew well as her impression of him. “That all went to
plan at school, where he was much too busy being a coldhearted prat. Until, one day—”

Luna piped up. “While trying to obsessively follow Harry Potter’s whereabouts…” Draco’s
face surely pinked, but Harry was too busy intensely sipping his drink to notice. “He found
that what the Room of Requirement thought he needed was a piano.”

“And when he sat down to play,” Pansy smiled sweetly. “He felt more at peace than he had
since Pansy Parkinson gave him one night of shagging so matchless that it turned them both
gay—”

“Alright,” Draco croaked. “Story-telling privileges revoked, all of you.”

“And Draco here thought to himself,” Blaise ignored him, per usual. “‘When Narcissa
Malfoy isn’t hovering…”

“Music does make me feel something,” the three of them said in unison.

Harry looked to Draco with an amused, lopsided sort of smile.

“They’re making it sound like I go telling that story constantly,” he disclosed urgently. “I
don’t, really. It’s a bit disconcerting that they’ve got it so rehearsed.”

Harry winked, and it felt like don’t worry, I know, just for them. Something pattered around
his chest like his heart had pulled loose from his ribcage.

“See, that’s already loads more information than I’ve gathered in all our pub nights. For
starters, you and Draco?” He leaned towards Pansy greedily.

Draco threw up his palm between them. “No! No! Sod off, Harry, I’m not doing all this
again. No, change the subject. Someone. Neville! Please.”

Neville startled into attention with an expression mirroring Draco’s sudden alertness at his
name just a few minutes of shame ago.

“Er… okay. Well… if we’re starting traditions, my gran and I used to do something at
dinner... It’s supposed to be uplifting. It could be useful if we’re going to be having a pity
party.” He glanced around at all the faces waiting patiently. “We called it Rose-Bud-Thorn.
You basically—everyone says the best part of their week, the rose, then the worst part is the
thorn and the bud is something you’re looking forward to.”

“It’s absolutely the corniest thing I’ve ever heard, Nev,” Blaise spoke. “I love it. So my rose
is that Harry acknowledged his attraction for me.”

“I did not.”

“My thorn is that I have to take these mandatory classes for new solicitors, just when I
thought I was done with school. And my bud is that you lot are going to go to bed after this
like a bunch of dull and dreary old people, and my night is young. Did I do that right?”

Neville nodded with a grin. They all went enthusiastically after such a wholehearted
introduction. Harry was last, and Draco didn’t think he was the only one a little nervous for
what he’d say.

“My thorn is that I’d been wasting my time with Anthony. My rose is that I stopped wasting
my time with Anthony… and my bud is that I’ve discovered Draco has been squirrelling
away a decent sense of humour all this time.”

He wiggled his eyebrows at Draco in a way that was completely disarming. He let his guard
down for five minutes of friendly attitude-bolstering and look where it had gotten him.

It wasn’t long after that when they moved back inside and, after a group effort to clean up
from the night, began to excuse themselves with plans to do it all again in a week. Draco
kissed Pansy and Luna on the cheek as he left, feeling full and warm and more content than
he usually left the evenings.

The contentedness sat in his belly like a light buzz, and that might have been what drew his
feet to move sans dialogue with his brain when he noticed Harry walking down the pavement
the opposite direction from Pansy’s door.

“Harry!” he said suddenly, scarf half-wrapped and coat not yet adjusted squarely onto his
shoulders.

Harry swivelled towards the sound, hands shoved into his coat pockets, and smiled in
surprise. “Draco, hi, I thought you’d disapparated already.”

“Haven’t. Look… this is going to sound contrite and snobbish but… I read a lot of Latin. I’m
learning the language, so, but they were excessively profound and words sometimes help me
get through something, I’m not trying to lecture…”

What was he saying, and why was it so digressive? Where was this coming from, because
he’d thought prudently about everything he said to Harry, but it tumbled out now like a
compulsion.

Harry extracted a hand and pushed his arm lightly. “So what’s the Latin?”

“Igne natura renovatur integra, ‘Through fire, nature is reborn whole.’ It’s from alchemical
studies—which is why I’m learning Latin—but anyhow, it refers to the basis of alchemy
basically, which is the cleansing power of fire and the cycle of death and rebirth…
Sometimes things must burn to move forward…”

Harry needed to stop him, but he simply stood and listened with his head cocked.

“You joked a lot at dinner but I just wanted to—I hope you know that Tony was shite and
you’re not. What happened wasn’t your fault at all but it’s not the end of the world, it’s…
you’ll come out the other side fine. I think it’s rubbish when people say misfortune always
makes you better off, that you’re stronger for it, but I do think you will be fine.”

Harry was grinning so wide that the dimple was back. Draco had forgotten about the dimple.
“You said so many words to me just now,” he said.

“Well, yes, I… yes.”

“That was nice to hear, thank you. I needed that.” He stuffed his hands back in his pockets
and raised his shoulders with a deep breath. “See you next Friday?”

“Yes, Harry.”

“Erm, also—during dinner, all the talk about piano… I hope you don’t think I was having a
laugh. I… it’s brilliant, I think. I mean, I’ve hardly heard you play, but I may have found your
published work—”

“Oh, Circe.”

“I think it’s great, that’s all. I just wanted you to know,” Harry said, rubbing the back of his
neck. “It’s fitting for you, piano, I think. Anyway, I’ll see you next week. I’ll… I’ll be over
early, I think. Maybe a quarter to seven. Just if you were trying to beat me there… that’s the
time to beat.”

“Quarter to seven,” he repeated.

Draco watched him walk away, content for now to keep his real ‘bud’ from one of many new
traditions to himself: the marvelous fact that Harry Potter was single.

February 2013

They’ve added chairs to family dinner over the years. First for Teddy, outgrowing his high
chair and wishing desperately to be big enough to sit at their level, then for Rose and Hugo.
Years ago, when Pansy and Luna moved, Harry had taken over hosting, but despite the
fluctuations in cook and location over time, most of the practice had remained comfortingly
unchanged, including the unmissable entrance of the meal’s youngest attendees.

Harry hears the raucous footsteps moments before Rose and Hugo try to take him out at the
knees. He reaches a hand down to each of them in greeting, then lifts his elbows out of the
way as they peer into the skillet.
“What’s in that?” Rose asks.

“It’s chickpeas. You like them,” Harry says, eyeing and nudging Hugo’s little hands away
from the hob. “Do you want to help?”

“Yes!”

He hands her the wooden spoon. “I added the stock so just keep it stirring and it’s going to
cook down, okay?”

She nods, gripping the spoon in a tight fist and sticking her tongue out in concentration, a
brilliant impression of her mother in deep focus.

“Thank you so much, Rosie, I owe you. And Mr Hugo I have the most important task of all,”
he says, reaching into a drawer for a pile of cloth napkins. He deposits them in Hugo’s arms.
“Can you take these up and put them at every seat at the table?”

He nods into a toothy grin and runs out before Harry can think to tell him to slow down. He
winces when he hears shuffling on the staircase and an “Oh!” moments before Hermione
takes three more steps down and shouts “Walk!” behind her. The maternal expression of
reproach softens when she catches his eye and Harry matches it, meeting her halfway through
the room.

“Do you know how great it is to see you doing something so like you? Smells great,” she
says warmly, pulling him into an embrace. It instantly fills him with comfort he hadn’t known
he needed. They speak softly with Rose in the room.

“I’ve been thinking about you all week,” she murmurs. “And then Ron said you and Draco
weren’t on the best terms…”

“We’re better,” Harry says. “We’re cohabitating.”

She pulls back and purses her lips.

“It was a rough start but I’ve been on my best behaviour, honest. Sometimes I see him at the
piano when I’m leaving. Or this morning—we talked for a minute in his… alchemy lab?”

He watches her face, but this seems to be a natural string of words to her. As he opens his
mouth to continue arguing his case of peaceful truce, the sound of more arrivals stops him.
As if summoned, Ron appears on the steps with Draco by his side. The kitchen was
beginning to feel rather crowded.

“Everyone’s here,” says Ron, greeting Harry with a pat on the back. “I see you’ve put Posy to
work.”

“I’m cooking it down,” she announces over her shoulder.

He nods solemnly. “Yes, chef.”

Draco clears his throat from some paces behind them, glancing between the trio. “I’ll… bring
up plates and cutlery,” he says. He walks around the kitchen for a moment, stacking dishes
and utensils and touching Rose’s head affectionately as he passes. When he’s gone, Ron
wastes no time before smacking Harry’s shoulder with a tea towel.

“Ow!”

“You’re being such a… dunderhead!”

“A dunderhead.”

“Rose,” Ron says warmly. “Maybe Harry should take over. I’m sure your brother misses
you.”

Rose scoffs but sets the spoon down against the edge of the pan. “I know when you want me
to go,” she mumbles, stalking upstairs.

“You tried to kick Draco out?” Ron asks, following Harry closely around the table to the
stove. “Isn’t that a bit… insensitive?”

“Who told you?”

Ron blinks. “…Draco.”

“Oh. I only meant until Bill gets back to us,” he mumbles. “And we’d go from there.”

“Isn’t it enough that his husband doesn’t remember him?” Hermione suggests timidly. “This
is still his—”

“You don’t have to talk to me about this. I took it back. That was Monday, I’ve never
suggested it again.”

“Whether it was yesterday or four days ago, it hurt his feelings.” She hums in a tone that feels
too judgmental to Harry. “You should consider—”

Before he can stop himself, he throws down a serving spoon with a clatter, turning from the
counter quickly. “I’m sick of this,” he grits out through his teeth. “Everyone is holding me to
the emotional responsibilities another version of me had. Harry the Husband should not say
those things, sure, you’re right.” He points jerky hands at his heart. “I’m not him! At least not
this week. I’m getting a bit sick of everyone judging what I say or do as if they have even the
smallest clue how it feels. Imagine if one of you forgot the other.”

Hermione and Ron glance at each other nervously.

“Whatever you imagine, it’s not right. You’re probably thinking ‘I’d still love him’, right
‘Mione? You’d love him if you forgot everything that happened while you loved him—all the
way back through Hogwarts? He’d be a stranger! A stranger who felt very deeply for you,
which is what you want from a husband, but feels very unnerving coming from someone you
hardly know at all. I’m not trying to hurt his feelings—not since Bill’s visit, anyway—I’m
just trying to take care of mine. Dinner’s going to get cold.”
He slips between them with the serving bowl and up the stairs where the noise of boisterous
conversation grows quickly. Three seats sit vacant—two beside Hugo and one beside Draco,
unsurprising given the distinct gaps in his memory. He takes the single seat impartially as
chatter continues around him.

Ron and Hermione trail in not long after, sitting as stiffly in their seats as Draco, but despite
having managed to make almost half the adults at the table uncomfortable with spectacular
speed, the room feels sweet and familial.

“We had quite the dramatic puffapod incident with the fifth years this week,” Neville’s
saying. “An entire table of Slytherins in the back of class knocked over their plants. Six pots
worth of blooming pods.”

“I’d bet you didn’t even take points,” Pansy tells him. “You’re dreadful at reprimanding.”

“I made them clean their mess. Punishment enough.”

“See, this is why you’re everyone’s favourite, Nev.” Ron points his fork with kindly
accusation.

“Not a pushover? I think it just makes me a pushover, maybe.”

“They’re all still just kids,” Harry says, thinking to Teddy, then to himself, to hair-raising
professors like Snape. “They need compassion. Besides, Ron’s right. Teddy tells me all the
time. You’re beloved.”

Neville’s cheeks flush a little but he shrugs his shoulders and seems to accept the
compliment. The conversation switches easily to some creature Luna’s been investigating
deeply for the Quibbler, then with loving patience to a story Rose tells about how she and her
friends definitely saw a unicorn in the woods at a birthday party in the Heath.

Harry finds it surprisingly easy to keep up with everyone, in part because Draco is being so
quiet. It’s a calming reminder that despite the environment he’s existed within this week, his
life didn’t revolve just around the other man. He follows at least ninety per cent of the night’s
discussion confidently.

But then Ron mentions the barber Hermione had sent him to for a haircut and the
conversation takes a turn in a markedly fuzzy direction.

“Honestly, you should have seen it,” he’s lamenting. “When was the last time you felt
underdressed at the hairdresser? Rubbish.”

“Yes, well, that’s what I get for asking my coworkers for recommendations,” Hermione sighs.
“I’m not going to pretend I’m surprised the International Office of Law has high haircut
standards.”

“Hey, I have high haircut standards! I just have low haircut price standards.”

“We’ll keep looking. I’m certainly not cutting it. We all know what happens when this lot
takes it upon themselves to make cosmetic changes.”
With a wave of laughter, every one of Harry’s friends looks expectantly in his direction. His
spoon stops halfway to his mouth.

“That hair disaster should serve as a warning for at least two decades,” Pansy cackles.
“Remember, Harry? ‘My god, you did make me look like Umbridge!’ Why, oh why did no
one bank that in a Pensieve?”

Harry winks back to avoid answering. Internally, he’s a bit miffed that they’re laughing in
front of him at things he can’t remember, but there seems to be an unspoken belief that this
should be remembered. Maybe they didn’t know Draco was there? But then Pansy turns her
attention a seat to the right of Harry.

“One of your greatest crimes, darling,” she tuts with a smile. Harry glances at Draco, then,
too. He’s smiling softly at his plate, just a little, but feeling the attention on him, he lifts his
head towards Harry, who averts quickly back to his own dinner. It’ll remain a mystery, he
supposes, unless he feels like making a pitiful scene. It’s an acceptance he’s had to make
often this week.

When they do rose-bud-thorn, Harry keeps it strictly work related, though his real thorn
might be how sure he is that dinner didn’t taste good. No one says a word to the contrary, but
the kids’ plates speak for themselves, as does his own. He’s almost too distracted dissecting
what went wrong to notice that Draco skips the activity entirely. No one says a thing about
that either.

*****

In the living room, a group effort ensues to reassemble the destroyed chess set while Harry
watches from a remorseful, removed distance, knees tucked in close and enfolded in his arms,
peering over the back of the couch. All but the Granger-Weasleys had left. It wasn’t like them
to keep the children up and out of the house this late, but he thinks they could tell how much
both of Grimmauld Place’s inhabitants needed company a bit longer.

“I was thinking, during dinner,” Hermione says to him from the other arm of the sofa.

“About what?” he murmurs distractedly. The chessboard is whole again. Hugo sits in Draco’s
lap, his smaller hand wrapped over Draco’s hold on his wand. When they swish it together
and reunite a knight and his steed, he looks elated.

“What you said about us not understanding how it feels. Even when I try to, it’s just…
unfathomable. What about a group of some sort? There are support groups for people who’ve
been Obliviated.”

Harry frowns, meeting her eyes. “This is different, this isn’t long term. We’re just waiting for
Bill.”

“But in the meantime, wouldn’t it be nice? To have people to talk to?”

He shakes his head. “I appreciate it, ‘Mione. Not now. I don’t want to sit in a circle and talk
to more strangers about my private life.”
“Okay.” When he turns to watch the men argue about resetting the figures on the board, her
eyes follow. “Do you remember?” she asks.

“N…no.”

Harry thinks Hermione’s the best at casually telling him things he should know. She does it
now kindly and easily. “They use the wizarding chess set Ron got you that one Christmas for
short games, but a while ago Draco bought a Muggle board so they could play a long game.”

He shifts uncomfortably on the couch. “How… long?”

“As long as they want for each move. Go home, do research, sleep on it. Play through every
possible scenario of repercussions. I’d say usually one of them moves each Friday, but
sometimes they take an extra week or so.”

“Blimey.”

“Yeah,” she smiles. “The good news is I’m very confident they both know exactly where
every piece was on that board.”

“That’s a relief.” Harry sighs, throwing his hands in his lap. He scratches a fingernail at some
wood stain on his palm. “Hermione, that speech downstairs… I’m not coldhearted. I do feel
bad.”

It takes her a moment to answer. “Forgetting Draco doesn’t make you less Harry,” she
eventually says, heartfelt and forgiving. “We know you’re you. You’re the same as ever with
Rose and Hugo.” She nods to them, sitting observantly on the rug.

Harry swallows. His voice is quiet. “I don’t know.”

“What don’t you know?”

“I don’t know that I’m not less Harry,” he explains to his hands. “Or a different Harry. I
remember meeting Draco. I remember thinking we always could have been friends if our
lives had been different, but I remember it all like something another version of me
experienced.”

Hermione sits thoughtfully, her gaze steady in a way that’s comfortable where another’s
could be invasive.

“I don’t want to tell him, there’s no point to say something so unhelpful when we’re still
waiting on Bill’s word. But I… I would imagine it’s impossible that over a decade of a
relationship didn’t affect who I am—was. I’m like… I’m an alternate universe version of
myself that’s been thrown in the wrong timeline. But everyone wants the other version. And I
don’t know if I can be him.”

Harry didn’t think he was feeling especially emotional, but Hermione heard the crack in his
voice. He’s usually quite emotionally literate, but he’s not spared much thought for his
feelings this week. It seemed pragmatic not to focus on such things when a potion that makes
 the curse reversible sits on the horizon. But some gut feeling has been settling uncomfortably
in him since he tried to unsuccessfully observe Draco with an open mind yesterday.

Hermione’s hand had been sitting along the length of the sofa’s back, reaching close to his
own, but after a moment of flicking between his eyes she shifts forward entirely, past his
knees to hug him tight.

His eyes close, pressed into her hair, and all-too-slowly he brings his arms around.

“God, Harry,” she murmurs. “We’d take any version of you, so long as you’re okay.”

Chapter End Notes

Hope you've enjoyed it thus far!

Feel free to leave some words below in the comments, or find me at

writandromance.tumblr.com. Doing my best to reply as often as I can, but know I read
them all!
 Mahler's Fifth
Chapter Notes

The chapter title refers to Gustav Mahler's fifth symphony in C-Sharp Minor,
Aadagietto.

See the end of the chapter for more notes

February 2013

The weekend was manageable, largely thanks to how revitalising it had felt to see friends on
Friday, but Monday—Monday was a great day. There was a comfortable flow of customers
into Collector’s Quidditch, but enough lulls to get work done in the back. He spent a long
while metalworking, groping with tools in his thick black dragonhide gloves to painstakingly
apply the curved footrest pieces to the metal band of a costly sandalwood broomstick.
Bending and bending, then hopping unsteadily with his foot hooked into the metal to test the
shape had yet to prove unproductive, so he’d never bothered to create a more professional
system.

The weather was nice, too, and Harry could tell it would stay that way. He fully embraced
English sensibility and mentioned the clear February skies to every customer that approached
the till, a welcome bottled set of small talk when he didn’t think he was much capable of
making conversation otherwise.

Aldona stopped by with coffee and a croissant for him a while later, too, flowering in the
doorway like the first bud in spring in a hot pink sweatshirt reading ‘A Broom of One’s
Own’. His interview for Seeker Weekly fueled the fire of their chat, catching her sincere
interest when she’d only mean to drop off a treat for him and go.

“She asked you about Draco and Ginny directly?” she’d said, frowning through her bite of
flaky pastry. “What, is she trying to unravel all the work you’ve done there?”

He’d shrugged ambiguously. Then she’d come to the back, whistled as she traced her hand
down the broom handle he’d been carving rough designs into. It was hard not to grin when
she cussed him out for being self-taught. All of it was properly flattering.

“You know, this interview rubbish has brought me comfort,” she mused, stopping in the door
on her way out. “When a male Seeker Weekly reporter asked me the excess nipples question, I
was deeply offended as a woman. Now I’m just deeply offended.”

One of the best days he’d had in a while. But it disappears when he steps through the
entranceway that evening to find Ron, Hermione, Bill, and Draco all sitting in the living
room. A game of chess rests half-played on the glass coffee table, a rook gripped tightly in
Draco’s hand. He sets it distractedly back down when the door shuts.
Harry faces them grimly, gripping his knit hat tight in his hand. “You’re going to tell me to sit
down again,” he says faintly.

August 2001

Draco was, officially and by his own decree, a complete coward.

He was a coward because when they rang in the New Year, Harry whinged, “What an
unfortunate hour to be single,” and Draco offered a choked chuckle and quickly walked away
to find Neville.

He was a coward because he kept coming to Friday night dinners early just to catch Harry—
who also kept incidentally arriving fifteen minutes premature—and laugh about his
customers and Draco’s students before the others arrived, but he never let it stray into a more
intimate depth of conversation.

He was a coward because he’d gathered the courage to disrupt the entire seating arrangement
back in January to sit to Harry’s right (claiming it to be so he and Luna didn’t have to shout
indecorously across the table about alchemical astrology anymore) only to thoroughly ignore
him most of the evening or join in enough to throw a friendly insult his way. Somehow,
without fail, he’d lose the voice he’d commanded in the parlour the second they were a unit
again.

So, with all this cowardice on display, there was no one to blame but himself when Harry
announced radiantly as his ‘rose’ in rose-bud-thorn one night in March that he’d accidentally
whacked a gorgeous man in the head with the bristle end of a broomstick at work and sent
him careening into a shelf of Bludgers, one of which escaped, then worked with the mystery
man to tackle it while a mother and her two young sons ducked behind the counter.

He’d owed him dinner, naturally. And dinner, Draco bitterly learned, had gone swimmingly.

“Harry, have you ever fancied someone who wasn’t a Quidditch player?” Ron asked with a
mouth full of pudding.

“Ginny,” Hermione said, a finger to her lips. “Cho…”

“Cedric,” Ron coughed.

“Tony. Now…”

“Miles,” he supplied happily.

Miles. Draco held back a sneer. No more Tony Tony Tony, but now Miles Miles Miles.

And wasn’t that bad enough? Miles’ existence? But Draco met him a few weeks later, and he
was impossible to hate. He arrived for dinner not empty-handed but with his mum’s kimchi
stew, passed down, he told them with a storyteller’s gift for gravitas, from his great-
grandparents on the same tattered old parchment in Korean that only appeared off the blank
page if a blood relative touched it. As if that wasn’t enough, it was delicious.

He complimented Pansy’s home with sincerity and included enough of Luna’s personal
touches in the praises to win her over, too. He matched Blaise’s charisma without a moment’s
hesitation.

Wedged between Harry and Draco at dinner, he even asked about his music. And not the
typical ‘Are you any good?’ but instead questions like ‘What do you love about teaching?’
and ‘Where do you draw inspiration for your original pieces?’ and ‘Who’s your favourite
composer?’ while everyone else listened enraptured as if they couldn’t have asked insightful
questions at any point in the last fourteen months.

Miles was striking, Draco could admit, too, which was just superficial salt in the wound. He
made Harry laugh, and Ron and Hermione loved him. Through context clues, he ascertained
that the four of them often got together for couples’ nights. He hadn’t asked Pansy if she and
Luna were invited—even without knowing how Draco felt, he knew her intuition was
powerful enough not to leave him or Blaise out like that.

The next few months were spent unobtrusively envious. It began to feel eerily similar to old
times, stewing in a jealousy of Harry Potter, all his friends to Draco’s two, his charm, his
handsome boyfriend. It got so mangled in his brain by May that he started losing track of
where he sat on the line between wanting to be with Harry and wanting to be him. This, too,
felt like even older times.

Harry stopped showing up fifteen minutes early. Draco arrived at a quarter to seven twice
more before he reverted reluctantly to a prompt arrival. Then, walking through the door a few
minutes in advance with parsley Pansy had asked him to pick up in June, he’d spotted Harry
sitting alone in the parlour looking—honestly—horrible.

At the sight of him, months of fuming extinguished in Draco, replaced with sympathy and a
pang of guilt that he’d been wanting this—the carefree smile wiped off Harry’s face. He
looked up, sniffed, and the corners of his mouth fought hard to tip up slightly.

“You weren’t here at a quarter ‘till,” he said first.

“I stopped coming early when you did.”

Harry’s eyes did something different, then; he was usually so keen to make eye contact—
disquietingly keen—but at that moment his gaze widened in curiosity, ping-ponged, then
settled back on his own hands. It was fleeting and interesting.

“Miles…” he supplied cryptically after a moment.

“Bugger,” Draco said. “Let me just…” He held up the greenery. “For Pansy. I’ll be right
back.”

But by the time he’d handed over the herbs and pried Pansy briefly about Miles (“I think he
got dumped, but he hasn’t specified yet,” she whispered), he returned to a parlour filled with
Gryffindors. This was personally disappointing but seemed to have a positive effect on
Harry’s psyche so he slipped back out and helped Pansy plate the meal.

Eventually, Harry explained at dinner, anyway. He always spoke openly about himself like
that, as if he had no reservations in wearing his heart on his sleeve. Miles, he said, had ended
things kindly but suddenly. Harry’s ‘fame’ was ‘a lot to contend with’.

“I think he was intimidated by me,” he mumbled, pushing around his rice.

Draco hummed, deciding to hunt for a laugh. “Well, did you immediately defeat Voldemort,
the greatest threat to wizarding society we’ve lived to experience, at the dinner table, or did
you let Miles have a go himself first? It’s emasculating to take care of it right away.”

“He’s right, you have to do a little dance first. Proper etiquette,” Blaise joined in as Harry’s
mouth tipped up. “‘Shall we split the Dark Lord’s demise?’ ‘Oh no, please let me get it. You
get it next time’.”

“Piss off,” Harry said with his biggest smile of the night. And—quickly, so quickly—he
patted Draco’s knee under the table. ‘Thank you’ he mouthed when Draco’s attention shot to
his eyes at the motion.

That breakup hit Harry harder than Tony. The good riddance energy that had filled their
dinners past their first pity party was replaced by an obvious process of grieving the loss of
someone he’d really fancied. They’d only been dating for four months and two weeks—not
that Draco had been counting—but Harry fell hard. Within a fortnight, though, he was joking
at his usual quota, even if he’d sworn off men in the process.

“Dating is more trouble than it’s worth,” he’d told Draco before dinner one night.

Draco shrugged, hypocritically unconvinced. “You know the word passion comes from the
Latin word patior, which means to suffer?”

“I can’t tell if that’s supposed to be anti- or pro-dating.”

“Take it as you want. I just think if it’s real then sometimes it hurts. Doesn’t mean you choose
to feel nothing at all instead.”

Harry’s eyes travelled his full silhouette, sizing him up. “Wise and depressing, Malfoy.”

By August that year, however, they’d all had a bout of good fortune substantial enough to
plant Miles firmly in the past. Harry had thrown himself into his work to sweat off the
heartbreak and—after having spent the better part of a year bringing dodgy prototype brooms
to gatherings and announcing ‘try this’ to whoever was most daring—sold his first bespoke,
handmade broom. He received five more orders almost immediately. Draco, through a
student’s relative, was commissioned to write a piano concerto for the London Young
Wizards Orchestra, Ron and Blaise both had major successes in cases at work, and, perhaps
most exciting, Neville had finally accepted Professor Sprout’s offer for assistant teaching in
Herbology as she slowly transitioned into her next adventure.
And it was Neville, laying on the grass in Grimmauld Place’s garden with Teddy, who made
the proposition for a trip. Draco sat nearby with a book, but the newly-minted professor
looked right to Luna, who’d gravitated towards the patch of sun hitting the little table at the
garden.

“What a busy summer,” he mused, holding Teddy’s hand over his head as he tottered around
him like a maypole. “We should get out of London.”

“Like a holiday?” she called excitedly, dropping her crossed ankles from the second garden
chair.

“Yeah! Somewhere on the water. No work allowed.”

“We must!”

“We’ll talk Friday.”

Draco was always keen to get out of London, but sat quietly, apprehensive about the concept
of no work, even if he could admit it was needed by all. The three of them were over because
Harry had yet to learn to say no to his growing broom requests and needed a Sunday in the
shop. Or rather, Luna was over to watch Teddy, Neville had a free day he’d wanted to spend
with his best friend, and Draco had spent the last month working doubly to please Harry,
which in this case meant jumping at the chance to help child mind.

And yet—always the coward—he kept his distance from the actual baby. Teddy didn’t read
his body language, unfortunately, and repeatedly jumped into his lap with the sort of scream-
laugh three-year-olds perfect too quickly.

“Just reach out and touch him,” Neville chuckled, watching him hold his hands and book up
high out of the way when Teddy collapsed upside down onto his legs.

Draco shook his head slowly at him, eyes wide. Babies, as a general phase of human growth,
were sticky and loud, but beyond that, they tended to belong to people who cared deeply
about them. And they were so small and so impressionable, with constantly reconfiguring
brains and a penchant for injury. Teddy was a walking opportunity to disappoint Harry.

“Fine,” Neville sighed. “But you’ll never get close to Harry without Teddy on your side.”

“Close to…” He laughed hoarsely. “I’m not trying to get close to anyone. I’m just here.”

Neville watched him a moment, then shrugged and reached out for Teddy to run back his
way. “Hey, maybe not. But anyone who wants to be his friend needs this little lad…”

When Harry came home, hair stuck up and work clothes covered in sawdust and polish,
Teddy was on Draco’s hip.

*****

They booked a large beach house in Saltburn-by-the-Sea, facing the North Sea coast, for a
week at the end of August when Teddy could come along. It was Pansy’s find—six
bedrooms, warm wood and stone, windows that opened to the white noise of crashing waves.
And if Draco walked down the plank steps behind the home, he could be surrounded by
mossy, rocky beach and a line of sailboats in under a minute.

There was a large kitchen that Harry took to like a wizard to a wand, but Draco’s favourite
room was at the back of the house, facing east over the shoreline. It had a stand piano,
shelves of books on coastal research and native species, and plenty of seating. That’s where
Pansy found him after everyone else had run to claim bedrooms like children.

“It’s not that I went out of my way to find a place with a piano,” she said, wrapping her arms
around him from behind. He watched the waves slither up the sand. “But when I found a
cottage with one, I supposed it would be easier than arguing with you about actually putting
your work on hold.”

He huffed. “And I’m the one who’ll get ridiculed if it’s discovered you’re playing
favourites.”

“Mm, I’ll take the fall.”

But Draco went almost the entire trip without touching the instrument. The skies were clear
most afternoons, and at least once a day they travelled down to the beach as a group, where
he would firmly situate himself on the high sand under an umbrella, book in hand. That first
day, he turned pages to the sound of Hermione shrieking (Ron had picked her up and tossed
her into the water in the name of testing temperature) and Teddy inciting laughs from the
others as he experienced the coast for the first time.

He’d fussed with a sticking charm on the umbrella post four times before getting it right, just
for Harry to run up later soaking wet with hair stuck down to his forehead, flop into the sand
beside him, and immediately nudge it distrustfully with his foot.

“Too prissy to come down to the water? On our trip to the coast?” he panted with an easy
smile. Draco glanced up from his book and back down quickly in the name of keeping his
composure. How any of them had gone near the fifteen-degree Scottish water at all was
beyond him, let alone shirtless.

“Has anyone ever told you the complexion of your skin has left you dreadfully ignorant of
other, paler peoples’ experiences?” he deadpanned, turning the page. “There’s not enough
sunblock on the planet to make it worth my while.”

Harry snorted. “God, you’re right. I’m incredibly intolerant.”

“Mm.”

“Ron’s down there. He’s made no excuses.”

“His masculinity keeps him performing bravely under dangerous UV light for his girlfriend.”

Harry said nothing in response so Draco lifted his eyes from the page again quickly, then
raised his entire head when he found Harry staring with a deepening look of contemplation.
“What?” he asked.

Harry shook his head. “I’ve just realised this must be the first time I’ve seen you in a t-shirt.
How is that… last summer did you not wear short sleeves once? I guess with the cooling
charms and your general disinterest in… well, the outdoors, it’s never—I haven’t…”

Draco grasped, suddenly, that Harry was looking down at his left arm holding his paperback,
the raised pink scar there, and the words tattooed over it years later. He laughed. The sound
caught the other man off guard.

“What?” Harry’s head jerked back self-consciously. “What’s so funny?”

“I forgot.”

“You forgot?”

“The—I try to cover the mark. Mostly just for ease of moving through condemnatory
wizarding London, so when I’d imagined you finally seeing it, I really did think it would be a
painstakingly purposeful choice. But I… I just forgot this morning.”

Harry laughed next, holding his gaze steady. “You forgot.”

“Completely.”

“I can forget, too,” he said.

“No.” Draco laid his book down open on the towel. He leaned back on his hands to match
Harry’s posture. “I suppose subconsciously it was time.”

Harry stole another look, then tilted his head back, shutting his eyes into the sun, so Draco
looked out at their friends again. Hermione and Teddy were sitting in the sand just where the
tide could come and lick at their heels. Further in, Blaise and Ron stood waist-deep with
Pansy and Luna on their shoulders, Neville appearing to referee whatever hijinks was
occurring.

“May I see?”

Harry’s voice brought him back from the water’s edge and without pause he shifted his
weight to lift his left arm and hold it out in front of them. Harry took it carefully. His palm
was gritty with sand, damp from the water. His wet, bare shoulder touched Draco’s.

“When did you add to it?” he asked, tracing a fingertip along the thin black lettering that
trailed down the length of the serpent and skull. It sent a shiver up Draco’s spine.

“A year after the war.”

“‘No wrong notes’,” he read aloud. “What does that mean? If you don’t mind.”

Draco kept his gaze trained on Harry’s fingers wrapped around the thin skin of his wrist
instead of braving eye contact. He cleared his throat.
“There’s a jazz pianist called Thelonious Monk,” he explained, “who famously said ‘there are
no wrong notes on the piano, just better choices’. It stuck with me. So it’s my reminder—of
what I’ve done that I can never take back, but also of the opportunity to be better moving
forward. It is, admittedly, a bit cliché.”

“No! Not at all, that’s... blimey, I don’t have any meaningful tattoos.”

“You have tattoos?”

“No, no. Maybe someday.” Harry grinned, then seemed to feel Draco’s skin beneath his
fingers for the first time and let go. He ran his hands up and down his shins absently. “So I
can’t get you to come back down with me? There’s nothing I can do?”

“Nothing,” Draco whispered, the corners of his mouth creeping up.

“I’d resort to a kidnap-and-toss like Ron did with Hermione but he has the benefit of eternal
love and I’d just get hexed.”

“And I’d do it in front of Teddy. He’d never idolise you then.”

Harry shifted forward with a knowing nod, and in retribution made sure to shake his hands
through his hair before standing, sprinkling Draco with saltwater.

“Oh, fuck off, you arsehole,” he groaned, smacking Harry’s rising calf with the book he’d
just doubled over to save from saturating. “I remember why we hated each other just as often
as I forget.”

But when he jogged back towards the group, Draco set his book back down. He chose,
instead, to participate from afar. It was his own compromise with a Harry that wasn’t even
considering him anymore but instead walking Teddy towards the waves in easy conversation
with Hermione.

Children grow upwards at an alarming speed, he thought, smiling as Teddy picked up pace
into the foam. Harry said in the parlour once before dinner that he’d changed his hair colour
shortly a time or two after birth, but it’d been strictly Harry-colored for a while now. Once in
a blue moon, it went red, which each Weasley was capable of attributing to their doting
influence. But mostly it grew as black as Harry’s, touching, even if it was far from the only
piece of Harry that Draco saw in him.

Every day Harry asked him to come in the water and every day Draco refused. But he’d only
read twenty pages of his book in all that time, so content was he to sit and observe. It was
unavoidable, when the observing was so nice. And sinful, really, if the rest of the group knew
that long after they came inside, showered, filled the living space with laughter and Celestina
Warbeck and wine, Draco would still be thinking of Harry standing on the waterline,
contrapposto and silhouetted by sun; everything a Greek statue wished it could be, if it had
the honour of being beautifully, heart-poundingly human.

*****
On their last evening, once Teddy had been put to bed, the gang gathered in the back room
for exploding snap and finishing off of the shiraz and cheese they didn’t want to lug home.

It was a perfect final night, Draco thought. It started with easy laughing and somehow turned
into divulging Hogwarts-era secrets they’d all been too antagonistic to share at the time. This
was how Draco came to learn he’d once had an extensive discussion with Harry and Ron in
the Slytherin common room, thinking them to be Crabbe and Goyle, though no one would
tell him where Hermione had been (her glare of confidentiality had been uncontestable).
Harry had a proud smirk on the entire time Ron recounted the story, and when Draco met his
eyes he winked. Full of secrets, he thought. He wished for them all.

They grew a little quieter, then, after the roundtable of childhood memories. Ron was the first
to turn in, Hermione laughing in his arms, which paved the way for Luna and Pansy to do the
same.

“Thank Circe, all the boring old married types have finally left us bachelors at peace,” Blaise
had said when they’d left. “Spin the bottle?”

“Unfortunately, I’m going to prove a partner isn’t required to be boring,” Neville replied,
standing too. When he’d stepped over Harry and Draco’s extended legs on the rug where they
sat propped against the couch and bid them ado, Blaise redirected his attention yet again with
something akin to desperation.

“Harry. Draco. Our last night, lads. Tomorrow we have one more splendid lunch and then we
must return to work and life…”

“One more round of snap, then,” Draco acquiesced.

Blaise beamed. “Fantastic. I’m brewing coffee, anyone else?”

“You outpaced me tenfold,” Harry sighed from his right, resting his head back on the seat of
the sofa. Draco nodded in agreement. He was so sober that coffee would just keep him from
sleeping.

“Suit yourselves,” he said, sauntering out once they’d pulled their knees up for his passage.
Draco heard the click and whirr of the coffee maker in the kitchen.

Alone now, he leaned his head back, watching in his periphery as it prompted Harry’s to
swivel towards him. He didn’t dare turn and meet his eyes this close.

“Had a good week?” Harry mumbled.

“Mmhm.”

“Me too.”

His head turned straight again, falling into silence, so Draco counted to ten and chanced his
own look. Harry’s eyes were closed, his breathing steady. He lingered on his lamp-lit face
selfishly while he could. There was still sand in his eyebrows.
Not until he’d looked away and closed his eyes did Harry say, softer than before, “I don’t
think I’m a bachelor.”

“I thought you were asleep,” he replied without turning.

“No.”

Draco couldn’t hear Blaise clanking about the kitchen anymore.

“If you’re not a bachelor, then what are you?”

“Ideally… a nun.”

“A nun?” Draco huffed. “Mm. A nun. You would look nice in the habit.”

He turned again and watched Harry smile fully, eyes shut, then gulped a breath when his lids
suddenly opened to bright green and he lifted his head to study Draco closely.

“Are you seeing someone?”

“Am I seeing someone?” he repeated in surprise.

“Sure,” said Harry casually, as though they chatted like this often. “All this time and I’ve
never seen you with anyone. Have you dated?”

“I’ve… dated. Not lately.”

“Not since I’ve known you?”

Knowing each other, as Draco understood it, began at Pansy’s party. Everything that had
come before was a result of not knowing each other at all.

“No.”

“Why not?”

Draco rolled his eyes dismissively. “It’s not unusual. Neville’s not seeing anyone either.”

“Neville’s married to Herbology. Or Professor Sprout. What’s your problem?”

“Merlin, now it’s a problem?”

“Well, it can’t be for nothing,” said Harry. “You’re… you’d be—there must be a problem,
because you’d have no trouble—I’m sure we’d find you someone.”

“Just leave it, Harry.”

He narrowed his eyes. “No, seriously. I’m always wondering. What’s the huge red flag?
There must be one because you’d be a catch. And don’t get all gloomy Death Eater, it’s not
that. Do you snore? Is it your mother? I bet it’s your mother, she’s petrifying.”
“It’s not…” His mother’s piercing face filled his head like a spectre. But no. “It’s not my
mum.”

“Is Blaise just the worst wingman?” He leaned in closer, conspiratorially with a twinkle in his
eye. “I’d do better.”

Harry helping him find some other strange man to take home sounded like a walking
nightmare.

“No.”

“A secret boyfriend?”

“No.”

“A secret girlfriend?”

“No.”

“Then why not?”

They were sitting so close that, to Draco, it couldn’t have been an accident. So he put a hand
on Harry’s knee and, when that wasn’t immediately shoved away, he kissed him. He closed
the distance unthinkingly, with a sudden impatience that threw out an entire year of
impressive fortitude.

This is why, he could only hope it said. Obviously, this is why.

Harry inhaled sharply through his nose in surprise but for a perfect two seconds, he kissed
back—or at least didn’t pull away, didn’t push Draco’s hand off his knee in disgust.

The thrill of it felt like such a natural escalation from a series of thrills of intimacy he’d
committed to memory, imagining this intensification would never happen: Harry reaching up
to pluck pollen from his hair; Harry hugging him on his birthday, fast but tight; Harry tasting
the drink he’d made for himself, communing their spit on the rim. He tossed those now-
trivial moments aside as a starving man would bin his last can of beans for a Sunday roast.

When they parted, Harry’s eyes were saucers, so unblinkingly wide that he must have
watched Draco kiss him, and instantly his rush of adrenaline and joy was replaced with
mortification. There was just enough time to take one full breath before Blaise walked
through the door with a loud groan.

“I heard a child calling out, so I try to be responsible and get conned into displaying maternal
instincts for minutes. Minutes, Harry.”

Harry blinked a few times, then sat straighter. “And… what did these classic Blaise Zabini
maternal instincts tell you to do?”

“Well, I tried saying ‘shush’…”

They waited patiently, but Blaise didn’t elaborate.

“Oh, that’s it?” said Harry.

“It didn’t work. He’s asking for you.”

He nodded into a grimace and got to his feet while Draco was still trying to find his voice,
unsuccessfully, though his brain was doing all too well at coming up with words. Words like
Why isn’t Harry speechless? That can’t be a good sign, and You kiss someone who just
announced he’d like to be a nun? and Merlin’s pants, that felt amazing.

“I’m off then,” Harry said, stretching his arms up in the doorway now with aggravating ease.
“I hope—er, sleep well, Draco.”

He smiled lightly then disappeared. Had Blaise taken note of the pink on his face, or the
wetness of his lips? He only scoffed, rolling his eyes as he took the spot next to Draco. “I’ll
sleep well, too, thank you.”

‘Sleep well’, Draco thought, was certainly not going to make his brain turn any slower.

February 2013

Hermione seems to have been designated the person with the best bedside manners because
it’s she who speaks once Harry’s lowered himself into the remaining living room armchair.
There’s no dallying—Draco appears properly high strung, as though he’s already sat through
enough horrible anticipation waiting for his arrival.

“So, Harry. Draco,” she starts, voice immeasurably gentle. “Bill and his colleagues have a
definitive answer for you. I won’t dance around it.” Her chest rises and she wipes her palms
calmly on her trousers. Harry braces himself instantly. “It appears that rather than being
foundationally a memory charm constructed to affect love, the makeup is closer to a love
potion base rigged to affect memory. Which means, as we feared, it’s the love component that
would need to be supplemented for an antidote. That is… impossible in our current
understanding of magic.”

She presses her lips together, glancing between them. No one speaks. Harry takes a deep,
lung-filling breath and pushes at the carpet with the toe of his trainer. He’ll wait for someone
else to voice their thoughts into the growingly awkward silence. If he opened his mouth, he
wouldn’t know what to say other than ‘oh. okay,’ and he can read the room well enough to
know that would be rude.

It’s not as if this isn’t bad news. He sees that. Having no antidote won’t leave him free of loss
—things like Rose’s birth, for example, are gone without it, or the knowledge of how half
these items ended up in his home. And then there’s the awkwardness he’s refused to consider
until the worst-case scenario manifested—watching his friends mourn a loss he’s both
responsible and an inadequate replacement for. Already, he sits with hardened acceptance
among faces that have turned grim faster than he could have imagined. Even Bill looks upset.
“I suppose I haven’t been an alchemy hobbyist all this time for nothing,” Draco says quietly.
He meets Bill’s eyes. “If you provide the diagnostics from the curse-breakers, I can start
experimenting.”

Hermione frowns. “It’s… there’s nothing for you to discover. It’s just a law of magic; you
can’t summon food from thin air and you can’t… create genuine love.”

“But you can take love away?”

“It comes with the territory of memory charms, unfortunately,” says Bill. “Take away all fond
memories of a person, you’re likely to affect the very foundation for romantic feelings.”

“But you said it’s not so much a memory charm as a—” He gives up halfway through and
drops his head into his hands, blonde hair slotted crazily through his fingers.

“Golpalott’s Third Law,” Bill responds patiently. “An antidote is more than the sum of its
parts. So Godric forbid one of the parts is love and—”

“I know the law, thanks,” Draco mutters. Soon, Harry thinks, they’ll realise he’s said nothing.
But then Draco’s rubbing his eyes and leaning back into the couch in a slouch,
uncharacteristically wilted. “What’s left to do?”

Hermione nods, focused. “Think about it like this: You get braces, they rearrange your teeth,
and then when they’re removed you’re given a retainer to hold that position. When you stop
wearing your retainer, they shift back. At that point, a retainer won’t fix it. Only new braces
will.”

Draco stares back blankly at the swift turn into dentistry.

“I’m saying falling in love was the braces, and building a life together was the retainer. The
remaining solution,” she says, “is new braces.”

“Getting Harry to love me again. Organically. To get the memories back?”

“I’m… seventy per cent sure that if he were to regain the romantic emotions, he’d regain the
associated memories. Given the way the curse worked,” Bill adds helpfully.

“Oh, good heavens, an entire seventy per cent!” Draco’s voice rises in pitch sarcastically.

Harry, meanwhile, manages to lift the entire corner of the carpet and stick his shoe
underneath.

“Er, I should say, publicly, nothing has changed,” Ron says. “Which means continuing to live
at Grimmauld Place, keeping the details to a select few. Friends and family only. I know
living together hasn’t been the easiest, but it feels necessary for Harry to begin regaining
feelings. I’m sure—”

“Why is everyone talking like it’s been decided?”

Harry’s voice finally draws all eyes to him, Draco’s head whipping up the fastest. In the
sudden and intense attention, he backs away from the bluntness. “Sorry, I don’t mean to
sound rude. I’m just—is it not up to me how to proceed?”

“Surely this is the way to proceed, as a safety issue. Recovering the memories. We don’t
know who did this, and Ron said it’s dangerous not to know,” Draco says quickly.

Ron grimaces. “Well, actually… I’ve spoken with all of you, with anyone else in Harry’s
circle, colleagues, customers that day… No one knows about any potential danger. I did find
seven other fan-posted packages also addressed to the shop that were cursed or charmed on
some level. Three with love spells. Essentially, it is unsafe not to have this solved yet and it’s
my top priority, but it appears to be par for the course. Except for this time Harry was…
cavalier enough to open one.”

“I’m sure I would’ve told you if anything dodgy had been going on,” Harry tells Ron
confidently, feeling the conversation swaying in his favour.

“Bollocks.” Draco speaks thinly and firmly. “Harry getting cursed isn’t par for the course.”

“An attempt is. Look, I’m not dismissing it, I’m just saying he doesn’t need to treat
Grimmauld Place like a bunker.”

“This isn’t a slip up. This is… this is the tide pulling in before a tsunami. This is animals
fleeing before an earthquake!”

“Draco, I appreciate that this is personally life-changing,” Ron says slowly. “For all of us.
But objectively it’s not a sign of anything as of now. We had a hunch, I investigated the
hunch, case closed. If any animals are fleeing an earthquake, it’s all the Death Eaters that’ve
been moving away from London. There’s less Dark energy here than has been in years.”

“Reformed ex-Death Eaters, like the one you’re speaking to,” Draco scowls. “And I can’t
bloody blame them, half the time I want to leave this parasite of a city. Contrary to Auror
methodology, there’s no direct fucking line anymore between Dark magic in play and how
many wizards you can count a snake tattoo on.”

“Okay, let’s all take a breath,” Hermione says coolly. “This is difficult to hear, I know. It’s all
to say, really, the consensus now is that this is a health matter, not a criminal matter. So we
can’t… you can’t force anyone into something as intensive and subjective as this.”

Harry’s heart soars with the impartiality his best friends are affording him. Draco, however,
looks equal opportunity angry at whoever dares meet his eyes. Harry’s had no hate potion in
his system for over a week, but a little flutter of something all-naturally satisfying passes
through him to see the other man outnumbered in the way he’s felt so often since two
Saturdays ago.

Then his gaze darts to Harry and instead of anger it’s replaced with something verging on
begging. In the discomfort of receiving it, Harry feels all the reservations that have led him to
this decision; look how much power he holds over someone else’s happiness. Wouldn’t it be
crueller to agree to something he knows he’s not capable of? Why extend Draco’s pain?
He addresses him directly, trying to look as genuinely apologetic as he feels.

“I’m sorry, but I don’t think we can force something back into reality that I don’t even know
to miss. You seem nice, but our lives—they’re so different than they were when we first met.
The circumstances have changed, we’ve changed. We can’t just apply the same formula from
when we were twenty.”

He glances at Ron and Hermione but their expressions are carefully controlled.

“Sometimes-sometimes shitty things happen in life and-and you just have to move in a new
direction. Unexpected tragedy separates people all the time; death of a loved one, or a horrific
accident, I just—I think this is our tragedy.”

He thinks Draco’s eyes flicker with something stronger when he says our. Maybe he’s
offended by the implication that they’re equally torn asunder by the ‘tragedy’. Or maybe it’s
just the first time since the Obliviation that he’s heard Harry use the unifying word. He’s
flexing his hands incessantly, too, shaking his head the longer Harry talks.

“No, I… no,” he says. “That’s not how this is going to go. Not when we have a prospective
solution.”

“How is pressing me to try and fall in love again under completely different circumstances
any different from the fakeness of love potions that do exist?”

“Because I love you already!” he snaps, voice shaky. “And you already loved me. You’ve
done it once. You can do it again. If you just—”

“I don’t feel anything,” Harry interjects. At night, when words had come to him, ways to let
Draco down gently, they’d never sounded so blunt. “I’ve tried. I’m not the same. I don’t feel
anything for you. Haven’t you heard of ‘right person, wrong time’?” He waves his hands
around the room desperately. “Wrong time!”

Much better, Harry, really, he thinks, swallowing thickly. A stunning show of compassion.

This retort finally sends Draco to his feet, looking pallid and stalking from the room. He
shakes his hands at his sides as he goes, as if he’s touched something hot. Harry sits forward
in his chair and rests his forehead in his hands.

“That felt terrible,” he says to a room full of awkwardly averted eyes.

“Are you alright?” Hermione’s tender voice breaks the silence.

“No,” he says, “I feel awful. What can I even tell him? I don’t see any way out but through.”

Still staring at his feet, he hears her stand and walk closer before he feels her hand on his
shoulder. “Nothing needs to be decided right now. You can think about what you want to do.
Maybe you’ll feel optimistic in time.”

“Sure.”
“You two… that’s something special. Do you remember after Ginny you said you’d be lucky
if you found half of what Ron and I have?” Harry nods. “In full,” she says. “But. I’m happy if
you are. Whatever you’re offering, we want. I’m sure Draco feels the same.”

Harry huffs a laugh, but doesn’t challenge it. He’s sure to find out for himself, sooner than
later, whether that’s true.

*****

Hermione, Bill, and Ron leave without saying goodbye to Draco, mostly because the light
had been on in the locked first-floor washroom since he walked out and the most they’d
gotten was a distant ‘go away’ when Hermione rapped her knuckles lightly on the door.

Harry certainly doesn’t attempt contact. He still hears no creaking wood above him as he
cooks dinner. Perhaps he’s not as attentive as he thought, though, because when a steady
voice says, “It’s always quiet” somewhere behind him, he startles.

Draco’s teetering on the bottom step, lifting his heels irresolutely with a leather-bound book
in his arms. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to surprise you.”

“It’s fine,” Harry mumbles, focusing back on the hob. “I’ve been trying to be quiet. Since I
interrupted your lesson this week.”

He hears the footsteps move again, the creak of wicker. “No, Harry, that’s not… I meant that
we always have music playing. Watching you cook in silence is eerie.”

“Oh.”

Volunteered information. He’s only done it a few times. When he’s angsty. Harry doesn’t
have to wonder long whether it’ll continue.

“Can I trouble you while you’re eating?” asks Draco.

Harry glances back to the table where he’s sitting rigidly, one hand placed over the book like
he’s going to swear on it in court. He shrugs apathetically and collects his dishes. He’s hardly
pulled out a chair of his own before it’s being pushed towards him.

“This is a photo album,” Draco says.

“Okay.”

“I was hoping to share a few pictures. While you’re deciding what you want to do.”

Decided, Harry thinks. And on top of it, he finds this all a bit uncomfortable. But he’s not
heartless, just loveless. He nods.

“Okay.”

He takes a bite of his risotto while Draco hurriedly flips the album open. He pulls it up
slightly out of Harry’s view as he flips through. “I won’t show you anything too substantial.
Just… us. Living our life.”

“Okay.”

He flattens the album and turns it to face Harry again. It’s a group photo.

“It’s a group photo.”

“I know.”

Draco’s eyes are on him expectantly, the only sound in the room the clink of his fork on the
bowl. The wicker creaks some more as Draco shifts awkwardly in his seat.

“It’s us all in the stands at Teddy’s first intramural match,” he adds.

“I see,” says Harry, and finally leans closer. They’re grinning, huddled close like a makeshift
family with their arms slung around each other's shoulders. The colours for the Central
London Snidgets were gold and blue and everyone was dressed appropriately, even Blaise,
who looked stunningly unrecognisable in the simple act of donning a bright yellow Quidditch
jersey. Harry stood centre, like he’d been pulled quickly in, in his usual coach’s attire.

He remembers the day clearly—remembers a bunch of children a foot off the ground flying
towards the wrong goals, remembers laughing lovingly at the young Beaters missing soft
Bludgers completely at every turn. What he doesn’t remember is the man standing next to
him, decked out in a blue and gold away kit and a matching scarf. It’s a set of fashion choices
he’d never expect from the Draco he’s known thus far. His photographed self tops it off with
a smile wider than Harry’s ever seen. When he moves it’s at Harry’s gentle nudge to turn and
show the letters LUPIN across the back of his shoulders.

Again, it hits—that feeling of loss for another Harry. His condolences, for another Harry. But
this Harry looks at the image with all the interest of a historian piecing a story together
through artefacts.

Draco’s eyes are locked on him, waiting for him to say something, so he offers, “We lost
horribly.”

“Ridiculously,” he mumbles back, flipping intently to another photo. “This one, too. This is a
good one.”

Gone are all the familiar faces of old friends—this is just the two of them and one extremely
large carrot. They cradle it between them like a newborn, glancing into the camera with wide
grins before turning towards each other for a quick kiss.

It’s an older photo. The wiggentree they sit under is so young. It’s also the first time Harry’s
seen them kiss. He watches himself lean in a few times.

“Do you remember?” Draco asks.

He shakes his head.

“You accidentally doubled the magical fertilizer Nev brought you. You had an entire harvest
like this.”

“Oh.”

“They were grim. I helped you dig the crop up, we cooked it together, then ordered takeaway
immediately.”

Harry hums, letting his finger trace the edge of the protective film. “What an unfortunate day
to commemorate.”

“Hm, as Cicero would say, ‘lucunda memoria est praeteritorum malorum’—”

“I don’t know Latin.”

“Clearly I was about to translate it,” Draco grumbles, flipping through the album once more.
“’Pleasant is the memory of past troubles.’ I’d give anything for you to cook up such
horrendous vegetables that we argue whether to get Indian.”

“Yeah, well.” Harry takes another large bite of his risotto.

In response, the other man stares blankly at him, fingers frozen between two pages.
“Alright,” he says wearily. “This one. You adored this one.” He proudly pushes it back to
Harry.

He’s right. It’s the only picture that really gives him pause, in part because Teddy is so lanky
and snarky now but there he is at eight in a small Gryffindor jumper, kneeling between a
seated Harry and Draco on a blanket in the grass. But he pauses too because this picture
seems to hardly be about him at all. He leans back on his arms, head tilted and grinning at the
camera, in the edge of the frame.

Teddy’s hair is pale as the clouds, leaning up to mush his cheek against Draco’s with a young
child’s grin—as wide as possible, gums seemingly filled with teeth at random, one here,
another gone there, eyes so squinted that they’re close to shut. He’s hanging so heavily off
Draco that he looks to be a moment from falling completely into his lap.

“Hermione took it,” he tells him gently, seeming to have caught the change in Harry’s
demeanour.

“I need to talk to Teddy,” Harry thinks out loud. His eyes soften, staring interestedly at his
face laughing back up from the glossy paper. “I’m not cruel, you know. I do feel things. I feel
sorry for him.”

“Sorry for Teddy?”

“For Harry.”

Draco says nothing, just sits with his lips pressed in and his brow furrowed thoughtfully.

“He looked happy. I know that we were happy.”

“Do you feel sorry for me?”

“Yes,” Harry answers instantly.

He meets glassy eyes of grey, sitting atop bags of sleeplessness that seem more prominent
than he’d noticed, now that they’re just a table’s width away. Something about his entire
being feels on the point of breaking.

“Of course,” Harry carries on. “You care about me, I cared about you. It would—I wish you
could feel how I feel. I’m not trying not to love you, not like the hate potion. It’s just that… I
can’t manifest something that isn’t there. I think this just means it’s time to move on. Isn’t it
nice, though, to know it was so beautiful while we had it?”

Draco swallows hard. He’d pressed a fist to his lips as he listened, but now the hand moves to
pull the hair at his temple. “Move on,” he says.

“Unfortunately.”

He chuckles in disbelief. “Do you know how sociopathic you sound?”

“Sorry?” Harry replies weakly.

He gestures at the photo of them with Teddy. “Your entire life was absolutely decimated.
You’ve lost a significant number of memories, a life partner… and we’re all being as patient
and understanding as possible around you, but this is big, Harry. You’re acting like this isn’t
big. You’re shrugging and telling me to just move on. Act like this is world-ending, for fuck’s
sake!”

The word sociopathic echoes in Harry’s head. Could he be? Because he’s just watched
Draco’s face grow red and frustrated and thought, the other Harry would be very concerned,
but I mostly feel like I’ve gotten in trouble.

“If you could just feel how I feel,” he stammers again.

“Is that all you have to say?” groans Draco.

“I don’t know what else to say! I—I’m running out of ways to say this, it would be easier if
you just could feel it.”

“This is all acidly ironic considering our marriage has been a series of you convincing me to
talk about my emotions.”

Harry wets his lips and tries to speak without a pained look. “Okay. My honest emotions? I.
Do not. Remember you. We met at a party, we were nice enough, we saw each other more,
and then a fucking decade passed and this bloke I sort of knew was overwhelmingly more
interested in me than I was in him. Imagine if a complete stranger came up to you and said
‘you need to fall in love with me because you have before’. I cannot be the first person whose
Obliviation ruined a marriage. The only difference between me and them is I remember
enough to know it wasn’t perfect, anyway.”
“How do you mean?” Draco’s voice is almost inaudible.

“I mean I remember the Manor dinner. Vividly remember it. You and me.”

He shakes his head, unconcerned. “No, you don’t remember that. We’d been together for
years.”

“I do! I remember it. You wore a suit. It was black. Your nails were painted and your mother
noticed. We were supposed to eat duck but we left before we were served.”

They both know what him remembering it implies.

Draco’s stunned. He looks as hurt as Harry had hoped. It seems to him at this moment that
hurt is the only way this is finally going to get through the bizarrely thick wall of optimism
the other man had built up.

“How long have you remembered that?” he whispers.

“Since the hate potion wore off. When it was easier to think again. Look, I’m very sorry. I’m
really sorry, Draco, you’re a… you’re an innocent bystander. But he—” Harry presses a
finger to his own laughing photographed face. “—doesn’t know how to get back here. He’s
got too much distance to cross. I think he’s gone.”

Draco’s shell-shocked eyes had followed his finger and for a moment they both stare down at
the album, Harry’s last words hanging in the air. He’s sure Draco is going to say something.
Or ask a question. Or yell at him again. But instead in one harsh swoop, the album’s torn
from under his hand and clutched tightly to Draco’s chest. The way he looks at him before
turning is at once refreshingly recognisable in its bitterness.

“Hold on,” Harry calls after, heart hammering. The flash of an idea, albeit an unnerving one,
had come to mind. He’d give anything, maybe, to have someone fully understand how he
feels instead of reluctantly imagining. “Are you still skilled at Occlumency? That would
mean you could give Legilimency a try, right? You—I mean, if you really want to know how
I feel.”

Draco fixes him with a look of extreme judgement. “I don’t want to go rooting through your
head. I’ll take your word for it if you don’t love me, thank you.”

“I don’t mind if it helps you understand.”

Draco’s jaw clenches like Harry’s slapped him in the face. “You need to understand that I
would never do something that invasive to my Harry, just because this-this other version of
him says it’s okay. I know he’d be uncomfortable. No.” His expression hardens, as does his
grip on the album. “And I’d appreciate it if you didn’t use his persuasive face to ask me to
perform Dark magic to confirm I’m not loved by him. Fucking hell.”

He leaves Harry standing there, listening to his footsteps overhead. By the time he follows
him upstairs, he’s made perfect timing to hear the living room doors slam shut and the piano
ring out with a furious volume. There’s a drastic incongruence between the melodrama he’s
 heard this month and the frantic tempo that follows him all the way up to the bedroom like
his head’s under the piano lid. He runs swiftly back downstairs.

“Draco!” He calls over the music, pounding on the door and lowering his fist when the music
stops. And yet nothing comes of it. The doors stay shut. He steps closer and speaks into the
seam between the French doors. “Draco. Hey, put a silencing charm on, please, I can’t focus
on anything with that sou—ah.”

The door flies open, sweeping a breeze through Draco’s hair as he meets Harry’s face with a
piercing expression. “Can’t. Focus?” he hisses, eyes narrowed, lips pressed so tight they’ve
gone colourless.

“Yeah.”

“Apologies,” he spits. He holds Harry’s gaze as he brandishes his wand behind them
wordlessly, then steps back and shuts the door in his face.

Chapter End Notes

Hope you've enjoyed it thus far!

Feel free to leave some words below in the comments, or find me at

writandromance.tumblr.com. Doing my best to reply as often as I can, but know I read
them all!
 Adagio for Strings
Chapter Notes

The chapter title refers to Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings, for the second movement
of his String Quarter, Op. 11.

See the end of the chapter for more notes

August 2001

The best part of a holiday was waking early, walking through the white-bright empty home
alone and unbothered. Draco had been doing it all week. Brewing coffee. Sitting and reading.
They slept with the windows open, so in the quiet morning walking to the back room felt like
holding one big seashell to his ear.

Sleeping was difficult to acquire but easy to keep. His closest encounters with Harry had
often made it impossible to get a good night’s rest, but once he slowed his thoughts enough to
the more meditative qualities—Harry’s lips, a sharp breath, two seconds of quiet elation—of
what was a horrifically momentous evening—Harry’s wide eyes, Blaise’s maddeningly
untimely reentrance, the hole in his gut the moment they parted—he could lull himself into a
few solid hours of sleep.

And when he woke, for the first time all holiday it was with a desire to choose the piano over
the sofa for the morning. He’d play through whatever was circling his head and see if
anything bordering articulate resounded out. The comfort of productivity could stave off the
panic of seeing Harry again.

This was instantly binned when he spotted a familiar figure laying on the couch in the back
room, who unfortunately spotted him too.

“Oh,” he said daftly, pausing in the doorway.

“Morning,” Harry replied, sitting up a little more and resting a book on his knee. Self-Braking
Spellcasting for Nonmagical Woods. Riveting.

“I can go, I didn’t…”

“No! No, stay, it’s my bad, er…”

“I didn’t expect anyone else to be awake,” said Draco.

He waved his hands flippantly. “And I’m not usually awake.”

In the silence that followed, Draco spent an excruciating amount of focus taking a sip of his
coffee.

Harry cleared his throat. “Look, should we—”

“Another day of good weather,” he said quickly. Beyond the window, the sky was indeed
cloudless and growing bluer as the hour lengthened. Harry twisted to look behind him, then
frowned.

“It’ll rain soon.”

“It’ll rain soon?” Draco pressed, shifting in the doorframe. “It’s lovely out.”

He shrugged. “I make a lot of weather-based small talk, you know, at work, coaching... I
think I’ve just gotten a feel for it. And I just… I feel like it’ll rain. Did you come to play?”

“Oh,” he glanced at the piano. “I don’t need to.”

“I don’t mind.”

“That’s kind,” Draco said. “But I don’t rehearse in front of people.”

Harry slumped back down in his corner of the couch. “Please? I love when you practice at
Pansy’s and don’t put that iron-clad silencing spell on. It helps me focus, your playing.”

If that happened, then it had been a misstep. Draco briefly ventured into the past, wondering
just how often he’d thought he was the only visitor at Pansy’s and Harry had been sitting
quietly somewhere just out of sight. He wondered too why it didn’t feel as invasive as he
thought it should. If he’d thought, say, Ron had heard, he’d be mortified.

He certainly wasn’t going to compose in front of him, but there were pieces he could use to
warm up. There was a measure of power to accepting the request, Draco thought, so sure was
he that they were just extending the half-life before they had to talk about last night. Minutes
of piano sat between now and Harry letting him down, a court jester safe from the king’s
wrath so long as he kept him entertained.

Slowly, he raised his chin at Harry’s charming smile and acted like it wasn’t a shot to the
heart to receive in all its genuine brightness. Passion comes from patior for suffering.

Harry sucked in an excited breath as he crossed the room to the piano and barely remembered
again to block the room’s noise from the rest of the sleeping household. He briefly considered
asking what the other man wanted to hear, but that seemed too accommodating and when he
glanced behind his shoulder Harry was very pointedly reading again anyway.

He played Liszt. That he could do justice even with nervous hands, because Liszt hardly
required connection to his brain by now. After a while, the world dependably disappeared to
just his fingers. The waves out the window were soothing, and Harry acted nonexistent—he
was strangely good at that. Draco hopped from piece to piece without pausing, scared of what
sort of conversation could step into the silence, until finally he dropped his hands and looked
out the window. He’d played long enough that wispy, grey clouds were beginning to creep in.
There was an urge difficult to control that was nudging him to glance back at Harry and see if
he was still reading, but he resisted it. The time with which he could delay the inevitable felt
like it had run out.

“Draco?” Harry spoke softly. “Are you ready to talk yet?”

Merlin, he thought, is there nothing unapparent about me? He kept his gaze on the clouds
outside.

“You’re perceptive.”

He chuckled. “Definitely not. I think you just remind me of myself. Anyway, I’m not gonna
force a conversation on you.”

“No, I’m as ready as I’ll ever be,” Draco sighed, body tensing like this would be a physical
punch to the gut and not an emotional one. He finally turned completely on the piano bench
to face Harry, whose eyes brightened in attentiveness. “I want you to know, first… I
apologise fully for kissing you like that. Usually I have more self-control than doing
something simply because I want to.”

“But you wanted to,” Harry said slowly, closing his book.

He felt as though he had to fight an Imperius curse just to nod even slightly, being so used to
denying the charge. “I’m sorry if I ruined your holiday.”

“You made my holiday,” Harry responded quickly, planting his feet flat on the ground to face
him more directly. “Let’s get that straightened out, first. I was just stunned. You always keep
a distance from me. I’d convinced myself you didn’t feel that way.”

“Of course I felt that way—look at the distance I kept just not to go mad.”

Harry laughed lightly. He made Harry’s holiday. Harry wasn’t cross. Harry was smiling wide
enough to reveal the dimple. Harry looked lovely.

“I didn’t think you’d feel that way,” he continued quietly. “Or at the very least I should join a
queue.”

“What, at the back? Or would you jump it? You’ve got the makings of a jumper.” Even his
smirk, perhaps at a level of relaxation Draco hadn’t caught up to yet, was eye-catching.

He rolled his eyes. “Please, don’t joke right now.”

“Sorry. The idea of you waiting your turn is just…” Harry tilted his head, voice softening
after a moment of consideration. “I wish you saw yourself the way I see you,” he said.
“Because I see this boy who, rather democratically, hated himself just as much as he hated
everyone else. Who-who managed to unlearn all the arrogance in his family and do the right
thing again and again and again. You’re—listen—” He snapped his fingers as Draco’s eye
contact drifted away self-consciously. “You’re thoughtful and-and kind, even if you’d be
embarrassed to hear it. Someone I’m glad will influence Teddy as he grows older. You’re
finally the person I would’ve wanted to be friends with at eleven.”
“You want to be friends,” Draco managed.

“No, I mean yes, but—do you understand? I want you to understand,” Harry said earnestly.
“You’re brilliant. The way you play and the—how you are when you’re concentrating on
those alchemy books. And you’re so good with Teddy like I never saw coming. And
handsome and stoic and clever… You’re impossible not to like. I don’t know how everyone
else manages it.”

Draco chuckled, though inwardly his brain was shorting out. He could feel the heat in his
ears. This was more information about himself than he knew how to take in. Pansy and Blaise
were his best friends, but they had a go at each other more often than they laid the
compliments on heavy. It was like swallowing a tough pill with nothing to chase it. Him:
handsome in Harry’s eyes, kind in Harry’s eyes, desirable.

“So then…” he prompted, at a loss for his own words.

Harry stood and crossed the room, so Draco budged over instinctually on the piano bench. He
straddled it to face him directly, eyes intense. It was exponentially more distracting than it
had been ten minutes ago, when he hadn’t known how mutual things stood.

“The thing is,” Harry said, voice low like all they’d said was public knowledge and this was
the secret. “If you’re interested in this, if we pursue this, I’ll be a goner.”

“A goner?” he echoed.

Harry took a lung-filling breath. “Yeah, Draco,” he sighed. “That’ll be it for me. Tony… well,
Tony I ended up happy to see go. Miles, I—that was hard in the moment but I was fine. But
you… we’re so connected, our lives are so connected, our friends. I don’t want to fuck
around, it would be serious, to me. You’re serious to me. I’m sorry if I’m coming on a bit
strong—”

Draco shook his head, willing his mouth to move. “No, not too strong. Have you thought this
through, though? What if we’re not compatible?”

He cocked his head, looking genuinely baffled. “What do you mean?”

“We could end up hating each other. It could outweigh the good that comes from being
friends. I could say something unintentionally cruel, or you could find me predictable or
watered down—I’m going to be nice to you, that’s… far less thrilling, I’d presume.” He
paused. “I just mean, if you’re going to be a… a goner, are you sure it’s worth it?”

“Are you trying to change my mind?” Harry smiled.

“I’m making sure you’ve made it up before I get excited. I’d prepared for the worst, not…
this.” He gestured between them vaguely. “I never prepared for the best.”

“You didn’t think in almost two years of friendship I could develop some sort of interest?
Isn’t that exactly what you did?”

“I didn’t just develop, I—feel free to come on strong. I’m just pleasantly surprised is all.”
Harry made an interested face again, the kind that usually preempted some sort of emotional-
literacy-related soapbox, but seemed to table whatever train of thought he’d prompted. “What
do you want?”

“You,” Draco said, in all seriousness, but it made Harry laugh.

“Okay, Draco, okay.” His hand patted on Draco’s knee. It anchored him to the present when
he was almost certain he was experiencing the generous flash of neurons in a coma. “If this is
serious, you’re keen?”

“Yes, unquestionably.”

“I think this’ll be something special. Us. But I need a bit of time,” Harry said. “Patience, if
you can manage. I thought this would be a years-long trajectory if anything at all, but then
you just leaned in like it was nothing, and I—I didn’t see that coming.”

“Neither did I,” Draco murmured.

“I don’t want to rush this. I’m not hesitant about you, though, I promise. I just need a minute.
This wasn’t on my summer agenda.”

Draco’s hands twitched at his side, fighting between wanting to clamp them behind his back
safely or reach out and touch Harry. He did neither. And his tongue twitched, dying to ask
how long a colloquial ‘minute’ would be, what exactly it meant if Harry felt he was a ‘goner’
with Draco, whether he could provide details on just what made him think Draco deserved to
be the recipient of a ‘years-long trajectory’ to get together.

But that wouldn’t be the patience Harry so kindly asked for, so instead he tried to match
Harry’s solemnity in his eyes as he said, “I can wait.”

“You can?” A smile spread across Harry’s cheeks.

“I already have been.”

He nodded, trying to tamper down the delight in his expression. It was endearingly
unsuccessful. “Well, in that case, I… guess I’ll go start breakfast? At least there’ll be potatoes
and bacon ready when everyone discovers our last beach day’s rained out. I’m glad we both
woke early.”

“Yes, thank Merlin I saved you from Self-Braking Spellcasting being the most interesting part
of your morning,” he said, looking up as Harry stood with a warm hand on his shoulder.

“Aw, don’t get smart to wash off all that vulnerability, you wore it so well,” he replied, eyes
sparkling. As he backed towards the doorway, his arms opened wide. “Bask in the beauty of a
difficult, emotional conversation.”

Draco rolled his eyes, resituating himself in the centre of the piano bench. “Enchanting, by
the way,” he heard just as his hands touched the keys. Harry hung doubled back in the
doorway, a hand on the doorframe. “I could listen all day. You sound enchanting. Lay off the
silencing charms.”
The door shut behind him and Draco instantly waved his wand again, double-checking the
silencing charm, then dropped his forehead onto the keys with a loud, discordant drone. He
stayed there for a breath, reliving the conversation, then sat straight and composed with a
speed he’d only managed once before. It wouldn’t be for the children’s orchestra, but it
would be special. He could feel in his fingertips that it was special.

He played and drafted it out in a scrawl on the unlined pages of his notebook until he’d heard
enough footsteps around to travel back to the kitchen. Harry was moving with a usual
hastiness around multiple pans, while Ron, Hermione, Neville, and Luna sat on barstools in
easy morning conversation. Pansy and Blaise were down, too, sipping coffees at the dining
table nearby and speaking softly with a messy-haired Teddy.

“…free to do what they want this morning, as the beach is clearly out of question,” Hermione
was saying. Harry glanced over to nod at her and noticed Draco’s approach, eyes
illuminating.

“Morning, Draco! We were just saying, given the weather, it’ll be a relaxed morning.”

“And I was just going to remark on how happy Harry seems to be to wake up to grey skies,”
said Hermione.

“D’you prefer me sad on our last day, ‘Mione?” he challenged, smiling wide.

“Not if it affects my breakfast,” said Ron, shifting from such a completely statuesque state of
sleepiness that the others looked surprised by his voice.

Draco chuckled without a word and left them to sit with his friends and the baby, but mostly
he just rested his chin on his hand and watched the kitchen from afar. Blaise and Pansy were
too wrapped up in some gossip to care, anyway. Draco, luckily, could expertly plaster on a
neutral expression even as he watched Harry continue to be incapable, grinning stupidly at
the pancakes he was pushing onto a serving dish.

He only picked at breakfast. Whatever appetite he’d had was gone. His heart was too full to
eat.

“Suddenly don’t like my cooking?” Harry muttered, nodding at his plate. “At least act
normal, like I am.”

Draco scoffed, now fully offended, but he stuck his fork in his mouth with a large bite. Act
normal. He didn’t challenge it because he didn’t want to correct Harry—every few moments
he fell back into disbelief that his rare impulsivity hadn’t ended in the destruction of
everything their group had built. He only had to look to his left and take in Harry’s inability
to eat without beaming uncontrollably at his food to pinch himself back to reality.

February 2013
“Our last tutoring session, Kensuke came home reporting that you’d run general training
drills the entire hour. I hope that won’t be the case today.”

Harry smiles tightly at the man across from him, who stands with his hands squarely in his
pockets, his head tilted challengingly. He and his son are under the awning outside
Collector’s Quidditch, just out of range of the flurries sinking into Harry’s hair and jumper.

“There’s nothing as important as the fundamentals, especially in youth sports, Mr Tanaka,”

he says, adjusting his stance. Unlike the man across from him, Harry’s got two brooms
tucked awkwardly under an arm, a full case of Quidditch balls clutched in the opposite hand,
and a pile of shin, knee, and arm guards thrown over his shoulder. But that’s never stopped a
parent from inopportunely discussing his coaching methods before. “Everything else you’ve
brought to my attention will be improved thanks to the basics.”

His smile, though tight-lipped for Mr Tanaka, turns warm when he trains his attention on the
young boy beside him. He grins up and pushes at his glasses, thin and rectangular and water-
spotted. Harry has applied the same Impervius charm Hermione’d once gifted him every
rainy lesson, and today won’t be an exception.

“All the same, I’ll be joining today,” says Mr Tanaka.

“Of course,” Harry replies. “I keep the rule that only students and I are on brooms, as you
know, but this pitch has plenty of seating. I think it’s lovely when parents come along.”

Mr Tanaka breathes in deep and nods. Kensuke’s all teeth. Harry’s always happy to coach
him. There aren’t many children whose parents ask for individual lessons (it’s not something
he advertises) and only a fraction of those are available mid-year—it’s a rarity that a parent
wants intensive practice before their child’s left for Hogwarts and school teams.

It made it easier to leave Grimmauld Place this morning, knowing he had a February lesson
with Kensuke. He’d certainly had no fears of running into Draco so early. Thank god,
because every run-in seemed to end in him repeating what no one would take at face value—
that he feels nothing for the man, no matter how much easier life would be if he did.

Last night in bed he’d briefly considered faking something, just to end the constant cycle of
professing his un-feelings. But the idea sounded terrible by the time he woke up, and he’d
been glad he hadn’t. Despite it all, he thinks he really is still a bit of a romantic. He can’t
pretend.

And it had left him thinking about Ginny and Tony and Miles; what he’d learned from them;
what he’d learned and lost from Draco. If those were things that built him, was he unfixably
different now? It had left him glad to be uninterrupted this morning as he crept about in the
dark to feed Jules and wait at the shop.

The pitch they travel to is the same one from the group photo at Teddy’s first match, though
it’s unpopulated on a snowy weekday morning. Still, seeing the familiar stands and lower
intramural goalposts leaves him feeling a little wonky. If he focuses on the blank canvas of
the whitened grass, Draco’s eyes waiting wide and expectant as he looked at the
photographed stands returns, so he shakes it off and sets the ball case down with a clunk that
shakes what icy flakes haven’t melted into the wooden seating onto the ground.

“I haven’t seen you in months, Kensuke,” he says when they’re in the sky a few minutes
later. The young boy is raising and lowering his broom a foot or two to fidget while they
speak. “How’ve you been?”

“It’s Ken,” he says instantly, levelling his broom.

“Oh, just Ken now?”

“Just Ken.”

Harry turns his mouth down in interested amusement as he nods. “When did that start?”

“Just at school. It’s easier,” he replies, following Harry without needing direction as they
begin a few easy laps around the pitch. “My mates all have easy names.”

Harry considers this against his upbringing and his own always wondering. Too ashamed and
silenced to consider identity and culture as a child, too busy at Hogwarts. It was difficult to
grapple with afterwards, beyond heritage. He didn’t even know who he was outside of a war,
let alone who he was in a string of ancestors.

Now, though, he regards Kensuke as they orbit. It’s not uncommon to homeschool young
wizards, but not unheard of to attend Muggle schools, either. He remembers Dudley’s school.
Remembers bullies. Remembers ignorance. Late at night, when the shuddering on the stairs
above signalled the last Dursley had gone up to bed, he remembers scratching his name in the
back of a secondhand Horrible Histories book as it might’ve looked if his Indian family had
been prominent in his life.

Hari, he’d scrawled with a dull pencil. That could’ve been him. Hari. And why hadn’t it
been? What had his father thought of his heritage? Why Harry? Was it embarrassing to
wonder so often about his ancestry when his dad seemed not to care?

He knows the answer now—we want what we cannot have. Knowing Jamaican history, her
family’s songs and food and culture, is second nature to Hermione because it’s always been
the soundtrack. She appreciates it no less, but it’s not a thread to pull like it’s always felt to
him. He wishes he had that book, still.

“Dives and lifts now,” he says easily. They round the pitch again, shooting low and back up
high like sewing needles. When they’ve returned to where they started, he redirects to face
Kensuke head-on. “I love your name, Ken,” he smiles, hoping it’s not overstepping. “Both
ways.”

The boy’s brows furrow as his grip tightens on his broom.

“How do your mum and dad feel about Ken?”

“I didn’t tell them. I’m only telling my friends.”

Harry nods thoughtfully. “You know, for me, Desi culture was this… far-off thing for other
kids growing up. It didn’t get to be for me.” He removes a glove and adjusts the strap as he
speaks. “It can be rewarding to keep in touch with family history. Certainly, there’s nothing to
be embarrassed about. Change for you, but don’t change for others, yeah? But I’m glad to be
your friend. I’ll call you anything you’d like. Even… Glorp.”

“Glorp?” he laughs.

“Zjlack? Blurb?”

“Kensuke,” he says. “Ken if you’re in a rush.”

“So how’s it sound if I was to say, ‘Alright, Kensuke? Excited for summer holiday?’ and
‘BLUDGER, KEN!’”

Kensuke giggles again, nodding happily, and Harry taps his head fondly as he tells him to
wait while he gets the Snitch. On solid ground, he responds polite but dismissively to Mr
Tanaka’s attempts at conversation and his praise at Harry for breaking into the case of balls as
if it was a followed order and not an independent choice, kicking back up to Kensuke
quickly.

Mr Tanaka’s enthusiasm for his son’s Quidditch education, while perhaps overbearing at
times, is not unfounded. Harry kept his predictions to himself, always, and especially with
parents who needed no added encouragement to push their kids towards success. But
privately he focuses so broadly with Kensuke on basics and manoeuvres and learning roles
besides Seeker—his clear aptitude—because he sees in him an immense likelihood of
stardom, if he desires it. He doesn’t need one-on-one Seeking practice. He needs the
opportunity to know the sport with his eyes closed, including every move other players
would take for granted, every tactic not just for his position but for positions of his
teammates and opposition.

Most of all, Harry wants to ensure that he still has fun. He doesn’t price himself nearly where
he should for lessons. It’s a passion project—though just about everything Harry does is a
passion project. It would be pointless if it was turning kids miserable in the name of skill.

“My mum said that you and Mr Malfoy are off the rocks,” Ken says after a while. Harry
laughs under his breath. They’re hovering, giving the Snitch time to run amok. “She read it in
the paper.”

He shields his eyes and looks around for a glint of gold. The snowfall had turned into rain
and minutes ago they’d both raced back down for the raincoats he’d thought to bring.
Eventually, he says, “You know what I read in the paper once?”

“What?”

“That my glasses don’t have a prescription and I used my money to buy magical prosthetic
eyeballs that see through everything, even the back of my own head.”

Kensuke’s eyes are saucers. “No!” he grins.

“There are excellent journalists out there. I’m mates with two of them. But the papers don’t
even believe half of what they say. You know me much better than those writers, yeah?” He
spots a flash of gold metres behind them and turns back to Kensuke to wrap this up and
return to work. “My best mates are the ones who know me better than anyone else. Even
better than the papers. Your friends are the ones you don’t have to change for or be any less
than your full self around. Right?”

He nods. Harry smiles back. “Only catching the snitch in both hands today. Your dad wants
to see those mad Seeker skills in action and I want you to work on your broom balance.
Knees in tight. Work with the momentum you’ve already created.”

*****

When Harry says goodbye to Kensuke and his dad at the shop, two people are waiting for
him, one keen for a book he stocks, the other keen to hand over a family heirloom for repair
—a delicate 19th-century Snitch he was anxious to even hold. And by the time they’d both
left satisfied, someone else walked through the door, and so Harry ends up tending the shop
for almost two hours of constantly rotating customers, incapable of forcing people out. He
finally turns the sign around at eleven to go shower off the training session.

He’d hoped the house would be empty or he’d hear running up and down the keys of a piano
behind a closed door, but instead the sounds of Queen rise inexplicably from the floorboards
beneath him, followed by loud clanging and a “Shit!” bitten out sharply over the music.

Harry drops his shoes by the door distractedly, hesitating where the road diverges before him
—upstairs to the warm shower and fresh clothes, or downstairs into the sounds of chaos. It’s
not out of a concern for Draco, certainly, that he chooses the stairs leading down—those are
his pots and pans getting roughed up. And god forbid someone’s washing the cast iron.

“Er, Draco?” he calls, wincing at the sound of his cookery scraping horrendously.

Rounding the bottom step opens into disarray. The kitchen looks ransacked. And abandoned.
But then Draco stands up straight from where he’d rummaged through the bottom cupboards
and places a pan on the already-flaming hob without a word.

“Draco!” Harry tries again to no avail as he cracks an egg and scrambles it with erratic speed.

He steps toward the edge of the kitchen counter and turns the radio off, then in the immediate
silence recognises the sound of paper under his feet. He lifts his shoe off one of many littered
pages of sheet music. It’s as if a pile had been knocked off the table and never picked up, and
Draco glances at him as he reaches down to collect them all.

“Your papers,” he mumbles, reading ‘Valet Moram in B Minor’ across the top as he picks a
few more pages up from under the table.

“Leave them. They’re best on the floor.”

The gravelly mock amusement in his voice tugs Harry back to his feet, eyebrows drawing
together. He’s just in time to see him sprinkle salt generously from a small dish Harry keeps
by the stove into his tea absently before returning to the hob to push around his blackened,
rubbery-looking eggs.

From what he feels he’s learned of this Draco in the past couple of weeks, he’s known him to
stand stiffly in his presence, to keep a distance and distance his emotions, but even this
interaction feels especially robotic. The chances that it isn’t related to something else he’s
done are slim.

“Salt, Draco,” he says, crossing in two paces to take the mug back from his reaching hand.

He frowns at Harry. “Hm?”

“You… that was salt in your tea.”

“Oh. Damn.”

There’s a second open burner aflame to the left of the skillet, just waiting to meet something
unfortunately incendiary. With an itch to do what comes naturally, Harry dumps the tea with
one hand, turns the naked burner off with the other, restarts the kettle, then prods Draco away
from the eggs. They’re long done. He picks out a piece of shell with a curled lip of disgust,
but tilts them onto a plate anyway and takes a guess on seasoning he can only hope will
marginally save the dish.

“Not like you to have a lay-in, is it?” he asks, pushing the plate over and pouring the
steaming kettle over the mug again. Draco stares blankly. “Dressing robe,” he points out in
explanation.

Apart from that first morning and a pair of Chudley Cannons joggers he hasn’t seen since,
Draco’s been perfectly presentable no matter the hour. Harry knows this couldn’t be how he
always dressed—he’d seen the t-shirts and trainers in the wardrobe—but it had been the
existence performed for him. And yet here he stands in pyjama bottoms, a long-sleeve shirt,
and an open silk dressing gown.

“Abiit nemine salutato,” he murmurs to himself, staring down at the dressing gown.

“Sure, er… Do you want milk in this?”

Draco’s head shoots up and for a moment his face is expressionless. Harry feels like he’s
about to be chastised, but instead he guffaws loudly. The sound of it is a surprise, so unlike
anything Harry’s heard from him.

“Are you alright?” he asks nervously.

“Do I want milk? Yes, I always want milk. Don’t add it though, it doesn’t matter, does it?”

“Well… it does… depending on which taste you prefer.”

Draco scoffs. Harry suddenly thinks maybe the importance of taste preferences isn’t a
winning argument as he watches each bite of abysmal-looking dinner enter Draco’s mouth
without any facial inflexion.
“It doesn’t matter,” he says between bites. “Not much does. We’re all just on a big floating
rock.”

“Okay,” Harry says slowly, quietly, wondering just what he’s stumbled into. He sets the tea
down as is. “Can I do anything else for you before I go—”

Draco laughs again, just as loud. “You? You!”

“I’m the only other person here… so…”

“You.”

“Well, yes.”

Draco laughs, pushing at his half-eaten plate with finality, and with a sudden loud crash, it
knocks the fresh tea onto the floor. Harry stares, mouth slack, first at the tea-stained pages
still littered over that side of the kitchen, then back up at Draco. His face is completely blank,
trained on the spill. Harry waits without breathing.

He laughs again, hands pressed over his eyes wearily.

He’s still chuckling when Harry repairs the mug and backs cautiously from the room with a
placating smile, heading straight for the floo. The living room, he discovers, is just as messy.
There are three teacups on the piano, more of those ‘Valet Moram’ pages on the bench and
the floor. He picks the bottom half of an ash-eaten page from the fire before he throws the
powder in.

Pansy and Luna’s Hampstead home is much smaller than the one Harry had re-met the
Slytherins in on New Year’s all those years ago, so when his head pops through, he’s
instantly greeted by Luna’s smile from a sofa a few feet from the fireplace.

“Well, that explains it!” she says to him with her hands around a teacup.

“Hi, Luna, er, explains what?”

“I was reading tea leaves; they said I’d be visited by a man whose brain was more empty than
full. Then the floo sparked.”

Harry chooses to take this as identifying his amnesiac tendencies and not a marker of his
intelligence. There’s no time to inquire—he asks after Pansy instead with a grim resolve that
Luna identifies. She disappears immediately and doesn’t return for a few minutes.

“She’ll come right to you from the Prophet office,” she says on her knees in front of the
fireplace, all business. “She can floo to Grimmauld Place from there, right?”

Harry hesitates. “I think so. Yes.”

“I think it says a lot about them, Draco and Pansy. That you hardly know them as a pair but
you didn’t hesitate on who to call.”
“Was that the right thing to do?”

“Oh, yes. She’d kill you if you’d rang anyone else first.”

Sure enough, when Pansy comes through minutes later in a pencil skirt, her heels scraping on
the grout of the stone hearth, she fixes a no-nonsense gaze on him. “What happened?”

“I… think I broke Draco.”

“Harry,” she groans, pushing at her temples. “Where is he? How’d it start?”

“Eating downstairs,” he answers, following her out of the living room like a child on her
heels. “I just got home and he was having some sort of mid-life crisis… I… last night he was
asking again whether I’d try to figure this out and I was firm in explaining that there’s
nothing I can do to bring back what’s lost, and…”

“How firm?”

He purses his lips. “Firm.”

Down the stairs, Pansy holds a hand up for Harry to stay out of the way, but he doesn’t need
the order. He knows well when to blend into the wall. She walks up to Draco behind the table
with no fear.

“Draco, love, tell me you’ve not been walking around looking like this,” she purrs, stopping
his pacing and running her hand down the silk sleeve.

Harry watches him turn and recognise her, seeing the uncaring stiffness he’d been offered
disappear instantly. “What’s wrong with it?” he pouts.

“It’s just inside out.” He stares back as if this is a riddle requiring deep thought. “What is it?
You okay?” she adds, combing his hair out of his eyes.

“Nothing. I’m fine. Why are you here? I’ve got everything perfectly—”

“Is that tea on the ground?”

“I-y-yes, I was going to…” he stammers, searching the room for his wand with his eyes.

“Draco, Draco,” Pansy says, holding his shoulders. “Just stop for a second. Something is up.
I love you, let me carry this. What do you have holed up in there?” She taps the top of his
head gently with a finger. This seems to be the magic invitation. It crumples him, and Pansy
reads the impending distress moments before it happens with all the intuition of her wife.
She’s pulling him tightly into an embrace before he even begins to melt.

Harry barely hears it. They’re across the kitchen and his face is turned away, but it comes out
close enough to a choked cry that even from the stairs, he muddles through the words.

“I lost my husband,” he muffles into her shoulder, hands clenched into the back of her blouse.
“I lost him. I didn’t even get to say goodbye.”
“Oh, darling, shh,” she whispers, a hand on the nape of his neck. Over his shoulder, she
meets Harry’s eyes, all thin lips and sad, fiery eyes. Disappointment.

“He’s gone,” Draco croaks.

Harry has a dreadful feeling like he’s intruding, like they’re not even talking about him, so he
gestures back up the stairs to Pansy when she looks at him again and escapes to his room. He
waits there, letting Jules harangue him about switching to mealworms until Pansy knocks
lightly.

“Come in,” he says, standing from the cage.

She enters cautiously, glancing around as the door shuts softly behind her. “Draco wants a
few things from the bathroom.” Her eyes briefly meet his but don’t stick around. They focus
on the other door. “He told me where to find them.”

“O-okay, sure.”

She brushes past where he stands uncomfortably by Jules, pushing the bathroom door wider
and crouching to reach into the storage under the sink, where she finds an unopened box of
toothpaste and a few other small bottles to throw into a bag. Harry watches, biting his lip, and
waits until she stands and faces him by the bed to speak again.

“Is he ok—”

“No, Harry, he’s not okay,” she snaps. “Last night must’ve gotten him. Though I must say it’s
about time, really. He’s been remarkably well-adjusted up to now.”

“I didn’t know he was an, er… emotional person.”

“He’s not,” mutters Pansy. “But once-in-a-lifetime grief calls for once-in-a-lifetime mental
breakdowns, I suppose.”

He sucks in a breath. “I was just telling the truth, I can’t—”

“Draco’s staying with us for a bit. I don’t know how long. I’ll be back if I forgot anything.”

A strange pang of guilt hits him. He would’ve said he’d do anything to finally get Draco to
give him space but this feels wrong, even to him. It leaves a bad taste in his mouth, too, to
have Pansy shooting daggers every time they make eye contact. He sighs, dropping onto the
mattress.

“And now you’re cross with me too,” he says.

She tilts her head, seeming to weigh her words carefully. “Mm, I don’t think so. Maybe. I
know you’re having a rough go, too,” she says, reaching out to touch his shoulder. “But my
best friend is heartbroken like I’ve never seen him, so I’m struggling with impartiality.”

Harry nods in understanding. “Erm, Pansy, before you go… can I say…”
 “Fast.”

“I thought about this a lot lately. This feeling that my life is… segmented.” He sits forward,
elbows squared on his knees. “There’s all these Harrys, right? The one who survived the
Dursleys, the one who went to Hogwarts, who joined the Quidditch team, who… who walked
into the forest. And I do things now because of them—for them. You know, I-I cook on
behalf of Dursley Harry who never saw the joy in food, I opened the shop on behalf of
Quidditch Harry…”

Pansy’s regarding him like he’s lost the plot, but she doesn’t walk away.

“What I’m trying to say, Pans, is… I know them well. They’re old parts of me, and I-I move
about the world with them in mind. But Draco’s Harry—he’s a mystery. I don’t get to know
him. But I can appreciate him, so… whatever Draco needs. If that’s your anger at me as
moral support, or space, or… just—whatever it is. On behalf of Draco’s Harry, I’d want that.
What he needs.”

“That’s a really nice sentiment that Draco should hear.” Harry opens his mouth, but she raises
a finger to stop him. “I understand, Harry. I think about him, too—Draco’s Harry. I do things
he’d be happy I was here to do. I think we all do, in a way. You know? Rising to the occasion
for him, or something.”

Harry nods, then looks down at his socks. He only lifts his head again when Pansy’s hand
touches his arm kindly.

“I’ll be in touch. Or Luna will. For what it’s worth, Old Harry’s Draco would tell him to take
the rest of the day off work. Stop speeding back into life. You’ve just had a traumatic
experience. See you around.”

She leaves, capable of showing herself out. Harry sinks back to the floor, knees drawn up to
his chest, and faces his gecko again.

“I feel like I’m breaking up the band, Jules,” he grumbles.

Is that life?

Harry frowns. “Er, I don’t know. I suppose even the Beatles went separate ways.”

Jules flicks his tongue. No beetles. Waxworms.

“Waxworms? You just said mealworms today.”

Tastes change.

Harry can’t argue with that.

Chapter End Notes

Hope you're enjoying!

Feel free to leave some words below in the comments, or find me at

writandromance.tumblr.com. Doing my best to reply as often as I can, but know I read
them all!
 Liebesleid (Love's Sorrow)
Chapter Notes

The chapter title refers to Liebesleid (Love's Sorrow), Fritz Kreisler/Sergei

Rachmaninoff.

See the end of the chapter for more notes

September 2001

In the fortnight since the summer holiday, Harry had acted completely normal. After their
buzzed excitement that first morning, Draco had his doubts, but on their first Friday back in
town he’d arrived fifteen minutes early to Pansy’s and found Harry waiting in the parlour as
usual. It was stranger than he’d anticipated to fall back into a routine, as if all of Saltburn had
been a dream. The smile he received might have been a bit larger than before, the stares may
have lingered longer, but the conversation was as expected; Harry’s continued success in
bespoke brooms, an offer to make one for Draco, Draco’s reiterated refusal to fly, which
always drifted into discussing the work he so carefully protected his extremities for.

The more major difference had been in the way it felt to interact with Harry—a broken seal.
Speaking came even easier, as did sitting beside each other. At dinner, where he’d previously
ignored or goaded Harry, he managed to be completely amicable. How light he was now,
moving about knowing Harry could say things like kind and handsome and be thinking of
him. It wasn’t until he knew the opposite that he grasped how weighed down he felt thinking
Harry was at most neutrally okay with his existence.

It didn’t help his patience, though. Outwardly, he was a perfect gentleman. Inwardly, his
jealousy had reached new heights in the teasingly-nearing possibility of Harry pursuing him.
It was a toss-up, really, whether in any given situation these outward or inward wishes would
prevail.

An average afternoon at Pansy’s was leading in especially indefinite directions, while Draco
was sitting with a quill in hand pouring over the alchemy text of Severus’ and Harry sat
across the room on the rug whittling a little piece of wood. Draco hadn’t even known he was
here until he’d appeared from somewhere back in the kitchen long after he’d gotten
comfortable reading and settled right under Luna’s knitting position on the couch as he said,
“The pie is in, the timer is set, and look, Draco seems to have materialised conveniently
timely to win a slice.”

“Contrary to popular belief, most of us don’t walk the earth keeping track of your
whereabouts,” he’d replied, missing an inhale when he caught the interested way Harry was
eyeing him back. Eyes back down, for safety’s sake.
“Likely story. Pansy’s your informant, I’m sure.”

“I’m blameless,” said Pansy, appearing and sitting in close to Luna. “Perhaps Draco just
loves my company.”

He scoffed and turned the page, trying to focus on the wordy description of some process
called ‘gradation’. That worked for a minute, their light conversation fading into the
background, until he glanced up again to try and see what Harry was whittling and found
himself captivated by something different: Pansy was leaning down, curled close to Luna’s
side, and trying to plait the long strands down the top of Harry’s head as they all chatted.
Rather kindly, they were ignoring him, leaving him to his text, but he couldn’t pull his eyes
away, head still angled inconspicuously towards the writing.

It was childish, yet in that moment he was so aware that Pansy needn’t keep her distance out
of respect for a marinating decision like Draco did. He watched her give up on the plait and
skate her fingers through to let the loosely connected strands go, and his jaw tightened when
Harry leaned back and closed his eyes with a friendly smile of comfort. When had they
gotten so close without his noticing?

Pansy held a lock of hair taught like a growing sprout on his head, stretched straight. “What I
wouldn’t give to straighten your hair,” she mused. “Can you imagine?”

Harry chuckled. “God, I’d look like a tosser. I need a cut, really, but I can’t be bothered to go
somewhere.”

“If you wait for the next time Blaise is over, he’s performed more than a few haircuts in his
day.”

“Unsurprising. Maybe.”

“Or Draco!” He snapped his head up and alert at the high pitch Pansy used to conjure him.
“Didn’t you cut Millicent’s hair once?”

“I did…” He spoke slowly and cautiously. “It was an emergency and I trimmed it.”

Harry watched him with large, hopeful eyes.

“I was the only one around,” he implored. “I was bored. It was cathartic, like pruning hedges.
You don’t want me touching your hair.”

“Oh but I do. Anyone who compares a haircut to landscaping must be good,” Harry joked.
“Earn your pie, Malfoy.”

“You are the artist of the group,” said Pansy.

“That’s a stretch.”

He rolled his eyes from Pansy to Harry, who sandwiched the carved chunk of wood between
two praying hands. ‘Please?’ he mouthed, with large eyes.
What was he to do? Say no?

Pansy brought a stool into the bathroom for them and a pair of nice scissors, which were
offered after too-dramatic a gasp from her when Draco mentioned kitchen shears, then left
them to it. Harry set his glasses by the sink before crossing his arms over the hem of his t-
shirt and starting to pull.

“Harry, Harry, what…”

“I don’t want to get hair all over my shirt.”

Draco nodded rigidly. “Yes, sure. Makes sense,” he said.

“Should I get my hair wet?”

“How should I know?”

“You’re the bloke with the scissors,” Harry gestured.

“Which were practically thrust into my hand.”

He shrugged and turned the bathtub faucet on, kneeling to stick his head under the stream.
When he reappeared, he reached for a hand towel and dried it to damp. “I just want some
length off, it’s getting long,” he said while he settled the stool on the porcelain base, as if this
haircut was going to reach such a level of professional requests.

“Highlights, miss? A blowout?”

“Sod off. No, don’t though. Sorry, I’ll shut up.”

Draco huffed, but he was happy for the silence to concentrate. He stood behind Harry, where
only he could see the way his hands hesitated an inch from his head. There was no world
where he had the practice to have been put in this position. Still, sometimes, in moments like
these, it surprised him how much everyone had grown to trust each other. He felt like he sat
just outside a gravitational pull, orbiting while everyone else was dragged in. Harry left
Teddy with them, let Pansy get affectionate. Pansy let four Gryffindors traipse freely around
her house without an invitation.

“You have a relentlessly sharp gaze, Mozart, but your eyes alone won’t cut my hair,” Harry
broke the silence.

Draco blinked and reached out too fast in response, gripping Harry’s hair at random, but at
least it got him moving. When he flattened a more carefully-chosen wide lock and finally
trimmed carefully across, he could feel Harry’s smile from the back of his head. With a flutter
of courage, he kept going, measuring other lengths of hair against the first and cutting again
and again. The sound of the snipping was the only in the room.

“Why do I feel like this is some sort of test of whether I’d be trusted at menial tasks,” he said
aloud after he’d moved another couple inches up Harry’s head. “A test I’m bound to fail
because I’m not a hairdresser.”
“It’s just hair,” said Harry.

“Sure,” said Draco, who’d never uttered such words. “Sure.”

“You wouldn’t have scissors to my head right now if I didn’t already trust you. We all do.
This entire haircut is basically a personification of trusting your family to mould you—
physically or otherwise.”

“You’re not my family.” The scissors clipped in the silence. A slightly too-large chunk fell on
Harry’s shoulder and Draco cleared it off with the quickest brush of fingertips possible.
“That’s not what this is. I don’t trust my family because they moulded me.”

“I’ve been wondering,” Harry asked. “Is it self-punishment? The way you keep your distance
from all of us still?”

Draco’s fingers drifted down from his hair. “Pardon?”

“Is it self-punishment? You seem the type—convince yourself that we’re a part of something
that you’re not. That you’re on the outskirts.”

“It’s not… self-punishment, really,” he mused, lifting the scissors again, candid only because
he could focus on the hair between his fingers rather than the man attached to it. “But cruelty
needs a conduit, doesn’t it? If it’s not being expended towards others, then it has to go
somewhere. ‘Self-punishment’ doesn’t account for the necessity—the conservation of
energy.”

“Draco, stop. Put the scissors down.”

He hadn’t accounted for Harry to change the delicately balanced set of circumstances that let
him speak openly. And though this was nothing to label yet, he came to terms in that instant
with something that would hold true for years to come—Harry didn’t breeze past anything,
no matter the circumstances.

Once, on Blaise’s birthday, Harry and Ron had gone out to the off-licence for reinforcements
and returned an hour later because they’d watched a man on a bike get clipped by a car and
Harry had insisted on seeing him to A&E personally. He didn’t leave people on the side of
the road and he didn’t leave problems unattended, so Draco knew not to bother with a fight
when he turned to face him in the shower.

“Cruelty doesn’t need to turn inwards. It doesn’t have to go anywhere,” he said.

Draco pursed his lips. “I get angry.”

“Me too.”

“It has to go somewhere,” he repeated hopelessly.

“Following your own logic, energy can’t be created or destroyed, but it can be transformed,
right? So don’t leave it as cruelty. Turn it into something else.”
Draco blinked. “Are you reasoning with me through science? The First Law of
Thermodynamics?”

“What, I have to be a pretty face?” Harry eyed him dryly. “Finish my hair. Prove you don’t
keep your distance after all.”

Mercifully, he turned around and exposed the back of his head to Draco again, who gripped
his scissors feeling completely bowled over and muttered, “I don’t keep my distance.” He
couldn’t help himself. For most of his life, he’d allowed people to think what they wanted of
him, but he needed Harry to have the right picture.

Harry made a noncommittal noise of disagreement. “Not physically so often, just... you only
talk surface-level. And you just said—you don’t see us as family. You’re still wondering if
we trust you. You apologised sincerely. Accept that we’ve accepted that.”

Draco brought the scissors back into his wet curls.

“Family doesn’t mean warm, happy things to me, Harry. Trust me, it’s a compliment not to be
a part of it. Family is… my father compelling me to do horrible things in the name of honour,
and my mum reading by the fire and asking me about my day as if Voldemort isn’t
downstairs, as if I’m the mad one for never leaving my room. I don’t want you all to be
family.”

It was easy to say things like this; Harry facing a tiled wall, Draco standing behind his stool
and neither having to make an excuse not to keep eye contact.

“I’m sorry,” Harry said quietly. “I didn’t think about it like that.”

“It’s fine.”

“If you’re ever willing to call us family, I’ll be flattered. But whatever you call this thing
we’ve created—Luna and Pansy created—it’s wonderful. It’s love. You’ve got a circle, of
people who love you and trust you.”

“Calm down, Mr Likeable,” Draco whispered, leaning down to get closer to the hair by his
ear. He thought Harry shivered when he spoke. “Don’t immediately count your friends as
mine.”

“You don’t see Ron and Hermione as your friends? Neville?”

“Depends on your definition of friend. They know nothing about me, I know nothing about
them. What reason do they have to consider me a friend?”

Harry sighed tiredly. “Just because. Because we’ve been a collective unit for two years,
eating each other’s meals, drinking each other’s wine, buying birthday gifts. They don’t know
what you just said about your mum and dad, or about cruelty, but they know you’ll play with
Teddy and pick up everyone’s dishes after dinner. And if you did tell them stuff like that,
they’d listen.”
But why? Draco thought. Harry wasn’t understanding what he didn’t understand. Why didn’t
they need more?

“They’d tell you things, too. They probably think you can’t be bothered.”

“What, I’m just supposed to know to ask? Is that how you and Pansy have managed to get
along so well?”

“Jealous?” Harry offered, a smirk in his voice. It felt like a rare recognition of what lay
dormant between them. “People get closer through hearing the things that don’t come up at
eight-person group dinners. Like me just now. Like us in the parlour. I see Luna and Pansy
when I’m over alone. I see Blaise.”

“You see Blaise when?”

Harry shrugs. “He comes into the shop sometimes around lunch. I think to escape that office.
We catch up. Blaise in corporate attire is strange, isn’t it? It feels like it should work, but
there’s something uncanny about it.”

Draco didn’t know what to say to that. He’d thought he was a metre behind in the race
towards friendship, but in reality everyone had lapped him.

“They all like you,” Harry added warmly. “But you don’t see them. Maybe it’s subconscious,
you thinking you’re not really a part of us, I don’t know, that’s why I was curious. Just talk to
Hermione about your… whatever you’re up to with that alchemy book. Play bloody chess
with Ron. He’s dying to play you because I’m rubbish, but you’re a bit standoffish so he
doesn’t want to ask.”

“Did you find me standoffish?”

“I wore you down. Didn’t care about meeting halfway like they might.”

Draco made a hum of acceptance and turned Harry’s head the other way. He was over
halfway done, probably. There were little black dustings across the white tub like chocolate
vermicelli, on Harry’s back and shoulders. It was prescient after all, it seemed, to leave his t-
shirt folded over the towel rack.

On a whim minutes later, Draco set the scissors down on the ledge with the bar soap and
instructed Harry to wet his hair again. He was taking so long that it’d begun to dry.

“Where are you going?” Harry asked, watching him step over the lip of the tub with his head
cocked under the water at an awkward angle. Draco froze when their eyes met, unprepared
for how strange it would feel to make contact again after speaking so intimately to the back
of his head.

“I’ll be right back.”

The answer was to find Pansy’s little aqua-coloured radio. To fill the silence before the
unofficial Mind Healer could return and force him to… what was it? ‘Bask in the beauty of a
difficult, emotional conversation’?
Harry was sitting on the stool with his hair dripping when he returned and granted him a
dubious glance as he shifted through the channels. The music resounded hollowly in the
small tiled room. Still, it relaxed him.

“Hm,” Harry said, when he’d only trimmed two more locks of hair.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

Draco had lost the little confidence he had in trimming hair now that he’d reached the crown
of Harry’s head. He adjusted the height he held the scissors against the taught hair three times
and was still hesitating when again Harry said, “huh.”

“What? You’re grumbling like an aggrieved housewife.”

“I expected you’d be a music snob is all. Reckoned when you brought the radio in I’d end up
listening to something complicated like… jazz. You’ve surprised me, yet again.”

Draco frowned at the radio as Madonna faded out. “I’m no snob—music snob,” he clarified
before Harry could say something smart. “Classical isn’t the only complex music, anyway.
Don’t get me started.”

“Please get started,” Harry responded.

“Pardon?” Draco could almost laugh at the tangible enthusiasm in his voice. Harry finds you
kind. Harry finds you clever, his mind whispered, a reminder that’d been sung like a lullaby
in his head almost nightly for weeks.

“I don’t know if I’ve ever seen you as joyful as that night Miles heaped piano questions on
you. You came alive. You never look like that.”

“You never ask.”

“I’m asking.”

Draco circled to face Harry and check his handiwork from the front. He did his best to busy
his gaze elsewhere, away from focused green eyes.

“This song’s exceptional,” he offered as the tempo picked up, delicately comparing the hair at
both of Harry’s temples for evenness.

“This song?” Harry snickered. “Total Eclipse of the Heart?”

He looked so lovely that close. Bright eyes, wet hair, easy grin. Like on the beach. Draco
didn’t dare glance any lower than the nape of his neck. He cleared his throat and shifted back
to Harry’s side to clean up a few strands there.

“Music is intricate everywhere, don’t be arrogant,” he said. “This goes through, like, four
unrelated key centres. And it does this chromatic third modulation—like in Wouldn’t It Be
Nice? The Beach Boys?”

Harry nodded, eyebrows raised.

“It’s heavenly. It’s like a reverse direct modulation—when you shift up a half-step or step—
but it’s so smooth. In the chorus here, wait…” He wasn’t even holding his arms up to Harry’s
hair anymore, but instead gesturing demonstratively with the chords as Bonnie Tyler began to
croon through the chorus. “C,” he announces over it, “then F major seven, and then just like
that we’re on E major. But the melody was already on E, so then the seventh of the F major
seventh chord is the new tonic, just like that.”

“Just like that,” Harry murmured, the corner of his mouth tipping up.

“You should’ve been there when I discovered Muggle pop music. My mum would’ve gone
spare. Finished.”

Harry’s chest rose, still looking up at him with a soft expression. Draco’s stomach flipped.
Without thinking, he lifted his wand and blasted him with hot air, wiping the look off his face
and drying his hair in an instant.

“Jesus, Draco,” he spluttered, standing and combing his hands through it. “Your customer
service is awful.”

“The pay’s awful.”

He reached for the stool while Harry pulled his shirt on. When he righted himself and Draco
looked at him again his heart stopped. Harry’s eyes darted around his face, smile falling.

“What? Why d’you look so grim?”

“Nothing. Er, I’m sure it’s just… the way it got blown when it dried,” he said quietly. Harry
put a firm hand on his arm and pushed him out of the way to look in the mirror.

“Draco.”

“I told everyone I’m no hairdresser!" he argued instantly. "I didn’t even have confidence in
myself, Honestly, it’s on you lot if you chose to have confidence in an unconfident man!”

As he spoke, Harry slowly trailed his fingers along the contour of his waves which was,
admittedly, more than a bit bell-shaped. His mouth had gone slack, his eyes sparkly with an
intensity that could go one of two ways. Draco held his breath.

“I look like a granny,” he whispered.

“No, you look fine, you look… you’re very…”

You’re too handsome for hair to ruin it, was what he was thinking. As he trailed off, Harry
spun to face him and before Draco could comprehend what was happening, stuck his hands in
his perfectly-combed hair to completely muss it up. He pulled him into the reflection with an
arm around his shoulder to view the handiwork. It was like he’d walked directly into a
tornado.

“I deserved that,” he groaned, fighting the urge to flatten it back a bit.

“You’re just lucky I don’t follow biblical eye-for-an-eye principles.”

Draco could pretend as much as he wanted that he was an obstinate, cold-hearted man. But
that would never explain how quickly he reached around Harry for the scissors and held them
handle-up in the thin space between them.

“Go on then,” he said. “Take a bit.” Harry’s eyebrows shot up, gaze shifting between Draco’s
hand and face. He pressed the scissors towards Harry an inch more. “Go on.”

Harry laughed. “Draco, I’m not gonna…” He drifted, watching him piece out some hair right
on his temple and hold it out. “Merlin, that self-punishment does run deep, doesn’t it?”

“Don’t start the Mind Healer ru—”

Harry’s hand covered his on the scissors and slipped them from his grip. “Turn around,” he
said. Draco faced the wall with embarrassing obedience, felt fingers skate up the nape of his
neck and separate the top of his hair from the lowest hidden pieces. The cut was unhesitating
and quick, and he shivered when the hairs dusted down the back of his jumper. His hand
lifted to search out the short tuft as he faced Harry again. They grinned.

On their funeral march to the parlour, Draco was sure Pansy and Luna would help bolster
Harry’s confidence but they fell into each other laughing the second they walked back in.

“Harry!”

“What did he do to you? You look like Umbridge!”

“It’s all my fault,” Pansy wailed. “I sent him in with Draco like a pig to slaughter!”

“It’s not that bad,” Draco tried. But it was too late. Harry was drifting towards the ornate
mirror above the fireplace with a distant look in his eyes.

“My god,” he whispered, hands rising delicately to his ears. “You did make me look like
Umbridge!”

February 2013

Draco’s gone for a week. Not even Friday night dinner brings him over, and it leaves for an
awkwardly piecemeal evening. Luna sends her regrets, with Pansy’s in parentheses, and
Blaise is an unsurprising no-show considering, so Harry finds himself invited to a grand
takeaway feast at Ron and Hermione’s with the kids and Neville. It’s pleasant, but there’s a
soreness in the air—as if sides have been taken.
And Grimmauld Place feels quiet. He could only hear the piano when Draco didn’t think he
was home or hadn’t yet heard the front door close, but he misses at least the sound of the
door slamming shut and the ear-ringing silence of a sound vacuum coming from within.

Strangely, it takes him a few days to realise just how much it’s all affected him emotionally. It
takes a lizard, requesting far too much information in the name of dinner when Harry gets
home late Friday.

“Are you happy we have switched to waxworms?” he asks, resting his chin on his knee sitting
tank-height.

Happy for extra waxworms. As circumstance of sadness.

Harry blinks in surprise. “What do you mean?”

Difficulties with ice queen. More waxworms for me. I am a thing to show care.

“Yes… he is… still travelling.”

Do you think he never came in the room all these days?

Harry sighs. “Caught out by a bloody lizard,” he grumbles. “We are shedding. New skin.”

You want old skin. Or would argue over waxworms like always. But only a tail can grow
back. Old skin is gone.

“Sorry, you think if I am being generous, I am… sad? Jules?”

Jules eats his dinner unbothered, then crawls away to his log under the heat lamp. Harry
shakes his head as he stands, wondering how he’d reached a point of sitting on the edge of
his seat waiting for a gecko to tell him how to feel. Hermione’s suggestion of a Mind Healer
suddenly sounds less outlandish.

He had cleaned up all the papers Draco had left the same night, the tea-stained, the fire-eaten,
and the trodden. It was all handwritten with no page numbers, which seemed foolish. He
stacked them and set them by the piano, and then methodically cleaned the entire home
except for the spare room Draco had taken up.

That was all presuming everyone would be coming over Friday. Instead, his clean home sat
empty, only added to by the leftovers he brought back with him that evening. On Saturday,
feeling properly lonely, he wakes and walks out into the garden with coffee and sits under the
wiggentree. It’s the kind of location that turns the pitifulness of loneliness into a more
romanticised Thoreau-ian picture of solitude.

He thinks about Ginny. Breaking up with her had been less of a decision and more of a fading
thing, though the fading thing wasn’t love—that never went away—but connection. And
could it really be a break-up if they had never fully had a chance to exist without a war
raging? They were both teary, but there was something bittersweet and indefinite about the
farewells. “See you at Christmas,” was certainly an unusual way to say goodbye as you walk
out the door.
Breaking up with Anthony had been rage-fueled. It had been humiliating. Discovering
another man with his boyfriend was most humbling when it was a result of trying to be
thoughtful, showing up early as a surprise with dinner in hand. He’d been in and out the door
in less than a minute. Tony didn’t try to stop him. He remembers walking home mostly cross
because his stomach grumbled—he’d left the food on the table.

He wouldn’t know what breaking up with Miles felt like because he’d been the one to receive
soft, careful words. He’d been the one still head over heels, and it had taken days to set in,
but seeing his friends had helped.

Imagining Draco gets him nowhere, but he can work with what he has, and what he has is
several circumstances of suffering that have never left him or a partner forgetting open
flames, salting their tea, bargaining again and again for weeks without taking no for an
answer, or reading books on memory charms any moment available. All while giving space
to the culprit himself, giving love and patience.

It hurts to think about. It twists somewhere deep in his heart, but he can’t tell if the feeling’s
any different from guilt. Hermione had told him (though she’d mostly been telling herself)
once that fear and excitement felt the same before an exam. He wonders if the same was true
for love and pain.

Somewhere something whispers in the back of his mind.

Patior.

“Patior,” he murmurs, his first word aloud all day, to bring it from a liminal space to his lips.

He’s sat long enough for his coffee to grow cold, but the bowtruckles have begun to emerge
from the knotted roots so he can’t move. They only appear when he’s done his best
impression of being a part of the tree, and when he looks down one long, spindly creature is
creeping towards the back of his flat hand in the grass. He’d hate to scare them off and ruin
the symbiosis.

The bowtruckles were possibly the only creatures around who loved the tree just as deeply as
he. The prickly edges of one’s fingers tickle Harry’s hand as it investigates him, but they can
turn dangerous just as easily, to dig out woodlice or eyes from the head of someone willing to
endanger the tree. In that fact, he finds a camaraderie.

It’s a sign of trust that they don’t scamper away when Neville opens the door to the garden.

“Morning, Nev,” he says, carefully immobile. “Did I know you were coming?”

“No, sorry, bit of a whim.”

Harry smiles as he enters the green patch of grass warmed by his wand and shrugs out of his
coat. Slowly, he raises his hand and deposits a bowtruckle onto Neville’s knee, then lowers it
for the others creeping out of hiding. “How are classes?” he asks, leaning back against the
trunk.
“Fine. It’s a slow time of year. Everyone’s back from Christmas just counting down until
Easter.”

“Teddy’s doing well?”

“You know he’s always on his best behaviour in Herbology,” Neville chuckles. “Doesn’t even
talk to his mates. I was wondering, do you… er, now that things are solidifying, are you
going to tell him? About…”

Harry closes his eyes. “I know, I’m sorry, it’s put you in a difficult situation.”

“We don’t talk much at school. Just thinking of you.”

“I just can’t imagine telling him over owl. None of you have been immune, obviously, but
with Teddy, there are so many things that are fuzzy just around the edges. Clearly, Draco was
a large part of his life.”

Neville nods, reaching a finger out to the bowtruckle. “I’m the one who told him, you know.
That Teddy was the way to your heart. He didn’t want to touch it with a barge pole. But once
he braved it, it worked. Too well, it seems,” he says. “Now you’ve lost these great bits of
Teddy’s upbringing, and Rose and Hugo keep asking what’s wrong with Uncle Draco… not
to mention all the kids at the Manor confused because he’s not been following up on
administrative duties.”

Harry lifts his head. “What kids at the Manor?”

“Oh. Er, oh. Draco mentioned something about you telling him you remembered the Manor. I
assumed he meant this.”

“No… something else,” he murmurs. “What kids?”

“When his mum moved to France, the house was left in his name. It’s a children’s home.”

Harry shifts to sit alertly, meeting Neville’s gaze in profound interest. It sends the
bowtruckles scuttling, even the one on Neville’s knee, back towards the roots and knots of
the wiggentree.

“Or it’s mostly a children’s home. The certification came through a while ago, so that’s when
the children moved in and the carers, but he had loads of plans; music lessons, outdoor
activities, Quidditch if they wanted, art supplies. The school lessons are going well, the actual
day-to-day is a success, but I know he saw himself taking a much more active role. I don’t
think he’s been since Christmas.”

“That’s…”

“Oh, gulping gargoyles,” Neville interjects, hands rising to his cheeks cartoonishly. “I wasn’t
supposed to tell you that, was I?”

Harry frowns, unbothered. “Oh, I don’t know. I think that was if I was going to attempt an
emotional… recovery. Even then, I thought we’d meant Draco and Harry things—the
wedding, or-or—you’re fine, Nev, oh my god you look peaky.”

He’s gone a bit pale, and Harry reaches out to clasp his arm.

“Sorry, Harry,” he says. “Just on the off chance that you changed your mind, I’d hate to be
the reason it went wrong. Draco would truly murder me in my sleep.” “Twelve years, right?
Even if he wanted a few things kept ‘sacred’ in case I have a change of heart, it’s impossible
for twelve years of memories not to come up. I’m sure I would’ve found out. He showed me
a few pictures last week.”

“He did?”

“Yeah.”

“Hm, okay,” Neville mumbles.

“It’s fine, Nev,” he repeats earnestly. “I don’t—I don’t think it’s even possible for us, so don’t
fuss over ruining a hypothetical.”

“A hypothetical,” Neville says.

“Yeah.”

“Do you think you’ll be in each other’s lives? Or was last night what to expect from
Fridays?”

Harry breathes in through his nose, forehead wrinkling. He might have been uncomfortable
with Draco’s return into his life, but he loves Pansy and Blaise. Neville, too, seems in danger
of losing, if it’s between seeing him or Luna once a week.

“I don’t want to be the reason the entire group fractures. But I’m not the one with problems
right now,” he says, not missing Neville’s sceptical sideways glance. “Maybe when he stops
caring quite so deeply we’ll get back to something normal.”

Neville pulls his head back in surprise. “Oh, Harry, he’s—I don’t think caring less is on the
table, even hypothetically. As someone who knows what it’s like to look at people you love
and see no recognition in their eyes, it doesn’t change how you feel. You love them anyway.”

Harry gapes at his friend. One of the joys of post-war life has been getting to know his
schoolmates in a new, less-dramatically charged atmosphere. Cooking with Neville—which
had transitioned into gardening with Neville—had brought them close, as had over a decade
now of joint birthday weekends. There’s much more they have in common, though, than July
birthdays.

The reality check comes to him like some horrible earthquake beneath his feet, shaking the
very foundation he forgot he’d chosen to stand on.

Arsehole. Prick. Self-centred… He’s been putting himself first as if that was a rule to follow,
but when had that ever been a rule he followed? And how had he put it to Hermione? ‘I’m not
trying to hurt his feelings, I’m just taking care of mine’. He can’t consult Draco’s Harry, but
he’s sure that’s something he’s never said—not about Draco, not about Hermione or Ron or
Teddy.

And then he had the gall to disregard the feelings of those who loved him most, including a
friend who knew hurt the way Draco likely felt it. He’d wondered briefly, just minutes ago,
when Draco and Neville had spoken long enough and personally enough for him to know
Harry’d mentioned the Manor, but now he sees why they’d be the most therapeutic match of
all.

“I think I’m going to trust your council on that one, Nev,” he says, voice dripping with
distress. “How had I forgotten?”

But Neville is Neville, and he shakes his head dismissively. “Not to worry. Just to keep in
mind.”

“Old skin,” he mutters. Neville tilts his head inquisitively, but Harry hops to his feet. “Fancy
some manual labour? You can take some fresh kale home for the effort. Cabbage, too, I
think.”

October 2001

Blaise had fixed Harry’s hair a couple of days later. He did it so deftly that they were left
speechless, interspliced with judgments of Draco’s choice to cut the hair wet ‘as if he wasn’t
an amateur. Draco was too busy puzzling why he was cutting vertically instead of
horizontally to care. Besides, it had been a good afternoon. His hand drifted to the back of his
head.

Other than their quarter-hour waiting on everyone before Friday night dinners, Draco and
Harry didn’t have any more extended one-on-one time. But that reality began to draw to a
close on an afternoon in October, long enough past their summer trip for leaves to fall off
trees and Draco to lose track of his impatience in the same way one can become so hungry
that their stomach gives up on growling.

He’d been spending a lot of time on Severus’ alchemy book lately. The actual contents were
mostly focused on alchemical applications in potions, but the margins were another story.
They were the opposite; potion-based strategies that hinted at methods for an alchemical
magnum opus. The first time Draco had paged through, he’d done it to see Severus’ writing,
to have a piece of him in his possession, but then he’d shifted focus to the old, Latin texts the
author recommended. It was academic, an itch for what a music career didn’t offer. It was a
race without a finish line. For once, Draco was learning for the sake of learning, and
understanding Severus’ writing more than he ever had before.

But studying Alchemical Elements and Transmutation again, he read in the margins under the
final page of Chapter Four: Alchemical Comparative Religion; ‘Branchos—serpentine
power/transmutative property—dissolution.’ He’d learned a great deal about transmutation,
the changing of a substance’s state, since his first read, but this was still a mystery.
He was at Pansy’s, yet again. Always at Pansy’s. It increased his odds of seeing Harry, like
today. Right now, Harry was playing a card game with Luna that required occasionally
announcing “Gin,” while Pansy kept score with her legs draped over Luna’s lap and
wordlessly shuffled a second deck in rotation as they played through.

“Pans, you took N.E.W.T. potions,” he said, his first words in half an hour.

“Mmhm.” She flicked her wand and floated the second deck to Harry as he set aside a new
discarded pile.

“Does serpentine power mean anything to you?”

“…No, nothing comes to mind,” she said, tilting her head at him. “Why?”

“Notes in this potion book… serpentine power as transmutative property, but I’ve been
through the entire text and there’s nothing about it. Transmutation is alchemical but most of
these notes are potion-based, so I’m surprised I’ve not heard of it.”

“I don’t know about in alchemy, but in Hinduism serpentine power could be a reference to
Kundalini. It’s supposed to be ‘coiled’ in the root chakra—associated with… well, the bum—
as the foundational location for a spiritual ascension, you could say,” said Harry, casually
rearranging cards in his hand. “And if anyone tells Blaise his endearingly-ignorant
Kamasutra gag gift for my birthday had useful educational information in it, I’ll hex you.
Gin.”

He set his cards down flat on the table, so Luna did, too. They seemed to start some mental
maths and Draco frowned back at his notes, too keen to decode the work to register who his
information had come from. “What about Branchos?”

“Branchos as in related to the Branchidai lineage?” Luna asked. Draco shrugged, eyebrows
up in surprise. “The oracle at Branchidai-Didyma was known for its divination by trance and
cleromancy, specifically with astragalomancy—that’s dice. Could Branchos be Branchus?”

“Would that make sense?”

“Oh, yes,” she said. “Oracles given by Branchus were said to be second only to oracles at
Delphi. You know, it makes sense with what you said about spiritual ascension, Harry, given
the story; at birth Branchus’ mother had a vision of divine light that entered through his
mouth and ended its path at the genitals—sex as an ‘experience of light’—and when
Branchus became a lover of Apollo, it was a physical ascension that established a spiritual
ascension. Apollo taught him the mantic arts and he became a prophet and there you have the
divination at Branchidai-Didyma.”

She beamed sunnily, then gathered the cards and distributed new ones to Harry, cupping her
hand around her own in discretion. Draco had just looked back down at his book to reread the
notes when Pansy exclaimed, “OH!” loud enough to startle them all. Her hand shot up in a
wonderful impression of Hermione.

“…Yes, Parkinson?” Draco said slowly.

“Alchemy is metaphysical and chemical ascension; I remember that from sixth year and also
your inability to shut up. So it’s suggesting that with all the stages of alchemical
transmutation, there’s an associated transmutation of personal enlightenment. The note is
suggesting that the alchemical equivalent of serpentine power is… what did it say?”

“Dissolution,” he said faintly, mouth slack, finally looking at the room of engaged fellows.
“Merlin, I’m the thickest person in the whole room.”

“Essentially, you need Harry to shag you,” she finished cheerfully. The bottom fell out of
Draco’s stomach. Harry’s eyes widened in interest, but he continued his game with no further
reaction.

“Pardon?”

“Serpentine power?” she answers, sounding bored in the apparent obviousness of it all.
“Ascension through the root chakra as exampled through shagging Apollo—a god who
famously slayed a huge serpent? I don’t know where you were second year but I remember a
certain Parseltongue-speaking, Heir of Slytherin-accused boy slaying a basilisk and stealing
the House Cup from under our feet. If he doesn’t have serpentine power in excess just
waiting to provide enlightenment…”

“Are you whoring me out, Parkinson?” Harry said coolly without looking up.

Draco could feel his cheeks heating. He didn’t dare look anywhere but at Pansy. “I take it
back,” he said. “I feel intelligent once again. And I’m certain Severus Snape wasn’t notating
on romantic enlightenment. Practically a monk.”

Harry sniggered.

“What?” he snapped in a moment of insecurity.

“It just—what Pansy said makes sense. Not the—I mean—a parallel between a journey in
alchemy and a personal journey, love included. If you want to believe that stuff. Don’t count
it out on the assumption that Snape wouldn’t think of it, too.”

Draco offered him a curious look.

“Ask me sometime,” he said softer. Surely, Draco thought, not realising that he’d just made it
sound as if he had a love affair with their professor. “But see what happens when you
participate and invite help?”

“That feels like the tail end of a lecture we weren’t privy to. Gin.” Luna hummed.

“Neville!” Pansy said, face lighting up. Draco turned to the doorway, then the floo, then back
to Pansy. “Neville killed Nagini,” she continued. “He could shag you into enlightenment!”

He pulled the pillow from his lap and threw it with precision.

“Fancy a good dinner?” Harry said as Pansy lobbed the pillow back. When Draco looked up,
he was smiling at him.
“Luna’s busy tonight,” said Pansy. “And I’m busy keeping her busy.”

“Draco?”

“I… don’t have plans.”

“Savour Islington? Seven?” he asked.

Pansy clicked her tongue. “Savour? Harry, check if people have plans before you make such
tantalising reservations. Surely you have a reservation. You aren’t going to waltz in and
demand a table in the name of celebrity.”

“It’s taken care of, Pans,” he said. “And jealousy doesn’t become you. Make your wife feel
like a priority.”

“Don’t you worry about her. Her chakras are fully aligned.”

*****

Harry was already seated when Draco arrived, at a table in the first room draped in cloth nice
enough that his mother would have died before referring to it as ‘white’ over ‘eggshell’ or
‘ivory’. When Draco pulled his chair, he looked up from his menu with a small smile that
seemed like it reached much further behind his eyes.

“You made it!” he said. “D’you think I have to order in French or can I use the little English
translation underneath?” Draco sat slowly, glancing at the menu placed at his seat. “I didn’t
think it would be this posh. The waiter had an accent. Like they imported him direct.”

“Order in English,” Draco said.

Harry nodded, chewing on his lip. He always looked good, but he’d dressed up. It took Draco
back to the night of Pansy’s party, Harry standing tall and poised and dressed out of character
but so radiant that it didn’t matter. He made himself look comfortable no matter how untrue it
may be—he made others feel comfortable. Made Draco.

They ordered soon after—drinks and starters—and Draco spoke in perfect French smugly
just for the narrow-eyed scoff it put on Harry’s face.

“So that book you have. It was Snape’s?” Harry asked not long after, leaning down for
another spoonful of his soup.

“Yes,” said Draco.

“Is that why you study alchemy?”

He sat attentive, elbows tight to his side. “I enjoyed it as a student. Mainly, I took the
textbook to have something of his, but it’s been useful, the more I’ve studied.”

“Do you want to be a career alchemist? Like Flamel?”

“Flamel? No, I love the piano. But if I only play piano, I might as well be a Muggle.”

Harry’s brows drew close. “No harm in that.”

“No, no,” Draco said quickly. “What I mean is, composing and teaching doesn’t always feel
intellectually challenging. Not in the way alchemy is.”

“Is ‘impossible’ the only challenge you like? Piano seems difficult to me, but there’s no
centuries-old quest for immortality there, right?”

“I’m not questing for immortality, but you’re not completely wrong. Alchemy’s uniquely
challenging. In a way music isn’t.”

“So what metaphysical stage are you at then? Alchemically?” Harry asked, leaning back,
eyes sparkling. “Striving for the serpentine?”

“Ah, you don’t believe in that. It’s all a bit… woolly and fantastical.”

“Don’t tell Luna you put down her hobby to reinforce yours.”

“I fully support Luna’s interest in divination, I—alright, well. Hypothetically, the first stage is
calcination. Chemically, it’s reducing something to ash. I suppose that would be through
1998. If that wasn’t burning an existence to dust I don’t know what is.”

Harry smiled wider, pleased that he’s played along.

“Then dissolution, which chemically would be like dissolving the ash in water. It would be
like breaking down artificiality and letting go of rejected parts of our psyche, opening to your
deeper, truer self.” Draco spoke with a tint of sighing resolve in his voice, to emphasise his
disbelief even as he said it. “I don’t think I’m there yet.”

“Don’t I feel special,” said Harry. “Finally taking you out on a date and it’s not even a
consideration for breaking down artificiality. Opening up.”

Draco almost dropped his fork, and in catching it quickly created a louder clatter that sent a
wave of hushed tones of surprise through the surrounding tables. He leaned into the centre
and said in a hissed whisper, “What date?”

Harry met him in the middle, inches apart. “This date,” he whispered back. His eyes darted
across Draco’s face, taking in his slack mouth, his incredulous stare. “Draco, you knew this
was a date. You knew this was a date.”

“Pansy and Luna were there when we made plans! They were invited!”

“They weren’t invited, I looked at you, I asked you. Pansy made assumptions.”

“And you haven’t said anything date-like,” Draco argued.

Harry laughed. “What was I supposed to do, ask if you have any siblings?”
“I don’t know,” he grumbled, arms folded. “I wish I’d known. I would’ve been less
combative. I would’ve worn a different suit…”

“Draco, I don’t want you to act differently, I like you because of who you already are. And
you already look… I mean, blimey, look at you, you’re… not ugly,” he bafflingly settled on.
He chuckled, shaking his head, then stood, set his cloth napkin on the table and smoothed his
trousers. Draco watched perplexed.

“What are you doing?”

“A do-over.”

“What are you, seven?” he asked, but Harry was already walking away.

He observed with an expression drifting between horrified and deeply amused as he walked
out the front door, strode in a circle, and breezed back in with a charming nod to the maître
d’.

“Draco!” He stopped behind his empty chair again. “My god, you look handsome. How did I
get so lucky for you to say yes to this date tonight? And did you already order dinner for
me?” He sat back down and placed his napkin in his lap. “What an assertive move.”

He looked over his glasses at Draco, who was glaring with nothing but warmth.

“D’you have any siblings, Draco?”

He huffed. “No, only child.”

“Mm, figures.”

“Piss off. What ‘figures’?”

“I thought I did a ridiculous twirl for the valet because you wanted to be less combative.”
Harry quirked an eyebrow.

Draco shrugged. “Alright, theoretically. A bit lost on me. No sense in rearranging deck chairs
on the Titanic.”

“Do Pansy and Blaise know you talk about yourself like this? Like there’s no hope for you?”

The question caught him by surprise, there again, that sudden seriousness after joking
moments ago.

“They know it’s just banter,” he laughed uneasily. Harry looked sceptical. Draco tried to meet
it with an easygoing confidence. “Does anyone ever tell you you’re oppressively emotionally
literate?”

“Not in so many words. Would that scare you off?”

“Not off, no, but scare, yes,” he answered honestly, lifting his chin. “But that’s growing
pains.”

“Dissolution,” Harry offered. Draco rolled his eyes.

February 2013

On Friday, Harry’s just pulled a baking dish from the oven and set it on the stovetop to cool
when he hears movement on the stairs. He cooked plenty for everyone, choosing optimism.
But Pansy said she’d be in touch but he’s heard nothing, so he may as well prepare the
Tupperware containers now, optimism be damned.

“Ron?” he calls over his shoulder as he digs for the salad spinner.

“Hate to disappoint.”

He stands quick enough to get momentarily lightheaded, salad spinner in hand and eyes wide
in surprise. “Draco,” he exhales. “I—wow—I didn’t think you were coming either way but
you’re early.”

“Just fifteen minutes.”

Harry nods, growing speedily uncomfortable but unwilling to throw a man out of his kitchen.
They’d left this room last on volatile terms. Two men on opposite ends of a catastrophe.

Seeing Draco look put together is a relief greater than he’s ready to admit. The bags under his
eyes, though still present, are a fainter blue than Harry’s seen them. He’s dressed well, too, in
pressed slacks and a turtleneck, and his hands thrum continuously on the back of a chair. For
a count of thirty, they stand in silence as Harry washes the lettuce, sighing and trying to think
of the best way to admit that he’s finally entertained the concept of compassion. He takes a
deep breath, turns back to the table and opens his mouth into a silence Draco breaks
simultaneously.

“Draco, I was a prat not to—”

“—I overwhelmed you—oh,” Draco stops himself. “You go first.”

“No, I haven’t been listening to you, that’s what… please, I want to hear you.”

He blinks in surprise, but stops tapping his fingers and pulls the chair out instead. “I was
going to explain that I know I… overwhelmed you after the curse,” he says. “I let my pain
get in the way of what you needed. Highly unlike me. It is what you do when you’re
miserable, I suppose, but I still shouldn’t have—”

“You were responding perfectly normally!” Harry says. “You… sorry, I was letting you talk.
Sorry.”
“You’re fine, Harry. Look, Pansy’s was good for me. Seeing you every day… I couldn’t
process this because what I was feeling was grief and loss but then there you’d be in the
kitchen… like you were haunting me. I’m sorry if I was a bit dogged. You told me repeatedly
how you felt but I simply found myself incapable of letting go with grace.”

Harry punches hard at the salad spinner as they talk, like it’s life-saving CPR. “You’re
staying in Hampstead then?”

Instead of answering, Draco rubs his eyes, then presses them into his palms. He sighs and sits
back in the seat. “What did you want to say, Harry?”

“I was going to tell you that I know I was being unlike myself, too. An arsehole, specifically.
That… I clearly lost a husband and with it my ability to empathise, but I should’ve
sympathised more. I… when you look at me I can tell I’m not who you want to see, but we
could—it would be best for us to get along. I think… I think… that this salad’s quite dry
now.” It spins with dying momentum as he lifts his hands.

“Finish the phrase,” Draco murmurs.

Harry pulls a drawer open for the big wooden salad servers, then cracks the fridge. “I did, I’m
done talking.”

“No, it’s—when I play, even when you interrupt you always wait for me to finish the phrase.
It’s the set of measures that fit together to form one sort of musical thought? A complete
thought—and I don’t think you finished yours. So that’s what we say.”

“Oh. Well… I’ve just been thinking a lot about what we meant to each other, and what we as
a couple meant to the rest of my friends,” he says. “I haven’t changed my thoughts on finding
love, I don’t think I can manifest it under such different circumstances, but moving forward,
maybe we’d both be happier if we were still friendly.”

Draco’s posture stiffens, regarding Harry down the length of his nose. “You want to be
friends?”

“I didn’t forget everything. I thought we could be friends before, the only thing stopping me
now was the, er, tragically crushing adoration. But you can’t exactly stop that, so…”

“No, I will… tone that down. I already planned to.”

“And I need to get to know things about you. Everyone’s keeping me in the dark to track
what I recover but it really makes you seem like a stranger creeping around my house.
Neville said the Manor is a children’s home?”

“Is he who got you questioning things?” he asks, head tilted.

“Him and Jules.”

Draco rolls his eyes. “I find it unnerving when the lizard’s profound.”
 “He only manages when it’s to comment on his own gluttony,” Harry chuckles. His eyes
follow as Draco stands and runs a hand through his hair with a big sigh. “You’re alright?” he
checks.

“Huh. You haven’t asked that once,” Draco points out, before catching the guilt on his face.
“I’m not accusing you, I just—there’s your proof that it was a good week apart.”

“I’m asking you to be friends with this version of me, to clarify,” he says cautiously. He grips
the salad servers a little tighter and listens to the pattering of small footfalls upstairs. This
needs to be settled before they sit beside each other under several sets of watchful eyes.

Draco smiles warmly and it doesn’t make him recoil in discomfort. “I’m sorry that I made
you feel otherwise, but if this week taught me anything, I’d take any version you’re offering
over none at all. As you said once, I believe it was… ‘You seem nice’.”

Is that an eyebrow raised? It is, and maybe it catches Harry just off guard enough to pull up
the corners of his mouth. Just a little. Slight enough to hide as he thrusts the salad bowl into
the other man’s arms and fills his own with the pasta bake. Together, they rejoin their friends.

Chapter End Notes

Hope you've enjoyed it thus far!

Feel free to leave some words below in the comments, or find me at

writandromance.tumblr.com. Doing my best to reply as often as I can, but know I read
them all!
 Venus, the Bringer of Peace
Chapter Notes

Apologies for the late upload! I ended up in a cycle of daily updates occurring late late
at night, which was resolved with one day of waiting for the following morning. Thanks
for your patience!

The chapter title refers to the second movement of Gustav Holst's The Planets, Op. 32.

See the end of the chapter for more notes

February 2013

February closes its doors on a tentative agreement: to try, not at love, but friendship. Mutual
existence. Harry’s excited by the prospect—everyone at dinner that Friday agrees that if he’s
adamant that recouping old memories through romance isn’t on the table, he’ll have
questions and deserve some answers.

He and Draco come to the compromise easily, like they’re striking a business deal, over
breakfast a couple of days after his mid-February return. It’s coincidental that they’re even in
the kitchen simultaneously (at least, it’s coincidental on Harry’s part—most mornings
Draco’s dishes are in the sink before he’s come down), but they take advantage, equally keen
to crack on with their lives. Harry’s growing sick of the melancholy they’re wading through
every day and he can tell even Draco, in his strange state of post-mourning, is too.

Hermione, they decide, would make a good intermediary. Draco can sit with her and choose
some specific life events to keep untarnished by the stories about himself Harry will
undoubtedly wish to discover. He doesn’t mention what he plans to hold sanctified, but Harry
guesses at least one memory is his wedding, maybe even the stag night that Ron had briefly
mentioned. He’s not worried—any memories Draco wants to keep unpolluted by varied
recounts are the memories that still make his stomach flip nervously anyway. He’s just
curious about who he was, who Draco is, anything particularly exciting that he may have
forgotten about Teddy or their friend group. Tuesday can’t come soon enough.

“You’re really fine with this?” he asks Draco while they settle it all, just as he finishes the last
bite on his plate.

Draco’s been holding a mug of likely-lukewarm coffee for fifteen minutes now, accompanied
by a plate with an untoasted raisin bagel. Harry would bet good money that this is a second
breakfast, conveniently scheduled an hour later than usual. Draco tilts his head. “Fine with
which part?”

“It’s one thing to say you’re fine with me in your life as a friend, quite another to start taking
physical steps in that direction. Makes it solid. Real.”
“But I’m withholding some key memories.”

“Sure,” Harry says, trying to keep a pitying edge out of his voice. “Just in case.”

“Exactly. Just in case. I’m fully on board still. Fingers and ears.”

“Erm, what?”

Draco holds up his hands, then points to either side of his head. “I’ve got my hands. I’ve got
my ears. I’m grateful for what I still have, not dwelling on what I’ve lost.”

To Harry, this sounds like just the idiom a man too careful to get on a broom would create. If
there’s a day where a freak accident turns ten long, pale fingers to nine, he doesn’t want to be
there.

Hermione comes over the next evening directly from the Ministry and Harry sits under the
wiggentree with a book while they talk in the living room. When they’re done and she pokes
her head out the back door to wave him in, she looks solemn, so it’s unsurprising when Draco
appears even more wrecked. He looks at Harry once she’s gone with a desire to reach out so
transparent that it gives him the itch to disappear completely. But Draco doesn’t come closer.
The door to the guest room shuts soon after.

It’s a shame. Harry was looking forward to diving into his missing memories. But sympathy
sympathy sympathy is the name of the game, so he leaves Draco be. He can be patient in
waiting to know himself.

And then, after spending a day ruminating on the image of his housemate as he’d last seen
him—grey-faced where he wasn’t red, appearance drawn more sombre than he’d thought it
possible, posture deflated—the sight that greets him the very next night is thoroughly
surprising. He gets home later than usual, thanks to a delivery of vintage Quidditch
magazines from an estate sale that made their way to Quality Quidditch by accident, and
notices the light on in the dining room before he even registers who’s sitting there.

“Harry, hi,” Draco says as he appears curiously in the doorway. “How was work?”

Harry looks around as if another Harry might live on the premises. “Er… Good. Had a mare
tracking down a delivery.”

“I swear, those postmen just read the word Quidditch on your parcels and go straight to
Aldona.”

It still takes his breath away to hear things so close and detailed to his life fall off Draco’s lips
with ease. He nods daftly.

“Hungry?” Draco asks, pointing towards the takeaway bags on the table. One is open in front
of him, the Styrofoam box placed amusingly on top of a porcelain plate. “My Delhi Kitchen
eyes were larger than my stomach.”

“I love Delhi Kitchen,” Harry murmurs, stomach growling.

“Please,” Draco says sunnily, sweeping an arm to a second chair.

“I was going to heat my leftovers.”

“Save me from heating these tomorrow.”

Harry takes a step closer, enough for the smell to hit. It weakens his resolve on the first
inhale, and he shakes his head as he takes an empty chair. “We’ve got to make some sort of
rule about using your preexisting knowledge of me to your advantage.”

“No,” Draco says, firmly but jauntily. Smugly, Harry might’ve said a week or two ago, but
he’s getting better, more open-minded about intentions. “I win your company with your
favourite food; you get to fill that empty mind of yours.”

Harry lets him have that. It’s worth the slightly-awkward company even without the Delhi
Kitchen dinner. But he can be won in many ways, head, heart, and stomach.

“So. What was I like?” he asks instantly, popping the lid to his takeaway. “What did you like
about me?”

Considering the air of confidence he’d shown on Harry’s arrival, this stalls Draco rather
quickly. He pokes his fork into his dinner hard enough to hear the little popping noise of the
utensil piercing the Styrofoam bottom.

“Oh,” he grimaces. “I’m… really very sorry. Don’t get me wrong, I could talk about you for
hours. Unfortunately, I might wish to walk into the sea when I’m done. Questions that aren’t
about how I feel about you might be a better start. What else do you want to know?”

Harry blinks a few times at the barrage of probably-concerning information. “Okay, what
about yourself then? Tell me about you.”

“Merlin, like an icebreaker? Like ‘Give us a fun fact about yourself’?”

“No.” He rolls his eyes—half in exasperation, half because the first bite of dinner was
everything he hadn’t known he needed. Wizards aren’t particularly religious, but if there’s a
god, he works at the grill in Delhi Kitchen. It fills him with a bit more energy. “Actually, you
know what? Yes, you’ve dug your own grave. Two truths and a lie.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

It takes five more bites for Draco to speak again. “Alright,” he says. “Two truths and one lie.
I… speak four languages. Blaise and I have snogged. We bought the Muggle television in the
bedroom because I wanted MTV.”

“I know this! You only speak three languages: English, Latin, French.”

Draco looks properly smug. “Four,” he answers in a familiar breathy hiss. Harry, in return,
forgets to breathe.
“Impossible,” he responds in a hiss of his own when he gathers air again. “How long did it
take me to teach you? It is not even a language I learned. I could not have been a good
teacher.”

“Five. Six.”

Harry sets his fork down, leaning forward in great interest. “Six months? Six years?”

“Seven. Eight.”

“Nine. Ten,” Harry finishes, smirking. “You prick. Can you go to a hundred?”

“No. Just to ten. Additionally—” Harry finds it curious that Draco can’t seem to speak the
language without narrowing his eyes and ‘getting in character’, for lack of a better phrase. Is
he mimicking Harry? A sudden urge to speak Parseltongue in the mirror nags him. “—You’ve
had plenty to eat… I know where we keep the cauldron… Plus, I love you… And a couple
more that are not befitting our current non-romantic association.”

“Blimey,” Harry grins. Even with questions about his identity evaded, his spirits are up.
There’s a lot to learn indirectly. Like that some version of himself has had enough patience to
teach a smattering of Parseltongue. Or that Draco’s taken an active enough role in Jules’
upkeep to admonish him in his native tongue.

“I actually should’ve known,” he tells Draco, settling back comfortably into his dinner. “Just
hearing you mutter the words MTV seems like it should make this pureblood-built house
combust.”

Draco reacts like he’s just said something irreversibly horrible about his mother, mixed with
astonishment. He’s far too entertained for Harry’s good.

“Really?” he scoffs. “You think I would let Blaise Zabini call me a conquest? I was trying to
make this easy! I know you don’t know me, but you know him, Harry. So long as I’ve never
let that man near me, he can’t hold all the cards.”

“You and Pansy have quite literally—”

“And she brings it to our attention once every… five years? That’s respectable. He would
ruin me.”

“Hm.” Harry picks lightly through his meal until, like driven up from a once-deeply-buried
depth—not Obliviation-based, but most certainly alcohol-based—a memory resurfaces. “Oh
god,” he groans, expression frozen slack. “Oh god. I’ve kissed Zabini.”

Draco winces, the face of a man who knew and clearly hoped he hadn’t remembered. “I was
curious whether that made it through the Obliviation. I did blackmail him into never lording
it over you, so never fear.”

“I don’t remember that part,” Harry says quietly. “But it sounds like you have a rather
Slytherin solution, so if he tries to pursue you, you’ll be fine.”
“That would be true if Blaise wasn’t a horrifyingly open book. And I, rather Gryffindor-ly,
wasted my only private information on you out of love and sacrifice.”

Harry sucks in a breath and sees in Draco’s incrementally widened eyes and pursed lips that
he also recognises that the conversation is safer when they stray from such romantically-
based stories. He covers it impressively fast.

“This New Harry who is not afraid to speak openly with me about snogging my best friend is
a gift, though. Friend to friend, tell me once and for all; was he any good?”

It’s a vague memory, and the more they talk about it the more he wonders if there’s more
Draco-based obstruction on it than he first thought. He can only remember a blank mind
when it happened, so his thoughts were either completely on Draco or he was struck dumb.
Both would crash the momentum of this peaceable dinner, so he screws up his face and
shakes his head.

“On behalf of Old Harry, I’ll be maintaining my silence.”

“Good, you’re teaming up. Delightful,” says Draco.

“What else do you like to do then? Alchemy, right? What else?”

“Oh. I don’t know…”

“You don’t know what you like to do?”

Draco sighs. “No… I do. It’s just been a while since I’ve been asked to talk about myself, and
to do it to you… Everything starts with ‘we’, you know? We watch films. We walk Regent’s
on Sundays.”

Interesting, Harry thinks again, before quickly pressing on. “I’m sure there are things you
like that I didn’t partake in.”

“I like chess. With Ron,” he offers. “You’re dreadful.”

“Oh, yeah! The long games. How many have you won?”

“I won the first. And six since.”

Harry can feel himself softening even further into a familiar topic with Ron as a
conversational crutch. “Do you have a style?” he asks. “Does Ron? What’s he play like?”

Draco likes that question. His face brightens in a way it hardly has, even in tonight’s
objectively amenable discussion.

“You’ve never asked.” For a beat, he looks up thoughtfully. “Ron is… Ron’s a surgeon, to put
it in Muggle terms. He’s calculating. And you can’t assume if he’s got a bad position early in
the game that it’s not part of a larger plan, because he’s willing to do things like that. He’s
practical. Sacrificial.”
It’s almost just as interesting to sit in wondrous interest and hear Draco Malfoy speak
affectionately about his closest friends as it would be to hear about himself. He’s glad, at
least, that Ron’s found some decent competition.

“What else do you like?” There’s an eagerness now to his voice, in the gaining momentum.

“Hm. Books. Comparing translations, especially. Or the original texts.”

“Latin?”

“Yes.”

Harry cocked his head. “Go on. What else?”

“Instruments? Even when I can’t play them.”

“Can you play that violin?”

“Poorly.”

“The guitar?”

Draco waves a hand indecisively.

“What’s the point of them?”

“Sometimes it’s helpful when composing to hear the melody in a completely different tone.
Even deficiently played.”

“What do you like to listen to?”

He frowns. “What don’t I? We—I always have music playing,” Draco says. “I like it if I’m
cleaning, or sometimes while experimenting upstairs when I don’t need the silence to
concentrate.”

Harry pushes his box away and kicks a foot up onto the chair. “Can I be honest?” he asks,
resting his hands on his knee.

“I suppose I’d prefer it.”

“I know I’ve said piano suits you. And I know we’ve talked about this before, at Friday
dinners back when I remember. I know the fable as it was told. But I’ve not once for the life
of me been able to picture you feeling this way about the arts while at Hogwarts. You, what,
called ‘Mione a-a… ‘Mudblood’ and then skipped away to play Beethoven? That’s cruelly
hypocritical.”

“Beethoven was a wizard,” Draco replies. “Sorry, not the point.” He looks tense, his posture
corrected stiff after relaxing into topics of chess and music. “We could—have, and I expect
we will—spend time discussing this. There was a performed and a suppressed version of
myself at Hogwarts, I believe. Music falls into the latter.”
Harry nods, satisfied enough for an otherwise amicable takeaway dinner ambush.

“I’m sure there was a point in time when I’d rather die than let someone know I’m not all
harsh words and wand at the ready. And I was convinced it would make me look gay to love
classical music,” he adds.

“Yes… well,” Harry says meaningfully, tilting his head and tipping his mouth down at the
uncontested concept.

Draco sighs back. “’Yes, well’ indeed.”

October 2001

Draco walked Harry all the way back to Grimmauld Place after their dinner in a show of
chivalry that required a suspended disbelief of Apparation’s existence. Everything in his body
screamed to leave now, to split ways outside the restaurant while he’d left everything pleasant
and warm. But the words had tumbled out courtesy of the gallantry instilled in him from birth
before cowardice could win, and Harry seemed to appreciate the unexpected gesture at least,
given the way his eyebrows had shot high and the surprised smile still hadn’t left his face.

“So you enjoyed dinner?” he asked, knocking his shoulder into Draco’s as they walked. “As
unprepared as you were?”

“It would be quite difficult for dinner with you to be unenjoyable.”

“See? Look at you, so smooth and off the cuff.”

“Imagine how unstoppable I would’ve been with careful revision.”

Harry smiled wider and briefly squeezed Draco’s arm as they crossed the street. His own
hands were firmly stuffed in his pockets. Autumn was his favourite time of year, but the
transition from summer always seemed so sudden, as if the trees collectively circled a date on
the calendar to shed as one. As it was, the darkened park they crossed through had properly
transitioned. There were more leaves underfoot than on the branches above them, which
made it easy to hear another couple cutting through the grassy plot before they saw them.

Another couple, he’d thought. He resisted the urge to glance back at their disappearing
figures, the way they hung off each other in perfect step, a lot closer than the temporary touch
of Harry’s hand to his arm that’d sent his heart pattering. Couple. Are they a couple? Draco.
Half of a couple.

“I have a question,” he broached into their quiet walk, forced casualness sending his voice up
in pitch as they crossed onto Harry’s street.

“I might have an answer.”

“It’s been, what, a month and a half since our holiday?” He pretends not to know exactly how
long. “You said you needed time—forgive me if I’m intruding—but what did you need the
time for? Why now?”

“I needed time to get my affairs in order. In case this was a long con to exact some well-
hidden school-age revenge.”

“Funny.”

Harry stopped outside Number 10 and leaned against the wrought iron fencing to face Draco,
legs extended straight in front of him. “Before a Quidditch match, everyone always wanted to
have this big, buzzing breakfast and walk to the pitch together and crowd around in the
changing room shouting. And I just wanted to eat a light meal in peace with my mates and
then get on my broom and sit patient. That’s how I always spent the match anyway—on my
own, above everyone else. They were preparing to collide and beat, to score, and I was
preparing to spot a needle in a haystack.”

“This month was you preparing in peace,” Draco said. “For the big game.”

Harry smiled widely. “You know, I’ve been thinking about you a lot this month. Including
how you deduce things so quickly that I never need to see my terrible extended metaphors
through. What a talent.”

“Why now?” Draco pressed, making a conscious effort to roll his shoulders back and down
from where they sat tense. It was the opposite of Harry’s leaned back posture.

He shrugged. “I wanted to.”

“So verbally generous and then… so not,” he replied.

“In part, I was reckoning with the idea of us being an us,” Harry said and stretched one of his
legs further to knock Draco’s shoe distractedly. “What it’ll mean for our… past. Our future. If
I’m honest, it staggered me how fast you agreed to something serious. I probably could’ve
taken the whole six weeks just to come to terms with the fact that you were interested in me.”

“That I was interested in you?”

“Don’t sound shocked. I don’t think it’s proper first date etiquette to list all our past
grievances, but I will if needed—you weren’t my biggest fan. And I don’t know, I know you
watched me bring others over. I’m not convinced the parade of men was a good look.”

“A parade? It was two.”

“Yeah, well, two that ended a bit dramatically,” Harry grumbled.

Draco frowned, brows drawn close, heavy in thought. “Remember in Saltburn you said
something about wishing I knew how you saw me? That I was better than myself and others
give me credit for?”

It was purposefully paraphrased; just because Draco could recite what he’d said to him that
morning by heart didn’t mean he should. Harry nodded, a captivated interest in his
unblinking eyes.
“I had the opposite with you—these last two years were me coming to terms with the fact
that you are everything they say you are and more. You are kind, and hardworking and
caring… I’ve always been ‘interested’ in you, but I was so sure it was for these miscalculated
aspects of your personality I was meant to hate. It just wasn’t until after the war that I
understood exactly what sort of attention I wished you’d show me.”

Draco’s pessimism was telling him to interpret the smile on Harry’s face as laughing at him,
not with him. He’d essentially said he’d taken years—years—to fully appreciate that there
was more to Harry than the story that his parents and the papers they donated to had built up.
There was a gentleness, though, in Harry’s eyes that didn’t fit his cynical narrative.

“I’m keen to kiss you, but everything about your body language is the most guarded show of
reluctance I’ve ever seen,” he said, leading Draco to instantly drop his shoulders from his
ears again and take his hands out from where they sat stiff and straight-armed in the pockets
of his coat. “Are you nervous?”

He opened his mouth and closed it again, incapable of finding clear words. The best he
managed was clasping one hand tightly around the opposite wrist behind his back and
shrugging.

“Are you?” Harry repeated, softer. Fuck him, truly, Draco thought, for being so genuinely
confident. He’d thought, as children, that they were both performing that outward confidence
—something they had in common.

“Not nervous. Careful,” he answered. “Not to cause problems. Which… is coming off a bit
tense, I know.”

Harry reached his arms out, fingers curling in summons, so Draco countered the offer with a
single step in. That was all Harry needed apparently, because he set a hand on each of
Draco’s upper arms and began to rub up and down quickly. It was the kind of gesture that
would warm him if he was standing in the autumn air less dressed, but the playful friction
against his coat sleeves simply conjured a small scowl of doctored annoyance.

“Ease up,” Harry said, turning the up and down movement into a full back and forth shake
like Draco was a plaything. It should’ve ended in a well-deserved hex but instead he felt his
mouth turn up.

“Alright,” he replied sharply, bracing his hands on Harry’s shoulders to stop the shaking.
“Message received.”

“Don’t be careful with me,” Harry said.

“Famous last words.”

“I’m serious.” When his hands trailed away from Draco’s shoulders to the hang around the
back of his neck, that message was received, too.

Draco hated first kisses. They were always awkward, which is why he’d historically preferred
them in the dark. the loud, the intoxicated of the horrid places he’d let Blaise drag him just
after school. Harry stood before him now soberly and lit all too well by the lamps lining the
quiet street, glowing handsomely. He swallowed.

It would be helpful to recognise that this was to be their second kiss, but his stubborn psyche
refused, given how the information on hand aligned so perfectly to a first: a sudden inability
to move an inch, a confidence that his hands would be vibrating if removed from Harry’s
shoulders, an inner spectator in the back of his head telling him for the love of Circe, lean in
you coward.

His hands tightened on Harry’s shoulders.

“Draco, I swear to god, if you don’t stop looking like you’re gathering the nerve to down
Polyjuice potion, I’ll see myself out.”

He relaxed his face in response, and it must’ve gone more lifelessly blank than he planned
because Harry looked between his eyes and laughed lightly. Seeming to take pity on him, his
hands rose again, a thumb reaching out to rest gently just in front of each of his ears. There
was time to blink once or twice in acceptance before fingers wound through the hair at the
back of his head and, gently but assuredly, pulled them closer.

The last time Draco’s lips had touched Harry’s had been two seconds of screeching surprise,
every alarm bell ringing in his head, then instant panic. But this. This was so different that
they didn’t deserve to be known by the same word. Harry breathed that same calm stature and
easy voice of his into the kiss itself, so soft, with none of the impatient urgency Draco had set
precedent for on the coast.

He pulled away what felt like too quickly, eyes still shut lightly when Draco opened his. Then
they were looking back, above a creeping smile, as Harry pushed off the fence. “Cold’s
seeping in,” he said, pulling his coat tighter. “Better go inside.”

Draco hadn’t moved at all, but at that he licked his lips and nodded blankly. He had no idea
this night would look the way it had, and yet he was as sad to see it go as if he’d been
counting down the days. Though he had been counting down, hadn’t he? There was just no
way to know when he’d hit zero.

Zero, he thought, staring moonstruck back at Harry.

*****

After dinner, Draco and Harry made themselves hard to miss, through visits prompted by
thinly-veiled excuses. The first time Draco came to Collector’s Quidditch featured a
particularly lazy story that he had no trust in, but he pressed on anyway. He’d been going
mad replaying their dinner for the rest of the weekend and well into the work week, so when
Friday afternoon involved an early finish with the Children’s Orchestra, his feet drove him to
the eclectic storefront.

The sign was flipped to ‘OPEN’ but the shop sat empty, and Draco ignored the bell on the
counter with a greater interest in the open door leading straight back. It was the workroom,
judging by the tools and tables and Harry himself, too focused to notice him. He was
engaging in some charade where he seemed to have decided that balancing on one foot with
the other hooked in the metalworking of a bristle-less broom handle was the best way to test
the footrest shaping. He cussed under his breath and wiped his brow just as he turned to
notice his company in the doorway.

“You’ve got to be joking,” Draco said, shaking his head and pushing off the doorjamb. It sent
something delightfully jagged through him to watch the way Harry’s eyes widened dolefully.

“What?” he groused.

“You look like a bloody pre-war chimney sweep.” Draco pointed at Harry’s t-shirt, smudged
with brown and black stains. It seemed unlikely that he knew there were similar ones on his
neck and the backs of his arms, the back pockets of his trousers.

Harry scowled, warmly, and set the broom carefully on the long workbench, where it teetered
on uneven footholds. “Did you come to insult me?”

“Added benefit. I came to make sure dinner was at seven.”

He stopped in his tracks, a hand frozen halfway to the tools. The look he offered was deftly
suspicious. “Yes… the dinner that’s always at seven… is at seven.”

“Don’t give me that face. This is the first one at Grimmauld Place. You are now a host mad
with power. Anything was possible.”

“You’re right, I’m a tyrant. D’you wanna stay or do you have somewhere to be? You look
nice.”

“Thank you,” Draco said, reaching for a stool in answer. “I came from rehearsal.” He sat on it
inelegantly, the heels of his dress shoes hooking into the bottom rung. Harry said nothing
more, just returned to work. Twice more he stood on one foot, then lifted the metalwork and
began to twist and bend it with a physical effort that lent Draco to lose face ogling.

“Take a picture, it’ll last longer,” Harry grunted out into a final curve of the pliers, glancing
up long enough to catch his eye and raise a knowing eyebrow. Draco felt his face heat and
turned his focus to pulling the hem of his trouser leg straight from where it had gotten
snagged on some splinter of the workbench. Harry’s ability to tease was quite the stressor on
his attempts to stop averting his gaze so habitually.

“Not drowning in broom commissions, are you?” he asked in deflection, an innocent,

collegial question.

“I don’t mind. I’ve always moved the goalpost of what would keep my hands busy enough to
be happy—cooking, then cooking plus Aurorship, then running the shop, but this,” he said,
prodding the broom handle and grinning charmingly when it no longer teetered on uneven
legs, “I think it’s actually done it.”

Watching him work—when he got the nerve to do so—was captivating, in part because he
remembered Pansy’s party, back when Harry didn’t even feel like it was fair to open a broom
shop when the world around him was so used to requesting heroism. He was happy to watch
him evolve to embrace it, and enough to turn to broom making. But brooms, he was
suspicious, were just an additional way to serve the community.

Maybe it was the almost-regrown tuft of hair at the nape of his neck that still reminded him
of an emotionally productive but aesthetically destructive haircut, but Draco felt a desire to
return the favour and show interest in Harry’s emotional wellbeing.

“What do you make for yourself?” he asked.

Harry frowned. “It’s commission-based. On demand.”

“But do you ever make anything you’d just like to? You could still sell it.”

He gave a strange exhaled snort of disbelief.

“People would buy.”

“Maybe.”

“That’s not the point anyway,” Draco said, poking a finger out at a cluster of broom bristles
sitting near him.

Harry swept a second stool out of nowhere and set it directly against Draco’s, springing on
close enough for their knees to slot in like a puzzle. The touch felt like a heat source against
his legs, and he blinked hard to focus on Harry’s face.

“So what’s the point?” Harry said, leaning very close.

“The—it’s—self-actualisation,” he stammered, pushing back on Harry’s chest gently with a

hand. He smelled like freshly-stained furniture and deodorant and something lavender that
was specific to the shop—an elderly-lady scent that travelled on the antiques, perhaps.
“Something we have in common. I worked hard to find myself after the war and I’d venture
you did the same.”

“Obviously, based on my occupational confusion,” he said, sweeping his hands around them
with an old cloth in one. Draco watched him twist it over each stained finger, to no avail, then
lifted his wand to wordlessly apply the same ink-lifting spell he employed so often himself. A
flicker of surprised cheer crossed Harry’s face at its success.

“You should make things just for you,” he suggested as he stowed his wand again. “I think
you’d find it rewarding. I write music that’s not meant for anyone.”

“You’ve got secret music?”

“It’s not secret. It’s unpublished.”

Harry said he’d consider, and Draco didn’t have high hopes, but when he stopped by that
weekend to return a plate he’d been sent home with piled high with biscuits after Friday
dinner, he found the man out back. An entire portion of the grass had been torn up and
reduced to dark soil.

“Draco,” he greeted with a smile. “We can’t keep meeting like this.”

“How’s ‘this’?”

“You dressed to perfection. Me covered in dirt.”

“But you wear it so well,” Draco joked as he lowered himself into the grass, as if to prove
that his wardrobe wasn’t the priority some assumed it was. “This a garden?”

Harry beamed. “Neville’s help, of course. Your usual run-of-the-mill vegetables plus
tomatoes. A few magical varieties he promised I’d appreciate. And a tree.” He patted the
skinny trunk with a gloved hand.

“A wiggentree.” It was roughly Teddy-height, but for now it was splinted with long planks of
wood to stand straight.

“Yes! You know them?”

“I took Herbology, didn’t I?”

“I didn’t remember them. It was kind of a gift from Nev. Something I could help grow, he
said. And a symbol of goodness and protection and all that. Isn’t that a nice thought?”

Draco wobbled his head indecisively. “Seems like a lot of work when we can just watch
Teddy grow, can’t we?”

Harry’s face fell. No, that wasn’t right—Draco was trying to make him laugh. Or rather,
make him roll his eyes and say something snarky, the act of which would make him happy.

“Sometimes,” Harry mumbled.

It had been two and a half weeks since he had seen Teddy, chalked up to business in the
workshop and a trip Andromeda was taking with him. Draco kicked himself, unsure how
he’d forgotten the way Harry had been missing the child lately.

“Poor joke, then. That’s my mistake. At least, when you think about it, it’s better that Teddy
has enough loving homes for you to miss him, isn’t it?”

Harry turned a gaze on him that was at once tired, investigative, bemused. “The unexpected
angel on my shoulder: Draco Malfoy.”

“Have you heard of gratitude? Or optimism? A dash of hopefulness?”

Harry laid down in the grass so his head ended up right beside Draco’s hip. He raised a hand
to shield his eyes as he looked up. “Hello, Cauldron? It’s Pot. I’ve got some news about your
colour.”
“I wish your friends would stop acting like the sky’s fallen when I utter anything remotely
positive,” Draco groaned, lifting his eyes to the clouds. Two nights ago at dinner, he’d been
the butt of multiple jokes related to his growing inability not to smile sunnily through their
meals. Luna had felt his forehead for a fever.

“Then stop making it noteworthy.”

“I am! It’s your fault. You’re infectious. I’m catching your positivity.”

Harry was grinning, dimple and all, when Draco lowered his head again. It felt like he was
seeing right through him.

“Stop smiling like that,” he grumbled. “It’s disconcerting. I don’t like it.”

“What a charming thing to say. You’re such a catch.”

“It’s lovely and disconcerting. Great teeth—unnerving way to use them.”

Harry scrunched up one corner of his mouth and the associated eye, a pleasant gesture that
sent a gust of unnamable emotion through him. Draco would never use a word like adorable,
but he could admit to a situation where a lesser man might. Like now, as the stretch of
Harry’s arms over his squinted eyes in the grass tugged at his shirt. Draco didn’t stop his eyes
from exploring. It was still difficult to break old habits and consider Harry a part of his life, a
partner potentially, and not something pretty that was reserved to furtive glances. He was still
breaking those habits. But in some quiet moments, just the two of them, it was deceptively
easy.

His eyes trailed down Harry’s body all the way to his fidgety feet, toes of his trainers
knocking together repeatedly in a way that reminded Draco of a dog’s wagging tail. When his
attention dragged upwards again, Harry was watching him, though his grin had relaxed at the
edges. It was a face he recognised. Usually followed by some emotional and introspective
sentiment.

“Being with you is like being alone,” Harry exhaled, soft like a sigh, right on cue. “I want
years of this.”

Draco certainly didn’t verbalise that he’d also felt something worth preserving in the
comfortable laziness between them, a desire to bottle up the quietude before their friends
know, before the world knows, and set it up safe with his alchemical supplies. Still, it was
strangely validating to hear the same from Harry, when he’d grown so used to feeling
unreciprocated.

“Perhaps this is just the ‘honeymoon’ period,” he mused aloud, carefully cynical instead.

He watched Harry’s mouth twitch. “I think you’d have to kiss me to enter the honeymoon
period.”

“Bugger off.” Maybe he did move slow. Maybe someone who’d dominated the story of his
life for over a decade had said words like ‘goner’ and ‘years of this’ and leaned close very
often. “I’ve been a gentleman.”

“You’re twenty-one. I think we’re supposed to be attached at the hip.”

“You need better sex education if that’s how you think it works.”

“Ha. Ha. Just don’t keep asking when we’re telling everyone and still be surprised that there’s
nothing much to tell.”

“I fancy you, Harry, really I do, but—”

His forearm fell from his eye line. “There’s a but?”

“But you’ve also been my friend for years. Something… else for longer. It’s a strange leap.”

Harry regarded him for a long pause.

“I can wait,” he said, and the tipped corner of his mouth proved he knew he was echoing
Draco’s previous promise.

He looked genuinely surprised when the notion sparked some movement in Draco, who
rolled impetuously out of a sitting position and on top of Harry, one hand planted by either of
his shoulders. They were close enough that their noses were touching, his hair tickling
Harry’s face, his knees pinned tight around Harry’s legs. Points of contact like a spark,
igniting something primitive and beautiful. A lightning strike, a forest fire, a crackling wood.

“I said I can wait,” Harry repeated in a short breath, as if such grand movement could’ve
been in simple misunderstanding. He opened his mouth, maybe to question, or to repeat it a
third time, just before Draco cut the distance between them.

Their lips, the heat passed between them, the slip of Harry’s tongue in surprised enthusiasm.
Draco’s first kiss had been an answer to a question, the second kiss a reassurance from Harry.
Here, now, this was wholly human, mortal. Something in him felt uneasy with that—so used
to living self-importantly on a higher plane, but he could feel Harry’s arms scrambling to
remove his gardening gloves somewhere above them and the huff of laughter it brought out
of him eased any internal tension.

He kissed the happiness that had bubbled up in him onto the corner of Harry’s mouth, onto
the hinge of his jaw, the dip of his neck, urged on by the return of Harry’s hands, gripped
tight first to his ribs, then his neck before finally settling on his face. He found himself
hoping, as the action sent something hot and worth repeating through his body, for a day
when he’d lose track of how often they touched each other like this.

When Harry’s hands skated down to pull gently at his back, Draco let himself be lowered
towards the grass without sparing a thought for bugs or dirt. They went back to kissing. Harry
tasted human, too, situated equidistant from any meals or tooth-brushing in the mid-afternoon
to call to anything besides his own natural taste. That, too, was a rush of crude intimacy like
Draco hadn’t experienced, like catching someone’s natural scent after sports or smelling them
on a pillow. It all brought forth that old chorus of existentialism, whispering that’s Harry, it’s
Harry! but he waved it away. Only when he yelped a minute later and pulled a trowel out
from behind his shoulders did they fully pull apart and sit up, staring for a moment before
falling back into each other with a shared laugh.

“Neville was right,” Harry chuckled, looking bright and buzzing with life. His dishevelled
appearance sent Draco combing a hand through his own hair. “Gardening does help you
pull.”

Draco scowled, which made Harry smile. “Come inside and I’ll cook you dinner,” he said,
rubbing a thumb on Draco’s forehead and wiping the soil on his trousers. “What brought you
over, anyway?”

He laughed much too hard when Draco sheepishly handed over the cleaned plate he’d
brought, then pointed to a chair for him to sit in while he cooked. He’d sat in the same seat
last Friday, when he’d first tested whether he could arrive fifteen minutes early even if Harry
was now a busy host. Though they had chatted briefly about Pansy and Luna’s move to
Hampstead, he’d been silenced by the frazzled cook soon after, then sent to entertain the
guests. They’d eaten in the dining room then, but this night they sat right in the kitchen.

Dinner tasted great—some curry something with ingredients he’d never have the creativity to
combine. When Harry pushed up his sleeves and started the kitchen faucet afterwards, Draco
gently nudged him aside and took over the dishes, leaving him to pack the rest of the food
away. The conversation had flowed easily as they ate, but now the room was contentedly
quiet.

“For someone who loves cooking, you seem completely oblivious to the joy of turning on the
radio,” Draco spoke into it, occasionally dropping a plate onto the drying rack.

“I’m not sure if I love cooking, or love cooking for people, to be honest,” Harry said. “Either
way, I’ve really never thought to turn music on.”

Madness. Perhaps, Draco thought, the complete dichotomy in their willingness to speak
deeply of their emotions laid in Harry’s inclination to work in silence and Draco’s inability to
let his thoughts wander longer than it took to find a good radio channel.

When he glanced behind him, Harry was pouring the food from a small container into a
larger one. “Mrs Weasley’s superpower is guessing the right sized container for leftovers,” he
said when he caught him looking. “But not me,” he sighed. “She’s who taught me that
cooking can be a labour of love, you know. That’s not why I cooked as a child. All the
cooking at Privet Drive made me proficient, but Molly just made food taste good. My
childhood cooking tasted soulless, I think.”

Harry’s food tasting soulless seemed impossible. He’d been inclined to pinch the leftovers,
and not just because he’d have something else to return. “Did you get enough to eat?” he
asked over his shoulder, eyeing just how much of the meal there was to steal.

Harry laughed harshly. “God, never. I don’t think I knew what it felt like to have a full
stomach until that first Sorting night feast.”
Draco slowly stopped scrubbing the last glass, leaving the faucet running. Harry was kicking
the fridge shut with an elbow, traipsing lightly around the room with purpose.

“I meant for this evening.”

“Oh,” Harry said, cheeks warming even as he shrugged. He gave a breathy laugh and turned
quickly back to his task. The subsequent table wiping he executed was vigorous and focused,
to say the least.

And Merlin, did that twist up Draco’s insides. If the radio were on, they wouldn’t have filled
the silence, and he wouldn’t be thinking about his ninth birthday when he’d decided the
morning of that he didn’t want the three courses the house elves had been preparing and
watched with his mother as they tossed beautifully prepped dishes into the bin while crafting
a new shopping list. He had simply woken and no longer wanted fish. It was not a problem,
for the youngest Master Malfoy.

Draco stood in front of Harry when the last dish was cleaned and thought he could see in his
eyes that he knew Draco was thinking many things. He sighed and said none of it, but he did
tilt his head at Harry’s worried eyes, lean forward, and press his lips to the top of his head. It
was an equally large feat, as far as he was concerned. It said just as much to him.

He thought he would leave, then, without an excuse to return because his hands were empty,
which was admittedly ridiculous. He didn’t need an excuse to see Harry, but life was easier
when he had one.

But, “Draco!” Harry said just as he opened the front door. He pointed a thumb at the nearest
door, to his living room. “Er, you know there’s that piano in the living room. It doesn’t work.
But if you had an interest in getting it fixed, you’re welcome to play here. If you want.”

March 2013

They’ve entered a routine, more or less. It’s a routine begrudgingly taken up by all, Harry can
tell, because there’s unfinished business in the air; it was January when he was an idiot
contemplating opening some fan mail, and now March has little to show for the time passed,
just a successful antidote, an unsuccessful one, and questionings that’d led nowhere. The
tenseness is strongest between Ron and Draco, the latter of whom seems irritably powerless
to waiting on the former’s investigation.

As the resident individual looking forward instead of back, Harry thinks they’re all
disregarding the very idea of a silver lining. He’s happy that it’s March and no more curses
have come his way, that no one’s crawled from the woodwork trying to kill him and no news
of his attack has hit the papers. But perhaps simply being happy he’s not been targeted to kill
isn’t that relatable to the others.

Maybe Harry’s more enthusiastic about keeping a new routine than the others because it’s
what makes his day feel anything close to normal—something increasingly difficult to grasp.
He’d thought filling some gaps in his memory would be fulfilling and it was, at first. What
he’d learned over takeaway with Draco that first night had been an instant excitement and a
latent soreness in his heart. It’s irresistible, and the sole reason for a nagging feeling like he
has no agency in his existence; everything he shares is already known by Draco, everything
given in return is unknown and inevitably changes what’s left of who he thought he was.

Draco handles his routine fairly well, at least as outwardly as Harry does. Their days overlap
slightly, at the level of light friendship they’ve strayed into, but mostly he seems to wake
early, eat before Harry, spend some time upstairs in the lab, then play the piano downstairs or
leave to—Harry assumes—play it elsewhere. Sometimes he hears children’s voices and
reckons it’s a lesson. Occasionally he comes down to the kitchen just as Harry is finishing up
dinner and they make uncomplicated conversation, but mostly he seems to eat in the living
room, taking bites at the piano. This doesn’t seem productive to Harry, but it’s not his place
to question.

He tells Teddy about the curse, finally, in person during a Hogsmeade weekend over
butterbeers in the very back of the Three Broomsticks. It’s fucking terrible. For the longest,
saddest minute of Harry’s life, he thinks it’s a joke. When he realises it’s not, he’s cross that
he’s being told months later, no matter how much Harry explains that he couldn’t put this in a
letter.

He’s truly a fifteen-year-old about it—all questions and huffing and making it a personal
affront. Harry doesn’t blame him. He does what he can to ease the shock, which mostly
involves being apologetic and understanding. He thinks there’s some Draco in the teen, now
that he sees him for the first time since the curse, and that’s something that knocks him for a
loop. He can’t put his finger on it, though, until Teddy clicks his tongue and runs a hand
through his hair with a sigh that sounds identical to one Harry’s been subjected to for over a
month now.

“Honestly, were you Confunded?” Teddy asks. “You’re opening fan mail without checking
things now? Draco must’ve gone spare.”

“People make mistakes,” Harry says tiredly, a bit sharper than he usually speaks with Teddy,
but he’s growing up—has shot upwards even since Christmas—and something about this
very real, serious adult conversation makes him feel like he’s not sitting with his godson.

“Everyone’s been so strange in their letters.” He shakes his head shrewdly, staring
reflectively past Harry. “Now I get it.”

Harry fields his questions a bit longer (No, Draco hasn’t moved out; Yes, he can tell Vic; No,
no one else can know; No, he doesn’t remember touching the letter) then segues from that
tenseness into the more bonding experience of shaking their heads at the Seeker Weekly
article that had come out in the latest issue.

The first half is very professional, but Teddy snorts halfway down before reading aloud with
a curious lilt in his voice, “’Even the Chosen One relies on networking, though Potter refused
to comment on how long-time partner Draco Malfoy felt about his continued advantageous
relationship with ex-girlfriend and Harpies Chaser Ginny Weasley.’ That’s rich,” Teddy
scoffs. “Anyone with a toe into our lives knows how Draco feels about…” He leans into the
article again. “Your ‘continued advantageous relationship’.”
“Well, er, anyone but me, Ted,” Harry points out.

“Shit, I already… That’ll take some getting used to.”

Harry waves him on. “How are they together, though? Is it that bad?”

Teddy’s eyes widen as he sucks in a breath. That can’t be great. “You told me with your
parenting filter on, so… but, er, your go-to line is ‘They have differing priorities about the
importance of forgiveness’.”

Harry can start to sort out the rest. But he wishes he needn’t. It got old fast, playing detective
with his past. And at Friday dinners, he grows angry with each first bite, every meal just as
soulless as the last. Something is missing in him. He and Draco don’t speak directly very
much, either—both thirstier for the company than each other, he thinks—and their rose-bud-
thorns become about daily life; an acquirement Harry’s made, or a piece Draco’s been
trudging through, or a good move Ron made in their extended game that gave Draco grief.
They’re all so kind to Harry, which would move mountains if Harry just felt like Harry
himself.

Group therapy is something he would rather die than attend after fighting tooth and nail to
maintain some semblance of private life. When he broaches the topic after dinner, Hermione
ensures that those kinds of spaces are tightlipped, but it’s not a risk he’s keen to take. There
is, however, a woman named Anastasia who specialises in Obliviation. Her name came
directly from inquiries Hermione made at work in the hopes Harry would have a change of
heart.

He’s just stressed and concerned enough to say yes, and the smile of relief the answer draws
across Hermione’s face scares off the last of his trepidation. Anyone who appears to lose five
years off their age just from him mentioning therapy deserves some peace of mind.

So he’s reminding himself of how pleased Hermione looked while he’s tapping his foot in the
waiting room of a surprisingly inviting office the following week. He’d gone on a holiday
with Ron and Hermione to the Peak District once where they’d stayed in a cabin with warm
wood rafters that remind him of the open beams running across the ceiling of the small
building. He’s frowning, reaching hard enough into the edges of his memory to warrant a
headache trying to find a sign of Draco on the trip when a woman likely ten years his elder
opens the door. She wears small, cat-eye glasses and stands a few inches shorter than him,
but she commands the space like it’s her home.

“Mr Potter?” she inquires, and he’s put at ease instantly. Chalk it up to practised intuition,
perhaps, but she meets his eyes with crows-feet and warmth and no more recognition on her
face than that of discovering any new client in the hall. His reservations start to recede.

“Harry,” he corrects easily.

“Come on in, let’s chat.”

He smiles fleetingly, then passes through to sit a bit awkwardly on a soft blue loveseat while
she shuts the door. He’s not sure how to hold himself, who to present to her. His gaze
bounces around the room, to the tall floor-to-ceiling single pane windows that run the length
of the office, to the thick vegetation just outside. The plants sway in the wind of an oncoming
shower as he waits to be joined.

“It’s nice to meet you, Harry. I’m Anastasia.” The specialist sits across from him and tilts her
head inquiringly. “What made you wish to see me today?”

“Completely confidential?” he asks in return.

“Entirely.”

He begins to fill her in on the last months, slowly first and then picking up speed as he
transitions from the factual details to the ways he’d been feeling by the end of February, the
confusion, the lack of recognising himself. She’s an expert at a poker face, but her eyebrows
rise slightly as he slows back down with a “so… yeah,” before taking a filling breath.

“Only my family knows,” he adds, eyes narrowing as he watches her write. “Ron hasn’t
found the curser, so it’s… an unsolved case, I suppose. That’s its own stressor, because I want
it solved obviously, but also because it’s making Draco dreadful to be around. What did you
think I’d be here for?” he asks, without giving her a moment of pause. “I’m guessing you saw
my name on the schedule.”

He expects an answer stereotypically therapeutic, like We’re not here to talk about what I
think, or that recycling a question nonsense, like What do you think I thought you’d be here
for? but instead, as she sets her pen down flat to the notepad, she says simply, “I thought you
might be seeking therapy in regards to the war.”

“The war?” Harry echoes in surprise, leaning back against the corner of the loveseat and
regarding her anew. “You’re an Obliviations specialist.”

“I work in many of areas of specification, Harry. Obliviation, yes. Also trauma, anxiety and
depression, bereavement. Is this your first time seeking therapy?”

“I went twice, after the final battle.”

“How did you find that?”

“It was rubbish. We were less than a year out. The bloke wouldn’t even call Voldemort by his
name. Pointless.”

She nods with a frown. “What about after you transitioned from Aurorship?”

“No. Quitting took care of everything,” he answers, ignoring the familiarly strange feeling of
a stranger knowing information he hadn’t volunteered.

“What’s everything?”

“Nightmares. Anxiety, at work, and then increasingly not at work. I was a dick. I was guilty.
A liability.”
“You felt guilty?”

Harry eyes her carefully. “Sure. The point is, I haven’t had any of that since. That’s not why
I’m here. Can we talk about why I’m here?”

“Mm. You’ve had a traumatic couple of months, certainly. Feeling a lack of safety in your
home, handling your Obliviation and the effects on yourself and your family. It sounds like
you feel lost in your identity.”

“The hate potion—during everything with Voldemort, there was… something that made my
temper worse, related to the war. This felt like that,” he mumbles. “It was like I was
seventeen again and full of this… terrible pain and anger and it felt good to lash out.”

“That’s how hate potions work, that’s not you.”

“But it has been me. To feel that way again… I wasn’t prepared.”

She says nothing, just offers him a soft, thoughtful look. He can’t tell if he’s supposed to wait
patiently while scrutinised or if he’s playing a game of chicken to see who will speak first.
It’s a shame she doesn’t know how comfortable he is sitting in silence. Vaguely, he wants to
get her to say ‘Voldemort’, just to see if she will. She looks like someone who’d say
Voldemort, he thinks in a strange but genuinely complimentary way.

Finally, “Do you think about the war, Harry?” she asks.

Of everything he thought might break the silence again, that was a surprisingly difficult
question. He doesn’t think about the war. The war comes to him, sometimes. Like on
Christmas mornings. Or at Andromeda’s door. But he always pushes it back.

“No.”

“And how did you feel when your family expected you to work immediately towards
reverting the Obliviation?”

Harry shrugs. “Once I was confident I couldn’t, I just wanted to move on.”

“Can I make an observation?”

Quite literally her job. He raises his eyebrows and ducks his head in a motion of anticipation.

“It appears to me as though you shut yourself off from what you don’t want to emotionally
confront. Not for nothing—denial helps you protect yourself from trauma, but in the long-
term, it stops you from pressing forward. That’s not healthy anymore.”

“That’s not it,” Harry says sincerely. They don’t know each other after all—it’s no fault of her
own that she’s inaccurate. “I’m known for being open about things. I’m the one who gets
everyone to talk about their feelings. I’m not shut off, I’m well-adjusted.”

“Sometimes it’s the oversharer who’s closing themselves off the most,” she replies. “People
speak openly about their emotions to communicate, but it also allows them to control their
narrative. If you appear to be an open book, no one would think to press you on the topics
you’re closed about. Maybe that’s not you, but I’ve seen it in others. Something to consider.”

Harry’s quiet. His first instinct is to instantly refute that and remind her that they’ve known
each other for under an hour even if she thinks she knows him well thanks to The Prophet.
But he can’t bring himself to because, Merlin, does that analysation fit him well enough to
leave him shifting uncomfortably in his seat.

“What do you think I’m shut off about?” he asks after a minute during which she’d written
far too quickly in her notes and he’d slowly sipped his water.

“What do you think I think you’re shut off about?”

Harry rolls his eyes but plays along. “The war, clearly. And Draco, probably.”

“What about Draco?”

“That I don’t like thinking about being married for ten years. Looking forward is more
productive than looking back.”

“Do you think it’s possible that Draco and your friends didn’t take your decision well because
they wish you’d spent more time reflecting on what you were giving up?”

“Does it matter though? If I can’t get it back?” Harry asks. “It would just… hurt more to
reflect.” He knows he’s circling the drain of exactly what she’s saying—he’s admitting that it
would be sadder to know and miss what he had with Draco than to consider it a loss and
move on. “I can’t get it back. I’ve tried, really. I’ve watched him and tried to feel it, but it’s
not there. Have you ever had someone Obliviated fall back in love with the same person?”

“Most of my clients don’t have such selective Obliviation to their partner,” she answers, or
rather doesn’t answer. “But you’re right in that—just like non-Obliviated couples—tragedy
or even the simple evolution of who we are as we grow and age can affect the likelihood of a
pairing. Regardless of whether you see yourself as interested romantically, you’re a
compassionate person, though, so it does matter. Being open to someone as a friend helps
them and you. Would you find yourself open to the idea of becoming closer with Draco?”

“I told you, we’re friendly. We see each other at home and dinners. We talk.”

Even as he says it, it feels pitifully similar to what he’d said to convince Hermione
everything was fine days before Draco went mad and left for a week. What had changed,
really? Draco had made progress. And his progress had given the impression that they’d both
moved forward, when Harry hadn’t done much on his part at all besides apologise and try to
be humanly sympathetic.

Anastasia hums thoughtfully. “Harry…” she begins in a drifting, distracted tone, still writing.
The pen clicks and her full attention is on him. “Has anyone spoken with you about intimacy
yet?”

He laughs stiffly. “Er, ever?”

“No,” she smiles. “This year.”

He shakes his head, which makes her sit up more alertly, leaning forward with the notepad set
down by her side. The simple act of it catches his attention, too. He swallows.

“This has been a chaotic time for you. Some aspects of how the Obliviation affected you may
have been overshadowed by others,” she says. “The loss of your marriage has been a large,
important event. But something I find important to speak with clients about—and especially
in your case, Harry—is the loss of intimacy.”

“Intimacy… how?”

“For those whose Obliviations have removed memories of a relationship, a significant side
effect is a loss of physical intimacy. What’s the last you remember that would classify as
that?”

Harry frowns, a tad uncomfortable under the request. “Er… my ex. Miles,” he answers after a
moment. “2001.”

“If you’re not interested in Draco romantically anymore, no one can fault you for that. But a
long-term relationship has a habit of dominating our lives—we grow up, see our friends less
often perhaps, have children, focus on our jobs. Much of our needs for intimacy that might’ve
been diversified in youth become more trained on our partner.”

“I’m not gonna… cozy up to him.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t even suggest it, Harry. It sounds like he needs understanding and space to
come to terms with this himself. But for you, what I mean is, because you had a partnership
that ruled your intimacy, removing those memories essentially removes the bulk of affection
you’ve experienced since around 2001.”

“That sounds sad,” Harry says quietly. Outside, the storm has hit, and it’s not rain but hail.
Watching the peas of ice pummel the plants out the window makes anxiety hit for his garden.

“It’s unfortunate. But it’s solvable. Through diversifying that intimacy again. If you and
Draco are determined to stay in each other’s lives, focus on emotional intimacy and
intellectual intimacy—talk about your jobs and interests, keep up with how you’re both
managing this. And see if you can’t find intimacy elsewhere, too.”

Harry hadn’t thought about intimacy. Or about missing it. But once upon a time, he had been
quite lovable with his friends. It had been a lighthouse when he’d been trying to come down
from the hate potion in Pansy’s lap that first weekend, now that he thinks about it. Every hug
from Hermione since the curse had brought his heart rate down dramatically.

“I guess it’s nice when my friends show affection,” he says.

“Exactly! Explore that, Harry. Instead of shutting down on closeness to cope, see if you can’t
find other ways to expend it. Not everyone has or needs a romantic partner, but everyone
needs love.”
He stares out the window, thinking about this, long enough to catch Anastasia in his
periphery leaning forward to catch his expression.

“How are you feeling, Harry?” Her voice is soft and kind.

His voice hits his ears from far away. “I’m fine. Worried… about my garden. This weather.”

“Hm. Well, I have papers about intimacy and what I’ve mentioned, if any of it didn’t quite
cement in the first time—it’s a lot to manage, I know. You can take them home with you,”
she says, then sits back comfortably. “What’ve you planted this year?”

The rest of the session is filled with suspiciously easy conversation, but it does the trick
because Harry leaves with a tight but present smile and sets a date with the receptionist. He
holds his homework under one arm, happy to get hit with only raindrops upon exit.

Friday night, too, can’t be predicted. Draco comes downstairs early, before Ron and
Hermione have even arrived, and sits at the table quietly behind him without a word. Harry
tells him about therapy before anyone else (besides the joint Granger-Weasley mind), because
it seems… nice and patient and open and everything else he’s trying to employ. Besides,
technically Draco is still the top name on his emergency contacts. There’s surely some
deservedness there. If he gets committed to St. Mungo’s, it’ll be best if the man’s first
question isn’t ‘Anastasia who?’

“I’ve been to see a Mind Healer,” he announces without turning from the stove. He doesn’t
hear anything and he’s just considered that maybe Draco had left the room when he hears, a
bit breathy in its astonishment, “Have you?”

“Yeah,” he shrugs. “Was alright. Just thought I’d tell you before dinner.”

“Thank you,” Draco says calmly, almost thoughtfully. “I’m happy for you.”

Blaise, as may be expected, wins for most opposite reaction. Harry’s doing his best recitation
of (some of) Anastasia’s lecture and papers on intimacy as part of his rose when, three seats
away, he throws his napkin down with conclusiveness.

“I can give you intimacy, mate!” He winks. “First time in twelve years? Talk about easy to
impress.”

“Oi, back off,” Draco mutters at his plate. Harry, newly minted in patience and
understanding, lets him.

“You are separated, aren’t you? He’s fair game a—ahHsh, Parkinson, those heels are bloody
registered weapons.” She fixes Blaise with a strong, meaningful glare. It shuts him up well.
And good thing, because Ron’s fixing him with something equally murderous across the way
and next to his two young children.

Draco’s still wearing his wedding ring, a thick silver band with no markings, so far as Harry
can see when he glances. Harry hasn’t put his on once. It had disappeared from the nightstand
at some point, anyway. He’d bet money on where it ended up.
Luna reaches across the table and touches Harry’s wrist quickly. “Regardless of where they
stand, Harry’s feeling a bit tossed in the waves. He’s not looking for romance, right?”

“Yeah,” Harry says, nodding gratefully in her direction. “And I was saying, there are many
ways to be intimate. Anastasia meant being close with you lot. Participating more. Discussing
our interests.” He keeps it deliberately vague with a smile for Hugo. “Maybe Hugo will
finally let me bother him into hearing about dinosaurs.”

“Essentially, help you be proactive about building your own new identity?” Draco’s voice
from beside him is surprising, both in the reticence of the question and the conciseness in the
summation that Harry’s not managed in the last five minutes.

“Yeah,” he says. “Exactly that.”

Draco pats his shoulder and turns back to his plate easily, and though Harry moves on equally
fast, he catches Hermione’s face; the way she looks between them and back at Ron with a
forlorn gaze. Neville and Luna dive into an exuberant story from a dinner they’d had recently
just as Ron leans in, face solemn, and whispers something in her ear. She nods with a smile
and Ron kisses her temple. Harry lowers his head back towards his pudding.

*****

It’s still chilly in London only a fortnight later when the spinach can be harvested, and there’s
more than he needs so, cautiously, the last week of March, Harry makes dinner for two. He
can hear Draco rehearsing and knows a student left over an hour ago, so he knocks on the
door and pushes it open before he can lose his nerve.

He’s playing something slow. Harry wonders whether once upon a time he knew enough to
call it anything other than pretty.

“Draco.” The keys yelp as Draco startles, an inharmonious sound. He twists, looking
surprised. “Oh,” Harry grimaces. “Sorry.”

“What is it?” he asks expeditiously. Harry remembers his little story about ‘finishing the
phrase’. There’s a chance he’s broken some cardinal rule, interrupting, but how’s he to know?
And he knocked.

“I’m making dinner now.”

“That’s fine, I wasn’t going to cook for a while. Late lunch.”

Harry clasps his hands behind his back, squeezing his palm. “Oh… er, never mind then.”

Draco, whose face had been at best pointedly tolerant, comes alive, and he turns completely
on the bench to face him. “What do you mean ‘nevermind’?”

“I was asking because I did some harvesting. I’m making more than I can eat, so if you were
hungry now…”

“I could eat a hippogriff,” he says instantly. “I’m starved.”

“I thought you had a late lunch.”

“I didn’t know what we were talking about.”

Harry offers nothing but a sceptical humph and leaves him sitting flummoxed on the piano
bench. Only a few minutes later, just as he’s finishing up in the kitchen, does he hear the
footsteps approaching.

“You did not,” Draco says with an edge of disbelief Harry can’t place.

He hesitates, bowl in hand, watching full grey eyes stare into it. His voice is defensive.
“There’s no peas.”

Draco’s brows creep inward, trying to put the exchange together. “I… know,” he comes up
with, pulling out a chair opposite the one Harry’s taking. “But you made the orzo salad. I love
this salad.”

“You’re not allergic to nuts, are you? I add—”

“Pine nuts. To the dressing,” Draco says, reaching for the bowl and serving himself.

Harry sends him a sidelong glance, taking the offered bowl and tongs next. “You know, it’s
not fun when everyone knows what I’m going to say. Doesn’t feel brilliant for being
confident in my own identity. I never get to tell anyone anything, you know?”

There are a lot of ‘everyone’s and ‘anyone’s in a statement that’s clearly code for ‘you,
Draco’.

“I’m sorry, do you want me to Obliviate myself, too?” Draco mutters, stabbing his fork
forcefully into the salad that’s done nothing wrong.

“No,” Harry grumbles. “But letting me finish my own sentences would be a start.”

“Fine.”

“Great.”

They eat quietly. Considering the excitement with which Draco viewed the meal, he’s eating
it quite halfheartedly. Harry’s a mirror of glumness across the table, pitying himself for
ruining his peace offering so quickly.

“Do you still want to know about yourself, then?” Draco cocks a brow, a hint sourly. “Or
does that interfere with building a new identity?”

Harry blinks up, forehead wrinkled in apprehension. “I… want to know things?”

“Then in the spirit of knowing things, you do realise why your food doesn’t taste as good as it
used to?”
His fork drifts down from his mouth. On one hand, disrespectful. On the other, there’s
something worth appreciating about someone finally verbalising what he’s been thinking for
ages.

Harry gestures his fork at the meal. “You think it doesn’t taste as good?”

“Neither do you, I see it on your face every Friday. Forgive me in advance for knowing about
you, but I know you insist that ‘cooking with love’ makes food taste better. You’re the kind of
person who puts your heart into catering for family and your heart’s not been in it.”

He doesn’t know what to say.

“You used to be funnier, too,” Draco adds, fully turning the corner from sour to petty and
grinding salt in the wound.

Harry’s mouth falls open.

“That’s rude.”

“I’m simply saying, I’d propose that they’re both related to that loss of identity you’re
feeling. You’re uncomfortable with yourself. And your discomfort’s stolen away my
favourite parts of you.”

Harry clears his throat. So long as they’re uncomfortable, then. There’s a part of who he was
with Draco that’s been eating at him. If Draco gives another speech about not being ready to
speak about them as a couple, Harry will find it in him to argue—it’s been ages, and he’s
cranky as it is.

“Early on, you… almost called me things that weren’t my name. Darling, I think, yes?” He’d
gotten so far as ‘dar’. Harry needs to know, for one because that word coming from Draco’s
mouth, as bizarre as it feels, would tell him a lot about the man.

“Darling?” He pulls his head back, brows furrowed in disbelief. “When?”

“Er, I think with the chessboard. When I dropped it.”

“Yes, when you ‘dropped’ it. Oops.” Draco mumbles. “I see. I wasn’t calling you ‘darling’.
I’d never say something so… gooey and pedestrian.”

“What were you saying, then?”

“I was insulting you.”

Nothing new to discover there, then. He takes another bite of his salad.

Lemon juice.

It needs lemon juice, and perhaps a bit more pepper. He stands, to Draco’s surprise, and fishes
through the fridge, snagging the pepper pot on the way back.
“Insult me, then,” he says, lighter in his distraction. “It must come very naturally, if you were
breaking a habit.” In a quick swoop, he slices through the lemon and squeezes it over his
dish. Draco waits for the pepper pot to stop making noise to speak.

“Well now it’s embarrassing,” he says, eyes following Harry’s fork from the bowl to his
mouth.

The next bite is worlds better. He shakes his head up and down happily and pulls Draco’s
bowl a hair closer, repeating the movements, first lemon, then pepper. A bit more lemon.

“What was it? Dar—what?”

He reaches over and pushes his fork into Draco’s salad, taking an equally satisfying bite.
When he pushes it an inch back across the table approvingly, Draco’s blinking at him
wordlessly.

“Dar what?” he repeats, snapping him back to attention.

“Dartle,” Draco says slowly, staring back into his meal as if it’s going to bite him. “Miss
Dartle, from David Copperfield. You’re much nicer than her, it’s not an implication that
you’re some… shrewd vengeful crone.”

“Thanks.”

“I know it’s a bit lazy, but it always entertained you. She’s an orphan.”

Harry’s eyebrows rise interestedly.

“And she has a facial scar.”

In the moment that he takes to process, Draco leaps ahead in concern. “I know, low-hanging
fruit. I know. But you never cared. Not that—you can care now. Feel free to care.”

“Why are you explaining Dickens like I’ve never read it?”

Draco looks strangely blindsided. “What? No. You can’t have.”

“Oh, I know. It was far too advanced as a child, but I only got the books Dudley thought were
boring and—”

“No, you prat. You prat!”

In the shock of Draco’s exclamation, Harry forgets to point out that he’d gone and interrupted
him again. He’s unstoppable anyway, eyes wide with some personal offense Harry’s not been
able to follow.

“You sent me on a fifteen-minute backpedal the first time I called you that! All big green
eyes and cocked head, going ‘I don’t understand. Explain the book to me? You think I’m a
mean old woman?’” He pulls his mouth into a dramatically drooped frown as he imitates Old
 Harry. “I practically lectured you on the book’s themes because you’d gotten me so
convinced I’d mortally wounded your pride.”

Harry laughs, first at Old Harry and the rare moment that made him respect his old self rather
than remain distantly reserved about his existence, but then at Draco’s face now, looking at
this Harry. It’s the exact affronted expression he’d bet Old harry was aiming for but didn’t
live to see. The sound of his laugh changes it though, flickering into something less reflective
and more presently twinkling. And then Draco laughs back. They’re both surprised to hear it.

Chapter End Notes

Hope you've enjoyed it thus far!

Feel free to leave some words below in the comments, or find me at

writandromance.tumblr.com. Doing my best to reply as often as I can, but know I read
them all!
 Somewhere in Between
Chapter Notes

Today's theme... intimacy...

The chapter title refers to Jacob LaVallee's 'Somewhere in Between'.

See the end of the chapter for more notes

March 2013

Eugenia Ivanow is a thin, birdlike woman with wire-rimmed glasses that sit much closer to
the tip of her nose than the bridge and a permanent scowl. At first glance, she reminds Harry
of Professor McGonagall, if only in silhouette and first impression demeanour, but there’s no
warmth behind her eyes, no well-earned care for others like he still feels in the headmistress’
presence. At present, she’s sitting straight as a board in a chair against the wall, eyes trained
unblinkingly on the two Aurors standing nearest; one holding her wand, the other holding
two clear bags with one unrecognisable and one recognisable envelope marked as evidence.

As Harry watches, she leans forward and takes the smallest sip of tea he’s ever seen, mouth
barely opening. One would think it was lemon juice, the way she glared down at it.

“To put it easy, mate, she… isn’t the biggest fan of you,” Ron is saying in a low voice,
ducking close from his left. Harry’s eyes don’t leave her face across the room as he does, his
arms folded in observation. He’s never seen her in his life. “Said you were ‘a bit dramatic’
about Voldemort. No connection to Death Eaters or the Dark Arts. Or the other extreme, for
that matter. Just says she abhors spectacle and infighting in wizarding communities. But that
the letter wasn’t personal.”

They’re both leaning against a free desk on the Auror floor far enough from Ivanow to speak
in confidence. She’s not physically restrained in Ron’s alcove of the department, but several
shrill alarms will sound if she so much as stands. Beyond that, she appears to be too apathetic
to even consider it.

The news of Ron’s discovery had come to his shop via Patronus, which was the first sign
something gravely important had happened. The second sign was his request that Harry drop
everything and get to the Ministry as soon as possible. He’d ushered customers out the door
without explanation, disapparated, and been halfway up the lift with his guest badge on
before he’d even thought to contact Draco first. The urgency of it all instantly shattered the
routine he’d assembled—shop, garden, therapy, dinners, repeat—and with it such common-
sense reactions. Luckily, Ron had taken care of that, too.

“She hates me but it wasn’t personal?” Harry repeats, frowning.

“Completely impartial, just goes where the money is. I should be thanking you, really,” Ron
says. “We’ve brought in an entire ring of cursed letters. She ran a business.” Harry follows
his hand’s gesture of disbelief towards Ivanow again.

“She was paid?”

“In a drop-off exchange. The Minister for Magic received a cursed letter hours ago—which
obviously didn’t make it past a single level of security—and the postman hadn’t even left the
building before alarms were going off, so we were able to trace it to the customer, who gave
her up almost immediately. Same handwriting as your letter. Different message, different
curse.”

“Different customer requests.”

“Exactly.”

“Blimey,” he murmurs. They stand silently for a long pause. “So what’s my price?”

Ron huffs a small laugh. He’d seen it coming. “Ten galleons.”

“Ten galleons? Fucking hell, I’m a steal.”

“Until last month, everyone believed the idea of you opening their cursed letters was a pipe
dream,” Ron argues. “Should’ve been a waste of ten galleons. Same as Shacklebolt. She tried
to tell her customer as much, apparently. Save them the trouble.”

“That’s nice,” says Harry. “At least she runs an honest business.”

Ron tilts his head in amused reflection.

They’re waiting on Hermione. She works quite closely with the Minister, so, entertainingly,
the related discovery about Harry’s case isn’t even at the top of her schedule. Everything
upstairs is in hectic disarray, though the letter hadn’t made it past the basement mailroom.
Harry would bet that Pansy’s having an equally chaotic morning at the Prophet.

“You haven’t asked about the customer responsible for your letter,” Ron points out, perhaps
tinged with wariness.

Harry sighs, briefly raising a hand and a polite smile to another Auror passing by them, an
old colleague from training. The moment the smile slips, he looks to Ron again. “I reckoned
if it was good news you wouldn’t be holding out. Delaying the inevitable I guess.”

“Fair enough.”

The Auror floor hasn’t been safe from the morning’s chaos, either. If Ron wasn’t waiting on
word from the Minister’s people on how and when to charge Ivanow (Shacklebolt’s
involvement had placed an especially careful eye on the proceedings), Harry’s presence
might have caused a larger stir, but as it is, the two friends leaning against a desk in the back
of the room are mostly ignored.
“So?” Harry narrows his eyes as Ivanow begins to pick blithely at her fingernails.

“Her clients’ discretion is a top priority. The inquiry and payment process is anonymous over
owl and destroyed after, and there’s no way to know whether the individual who picks up the
letter from the discrete drop locations is disguised or not.”

He pushes off the desk, standing to face Ron in interest. “She doesn’t mail them directly?”

“No, that’s up to the customer.” Ron shakes his head. “She just performs the curses and seals
them in the letters.”

“So the person she saw pick up my letter…”

“An old, old woman. Practically permanently bent at the waist. Drinking from a flask.”

“Polyjuice,” Harry groans, to which Ron nods grimly. “And either Bill is hard at work
somewhere surprising me, or she had nothing to add to the discussion of an antidote?”

“The deed is done, unfortunately,” says Ron. “She looks like a sour old witch, but that was
the one moment of questioning that made her feel… honestly sinister. Can you picture her
smiling?”

Harry steals another glance and shakes his head. Ron points a finger at either corner of his
mouth and pulls them up to his eyes, eyebrows high. “Full grin as she told me she proudly
makes her curses irreversible.”

That’s… concerning. He opens his mouth to speak, but Ron’s darkly disclosing face
brightens in a way that can only be in response to one thing. Harry turns and follows his gaze
to Hermione’s approaching figure. She looks frazzled but happy to see them.

“Attempted murder by way of contract killing, dear,” she says in greeting, reaching out to
adjust the collar of his Auror robes as her other arm snakes around Harry’s shoulders. “Big
day, Harry, doing alright?”

“I should be asking you.”

Her eyes widen as she drops her head to his shoulder, and within a moment he gets a face full
of curls. “The letter didn’t even make it upstairs and my day is shot.”

“You’re lucky we brought in the offender or you’d be first on the list of suspects,” Ron says.
“Almost-certain future Minister for Magic with a notoriously dogged work ethic. You’re
suspicious.”

The hair leaves Harry’s face. “Excuse me?”

“And beautiful. And a great mother. A perfect wife.”

“Keep listing qualities subject to my womanhood and see how it goes, Ronald.”

“Heard from Draco?” he says instead, a bit loud.

Hermione shakes her head. “But Pansy mentioned he had rehearsal when we spoke. She
wants to know what they can run, by the way.”

“Nothing,” Ron glowers. “It’s an open investigation.” He leans toward them with a whisper.
“And one related to Harry, if she’s forgotten.”

“Give her some credit. It’s not her beat, anyway. Her idea was that they’ll pry less if we give
them something than if we give them nothing…”

Harry lets them professionally bicker, his own thoughts straying to what he should even do
with his day now. Treat it like normal? Call it off? He’s going to have to peruse a Muggle
shop for new DVDs soon the way he’s been wearing out his library lately. The bed’s just been
so inviting.

Draco’s going to be cross that Harry’s come and gone from the Ministry before he’s gotten
out of rehearsal. He seems the type to hate being the last to know something. Maybe it’s a
nice gesture to send a second owl, let him know he’s left again and that he’ll be home later
and can fill him in. Sympathy, sympathy, sympathy, he thinks. Compassion, compassion.

He spares a final look to the woman in the corner, who disrupted his life without batting an
eye, all for ten galleons, and as he does she raises her head from her lap again, spotting him
for the first time since his arrival and holding his gaze with piercing eyes. The reaction is
unexpected. His adrenaline spikes, his mouth goes dry, and images of him and Draco sharing
a bedroom, laughing in the garden, smiling in Italy flash through his mind. They’re not
memories—they’re what-ifs.

I’ve been feeling down about myself and whether I’m doing enough for the community lately,
he can imagine Old Harry saying. I brought the post home, maybe we can open it together
later and listen to people sing my praises for once instead of argue for broom discounts.

And Old Draco would say You nitwit, you daft fool, you blunderbuss, what would you do
without me? Don’t open that, it’s not safe. There’s no length of time past the war where you
stop being a public figure someone somewhere will want to curse. And he’d take the letter
tenderly from Harry’s hand and put it aside to be tested first, as they do with all the post sent
to the shop for good reason, and sit with him in bed instead, laying close and warm, feeling
whatever being in love feels like, which Harry suspects feels like if loving Ron and Hermione
hurt too much to breathe, all while MTV—for lack of more knowledge on Draco’s interests
—plays on the telly.

He’d forget about the letter, and when the report came back and it wasn’t returned with the
cards from children drawing Harry on brooms or thoughtful letters from wizards his age who
remember the war or families with babies they say wouldn’t have been born if the war hadn’t
ended, he’d be thankful Draco had wrenched it from his self-immolating, self-pitying hands.

Ivanow tears her eyes away first, like she’s releasing Harry from some petrification, and he
turns back to his friends.

“Harry? Are you alright?” Hermione asks softly, a hand resting gently on his back.
“Y-yeah. Just thinking… for someone who hates me, it must’ve been painful to pass on
flattering word about my physique in that letter she wrote,” he jokes shakily.

*****

Thank Merlin for the fortuitous timing that’s put his third appointment with Anastasia this
afternoon. Harry’s getting used to the first word’s out of her mouth being, “How are you
today, Harry?” but this is the first time it makes him laugh out loud.

“Do you think the universe listens when you think you have nothing to talk about in therapy
and sends something worth discussing your way?” he asks, falling onto the sofa.

She smiles up from her desk, where she’s leaning over a pad of paper and scribbling multiple
pens to find a working one. “You’re not the first I’ve heard make such an observation.”

He at least waits until she’s seated across from him to fill her in on the morning’s
pandemonium, skipping the bit about looking into the woman’s eyes and the way it froze
him. Surely, he thinks, there’s not a person on the planet who tells their Mind Healer every
fleeting thought that crosses their mind.

Her expression mirrors the surprise and exhilaration of the morning. “That must’ve made you
feel some mixed emotions.”

“I was so… nervously excited when I got Ron’s Patronus. For the first time in months, I
seriously had to consider taking an antidote, which was… strange. But when the first words
out of his mouth weren’t ‘we got her’ or ‘I’ve got the cure’ I lowered my expectations. It’s a
dead-end, so I’m just trying to go back to how I was feeling before. I’d gotten into the swing
of things, you know?”

“Whether something is reversible or not, it’s nice to see justice served. It’s okay to be
disappointed that it’s not fully the case for you today.”

Harry slips his hands under his glasses and rubs at his eyes. Petunia used to yell at him for
that. She said it would ruin his eyesight, but he’d found his eyesight to be fairly ruined as it
was. “Can we talk about something else? I just wanted to update you, but there’s nothing
really to say.”

“We’ll circle back,” she half-agrees. “How have you felt, now that we’ve been speaking more
openly about your school years?”

Harry needs to remember that requesting to gloss over a topic doesn’t stop its replacement
from being equally troubling. True, they’d begun talking about the war at his second
appointment—something Anastasia thought was long overdue for his wellbeing. She did, he
learned, call Voldemort by his name. She also kept up well when he’d interchangeably call
him Tom.

“What’s the difference?” she’d asked, far enough into the session for Harry to be sitting with
his knees up on the ottoman, pulling in a bit. “Voldemort and Tom?”
“Tom was the man. Voldemort was… I met Voldemort. But I was scared of becoming Tom,”
he’d said, almost inaudible.

In that second session, he’d started to recognise that there was a lot to say about his school
years that he’d never had the chance to speak about. Each incident on its own should’ve been
a set of therapy sessions, but in the middle of what came to be a war, there was no time for
that. No time for feelings, only actions.

“Is it possible that’s the approach you took to this curse?” Anastasia had set her pen to her
lips and tilted her head inquisitively as if this was a question at all. It was more than possible.

He dragged his feet back into Grimmauld Place after the second session with orders to take it
easy and not push himself, which seemed ridiculous when all he’d done was talk, but he must
have looked worse than he thought because Draco happened to be carrying a stack of
notebooks from the living room to his bedroom when he caught sight of Harry in the entrance
hall and gave him an embarrassingly pitying look.

“Harry! I—Merlin, are you okay?” His forehead wrinkled, mouth turning down as his eyes
scanned his figure.

“Anastasia,” he said, in way of explanation and blame.

Draco’s face fell further, his hands fidgeting with the edge of the notebooks as if he was
working to stand still. “Damn. A rough one?”

She’d proposed that coping mechanisms he’d deemed necessary during a life-or-death battle
for the livelihood of the wizarding world weren’t necessary for recovering from a single-
instance Obliviation over a decade later, then looked to the clock and called it a day.

‘Something to sit with this week’, she’d said. ‘Fucking hell’ was about all he’d managed to sit
with the entire way home.

“Yeah, I… Yeah.” He kicked his shoes off by the door and traipsed up the stairs without
lingering longer in the hallway. His plan had been takeaway and bed and maybe chatting with
Jules about lizard things, and it sounded better by the second. Draco had looked like a mess
when Hermione talked to him about a few significant memories of them. Vaguely, as he
crawled into bed, he wondered if he looked just as bad.

Not long after, a soft knock had sounded on the door and Luna had poked her head in. He
doesn’t remember what excuse she’d made to come calling, just that it was clear and unsaid
between them that Draco had called for her. They watched The Wizard of Oz under the
blanket together, nestled close and laughing in disbelief or incredulity at the fun facts Luna
gave about the movie’s magical connections, like Narglecide serving as inspiration in the
poppy fields, the monkeys as magical creatures by a long foreign name he couldn’t retain.
True or not, Harry liked hearing her talk.

It’s Wizard of Oz with Luna that comes first to mind, then, when Anastasia asks how he’s felt.
“My friend came over after our last talk,” he says now, removing his hands from his eyes and
running one through his hair instead. “We watched a movie in bed together, which was nice.
And then she asked about what had me feeling bad, so I told her. She’s a good listener,
Luna.”

Anastasia smiles. “We tend to underestimate the value in leaning on our friends’ strength
when we can’t find our own. I’m glad you haven’t.”

“And I asked Draco about it.”

Well, more appropriately, he’d told Luna that he’d begun wondering whether he spoke to
Draco about the war during their time together. He wondered whether he’d already done the
work of fixing all this only to lose it with the curse. She’d suggested they ask—together,
she’d said pointedly, squeezing his hand—then shouted for Draco at a volume inherited from
living with Pansy so long.

Harry had felt sorry for him when it became obvious that his shouted name by Luna from
Harry’s room read as ‘emergency’. He was wide-eyed and alert when the door swung open,
which quickly turned to confusion to see them sitting calmly eating popcorn with ‘If I Were
King of the Forest’ sounding on a low volume from the television.

“Harry wants to know if you two ever talked about the war or how he felt about it,” she’d
said bluntly, never straying from his side. Harry met his eyes guiltily. It seemed like a
weighty question, from the way his chest rose with such a deep inhale before answering.

“You asked him about your school years?” Anastasia clarifies.

He nods. “The war, more specifically. Or, anything we talked about last time, really. But no.
None. I never talked about it.”

“How does that make you feel?”

“I dunno. I assumed Old Harry had it all sorted. This feels like the first proof he didn’t.”

“I’m inclined to think that makes what you’re doing here all the more important, Harry,” she
says. “It goes back to our first discussion—intimacy and friendship to find identity. In the
early days of Obliviation, everything that made someone who they are happened before the
spell. But this is a ‘New Harry’ choice. Braving talk about the war is something you’re doing
for who you are now, not who you were, does that make sense?”

“Yeah. Yeah,” he exhales. “You’re right about diversifying intimacy, but… sometimes being
with my friends doesn’t feel better. Because there’s—I still feel that pressure from everyone
to remember faster somehow. They don’t say it, but I feel it. Plus, I never even said I’d
remember. Can you write them a note? Like a doctor’s note, telling them that’s not something
to expect?”

“I have full confidence that you can get that point across if it’s important to you, Harry.”
She’s tamping down a smile as she says it, looking at her notes. “Managing expectations is
important, but it’s impossible to control others’ wants and hopes. Taking the pressure off
yourself is a starting point, though. Most Obliviated individuals don’t even have
remembering on the table—it’s still only a theory that you do, at all.”
Harry can’t decide if that fact is reassuring or distressing, so he doesn’t decide at all.

“Here’s a task that might help all parties involved,” Anastasia continues. “Find some new
things about yourself—new interests, new friends, new activities. Something that informs
who Harry is, post-Obliviation. Do something for him. Maybe with your friends so they can
get to know the New Harry better?”

He likes that idea, really likes it, actually. It makes the energy he brings through Grimmauld
Place’s door that evening worlds lighter than a week previous, despite the day beginning with
beady-eyed Ivanow. If or when he saw Draco, he was going to bring it up in the name of
volunteering information in their lives, but Draco appears from his room that night itching to
talk about the Ministry, looking like he’s had a bad day, so Harry leaves it be. It’s only three
days later, anyway, when he gets the chance to tell them all at dinner as something he’d like
to actively schedule.

“Does this mean I finally get to steal you to go antiquing again?” Luna gasps instantly.

Harry scrunches his face, wavering his hand indecisively. “I’d love to also go antiquing, but
the concept is more trying something new. What’re you doing Sunday though, because
there’s a shop in—”

“I call Potter two weeks from now! Saturday the 20th of April,” Blaise declares. All heads
turn his way. He’s pointing an index finger strongly at Harry across the way.

“What for?” Draco asks.

“Then it wouldn’t be a surprise, would it?”

“Er, correct,” Harry tacks on. “Good thing I didn’t say anything about surprises.”

“I did. Just now.” He looks at him challengingly, smirking as he takes his next bite of dinner.
And is there any use in arguing? Harry turns to Draco, but he holds his hands up.

“Consider it reserved,” he sighs.

It’s safer, he decides, to not even let his mind wander towards wondering what Blaise
considers worth ‘trying new’ for Harry. A lot can happen in a fortnight, anyway.

October 2001

On the other side of the war and the Wizengamot, seasoned at hiding his forearm and his eyes
in Diagon Alley but lifting his chin at orchestral events, skilled enough at alchemy to do
something professional with it and comfortable enough with his life not to, Draco knew who
he was. He knew who he’d been, and he was proud of the lengths he’d crossed to be the
Draco he presented to his friends in 2001.

Fancying Harry from afar had fit into who he was perfectly—the jealousy, the angst, the
unrequitedness—but Harry fancying him back had been the first chip in an otherwise solid
sense of identity. The garden, then, had been a full veining crack in the foundation.

He thought perhaps the reservations he’d had with Harry leading to that afternoon were the
result of fighting to grip onto the Draco he believed himself to be. Fighting against
transmutation, a combination of Harry and Pansy teased in his ear. In a way, kissing Harry in
the garden had been an allowance for transmutation. He’d let a new Draco in.

He didn’t know much about this new Draco, but he did act his age. It was something he’d
always loved about Harry from afar—his ability to have fun, to laugh and be easygoing, to
remember he was only twenty-one. So maybe Harry’s positivity wasn’t the only thing
rubbing off on him.

For one, he’d been an expert at forgetting the Saltburn kiss, for his mental wellbeing, but the
garden kissing dominated his consciousness, and with it everything else Harry; his weight
pressed against him, the feeling of him smiling into a kiss, his tongue, his breathing, his
blinking, his existing. He found himself drifting during lessons, lying awake at night.

There was as much new to learn about Harry as there was to learn about himself. He’d
thought Harry wasn’t a very touchy person because he’d never been interested in public
displays of affection and he was unaffectionate with his boyfriends at Pansy’s, too, but on the
other side of the looking glass, Draco learned the truth—Harry’s just respectful. And Merlin,
wasn’t that somehow more overwhelming? Harry was affectionate and respectfully private
about it. It opened up a new landscape of jealousy first, imagining everything he could’ve
done with ex-boyfriends behind closed doors, but sooner than later he’d supplanted them
with himself under Harry. That made for significantly more pleasant daydreaming.

Harry came to Draco’s for the first time the week after the garden. The address wasn’t a
secret, but it wasn’t a meeting place either, so when he answered a knock on the door
Tuesday afternoon to find Harry lowering his fist, it was as if he’d been conjured straight
from his thoughts onto his doorstep.

“Oh,” was all he said at first. “It’s you.”

“Surprise,” Harry grinned, already peering nosily past him. Draco stepped aside. The flat was
drab but orderly, a mess of papers cluttered around the piano notwithstanding. That was
practically as much a fixture of the place as the piano itself.

“I was just thinking about you,” he said bravely, combing a hand through his hair quickly,
fixing his collar.

Harry wandered through the entranceway, cocking an eyebrow. “And I, you.” He poked at a
bowl of softening fruit on the dining table. “Is this a front or do you live here?”

“I do live here.”

“No. I can’t picture you here. Do something domestic—brush your teeth. Toss something in
the bin. It’s… so the opposite of the Manor.”
“That’s sort of the idea,” he pointed out. And then, because Harry stood rocking on his heels,
eyes investigating from the main room with his hands behind his back, he ventured, “What
did you need?”

“Do I need to need something? I’ve been thinking about you all day. I almost came up with a
terrible excuse to stop by, but that’s your thing. So I made my thing wanting to see you
without an excuse. Are you busy?”

Draco blinked back. “Am I busy?”

“Yeah, are you busy?”

“I have to be at the concert hall in an hour. The Children’s Orchestra performances are in two
weeks, so there are full rehearsals on site.”

“That’s fine,” Harry shrugged. “I have to coach a match in twenty minutes.”

Draco couldn’t help but deflate a little at that. There’s not much to be done in twenty minutes.
Though his mind unhelpfully rebutted with many things that could be done in twenty
minutes. Maybe the garden had been such a long time coming that it had no choice but to
keep him so distracted. He truly just couldn’t stop thinking about him. And his hands making
dinner with love, but also his hands cupping Draco’s chin or pulling him closer or—

“Nineteen now. Eighteen, soon, if you don’t stop staring like that,” Harry said, lifting his chin
in an attempt to completely eclipse Draco’s view of the flat behind him.

“I was just thinking… what’s there to do in twenty minutes even?” he murmured, feigning
full empty mindedness even as his hand (bolder than the rest of him) reached out to feel at the
neckline of Harry’s jumper. It was bright Central London Snidget yellow, which should’ve
been a sign of Harry’s evening plans if he’d had his wits more about him.

He liked that flicker of excitement that crossed Harry’s eyes, the same one he saw when they
pulled apart in the garden. He’d been thinking of chasing it. That feeling he’s felt all week, it
was like a task he forgot to see through. The way Harry was looking right now… maybe he
felt it too.

“Do you want the full tour?” he added, running his hand up to Harry’s cheek. “It’s not a large
place. Just this. Spare room with a piano. Toilet. Bedroom.”

“Boring,” Harry responded, leaning into his hand. “Skip to the end.”

Draco stepped closer, feeling that tug of who he was used to being and ignoring it. It’s Harry.
That’s Harry! his mind shouted again, but something born from the week since tacked on and
you know Harry.

He did. He knew Harry, what he liked, what he loved, what caught him by surprise and what
made him cross.

“Piano,” he said, looking down an inch from Harry, close enough to feel his breath, and he
tightened his hand just a bit on Harry’s chin. He directed it, pushing Harry’s attention to his
left, where the door to the spare room sat cracked. “Toilet.” And again, watching Harry’s
eyes, he pushed his cheek the other way, down the hall. “Bedroom,” he said, at last, lifting his
chin so their mouths just barely touched, “behind you.”

Harry’s eyes flickered fiery, trying to read him, maybe surprised by the sudden show of
confidence, but he didn’t challenge it. Necessitas etiam timidos fortes facit—necessity, he
considers, makes even the timid brave. Harry couldn’t know Draco was all talk and no
trousers, giving him what he thought he wanted with a question mark hanging quietly at the
end of every move he took.

He lowered his hand to Harry’s chest and pushed, ever so gently, to see how pliable he would
be. Harry walked backwards instantly, a look in his eye that just about stopped Draco’s heart.
They couldn’t do that in twenty minutes.

They didn’t. But through the bedroom door, before Harry could begin again with those
wandering eyes, he leaned down and brought their mouths together. It was as if kissing in the
garden had simply been put on pause and resumed in this moment. An unfinished
conversation. Harry inhaled a breath of astonishment even as he responded appropriately.
They ate up a fair bit of time that way before they pulled away for air again and Harry fell
back on the bed, looking unfocused and content, staring at the same ceiling that Draco often
fell asleep to.

He laid back too, so their shoulders were barely touching. The window was cracked for
airflow, just enough for the sound of a child’s piercing laugh to break through the dreamlike
silence and remind him of his reality. After a beat, when the bed creaked and Harry crawled
over so he was sitting on Draco’s legs, he felt like he’d hardly had time to take an account of
his wellbeing, like a riptide pulled him under every time he won a single gasp of air.

But Harry didn’t kiss him. He leaned forward and Draco separated his lips just slightly, but
instead a careful thumb pressed lightly against his Adam’s apple, not too hard but impossible
to miss. The finger moved with him as he swallowed nervously. He opened his mouth, but it
felt too importantly exploratory to speak, with that curiously fascinated look on Harry’s face,
and he found that he liked being at the centre of Harry’s attention in such a quietly physical
way, so he laid there watching him watch his hand.

Harry’s eyes flicked up to his for a brief second, then back to his hand. As the thumb ran
confidently up his windpipe, he closed his eyes, tilted his head back at some unspoken
instruction, feeling the weight on his body, the weight of Harry on his legs and the weight of
Harry’s hand on his throat. The weight of Harry’s attentiveness. Then the thumb left
altogether, for one moment where Draco lay alone situating himself in the familiarity of his
bed and the unpredictability of what he’d closed his eyes to above him.

He gave a slight gasp when two hands cupped his face, the thumbs returning to rest on his
eyelids. They quivered, heavy, eye stones on a corpse, when he moved around under the
touch. Harry had his way with him, and whether it was the anticipated effect or not, he’d left
Draco feeling completely bendable to anything he might want, anywhere his hands could go.

The hands left just as Harry’s weight shifted again and Draco’s lips parted like a clairvoyant,
or a man so used to blindness that it elevated his other perceptions. Either way, he was ready
and waiting before their mouths connected. They kissed again, Draco mostly surprised to find
himself not left completely boneless.

Wilting to Harry had left him feeling free, unworried about how he acted, naked despite his
clothes, and he did his own exploring, cataloguing how it felt to have Harry’s lips warm and
wet on his neck, the sound Harry made when he left his mouth alone to press a kiss to his ear
and the sound Harry made when he pulled away completely a generous length of time later,
stumbling through something about needing to instruct an entire ensemble of children
without feeling debauched. Harry moans, he learned. Harry pouts.

In the sudden cold absence of Harry’s touch on his face, he squeezed his eyes shut, trying
once again to mediate this transition, to go without thinking too hard. He could hear him
laying somewhere close by, exhaling little happy sighs. It had felt more daring than Harry
knew to let someone touch him so gently. That made it all the more important, he thought,
that Harry didn’t even know. That Harry was gentle for the sake of it, without knowing what
it meant. He’d unknowingly handed Draco a moment he’d desperately needed to confront.

He rolled over on his side, until he was just against Harry, four arms folded tightly between
them, and rested their foreheads together.

“Are you okay?” Harry just about whispered.

Draco hummed in response, then reached a finger up to press against Harry’s lips and shush
him.

Okay.

Harry was in his bed. On his bed. Harry with his nice smile and his Quidditch body and his
no-tattoos-but-wants-one and his artistic eye and jokes and woodworking hands and… a
really warm forehead. All of that, interested in him. Touching him. Wanting him.

He was no shrinking violet. He wanted this and he wanted more. He wanted Harry in his bed
and his life.

If that was a relationship, then he was happy to be in one.

So to keep it? he thought. Stop letting the reserved Draco come calling. Be the thin eyelid
beneath Harry’s careful touch. Disregard the disbelief tugging on his sleeve and accept that
Harry was his to touch, to hold, to kiss, to tease, to make happy. Let himself believe it, then
love it.

Make it worth his while. Be worth his while.

Okay.

“Alright, I’m fine,” he said as he pulled back. The poor man looked wide-eyed and
perplexed. His pupils flicked unsettled across Draco’s face, and he could practically see the
gears turning behind them, no doubt deciding what sort of dreadfully emotionally literate
thing to say in response to such a show of quietude.
“What-what're you—was that, er…”

Sweet Circe, he’d broken him. The bed bounced as Harry sat up quickly. Draco did too. It
was impossible not to run a hand through Harry’s hair or pull at the sleeves of his jumper—
one side of which had been jostled low enough to show his naked shoulder—so Draco busied
himself doing so.

“I just had to settle in for a moment,” he explained as he made the fixes.

Harry blinked. “Settle in?”

“To us.”

He expected Harry to launch into a series of questions, a request for clarity on a vague
statement, but he nodded sagely. “Thank you for joining.”

Draco would describe what followed the quick visit as volleying, an almost giddy back and
forth of affection. This, he thought, was the honeymoon period. He’d go over to Harry’s and
plink around in the piano, preferring to treat it as an educational project rather than call a
professional tuner. Before long, hands would wind around his waist from behind, a warm
body and a pair of glasses would press into his cheek as Harry watched him work for a
moment. Inevitably, it would draw a wide smile from him, the task forgotten or botched
under the distraction of a second pair of eyes. Lurking in the shadows, always, was guilt, for
keeping it a secret.

“We should tell them,” he would sigh, leaning his head back as Harry pressed quick kisses
under his ear.

Or smells would drift from the kitchen, beckoning Draco down with a growling stomach,
where he’d purposefully sit on the counter to get a rise out of Harry because he hated that and
he looked so lovely when he was frustrated, face red in the hot kitchen, biting a cheek or
pressing his lips tight to keep a smile from forming because he was too forgiving for his own
good. Draco would quiet a litany of insults about food safety and gas hobs with a kiss and
Harry would drop his head to his shoulder and groan, “We should tell them” into the fabric of
Draco’s shirt.

They hadn’t gotten their act together in time for the first dinner since the garden, but as Draco
sat cussing out the open-lidded piano the following Friday, he made a pact to do just that.
Harry was somewhere outside, reading or willing his wiggentree to grow with unblinking eye
contact, but he’d knocked on the window earlier to perform a bewildering winding-up
charade that Draco had thought was code for ‘it’s a film’ but meant ‘open the window so I
can hear your beautiful piano playing’.

Not that there was much piano playing to be had, much less beautifully. So far, the repair had
mostly been a concentrated hammering of individual keys, incessant, mind-numbing. It was a
laborious process, string by string. The first day he’d come over to work on it Harry had let
him in and sat interested on the couch, asking every two seconds what he was doing with
each of the tools he’d brought. Draco may have snapped and banished him in the name of the
concentration needed for tuning, but based on Harry’s persistent trips back in to make
physical contact, there were no hard feelings. Today, he was aggravatingly close to having it
ready, with a few anomalies on the upper octaves that were driving him mad.

“A week of fiddling with that thing and this is the first time I’ve found you sat on the floor.
Can’t be good.”

Draco looked up from where he was leaning against the couch with a book on tuning in his
lap. At the sight of the mugs in Harry’s hand, he dropped his head back against the seat of the
couch in wholehearted appreciation. “You symmetrical, emerald-eyed man, you,” he sighed,
reaching a hand up.

“And he’s complimenting me, call the Healer,” Harry bemoaned, sitting beside him. “I heard
what you called the piano through the window. She’s somebody’s daughter, you know. Be
kind.”

“I’ll be kind when the upper octaves hold a tune.” He raised the mug happily to his lips,
taking a slow sip. Harry lowered his head to press his mouth to Draco’s shoulder and stay
there for a long beat. The caffeine was a blessing. Draco set his mug down and raised a hand
to Harry’s head, distantly pulling waves taut as he continued reading.

The remedy should be a pitch raise, which he knew of but never tried himself. At the start of
that chapter in the book, the author began by suggesting that the reader hire a professional
and give up entirely, a pessimism that only made Draco sink his claws in deeper. But even in
considering that, there was a warp in the shape of the soundboard itself, and the instructions
weren’t helping nearly as much as they should.

He’d tuned pianos before. The problem was, he kept his pianos tuned. Starting with one that
hadn’t been touched properly in years required a lot more foundational work and—Merlin, he
thought, he was the piano. He looked up and narrowed his eyes at it. Now it was bloody
personal.

Harry hummed and lifted his head to drink, oblivious to his introspection. “I like having you
here.”

“I like being here,” he said easily.

“Er, are we dating?”

Draco dog-eared the book and set it down. “I thought so. I suppose we hadn’t discussed it
exactly.”

“We should probably date date more then. If we’re dating. Don’t you think?”

“I’m cool,” he shrugged. “One meal at Savour and you can be done courting me for the rest
of time. Anyhow, this can be dating. Dating’s anything we want it to be, so long as you’re
happy. We make the rules.”

“We do,” Harry murmured.

Draco saw the kiss coming in his eyes before he leaned in. It was in the way they softened at
the edges, a warmness verging on glazed over, so that he was smiling already when he kissed
back. What he hadn’t anticipated was its passion, much harder than the gentleness his
expression had suggested. He hummed into Harry’s mouth happily, reaching a hand back to
feel around for his mug and move it onto the coffee table.

Sometimes Draco said just the right thing without knowing it, and if Harry inching more on
top of him was an indication, he’d just done so. He touched heavy, breathed hard, kissed
slow. It took Draco about three seconds to identify the difference.

“Is anyone coming over?” he breathed when they next pulled apart for air.

“Not until dinner.”

It was four at the latest. Something fluttered excitedly in his chest as he made a sound of
approval and met Harry’s lips hungrily if not a bit clumsily, firm enough to feel their teeth, to
crush against each other with too much eagerness to entertain skill. None of it was close
enough, he felt, even as his hands pulled them together. Harry clearly felt the same. His hands
had travelled from Draco’s neck to the hem of his shirt, pulling, so he lifted his arms just long
enough to feel the hit of cool air before reaching and pulling at Harry, too.

“Ergh—Draco—hold—” Harry’s fingers flailed for his face somewhere under the neckline of
the hoodie, at which point Draco realised he could see only one lens and the bridge of his
glasses pressed against his forehead.

“Shit,” he laughed, breathy with embarrassment. His hands found Harry’s and pushed them
aside, tugging the hoodie towards him to make room to thread the glasses out. Harry crossed
his arms and pulled the hoodie and a t-shirt underneath off together, and when Draco handed
the glasses back, he just set them aside. Draco stared back, worried that he’d disrupted the
tension irreparably. His arms folded over his chest even as he looked at Harry’s tan body
exposed across from him, the line of his pants over the waistband of his jeans, the thick white
scar with an untold Auror story on his right ribs.

The body shifted, muscles sliding in manipulation as Harry shifted closer, bent low to meet
Draco’s own lowered chin, and caught him in a kiss.

“You’re so…” Harry whispered to him, drifting a light finger over his newly exposed
collarbone, his naked shoulder. His hands gripped Draco’s wrists and pried his arms away
from their position of insecurity with just enough power to be insistent but not forceful.
“You’re perfect,” he finished. “You drove me mad, this summer, not coming down to the
water ever.”

Draco slipped his wrists from Harry’s grip to tighten his own fingers around his arms, pulling
them away so the two of them were chest to chest, heaving lungs in contact, flushed faces
frozen and staring. It surprised Harry, excited him, he saw in the flicker of his eyes and the
quick lick of his lips.

He could barely think. He felt privy to Harry’s bodily mechanics, that close. When his lungs
filled, his chest expanded against Draco’s, and when he exhaled again, it was breathed
directly against his mouth. His heartbeat, too, pounded wildly in warm green veins threaded
through the wrists under Draco’s fingers. So much at work like pistons and gears to keep the
man beneath him walking and living and kissing. He was hit with an urge to lay praise upon
all of it, to press kisses to his wrist, his jugular, the centre of his chest, where the beats rose
confident. Instead, he stared back, stuck at a cruising speed much lower than that of his brain.

“I can’t swim,” he responded daftly, barely at a volume.

Harry’s face crept so slowly from desire to amusement that Draco could name a handful of
emotions expressed in between, and when he saw him open his mouth to inquire further, he
kissed into it instead, which did plenty to pull him back in. They started back up
enthusiastically at that, newfound confidence running through both of them so that, by the
time Draco found himself horizontal on the rug, their touching had gotten a bit greedy. When
Harry’s fingertips traced down his side with a shiver and meddled with the closure on his
trousers, he let him, marvelling at the way it had him thinking around a thousand thoughts
right before thinking exactly zero.

Or one thought, really, after a moment of finding himself incapable of doing anything but
grabbing tighter to Harry and gasping with uncharacteristic gravitas: Had it really been that
long since he’d been intimate with anyone? Or could he have slept with someone yesterday
and still lost his composure once Harry reached out?

Then a second thought, after that answered itself in the way he wanted to do nothing but
touch Harry, taste Harry, too, sooner than yesterday. His fingers scrabbled with the button on
Harry’s jeans, praying he couldn’t tell his hands were shaking, but he seemed a bit too
distracted to care, anyway. Draco was almost too distracted himself. But then Harry moaned
what very well might have been his name at his first touch and everything fell away, reduced
to the tactile. They moved with synchronisation, a steadiness like the one Draco had felt in
Harry’s pumping blood, now mirrored in their dipping kisses and busied hands.

It would be clichéd for Draco to use a word like crescendo, so he wouldn’t, but there was at
least a moment where he clung to Harry more than he ever had, allowed himself to be
vulnerable and vocal in a way he usually never would, and by the time they rolled onto their
backs, he looked up and noticed that they’d inched a decent way under the piano. He blinked
sluggishly at its underside.

“Oh my god,” he panted, sounding like Harry. At the words, Harry shifted into him and
sighed just below his ear.

“I know,” he said tiredly.

Draco looked down his nose at Harry, then back up and pointed at the bottom of the piano
like they were stargazing. “No, not that, look up—that wood is snapped. No wonder the
highest octave has been playing poorly. It’s completely off balance.”

Harry sat up completely. His gaze vacillated disgruntled between the fractured wood and
Draco’s face. As solemn as he looked, Draco couldn’t stop the corners of his mouth from
turning up; his hair was an absolute mess, flattened on the left, his glasses missing, and his
lips kissed to tender. Any attempt at seriousness was futile.
“Come back,” Draco sulked. “I won’t talk about anything but you.”

This didn’t mean he couldn’t think about his next steps in tuning the piano.

“Anything but me? I’ve died and woken up in second year,” Harry teased, so quick to
forgive, quirking an eyebrow though he was crawling back over. It was a tad terrifying how
instantly Draco had missed his body beside him. When he laid back down, he pulled him in,
his right arm wrapped around his back and the left tracing a finger up and down his forearm.

It’s as close as he’d wished they were in Saltburn, shielding his eyes and watching Harry run
around in the water, or when he’d stood close and trimmed his hair in the quiet of the
bathroom. He thought of Harry holding his attention soberly and whispering like it was a
secret he held close to his chest, “I’ll be a goner,” and, feeling that same body tucked against
his contentedly now, understood the sentiment perfectly.

Did being a ‘goner’ erase any possibility of remaining friends, should this take a turn? He
and Pansy were fine, but he’d never been this captivated, hypnotised, by her. Their closeness
had been born out of miscalculation, what was meant to be a lifelong friendship. This felt
greater. Unnamable. In the same moment that he realised he’d never be able to just be friends
with Harry again, he gripped him tighter.

“I feel like a girl,” he said, instead of all that.

“Can confirm no,” came the lazily mumbled response.

Draco turned his trailing finger into a jab at Harry’s bicep, but proceeded delicately to run it
up the side of the man’s face, purposefully negating the gesture of annoyance.

“I’ve just never felt closer to you,” he tried again.

“Oh,” Harry sighed, looking up and kissing his cheek. Maybe Draco was reading into things,
but he could’ve sworn from Harry’s fond expression that he’d heard his inner workings and
not his failingly brief handful of words. He pressed a thumb to Draco’s lips, then replaced it
with his own lips.

“Shit,” he mumbled next into the crook of his neck. “We really should tell them.”

*****

Draco left Grimmauld Place to freshen up, which made it feel like an especially dishonest
farce when he arrived back at the same time as Pansy and Luna.

“Draco!” Luna kissed his cheeks at the door. “We were just saying how well Harry’s done
taking over hosting!”

“He’s a natural,” said Draco, reaching to kiss Pansy hello. “How’s the new house? All settled
in?”

He’d been over once since they moved, but moving house felt like the end of an era—it was
no longer a hub, which hit home while Neville was over a month into his first year at
Hogwarts, Ron and Hermione were receding further into domesticity alongside Pansy and
Luna, and Harry and Draco were doing something new of their own. Their Fridays had never
felt more important.

The living room was in perfect condition, Draco’s tuning instruments and book sitting on the
piano bench as the only proof of the time he’d spent there. He took up a seat on the armchair
and sat contentedly if not a bit dreamily, staring off in the distance while Pansy and Luna
prattled on about compromising two very different home spaces into one. When Blaise
arrived and inquired about drinks, Draco couldn’t stand fast enough.

He took the steps down to the kitchen two at a time, so that when he reached the bottom,
Harry looked surprised to see him.

“Bloody hell, I thought you were Teddy, running down like that.”

“Is he coming today?”

Harry’s grin was answer enough, but he added, “With Ron and Hermione,” as Draco rounded
the table.

“I’ve been sent to inquire about drinks. Blaise is beginning to take your lack of a drink cart
quite personally,” he said, stepping into Harry’s space.

“Sent or volunteered?” Harry countered from even closer.

He shivered and stepped back. Harry smirked, like he’d known he would break first.

“We’ve got to tell them,” Draco urged. “Remember when Pansy didn’t tell me she’d eloped?
I was gutted.”

“It’s not like we’ve gone and gotten married, though. We just snog.”

Draco couldn’t have looked more unamused. Understatement of the century, he thought.
There was a bit too much flowery emotional connection to say they were just snogging. It
was especially dismissive coming from the man who’d professed a complete disinterest in
something casual. Harry surrendered immediately.

“We’ll tell them tonight,” he said. “It’s my rose. And my bud. So if it comes round to me first
I’ll announce. Same for you?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, you’re a bloody thorn if anything.” Draco leaned
close and kissed him softly, stifling any retort. “Thank you. I’ll be glad to have it out.”

Hands pushed him away, gently but firmly. “Until then, a good distance. You’re too pretty to
stand that close.”

Draco cheeks pinked as if on cue. He could dish it out but not receive it, apparently.

“I like complimenting you,” said Harry. He was leaning against the counter with his arms
crossed, but he reached one out to prod Draco’s shoulder. “It breaks your brain.”
Draco took a pointedly large step back.

At dinner, rose-bud-thorn started with Teddy to Harry’s left, which meant they’d get most of
the way around the table before the spotlight would be on Draco. Listening actively was easy
for Teddy’s rundown of the week (Had ice cream, fell playing, looking forward to more ice
cream. Oh, to be three, Draco thought with a strange anxiety-ridden flash of jealousy), harder
when the nerves kicked in by Luna’s discussion of a local paper’s exposé on crumple-horned
snorcacks (he never quite nailed down whether it was a positive or negative snapshot of her
week). He didn’t even hear Ron’s, too busy practising his own. Only when a familiar hand
suddenly gripped his leg tightly did Draco tune back in, turning to Harry’s face, which was
wide and awestruck staring at Hermione.

“Which is why my bud,” she was finishing, honing in on whatever Harry’d felt coming, “is
that I’m excited to spend the rest of my life with my husband!” Her hand shot out from under
the table, a ring flashing on a finger that had been naked for years.

Naturally, the table shot into a frenzy, Pansy shrieking, Luna hauling Ron into a hug, all of
them getting to their feet. Harry laughed happily to Draco’s left, and when their eyes met, it
was clear to him—they wouldn’t be telling a soul tonight. Next week, the man’s expression
said.

The rest of rose-bud-thorn was quick and distracted, anyway. Draco busied himself with
dishes afterwards, making some joke to a suspicious Pansy that he’d lost a bet or something.
She was the only one who came down to find him to say goodbye, and when she hung her
chin on his shoulder from behind and mentioned that he was missing the celebration, he
shrugged.

“Never one for group activities, are you?” she said quietly. “You haven’t been over in ages,
come see me. I’m beginning to think you only loved me for my parlour.”

“Bite your tongue,” Draco said.

“Honestly, though. I’ve never seen you do so much manual labour willingly. What’s Harry
got on you?”

Draco just laughed lightly. They made plans for the next week.

It was one thing for Pans to point out his disinterest in joining in sometimes, quite another for
Harry to come down minutes later and repeat it.

“Thanks for cleaning,” he said, and Draco knew by the hand lingering on the small of his
back that everyone had left. “Everyone missed you upstairs.”

He huffed.

“You were missed. Better believe it.” Harry moved to his side and began to dry some of the
things he’d left in the rack by the sink. “You were… happy for them, weren’t you?”

“Of course. They’re disgustingly made for each other.”

“You didn’t even get up and hug them, I wasn’t sure.”

“Wasn’t my place,” said Draco.

Harry dropped cutlery into the drawer with a loud clatter. “Wasn’t your place? To
congratulate them?”

“We’re not… close. We’re not friends. I offered ‘congratulations’, I just didn’t think I should
be pushing my way through everyone they’re closer to for more than that.”

“Draco—not friends? Are you having me on? Everything I said about—about found family
and letting people love you if they want to and forming trustful relationships?”

Draco shut off the faucet and faced Harry head-on. “I did all of that with you.”

“But I want you to do it with my friends. Our friends.”

“But it’s easy for you, isn’t it? You’re so likeable, so you imagine it’s easy.” He could hear
his voice rising, but couldn’t quite tell how to stop it. And anyway, it needed to be said. “I
apologised to them and I’m glad I did, but maybe that’s just where we stay. I don’t want to
make them uncomfortable.”

“Ask them to do something, then,” Harry said. “At least give them a chance to prove whether
uncomfortable, yeah? They accepted your apologies. Any lingering awkwardness is because
that was as far as your friendship’s gotten. I want them to see you how I see you.”

He met Draco’s gaze with so much pleading, his eyes intense and beautifully green, and he
knew what he was doing, surely. Harry knew he was nice-looking. It was pointless. A libido
and dangerously-high forgiveness had brought Harry to him, but he had nothing to offer Ron
and Hermione but the gall to befriend those he’d hurt beyond belief. It would be like pulling
teeth, with stiff hugs and tight smiles for the rest of time, but he’d do it for Harry. If this look
from Harry weakened his will so quickly, he had a long life ahead of him.

April 2013

Harry had a lesson on Saturday afternoon, not with Kensuke, but with a young girl with a
mean streak and a much-needed outlet to expend it. She’d make a good Beater. A scary one at
that. He likes her spirit, but he dislikes how long they’d spent racing around in the rain
lobbing a Bludger.

He comes home tired and sweaty, surprised to find the living room full of bodies. There’s
light playing at the piano, slower and sweeter than the angry mashing that dominates what he
tends to hear, and he’s pleasantly surprised to see it’s Hermione. Draco’s playing with both
hands, with her head on his shoulder, her left hand at her side and her right playing some
higher notes in a melody. It sounds like they’re singing together, or to each other, over the
keys.
“Harry!” Pansy’s the first to notice his arrival, waving from the couch, and the music stops
before he can wave and walk on past, so he ducks his head warily and joins her instead.

“Doing okay?” she murmurs once Draco and Hermione go back to playing. Harry shrugs,
tilting his head interestedly at the couple on the piano bench. Pansy follows his gaze. “It’s
been a hard week. With the bad news about the woman who writes the letters and
everything.”

“Yeah,” he sighs.

They both watch and listen. Harry hopes he doesn’t smell too bad. He’d left his shoes by the
door, but he was probably infusing the couch with a decent bit of London weather anyway.

“You really don’t feel anything for him?” Pansy whispers. “He’s rather handsome.”

Harry chuckles. “You don’t have to be his wingman, Pans. I know he’s handsome, I’m not
blind. But I just… it’s an objectively noticed fact.”

“Did you think he was handsome in school?”

Harry shrugs.

“You did,” she smiles. “I see it on your face, you did.”

“Objectively.”

“What makes it start being subjective?”

If that wasn’t the exact question at the heart of all of this. He flops his head back against the
couch. “I don’t know. I don’t know.”

She leans close. His eyes are closed, but something blocks the light on his eyelids for a
moment. “You reek of sadness, you know,” she says.

“I think that’s just rainwater.”

“No,” she says. “No, it’s not.”

“At least I don’t know what I’m missing,” he sighs, lifting his head and rubbing his eyes
again, then moving his fingertips to his throbbing temples. “It makes it easier to lose.”

Pansy gives him a sad, sad look. Then she widens her eyes and sniffs. “Sorry, Harry, I—we
try not to get emotional for your sake, but it’s hard. I look at you and I think—I can’t imagine
forgetting Luna. Or her forgetting me. I’m just so sad for Harry. He’d hate to hear that
anything made Draco easier to lose.”

Harry doesn’t know what to do with that. He thinks talking to Draco’s best mate about it will
never end neutrally, so he excuses himself soon after. Maybe that’s why he has such a hard
night.
 *****

He had woken up in a cold sweat roughly ten minutes before he knocks on Draco’s door
downstairs. Almost instantly, he regrets it. He’s still praying that Draco’s too asleep to hear
when it opens. He looks concerned but equal parts sleepy, dressed as casually as Harry’s seen
him—a t-shirt and pyjama trousers in some sort of striped print.

“Harry?” he asks, squinting and running a hand through his hair.

“Sorry to wake you. I… well, I didn’t know what I wanted, I guess… I just thought you’d
know what I do about nightmares. Because I don’t remember the last time I had one, so we
must’ve done something about it together. Or I’d have the memory, you see? And I reckoned
you’d know.”

Something worried and sad flashes across Draco’s face. “You’ve never gotten nightmares,
Harry,” he says.

He stalls with his mouth agape. “Oh, okay.”

That was a waste of worry. He’d tossed and turned for five minutes before coming down
here, then paced for a few more. At this point, he’s fully woken up. He’s just about to turn for
the stairs again when Draco fully steps out of the room, closes the door to a crack, and sits on
the hallway floor against the wall. He draws his knees halfway up and gestures to the ground
across from him. Harry stares for a beat, making sure he’d understood the motion right, then
does the same, locking his hands around his shins.

“Do you think it’s the war? You’re talking about it again,” Draco says.

Harry leans his head back against the wall. “I’m sure it is.”

“Maybe some calming tea. Like chamomile.”

“Maybe,” he mumbles.

For someone who’d just woken up, Draco seems ten times more alert than he was even
seconds ago. Even with his head tilted back, Harry can feel his eyes on him.

“Last time I tried to handle this stuff, I didn’t talk about it enough. I just pressed on,” he adds.
“So thank you.”

“For what?”

“For sitting down on the hallway floor. I would’ve gone up and done more of the same.”

“Emotional intimacy, right? I read the papers. Your homework.”

Harry smiles. “Dead on.” But then he takes a long, studying look at Draco’s face. Alert, yes,
but he gets the impression that it sits in a permanent frown. That’s the default—turned down.
There must’ve been a time when it was the opposite, right? Or Harry just fancied grumpy
people. Twelve years must’ve involved more smiling than this.
“With all of this. The curse,” he ventures quietly. Draco’s eyebrows are drawn into a cleft the
moment he says it. He continues anyway. “What do you think about the most?”

Draco frowns. He sniffs and clears his throat and Harry thinks he’s not going to answer at all.
Fair—Harry’s the one who needs emotional intimacy, after all. And it was a vague but also
personal question. He lays his head back and closes his eyes, though sleep seems far away.

At school, any nightmares he had were so notable that he tended to need to report them to
Dumbledore. Another example of the inability to sit and come to terms with something.
Always on the move. Always planning and solving. It’s left him unsure what to do now. What
would Molly do, he wonders sometimes, if she were his mum and he was Ron and something
woke him up at night? But that was irrelevant anyway. He wasn’t a child. He was a grown
man who should be able to handle night terrors without knocking pitifully on someone’s
door.

“I think about whether I told you I loved you enough.”

Draco’s voice is breathy and shivery. Harry opens his eyes quickly, dropping his head back
down fast enough to grow dizzy. The ghostly man opposite looks like he’s about to cry. “I
question whether I could have done something to avoid this. Whether it was only possible
because something had already been weakened enough to allow for it.”

Harry’s voice is appropriately whispered, shocked by the information. If there was anything
Draco seemed confident in, it was what they had lost. “Did we fight?”

“You know we’ve had rows. You remember the Manor, you said so.”

“But other times, less… dramatic, more frequent.”

Draco breathes in deep. “Hardly ever. And if we did, usually incredibly domestic. The wash
was left in a wet pile. Or you made dinner plans and forgot to tell me.”

“The… pleasant memory of forgotten troubles,” Harry recites, watching his mouth tip up
sadly recalling old squabbles.

Draco hides his head in his hands. His next words are muffled. “And I wonder… did you
touch the letter on purpose?”

“What?”

“Think about it. You can slide a letter opener through and read the first half of the note
without touching it. You didn’t need physical contact, but you made it.”

“I wouldn’t do that,” Harry says sternly. “Does that say worse things about what you think of
me or yourself? Even if we were having problems, I’d be man enough to tell you and not…
I’d be mental to choose this. I’ve lost more than you. I’ve lost so much.”

It’s the first time he’s found himself arguing in favour of what he’s lost. Valuing it. His
adamant tone hangs in the air. He watches Draco lift his head, then run the back of a hand
across his eyes quickly, nodding.
“Is this because of what I said? You said I left you a note. That first day, you said that. ‘We
need to talk’, or something. And I was… well, I was a dick, but you didn’t take me seriously,
did you? When I said you probably fucked something up?”

Draco shrugs, staring at his feet.

“That was the hate potion, really. Did I give you reason to think you’d fucked up? The night
before?”

“No,” Draco mumbled. “But people change their minds.”

“About what?”

“Doesn’t matter.”

“Oh,” says Harry. “Is it one of the key memories?”

“No, I just don’t want to talk about it.”

“Okay.” He takes a deep breath. “Look, I don’t remember loving you, but I know that I love
my friends deeply. So it seems likely that I loved you… very, very much. Too much to ever
want to purposefully forget you. Just get that through your head. This is me teaming up with
Old Harry again, yeah? We’d never touch that letter on purpose.”

Draco laughs wetly, rubbing his eyes roughly with the palms of his hands again. “Okay,
you’ve got me outnumbered.”

They need a distraction. Harry didn’t come downstairs with a red nose and wet eyes to give
Draco the same.

“I know what’ll help me sleep again,” he says, after waiting a moment for Draco to collect
himself. He tilts his head inquiringly, so Harry continues. “I… don’t remember Rose’s
birthday. I’ve tried and tried. Which means you were there. I’d quite like to know it.”

Draco smiles warmly and lowers his knees so his legs stretch straight across the hallway, his
feet almost at Harry’s hip.

He tells him it all. About the owl that came through the window on a Friday morning because
Patronuses were spent on the grandparents. How Harry practically bashed his head on the
nightstand trying to scramble out of bed so Draco had made him sit and put trousers and
shoes on while he put some things together.

“You’d think you were in labour,” he says, happy in reminiscence, “the way you lost the plot.
First baby since Ted and all that. But you were incapable of existing without help.”

Draco had leaned over Harry’s shoulder in awe at the little being in his arms, whispering
about how tiny and red it was and absolutely surprised when Harry offered her to him next,
then remarked upon how natural Draco looked holding a baby, which was ridiculous because
he used to freeze up if Teddy so much as touched him.
 “Love begets love, I think,” Draco says quietly. “That’s the problem. Seeing others’ makes
your own feel louder. Like that overwhelming feeling you get at weddings when you’ve
brought someone you care deeply for. That’s why you don’t remember. I’m so sorry.”

Harry doesn’t know what to say, so he reaches a hand down and tightens it for an instant on
Draco’s ankle in thanks.

“How were any Friday night roses ever going to compete with her again?” he murmurs
thoughtfully, and this time when he closes his eyes, he can see them staying closed. Only
Draco’s hands prying him to his feet nudges him to bed, where he dreams mercifully of
happy things and what a fantastic storyteller lives in his home.

Chapter End Notes

Hope you've enjoyed it thus far!

Feel free to leave some words below in the comments, or find me at

writandromance.tumblr.com. Doing my best to reply as often as I can, but know I read
them all!
 Arabesque
Chapter Notes

The chapter title refers to Debussy's Arabesque No. 1.

Let's dance!

See the end of the chapter for more notes

November 2001

The group may have never been in a better mood. The engagement had come with one
diamond ring and eight pairs of rose-coloured glasses, and while Draco’s happiness for Ron
and Hermione was genuine but reserved, Harry was practically skipping. Midweek, when
Draco visited Grimmauld Place for dinner, he discovered the other man cooking to the radio
and humming along, an unstoppable grin on his face. The astonishment Draco presented had
him laughing, and he turned the dial up and sang louder.

That night, sitting shoulder to shoulder at the kitchen table, he heard all about the impromptu
Weasley family celebration the Saturday after the announcement. He’d never been to their
home, but it sounded like the opposite of everything he’d grown up with. The stories wove a
tapestry in his mind; everyone crowded close in the Burrow, happy and loud, holding up
drinks for teary toasts, celebrating a kind of love so natural that it was unremarkable, but
honoured still as if Ron and Hermione were the first to find a soulmate. It brought all of
Harry’s speeches about family into perspective.

Yet it still felt like something removed from him. And, like a tapestry, he hung the stories
high, unreachable images of a faraway fantasy land, where people crowd close on purpose.
He hadn’t forgotten Harry’s plea to befriend the Gryffindors, but he was moving cautiously.
Strategically. Hermione seemed more primed for success, but Ron seemed easier to approach
—one invitation to play chess before dinner, maybe, and he could wash his hands of it.

He gave himself that Friday off from attempting anything of the sort because he was busy
remembering how to breathe and talk. Everyone had arrived, sitting in the living room with
drinks, and he managed exactly five minutes of stiff small talk before he made the excuse of
checking on dinner to go downstairs and get a glass of water.

It was flattering, the way Harry beamed when he saw who was coming down the stairs, but it
slipped a little as he watched him walk straight to the cupboard, fill a glass from the tap, and
drink half of it in shuddering, gulping swallows without stopping. He lowered the cup and
glowered at Harry’s bewilderment.

“What?”
“Nothing.” Harry widened his eyes in innocence, replacing a glass lid on a large pot. “Doing
alright, then?”

Draco pursed his lips. “As expected. You’re not nervous?”

“Oh, I’m riddled with fear,” he said easily, fiddling with the timer and hopping up on the
counter. He was usually more careful of such hypocritical activity—maybe he was nervous.
“This damn stew won’t reheat, though. I cooked it a day ahead specifically because I knew
I’d be pathetic tonight.”

“A watched cauldron never… oh.” Draco leaned down and glanced under the pot. “You’ve
got the wrong burner on, four-eyes.”

“What? Fucking hell, I’m useless.”

Harry shifted to hop off the counter, but Draco put a hand on his leg to stop him. He took a
step closer to the stove, clicked one hob on and the other off. He had to give it to Harry—
stopping to put the other man at ease did a good job of distracting him from his own
apprehension. When he stood in front of Harry again, he smiled in overwhelmed thanks.

“You weren’t anxious last week, were you?” he asked as he reached a hand out to fold the
collar of his polo right.

Harry shook his head. “No, but last week I wasn’t worrying that I’d be stealing attention from
my best friends, or trying to outshine them, or seeming like I’d been purposefully keeping
something secret.”

“They’re not going to think any of that,” Draco said with faked confidence. He hadn’t
considered them stealing attention. “They’ll be pleased you told them, and I’ll be pleased to
have it done with.”

Not sure if it was for Harry’s benefit or his own, he began to run his palms up and down
Harry’s jeans quickly, a friction the other man had used jokingly to get him to ease up at
Savour weeks ago. It wasn’t for nothing—he watched Harry let his teeth leave his lip alone,
felt his knees close in around Draco’s hips.

“It’s exciting I guess,” Harry admitted, his arms wrapped around his neck. “Hermione always
says excitement feels the same as nervousness. So maybe I’m really excited to tell everyone.”

“I wonder what they’ll say,” Draco mused, tilting his head back.

“Hermione and Luna will be calmly interested. Ron will need a minute. Neville will shrug.
Pansy will freak. Blaise will say something endearingly distasteful.”

Draco snorted at that. Harry’s eyes grew in response. “Malfoy snorts?” he whispered, mouth
tugging upwards. They were, after all, still learning about each other.

“Yes, make fun of any and all accidental shows of vulnerability,” he drawled, leaning forward
so their lips brushed as he spoke. “Good strategy to win more of it.”
Harry huffed in surrender and closed the distance. It was a kiss meant to be more
communicative than impassioned—slow and soft, a show of connectedness. In-it-
togetherness. Against it, Draco’s muscles relaxed.

Then, behind them came a strangled squeal, shrill enough in the silence to act as an alarm bell
and Draco jumped back faster than he had in his life, turning in the direction Harry’s
dumbstruck eyes had already fixed on to see Pansy standing on the bottom step with one
hand on the bannister and the other smacked flat over her mouth.

“Circe’s lacy knickers, you GUYS!” she called as she turned and ran. The last swish of a skirt
and platform heels disappeared incomprehensibly fast, the cloudy fuel of a jet engine.

“Couldn’t just stay and talk it through, could she?” said Harry, almost tiredly. He knew Pansy
well.

Draco was still processing, spun senseless by the combination of Pansy’s shrieking exit and
the still-present wetness Harry had left on his lips. He met Harry’s eyes with a look of pained
emergency and watched a firm resolve cross his face. They moved as one, pounding up the
stairs and whirling into the living room rather guiltily out of breath.

Pansy looked like she’d just begun holding court, the back half of a sentence trailing off at
their entrance.

“—caught Harry and Draco together…”

“Like… getting handsy?” Blaise asked, enraptured, eyes flicking over to their approaching
figures.

“Madder than that,” she gasped, fanning herself. “It was a tender kiss.”

Harry shifted his stance, making half a metre between them in the doorway. “Dinner is
coming out any second. Not a bloody word,” he pointed a commanding hand at Pansy, “until
then. There’s a bride-to-be here who’d probably love to tell you what colours she sees for an
autumn wedding or something.”

Hermione, who’d been looking Harry up and down like he was a thought-provoking exhibit,
pulled her head back in surprise. “I’d find that quite excruciating, really,” she said, just as
Ron blurted “Auburn!” like an exclamation of panic. He made her expression look
nonthreatening, the way he stared unblinkingly between them.

Harry blinked at his friend, nodded, and left. It seemed worse to stay in that room, so Draco
followed him back to the kitchen subserviently. He busied himself with plates, trying to
minimise the clatter they made in his unsteady hands. One slipped out of his grasp and froze
an inch from crashing on the floor. Wide-eyed, his head whipped up to Harry, who he hadn’t
even seen take his wand out.

In all the hypotheticals of the evening, he hadn’t imagined their shocked faces. In his
spinning imagination, Ron looked like he’d seen a dementor, and Draco, then, was that
dementor. This spectre of severity, now looming over Harry. Did any of it matter—his
laughter at dinners? His graciousness? His passivity?

Now, he considered, maybe all of this was miscalculated. Draco, perhaps, was perfectly
acceptable as a friend, but different standards needed to—and couldn’t be—met to court
Harry Potter. He’d spread himself too—

“Draco,” Harry said, suddenly beside him, in the same unassailable tone he’d used with
Pansy upstairs. “This is simple. There’s no need to worry. Either they’re not all your friends
and so you don’t care what they think, or they are your friends and they like you too much to
care.”

That was clever. And so Harry—giving him logical reasoning whether he chose to be
guardedly apathetic or vulnerably concerned. He opened his mouth to dampen Harry’s
confidence anyway, but he was more readable to the man than he thought, because he was
nodding smugly before he got a chance.

“Yeah, exactly,” he said, taking the plates out of his hands. “You’re fine. We’re fine.”

Draco busied himself with the glass of water he’d started just minutes before, while Harry
finished preparing the plates. There wasn’t an ounce of his previous nerves in the man now,
like the anxiety had dissipated in the wake of tasks to accomplish. Draco watched his calm
stature admiringly. It was intriguing to witness this switch from panic to action, some latent
skill, task-focused, survival-based.

When they climbed the stairs again, this time with dinner, he tried to channel it, too, to shut it
off and stand tall. Everyone had moved to the dining room like chided children. He and Harry
stood behind their chairs. They had their full attention.

“Right. So,” Draco started, chin raised. “Harry and I are seeing each other. At the risk of
insinuating that this is any of your business, you may each ask a question.”

“So, if… how—since—” Ron cleared his throat and scratched his head.

“Sorry, Weasley. Intelligible questions only. Your loss.”

Hermione tapped a finger to her lips interestedly, her free hand resting in appeasement on
Ron’s shoulder. “How long?”

“Maybe five weeks, you could say,” Harry answered.

“Not since Saltburn?” Neville frowned, thinking out loud. “Huh. Alright.”

Draco didn’t know if that was a question necessitating an answer, and he didn’t have words to
comprehend the scope of it, anyway. Pansy cleared her throat, hands flat on the table, so he
braced himself for that instead.

“Should I be worried,” she started, voice lilting playfully, “about how often I left you two
alone in my parlour while I prepared dinners?”
“What part of five weeks don’t you understand, Pans?” Draco cracked a smile for the first
time, so relieved to hear the lack of offence in her voice.

“Fine. Is it serious?”

“Hold on,” Ron interrupted sourly, sitting forward with a scowl. “Why’s she get two
questions and I’ve not even—”

“Best friend,” she retorted, holding a palm out flat in Ron’s face to shush him.

“Harry’s my best—”

“Best friend,” she repeated louder, smiling sweetly and shaking the hand again, bracelets
tinkling lightly like they were laughing along at Ron’s discontent. “Is it serious?”

Draco glanced beside him at Harry and his endearingly reddening ears. He gave Draco a
hopeless look. They couldn’t lie, could they? But it had also been only five weeks—barely
even, given the awkwardness of the first few—and the whole ‘I’m a goner’ bit felt rather
intimate.

“Merlin’s beard, it is serious,” she gasped before he could worry too long. “Look at you
two!”

Draco lowered his face to the table. Surely now he was running as hot as Harry. And his food
was getting cold. But Luna gave a light ahem, pulling his attention back from the dinner
sitting uneaten as his seat.

“Harry,” she said warmly. She’d been quiet in the living room and here, but now she smiled
between them with a level of happiness that looked the closest to matching their own. “I
always say to be careful with Gemini men. But you boys. My lion and my twins. I’ve always
wondered whether anyone sees that second side of Draco, but I think it’s rather nice that it’s
you.”

No doubt, he was rosy-cheeked now. It took all he had at that sappy, kind-hearted also-not-a-
question not to reach out for Harry. For the first time, he considered that it was maybe a
benefit and not a detriment that they’d told everyone while the golden glow of a happy
engagement lay in the air.

“Thanks, Loons.” Harry’s smile grew. Draco’s threatened to begin.

“Best for last, then, I suppose,” said Blaise, in his orator’s tone. Godric save them all. Draco’s
mouth twitched amusedly now that the end was near, watching Harry’s knuckles whiten
under a suddenly harder grip on the back of his chair.

He gave Blaise what he hoped was a calculating glare of warning. “One question, Zabini.”

Blaise cleared his throat. “We can all agree that there’s an inherent power play in the roles of
any relationship, often presented in the bedroom. Now, you are both wildly officious,
assertive men…”
“Yeah, my mistake to give an inch,” said Harry, ignoring the insulted look on Blaise’s face to
pull his chair and sit down. Draco laughed.

All things considered, he could admit that it had gone shockingly well. It had caught some of
them by surprise, sure, but it wasn’t the world-disrupting announcement he’d dreaded. It had
taken him ages to accept that having feelings for Harry after all they’d been through was
acceptable, yet the rest of them had done it in one meal. It was almost envious.

After that, the conversations turned normal. He and Harry were no more amorous than usual
—he hadn’t expected to be, first because Harry was a private person, and then because he
certainly wasn’t performative with affection. Not that he’d had many chances to decide such
a thing.

It was interesting that Harry hadn’t asked him about his past yet. Sure, briefly he’d
questioned him on dating in Saltburn, but that had been a means to an end, searching for a
specific answer, and not loaded with the pressure of speaking about past relationships from
within a current one. He’d been bracing for it, the longer time went on, but Harry kept not
asking. Perhaps not caring.

Either way, he was glad Pansy wouldn’t be there for it. She was fully knowledgeable on his
scarce non-platonic experiences and a bit blunt in her discussion of them.

“So… this is moving fast, huh? Already quite serious,” she chirped in his ear, hanging onto
his arm as he carried a couple of drinks downstairs for refills while everyone moved to the
living room. “I assume you’re panicking internally. I’m all ears.”

“Much appreciated, as always, Pans, but I’m fine.”

She gripped his arm tight enough to check his blood pressure. “How’s that possible?”

The kitchen chimed with the sound of glass bottles clattering against each other. The bottle in
Draco’s hand hissed in impatience as he worked the cork off. “I don’t know, I’ve not
considered the timing. I’m doing what feels appropriate as it does.”

Pansy slapped a hand flat across the top of a glass as he moved to pour. “You hadn’t
considered the timing?” she whispered, head cocked in disbelief. Draco lowered the bottle
with a sigh. “Mister ‘I didn’t give him my name so he couldn’t come calling’?”

“Don’t be so dramatic,” he said, nudging her hand from the glass and topping it off.

“Mister ‘I’d rather die than be called a boyfriend’? You’ve got it bad. This is a… a
something.”

Vague enough to be agreeable, he thought. It was, indeed, a something. He didn’t know how
to explain that the precedence set by his past amorous connections didn’t matter, because
Harry didn’t feel like dating at all so much as… an uncontestable destiny. And if he couldn’t
say it without sounding sappy, he’d rather not say it at all.
April 2013

In the wake of last week’s nightmare and subsequent late-night conversation, Harry had gone
full investigative Auror. At first, he’d just wanted to know what sort of rehearsals Draco was
increasingly disappearing to attend, but the task had grown unmanageably larger since—a
new, deeper desire to understand the person who lived in his home, this man who only cried
with his head hidden and whispered his insecurities in the dead of night.

So Harry nicked the record player and records from the living room before he left that
morning. He thought Draco would notice, and gets a little thrill at the idea of confrontation,
but he manages to get to the shop and set it up without trouble.

Yes. It would be easier to ask Draco about himself directly, but it’s a knotty situation to
Harry. When he asks Draco anything deeper than ‘what kind of music do you like’, there’s a
dullness in his eyes, a tightness on his face, neither of which disappear when he smiles and
answers. And, Harry thinks, he put that sadness there. So he chooses his questions
strategically, careful what he asks while Draco’s preoccupied over some open flame in the
alchemy lab or hacking at an avocado in the kitchen. He bothers him in moderation, away
from dangers.

It’s easier to save such moments of precariousness for the questions only Draco has answers
to, so something as publicly understood as his career becomes a personal project instead. He
knows already that students come over, that Draco plays alone a lot too, and that the stack of
half-burnt handwritten notes he’d gathered and set safely in the living room post-breakdown
had disappeared again.

The consistent ‘off to rehearsal’ was more difficult to analyse, but Harry eventually pieced it
together. He doesn’t know much about the world of classical music, but the papers, programs,
and calendar in Draco’s little corner of the living room paint a picture of a concert pianist,
intermittently hired for performances requiring weeks of practice and rehearsals. There’s a
blue strikethrough on a performance with some London-based orchestra the week after the
curse, then line after line of blank squares, but by April the days were filling up again.

None of this leaves him feeling more knowledgeable about who Draco is, though, which is
why he’s setting the needle down on the first record behind the till in Collectors’ Quidditch.
Draco doesn’t have much published music, but what does exist was all catalogued neatly in
the living room. He’d taken the entire stack. With the sky still dark out the window that
morning, he worked quietly at bookkeeping by the till to the sound of Draco’s compositions,
few as they were.

Only one sounds familiar—his first published piece, from 1999 per the label, and in an
instant he’s flashed back to the fuzziness of early acquaintanceship, to dinner at Pansy’s and
Draco sitting across like he’s been put under an Imperius just to attend. That’s the man who’s
made a name for himself with intimate, emotional classical music? he’d thought, laden with
scepticism.

Sometimes he thinks about moments like that. Memories so clear about a man who feels like
a stranger, and it fills him with confusion not even Draco would have answers to. He should
know a lot more about Draco, shouldn’t he? If they were friends?
He’s tentatively proposed the topic with Anastasia. She suggested the obvious; that he fell in
love and then learned more about Draco. He’s still unsure. But Draco seems private. Maybe
he’d had no choice but to dive in before knowing how deep the water was. Rather brave of
him, he had to admit, if it was true. And, if he was being even more honest, telling of just
how willing he was to jump head-first into love.

When the last of the original compositions plays out, he switches to the majority of the vinyl
recordings, which are of orchestras Draco’s soloed for and compositions he’d written for
other performers. Though ‘performer’ felt generous sometimes, especially as he sat through a
simple, trudged through Children’s Orchestra performance from the early 2000s.

Distantly, in the temporary silence when he hefts the player into the workroom because the
day’s been slow, he thinks to Draco calling Ron a surgeon at chess. Did he think about piano
like that? What kind of pianist was he, then? It was strange, listening to him on a recording.
There was an air of rote practice to the living room playing, no matter how expert it sounded
to Harry in passing, that was absent in these tracks. These were performative. Emotional. He
thinks of how certain singers on the radio just sound like they’re emoting, pulling expressive
faces as they sing. He’s more sure than anything that Draco doesn’t do that, but he emotes in
other ways, maybe. With his hands. He feels the things he plays.

Harry feels things when he works on brooms, and maybe that’s something they bonded over
once. He gravitates to certain tasks depending on his mood, when he has the pick of the litter.
Right now, for example, Draco playing for him indirectly, he’s smoothing out the grit of a
chestnut handle days in advance, letting the repetitive motion of the sandpaper hypnotise
him. Beneath his hand, the wood grain changes with every pass over, worn down to show
incrementally new paths in the rings.

The action is so meditative that he’s thirty seconds into the smallest, unlabeled record he’d
pulled from a sleeve in the back of the stack before it registers that he’s sanding to the sound
of white noise. He sets the broom handle down and takes a step towards the record player to
lift the needle when he hears a throat clear and the sound of piano keys trilling lightly in
practice. His hand stops in the air. When a song finally begins, gradual and meandering, he
returns slowly to the broom, ears pricked in keen interest.

It’s not like the other records. He can hear the shift of the piano bench, the occasional flutter
of paper. It might be the Grimmauld Place living room. Harry doesn’t have good words for
music with lyrics, let alone classical, but the taste this one leaves in his mouth makes him
wish he could describe it. As it is, nothing he thinks of sounds proper. It’s happy. Thoughtful,
maybe. Languid. But certainly, it is much more than those words allow him.

In their better days, however brief, Tony would make him the pancakes his mum used to
make and they would eat in bed over a crossword, living under the covers like the world out
the window could be muted at whim and everything could be reduced to two bodies, plates
drowned in syrup, and slow, scratchy morning conversation. It’s laced in bitterness in his
memory, now, but if someone had played him this song at the time, he would’ve found it a
perfect soundtrack for exactly how those mornings felt.

The piece plays out and for a moment there’s nothing but the crackle of the record player
before one final, comically-grand chord echoes and a soft laugh that sounds like…
Draco’s voice is tinny on the little speaker. “There, archived for posterity. Happy?”

“Thank you. Happy doesn’t even begin to cover it,” his own voice sounds back. With a
sucked breath, Harry startles, accidentally letting his sandpaper flutter to the ground like a
fallen leaf. He doesn’t even budge to pick it up, staring slack-jawed instead at the little 45
spinning.

A sound between a groan and a huff. “Stop the recording if you plan to be sentimental.
There’s no need to fossilise that.”

“If you’re just tuning in, that was Draco Malfoy being a lovesick sod, compositionally. Live
on air. You can’t tell over audio, but he’s dressed like Cupid—nappy, arrows, and all.”

“Harry, I swear to god.”

“Next up: Adele.”

Draco’s voice suddenly appears much louder, closer to the recording device. “It’s a lie, I’m
fully clothed.”

“The little angel wings really flutter when he’s cross.”

“This is defamation.”

“For our fifth anniversary, he’s put the nappy on, and for our tenth, he’s going to take it off,
and you heard it here fir—”

“We should just rerecord at this point, I—”

“No, it’s perfect like this. I love—”

Harry’s voice cuts off suddenly, replaced with the white noise again, then nothingness as the
needle hits the centre of the record and lifts automatically. He lets it spin aimlessly.

That Harry—and that Draco, too—sound… happy. So happy. The limited pictures he’d seen
hadn’t affected him like this. But hearing his voice, hearing their back and forth. God, it
hurts. He didn’t expect it to hurt this bad. He’s got a hand to his heart, risen subconsciously as
they teased each other over the subpar speaker. The sympathy he feels for those two is
unmatched. What they had and lost. He sort of wants to apparate home and hug Draco, but
also hand him the 45 and make him listen to it, because there’s no world where those are two
people falling out of love, or whatever he’d been worried about on the hallway floor.

“That’s enough music for today,” he says aloud, to clear the air of his twenty-eight-year-old
voice as he stoops to the ground. The sandpaper had slipped under the shelves and he presses
his ear to the dirty floor, closing an eye to peer under.

There’s the sandpaper, and three of its closest fine-grit friends, plus a Snitch’s wing and a
glossy sheet of paper. He sits up and reaches for the broom handle he’s been sanding, then
kneels and sweeps it under the shelf, pulling out all the bits from underneath.
The sandpaper gets put back on the workbench, as does the Snitch’s wing, but he lingers
curiously on the glossy paper. There’s a ring from the bell in the front of the shop, but Harry
ignores it.

The flip of dread in his stomach is the first, instinctual sign that he’s holding something
important. The second is that on the paper, staring back at him, is Draco.

It’s a grid of four photos of him. Moving, magical. He’s leaving a large, ornate building in the
first, probably the concert hall, looking tall and put-together. He’s sucking in a breath that
accentuates his cheekbones, pink in the cold, wind whipping blonde hair back from his face
as he raises his shoulders and looks both ways across the street.

Winter, clearly. Maybe December? Earlier? Regardless, he doesn’t seem to know there’s a
lens aimed his way.

The bell rings again, a set of three dings now.

The second photo is a closer but equally undetected shot of Draco in the same coat but
different clothes, leaving a potions shop in Diagon Alley a few doors down from Harry’s with
a paper bag hooked on a couple of fingers.

The third has Harry in it. Old Harry, rather. The two of them are walking through Regent’s
with coffees in hand and hoodies and hats on. He’s pointing through some trees, towards
what he knows is the back of the zoo.

The fourth is about a block from Grimmauld Place, which makes him especially
apprehensive. It’s Draco walking alone again, dressed handsomely like the first photo, with
his nose down and his hair in his eyes, one shiny oxford hovering just above his next step on
the pavement.

When the bell rings again, Harry stands quickly, folds the paper in half and sticks it in his
back pocket as he rushes to the front of the store. “Hi, we’re closing,” he says breathlessly to
the woman looking cantankerous at the till. He flips the sign and holds the door open to usher
her out before she can get a word in, then follows her and taps the lock. He’s four paces from
the door when he thinks of something, almost collides into her turning around, and races
inside.

Back through to the workshop, he gets on his knees again and crawls on the floor, his ear to
the ground once more, and checks for anything else under the furniture—more photos,
something else incriminating he doesn’t know he’s looking for—but finds nothing. He does
the same under all the shelves in the shop, under the till, and then, after only finding pencils
and small bits of old repairs, locks the door behind him again.

There’s a little thrill that hits him every time he takes the guest entrance into the Ministry, a
small, joyous reminder that he doesn’t work there, but taking it twice in under a fortnight for
such serious business leaves him with nothing but an unsettled stomach. And unlike last time,
when his presence was overshadowed by a minor assassination attempt, he feels at least four
pairs of eyes on him the moment he steps out of the lift onto the Auror floor.
“Harry Potter!”

It’s not Ron’s voice, but it’s the next most comforting to hear. Barry MacCallum, who looks
the least like a Barry that someone can, is the first to notice his lost glances around the
department floor. He’d had about half the tattoos he does now when they were still in Auror
training together and probably twice the hair, but the seasoned Auror approaching Harry now
keeps it shaved close at the sides and bright blue. He and Ron spent a year trying to eke the
true story about his crooked nose out, but it changed every time: a rebound curse; a
transfiguration; a crocodile.

“Baz,” Harry greets, letting himself get pulled into a quick but strong hug.

“It’s happening, isn’t it?” Baz asks, eyebrows wiggling. “I’ve seen you twice this month. Are
you coming back?”

It’s far from the first time Harry’s been asked, and his face mirrors that lack of surprise. He
gets the question officially and unofficially regularly, but it’s always dismissed. He offers Baz
a perfected expression of reluctance that lasts skin deep.

“No luck, mate. Just looking for—”

“Ron. He popped into a meeting but won’t be long.” He waves a stack of papers in the air
between them. “I’m off, but good to see you, yeah? Drinks soon.”

“Drinks soon,” Harry echoes.

It still feels eerie to sit in the spare chair at Ron’s desk Ivanow had taken up so recently, so he
takes the page from his back pocket and settles into Ron’s chair instead, immediately nosing
around at the little notes and things on his desk. There’s a family photo, adorable: Ron and
Hermione on the beach with a probably six-year-old Rose and four-year-old Hugo. A
snapshot of their trio that had been published just after the battle. A couple of tacked up
memos scrawl reminders of changes in procedure and outstanding persons of interest. A bowl
of sweets he’d wager is less communal than meets the eye sit on the partition.

In light of the discovered photos, he’d practically forgotten about that last record he’d heard,
but it hits fresh when he spots another picture, not framed like the others but tacked next to
the memos. It’s him and Draco. He’s got Hugo on his shoulders while Draco smiles wide
with a hand steadying Rose on his. The only background is tall grass, but Harry knows
enough to recognise that the photographer’s back is to the Burrow. His eyes prickle, for no
good reason besides the exhaustiveness of the last couple of weeks.

His fingers are still pinching the edge of the photo when Ron rounds the corner, a sandwich
in hand and a bite in his mouth. “How long have you been here?” he asks through puffed
cheeks and hardly-opened lips. “No one told me or I wouldn’t’ve stopped off in the kitchen.”

“Ron.”

His voice is hard. It drops the smile off Ron’s face. He sets his sandwich on some papers and
pulls the second chair closer, a hand covering his mouth as he swallows quickly. Without
waiting, Harry offers the photos wordlessly, then watches for the moment Ron transitions
from confusion to alarm.

“Where did you get these?” he murmurs.

“Found them,” Harry says. “Under something at work. There aren’t any more.”

“Okay,” he says. “Okay. Alright.” He flips it to the blank back, then stares at the photos
again. “Okay.”

“This is dodgy, right?”

Ron glances at the doorway. “Absolutely. Shit… this is more than a hands-off infatuation
with you. This is bigger than we thought.”

“Clearly.”

“You agree?”

The question catches Harry off guard. He’d not even been a colleague long enough to get the
matching robes.

“I… well, yeah, right? If this was in my shop, I had more contact with this person than we
thought. My Obliviation on its own implies an unorganised, desperate individual. But if you
see it also as removal of… loyalty or dedication as Draco’s closest companion,” Harry points
a thumb at himself, “plus proof that he was being tailed. Either an admirer is taking a more
active role than anticipated or…”

“Or it’s not about you, actually.”

Harry nods curtly.

“Either way, if he’s being surveilled, we need a detail on Draco. Especially with the
proximity of that last image to home.”

“He’s… not going to like that.”

“I’m aware,” Ron says, sounding strained. “Where is he now, do you know?”

“Grimmauld Place, I think. There was rehearsal this morning, but he’s probably got lessons.
It doesn’t feel much safer to tell more people where we live so they can watch the house,
does it? Draw more attention?”

Harry looks down at the pictures as he speaks, at the first image, Draco sucking in a breath
with his head turned, his slender neck exposed. Wizards had a curious habit of forgetting
about completely Muggle weaknesses, Harry thought. The thin skin on throats and the
completely universal need for working lungs and hearts. Learn to hold a wand, live immune
to the common cold, and suddenly forget that knives, too, are sharp.
“Baz wants hours, I bet he’d take some shifts. You remember Connor? He’d do it, I know.
And Amir. Good people, people we know. They won’t have the exact address anyway, just
watch the street. Temporarily. To see if someone else is watching the street.”

It sounds reasonable, but it also sounds tremendously dramatic. “We’re not overthinking this,
are we?”

Ron holds his gaze seriously, and when he leans in, their friendship is gone. They are two
men who’ve seen things and experienced terribleness, speaking about a new terribleness.

“You trust your gut as much as I trust mine. These weren’t meant to be seen. They weren’t
sent in the post, or nailed to your door. This was supposed to be as nonexistent as your
memories. And that makes it worth as much thinking as we can give it. Bloody hell,” he
finishes, sitting back fully returned to friendly astonishment.

“I should tell him,” Harry says. “Can I get a copy of this? Maybe he’ll recognise the pictures,
or saw a camera, or remember something I said in new context.”

“Yeah, good. Wait here.”

As Ron walks away, Harry feels a hole forming in his gut, that same sinking mood he’d had
when he first recognised the hate potion in his system. That gut feeling, like Ron had said,
that something was much worse than he’d known. Things had been going well, all
considered. The case had been unsolved but understood, and now he’s lost in the dark.

He can’t imagine it’ll feel any less complicated when he draws Draco’s face into the same
grim expression Ron’s carrying. Complex history aside, photos like that so focused on
someone in his circle is concerning. He wonders whether rehearsal ran late. If Draco’s
walking the same route photographed. If Old Harry knew that he shouldn’t.

Had the photos been with the letter? Some sort of overeager proof that this person knew
Harry’s life and love? Or had he received them first, like a warning? You do what you must
for love, the letter had ended. They had never considered the fact that someone willing to
Obliviate a public figure, who hadn’t promised Draco any sort of amnesty in their pursuance
of his husband, might have it in them to take more drastic moves.

He imagines Draco swallowed up in a long, dark coat on the path he’d walked benignly for
years only to find himself at the nasty end of a wand—the rustiness with which he’d fight
back, or perhaps the stunning polished duelling that might come to him like riding a broom,
Harry can’t know which is the truth—and caught off guard regardless, as pacifists more often
are. Would he think of Harry? Picturing the pain or surprise on Draco’s face, the way it would
pale, the way he’d fall… It would tighten Harry’s throat, tense his shoulders, sting his every
breath. If he were Old Harry, that is. Then it would hurt like that.

He clears his throat and stands, to look over the expanse of the department for a ginger head,
itching to get home. When Ron appears, holding the photos high in achievement as he
approaches, Harry lets out a breath.
“No front entrance for now,” Ron says, maintaining his grip on the photo sheet for a moment
when Harry reaches for it. “If Draco’s not there, send an owl. Our floo is yours anytime you
need it, and I’m sure the same goes for the rest. Not one at the shop, is there?”

“No.”

“What about your Quidditch lady friend’s place?”

“Aldona has one.”

“Good,” he nods approvingly. “You trust her?”

“One hundred per cent.”

“We’ll be interviewing her again, I’m sure. When I questioned everyone that first week I kept
it unspecific, but we’ll have to fill her in.”

Harry nods. That’s fine. He’s been keen to tell her, anyway. Maybe once Ron talks to her, he
can finally have a friendly confidante. One who’s not equally invested in Draco’s emotions or
paid to listen.

He disapparates back to Diagon Alley from the Ministry, stops briefly at the shop to collect
the record player and records, then lugs it all in his arms down to Quality Quidditch Supplies.
He ignores the conversations that stall or change as he passes, except for the brief exchange
of thanks he entertains with a leaving customer who holds the door open for him. He remains
unnoticed long enough to make it almost to the back before a familiar voice calls after.

“You’re supposed to take goods out of the store, not bring them in, Potter!”

Harry turns, adjusting his grip, and smiles tightly back. “Better not make a habit of it, then. I
need your floo, though. Er, often, possibly. If that’s alright.”

Aldona hands a paper bag to a departing teen boy and leans on the counter to study him
closer. She taps a pen on the counter distractedly, squinting her eyes. “You look dreadful.”

“And you’re no Veela. Hard day, ‘Dona.”

“Do I want to know why?”

“Afraid you won’t have a choice. Some Aurors might be by in the future. My mate Ron.
We’ll talk.”

She cocks an eyebrow. “Gotten yourself into trouble?”

“Trying to get back out of it.”

“An intrepid task.”

“Sure. In a rush,” he says, pushing on the door to the office. “Appreciate you!”
It’s unfortunate that under new circumstances, the likes of which Draco doesn’t yet know,
Harry emerges from the floo in a puff of smoke and magic directly in the middle of a young
girl’s laboured rendition of Ode to Joy. Her hands hit their notes loudly, then freeze as he
ducks out sheepishly from the hearth. The look Draco greets him with from beside her is
unsurprising in its wrath.

“Hi. Sorry, just a moment,” Harry says to the wide-eyed student. “You sound brilliant.”

Draco stands, stepping sideways to block his path to the dust-free square on the bookcase
where the record player lives.

“Outside, now,” he hisses under his breath.

Harry follows without argument. He had, of course, been just moments from asking him for
the same. He watches Draco take extreme effort to close the door calmly, then turn and open
his mouth.

“Oh, let me start,” he interjects, setting the record player on the floor.

Draco narrows his eyes and presses his lips thin. He takes his lessons very seriously. It’s the
heart of his reputation, of his success in the field, he’d explained, not long after Harry had his
telling off about his kitchen clanging.

“To explain yourself, I hope.”

“I found these in the workshop today. Tucked under a table.” He pulls the photos from his
pocket and hands them to Draco, watches, like Ron all over again, as he registers what he’s
seeing. The second the shock hits, Harry leans closer. “Do you remember these days?
Anyone you saw? Anything suspicious?”

“Shit,” Draco murmurs, eyes scanning erratically like he doesn’t know what to study the
longest. “No, I…” He points a finger at the photos running clockwise. “That’s at the concert
hall, that’s Diagon, obviously. That one—shit, that one’s up the street. Maybe it’s just some
journalist…”

“Is that how it feels, in your gut? Like paparazzi?”

Draco looks up at Harry with a newfound severity, his expression an answer in itself.

“Sorry to interrupt your lesson,” Harry says quietly, not sure where else to start. “Ron says
the front door’s off-limits.”

Draco’s eyes soften, tinted with regret. “Sorry to… react.”

“You didn’t know,” he shrugs. He’s glad he’s okay, even if he’d wanted to tear Harry in two
for a moment. He watches while Draco stares back down at the photos, shaking his head. The
paper bends under his tightening fingers.

“I said this, months ago,” he says eventually, evenly, scary quiet. “Right from the start, I said
this was bigger than one fan letter. I let myself get convinced otherwise, and you’ve been in
danger all this time. I said this.”

“Sure, Draco, you were right, we were wrong. But I’m not the one in more danger. It’s…
you.”

“Me? That’s what Ron’s thinking?”

Harry studies him carefully. “That’s what we’re thinking,” he corrects slowly. “Whatever I
knew about these photos was lost when I touched that letter. Maybe they’re related, maybe
they’re not. But by forgetting you, I’ve put your life in danger.”

“Oh,” Draco’s shoulders drop. They fall back and down in accompaniment with an exhale. It
catches Harry by surprise.

“I think you heard me wrong,” he says, leaning closer. “You’re in danger.”

Draco leans back like Harry’s contagious. “I heard you just fine. It’s still good to hear a
logical reason why you are not in more trouble.”

It hits like a punch, the relief on his face about something that had Harry running home,
worried. With it comes a flush of embarrassment that he’d been so worried, which he hadn’t
even gotten a chance yet to probe.

“Unbelievable, Draco.” He shakes his head, lip curling in disappointment. “Having no self-
preservation isn’t a contest, you know. You won’t win anything but a casket. Put some value
on your own life, for Godric’s sake.”

Draco smiles back.

Harry can feel his frustration rising, marinated in tiredness and confusion and fear. It’s
aggravating, to feel so uncertain of how someone will react next, and especially so when that
person predicts his thoughts by the twitch of an eyebrow.

“Why are you smiling?”

“You sound just like him.”

Harry doesn’t ask who. He sees it, in the way for a moment, Draco looks at him like he’s
someone else, someone preferable.

“Go figure,” he snaps, to shake off the discomfort. “You’re being followed. Clearly. Or at
least were. So there’ll be someone posted on the street, observing for suspicious behaviour.
Only people Ron trusts, so I trust, so you should trust.”

“I trust who Ron trusts,” Draco says simply.

“Great.”

“But I’m just supposed to let Big Brother sniff the bottom of my robes all through town
because someone else is also watching my every move?”
“Yes, Draco. That’s how surveillance works. Take a new path to work, too. Take the floo
there, if you can.”

Draco rolls his eyes.

“They’re here to help,” Harry urges. “Accept help. Let them do their job.”

Something is biting in the air. Like hot days where no number of open windows saves you
from feeling as though you’re swimming in some inescapable heat. “Thank Merlin,” Draco
sneers. “The Ministry will save the day.”

Harry scowls. “I’ll tell Ron how you feel. I’m sure he’ll be touched to hear your trust in his
work. Hermione, too, actually.”

“Don’t do that. That’s cheap. Everyone knows they have my full support, just as everyone
knows I hate the idea of Ministry outsiders in my home—”

“They won’t be in your home.”

“—and Ron and Hermione are too good for the Ministry anyway, if you ask me. So perhaps I
simply prefer when that business stays out of my life.”

“God,” Harry mutters. “You sound like your mother.”

Draco freezes, blinking in shock. It’s funny, Harry thinks, that most everyone he knows can
be offended just by being compared to their mum. It’s one of the stranger things he’s
witnessed from afar, from the outside. Sure, in this instance, he knew what he was loading it
down with. But he remembers saying the same to Ron, only because he’d seen him suddenly
humph around his children with an apron on and a tea towel thrown over his shoulder, and
one would’ve thought he’d called him something unrepeatable.

“Unbelievable,” Draco whispers. “You’ve got exactly one memory from our marriage and
you continually wield it like a fucking weapon.”

“I’m sorry, I saw the opening and I took it. That was uncalled for,” Harry says immediately,
glancing nervously towards the student practising diligently in the next room. “I’m stressed,
to be honest. I’m convinced I knew something, which means I have the answer and I just
can’t access it, and I don’t love you—sorry to put it bluntly—so I don’t know how else to
retrieve it, but I like you as my friend, you’re a good friend, everyone loves you, so I’m
nervous for you and it’s mental that you’re not nervous for yourself. I don’t know what to
offer you besides surveillance and you won’t take it. And my eye keeps twitching and it
won’t fucking stop.”

He squeezes his eyes shut at the finish, rubbing his fingers at them under his glasses. When
he opens them, Draco’s tight frown has softened into something more neutral. It looks like
relief, like he’s grateful for something he can answer.

“I do know about your eye twitches. Lay off the caffeine and sleep in tomorrow. I’ll help by
being calm about the surveillance.”
Harry sucks in a breath. “You will?”

“I don’t want you worried.”

“I don’t want you killed,” Harry retaliates. “You need to be cautious.”

“Cautious is my middle name. I’ve got to get back to work, though.” He reaches for the
handle of the door.

“What is your middle name?”

Draco pulls a face. “Lucius,” he says, drawing the doorknob down. Impulsively, Harry puts
his hand on the handle, which sends Draco’s flying off like he’d touched a hot pan.

“Wait,” he blurts. “There’s… one more thing I thought of. To help. But it’s a really uncertain
plan, don’t get your hopes up.”

“Ah. No worries there, it’s the hope that kills you,” says Draco lightly, folding his arms in
expectancy. It’s a bit of a fatalistic football phrase to come from his mouth, Harry thinks, but
he looks set in his ways.

“Er, right,” he starts quickly, a bit intimidated under the attention now. “I’ve been thinking
about what Anastasia says about different forms of intimacy. Love’s built from it, just as
friendship is. What if romantic intimacy isn’t required to get my memories back? What if it’s
just intimacy in general?”

Draco looks conflicted. “What did Hermione think?”

“I haven’t told ‘Mione. I’m telling you.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah, 'oh',” Harry says. “I want to work on my memories. I want to know who I was. I know
this is starting to sound like a broken record, but we didn’t get much closer last time we
decided this, did we? I was reluctant. I thought I could figure you out on my own.” He
reaches out and takes Draco’s wrist. It’s soft, but tenses under his touch, tendons tightening.
Harry holds harder. “You miss me,” he says. “You’ve been reluctant, too. I’ve got big shoes
to fill and I’ve announced I won’t fill them, so you miss him and give me the cold shoulder.”

“I thought you were feeling good about creating a new identity,” Draco says faintly. “You
wanted to move forward without looking back.”

“But it’s bigger now, no? It’s your well-being. Mine too, probably. Could be all of my family
in danger, and we don’t know the first thing about why. It doesn’t matter what I want. It
mattered when it was personal comfort, but now there’s more on the line, and I have the
answers, somewhere.”

Draco takes a breath deep enough to start through his nose with his lips pursed and finish
through his mouth, a gasping thing that leaves Harry lost long before it turns to an exhaled
smile.
“You’re a paradox, you know that?” Harry says, squinting. “What emotion even is this?
What’re you thinking?”

Draco cocks his head. “Why’s it matter?”

“Erm, because it’s important to talk about how we’re feeling? Emotional intimacy, like I just
said?”

In one long pace, Draco steps forward and grips his shoulders tightly. It’s a shocking move
for a man who’s stepped away more often, pulled back more often.

“Yes,” he says. “See? I knew it. Listen to yourself; chastising me, putting others first,
earnestly caring, prattling on about proper communication. Do you see?”

Harry shakes his head, at a loss for words.

“There is no Old Harry—you’re him. One and the same.”

Harry doesn’t know what to say. He can’t even quite tell if that was a positive or a negative
discovery for Draco, and his eyes are a bit wet, which could also go either way.

“It’s good, Harry,” Draco says as if he’s read his mind. “It’s like… a small concession. It’s
good to see you like that again. My Harry’s not all gone, you know? He never left, he just
changed. You’re him, still. In the important ways.”

Harry smiles back, warmly but with more reservation. “The important ways.”

Maybe that was their way forward. This was their currency—not kissing, not walks in
Regent’s Park or whatever else they used to get up to—small concessions. Dinner for two.
Chatting at Friday night gatherings. Teasing and caring like Harry always has.

And Draco, though he might not know it, had just handed Harry a concession of his own: He
was still Harry, he’d said, ‘in the important ways’, which for once had included all of his best
qualities and none of his romantic attention. Draco saw Harry as things besides husband. It
fills him like a Christmas dinner, fat and happy in a way even the lovely Anastasia hadn’t yet
managed to make him feel about his identity.

They’re both buzzing a bit too contentedly for the bad news Harry’s just brought home, but
maybe that’s a small concession, too—another person, who can dampen the hardest blows.

“Take this with you, I’d hate to show my face in there again,” Harry adds, stooping to pick up
the record player. He watches Draco’s eyes grow wider, alighting on the stacked sleeves of
records. “I was trying to understand you,” he explains.

“How’d it go?” asks Draco just as his hand stills on the small, unlabeled 45. Harry would be
lying if he said he wasn’t watching attentively, waiting to see what it would evoke in his
expression. A lot, really. A confusing amount. Something lovely, but something sad masked
over.
 “Didn’t get around to hearing them,” Harry lies, watching his face relax. “You’re a
formidable thing to understand.”

Chapter End Notes

Hope you've enjoyed it thus far! I can't believe it's already been ten chapters!

Feel free to leave some words below in the comments, or find me at

writandromance.tumblr.com. Doing my best to reply as often as I can, but know I read
them all!
 From the New World
Chapter Notes

You know it's an event heavy chapter when it's coming in at over 12000...

The chapter title refers to the second movement of Dvorak's ninth symphony in E minor,
Op. 95, 'From the New World'.

See the end of the chapter for more notes

April 2013

The only person pouring over memory books more than Harry is Draco. Now that the
discussion of the task at hand is more open with Harry’s announced participation, it becomes
clear that Draco’s research was much more extensive than the textbook or two Harry had
noticed in the early days.

“Already read it,” he says apathetically each time Harry presents what he’s brought home
from Flourish and Blotts. He speaks often about not letting himself get hopeful and yet works
unendingly. It’s going to go one of two ways, Harry thinks nervously—doggedly-won
success or agonising disappointment.

Considering the bibliography Draco had built himself, Harry’s excited to earn the brightness
on his face when he brings home a set of Muggle texts he’d ventured out for.

“Maybe Muggles will have ideas we don’t,” he suggests to Draco, dropping them in front of
his dinner in the kitchen. “They did quite well with electricity. And the telly. Could’ve done
without the coal power.”

Draco pushes aside his bowl of something bland and rice-based to flip to the index of the top
book. His fingers run down in interest, eyes scanning quickly. When he’s finished, he turns
his mouth down, impressed, but gives Harry a tired look anyway.

“I know they’re helpful. Why do you think I have so many Muggle books on chemistry and
physics? I think this one’s upstairs.” He taps a slim finger on the fourth spine down,
Advanced Sciences for A-Level and picks up his bowl. “Haven’t read any for memory yet,
though.”

Harry decides to take that on as his task, then, and the first thing he gains in his readings is a
bit of gratefulness for the straightforward characteristics of Obliviation. In the Muggle books,
every case study is completely different. There was an accountant who could remember
everything except for his days at work, a mother who woke up in 2002 thinking it was 1989,
a man who had to relearn talking, shaving, walking. A teenaged boy hit his head and woke up
remembering nothing, but was able to play songs on the piano.
“Good student,” Draco murmurs distractedly when Harry tells him the last one through the
living room window, which is open that evening, creating a direct path from his rehearsing to
Harry’s wiggentree-situated revising. “That’s a well-practised player. Repetition, repetition.”

If Draco was that teen, would he still play the piano? Retention seemed to be based on how
engrained the activity was, so Harry can’t imagine he wouldn’t. And then, he thinks, with the
first actual swoop of butterflies in his stomach since January, did removing years of love
disrupt his instincts? Was he the teen with unaffected proficiency or the bloke retaught how
to hold a razor? Could he still kiss? Touch? Shag? Would he be proficient like he’d slept with
Miles yesterday, or would he be a bumbling mess? The answer he came up with was even
simpler, maybe, and cruder, surely—it wouldn’t matter, because no one who hasn’t been
touched in twelve years lasts long enough to find out if they’re still good in bed.

Harry reads through the books over breakfast, behind the till, while dinner’s in the oven,
before bed. As often as he can, besides mealtime. That time is kept book-free, for the kind of
memory work that can’t be found in a textbook. That’s when he and Draco talk.

It’s Draco who broke the communicative seal once and for all, unintentionally Harry thinks,
by appearing through the floo the day after the photos were discovered with a grave face and
an opinion he couldn’t seem to keep to himself.

“Teddy, Teddy,” he grumbled in the kitchen doorway, turning the radio on low then peering
over Harry’s shoulder at the pan on the stove.

The Obliviation had matured from an abrupt emergency attack to a chronic condition of
Harry’s, and the list of people who knew about his situation had grown the longer it went
unsolved. First, Andromeda and the rest of the Weasleys, which included a long letter from
Mr and Mrs Weasley and enough meals for him and Draco to divide up for a week’s worth of
lunches. Then, Aldona, who listened and reacted as if he’d finally finished the lyrics to a
song stuck in her head.

“Oh, Harry,” she’d said, leaned across the Collectors’ Quidditch workbench. “His name was
air in your lungs, and then one day you just clammed up. I thought it was a nasty divorce. Not
my place to ask.”

In what ways, Harry wondered, though, was it not a nasty divorce?

And just that morning, McGonagall had been informed, according to Ron, because he’d
needed to speak with Teddy and sorted it with her. Teddy, though he’d been home for
Christmas in the weeks before, likely knew nothing about the photos of Draco, and his point
had been proved when Ron never showed up at the shop or sent an owl. All of it, then, left
him feeling confused by the moody atmosphere Draco brought into his kitchen.

“What’s wrong?”

Draco leaned on the counter. “I went along with Ron to Hogwarts today. I miss Teddy, so I
thought we could have lunch. And I think Ron’s trying to appease my impatience about all
this by including me when he can.”
It shouldn’t be surprising at this juncture, but the fact that Draco misses Teddy caught Harry
off guard anyway. Of course, Draco would miss Teddy. But what do they do together? What
do they talk about?

“And?”

“And Mr Fifth Year had somehow gotten the impression he could talk about you to me, now.”

Harry frowned at the pasta. “Talk about me how?”

“Complain about you! He’s offended by how you’ve handled it all. I said it’s your place to
make decisions that make you comfortable. Then he said he’s pissed off that you were thick
enough to touch the letter.”

“I was.”

“But that’s not his place to say, and not to me,” Draco retorted, pulling glasses from the
fridge. He’d fallen into a helpful role in the kitchen rather easily. A dozen years on and a few
measly months off, Harry supposed. “Go chat shit with Victoire, for Merlin’s sake.”

“What did you do?”

“Gave him a right ear-bashing, obviously,” Draco said exuberantly. “If he thought the curse
and subsequent… distancing of our partnership… meant we weren’t a united front any
longer, he could stand corrected.”

Harry hummed as he plated the food, quietly intrigued by this side of Draco. He wasn’t that
insulted, really. Teddy was perhaps a bit blunt in his opinions, but they weren’t unpopular
ones. Draco was a miscalculated ear to bend, though. He gave the impression of someone
who values respectfulness. Not near the extent his father might’ve, but certainly enough not
to stand for coming to one parent—guardian… friend… family member?—about another.

But, ah! There was a mutual interest! And one he hadn’t thought to take advantage of in all
this time over achingly awkward meals, so he presented it with a fresh desire to make
something easy exist between them.

“D’you reckon they’re dating?” he asked, presenting a plate at Draco’s seat and settling in
across from him.

“Who, Ted and Vic?” Draco raised his eyebrows in consideration. Then he cocked his head, a
sort of sideways nod. “Probably.”

“Eurgh.” Harry groaned, twisting spaghetti noodles around and around his fork.

“What?”

“I thought maybe puberty would skip a generation.”

Draco chuckled. “I told you to brace for this. Though I guess you’ve retroactively lost out on
that mental preparation.”
“Even if I remembered your warnings, it wouldn’t be enough to come to terms with my
godson snogging. He’s supposed to be eight years old for eternity.”

“Snogging?” Draco said, voice pitching up. “Pansy and I had sex fifth year.”

“At fifteen?”

The same year, he thought marvellously, he’d had the worst time he’d ever had at Hogwarts,
barely managed a first kiss, and lost just about everything he’d loved. Draco seemed to
register his bewilderment and scowled, waving his fork dismissively.

“Chalk it up to Inquisitorial Squad power trips. I don’t know. Look, I’m sure—Teddy’s in
Hufflepuff. He’s a kind boy. It’s fine. We like Victoire. Eat your pasta.”

Harry was already going to eat, the fork halfway to his mouth, so he took a bite anyway.
Draco looked smug. He’d never say, but he liked seeing him riled up. It was recognisable,
like finding a chain restaurant in a foreign village. He was comfortable in its familiarity,
much more than he was with that other look, the one Draco falls into when he thinks Harry’s
not caught him—forlornly sweet. Or that other other look, too close to desire for Harry to
comfortably give it thought.

Their talking over dinner is consistent from then on. The topic of Teddy is a safe starting
point, so the next night Draco clears his throat and tells Harry how it felt to watch Teddy’s
youth Quidditch matches from the stands. In their burgeoning practise as conversationalists,
Harry discovers that, even without saying anything explicitly romantic about Harry, Draco’s
longing can’t be filtered out completely. It’s just below the surface, in the way he talks about
Harry’s coaching, his swift movement on a broom, his smile when they won and his smile
when they lost, to teach the kids good sportsmanship. They were so different, evidently, that
Draco could look up from a book, catch sight of the grin, and know the results no matter how
inattentive he’d gotten.

Harry learns to be more flattered than discomforted. Who hasn’t, after all, rejected someone’s
confessed feelings? Life goes on. People remain friends. This was that, though accompanied
with an exceptional set of baggage.

Draco’s too busy for dinner the next night so Harry eats with Memory-Access and Trends in
Neurosciences, about a fifth of which he understands. The next night he’s feeling cheery, and
Draco either leeches off him or brings home the same liveliness, so Harry nudges him into
some Latin.

He counts to ten, says hello, goodbye, and ‘where is the library’ on request, but Harry’s never
heard him sway towards such mundane phrases.

“Alright, human fortune cookie,” he says, crossing his arms. “Give me one of your
proverbs.”

“‘Ens causa sui’ would fit your personal motto,” Draco suggests, so fast that he may have
already been thinking of it. Harry quirks his head. “‘Existing because of oneself’. Fit for the
man trying to find his identity, isn’t it?”
“Ens causa sui,” Harry repeats. “Ens causa sui. I quite like that. What’s your motto, then?”

Draco thinks for a moment, while Harry hunts out the last bites of his dinner.

“‘Facium ut mei memineris’,” he answers. Harry looks back up and catches his gaze first,
tonelessly grey and suddenly hard. “‘I’ll make you remember me’.”

His mouth is quirked up, but it doesn’t fool Harry. The smile hasn’t reached his eyes.

“Ah,” says Harry, swallowing thickly. “Are you—er, have you got any phrases wobbling
around up there less… sage?”

Less threatening?

He thinks for a beat again. “‘Mea navis aëricumbens anguillis abundat’.”

Latin rolls off Draco’s tongue like Parseltongue off Harry’s. An otherworldly ease. It’s a bit
hypnotising.

“What’s that mean?” he murmurs.

Draco stands and collects both their plates. “My hovercraft is full of eels.”

The next night he tells Harry a story, of the time he caught dragon pox from one of his
students. Even with the proper potions, it was days of fever, no appetite even for his favourite
meals, red spots and an inability to get out of bed, and Harry didn’t leave his side.

“I was a terrible patient; all I did was moan,” he says.

Harry’s properly surprised, and for good reason. “I took care of you?” Draco nods and Harry
frowns back. “But I’ve never had dragon pox. I shouldn’t have been immune.”

Draco smirks reminiscently. It’s an expression he must have invented. The alchemist,
plucking unmatchable emotions from thin air and turning them into something new and
shiny. “I know. I didn’t know then, of course. That’s how you got away with tending to me.
You came down with it days later, though.”

“Oh, real cheeky,” Harry says, at himself. Draco’s watching him, face creasing up, seeming
in agreement. “So I have had dragon pox then?”

It feels strange to have missed an entire illness, some insidious lack of knowledge about his
own body, which is worse even than not knowing Draco.

“I never thought to get a you-specific medical history update.”

“It seemed one of the lesser medical updates in your life lately,” says Draco.

True, his life’s been a bit dominated by the memory charm, even before he decided to work
actively to fix it. The textbooks—Muggle and magical—have nothing solid to offer besides
case studies that ease Harry’s mind by leaving him feeling less alone. One thing that keeps
reappearing as a tool, however, feels literally too close to home to ignore: music.

Draco invites Harry into a day of lessons. It’s a long day, he explains, but he knows Harry
wants to get to know him and, as he puts it, “you’ll get to know me much better watching me
teach than listening to the rubbish I called compositions in the 2000s.”

Harry, who thinks it prescient not to mention his listening given the invasiveness it had left
him feeling, thought the recordings had sounded rather impressive. He doesn’t say as much.

He’s hung around for lessons before. That much is clear, because Draco, fully transitioned
into professional mode—which Harry thought he’d already been in until he began fussing
with his clothes and hovering rigidly by the fireplace—begins to debrief Harry before each
arrival like a politician’s right-hand man.

“Mary’s first, she’s ten, you’ve met her twice, she loves Jules,” he’ll say. And Harry nods
from his unbothersome position across the room. He’s in a reading chair moved to the back
window overlooking the garden, where he can listen and watch with a book in hand, too far
away to be distractingly observant.

Draco’s sweet with her. She waves at Harry, but she’s been practising a song called The
Entertainer and is keen to show it off, so he’s quickly forgotten. He watches them together at
the piano, Draco hunched over to meet her eyes often. He gets her engaged and grinning in
understanding with a story about staccato, about the plinks of raindrops hitting the window
one by one. Countable. Short and plucky.

“Omar. You’ve never met him. He’s nice enough, very serious about his practice,” preludes a
young man, probably nineteen, who plays something so flawless that Harry finds himself
worrying for Draco’s position in the industry. Draco stands and listens from the window by
the bookcases, a hand to his lips, unperturbed by his creation of his own competition.

“Well done, dynamic contrasts,” he states when Omar’s finished. “Careful with the pedal,
though, you’re verging towards foot taps again. Try to keep the pedalling gentle. Subtle,
Omar, subtle.”

Omar looks expectantly corrected like they’ve had this discussion before. Harry goes fully
back to reading when they begin discussing composing. Something about contour and finding
the apex in his phrases. Throwing out names of composers he’s never heard of, words in
Italian. At that point, his time is better spent on Recollections of Forgetting: Case Studies in
Obliviation.

When a young man named Nico comes in early that afternoon, dressed like he’d prepared for
a recital and then carefully dishevelled it for fashion’s sake, and plays just as well as Omar,
Harry’s no spring chicken—he’s prepared for Draco’s evaluation, but not its delivery.

“That was a stunning display of tempos.” Draco lifts an eyebrow, tilting his head at the
pianist from his same spot by the window. “It would behove you to pick just one, though.”

Harry looks up from his book quickly. Nico laughs. “Sod off, sir. Kindly.”
“I can just see it, though, Nico,” Draco says, shaking his fists with his palms turned in, and
Harry wants to check the floor, to see where he accidentally dropped that stiff
professionalism. “That natural talent and a serious drive to do something with it, sat tirelessly
at that blasted cooking pan of a piano every night, thinking ‘do I really need to find the
bloody metronome?’”

“I hate the clicking, it’s distracting!”

“Distracting? You should be able to play on the sinking Titanic! You should have it engrained
so completely—tempo, dynamics, articulations—that I could Obliviate you and you’d be able
to play it tomorrow!”

Harry’s mouth twitches, but he keeps his head down.

“I’m insistent because you told me you wished to do this professionally, and I can see you
succeeding at that. But bloody hell, Nico, it’s been a year since you mentioned a new piano.
Do you at least own a metronome? Tell me you own a metronome or lie to my face.”

Nico half-smiles. “I’ve got a metronome.” He looks down at his hands. “Piano’s a rougher
deal. Mum’s having kittens over work, they’re not giving her many shifts, so… no time soon.
But I’ll start using the metronome again, I swear.”

“Do you need me to tell you to floss, too? Any other basics of life?” Draco says teasingly, but
he’s walking to his sets of books and tools and grabbing a pencil. He hands it and the
notebook he’s been carrying to Nico. “Your address, if you’d be so kind. A stand piano?”

Nico takes the pencil excruciatingly slow. “It’s a small flat.”

“Stand piano, then. They’ll take the old one out, don’t worry.” Draco takes the paper back,
stowing it in his pocket.

“Thank—”

“I’m doing myself a favour.” Draco waves him off, reaching for his own metronome, some
expectedly antique-looking model. He sets it in front of Nico and starts it. “It’s painful to
watch you piss away talent. Go on, the second movement again.”

They exchange a few more insults each way at the end, Draco sending him off with a
delivery date for the piano sandwiched between some thinly-veiled threats in regards to the
revising he’s assigned, and a rude hand gesture lasts just a little longer in the floo than the
rest of Nico’s disappearing body. Draco smiles, shaking his head, then lets it slip a little when
he meets Harry’s eyes.

“What?” he bites.

Harry raises his hands. “Nothing, just a complete one-eighty in your entire demeanour.”

Draco shrugs. “I’ve taught some of them for years. You get to know what they respond to. I
adapt.”
“You Slytherin, you.”

“It works. I like Nico.”

Harry still eyes him with fresh curiosity.

The final student is Jamie, a young boy whose father is the manager for Puddlemere United.
Harry’s jaw drops at the announcement. “You’re having me on,” he gasps. “That’s brilliant!”

Draco points a threatening finger. “I’m telling you because he hates talking about it. You’ve
met him a handful of times and purposefully never bring up Quidditch.”

Harry’s hardly talked all morning anyway, and he has no plan to now. Speaking only when
spoken to, in general, has been a good rule for those he doesn’t know who do know him. The
lesson is more like the first one with Mary, personality-wise. Harry abandons his book almost
completely, sitting with his head tilted, thinking distantly to Luna’s astrological inclination.
Draco’s Gemini. The twins. Harry thinks maybe quadruplets, more realistically. Sextuplets. A
baker’s dozen. There were always more sides to him.

By the time that lesson ends, he could murder a sandwich, but he sets the notion aside with
clear intent and waning nerves, walking to where Draco’s replacing music books on the
shelves.

“What did you think?” Draco asks without looking up.

“You’re a good teacher.”

He smiles down as he works, nodding. “Happy your opinion’s unchanged. That means it was
always genuine.”

“Yeah, look, I was thinking, everyone’s trying something new with me…” Harry says slowly,
stepping closer with his hands clasped in front of his chest.

“Oh, yes. Exciting. Blaise still hasn’t hinted at what you two are doing this Saturday?”

Oh god, that. He had, actually—one terrifyingly simple remark when he stopped by the shop
midweek to say hello.

“He said ‘It doesn’t matter what you wear because I’m bringing you something to change
into’. And then he asked for my sizing.”

Draco stills and looks up warily. “That could be a dozen things. I don’t envy you.”

“I’m embracing uncertainty,” Harry delivers through a gritted-teeth smile, an Anastasian

phrase, sounding plastically chipper.

“Easier said than done,” Draco mutters.

“I’m trying not to dwell. But that aside, I was wondering if you’d put any thought towards
something… we could do together for the first time?”
“Like?” The books of sheet music are completely reorganised, his notebook returned to its
shelf. What Draco’s doing now could only be considered avoidance-based fidgeting.

“Like… piano?”

His hand drops from the shelf. He faces Harry directly, finally submitting his full attention.

“Oh,” he says, sounding pointedly controlled. “I was curious whether you would ask. I’ve
taught you before.”

“You have?” Surprised, Harry lowers onto the piano bench, looking up faintly at Draco.

“Although, under these circumstances, can we still consider it new to you, I’d assume? That’s
what matters here, right?”

“Yeah, we—whatever we want to matter is what matters. You’re a great teacher, and I’ve
been thinking about what we’ve read on the importance of music for memory. And now
you’re saying you’ve taught me before—we just have to.”

Draco regards him for a moment so long that Harry’s sure he’s deciding how to let him down
easy, but then he reaches back onto the shelf for a thin booklet and swings onto the bench
with Harry before he’s had a chance to make room.

“You better be more patient than last time, though. You were a whinger. What do you know
already?” he asks to Harry’s bewildered face.

“What? Right now?”

“Or do you need me to schedule weeks in advance like Blaise? You’re right, this is a good
idea for your memory. We may as well get started.”

Harry’s intimidated by Draco’s quick uptake, but he takes a deep breath and shifts on the
bench to make more space. He points at the keys as he answers his question.

“The keys go through letters. A to… something. The black keys… are something different.”

“Sharps and flats, in between the A to G,” Draco nods, reaching a hand out and delicately
playing through an octave right in front of Harry. “Your north star is Middle C.” He pokes a
white key next to two black ones in the middle of the piano. “Which is how we get Middle C
position…”

Harry feels nimble on the Quidditch pitch, dexterous in the workshop, but in this moment
he’s a ruddy brute, watching Draco manhandle his fingers that hit like clubs on the keys the
other man dances around easily. He only learns a basic warm-up song, nothing that’s going to
give him a lightning-strike moment of recollection, but that had been an afterthought,
anyway. Something to say to keep his mouth moving after he’d expressed interest in spending
more time with Draco and his piano.

“You should do this for a living,” he says quietly, when he’s been playing scales following
Draco’s example over and over long enough for his mind to wander and consider how
aimlessly enjoyable this is. He’d forgotten entirely about lunch.

“Oh you’re a laugh,” Draco mutters coolly, motioning for him to keep his eyes focused on
what he’s doing. Now and then, he joins in, mirroring Harry’s motions much further down on
the piano, and it reminds him of when he and Hermione played, but they were talking to each
other, and this felt more like uncreative chanting.

“There’s a value to playing together, though. I’m not going to say this is just about memory
retrieval for me,” Draco admits.

Harry’s stomach twists a little. He’d thought the same, but decided to conceal it. Met by
Draco’s openness, he reconsiders.

“Me neither,” he corrects himself. His fingers hit the keys a little more confidently each time,
and he remembers what Draco said about good students, even Obliviated ones. Repetition.

He looks up again, defiant to explicit instruction, just in time to catch one of those other
looks in Draco’s eyes. He doesn’t pull away. He chooses stubbornness towards his
discomfort, forcing himself to feel its weight, to smile back with the same sympathy and
understanding he’d allowed a pissed-off Teddy or an emotional Pansy.

Draco’s eyes flick down to his smile and back up. Harry thinks he’s going to switch Dracos
and be disconcertingly warm, but he clicks his tongue like a schoolteacher.

“I just got on you about proper form.”

An impartial hand on Harry’s back forces him to sit straighter and he snaps his wrists
straight, too, before he can be chastised further. They play on.

*****

Draco is conveniently free of lessons or rehearsals at the time Blaise is set to come through
the floo Saturday to collect him for his mystery activity. Harry’s upstairs, trying to blindly
pick shoes that befit an unknown event and outfit.

“Harry!” comes a voice from floors below. Draco. Sounding young and lively. “You’re going
to want to see this!”

He shoves his feet into trainers quickly.

The first image he’s faced with is Draco’s expression of forehead-wrinkling amusement,
eyebrows high in anticipation. And then he comes across Blaise, beaming wide and standing
with his head held high in a pair of white breeches tucked into tall brown leather boots that
reach almost to the knee.

“What a fine day to ride a horse, Harry!” he booms, opening his arms wide and grandiose.

Harry stares back, willing himself to acclimate. “You’re taking the piss.”

“I am not!”
“No,” Harry shakes his head. “Nope.”

In response, Blaise widens everything; pulling his cheeks tauter, holding his hands out
further. He says nothing, and Draco says nothing, either. He’s just looking between them,
face softened to a lightly-tickled smile. Blaise will think he’s the reason Harry gives up on his
reservations without another word, but it’s him looking pleased with the casual exchange.
Like all is normal.

“I see why you kept it a surprise,” Harry sighs with acceptance. “Alright, then. Abduct me
into your life, Zabini.”

Blaise crosses the room happily and claps his shoulder. “Fantastic worldview! Draco, I will
return him by sundown.”

“Not his minder,” Draco mumbles, the moment over, already stalking back to the piano.

The location Blaise instructs Harry to recite in the floo takes him to a clubhouse covered in
stone and bright white walls. He’s tilting his head up still to take in the tall ceiling and
chandeliers when Blaise drags him out and onto the greenery of the club’s outdoor space.

“The clubhouse was for wizards, but this is a joint property, so wands away,” Blaise mutters
as they walk a path of trimmed rectangular hedges and white tenting towards a set of terra
cotta-shingled buildings. To their left, impossibly vast green fields for the centre of London,
currently unoccupied, though the club is busy—Harry and Blaise pass several visitors dressed
like Blaise but just as many in sundresses and nice weekend attire who seem happy to take up
waited-upon tables lining the fields or picnic blankets set off in the grounds. Harry’s
attention, though, is set towards the approaching stables, the horses and handlers and dogs
trotting casually around. Blaise wasn’t joking about the horses.

“We’re going riding?” he asks reluctantly, looking over at Blaise and picking up the pace.

“Not just riding,” Blaise says with a wink. “Horse hockey. Golf in an earthquake.”

“What?”

“Polo, mate, we’re playing polo.”

Circe’s sake. Harry’s never given much thought to the sport, but he tries to recall everything
he can. Horses, sticks, a ball. Contact sport on 70-stone beasts. “Er, isn’t polo fairly
dangerous?”

“Quite. It’s terrific,” Blaise grins.

And Harry thinks, sure, why not? Unknown individuals are stalking his non-husband, and the
continued effects of his own attack looming, the potential relation of the two and the
likelihood of further danger for one or both of them. It would be unseemly to falter at a bit of
casual equestrianism. It’ll be something to tell Draco about, anyway, and Anastasia. He’ll
learn something about himself one way or the other, even if that something is he’d prefer
getting on the back of a Horntail again before getting on a pony.
Blaise waves both arms over his head, which Harry reads as a universal symbol for the
distress he’s feeling, but in this case seems to be a greeting.

“Lads!” he calls, and a group of similarly-dressed individuals near the second stables turn
their heads as one. It’s a motley crew of five, the first of which to step closer and meet them
halfway is a woman about Harry’s height, stocky and mean-looking until she smiles and it’s
so bright and kind that it could sugarcoat just about any news.

“Blaise!” she says. “Harry made it!”

“I reserved him,” Blaise reminds her like that’s commonplace. He sweeps an open hand
between them. “Harry, Marise. Marise, Harry.”

Harry takes her extended hand amicably, though he sneaks another sidelong glance at Blaise,
surprised by all the company.

“Come meet everyone, Harry!”

Marise grabs his wrist and pulls him away from Blaise towards the group. Approaching their
pristine uniforms in his trainers and blue denim feels ostracising, like they’ll assume he’s
there to muck the stables, but he lets himself be carted over.

He meets Tola, a petite Polish woman with thick, blunt bangs and a high pony. And Graeme,
who reminds Harry of Draco a little—angular and poised—but with short almost-buzzed hair
and piercing amber eyes. He smiles in greeting, grasping Harry’s hand firmly.

Klara is the only one to forgo a handshake for a hug, waving his extended hand away to
squeeze him tightly and offer warm welcoming words. He laughs weakly with everyone
when she whips him in the face with her long braid while turning quickly to retaliate when
Chris teases her about the embrace.

Chris. He gives Harry pause. He’s stocky, muscular, with a stony expression. He doesn’t
come forward to say hello but gives a short raised hand from the back of the group. He’s
dating Graeme, Harry learns from Blaise soon after, but he’s mostly stand-offish out of
dedication to the game and an assumption that Harry’s inexperienced presence is going to
ruin a day on the field.

The introductions are enough to distract him from the actual gameplay for a minute, but he’s
sorely aware of the impending activities at Blaise begins to explain the equipment and rules
through the wood slats of a cramped barn toilet while he changes.

“Merlin’s pants, Harry,” he grins when Harry emerges feeling itchy and compressed. “I
should’ve brought a camera, Draco would die. Give us a twirl.”

Harry adjusts the tall boots, shoving the legs of his breeches further down. “Shut up, Zabini.”

“Wouldn’t if I could.”

“Can you keep your eyes on my face and get back to explaining why I need horses plural for
—”
“So! This is the fabled man my parents measured me against when I dared stoop as low as an
Exceeds Expectations.” A third voice breaks into the light repartee, drawing their attention,
and while Harry meets the new face warily, Blaise lightens immediately.

“Dev! He’s here, I told you he’d come!”

He shoves the equipment from his hands into Harry’s and strides to meet the man halfway
from the interior of the stable, leaving Harry standing awkwardly with a length of horse-
related strappings in his hands.

Dev is about Blaise’s height, Indian, and completely unreadable, but his presence rounding
out the group confirms what Harry’s always believed; Blaise only keeps pretty friends.

Harry smiles apprehensively when they look back his way. “If it makes you feel any better, I
wasn’t a great student.”

The expression he receives is straight-faced and it knocks the smile from his face. Dev’s not a
joker, either, it seems. He and Chris must get along.

“Thirteen years too late,” he mutters, turning back to Blaise.

Harry learns a bit more about Dev as they prepare to play; he’s got a booming laugh, the one
time Harry hears it brought out by Tola, and intense eye contact. “Scary on a horse,” Blaise
tells him quietly while he’s helping him prepare his first mount, a warm brown horse called
Talulah that won’t stop snorting.

“I better hope he’s on my team, then.” Harry tightens and loosens the straps on his bowling
ball-looking helmet Blaise had handed him. They’re pushing his glasses up off the bridge of
his nose.

“He’s the other team captain.”

Blaise finishes tightening the leather around Talulah’s muscular chest. Harry stares into its—
her—eyes, trying to come to grips with mounting her. This news about Dev would be less
intimidating if Blaise hadn’t just spent his time attached the bridle to describe the captain’s
position on the field with words like ‘aggressive’ and ‘relentless’.

Blaise leads him to the others and their horses, then walks off with Dev to find the referee.
Their jabbering chat dies as he approaches. He stands with a tight grip on Talulah’s lead,
trying to think of anything to say while overshadowed by all of them looking down from their
saddles expectantly.

“You’re all lawyers, then?” he settles on.

Marise laughs, that lovely smile that breaks up a face twice as scary when she’s on her horse
with her polo mallet in hand. “Not on my life!”

“Oh. So, where do you all know Blaise from?”

“Film set, a few years ago.”

Harry blinks once or twice. “Filming what?”

“Harry! Planning to spend the whole match leading your horse by the reins?” Blaise says,
briskly shaking Dev’s hand before they split for their horses. There are three men following
them dressed in vertical stripes, two of which are leading horses of their own.

Talulah snorts loudly and stomps a hoof. Harry stares her down, swallows, and, reckoning
he’s only putting off the inevitable, takes a deep breath as he grasps the saddle tight and
swings a leg, pulling with his arm as he jumps up. It’s sloppy, but not irrevocably
humiliating. Talulah, to her credit, seems to care as much as she would if he was a fly that’d
landed on her head.

He’s quite aware that this hesitation is ridiculous—she’s not even called a horse, she’s a pony,
and Harry’s taken a class about caring for magical creatures, faced far worse, but there’s
something more intimidating about this creature, so unlike anything he’s ridden. He thinks
wistfully of Buckbeak. If he and the horse could bow in a show of mutual respect, he might
feel better, but as it is he leans forward and pats the side of her neck gently as if she’s a live
grenade.

Following the example of his teammates, Harry taps lightly with his heels on her sides, and
she trots alongside the others as they take to the manicured lawn. It’s far from the first fields
they’d seen, past the potential spectators. The sky is overcast, but Harry knows better than to
hope for rain.

On the back of his jersey is a large four, marking him as the ‘brick wall’ of the team
according to Blaise, which means he mostly gets to hang back as the last line of defence in
front of the goal. Dev and Klara and Chris will see him as an easy last defence, surely, but it’s
a better position for him than the critically adept and speedy roles of the frontrunner and
midfielder. Blaise tells him a lot more than this—about goals and right of way and riding off
a player and penalties—but when the umpire throws the ball in, it all devolves to hit the ball
with the stick, don’t fall off Talulah.

He’s easily impressed by the height and distance the others get on the ball. The field is
hundreds of yards long and the second the match kicks off, their hooves carve divets into the
grass, turning on a sickle, flank to flank, speeding with their mallets raised, like swords held
high by charging knights, until they’re swung down with precision and power that catapult
the ball in a perfect impression of the more magical, flying balls Harry’s familiar with.

He gallops close but not too close, watching keenly with a rushing in his ears he’s not
experienced since his first Quidditch game. When Tola sends the ball soaring and Harry sees
Chris galloping towards him at a speed that should only be suitable for emergencies, Blaise’s
voice breaks through the pounding loudest of all and snaps him to attention.

“Harry! GO! MOVE!”

He waves his stick high and Harry’s head wobbles up and down as he pulls on the reins in an
impression of someone who knows what they’re doing, urging his horse towards their goal,
coming up fast alongside Chris. It’s hard, so jostled by the galloping beast under him, to
imagine even getting close to hitting the ball. With the mallet gripped firmly, he leans down
and swings hopelessly, then laughs in surprise when he makes contact and knocks it back in
the opposite direction.

Chris growls, his horse changing direction much faster than Harry and Talulah, but Harry
feels the force of the fight now and the lingering, encouraging feeling of his stick hitting the
ball. He leads Talulah back towards Blaise with another sweeping swing at the ball, but
something snags his stick, stopping his swing and almost tearing it from his hand.

Dev turns his horse like it’s weightless, racing back towards their goal with the stolen ball
and no one in his way, and Harry watches with a wince as he directs it straight through the
goalposts.

As he offers trots back towards his team, he makes sure to give Harry a taunting sneer.

“Not for lack of trying, mate!” says Blaise though, sidling up and looking genuinely
impressed. Harry reaches out to take his extended hand in an unfit celebration for giving up a
goal and almost falls off his horse.

The chukkas—quarters of the match—are short, only seven minutes, and Harry’s barely
gained confidence on Talulah before they’re exchanging their horses for a completely new
set, and he mounts a pony called Ruby tentatively.

The rush of participation from the first chukka fuels him in the second, the feeling of
competition running through his veins no matter the sport, and he knocks the ball hard once
this time, high enough to send Blaise and Marise kicking at their horses’ flanks to speed after
it. Tola’s waiting for them, though, and Harry’s vision of being partially responsible for
scoring is dashed. Blaise says something to Marise that sends her laughing brightly anyway
as they run up the field. Harry’s handicap really does seem to be of minimal concern for all
but Chris and Dev, so he lightens the pressure on himself, too.

Despite the friendly support and a growing understanding for the game, his successful
participation is lucky at best. He’d like to blame it on his rental horses, but that would be
insufficient. The rest of Blaise’s mates have their own horses, too, but they also have
immense skill.

Harry, meanwhile, almost nosedives off a chestnut horse called McGoo in the third chukka, a
close enough call that Graeme stops to offer him kindly—perhaps pitying—words of
encouragement despite the evil eye it earns him from Chris.

In the fourth and final, Dev flanks him aggressively, running him off the one time he
manages to move with the ball, and Harry glares back when he smirks. He’d be just as cross
if someone took it easy on him just because he was new to the sport, but he’d been so elated
to be in the gameplay again. Still, he manages to stop Dev from scoring twice, Klara once
too. The opposing team wins, expectedly and by a longshot, but no one seems to care once
they’re off the field.

“Well done,” Dev says, catching up with him outside of the stables. Harry had taken the
helmet off at his first opportunity and is scratching his fingers through his hair in an effort to
reverse the superb flattening job it had done. “Chris is less pissed off than he expected to be
by your participation.”

“Thanks, I guess?”

Blaise is too busy talking to Marise and Graeme to notice him, Harry discovers when he
immediately begins looking around for him. He finds a clean spot on his jersey to wipe his
glasses.

“What is this, then?” Dev presses. “A quarter-life crisis?”

“Just trying new things.”

“And?”

“Sticking with brooms,” Harry mumbles.

Dev chuckles. When he shields his eyes and waves to Chris, Harry watches him closely, for a
moment imagining a world where other mums lecture their sons to be like him. He might
hold a grudge, too, if the roles were reversed. Thankfully, they don’t have to spend long
standing awkwardly together before Blaise reappears, slinging an arm over Harry’s shoulder.

“What do you say, Potter? Strip the britches and grab a pint?” He catches Harry surveying the
group around them, Dev now walking away to meet with Chris and Graeme. “Can you stand
them a bit longer?”

“Yeah, they’re brilliant.” Mostly. “I’m just handling the shock that you’re a part of my group
of friends, but you’ve a side group all along,” he jokes, walking back with awkward joint
steps to the stable. “I feel like I just found out my dad has a second family.”

Blaise guffaws and the arm around Harry’s shoulders tightens. “But I always come home to
my firstborns.”

Harry’s less surprised that he has other friends—they all do, in some capacity—and more that
he’s been invited to join from one to the other. Blaise lives many lives, and he can tell that he
doesn’t keep them purposefully separate, and not as a mark of secrecy. It’s a show of
consideration. All of his mates feel equally important and prominent in his life when he’s
with them.

Maybe that’s what he’ll take with him long after he’s washed off the stink of the stables
tonight. Not knowledge about how this version of himself enjoys a new hobby (he doesn’t),
but knowledge that he can still make new friends and new rivals without losing the old. He
needn’t return to this singular Harry he’s searching for, when there can be so many.

January 2002

“You enjoy alchemy. Can you turn something into gold for me?”
Harry asked the question casually while mixing up pancake batter on a Saturday morning,
and it lifted Draco’s head from the Prophet in its flattering overestimation of his skill.

“That’s quite literally the magnum opus of alchemy and you think… what, I can whip it up
for you?”

Harry glanced back and pouted. “Just a question.”

“Sorry, Scarface.”

“Flamel whipped up the stone.”

Draco slapped the paper down. “Whipped up the—” he started, before catching the self-
satisfaction on Harry’s face, the warmly curled lip and the glint in his eye. “Oh. You’re
winding me up. Well done. What do you need gold for? And why can’t you acquire some
without employing modern miracles?”

Harry pointedly hid his face, the air filling with the sound of the first sizzling pancake. “This
bloke I know gave a speech about self-actualisation once. I listened. Applying myself to
personal interests. Just thought your gold would make it more special.”

“A sentimentalist,” Draco observed.

The quick scrape of the first pancake leaving the pan for the plate.

“Me?” said Harry.

The click of his tongue in eternal disappointment at the first made.

“Never,” said Harry.

The hiss of the second heating.

“Sirius Black’s bedroom sits gathering dust on the fourth floor because I’m lazy.”

Draco chuckled. Harry lazy was an amusing thought. Sometimes he entertained the image of
them spending a lifetime together, which was easy because he was so sure they’d both be
dead by thirty of exhaustion and an inability to take a holiday.

Anyway, he’d never gone that high in the house, but he’d gathered that the top floor held the
youngest Blacks’ bedrooms when they’d done some repainting before the holidays and Harry
had adamantly carved a line where refurbishments were to end. Maybe he’d see it someday,
or maybe he never would. Mentioning Sirius would mean mentioning the war, his aunt, his
father’s imprisonment. It was strange, he thought sometimes, that he and Harry had likely felt
as though their lives were falling apart the same night at fifteen. But they would never talk
about—Harry seemed to pointedly avoid the topic of the war altogether.

He never found out what he was making, even after he’d acquired boring old non-sentimental
gold and a set of tools that he ushered away to the workshop. Draco didn’t bother him about
it. He was happy to see him so invested in something he wouldn’t sell, and he imagined he
had all the time in the world to discover once Harry was ready to show him.

Harry’s made Draco a lot of breakfast since November because Draco’s woken up there
often. In group settings not much had changed, but they both preferred it that way. They sat a
little closer, maybe. Were teased a little more. Their words to each other were dissected
playfully by the others. But Draco stopped leaving and returning with everyone else,
pretending he hadn’t already been there, a better host than Harry anyhow. The piano
remained tuned. The honeymoon phase didn’t seem to have an expiration date, so much so
that Draco began to wonder if they’d had one at all, or if this was just the beauty of life.

Though if this was just life, it threw left hooks unexpectedly. Tooth-breaking, skin-purpling
ones. The first time he laid fully unclothed before Harry, he was everything he hated most in
himself. Too rough, too anxious, hardly himself—or at least hardly the self he’d come to
distinguish as specific to being alone with Harry. It affected him more than it affected Harry,
who could harbour anger until death but was forgiving to a fault with those he loved, while
Draco knew how to hold grudges against himself best of all.

It started at the tail-end of a lazy weekend. He’d overstayed his usual unspoken quota for
sleeping over, but he couldn’t drag his feet out the door on Friday with the others and Harry
didn’t argue. They spent the weekend in bed, watching movies half-dressed under the covers.
Long after, he’d still first remember the heavy press of Harry’s head on his chest, his arms
securely around Harry’s shoulders, and the instantly sobering wonder for when he’d blinked
and entered a life overflowing with moments of pure happiness.

But then the credits began to scroll up the small screen, which he knew meant it was over and
the movie would spit out of the supplementary box under the telly, and Harry shifted to look
at him. It wasn’t the wide-eyed, high-eyebrowed ‘What are we watching next?’ but instead
darkly intense green and a sly, creeping smile on his lips. Draco knew what that look
destined.

“I want to see all of you,” he’d said, and Draco swallowed.

“Here I am,” he said.

“You know what I mean.”

Harry coaxed him out of his clothes with compliments and goading insults, a tenuous
arrangement choreographed with a precision that proved how well he’d figured him out, so
that by the time Draco could take in Harry in his entirety, he’d completely forgotten his own
nudity. How could one worry about scars and ghostly skin, pockets of fat or bone, when
Harry was before him so willingly bare, too? He regarded Draco with an expression of
adoration that he himself seemed more deserved of receiving than giving.

He laughed lightly, no doubt at the astonishment on Draco’s face to receive such admiration,
which snapped it instantly from blatant staring to an insincere glower. It was nerves. Harry
felt like home but he couldn’t ignore the newness of the moment, like under that piano,
recognising in a moment that felt frozen in time that things would never be the same. But he
didn’t want the same, did he? He wanted new, with Harry. More, with Harry.
So they fell together while the alarm bells were still ringing in Draco’s head, trying to ignore
how much skin was left unimpeded to touch. It had been so long since he’d been so
vulnerable. Harry was lovely, warm to the touch, thoughtful with his action. Perhaps Draco
switched into some sort of autopilot mode then, desperate to draw on experience to please
Harry—ridiculous, in retrospect, because those experiences had hardly pleased him.

Harry made happy noises in his ear, soft exhales, and he didn’t notice when it turned to a
wince. He didn’t hear the abrupt change of sounds in a man he swore he knew inside and out.
He said his name once, then a second time; “Stop, Draco,” then “Draco. Stop.” Annunciated
with a clarity that worked like a slap in the face after slurred bedroom talk. If the first call of
his name was gentle, the second was immensely frustrated.

He’d put distance between them instantly, sitting back, eyes saucers, heart hammering in
arousal quickly replaced with heart hammering in anxiety and heart hammering in is he
okay?

In the beats it took Harry to sit up too, Draco swerved too easily back into the method of
thinking the man across from him had staved off for long enough. Draco the selfish. Draco
the harbinger of pain. Draco the ruthless, the uncaring. Once a Death Eater always a De—

“Draco? You look peaky. Hey, I’m fine.” Harry’s thumb and forefinger found his chin and
drew it up to meet his eyes, which had been terrible because Draco knew there was pain in
his and Harry always found it. “I just don’t enjoy it like… that. I needed a second. Er, I—we
don’t have to stop…”

Draco had shaken his head slowly, so far beyond the immediate conflict Harry was trying to
solve. He was a summer rainstorm, feeding on the wet heat, finding himself a tempest. And
his grip on Harry’s leg was a throbbing one; tight in concern and then gentle in fear that he’d
held too strong, then repeated.

“That’s not who I am, Harry,” he whispered. “I’m so sorry.” It felt imperative that he knew
this wasn’t some slip into id, not some latent roughhousing desire he kept buried. It was a
complete failure of ego, sending him careening towards unconscious defence mechanisms
and sparse experience. “That was not who I am. I promise you. I listen, I’m attentive, I…”

Harry kissed his cheek, barely puckering, a pressed square of contact that slowed his words
to a halt. “I know. You didn’t hear me. We should’ve talked about what we like more.”

“No.” He shook his head. “Yes, we should, I mean. But that was not what I like either.” Not
close. Not at all. That’s what had propelled this minor miscommunication into something
insurmountable—that he’d projected onto Harry the same sort of instance that had brought
him discomfort.

Harry looked confused and worried. Draco felt absurd, now, in his nudity. Sitting naked and
soft and close to tears. The man Harry had grown close to was hardened and standoffish.
When had he been turned into this? Was Harry responsible? Or was this who he was slated to
be if someone happened to come along and celebrate his moments of expressiveness rather
than tease him for them?
Either way, it was quickly growing out of control. He could tell in his hands, losing feeling
quickly, fear sinking in—of himself, for them—and his legs tingled when he shifted from
sitting back on his heels to join Harry at the top of the bed. He slid his feet under the sheet
and sunk down, the linens an armour, a second skin covering his too-bare self.

With willfully steady hands, he pressed his thumbs to Harry’s cheeks, pulled lightly towards
his ears. Like a light touch could cancel out the other. There was a flush still on the apples,
his lips pink and wet from better times only minutes ago. His eyes drilled into Draco’s face, a
look of intense detective work, trying to figure him out. Draco gave him something to work
with.

“What I like is whatever makes you feel… loved. And-and happy. That’s what I like. This I
hated.” He pulled Harry closer.

“I know you,” Harry repeated softly. “It was a mistake, why is this killing you? Are you
alright?”

No, he wasn’t alright. He was all-too-aware of his body. No more numbness in his hands, just
a raking oversensitive awareness everywhere the sheet touched. “I just feel like an arsehole.
I’m so sorry, Harry.”

Harry sighed, like he couldn’t combat such decisive self-hatred verbally. “Don’t you go
anywhere,” he whispered in his ear instead, kissing the outer cartilage, and then he left for the
toilet. Draco had turned on his side by the time he returned, sheets pulled to his shoulder, and
Harry folded in behind him. “Relax, let’s just sleep,” he’d said.

But it all felt so fucked. Selfish, to have ended with Harry comforting him, even if he did
seem fine. And on the inside of his eyelids were grainy images like the movies they’d been
watching happily today, but of Harry under him, of Draco doing things he did not want and
taking a breath too long to react appropriately. Even with Harry pressed against his back, an
arm over his waist, he couldn’t let himself go.

He overcompensated so well a week later that Harry had to whisper “I’m not made of glass,
am I?” as he covered Draco’s hand with his own, guiding it to his skin from where it had
been practically hovering carefully over his inner thigh. Draco followed his lead, he adjusted,
but he wasn’t sure which of them he’d been worried would break in the first place. The deed
was done with him; he just didn’t want to break more. They were kintsugi, Harry the artist
maybe, Draco the shards of ceramic, the way they touched so tenderly from then on the
shining mending of gold.

There were many more shared nights, however, before Draco finally wielded that openness
for his wellbeing and mentioned how he’d let other men talk to him. He was surprised by his
willingness to share with Harry. Distantly, he thought maybe Harry had never asked about his
romantic history for this reason—he was waiting for Draco to come to the decision himself.
He did so now, as casually as possible, lying in bed facing the wall with Harry’s breath on his
neck, aiming to cause the least disturbance in post-coital contentedness possible.

“No one’s communicated with me during sex,” he said, a purposeful lightness in his voice,
like he’d just come to the realisation. Like he was saying, oh, I remembered to ask Hermione
about that book she was reading… “It’s never been a discursive event. Words were… a lot
harsher.”

He felt Harry shift in the bed to sit up. Unsurprisingly engaged. Draco closed his eyes.

“Harsher? What,” Harry said, “like talking dirty?”

“Sure,” he said.

“Like calling you a-a… slag or something?”

Draco exhaled through his nose, light amusement. He could stop then, because clearly Harry
would never be following in their footsteps. That was fine. A relief. He could say yes, just
like that—a slag, and move on. But nothing with Harry had been about doing what he’d
usually do. He smiled, eyes still shut, his back still turned.

“No, not like that.”

Harry grew quiet. He wouldn’t press, Draco could tell. It made him want to tell him even
more. So he told the truth; following Blaise into the din of clubs, with hesitancy and then
later as an outlet. How the first time he slept with someone after the war, in the black of the
man’s cramped flat, he’d growled in Draco’s ear, “I’m going to fuck you like I hate you,” and
he’d only thought, how fitting, how unremarkable—I hate me too. That was a tamer night.

It was more than dirty talk; it was fulfilled promises. The harshness of actions and words, and
it was nice, in the ways Harry had deftly discovered a while ago—self-hatred, self-
punishment. He was taking care of what the Wizengamot hadn’t.

Harry asked for examples in a thin whisper like Draco had never heard, still from somewhere
behind him, not willing him to turn from the wall or reaching out to touch him. He provided
stories, though there weren’t many, and when Harry sat stunned silent he tumbled into it with
allowances, reassurances. “He tried to make me breakfast in the morning,” or “we met up
once more,” or “he would’ve stopped if I told him to.”

When he stopped speaking a gentle hand on his shoulder urged him to lay flat. He let himself
be handled like a corpse, eyes still pressed shut, lips thin and tight. Beneath him, the mattress
sank, while above him a warm, familiar weight pressed on top of him, and he took a deep
breath, pleasantly overwhelmed by the presence of Harry. His legs slotted between Draco’s,
his hands snaked under his back with a little shifting, his face pressed close. Cheek to cheek,
mouth to ear.

It was like a fog had rolled in, swallowing him whole and turning everything beyond arm’s
reach blurry, because everywhere he looked was the mist. Everywhere he looked was Harry.

“God, Draco,” he whispered against his ear. “There’s dirty talk and then there’s… I don’t
even know. Hatred? That didn’t bother you?”

Draco shrugged awkwardly under his weight. It only felt like reparations, really, to be spoken
to that way. Tinted bitter even now only because he’d let it affect Harry.
The first time they slept together after he’d told Harry the stories was so careful, like he
wanted to show him what he’d been showing him already—tenderness, caution, deep
affection. “I’m not made of glass,” he’d echoed weakly, laughing with a breath.

Harry’s face melted into amusement, his eyes glittering, like Draco had said the sky was
green. “Yes you are. You’re crystal clear to me.”

It should have made him squirm, but instead it made him feel seen. He was clear to Harry. So
clear that he was unsurprising in his anger, but equally unsurprising in his love or his sadness
or his ridiculousness. He’d seen it there all along.

Draco loved Harry’s perceptiveness. He could be abrasive if he let his temper rise, but it only
ever rose purposefully. Draco didn’t have to tell him not to bring it up again, but he couldn’t
stop him from bristling beside him one Friday night when, the three of them left alone in the
dining room, Blaise made a crack about Harry and Draco—how the antagonism of their
youth must translate to something verging on rough in the bedroom.

Draco glanced over, mid-laugh. Harry’s jaw was clenched and his eyes were focused hard on
Blaise, but he gave Draco a look of light offence when he clamped a hand on his knee to stop
him from speaking up. Have some faith, his eyes said. Draco scrunched his nose in response,
then turned to Blaise.

“Honestly, your crassness is getting out of hand,” he said. He sneered at Blaise and Blaise
sneered back.

“Wankstain.”

“Are the suits so your clients don’t know you’re so juvenile?”

“Is the cohabitating so people think you’re capable of a long-term relationship?”

Draco and Harry scoffed, Draco’s a bit more good-naturedly. Harry still seemed stiffly
defensive. “I’m refilling our drinks,” Blaise added, collecting the short glasses between his
fingers. “Tell your boyfriend we’re mates and he can drop his hackles before I get back.”

“Amusing! Harry doesn’t fight my battles, I can do that myself!” Draco called after him,
sting but no hostility in his voice. It was common room talk, and when he’d left them alone,
Draco turned his attention to Harry with a mask dropped. He smiled, a hand raising to push at
curls by Harry’s ear.

“This tension is sweet but unnecessary,” he said, with a different, softer drawl. “And yet how
flattering it is to witness. You should fight all my battles.”

He moved to press a kiss to Harry’s cheek but Harry turned his head to catch Draco’s lips
directly, instead. The kiss was slow. He felt Harry smile into it. “Both my Dracos,” he said
lightly.

Draco didn’t go home that night. Or he was already home, because the more he was drawn to
Harry’s bed like a Kappa to a marsh, the less reason he saw to be at his flat. He didn’t
technically move in—there was no invitation, no grand gesture, no presentation of a key.
Mostly, he brought more and more clothes over, and Harry wordlessly made more space, and
the locks began to let him in at will, and his favourite foods became staples in the fridge, and
by the summer of 2002, it was ‘Harry and Draco’s’.

So it felt like home—falling into Harry’s bed and hands at night, composing in Harry’s living
room, inviting his friends into Harry’s home—by the time he made a grave error.

Alchemy was going well. It was August, a wave of heat rolling through London, so all the
windows were open while he attempted an experiment he’d found in Latin in one of his older
texts. Saturday was spent preparing it, but today was to be a day of experimentation.

All week, Harry had been hardworking and quiet, which Draco attributed to the temperature.
They barely touched at night, spread almost naked on the mattress, and Draco had snapped
on Wednesday morning when he’d found himself covered by Harry’s already running-warm
arm and leg, an oppressively hot, clammy way to wake up. They were snippy, knackered,
busy.

He exhaled shortly under his breath at the cauldron in front of him, the unhurried suffusion
and the wood shavings that still floated to the surface. Alchemists had a lot of free time and
patience, he’d discovered through his oldest manuscripts. It reminded him of the old bread
and butter recipes and the women who spent fourteen-hour days resurrecting a sourdough.
Surely every early bread maker was married to an alchemist, bonded over sitting and staring.

He wiped his brow and stood from the stool. Harry was around somewhere, maybe with
Jules, who’d treated the week as a ‘what heat lamp?’ holiday, basking on surfaces patched in
light around Grimmauld Place with what Harry reported as “an ecstasy that laughs in the face
of our sweat.” There was only so long one could keep a cooling charm going, after all. And
much better uses for their magic. Draco’s, ironically, was focused on keeping a cauldron
warm in the spare room Harry had surprised him with as a laboratory for his birthday.

Downstairs was empty, when he began searching for the other man. The kitchen was empty,
too, but his eyes lingered on an opened letter on the table, sitting pretty like it was waiting to
be read by an interested party. He looked back to the stairs, then leaned over. The Ministry
letterhead caught him by surprise first, then the script, neat writing signed by the Minister
himself.

‘Harry’, he read. ‘Congratulations on the success of Collectors’ Quidditch. I and the Auror
Department have watched on enviously. If you see yourself leaving daily operations in
capable hands, it would be quite the benefit to all of wizarding London to have Harry Potter
in the Ministry again.’

There was more, waxing poetic about Harry’s skillset, politely implying its wastefulness at
Diagon, reminding him of his triumphs.

Lemonade.

Lemonade sounds nice, Draco thought, immediately regretting his snooping. His boyfriend’s
nosiness was contagious and unnecessary. Harry was going to tell him, because Harry always
told him, and now he’d have to pick an emotion to present as the ‘first’ time he’d heard the
news.

And what would Harry say? Was he excited? Was he going to go speak with the Ministry? Or
accept immediately? Draco, dating an Auror. His mum would go spare. Harry didn’t talk
about his time at the Ministry, but that didn’t mean he hated it. Just because Draco had found
a wandless career that didn’t leave his hands twitching to duel didn’t mean Harry felt the
same.

He was pouring two glasses of lemonade and popping ice cubes in when he heard the back
door slam. It startled him, and the subsequent sound of pounding feet made him abandon the
drinks, padding up the stairs quickly.

“Harry?” he called, ducking into the living room and seeing no one.

“Draco!” he heard from above, Harry performing his search and moving quickly down to
meet him in the entranceway.

At once, he knew something wasn’t right. Harry’s face was red, but that could’ve been the
heat. His eyes, though, looked agonised with worry, his mouth turned down waveringly, like
he was trying to remain straight-faced and starting to fail. He locked onto Draco’s face, and a
wave of affection rolled across Draco, that now-immediate eagerness to console him, to fix
that look. His shoulders sagged, his lips widening into a sympathetic half-smile, ready to
open his arms and—

“Did you touch the tree?” Harry growled, Harry growled, in his face. The sudden
venomousness of it caught him off guard. Left him standing and stammering.

“I-w-what? The—what?”

Knowing the look Harry exhibited was for him sent a new, deeper chill down his spine, a
shiver of nerves. It rapped on the door of some latent beast, who knew the expression well
and carried its competitor. Harry pushed past him, a hand running up through his hair—his
stressed tick, Draco knew—and Draco followed him back into the living room.

Harry stopped at the window and threw an arm behind him towards the back garden. “Did
you touch the wiggentree?!”

Oh, Merlin.

Oh, holy ancient philosophers. Oh, Flamel, who’d lived to see seven centuries and here
Draco was, about to die at twenty-two.

“Yes,” he said, more of a breath than a word.

“YES?”

“I-I took a branch—a small one, I—” Harry’s eyes widened, his mouth dropping open for a
retort, likely in response to the signifier ‘small’. “I thought it was fine. I harvest vegetables
and clip the herbs, so… and the bowtruckles didn’t even put up a fight.”
Harry screwed up his mouth. “Because they trusted you!” he said, walking forward and
jerking a finger into Draco’s chest. “They trusted you, they didn’t know not to. Of course
they’d let you near the tree! They didn’t know they couldn’t trust you.”

The words were uttered with all the wounded anger he’d expected directed his way back in
bed in November. Then, he can admit now, it was unwarranted. And it is oh so much worse
here, warranted, with months of lovely domestic living traversed since.

His heart was breaking, falling into pieces to clatter around somewhere in his torso, clanking
against his ribs, his intestines, his stomach. “It won’t happen again. I considered it part of the
garden, and you know it’s a rather powerful ingredient in lots of potions and spells and the
fact that we have one at all is impressive…”

Harry stepped even closer, intimately familiar with sharing Draco’s air, and laid his fists and
forearms on his chest in frustration. He reared them back, then hesitated and only tapped
them lightly back down with restraint, incapable of expending any real force against him,
stuck in some confused wish to reach out for touch and sympathy, but clearly desiring to
shake sense into him. His voice, which was a suppressed croak, sliced though like a sharp
knife.

“Just because something can be powerful doesn’t mean it needs to be used for some… some
greater fucking good,” he muttered through gritted teeth. “It can just be nice to have around
because it’s nice to have around.”

He pushed off Draco and hid his face towards the garden window, which was good because
Draco’s had morphed back into understanding, dreadful guilt, and a wandering eye towards
the kitchen stairs and the letter that sat undisturbed below.

As horrible as it sounded, he hadn’t even thought twice about the wiggentree when he’d
snapped a branch. It was a bit shocking that Harry had even noticed, truth be told, in the tall
tangle of wood. Draco rocked on his heels, watching Harry’s arm-crossed statuesque position
with his back turned. He wanted to believe it was a good sign that he hadn’t stormed out, but
a more cynical side of him considered the likelihood that he’d turned to collect himself and
perfect the wording when he’d tell Draco to collect his things.

He’d deserve it. And not because of some self-sabotage—he did that less and less by the day.
He’d deserve it because he’d never been convinced anyone deserved Harry. Why should he
be an exception to the rule?

It would be harder because he’d need to find a new place, and deal with Blaise’s unending
questions or stay at the manor in the meantime, which would mean questions from his mum,
who’d barely offered more than a curt “if you’re happy” when he’d told her to direct his mail
to the Black residence.

And he’d have to strategically see Blaise, Pansy, and Luna. Maybe Neville, too. He’d have to
say goodbye to Ron and Hermione, and just as he’d begun to consider them real mates. Ron
had just hinted that he’d sorted his next move in their chess game—an indefinitely long game
on a Muggle board. He’d predicted he would move his knight to block Draco’s path to his
remaining bishop, but now he’d never know. And he’d wanted to win their first game so
desperately, some meagre attempt to prove his niche in Ron’s life.

Harry’s face would be everywhere, as it always was. News of them had gotten out (‘Flirting
with the Enemy?’ a tabloid had posted a month ago above photos of them arm in arm in
Diagon) and news that they’d separated would, too. Friendship wouldn’t be an option; it
never had been. Harry was too cross with him, but wouldn’t it be worse if he wasn’t? If he
gave Draco the time of day and Draco wanted so much more still, and had to look at his
brilliant green eyes and his toothy grin, remember the ways he’d hurt him, and watch him
find someone else? No, he’d have to leave.

“Draco?”

He watched Harry turn back to him, head tilting, eyes red-rimmed, seeming distracted. But he
was distracted himself by a feeling he hadn’t felt fully in a long while, which started in his
fingers and shot upwards. It prickled. Ants running up his arms and leaving behind a
numbness. Then the faintness hit, and he mumbled something about the loo and disappeared
into the small toilet off the hallway to sit on the floor with his knees drawn up to his chest
and his arms locked straight out resting on his kneecaps. He shook his wrists, eyes shut.

Slowly, he collected his breath. Inhaling deeply never worked, it just became gasps that
replaced short, unsteady pulls of air. Instead, he counted to six, breathing in through his nose,
not even half filling his lungs, then exhaled for the same count. Again. Again. Again. Wrists
shaking, head back against the wall.

There was the sound of the catch in the door, the knob turning, and with his eyes still closed
he made no protest to the timid approach or the warm body that lowered beside to him.

In six. Out six. In six. Out six.

They sat shoulder to shoulder for another minute before Harry’s hand reached out and folded
his hair behind his ear with gentle, focused affection. It made Draco sigh in relief, though
Harry probably didn’t know how much he’d just communicated.

“Do you know the physical symptoms of an anxiety attack?” he asked softly, when he felt he
had his voice back, feeling Harry’s hand drop to his leg, his thumb sweeping.

“Tell me.”

“Difficulty breathing. Chest pain. For me, most of all, I go numb.”

“Like… you feel numb?” Harry’s voice sounded so different than it had before. It was
breathy and gentle.

“Like I go numb. In my hands and my arms. It’s my worst nightmare, not being able to feel
my hands.”

Harry hummed sympathetically. “But it’s temporary?”

Draco nodded.
“Is it going away right now?”

Draco nodded again. The hand that wasn’t on his thigh reached out to take his left hand and
squeeze.

“You feel this?”

He squeezed back in response, letting himself sag down and set his head on Harry’s shoulder.
It was awkward, with the way Harry was touching his leg and crossing his other arm to hold
his hand, but the contact helped.

“What made you anxious?” he asked.

“Losing you.”

His answer was immediate. Harry made that sympathetic noise again. “I may… have
overreacted.”

“No. You were rightly emotional.”

“Next time you start giving jazz hands and disappearing to the bathroom will you tell me?
And I can come with you?”

The insinuation that they’d be together for a next time settled like warmth in his chest. Draco
looked up and kissed Harry’s cheek, then kissed him tenderly when Harry turned his head to
meet his lips. It was too hot for all this contact. The bathroom was a stifling shoebox. Harry
pressed his forehead to Draco’s anyway, his hand tightening around Draco’s fingers.

“I am so sorry about the tree, Harry,” he whispered. “I feel terrible.”

“I know,” Harry whispered back. “I’m sorry, too.” He paused. “There’s a letter in the kitchen
you should read.”

“Okay.” He knocked his forehead lightly on Harry’s.

Harry extracted a hand and pressed it flat against Draco’s chest. If he was checking for a
slowed heartbeat, he’d find it. Draco had gotten a bit ahead of himself in the living room, but
he’d also witnessed firsthand just what the very idea of losing Harry did to him. Just about
anything could happen to him at that moment and he’d be happy just to have Harry still there.

“Fingers and ears,” Harry murmured distantly, pinching Draco’s earlobe and wiggling.

He swatted the hand away. “Head, shoulders, knees, and toes?”

“What really matters, I was just thinking,” Harry replied. “The wiggentree could get struck
by lightning tomorrow, but at least I’d have myself. I’d have you. I could still work on
brooms and listen to you play. Even if you’re panicking, you can look down and see your
hands, you can hopefully hear me next to you being a pain. I think you’re supposed to count
things, anyway, when you’re panicking.”
 Draco closed Harry’s attentive eyes by leaning in for another kiss. He couldn’t stop kissing
him. He felt like his life had just flashed before his eyes.

The honeymoon phase had ended, surely. Maybe it had long ago. But there was something
lovely about dealing with the hard things, too. About having a beautiful boy willing to sit and
count his breaths with him. The bowtruckles never trusted him again, but Harry did.

Chapter End Notes

Wow, I feel as though there's been so much love and interest in the last few days! We're
really in the thick of it now! Every chapter I edit, I come across some small passage I
really enjoyed bringing to life, and it's so rewarding to know others are enjoying as well.

Feel free to leave some words below in the comments, or find me at

writandromance.tumblr.com. Doing my best to reply as often as I can, but know I read
them all!
 Piano Man
Chapter Notes

The chapter title refers to Billy Joel's 'Piano Man', but if you're keen for an instrumental
version, Francesco Parrino's is well done.

See the end of the chapter for more notes

April 2013

In the early spring of 2013, something is born in the dark of night at Grimmauld Place. Harry
had started it, technically, with his first nightmare, but it’s Draco who gives it life, and the
both of them who feed it.

They’re more tied to home these days, the snapshots of Draco having sent Ron and their
closest Auror colleagues into a slight frenzy. It’s not isolation—they both take the floo often
to meet friends or go to work—but a locked front door does strange things to the feeling of
the house anyway.

In the yellowed light of day, they chat blithely. Draco tells more stories—they seem cathartic
to him—and Harry listens and asks surface-level questions. Harry fills him in on the polo
match, then learns that Draco sat next to Chris and Graeme at a Zabini-hosted dinner once.
They smile, shaking their heads at Graeme’s sunniness to Chris’ solemnity until Draco points
out that that’s how many saw the two of them. It pulls their mouths down, so Harry asks him
about Muggle music and they redirect the conversation with internal sighs at a close call.

Always, talking is a careful balance; as positive as possible for Draco, as detailed as possible
for Harry, never too invasive, yet inevitably drawing unexpected emotion from the storyteller.

Harry’s been asleep for at least an hour when he hears the knock on his door. He sits up,
blinking groggily in the dark, thinking it might have been a dream, but then again—knock
knock. His second thought is of emergency, so he stands faster than his eyes can open. In the
doorway stands Draco, waiting calmly a couple of paces back with his arms held behind him.
He looks surprised to see Harry as if he didn’t expect him to exist behind that door at night.

“Draco?” He rubs his fingers over his eyes, a bleary mess at the witching hour. “Is something
wrong?”

“I had a nightmare.”

Harry almost laughs aloud. It must have looked equally pitiful when he’d appeared at Draco’s
door and said the same. At least he’d been in pyjama bottoms and a t-shirt. Draco, with his
dressing robe tied shut, looks a bit like a wispy Victorian ghost.
He’s unsure just what Draco expects of him. Harry had only shown up at his door because
he’d expected some secret recipe for easy sleep. Draco offers a half-smile, seeing some of the
confusion on his face.

“I was hoping I could sit in the hallway and poke your vulnerabilities to distract from my bad
dreams,” he says.

Well, if that’s how Draco saw their previous midnight encounter, Harry thinks sorely, but he
reaches into the bedroom to turn on the light, then shuts it to a crack so a splinter of a warm
glow cuts through the hallway’s darkness. When he sinks to the hardwood, so does Draco, the
light cutting a line across his face, one that traces from a grey eye washed red with
sleeplessness to a turned-down corner of his mouth. When Harry tries to imagine what he
might have nightmares about, too many things come to mind, and that makes him sad. He
averts his gaze, resting his head against the wall.

After a pause, he clears his throat. “Do you want me to… ask about…”

“Did you ever consider me romantically in school?”

Draco’s question cuts quickly through his own. He blinks, snapping his head down from its
propped position. “Wouldn’t I have told you before if I did?”

“Maybe your answers will be different now. A new perspective, different motives.”

Harry hums but doesn’t object. “No, I hated you. Does that track?”

Draco’s laugh is biting and hard, but genuine. He leans his head forward into his hands. “Yes,
cheers.”

“You think Old H—I would have lied to you?”

“No,” he exhales. “Just checking.”

It feels like a minor success to have made Draco laugh, even if it was with the words ‘I hated
you’. But it fades fast, and with it Harry’s satisfaction.

“Ask me if I considered you attractive in school,” he prompts generously, because he’s sleepy
and the hallway seems like a different space at night, open to more candid conversation.

“Did you… find me attractive in school?”

“You were quite good-looking, I knew. When you didn’t have that pinched-in look about
you.”

He leans his head back again. Bed had been so nice. He’d had a long day at work. A woman
threw her purchase on the till and told him he didn’t understand Quidditch. He looks down
his nose. Draco’s got a bit of a flush to his cheeks.

When Harry knocks on Draco’s door four days later, he hears the shuffling and then silence,
then the door opens a crack.
“Nightmare?” Draco is breathy in sleep.

Harry crosses his ankles and bends his knees, lowering to sit with his legs crossed against the
hallway wall. “No.”

Draco blinks, the twitch of his mouth a fleeting hint that this has caught him by surprise, but
he takes it in stride. “No?” he says. “Okay.”

He sits across from Harry on the floor, reaching out to pull where the fabric of his pyjamas
bunches at the knee. They stare at each other, unsure what to say, but in some unspoken
forming habit, Harry knocking means Harry’s questioning.

“Erm, I was just thinking in bed. Wondering, I guess,” he starts, picking at a thread on his
shirt hem. “Because I can’t remember what it feels like to be in love.”

Draco tilts his head. Harry can’t read his expression. “Was there a question in there?”

Maybe there shouldn’t be. He’d been lying under the covers piecing Ron and Hermione’s
wedding back together through all these little moth-eaten holes where Draco had stood. It
was a labour of love, quite literally. He’d closed his eyes and thought of Anastasia’s guidance
for remembering—visualisation. So he’d visualised Hermione’s dress. It was white and long,
strapless, sweeping down the aisle, but when the dancing started it had pinned up perfectly in
the back. Still, there was a fuzziness when he looked past the newlyweds, like he was
searching for the chorus of a song he couldn’t even remember the melody to.

Except outside the memory, he knew the melody had an arresting face, bark and a bite,
stunning loyalty, award-winning moodiness. So then he was thinking of Draco and his face in
Pansy’s parlour in… 2000, maybe? So clear, because all he’d felt at the time was curiosity.
(He doesn’t venture into Draco-covered memories often. It feels too similar to that
adrenaline-inducing anxiety he felt staring back at Eugenia Ivanow sitting under Ministry
watch.)

“Well, you know,” he mumbles. “What it feels like, I mean. Could you tell me?”

Draco in the parlour had watched Pansy and Luna reenact their elopement with a smile that
looked bittersweet, a knowledge that no recreation would match the missed event with a
grace to pretend otherwise, and when his eyes had flicked from the newlyweds to Ron and
Hermione, his lips had pursed, his brows pulled in.

There was a man Harry had thought was too distanced from anything bordering emotional to
look envious of love, but he thought he’d wished for it then. And Harry had given it to him.
Which made his heart retreat again to adrenaline-inducing anxiety thinking about Ivanow, the
strange nerves while imagining what life would’ve been like if he’d never touched the letter.

The only person who could tell him what it had felt to have what he imagines was sleeping
downstairs, and now stares at him like each swallow is a pained process.

“I don’t think it’s particularly rare or beautiful, if that’s what you were hoping to hear,” Draco
says eventually, exceeding his expectations by responding at all. He fixes his gaze
somewhere past Harry’s right shoulder, boring into the wallpaper.

Maybe, Harry instantly thinks, it was a misstep to ask a mourning ex-husband what love felt
like. He’d let the amnesty of the midnight hallway cloud his judgment.

“Ordinary. Not important. Shouldn’t have asked,” he grumbles.

“That’s not what I said.” Draco looks right at him. “It’s common, but not in a bad way, right?
And it’s… horrifying, I think. There’s someone out there who knows every inch of you—
literally, figuratively. Decodes all your mannerisms, knows your secrets.” He’s rolling his feet
back and forth on his heels, fidgeting. “Worse than that… when you think of them dying, you
want to die. So you live feeling wholly exposed of your inner-workings, just hoping this-this
other creature walking around that once upon a time was a complete stranger doesn’t die
before the day is up, because it would kill you.”

‘What’s worse—losing you or death?’ echoes in Harry’s head unfounded. He can’t place it to
a voice, a memory. He suddenly has a need to swallow hard and sit up more alertly.

“Maybe that was morbid,” Draco murmurs. “It’s late.”

“No,” says Harry. “I understand.” He’s keeping his attention on Draco but his thoughts are
drifting to the found photos, Draco’s vulnerability in them, his fears of reckoning with just
how mortal his friends are, how mortal even Draco is, this man who often seemed
impenetrable. He knocks his socked foot on Draco’s leg. “Thank you.”

“Sure,” says Draco. Then they sit quietly for a while again, comforted by company alone, but
Draco’s head starts to nod and Harry feels guilty, so he gets to his feet and extends a hand to
pull the other man up too.

In the morning, the sun will peek through the front windows, dawn brightening murky,
moonlit corridors. Like every other morning, the dark hallway they’d spoken in will simply
cease to exist, and with it, their words spoken.

August 2002

Harry and Draco fell into habits just as easily as they’d fallen into living together. If one of
them was held up at work, they’d owl so dinner was sorted. In the kitchen, if Harry held up a
spoon, Draco knew to take a taste. And he always asked before he took anything from the
garden, even the smallest harvest of mint leaves. The home was never quiet, music playing
relentlessly, first exclusively by Draco’s doing, but more and more often at Harry’s hand
without prompting.

One thing that hadn’t been habitually fixed yet was Harry’s ability to startle him halfway
towards death when he came home while Draco was rehearsing. He’d managed it a few times
before. The piano sat so that his back was to the living room doors, and the more stressed he
was the more he disconnected from his environment.
The level of anxiety he’d reached two weeks after the wiggentree incident practically sent
him into tunnel vision, seeing no further than the piano keys. His time with the Children’s
Orchestra had gained him some new students, which snowballed into more solo pianist
opportunities. He’d felt he had no choice but to accept when an orchestra in Wales owled him
on a week’s notice asking him to perform Rachmaninoff’s third symphony the following
Saturday.

Draco had played the concerto once before, but he’d taken a month or two out to practice. A
week to refresh was obscene. He needed a career stable enough that he didn’t feel obligated
to accept jobs. He needed a time turner.

What he had was Pepper-Up potions and a lack of sleep, so Harry had startled him twice that
week. He’d taken to announcing his arrival if he heard the piano. Even a loud “HOME!”
from the front door was less of an intrusion for Draco than the cardiac arrest when Harry
snuck up to kiss him on the cheek.

By Friday, he had a good handle on the music, and discovered he wasn’t the only one in a
good mood when a warm, familiar voice called from the hallway, “Oi! You at the keys! Play
Piano Man!”

Draco smiled to himself and on impulse switched seamlessly from a perfected Rachmaninoff
into his best guess by ear for Billy Joel’s lilting opening melody, just for a laugh.

“He takes orders!” Harry announced with played-up shock from closer, just outside the door,
and though Draco missed a few notes, he didn’t care and Harry didn’t notice, too busy
rounding the corner wearing one of Draco’s favourite looks—utter excited surprise. Draco’s
hands lifted from the piano to Harry’s face, meeting his kiss in greeting. He smelled like
wood. There was stain under his fingernails.

“Full of surprises, Draco Malfoy,” he smiled against his lips. When he slid onto the bench,
his right hand was a magnet to Draco’s skin, fingertips tracing his cheek, trailing from his
right shoulder to the nape of his neck, then down soft and warm to hook around his waist as
he settled in beside him.

“Go,” he instructed lightly, so Draco turned back to the concerto, aware of Harry’s attention,
happy for it.

Sometimes Harry came back from work like that, knackered and missing him, and he’d sit on
the piano bench with an established point of physical contact and drink him in while he
practised. This was when Draco was most grateful to live in the same home.

He hated to go as much as Harry hated to see him go. But he’d be back by Tuesday, and by
then Teddy would be here for the week. He was growing into himself, finding a personality
and a sense of humour and soaking up everything about Harry to offer back up like a looking
glass. It was a delight to witness.

They slowed down their workloads while Teddy was there, too, the Achilles heel to a pair of
workaholics, so it was weeks after he’d gone back to Andromeda’s before “Oi! Piano Man!”
preluded Harry’s entrance again.
Draco smiled as he heard the door shut, and playfully offered up those opening measures
again. Hello to you, too.

This time Harry sat down quickly, still buzzing with the high energy that Draco attributed to a
day with more workshop time than customers. He slung an arm around Draco’s shoulder as
he leaned in to look at the sheet music. Draco resumed his playing, making it two minutes
uninterrupted besides the light, almost distantly unconscious back and forth of nails grazing
his shoulder.

“How do you know how long to play each note?” Harry asked into a pause. His voice was
close to his ear and it gave him the start of gooseflesh. They’d both been so busy, the bane of
growing careers. He felt the irresponsible desire to close the piano lid and pull Harry upstairs,
but instead he pointed to the first measure on the open page of sheet music.

“This one’s closed, it’s filled in, so I know it’s a quarter note. These are open and they don’t
have a stem, so they’re whole notes.”

He played the difference in duration. Harry nodded beside him. There was nothing else to
explain, not at whatever general curiosity level Harry was presenting, but he wasn’t going to
go back to playing, so he dropped his hands into his lap.

“I’d like to learn,” Harry said.

Draco could’ve cricked his neck, how fast he turned his head. “You?”

“Me.”

“Learn piano?”

“What’s your going rate?”

Draco gave him a cat’s grin, rare and thrilled. “Your attendance, tonight, upstairs in bed.”

“Blimey, I hope you only offer that option to me.”

“Just you.”

He met Harry’s eyes, which sparkled in excitement, and felt it spread through him. Harry had
always shown an interest in his interests. He’d listen to his final rehearsals before a show, or
even offer an ear if he knew he was writing, but this was different. Participatory. It made him
feel great things, appreciative things. He was unsure who would be owing who tonight.

April 2013

Nobody dares bring it up, but Ivanow never spoke. Tightlipped or truthfully unfamiliar with
the identities of her customers, her day in court came and went and nothing came of it for
them. Anastasia had been right. Her conviction didn’t leave him feeling any closer to justice
served. Life simply went on, unchanged other than how tired Ron tended to look that month.
Draco takes it strangely well. Still, he seems more worried that something with him at the
centre had led to disastrous effects on Harry’s life than he is for his own safety.

Everyone else has their opinions, too. Blaise theorises that Draco was collateral for some
sketchy deal Harry made, which mostly succeeds in making them laugh. Pansy and Hermione
agree with the hunch that they’re dealing with a more serious customer of Ivanow’s than
expected. Ron refuses to narrow down what he’s entertaining.

Harry sits interested. There’s so little accusation—has been so little accusation this whole
time. He knows his friends so well but still finds himself sitting back in silence like a
naturalist, watching them interact in new ways. Not an ounce of suspicion slinks towards
Draco, not even from Ron.

Harry, too, escapes suspicion, or some past version of him does. The only time Draco’s face
fully falls is when Ron asks again whether Harry had said anything out of the ordinary that
week.

“Not a thing,” he murmurs, fork drifting down at dinner, eyes glazing over. Harry and Ron
exchange a look. “Just the note. Nothing else.”

The note. We need to talk. Wake me when you get home.

And Draco’s not even convinced it was related to the case. It’s incredibly vague. Harry hates
the expression he gets when they skirt too close to the Erumpent in the room, that Harry had
been concealing something from him. It’s full of frustration and heartbreak with no outlet, so
it simmers just behind his eyes. In the instances where he catches sight of that turmoil, he’s
glad to no longer be the man they miss, to not be the one expected to apologise for his
actions.

Luna and Neville remain the most unsure of just what to make of it all, as perplexed as Harry
is by how it’s all unravelling. They’re also the two most removed and objectively observant
of Harry’s mood at most dinners. Ron and Hermione, brilliant as they are, watch him with an
edge of wishful thinking. They hope he’s okay, so when he’s on the precipice of fine or not
fine, they inevitably read the former.

Pansy ‘You reek of sadness’ Parkinson swings the other direction, assuming the worst of his
coping. Blaise is unreadable. But Luna and Neville ask him how he is with faces that make
him feel he can be frank, so it’s them he answers honestly by the fire after dinner.

“The longer this goes on, the more pressure I’m feeling to remember,” he says quietly. Ron
and Draco are playing a speed game of chess, the sound of the punching clock punctuating
his words from afar. Draco makes a good move. Harry speaks low over the sound of Rose’s
excited squealing. “I put it on myself, I know, with the whole platonic intimacy theory. But
now it’s a safety issue and I’ve got the only clue somewhere unreachable inside me.”

“There are other ways to keep you and Draco safe,” Luna says, grabbing his hand. “If they’ve
only got an Obliviated man in their arsenal, they’ve got larger problems.”
“Yeah,” he offers insubstantially, tracing a finger down the seam of the sofa pillow. The
punching clock speeds up.

“What are you doing Monday, Harry?” Neville adds.

“Just the shop. No broom pickups, no lessons.”

“Fancy a trip to Hogwarts? Sit in on my classes? Say hi to Teddy? I—”

“Checkmate!” Ron announces enthusiastically behind them. Harry turns in time to see Draco
scrunch his nose in disappointment and flick over his queen.

“I don’t know if you can bunk off like that,” Neville starts again, “but it sounds like it could
be a nice break.”

Harry waves his hand. “No worries there. I’m notoriously unreliable.”

“In shop hours,” Luna clarifies.

Draco cusses lightly and Hugo repeats it with gusto.

“Course.”

He agrees. It would be nice to see Teddy again and patch up whatever thorniness was
creeping in between him, Harry, and Draco. Plus, watching Herbology certainly had a
newness to it that he could appreciate.

“I hope you’re more confident in your teaching abilities than I am,” Draco says the following
afternoon when Harry tells him. He’s leaning out the living room window with his arms
crossed on the sill, the sleeves of his shirt rolled up to the elbow. “Watching Neville lecture is
properly humbling.”

There’s an ink spill of black on his forearm, which Harry can just barely make out. The skull
and something more.

“Maybe I’ll learn a thing or two from him, then,” says Harry.

“Speaking of learning a thing or two, I’ve just had a lesson cancelled.”

“And you want me to fill it?” he asks, wiping his arm on his forehead as he sits back on his
heels.

“You’ve been practising, haven’t you?”

Harry doesn’t bother pointing out that his opportunities are minimal when he lives with a
professional pianist, who, as Hermione pointed out to a hate-infused, befuddled version of
himself in January, ‘practically lives in that room’. He makes do in the time Draco spends in
the alchemy lab doing whatever he does, so he just gives a gloved thumbs-up.
In response, Draco fully grins. Harry’s only seen it… Harry’s never seen it, actually. He
smiles back, a bit nervously in its wake, and leans back on his hands. Something wet seeps
into his glove. He turns to find a knocked over watering can drowning his hand and the first
row of vegetation.

“Oh, shit, I—”

He scrambles away from the muddy river quickly, righting the watering can, though three
quarters of its contents was now watering the tomatoes, instead. Once he’d removed the wet
glove and wrung it out, Draco was gone from the window.

Harry’s a good piano student, if he may say so himself. He presents the skills from lesson one
well-practised, watching Draco’s face expectantly for approval. He gets a tight nod and a
“well done,” which from him seems celebratory.

It’s exasperating, though, to start something so unknown. He feels the drive for immediate
proficiency like polo, but he has even more desire to prove himself to Draco than Blaise.

“Could you play a bit worse while you’re teaching me?” he grumbles as Draco demonstrates
how to properly play a measure from a song in My First Piano Lessons, a thin book with
simple, large-print words and illustrated children dancing on musical notes on the cover.
Draco pulls his head back to judge Harry from a further distance.

“You’re frustratingly good,” he explains. “It’s—it makes me want to give up.”

“I’m sorry that I’m talented at the task I’m attempting to teach you,” Draco says airily. He’s
laughing at him, Harry thinks. “Most of my students aren’t disappointed that I’m… good.”

“Well, most of your students don’t have a history of tense competition with you.” He plinks
aimlessly at the key in front of him. “It doesn’t sound like you make it sound, even though
we’re playing the same thing. How do you make it sound—it’s so full of life.”

He glances over, then redirects his attention entirely to the man beside him. Draco looks
paler, if possible, like he’s seen a Dementor.

“Merlin, are you alright?” he asks, hand still tapping at the key. Draco slaps his hand on top,
stifling the sound with one final plunk of it and its neighbouring notes.

“Fine, just… déjà vu for a moment. What do you mean, full of life?”

Harry’s lack of piano vocabulary prowess is about to be on full display. He takes a deep
breath.

“Alright. You know, like… you’re playing piano. I’m playing piano. But you’re playing
piano.” He holds his hands palm up to emphasise like he’s holding something heavy. “It has
proper emotion. Like it would if you were singing. How do you do that? You can even hear it
on the recordings, that you exude—” Harry shuts his mouth quickly, lips pressed thin.

Draco’s eyes might widen for a flash, but he looks at Harry evenly. “When you care about
what you’re playing, it shows. You’re a conduit. You speak through the music… Or
something like that,” he finishes with a scowl and an immediate dismissal of the emotional
side of his statement.

Harry narrows his eyes. Draco looks like he wants to say something else but doesn’t, and
then, when Harry shifts a bit to get his foot back on the pedal better while maintaining
Draco’s strictly enforced posture rules, Draco’s hand snaps back from his, leaving it so
suddenly alone out in the air that he feels a curious sense of missing.

Twelve years without intimacy, he reminds himself. All touch leaves a pang of hunger.
Blaise’s friend Marise had hugged him at drinks after polo, and he’d reminisced over that for
days, too. He can still feel in his palm where Luna held his hand supportively on the couch
last night.

For a moment, they sit apart on the bench, Harry carefully still. Suddenly, this is just like polo
after all—moving with care not to spook the intimidating creature beside him. Then Draco
stands and mumbles something unintelligible about practising more and disappears. It’s one
of those reminders of which one of them is in love and often needs space, and which isn’t.

The sheet music stares blankly back at him and Harry, for the life of him, can’t figure out just
what bloody emotions Draco can find to evoke in Chopsticks.

*****

Monday is a rainy day, and Harry sits on a stool in the corner of one of the Herbology
greenhouses listening to the quiet chatter of fourth years and the patter of rain hitting the
panes of glass above them and imagines Draco at the piano across the Grimmauld Place
living room in sunny morning light, leaning down kindly and tapping his fingers in the air
with smiling eyes towards his young student.

Staccato.

Like raindrops hitting glass. Tap tap tap.

Which makes him imagine Draco in that living room looking at Harry that kindly, in
whatever versions of them existed on that record happy and oblivious to their expiration date,
playing something Harry had begged him to get on recording simply because he’d begged.

Draco Malfoy being a lovesick sod, compositionally.

It gripped him with a sort of feeling in his chest not dissimilar to distress—

“Doing alright, Harry?”

Neville’s back. He was circling the room, going table by table as the students harvested
shrivelfigs, methodically separating skin from meat, roots and leaves, just as he had
demonstrated in the front of the greenhouse a while earlier.

“Yeah, just fine.”

He pulls up a stool beside him, leaning his arms forward on the workbench just as Harry is.
“So how’s this compare to Blaise’s expedition?”

“Mm,” Harry tilts his head thoughtfully. “Manageable and educational. Can’t believe I’ve
never seen you in action.”

Neville ducks his head. “Hopefully not too tedious,” he says.

They’re speaking in hushed tones, maintaining professionalism. The first years came through
first, earlier today, now the fourth years, and later the fifth. Each class has started with
Neville pointing out that yes, Harry Potter is sitting stiffly in the corner of the greenhouse,
he’s just here to visit, don’t mind him. Then Harry would wave, say a few words, thank them
for letting him barge in, they were doing him a favour.

He’s a little concerned that he’ll be leaving with a reputation—that barmy old grouch their
parents fawn over sometimes, the alumnus walking around with a lizard on his shoulder.
Jules is in attendance at Teddy’s request, the guest of honour for that afternoon’s Magical
Creatures Club.

Neville’s selling himself short, Harry thinks, because his lessons are anything but tedious.
He’s brilliant with students, patient and clear in his instructions, chatting amicably and
earning genuine laughs. When the fifth years come in, two Gryffindors bound up to the table
as if Harry’s invisible.

“It worked, Professor Longbottom!” the smaller of the two says, beaming and practically
bouncing on her heels. “It’s taking root!”

“That’s brilliant, Meg.” Neville smiles up supportively and back down at the small clumps of
violet-coloured flowered plants he’s separating with gloves on. Toxic. “Take a quick step
back for me, though.”

They both listen obediently, still buzzing. The second girl finally notices Harry in the absence
of Neville’s eye contact.

He gives a small wave. “Er, what worked?”

“We were trying to propagate Professor Longbottom’s Mumbles Mimbletonia,” she replies,
peering down at Jules with interest. “It’s quite hard, given its defence properties.”

Harry nods, eyebrows raising. “I hope you propagated outside. Stink sap is a horror.”

Their faces look regretfully knowledgeable. Neville winces empathetically too, still listening,
still working with his gloves. He had triggered such ‘defence properties’ on the train once.
Before Harry can inquire further, though, past them he catches sight of three boys entering,
and there’s Teddy at the centre, grinning with a textbook tucked under his arm.

“Harry!” he calls, waving, and every eye in the classroom turns to find him at the front,
except for the two girls who look back towards Teddy instead. It’s a shock for Harry, who sits
up more. He’d been sure his godson would stand in the back of the room, pretend Harry
didn’t exist, and get quietly through his lesson without added attention. With a twinge of
guilt, he realises he’d perhaps underestimated how mutually excited they’d be to spend time
together without the dread of a bad announcement hanging over like before.

The girls find their friends just as Teddy drops his book on a table and walks up, hands
shoved in the pockets of his robes. His hair’s light brown, his favourite way to keep it,
informed by photos of his father.

“Make it fast, Ted, class is starting,” Neville says with the same warmth that’s left everything
he’s said to his students feeling unquestionably friendly.

“How’re you finding it?” Teddy asks, reaching out to pet Jules.

“Brilliant, Nev’s a great professor, you’re lucky to have him.”

“I know,” he says, catching the third man’s eye with a slight smile. “Are you helping or do
you just sit there and stare at us all class? My mate Angus had you with the fourth years and
he says a rumour’s already starting up that you’re here to survey all the professors before you
decide whether to join the staff.”

Harry snorts. “Feed that rumour or kill it, whichever you prefer.”

“Kill it,” says Teddy, likes it’s a ridiculous consideration. “I’m too friendly with the teachers
already, can’t have you even hypothetically adding to that reputation.”

Neville clears his throat lightly and they both glance his way. Behind Teddy, everyone is
seated.

“Better get going,” Harry nods towards the rest of the class. “Looking forward to later,
though.”

“We meet in the Transfiguration courtyard!”

He smiles once more, and walks back, pulling a chair at a table of Hufflepuffs in the middle
of the room.

Neville lifts his eyes, waits a few moments longer to let him get settled, then holds up the
plant. “Wolfsbane. Monkshood. Can anyone give me the third name for this plant?”

Six hands shoot high.

*****

Harry thinks it’s going to take a good year for Jules to stop riding the high of speaking to
Teddy’s fellow club members, an enthusiastic group of students not used to Parseltongue or
the ability to ask a reptile questions about his life. He’s the star of the show, leaving Harry
hard at work to translate his Jules-like responses into something feasibly understandable.

Meanwhile, higher on the slope of raised land on the edge of the grassy plot, Teddy sits back
confidently, letting them talk and chatting with Victoire, seeming perfectly aware that he’s
brought the most exciting set of guests.

“How long do you live, Jules?” a third-year boy is asking, smiling at Harry’s shoulder.

I am eternal.

“Ten to twenty years,” Harry answers.

A second third year crowds in beside her friend. “How do you feel about being a potion
ingredient?”

“That’s rude, Tabs,” says the boy.

“They wish to know how you felt about the potions shop. About being an ingredient.”

Jules opens his mouth, flicking his tongue out, and Harry thinks it’s his version of evading
the question. But then he says, low and easy, I was serving a purpose. Now I serve a different
one.

Harry repeats his answer to the group.

“That’s intriguingly thoughtful,” Victoire pipes up, catching Teddy by surprise with her
participation. He looks affronted, hands still raised in the middle of some story. “Does he
have a concept of death?”

Teddy snorts, but she’s clearly serious. Harry thinks yes, but he enacts his impartial role as
translator.

Animals have better understanding of death than humans, Jules chirps. No gods. No pretend.
It is a matter of life. Does your offspring’s ice queen believe she understands death?

There is so much loaded perception of Harry’s life and family in the question that he’s
rendered speechless. He’s also very aware that everyone is watching him and waiting,
Victoire most of all. Harry meets Teddy’s perplexed gaze before turning to hers.

“He wants to know if you understand death,” he explains faintly.

The third years right in front of him squeak. Victoire perks up, her mouth opening slightly.
Teddy looks chuffed by the way it’s boomeranged back to her. He’s watching her in pleased
anticipation.

“Yes?” she answers.

“Yes,” Harry repeats. Jules says nothing else.

“Does he understand love?”

Teddy this time, quirking up an eyebrow. Harry shoots him a glare over the younger heads,
which he meets with such an innocent shrug of his own that for a moment Harry sees himself
at fifteen. The group leans forward interestedly.
“Do you understand love?” Harry asks tiredly, holding his hand out for Jules to walk onto.

I understand what you think love is.

This felt unnecessarily boastful to a man who knocked on doors at night just to catch a
glimpse of the feeling. But he’s not about to inquire in the wet grass of a Hogwarts lawn
surrounded by his godson and several students more interested in the reptile than the wizard.

“But you don’t have a concept of love?” he clarifies.

It is different. The little ones are loyal with their love. Affection. You are loyal with your love.
Food. Language.

“Er, I think that’s a yes. Kind of. He knows that his definition is different than ours?”

The group bobbles their heads.

I understand you. This means I understand humankind, Jules chirps up unprompted. Harry
looks back down at him. Your sadness about death. Your love with ice queen. Moons when
you are irregularly nocturnal. They can stop such questioning. Ask me about lizards.

“He… he said you can assume he understands human concepts like death and love because
he watches me, and he knows I experience them,” Harry says, working quite hard suddenly to
keep his voice raised. “So you can redirect your questioning to those about lizards now.”

Victoire elbows Teddy in the side. “Look, now you’ve gone and made him sad.” Harry’s not
sure if she means him or the gecko.

The conversation changes pace after a period of questions about shedding, eggs,
Parseltongue, and more when Teddy gives up his carefree backseat to take over the
discussion a bit more. Besides one sixth-year who seems to only be attendance physically and
not mentally, he and Vic are the oldest members. Harry sits back with Jules, thanking him for
participating and waiting until the group slowly dwindles.

Victoire comes to sit with him first, a blonde ponytail swinging behind her. In the Weasley
family, it became not having red hair that was exceptional. He greets her with a smile, then
turns his attention back to Teddy laughing with some fourth years, gesturing at the toad in
one of their hands.

“Dad’s still working on it, you know,” she says quietly. “Whatever antidotes you lot are
trying to cook up. He really cares.”

Harry looks down at her. Her arms are extended behind her, her attention also trained happily
on Teddy. “I’m sure he does.”

“I just overheard him at Easter telling Mum that he thought you might think he’d given up.
Because Draco always sends ideas from his alchemy notes or something he read in some old
dusty book, and I haven’t read the notes that come with, but as polite as they are Dad seems
to think he… thinks he’s the only one bothering with the antidote method anymore. He’s
not.”
Harry doesn’t know what to say to that. He’d assumed Draco was working all angles, but he
hadn’t thought he was contacting Bill.

“I wouldn’t have told you if I hadn’t just seen you today. But so long as you were here I
reckoned I’d do what dad won’t and let you know. Casually.”

“Well, casually, if it comes up, feel free to let your dad know Harry appreciates his continued
efforts.”

“Done.”

Soon, the last of the students are walking off in clusters and Teddy comes their way, falling
into the grass easily. “Everyone will be talking about that for weeks, thanks, Harry.”

Harry reaches over and ruffles his hair, emboldened by a day of happy Teddy. “Thanks for
having me.”

“You’re searching for your identity? That’s what Teddy said.” Victoire tilts her head
quizzically.

“Sort of. Just on a mission to branch out, make new memories, so that I don’t only have
things related to the older version of myself.”

“Sorry I asked about love,” Teddy says. He catches Harry off guard with his earnestness.
“I’m also… sorry I’ve been a prick.”

Harry shakes his head. “I’m not sure you’ve been a prick so much as frustrated. I get it. I’m
frustrated, too.”

“You are?”

His eyes widen. “Of course.”

“You seemed fine with it when you told me. Like you were reporting the weather.”

“I suppose I’ve just talked about it a lot. The story itself gets easier to say,” he says, feeling a
bit guilty. If Teddy thought Harry didn’t care about something that affected them all so
deeply, no wonder he’d been underhandedly upset with him. “I’m feeling things. I’m
uncomfortable. Frustrated. Confused.”

“Do you miss him?” Victoire asks timidly, hardly above a whisper.

He doesn’t answer right away. Instead, his thoughts immediately jump to Draco on the
hallway floor one night, calling love a common thing. All these people, he thinks, with
parents so authentically in love. Bill and Fleur, Ron and Hermione, and all their sets of
married parents. Teddy growing up with stories of his parents, plus Luna and Pansy, Ron and
Hermione. Harry and Draco, he even admits with a splinter of sadness.

Love begets love, Draco had said. He eyes the two of them for a moment, feeling like some
great parental shift was happening unpreparedly within him. How could he be surprised that
 two young people so surrounded by love wouldn’t go looking for it, even in its teenaged
infancy?

Victoire and Teddy share a concerned look, but Harry’s not as offended by the question as
they might be worrying. He’s considering. The ‘looking forward’ part of him enjoys the
exhilaration of trying polo, sitting with Teddy and Victoire, watching Nev teach. But the
‘looking backwards’ part wishes to remember piano lessons, Ron and Hermione’s wedding,
Italy, summer holidays, his entire wedding, what love feels like, and how thrillingly terrible it
is to spend every day hoping someone else’s heart doesn’t stop beating. He’s curious. Who
wouldn’t be? So does he miss Draco?

“I miss everything that came along with him,” he decides.

“I think that’s missing him,” says Vic decisively.

Harry misses Draco. Maybe she’s right. He can miss him. There are many levels with which
to miss someone. Harry’s is curiosity-based, friendship-based, and Draco’s is based in a way
where he almost filled the kitchen with gas, lit the robe of his dressing gown on fire, and had
to disappear for a week.

Part of the problem appears to be Harry’s short-sightedness. Not in his lenses, though he’s not
that useful without those, either. He’s failed to recognise just how much love surrounds him
despite his own deficiencies in the matter. It trails after him, slime to a slug.

So he doesn’t catch the way, after hugging him and watching his lone figure walk away,
Teddy and Victoire dare to hold hands a little faster and a little tighter than they usually
would with Harry not yet out of sight. Just as he’s missed the way Ron and Hermione press
close at dinner, his hand more often on her knee than not, or the way Luna and Pansy kiss
each other’s cheeks just about any time Draco ventures a word conversationally, that ever-
apparent edge of gloom in his voice. He misses the way Blaise looks at Marise during polo,
and that they walk home in the same direction.

People, all around him, who in his presence or in Draco’s become more grateful for the love
in their own lives. It would likely help him—ever the giver, the self-sacrificer—to know that
his difficulty was having such an effect in a drop of water rippling exceedingly outward. Or it
might help, on an even more essential level, to identify the reason he hadn’t noticed this
already; the focus of his attention, as it always has, wastes his observational skills entirely on
Draco Malfoy.

But Harry’s tired, and Harry’s worried, and Harry leaves Hogwarts feeling as though he can
check another box in the ‘looking forward’ category. And Harry hopes maybe late at night
Draco will knock on his door and ask him questions so he can feel as important as Jules did
to the wide-eyed third years, even if they won’t talk of it when the sun rises.

Chapter End Notes

Thanks for the continued enthusiasm!

Feel free to leave some words below in the comments, or find me at

writandromance.tumblr.com. Doing my best to reply as often as I can, but know I read
them all!
 Liebestraume (Love Dream)
Chapter Notes

The chapter title refers to Liszt's 'Liebestraume No. 3: Nocturne in A-Flat Major'.

Perhaps the piece that also encapsulates this entire story, or even this pairing, most
beautifully. Life's inevitably full of ups and downs...

See the end of the chapter for more notes

May 2013

Draco dips in May. Harry knows why. He must feel like they’re plateauing, because though
the piano lessons continue, they’re running out of memory books left unread, and that’s the
end of Harry’s list of new ideas. Draco sighs frequently, without warning, and speaks
morosely at Friday night dinner. He plays a fatal mistake in his chess long game that Ron
counters immediately with a checkmate—the first time Harry’s seen them both make a move
the same night and the first win since his Obliviation. It means a meal out together that Draco
pays for, according to Hermione, but Ron eyes him warily, like he regrets winning.

And at the dinner, which Harry is already stiffly working through, trying not to feel as though
he’s on a double date, Ron decides it’s a good time to mention that he’s been in contact with
his mother.

“My mother?” Draco annunciates dangerously. “Surely someone else’s mother.”

Ron shakes his head slowly, eyes wide, already lamenting his choices. Harry is stuck in deep
interest at mention of Narcissa, the first hints of what their relationship might be like.

“My mother. Narcissa Malfoy.”

“Yes,” Ron answers, high-pitched. He clears his throat. “Yes,” again, in his usual tone.
“Given the pictures, I needed to make sure she didn’t know anything and—”

“You told her? You told her. Everything?”

“The general idea. The Obliviation, the photos… She, er, had nothing to offer. Just said—
well, we don’t have to go into the specifics—okay, I’ll tell you,” Ron corrects quickly, at the
look of offended insistence on Draco’s face. “It wasn’t anything helpful. Just that if
someone’s following you, this is what you get for not moving away from London after she’s
told you to.”

Draco closes his eyes and seems to take some internal journey towards peace and tranquility.
“Amazing that she can take the traumatic upside-down turn my life has taken and make it an
I-told-you-so,” he mutters then. “Sorry you had to go through all that for nothing.”

“Not nothing. Crossing off a potential lead is just as helpful as learning something new.”

Draco rolls his eyes at the optimism. The night ends in a race to see who can get the check
and leave fastest.

Harry tries to give him space, but Draco knocks on his door twice that week and they sit in
the hallway, hugging their knees to their chests, waiting for the other to speak. Both nights
Draco doesn’t pose a question and after long enough for Harry’s eyelids to start growing
heavy again, he leaves like he’s satisfied with nothing said at all.

And then, on Saturday, he’s cagey during dinner, checking his watch frequently and inhaling
his food without explanation, and for once he abandons his meal completely for Harry to
wash up, disappearing back upstairs the second he’s finished.

Harry cleans with the radio on, some highly-repetitive pop song that he can sing the chorus to
under his breath by the second verse, then pads upstairs and hones in on the unattended piano
like a gazelle at a lion-less watering hole. He’s still stumbling through some practise
techniques Draco had told him to work on when the man himself makes his presence known.

“You’re supposed to be playing chords, not arpeggios.”

“Piss off,” Harry responds lightly, busy biting his lip and squinting his eyes at the sheet
music. Playing every note in a chord at once is harder than it looks. He’s discovered quite
quickly why he’d whinged so much last time he learned; musicality is not instinctual to him.

“Thirsty?”

Draco is holding a strangely bubbling purple drink. He seems to be working hard to hold still,
as if someone’s called all his matching lottery numbers except the last one, waiting for Harry
to seal the deal. The drink looks murky. ‘Tasty’ potion should be an oxymoron, but this one
wavers on the brink. It smelled like the seaside, salt and summer rain, then in the next
instance like stewed vegetables, then old books and fire like he’d strayed into the alchemy lab
itself, then back around to a woodsy, burnt smell that curled his lip and scrunched his nose.

He eyes it warily. “Growing less so.”

“I’ll admit, I’ve been working on something.”

Draco comes closer, setting the drink down on the coffee table and sitting forward eagerly on
the sofa. There’s a buzz about him that seems wholly out of place in his character as Harry
knows it.

“We know memory potions won’t work, but I thought, what if alchemically I can adjust the
portions of a memory enhancement potion with a love potion, and the love potion works just
long enough for your memories to be restored? Then we provide the antidote, but your
memories stay. This is that concoction.”
The look of shock and concern on Harry’s face must be disheartening because it’s the first
moment since Draco entered the living room that he resembles the sombre version of himself
that had been traipsing about all week.

“Harry, I’m good at this,” he continues. “I’ve been working on the formula for weeks, double
and triple-checking. I did all the stoichiometry, the proper brewing times to the second.
You’ve got to admit, it’s the first real idea we’ve had in months.”
“We have ideas. Emotional and intellectual intimacy. Muggle memory methods. Music as
occupational therapy,” Harry lists desperately, feeling as though in the shadow of this rough
and ready quick-fix, his own work has been dismissed.

“They’re not working.”

“These things are slow! Healing is slow.”

“I thought you agreed we don’t have time anymore. That there was a renewed urgency
because of the photos, because of what you might know about all this.”

Harry purses his lips, taking a deep breath through his nose. “Then send it on to Bill, and
we’ll see—”

“Bill won’t let us do this. He said no love potions, it’s unethical. The Ministry can’t just
support dosing you up on it. We don’t have to follow their rules, though, we’re free agents.”

Harry lifts off the piano bench and sinks to the floor, cross-legged and facing the potion at
eye level. “I don’t know. I don’t like this,” he says quietly. “The hate potion made me feel
horrible. I hate not being in control.”

“I’ll have the antidote waiting. It’s upstairs. It’ll be within arm’s reach the whole time. And
because the love potion is diluted with the memory potion, it hopefully shouldn’t be
traditionally strong. Enough to do the trick, but…”

“Hopefully,” Harry bites out, dubious.

“It will.”

Harry studies the thick liquid, then Draco’s hopefulness, then buries his head in his hands and
speaks before he can change his mind. “Bring the antidote. And a glass of water.”

Draco hurries off, and he pulls his hands away, staring again at the confusing concoction. He
really shouldn’t, but Draco is skilled at this, and he’d looked so optimistic. They’ve been
nose-diving towards the excruciating disappointment he’d worried about Draco experiencing,
but this might let them catch some air.

Draco returns quickly with water and a small vial, which he sets on either side of the potion.
Harry takes a deep breath. “I won’t want the antidote. Can I trust you to give it to me?”

“Of course. I don’t want your love in this way.”

They should get a third party involved, but he thinks they both know deep down that not a
single one of their mates would consider this a good plan. No one is as desperate as them,
either, to try everything under the sun. Harry eyes Draco seriously one last time, closes his
eyes and drinks.

The mixture is weird, that pearlescent sheen, but mucked up by whatever earthy ingredients
belong in a memory enhancement potion, and Harry swallows austerely. It’s warm, smooth
like honey, like the best desserts he’s ever had at the Burrow. He opens his eyes.

Draco’s expression is frozen in nervous interest, darting between his eyes, and Harry takes a
slow, shuddering breath in the beauty of it.

“Well?” Draco breathes. “Do you remember anything?”

It feels sickening, suddenly, to answer in anything but the affirmative, to disappoint. And
there’s a plummeting sensation in his chest at being addressed directly. Draco’s eyes are
penetratingly intense, a glacial ocean. His eyelashes are longer than he’d taken time to notice,
and he follows them as he blinks.

When he leans closer across the table to get a better look, Draco hitches a breath and pulls
back. It’s a stab to the heart.

“Do you remember anything?” he asks again, sounding strained.

“I remember a lot of things,” Harry murmurs, heart beating fast, eyes flitting like he can’t
decide where to settle them. “Some of them unbelievable. Like my husband. My magnificent
husband.”

“Why’s that unbelievable?” Draco pipes, shifting again when Harry crosses quickly to the
sofa.

He laughs incredulously. “Look at you! What’s not unbelievable? Me with you? You—you’re
perfect. Are we married? Or do we need to do it again? Did it expire when I said I didn’t
want to pursue this and—oh god,” he stops, his stomach hollowing out. “I said I didn’t want
to pursue this.”

It’s like he can see clearly for the first time, and what’s clear to him is this man and the
awfulness it would be to send him away. His eyes grow wide, face lengthening in abject
horror at the very idea. He grabs for one of Draco’s perfect wrists, soft, delicate—the nerve to
have tried to risk these hands on something as childish as flying. He should keep Draco in a
box, away from even the smallest scratch.

“I’m so sorry,” he tells him earnestly. “You have to forgive me. You have to forgive me. I’ll
make it up to you.” Something flutters in his chest; ideas. “I know just how to,” he whispers,
leaning close to Draco’s ear.

“What did you say to me on our wedding day?!”

Draco blurts it urgently, so flustered that it comes out more like
‘whatdidyousaytomeonourweddingday’, his voice unnaturally high.

Harry pulls back just an inch, but close enough to smell Draco still, to see his eyelashes this
close and watch the flush fill his face. In the slate grey of his eyes, there are specks of darker
charcoal like he’s never noticed from afar.

“I don’t know,” he answers, exasperated. “But that’s why we’ll have a new wedding. And
you can wear white, but you’d look fit in anything—you’re tall and those cheekbones… We
can do it this weekend. We’ll invite everyone, you can meet all the Weasleys.”

He wants to kiss those cheekbones, right where a few strands of blonde hair fall, pulled out of
place by the way he’s leaned back already. So impatient, Harry thinks, for them to be
horizontal. And as he leans in again, Draco leans back more, like they’re magnets with
opposing forces, until he’s almost flat on the couch. So impatient, Harry thinks, so forward.
It’s attractive.

“Harry, wait a second. Please. You don’t remember our wedding?”

Harry pouts. “I’m trying to plan it right now.”

“You don’t remember having a relationship with me.” Draco’s hands have pressed out, arms
locked at the elbow, to hold Harry above him at a frustrating distance.

Fear grips Harry’s heart, a trifling reminder that this, for some reason, is a deal-breaker for
the man he wants. Remembering. And lower, in his gut, a shame that he’s forgotten.

“You’ve told me all about it,” he urges, leaning his weight a bit more on Draco’s hands, one
arm still wrapped around his wrist. “I do remember, basically. I know you had dragon pox
and we went to Italy and I turned your laundry pink once and I cook you dinner. I basically
remember. Please.” He wasn’t better than begging, not for this, not for Draco.

“Do you love me?”

“Of course I love you. Of course. Draco, yes, I love you.” The words tumbled off his tongue,
desperate, parched and staring at the freshest, clearest lake, too beautiful, as nature can be, for
manmade language. “I love you. Please. Let me show you I love you.”

While one arm still braces him against the couch, the other’s left Draco’s hand alone to find
purchase wherever else it can. The expression on Draco’s face is concerningly complex, too
complex for Harry’s one-track mind to decipher, but it shifts in distinguishable directions
when he meets skin in certain places; fingers managing to brush his neck only elicits a bug-
eyed panic, but sneaking under his shirt an inch sends him swaying the other way.

“Please, Draco, I answered your questions.”

He doesn’t care that he sounds so sad. He is sad. He’s playing along and Draco’s being
combative and isn’t he supposed to love Harry back? All he can think of is Draco.
Meanwhile, Draco looks like he’s thinking a thousand other things, not enough of which are
Harry.

“Don’t you love me?” he presses. “You say you do but you don’t act like it. I’m right here,”
his voice cracks, frustrated.

Draco’s hands are tense on his chest, but at those words something massive lets go and it’s as
if every tight muscle in his body suddenly relaxes. Harry’s weight is shifted fully onto his one
extended arm again as the hands that were his enemies become friends, lifting delicately to
just skirt his hips.

“Draco,” Harry sighs, like a thank you or a prayer, maybe a plea.

“Try to remember, Harry. Look at me. Remember m—ah—me?” Harry’s hand had slipped
under his shirt, running up his chest, appreciating his soft belly, grazing up over his chest.
“Remember me.”

Harry cups his cheek, so peachy, so glass-like. “I don’t need to, I have you now.”

“N-no, you need to,” Draco closes his eyes and turns his head away from Harry’s gaze, like
he’s too bright to look at, so generously offering his neck as he does. The hands tighten on
Harry’s hips. He smiles. Participation. A duet. “Think hard—what did you say at our
wedding?”

“I don’t know,” Harry whinges, leaning lower.

“Where did we first sleep together?”

“A bed?” he guesses flippantly. His breath is warm on Draco’s ear, and he can feel the hands
on his hips creeping, so slowly, upwards. The fingertips are colder than he’d expected, and it
makes them impossible to ignore. He presses his lips to Draco’s neck and it pushes a sound
out of him like never before, an inhaled yelp, as his eyes snap open. He stiffens under Harry
and scrambles to push him away again, this time slipping fully out from under him. He backs
until he’s against the piano, breathing hard.

“I—I’ve, I have something for you,” he says, sounding miserable.

The surprise of it helps Harry recover from the sudden appearance of negative space beneath
him. He sits back on his heels on the couch.

“What is it?”

“Something I m-made just for you. Because I—Because I love you.” He steps towards the
table. “Remember, you said you wanted me to act like I love you?” He holds out the small
glass vial. “Here, this is my proof. It’s for you.” He walks close enough to hand it right to
Harry.

Harry pulls back as he displays it before him. “I don’t know. You don’t sound happy about it.
You sound miserable.”
“Who said anything about being sad?” asks Draco, pulling his mouth up into a smile. It looks
hard to hold. “If I’m sad it’s only because… I made this just for you and you don’t want it.”

“I want it,” Harry says fast. “You’ll be happy?”

“So happy.” Draco swallows and looks down at the table. He pushes the glass of water
towards Harry, too. “It’s really important to me.” And it must be, Harry thinks, because he
sounds choked up. Anything that matters that much to him is something he wants to make a
reality.

“The whole thing. For me,” he adds, when Harry’s still staring down hesitantly.

Slowly but surely, he removes the stopper and tips it back. It’s oily, earthy, unpleasant, but
when it’s completely down, he feels like he’s finished an asthma attack and just took his first
lung-filling breath. He takes another gasping one. And another, pointedly not making eye
contact with Draco, who’s sunk weakly onto the coffee table facing him, because Harry’s
coming back into his own just as fast as he left it, and he’s pretty sure he just endured the
worst idea he’s ever entertained. But the way Draco had described it sounded so clever, a
loophole not investigated only because the Ministry hadn’t considered that entire line of
possibility. He’d gotten lost in the confidence he threaded through his words.

If they’d taken a bit longer, Harry might have thought about it differently. He may have
considered that even a love potion wasn’t real love, that it might not even have a chance of
eliciting what they wished, and that the memory enhancer would only leave the embarrassing
events more vividly seared into his brain. He’s not going to sleep well for a while. He’s going
to owl Anastasia.

“Harry?” Draco sounds small, unconfident now to an extent rivaling his confidence before
Harry had drunk the potion.

Harry, meanwhile, looks into his clasped hands, trying not to think about where they’ve been
without his approval. “Took you a while to stop me.” His voice is even, not without effort.

“I had to give it a moment. We had no reason to think it would be instantaneous.”

“I think it quickly became pretty bloody clear it hadn’t worked. The least you could’ve done
was stand up and walk away!” Harry puts his head back in his hands, staring safely into the
grainy darkness of his palms. “We shouldn’t have tried. It wasn’t going to work.”

A shaky hand tries to coax his head out from behind his fingers, and the feeling of it against
his wrist so quickly after everything is jarring. Harry jumps to his feet.

See? he thinks, trying not to look as shaken as he feels. See how easy it is to walk away? To
put space between us?

Draco pushes forward as if his mere presence hadn’t just spooked the man in front of him. “It
was a last-ditch effort.”

“It didn’t need to be. We’re working on this elsewhere!”

“Not fast enough. Not hard enough.”

“I’m doing the best I can.” He walks to sit on the piano bench, hunched forward with his
elbows on his knees. Staying stationary, maybe, will dampen the emotions quickly bubbling
up. “Don’t pretend this impatience is about your safety, either. We’ve established well enough
that you don’t care about that. This is about wanting me in a way I’ve explicitly said I’m
incapable of. So accept my best efforts.”

Draco mumbles something from the coffee table. Not enough, it had sounded like. He won’t
look Harry in the eye. Instead, his attention is trained solidly on the window. His profile looks
stony.

“Sorry?”

“I said your best isn’t good enough.” Draco flicks his eyes to meet Harry’s. He throws his
hands up. “Neither is mine.”

Harry needs no hate potion. He needs no instigation, no synthetic emotions. His blood is
running hot, his fists feeling tight. He sits pin straight.

“We are in uncharted territory,” he bites out. “I never made promises for a reason—there’s no
word to go back on, no way to disappoint as completely as you seem to think I have. I didn’t
promise to love you and-and if me working towards remembering in a friendship capacity
means ‘not enough’ then give the hell up, Draco. We are not together. If I don’t remember
saying I Do, then I’m not the man who agreed to marry you. You said you’d accept whatever
I offered, so fucking act like it!”

Draco stands, his face pinched, the angles of his features always sharper like this. Like they’ll
cut if his words don’t, but he doesn’t often disappoint on the latter. “People change,” he
offers now, though, hopelessly. “Opinions change. I want to be your friend. I want to be
capable of that.”

“That,” Harry points to the half-drunk concoction and the empty vial, “didn’t feel like
friendship. That felt like trusting someone to call something off and them losing control.”

“It was a hectic situation,” Draco urges, stepping closer.

“That you put me in!”

“I didn’t think you’d act like that. I didn’t think you’d be so… touchy.”

Harry stands too, suddenly, disliking the height Draco has on him from increasingly close. He
speaks waveringly, feeling the temper give out into something more breakable.

“What part of no one’s touched me in twelve fucking years don’t you understand? Of course
that’s how I acted! Do you know what you would’ve taken from me if the first person who
did was while I was that fucking legless on love potion?”

“The potion—I was trying something new.” Somehow, against Harry’s upset, Draco grows
harder. His words are spat low and consonant-heavy. “You wouldn’t understand, because
you’ve been worshipping the same fucking morals since the first day. No room for
reevaluating. Not once have you reconsidered since you decided two days in that you
couldn’t love me!”

“I reevaluate! All I do is reevaluate! And you’ll still be standing here, cooking up rubbish
that doesn’t work, waiting to drag me down the very second I make progress towards
anything verging on confidence. I’m doing new shit every day—per my therapist’s orders—
it’s just not the kind of new you want me to choose because it’s not about us.” Harry takes a
deep breath, trying to eke his last words out with something resembling control. “I’ll take a
page out of your book in the meantime, yeah? I’m leaving. How’s that for reevaluating?”

“Go then!” Draco’s face is red, maybe embarrassment, maybe fury, as he jerks a finger at the
door. “Learn how to understand someone else’s perspective while you’re at it!”

“No, you learn to understand someone else’s perspective!” Harry argues.

It would all sound a bit ridiculous if the air wasn’t so charged with fed-up misery. Something
had to break.

“You just have to have the last word.” Draco chuckles humorlessly. “You’re too stubborn.
That’s your problem. You’d fall in love with me and still be too stubborn to admit it just
because it’s not what you said at the start.”

Harry’s stomach sinks, a horrible, ill feeling. He feels both called out and completely
misread. He is stubborn, yes, in that maybe he hasn’t done as much reevaluating as he’s
advertising. But Draco’s not giving him much reason to right now—he’s stubborn, too. All
Harry wanted, really, was an admission that he’d let the love potion go on too long. To do so,
however, would be to admit that his carefully crafted platonic distancing had cracked under
expected and knowingly artificial reciprocation. He’d need to admit weakness, wrongdoing, a
break of freshly-gifted trust.

“When I fall back in love with you, you’ll be too worn-out to care,” Harry snaps, “because
you’ll be over a hundred years old. That’s how long I’d need to be away from you for this
evening to wear off.”

Draco’s expression is unreadably blank. He folds his arms. “You said when.”

Harry makes some sort of strangled noise of pure frustration and swivels, fuming, aware of
Draco’s fiery gaze on the back of his head, and reaches for the floo powder. When the smoke
clears, he’s in a darkened Quality Quidditch Supplies, but it’s just a stopover. He steps out the
back, then disapparates in a mess of anger.

*****

He listens with a tapping foot and an inability to stand still as the doorbell reverberates
grandly behind the tall mahogany he waits before. As intense as that confrontation had been,
he’d at least left with clarity. It was a rush, after such a brief stint feeling completely out of
control with who he was, to know where to go.
“Look what the Kneazle dragged in!” Blaise looks surprised when he opens the door, but he
wraps Harry in a quick one-shouldered hug anyway, ushering him through. He looks good,
dressed to kill, though that’s unsurprising. “What’s brought you to my doorstep this
evening?”

“I’m fuming. I just… I need to blow off some steam.”

Blaise pauses in the entranceway, crossing his arms. Besides Harry, he’s the only one of them
who’s never moved in their thirteen years of friendship. The house is expansive, far enough
outside of London to have impressive land, and their voices echo under the tall ceiling in a
way that seems to immediately force Harry to come to terms with every word he says,
rebounded towards him the second they’re uttered.

“How much steam?” Blaise quirks an eyebrow.

“Whatever you’re up to tonight, count me in.”

He cracks an impish grin, pleased for the opportunity. “I have a party tonight. You’ve barely
caught me.”

“Brilliant.”

“Does Draco know?”

“He doesn’t,” says Harry, and Blaise nods evenly, appraisingly. “Are you going to tell him?”
There’s a childishness to the question, but Harry’s feeling quite out of his element tonight.

Blaise shakes his head, and for a second the brightness of his good attitude drifts behind the
clouds, revealing something more thoughtful. “You’re my friend, too, Harry,” he says softly.

Friends or not, he refuses to bring Harry along in what he’s wearing. It takes a while to build
an outfit for him out of Blaise’s closet. He’s an inch or two taller, which is manageable, but
compounded by the width of his suits, it leaves Harry swimming in too many directions.
Eventually, they settle on a pair of slacks that get shrunk magically all over (Blaise is bitter in
his report that they’ve yet to invent a spell that simply shortens hems) and a button-up shirt in
an agreeably neutral, solid dark blue. But then Harry’s trainers are completely laughable, so
those are exchanged, too.

“I’ve always wanted a son,” Blaise enthuses with a mock teariness, standing next to Harry in
the mirror and shaking him with the arm around his shoulders. Harry laughs, surprised that he
has it in him to do so. They do look riskily cohesive.

After giving Harry the address, Blaise disapparates, so Harry follows suit, twisting back into
space somewhere just as expansive as the estate he’s left behind. There’s distant chatter and
laughter, a chorus of partygoers inside. Behind him, the sound of more apparations is like
fireworks, women in shiny dresses, men in expensive suits, all cracking into existence at
scattered intervals. Blaise is waving to him up ahead on his left.
They walk in together, but that’s all Harry’s gifted. It’s a large home with plenty of rooms to
disappear into, and Blaise does just that. Harry’s not mad; he only asked for a way in, not a
chaperone.

He’d been decent at this once upon a time. Especially during his brief courtship with the
Ministry, he’d found himself incapable of saying no to postwar events, all for good causes.
Mingling was an acquired skill, long lost, but he attempts to channel it now, to find that Harry
and use him, like sifting through a Swiss army knife.

It turns out to not be too far gone. He has help, anyway, in his identifiability. Most of the
party seems to be taking place in a high-ceilinged ballroom. He spots Blaise in there, talking
to a few people sitting at one of the round tables that freckle the room, but walks towards the
bar instead. That’s where he’s first approached, a beer in hand, by a woman who recognises
him from some gala she attended an entire decade ago, so they talk for a while about that.
She has friends in attendance and one of them is a Quidditch historian based out of Scotland,
so Harry speaks easily with her, too, long enough for a waiter to clear two empty pint glasses
each from their table.

Then Blaise finds him again and wastes no time before stealing him away to meet some more
people. His eyes are more dilated than before, his grin wider and his forehead a bit sweatier.
“I have many secret families, Harry,” he laughs. “Let’s make it a reunion.”

And so Harry meets some women from his book club, plus a man he used to take fencing
lessons with, another reformed ex-Death Eater living in Canada who regards Harry like he
toppled the Berlin Wall by marrying Draco (Harry wanders off conveniently when he tries to
ask how Draco manages to still live in London), and the barista from the café close to Harry’s
shop. He offers her a smile and tries to kindly make small talk, but Blaise is already tugging
his arm again.

“Marise! Tola!” he calls as he pulls on Harry’s elbow.

That makes him grow more alert. He knows those names. Sure enough, two of his fellow
players lounge in a corner of the large living space, looking almost unrecognisable out of
polo gear. Blaise presents him like a trophy.

“He wants to ‘let off some steam’,” he discloses with air quotes and a wink before heading
off to circulate some more. Harry tries not to feel like a child being passed between
guardians.

“Let off some steam?” asks Marise, pulling his attention back their way.

He nods sheepishly, rubbing the back of his neck.

The women share a lengthy, wordy glance. Marise breaks into a laugh. “What Dev wouldn’t
pay to hear—Tola!” she gasps, holding her drink high out of reach of the other woman’s
clumsily flailing arm, flagging down a server.

“He doesn’t even have a drink in his hand. That’s where the relaxing starts!” Tola says
brightly.
Harry doesn’t get a chance to inform them that he’s already decently drunk before something
cold and vibrant is placed in his hand.

“For the second leg!” she adds exuberantly, raising her glass. Harry raises his, clinks
accordingly, sips.

He’d like to say the taste was fruity, or bitter, but it was mostly just strong. Flavours cowered
in its presence. “You could disinfect a wound with this,” he choked. “What is it?”

“Disinfect?” Tola cocks her head.

“It blows off steam.” Marise waves him on. He takes another sip.

They’re kind. The exact sort of thrillingly fresh acquaintances that leave him excited for
everything they’ll say next. He learns more about them than he’d had a chance to at the club,
how Marise works in activism and Tola is a producer. The film they have in common, he
comes to learn, is some sort of documentary Blaise had funded about Muggleborn rights
years ago without telling any of them.

“Fully-funded?” Harry repeats, smiling briefly in thanks at the server replacing his drink.

Marise nods. “He came to set to oversee a lot of the talking heads. Wanted the interviewees to
know they could say as much or little as they liked.”

“He never mentioned,” he murmurs. Technically, it could be hidden away in a Draco-sized

hidey-hole, but the likelihood that the entire event had disappeared to that was unlikely.

“That’s very Blaise though, isn’t it?” Marise smiles wide, and when her eyes drift past Harry,
he turns to follow them to the man himself, talking cheerfully with a new group, distributing
a handful of champagne flutes from his hands.

The chat continues, shifting to Harry’s work, to Tola’s, to a holiday she’s planning, until,
when Marise has spent more time lifting her eyes to find Blaise than listening, they leave him
with hugs. At this point, Harry has the humbling moment of thinking, after plenty of sitting,
that he must be nearly sober until he stands and the room spins. Without leaning in towards
Marise and Tola to hear each other, the living room suddenly seems loud, the ballroom
louder, and he’s just venturing past the wide ballroom doors seeking what might be the
kitchen when he hears another voice he knows.

“Fucking hell,” Dev shouts from over the din. “You’re joking.”

Harry doesn’t hear his name, but somehow he knows in the tone that it’s for him. He turns
with already narrowed eyes.

“What?”

Dev walks through his circle of friends and out the doors, joining Harry in the long hallway,
where the company around them is only partygoers in transit. He had been in transit, Harry
thinks wistfully, looking past Dev to the kitchen.
“Nothing,” Dev says. “I’ve just never met you and now you’re everywhere.”

“I’m mates with Blaise,” Harry says shortly.

“I’m mates with Blaise. But we’ve never met.”

“I’ve been a bit more available lately. Not this second though. I’ll see you around.”

Harry sidesteps Dev, again towards the kitchen, but he hears footsteps behind him.

“Bit more available, like this quarter-life crisis you’re having?” Dev calls, catching up.

Harry doesn’t answer.

“That why you’re not wearing a wedding ring?”

He freezes, a bit too suddenly because it sends his head swimming a bit. “What?”

“I noticed you weren’t wearing your ring during polo but reckoned you took it off for sports.
But it’s not on now either. ‘s that why?”

Harry opens his mouth and closes it again, trying to calculate what to say with a head that’s
been properly muddled. Dev puts a hand on his arm like he’s a senile old woman. “Blimey,
harder question than I thought. You were headed for the kitchen, I think. Come on, then.”

He nods his head towards the next doorway and suddenly Harry’s the one following him.
“Interrogating my personal life or demeaning me aren’t your only options, you know,” he
says as he does. “You can leave.”

Dev waves a dismissive hand then slaps the marble of the kitchen counter. “What did you
want?”

“I don’t know. A different room than the one I was in.”

“Oh,” Dev says. “Done.”

“With someone who likes me.”

“Oh,” Dev says, a bit more curiousness in his voice. “Done.”

Harry squeezes his eyes shut, too tipsy in the quiet of the kitchen to handle being hassled this
much. When he opens them, the other man’s head is cocked in interest, eyes narrowed.

“What?” Harry sighs, for the tenth time.

“What’s your evidence? That I don’t like you?”

“Er, you don’t laugh at my jokes. You were antagonistic on the field.”

Dev shrugs. “I don’t think you’re funny, and I take polo seriously.”
“Cheers, then.” Harry rolls his eyes. Now that he’s here, he could eat something. Or really, he
should at least drink some water. He steps away and starts opening cupboards, finding
everything but glasses.

“Looking to nick the silverware?”

“No, just a glass.”

Dev opens the last cupboard he’s not yet gotten to and hands him a tall glass, then pulls the
drawer beneath it with a cocky casualness. It shines with silver tableware. Harry gives him a
tired look and shuts it.

For a moment neither man says anything and Harry fills the silence nicely with the sound of
the tap. He takes a long drink, gripping the counter behind him for stability.

“What’re you doing here, Harry?” Dev asks.

“Came with Blaise.”

“To drink yourself under the table and rummage around a kitchen? Do you even know whose
house you’re in?”

Harry lowers the glass from his lips and presses his lips together.

Dev nods expectantly. “Mine, actually.”

He chuckles at the surprised expression Harry must fail to hide.

“Oh, Merlin. I—I didn’t mean to party crash, really, I just—we—”

“Do you know what the party is?” Dev asks slowly.

Harry finishes the glass, firmly set on asking Blaise for details the next time he impromptu
tags along to a random home in a distressed state. He shakes his head.

“It’s my birthday.”

“Oh god, I—”

“It’s fine, I got strong-armed into the event, anyway. Not big on celebrations.” This time he
smiles into his grimace, like Harry’s in on a joke. But then he deflects and points to Harry’s
hand again. “Are you and Draco still getting on?”

Harry is too beautifully intoxicated to feel that usual discomfort, at someone he’s hardly met
speaking on a first-name basis about the people in his life.

“It’s… complicated.”

“Sorry to hear that.”

Harry shrugs. He lifts the faucet handle again, aimlessly filling the glass for something to do.
“Too complicated for me to do this?” Dev asks, behind him and puts a hand on top of Harry’s
left one where it sits flat on the countertop.

Harry stares at it and blinks hard. It almost feels like someone else’s hand is under Dev’s.
Like he’s watching from afar, curious to see what happens to this other person, this other
Harry. He’s been quiet too long.

“N-no, that’s fine,” he answers, fast and faint.

“What about this? Too complicated for this?” He moves it to Harry’s shoulder.

“That’s—it’s fine,” Harry stammers. He sets the cup under the running water and turns back
around to look at the other man. Dev seems completely sober, or at least much closer to it.
Which makes it more bafflingly believable that he doesn’t hate Harry after all.

“Why don’t you just tell me when it is too complicated,” says Dev, before lifting the hand to
Harry’s cheek. He pauses, rather gentlemanly, for the word, but Harry can’t get it past his
lips, too astonished at being wanted again, simply, easily. Dev raises his eyebrows at the lack
of response and Harry stares back challengingly, so there’s nothing left to do really, but lean
towards each other.

Dev kisses firmly. He tastes like that horrible drink Harry had been handed, maybe the
signature cocktail of the evening, but the affection still washes away the residual shame from
the love potion, this rush of choosing. This is choosing someone who chooses you back. This
is organically mutual. It feels wonderful to be intimate, and Harry thinks in the moment that
it would be notably more enjoyable if only he was kissing Draco.

The thought hits so suddenly that it catches him by surprise, the hitch it draws in his breath
translating as enthusiasm to Dev, who pulls him closer. And it’s not unpleasant to be kissing
Dev, not in the slightest. But he doesn’t fancy him, does he? In imagining kissing Draco, he’s
imagining what lacks in Dev—a conversationalist, a friend, the complexities of real desire.

Next comes the guilt, only a moment after. He and Draco had separated, right? Hadn’t they?
Because Harry’s wedding ring’s gone, and no one corrected Blaise when he said as much at
dinner. Harry said it again today while arguing. He can’t figure out, then, why he wants to
shiver like he’s found a spider in his trouser leg.

Harry pulls away, feeling dizzy. “Happy Birthday,” he says. “I need to find Blaise.”

Dev looks unprepared for that, but he shrugs it off, his hands slowly dropping from Harry’s
sides. “Sure, I should be a host, anyway.”

Harry walks room to room until he finally finds Blaise out on the terrace with some burly
looking men holding cigars.

“Hey, Potter,” Blaise grins sloppily.

“I’m gonna leave,” Harry replies.

The announcement pulls him to his feet. He stamps the cigar out immediately, coaxing Harry
back inside with a hand on his shoulder. “You alright? Have a good time?”

“I just—home, I need to… good time, though. Listen, Dev… is he a talker?” Blaise looks
confused. “A gossiper,” Harry elaborates. “Like, should I be worried?”

“Should I?” asks Blaise.

“He—we—”

“Plausible deniability.” Blaise raises his hands as he cuts Harry off. “He’s a private person,
but I’ll talk to him. And I’ll remind him how valuable it is to be private, yeah?” The stern
confidence leaves Harry with no doubts.

“’Kay,” he sighs thankfully, patting Blaise’s shoulder and feeling a bit dizzier now that
worrying over Dev isn’t sobering him further. He searches the walls. “Er, front door?”

“Floo,” Blaise reminds him.

“Right.”

They seek one out together, daring to go upstairs. There’s a study with a working floo and
Harry bashes his head squarely on the brick climbing in, so Blaise takes it on himself to send
him off, throwing the powder in and saying the address while Harry squeezes his eyes shut
and tries to stop spinning.

He can only hope he hasn’t ruined Blaise’s night as he spits out in Grimmauld Place. He’d
left in a fury, full of grand statements and a purposeful storming out, but now he traipses
shamefully through the living room. All the glasses on the coffee table from their little
experiment are gone. He kicks Blaise’s shoes off but does nothing else before walking
straight to Draco’s door. It must be late, past one in the morning, but Draco swings the door
open so fast after his knock that he almost gasps in surprise. He stumbles back a little.

“Harry.” Draco’s looked grim all week, but this takes the cake. Clearly, he wasn’t sleeping,
and the light coming through the cracked door behind him makes it seem like he wasn’t even
attempting. “You alright?”

Harry breathes in through his nose and rubs his eyes, trying to clear his mind.

“Where did you go? Are you drunk?”

“Do you know that spell?”

Draco sighs and disappears from the door. Harry wants to push at it, let it swing on its hinges
just enough to show him an inch of Draco’s most private space in a home Harry’s mostly
made him feel unwelcome in, but he returns too quickly, wand in hand. It touches gently to
Harry’s temple, then whispered words and the fuzziness is gone, the unsteadiness.

“Better?”
“Thank you, much.”

Draco fidgets with his wand. “Is that… all?”

“No.” Harry briefly wonders if he needs to wait for morning, simply because what is spoken
of this late at night is never revisited. “Well, yes. We should talk about this tomorrow.”

“Tell me now, I can’t sleep anyway.”

“We should still talk about it tomorrow.”

Draco leans on the doorframe and closes his eyes. “Fine. We’ll do both. What is it?”

“I kissed somebody.”

Immediately, Draco pushes off the wall, his eyes open and sad, so suddenly alert, looking
Harry up and down, his clothes, his face, his arms held tightly behind his back. “Jesus,
Harry,” he whispers. “I don’t need to know. I don’t need to know that.”

“I thought of you.”

His face drops completely blank, void of anything, too busy computing. Previously, Harry’s
wondered what he looks like sleeping, when all the pain is wiped from his face. This feels
like the closest he’ll get.

“What did you say on our wedding day?” he murmurs after a long pause, and Harry hates to
disappoint.

“’I do’?” he shrugs, impatient to get to the next stage of the conversation.

“Where did we first sleep together?”

“The moon, I don’t know. I’m not there. But I—It’s been complicated to sort out my feelings.
It’s hard because for me there’s been no once since I was maybe twenty-one. So anything I
felt for you, I reckoned I’d feel for anyone, you know?”

Draco walks out of the doorway and leans against the wall, sinking into his usual late-night
position. “You felt for me?”

“Well, yeah. I’m worried for you, and you’re my friend,” he tells him, lowering himself too.
“But then I kissed… I guess I realised tonight, I don’t think about everyone the way I think
about you.”

“Maybe it just wasn’t him. Or her.”

“No, I thought of you. In the moment. I felt guilty. Why would I feel guilty if I didn’t care
about you?”

“Because you’re a good person.”

Harry shakes his head. “Stop being your own saboteur.”

“I’m clarifying. I don’t want to be disappointed. It’s the—”

“—hope that kills you,” he finishes, unamused. “Do what you need, I guess. But I want to
know more about… how I feel about you. I want to know you as well as you know me. I’m
—I’m more confused than I’ve ever been.”

Draco’s eyes flick between his. He frowns slightly, appearing genuinely sympathetic. “Did
you enjoy sitting in on my lessons?”

Harry thinks back to it with a warm buzz under his ribs, to watching Draco’s intelligence at
work, seeing his friendliness, feeling the joy when he caught Harry by surprise, forcing him
to recalibrate who he thought Draco was. “Immensely.”

“We’ll do more like that then.”

Harry meets Draco’s gaze self-consciously. He feels stripped down, saying words like this out
loud without putting much thought into it mentally first. It had happened so slowly, he thinks.
Not minding that Draco lived downstairs, not minding that Draco ate dinner with him, not
minding that Draco knocked on his door at night, minding terribly that he wasn’t concerned
for his safety, then minding terribly that they’d raised voices and he’d run to find someone
else. Draco grew on him like a summer tan, catching sun without noticing the steady change,
until one day he’d looked down and not recognised himself in his skin.

“I look forward to it,” he says, understatedly.

They sit silently again, like the last few times in the hallway, until Draco stands. Harry
follows suit.

“Do we need to discuss what happened tonight?” Draco asks nervously, holding his hands
behind his back. “The potion?”

“If we both regret what we said, I think it’s best we let it die. We ought to just look forward
now, together.”

Draco looks surprised and grateful. Small concessions. Then he walks forward and wraps his
arms around Harry tightly, who returns the hug in record time, sliding his arms around
Draco’s body under his arms. There’s a hand cupped tightly around Harry’s neck. They’ve
never hugged, hardly touched at all with a sorely recent exception, and Harry holds on, his
face pressed into a very thankful Draco’s shoulder.

“You look like Blaise,” Draco mumbles above him. “And you smell like him.” When he pulls
away he looks suddenly stricken. “You didn’t—”

Harry laughs. “No. No. Not Blaise. Fool me once.”

*****
“You’ve been a few times. I know you’re usually good with names, but the children don’t
know that, so just… sell yourself low.” Draco’s got his hands deep in the pockets of a long
coat, walking briskly down the long drive. It’s anticipation and excitement, and Harry walks
faster to keep up.

“Act forgetful. Easy. Understood.”

Draco gives him a weary look that Harry thinks is him smiling, just like scowling can be him
laughing. The manor is set back into sizeable land. He was apprehensive, imagining a space
with such a dark history inhabited with children, but this must’ve been a concern of Draco’s,
too, because what Harry approaches is a completely different home.

The hedges remain, tall and green, lining the wide path, but that’s where the similarities end.
There’s a fresh, brighter coat of white paint on the home, clotheslines pinned with sheets and
miniature trousers on the grounds previously strutted by peacocks. Harry can already hear the
voices of children. It’s all a bit striking.

“So, er,” Harry glances over at Draco again, trying to gauge whether coming here is tense or
relieving. When Ron brought Narcissa up, it had been tense, but now he looks content. “Your
mother. Do you… Is she… around?”

Draco keeps his eyes forward. “You remember the Manor.”

“Well, yes, I remember the dinner. I remember walking out.”

“So you understand why I don’t see her.”

“Sure,” Harry says quietly. “But her home… where did she go?”

“France. I have her address. She sends me Christmas cards.”

“And do you…”

“I send her a lovely photo of us every year,” Draco says in a monotone. “It brings me joy and
incredible fear to do so.”

“Right.”

Harry walks a little faster towards doors his friends were once attacked behind, trepidation
hitting again. But the interior is just as changed, bright, windows open, Sunday light
streaming in. There’s an older woman who Draco told Harry is known by the children as
Miss Claudia. She’s plump, friendly, and pulls them into a hug, pressing them to her and to
each other in an instant.

“You should have seen the children when they heard you were bringing Harry,” she says,
which strikes a pinch of fear in him. Or the pinch was already there, in his awareness of
Draco’s cheek against his. “The weather’s nice, so we’re doing arts outside. Everyone’s back
by the fountain.”
Draco had started the project of transforming the manor a few years ago, but he won’t tell
Harry how he came to the decision, which leads him to think it’s one of those key memories.
Already decently open with telling Harry stories, he’s been even more candid lately. It’s not
hard to discover, then, which events are purposefully off-limits; his wedding, clearly; their
first days of intimacy; and now this, the first heart-stoppingly selfless thing Harry heard
about Draco from Neville.

There are maybe a dozen children. A large home didn’t mean filling the place to the brim
with too many youngsters for all to get the necessary attention, Draco said, so they kept the
numbers low.

There was music lessons, gardening, arts and crafts, exercise sessions, trips into town for
activities like the cinema or bowling, trips further to farms or London or the beach or parks.
There are carers on weekdays, who engage in play therapy, music therapy, and any other
support they might need. Harry goes breathless just listening, sitting on a bench with Draco
watching the children, who are being respectfully patient despite their excitement when the
two of them walked back.

“There’s a set of outcomes we want for the children,” Draco is saying now. He’s got an arm
around the bench, and if Harry sat back a little more he might touch it. Draco is happy, he
thinks again, with amusing suddenness, like he’s just realised Draco has eyebrows. Purely,
unstoppably happy. “Safety, independence, education, health, achievement, activity with the
other children and with the community.”

“All from wizarding families?”

“Or Muggleborn but showed signs. The youngest right now is six, I believe. They all have
places waiting at Hogwarts.”

“Can we join in?” Harry finally asks.

Draco quirks his mouth up and uses his extended arm to nudge Harry’s shoulder forward in
answer. The grounds are expansive, but the children have settled closely in the courtyard.
Harry approaches reservedly. Draco sits immediately in the grass between two young girls,
reaching for a blank sheet of paper and a crayon. For a moment, Harry stands awkwardly,
scanning.

There’s a boy sitting alone with his back to the fountain. Something in Harry urges him to
take a sheet of paper and a box of crayons and walk over.

“Mind if I sit?” he asks, gesturing with his supplies.

He looks up and his smile creeps in with a speed Harry hadn’t expected. His back had been to
them on arrival. He hadn’t known they were there. “Harry!” he exclaims.

“Er, yeah, hi, can I sit?”

“Course.”
Harry puts his back to the fountain, too, though it’s spraying his neck in a fine mist and the
rocks jut into his spine. He adjusts a few times, glancing down at the boy’s picture as he does
so. It’s of the tree in front of them, but he’s adding something to the sky now, in bright red.

“Geezer,” the boy mutters, side-eyeing Harry’s uncomfortable repositioning.

It catches him off guard. He didn’t expect to enter a pre-established banter he hadn’t known
about. Blinking in surprise, he sits awkwardly, hunched forward so he can set his paper flat
on the ground, but the boy pulls the top off a Snakes and Ladders box beside him and hands it
over without a word. Harry takes it and settles back, propping it on his pulled-up knees. He
glances over again.

“Drawing a dragon?”

“Might be. Sky’s too boring here.”

“Mm.” Harry starts drawing a line of green cutting the page in half horizontal. “I often think
the skies are a bit low on dragons.”

The boy nods sagely, and they drop as easily and instantly into silence as he’d launched them
into conversation. Harry glances back through the falling water and makes out the wavy
outline of Draco, still laying casually in the grass.

“A couple all the way from New Zealand came last week to meet Miss Claudia. If they
adopted me I could see Antipodean Opaleye in person.”

Harry vaguely associates the term with a dragon breed. The boy adds fire shooting out of the
dragon’s mouth in a ball of heat.

“But they wanted a baby girl. We don’t have those.”

Harry focuses on colouring in his grass, trying to think of what to say. He must have gotten
close to the boy, for them to speak so openly, but he’s careful not to ask things he should
already know. He’s likely around seven, a bit long-limbed without seeming to know what to
do with it yet, with short dark brown hair and pale skin a bit flushed in the chilly spring
weather.

“Is that Draco?” he asks Harry, leaning close and blocking his view of his paper. He’d drawn
two stick figures, one with spiky black hair and another with pale yellow hair, but on the
white paper, the latter just looks bald. “You forgot Jules.”

“I’ll add him,” says Harry, peering interestedly again at the young boy. “Sorry about the New
Zealand couple.”

“It’s fine, I thought about what you said. About how my real new mum and dad won’t be
looking for a type of kid, they’ll be looking for me.”

“Oh, that’s… good.” Harry picks a light orange pencil, outlining a little lizard hovering above
the grass line he’d drawn.
“And I thought if anyone wants a screaming baby on purpose, I don’t want to live there.”

Harry laughs. “Anything else?”

“They might’ve been vampires. And her smile was weird. Like she didn’t know that the
edges were supposed to go up. Like this.” He turns to Harry and stretches his mouth out
sideways in an amusingly toothy grimace that makes Harry chuckle. “And also he was too
nice.”

“Not bitter at all, though, yeah?”

“Not bitter, just noticed things.”

Harry hums, still smiling, as he colours spots on Jules.

“Do you need help with your drawing?” the boy asks, looking over sceptically.

Harry scoffs. “Excuse me? This is beautiful! What, you must think it’s missing a dragon?”

The boy holds out his hand, so Harry puts his coloured pencil in it, but he sighs, drops the
pencil by his feet, and holds his hand out again. Harry hands him the paper then, watching as
he rifles through his art supplies. He draws focused and intense, his tongue poking through
his lips. After a minute or two, he grins at Harry and hands it back. The small blob meant to
be Jules now has impressive, leopard-printed wings.

“It’s perfect,” Harry says, knocking their shoulders together. He adds ‘To: Draco’ on the top.
Surprisingly, the boy does the same on his.

“Oi, Yams!” They both lift their heads. Another young boy calls towards them from the
grassy plane just beyond the courtyard. He doesn’t doubt that once upon a time, Narcissa
Malfoy would have gone mad imagining children running across the manicured lawn. “We’re
playing Aurors and Dark Wizards!”

“I’M DRAWING WITH HARRY!” The boy (Yams, maybe?) shouts loud enough to burst
Harry’s eardrum. He flinches.

“Go on, then. I’ll give Draco your drawing if you want,” says Harry. When he looks back, the
other man is already approaching, something soft and happy in his features.

“Best give him yours first. If you show mine, he’ll think yours is going to look just as good.”

The boy hands him the drawing, hugs him fast and slack, and runs off. Draco takes his spot
almost immediately while Harry’s still chuckling.

“I should’ve known that even with no information or recollection, you two would gravitate to
each other.”

“We seem to get along well,” Harry muses, watching him and the other boy browsing the
twigs worth brandishing like wands. “I think he’s a bit brilliant. These are for you, guess
which is mine.”
“Hm, the one without the accurately portrayed Chinese Fireball, I’d assume. He’s even got
the forked tail. Although Jules as a dragon is a nice touch.”

“That was… ‘Yams’?... idea too.”

Draco nods knowingly, searching his face like he’ll want to memorise how it looks in a
moment. He smiles, chest rising in a deep breath.

“Yams is a nickname the children call him,” he says on the exhale. “You call him by his real
name. James.”

September 2002

Draco heard Harry come downstairs before he saw him. The groans were audible, a sleepy,
grunting sort of breathy sound, and he smiled into his coffee and Prophet before he’d rounded
the corner.

“I can’t believe you’re moving around.”

Harry looked wrecked—boxers and an old t-shirt, hair stuck in each cardinal direction, red
marks on his collarbone. Oops, Draco thought.

“Have some coffee, Britain’s Most Wanted. You’re going to make me look like a necrophile
walking around like that.”

Harry frowned, taking a long moment to put the insult together in his mind. He didn’t turn for
the kitchen, however, instead electing to join Draco on the couch and nudge his legs apart
enough to rest between them. His head laid heavy on Draco’s chest, dangerously close to the
hot coffee in his hand.

“Help me with this crossword,” Draco said softly, jostling them both to set his mug down. He
flipped back to the right section of the paper, then sat back again. “‘Irritable with volume,
from seedlings’. Eleven letters. All I can think is mandrake but that doesn’t fit.”

“I’ve been awake for two seconds,” Harry groaned, finally speaking and rubbing his eyes.
“Don’t feed me riddles.”

“It’s not a riddle, it’s a hint.”

“No hints,” he grumbled. “’m sleeping.”

Draco slapped the paper down, making eye contact with the top of Harry’s head, all he could
see. “Did you come out here just to fall asleep on me?”

“You’re making it difficult.”

“Beds make it easier.”

“No, it’s easier on you.” But Harry sat up and pulled a knee in, seeming to give up, and
Draco found himself facing a very grumpy expression. “You look nice.”

“Thank you.”

“That was me being cross.”

Draco kissed him quickly and stood, stretching his arms. “Needs work, then.” He’d been up
for hours, when Harry was still so comatose that he’d checked his heart rate with a tinge of
paranoia before creeping downstairs. “Why is my niceness a concern?”

“Because we both drank too much last night. And we were lazy about it when we got home.”

“We were preoccupied when we got home,” Draco corrected, laced lightly with innuendo. He
did know a rather complicated spell to remove the effects of drunkenness—it kept him in
Blaise’s good books—but it became moot when he waited long enough for drunkenness to
turn to hangover. The best they could do now was a Pepper-up potion.

Ron and Hermione’s wedding had been his first trip to the Burrow. It was everything he’d
thought it would be. A sea of redheads, a smaller collection of individuals who looked a bit
like Hermione, many people he thought he’d never see past King’s Cross station again. The
event was rough around the edges, held informally but prettily on the property. No one
seemed to have wanted it any other way.

Harry danced badly. The fact that he danced at all was a marker of the night—the good drinks
and the contagious carelessness of their mates—but he couldn’t manage to pull Draco into it,
so he, Ginny, Ron, and Hermione spent a long time on the dance floor together.

He couldn’t stop himself, though, when the music slowed and the floor cleared of all but
couples and Harry and Ginny, confidently amicable, looked set to waltz. He stood and held
an arm out to Harry, gallantly, approaching from the side, and Harry looked elated. That
enough was worth it, but Ginny gave him a look, a pointed one, up and down.

“The last time we had a wedding here,” she said, “it was interrupted by Death Eaters. Guess
that was circumvented by inviting them.”

“Ginny,” Harry hissed. Draco’s hand tightened around his.

“Joking,” she’d said lightly, walking off.

Harry had put an arm around his waist, squeezing his other hand, then leaned up. “Forget
her,” he’d said, chillingly close to his ear. “Let’s have fun.”

So they did. First with Neville and Luna, Pansy and Blaise, then with added exuberance when
Ron and Hermione found them again, laughing arm in arm. Harry and Hermione ended up
lost to them somewhere in the grass for a bit, but Draco could hear his laugh and her familiar
giggle.

He took their absence as a chance to sit again, alone at the round table in the back of the tent,
nursing a drink, and that’s where Mrs Weasley found him. She sat with such resolve that he
felt himself shrivel inward a little in fear.

“Hi, dear,” she said with a smile, which did nothing to ease his stress. “Ron’s told me much
about you.”

“Oh,” he grunted out.

“Harry not so much. But that face he makes when I ask after you…” She tapped a finger to
her nose. “I know my children without them saying a word. He says more than Ron does, in a
way.”

Draco swallowed, tapping his glass on the table. “Congratulations, Mrs Weasley. On the
wedding.”

“Dad’s looking for you, Mum,” said George suddenly from behind Draco, like his
unexpected angel. She brightened and stood quickly, bustling off back into the throng of
guests. George looked down, hands shoved in his pockets. “All these couples getting married
young,” he said. “It’s like we’re grateful to have survived a war or something.”

He sauntered off, leaving Draco still sitting frozen. He had the strange sense that he’d just
met Harry’s mum, without enough pomp, circumstance, or alcohol in his system.

Eventually, the family began leaving, the party dwindled, Ron and Hermione’s exit in the
past, when Harry found him next, hands linking around him, and interrupted his conversation
to mutter, “Do you want to leave?”

“I wouldn’t mind leaving with you,” Draco spoke low. Harry seemed to be leaning on him a
lot. He shuffled and rebalanced. “Bloody hell, can you even stand?”

“Don’t need to stand where we’re going.”

“Right here, lads,” Neville waved at Harry with two fingers extended from a wine glass stem,
and Draco thought he hadn’t even realised he wasn’t standing alone talking to a wall when
he’d approached.

And now he was handling Harry again, thankful that he was so nice to look at, even when
crabby the morning after. When he returned from the kitchen with a coffee for him, he’d
disappeared under several blankets on the sofa, just a peek of wily black hair out the top.

“Harry?” he tried.

No response, so Draco set the coffee down and hit it with a warming charm, then went to the
piano. Some people had practise to get up to, and couldn’t afford to challenge the constitution
of their bodies as much as Harry had. He closed the lid of the piano and played as softly as
possible, focusing mostly on repetition anyway, but struggled not to think back to last night,
to Hermione’s dress and Ron’s elation and Harry’s face flushed happy.

“I never sound like you,” Harry mumbled a while later, announcing his reentrance into the
living.
Draco stopped playing, turning to find him propped on an elbow. He smiled and lowered a
hand from the keys. “Coffee for you, Winkle.”

Harry made a happy sound and sat forward, cupping it in his hands and taking a sip.
“Honestly, though,” he said again. “it’s been months and I don’t sound like you.”

“I’ve been playing… since I was five,” Draco reminded him slowly.

“No, it’s not the skill level, I swear, it’s… you make it feel like something. It’s like when you
play you’re… talking through the piano. Or to the piano. I’m just hitting keys. You make it
sound like a language.”

Draco used to avoid playing before people outside a professional setting. But he’d been so
swayed when it was Harry asking. And Harry always said such uniquely beautiful things
about his playing that made it so genuine. I want to swim in that one, he’d say, not even
knowing it was an original composition. Or that’s a different instrument when you play it.
And he was asked so often why piano, why still piano, but Harry never questioned it.

“Why would he stop doing something he’s stellar at?” Harry had said earlier that year, over a
dinner with extra seats for George and Bill. He’d shrugged and turned back to his plate.
Unblinkingly defending Draco.

People requested his playing, but Harry made him want to do it for him unprovoked.

He left the piano, climbed over Harry’s discarded blankets and practically into his lap,
sinking into the crevice of remaining space on the sofa. Harry placed a hand on his knee like
it belonged there.

“I talk through the piano?” he asked.

“Yes, it’s aggravating, I don’t know how your students handle it. It’s like we’re not reading
the same sheet music. I hate you,” said Harry.

“I love you,” said Draco, because it was true.

Harry’s face slackened from its position of fake hostility. “What?”

“I—” Draco felt his throat tightening. His nerve disappearing. He leaned in for a kiss instead,
but a coffee-warmed hand abruptly met his lips. Harry steered him back.

“Finish the phrase,” he challenged quietly. His mouth was neutral but his eyes sparkled
intensely. Draco focused on them to continue.

“I love you.”

Harry grinned. “I love you, too.”

Draco took a heaving breath in and out. “Thank god,” he teased, folding his head into the
crook of Harry’s neck. “I’ve been ‘telling you’ through the piano for weeks.”
Harry would drift out of piano playing by 2005, but there were no hard feelings. He was a
difficult student, anyway, and how could Draco be upset when he even bowed out sweetly?
One day in the future he’d stop Draco’s responsible initial protests with a kiss and a scowl.
“Now why would I preoccupy an instrument that you make sing?” he’d ask.

May 2013

The first weekend of May is more eventful than the entirety of Harry’s April, but he takes it
in stride. He sees Anastasia on Tuesday, which is a godsend, even though she mostly tells
him to be careful with his feelings. Between the reconfiguring his brain is busy with and the
shop work his hands are busy with, he’s fully embracing the busy is happy mantra once
again.

And with the admittance that he cares deeply for Draco, he finds himself reinvigorated to
consider the case, too. Draco is surprised to find him pouring over his work calendar at the
kitchen table with food in the oven Wednesday night. Ron had taken it in January, but he’s
hoping he’ll see something new in the pages now, with a fresh mind, like he sometimes sees
something new in Draco. Unfortunately, despite owning a diary, he left it quite empty. He
flips forward instead of back, hesitating over a circled date.

“Does August seventh mean anything to you?” he asks, pushing the book to Draco, who’s
settled in with a notebook a couple of chairs down.

He frowns. “You must mean my recital, but you missed the one. Seventeen, not seven.” He
stars the seventeenth with a pencil, then begins to flip through himself. He stops in July. “And
you’ve got Teddy’s return date wrong. He gets back late June.”

“Oh.”

He fixes that, too. “This is why I tell you not to half-listen when I tell you important things.”

“You have a solo recital?”

Draco looks up. “Yes, Harry. You know, the longer it’s been since the Obliviation, the less of
an excuse you have not to know these things.”

“Tell me all about it, then,” Harry urges. “I’m sorry, I want to know about it.”

Draco tells him, but in suspiciously little detail. It’s in August, at an outdoor concert hall in
London, and it’s a Very Big Deal. A career-defining opportunity. Harry tries to picture the
large amphitheatre and Draco’s small figure alone on the stage. No wonder it’s nerve-
wracking, he decides immediately.

That night, he dreams of crickets. Specifically, first, of Draco storming upstairs and pounding
on the door until he comes to it.

“My alarm doesn’t go off for thirty more minutes,” Dream-Harry moans, but he entertains
whatever’s brought this man to him, because Draco looks mad as a box of frogs. He drags
 him by the arm down the stairs and to the piano and gestures with wide, red-rimmed eyes.

“There is a cricket in the god-forsaken piano. Find it.”

And Dream-Harry laughs for a minute as Draco’s face gets sterner, refusing to take the blame
if Jules had let some dinner escape, but then he breaks and begins searching with Draco
hovering over his shoulder to remind him to be careful of the instrument’s innards every few
seconds.

And then he wakes up.

The dream was so perfectly normal that he lays awake for a moment just registering it. No
flying crickets. No terrifying magical creatures. Harry usually has night terrors or nothing at
all.

Draco answers the door on the second knock.

“Was there a cricket in the piano?” Harry asks urgently.

“What?”

He seems to have actually been asleep this time, squeezing his eyelids as if to will himself
further awake.

“A cricket,” he repeats. “In the piano.”

Upon hearing him, Draco’s face falls, preemptively exhausted at the very notion. “Again?” he
moans, leaning his head on the doorway, eyes shutting.

Again?

Harry sinks to the hallway floor, his usual spot, but that’s the only thing normal about the
exchange.

He’s just remembered.

Chapter End Notes

Thanks for the continued enthusiasm!

Feel free to leave some words below in the comments, or find me at

writandromance.tumblr.com. Doing my best to reply as often as I can, but know I read
them all!
 Rachmaninoff's Concerto
Chapter Notes

The chapter title refers to Sergei Rachmaninoff's second movement of his second piano
concerto—Piano Concerto No. 2 in C Minor, Op. 18.

See the end of the chapter for more notes

May 2013

Harry is on the floor mostly because he’s not confident his knees will work if he tries to
stand. Draco joins him, looking confused but following the tradition robotically. He kneels
close, though, instead of sitting with his back against the opposite wall.

“I had a dream, but I think it’s a memory,” Harry says faintly, staring past Draco.

He sinks lower on his heels. “Tell me.”

And so, for once, Harry recounts a point in their marriage to Draco. He closes his eyes to try
to bring the image back. “It was early in the morning… You woke me up looking like a nutter
and took me to the piano because you said there was a cricket in there. And… the coffee table
was wood, not glass. Your other instruments weren’t hanging.”

“Maybe 2006,” Draco murmurs.

“That’s about it. You made me root around in the piano but you also wouldn’t stop hovering
and telling me to be careful. It turns out you’ve always been exasperating. Is it real?”

“I remember a cricket in the piano once. Either it’s a very specific dream or a memory.”

Harry reaches out and grasps his wrist. “That’s amazing then! Act excited!” He squeezes
Draco’s arm provokingly, but his face stays even.

“I’d prefer not to.”

“You’d prefer not to get excited? To be happy? What, it’s hope that kills you? Still?”

Draco shrugs.

“Blimey, that’s getting old, you know.” Harry lets go and leans back, feeling like the wind’s
left his sails. A memory. A real memory. He scoffs and stands, leaving Draco on the floor.
“Go back to bed, then.”
November 2002

There was nothing conventional about the timing of Harry and Draco’s relationship. Years as
foes, then years of friendship, then an entire year of dating before they’d dared to say ‘I love
you’ out loud. So maybe there was nothing too surprising about the fact that by November,
Draco couldn’t think of a reason not to marry him.

They’d been teased about it at Ron and Hermione’s wedding—the fact that they’d be next.
They’d laughed it off, finding it cause for neither an intense discussion nor a disavowal. He’d
like to say something extravagant made him consider it again months later, but it was terribly
simple.

Harry was in the kitchen, which was surprising considering it was ten at night. Draco had
spent a long day with donors for the London Wizards’ Orchestra, appeasing them and
laughing tightly at their jokes with his fellow musicians, eating strange boastful foods
procured by the director cooked with a tenth the heart Harry managed. He felt empty, pulled
up all day only by the puppet strings reminding him to do the song and dance and appreciate
that his righting reputation had even gained him an invite.

“Oi, piano man,” he requested in greeting, though it made no sense. Harry turned with a grin.
He seemed unaware that there was broom polish smeared on the back of his neck and a solid
dusting of wood shavings down the entire back of his jumper like he’d laid down on the
workshop floor. “When did you get home? Have you even bathed?”

“No. I was getting to it.” Harry fixed him with an uncompromising glare. “But you sounded
tired in your owl.”

“How do you sound tired over owl?”

Draco set the paper bags in his hand on the kitchen table and walked around it to Harry,
lifting his chin with a still-cold hand from his walk outside to kiss him.

“‘Posh wankers with more front than Brighton haven’t considered my boyfriend’s stunning
dinners. Consider me held hostage past 21:00’,” Harry leaned over the note, which had been
left by the fridge. “‘I will die in this concert hall conference room, but rest assured my last
thought will be you.’ Yeah, dunno how I got tired from that.”

Draco huffed. “I padded it with romance.” He gestured to the bags. “I presumed you would
have eaten, so I brought takeaway.”

“Oh,” said Harry, sounding a mix of dejected and curious. “I have eaten. But I knew you’d
come home knackered and starved, and I’d worked late with a quick meal with Aldona, so I
reckoned I’d spend my time down here rather than sit around in a too-quiet house only to
hear you gripe about whatever they fed you.”

“You worked late, then came down to make me dinner?”

Harry shrugged.
“I don’t deserve you.”

He rolled his eyes. “Save it. What did you get for dinner?”

“Delhi Kitchen.”

Harry’s hand holding a spatula sunk in gloom. Enviously. But Draco watched him force a
bright smile. Surely, he knew that Draco knew him better than to believe that poor attempt at
selflessness. It was a kind gesture, no matter.

“Perfect for a long day,” he said. “I’ll just put this away for tomorrow, yeah?”

“You want to put your Delhi Kitchen in there for tomorrow, too?”

“You brought me Delhi Kitchen?” Harry gasped, reaching into the bags. “You said you
thought I’d eaten!”

Draco sat and smiled, smug. “Yes, but I also presumed you could eat again.”

This time Harry bent over to kiss him, first on his lips, then his nose. “I don’t deserve you,
either.”

Draco pulled his container over and set the paper bag on the floor. “Maybe we should spend
the rest of our lives not deserving each other,” he said, surprising even himself.

Harry looked at him with deep interest. “I thought that was the plan already.”

“I mean, officially. Legally.”

Though he attempted to react casually, Draco knew Harry too well to miss the excitement
beneath the surface as he turned his attention back to the takeaway. “I’d be interested,” he
said, voice a wee bit too high. He shrugged and took a bite of his second dinner.

Here, there was a dilemma though: Draco’s parents had a strangely strong marriage, though it
shouldn’t be considered an example to follow. And while their relationship had led to
unhealthy expectations for each other and their son, he’d seen their loyalty, the pragmatism of
their marriage as one of a constantly united front. Their engagement had been curtly
traditional; a question asked of a father, a formal dinner, a proposition to join their families
with no ring present. That would be procured later, from an array of two bloodlines’ of
heirlooms. The most romantic thing about them had been that they’d both fallen for someone
their parents would have happily arranged them with, anyway. Draco wished to be much of
what his parents were not, but he was a product of their creation, and it simply didn’t feel
natural to go ring shopping.

But then there was Harry to consider. Harry who he truly wished to please until death, who
he needed to make happy like a pang of hunger in his stomach. He could imagine his smile,
at being presented a ring. He did fancy an emotional conversation, a gesture of goodwill as
simple as having dinner ready or as large as gifting Draco an alchemy lab. That’s a man
who’d like a ring.
Between Harry’s preferences and his own, Harry would always win out. He bought a ring. It
was nothing much, simple and symbolic. He kept it in his pocket, waiting for the right
moment. And distantly, he spent a few weeks wondering whether Harry saw a change in him,
though he felt unchanged himself. They both had a lifetime of plans together; he was just
finally doing something about it.

They’d been living off takeaway and leftovers for a long week when he lost his patience. The
holidays approaching meant a flurry of broom orders, requested repairs, and a busy shop for
Harry. It meant enough performances of Pletnev’s Nutcracker concert suite for Draco that
he’d begun to dream of sugarplum fairies and had to bend over backwards not to fully cancel
any lessons. Harry had begun to hum the Russian Trepak the other day and Draco had
snapped to shut up like it had caused a visceral reaction in his body. The poor man had no
choice but to hear the concert as tirelessly as Draco practised it, of course it had lasered into
his brain, but he couldn’t handle an extra second of the song that had given him more grief
than just about any other.

“I’m going to cook tonight,” Harry said early that day in bed.

Draco had complained of chill through the window, but somehow his eternal flame of a
paramour was spending November above the duvet with the window cracked, so he’d
compromised by flattening his shirtless body on Draco’s jumper and joggers. The promise of
a good meal gave him almost as much thrill as these last few minutes before their alarms
where he could lay with a hand on Harry before the world kicked back up outside their door.

Gentlemanly, he clicked his tongue in disagreement. “You’ve been so busy, I’ll cook.”

Harry gave an insultingly loud snort into his ear. “Cooking chicken straight from frozen,” he
said with a kiss at the hinge of his jaw. “Wet vegetables in the oven… Salad in an inch of
water…”

“Alright, understood. No need to rake me over the coals. You could teach me, though, you
know.”

Harry abandoned his lifeless position to sit up a little and kiss Draco seriously, a bit too
heated for five to eight. He raised his arms and let them rest far enough back on Harry’s hips
to get a playful look.

“If you can make yourself dinner,” he said, “you won’t need me.”

Draco rolled his eyes dramatically, finding his lips again. The morning breath, at least, was
mutual. “You don’t need to keep me from learning life skills to want you around,” he said
when they parted. “I could be a professional chef and I’d fake incompetence to eat your
food.”

“I’ll make it a special dinner,” said Harry.

“What’s the occasion?”

“Do we need one?”

No, but Draco thought he could make it one. The timing felt right. If they could be this happy
at their busiest, they were meant to work. It should have come with nerves, the actual
proposal being set in motion, but it didn’t. He only felt a rush of excitement.

“You’re gorgeous, you know that?” he found himself saying. “Your eyes, your smile. You
have perfect eyelashes, have I told you?”

Harry smiled with a sigh, like it was tiring to be complimented. “You’ve told me.”

“Did you know I love your hands?” He took one from its place on the bed by his shoulder
and kissed each knuckle. He vaguely remembered Harry’s hands the year they’d met, before
the workshop had overtaken the shop itself in sales. They were tough, now, always with some
scratches or pockmarked skin. Harry was regarding him like he’d lost the plot.

“Er, you’ve got the star hands of the family wrong,” he said.

“No, I love yours. They’ve got character. I’ve told you, surely?”

“Must’ve.” He looked a bit flushed, and when he leaned back down like sitting up could only
test gravity for so long, the kiss deepened, his tongue passing Draco’s lips. It drew a whimper
Draco wished it hadn’t; the alarm was going to go off any moment now.

“Perfect, perfect man,” he said, feeling giddy.

“Careful,” said Harry. “Wouldn’t want your mates to hear about how kind you are in private.”

“You wouldn’t ruin my standing like that.”

“Teddy already does. ‘Uncle Draco kisses me goodnight… Uncle Draco gives me sweets but
it’s a secret…’”

“What a little informer.”

Harry kissed the conversation to a pause. He moved against Draco, too, in a brilliant
impression of someone who doesn’t need to get up soon and speak to customers and
conductors and—

“Mm—Harry, Harry—the alarm, there’s no time to—”

Harry didn’t pull back at all. “I turned it off,” he said in quick breaths. “Like, ten minutes
ago.”

“What?” Draco froze.

He sat back entirely, sniffing, annoyed in all his features to need to explain further. “You
don’t have anywhere to be yet, and me neither. There’s no use in getting up early.”

“Breakfast? Coffee? Relaxing with the morning paper?”

“Hair care? Steaming some white shirt for thirty minutes and prattling on about starch?”
Too much snark. He had his limits. Quickly, he wrested Harry from his position above him,
easy only because Harry let it be so. He grinned up at Draco.

“I stay because of your cooking,” Draco muttered in his ear, affecting more annoyance than
he felt. They both knew that game. “But also because you’re so impudent when you want to
be. Keeps me in line.” He moved his lips to Harry’s clavicle, who tilted his head back
hospitably. “And it’s rude of you, I think, to forget all the other reasons I keep you around.”
He sat back on his heels, kissed lower, just over Harry’s heart, between his ribs, his belly
button. Harry was fidgeting. “Might I remind you?”

“Don’t ask stupid questions,” Harry sighed.

*****

They ate in the back garden that night. Harry had commented on the surprisingly nice
weather, and Draco had taken it upon himself to hover fairy lights—Muggle ones—around
the table to light the way. It was a delightful dinner, though not extraordinary enough for
Harry to suspect anything abnormal. A quiet evening together was something they tried to do
once in a blue moon; a night where they slowed down and enjoyed each other.

“Well, I think this has been a top tier date night,” Harry said as they finished the clafoutis
he’d made—Draco’s favourite of his mum’s baking.

Draco dropped his jaw. “This was a date?”

“Oh, you’re sidesplitting.” Harry pointed behind his back. “Should I leave and come back?”

“Don’t you dare leave.” Draco said it too seriously for the banter, his eyes piercing with deep
focus into Harry’s. He watched him swallow and sit straighter. “But do you fancy walking by
the garden?”

Harry grinned. “You want to take a turn about the room?”

“You have spent too much time with me.”

Draco offered his arm and kept his distance from the wiggentree, as he always did now.
Bowtruckles held grudges. Instead, he stopped a couple paces away from it, Harry in between
looking wholly confused, like they were about to do some strange nighttime harvest.

“I’ve been thinking about when you planted that tree, and the garden,” Draco said as casually
as possible, keeping one of Harry’s hands in his own. He traded it back and forth in his hands
restlessly, thumbing his palm, then the flat back of his hand. “How you spoke of beautiful
things taking work, and being purposeful with them so they can grow. And now I can look
back and see how much we’ve grown, just as quietly, incrementally. I look at that tree and I
remember the sapling and think ‘When did it grow so tall?’ And I look at Teddy and think the
same. And I look at you and I and think the same, because it’s taken years but it’s grown
strong and steady. Unwavering.”
He held Harry’s eyes the whole time, watching them slowly grow in the continued
lengthiness of the speech.

“You said you’d be a goner back in Saltburn, and you said it with a confidence I could only
imagine, but… I think I caught up rather well.” A corner of Harry’s mouth tilted up. “I love
you, Harry. So much it hurts. You’ve made me the best version of myself, or rather helped me
find the interest in making myself a better person. I won’t trouble you with the Latin, but
Ovid said ‘If you want to be loved, be lovable’ and Seneca said ‘If you want to be loved,
love’. You’ve taught me both. I can only hope I’ve provided a fraction of that adoration in
response. I’m not sure if we’re kneeling people—”

“We are,” Harry said quickly, patting his hand.

Draco laughed, but he fished in his pocket, found the gold band Harry now looked
unsurprised to see, and dropped a knee, offering it. “Would you let me be your husband?" he
asked, almost breathless.

“D’you want to see something?” Harry asked instead of accepting it, which fleetingly
plunged Draco’s heart into arctic waters. But then he put a hand in the pocket of his jeans and
pulled out a silver ring of his own. He dropped to both his knees to meet Draco eye to eye,
then held it between them.

“You’re not serious,” Draco said, ogling it.

“You stole my proposal, you little thief,” Harry said, eyes narrowed but smiling.

“I did no such thing!”

“I cooked your favourite foods! I asked you to keep your evening free! I chose the back
garden instead of the kitchen…”

Draco grimaced—an admission of guilt. “It’s your fault for making the evening seem perfect
for one.” Harry just laughed, so he squinted at the ring again. “I thought it would be gold.”

“Gold?”

“You asked ages ago about procuring gold for a personal project. And then I never heard of it
again, so…”

Harry chuckled and held Draco’s face between his hands. He could feel the cold of the ring
between his fingers against his cheek as Harry leaned in and kissed him. He returned it
wholeheartedly, eager and grateful. Harry’s lips parted and he tasted like fruit, like clafoutis,
like home.

“That gold’s for a rainy day,” he said, slipping the ring onto Draco’s hand. For a beautifully
thoughtful moment, he tilted his head and regarded it, then looked up with that single-
dimpled grin. “I guess we both know we’d say yes.”

Draco kissed him again, feeling strangely light, though he’d had no real concerns. To get it
out at all felt like an accomplishment. “How could it have been anything but?”
June 2013

There’s sand beneath Harry’s feet, a tide coming closer and fast, and all he can think of is the
summer that the Dursleys brought him along to Brighton and Dudley and his friends threw
rocks at him on the coastline. He’d wished for a sandy beach then. But he’s sure they
would’ve found a way to ruin him anew. Time moves too slow when you’re at the whim of
horrible children and too fast when you’re trying to piece your own life back together.

“What are you thinking about?” Draco asks behind him, appearing from higher ground.

“Dudley.”

He makes a noise of appalled surprise, lowering onto the beach beside Harry.

“Just—on a trip to Brighton…”

“The one-way rock fight,” Draco nods. “Oh, sorry, you want to tell your own stories. I—”

“It’s fine, Draco, really.” He digs his heels in deeper. They’re not usually in Scotland this
time of year. The wind has a cold lick to it. “I was being a prick when I said that.”

Draco’s attention in his periphery is clear, but he doesn’t turn his head.

“You were handling a lot.”

“Yeah, well,” Harry mumbles.

The family trip isn’t until August—it’s always August. But Draco had spent the last few
weeks being his most amenable self, not quite optimistic, but warm with Harry in some
perfected quality that sat between friend and ex-lover, then used his birthday as leverage to
get Harry to agree to come out even earlier than their friends were planning to. The goal was
to jog his memory geographically, a method popular with Anastasia and their Muggle and
wizarding memory books alike. So far, though, nothing.

There’s a nice breeze on the water, the cry of seagulls. Harry lifts his face to the air and
closes his eyes. With a little focus, he can make the shoreline feel timeless, pick any of the
many summers he’s spent in this spot, and pretend he’s there again.

“What do you do when we all come up?” he asks.

Draco pauses. “Read,” he says. “Write. Watch you swim or fly.”

“Mm.” What’ll you do this summer, then? he wonders. Where will you sleep?

“You’ve made me fall for summer. I used to hate it. The heat. All that time at the Manor, back
at the bottom of the food chain.”
“I hated summer, too,” says Harry, looking over at him. He thinks Draco’s forehead and
cheeks are starting to look a little too pink. He almost reaches out to touch, to see if it’s
tender from the sun or just a flush, but Draco speaks before he even has to question the
thought.

“Had a pretty good summer the first time we came here.” He smiles wide, staring out at the
horizon.

Harry remembers what he, at least, considers to be all of it—Teddy cackling with his first
steps on a beach, group-effort dinners, cold salty water, and late-night games of exploding
snap.

“Yeah,” he says. “Good summer.”

Draco snaps his head over, eyes softening. “You still think so?”

“Sure. It’s nice that we have this every year, you know? And thinking back on how young we
all were… We’ve all changed, but we come to this place that remains the same. I like that we
started that tradition.”

“I’m finding it strange, right now,” Draco admits. “That it’s the same. Like when someone
close to you dies, but you go to the supermarket and everyone’s doing their weekly shop.
Natura non constristatur.”

“Something about nature?” Harry guesses.

“’Nature is not saddened’. The ocean doesn’t care. That we’ve fallen apart.”

He swallows, feeling the shadow of gloom approaching. “We’ve, er, got a few hours of
daylight left. We could go flying?”

Draco exhales forcefully, an almost laugh, if it wasn’t for the clear exasperation. He cocks a
brow. “No, Harry.”

“There are spells to fix bones! What’s the point of modern miracles if you don’t give them an
outlet?”

“Yes, but they can affect movement,” he sighs, like they’ve had this conversation a thousand
times over, and maybe they have. “They can limit mobility for a while. And if you do them
wrong enough, you might temporarily lose all the bones in your arm, but I wouldn’t know
what that felt like. Maybe you can refresh my memory.” Harry shudders, remembering the
feeling. “Why risk it?”

“Still, that’s mental.”

Draco shrugs.

“This is me extending the olive branch. Brooms are my olive branch, come on.”

“Sorry.”
Harry huffs. “I won’t force you. I just can’t believe we spent eleven years together and I
never got you on a broom.”

“You said it yourself—you never force me. Too indulgent.”

“Well, I’m not going to force you. What about cooking, do I ever cook with you?”

“No.”

Harry drops his chin in annoyance. “Not even a knife and a cutting board and some
instructions?”

Draco shakes his head.

Too indulgent, Harry thinks. He’s not surprised, really. He had always been lenient with his
partners, caring too much to play stubborn and forceful.

Draco looks back out at the water, fixing it with a contemplative, statuesque look. Harry
wonders what he’s thinking. It would be helpful to know every thought inside of him, like
feeling lost in a large forest and then being handed a detailed map of the trails and beaten
paths.

The breeze, still present, pushes the hair away from Draco’s face. Nature doesn’t care—
Draco was right—that he works so tirelessly to curtain his expressions from Harry with the
longer locks at his temple. When his stoic companion finally acknowledges his staring and
turns to face him, it’s more surprising than it should be. He sucks a breath in, his lips
lingering parted, feeling caught out and unsure why. But then Draco’s face brightens
incrementally from its sullen resting position—just a hair, only visible because they’re so
close.

He turns his head back away from Harry, letting them return to having their own moments on
the beach, giving up the shared one.

The tide’s coming in fast, creeping close, trying to get Harry’s feet wet, though he feels like it
just went out. He’s not ready to make the choice to stand and move, but it’s so much bigger
than him—this beach, this shoreline and the moon that commands it—and it’s not saddened
to push him before he’s ready. It’ll come back just like it went out, on its own time.

He touches Draco’s elbow. “I have an idea.”

*****

“Salmon en papillote,” Harry says. He can’t see a thing. Draco’s scarf is tied over his eyes
and just over his nose, surrounding him in his scent like he’s pressed his face into the collar
of one of his jumpers.

“Salmon in paper?”

Draco’s voice is right beside him, mixed with the rustle of the produce and the sound of paper
unwrapping.
“Precisely.”

“And you think… this is a good exercise in communication? Handing me a knife and
blindfolding yourself?”

“We did it in primary school—not-not cooking, but an obstacle course. It’s fun!”

“Fun,” Draco grumbles.

“You’ve taught me to play the piano twice now, but I’ve never gotten you on a broom or
cooked with you.” He reaches an arm out to his side and smacks into Draco’s, finding him
closer than he thought. “Sorry,” he says, gripping his upper arm for a moment in apology,
then pulls his hands into his lap. “Look, if I’m stepping outside my comfort zone, it would be
supportive of you to do the same.”

Draco sighs, but then the stool squeaks and Harry senses his absence, just before he hears the
fridge door open and shut.

“What first?”

Harry grins. “Oven to 200.” He listens for the click and white noise of the fan. “Then the
parchment paper. Cut two large ovals for each of the salmon fillets.”

“How large?”

“Large enough to fold the parchment over the salmon like an empanada.”

Draco hums in response and gets to work, while Harry starts to realise how boring it’s going
to be to sit diligently and wait till he needs further instruction. “Can you turn on the radio?”

“I just got fish on my hands,” Draco says.

“You’re a wizard, aren’t you? Why’d you get fish on your hands, anyway? Did I tell you to
touch the fish?”

There’s a pause and then the radio plays low from the other side of the kitchen. He pictures
Draco waving his hand and smiles at the oldies wizarding station that fills the room, the kind
of music Mrs Weasley hums while bustling around the kitchen.

“What do I do with the parchment?”

“Just set it aside. Slice the fennel and the courgette thinly.”

Harry listens to the sound of the knife hitting the cutting board repeatedly. He leans back in
the chair, fingers tapping to the music. He could get used to the lack of responsibility in
sitting and watching others cook, but he knows why he hasn’t before—it’s a hobby that just
happens to also be a necessity for human life. He enjoys it too much to step aside. But
cooking with someone else could be agreeable.

“Harry? What next?”

He lifts his head as if there’s something to see. “Brilliant, so put half the courgettes on half of
each parchment, it’s fine if the circles overlap, and then—”

“Was I not supposed to cut them lengthwise?”

Harry’s mouth opens but no sound comes out.

“I was supposed to cut the courgettes into disks?”

“Yes, Draco, bloody hell, you’ve at least eaten food before, right? What are you saying they
look like, ribbons? Why would you cut it—No, sorry, that’s not how I teach. I shouldn’t…
You’re doing great. And it’ll taste the same either way. It’s a creative choice. Artistic—”

“I was having a laugh,” Draco says, sounding much closer, like he’s leaning across the
counter. Then Harry feels a hand cover his, cold and clammy, which confirms as much. “But
nice to see how much you walk back any response to my stupidity.”

Harry pulls a face, hopes Draco catches it, then returns to calmly describing in detail how he
should lay out the ingredients and the salmon, how to season it, to wrap the parchment into a
pocket. To his credit, Draco only needs the instructions once, and they fall into silence as he
prepares the dinner for the oven.

There’s nothing inherently risky about the activity. It’s pleasant and comfortable between
them. But Harry can’t shake the feeling that he’s a cat showing his underbelly in this, giving
himself up completely to Draco’s whim. He hadn’t seen it coming when he touched his hand,
and he’d be equally unprepared if Draco suddenly decided to lean in and touch him again, he
considers with a sudden breath. It sends something that feels like nervousness rolling through
his gut.

The oven opens and closes, a timer beeps, set for the time Harry had ordered, and then all
movement stops.

“You’re looking at me,” Harry says. He can sense it.

“I am not,” Draco replies, and a drawer opens and shuts.

“You are! I can tell! Foley effects aren’t going to change my mind. And now you’re smiling.”
He doesn’t know why he says it, just that he knows it to be true.

There’s a beat. “You don’t have to keep blindfolded, supper’s in the oven.”

Harry had been speaking with lightness, but Draco’s response is blunt. His face falls,
surprised by the change of tone.

“Oh. Er, sure, but you’re in charge of checking when it’s done,” he says, pulling the scarf off
and blinking in the light. Draco’s moving the dirty cutting board and the rubbish by the sink,
looking perfectly normal and impassive.

“I can manage that,” he says.

“Do you know what to look for?”

He sweeps all the scraps into the bin and pulls glasses from the cupboard. “I may not have a
lot of experience preparing dinner, but I’ve had plenty in knowing when to send food back.”

“Fair enough.” He smiles tightly, briefly.

Somewhere in the same part of Harry that knew he was smiling, he senses the sadness and
steps closer, around the bar to lean beside the sink. “Are you alright?” he asks softly.

“Fine. Fine.” But his grip on the counter is tight, his gaze on the faucet steadfast.

“Draco, we’re solidly friends by now. You can tell me anything, you know that.”

“I can’t though,” Draco snaps. Harry blinks up in surprise. “I can’t tell you everything.”

Harry takes a deep breath. “Okay,” he whispers.

He disappears to the backroom after that, unfollowed. Until the timer goes, he sits at the
piano, which he recognises with a moment of strange clarity has been touched by Draco
much more than he feels it has. He practises scales, then rehearses what he can remember of
the simple songs he’d been assigned.

And then, when he’s called back, Draco’s taken the fish out in perfect time, and Harry
compliments him on it quietly as he sets his napkin in his lap, unable to read the mood of the
room.

“Thank you, though you’re the head chef, really,” he says pleasantly, if not a little more
reserved than usual. “Your playing’s coming along nicely, anyway. If you could just stop
overusing the sustain pedal to cover your mistakes.”

Harry smiles wryly into his next bite. “You should know better than to offer critique outside
of lessons. Bad business plan.”

“How much do you charge above the cost of materials for those beautiful brooms?” He raises
an eyebrow.

When Harry narrows his eyes and takes a large bite, he turns smug.

*****

Draco had been sitting at the piano for an unknown length of time when Harry woke up the
next morning, and he stayed there through his breakfast, through his walk into town to find a
birthday gift, and still writes feverishly into a notebook propped on the piano stand when he
returns with lunch.

He knocks on the cracked door and holds up a paper bag. “Hungry? I brought sandwiches.”

“Fancy another walk?” Draco asks in response. “I have a spot I want to take you.”
Harry shrugs in agreement. It turns out to be a brief walk, anyway, to the short fishing dock
near the property. It’s bright out again, the sun high, and by the time they reach it, Harry is
already staring a bit longingly into the water.

“Here,” Draco sighs, stepping onto the sun-bleached slats of wood. Harry sits beside him on
the edge. Their feet dangle six feet over the water. He watches his trainers over the blue as he
eats, sparing glances to his left on occasion. For half a sandwich’s worth of time, they don’t
say much at all, until Draco points out a sailboat in the distance and it somehow opens the
floodgates. Then they chat about everything, friends, Teddy, work. It’s as easy as it’s ever
been.

“Why here?” Harry finally ventures on his second-to-last bite.

Draco covers his mouth full of food graciously. “Do you remember this area?”

“It’s… the pier near our place. We come out here at least once each trip.” He glances over
and sees instantly that it wasn’t the proper answer.

“Nothing more specific?”

He shakes his head. “No. I’m sorry.”

Draco shrugs, like it’s okay, though he looks especially put off. Harry thinks that for someone
who declares himself unhopeful, it’s awfully telling that he’s brought him all the way out here
days early on the off chance a patch of sand or water reminds him that he was once in love.

He reaches out and settles a palm between Draco’s shoulder blades, patting sympathetically
before putting his hands back in his lap. He might have imagined that Draco leaned back into
it a hair.

“Whatever you want me to remember on a dock, it can’t be that important. Did we catch a
big fish? A shark? Giant squid?”

Draco cracks a smile.

“I think you wanted this to be a weekend of reminiscence, and I’ve failed at that and turned it
into a weekend of new activities. New memories.” He swings his feet as he talks, squinting at
Draco’s face in the sun’s reappearance behind clouds. The pink on his cheeks from yesterday
had turned out to be less than temporary. “Does that make you cross?”

“I think you lose sight of the big picture, sometimes,” Draco says, squinting back.

“What’s that?”

“One of the greatest tragedies of your Obliviation was that I felt like I was losing our future.
But all this trying new things, getting me to do the same, you’ve given me that anyway, even
if it’s a different future than I’d imagined. I meant it when I said I’d rather have any version
of you over none.”
Harry meets his lovingly warm gaze as nicely as he can. “You don’t want your husband
back?”

“I always want my husband back.”

“But you’ll have me.”

“You’re amazing in your own right,” he says, knocking Harry’s shoulder. “You’ve never got
me cooking before. You surprise me in ways you never used to—your studiousness with the
Muggle science books, the care you’ve invested in your friendships, going to therapy. It’s not
whether I’ll have you. You’re not a replacement, you’re just… wonderful.”

Harry will blame his blush on the sunshine. He looks down at the wooden planks, and the
waves rolling slow in the gap between them. He doesn’t think anything of the coast, but he’d
spent a long time watching Draco watch the water come and go. He’d felt something, and he
feels it again now—not a grand swoop in his heart, but it’s a little prickle of something
rearranging in there. Or maybe arranging itself back to where it had once been.

“That’s enough complimenting, then,” Draco adds when Harry says nothing. “It’ll all go to
your head.”

He snaps back to himself. “Things don’t go to my head,” he argues reflexively. “They go to

your head. Historically.”

“Things ‘going to my head’ is called learning, you flying elephant. That’s the kind of ‘going
to my head’ I entertain. Good music goes to my head. New memories go to my head.”

Harry leans closer, smirking. “You want to make new memories? We can make new
memories.”

“I can’t tell if that was a threat or not.”

“Do you have anything important in your pockets?”

“What a strange question. Do I—no, my pockets are empty. Why are you—wha-AGH!”

Harry had placed both his hands flat on Draco’s back and pushed with a laugh, so that the last
sound he makes before he splashes into the cold ocean is a startled yelp. He leans forward
over the dock with a bright grin, just in time to see Draco’s head bob up looking furious. He
spares a splashing arm to sweep darkened blond hair out of his eyes, only to sink lower in the
water and have to do it all again.

“YOU ARSEHOLE!” he shouts.

“You earned it!” Harry yells back.

“Are you trying to drown me?!”

He snorts. “Dramatic!”
“I can’t swim!” Draco calls up, before almost dipping completely under again, and Harry’s
face pales instantly. It’s not a joke, when he remembers Draco saying that he’d never much
come in the water with them, when he realises just how much splashing has already been
employed just to keep him above water enough to yell at Harry.

“Jesus fucking…” He kicks off his shoes and jumps off the pier without thinking, gasping
internally as the chill hits.

When he breaches the surface, the top of Draco’s hair had just gone under and he bobs back
up after a single frantic moment of Harry turning in circles. With a few strokes, he’s at his
side, catching the pissed off eyes he deserves, wrapping his arms tight around Draco’s waist
and pulling him close. The swim to shore is awkward; Draco’s trying to do his part at moving
the water under them, with one arm around Harry’s neck, while Harry kicks and swims with
the arm he doesn’t have tightly around the other side of Draco’s ribs.

Neither of them lets go when they reach wading depths, leaning into each other as they
stumble up the foamy white edge of the water onto solid land. Draco stops and drops his
hands to his knees, taking deep breaths.

“Are you okay?” Harry drops a hand on his wet back, folding over a bit himself. “Oh my
god, I’m so sorry, I… I thought you could… Jesus.”

“Just something… you hadn’t… learned,” he replied between exhales. “I would’ve made it to
shore.”

“Keep your head above water if you want me to believe that.”

Harry takes his hand back when Draco straightens up. He’d worn some of the most casual
attire he’d had seen him in yet—grey trousers and an airy button-down that now cling tight to
his frame. His hair is sodden and stuck flat down his face and neck. He catches Harry’s gaze,
water droplets still trickling down his nose, and in the absurdity of the moment, their
seriousness slips into inappropriate smiles.

“Bloody hell! They’re trying to kill each other!”

Ron is staring at them with a hand shielding his eyes, looking either dumfounded or amused.
Behind him is Hermione, plus Blaise, Pansy, Luna, and Neville. All with various looks of
astonishment on their faces to find them drenched and dripping in the sand.

“We’re not!” Harry calls, walking closer. “Draco ended up in the water, I jumped in, too.”

“’Ended up’ is quite the neutral way to say pushed.” Draco stops next to him, across from
their friends, but his voice is more teasing than bitter, thankfully.

Hermione’s eyes widen. “Harry!”

“I didn’t know!”

“He didn’t,” Draco says, his hand briefly on Harry’s shoulder again. It’s a fleeting,
comforting touch, doing its part to slowly soften the mortification he’s feeling.
 They walk back up to the house, all eight of them. Neville offers the corner of his shirt to dry
Harry’s glasses, while Pansy loudly asks after Draco with her eyes set on Harry, anything but
subtle in her concern.

“The hits just keep coming, eh, mate? Happy birthday, by the way,” Blaise grins, slapping
Draco on the back. “I can see your nipples through your shirt.”

Chapter End Notes

This is where I rather delicately inform anyone reading this in real-time that I will be
travelling without a computer for two days... Who knows what may come, but rest
assured there will certainly be an update on Wednesday if not sooner. Is it better or
worse if I tease that it features the Manor in 2002, but I don't even find that the most
exciting part of the chapter?

Thanks so much for the continued enthusiasm, I'm looking forward to responding to
some comments at least in my upcoming down time!

Feel free to leave some words below in the comments, or find me at

writandromance.tumblr.com.
 String Quartet in G Minor
Chapter Notes

Wow wow, I missed uploading! I'll sum my week up in three words and hope they
convey multitudes: travel; illness; dissertation. On top of it, the last thing I wanted to do
was rush this chapter! I hope it's worth the wait, we love growth around here.

The chapter title refers to the first movement of Edvard Grieg's string quartet in G
minor, Op. 27.

See the end of the chapter for more notes

December 2002

Draco couldn’t take his eyes off Harry—the way he listened so earnestly as Blaise explained
the approximate number of bites a finger sandwich should take to consume, as if it mattered
in a grander scheme of life. Somewhere behind those attentive green eyes, he must have been
finding it all ridiculous. He acted the opposite.

They were somewhere central, afternoon tea at a spot Blaise took clients that needed to be
seduced with class before they considered his expertise. “Two is appropriate but
questionable. Three is ideal,” he was saying while Harry nodded, brows furrowed
thoughtfully.

Draco knew Harry’s face in the dark, could read every twitch, noticed when an unexpected
emotion flashed across his eyes, but on occasion he once again saw this beautiful stranger. So
he was staring, unhelpfully, at this handsome man as if for the first time and thinking how if
they saw each other at a social gathering having never met, he’d never have the courage to
introduce himself. Harry would have to trip and fall at his feet again or they’d never plan a
marriage.

The afternoon was a dress rehearsal, and Harry had pulled out all the stops; he’d pressed his
slacks with the centre lines like Draco did, paired the dark trousers with a button-up that
sloped perfectly at the shoulder, fell beautifully past the wrist, and it all, when painted with
his charm and easy smile, made him look effortlessly stunning.

The fact that this was all in preparation to meet his mother, unfortunately, staled his beauty,
forcing it to fight with the intense anxiety that had been welling up under Draco’s skin for
days.

It was kind of Harry to agree to go to the Manor for Christmas Day at all, but he seemed
intent, too, to do the impossible and make a smashing first impression, hence the way his
hand appeared to twitch throughout their etiquette lesson as though he was always one more
baffling rule from taking physical notes.

Last year, they’d split paths—Harry to the Burrow and Draco to the Manor. Their relationship
had been so new. The pang of jealousy he’d felt knowing the trio plus Teddy would all be
having a lovely, warm week while he and his mother echoed footsteps around their large
home pretending it was equally full of love wasn’t. He’d felt something strange and novel,
however, as his mother snapped her fingers and delivered impersonal gifts to him via house
elf, like he was expected elsewhere, or something was missing.

“It felt wrong, for you to be so far away,” Harry had said into the Burrow fireplace that night
when Draco came calling. He’d found himself eye to eye in the embers with George, who
lifted an eyebrow in surprise and walked away without a word, returning a minute later
dragging a confused Harry by the arm. He never took for granted the unique smile Harry
turned on just for him.

Then it had clicked, of course—why he’d felt even less whole than he usually felt sitting
across from his mother. But even then, even when he imagined them spending Christmas as a
couple, now as an engaged one, it had been him joining his friends, not Harry entering the
lion’s den.

Harry stirred his tea enthusiastically, and, all of this causing a bit of a storm for his psyche,
Draco reached out a hand without thinking to close over his and stop the loud clinking in its
tracks.

“This isn’t the bloody children’s orchestra, is it?” he said, interrupting, his voice harder than
necessary.

Blaise gave him a reproachful look, but Harry remained unperturbed. “How d’you want me
to do it?” he asked too patiently.

Draco blinked in surprise. “F-fold it. The sugar in. Slowly.” He stirred his tea, catching
Harry’s careful observance and then mirrored action. “Thank you,” he added. “You’re being
quite… acquiescent.”

“I find this fully absurd.” Harry took a bite, which he shouldn’t have mid-conversation, but
he covered his mouth at least as he continued. “But I love you. So here we are. Your mum’s
really going to care?”

“Yes,” said Blaise and Draco.

He raised his brows with a look that read fair enough. He’d experienced Narcissa. And he’d
heard stories by then (like the repercussions of Draco chasing the peacocks in new slacks at
seven just before some of his father’s scarier colleagues came for dinner; the repercussions of
goading Harry so vocally in second year when his father’s only words before getting on the
train had been to keep his head down) that were detailed enough for him to take their word
that a clinking teaspoon was dire.

“What exactly is making you nervous?” He sets his hands in his lap. “Is it me? Because we
can keep practising, we have four more days.”

“No, you’re…”

Harry’s eyes were wide, his expression so genuine, like he’d break into Gringotts if that’s
what Draco thought would make him feel better.

Draco glanced at Blaise, who picked at his food with a neutral, unobtrusive look. “You’re a
fast learner,” he finished. “I’m not nervous about you.”

“So where’s the anxiousness from?”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” said Draco just as Blaise announced, “He’s his mother’s
recompense for a husband in Azkaban.” His final words hung alone in the air.

There was a pause, both claims sitting between them, where Harry looked from Blaise to
Draco, and Draco from Harry to Blaise, and Blaise stared Draco down without remorse.

“You’re marrying him,” Blaise retorted an unsaid but existent accusation in Draco’s
expression. Quite lawyerly of him, offended to receive any kind of cold shoulder for telling
the truth. “He should know your baggage.”

“He knows my baggage,” Draco replied firmly.

“What’s he mean, you’re the recompense?”

His mum had cried when his father returned to Azkaban, a sort of private grief that only
became visible to him in its warning tremors and aftershocks. He’d watch her face, so stony,
begin to crack into pain during dinner, or catch her with red eyes in the garden when she’d
‘gone for a walk’.

An only child, an heir. A trophy, an expectation. His father was the martyr to his mother—
guiltiness ignored—and anything less than perfection from Draco was a waste of his
sacrifice. At least she approved of his profession, even if she saw it as a practice of keeping
his head down and not a passion. This was something Harry didn’t know well, because while
Draco certainly matched each of his Dursley stories with a Manor one so he felt less alone,
Lucius Malfoy, so far as the narrative would have one believe, existed until roughly 1994.

He shrugged as if it was simple. “My father took all the blame to give us a life, so she feels
we must live it how he’d want. To make him proud.”

“But… You are a son to be proud of.”

Draco gave a hollow laugh. “Er, not lately.”

“Because of me being… me? Or because I’m a-a bloke? Or…”

“Because I moved away, conformed to proper society much more than she’d asked me to…
Because I never talk about Father. And I don’t stop her from thinking he’s more good than
bad but I certainly make it apparent that I don’t concur. And yes, because I’ve inverted
enough to be with you, but she doesn’t hate you. I don’t think.”

“You don’t think,” Harry repeated dubiously.

“I just need this to go smoothly.” Draco spread the blackcurrant jam on his scone with too
much force, pressing it to pieces under the flat edge of his knife.

“Don’t murder your scone then, mate,” said Blaise, perfectly spreading butter on his own. He
waved a hand at their server as she passed. “More of the brut, darling.”

By the time she returned with the champagne, the conversation had transitioned again to
something benign and surmountable; Blaise giving all the houseguest advice Draco didn’t
quite have the experience to offer. The generosity of his coming along was not lost on Draco.

“You’ll need to bring a gift,” he was saying, eyes trained on the ceiling in an effort of detailed
recollection. “She’ll expect one from a good guest—plus, it’s Christmas. Shoes don’t come
off at the door, don’t say ‘hey’ it is always ‘hello’, she’ll offer you a coffee after dinner and
you should accept, certainly don’t say ‘toilet’ over ‘loo’… She won’t extend her hand to you,
but she’ll still expect you to extend yours.”

Harry nodded vaguely at Blaise, seeming overwhelmed.

“We haven’t even talked dinner etiquette,” he added.

Exhaustion crossed Harry’s face at a frequency no amount of love could cover.

June 2013

Saltburn was a Muggle town, but in a small mostly-wizarding village called Barmwich close
by lay Brew or Die, a pub Harry pleasantly remembered frequenting through their years on
holidays up north, but had never experienced with Draco by his side. And never, therefore,
for Draco’s birthday. He watched him hunch a little under Pansy and Blaise’s excitedly
wrapped arms, which appeared around his shoulders the moment they’d apparated into town.
He’s perplexingly uncomfortable in the spotlight compared to the cockiness Harry would
have thought to associate with him in January.

“You’re completely wrong,” Hermione says the moment she cracks into existence on the
pavement. Her eyes are on Draco, her words the tail end of a discussion that had started in the
living room of the cottage waiting on Harry and Ron, who had been listening to Harry’s
retelling of the weekend’s events while he towelled the saltwater dry in his hair and changed.

“Not.” Draco bows under Blaise and Pansy’s arms, coming up beside her. Then he looks
down and notices the cell phone in her hand.

“Yes! Yes, see—” She points to the screen so he can see too, just as Ron, Neville, and Luna
bring up the rear. “That’s why it’s still octopuses in the plural, not octopi. Because it’s Greek
turned Modern English, not Latin.”

“Merlin, ‘Mione,” says Ron, sidling up to Harry. “Breaking out the cell phone that exists to
call your parents in emergencies, just to show Draco up on his birthday.”

“His actual birthday isn’t until Wednesday,” she responds ruthlessly. Draco looks impressed
by her, raising an eyebrow at Ron, and Harry’s hit with his own desire to impress, still
thinking about Draco on the pier saying he surprises him in new ways.

“Still his birthday weekend,” he pipes up.

Draco gives him a quick, neutral nod. Blaise gives him twice the enthusiasm Draco had,
clapping his shoulder as he walks through the pub door the overexcited man is holding open
for them.

“Precisely!” he proclaims. “I take back what I said about you drowning Draco.”

Harry pulls his head back. “What did you say about me drowning Draco?”

“Doesn’t matter, I took it back.”

Rather than seek further clarification, Harry leaves Blaise and the rest to squeeze seven into a
booth made for five to buy the first round from a young woman with a burning red plait
bustling around behind the bar. She sets the last clean glasses in her hand down so fast at his
approach that he winces, sure they’ve broken.

“Hi, I’m Mary,” she says as he leans against the bar.

“Harry,” he says.

“Oh, I know! You’re not usually here this time of year, though.” Her eyes widen suddenly.
“Not that we’re waiting for you. I just—I started here a month ago and they said your lot
stays nearby at the end of summer and sometimes you come into town. And that you come
here. But I didn’t expect you in June.”

Harry opens his mouth to speak.

“Sorry,” she rushes in and glances back at his table, so he does too. Luna’s already
transfigured two paper napkins into thin little fairies, which are fluttering at the tail end of her
wand like they’re waltzing. Pansy’s head is on her shoulder watching, saying something,
while Neville and Draco on the two outer ends of the booth lean in to speak and Blaise, Ron,
and Hermione hold a discussion of their own. Harry watches and feels a fight in his chest,
something between jealousy and comfort, seeing that they’re alright without him.

“I haven’t even asked what you’d like,” Mary’s saying, so Harry proves his years of
friendship with a perfect set of orders, except for Draco, who he has to guess on, but he’s
seen him make gin and tonics on Friday nights, so that’s what he places before him when he
returns. Draco looks up, apparently pleasantly surprised, as if Harry can’t be an observant
person.

“Shove in, Harry!” Luna directs cheerfully.

He circles his eyes around the packed booth. “I’ll pull up a chair, I think.”

“Nonsense!”

And they all wriggle closer with such comical determination that he has no choice but to take
the six inches of space that had opened next to Draco, though only one leg could fit and he
had to use his left foot on the floor outside the booth for balance.

“I heard a rumour about you today, Hermione,” Pansy chirps, stirring the straw around her
cocktail with a sly smirk. Hermione always bites when it comes to chatter around the
newsroom.

But then, “I don’t want to know,” she replies. She shakes her head shrewdly. “I know what
it’s about and I don’t want to think about it.”

Harry frowns and catches Ron’s eye, who lifts his shoulders slightly and then nods his head
to the side—‘later’.

Pansy looks doubly interested but refrains, and conversation meanders between the lot of
them for a while. It’s only after three drinks that Draco’s subjected to a rousing rendition of
‘For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow’, which picks up the rest of the bargoers, flushes his cheeks,
and ends in hollering and applause.

Pansy leans in and kisses his cheek with enough force to send him leaning into Harry, who’s
tipped unsteadily off the edge of the booth by the sudden move.

“Fucking hell, Pansy.” Draco nonchalantly reaches for Harry’s leg and recentres him on the
seat, never looking his way, as distractedly as if he was righting a piece of furniture. “You’re
between ‘Will kiss anyone’ cocktail levels and ‘Can’t keep her hands off her wife’ cocktail
levels. Let’s get you over the hump.”

“I am over the hump,” she drawls in response. “But you’re intimacy-less. A charity case.”

“Only since January. I’ve gone much longer.” And with whatever memory that calls to him,
he seems to realise he’s let his hand stay anchored on Harry’s leg as long as only a pre-
January version of him would. He pulls it away fast, feigning a need to cup his drink and
draw it closer, which Harry sees right through.

He doesn’t mention it, of course, because he can feel his own ears heating. No one at the
table—himself included—is sober and it would be easy to blame not speaking up about
Draco’s lingering hand on that. If he was being candid, though, that wasn’t the source of his
reddening face. It was the knowledge that Draco could so expertly read him that, should he
scrutinise Harry right now, he’d have no good evidence to reject an excuse of drunkenness,
but he’d see the untruth in his expression regardless. Because, in the plainest of terms, it had
been nice.

But Draco seems embarrassed, too, that he’d let himself drift into old habits. He pointedly
doesn’t look at Harry for a while after.

They retreat to Saltburn, laughing louder and acting a bit wilder, Ron and Hermione
especially, no doubt riding the high of leaving their children with Molly. Ron’s the one who
suggests stopping at the off-licence for reinforcements, which are doled out shortly before a
pile of gifts is placed in front of Draco.

Harry can’t stop grinning as he opens them. He wants a snapshot of this moment; Draco
carefully separating wrapping paper without tearing, Blaise goading him for it, all of them sat
close at varying levels—Draco and Blaise on the couch, some of them sat opposite, Harry
and Luna on the floor, Pansy on the seat behind Luna with her arms around her neck—the
warm glow in the room and the waves out the window and the sound of his friends all
genuinely happy, Draco included. With a startle, he looks upon the scene like an observer
through a Pensieve and realises it’s possibly the happiest he’s been since the Obliviation.

Draco’s reaching into a bag while Luna vibrates with excitement to Harry’s right, and without
thinking he snorts aloud, because Draco’s regarding the mysterious contents with the
blankest, most confounded expression he’s ever seen him wear. His head snaps up at the
sound, and he scrunches his nose in scorn right at Harry before lifting his hand from the bag
and meeting Luna’s eyes.

He’s holding a can of herring, straight from the shelves of a supermarket. Luna beams.

“Fish?” he asks slowly.

“Herring!” She claps her hands together. “Ichthyomancy. It’s divination by fish heads. Your
future is cloudy, so this is my offering to help!”

Draco smiles, and says, with the warmth of the clearest ‘it’s the thought that counts’,
“Marvelous, we’ll have to try together. I’ll be lost without you.”

“There’s something else in the bag,” says Pansy, gesturing him on.

He pulls out another tin, this one shallow and round. “Piano polish! Cheers, Pans,” he says
joyfully, and Harry, practically a polish connoisseur, makes a note to get a closer look later.

From Ron and Hermione, he uncovers a gift certificate to one of his favourite restaurants,
Savour, nice cufflinks from Neville, and a set of first edition published notebooks of Nicolas
Flamel from Blaise, which gets the largest reaction of all.

“I used my pull with Bloch. He’s in the Wizengamot and his wife collects first editions or
something,” Blaise explains to Draco’s shocked face, waving a hand to downplay the find.
“Or ex-wife, rather. I’m the reason he’d even acquired half the collection in the separation.
He owed me.”
“And he’s just giving them away?” asks Hermione, her head pulled back at an awkward angle
as Ron expertly braids one of the discarded ribbons into her hair.

“Not his hobby,” Blaise offers with a shrug.

“Doesn’t matter where it came from, just that it’s mine now,” Draco mutters darkly, looking
absorbed completely by whatever page he’d opened to.

Around him, the group begins to clean, empty glasses are stacked, bottles rounded up, and
Harry watches them in confusion.

“Oi, what about mine?” he interrupts, pointing to the small box still sitting on the floor, half
pushed under the couch by Draco’s foot. Everyone stops in surprise, while Draco’s hand
slowly drifts shut around his book.

Harry leans forward and picks up the box, presenting it directly to him. He takes it and quirks
a small smile. The rest of their friends settle back down, and Harry feels Luna wrap an arm
around his waist. He leans into it, watching Draco carefully reveal the box under the paper.

“What’s a… ‘pocket organ’?” he asks, flipping it over curiously.

“It’s a Muggle electronic instrument.” Harry instantly leaves Luna’s side to come closer.
“Take it out, I put batteries in it.”

The pocket organ is a thin little rectangle, the size of a small paperback in Draco’s hand, and
a stylus dangles from a thin wire. Without instruction, Draco picks up the stylus and touches
it to the thin metal strip that runs lengthwise along the instrument’s body. All their friends
lean in. Nothing happens.

Harry reaches up and fits his hand between Draco’s to turn the switch, and suddenly, the
stylus still touched to the metal, it gives off an unearthly whine. Draco lifts the stylus, halting
the sound, then touches it again to the right instinctually and it emits a higher pitch of the
same drone. To the left, he discovers, lower.

“You don’t have one, do you?” Harry asks.

“Do I have a…” He lifts the stylus and reads the box again. “A pocket organ? No, Harry, I
don’t—or didn’t.” He smiles. “Thank you.”

“Thought it would be fun,” he shrugs.

“Dad would love it,” Ron comments, getting to his feet again. “And speaking of dads, I have
to pick up a couple creatures early tomorrow, so I think I’ll turn in. Happy birthday, mate.”

He steps over Harry, who’s sat up against the couch by Draco’s legs, to give his arm a
friendly tap. Hermione’s standing again, too. She leans in to hug Draco and momentarily sets
her hand on Harry’s head affectionately. That starts the trend, then, them leaving for their
room, and it’s not long before everyone else begins to bow out, even Blaise.

“Haven’t slept in fifty hours,” he yawns without explanation as he shuffles away. Only Draco
remains on the couch, his nose buried back in the Flamel journals, when Harry shifts to go.

“I’m not tired yet, are you?” Draco asks, lowering the book and meeting Harry’s eyes.

“No,” Harry lies, settling back down. If sleep wasn’t on the immediate agenda though, coffee
might be the only way to sober up. But if he stands, it’ll be unsteady, and for some reason he
wishes tonight to be steady on his feet the same way he’d lie and tell Draco he’s not tired.
Instead, he sets an elbow on the cushion just by Draco’s hip and rests his head in his hand.

Draco looks content, tapping a finger on his new book like he’s keeping up a tune and tilting
his head at Harry with a gaze that seems to look deeper than surface level eye contact. His
posture is relaxed.

“Thanks again for the gift,” he says. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“Charming of everyone to assume I’d get you nothing just because we’re not… you know.”

“In their defence,” says Draco, “you don’t usually get me something.”

Harry’s eyes widen in surprise. “I don’t?”

He finds pride in gifting things to his friends for the same reason he loves cooking for them;
there’s so much that wasn’t available for him to find happiness in as a child, things that were
only painted in a loving light once he’d met Ron, really. And presents, like cooking, was one
of them. He’d made up for lost time since.

“Well, we don’t exactly do gifts for birthdays,” Draco says. “Didn’t do gifts, I mean.”

“Surely there’s an alternative.”

“We got each other actions. Did things for each other.”

Harry pulls at his collar. “Did things, like… sexual… things?”

Draco sniggers. It’s a light, delightfully casual sound. “Like, last year you made me my
favourite meal from childhood, with ingredients and produce directly from France.”

That was a great idea, Harry thought, revelling momentarily in his past self, sad that he
couldn’t remember the challenge of it.

“And,” Draco adds, offhand, “you let me spit in your mouth.”

“What?” Harry’s elbow slips from the couch.

“No, I just fancied seeing that look on your face.” Draco tosses the book on the table with a
wide grin, his second ever. He lifts his arms to his face when Harry throws a pillow his way.
“God,” he groans, flopping back down. “It’s all swimming. The walls. The ceiling.”

“It’s your birthday,” Harry offers weakly, still recovering. “It’s supposed to be swimming.”

“Not when you’re turning thirty-four with no husband, no plans, no…” He covers his eyes
with his hands. “Sorry. You’d have little reason to know, but I can be a miserably self-
examining drunk.”

“You have plans,” Harry offers awkwardly, not feeling at his most competent or soberest self
for cheering up. “Your solo concert, right? In August.”

Draco grunts.

“Teddy will be home for the summer soon, if he survives O.W.L.s.”

Draco’s mouth twitches slightly at that, but he sighs.

Harry sighs, too, glancing around the room at the pile of wrapping paper and the stacked
glasses with their half-drunk bottles. What does one do without a dark hallway to speak in?
Had it been a place of freedom, or ended up constraining his more vulnerable words along its
walls?

“Everyone always wants to speak with me about the curse, but d’you know what no one has
ever pointed out?” he says, turning to face Draco directly, a sly leer on his face. He’s
thinking, still, of that grin he’d won only a minute ago.

“What?” Draco doesn’t raise his head or look Harry’s way.

“How strange it is that you’ve seen my prick and I’ve forgotten yours.”

His head snaps up with a full snort of absolute surprise, gaping at Harry with that look like
he’s not who he expected, or alternatively is someone he’s not seen in a while.

“I’m serious!” Harry continues, smiling, bolstered by his response. “That’s so strange! What
a bizarre set of circumstances. And you knew me in the nude well.”

“Mm, I know.” Draco’s voice lowers and slows, like honey, reminiscent, and he closes his
eyes and smiles. There’s so much smiling to be had when they’ve drunk enough, Harry’s
discovered. “I can still picture it.”

Harry gasps, widening Draco’s smile.

“There’s that freckle, right? Just on your left hip.”

“Hey!”
Harry’s eyes widen further, and before he knows it he’s leapt up onto the couch, balancing on
just as little seat as was available to him at the pub, and begun pulling lightly at Draco’s
cheeks and eyebrows with his fingers as if to pry his eyes open.

“That’s my imaginary body,” he laughs. “Stop daydreaming!”

“Piss off, actually,” Draco drawls, squeezing his eyes tighter shut. “My dreams are the only
place I still have you. You still kiss me there.”

“Enough!” Harry frowns, though his turned down mouth still shows a dimple.

Draco somehow succeeds at looking smug even with his eyes closed.

“Make me.”

It would be easier—to tell Anastasia, to reflect on himself, to explain to the man across from
him—if Harry knew what thought process left him leaning in, because that’s what he did
next, laying a hand flat on the couch for support and pressing his lips impulsively to Draco’s.
But as he kissed him, he could only wonder if it was muscle memory. Something his body
had been so habitual about that, in the current joy buzzing between them, had kicked up the
dust and whined back into motion.

Draco sucks in a breath and, to Harry’s immediate horror, stiffens entirely and pulls his head
further into the pillow below, effectively putting space between them. Harry sits back, too.

“I—sorry—I thought—” Harry stammers, but it dies in his throat.

“You’re drunk,” Draco finally whispers, sitting up rigid.

“So’re you.”

He presses his lips thin. “You don’t remember anything, do you?”

Harry shakes his head.

“Why did you kiss me?”

There was no good reason, truly. Nothing he could word, at least. And if there was one, he
certainly hadn’t thought it before leaning in.

“Why not?” he whispers, feeling like it’s the wrong answer before Draco’s face even pinches
in.

“‘Why not’,” Draco repeats, nodding grimly.

He raises his hands to his temples, the heels of his palms dragging at his eyes in
overwhelming emotion. Harry thinks, with a sinking feeling in his gut, how happy they’d all
been less than an hour ago, even less than ten minutes ago. How lost in the night he feels
now.

“I’m going to bed,” Draco says, standing fast. “I’m—I need to—night, Harry. Get some
sleep.”

He fades deeper into the dark house, head bowed low, leaving Harry awfully alone.

*****

Harry eats toast in the quiet early morning, the last tasteless bites unenthusiastically sitting in
his mouth when Ron traipses in.

“Oh, hey, Harry,” he speaks into a yawn, stretching an arm across his chest. “Been up long?”

Hadn’t slept long, more accurately. Trying to rationalise why he kissed Draco had proven
impossible, but sleep had come no faster once he stopped trying to decipher his actions at all.
He shrugs, lifting a coffee mug to his lips as his friend pours two bowls of the single box of
cereal Harry had picked up at the store Saturday. He fills one with milk and leaves the carton
out by the second bowl as he joins Harry at the counter.

“Doing all right?” he asks, then slurps a spoonful. “Feel bad that we’re at a standstill, but Bill
says you’re all still working on your own angles, so I don’t feel too alone in this.”

“Fine,” Harry mumbles, staring down into his drink.

“The rumour Pansy heard—we were going to tell you at dinner last Friday, but then Hugo fell
asleep and Rose was invited to her mate’s... ‘Mione said you probably weren’t thinking
anything of it, but I’ve been worried since last evening that you thought we weren’t including
you or…”

“I didn’t think that,” he says. Considering the trajectory the night had taken, he hadn’t had a
moment to even consider thinking such things.

“Are you telling him my news without me?” Hermione joins them with a book under her
arm, her hair still tied in a satin-scarfed top knot.

“Just making sure he doesn’t hate us.”

“Impossible,” says Harry.

“Dunno, mate. You’ve been throwing hate in surprising directions lately.”

Hermione shoots Ron a glare as she returns the milk to the fridge, though Harry just
chuckles. “I definitely don’t hate Draco anymore.”

She meets his eye with that rare, markedly Hermione scrutiny, like she’d heard every
complicated thought behind his inflexion. “Why’d you say it like that?”
He shrugs. “Like what?”

“Like ‘I definitely don’t hate Draco anymore’.”

“What’s your news, Hermione?” he asks with raised eyebrows, setting his hands flat on the
counter. She beams and carries her cereal over, sitting on his other side. Whatever it is, it’s
good enough to leave his questioning in the past.

“Pansy likely heard that I’m in talks with Deirdre Bachmeier,” she announces.

“Deirdre… Bachmeier?”

“Dierdre Bachmeier,” she repeats. “The most acclaimed magical creatures’ rights lawyer in
England.”

“Oh! Talks about what?”

“About becoming a partner.”

“And leaving the Ministry?!” he asks.

She nods. “I’ve done what I can do there—made change, hired people who will sustain it. It’s
time to go elsewhere.”

“So why didn’t you want Pansy to talk about it?”

“Because it’s not official yet.” Ron draws his attention from the other side. “And she’s got
some Muggle superstitions.”

“I’m just not going to count my chickens,” says Hermione.

“Hell, I’ll count them!” says Ron. “Deirdre said ‘We’ll talk contracts and personal relations.
How much more certainty do you need? We might as well buy the champ—”

“Shh-ch-ch!” Hermione holds a hand up flat in their faces, just as Pansy and Luna shuffle in.

“Secrets, secrets,” Pansy intonates, winking at the three of them. “Morning, lovelies. Draco
not back yet?”

Harry perks up. “What d’you mean back?”

“I got up to go to the toilet this morning and he was leaving,” says Luna, propping her elbows
on the counter to face them. “Said he was walking the beach.”

“I’ll—here Luna, I’m getting up, so—you can have my seat.” Harry’s foot slips on the rung
of the stool with the speed he stands with. He feels eyes on him as he rinses his dishes, but
Hermione only gives him a light smile and returns to her breakfast.
When he laces up his trainers and takes the weatherworn steps down to the beach, he doesn’t
know where he’s going besides the general direction of the pier. It was only just past eight,
and on a Monday, so the coastline was an empty expanse. There weren’t even boats on the
water, the waves too wild with some approaching summer storm for fishing or recreation. He
didn’t like picturing Draco in those waters and wondered how a version of him who loved
him had let years go by without teaching him to swim.

He sees Draco’s slender frame first, in the sand just past the pier, looking like an elongated
afternoon shadow, and he waves an arm when he thinks he’s looking his way. Draco raises a
hand back.

“Good morning for a swim!” Harry calls over the crashing waves.

“Why, going to throw me in if we don’t talk about last night civilly?” Draco returns. He looks
so absolutely casual that it throws Harry off, in tan trousers rolled to the calf, a powder-blue
windbreaker, a pair of boat shoes hooked in his fingers.

“I don’t want you dead,” he replies when he’s close enough not to shout. He stops in front of
Draco. There’s an electric charge in the air, maybe the storm, maybe not. “Be honest, did I
fuck up?”

“Yes,” says Draco matter-of-factly.

“Brilliant.”

“Are you surprised? That I feel that way?”

He’s a step ahead, it seems, of anything he’d prepared while crunching on his burnt toast.
Like reading his mind.

“A little,” he answers. “I thought you’d want me to.”

“Is that why you did it? You thought I’d want you to?”

The childlike calm Draco’s intonating grates against Harry’s already-present embarrassment,
frustration, confusion. He shrugs, momentarily not trusting his voice.

Draco sighs and runs a hand through his hair, glancing out at the ocean. “I upset myself,
really,” he continues. “I had this… image of what it would be like to kiss you again, and it
was always more romantic, more mutual. A sign of something greater. Your ever-flattering
‘why not’ didn’t quite do the trick.”

“And I’m upset because it was yet another instance of you showing absolutely no emotion
when I’m being as vulnerable as I can,” he retorts angrily. Draco raises his eyebrows at the
emotion in his voice.
“I’m trying not to push you,” he says. “I’m perfectly happy just being your friend. You’re the
one who snogged someone else and decided you needed to make some sort of black and
white choice about me afterwards.”

“I didn’t!” The water licks Harry’s shoe; he hadn’t realised he was so close to its edge. “I just
said I thought about you. And you liked that, and you hugged me, and we were happy, so
Godric forbid I thought you’d be pleased to kiss your husband.”

“Oh so now you’re my husband?” Draco scoffs.

“You never stopped seeing me as your husband. So why are you acting like it’s so terrible to
act the part? You weren’t so averse when I was under the love potion and that was loads more
disingenuous than last—”

“Careful.” Draco’s voice grows hard, and his face, when it turns to Harry again, is much
sterner. “I know when your temper’s rising. You’ll say things you don’t mean.”

Harry sighs, inaudible over the heightening waves. “You say things like that as if you know
me better than I know myself! Have you already forgotten what you admitted on the pier?
That you know I’m a different person?”

“I know you!” Draco looks up at the looming clouds, then to the choppy water, then back at
Harry’s widening eyes. The waves roar up the sand with more and more momentum.
“Talking about the love potion is unfair. I stood up. I walked away. I’d like to see you do that,
if the roles were reversed. If the picture of your husband is saying he loves you for the first
time in months!”

“But you were attracted to me!” Harry feels like this has slipped far beyond the discussion of
last night and Draco’s response. “You’ve wanted me to kiss you that day! Right?”

“Why does it—”

“Right?”

“Right,” Draco concedes, a biting, gritted teeth admittance. “Partly. It’s not that simple.”

“Why not?!”

Maybe it was like those Magic Eye books Dudley had when they were younger, he’d thought
on occasion this year, when imagining what it must feel like to suddenly click into the clarity
that you’re in love—like a loud, unclear pattern that, if you looked long enough, would
suddenly shift to offer a perfect image of a dolphin or a castle that’s been there clear as day
all along. Simple. Sudden. Unquestionable.

“Because you’re confused!” Thunder cracks and booms, startling Harry slightly. Draco’s
flushed face stands out against the greyscale and the periwinkle of his shirt. “It was so out of
the blue, I’d thought you were falling, not kissing!” He steps closer, tall and indignant. “Do
you want to kiss me right now?” he challenges loudly, wind whipping his hair. “Sober?”
Harry opens his mouth, shocked by Draco’s closeness and the bluntness of the question, and
ashamed of the answer, which doesn’t even make it across his lips.

“Precisely!” Draco steps back again. “I know you, I really do. You want to make your friends
happy. Do you know what I think that was? That was you, drunk, grasping that we’ve
become close enough friends to have a laugh. Remembering that it’s my birthday and that
you want to make me happy, like you did when you let me try that love potion. And so the
friendship got all muddled in your head and that’s what came out.”

Harry stares back, at a loss. That feels exponentially greater than what had managed to cross
his mind in the moment, what had been—he’d decided—at least a hint of desire. Anastasia
would tell him to trust his gut, but as it was his gut had lodged itself in his throat, his
burgeoning selfhood momentarily lost again in the confidence of Draco’s I know you’s. And,
settling somewhere even deeper in his stomach with a note of quiet dismay, is the recollection
that this wouldn’t even be the first time he’d impulsively kissed someone on their birthday
while also feeling guilty about them being sad on their birthday.

“Maybe you’re right,” he finally acquiesces, the bitterness of the admission still sharp on his
tongue. “But calling me confused isn’t as revolutionary as you’re acting. Of course I’m
confused! Look how confusing you are—I never know what’s going to excite you and what’s
just going to leave you sad. This might all seem straightforward and-and calculable to you
because you ‘know me’ so well,” he bites out with jerky air quotes, “but some of us are
always guessing.”

Draco laughs, high and barking enough to pierce through the wind and water, but there’s no
humour in it. “Is that what you think? That I’ve got it all sorted?”

Harry’s cheeks are flushing. That was sort of what he thought—that he was grieving, yes, that
he was giving Harry distance, but that he firmly knew his situation, knew what he’d had and
lost and where they stood now. And Harry had never put his finger on it before, but there’s
been something aspirational about Draco this entire time; it’s in the surety of his emotions, no
matter what they may be. If it was grief, he was all in. Anger, all in. Hope, all in. He seems to
know himself inside out.

“I’m confused too!” Draco yells over another crash of thunder. “I’m never not confused!” At
once, a level of ire that they’d previously skirted lands right in Harry’s path. His eyes are
narrowed, his brows drawn down, his arms opened wide, a figurehead in the wild sea spray.
“It’s not as though you’re flailing in the dark and I’ve got it figured out! I lost my husband—
except you’re him. And sometimes you’re so him that I could forget you were Obliviated at
all, and I have to remember, like opening a closing wound. Other times I think about kissing
you and it feels like infidelity to him and taking advantage of you.

“And you’re your own person, of course, whom I love in your own right. But I have to
spoon-feed you our history. It’s like-like you left me out here alone to carry the weight of our
entire love story! I don’t want to be the sole archivist—I miss the discrepancies and all the
differing perspectives! Instead, it’s just me, alone with it all! And you wonder why I freeze
when you surprise me like that?! You don’t think that just adds to my mess?”
Harry gapes at him; his face melting down in raw emotion, even his hair sinking in the
weight of the weather. His last shouts fly away on the wind, and Harry thinks it almost looks
relieving to have finally yelled at him. He’s not too daft to know everyone’s been
prescriptively patient in his presence.

“I just—I would’ve bet my life you at least still wanted me.” He winces internally at the
crack in his voice, though he’s not sure Draco hears it over the swell. They should go in. But
this feels like the hallway at night. If he opens a door or turns on a light, it’s over. “I just
mean, does—what if you fall out of love just as I’m trying to fall back in?”

Draco grows solemn, like Harry’s spoken the unspeakable. “I will… always love you—that’s
quite literally been the problem thus far. I would die for you—this version of you—
tomorrow, alright? I’d walk into the fucking sea!” he hollers, pointing. “I thought that was
abundantly clear! But you can’t just kiss me like that. If we’re going to do that, it has got to
mean something. I don’t want to muck up the way I remember you just because you’re
drunk.”

“I just really didn’t think you’d be upset,” Harry says pitifully, feeling a need to tighten his
hold. He can still feel what it’s like to be that close to Draco, like an intrusive thought.

“I felt like I’d exceedingly overstepped after the love potion.” Draco steps closer so he
doesn’t have to raise his voice so much. Drops are beginning to fall now, sparse but heavy. “I
promised to be your friend and then felt lost the second that promise was challenged. This—
if it was truly nothing—felt like it was exponentially raising that challenge.”

His hand drifts to his left sleeve and tugs absently.

“But you made your way through before without either of us leaving our comfort zones—for
Circe’s sake,” he interrupts himself, chuckling, “this isn’t even the first time one of us has
kissed the other preemptively, is it?” Bafflingly for Harry, who’s doing his best to keep up
and failing, he smiles sadly. “Guess we’re even now, though I’d expect it to at least have left
you wise to the feeling of being ambushed into affection.”

“What’re you talking about?” Harry leans closer. His glasses are practically opaque, covered
in droplets.

“That first summer?”

He shakes his head.

“I… kissed you,” Draco’s voice is calmer, a slow, hand-holding cadence. “Late on our last
night? You said you weren’t ready… we didn’t date for months after.”

Harry shakes his head again and watches a new emotion pass over Draco’s face, boosted by
the realisation; Harry had loved him much sooner than he’d thought. Months earlier, at least.
He wants to say something about how this wouldn’t have taken so long to discover if they’d
skipped right to friendship, but the barriers they’d placed in the way of that seemed
preestablished and mutual, so he held his tongue and let Draco take his time emotionally
registering. He was doing a lot of blinking and nodding.

“Well.” Draco swallows thickly. “That just means you fell in love with me once without a
single romantic interaction, so you’re already ahead of schedule.”

Harry’s not that reassured. If Anastasia has taught him anything, it’s that the timeline of his
last relationship with Draco means absolutely nothing for the men they are today.

“I’m not saying you have to fall in love with me,” Draco adds when he doesn’t react,
reaching to grip his arm in sincerity. “Just don’t… kiss me if you don’t. Please.”

Harry nods, staring down at his muddied trainers. It’s such a miserably small request. “I
understand.”

“I am sorry. I’m not—quite honestly, I should see a mind healer of my own.”

“No kidding.”

Draco drops his arm. “You honestly don’t remember our first kiss?”

He shakes his head no. “Was it good?”

“You didn’t even close your eyes,” Draco tells him, then nods at his grimace. “Indeed.”

Harry feels like he’s going to cry and he doesn’t know why, but the rain has gone from a
smattering of staccato drops to a downpour and it disguises any emotion that might slip out.

“Come here,” he murmurs, acting on reflex, and Draco moves to hug him so fast that he
might’ve taken the first step before Harry finished speaking.

He holds Draco tightly, knowing he needs it, clear in the way his breath hitches against
Harry’s shoulder, and considers in the embrace how difficult it must’ve been for Draco to
reject him at all. Doing the right thing is so much harder than doing the wanted thing. Harry’s
hold tightens.

“You’re so tough,” Harry mumbles. “I’m so sorry.”

“For what?”

For kissing you without warning. For confusing you. For not being able to nail down
whether I fancy you. For constantly trying to force you out of your comfort zone.

“For touching that letter.”

Draco pulls back and meets his eyes, lips parted. Harry’s regretted much of what’s become of
his life this year, but he’s never outwardly told Draco he missed what he’d lost. Draco opens
his mouth once, twice, to speak, and instead lays a hand on the back of Harry’s head and
pulls him in again.

“When we met in 2000, I was quite sure that I couldn’t receive new love, just whatever I’d
managed to cling to after the war,” Draco says into his ear, his thumb moving in Harry’s hair.
“But, Merlin, you are persistent. I have no doubt we’ll fix this. Some way or other. You—
You’re very good at loving me, I promise. When you get around to it.”

Harry reaches a tentative hand up to Draco’s back, too. “I’m cold,” he says. Draco nods and
they separate.

They walk back through the sideways rain together, huddled close, and when they squelch up
the steps and through the backdoor, Ron looks up from the overnight bag he’s zipping shut.

“Cancel the search party!” he calls down the main hallway. “They’re back and they’re
soaking wet again!”

They both chuckle, and Draco puts a hand on the back of Harry’s neck again and squeezes
once in goodbye before he departs for his bedroom and the dry clothes that await him. Harry
watches him go, feeling battered and bruised, not just from the storm.

“If I get around to it,” he murmurs softly in his bathroom mirror, peeling off the waterlogged
layers. “Doing my best.”

December 2002

The feeling in Draco’s chest as he approached Malfoy Manor was akin to the panic he’d felt
before O.W.L.s, a desperate, whirring set of intellectual death throws sounding in his head;
don’t mention Father, good posture, speak with conviction, don’t use Harry’s Muggle phrases
that have been rubbing off. Confidence. Pride.

Beside him, Harry’s attention was straight ahead, his lips moving slightly as if practising his
own reminders. Draco squeezed his hand. “It’ll be over before you know it.”

“I’m here as long as you need me,” Harry responded like he was eating glass.

They’d spoken about the lack of expectation for Harry to have a change of heart large enough
to like Narcissa—the goal is simply to make it through an evening so they can say they’ve
broken bread. He could never ask him for more, and wouldn’t think to.

The tall hedges along their walkway were perfectly trimmed, one of the first returns to the
norm after the post-war trials. With Lucius gone, Narcissa had projected her feelings onto
grounds keeping. It was a way, he thought, to control outward appearance wherever possible,
which was incidentally the same reason they’d drifted apart faster than ever before.

A bronze dragon with a large ring through its nose narrowed its eyes as Draco approached,
and began to raise the knocker. He threw a hand out, “Not so fast,” and turned to Harry,
whose eyes were flitting between the halted doorknocker and his face.
“I do love you,” Draco said, drawing a smile from Harry. “Have I thanked you enough?”

“Getting there.”

“You are… striking,” he thought out loud, drinking his boyfriend—fiancé—in one more time
before his mother required all the attention. Harry in all black was so wrong it was right—
remarkably smart even before he turned on the charm. The fact that he could choose to be
this polished and simply preferred not to was dizzyingly attractive in a way he wasn’t
prepared to interrogate.

Harry just chuckled. “You too, Malfoy.”

Draco had slicked his hair back, keen to win points with his mother anywhere possible. It had
brought its fair share of teasing. As they rushed out the door even, Harry had stopped
urgently like he’d forgotten something, only to ask if he could copy Draco’s Transfiguration
essay. He’d been so flustered by their impending social engagement that he’d forgotten to
laugh.

“If all else fails,” he said, “compliment the home and avoid expletives at all costs. Common
sense things.”

“I’ll do everything in my power not to end sentences in prepositions,” Harry said with a hand
to his heart.

Finally, Draco smiled. “Thank you, Mr Debrett. Any last words?”

“Mmhm,” Harry hummed and leaned up to kiss him, lovingly tender. Draco was reluctant
when they parted. Maybe they didn’t need to go in at all. The doorknocker was a snitch, but
he’d say he’d gotten sick and they had to go home.

“Just something to remember,” Harry murmured, speaking still from so close to his lips.
“When your mum’s got your face all stiff and bothered like looks could hex.”

Draco nodded, smiled tightly one last time, gave the dragon the go-ahead, and let go of
Harry’s hand just as the reverberating bang announced their arrival within.

Harry looked surprised to lock eyes with the house elf that answered the door, but Draco
knew better than to expect Narcissa Malfoy to greet her own guests. She stood, instead, just
in the hallway as they stepped in, glossy white hair like a sheet of ice down her back, and her
voice just as cold.

“Draco,” she said. “Harry. Hello. You’ve—”

“Hi,” Harry accidentally interjected. Draco snapped his head to the side just in time to watch
his eyes widen imperceptibly, clearly having expected her to stop at hello.

“’Hi’, Harry,” she said slowly, laced with judgement. “You’ve brought the outside in.”
Harry looked down at the potted pothos in his hands. “A gift.” He took a few paces forward
and held it out to her. “Happy Christmas. And thank you for the invitation.”

Narcissa took it transiently, just long enough to hand off to the same house elf who’d closed
the door behind them. “How practical, to combine the hostess gift and Christmas gift for the
holidays,” she said with a thin smile. “And some… pedestrian… greenery always does to
break up the florals tastefully.”

She waved her hand at some of the impressive floral arrangements in waist-high vases along
the entrance hall, and the mammoth-sized collection of poinsettias snaking up the staircase.
Draco felt Harry glance at him, but kept his eyes firmly on his mother, racking his brain for
somewhere to take the conversation.

“Happy Christmas, Mum,” he chose tediously. He kissed her on each cheek, then stepped
back to Harry’s side, their shoulders brushing. Boldly, he set a hand on Harry’s lower back
and tipped up the corners of his mouth. “What do you reckon? Do I look like a soon-to-be-
married man?”

“The saviour of wizardkind,” she hummed, gesturing towards the sitting room and speaking
back at them over her shoulder. “Your eyes have always been bigger than your stomach.”

Harry closed a hand around Draco’s wrist as she walked ahead, a question in his eyes. Draco
shrugged, unfazed by his inability to tell whether they’d been complimented or insulted.

Tea went just as uncertainly for the most part, besides her observation that his nails were
painted when he reached for the teapot. Harry, in his expert etiquette, clearly left her with
nothing to critique, so she cocked her head dangerously at his hands.

“What an attention-grabbing form of body modification,” she said, which made something in
Draco chill to its core, thinking she’d caught glimpse of a tattoo. But she was a melodramatic
woman, eyeing instead the black polish on his nails. Pansy had done it when they’d both been
bored one night recently, and suddenly he couldn’t fathom how he’d managed to sweep his
eyes over it all week without remembering to remove it before visiting the Manor. Harry
must’ve sensed this discomfort, because he reached a hand out to rest on his leg and Draco,
in fear-stricken panic, shoved it off faster than his brain could register.

Harry’s eyes drilled into his head then, so he sat stiffly and didn’t look to the side as he
answered. “Just a silly thing I let Pansy Parkinson do.”

The conversation settled down again after that, though Harry very slowly covered the single
black thumbnail he’d gained after lamenting a bit too loudly to Pansy about missing out. He
closed it tightly in his left fist, the knuckles whitening.

By the time everything began slipping irrevocably towards ruin, Draco had nested into
enough false security to daydream about showing Harry the grounds and his old bedroom
before dinner. The alarm bells in his head didn’t even ring. That’s how used he was to his
mother’s passive aggression. Harry, unfortunately, had less patience.
“Much of the Malfoy family was constructed through strategic unions,” Narcissa was saying,
folding her napkin and tilting her head. “As the only and eldest son, Draco had that
responsibility on his shoulders, should it be required. But you of all people must understand
the gravity of an arranged marriage, I’m sure.”

Harry’s face blanked in shock. He glanced at Draco, who looked between him and his mother
speechlessly. “Why would I understand arranged marriage, Mrs Malfoy?” he asked evenly,
more a prompt than a question.

“Let’s not play dumb, Harry.” She tried to give him a knowing look, which bounced off him
in his incredulity.

“No, let’s not. What about my parent’s loving marriage or my aunt and uncle or anything else
about my life in England has given you the impression that—”

“Mother, if your statement about… marriage implied that you have any say over who I marry,
you must know you have none.” Draco met her eyes intensely, hoping to hide the anxiety that
bracing up to her always entailed.

“You can marry whomever you choose, dear. I want your happiness. I was simply conversing
with Harry, who would naturally understand the gravity of eschewing a cultural history of
arranged marriage.”

“Right,” Harry grunted out.

There was a terrible silence, which no one seemed to know how to fill. Beside him, Harry
took an extremely meditative deep breath.

“You have a beautiful home,” he tried to save valiantly. “I’ve never been able to stop and…
take a… look…” He drifted off, the brightness leaving his voice as he recognised his mistake.

Don’t allude to the war. Rule 400.

For a moment, Draco thought his mum had been left unbothered. But her brow twitched,
then, in a way he remembered all too well. His side burned, reflexively, at the thought of her
dead-on hexes.

She offered Harry a fearsome smile. “I’d love to be able to show it to my great-nephew.
There’s always room for him to stay, if he wasn’t barred from entry.”

“Teddy?” Draco asked.

“There aren’t any other children in my life, are there? And none on the way—” She glanced
pointedly between the two of them. “—so I have to make do, don’t I.”

“Teddy’s not something you ‘make do’ with.” Harry bristled beside him. There was no doubt,
knowing Draco’s childhood so thoroughly, that he would never leave Teddy here alone,
anyway. “But if you want to see him, I’m certainly not the one to speak to. Andromeda’s his
guardian.”

“So you don’t raise the boy?”

“We both do. Dromeda and I have grown quite close. But it’s her call. Her family.”

“My son’s practically a father and I’ve never met the child,” she spoke coolly, like every
added hint of emotion in Harry’s voice made her calmer.

Harry gave him a begging, desperate look. Draco grimaced back and looked down at his
plate.

“Well, Draco takes his career very seriously, so he and Teddy only get time together on the
weekends, generally. Not that he’s not a good father—not that he’s a father. He could be—I…
what I’m saying is, we’re not exactly stay-at-home mums. We have jobs. Teddy is mostly
with Andromeda.”

Here, Draco tensed up, so sure was he that Narcissa Malfoy—proud woman who ran her
household like it was a career—would bite back about the ‘stay-at-home mums’ comment,
but she smiled, albeit emotionlessly, and said, “You have a broom shop?”

Harry’s shoulders dropped and he flashed a reserved smile. “Yes, I do. Collector’s items more
than state of the art, though. I do a lot of acquiring… estate sales… charity shops…”

“You must find such interesting things at estate sales.”

“Oh, I do! Just last week I came across a first edition Moontrimmer in a broom shed, and all
first edition Moontrimmers were made with bristles reportedly from the Boscobel Oak, so it
was quite the find.”

“I say everyone should be greedy from time to time,” Narcissa said. “It must be comforting to
be selfish for once and open a Quidditch shop instead of safeguarding your community.”

Harry snapped his mouth shut, clenching his jaw tight in what Draco knew to be a careful
show of restraint. And just like that, the eye of the storm had passed overhead.

“It’s not like I abandoned society—there are plenty of other talented individuals within the
Auror Department,” he said calmly after a beat. “Ron Weasley, for example. A better man on
the job than I ever was, honestly.”

“If my son’s going to be stubborn about living in London even though it’s a hostile
environment for people like him, it would be better if someone on his side was within the
department.”

Draco sighed. This was an old conversation, held every time he visited. Why would you live
in London? No one there will accept you, trust you. They’ll always see your past. And there’d
been talk, lately, of individuals who wished to form in London to speak for the conviction of
all Death Eaters, buoyed by the years since the war, the fear of it all fading. It was the only
time she’d sent him a letter that year, telling him to stop playing defector and come home to
Wiltshire.

She always spoke of this past he was branded with like he wasn’t born into it. Like she hadn’t
made him into it. Like he deserved punishment separate from her.

“Ron’s on his side,” Harry was saying. “I’m not the only one who cares about Draco. It’s not
like he’s alone in London.”

“That’s nice to hear, even if it is a fraction as comforting to have a Weasley watching his
back.”

Harry’s head snapped to Draco again. He opened his mouth to respond, but nothing came out,
not even a squeak. Harry’s lip curled up at his silence, like it was twice as hurtful to not
defend Ron than to not defend him, which was probably true.

“It should be twice as comforting,” said Harry. “I was a miserable Auror. Draco can look
after himself, anyway. But I have his back. Whenever he should need it.”

Another look at Draco, which felt very pointed. He swallowed and opened his mouth, to say
what, he’s not sure because Narcissa spoke up again, an avalanche picking up pace.

“And this one will stick?”

Harry blinked, eyes wide and face suddenly void of anger. “Of course. Mrs Malfoy, Draco
is… you and I seem to disagree on many things but I’m sure we can agree on how
remarkable your son is. I’d be thick not to hold onto him.”

“Quite,” she said. “It seemed necessary to verify, given what I’ve seen in the papers.”

Draco stared a hole into his teacup, begging Harry not to take the bait. But his prickliness,
though often subdued, couldn’t be tempered now, everything and everyone he loves having
been laid on the table for dissection.

But he could just not take it. He could make some little observant noise, pour himself a new
cup of tea, and ask about the drapes.

“And what have you seen exactly?”

Draco tutted softly.

“You and various men. Roving around town.”

“It’s called dating,” Harry said icily.

“You make quite a show of it. And now Draco’s made an appearance.”

“What am I supposed to do, not live my life?” Harry retorted. “I’ve not made a show of
anything. God forbid we go to a fucking farmer’s market. Would you rather I was ashamed of
him?”

Narcissa looked irate, a flush on her usually lifeless face and eyes piercing like daggers. The
pupils flick to Draco.

“You let your guest speak to me like this?”

Her voice was sharp, hardly above a whisper. The quieter, usually, the worse.

Harry scoffed beside him, and his attention joined Narcissa on Draco, who sat rigidly. His
mouth opened and shut, like a gasping fish, until he heard himself finally rasp out, “Sorry,
Mother.”

She nodded, pleased. But when she looked to Harry, clearly expecting a second apology, he
shook his head petulantly.

“You weren’t brought up in a cave,” she shot at him. “Though if you were, I’d expect my son
to at least impart a word or two about how to behave when invited into someone’s home.
Muggles are eccentric but they do have manners. It seems you were a waste to yours.”

“Me,” Harry seethed. “A waste to them? They were… cruel.”

“I know how hard it is to be a parent—” Draco held in a scoff, more expertly than Harry
managed. “—and not knowing basic etiquette is certainly a glaring sign of disrespect to the
people who nurtured you. As is disrespecting the mother of someone you wish to marry.”

“We’ll see,” said Harry coldly.

Every word of the conversation seemed to freeze Draco’s tongue further, like some horrible
discovery about how he’d fare in fight, flight, or freeze at the sight of an altercation. Freeze,
he was discovering. Petrified, watching.

“It just concerns me, what it means for the perception of people like my family if what you’re
sharing with that oh-so-valuable spotlight is that you believe benign little Muggle caregivers
to be capable of true maliciousness. It skews the entire perspective in a way the public
doesn’t know.”

Harry, one last time, opens his mouth wide and tries to catch Draco’s eyes.

“Do you let him speak about them this way, Draco? Do you understand what image it would
paint of us by comparison?”

Be less evil, Mother. Accept that people are terrible in creative, non-magical, and wholly
human ways, Mother. Understand that maliciousness comes in many forms. Admit that their’s
being downplayed doesn’t erase your own.

They were both staring at him. He cleared his throat to say just that.
“I understand, Mother, sorry,” crossed his lips instead.

The chair beside Draco barked as it scraped back on the floor and Narcissa barely appeared
surprised when Harry stormed out. Somewhere in the hallway, they listened as he told a
stammeringly helpful house elf that he could find the front door on his own, and shortly after
they heard it shut deafeningly.

“Ichor!” she called into the hallway, looking almost pleased. “Remove one plate for dinner.”

Draco’s heart was pounding, the negative space in the seat next to him throbbing like a sore
tooth. “T-two!”

He stood, hesitated, and moved quickly for the entrance hall.

What if Harry had disapparated instantly? Or sometimes he’d just begin to walk with
conviction, circling the blocks around Grimmauld Place until he’d cooled down. He was
understanding, but Draco had grown to learn that the understanding came with time for
reflection. Harry was a thoughtful man, but an impulsive one.

But when he burst out the front doors, there he was on a white metal bench set off in the
gardens, his feet firmly planted and bracing his elbows, staring with his hands on his cheeks
into the grass. When the door closed behind Draco, he looked up. No part of his expression
brightened.

Harry in closer detail was no less concerning. He looked unravelled, physically, from the
sharply dressed man who’d arrived with him. When Draco stopped in front of him, he rubbed
his eyes and sighed, looking up.

“Harry, I—”

“I don’t know if I want to hear what you have to say yet,” Harry spoke under his breath.

Draco nodded. He considered sitting next to him on the bench but decided he ought not
chance it, so instead he lowered himself onto the lawn. For a few minutes, they sat in silence,
Draco slowly letting go of the wild fear his mum would follow them out—she was too good
for a chase.

Eventually, Harry cleared his throat and covered his eyes with his hands. “I don’t know
where to go from here. I feel… I feel… I feel like I handed you my heart and you’ve pieced it
apart nicely with proper etiquette and offered a bite to your mother.”

“No, that’s not…” Draco hesitated. It was a creative, visceral image. “If I could take back the
apology I would, but—”

“Surely, you don’t think this is just about the apology?” asked Harry. Unquestionably the
correct answer was that it was not, in fact, just about the apology.
“It’s… not,” Draco responded.

Harry nodded, unimpressed. “I–I… It’s hard enough to walk back into that… that place. To
face your mother—a woman who would’ve left me dead at Voldemort’s feet if I didn’t
happen to know whether you were alive. But I thought, I’m not going in alone, am I? I’m
going in with a man who loves me, who will stand up for me and I—”

He took a gulping breath. Draco had never seen him so incapable of saying something
outright about his feelings.

“And at every step, you were nowhere to be found,” he bit out, seeming to find resolve. “That
shit about assuming I understand arranged marriage, Draco?” He looked at him astounded.
“You had nothing to say about that?”

Growing up with arranged marriage always a part of the discussion—something ancient but
occasionally necessary, and something that a younger Draco would’ve bent over backwards
to do for his family—he’d let himself assume she was referring to Harry’s pureblood
ancestry. Maybe because that was less uncomfortable in the moment. But why would that be
the truth, he thought now under Harry’s pained gaze, when his father married a Muggle-born?
When his family had already been excluded from the Sacred Twenty-Eight for generations?

And he’d just sat there, watching his mum blanket his future husband in ignorance.

“And you could’ve told her that plant she hated was a joint decision! You could’ve spoken up
in any of the awkward silences where I accidentally brutally offended her, instead of just
watching her try to hex me with her eyes! And what she said about my career?!” Harry was
gaining speed, his face fraught with emotion. “And I sit there and stand up for you, stand up
for Ron, stand up for our relationship, and what do you do? You apologise about me? To her?
Clearly,” he finished firmly, “there’s an imbalance of love. Or was.”

“I’m s… sorry,” Draco heard himself say, like a frustrated, dying exhale.

“One of the last places I’d want to go to see one of the last people I’d want to see—and not
just because of the war. The things you’ve told me…” he choked out. “…Because I loved
you. If you’d let me I’d… she’d regret it all. Your father would regret it all.”

Draco looked into his darkening eyes. It was the most chilling he had ever seen him, a
culmination of some deep-seated temper he’d held at bay so as not to scare Draco off from
sharing his past. Draco recognised it because he’d often felt the same, hearing Harry talk
about his childhood, especially the fully Muggle years. It was best he never meet the
Dursleys.

But there he’d sat again, silent, cowardly.

“But I’m glad we came.” Harry pressed his lips together firmly and stiffened up again.
“Because I wonder how much longer I would have gone on thinking you loved me like I
loved you.”
It was as though the world stopped. In his immediate loss of function, breath stopped halfway
up his throat, he was baffled by the continuing birdsong, the wind still breezing through the
trees.

“What?” he stammered after a long silence.

Harry swiped his hands over his eyes quickly, nodding profusely. “You don’t love me. In
there, you didn’t love me. Maybe you think you do—”

“I do!”

“You didn’t act like it! It’s actions that matter, not words! You can say you love me all day,
but if you-you just sit there like I’m some prey you’ve delivered to the king of your pride!”

“You’re not prey!”

“Well, I feel properly chewed alive.” Harry leapt to his feet, so Draco scrambled up too.

“How many times do I have to apologise?” he scowled, gesturing erratically, angrily. “I’m
sorry! I came out after you! I regret it, obviously!” It hurts, the longer it settles in his chest,
that Harry’s just said Draco doesn’t love him. It prods him forward like a devil on his
shoulder. “It doesn’t feel fantastic on my end how quick you were to lose faith in me!”

“Actions, not words,” Harry spat, reaching for his wand. Draco flinched. Harry noticed.

“Woah, woah.” He held his palms up, the wand pinched between his thumb and index finger.
“I was just going to tell Ron and Hermione I was coming.”

Leaving him here. Or leaving him to slink back to Grimmauld Place. But now his attention
was flicking nervously between Draco and the grounds around them. It made him want to
recede into his skin.

“It’s just the Manor,” he explained quickly. “It makes me jumpy.”

There was less of a buzzing high frequency between them in the awkward quietness of the
exchange, so Draco took a step in. Harry didn’t pull away.

“Look, I agree—I should have acted differently in there. I hate how I made you feel. But do
me the favour of at least looking at the complexity of this situation for me. I don’t like this
place either, okay? The only things here that don’t suck the joy out of me like a Dementor are
the piano and this garden,” he said, gesturing at the line of flowers behind the bench, most of
which weren’t in bloom. A small collection of what looked like oversized dandelions, domes
of little white petals and black roots, stood open though. They’d always been his favourites.

“When Mother planted those Moly flowers, she was so gentle. They’re rare,” he murmured.
“I’d never seen her that soft. Little silver seeds, like chrome…”

He flicked his eyes up. Harry’s expression had softened considerably.

He’d been jealous of flowers. A full son, jealous of a garden. She’d not been gentle with him
since thirteen.

“They’re my favourites, but I’ll never ask her how to get them. Do you know why? She
terrifies me,” he said slowly, heavily.

“She terrifies me, too,” Harry whispered, with the confessional camaraderie Draco had
always wished he’d had a sibling to confide in.

“At least you had the guts to talk back,” Draco braved a smile.

“I don’t think I even consider the consequences before I do that,” he responded, shaking his
head. “I just always do it.”

He looked strangely thoughtful, a thumb swiping vaguely over the back of his other hand,
where a thin scar sat. Draco took them, to stop the habit.

“Please, please know, I love you so much,” he entreated. “I love you more than anything. But
when I walk through those doors, I’m in survival mode. I’m—I’m fifteen and terrified. I
flinch. I go mute. I speak when spoken to… I’ve never brought anyone home, I didn’t know
what would get us out alive the best. I’m sorry. I did it all wrong.”

Then the corner of Harry’s mouth tipped upward, just a hair. His hands tightened around
Draco’s.

“Tell me you didn’t really think I don’t care about you,” Draco held tighter. “Tell me I didn’t
almost ruin us in there.”

Harry didn’t answer, not really. He stared at Draco sadly, then closed his eyes and took
another deeply settling breath. When he opened them, it was like that spark of pure Harry
brightness had returned.

“I’ve never been so cross,” he said.

“An entirely titanic temper.”

“I… with meeting your mum, I just—”

“You’ve always been good at finding trouble,” Draco interrupted. “I’m good at creating it.”

“A perfect pair.”

“Entirely formidable.”

“Should I tell Ron and Hermione we’re both on the way, then? My surrogate mum will put
yours to shame,” Harry said, offering a wider smile. He looked relieved, and Draco felt the
same surge running through his body, though it was accompanied by something sharper, more
dangerous.
“Actually, wait right here,” he said, brushing his lips against Harry’s forehead and turning
back to the Manor before he could lose his nerve.

In the doors, Ichor was nowhere to be seen, the sitting room empty as well.

“Draco?”

He stopped, turning on a sickle to catch his mother at the bottom of the grand staircase,
looking aggravatingly unsurprised to see him. He didn’t waste a moment, blowing towards
her with the same sheer emotion that had fueled him outside.

“Harry is a decent man,” he spat, stopping before her. Her face flickered momentarily into
shock, before settling back into something stony. “A great man. If he was an Auror, the
papers would prove it, but the incredible thing about character, Mother, is that it marks you
whether the world is watching or not, and Harry is just as good and right and loyal and
thoughtful in his Quidditch shop as he is anywhere else. The way you spoke about him was
heartless, and I wasn’t at all surprised. Whatever that says about your character.”

She opened her mouth, and to Draco’s surprise, he held up a finger to hush her. Her gaze
hardened, but she pressed her lips back into a tight line.

“He’s a brilliant friend, an amazing father figure, a just coach. And he’s going to be,” he
swallowed, shaking his head in fervour, “the best partner in life I could wish for. I don’t know
what I’d do without him by my side, but I can imagine how I’d do without you.”

He shifted past her and up the stairs, through to his bedroom, where he began to look around
hectically for something to pack. Outside her attention, he was practically shaking. His
Hogwarts trunk was still beside the wardrobe, so he threw it on the bed and unlatched it.
Everything he couldn’t think to part with for an indeterminate amount of time was tossed in
quickly; books, some dress robes, a photo of him and Pansy and Blaise in third year, a couple
of heirlooms, a set of old nineties Prophets that Harry had graced above the fold which now
seemed too amusingly transparent of him to leave behind.

He let the trunk slam on every step of the polished staircase, passed his mum again still in the
entrance hall to stop in the parlour and take whatever sheet music he saw fit.

The luggage righted itself next to him by the door. Narcissa had come closer, trying to peer
into the parlour just as he’d emerged, and he stepped away from the trunk to pull her into a
light, brief embrace. He kissed her cheek. She was, after all, his mother.

“You have my address,” he said curtly. “Goodbye.”

He didn’t know if Harry was more surprised to see his Hogwarts trunk or his ear-to-ear grin,
but when he reemerged with a sheet-white face lugging it behind, he simply nodded solemnly
and reached out to take it off his hands. He had always been so gallant about carrying Draco’s
baggage.
Chapter End Notes

Thanks again for the patience, the interest, the persistence. Glad to be back in the swing
of things!

Feel free to leave some words below in the comments, or find me at

writandromance.tumblr.com.
 Pavane for a Dead Princess
Chapter Notes

A small but weighty chapter, much like Ravel's 'Pavane pour une infante défunte'
(Pavane for a Dead Princess).

See the end of the chapter for more notes

January 2003

If you asked Harry what it felt like to experience pain he’d ask, what kind? The skin-
crawling, intangible horror of a Cruciatus or the all-too-real wave of agony in a basilisk fang?
The feeling of approaching death? In the Chamber or in the forest? One was too soon, the
other too late.

And then there was the pain of losing people, of Sirius, Remus, George. And the pain of
thinking you’re the one about to be lost. Sometimes he could still hear his friends, as they
cried out over his lifeless body. But Christmas had been difficult to categorise. It was a pain
like no other.

The physical symptoms had hit before the thought had even calcified—a sudden inability to
catch his breath, a feeling like his body was too heavy to function, a cavern in his chest and a
will to disappear—and so he’d thought it must be true. That the pain wouldn’t hit without
reason. He knew, then, that some deep part of him had already accepted what his brain yet
hadn’t; Draco did not love him.

That horrible woman. Even days later, standing at the kitchen sink in the mess of his post-
New Year’s Eve home, he scrubbed at a deep pot much too hard and felt enough residual rage
to see red.

And with Draco’s lack of love, Harry felt his own disappear, not like a strategic counteraction
but like some mutual death-by-heartbreak, like those dogs, he thought, where when the one
died, the other would, too. The expiration of Draco’s love could only have one effect on his
own.

Sitting out in the garden and brimming with anxiety, he’d already been coming to terms with
solitude. Panicked, distraught, he realised he’d opened his home to a stranger, to an old
enemy, and saw for the first time un-blinded by love how their relationship looked to an
outsider. Like Draco was this wolf stepping out of sheep’s clothing.

But then the wolf had followed him outside and sat with him, patient and remorseful.

He’d snapped out of that feeling, but he could never tell Draco how right he was when he
looked at Harry, eyes shiny, and said, “how quick you were, to lose faith in me.”
Faithfulness was more than fidelity. It was trust, patience. Harry had lost faith, however
briefly, and thought how horribly similar it felt to losing himself.

As a child, solitude had been a compulsory part of his life, alone with his toy soldiers and
battered books. Nothing the Dursleys did felt particularly evil, not by the standards he
thought Draco must hold, and yet it hurt all the same. They were experts in teaching him to
lower his expectations—perhaps it’s that which had led him to assume so quickly that even
the greatest love of his life must have been fleeting. But did that get to count? As evil? Did
their neglect count as hurt enough to deserve sympathy? He thought of Draco flinching.

It would be ten years, one traumatic life change, and a few months with a kind woman named
Anastasia before Harry gave his cupboard consideration again, his youthful neglect and his
biting, instinctual hurt when Narcissa Malfoy insinuated that it didn’t get to count.

‘You were not a traumatised child because you were hurt; you were traumatised because you
were alone in that hurt,’ Anastasia would tell him then, soft and serious. ‘Alone is a greater
threat than we often understand.’

Draco loved so mightily that he’d forgotten the feeling of alone entirely. Without that future
wisdom, though, he simply remembered Privet Drive for that quiet oppression of being
ignored in the only home he’d ever known, returning each summer after facing trials they
wouldn’t care to know. And it hurt, still. A chill passed through him, but then there was a
sound from behind him and he turned and Draco was standing against the rich wood of the
stairwell’s framework with reverence painted across his features.

“Doing chores without me? I wouldn’t have let you clean all this alone,” he said.

June 2013

Pain sticks to Draco like a phantom limb, unforgettable, and though the hurt throbs in waves,
it never goes away completely, and he likes it like that. Even now, setting yet another single
serving of lunch down at the kitchen table, he welcomes the pang of missing his husband
beside him. Losing the pain, he’s decided, would be like losing the last bit of Harry.

Early on, he’d tried to hurry it along, agreeing with Pansy’s guiding hand on his elbow to
spend a fortnight at her house. In Hampstead, he mostly laid curled on the couch under a
throw blanket, accepting meals only on their third offer, mute and crushed. A week in, he’d
wanted to go home, not healed, just lonesome. Having some fractured version of Harry was
better than none. And he was inconsolable, anyway, so why uproot Pansy and Luna’s lives?
He turned the pain inward and kept it there.

His colleagues have been noticing the change in his demeanour—a great warning sign
because he was already known as a reserved, work-focused instrumentalist. It is true that the
solitude of a concert pianist always appealed to him over the collaboration of chamber music,
ensembles, colleagues that become friends. Without Harry, the lack of connections at work
was unexpectedly deafening.
 Last week had been a performance at Wigmore Hall. He’d told no one. Treated it like an
average day. Just past noon he’d arrived to meet the piano and coax out a sound he approved
of, and ignored that the last time he’d been booked to play there, Harry had whooped at the
news, almost bowled him over, and told every friend, shopkeeper, stranger.

He’d only performed at the Hall that once, years previous and much happier, which was
likely why it had never affected him like it did this year. The alabaster and marble, the deep
red of the seats, the cupola, stoned beautifully with the embodied soul of music, and then the
sound of his music reverberating. A sacred space, with this church-like impression, but also
now because Harry had sat third row. He’d felt a deep desire to cry or to pray.

Harry kissed him six days later.

It’s not real yet, what Harry feels—he’d know the second it was—but he can wait. He will
wait. A relationship is trust. It’s patience. And sometimes, it’s pain.

There’s a sound behind him on the stairwell and he turns in the chair, ready to make a second
plate, but it was his imagination. He remembers that Harry has a lesson on the pitch. The
doorway sits empty.

Chapter End Notes

Thanks so much for reading! Hope you're enjoying!

Feel free to leave some words below in the comments, or find me at

writandromance.tumblr.com. I love to read them!
 Lilacs
Chapter Notes

The chapter title refers to Rachmaninoff's Lilacs Op. 21 No. 5, written, by the way, to
afford his honeymoon.

See the end of the chapter for more notes

June 2013

It’s only fitting that Harry’s having an optimally productive day in the back of the shop when
the bell on the counter interrupts his work.

“Just a moment!” he calls, muscling a Bludger he’s attempting to subdue and strap down for
a restitching. It twitches, fighting up against him, and he knows from experience that if his
elbow slips off its surface, it will send an eye-stinging wave of pain through his face and he’ll
have to get the nice wizard in the apothecary to set his nose right.

DING.

“I’ll be with you in a second!” he calls again, grunting a little and kicking open the Bludger’s
travel case with a foot.

DING. DING.

A low growl creeps out, despite his best efforts to keep his demeanour calm before customer-
facing again. Sometimes Pansy questions why he’d purposefully choose a career involving
customer service and—

DING.

—sometimes he finds it just as difficult to justify. In the doorway from the workshop to the
storefront, his face switches instantly into a plasticky, wide smile.

“Sorry to keep—”

Harry stops, scowling with fleeting annoyance and growing excitement. Teddy keeps his
hand hovered over the bell, a sparkle in his eye, threatening to touch it again.

“You should hire help,” he says, with the smugness of someone who knows they’re the only
help he’ll accept. “Or give your help a pay rise.”

Harry chuckles and closes the distance, embracing him before it can be protested. His hair is
different than it had been when Harry visited him at school, perhaps a little lighter, and he
thinks he’s gone ahead and given himself some preemptive summer freckles, too.

“Does my help need a pay rise that badly?” he asks, letting go.

“Not really.” Teddy hops onto the counter. The store’s been empty for over an hour—it’s
early on a Tuesday, after all. “But Mr Weasley implied that I fancy Victoire when I was over
last week. Said if I keep stealing all her time, I’d better treat her well whether we’re dating or
not. Hypothetically, if I asked her to dinner, better be a nice one, then.”

Harry keeps his face a parent’s expert-neutral, celebrating a bit deeper that Teddy is
volunteering information about his teen-aged life.

“Bill’s not superficial like that,” he replies, crossing his arms. “Treating her properly means
not being a prick, not taking her to the best restaurants.”

Teddy’s lip quirks up, his gaze tied to his trainers hitting heels against the counter. “‘s nice
though, imagining taking her somewhere good.”

The sound of the front door straightens Harry’s carelessly leaned stance against the wall and
pops Teddy back onto his feet. It’s a young man, about Teddy’s age, who gives him a vaguely
recognised nod before heading toward the small section of new Quidditch supplies.

“Thanks for coming in early,” Harry says when he’s disappeared down the aisle and Teddy’s
settled behind the till. “Welcome home. I’ve got a Bludger in the back, so if you hear
crashing, save yourself.”

“Dunno why people bother repairing those,” mutters Teddy, pulling a small book out of his
pocket.

He shrugs. “Sentiment.”

The Bludger’s only got a few inches of popped stitching along one seam, and yet it’s another
hour before Harry resurfaces. He forgets every year how refreshing it is to have Teddy up
front. The ringing of the bell doesn’t pull him away from the momentum of every task at
hand, the life cycle of the shop moves more efficiently, and the joy of having a friendly face
around alone is always enough to brighten his spirits.

And then there’s Teddy’s methodical nature, an ability to sit still for hours or set his mind to
something completely unprovoked.

“You didn’t tell me the used book section had grown so large,” he says when Harry emerges,
for example. He’d spent the time between customers finally arranging it by subject and
author, like Harry had been meaning to do for months.

He had a knack, too, for the customers themselves, and an ability to absorb topics like Harry
had never seen. At thirteen, mostly hanging over Harry’s shoulder on workdays, he’d taken to
nosing in on custom broom orders and suggesting extremely tailored customisations; a broom
compass with the client’s wife at true North (a la Molly Weasley’s house clock) for a
diplomat he’d taken time to learn was living a country away from his family; broom polish
that changed colours when it was time for a tune-up for a young woman so awed by her new
broom that she was scared to damage it flying. If Harry had done any spell creation since
opening the storefront, something he’d once thought to be far outside the scope of his work, it
had been at Teddy’s innovative suggestion.

Certainly, he would never wish to take over the shop, but he was more than proficient in its
workings by fifteen and had heard much about Harry’s repairs, so Harry has no clue which
item he could be referring to when, as he locks the door behind them that afternoon, Teddy
says, “So you did end up fixing that compass, then?”

Harry’s brows pull in, racking his memory. “What compass?”

“The one giving you grief.” He leans against the narrow window ledge, the shop behind him
dark and empty.

“I haven’t had any compasses give me grief.”

“Must’ve been easier to fix than I remember you saying,” he shrugs, already turning towards
the high street and the shops Harry had promised they’d look through.

But Harry, following a few paces behind, feels instinctually less dismissive.

“Where was this compass?” he asks fifteen minutes later, directly interrupting something
Teddy’s saying about the World Cup in the back of Flourish and Blotts. His mouth stays
open, then he drops his arms from where they’d raised exuberantly in storytelling, looking
deflated but conciliatory.

“The safe,” he says.

“I put a compass in the safe? Was it for Draco?”

“No, it was just regular valuable.”

This brought more questions than answers: if it wasn’t for Draco, then why couldn’t he
remember? How were they connected? Not once can he remember having a compass
valuable enough for the safe.

So then they were stopping back at the shop, unlocking the door, walking through to the safe,
and Harry, a hand hovered over the combination, suddenly gathers that he has no idea what to
put in.

“Your—it’s your anniversary,” Teddy offers patiently from beside him. “Zero two, zero eight,
zero three. You really haven’t gotten in since I left?”

“I’ve had mostly broom orders,” Harry answers distantly, feeling the click as the small safe
bows open. “And appalling hours.”

Inside are things he’d expect but hasn’t thought about in months—a fair bit of money, a
ridiculously old Quidditch World Cup program he either never wants to or will never manage
to sell, and two golden snitches, only one of which he recognises. No broom compass.
He reaches for the unfamiliar Snitch, though, and hovers it an inch above his palm
wandlessly as he peers down at it.

“I’d bet money you don’t remember that,” says Teddy.

“For Draco,” he guesses.

Teddy nods in his periphery. “You used to work on it constantly. Then at some point, I reckon
it just started living in the safe.”

Harry may not remember this specific Snitch, but he knows his handiwork. It’s a bit mental to
build a Snitch from scratch. He’s only done it a handful of times, and only after years and
years of repairs. This one is a luxe gold, with sharp wings and etchings on the shell—little
potion bottles, snakes, a few Jules-looking lizards, a couple of wizards on brooms, all dulled
lines carved into reflective, polished metal.

With intrigue, he lets it drop into his hand, but nothing happens. He’d hoped for some notable
change in its surface at his touch, nodding to whatever grandness had sent it into a safe all
this time.

“Is it special?”

“For Draco,” Teddy repeats as if that makes it a self-explanatory yes. “Dunno if there’s more
to it. You were dead focused on those etchings.”

Harry pockets it. “Better get to Quality. I think we’ve got some news for Draco.”

*****

The alchemy lab produces a stifling heat when Harry enters, like opening the door to an oven,
and the three open flames below glass beakers that sit on the workbench offer both
explanation and a fair reason to worry over fire safety—surrounding them, being rifled
through messily by Draco himself, are pages and pages of loose parchment covered in
formulas, diagrams, and scratched notes. He looks focused and completely unconcerned by
the clear plummet into disarray the lab had taken over the months, but his face brightens
when Teddy appears behind Harry’s shoulder.

“Edward,” he enthuses, setting his quill down. “Is that your natural height or are you shooting
up just to surprise me?”

“Just my height.” Teddy grins and pushes past Harry into the mess. He hugs Draco quickly
with a hand on his back, then peers down at the papers on his desk. “Blimey, you’ve been
busy.”

“Yes, well, most of it proved unsuccessful anyway. Negates any productivity.”

“Success isn’t linear.”

“Certainly not in this case.”

Harry clears his throat in the doorway. “Teddy said something interesting about a broom
compass. Had I mentioned one?”

Draco cocks his head in interest. “A compass? Not at all. You don’t remember?” he asks, just
before his face falls in comprehension. “You don’t remember.”

“You just said this compass was difficult to fix, that it might be a lost cause,” says Teddy,
kipping up on a stool. He’s less concerned than Harry and Draco, enthused to offer
information, and the lightness in his voice falls on solemn ears. “I reckoned you either
cracked it or gave up.”

“Maybe I sold it.”

“Maybe you sold it?” Draco sets his hands on his hips. “What did your records say?”

“Oh,” says Harry. “Didn’t check them yet.”

“Well, did ‘Dona remember the compass?”

He grimaces, meeting Teddy’s sympathetically sheepish expression. “Didn’t ask.”

“Well, fucking ask! Bloody hell, you two. Now, Harry,” he adds incredulously when Harry
doesn’t move.

“Right. Right.”

Harry’s flustered, but he jumps back into action, and his heart is thready in anticipation when
he reappears in Quality Quidditch Supplies. Aldona’s head snaps up in surprise, elbow-deep
in the top drawer of a filing cabinet.

“Most use my hearth has ever gotten in June,” she says lightly, narrowing her eyes. He’d just
left through it with a wave two minutes previous.

Harry watches his step as he crosses over the stonework. “Most traffic your office has seen in
June,” he offers, nodding to her abnormal bookkeeping.

“Ah!” She holds a folder up in the air. “You’re right, but it’s not often that someone wants to
order the most expensive brooms on the market.”

“Peregrines?”

Briefly, Harry forgets all about the purpose of his visit and the man waiting on edge at home.
The brooms cost a small fortune and, if you asked Harry, they were more of a marketing stunt
than a particularly practical racing vehicle. Yes, it flew close to two hundred miles per hour,
but aerodynamics had been prioritised over balance and foot grip to make it happen. He was
yet to see them outfitted on a professional team, no doubt to the dismay of investors. If
anything, they were surviving off wealthy individuals who wanted to own one. Aldona only
supplied them because she felt she had to.
She nods, eyebrows lifted in mutual surprise. “I’ve never even taken the order forms out of
the welcome packet.”

“One entire Peregrine purchased—they’re going to have to dust cobwebs off their tools to
assemble it.”

“Six,” Aldona says slowly, enunciated in wonder.

Harry laughs. “Six? Fucking hell, Aldona, we’re going to have to celebrate!”

“Yes! I haven’t seen you or Draco in—erm… well, we’ll get drinks, you can invite whoever
you want.”

The gloomy correction brings Harry back down to earth. The corners of his mouth settle back
down. “I came to ask you something. Did I ever mention a broom compass? Maybe around
December?”

She shakes her head. “Sorry.”

The first sinking feeling of disappointment. “That’s fine. Thanks. Well done, again,” he says
with a slightly forced smile, tapping her arm with his fist. When he leaves through the
storefront, he glances around nosily to spot a buyer who might desire six Peregrines, but no
one especially catches his eye. A shame.

The second sinking feeling of disappointment comes when there’s no mention of a compass
repair in his books in December or January. A dozen or so sold, yes, a couple antique, but all
in good condition upon arrival.

Deflated and hoping Draco doesn’t hex the messenger, he stalks quickly to the Leaky
Cauldron, though it’s a good distance down the high street from his shop and Aldona’s. He’d
hate to bother her again, feeling that today, especially, he’s treated her floo like personal
transportation.

Led by that virtue—though he doesn’t know it—he’s accompanied by good fortune. Virtute
duce comite fortuna, Draco might supply in translation, if he knew how close the man he
loved was to the enemy if he had only bothered Aldona once more this afternoon.

Returned to her till after a brief trip down a darker alley for darker wares while she popped in
the back was a man who had been sorely disappointed when Harry and Draco stopped
appearing on the street leading to their home. Diagon as conspicuous as it was, he may have
been interested to fatefully learn of the fireplace Harry took to return home each night. He
may have been equally worried, though, that if Harry caught his eye, he’d feel a tug on some
memory, wallpapered over but so undeniably incriminating should that paper start peeling.

As it was, he left learning nothing, risking nothing, with six receipts in the pocket of his
cloak, while Harry disappeared through the pub’s fireplace.

August 2003
“Come on, Ronald, a bit of excitement! Where is your verve? Your lust for life?” George
jostled Ron’s shoulder. “I think you’d been sick in a bush by this point on your stag night.”

“Exactly why I’m preferring Harry’s.”

Ron took a pointedly conservative sip of the pint in his hand. The two redheads had their
backs to Draco, the rest of their group unaccounted for, perhaps somewhere in the large beer
garden advertised outside. He held his hands behind his back, head cocked in thoughtful
listening.

“This night’s dead—he’s not getting cold feet, is he? Has he been strong-armed into a
marriage? Draco is… Draco.”

“Nah, you’ve not seen them like we do.”

“Saw them last Christmas. Harry was white as a sheet and Draco looked furious about
something. Barely talked all dinner. He can be a scary bloke.”

“Me, scary?” Draco said loudly, startling them so completely that he couldn’t help but smirk.
George looked mortified, but Ron was already laughing.

“Draco!” He clasped his hand in greeting as if they hadn’t left the Saltburn cottage at the
same time earlier that evening before splitting off. “What are you doing here?”

He opened his mouth to answer but had no chance before a pair of arms flung over his
shoulders from behind, dragging him back with a suddenness that made him grunt. There
wasn’t much surprise in identity; he knew Harry’s smell and weight hanging off him without
needing the visual confirmation.

“I saw you through the window!” Harry said, twisting Draco at the shoulders to face him.
“What are you doing here?”

Draco opened his mouth again, but this time Blaise’s voice cut through the chatter, stealing
his chance.

“MALFOY!” he shouted, weaving through bargoers to meet them. He gave off the air of a
harried mother with too many children. The air of Mrs Weasley. “Oh Merlin, Harry already
found you. Listen, we’ve got to go before Hermione discovers I plagiarised her itinerary.
Weasley won’t tell her,” he added with a wink.

“Don’t think it matters, mate.” Ron pointed behind them. Hermione was approaching, with
Neville and—unfortunately—Ginny with her. The discussion of her addition to Harry’s
evening had been tense not because of their past romance but because of her blatant feelings
about Draco. Her presence in the summer home Draco associated with privately pleasant
memories felt intrusive, but his presence probably felt intrusive to the entire Weasley family,
so he was tolerant of it. He’d even made her a latte that morning, already brewing espresso on
the hob when she’d entered the kitchen. It seemed overtly rude not to.
“So. Have you got good reasons to marry Harry?” she’d asked tonelessly as he set it in front
of her. He’d been hoping to hand it over and escape back to their room, but that seemed
impossible.

“Have you got good reasons to care?”

“I care about him.”

Draco matched her blank expression, revealing no emotion for free. “Me too.”

“Yet you’re not even going to bring him breakfast in bed the day before his wedding.
Romance already dead?”

“He hates crumbs on the sheets. If that’s the kind of test you’d like to give before I become
legally bound to him until death, I’d suggest you choose something less trivial.”

He took his cup and turned towards the door.

“What’s his Patronus?”

Draco stopped a step from the hallway and rolled his eyes before facing her again. “That’s in
the papers. Not exactly privileged information. A stag.”

She looked offended, but on a deeper level, Draco had an inkling that she’d gotten the idea to
intimidate him before realising just how little she had in her arsenal about her own ex at this
point.

“What’s best if he has a nightmare?”

“He hasn’t.”

She shut her mouth. He wanted to tell her to just give up. It was hard to watch. She glared
while the cogs were turning. He watched her eyes alight when she found something else.

“Where did he go to primary school?”

“St. Grogory’s.”

“Fine, but why did he hate it?”

Why wouldn’t he? Draco thought, but he sighed tiredly. “Easy. Harry Hunting. Did you do
this to Hermione or Angelina, or do you just like me the least?”

“What’s his boggart?”

“Me.”

He dared her to question that—he’d seen it himself. Harry had stared down for a moment in
shock, already stooped low a bit under the beams in the Grimmauld Place attic, as Draco
appeared and followed his gaze. His body looked ashen, his lips pale and cracked, his eyes
wide and unseeing.

“Riddikulus,” Harry had recited quickly when he saw Draco looking, and his body assumed
horridly short denim cutoffs, a vibrant Hawaiian shirt, and in place of the chilling paleness, a
thick red sunburn. He’d remarked, after it was taken care of, that Draco must make him less
smart—Lupin used to call him wise for being afraid of fear itself most of all. Draco had
remarked that if what he pictured in place of his lifeless body was a lifeless-but-also-
unfashionable body, he had superior things to sort out.

Ginny had looked properly muted, then, so Draco gave her a withering, pitying stare and left
for his room. It was the most they’d ever spoken, and hopefully ever would. Even now, feet
from each other in a rather small group of friends, they each pretended the other didn’t exist.

“This is extraordinarily stupid,” Hermione was saying, stopping with a huff by Ron’s side.

Draco focused on Harry’s fingers scratching affectionately at the small of his back with
gloom. They were not so codependent that they couldn’t spend a single evening apart, but
Circe, his heart had skipped a beat just to see him. Surely, he wasn’t the first man who
couldn’t get his soon-to-be spouse off his mind during his stag do.

Blaise caught his eye with an I told you so look, which he returned with sympathy, though to
steal Hermione Granger’s agenda seemed close to suicidal.

She glanced between them all looking resigned to something. “We might as well continue on
together.” It caught at least half of them off guard.

“What?” Draco and Harry spoke at once.

“Harry’s spent the whole night missing you,” she said, crossing her arms. “It’s hardly felt
celebratory. You’d think you were out of town and we were the consolation plans.”

“Same with Draco.” Blaise nudged him. “Horribly boring. Join forces, though, and I can
make this a night to remember.”

*****

The world was bright and beautiful. The water, which Draco could see from the decked
outdoor space of their fourth pub, crashed in and out in a manner he’d never considered the
gravity of before. He’d joined Blaise to get some fresh air while he smoked, but also because
Luna had been dragging their friends up to a small, lifted area of the pub for karaoke, and
nothing had ever chilled him to his bones so quickly.

“What are you ruminating on with that absolute introspection on your face?” Blaise asked,
tamping out the cigarette. “The big day? Married life?”

“The moon,” Draco said wondrously.

“Hm. Say more about that.”

“So powerful,” he obliged instantly. “It brings in the waves and takes them away. Turns some
men into powerful creatures once a month. It’s the alchemical symbol for silver, you know.”
He sucked a deep breath of warm summer air through his nose, sharp with the briny scent of
the coast. “And yet we dare to think our magic is mighty?”

Blaise stared at him for a long beat.

“Yeah,” he said. “It’s kicking in, unquestionably.”

Draco squeezed his eyes shut and opened them again, as if it would reveal something to him.
“Is it?”

Blaise had distributed the phleus, some strange wizarding drug, only twenty minutes ago. To
everyone’s shock, Hermione had been the first to pluck one of the small coloured squares
from his palm. Ron stared through her like they’d never met.

“Suppose that could just be you talking the way you talk.”

“Harry is the sun.”

Blaise snorted. “Pardon?”

“He’s the sun.” Draco gripped the wood railing, observing the street a storey down, a line of
short buildings, then the drop off into sand and rock. “He’s always so warm, practically
feverish, and so full of heart—it’s the heart element, you know, gold.”

“So he’s gold?”

Draco ignored the amusement in Blaise’s voice. “Gold is the sun. And he’s the gold. Or the
sun. And I’m the moon. Silver. The mind—but he makes me feel. Experience. Gold is also
linked to Sundays. Harry is such a Sunday,” he groaned. He lowered his forehead to his arms,
eyes shut, with a heaving sigh.

“No, it’s kicking in. We should go back, everyone else’s will be, too.”

And maybe Draco was feeling its effects, but that was tinging the evening with a fear he’d
forgotten to account for. It was stressful to feel himself a bit inhibited, not in the company of
those he’d drank far too much around before, but in the presence of extra Weasleys.

The karaoke had ended, at least. Harry asked where he’d gone when he returned to the table,
saying something about a song he’d queued for them only to look and find him gone, and that
was how Draco knew the phleus had hit him too, because—he asked, slowly—when had he
ever given the impression that he’d even walk onto the stage for anything but a professional
performance? Harry reminded him that he was very good at wearing him down on things.

Pansy was the one to suggest ‘paranoia’, which Draco hadn’t thought about in years. It was
fantastic for drama-seeking individuals. The information that stood to be gained was higher
than most other drinking games if one was willing to pay (with alcohol consumption) for the
whispered questions that went with announced answers. They all agreed too quickly—if
everyone else was feeling like Draco was, they were more agreeable than usual, almost
floating through the evening. It was getting harder to keep a dopey smile off his face when he
looked to Harry’s, but he kept at it, for the sake of his reputation.

Pansy began. She cupped her hands and leaned in close to Luna, whose shoulders rose in
reaction when the words were whispered in her ear. She glanced at them all like she was
counting heads, then laughed and announced, “Neville.”

“Neville?”

“Just to see.”

Pansy cackled, enthused by the answer, but no one stepped up to satiate their curiosity. In
fact, the room stayed quiet next for Neville’s “me!” in response to Luna and Harry’s quickly
answered “Ron.” Then Harry was leaning close, hot breath right in Draco’s ear.

“Who here… have you had a sex dream about?”

Draco made an involuntary noise of protest, which drew keen attention from the group.
“Really?”

“Really,” said Harry at normal volume, sounding all too proud.

“You understand that anyone can ask to know the question.”

“You understand that you’re making it sound interesting the more you protest.”

He took a deep breath, let it out slowly, and accepted his fate. “You,” he started. “And…
Blaise.” A long, long time ago. A stressed teenage mind was an interesting place.

Harry raised an eyebrow with a salacious grin, a look in his eye suggesting less inhibition
than usual, which Draco was sure was mirrored in his own pupils should he stumble to the
bathroom and take a look.

He leaned into Blaise quickly so there wasn’t time for anyone to press for details. Blaise
mimed overdramatic shock while he cupped his hands up, but it dropped into a more genuine
face of slackened seriousness when he asked, “Who here would cheat on their partner?”

“Evil,” Blaise muttered.

Often, he joked that Harry had made Draco soft, but he regarded him now with the occasional
acceptance that Harry had only brought out another warmer side to him, not diminished the
hardnosed. Then, louder, he said, “Pansy.”

She scrutinised Draco’s physical response of surprise, then raised her glass in a lonely toast
and took an indulgent swallow. “I’ll bite,” she said.

“Who here… would cheat on their partner,” he repeated, trying to focus on her features,
which seemed to stretch too wide to decipher.

“To get a story,” Luna guessed, eyes scanning Blaise’s. “We have an agreement. Rules.”
“Flirting is a part of the job,” Pansy added, shrugging. “What’s the point of the womanly
wiles if I don’t use them?”

The gutsiness of Draco’s question and the awkward silence following Pansy’s request to hear
it followed the table for the rest of the round until Hermione, at last, whispered to Ginny, who
tilted her head and turned her mouth down thoughtfully. Her eyes flicked to meet Draco’s so
unexpectedly that he took a sharp breath in.

“Malfoy,” she barely said, before he was lifting his drink to his lips. Harry’s hand went
haltingly to his leg a moment too late.

“Question, Hermione.”

She lifted her chin and an eyebrow, with a see? expression of satisfaction before she’d even
spoken. “Who is the least like you thought they’d be?”

Draco jerked his head back a hair, looking back to Ginny in surprise. She shrugged, then
turned her attention to Harry with a curt small nod.

“Erm, sorry, does anyone else think the room is incredibly hot?”

Draco hadn’t noticed how far Neville had slumped down in his seat, but he sat now with his
hands cupped against flushed red cheeks. George said nothing but he pushed his full glass of
water over to join Neville’s empty one.

“I gave him the same as everyone else!” Blaise looked uncharacteristically concerned, the
game forgotten. “Nevy, what’s your name? Who’s the president?”

“Of what?” Neville spluttered.

“He’s on less than you,” said Ginny. “We split his, half each.”

“What happened to yours?” asked Harry. She pointed to George, who offered a two-fingered
wave from his temple. He looked insanely fine.

Seeing Neville sweat was making Draco feel warm under the collar, too, and he was suddenly
aware of just how buttoned-up he was. He moved his hands shakily to the neck of his shirt
and undid the top two buttons. Harry looked at him as though he now expected everyone to
begin to fall apart.

“Maybe some air?” Luna said to Neville then. “Sit under the moon and the stars for a spell.”

The moon. Draco found Harry’s hand under the table and squeezed it. Luna, Neville, and
Ginny slipped out of the booth, and with the sudden release of his hand, Harry began to stand
too.

“Just to the toilet,” he said at Draco’s betrayed expression, then dipped his chin down with a
look that said just a little more.

“I’ll go, too,” Draco said quickly.

The toilets were grimy, indecent to a degree so extreme that Draco wished to have nothing to
do with the loo entirely. In the furthest stall, brown and cream checkered tiles ran across the
floor and up the walls, but past waist level there was more graffiti than blank ceramic,
covered in phone numbers, names, promises of a good time, stickers, and dripping stains that
curled his lip. Then Harry was pressing him directly against it all.

“Don’t,” he gasped, pushing him off so he could stand straight. Harry stared back with wide,
insulted eyes. “These walls are foul.”

“I thought you’d be too high to care,” Harry sighed.

“It’s actually making it worse.”

The longer he trained his vision on the grout behind Harry’s head, the more the words and
stains seemed to float off the wall towards him.

“So don’t touch the walls.”

Draco leaned forward and pressed his forehead to Harry’s neck. Tomorrow they’d be married.
He felt fuzzy all over.

“Kiss me, please,” said Harry.

He indulged him, obviously. And then he was feeling all the heat that had hit Neville, though
harder to place to just the drugs with the way Harry kissed back, the undexterous nature of
their hands in each other’s trousers, how the entire world seemed to collapse in time so that it
was seconds and hours that passed in the stall, so that it was Harry’s third time saying “tuck
your shirt in” before he snapped back into himself enough to find something to worry about.

“Do I look normal?” he asked, leaning into a spotty mirror to comb at his hair. A blurry
version of Harry appeared behind him.

“You look handsome.”

“Handsome and normal?”

“Yes, handsome and completely unremarkable. Forgettable. Boring—”

“Alright,” he muttered, adjusting his collar. “No need to take the piss.”

Unfortunately, Pansy pointed a finger at them before they’d even sat back down. “Ill-fated!”
she accused. “You weren’t even supposed to see each other tonight! You’ve doomed
yourselves!”

“Leave them be, Pans,” said Blaise, leaning back in his chair. “Living in sin all these years,
what’s one more night?”

Harry muttered something unintelligible, very interested in his drink, so Draco scowled for
both of them.
“Besides,” Blaise added, just as Draco was growing appreciative of his comment. “Draco
proposed, so it was about time Harry knelt, too.”

“Oi, don’t talk about things you don’t know,” he shot back.

“What’s there to know? I used those toilets earlier. There’s no way Draco Malfoy let his
slacks touch the floor.”

Ron snorted into his drink, choking. Draco suddenly took stock of the table again, forgetting
slightly that there were others in attendance, but realised—with a little relief—that Ginny and
Neville were still missing.

“Went back to the cottage,” Luna said, noticing him. Her hand was patting lightly on Ron’s
back as he took short breaths.

“We should join them.” Hermione, it seemed, had been missing, too. Suddenly, she was
standing over Draco at the end of the table, the bill in her hand.

Draco didn’t grasp how wonderful life could be until he stumbled back into their summer
home, hit by the smell of baking cookies and the sound of Etta James, Harry happy, all of
them gigglier than usual, with a row of lilac satin dresses still hanging from the curtain rod
where they’d been steamed earlier.

The night sparkled, sounded like warm brass, felt like heaven. He was drawn to the piano
without begging, and when his hands touched the keys, the usual hushed quiet was replaced
for the night with raucous singing. And when Harry pushed him aside to play a stilted Mary
Had a Little Lamb, it was given just as much praise and enthusiasm as if it had been a sold-
out concerto.

“Best Mary Had a Little Lamb I’ve ever heard,” Draco gushed in the hallway later that night,
swaying into Harry a bit.

“Was rubbish,” Harry said, grinning anyway, a hand hooked into the V of his shirt.

“No, it’s all about response. If the crowd is feeling something, then it’s good.”

“I’ll make you feel something,” he drawled lazily.

Draco towed him in at the waist, kissing slow. Harry’s teeth lingered on his lower lip when he
pulled away.

“I couldn’t live without you, I just couldn’t,” Harry said, then, in all-seriousness like he’d just
woken up, a finger tapping on Draco’s chest.

“Mm. We should do something about that. Busy tomorrow?”

“Might have plans-aH!”

Harry’s eyes widened as distance suddenly grew between them. Ron was lowering his hand
from the back collar of his shirt. “This can wait.” He sounded motherly. It was endearing,
even from Draco’s perspective. “To bed, Harry.”

Draco smiled at Harry’s small pout of resignation. His left arm was wrenched behind him
where Ron yanked with rolled eyes. Draco stood leaning in the doorway until they’d
disappeared entirely into Ron and Hermione’s room and then he stood there longer, content to
be alone while Harry’s presence still echoed around him.

June 2013

The sky is cloudless, the weather is perfect, and Draco is in the back garden. Harry bounds
through the back door with determination, ignores the man’s surprised greeting and stops at
the broom shed. He takes his Firebolt and another broom, handmade. He swivels and holds
the Firebolt out in Draco’s direction.

“Let’s go flying.”

Draco shuts his book with a face of flat disenchantment. “Of course not.”

“Let’s go flying.”

“Hasn’t worked in ten years, Scarrus, won’t work now.”

Harry ignores him and walks closer, setting the two brooms between them like a line in the
sand. He kneels in the grass. “Cooking was rewarding, no? Doing something of mine? If it
hasn’t worked in ten years, isn’t that a sign that we need to do it?”

Draco screwed up his mouth in a signature frown.

“My entire life feels new, like, all the time. And I will wear you down, but it would be kind of
you to save me the time. Consider some empathy. Add some newness.”

He shoved the Firebolt closer and Draco shifted back like it was cursed. He narrowed his
eyes at Harry. “It’s not newness, I used to fly.”

“If it’s been since you were sixteen, it’s newness.”

“Haven’t you heard the saying, ‘It’s like riding a broom?’”

“Is that wise to remind me when I’ll be flying laps round you on the pitch?”

“You’re ridiculous.”

“Ridiculously persuasive,” Harry grinned. “Make some memories for me.”

*****

It had taken a good five minutes to get Draco to even straddle the Firebolt. But then Harry
made some joke about expecting him to sit sidesaddle, which, despite its nuisance, seemed to
put him in a better mood with the opportunity to tell him to piss off. He’d kicked off rather
fast after that.

They really did go to his and Ron’s favourite pitch this time, rather than lying and apparating
somewhere else like Harry had dared on that first full day. It’s busier in the summer,
especially on such a good flying day, but Harry also isn’t shouting angrily at Draco this time,
so no one pays them any mind.

Draco’s face had stayed intentionally blank as he rose into the air, then joined Harry in easy
laps, flying so slowly that no wind brushed their hair back, making conversation about the
broom compass, about Teddy, about Hermione’s new job. They might have been on another
walk through Regent’s Park, like in the photos. Harry wants to race now, though, and it seems
like it’ll be a tough sell. He’s convinced, however, that Draco loves competition as much as
he does. That the way to win a smile is through challenging him to something he can lose.

“You’ve had me on a broom,” Draco calls from a few metres away. “We’ve proven I can stay
on. We can return to earth now.”

Harry turns quickly on his broom to stop and face him, raw offence on his face. “You haven’t
even had fun yet!”

“How do you presume to know if I’ve had fun?”

“Er, you haven’t smiled once. Doesn’t take Legilimency.”

Draco lifts his face into an inhumanly stretched smile.

“A genuine one. One race? Three laps?”

He leans forward and stops next to Harry. His eyes scan his face, so Harry pouts, just a little,
just like he’d do for fun with Pansy or Luna, and Draco blinks back. Then he sighs.

“Just one.”

“Brilliant!” Harry grins. “Round the goalposts. You count down then. On ‘go’.”

Draco nods. “Three,” he says, fingers tightening on the wood. “Two,” he looks to Harry,
who’s kept a lax grip on the handle of his broom. “One…” He leans forward, more than
Harry expected, almost horizontal on his broom, looking forward with arresting intensity, and
Harry comprehends, in that last breath, that he’s planning to put his all into the race.
Surprised, he scrambles to correct his own form—fists tightening on his broom, his chest
ducking down to kiss the wood, head forward just as Draco says, “Go,” and fires off on the
fastest broom Harry owns.

The wind whips Harry’s face and he laughs as he presses forward, aiming for the tail of
Draco’s broom. He catches up rather quickly and drafts off him, watching his white hair
flutter, and then he’s turning back to face Harry, smirking, and taking the Firebolt for all it’s
worth.
They round the second set of goalposts, back in the direction they started. Draco slowed a
little on the turn, he notices. That’s his chance. As they race back, he steadies himself,
strengthens his grip on the handle with his left hand, and pushes on the footrest with his right
foot, reaching out for the back of Draco’s broom. His fingers graze the tail, then find
purchase. He yanks hard.

Draco yelps, falling behind instantly. “Cheater!” his voice calls at a fading volume behind
him.

“Can’t cheat if we didn’t set rules!”

The entire second lap, Draco stays behind him, maybe drafting, but Harry doesn’t care. If he
tries to pass him just at the end, he’ll block him well enough. And sure enough, past the
farther goalposts a third time, one length of the pitch from the finish, a smudge of white
enters his periphery. He weaves right, shouldering into Draco—more a push than a hit—then
weaves left again, drifting to a halt at the stem of the goal.

“Unbelievable,” Draco pants when he catches up, shaking his head in disbelief. “You play
dirty.”

“Rich, coming from you,” Harry points out.

They switch brooms for the second round and it quickly becomes clear that Harry needs the
handicap of the slower broom to make it competitive. He sits back comfortably minutes later
on the Firebolt as Draco catches up with an easy smile of gracious defeat.

“I’ve been an idiot,” he says loudly, still paces away. “A coward.” Harry watches him lift a
hand to his chest in humility, throw himself off balance slightly, and perfectly rebalance with
his feet. Muscle memory. “How did I go so long without this? You’ve learned piano twice
and this is my first time flying?”

“Anastasia says the longer we put something off, the more intimidating it gets. We give it
power over us.”

“Wise woman.”

Draco’s smile is pushing his cheeks, wrinkling the corners of his eyes, the blue in the sky
bringing out just a hint of colour in the grey of his irises. Harry’s thinking about his eyes as
they go again, three more times around and around the goalposts, Draco gaining, Draco
passing, and then Draco whooping in celebration, arms extended feet above Harry, laughing
at the sky—triumph.

This is just for him; Draco balancing on his broom, Draco outlined by the sky. The
recognition of it takes his breath away. A Harry that remembered falling in love never got to
see him like this, which made it his and only his. He files it away like a snapshot, like his
own key memory.

Brimming with elation, Harry reaches into his pocket and presents something to him. The
Snitch glints gold in the sun. Draco flies closer, leaning in with a look more akin to wonder
than feels necessary.

“Are those little potion bottles?” he asks.

He reaches out to touch but Harry snatches it back, eyes wide in playful threat. “Win it,
Malfoy.”

His eyes sparkle. “Oh, you’re on, Potter.”

Harry gives the Snitch a couple of short shakes. The wings flutter up, lively and buzzing for
release, and when he opens his fist it takes off past their heads.

They split up. Harry circles high, watching for Draco’s shape on the opposite end of the
pitch. It’s easy to catch the Snitch when there aren’t other players or balls to look out for. It’s
only a couple minutes before Harry spots it and dives, aiming for a spark of warmth near the
base of the nearest set of goalposts. He’s gaining fast, preparing to reach a hand out, when
Draco appears barreling right towards him. Harry curses and pulls up at the last moment,
avoiding a collision.

“Wanker!” he gasps, scanning for the Snitch hopelessly, heart thrumming.

Draco shrugs, smirking with no remorse. “It had to be done…” he starts to say, but trails off
quickly, staring somewhere behind Harry.

He springs into motion. Harry leans incomprehensibly low, a streak of colour on the field,
and follows, entering Draco’s airspace just as his long arm is reaching out. He’s low enough
that his feet are grazing the tall, uncut grass, and then Draco’s body is somersaulting,
catching Harry on the way, and he finds himself on solid ground with a bewildering
suddenness.

His hands are empty, but Draco, six inches away and laughing as he gets to his knees, has
quivering wings fighting between his fingers. For a second, Harry had frozen, mortified that a
tumble might have reminded Draco why he’d avoided the sport, but he hears the laugh and
relaxes into a smile of his own.

“I won’t stand for it!” he laughs, throwing himself against a kneeling Draco to reach for his
winnings. Draco pulls his hand in, though, staring down like it’s a treasure.

“Stop, stop—look,” he says breathlessly.

His hold on the Snitch lightens and as it does the little ball springs open in the centre, its
hinges no longer muscled shut. He takes Harry’s hand and turns it palm-up in his, tapping the
Snitch out. Tiny, shiny seeds, like silver, sit cupped in Harry’s palm. When he leans closer, he
can see a small, warped reflection of himself in their smoothness.

“What… are they?” he whispers, but Draco’s focused on the empty shell of the Snitch instead
with a shallow sigh. He sits up straighter and looks over his shoulder to try and read a small
engraving inside, but it’s difficult at the angle. “What does it say?”
 Draco smiles sadly, reaching out and tracing a finger along it. Then he remembers Harry’s
open hand and takes a seed gingerly, rolling it between his fingers just as reverentially.

“Draco, what does it say?”

“Hm?”

“The engraving?”

“Crescit eundo,” he murmurs. He’s holding a seed up to his eyes, too, registering the
wavering, miniature Draco staring back at him, when Harry says, “It grows as it goes.”

He lowers it, meeting his eyes intently. “How did you know?”

“Just knew,” Harry shrugs. It had been in his mind instantly, as if he’d never lost it.

Chapter End Notes

Hope you're enjoying!

Feel free to leave some words below in the comments, or find me at

writandromance.tumblr.com. Doing my best to reply as often as I can, but know I read
them all!
 Sostenuto
Chapter Notes

The chapter title refers to Chopin's waltzes, his Sostenuto in E-Flat Major, B.133.

See the end of the chapter for more notes

February 2004

The call had come last minute, stressed, and from the music director directly, a portly man
called Anton whom Draco knew professionally and informally, often running circles around
the wizarding London musical scene. Still, his knock on the door came as a surprise.

“Fion’s been splinched!” he said when Draco swung the door open with wide eyes.

“Splinched?”

“Splinched, Mr Malfoy. It’s tragic! A waste of a career!”

“His hands?” Draco gasped, clasping his own a little tighter. Fion was a masterful pianist and
a masterful drunk. He combined the two with a level of artistry that had often made Draco
consider, in his more blocked moments and desperate for creativity, the benefits of
inebriation. A splinching brought him back down to earth quite well, however.

“No, his hands are fine. His left leg, however—who’s this? Your son?” Teddy was five and
nosier than ever, peering at the large man with a booming voice on his doorstep from behind
Draco’s hip.

“Godson,” Draco answered, moving his hand from the doorframe to Teddy’s head. “So his
career’s not wasted? His hands are fine?”

Anton shook his head, eyes to the sky. “A waste of my career, if you’re occupied tomorrow.”
He pulled, from behind his back, a thick packet of parchment and thrust the entire concerto
into his hands. “Tell me you’re free.”

“Fion can’t play?” Draco asked daftly, stunned into late responses.

“Fion is in St. Mungo’s. There’s a full chamber rehearsal tomorrow. There’s no time for
formal auditioning, but we’ll treat this performance as one, eh? Consider it in deciding on
tenure, perhaps. How’s that sound? I must go. You can thank Étienne, by the way. He asked
for you.”

Draco shut the door on his retreating figure and stared down at the pages in his hand.
“Who was that?” Teddy asked. He was already dressed in his Quidditch kit, complete with
pint-sized shin guards. Andromeda would be there any minute. Draco sat right on the ground
on the hallway’s runner rug and flopped back, arms extended like a snow angel.

“That was a very important man offering me a very important job.”

Teddy flopped down next to him and threw his arms out, one hitting Draco’s neck enough to
make him cough. “You said yes?”

For just a minute, he put the anxiety of everything the job would entail aside for the sake of
celebration and rolled over on the carpet, snatching Teddy up as he returned to his back. He
braced him over his head with his hands and feet, like Harry often did (“Let’s do the flying!”
it often went, when bedtime became an impending threat), and grinned up at his smiling face,
though he was much heavier than Harry always made him look.

“Of course I said yes! I said yes! Yes!”

“Yes!” Teddy laughed.

“Yes!”

From the next room, he heard the roar of the fireplace, crackling with the impending entrance
of Teddy’s gran and his aunt.

Draco widened his eyes with a gasp. “Game time! Off you go!”

He set Teddy back on his feet and stood, following him into the living room with the trainers
and miniature Central London Snidgets raincoat that had been left neglected by the door.

*****

By the time Harry came home, the house had grown dark around him, the curtains still open
on black panes of glass. Rehearsing on a normal day even was a slippery slope for Draco—if
twenty minutes shows improvement, imagine what two hours could do, or twenty hours. He
trudged through a phrase for the hundredth time, and as he played the notes over and over
with his right hand as if he could physically hammer it into his brain, something touched his
left shoulder and startled him half off the bench.

“Circe’s sake,” Harry said.

He’d thrown his arm back in shock at the reaction, but now he set his hand on the back of
Draco’s neck, finding the tenseness there without much guesswork. He stretched his neck
back unthinkingly into Harry’s touch.

“I called Piano Man three times. At least I could hear—does that hurt?” he asked when a ball
of nerves between his shoulder blades sent up a twinge of pain. Draco nodded and he pressed
deeper. “Good—At least I could hear the piano from the door, knew you weren’t dead.”

Draco took a more dedicated look at Harry’s appearance; he was in muddied robes, his hair
messy and windswept.
“The match,” he groaned, reaching behind his head to take Harry’s hand and press his lips to
the skin apologetically.

“Mm, the one you literally dressed my godson for? And still managed to forget?”

Draco grimaced. “How was it?”

“Won. What’s twisted your day up, then?”

“Listen?” he requested hopefully, though Harry had the look about him like shower and bed
were twice as appealing. He brightened though and leaned down to kiss him.

“Of course.”

“Over there,” Draco ordered when Harry tried to budge him over on the bench. He walked to
the sofa without argument and dropped down boneless.

He played the first movement, critiquing in his head even as he went. It was time to turn in,
he was playing too fast, too rigid. His back throbbed, unbalanced by half a shoulder massage
and one looser side reminding him how tense the other was. The music materialised like the
last bites of a meal you’ve forced yourself to finish, rushed and unappetising, forced, and
when it was done he dropped his hands in defeat without waiting for the review.

“Sounds confident,” Harry said. “Beautiful. As always.”

“Confident?” Draco snapped.

“Is that bad? Er… it could sound… uncertain?”

“Don’t rescind your opinions.”

Harry lifted his hands. “I just don’t see what’s so bad about confident.”

“Bach. It’s meant to be soft. Floating. Not confident.”

“Draco, you’re a wonderful musician. It can be confident and… floaty.”

He made an embarrassingly childish sound of disgust, then got up and dragged his feet to
Harry. When he lay across the couch, Harry’s lap became miraculously available. He smelled
dirty, like earth and rain, but the feeling of his hand coasting through his hair was too
comforting to care much about the state of his fingernails.

“Why the Bach hysteria?” he asked softly after a minute of quiet coexistence.

“Emergency performance. Concerto tomorrow. Anton implied that it could end in a tenured
position as the concert pianist.”

“Fucking hell. No pressure.”

“Quite right,” Draco mumbled.

“Anton is… the Philharmonic?”

“The Chamber Orchestra.”

“But you’ve worked with both.”

Bless him, Draco thought, for always trying to keep up. He flitted between ensembles like a
child of divorce. That could end, though, if tenure was involved. As if reading his thoughts,
Harry leaned down and awkwardly flattened his hands on Draco’s cheeks until he met his
eyes.

“You are exceptional. This is huge. We’ll have a massively celebratory Friday dinner next
week.”

“I haven’t gotten it yet,” Draco croaked, finding the ability to be superstitious in such a state
of anxiety.

Harry just shrugged. “He came to you. Could’ve called anyone.”

“Slimmer pickings in full wizarding orchestras.”

“You know that’s not true.”

“Étienne wanted me,” he admitted.

“He adores you, I’ve always said it.”

“Green’s your colour.”

“Adores your skill. As a smart conductor. I’m not jealous. You’re beautiful, everyone should
appreciate it.”

“I’m going to be rubbish.”

“Couldn’t if you tried.”

Harry stood and Draco was in the air so suddenly that he laughed in surprise, couldn’t even
care that he was being held like a baby or some girly sort of newlywed. Which they were,
really. Newlyweds. Harry had kept his honeymoon-earned Italian tan far into the winter.

He hadn’t had much time to think of alchemy in ages, not with his career so in flux, his home
life taking priority, too, but clasping his hands behind Harry’s neck as he carried him up the
stairs he considered the metaphysical, how Harry had teased the concept out of him at that
first dinner, and wondered if they had skipped the turmoil of separation or fermentation—the
breakdowns, the rot—and lucked right into distillation.

Distillation—nothing is deserved, he could see with his eyes shut, in Severus’ handwriting
just to the right of the term. All is worth being grateful for.
July 2013

It is unjustly hot, and Harry had tried to ask Draco if he wanted to wait until next spring to
plant the Moly flower seeds but he’d been shot down immediately. The seedlings were tough,
Draco said, but Harry was less confident. That’s why he’s kneeling in the garden with the sun
high in the sky, carefully investigating the mounds of planted soil.

He swirls the liquid in his watering can and wets the line of seedlings. It’s a concoction
courtesy of Neville—all-season growth elixir that he’d need to apply every day.

“He should wait until spring,” Neville had said, digging through a shed of supplies in his
back garden. He was home for the summer, too, much to Harry’s delight.

“He doesn’t want to wait.”

“Lucky he has you, then. It’s a pain to grow out of season.”

Harry had taken the bottle Neville offered him with a look of disagreement. “He could’ve
done it himself.”

“But he didn’t have to,” he replied lightly, pointedly. “That’s kind of you.”

He’d looked up Moly flowers in a gardening book Neville had gifted him years ago and now,
knees in the dirt, he wipes a forearm across his brow and leans over its open pages in the sun.
Without growth accelerator, which he was too scared to add, they’d begin to sprout in a week,
and if the all-season elixir was working they’d be a pale grey, almost lavender colour.

“Moly and spite a woman make, may every man his true form take…” Draco’s voice rises
behind him as he steps through the back door, loping down the short steps and into the garden
grass. “A spell for swine, requiring wine & wicked intent.”

Harry shields his eyes with a gloved hand, squinting upwards at the approaching figure.
Piano music had been ringing out through the open windows for hours. Not a pane of glass in
the house was shut in this heat, but Harry was growing to love the sound of it, even the
rickety melodies of younger students.

“Sounds like the spells I used to scare Dudley with,” he says.

“A rhyme my mother taught me.”

“They’ve not grown yet.”

“I wouldn’t expect them to.”

For a long beat, they stare at each other. Draco’s in a light-coloured shirt of some more
formally-thick fabric, professional, sure, but certainly much warmer than Harry’s t-shirt. He
points up after a moment, unable to think of anything else to say, and asks, “Aren’t you
warm?”

Draco wobbles his head undecidedly. “Better for lessons.”

“So they don’t see your tattoo?”

Something about planting seeds of incredible import to Draco fills him with pluck he’d been
wary of before. These were seeds that even he, in this memory-less version of a soulmate,
knows were Draco’s the second he agreed to go flying. Had Harry expected it to take thirteen
years? Would the seeds have rotted for decades in a cage of gold? He’s feeling emboldened
and owed, offended, even, for this other version of himself.

“Yes, so they don’t see my tattoo.” Draco speaks evenly, then turns and walks away, Harry
thinks to abandon him entirely but he simply walks to the small garden table and lifts one of
the wooden folding chairs by its back. “It’s unprofessional,” he adds, settling it near Harry
and sitting.

“Is that what you’re trying to maintain between us, then? Professionalism?”

“We’re taking things at your pace.” Draco doesn’t rise to the challenge in Harry’s voice. “If it
feels like professionalism then that’s just because there’s some realm we haven’t gotten
comfortable enough for.”

“So you’re uncomfortable talking about things and somehow it’s my fault for being the one
setting the pace in this… in this.”

“How are you treating the seeds?” Draco points to the soil, a clear and unabashed avoidance.
Harry hates the way he’s sitting; arms crossed over his chest, legs wide and feet firmly
planted. Like a king in his country, but this was Harry’s garden. Harry’s soil, so carefully
kept, full of nutrients, giving the gift of its vitality to these seeds.

“Water,” he bites out. “All-season. Sunlight.”

Draco hums. Harry turns back to the soil, packing it down, eliminating gaps with the back of
his spade. He feels eyes on the back of his head as he presses empty plastic planter pots on
top of the seeds.

“It keeps them moist,” he says, preempting Draco’s question without turning around. When
he does glance back, sure enough, his mouth is open like he’d been about to speak up.

A few weeds are fighting through the soil by the potatoes, so he pulls them too, and before he
knows it, it’s turned into an entire maintenance session. Draco says nothing, and eventually
his presence drifts into Harry’s periphery, nothing but the occasional sound of him shifting in
the chair keeping him from disappearing entirely. His thoughts amble. Young children a few
doors down screech in their backyard and he misses Rose and Hugo. The grass is tall, but
he’ll leave it like that; any shorter will dry the soil in the summer heat.

Eventually, Draco sighs, stands from his chair, and lowers himself onto the ground. He
glances into Harry’s eyes, then back towards the house and down at his left sleeve. He begins
undoing the button at the cuff.

“I put the words over it much later,” he says casually, rolling his sleeve until a fading red
skull is revealed. Over it, a darkly inked phrase runs down his forearm.
Every second of it catches Harry unexpectedly. For a minute, he watches, looking around like
this could be for someone else, then, slowly, he drops his tools and walks closer. No wrong
notes, it reads. He sits back onto his heels gingerly across from him, resisting the urge to
reach out and touch the raised skin.

“It still feels distasteful to show my students. Especially when the tabloids still celebrate
every time an ex-Death Eater moves away.”

“What’s it mean?” Harry asks.

“A pianist, Thelonious Monk. He said ‘there are no wrong notes on the piano, just better
choices’, so it’s a reminder of who I was, but also how I’ve become someone I’m proud of.
Who it’s led me to be. Who it led me to.”

His eyes are glued to his arm as he speaks and Harry’s glad. He’s not sure he could hold eye
contact at the moment.

“I think it’s brilliant. I don’t… have… any.” He trails off as he finishes, knowing that he’s
once again volunteering things Draco knows.

But he graciously says nothing, just nods like this is new information as he rolls his sleeve
further, slowly revealing, to Harry’s surprise, two dancing skeletons just above his elbow.
They’re twirling, wobbly on spindled legs, thanks to magical ink. This time he gasps without
meaning to and reaches out to touch them. The balls of their feet jive under his glove. He’d
forgotten he was even gardening until he saw his dragon-hide fingers stretched out between
them. Vaguely, he tugs them off as Draco talks.

“It’s like the Danse Macabre,” he says. “A sort of memento mori.”

“Memento mori?” Harry repeats as a question.

“Remember, you will die.”

“Cheery,” he chuckles, having hardly ever forgotten.

“We’re all the same, in death,” Draco muses, even as he leaves his left sleeve pushed to the
bicep and starts to unbutton the right cuff.

Harry barely has a moment to register that he’s revealing another tattoo before his sleeve rises
under nimble fingers and he gets the first glimpse of more small bones. He’s going to make
some joke about Draco’s proclivity for skeletons, but then an entire dinosaur is revealed and
the words fall away. It’s not a t-rex, nor a stegosaurus. It’s slightly hunchbacked, short, with a
thick, pointed tail. Hugo would know, he thinks.

“Velociraptor?” he guesses.

“Allosaurus,” says Draco. “Or the skeleton of one.”

“Why?” This time he reaches out with naked fingertips, feels the warmth of Draco’s skin in
the high-noon sun.
Draco shrugs. “Hugo thought they were cool.”

Harry laughs, short and unexpected. “That’s it?”

“Would you rather I make up another deep story? This one should be even easier.”

Before Harry can calculate why his mouth’s gone dry, Draco’s unbuttoned his shirt at the
centre. He tugs at the pushed-up sleeve until he’s dropped his shirt entirely from his right
shoulder, revealing the thick black outline of—

“A rose,” Harry sighs. “For Rose.”

He nods. It’s simple, nothing gaudy, not even cliché, Harry thinks, perhaps with some bias.
Just some petals, a stem, thorns, and thin, pencilled lines of cross-hatching. The petals almost
touch the joint of his shoulder, the stem reaching down towards his bicep.

“There’s… one more,” Draco says softly with reservation in his voice. Harry’s not sure he
can mentally grasp it—already, he feels as though the body before him is more a stranger’s
than he thought, had been hiding both ink and sentimentality in places he’d least expected it.
But Draco unbuttons his shirt further, dropping it completely from his shoulders, like he’s
going to keep his momentum or lose courage entirely.

There’s a sun, just above his heart, on the left side of his chest. It looks almost like a
children’s drawing in its rudimentary shape, though the lines are confident and steady—a
circle with small arcs like sun rays fanning out. Against the porcelain of his collarbone, it’s
unmissable.

“What, you just love the summer?” he jokes, laughing lightly.

“No, this is you.” Draco touches it softly, with love, like he’s touching his heart.

“Me?”

“It’s the alchemical symbol for gold. Associated with the sun. Warmth. Heart. Er, perfection,”
he adds, almost sheepishly. “It’s stupid now.” When he motions to pull his shit back up,
Harry stops him with a quick grip on the fabric of the collar. He places his other hand flat
over the sun.

“Not stupid,” he says adamantly. “Not stupid. Lovely. It’s…”

He drags his gaze from Draco’s chest and meets his eyes, losing the rest of his thought. The
man is hanging on his every word, genuine and vulnerable. In another life, he thinks, for far
from the first time, they were always this close. Harry knew his tattoos, his love, and his
touch. Unthinkingly, he presses his hand a bit firmer into Draco’s chest, like he can find the
love through straight contact with his heart, which is beating quite fast.

Draco opens his mouth and makes a light, croaking sound like he’s getting the nerve to say
something.

“Er, shall I come back later?!”

Teddy calls out to them loudly from the open window. Harry snatches his hand back and
looks up, just as Draco shrugs his shirt back on and the art disappears as fast as it had
materialised.

*****

The lumber yard is tucked away in the woods an hour north of Edinburgh, comprised of tall
red oak cabins and dusty earth. Teddy used to drag his boots through the dirt while Harry
spoke to Laurie or Anson about supplies, laughing at the clouds that appeared at his feet, but
now he stands tall beside him, hands in the pockets of his jeans, and takes an adjudicating
look at the first timber they pass.

“Reckon it’s going to be more than we can transport?” he asks, looking at Harry.

“We’ll ship it.”

“Brilliant! That means our hands are empty, so for lunch…”

Harry smiles, waving to Laurie’s emerging figure in the largest cabin, straight ahead. “Yeah,
Ted, we’ll stop in Edinburgh. Hullo, Laurie!”

“Harry! Not a moment too soon!” The tall, wide man strolls down the steps and across to
meet them in the centre of the yard. He looks as though the appearance of a lumberjack was a
requirement for the job. “I’ve got that silver lime. Fluttered the dovecotes, it has. Been
holding everyone off telling them it’s yours, but of course, that gets them nagging me further!
Mr Lupin,” he adds, with a playful bow towards Teddy. “Another year of tip-top academia
behind you, then? Head boy yet?”

“That wouldn’t be until year seven, sir.”

“Ah! So inevitable, I lost track of time, then. Follow me, lads!”

Laurie waves a beckoning hand, and as they trail him towards the largest building, Harry lays
an affectionate hand on Teddy’s head. It’s quickly swatted off.

“I knew you’d want the silver lime and the ash,” Laurie’s saying. Through the doorway,
they’re hit with the near overwhelming smell of wood, like Harry’s workshop to the extreme.
“Last time, you mentioned the spalted beech, but I wasn’t sure if that sold like you wanted.
We’ve got some top-notch Scottish oak.”

“Dunno about the spalted beech,” Harry says, immediately finding the silver lime. The thick
planks still have the live edge of bark, and its colour is just as eye-catching as he’d expected
—shiny even in the roughed texture of the bark, like fish scales.

“Fair.”

“Cheers for holding onto this.” Harry pats the silver lime. “Shall we talk quantities?”

They leave Teddy to browse the showroom, walking through the stores and back into a small,
no-nonsense office. There are pictures on the wall of Laurie and his wife and their two young
girls, plus some reviews for the lumber yard.

“Read your article, in Seeker Weekly.”

“Oh, what did you think?” Harry directs his attention back to the man.

“Think she underestimated the challenge of woodworking. Made it sound like a hobby. Been
searching to understand why you gave her the interview at all—giving strawberries to
donkeys. Get a woodworker to ask you some questions, and there’s an intriguing article. Not
that it’s your fault she was insufficient.”

Harry shrugs. “I think it was a more calculated advertisement for the Cup than actually about
my work, honestly.”

“Hm. Wouldn’t put it past them. More ceibo wood? Official broom of the games and all
that?”

“Oh, yeah. That’s smart, add it.”

By the time they emerge, Teddy’s gone from the showroom. Harry shakes Laurie’s hand and
wanders back towards the less commercial edge of the timber shop and a towering copse of
yew trees where, as if Harry had known to find him there, Teddy sits in a clearing of wild
grass, shaded by the lethargically stretching branches.

He’s leaning back on his elbows with his legs extended in front of him, an arm lightly
extended into a patch of sunlight. Just hovering by the tips of his pointer and middle fingers
is a miniature, humanoid figure, iridescent and suspended in the air by two fluttering wings.
A fairy.

A twig snaps under Harry’s foot and Teddy snaps his head over, lifting the index finger of his
free hand to his lips. Harry nods, watching his step as he crosses the clearing. He stops when
he can squat on the balls of his feet next to Teddy.

Neither speaks for a minute. Harry’s waiting for Teddy to say something. Finally, he taps the
fairy’s pointed foot with his finger and it pushes off like a boost, taking to fluttering
somewhere not too far about their heads.

“Did you get your orders?” he asks.

Harry nods, regarding him thoughtfully. He looks contemplative but not particularly sad.
Lately, he’s been more and more resembling a grown version of himself or a young version of
his parents. Harry remembers the way Sirius and Remus would look at him like they were
seeing a ghost. The longer Teddy grows, the more his face fills out into the appearance of a
man, the more he understands.

“You’re good with creatures.”

The fairy had already decided Teddy was trustworthy and returned to his hand, this time
setting its full weight on his fingertips.
“Thanks,” Teddy mumbles.

“Have you given any thought to what you’d like to do after school? I don’t mean to add any
stress, it’s just… well, it’s been a joy to watch you grow into a talented young man…”

Teddy rolls his eyes expertly, lowering his hand and watching to see whether the fairy will
follow it down. “You sound like Gran.”

Harry huffs a laugh and doesn’t inquire further. After a minute, it does the trick, and Teddy
licks his lips and takes a breath. “I don’t really want to think about it too much until I hear
back about O.W.L.s, you know? Wouldn’t want to get my hopes up and then get rubbish
results.”

“As if you would.”

“Potions was dodgy. I answered too well in Magical Creatures.”

“How do you answer too well?”

“Got wordy. I don’t know.”

“I think you might be overthinking.”

Teddy shrugs. “Time will tell.”

“There’s not much you’d be bad at.”

“I thought maybe I wanted to be a professor, like Neville or Dad. But… I really like what
Hermione does.” His head tilts at the thought, like looking at a memory or perhaps a vision of
his future with a smile that reaches his eyes. The fairy flies out of his hand and hovers in
front of his face. “We use fairies like décor, but they’re living creatures. We teach house elves
to abuse themselves for the smallest mistakes. We deny werewolves jobs for something that
happens once a month that they can’t help. And it’s all legal. I don’t know.”

“Your parents would be proud,” Harry says. “Certainly, a career like ‘Mione’s would be an
outlet for that fight your mum gave you.”

Teddy shrugs. “Dunno yet, though, alright? Don’t go announcing that. You’ll tell Draco I
guess, though. Or maybe you won’t,” he adds, quieter.

“We talk about you loads. I’m sure it’ll come up.”

This seems to brighten Teddy’s mood even further. “That’s fine, brilliant, even. He’s… I
don’t know if you’d hate to hear it, but if you’re a father to me, so is he.”

He says it sternly, with all that fight in him that Harry had just mentioned, as if it’ll register as
anything but heart-clenching to Harry. It brings him back to that night early on, just when he
and Draco had begun endeavouring towards small talk and Draco spoke of reprimanding
Teddy with a tinge of fatherhood in his voice powerful enough for Harry to see him in a new
light.
“Even if you two weren’t…” Teddy drifts off, poking at the leaves at their feet. “He’s not
leaving. He can move house, but I’ll want to stay with him sometimes, too. I’d… you can’t
just bin him because you can’t figure out to love him, you know? Not his fault. Or mine.”

“Teddy, Draco’s going nowhere,” Harry replies, firm and a bit surprised that he’d been
worried over that. “He’s always in our lives. I just can’t promise in what way he’s in mine.
I’m sorry, I know this has been confusing for you. In the beginning, I underestimated what he
means to you—what you mean to him. But no matter what happens with us, it’s not going to
affect you two. Promise.”

Teddy nods, and when his hand drifts down again, the fairy finally flies off towards the brush.

“Did you sort anything out with the compass?” he asks.

Harry shakes his head with a frown.

“Do you think you’re still in danger? Both of you?”

“I don’t know. Those photos of Draco are unsettling, but it’s been months and no one’s tried
anything again.”

“That you know of.”

“That we know of,” Harry acquiesces.

“Vic says… she says Mr Weasley’s giving up. She hasn’t said that exactly, but she was
pressing him on it—I think she misses who I was before I was stressed about this,” he laughs
bitterly, clenching Harry’s heart again. “He said it’s been months, they’re running out of
ideas, and they’re not going to stop trying but things might slow if they don’t come up with
something new.”

“Don’t worry about what Mr Weasley says,” Harry responds immediately. “For one, Draco
hasn’t let up in the slightest in his lab. And we’re doing everything we can think of to get
memories back. With or without love,” he adds when Teddy looks suddenly enthused. He
doesn’t want to get his hopes up when it seems to have caused him so much anxiety already.

The young man says nothing, just begins to pick at a hangnail with his head hung low. Harry
nudges his shoulder. “Here’s a question,” he says lightly. “Where’s your tattoo?”

“What?” Teddy’s eyes are wide.

“Draco’s got tattoos for Rose and Hugo. You didn’t get one?”

“Oh,” he chuckles, leaning back easily on his hands again. “I was too indecisive. Spent years
coming up with ideas but they changed weekly. It’s not urgent to me. Maybe he’ll just get
something that makes him think of me like he did for you, without a request. Maybe he’ll
cover up your tattoo with one for me.”

“When pigs fly, maybe,” Harry laughs along.

“When he goes a day without reciting Latin.”

“When he makes a long-game chess move without citing multiple published chessmaster
games.”

“When he gets on a broomstick,” says Teddy, too busy getting to his feet to notice Harry’s not
laughed along.

*****

“…and that’s not to say you can wear one suit to every occasion, but every man should own a
bespoke suit. Prêt-à-porter your life away, but for Circe’s sake, have a tailor on dial-speed, or
however they say.”

“Mmhm,” Harry supplies distantly.

“You’re a spring-autumn, right?”

“I think I’m a Leo.”

“Don’t be cute. Vincent will know, anyway, he’s got a great eye for palettes. Draco used to
see him, but then he said something distasteful about the arts or what have you and he was
ridiculously stubborn. Said the Royal Albert should be bestowed a restraining order against
Vincent, if he was going to be that judgmental about musicians. Don’t tell him where we
went, he’s just so good with beginners like you. Blaise goes to some man in Italy. Fully
Portkeys for every fitting…”

Harry doesn’t need to be told that if he remembered Draco for more than ten per cent of the
time they’d been friends, he wouldn’t need a lecture on Savile Row. He’s not living in a
world, however, where Pansy doesn’t amend that hole in his memory. She walks beside him
with her shoulders back, her heels somehow exuding confidence just in the way they rap on
the pavement. Her skirt is some half-pleated designer piece, from a brand he’s already
forgotten the name of, and it only adds to his sense of inadequacy.

“Did I, er, dress okay?” he asks, trying to pull his tucked shirt out enough to look casually
suave like Blaise has perfected, but he just looks slovenly.

“I told him you’re an emergency case; there’s no need to impress.” Pansy hooks her arm
through his, missing the look of wariness on his face. That wasn’t exactly a compliment.

There was no reason for a new suit, as he’d reminded Pansy repeatedly since she got the wild
hair at their last dinner.

“You’re going to Draco’s solo recital—that requires dressing well,” she’d said when it was
just them and Luna by the door. “Imagine how dashing you’d look in something properly
tailored. Even at your wedding, you only agreed to get measurements because it would make
Draco happy.”

Her slip into wedding talk had caught him off guard. He’d made sure not to show a flicker of
excitement, though he thought of it all night.
They stop now outside a bright shop window, a façade framed in rich, warm wood with
Massif and Sons in elegant cursive above the entrance. In the window are torsos donning
tuxedos, winter jackets, blazers. He is definitively underdressed

They’ve barely stepped into the short-piled interior, the bell still ringing overhead, when a
small man with coke bottle glasses bustles towards them. He practically pulls Harry’s right
hand from his pocket. Harry stares back bewildered as he shakes his hand and speaks quickly.

“Mr Potter, I presume? How wonderful that Mrs Parkinson has gotten you through my doors!
Her friends are always welcome. Come in, come in, let’s take a look at you and then we’ll get
your thoughts!”

He finishes the greeting with relish, waving past the orderly lines of suit jackets towards long
tables littered with swatches. There’s no time to get a word out. The interior world of the
shop is moving around Harry at a speed he can’t keep up with. He’s still trying to decipher
whether Mr Massif knows about wizardry when a small cloth tape whizzes out from his
pocket and begins to run the length of Harry’s arms behind his head. Harry stops in his tracks
while Mr Massif walks ahead.

“Ignore it and make haste, Mr Potter!” he chirps. Pansy prods two gentle fingers at his back
and they set him moving again, as the measuring tape circles his waist, then his chest.

“It’s, er, a fine shop,” says Harry, based entirely on the fact that the items he does see look
like what Draco or Blaise would wear and it smells like whiffs of wool and shoe polish.

“How kind of you to say! My children—hold your arms up, young man, do not impede the
tape measure, there, back down now—they griped and groaned at a young age, but now
they’re more than proud to keep it running. Do you have children, Mr Potter?”

The measuring tape tightens around the base of his neck, and just briefly, he thinks this would
be an artfully circumstantial way to finally be murdered. Then it loosens and presents the
number to Mr Massif.

“None of my own. My godson lives with me quite often,” he says, a hand rubbing lightly at
his neck as the tape snakes its way down the inseam of his pants.

“Boys,” says the tailor with a sage nod. The tape measure presents a final number to him,
then snaps up into a tightly-rolled galleon-sized disk and rocks to a lifeless halt on the desk.
“Now, then,” he claps his hands together. “Come over, and let’s talk about what you’re
wanting!”

It’s a dizzying conversation, largely because Harry doesn’t want anything more than
whatever Pansy wants. She translates patiently for him (“single vent is one slit in the back,
double is the two slits”) and offers blatant decisions when he’s completely at a loss (“say yes
to the side tabs, belts are not bespoke”), but mostly she gives him the breathing room to take
a long time to answer and make more choices than he’s ever made about clothing in his
memory. When they’ve finally worked through the full run of a new vocabulary and Harry’s
commented on everything from spalla camicia to cuffs to lapel style, Mr Massif leaves them
to retrieve a tower of bolts of cloth, and Pansy grips Harry’s shoulders to face her in sudden
seriousness.

“I’ve been a bit laissez-faire about explaining why I wanted to do this with you,” she says,
her voice soft and friendly. It had reached into its haughtier register to speak with the tailor,
kind of like he’s watched it do when just she, Blaise, and Draco get off on a tangent together.

“The concert,” he replies.

She waves a dismissive hand. “This is far from your first concert. The clothes you had were
fine.”

He blinks in surprise and opens his mouth to argue back in surprise. “Pans—”

“I know you, Harry. Even in whatever it is you two are in now, you’d come here because
Draco needed you dressed a certain way long before you’d come for yourself. You’re a
people pleaser through and through.”

“I am not—”

“You are with the people you love. Care about,” she corrects at the look of protest on his
face. “You at least came here because I wanted you to. The point is, you need this!” She pats
her hands flat on his chest, not a push so much as a gesture of deep enthusiasm. “Look,
Draco’s response to the Obliviation was to turn inward and yours was to turn out—even these
Mind Healer-appointed activities with all your friends are about your friends. Why aren’t we
doing things for you? Learn to treat yourself nicely, Harry. That’s today’s homework.”

He’s so stunned by the outpouring of thoughtfulness that he doesn’t give her any words to
interrupt, just stands and stares at her with his mouth agape while Mr Massif drops bolts onto
the wide table with a whoomph.

“Vincent,” Pansy says, a hand on Harry’s shoulder. “Is there a suit in Harry’s size he can try
on, just to get an idea of how he’ll feel three fittings from now?”

“Three fittings?” Harry asks faintly. It falls on deaf ears. The tailor is spreading fabrics out in
front of them, nodding heavily.

“Oh, certainly, certainly. Settle on a colour and we’ll find something similar, eh?”

Pansy at least tries to help him in the right direction, but her visions are gutsy compared to
where his eyes are gravitating. The closest bolt laid out before him is a dark charcoal grey,
but beside it are reds, greens, blues, and browns.

“These are great, but I was honestly picturing a black suit. Is—would that be… bad?”

Mr Massif laughs. “Would that be bad?”

He lifts his shoulders unconfidently. “Er, fashionably.”

“No! A classic, Mr Potter. I had assumed you already had a black suit, no?”
“I don’t think so.”

“Well, you can’t go wrong with that, right Mrs Parkinson?”

Her hand grazes down the deep maroon wool as if in mourning. “Yes,” she sighs. “A classic.”

Harry hates to disappoint but he loves to be done, and that seems to be the last decision
required of him. Mr Massif disappears with the chosen bolt to find a similar suit, leaving
them with free reign upstairs.

“Why don’t you report on clothes, then, if you’re so interested?” he asks Pansy as they make
their way over to a pair of plush chairs by a velvet curtain.

She takes a moment once seated to smooth her hair and pull it behind her shoulders. “Fashion
critic,” she offers, leaning forward and pouring a glass of lemon water, “is not something I
need to be paid to perform.”

Harry snorts and pours his glass, then drinks it entirely waiting on Mr Massif. After long
minutes of silence, he’s beginning to wonder if the man had keeled over somewhere in the
shop and his ghost was going to float back with a tuxedo to finish what he started like
Professor Binns. Finally, though, they hear the creak of steps and he reappears from the
bowels of the store.

“A nine?”

Harry draws his brows in, confused, until the old man holds up a pair of dress shoes.

“My son’s. Are you a nine?”

“Close enough,” he says.

“I cannot let you try on a Massif and Sons suit with those… hm, those, trainers.” All three of
them look down at his Converse. Not, Harry thinks, particularly criminal. He takes the shoes,
hooking two fingers into the heels, and drapes the suit over his other arm.

Behind the curtain, the slacks fit well, if not a little long, a little loose. There are belt loops,
which he threads the belt from his jeans through, and he tucks the white dress shirt in as best
he can. Then the waistcoat, the suit jacket, the tie, feeling smothered in layers, wondering
how he is to wear something like this at an outdoor event in August.

“Pansy, isn’t this concert in Holland Park?” he begins as he pulls the curtain back. “How am I
—”

A gasp shuts him up. “Harry Potter!” she squeals, a hand flying to her heart. “You have never
looked this good in your entire life!”

He scowls. “I think that’s an insult.”

“No! You look fit. And this isn’t even the tailored suit, this is—you look handsome even with
that awful belt. Harry.”
He laughs nervously, scratching the nape of his neck. The fabric constricts at his elbow
uncomfortably. “Seriously, this is starting to feel over the top. I know this trip was to stroke
my ego, but you can tone it down.”

Pansy stands and walks over to him, running a hand down each arm of his jacket. “I’m not
stroking your ego, Harry, I’m reminding you to appreciate yourself—look.” With a grip on
his arms, she pulls him to the heavy, full-length mirror. He stands there, stiffly, but as he
stares, he begins to drop his shoulders, stand a little straighter. Pansy pokes his bicep.

“See? You see it!” She frames him better in the mirror. “Do you need me to teach you to be
vain, you prat? Is it that far from you Gryffindor sensibilities?”

Harry scoffs.

In the mirror, her head pokes up over his right shoulder. “You look like James Bond,” she
murmurs. “The black suit with your dark hair… hm? Don’t you agree?”

“I—I, sure. It’s a good colour.”

“You’re glowing in it,” she insists, feeling his weak resolve. “Look at how tall it makes you
look. You exude confidence.” She slaps the back of his hand. “Put your hands in your
pockets.”

He does so, obediently, pushing his open jacket away to sink his hands into his pockets.
Pansy claps her hands together. “Yes! Look how cool!”

Harry laughs. In the reflection, he swivels his torso a little in each direction, regarding
himself. With Hogwarts students home for the summer holiday, he’s had more lesson requests
since the year began, and even limiting himself to a small (‘exclusive’, depending on who’s
framing the observation) number of students, it’s a lot of time in the sun. It makes the white
of the shirt crisper, the green of his eyes richer.

When the tailor returns, he compliments Harry, though not as exuberantly as Pansy, which
would have been strange anyway, and points instead to the tightness in the shoulders, the gap
in the waist, and everything else Harry hadn’t even noticed that makes bespoke so time-
honoured.

As he’s fumbling around behind the curtain again, pulling his pedestrian clothing back on,
something comes to mind, like a task he’d forgotten to complete, offhand. Draco in his
workshop, dressed like he’d stopped at Massif and Sons, speechifying just as Pansy has—
self-actualisation, making things just for himself. His mind flits just as suddenly to his
garden.

“Earth to Harry?” Pansy snaps a finger in his face when they’re preparing to leave. “What’s
on your mind?”

He frowns. “Just my garden, I think.”

 She shoulders him affectionately. “This is what I’m talking about. We need to expand the
ways you take care of yourself. Beyond romping in the dirt. You and Neville,” she sighs.
“This is going to be the first of many times a tailor’s shop changes your life.”

Harry narrows his eyes at the ground. It seems untrue, in any possible understanding. He had,
after all, met Draco in one.

Chapter End Notes

Hope you're enjoying!

Feel free to leave some words below in the comments, or find me at

writandromance.tumblr.com. Doing my best to reply as often as I can, but know I read
them all!
 Moonlight Sonata
Chapter Notes

Check your watches, it's Moonlight Sonata O'Clock— Beethoven's third movement,
specifically.

See the end of the chapter for more notes

July 2013

Rushing water. Whitecaps. Foam.

Pink sky. Thin clouds.

Ginny.

Her hair is short, cut blunt in a bob just at her chin. Like it was when she was younger.

And Ron. Harry’s hands are shaking, so he folds the pocket square for him.

He can smell the salt as if he’s back on the coast.

Mrs Weasley sets a pie in front of him with a tea-towel wrapped hand. He’s still thinking of
last night’s dream as he reaches to move it to the cooling rack, and he hisses at the heat, the
sharp bite, snatching his hand back. It snaps him fully from his thoughts with the quick pain
of reality.

“Oh dear,” she tuts, bustling back over. “Thought you’d be the last one I needed to nag about
attentive cooking. Let’s see it, love.”

“I—I’m fine,” he grimaces.

She takes his hand anyway, spreading his fingers and investigating the red skin, then holds it
gently under the cold water. It’s soothing. Out behind the Burrow, he can hear raucous
laughter. He leans forward more to look out.

It might as well be a Christmas gathering in its numbers. All Weasleys are in attendance, plus
wives, children, friends, except Percy, who was ‘summering elsewhere’ as George told him in
his poshest voice. Most of Harry’s circle had come as well—Blaise is chatting with Bill,
Aldona seems to be holding court with anyone under twelve, and he can see Draco standing
on the edge of the garden with Charlie and a slim, smiling man Harry hadn’t met yet.

“That’s Charlie’s friend,” Mrs Weasley says, following his gaze. “Abeo. He was the
veterinary potioneer when Charlie’s research group settled temporarily in Nigeria. They must
get along well—he’s moving to do research in Romania too and Charlie’s offered his home.”

Harry looks to Mrs Weasley with wide eyes, then back to the three of them nodding and
laughing. Charlie pats a hand on Abeo’s shoulder and rubs it up and down before returning it
to his pocket. Harry reads in it what he suspects only Draco also reads out of the day’s
partygoers. Maybe Pansy and Luna, if they weren’t distracted swinging Hugo by the arms.

A potioneer also explains Draco’s switch into an animated conversationalist. Harry thinks of
the young James and wonders if he’s ever told him he knows a dragonologist. Surely, he has.

“Must be good friends,” he murmurs.

All day, he’s been jumping from one moment of distracted dissociation to the next, first
staring out the window of Grimmauld Place long after Draco had put his shoes on, deaf to his
announcements that he was ready to go. Then again in the kitchen, his hand on the pie glass,
and now with Mrs Weasley, staring unseeingly out the window while water rushes over his
hand.

If he hadn’t stopped in the shop, he wouldn’t have seen anything and he would be enjoying
his birthday instead of—

“What happened here?” Ginny asks behind them, peering between their aproned selves to
spot his hand in the sink.

“Burned it,” says Mrs Weasley, a touch disproving.

“Wasn’t paying attention,” Harry adds, pulling his hand softly from her grip and shutting the
water off with the other.

“Good it was a burn and not a lost finger, then. Distracted with a knife would be worse.”

Ginny leans back against the counter with a gaze like she’s trying to read him. He swallows,
staring back and still running a finger along the tender patch of skin. In his head, he keeps
seeing her at twenty with that blunt bob, instead of in the long plait before him. Her stare
wavers in discomfort under his unexplained scrutiny.

“Well then.” Mrs Weasley volleys her attention between the two of them, wiping her hands
dry on her apron. “I’ll get Arthur expanding those tables, then we’ll take everything out back.
Someone do a headcount and find the plates.”

There’s a long silence in her absence. Neither of them springs into action. Harry looks down
at his hands.

“Fleur’s not drinking,” Ginny says. He snaps his head up. “She never says no to an Aperol
spritz, remember when she joked she should’ve named Victoire ‘Aperitiva’? But she just
turned me down.”

“Oh. Uh. Okay.”

She knocks a foot into his shin lightly. “She’s pregnant.”

“Oh.” He stands straighter and looks out the window again as if he’s going to see something
incriminating. Catching her with a glow about her, even now in a sundress with a young
Dominique hanging on her waist, was too consistently Fleur to be a sign.

“You know, Mum thinks it’s a shame we didn’t stay together long enough for grandchildren,”
Ginny says. “And yet she didn’t find it funny when I said I’d sent you the letter.”

“Is she that convinced you’ll never settle down?” he laughs.

He knows, for a fact, from Angelina Johnson that Ginny’s been seeing someone in Wales. It
doesn’t bother him in the slightest. Even less, he’d expect, in a timeline where he was happily
married.

“She just thinks your handsomeness is a loss. And… speaking of loss…”

“Speaking of loss? In this company?”

“Just between us,” she shrugs. “How are you and Draco… What are you and Draco?”

“Gin.” He fixes her with a grim look. “Any couple who’s ever said ‘it’s complicated’ is the
picture of straightforward next to us.”

She nods appraisingly. “I see. So it’s an active mutual pursuance… or…”

Was it a pursuance? Again, unstoppably, he thinks to the shop. And how he’d just wanted to
clean. He’s been so busy, everything had cluttered up. A weeklong slosh of broom orders.

A note from Harry to Harry should be easy to grasp. Who does he trust, if not himself? Past
or present? Who else’s words would he take to heart more? These came from his heart.

“Twenty-five.”

“What?” Harry asks, but Ginny’s not looking at him. Molly cocks her head in the doorway,
frowning worriedly, and he blinks, unsure when she’d arrived.

“Twenty-five people, Sir Selective Hearing,” Ginny sighs. “I’ll be out with plates, Harry can
help.”

She begins to open cupboards, placing plates on the countertop, then pulls out her wand to
enlarge tea saucers to find the numbers.

“You sure you’re alright?” The plates sink heavily in his arms. The clatter of their added
weight fills the silence of his hesitating response.

Eventually, he nods feebly. He’ll be fine if he can just talk to someone. Anastasia, by
definition, would be the best but they’re not due to see each other for another week. Neville is
always unbiased in his listening and understanding, but he is regrettably out of town, off at
some herbologist’s conference that was Professor Sprout’s birthday gift to him.
It’s not that he doesn’t find benefit in speaking to Ron and Hermione, but they’ve got an
entire family and life, which he’s already interrupted enough. Hermione’s in the middle of a
career change, and Ron’s already manning his case within the Ministry. He can’t tell Draco.

For most of dinner, he searches the faces of everyone who loves him, feeling like an internal
implosion is imminent. Bill avoids his eyes almost entirely, and when they do meet he offers
a tense smile, clearly shrouded in the awkwardness of a case that’s dying before their eyes.

Near the end of the meal, Draco taps his wrist. “Everything go as planned at the shop?”

“What do you mean?” he snaps back. “What wouldn’t go to plan?”

Draco raises his palms in surrender, eyes grown large. “Cleaning the entire workroom is a
massive undertaking. Just questioning if you got through it all. Circe’s sake, Birthday Blues.
You’re thirty-three, not dead. Cheer up.”

They sing happy birthday, cut cake, and give Harry too many things, all thoughtful and
unwarranted. Looking down the long table, he’s surprised how many people came together to
celebrate him and chalks it up to pity. He can feel them parsing through conversation like it’s
a hedge maze with him, trying to discern which twists and turns lead away from mentioning
Draco.

When the group has dissolved again and the children are finally freed from their fidgeting to
play, Harry pulls Hermione and Ron away. Everywhere they turn, though, there’s family, and
they weave back through the house, up and up until they end up in Ron’s childhood room.

“What is it?” Hermione asks urgently, as she had all the way into the house and up the stairs.
Now, Harry sits under a fading Chudley Cannons poster, twiddling his thumbs.

It had been a cathartically deep clean, the kind where you scrub the walls because it might
make you feel more pristine inside. He’d been feeling off-colour, you see, ever since Draco’s
birthday. Why since Draco’s birthday doesn’t matter, he explains cagily, just that it had led to
Draco psychoanalyzing him and him agreeing. There have been memories, though, that burst
through, and they couldn’t if Draco had been right in saying Harry only felt like he wanted to
love Draco.

“Hold on,” Ron says, raising a finger. He chews, and they wait for him to finish his bite of
carrot cake. He’d brought his plate along. “You want to love Draco? I thought you were
playing Muggle memory games and shit to avoid that.”

“We have been researching memory recovery. But I wasn’t avoiding it anymore, really, I
just… didn’t want to rely on it. Because I didn’t feel it. But I want my memories.”

“And you say you’re getting them? You’re getting memories?” Hermione adds in a stunned
breathy tone.

“I don’t know if you can quite call them that. There’ve been a couple of dreams. And maybe
once or twice—you know that feeling when you wake up and you know you’ve dreamed
something but you lose it the more awake you become? It’s been like that. Things I know I
knew for a second. I don’t know how to describe it.”

“But that’s a sign,” she says eagerly.

“I don’t know if it is. This is all based on conjecture, remember? We’re just stumbling along
some path Bill theorised.”

That dulls them a bit. He’s not sure how the idea that she could be exactly right makes him
feel, so they aren’t allowed to feel it yet either. In their dejected quiet, he continues his story.
How he removed every single tool, broom part, broken Quidditch instrument, and one
Boggart from the workroom. He binned a lot, swept everything, banished Teddy’s artificially
dead body, and then, as he was replacing the supplies in the bottom cupboards, found some
scratches on the inner door of one compartment. He crouched lower, then threw light on it
with his wand and there—words.

‘Love Draco alw’

Almost three of them. Half of an order. A request. It was his handwriting, he could tell.

“Love Draco A-L-W,” Hermione repeats. “Always.”

Ron makes a noise of deep interest. “What were you on the floor for?”

“I was cleaning.”

“No, you nuthouse. Day-of. If you’d just touched the letter and felt you were being
Obliviated—we can agree on that, at least, yeah?—why write a note in the most inconvenient
spot possible? I would’ve painted it on the bloody front door.”

“Maybe I couldn’t get up,” he whispers. A chill creeps up his back, at trying to trace such an
ominous series of steps. “I was sore the next morning. Didn’t know why. Reckoned it was
just aches, like when you’re ill.”

“Where does this leave you?” asks Hermione, just as soft in her shock. “What does Draco
think?”

He shakes his head curtly. “I’m not telling him.”

They both jerk back from him like he’s said something truly appalling.

“You can’t be serious!” Hermione says at a frustrated pitch.

“He knows I loved him, and he knows I wouldn’t have wanted to stop. What does this do for
him but add to that pain?” Harry speaks sharply. Defence of Draco’s wellbeing comes rather
easily when he lets it.

“Well, if—if it changes your plan,” she stammers. “Shouldn’t he…”

“We’ve already discussed where my interest lay. Now I just know it was practically my dying
wish.”

“Yeah, well, I think the version of you that left clear instructions was onto something,” Ron
mutters. “I second that.”

“I don’t know who wouldn’t second that. Seems like the only hypothetical way forward.
Bill’s not even meeting my eye,” Harry says, sliding his palm down the denim of his jeans.

“He’s mortified that he hasn’t reversed the curse. And Mum’s not helping. Thinks he hung
the moon. She’s so confident that he’ll get it that I think it’s adding to his stress. Then add to
that that it’s been almost seven months. Can you believe it?”

Alternately, it feels like a lifetime or no time at all, depending on the day to Harry. Today is
the speed of light, blinking like slides in a projector. He shrugs vaguely.

*****

Grimmauld Place is dark and shuttered, and only in the brief light of the embers through
which they emerge does Harry catch Draco’s face. In the brief orange light, it’s solemn, built
of sharp edges and deep, dark caverns.

Then he catches Harry’s eyes and smiles tersely. “Happy Birthday,” he sighs in the form of a
goodnight.

“Yeah, thanks.”

His shadow crosses the living room and through the doorway before Harry calls, “Hold on!”
quickly, stopping him. “You didn’t get me anything,” he says.

Draco crosses his arms. His breath is a disappointed huff, like he’s been caught out. “I tried,
really, I did. But it’s so… not… how we navigate birthdays…”

“I know. Actions, not items.”

“I stood in every shop in Diagon Alley but I just couldn’t do it. I’m sorry.”

“You misunderstand me.”

Harry steps closer, into the same patch of light from the street out front. There’s something
indescribable, now, about Draco’s expression with them both so softly lit. Verging on
ecclesiastic. It’s one of those moments where he’s soberly aware of the hold he has over
Draco’s heart without having asked for it.

“I was hoping,” he continues, “for my birthday—if you hadn’t gotten me something. A kiss.”

“A kiss?” Draco echoes, barely audible.

“A thimble would do fine.”

His face pinches into a scowl. “I told you, I’m not entertaining anything unless you’re taking
it seriously.”

“I am so serious,” Harry says. “I want a real one. Sober. No one falling in or pulling back. I’d
like to feel that. Just to see.”

For a long minute, Draco doesn’t speak or move. He’s sure that somewhere deep inside the
intricate cogs that run his mind, he’s editing a plan to break Harry’s optimism again. Then,
“Just to see. Yes, okay then.” He nods, eyes averted and then eyes suddenly piercingly
present. Harry doesn’t look away. “That seems like a good idea.”

“O-okay.”

“Okay.”

“Yeah,” Harry breathes.

Draco steps forward. The sound of his shoe heel on the wood seems to be the only sound in
existence. Grimmauld Place is holding its breath. In a burst of paranoia, Harry considers
putting it all on pause to set some rules, unexpectedly overcome by the preoccupations of
whether this contract allows for hands to be lifted from sides, mouths to be opened. Then
Draco takes a deep breath, and he notices how loud the breath sounds because he is so close.

“Okay,” Draco whispers again as if psyching himself up. Two cold hands reach up and frame
his cheeks. The thumbs fall into his smile lines, just under his nose. Then Draco leans in and
touches his lips to Harry’s.

He can tell the difference from their last kiss instantly. That was hurried and one-sided, but
also lifted by a certain level of giggly drunkenness and curiousness. This one, lovely as it is
(The gentleness of Draco’s touch, he’ll think in wonder later, so discordant from that air of
austerity. The soft of his skin, the taste of mint.) is not for him.

No, it is so not for him that it feels invasive to receive. It’s for the other Harry, the one he
hadn’t even considered to exist anymore, but he must because there was so much love in this
kiss, for someone else. Like Draco’s trying to call out to his husband through it, shout after
him, cry for him to come home. He pulls away, and his hands linger on Harry for a moment
longer before they, too, are gone.

“Thank you,” Harry croaks out.

“You’re welcome,” Draco whispers hoarsely. He turns without another word, sweeps through
the black hallway. The guest room door shuts and the house is silent.

*****

The entire trip to the Manor, Harry’s pocket is incessant.

Out, it says. Out. Hoist me.

Out. Out. Out.

At the front hedges, Harry stops in the drizzle and Ron, Rose, and Hugo stop too. He pulls his
pocket wider with a finger. “My hands are full and the weather is bad,” he hisses, literally
and figuratively. “Have patience.”

Jules says nothing while Harry waits intently for the rebuttal. When it seems like it won’t
come, he drops his finger.

OUT.

“All good?” Ron asks as Harry picks up his pace again.

He shakes his head, coming back into line with them. “Just a spoiled lizard who wants a
change of scenery. These two might know a little something about how he got that way.” He
points a rather dramatic stare at the children. Rose giggles.

“I’ll hold him!” Hugo pulls Harry’s shirt hem. “I’ll walk in with him! And the orphans will
ask me about him and I can tell them everything.”

“Don’t call them orphans,” moans Rose, putting a palm to her forehead.

“It’s what they are!”

“Well, they don’t like being called that. It’s a reminder of what’s happened.”

“I don’t think they’ve all forgotten their mums and dads died,” Hugo argues, looking up at
Harry again. “C’mon! Jules!”

Harry stops again, meeting Ron’s tired gaze. We’ll never make it to the door, he reads in it.

“Alright.” He reaches a hand in and scoops Jules up. “But I’m not translating the whole time.
Speak to each other in meaningful gazes.” Jules creeps willingly into Hugo’s cupped hands.

“Hi, Jules! Are you on crickets? Do you like the summer…”

It’s a multipurpose trip, and it’s nerve-rackingly free from Draco’s presence. Ron, it turns out,
had visited once or twice with the children when they were younger. He’d wanted to find
something to do with Harry, who had wanted to go to the manor again, and then Hermione
had thought it nice for Rose and Hugo to join, so here they are, providing a good distraction
from Harry’s strange night.

Miss Claudia is waiting for them again, waving from the front steps. “A miserable summer
shower!” she calls as they approach. “I suppose all that won’t get use. Such a shame.” She
nods her head at Harry’s armful of training brooms.

“Yours to keep, Miss Claudia.” He flashes a charming smile. “Is there a broom shed?”

She guffaws. “I should hope so! You built it!”

“Ah, right. So I’ll just… head out back then…” he says. She doesn’t argue that, so he pats
Ron’s back and turns back to the growing rain. “You lot head in! Don’t let the kids hound
Jules. It scares him a bit.”

“Oh! A lizard!” pips Miss Claudia, noticing him in Hugo’s hands for the first time.

Hugo holds him higher. “He and Harry are both native to India. He has a hundred teeth…
The gecko. Not Harry,” Harry hears him clarify as he jogs back onto the path. He trudges fast
along the side of the property, ducking his head to try and keep his glasses dry only to stand
flummoxed by the fountain when there’s no broom shed in sight. Then, in the corner of the
property, he spots a small wooden structure.

Must be, he thinks.

When he undoes the latch and steps out of the rain, he’s glad to see there’s only a few
brooms, and large ones. He’d brought along fifteen, thrown under one arm and over the other
shoulder like a lumberjack, and he drops them to the dirt floor. The action draws a small gasp
from his right. A young boy, with his knees drawn up to his chest, is gawking at him with
saucers for eyes.

“James?” Harry stares back. He notices, then, his red-rimmed eyes and nose, his soaked hair.
“What’re you doing in here? Are you okay?”

'Are you okay?' triggers something, and James’ face screws up tight.

“Oh, oh no, okay.” Harry crouches down, tentatively placing a hand on his knee as the tears
fall. When he does, James tumbles forward into his chest, knocking his breath out with a light
oomph. He sits back in the dirt and says nothing but shush and rub his back.

Outside, the light patter becomes the white noise of a full storm. He glances around the shed,
taking in his handiwork as he soothes. He enjoys woodwork but he’s not exactly a carpenter.
A labour of love, it must’ve been then. A role he stretched into for Draco.

After a while, James’ breathing calms further and he sits back, wrapping his arms around his
legs again. Without thinking, Harry reaches over and wipes the tears from his wet face, then
combs his hair out of the way with his fingers, like he’d done for Teddy, for Hugo and Rose.

“What’s got your wand in a twist?” he asks delicately, frowning.

James shrugs, his eyes downcast.

“What? You can tell me. Or do you want me to fetch the matron?”

James shakes his head.

“It’ll be hard to make you happier if I don’t know what the problem is.”

“’s nothing,” he mumbles. “Something my mates are saying.”

“What are they saying?”

“That we’re getting too old to be adopted.”

Harry shifts, stretching his legs out. “Too old? You’re… you’re a baby!”

James glares.

“Not a baby. Sorry, mate. You’re, what, eight? You’ve got your whole life ahead of you!
Anyone would be lucky to have you.”

“Well, how come none of the people who’ve come want me?”

There’s no good answer. It’s not something children should have to wonder, at all. “Er…
remember though… the right people will be looking for you.”

Bafflingly, James’ face screws up again. Harry sucks in a breath.

“I think maybe the-the right people are dead.”

More than anything in that moment Harry wished to find Draco and drink him in until he had
no choice but to love him as much as he once had, just on the off-chance that it would bring
back with it an understanding of just what had happened to the boy across from him. How
long had he known his parents? Too briefly to leave an impression like Harry, or until the age
of five or six? Long enough to know what he was missing?

“It’s just ha-harder each ti-me someone meets me and doesn’t… want me,” James says
through gasping breaths, “to be-e happy.”

“Hey, now. Remember that couple that came looking for a baby? You told me about them last
time I was here?” He nods, wiping a hand across his nose. “You were so excited, and by the
time I got there you’d thought of a dozen reasons you didn’t want to go with them.”

“Uh-huh.”

“So, who knows what’s good and what’s bad?”

James lifts his head more. “What d’you mean?”

“Who knows what’s good and what’s bad? It means we never really know what’s in our best
interest. Do you wanna hear a story?” He glances down at his watch, knowing Ron’s going to
seek him out soon.

James nods again, so he jumps into it quickly. He can’t remember for the life of him where
he’d heard it, but he tries to make it engaging; the farmer, with his embarrassing one horse to
his neighbour’s dozen, and how, when it escapes, everyone says ‘tough luck’ and pities him.

“Know what he said, though?” Harry asks. “He said, ‘Who knows what’s good and what’s
bad?’”

“But it is bad,” James argues, frowning.

“Well, the horse returns! It comes back the next day, and behind it are fifteen wild horses!
They’d followed him home, and the farmer wakes and goes out to the pasture and sees more
horses than he’s ever owned!”

He nods and leans in, enthused. “So it was good.”

“Ah,” Harry raises a finger. “That’s what his neighbour told him. Guess what he said.”

“Who knows what’s good or bad?”

“Precisely! His neighbour thought he was a nutter, of course. How could this be bad? This is
amazing! But the next day…” Harry drifts off. Every time he tells this story, he manages to
forget the ending. That the horses trample his son in a stampede, overwhelmed by the large
numbers in a pasture usually holding a single stallion. Now seems like a bad time to mention
further death.

“The next day?”

“The next day… the horses are driven frantic by the farmer’s son. There’s not usually that
many horses in the pasture, you see. And they hurt him.”

“They hurt him?”

“He… breaks his… legs. Both of them. And they’re Muggles, so he has to put them in braces
and get casts and it takes months to heal.”

“So it was bad.”

Harry shrugs. “We could keep going for ages, don’t you think? What if because his legs are
broken he doesn’t go on some trip that would’ve caused trouble? That’s the point. You never
know what’s working in your favour. So you just have to take it as it all comes. Maybe you’re
doing all this waiting for something really worth the wait.” James gifts him a small smile.
“I’ve got to put these brooms up and then we need to go. I’m sure everyone’s wondering
where we both are.”

James stands when he does and helps put the brooms on some of the lower brackets, and
then, when they’re done, lingers close while Harry lifts his wand and cracks the door. They
run to the back of the property, heads dry but feet kicking up mud in puddles. He stands still
while Harry casts scourgify and offers sincere, glassy eyes when he gets down to eye level
and places his hands on his small shoulders.

“They will come,” he says firmly. “You will have a family. And they will love you so much.
Got it?”

“Mm.”

“Got it?”

“Got it,” mutters James.

“Jules is inside. I’ll translate for you. I’ve just got to speak to Miss Claudia for a moment.”
In the large parlour space, kids have spread out all around with board games, in chairs and
sprawled on the floor. Ron looks to be deep in an explanation of the mechanics of chess with
a couple older kids, but he looks up at the two of them as James spots Hugo and Jules.

“I thought that broom shed swallowed you up!” Miss Claudia smiles, appearing from
somewhere.

“Brought James back,” Harry says shortly, shoving his hands in his pockets. It lifts his
shoulders, tense, as he nods in the direction of him socialising with the Granger-Weasleys and
a few other boys. As expected, she cocks her head in a show of surprise.

“Yeah,” he says. “He’s been gone an hour. In the shed. Is it often that children are
unaccounted for that long without you noticing?”

In the face of his accusatory tone, she’s flustered. “If—well, if he’s on the property, then I
wouldn’t consider him gone, I… he was only on the estate.”

“Draco says the house and the grounds are considered two different spaces, given the size of
each. That the children are minded accordingly—inside time or outside time.”

“He’s not in any danger on property! You know we’ve got protection spells—”

“What if forty-five minutes ago he’d fallen and cracked his head open? He’s eight, can’t
exactly shoot sparks out his wand, can he?”

“He’s fine, Harry, look at him!”

“Thank god! Thank Merlin. Thank anyone but you—”

Ron wedges between them, facing Harry with a palm out to his shoulder. “Oi, Harry, you
cannot duel an old woman,” he hisses for only him to hear, pushing them back a bit.

“She’s your mum’s age at most,” Harry retorts. “If that was your child who’d gone missing
for an hour, how would you feel?” Ron’s mouth firms into a frown. “She’s supposed to be the
equivalent for them! How did Draco hire her?”

“Careful vetting. Let’s take it up with him, alright? There’s no reason to do this here and
now.”

Harry agrees, offering a semi-apology to the matron before he rejoins the children.
Interacting with them forces him to tamp down his anger. For a good bit of the afternoon, he
and Ron each play chess against one of the girls he was teaching. Then, for a while, Harry
concedes his chessboard and a third is procured. Ron sits in the centre of a crescent and plays
with three kids at once.

He’s just let an older girl get tantalisingly close to winning when someone clears their throat
and Harry finds Draco watching them. As he looks him up and down, registering the
carefully-cut suit like he wears on rehearsal days, several kids shout his name at once and his
stern face lightens (artificially, Harry thinks) into a smile.
“Can I borrow Harry?” he asks, shuffling forward unsteadily as a five-year-old boy Harry
thinks is named Bobby immediately takes to his arm like a jungle gym, joining the two
wrapped around his legs like ankle weights.

Harry stands, warily. And he follows a silent Draco upstairs, around a corner, and into a small
office without saying a word until Draco takes the seat behind the desk easily and asks, “How
long was he outside?”

“He said since lunch, so about an hour until I came out.” The heavy, upholstered chair across
the desk groans against the wood as he drags it closer. “Are you going to do something about
the matron?”

“I’ll make sure it’s noted, but no.” He pulls a quill from the desk and dabs it into an inkpot.

“What d’you mean no?”

“Do you have any idea how hard it was to find a trustworthy, well-meaning matron willing to
live full time at Malfoy Manor?”

Harry is silent.

“She feels terrible about it, truly. And it’s worth noting,” he says, scratching at the parchment.
He writes in large flourishes, swooping g’s and y’s. “James is very sneaky.”

“Oh.”

“Did you consider reprimanding him, too?”

Harry’s silence is his answer again, an open mouth and no words.

“Mm,” Draco nods, still writing. “Bit blinded by love, were you?”

There was no hello when Draco had arrived at the Manor. He’d just swooped into the room
and whisked Harry away with him, and then he’d been here, matter-of-factly in discussion as
if they hadn’t kissed the night before again. Every moment with Draco, he thinks, has been en
media res. It’s hard to keep up with someone who seems to know the exposition, the climax,
the resolution.

“I—well, he—you should’ve—he was so sad. Going on about not being adopted, and I’m
trying to soothe him—and he wildly trusts me, Draco, you should’ve seen him crying into my
shoulder—but what’s there to say? I tell him someday that someone will have a home for
him. Meanwhile, Teddy’s off at school more often than not, and I’ve got money and
experience and space… It felt borderline fraudulent.”

As he speaks, the feather in Draco’s hand slows, then stands still completely. Draco’s grip on
it seems to tighten and his eyes are staring a hole into his notes.

“What?” Harry says, leaning forward a little.

Draco says nothing.

“Have I asked about that before?”

His pursed lips tighten further and he takes a deep breath, setting the quill down resolutely.

“Oh. Have you asked about that before?” Harry tries. When Draco looks up, he doesn’t have
to say a word for Harry to sense the sadness. Something grips tight in his chest. “What did I
say?” he murmurs, afraid of the answer.

Instead of replying, Draco stands, an excruciatingly final motion, and opens the door. He
stands there with his hand on the knob as if to usher Harry out wordlessly. But Harry stays
seated with both hands gripped on the chair arm facing the other man.

“Draco,” he laments. He tries to look as pitifully pleading as he feels. “What did I say?”

He shakes his head, rubbing the heel of a palm against his chest. “We should get going.”

“At least tell me if he knows anything. I haven’t disappointed him?”

“He doesn’t know any talks were had. Nothing was set in motion.” It sounds like torture for
Draco to be having the conversation at all. He looks like he’s swallowing something acerbic,
and his discomfort makes even Harry want to end a talk he’d been dying to start. It would
have been better for Draco to just tell him—his imagination is going to run wild.

July 2005

The windows were open, the air was just the right mix of warm and cool to feel like what one
mythologises when they picture summer nights, and Harry was red-faced and drunk beyond
belief. Blaise was the same. And Pansy. Hermione was five months pregnant and taking it
like a champion, but Ron had to remain nearly sober out of sympathy. Draco, Luna, and
Neville were sailing somewhere between them, buzzed and content on the couch.

There was an intense discussion happening on the rug by the Grimmauld Place hearth,
however. Harry, Draco had learned, got intense about Muggle studies when he was plastered.

“They can drink a virgin cocktail, or some sort of fizzy drink. They don’t have to physically
wait in the car!” he was trying to explain to Blaise and Pansy, who sat like children at
storytime, cradling their drink glasses.

“But if they’re—” Pansy stopped to hiccup. “The driver. They drive.”

“What’s the driver designated for, anyway? Muggles take the underground train. They don’t
have to drive that,” Blaise offered confidently.

“In London, sure. And there are buses. But sometimes you don’t live in London. And the
buses aren’t running. People live other places, you prats.”

“Harry,” Blaise swallowed. “This is charmingly bucolic, even for you.”

“Hermione,” Harry called. “Please.”

She dropped her ankles from the ottoman in the reading chair halfway across the room. “And
say what? Yes, sometimes people don’t drink so someone else is around to mop up the mess
for the drunkards. I can relate.”

“You’re a class A drunkard on sabbatical, Granger! Don’t act so insulated!” Pansy held a
hand out to shush everyone, though no one was talking, then pointed an index finger right at
Hermione. “Thisbe!”

“No,” Hermione sighed.

As was the new trend, it instigated a ripple of name-proposing.

“Esther!” Blaise offered with his arms outstretched, palms up.

“Hester,” Harry said, solemnly marking an A on his chest as if it was the cross. He caught
Draco’s eye as he did, his green ones sparkling with a hidden smile, and Draco laughed back.

“Vivien?” Neville added.

Hermione shook her head at each turn, though it never failed to draw a grin from her.

Luna hummed thoughtfully. “Odilia?”

“That’s pretty, Luna.” Hermione smiled, a hand on her stomach. “Save it for yours!”

Blaise crawled forward on the rug and poked Luna’s knee. “That means she hates it.”

“I don’t! Luna, I don’t.”

“Come down with us, Loons,” Blaise begged with a pout. “Come be with the societal
outcasts!”

Ron scoffed. “Harry’s whatever the complete opposite of an outcast is.”

“Outcast by association. We all read the papers.”

Harry produced a cheesy grin like he was proud of this. They had all read the papers, indeed.
Pansy had gotten into a nasty row with the head of another department, who’d published a
story about Harry and Draco on page 2 of the Prophet: ‘Forgiveness or Defection? A Timeline
of Harry Potter’s Private and Controversial Partnership.’

They’d gotten most of the timeline wrong, anyway. A ‘reliable source’ was quoted
throughout, amusing to their little group because the bona fide sources knew the proper dates,
or at least knew that they’d befriended at Pansy’s New Year’s party, not the Hogwarts rebuild.

Draco was more cross than Harry, who seemed to still find it a novelty to have his reputation
threatened in the paper whenever news was slow again. “Hasn’t happened in years,” he’d
said cheerily, using a sticking charm to post it on the wall of the kitchen, just next to a photo
from their wedding day. “When it’s not about Voldemort, it’s almost entertaining. Isn’t it
interesting to see what they latch onto? They hardly mention Death Eaters, but it’s unusually
focused on the fact that you bring a book to the Quidditch matches I coach.”

“Sometimes it’s boring, they’re five!”

“I give it two years now, then there’ll be a new story,” Harry decided. “The baby will make
the paper, anyway. Two of the trio, new life, blah blah. That’ll be a nice change of pace.”

“Sure, start the child on fame early.”

“Never a disadvantage.” Harry winked.

Draco read the words more analytically, though. Harry didn’t think twice about the choice to
say Draco had ‘escaped’ punishment, or that it was a page away from the first time they’d
seen anti-recidivist groups given a name—Wreakers. Only Pansy had anything to say about
it.

“Why do people insist on being taken seriously and choose the daftest names?” She’d shook
her head. “It doesn’t sound like they wreak revenge; it sounds like they smell bad!”

It had made him laugh, which in turn made him take them less seriously. Now, it was far
enough in the past that Draco could try to chuckle along in less-Slytherin company, too.

“Yes,” he told Harry. “You’ve stooped to our level. There’s no turning back.”

“Nothing to turn back from, darling. If this is stooping, it’s the place to be.”

Harry was swaying a bit as he said it, a stupid, smitten smile stretching his lips wide,
revealing the dimple, and in the face of it and the sentiment, the loving nickname, so atypical,
took a moment to settle. The only response he could think to offer was to lean forward, his
feet squared on the floor in front of the crouch, and reach out to hold Harry’s cheek in his
hand. Harry shifted his head and puckered awkwardly to kiss the palm.

Sure, they would hang off each other at weddings, sit close at the bar; anyone, should they
see them, could presume they were together, though they didn’t often kiss. But tenderness, in
this way, was another thing, saved for behind closed doors. Love, to them, was private until it
was an urgency.

*****

Grimmauld Place had never been as occupied. as the first morning of August. Hermione and
Ron had gone home, but the rest had retired to spare rooms and would appear slowly in the
kitchen in various states of disorder, so Draco was balancing the French press over the hob
when Pansy came down, hair a wide, frizzed mess, in a long white nightgown of unknown
origin.

“Morning,” she grumbled, warm like honey but in a pitch much lower than her usual timbre.
At the stove, she wrapped her arms around his waist and squeezed. “How’s the birthday
boy?”
“Mine or yours?”

“Nev stayed perfectly within his means, it’s yours I’m worried for.”

“Dead to the world. I doubt he’ll be up for hours.” Draco had rolled over to try and nestle
close that morning, only to feel like he was sleeping with a wax statue. An immovable object
that was not bothered to meet with unstoppable force. He’d decided his time was better spent
smuggling breakfast in from the café two blocks away.

“Bless him, Blaise was goading him to match each drink. And poor Ron and Hermione. Do
you think we’ve seen the end of them joining in?” Pansy leaned back on the counter, her
hands at her temples. “Have they outgrown us?”

“I don’t know,” said Draco, who couldn’t predict what happened to friends when one had
children. A village had raised Teddy. Everyone had come together. But that was in part, he
knew, because Teddy had Andromeda and Harry and a hole to fill with love where his parents
were meant to be. The new baby would have that already.

“I loved drunk Hermione,” Pansy moped, shuffling across the kitchen. “She divulged the
most interesting things. I’ll tell Luna breakfast is here.”

“And if you see Neville or Blaise,” Draco added over his shoulder, and then his mouth tipped
up in surprise; Harry was lumbering down the steps. He stopped in the doorway, caught
Pansy’s silhouette in his periphery, and startled. Draco laughed at her sour face while Harry
rubbed at his eyes.

“Jesus, Pans, I thought you were a fucking ghost.” His voice was raspy and low.

“Fuck you, too,” she grumbled, slipping past him up the steps.

Seeing him standing there when he hadn’t expected him down for a long while sent a thrill
through Draco like he hadn’t known was possible before they were together. Rooms really
did brighten when he walked into them. Days did improve. Like that first time, Harry
glowing across the way in Pansy’s packed parlour, like a hot, flaming star.

“Eugh,” said his sun, the centre of his solar system, the gold he tethered his silver to in
beautiful, alchemical permanence. “I didn’t even know I had that much in my stomach to sick
up. Absolutely mad. I can tell you what I had the last three meals, I think.”

“Charming,” Draco replied, because to do so was in character, but he was already reaching
his arms out, affected by the pitifully sick look of his husband. “I did the spell though, last
night.”

“Wasn’t enough,” he mumbled, linking his hands behind Draco’s back. He leaned his head
back to give Draco room to thumb his cheeks, pushing his face side to side to inspect him. It
was too late to do the spell again.

He kissed Harry’s mouth, then ran a tidying hand through his hair. “I brought croissants and
sandwiches from that little place you like. Eat something if you can and I’ll grab a Pepper
Up.”

Harry dropped his head, letting it loll on Draco’s shoulder. He groaned.

“Alright then, how ‘bout some Dunkirk spirit, eh?” Draco whispered lightly.

“Djeyekablaze?”

“Sorry?”

He rolled his head so his lips were less pressed against the cotton of Draco’s shirt. “Did I
kiss… Blaise?”

Draco cleared his throat, staring up at the skirting along the ceiling. “Ah. Yes. Indeed.”

Harry almost hit Draco’s chin with the suddenness with which he lifted his head. “Oh no,” he
said, face pulled down in regret. “Did I ask you first?”

“You’re not my property.”

“But I’m your husband,” he retorted, hands flat on Draco’s chest.

“It was for a game, I’m not that dramatic. I watched it happen.”

His eyes, so red-rimmed and heavy-lidded, flitted between Draco’s. It was as if he’d made a
deal with the devil and only now realised the gravity of his decision. “Circe’s sake, he’s never
going to let me hear the end of it.”

“Aw,” Draco finally separated from Harry, pulling the French press off the stove. “You’re
underestimating him. He wouldn’t—”

“OH!”

Blaise shouted from the stairway. Draco’s hands jerked so suddenly at the exclamation that he
almost spilt the steaming hot coffee. “My love is like a red, red rose… newly sprung in…
July,” he moaned dramatically, taking the last four steps with grace, an arm extended like a
Romantic actor in Harry’s direction. “So fair art thou, bonnie lass, so deep in love am I… I
will love thee still, my dear—” and here, he reached out for Harry’s hand, offered with
extreme reluctance. “Till the seas gang dry.”

After a beat of silence, Draco offered a generous three lazy claps, then passed the two of
them with a fistful of Blaise’s shirt in his hand. “Eat,” he ordered with a pointed finger at
Harry.

Blaise was still orating up the stairs.

“And fare thee well, my only love! Fare thee well awhile!”

“Quiet,” Draco muttered. He pulled them into the little toilet in the hallway. “Can we just
forget this?”
Blaise frowned, leaning against the sink. “You laughed last night!”

“But he’s embarrassed.”

“To snog me? That’s his problem.”

Draco placed his hands together, palm to palm. “Look, I’m begging here. My best mate. My
brother in arms. Do this one favour for me.” “Sorry, dear friend. I love nothing like a good
story.”

He turned for the doorknob and, desperate to make some offering for the man he loved,
Draco spoke up quickly. “I love a good story, too,” he blurted. Blaise’s hand dropped from
the door. “I’ve got one about you I could tell.”

In one appraising glance, Blaise’s eyes travelled his form, jaw slackening. “Are you
suggesting blackmail? Merlin, good man, love has sunk you deeper into Slytherin. I’m an
open book, unfortunately.”

Draco sucked his teeth. For over a year now, it had been a casual observance that he’d kept to
himself, not squirrelled away for some time like today. Blaise was his friend. But he knows
an opportunity when it’s presented to him:

“Madame Morticia’s Matchmaking is an open book for you? I hadn’t known.”

Blaise sucked a sharp breath, leaning forward off the porcelain. All foolhardy smirking was
replaced by a soberly blank face. “You… you… how did you?”

“You let me peruse your library. Left out the papers. I’ve always taken you for a bit of a
romantic, you know? I just thought you had the self-esteem not to rely on this Morticia
woman.”

“I…”

“I won’t tell, so long as you forget that kiss ever happened last night. Say ‘what kiss?’”

“What kiss?” Blaise parroted, as though he’d seen a Dementor.

Draco nudged him aside and opened the small cupboard under the sink. Two bottles of
Pepper Up potion rested just inside, and he emerged with one. Blaise stood obedient and
silent as he opened the door.

“Did you find anyone?” Draco asked impulsively, stopping with a hand on the knob.

“Went on a few dates. Nothing serious.”

“Ask Pansy, too, next time you’re interested. She’s a brilliant matchmaker.”

“You know, you’re scary when you remember to be,” Blaise noted behind him as they walked
back down. “When you’re not busy being all cloying with the Chosen One, caressing each
other’s cheeks like you’re gifts to mankind. Oh, Darling… Oh, dearest one…”
Draco clenched his jaw, focusing on the wan but beautiful man waiting for him downstairs,
who could call him whatever he wished.

July 2013

The Prophet had been left on the table, so Harry’s scanning it with his solo dinner. They’d
run out of memory books ages ago, which had gifted him both a return to freedom of choice
in what he did while eating dinner and an impending feeling like he’d thrown up his last
white flag.

He can hear Draco pacing upstairs. He’s learned what it means; if he’s alone, it’s a mental
block, stuck in some composition; if there’s a student, it’s intense thought, a riddle of a
problem, and he’s going to suddenly stop at some revolution in his pacing, clap his hands
together, and go “Rubato!” or something similarly meaningless to Harry. Right now, there’s
no student.

Pansy has an article on the third page, an interview with a Diagon Alley restauranteur who
had been donating spare goods to Muggle food kitchens, but a magical item had made it
through and caused an entire day’s worth of abnormally swollen tongues and Accidental
Magic Reversal Squad interference.

She navigated it well—the good intentions, the lack of oversight, all into a deeper
conversation on Muggle and wizarding homeless populations. It ended in a careful tone of
optimism and the momentum of good deeds.

Right beside it? An article on the ‘exodus of those on the wrong side of the war’. Death
Eaters and their sympathisers, moving further from London, sometimes moving countries.
Does this make England safer, asks some arrogant journalist called Tom Beatty, or are we
simply sending our worst people to become problems in foreign lands?

Harry frowns, turning to the page where it continues. Perhaps, the article suggested, London
was intimidating to these people. Too valiant in its identity post-war. That was why they
leave. Essentially, it was calling them cowards.

The footsteps above him stop, then move into the hallway, and sure enough, it’s a few
moments before Draco appears on the stairs.

“Hi,” Harry says, closing the paper before he can see the article. “How are… things?”

At first glance, he’s polished; his hair is combed back, sure, and he’s in slacks and an
expensive-looking shirt, but there’s something off about how he stands that leaves Harry
second-guessing. His eyes, maybe, seem a bit dull or tired, usually piercing. Or it might be
the way his hands sit in his pockets, bordering on a confident posture but stuck in exhaustion
instead because of the hunch of his back and the way he leans forward against the door jamb.

“Things. They’re… copious. Recital in three weeks. Thank you, by the way, for not binning
those papers after I went to Pansy’s.”
“Oh, those were for this recital?”

“They’re the entire concerto.”

“I… I’m glad I picked them all up, then. What are they about? Why did you try to destroy
them?”

Draco gives him a look. There’s only one answer, and does he need to say it? There was only
one thing tearing him apart. It’s left unsaid. “I’ve been having trouble with rehearsing, given
the change in situation since it was written. It sounds so… rote.”

Harry opens his mouth to find something additionally supportive to say, but before he can,
Draco takes a step forward.

“Look, do you want to go flying?”

He laughs in surprise. “Flying? Again? And then what, I get to see the sunset, say goodbye to
my family…”

Draco scowls. “You’re not dying. I just want to. Are you going to try and talk me out?”

*****

The pitch was muddy from rain, hot and humid in the air, but Draco had flown like a weight
had been lifted. Harry thought, watching him, that he must have entirely forgotten how much
he’d once liked to be on a broom. It wasn’t like Hermione hating to fly, no, because that was
born from historically not enjoying the activity. Draco had been good, excellent, better than
he’d expected with a father paying for his place on the school team. He’d been lucky, there,
that his son played dirty but naturally.

Say anything long enough and you’ll begin to believe it. It’s a powerful example of the
human brain at work.

I don’t fly, even if somewhere deeper you very well might love to.

Or I don’t fancy Draco like that.

Harry gets it—the elation of being high in the air when life is getting heavy. The recital,
undoubtedly, is hanging over Draco’s head. The kiss, he kind of hopes, is lingering there, too.
And their anniversary, Ron had reminded him, is this week.

“Not oversharing about the wedding, or anything,” he’d prefaced, in a break at the manor
where the children had left them to their own devices in the corner. “Just want someone to be
looking out for him that day.”

Harry understood. And then, resetting a chessboard, he’d mentioned Draco’s description of
Ron’s tactics and casually asked what kind of player Draco was. Ron got as thoughtful as his
longstanding opponent had.
And then, resetting a chessboard, he’d mentioned the way Draco described Ron’s tactics and
casually asked what kind of player Draco was. Ron got thoughtful.

“A technician,” he’d said after a while. “He doesn’t attack directly. It’s all just quietly taking
positional advantages. Intuition, you know? He knows all the strengths on the board, all the
weaknesses, and he plays to them… invisibly.”

Climbing into bed with wet hair and the ruminative after-effects of a shower that night, he
thinks about it again—the feeling of Draco’s lips on his, the vision of him on a broom, and
suddenly has an ancient, long-forgotten feeling from age eleven: He, Harry, is on the
chessboard.

Draco’s actions before his week of mourning had been erratic, pure responses of pain and
blind hope, but after Pansy’s, he’d been steadily private in his sadness. A calm, quiet player.
He’d made himself available for dinner, engrossed him with select stories about parts of
Harry previously unknown, enticed him with his patience. He never visited the shop, like he
knew Harry needed a space fully safe and his. Discreet positional advantages. Maybe the
love potion was a risk, but so was bringing your queen out early, and Draco loved to do that.
He knew to support Harry’s burgeoning selfhood from afar, insert himself when Harry wants
him, become correlated with the best moments, the desired moments—playing to his
strengths—and he knew to push Harry towards the difficult, in a storm or hallways, with
grief or love, when he was losing his reserve, his stubbornness—his weaknesses.

Draco hadn’t returned from his breakdown with newfound acceptance. He’d come home to
play another long game of chess. He was waiting.

It’s late, but not past midnight, and there’s a soft glow of light under Draco’s door when
Harry knocks. There are sounds of rearranging, then it opens and he’s standing in a bright
golden glow.

“Sorry,” says Harry, just as Draco says “Nightmare?”

“Oh, no,” Harry rubs his neck. “I, er, wanted to tell you that… I think you’re more hopeful
than you let on. You know, your whole ‘it’s the hope that kills you’ rubbish? I think you
know it is. Rubbish, that is. Hope keeps you going.”

Draco steps into the hallway, closing the door further so only a cut of lamplight hits his cheek
and nose. He looks apprehensive, but bright-eyed and deeply engaged with the words on
Harry’s lips. He won’t stop looking there.

“I liked kissing you,” Harry continues. “Shouldn’t that give you hope? Shouldn’t that excite
you? Shouldn’t you be a little less respectful of ‘my pace’? The memories that come back…
it doesn’t seem linear at all. It’s flashes. Like… like words are on the tip of my tongue.”

His eyes dart between Draco’s to try and decipher him. Painfully slow, like waiting for ice to
melt, paint to dry, your husband to love you, Draco lifts his hand and brings them to Harry’s
cheeks. It’s awkward, just like two nights ago with his pitiful birthday request. Then Draco
moves his hands, and it’s nothing like that pitiful birthday gift at all. His fingertips trace a
line on his skin with reverence, soft, careful.
 “Words on the tip of your tongue?” he asks, very close. Their noses could touch if he leaned
forward an inch. Harry nods, head wobbly with speechless fervour. “Okay,” murmurs Draco.
“I’ll help you find them.” And then he pulls him in.

Kissing Draco in the hallway is nothing like ever before. It feels wholeheartedly for him—
this him, standing here with no memory of where they’ve shagged or what they said on their
wedding day, who’d practically met Draco this year. And that’s interesting.

In the face of such keenness, Harry’s a bit dumbstruck. He kisses back, reaching his hands up
for Draco’s hair and settling shakily on his neck instead, afraid for some reason that messing
up his hair would end this. Even the silk robe or the clothes beneath it feel horribly off-limits,
despite Draco’s sigh like he’d been holding a breath. He drops his hands to Harry’s back.

He doesn’t waste a moment wondering what another Harry would think of this, what he
might compare it to. Instead, it is completely fresh, like an Obliviation in its own right, where
at the moment everything is stunningly present tense. Draco’s tongue is past his lips. His
hands are in Draco’s hair. The space between them is gone. There is a warm, blood-pumping
body against his. All of this, now. In his reality. Temporality is for people not touching like
this.

Draco pulls back for just a moment, long enough for Harry to take a breath and drop his
hands to his waist. Then he leans in again, captures Harry’s lips once more, this time more
love than passion, sweet and easy. He kisses him just below the earlobe, too, then whispers
hot in his ear, “Go to bed.”

Flattened, zombie-like, Harry stares through Draco like they’ve never met and listens. He
says no goodbyes, just drops his hands and, when Draco gives a small smile and nod to
encourage him on, takes to the stairs with weak legs and a hand on the bannister like a
lifeline. Draco’s door clicks shut when he’s a storey up.

Back in his room, he lays in the darkness and stares at the ceiling. He takes one finger and
touches it lightly to his lips, feeling already like it was a dream.

“Jules?” he calls out in the dark. There’s no answer. “Jules?”

The wind blows the trees outside, and the hum of Jules’ heat lamp, waiting to click on at
sunrise, is a constant across the room.

Morning? Breakfast? he hears after a long moment.

“No. Just wanted to make sure you were real.”

Jules makes no other sounds. Eventually, Harry falls into a dizzying sleep, where he dreams
of kissing Draco again, but this time in the daylight, outside the hallway, deeply in love on a
coastal pier.

Chapter End Notes

Thanks for reading! Hope you're enjoying!

Feel free to leave some words below in the comments, or find me at

writandromance.tumblr.com. Doing my best to reply as often as I can, but know I read
them all!

P.S. Blaise recites, with minor edits, A Red, Red Rose by Robert Burns.
 Marriage of Figaro
Chapter Notes

The chapter title refers to Mozart's overture for the Marriage of Figaro.

See the end of the chapter for more notes

July 2013

Harry is already dressed for the day when he comes downstairs Wednesday morning, and the
sight of Draco at the stove stops him in his tracks. They haven’t talked since yesterday, about
this time, when Harry had been running out the door and noticed that, despite the lack of
piano playing, Draco was already at the instrument and the doors to the room were wide
open.

“Oh,” he’d said, a bit stupidly, losing larger words the moment he saw him sitting there.
Draco turned away from the window, which he’d been staring through like he was
daydreaming in class. Meeting his eyes in the daylight when only a shadowy, moonlit version
of them had haunted his thoughts all morning startled him into speech. “So… last night…”

Draco had laughed breathily. “Merlin, I was so exhausted,” he said, looking back down at his
sheet music. “Might as well have been a dream. Don’t stare at a piano for eighteen hours.”

Harry stared back in awe. So the hallway still had its power. It could still wrench meaningful
things into the dark of the night. Shocked, he’d mumbled something about having a lesson
that night, not to expect him at dinner, and that was the last they’d spoken.

But now Draco stands at the stove and, when he sees Harry, smiles wide. “Happy birthday!”

“Ah, thanks.” He tries not to look too nervous, to see him at the stove. He remembers terrible
eggs and sad-looking meals when left to his own devices.

“‘Ah, thanks’? Happy Birthday!”

Harry takes a deep breath and puts on an empty smile, raising his fists half-heartedly.
“Hurrah. Did you… what’re you making over there?”

Draco steps aside to give him a view of the hob. “Just coffee. Don’t worry. But I stopped at
that café, brought some things for breakfast. Too many, perhaps. You can bring it to the shop
if you’d like. Busy day?”

He hooks a finger over the paper bag on the table to see in. There are croissants, danishes, a
yoghurt, two rolls that look to be sausage and egg, a bottled green juice, a bottled orange
juice. He looks back up with a raised brow. “Rather busy, yeah,” he says slowly.
Anastasia at lunch. Thank Circe. Luna will be by ‘if it’s in the stars’. Sometime this week,
too, he’s supposed to get confirmation that the bespoke referee broom for the World Cup is
up to code. If someone had told him his year would be so outrageous that supplying a broom
for the World Cup became an afterthought, he wouldn’t have believed them. There’s a lesson,
too, in the afternoon. It’s with Kensuke, which makes him happy.

And then Draco puts the coffee in his hand, warm in a thermos, and he knows it’s the way he
likes it. He takes a moment, then, to consider the bulging bag of baked goods, the late start to
Draco’s day to make sure he ran into Harry despite the stress of impending recital. His
demeanour softens.

“Thank you,” he says. “Really. You didn’t have to do this. We celebrated already.”

Draco sets a hand on Harry’s back. Is he imagining that it creeps upwards in a way it never
has, thermos-warmed fingers touching the nape of his neck? “I really wanted to,” he replies,
earnest.

When he lets go, Harry feels the absence, not on his neck, but in his chest.

*****

“But he can put his hands on me? That’s fine? It’s like I have a twelve-year gap in my
memory where I forgot that all men are confusing. He’s no exception to the rule. I don’t
know what’s in this green juice, do you want it?”

Anastasia nods. He tosses it underhand and she catches it with the hand not holding a sausage
and egg roll. “People who act confusing are usually confused. He’s told you that before,
right? The beach?”

“He sounded like a jumbled mess, yeah. He said it’s all confusing.”

“Then this makes sense, I’d say. But if it’s confusing to a degree that’s now bewildering you,
you could suggest talking about it.”

Harry laughs humorlessly. “So long as I make sure we talk about it in the daylight, outside of
specific hallways.”

“Sounds like something else to talk about.”

“I understand the importance of communication.” He meets her eye with low lids and a lack
of amusement. “I don’t need to talk about it, I… guess I was just venting.”

He picks back through the bag and decides on the yoghurt. Two croissants had already
disappeared through the morning. One was handed to Aldona. The other was sneakily eaten
between customers at the till.

Anastasia writes something down, a jarring action when the sharing of food has created an
afternoon more informal than usual. She does the thing where she says nothing and waits for
him to have a thought worth breaking the lengthening silence. He uses the time to mix the
granola into the strawberries and cream. After he’s taken a few bites, he looks up again.
“I think I’m more upset with myself than him. And I did it to myself, which is ironic. That
note, the Love Draco Always. It’s always in the back of my mind. I feel like I should have
read that and click, loved him again. It should’ve sparked something. And if not that, then in
the hallway. That should have done it. Why didn’t that do it?”

He takes another bite, mostly to stop the spiralling tone of emotion in his voice.

“I think he laughed it off because it wasn’t The Moment,” he continues after. “He’s
embarrassed that something like that didn’t do the trick. So he’s embarrassed and I’m
disappointed, and neither of us wants to bring that up.”

“When you first told me you wanted to pursue him romantically, rather than just pursue
memories,” she says, “do you remember what we concluded?”

“I shouldn’t kiss random blokes at parties?”

She chuckles, setting down her green drink and sitting back more comfortably in her chair. “I
think we decided that was integral to your change of heart. I was hinting more towards
realistic expectations…”

He knows what she means; the first serious discussion they’d had after his debriefing about
the beach was how he can’t compare this to last time. “I can’t compare it to last time, I don’t
remember last time,” he’d argued. She’d been unamused—he knew of last time, enough to
know it had been fast and unquestionable.

“This is a new relationship,” she tells him now. “Whether you’re labelling it that way or not.
It’s not picking up some old thing—not for you, when you don’t remember, and not for him,
when you’re not the same person you once were—so you cannot force it onto that timeline.
Even if intentions are genuine, which I’m sure they are, there’s added stress and pressure. It
will come as it comes.”

“Our anniversary is in two days.”

“How does that make you feel?”

Harry shrugs. “Dunno if it makes me feel anything but strange. Worried, I guess, for Draco.
Roles reversed, that would be a hard day.”

“I wonder if you can make it easier?”

“Maybe I’m the last person he wants to see Friday. I’ll be around if he wants me around. I’ll
make myself scarce if he wants me scarce. I don’t think he knows I know the significance of
the date. It’s the code to the safe at the shop, and Ron told me again last week—I think
everyone else is worried for Draco, too… I’ll play dumb, but be available.”

After their meeting, Harry does something horrifying; take the tube back to Charing Cross.
It’s probably a response to the kiss, again. Magic is fearsome. Helpful, but unspeakably
powerful. Wizards ignore it for the most part, he thinks, the way Muggles ignore cars for the
screeching fast metal monsters they are. It’s harder to ignore with the Obliviation than usual,
that he lives under its whim, and that no matter how much he could want something like he
wants to love Draco, he can’t control the magic that’s controlling him. It draws him to the
purely mechanical, the understandable, the corporeal.

Of course, by the time he exits the station by Soho the impulse is long gone, squashed in the
putrid heat of the train car and the close bodies of strangers. At the second-to-last stop, a boy
had gotten on and stared at Harry with wide eyes as the doors closed. Harry, leaning by the
back of the car, smiled slightly. The boy pointed at his own forehead, so Harry pushed the
hair off of his, showed the branching line of scarred skin there, and the boy grinned. He
dropped his hand and looked out the window into the passing darkness again.

“Pardon, Harry Potter?” asked the man next to him as they came to a stop, having watched
the exchange.

Harry shook his head, “Who?” and pushed past as the doors beeped and opened.

The afternoon at the shop is broken up again by Aldona’s entrance around three while he’s in
the back. She says she’s come because she thought the Cup broom might have been dropped
back off, but when it hasn’t, she sticks around and asks him a lot of questions about the case.
He can’t answer most of them—he still doesn’t know how those pictures of Draco came to
exist in the shop, he doesn’t know if they’re being followed or not, he still doesn’t know why
he’d been daft enough to open fan mail in the shop. He does show her the carving, though,
mostly because she’s in the same room as it.

She crouches, then looks back with a tortured expression. “Harry, this is the most depressing
thing I’ve ever seen.”

“What?” He drops his hands from a broken Nimbus 2005.

“The idea of you opening your mail and then realising what’s happening and… scratching out
a message? Poor Harry.” She traces it with a finger. “To think I thought you were getting
divorced…”

“Poor Harry,” he echoes, wishing not to think of that image at all.

He’s saved, though, by the bell at the till, and leaves Aldona alone in the back parsing
through a pile of broken acquisitions that tend to gather dust. To his surprise, Luna puts down
a little polish kit she’d picked up at the till and beams his way. It’s like she’s brought summer
through the door, in her pink dress and orange mary-janes, sure, but more in the sunniness of
her smile.

“For he’s a jolly good felloooww…” she starts at the sight of him, clapping her hands
together.

“No, no, don’t sing.”

“…a jolly good felloooww…”

There’s a crash from the workshop, which sounds distinctly like the pile of wood scraps he’d
stacked by the door toppling over, and Aldona appears in the doorway, her eyes wide.
“Merlin’s pants,” she says. “It’s your birthday. I forgot!”

“You were at the Burrow, ‘Dona!” Harry says. “That’s celebrating my birthday. Why does
everyone think that doesn’t count?”

“Oh, let people love you,” Luna sighs.

“That’s what I’m saying.” Aldona pushes the wood out of the doorway with her foot. “You
—” She points to Harry as she passes the till. “Happy Birthday. Tell Teddy I got that book he
was asking about.”

“What book?”

“1001 Maneuvers, I think it’s called. Apparently, his girlfriend is a natural. Keeps leaving
him in her dust. Nice to see you, Luna.” She winks and exits. Then it’s just Harry and Luna,
who stares more into him than at him.

“Er, glad you were able to come by,” he says, clasping his hands together. “I do have another
hour…”

“I’ll watch the front! You do your work. If there’s an issue, I’ll call you, honest.”

He lets her push him to the back, where he stands for a few moments taking in the recently-
tidied, already-messy space. Then, with a speed like he’s trapping a creature, he shuts the
cupboard door with the writing inside. Only then does the workshop feel like it's inviting him
rather than screaming at him. All these months he’d felt like this space was his only escape,
but his own plea had been carved a foot behind his workbench the entire time.

As it turns out, Luna is a saleswoman at heart. She reminds him of Teddy. When he emerges
again, she’s impressed a handful of customers with her attentive listening, then persuaded
them into associated purchases with her incapable-to-hate bubbliness.

She suggests takeaway and dinner in the park, so they apparate near Primrose Hill and find
some aesthetically-pleasing vegan shop she loves, then walk to a clearing on the outskirts of
Regent’s Park. The days are long now. They sit amongst the summer evening’s buzzing
insects, the children nearby playing Frisbee, and eat quietly. Occasionally, she mentions a
local shop where she spotted an interesting divinatory device, or he a customer or item of
peculiarity.

After a while, they can hear the lions roar. Feeding time, at the zoo. It makes Harry smile,
thinking, for some reason, of Luna in the lion’s hat at a Quidditch game. He looks over and
she’s smiling, too.

“You know, I should thank you,” she says when their eyes meet.

“Thank me?”
She flips her hair over her shoulder and leans back on her hands. Their empty food wrappers
nestle in the grass between them.

“Pansy and I have been together since 1999. 1999! We’ve been together for almost fifteen
years. I could be the queen of fielding questions on when we’ll have children! I love her more
than anything, and she loves me the same. But I think… when you know someone’s going to
love you tomorrow, maybe you start to take it for granted just a little.”

“And I make you take it for granted a little less?”

Luna’s eyes are large, a pond of blue sadness. “When the horrible happens, we take stock a
little better. Isn’t that how we all ended up falling in love back then?”

He doesn’t answer. She lays back flat, her hair fanning around her. There’s a beat in which
they both think about what she’s said solemnly.

“You’ve got a bit of a gift for the weather, don’t you?” she asks then, patting the grass. He
lays back, following her attention up into the sky.

“Not a gift, I just spend a lot of time outdoors. Got a sense for it.”

“I’ve always thought you’d be rather talented at nephomancy.”

He rolls his head to watch her profile. “Nephomancy?”

“Divination through clouds. You ask a question, close your eyes, see what you see. I don’t
think it works for everyone, or at least Blaise and Pansy have never taken it seriously. But I
get this sense… you’d manage.”

“Like tea leaves,” he says, and though he doesn’t roll his eyes, the tone of such is evident in
his voice. Luna pushes his shoulder.

“But you’ve got no reason to be able to read tea leaves. I think you might have a reason to
read the weather. Humour me!”

Ever so slowly, he smiles at her. The sky is bright blue. There are thin, wispy clouds, like
pieced out cotton balls, and he does his best to see whatever it is Luna sees because the way
she sees the world is so nice.

“I see—”

Luna squeals. “No, no, ask a question first! Close your eyes. Breathe deep. Think of
something important.”

Yeah, he wants to say. Because the clouds can hear my inner monologue. But instead, he
shuts his eyelids and thinks and finds that, despite it all, he can’t bring himself to ask a stupid
question.

Is Draco in danger? he thinks of first. But that’s not very helpful—in danger of what?
Photographers? Someone worse, who Harry knows of, or knew of? Am I in danger? is
laughable—he thinks of that woman, sitting in Ron’s corner of the office, paid to Obliviate
people like him with no remorse.

What he wants to know is different. He thinks of Draco again, but in that hallway, with his
hands on Harry’s skin. And he thinks of how it led practically nowhere. What’s happening to
me? he thinks. What’s going to happen to me? Where am I going?

What’s going to happen to me?

“I’ve got one,” he finally says.

She whispers, “Open your eyes,” and the light is bright. He blinks once or twice, then tries to
make sense of the senseless, searching the white and blue above him for meaning.

“Er, a-a U? Like a… like a horseshoe?” he offers sceptically, but Luna gasps lightly.

“Good, good!” she says.

He looks back at her. She pushes his cheek to direct him towards the sky.

He laughs. “Are you going to tell me what it means?”

“At the end! Let’s get the full story!”

“There’s more to the story?”

She points into the air. “Is there one cloud in the sky?”

So he looks again. An arced shape, a crescent, like a moon. He tells her.

“The moon! Oh, Harry, good, more!” But when he points again to some tail-ends of a
rounded, thick cloud and likens them to snakes or worms, she clams up.

“What?” He smiles at her again. “That must mean I’ve got too many Slytherins in my life.”

“Anything else?” She smiles back, tightly, and looks up to the sky with something akin to
desperation. He searches for one more, to end on a brighter note than whatever snakes are.
Then, off on the horizon, he sees something bulbous with a branch off one side, and, to his
amusement, what even looks like steam coming out the spout.

He sits up straight and points excitedly. “A kettle! That’s got to be a kettle!”

He grins. Luna looks grim.

“Oh, come off it, Loons. You’ve got to tell me now.” He’s not so sure about divination
himself, but Luna has contagious moods, and this one is sinking in. When he asks again, his
voice is imploring. “Tell me, please. Won’t you?”

“It’s in my ethical code to always translate someone’s divinations. Wouldn’t be right not to.”

“Okay. So?”
She sits up, too, and closes her eyes with another deep breath, and opens with a
nonmagically-conjured cheeriness that doesn’t quite work. “Horseshoe’s a lucky trip, and the
moon means happiness and success,” she says.

The broom. All he can think is that he’ll get it back in working order, it’ll be approved, ready
to go, and its delivery to the World Cup will mean good things for his business.

“Snakes. A bad omen—take caution. Or worms, which suggests secret enemies.”

He shifts a little in the grass, less keen to let his imagination wander.

“Kettle. Death.”

His face slackens in surprise. “Kettle, death?”

She nods, eyebrows raised, watching him carefully.

“Kettle, death?” he repeats. She nods again. “Who elected for that? For a kettle to mean
death? That’s ridiculous. A kettle doesn’t mean death! A kettle means… it means… good
health. Good tea.”

“You can’t just make the meaning up, Harry.”

“That’s all we do in divination! If I don’t want it to mean death, it won’t.”

Luna sucks air between her teeth. Beyond the tree line, lions roar again. Harry feels the
crushing disappointment instantly. He reaches out for her arm.

“No, I don’t—I mean, we make it up as in people make it up, not you. I know it’s real,
wouldn’t I know? Subject of a prophecy? It would just be a decent amount less to worry
about if I didn’t believe in it. That’s where that came from.”

She gets to her feet, stooping to collect their rubbish from the grass. “Yes, I know. It’s always
‘Loony’s got a ridiculous hobby. Loony reads things in the fish and the tea and the sky and the
palms. What a laugh’ until you spend two minutes experiencing the discomfort of believing
and not liking what you hear. How fun it must be to believe in it every time you see a kettle!”

He stares back, at a loss for words, feeling like whatever appears on his tongue will only be
stammered out.

“You were excited to play with believing in it for the horseshoe and the moon,” she adds.
“We don’t get to pick and choose whether the Fates offer something we want to hear or not.”

She doesn’t like the kettle either, he can tell. It’s in the way her eyes are darting between his
and Luna has always worn her heart on her sleeve. He takes their rubbish from her hands
gently.

“Do we get to tell the Fates we’re pissed off that they ruined my birthday with omens of
death?”
She tilts her head, expression softening a little. “Yell at them all you want, Harry. Circe
knows I do.”

*****

August comes upon them like an untamed forest fire, hot, bright, and burning alive even in
the night. Harry dreams of kettles screeching at him all at once, shrill enough to bring him to
his knees, his hands over his ears, and when he wakes gasping and sweaty even under the
single sheet with the windows open, he stares at the moon until his heartbeat slows.

When he imagines taking this mood downstairs, as he has so often before, his brain feeds it
back to him in tableaus: that common scene of Draco’s stately figure cut black in the
backlight of his room, an invitation into the gentle night of the hallway, and then it goes
sideways—the taste of Draco’s mouth, the sound of his even breathing, the feeling that he is
known inside and out.

If it took that turn, he wouldn’t be upset. But Teddy’s back home, too, and his bedroom is just
down that hall. Wherever they stand right now, it’s not a situation where he can picture
himself taking Draco’s hand, leading him up the stairs. And Draco shuts his bedroom door
behind him like it’s a personal sanctuary Harry would snuff out by entering.

He stares at the moon and thinks these things until he falls back asleep.

*****

On their anniversary, Draco plays the piano early and unstoppably. Harry had ruminated on
what to expect from the other man, and honestly thought it would be a day in his little
alchemy laboratory, cooking up some concoctions he’d want Harry to take if they’d just stay
liquefied long enough. Twice, in July, when they were on the best terms they’d ever been,
he’d found Harry out by the wiggentree and begun a horrendously wordy speech about
respecting boundaries, and when Harry told him to skip to the request, they’d trek to the third
storey just for some glass to sit smoking, vaporous.

“Bugger,” Draco said both times. “It went gaseous again.”

Harry never found out what the potions were meant to be. Ironic, because he was finally at
the point of trust where he’d take any liquid the man offered.

So today he expects alchemy in double-time. Instead, through the window into the garden, he
hears the lilting melody of love. Or at least, he thinks it’s love, but it might be sadness.

Patior, he thinks. And then suffering.

It’s not all the music for the recital, which Harry’s come to know well enough to hum while
cooking. At some point, he hears the song from that little vinyl, and it’s off-putting to not
hear their young, laughing voices after it. There’s another song, too, that stops twice halfway
through and starts over, like a sentence Draco can’t get through. When he finally seems to
finish, Harry wants to celebrate for him, for the mental peak it was to summit.
“Maybe Draco would see a Mind Healer if they could… talk pianos at each other,” Harry
tells a sunbathing Jules.

Humans speak enough languages, Jules offers, laziness in his hiss.

“Ice queen would say music is one.”

Not sure.

He almost mentions snake charming, but that seems like something Jules would consider
ignorant.

Teddy is in the shop, leaving Harry free to be as present or absent as Draco wishes, but his
reappearance that afternoon is a gift all the same. It’s a loud entrance, involving laughing
above the kitchen, so when someone’s thumping steps announce an arrival, he’s surprised it’s
Draco instead. They’ve not seen each other much, besides a quick lunch. And he’s grinning.

Harry grins back, not knowing why, surprised by it all.

“Can dinner wait?” he asks, coming around the counter.

“Dinner is… half-cooked.”

“But you have to come see something!”

“Well, dinner’s in the oven,” Harry laughs. “I can walk away, we don’t have to put it on
hold.”

“Brilliant!” Draco takes his hand and pulls, guiding him back up the steps. He gets dragged
through the hallway, all the way to the back garden. At the door, Draco lets go and prods him
down the steps with a hand on the small of his back.

“Keep going,” he says. “Don’t be shy.”

“I’m not shy, I’m confused,” Harry argues.

There’s a whistle to his left. Teddy stands with a broom in his hand, one which Harry hasn’t
seen in months. He extends his arm with a wide smile. “Bad day not to come to the shop—
It’s back.”

He walks to it in a stunned stumble. The broom is pinkish brown, wood grain streaked with
grey, and he can still remember the way it fought back against the bite of his sandpaper. It’s
painted, shaded oranges, reds, and greens in a collaboration Harry procured with a local
Argentinian artist who focuses on Fileteado, a type of drawing special to Buenos Aires. Her
bold lines of climbing plants and flowers weave along the broomstick handle, follow the
grain of the wood as naturally as if you’d see the art if you cut wood straight from the ceibo
tree this broom was born of.

He’d tried to engrave a similar design into the metalwork of the footrests, semi-successfully,
swooping lines of ribbon and branches circling into the binding around the bristles.
It is objectively his best work. He takes it from Teddy like a newborn.

“So who’s coming?” he asks, looking between them.

Teddy scratches his head. “Erm… where?”

“To Argentina.”

“We all have tickets,” Draco says.

Harry shakes his head. “I’m hand-delivering the broom to the game’s headquarters. It’ll have
to be this weekend. Who’s coming?”

“I—me, bloody hell.” Teddy steps forward. “This weekend? Yes! Draco?”

“Yeah, Draco?”

Draco’s standing with his hands behind his back, eyebrows raised with the surprise of an
invitation to a trip he hadn’t known was happening. Harry thinks, watching him regard the
two of them with a dignified sort of consideration, that he’s quite good-looking. He thinks it’s
less objective than he once promised Pansy. When Draco meets his eyes he turns on a
purposefully charming smile, trying to communicate a sense of begging with his eyes, and
sees it start to chip away at the other man.

“I’m supposed to rehearse all weekend…”

“It’s just Sunday,” says Harry. “Just for half a day. They’ve had a standing Portkey waiting
for the moment I got the all-clear.”

“Just Sunday?”

“Everyone needs a break,” says Teddy. “You’ll be a better musician when you get back.”

Draco narrows his eyes. At the living room window behind him, Ron’s head pokes out. “Oi!”
he calls. “There’s a pie in the oven that’ll be a burnt pie in the oven in about five minutes!
When your little family meeting is over!”

“Coming!” Harry calls.

Everyone will be arriving soon, then. In a moment, one or both of the children will find their
way out the back door and into their conversation.

Draco looks down at the broom, then runs a careful finger along the painted wood. “It’s a
beautiful broom, Harry,” he murmurs, catching his eye again when he looks back from the
house. “Truly. I’d almost forgotten how beautiful.”

“Come,” Harry practically implores. He hands the broom off to Teddy and sets his hands on
Draco’s shoulders, lowering his chin and holding his gaze. “Come.”

Slow as a sunrise, Draco smiles in agreement.

Hugo and Rose burst through the doors, heading right for Teddy, and Harry needs to stop his
pie from burning. The moment ends.

Ron talks his ear off as he finishes dinner. He’s enthused about the Cup by the appearance of
the broom and wants to talk teams and players.

“Who do you think will be the final game referee?” he asks.

Harry shrugs.

“Last cup was some of the finest flying ever, wonder if they’re training twice as hard this
season?”

Harry shrugs.

At dinner, though, Draco’s upcoming recital is the main point of intrigue, and Harry sits
happily quiet, content to just watch him talk about music. It’s like sitting in on his lessons
again, rapt in the foreign language of things he knows nothing about.

Draco rubs the back of his neck uneasily as he mentions a colleague’s suggested revisions to
his piece, and Harry sees his features harden a little. And when Neville asks about how long
it took him to write it, he takes a large, deep, savouring breath as he says “Years, but it went
so fast.” When they’re not speaking to him, his fingertips tap a tune on his leg under the
table. Excited or nervous, Harry can’t tell.

Halfway through dinner, he catches Harry eyeing his fidgeting hand and looks down, then
back up to meet his eyes. Harry tilts his head. All good? Draco narrows his eyes. Mind your
own business. But the narrowing reveals the ghost of laugh lines.

It seems that everyone’s in some unspoken agreement not to mention the significance of the
date, but it also seems like Luna has forgotten. As they’re finishing, she lightly clears her
throat. “A spectacular meal, Harry,” she announces. “I can’t keep track of whether you two
are trying to get together… or not together… but I think we can all agree, this was a dinner
made with love, for a day filled with love!”

The fork on Draco’s plate, which had stalled in his hand when Luna began to speak, starts to
push food around with extreme interest, though he’d placed his folded napkin on the table
minutes ago.

Harry gives Luna a pained smile, and in the silence Ron speaks loudly. “Great dinner! Great
dinner, Harry!”

“Absolute deliciousness,” Neville adds.

“Wicked!” Hugo looks between them, trying to find his place in a situation he hasn’t quite
managed to read. “I didn’t taste the vegetables!”

Teddy’s darting his eyes between Harry and Draco with caution, like he’s calculating how to
help, and after a moment he stands and starts to stack everyone’s plates. His motion is like a
release, welcoming everyone to exit the room entirely.
“That was almost incident-less,” Harry mutters as they walk to the living room.

Draco pats his back. “That wouldn’t be a proper Friday night dinner. We are incapable of not
talking about the Erumpent in the room.”

When the last of them has left and the sound of an old Bowie album blasts from Teddy’s
room, Harry turns to Draco with his hands on his hips. “I guess you’ll be back to the piano,
now, seeing as I’ve stolen your Sunday.”

“Oh,” Draco runs a hand through his hair. “I was… going to see if you wanted to watch a
film.”

“A film?”

“With me. Just… if you’re not busy.”

Harry’s not busy. Harry sent a fifteen-year-old to man a Diagon Alley shop and spent his
entire day conspicuously placed around the house, just in case. Harry made the only salad he
can remember Draco commenting on with dinner, then begged him to spend the weekend
with him. Harry’s watched the muscles move under his skin at the table with carefulness,
attune to a clenched jaw or a tapping leg.

It was as if his anniversary was exactly what he needed for an excuse to be so vulnerably
available. It was the first day since the Obliviation that he had been attentive to every twitch
of Draco’s expression, every movement. He’d opened their relationship up raw and seen right
into its blinding centre, and the brightness was Draco.

“I’ve got all the time in the world,” he responds.

Draco says the word film with gravitas like he frequents festivals and can list several auteurs
whose work he follows, so Harry prepares himself for something grey-scale and transatlantic.
He escapes as casually as possible to tidy his room—home of the only telly in Grimmauld
Place.

“Ice queen is coming up,” he tells a drowsing Jules, gathering up strewn-about socks and
pants to dump in the closet. “Don’t be nervous.”

Jules says nothing, and that’s fine. He was mostly speaking to himself. By the time Draco
comes up, he’s just pulled the comforter to the top of the bed and fluffed the pillows. At the
sound of the door, he swivels on his heels, holding his hands behind his back.

“Did I procrastinate long enough for you to hide your dirty clothes?” Draco asks. His face is
flat, but there’s amusement in his eyes.

“No.”

There’s a quiet pause while Draco’s eyes travel the room. Harry hasn’t changed much in the
room, but he can imagine it would still be strange to walk back in somewhere you used to
spend each night.
“So,” he says. “What film did you bring?”

Draco reveals the DVD case from behind his back. Harry guffaws. He almost has to sit down.
“Oh my god,” he snorts. “Are you taking the piss?”

Draco scowls. “What, you think I’d only like old black-and-white films? You think I don’t
know how to have fun? I married you, for Circe’s sake! I’ve seen every film in your
collection! I can quote the bloody Princess Bride.”

“Draco,” Harry starts, trying to keep an even tone under a rather petulant stare. “You must
understand, it’s a bit misleading to call The Hangover a film. “

“Blaise got it for me as a joke around my birthday. He thought it would be… hilariously apt.
Perhaps you will find solidarity in their forgetfulness.”

This can’t be his reality. Yet Draco crosses the room and works the DVD reader with a
patrician wizard’s version of Muggle skill, which involves delicate but excessive button
pushing, while Harry sits on the bed.

“There!” he finally announces, proudly, while the production companies begin to flit across
the screen. After waiting an endearingly long moment to make sure, he sets the remote on the
bedside table and sits slowly, comically close to the edge of the bed, his legs draped off the
side like he was passing through and had sat for a moment in distraction.

Harry lets him sit that way for a full five minutes before he can’t take it anymore. “Are you
staying for the whole movie?” he asks.

Draco turns to Harry with wide eyes and a jarring amount of attention. “Pardon?”

“You… Get comfortable.” He pats the bed. “You’ve been working a lot. Take a load off.”

“Yes, alright.” Draco shifts his weight to his hands and budges further onto the bed. “Entirely
right that I’ve been working a lot.” He crosses his arms and leans back on the pillow, while
Harry tilts his head at his striped socks. They shift back into silence, though he seems more
comfortable.

“I’m enjoying this,” he says moments later. “How did that tiger get in there? Quite the
mystery.”

Harry smiles. He’s watching in the same sense that Hugo used to ‘watch’ the telly when he’d
put on children’s movies so long ago; shapes and colours passed, loud sounds, Draco’s nose
exhales that equalled laughs, but none of the content comprehended. The body beside him is
too glaring of a presence.

Everyone had been very concerned about Draco today—fairly so, and Harry had been
concerned, too. But it’s two hours to midnight and he’s just thought about himself for the first
time. What had he done on this day in years past? Did they get dinner, or stay in? Go on
holiday? Was that photo of them in Italy taken on August the second of a different year?
Draco is so close and he’s thinking so hard about how it might feel for them to be closer that
he thinks he’s fallen asleep and is dreaming when he feels a weight. His head snaps down.
Draco’s eyes are open, but they’re heavy-lidded and staring holes in the television screen.
Harry takes a shallow, shallow breath and turns his head back to the screen, too.

Shapes. Colours. Loud sounds. Draco’s slowing breathing.

By an hour in, there’s a significant lack of exhaled-laughs and Harry sneaks another glance.
He’s asleep. Even in unconsciousness, his arms are folded. Both legs are stretched out, his
ankles crossed. Harry sits frozen, barely daring to breathe. The movie now seems harshly
loud, a danger to the rest Draco’s getting, but he can’t bring himself to move, especially when
the other man’s head lolls minutes later, his sleep deepening.

Draco misses his chance to find out how the tiger ended up in that bathroom. He stays awake
for all the questions and sleeps through all the answers, while Harry sits and stiffly watches
the credits roll.

When the display has gone dark and he’s watched the DVD’s home screen loop around a few
choice video clips five times, Draco shifts and nestles closer into his side. For a few brief
moments, he stays. But then Harry feels him lose his limpness, remember where he is and
what’s happening, and he sits back up groggily.

“Sorry,” he mumbles, trying to fix his twisted clothes for reasons Harry can’t understand.
“I’ve been working a lot.”

“The tiger belonged to Mike Tyson,” Harry replies, as if this is a natural progression in
conversation.

“Mm?”

“Mike Tyson. The boxer.”

Draco sighs. “Is August second over yet?” For some reason, the hopefulness of his question
feels like an offence.

“In fifteen minutes.”

“Close enough,” he groans, swinging his legs over the side of the bed.

Harry watches him intently. “Are you alright?”

“Fine. Er, thanks for this. Sorry I slept through it.”

“Nice to have you,” says Harry quietly.

September 2007
Draco shook Harry’s shoulder slowly, then faster and faster, until finally, his disgruntled
groan announced he’d awoken.

“’s early,” he moaned, turning on his side away from Draco.

“I am aware, Dormouse,” he said. He straddled Harry’s coil of legs and sheets and leaned
down. “But Hermione didn’t have much say when labour would start, did she?”

For seconds, nothing about Harry changed, until the exact moment everything did at once as
he registered what Draco had told him. He squirmed underneath, twisting until his wide green
eyes appeared for the first time that morning.

“What?” he gasped.

“Hermione. Is in labour.” Draco spoke slowly, his smile growing.

Before he could comprehend, he’d been flung into the side of the mattress as Harry whirled
to life at record speed. “What are we waiting here for?” he asked, sounding strained. “Come
on!”

“Take a moment, will you? Listen!” Draco scrambled to the edge of the bed, just in time to
grab the back of Harry’s shirt. For him, Harry stopped, looking aggravated by it. Draco
placed his hands on his cheeks. “Labor could be hours. Rose is here. Molly dropped her off.
Our task is to wait for news. Take a breath. I have to go back downstairs.”

He kissed Harry’s lips, felt the rough texture of his morning stubble. This was to be the gift of
a new baby to him—besides the new baby, of course. Days of Harry with something
resembling a beard, short and rugged and stunning with his messy curls. Harry casting a film
of love over every aspect of their lives, tired but happy. Harry being good with babies, just as
Draco fell in love with him.

So they went downstairs and together were good with babies.

“Keep your eye on the floo and the window for an owl,” Harry told Teddy. It was a grey day,
and they were on the floor by the piano, putting together a small dragon figurine made of flat
slats of wood. “As soon as we get the word, we go meet Rose’s baby brother.”

Teddy glanced at Rose. “Why’s she here then? Where’s her gran?”

“Hm, well, Hermione got a tad ill earlier while the baby was in her belly. So her mum and
dad and Ron’s mum and dad want to make sure they’re at the hospital with all their attention
on her before Posy comes to meet everyone.”

It had just been a little bleeding, according to Ron, who had seemed remarkably calm about
it. In bed that night back in July, Harry had attributed the calmness to confidence in the
Healers. Draco thought it was closer to denial; if someone told him something was
potentially wrong with Harry, he might just disagree entirely. No one was overwhelmingly
worried, but the frequency with which Harry glanced out the window showed his desire to be
there, too.
Teddy looked up from the dragon. “Victoire said that her cousin Molly said that her mate said
babies are delivered by owl, but my book says they’re conjured during sex.”

Draco choked on his tea, which made a tiny Rose giggle across from him. Teddy had gotten a
recent thirst for knowledge, egged on by the discovery that no one would limit how many
books one could borrow from the library. Harry nor Draco, nor Andromeda for that matter,
felt it right to tell him to slow down on educating himself, so they’d become rather inundated
with facts of varying import and complexity.

“Not conjured, it’s not magical,” says Harry. “They’re conceived. It’s biological.”

“That is what you’re going to grab hold of in his sentence?” drawled Draco, recovering.

Harry pointed a finger. “If you’re not helping, you’re not allowed to critique.”

Rose pointed a little finger back, grinning a gummy smile.

“So I’m right and Victoire is wrong?”

“Yes, but that’s not her fault. She was given bad information.”

Teddy muscled an ill-fitting piece into the dragon’s ribs. “When will you have a baby?”

This time when Draco’s tea sloshed out of his cup and onto the couch cushion, Rose clapped
her hands and Harry gave him a tired look.

“Sorry,” he grimaced. “This is quite a lot for a Saturday morning.”

With his wand, he cleaned the mess and animated an old scratch paper of handwritten
measures. It tore itself to pieces and rearranged as a Kneazle, running delicately over Rose’s
legs and the arm of the couch.

“Er, you know Ted, in your books it probably specifies that when a man and-and a woman do
that, they can make a baby.”

Teddy rolled his eyes. “I’m not thick.”

“Of course not.”

“When will you get one, though? You could get one like me.”

Without parents, he meant.

Harry grew quiet. Teddy was oblivious, but Draco could see him sorting through for a careful
answer. They’d never discussed children. It seemed a moot point when Teddy lived there just
as often as he lived with Andromeda. That seemed to be the proper answer to Harry, too.

“We do have one just like you,” he said after a pause. “He’s about your height… your
weight… reads like a fiend… flies like a pro… hold on a second—that is you!”
Thankfully, Teddy laughed and let it go. They’d got enough puzzle pieces into the dragon for
it to begin flapping its wings.

They arrived at St. Mungo’s hours later, looking too much like parents with their hands full
for people who technically weren’t at all. Teddy had his hand in Harry’s, though he was
firmly in the age where he hated it, and Rose was squarely on Draco’s hip. They stopped
briefly to say hello to the Weasleys and the Grangers in the waiting space, but when Draco
tried to hand Rose over to stay out with Teddy, Harry looked genuinely baffled.

“Mr and Mrs Weasley can watch him, of course you’re coming, too.”

Draco knew better than to argue, in the scheme of things, he’d be practically invisible,
anyway. The second they got through the door, Rose cried, “Mummy!” and began to wriggle
out of his arms. Once he’d set her down she ran towards the bed and her mother, who smiled
at them with a pink in her cheeks Draco was relieved to see.

“How are you?” Harry asked quickly.

“Fine,” she answered. “Completely. Never again though. God, never again.”

Ron lifted Rose and sat her next to Hermione in the bed. The bundle of blue linen in her arms
was asleep.

“Gentle now,” he whispered. “Say hello to Hugo.”

Hugo, Draco thought and smiled internally. His hand went absently to Harry’s back, watching
it all, and then, surprising himself, he kissed his head, pressing his lips against the piney scent
of Harry’s shampoo for long seconds.

Was it a shame that they didn’t have that? That their family was so odd? They had something
equally lovely, it just showed itself differently.

The picture of Harry holding Hugo that lived in his mind from that moment on could play on
his worst day and make him smile. He beamed down at him, a soft look of awe—“look how
tiny,” he murmured to Draco—and made a formal introduction of himself, making a fair
enough face when the newborn whined in response.

That was family, too; Harry, Ron, and Hermione crowded around a bed, Rose between them
and the baby in Harry’s arms. There was no formality in them to share the moment with
Harry—it was simply his moment, too. Draco watched it with no envy left in his body from
all those years ago.

“Do you want to hold him?”

Hermione spoke to Draco for the first time when Harry had left to find Teddy. He nodded
silently, feeling incapable of saying no to her, and took Hugo into his arms, careful to nestle
his head against his arm for support, and watched the wrinkly little being settle again.

He sank slowly into one of the hospital chairs, incapable of pulling his eyes away from
Hugo’s face. When Teddy entered, he stood quietly next to Draco, a hand on his shoulder for
 balance as he leaned over the baby.

“See, he’s already got some hair,” Draco whispered. Teddy leaned closer, grinning. “Just look
though, we don’t want to give him our germs.”

“Can I touch the blanket?”

Teddy and Draco looked up at Ron and Hermione, who both nodded. Teddy ran a careful
finger up and down Hugo’s swaddled shoulder like he was petting a cat, but Draco kept his
attention up. Harry was standing a few paces away, an arm across his chest bracing the other,
a contemplative finger to his lips. He was smiling, and when he met Draco’s eyes it widened.

Draco could just tell what he was thinking. This, too, is family.

Chapter End Notes

Hope you're enjoying!

Feel free to leave some words below in the comments, or find me at

writandromance.tumblr.com. Doing my best to reply as often as I can, but know I read
them all!
 Something Good
Chapter Notes

The chapter title refers to ‘Something Good’, a beautiful Richard Rodgers song from
The Sound of Music.

See the end of the chapter for more notes

August 2013

Harry had a vision, when he held Draco’s shoulders and pleaded he come to Argentina, of a
family trip for just the three of them. He imagined perhaps slowly strolling the site of the Cup
or sitting in a small café with espresso. And admittedly he’d also pictured Teddy vying for
independence from his guardians, wandering off somewhere within the Cup headquarters and
leaving Draco and Harry alone in a new place to walk through the tower of still-rising
lumber, making more new memories that are only his to keep. Maybe his hand would reach
out for Draco’s, a pinky finger hooking another, just to remember what the thrill of such a
thing felt like.

But just as they touch down at a travel point in Buenos Aires, Harry spots a man on the other
side of the large, tourist-heavy room who zeroes in on him like a target. Despite his big
frame, he carries himself like he’s much smaller, weaving through the crowd until he stops
directly at Harry’s feet. He’s not sure if he’s high-strung or the small, tight bun of black hair
is pulling at his face deceptively, but he seems keen to speak.

“Harry Potter,” he says in a thick accent.

“Er, yeah, hi.” Harry switches the broom to his left hand and reaches out to shake his
extended hand.

“Loreto Villar. I will be guiding you to the Cup site today. Welcome to Argentina, Mr
Potter.”

Harry smiles. “Nice to meet you, Loreto. This is my… hus…band, Draco. And my godson,
Teddy. It’s a pleasure to meet you—I, er, thought I’d be meeting the ICWQC director at the
site of the Cup. That’s why I owled to move the first Portkey earlier.”

Loreto raises his hands in appeasement. “Consider yourself alone. I am just here for security
for yourself, for the broom.”

Harry glances around the bustling arrivals centre, the wizards coming and going, swallowed
up in every direction by unassuming objects. “Loreto, mate,” he says, clutching the broom
close. “The meeting with the president is still at three? And it’s only twelve-thirty?”
“Yes. Three.” He nods once, emphatically.

“What would you say if I trusted you with the broom and met you back here later? Could you
get us another Portkey?”

This is above Loreto’s expectations, clearly, but he seems kind, with a willingness to please.
Still, he glances between them all once or twice.

“I don’t know about that, Mr Potter. I have strict instructions to return with you…”

“But acquiring a second Portkey is possible?”

“It would be not a problem.”

“I would really appreciate it.”

“I could perhaps take you on a tour of our city,” Loreto offers reluctantly.

“Ah, but the broom,” says Harry. “Priority for you—and for me—would be getting that
broom where it needs to go.”

“Please, sir,” Teddy speaks up unexpectedly at Harry’s side. He looks a tad younger—not
noticeably unless you were looking for it, but there’s an air of innocence and a chubbiness to
his cheeks. “I always wanted to travel… with my parents…” He looks to Draco expectedly.

“Oh.” Draco lifts his chin slightly in understanding and clears his throat. “They’re dead,” he
says to the man. “It’s rather sad.”

Harry nods gravely and a bit too enthusiastically.

Loreto looks between the three of them with growing despondency, then glances at his watch
and holds a hand out for the broom.

“Two-thirty, right here. Plaza Dorrego has good food and markets.”

“I owe you, really. Thank you,” Harry grins.

Loreto shrugs despite still looking a bit anxious, but Harry has no time to feel bad. They’re
out on the streets of the capital, alone as a trio, within minutes, smiling into the fair weather.

“Teddy, that was outright taking advantage of that man,” Harry laughs as they pick up pace in
excitement.

“You looked darling, though, I miss those cheeks!” Draco’s smiling too, taking long steps
with his hands in the pockets of his trousers.

“Really?” Teddy cocks his head as they wait on a corner. “Blimey, I thought I was in for it.”
Harry shrugs. “Your mum would’ve been delighted. Can’t punish you for something she’d
shed a proud tear over.”

Though summer is approaching all-too fast in London, Buenos Aires is beautifully cool like a
spring day, sunny, but only in a patchwork through the shade of canopying trees. The streets
leading to the plaza are cobblestoned, the pavement red-bricked. Harry walks it all with a
skip in his step, feeling like a student who’d managed to bunk off his classes.

They follow the sound of music. It’s a hearty accordion and string instruments, and they lead
them right into the flea market. Teddy focuses on the tables set up near the players and the
plates of flatbreads and pizzas in their hands. Harry’s stomach grumbles.

“THIS IS PERFECT! WE CAN LISTEN WHILE WE EAT!” Draco shouts.

“SURE!” Harry shouts back. He and Teddy share a look. He’s not sure he’ll remember how
to chew this close to the noise. “AREN’T YOUR EARS AS PRIZED AS YOUR HANDS?”
he asks close to Draco’s ear.

“WHAT?”

“YOUR EARS?”

Draco frowns and shakes his head in confusion. Harry points a couple tables back, then
covers his ears. Draco shrugs like he hadn’t noticed the volume but will make any
adjustments Harry could need.

Teddy orders a pizza, Harry and Draco ‘milanesa italiana’ and ‘americana’ respectively, some
interesting breaded beefs, and they all crowd their plates onto a small blue table within sight
of the band. The music is lively, cheerful tunes wheezed out of the accordion, supplemented
by warbling cello and violin. They’re too focused on eating to speak, and when they’re done,
Draco doesn’t move to stand with them.

“Go ahead!” he says, gesturing with each sentence to ensure communication over the din.
“I’m going to sit! They have coffee!”

Harry gives him a thumbs up with high eyebrows. “Let’s go, Ted. I’ve got Argentinian pesos
burning a hole in my pocket.”

The music lessens immensely when they’re not directly next to the speakers, but the sounds
of the people grow more intense. Around them, the crowd chatters and sellers gesture
towards them with wares on their arms. There’s a full table of glass bottles, and another with
small dancing robots, little plastic toys that rock back and forth. Teddy convinces him to get
two of them for Rose and Hugo.

“Oi, reckon we should get some reading?” he asks a little further along. “You plan to be busy
at that meeting?”
Harry looks away from a table of old golden tools—magnifying glasses, monocles,
collapsing telescopes. Teddy’s jerking a thumb behind him, at a wall of scantily clad women
on magazines beside a row of vintage men’s magazines and sewing pattern books.

“Oh, funny, Edward. Funny.”

They begin to walk again, but it’s only a few paces before they each see something worth
investigating and split off again. The music transitions around Harry’s wandering like he’s
changing radio stations, each street performer blending into the next—an old man plucking a
melody on guitar, a man with a didgeridoo, then a young boy with an accordion, hardly
croaking out a sound, then an entire space carved out where a small band plays while couples
tango.

Despite his vision of the perfect trip including much less solitude and much more memory-
making, he’s surprisingly okay. Besides work and lessons, plus the occasional outing
prescribed by Anastasia, he’s spent the better part of the year in Grimmauld Place. Suddenly,
walking the cobblestoned street alone, he grasps what a shame that truly was. In his aimless
shopping he passes Draco again, sitting at that table facing the band with a light smile and his
legs crossed primly, a small cup cradled in his hands. He looks content, happy, even. He’s
likely feeling equally freed by the trip—at least Harry goes to the shop most days. If Draco
doesn’t have rehearsal, his students come to him.

A hand grasps his arm not long after, while he’s stopped observing a display of painted
puppets arranged on a blanket on the street. It’s Draco, who must’ve caught sight of him
wandering past.

“Hello,” he says. “Where’s Teddy?”

“Browsing. Potentially buying lads’ mags in a foreign language.”

Draco jerks his head back in bewilderment.

“Mostly joking. Walk with me?”

They continue down the street, Harry pristinely aware that Draco’s hand hadn’t left his arm.
Aside from pointing to vendors from time to time, neither say much of anything. Two blocks
down, Harry reaches a hand up and takes Draco’s from his arm.

“Sorry, sorry, Harry, I shouldn’t—”

He stops speaking. Harry had placed the hand into his, interlocking their fingers. He squeezes
them.

“Not a problem.”

Draco stares at him unreadably, then stares back at the street ahead while they walk, as if all
his mental energy must be directed at placing one foot in front of the other. Meanwhile, Harry
experiments with the feeling of this, such a small but domestic arrangement, as they walk. It’s
certainly not bad. Quite good, maybe. Sometimes, Draco’s grip tightens on Harry’s just a
little more.

Draco clears this throat. “So. Had a hard time getting ‘husband’ over your tongue earlier,
with that security man.”

Harry’s ready to appease him but sees that he’s smirking. “Oh, sod off. We never go
anywhere, I’ve not actually had to keep up pretences before.”

“Shall I get you a bin to be sick in, next time you have to describe me as such?”

“Go deafen yourself sitting an inch from that band.”

“Apologies that I have an appreciation for music—”

“Harry! Draco!” Teddy puts the exchange on pause, running up with rushed words. “Isn’t this
a Muggle city? This flea market is non-magical, right? Because—” Harry and Draco both
shush him, which incrementally lowers his voice. “—you have to see! Come on!”

He pulls them back through the crowd. Harry feels Draco’s hand loosen and then release
from his. Then, at a street corner crosswise to the path they’d been walking, Teddy stops and
points to a small tapestry hung beside a dozen more, woven into the shape of each species of
dragon.

“Muggles know about dragons,” says Draco.

Teddy rolls his eyes. “Do you think I’m brainless? Really, is that what you think of me?”

“I think sometimes I have to tell you astoundingly self-evident things. Like ‘hey, Teddy, don’t
leave the cast-iron to soak’.”

“That’s not as self-evident as you think!”

“It is when I’ve told you and Harry’s told you not to do that—”

“Guys!” Harry groans. “Right now? Go on, Ted.”

“Look!” Teddy steps forward. “Er, hola… er… the tapestry? Por favor? May I touch?”

He gestures to the dragon tapestry and the grandmotherly woman watching them bicker from
behind large lenses nods. The second Teddy’s fingers skate along a dragon’s spine it shivers
and stretches its wings, then bares its teeth and breathes out a large fireball. He touches
another dragon, pale white and icy, and it coughs up a snowflake.

“Tecnología muy avanzada,” the woman says, shaking her head up and down appraisingly.

“Where did you get this?” Harry asks her. “Er, dónde está… this? From where?”
“Language spells do exist,” Draco mutters impatiently to his right.

She pulls the tapestry down, enthused by their interest, and under her thumb a Hungarian
Horntail spits a deadly rope of flames. “De donde saqué esto?” she asks.

“Sí! Sí! Dónde,” Harry repeats, latching onto the recognisable word.

“Un hombre muerto. Diez mil pesos.”

“A man? Un hombre?” Teddy looks to Harry. “A million pesos?”

“I think mil is thousand.”

“Sí, ‘thousand’,” the woman nods again. “Muy avanzada.”

“It’s not unbelievable,” Harry says under his breath. “Mr Weasley says Muggles
unintentionally buy magical items all the time.”

“And if he’s not here… it’s really our duty to take this off her hands, remove it from non-
magical society…”

Harry laughs. Teddy grips the textile firmly. “Ocho mil,” Harry says.

“You’re haggling?” Draco asks, appearing to only exist in the conversation for the sake of
providing judgement.

“Diez mil,” she offers.

“Nueve mil.”

“Diez mil.”

Harry sighs and counts out the money, setting it in her hand as Teddy happily folds the
tapestry up.

“As delightful as it is to watch you two perform citizens’ arrests on Muggle artefacts, we
need to get to the Portkey location soon or some important people will be cross.” Draco
points to the ornate clock over the city centre that they’ve done well at ignoring. It’s two
twenty-seven.

Harry gasps. “We’ve got to go!” He swats Teddy’s hand away from his careful folding and
shoves the tapestry into the small bag with Hugo and Rose’s toys, then takes off at a jog.

“We could apparate back?” Draco suggests breathlessly next to him. They’re swimming
upstream, dodging tourists and street performers. Teddy narrowly misses a pram with a
gangly elbow.

“In the non-magical district of a foreign city we’ve never visited?”

“Forget I said it,” Draco pants. “You only seemed a little… desperate.”

There’s a bright blue car Harry remembers from earlier parked ahead at a street they’d turned
down, and he takes a sharp right, pushing into Draco on accident.

“The most prestigious event I’ve ever been a part of as a broom maker and I’m going to be
late!” Up ahead, Harry can see the white stone of the building. “And I’ve never even met the
director! Just exchanged owls!”

They burst through the doors, startling a young couple of travellers standing by the entrance.
Loreto Villar is nowhere to be seen. The three of them deflate in disbelief.

“I don’t believe this,” says Draco, two fingers smoothing stray hair back from his temple.

“D’you think we missed him?”

Behind them, Teddy sinks to the floor and rests his back against a column.

“Don’t worry. Just a moment.” Draco puts a hand on Harry’s shoulder, then leaves them to
cross the wide hall with purpose. Harry sits next to Teddy, watching him sidle up to an
attendant with his arms starchily held behind his back.

“Pardon me, good sir,” Teddy mutters in a sharp, annunciated Draco-like accent. “We’re
frightfully stranded. Have you seen—” Draco gestures back at them, and the attendant’s eyes
follow. “—this gentleman’s security detail? I’ll simply expire if I must join them on the
floor.”

Harry chuckles breathily. The attendant checks some papers, points off to the side of the hall,
and Draco, seeming pleased, strolls back. Moments ago, the room had been bustling. Now,
between the two-thirty and two-thirty-five Portkeys, it’s relatively empty. Draco’s shoes clack
on the tile.

“Well?” Harry looks up at his towering figure.

“He’s got a Portkey set for two-forty.” Draco drops to the ground opposite Harry and crosses
his legs. As he speaks, he taps his index fingers on the toe of Harry’s trainer distractedly. “So
we’ll wait for him to return.”

Teddy knocks his head back against the column and groans. From his pocket, Draco reveals a
Sickle. “There’s a kiosk with drinks and snacks, by the toilets,” he tells Teddy, dropping it in
his hand.

The boy looks sceptically at the coin. Finally, he curls his fingers around it. “Not a child.
Can’t just feed me snacks to pacify me.” But he sets his hands flat on the floor and pushes to
his feet. Within seconds, he’d traipsed off to find it.

“You’re a regular Teddy whisperer.”

“Had a bit of practice.”

A beat of silence follows. Then, as sudden as it had dissipated, the hall snaps full of dozens
of wizards catching their balance and righting their robes. It’s two-thirty-five. They’re
flooding towards the exits. Draco jerks forward suddenly, then directs an entirely rotten
expression at a wizard walking quickly towards the doors. He shifts to assume Teddy’s vacant
spot against the column to avoid getting kicked again.

Meanwhile, Harry’s running a distracted hand through his hair like a rudimentary comb,
staring down at his trainers lined up with Draco’s loafers like ducks in a row, wondering if
he’s completely underestimated what’s expected of someone meeting the man responsible for
organising all of the Quidditch World Cup. He’d seen the trip like a delivery of goods, but the
presence of Loreto seems so much more formal.

“You’re nervous.”

Harry looks to his right. “Me?”

“Yes, you.”

“Just thinking maybe I wore the wrong clothes.”

“Do you want to trade?”

“Sorry, what?” Harry splutters, incredulous. Draco’s not joking—his face is one of attentive
will to please.

“You want to dress properly.”

He laughs. “I think Loreto might have some questions about why we’d swapped entire
wardrobes.”

“He thinks we’re married.” Draco shrugs.

“And you think a pillar of married life is trading clothes midday?”

“I think married people remove their clothes and might get confused when they go to put
them back on.”

Harry sighs through a smile. “I’m alright, as much as I’d pay to see you in denim. Generous
offer.”

To his surprise—still, somehow his surprise, every time—Draco lowers his head and presses
a kiss to his shoulder. It’s fast, like he’d needed to be in and out quickly before he lost his
nerve. “This is a really important day for you.”

The pressure echoes on his skin. When Teddy returns with a Danish, he squeezes between
Harry and Draco and offers Draco a bite. They talk about the street performers, but Harry is
distracted making promises to himself. Could he kiss Draco’s shoulder? Could he do as he
wished? Anastasia’s voice in his mind tells him what he already knows he must do—he’ll
talk to Draco before the sun sets.

*****

Buenos Aires was crowded and vibrant, but the World Cup was not going to take place in
Buenos Aires. It was to be in the Patagonian Desert, where Draco, Harry, Teddy, and Loreto
stand in a vacuum of life near a scuffed left shoe.

“This is the weather they’re going to play in?” Teddy speaks first, pulling his thin denim
jacket tighter across his chest.

Harry cocks his head. “They play in snow at Hogwarts.”

“But these are professionals. They deserve fair weather.”

Sandwiching them in a flat lane of stunted bushes and sandy earth are plateaus of grey-ringed
rock. In the valley, wind sweeps through against their backs. There’s nothing for miles—or so
it seems.

“This way!” Loreto booms. He seems more at home here, Harry thinks, leading them down
the gorge towards where the rocks widen out. The three of them follow close behind,
swivelling their heads to take in the landscape. Past the valley, stone no longer swallowing up
the sky, they all stop in wonder; through the flatness of the desert is the rising bones of a
Quidditch stadium, the warm tan of fresh lumber standing out against the archaic grey and
red-ringed rock surrounding it. A smattering of supplementary buildings sit to the side of the
stands, and a field of open land sits waiting for the tents that will fill it in a year’s time.

“Fantastic wizardry,” Loreto says. “The opening of the cliffside acts as the point of
bewitchment against Muggles. They see a never-ending dry desert. Shall we?”

“This is gonna be brilliant,” Teddy marvels. Approached by the towering structures, he’s
forgotten the chill in the air completely. “Muggles don’t know what they’re missing. Imagine
having the best sportsmen coming to compete in your country and not even knowing.”

“Messi?” Harry muses.

“Who?”

“Lionel Messi. Football?” He turns to Draco, who shakes his head. “Argentina’s got one of
the best sportsmen. Loreto—Messi?”

“Ah! Dios del fútbol… My father is non-magical—could not care less when I told him Krum
is coming out of retirement for Bulgaria but would kiss the bottom of Messi’s cleat.”

Harry waves an open hand at Teddy with a See? He gets it gesture. It’s no use, Teddy’s
already distracted again by a man sauntering out of the largest building beside the stadium.
For good reason, Harry decides, at the sight of him.

“Harry James Potter!” he drawls from afar in a saccharine Texan inflexion. “Well, well, well!
Crossed the seas to show up on my doorstep! Why, you look rode hard and put up wet!”

“Jesus Christ,” Draco mutters so only he can hear.

Harry waves awkwardly. He’s never met the director of the ICWQC, but somehow the
charisma of Mason Banks matches the tone of the many letters they’d exchanged perfectly.
He’s broad-shouldered, sunburnt, and bearded, dressed well in a suit but, as they meet by the
doors, Harry notices his tie pictures small cowboys on broomsticks.

Banks takes Harry’s hand into a full-hearted handshake, then takes Draco’s with the same
vigour. “Mr Malfoy, I’m sure! The maestro!”

Harry hides a smile at the complete antipathy on Draco’s face, restrained only by a lifelong
practice of graciousness. Banks takes his thin smile happily. Teddy, meanwhile, clearly finds
the man entertaining. He’s grinning before the director even greets him.

“And the young Teddy Lupin! Now, remind me, what position do you play in Quidditch?”

“Oh, er. I don’t, sir.”

“Not on the Quidditch team? I’ll be… With Harry Potter as guardian, I’d reckoned there was
no doubt about it!”

“He’s a great teacher, I just had other interests at school.”

“I’m sure! I’m sure!” Banks is yet to let go of Teddy’s hand. “Busy young man, you are, I’m
sure!”

Draco looks as though he’s going to physically separate their hands if the director doesn’t let
go soon. Finally, he drops Teddy’s hand and claps his own together. “Loreto, would you be so
kind as to show Mr Malfoy and Mr Lupin the team headquarters? I want a word with Harry.”

Loreto, who’d been standing attentive, nods.

“C’mon, then, don’t be shy!” Banks thumps Harry on the back, leading him away from his
family.

He leads him through the bureaucratic branch of the operation, the interior of which is
unfinished, too, but Mason Banks’ importance is apparent; the further back they go, the more
properly completed it all seems to be, until he’s guided into a large, fully furnished office
with windows spanning across a view of the rocky horizon and the stadium.

“Sit! Sit! Cookie? Or tea? Or I have some Argentinian candy!”

Harry waves it all off. There’s an American and an Argentinian flag in a coffee mug filled
with pens, and an actual cowboy hat on a coat rack in the corner. “You received the
broom?” he asks, sitting straight.

“Oh, yeah! That broom! A fucking beaut!” He leans forward in his leather chair, his mouth
ticking up to one side. “You have not been paid, however! Which means this… is for you!”
He unlocks a drawer with his wand and sets a large purse of coins on the table, which clinks
soundly. “And of course, as was mentioned before, tickets to all qualifier games and the
finals… box seating… a premiere tent space… do you want those made out to you now?”

“Oh, we can wait. I might give them to my best mate. He’d go mad—”

“Ron Weasley!” Banks snaps and points a finger at Harry, who’s stopped speaking with his
mouth open. He announced it like he’d won a trivia round.

There’s a pause. “That’s the one.”

“Brother of Ginny Weasley! Talented player! Their first game is against Germany I believe—
easy as Sunday morning! But then against Brazil or Haiti… Tricky!”

“I’m rooting for them,” Harry offers. “So, is that all?”

“In a professional context! Unless I could convince you to franchise? I’ve never been across
the pond, but I’ve got a niece who travelled over and she’s been in! Damn good store!”

“Kind of hard to franchise a workshop. There’s only one of me, after all.”

Mason Banks appears crestfallen, his entrepreneurial dreams dashed in a moment. Harry
looks out the window and catches sight of Draco and Teddy trudging between two unpainted,
dry-walled buildings. Teddy pulls Draco’s arm and points to a spot high on the stadium.
Loreto follows closely behind them. Harry smiles.

“There is a favour I’d love to ask, though it may be too much,” Harry says, turning back to
the director.

“Anything!”

“Are we allowed in the stadium?”

December 2008

Crickets were singing somewhere off in the distance and the pale moonlight drove a foggy
white cast over the trees. It lit the two from behind through the paned glass doors of the
gazebo. The building itself was shadowy, casting them in silhouette as they held each other,
close enough to kiss.

“Perhaps I had a wicked childhood, perhaps I had a miserable youth,” Julie Andrews sings
in the dark. “But somewhere in my wicked, miserable past there must have been a moment of
truth.”

It would be easy to blame his emotions on a harrowing week, full of rehearsals for a tenured
position he’d only ever lucked into and lessons with children who played with gritted teeth
under the pressure of their parents.

But in actuality, it had been a pleasant week, just the kind that leads to a late Friday night in
bed after a good dinner with friends and an even better shag when they’d gone, tipsy on wine.
The kind where neither of them is quite ready to go to sleep and say goodbye to the day. He’d
finally handed over a composition he’d been squirrelling away for a long time and heard
great things from the publisher who’d handled his early work. A student he’d had since 2002
found professional work. Harry loved him and showed it often. At dinner, his ‘rose’ had been
‘everything’ and he hadn’t managed to come up with a thorn at all.

“For here you are, standing there, loving me, whether or not you should… So somewhere in
my youth or childhood, I must have done something good.”

And Harry had emerged from the shower with a toothbrush in his mouth and mumbled,
“Movie?”

“A classic,” Draco requested, sitting up instantly. He’d do anything to make good days last
longer.

They’d gone with The Sound of Music, commenting over the film as they went, tucked into
each other under the covers. Draco’s head was pillowed on Harry’s right shoulder, Harry’s
right hand ghosting distractedly across his chest. It was a good position until the song
overtook him.

He wasn’t all that sure what exactly happened, other than that he so rarely was overwhelmed
by any feeling besides panic that his body had no counter-attack. It just happened—his chest
caved in, his body felt immovably heavy, his eyes burned.

Nothing comes from nothing

Nothing ever could

He could curse Harry, for having his arm hooked around his body, his hand so lovingly
placed on his chest, because without it, he might have missed how shallow his breaths had
grown.

The crushing feeling was taking shape. It was forming into a recognisable beast. One he
foolishly thought he’d banished long ago. It was guilt.

So somewhere in my youth or childhood

I must have done something good

Eight years ago, he’d sat across from each of his new friends and apologised for his actions
genuinely—and there’d been a lot to apologise for. And not long after, Harry had come to the
mind-bending conclusion that Draco might be waiting for his apology, too. He remembered
that being so amusing, because between them there was such an ‘inequity’ of their sins.

He did his best to calm down from whatever greater thing laid below the guilt that he
couldn’t quite name yet. But his body was traitorous. His breath hitched audibly and Harry’s
hand stopped moving. For a moment, he sat still, Harry paused like a hunter observing the
forest.

Then he shifted to look down at Draco’s face. Daringly, Draco looked back. A
miscalculation. Harry sprung into action.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

Draco shook his head. “Nothing.” It came out warbly.

“Draco…” Harry pulled his arm back from behind his head and shifted under the sheets to
face him more directly. Only when his thumb swiped across the thin pale skin of his eye did
Draco realise he was crying at all. He couldn’t remember a single time he’d cried in front of
Harry, which would explain the bewildered, deer-in-the-headlights look on the man’s face.

“I don’t know,” he whispered, staring back at the movie, long past the pretty gazebo scene. “I
don’t know why…”

“Forget about why, just tell me what you feel.”

Harry’s voice was soft and easy to follow, his instructions simple. His hands—now both on
his face, wiping away each tear that came—were warm. He leaned forward, pressing his face
further into the other man’s palms.

“Guilty,” he whispered.

Harry hitched a breath. “Okay,” he said after a pause. “Any—anything else?”

“Bad.”

Harry nodded. “What, are you having an affair?” he laughed nervously.

“Never,” Draco said, twitching his head to kiss a palm. “The movie… I just thought… That
song…” He busied his hands with the hem of Harry’s boxers, picking at the point where the
thread frayed.

“I’ve never seen you like this.”

“It just got me thinking… ‘somewhere in my youth or childhood, I must’ve done something
good’. I’m not sure I ever have.”
“Have ever done something good?” Harry said it like the very idea was absurd, like he’d
spent his childhood volunteering at soup kitchens. “You’re a good person!”

“Or am I just not a bad person?”

Harry dropped his hands, frowning. They fell over Draco’s in his lap, so he took both of
Draco’s in his own. He opened his mouth and closed it again.

“Sometimes,” Draco whispered, taking a shuddering breath that he’d meant to be quite
steady, “I feel like I’m doing a poor man’s impression of you. Of a truly good person.”

“You are—”

“But what did I do to deserve this life? What part of everything I’ve been brought me here? I
was not a good person for a single second of my childhood. Spending an afternoon
apologising to you all and then simply not being a worse person shouldn’t... That afternoon
shouldn’t have given me all this.”

“More than one afternoon gave—”

“I need to do more.” He nodded vigorously, letting go of one of Harry’s hands to wipe his
face again quickly. “I need to be better.”

“You’re better all the time!” Harry’s eyes darted helplessly around his face, searching for
clues to an answer he’d accept. He wasn’t going to find one there. “You know I love you,” he
tried instead.

“That’s irrelevant.”

“Gee, thanks,” Harry rolled his eyes. “Look, forget Julie Andrews. That song’s got you
thinking too hard. And she—she was up against real Nazis, it’s—”

Draco thrust his forearm between them with a truly devastating expression, his throat
bobbing as he tried to hold everything within him from breaking into pieces. Harry glanced
down with wide eyes and then back up, furiously stern.

“Draco. If we have to go back to everything we used to talk about fresh off the war, I will.
You were seventeen. And scared. And brainwashed! And remorseful. And sad. I’m not going
to sit here and watch you hold up a scar you’ve already tattooed over and make comparisons
like that and—and talk as if everything you’ve—we’ve—built all these years is nothing. Tell
me you don’t think like that.”

He hadn’t thought anything. He’d been blinded by Harry for years. Laughed at newspaper
articles saying Harry was laying with dogs and catching fleas, then never stopped to consider
if what that implied about him was still true.

“I know what we have is good,” he said slowly. “I just don’t think I’ve done enough good.”
“Then do something. Or see a Mind Healer, for Circe’s sake.”

Draco laughed wetly. “I will if you will.”

“I’m fine, you’re the one crying over a musical.”

He leaned forward until his forehead touched Harry’s and stayed there with his eyes closed.
Harry’s chest rose and fell slowly—a directed set of breaths that Draco mirrored without
vocalised instruction. After a minute, he spoke again.

“My mum’s talking about moving to France.”

“Okay?” Harry whispered back.

“The Manor will be mine.”

August 2013

Harry waves up at the windows to Mason Banks’ office, feeling watched, as he walks to the
second locker room. Inside, Draco is leaning by the opposite wall, and he brightens at Harry’s
entrance. Teddy sits on one of the long benches, a hoodie added under his denim jacket.

“Look! Free souvenirs.” He holds the front of the sweatshirt out flat with both hands so Harry
can read Quiditch World Cup 2014. “They spelt Quidditch wrong so they’re binning them.”

“Twice as exclusive!” says Loreto, standing behind him.

Harry meets Draco’s eye. He winks. Teddy is happy. It makes them happy.

“I’ve just spoken with the director,” Harry tells Loreto. “He said… it would only make sense
if the referee’s broom had a test drive in the right stadium. And—” Teddy had sat straight up,
staring intently at Harry. “That there were some spare brooms in each locker room, should I
wish to be accompanied.”

“Really?” Teddy grins, oscillating his attention between Draco and Harry.

“Two additional brooms?” Loreto smiles at Harry, then projects a sad look down at Teddy,
the woefully announced orphan.

Teddy snickers. “One.”

“Two.” Draco sets his hands easily in the pockets of his coat.

“Eyes up, Malfoy,” Harry calls, tossing him a Firebolt. He sends the second towards a
stunned Teddy, who catches it mouth agape, then walks out with Draco. He slings an arm
around Harry’s shoulders as they trek to the pitch. The wind has picked up slightly, too,
sending a chill through the air. It pulls Harry’s muscles tight, those he’s already bracing a bit
in the thrill of surprising Teddy.

“He’s going to lose his head when he sees you on a broom,” he laughs excitedly. “D’you
think he’s following us yet?”

“I don’t think he’s gotten his limbs to work.”

“Maybe you’ll be airborne before he—”

A figure whooshes past them on a broom, Teddy whooping loudly and echoing around the
empty landscape. He turns easily into the stadium.

Harry swings a leg around his broom there and then, watches Draco do the same. They share
an anticipatory smile and finish the trip onto the pitch in the air. Teddy’s doing antsy orbits
above them.

“DRACO!” He shouts down when he sees them. “Are you having me on?”

“Does it look like it?” Draco calls back.

He climbs, Harry on his tail. They’re level with the skeleton of the announcer’s box, which is
yet to be anything but a blank, wooden structure. Never in his life has Teddy seen Draco on a
broom. If his smile widened any further, it wouldn’t fit on his face.

Loreto, jogging after them, finally makes it through the stadium entrance. He waves at Harry
before dropping his hands to his knees.

“I guess I’ve got to test this broom,” Harry says. He doesn’t, really, of course. It’s exactly
what several specialists have been doing the entire time they’d held the broom hostage. “Last
one around both goalposts three times loses!”

Without waiting for a count, Teddy leans forward and rockets off. Draco shoots Harry a grin
and follows. Soon, the three of them are tearing around the tall goals. Draco’s good, fast,
almost clips a pole or two with the swiftness of his turns. Harry sees the surprise in it on his
godson’s face, watches it spur him on faster with the same surprised grit Harry had employed
when Draco gave him stiff competition on their outings.

Teddy wins the first race, then accuses Harry of cheating.

“How can I be cheating if I lost?” he argues.

“You lost on purpose, that’s cheating.”

“That’s called throwing a race,” Draco offers helpfully.

“Which is cheating,” Teddy insists. He makes them go again. This time, Harry wins by a full
broom length.

By the third go, Loreto is shouting something at them from the ground, but the words are lost
in the air between them. All they hear are bellows. He waves a hand.

“I think we have to go in,” Harry says, sniffling in the chilly air.

He drifts down, followed reluctantly by the others. His guess is confirmed when Loreto looks
pleased by their grounding. Coming from the air to the ground must’ve made Harry dizzy
because Loreto’s figure is dancing back and forth. Behind him, Teddy is speaking at Draco a
mile a minute, wondering when he flew again, if Harry was a part of it… “I thought you’d be
rubbish,” he’s saying just as Harry trips over the flat earth and Draco reaches to grip his arm
with surprising reflexes.

September 2007

Draco was holding Teddy’s arm, when he was only ten, standing in the stark white of
Hermione’s hospital room. Harry hadn’t been able to stop thinking all day about what Teddy
had asked them about children. He felt like he had one, in his godson. Felt like Draco had
one. Recognised that Draco hadn’t asked for one.

Teddy reached out for Hugo as Draco whispered to him and smiled encouragingly. It took
Harry’s breath away how much pure love Draco was directing at the boy. He knew he loved
Teddy, but when he saw it written so plainly on his face, it always made him feel a certain
way.

August 2013

“Sorry,” he mumbles, but Draco had reached for him as reflexively as he’d saved him from
falling off that booth during his birthday weekend—as if Harry’s body was simply an
extension of his own. Already, he’s back to answering Teddy’s questions. He does something
especially Draco—something in the way he’s fixing his clothes after the windswept afternoon
racing—that Teddy feels he must mock expertly, and his hair flashes in a blink to a pale
white, matched with a dignified lifted chin and a ridiculously soft-footed walk.

Draco laughs. Shoves Teddy and leaves him stumbling for firm footing. Then laughs twice as
hard at Loreto’s double-take towards the freshly pale-haired young man.

Harry shakes his head. They’re almost to the stadium entrance when he grows so lightheaded
that he trips again, and this time Teddy and Draco are too engrossed in each other to catch his
fall. The bespoke broom slams into the dirt as he falls on his hands and knees.

“Shit,” he says, eyeing the metalwork on the footrests. It seems unharmed. Draco reaches a
hand out so he hands him the broom, thankful that he’s going to take this precious item out of
his extremely clumsy hands.

“Your hand.” Draco gives the broom to Teddy and extends his hand again. Harry takes it.

“I’m fine,” he preempts the other man’s concern. Draco eyes him sceptically as he dusts off
 his jeans. “Just got dizzy. Think I landed the broom too fast.”

“You want some water? Or to sit for a while?”

Water. The thought turns his stomach, which is growing nauseous, but it awakens his brain.

August 2003

Back to the ocean, again, but this time another year. Ginny with short-cropped hair. Draco
standing on the pier. The amusing dichotomy of his pressed slacks and shiny black shoes and
the sun-bleached wood of the planks.

August 2001

Water. Teddy, so small. Draco up in the sand. No wrong notes. Draco reading his book, each
of them looking up when the other looks down. Wondering if maybe today, when he asks, the
captivating man on the beach will join him in the water.

August 2013

He’s not even aware he’d passed out until he comes to. Suddenly, he’s looking up at the blue
and the brown of lumber circling the sky with three faces staring down at him in concern.
Teddy is gripping three brooms in his hands, biting his lip. Draco’s kneeling over him,
holding his face in both hands. His wide eyes try to read Harry’s own, worried.

“Harry?” he asks, laying the cold back of a hand on his forehead. It returns to his cheek.

Water. Like a breaking dam, Harry remembers.

Chapter End Notes

Hope you’re enjoying! Thanks for reading! Appreciate and read all the comments, as
ever!
 Rautavarra's Andante
Chapter Notes

The chapter title comes from Rautavaara's second movement of the first piano concerto.

See the end of the chapter for more notes

August 2013

The first thing Harry thinks is that it’s interesting that Draco looks more handsome now than
he did under the love potion. The amusing quirk of true love versus manufactured. He stares,
maybe a second too long, like he’s put his glasses on for the first time in a long while. Like
someone moved everything in his room an inch to the right and has just admitted it.

“I’m okay,” he somehow manages to breathe, surprised by the even timbre of his voice. He is
very aware of Loreto’s presence and Draco’s caring hands. With the knowledge that’s come
back to him at a nauseating speed, it’s hard to believe he’s been walking around since January
with none of the paranoia he feels now, thousands of miles from home, with a stranger over
his shoulder and another potentially watching him keel over from a set of beautiful paned
windows and a head-of-command-sized leather chair. “Must’ve been the food earlier.”

Draco snatches his hands away from his cheeks quickly, abashedly. “Are you sure? Should
we… I don’t know, should you lay here?”

“I think I’d just like to go home,” he says.

“Are you sure you should—”

“I’d really like to go home.”

Draco blinks in surprise at the firmness of the statement. “O-okay, if you’re alright to
move…”

“You can sit in the VIP lounge for as long as you’d like, Mr Potter,” Loreto speaks up.
“Although it’s not much of a lounge yet… There are folding chairs we can transfigure into a
couch? And some water or perhaps a meal?”

“No, I think we’ll just get going.”

“I cannot leave you feeling ill like this in our care, it is really no problem if—”

“He wants to go home,” Draco barks as he confirms that Harry’s good on his feet. His voice
is tense. Harry could kiss him—he has no specifics, but clearly can read in him how very
much they need to get back to London. “Is the Portkey to send us back to England here or in
Buenos Aires?”

“Here, yes, just in the main offices. It’s been set for an open return, so whenever you’re
ready. It will be waiting even if you choose to take a minute…”

“Here are the brooms, Mr Loreto,” Teddy interjects expertly, filling the man’s arms. He starts
walking, which persuades Loreto to follow. Draco and Harry lag a pace or two behind. Harry
feels almost woozy—overwhelmed physically as he’d felt during the Obliviation and the hate
curse, but also mentally by a near-constant onslaught of memories, like his mind was
stretching after a long trip.

“What’s wrong?” Draco whispers.

“I just… remembered something,” he responds vaguely, an overwhelmingly guilty

understatement. Even as he speaks, Loreto looks back at them, seeming genuinely focused on
Harry’s wellbeing. “Mixed company, so… and I don’t feel great. You need to get home
anyway, I promised a half-day, that you’d still have time to practice. It must be nearly eight at
night back home.”

“You’re not going to collapse on me?”

He shakes his head. Draco frowns with sympathy and for a brief, beautiful moment rubs his
back.

By the main buildings, Loreto dawdles for a moment and then, at Draco’s glare, disappears
quickly inside with the brooms and returns with a cowboy hat. “Portkey,” he says. “Doubles
as a souvenir, courtesy of Director Banks.”

Harry barely says another word. He waves up at the director, mumbles a thanks to Loreto,
then reaches for the hat with Draco and Teddy, bracing himself for the additional stomach-
turning twist into space. When they reappear at the Ministry, he takes two steps out of the
way and sets his hands on his knees.

“What’s your problem?” Teddy asks instantly.

Caught up in his own sickness, Harry briefly thinks he’s trying to start a fight. Before he can
open his mouth, Draco responds, “Bad meal, a little bit of Obliviation illness... Should we ask
Andromeda if Teddy can stay over so you don’t make an extra trip?”

“It’s fine, really.”

“Should I come with you? My practice can wait, I promise.”

He means it, Harry knows. He wonders if anything on his own face gives away the true
extent of the ‘something’ he’d remembered, but if he’d fallen back in love to find it, maybe
there was no difference to spot. Either way, he knows they’re less than an hour from him
turning Draco’s life upside down once again, and he loves him enough to give him however
long he can to rehearse beforehand.
“Go on,” he says. “I’ll get him to Dromeda.”

“I can go myself,” says Teddy.

“No,” Harry and Draco answer in unison.

Draco must be itching to get back to practising more than he’s letting on because he doesn’t
argue besides triple-checking that Harry’s okay. They navigate back to the atrium, then take
separate floos. The entire time, Harry feels like he’s going through the motions, Draco’s face
flickering through his mind, the year’s events remembered in a new light.

“Are you sure you’re alright?” Teddy asks when they emerge in Andromeda’s home. The
house is dark, lit only by the lamps she had left on for him when she left for her weekly book
club meeting. He doesn’t quite want to leave Teddy alone, but there’s no reason he should be
in danger, and Draco had done the wardings on the house himself.

He smiles weakly. “Don’t worry about me. A good night’s sleep ought to help. You’re staying
in? Not going to see Vic or anything?”

“No.”

“Well, if you acquire a teenager’s inability to avoid their girlfriend, have her over here
instead, okay? Through the floo. Just… you know, to be safe.”

“I’ve never called her a girlfriend,” Teddy murmurs.

Harry stops moving for just a second and scratches the back of his head, antsy and distracted.
“Oh. Right. Sorry, I made an assumption.”

“I’m not meant to have her over alone anyway.”

“And there are so many people present to inform if you do,” he points out as he unlocks the
front door. “Lock this behind me.”

Only when he’s on the front step does he grasp that he’d told his fifteen-year-old to have his
girlfriend—not girlfriend—over unsupervised. Again, though, there’s no time to linger.

He apparates closer to Grimmauld Place in purposeful defiance of Ron’s orders. For the first
time, if someone truly is watching their block, he’ll know their faces. The street is still lit by
the setting sun, and as he turns the corner he keeps his eyes scanning. There’s a couple
against the iron fencing opposite their home, but he knows them from two doors down. When
they see him, they wave. He doesn’t know which number they think he lives in. They
probably thought he was dead until just now, anyway, the way he’d been coming and going.

Only once he’s satisfied that there’s no one he can see does he take a deep breath and reach
for the knob. Entering his home feels different, like he’s woken from a dream. There, down
the hallway, is the room Draco’s been sleeping in, at the centre of a corridor they’ve kissed in
like it was the first time and not the millionth. In the same hall, he’s helped Draco rearrange
the photos from their wedding. And in the living room, Draco had fed him a potion keen to
remove that stubborn apathy he’d been feeling. The same living room where he’d felt so
much for him that he thought he would burst.

Something beautiful, lingering and remorseful, a ballad, rings out from the living room. He
could almost cry from the joy of recognising Draco’s playing. ‘Valet Moram in B Minor’, the
subject of one of his most important performances ever, less than two weeks away. ‘Worth the
Wait’. Ridiculously lovey, really. And this is a man who says he’s not much of a romantic.

Harry clears his throat and calls, voice unsteady in anticipation, “Piano Man.”

The music stops as suddenly as a record scratch. He can imagine Draco’s fingers freezing
over the keys without seeing it. On average, he starts playing the tune—hi back—within five
seconds. This time, it takes thirteen. Then, light trills and Billy Joel played as hesitantly as
possible. It fades as he enters the room.

Draco opens his mouth, likely sure ‘Piano Man’ is the memory he’d gathered in Argentina,
not knowing that it was so much greater.

“You were wearing a deep blue suit,” Harry starts before he can say anything, his hands
clasped behind his back. Draco drops his arms from the piano entirely. “It fit perfect because
you’d taken it to the tailor four times—a tailor you refuse to see now because he had the
audacity to call Mahler overrated. Very mature of you.”

He smiles, but Draco only offers him a blank expression of cold disbelief.

“And, I remember standing across from you and thinking how exquisite that the moment my
life stopped being guided by prophecy, it started guiding me to you. I dropped the ring.” He
grimaces, which earns him his first emotion from his husband, a short, choked laugh, almost
sad, still shocked, still not sure just what’s happening. “Everyone laughed. So you dropped
yours. And you played for me. Composed, special for the day. I remember you could hear a
pin drop. I think I heard it recently. I think I heard it the day I refused to try to fix this. The
day you cried to Pansy.”

He’s not sure Draco’s even breathing but his eyes are following Harry unblinkingly as he
crosses the room.

“That’s the second time you’ve cried in front of me,” he sighs, sitting on the edge of the
coffee table. “The first was when we watched The Sound of Music. It took you eight years to
cry. Let’s see…” With every word, something lightens deep in his soul. “We first shagged
upstairs in bed, but I think what you were looking for was ‘under the piano’, which I suppose
counts. And that pier in Saltburn is where we were married. It’s kind of romantic that I tried
to kill you in the same place I said ‘til death do us part’, isn’t it?”

Draco begins to get up from the piano bench, face still slack, and Harry’s sure he’s going to
stand and meet him but instead he lowers himself to the floor, like he needs to touch
something as solid as the foundation beneath them.

“You—Harry?”
A senseless question, because at no point was he not Harry. But he understands and he nods,
mouth turned down, feeling too much to specify one heart-clenching emotion from the next.

“Harry,” he repeats, as Harry kneels down in front of him.

“I can’t believe I made you cry. And all those days of you eating at the piano… all the
warning signs of a complete breakdown and I would just wave goodbye and go to the shop—
wouldn’t even say goodbye, actually. God, I said to your face that I’d never love you again.
I…”

“Harry.” Draco’s been reduced to his name and still conveys everything necessary in each
repetition. This one stills him mid-ramble, pulls him back from his head.

“Hi,” he sighs.

Draco leans toward him gently, like the mirage might disappear if he moves too fast, and
pulls him into the world’s slowest, tightest embrace. In his ear, he can hear his unsteady
breathing and holds tighter, drinking in everything Draco; the soft of his cheek on his jaw, the
fresh laundry smell of his shirt, the feeling of his body through his clothes, so familiar at
every dip and protrusion.

“When? In Argentina?” he whispers.

“Yes,” says Harry.

Draco pulls away and shoves him hard, knocking him a few feet back and onto his bum.
Harry gasps a breath as he lands, splaying his hands behind him for support, but Draco has
followed him, wrapping him in another hug before he can say a word, a flurry of emotion.

“That was over an hour ago, you arse,” he mutters in Harry’s ear.

“I thought you should have a moment to practice while I took Teddy home. Before I uproot
our lives. Again.”

“That is so… so, you, my god. I—Harry… Really, you—”

“Your recital is important! I’m about to make you so busy!”

“Shut up.”

Draco kisses him, hard against his lips with gratefulness. Harry can’t imagine thinking any
other kiss this year was meaningful compared to this. Draco’s kissing him not as someone
missing another version of Harry—the one who loved him long ago, unstoppably—but not
for this year’s hard-won version either. It’s for this in-between Harry, who loved him, lost
him, then loved him again.

He doesn’t ask Harry why he’s going to be too busy to rehearse. Doesn’t inquire about how
he can enlighten them about his own Obliviation. And Harry’s not immediately itching to
share. The world fades away because he lets it. They deserve a minute like this before
everything comes to a head. Harry breathes hard into the kiss, pressed so close that they’re
practically joined at the waist. When they part for air, he presses his lips to Draco’s cheek,
then to the hinge of his jaw, back to his mouth, which waits impatiently.

Eventually, Draco finds sentences again, which he asks at a worried speed, his hands
surveying Harry’s body. “Are you okay? Do you remember it all?” he asks, carding his hands
through his curls. “Should we call anyone? What do you need?”

Harry nods, soberly feeling the need to discuss serious things. It makes him miss Draco
horribly already. “We need everyone here. Now.”

Draco doesn’t argue. “Of course,” he murmurs. “Of course. Er, do you want to send a
Patronus to Ron and Hermione? I’ll get Luna and Pansy by floo and they can get Blaise and
Neville.”

The next few minutes are a rush of activity. Harry leaves his Patronus vague but urgent,
hoping it won’t worry his friends too much, and when Draco emerges from the fire he nods in
confirmation to the couch where Harry had sat the moment he could.

“How are you?” he asks again, crouching with a hand on Harry’s knee. “If you fainted earlier
because of this—” He sweeps his hand around the room, which is about to be filled with their
closest confidantes. “That can’t be great.”

“I don’t feel great, but I’m fine. I love you.” Draco looks stunned, as if they don’t say that all
the time. “You love me.”

“Clearly,” says Harry. “I love you.”

Draco says nothing. It’s like he’d had time to grasp the return of memories but not how Harry
got there, not the magnitude of what it meant.

“Do you… love me?” Harry hints in the silence.

“Yes! Yes, I do,” his eyes widen, snapped back into the present. “I love you.”

“Brilliant. Optimal.”

“Tea? Chamomile? With some honey?”

It sounds wonderful, if not just because it’s being made by Draco. He doesn’t even answer—
Draco reads his expression and nods. He disappears downstairs. Harry thinks he might be
happy having a task, anyway, something meaningful and productive to do with his hands.

The fire roars, sudden and heatless. He sits up straighter as Hermione comes through first
with Hugo, eyes practically shut in oversized sea creature-patterned pyjamas. She looks
Harry over, relieved, and as Ron walks through with a slightly more awake Rose, scans the
room and finds Draco nowhere.

“Is it Draco?” Her voice is hard and wavering. “Oh, Merl—”

“He’s fine! He’s just downstairs, ‘Mione, he’s brewing tea.”

She takes a visible breath of relief. “Oh. We couldn’t reach Molly and wanted to get here as
fast as possible…” She sets a hand on Rose and Hugo’s backs.

“Teddy’s at Dromeda’s if they want his bed. Or one of them can take mine.”

“They can share. Thanks.”

Ron picks Hugo up with a quick nod Harry’s way. He lolls his head into his father’s shoulder,
instantly, as they leave for the bedroom. Their exit misses Draco by a second, like some
comical theatre routine; Harry sits alone in the living room only a moment before he returns
with a steaming mug.

“Do you want biscuits? Something to fill your stomach?”

“This is plenty, really.”

Harry takes the mug and cups it in his hands. His head is beginning to ache and, as if he
knows, Draco hands off the tea with a kiss to his temple, lips lingering flat against his skin
for long seconds with something akin to thankfulness. He pulls away a beat after Ron and
Hermione reenter.

“NO!” Hermione gasps first, somehow reading everything in one quick peck, or perhaps in
the serenely reverent way Draco applied it.

Harry grins weakly, glancing up at him. His smile is strangely smaller than Harry’s, but
present nonetheless. He gulps and nods.

“’No’ what?” asks Ron. “Harry said he was going to try—”

“Harry remembers,” she gushes, too excited to explain patiently. She pushes past a still-
bewildered Ron and manages to cross to the couch in two paces, where she engulfs him in a
hug so powerful that he almost spills his tea. “Oh, you!” she says in his ear, voice sounding
choked up. When she pulls away, her face is wet. “You must be over the moon, Draco, oh my
god, I can’t believe this! On some random Sunday in August, no less!”

“I don’t think it’s set in quite yet,” he responds quietly somewhere above Harry, who can’t
stop looking at him. At least Draco seems equally stuck on him. His eyes keep scanning him,
maybe just questioning whether he’s alright, but Harry can’t help but wonder if his inflexions
have changed, whether he sees the same person he saw in January.

Pansy and Luna tumble through next, with worried expressions that are extinguished twice as
quickly once they light on Ron and Hermione’s happiness.

“Oh, thank Circe, it’s good news,” says Pansy. Blaise nearly pushes her into the coffee table
with his hurried entrance. She jolts and turns to him. “Good news, Blaise.”

“Merlin, we could go for some good news.” He runs careful hands down his trousers, like
preening.

“We just need—”

“That’s the most alarmed I’ve left the headmistress in a rather long time,” says Neville,
before he’s even stepped over the hearth. “Late night emergency use of her floo. On Harry
Potter related business, too. Just when she thought that name had stopped taking years off her
life.”

“It’s fine, Nev,” Luna whirrs to life. Her hair is in a long plait and, he notices now, she has the
top half of a nightdress tucked into trousers. “It’s good news!”

“Partly,” Harry finally interjects, darkly.

“I should send Bill an owl,” Ron thinks aloud, finally done computing. “Let him know his
Obliviation theory was right. It was love that did it, right?”

“Did what?” Pansy asks.

Luna gasps. “It happened?”

“What happened?” Blaise rubs his eyes.

“The Obliviation—Harry remembers everything,” Hermione offers helpfully.

“Where’s Teddy?” Ron glances around the room.

“Didn’t think it was safe for him to come.”

“Cheers, Harry—my children are asleep a room away!”

“Well they’re not going to try and get involved.”

“When?” asks Luna.

Harry takes a sip of his tea. “Today, in Argentina.”

She gasps again. “Lucky trip!”

He smiles. “Lucky trip.”

Kettle-death sits in their shared gaze but doesn’t dare meet their lips.

“Superb trip,” Draco announces, a bit tetchy. “But I think we need to hear just what Harry
knows so I can sort out who to kill.”

Harry doesn’t amend that. Draco’s still crouched by the edge of the couch, so he shifts to put
his back to the cushions instead of the arm, making room for him to sit close. The rest of their
friends fill the couch, the chairs, the piano bench, in an imperfect circle.

“Only when you’re ready,” says Draco, warm against his side. His hand rests loosely on
Harry’s leg. There’s hardly been a moment without a point of contact since he came through
the door, like an anchor.

“Just let me get through it all,” Harry tells them. “Then you can tell me what an idiot I am.”
January 2013

It was a horribly cold day. Earlier it had hailed and so many Diagon Alley shoppers had
crowded under the awning outside the shop that he couldn’t get out to run and grab lunch.
He’d had to escape out the back and then, when he’d returned, he’d been aggrieved by
customers upset that he’d closed unannounced, flummoxed that they hadn’t seen him leave.

So that was the state he was in when the afternoon rush died down and two men entered.

“You’re Harry Potter,” said the lankier one. He was white, pallid, taller even than Ron.

“Are you asking or telling?” Harry muttered, halfway through scribbling a letter to a client
that their broom was complete.

“You take repairs?” The second man ignored him and leaned his arms on the counter,
uncomfortably close. He was broad-shouldered, clearly used to intimidating through size, but
Harry eyed him and finished his note unperturbed.

“Mm-hm.”

“Oi, do you usually look at your clients?” The skinny man snapped from somewhere behind
his mate.

Harry raised his head excruciatingly slow, too tired for this. “Are you clients?”

The closer man reached around in the pocket of his coat and placed something with a metallic
clunk in front of Harry. A broom compass. He’d never seen anything quite like it; the gold
was tarnished and it was clearly antique, but it was more or less in good shape.

More interesting were the markings—below the glass lay a compass needle without cardinal
directions. Instead, it was circled by a carved ring, etched with a crescent moon and, opposite
like north and south, a pinwheel shape. Above the glass, along the outer gold edge of the
compass, ran Roman numerals and, protruding upwards, was a small, sharp sundial. Along
the length of the dial were engraved wheat stalks.

“I’ve never seen anything like this.” Harry reached out and touched it. “What’s the matter
with it?”

“Won’t point right.”

“Er, where’s it supposed to point?”

“Doesn’t matter. Inner mechanisms work like any broom compass, so fix it how you’d fix
any other one.”

Harry chuckled humorlessly. “There are different things wrong with different compasses.”
“If we knew what was wrong with it, we wouldn’t need a repairman,” the large man bit out.
They would, Harry thought, but these were tough customers. His patience was wearing thin.

“Do you know what it’s supposed to do?” he tried.

“It locates people.”

He sighed. “Okay. That’s something. I’ve worked with compasses like that. Leave it with me,
I’ll do what I can, no promises though. You won’t owe me anything if I can’t fix it. Can I
have an address to contact?”

“No address. We’ll be back in three days.”

“That’s… not how this works,” said Harry. “I can’t promise it’ll be ready. A point of contact
—”

“No. We’ll be back,” the thinner man interjected. “You do your job and we’ll return to see to
it you have.”

“That’s a costly piece,” added the brutish man. “Coveted. Keep this private.”

Harry blinked in surprise, used to customers ordering him around but less so to what felt on
the verge of threats. He eyed them carefully, their nice coats, their focused faces, and decided
to assume they just cared deeply about their heirloom.

“Sure. Stop by later this week, but… I have other customers, repairs. Don’t get your hopes
up.”

“Three days,” he repeated, and then they were gone.

Truthfully, it was nice to turn his attention towards an especially puzzling piece. He’d seen
nothing quite as challenging in ages, if ever. And Draco had just gotten news that his solo
recital had graduated from hypothetical conversation with local funders of the arts to full-
fledged, scheduled event. Naturally, it had led him to stare at his compositions until his eyes
dried out and he could dramatically announce that they were ‘complete detritus’. He played
late into the night every night—Harry was lucky if he woke up enough to feel him crawl
morosely into their bed. It was less lonely with a project.

Unfortunately, the compass itself didn’t feel like collaborating with his enthusiasm. He took it
apart, investigated each part, compared it to various old manuals he kept on hand, tried
(unsuccessfully) to date the piece or decipher the symbols beneath the glass. None of the
simple fixes worked.

His breakthrough came in the form of a revealing charm; one he’d been putting off. He only
ever tried it as a last-ditch effort, when items were impossible to solve and only the worst was
left to assume. He waited until the shop was closed before even attempting it. Only once had
it ever produced a positive diagnosis of Dark magic, on a broom that tried to plummet its
rider towards the ground any time it reached a particularly deadly height.
That day, it revealed Dark, Dark magic. In the unlit workshop, sunlight ebbing fast outside, it
produced enough evidence to make him shudder. But while that broom, once upon a time,
had revealed Dark magic that, if removed, would fix the broom, this was quite different; the
compass itself was Dark. To repair it would be to awaken the Darkness within.

He was dying to tell Draco. ‘Coveted’ or not, spouses were surely exempt from all secret-
keeping. It was a fact of life. But the last day before they’d set to return to the shop, Draco
had a full-fledged panic attack. The instigator was more recital news; he thought he was
getting an intimate venue, but instead it had been decided he would show at a large outdoor
site, horrifyingly old and renowned.

The night was spent on the bedroom floor, whispering soft words, kissing, breathing. Fingers
and ears.

“Have you ever heard the phrase ‘don’t borrow trouble from tomorrow’?” Harry murmured
when they moved to the bed. They were laying on their sides, Draco’s head tucked under his
chin. He felt him nod. “Okay, well,” he paused to kiss his hair. “I’m not telling you how to
live your life, but as your life partner… It’s only January. You can’t last eight months like
this.”

“Alright, I’ll simply reschedule my anxiety.”

“Okay.”

Draco clicked his tongue, the pitch-black bedroom version of a scowl.

“I’m serious. Aren’t you going to be stressed in August either way? So don’t be stressed
about being stressed in August.”

“Can we not talk about this while I’m trying to stay calm?”

Harry squeezed his arms tighter around Draco’s torso. “We don’t have to talk about
anything,” he said, and he meant it. They’d catch up tomorrow.

*****

He tried to stay in the workshop as much as possible the next day, working with his hands to
maintain his composure. It was less that he was worried about declining the two men’s repair
request and more that, should they challenge it, he didn’t trust himself to keep his cool. Many
customers were arseholes and many were personally offended when he had to refuse a repair
—these seemed like they were the centre of that Venn diagram.

They came just before lunch. The bell rang, he walked to the front, and found them standing
expectantly at the till. He took a deep breath.

“Gentlemen,” he said, crouching down and unlocking the safe. The compass was nestled
right next to Draco’s snitch. He set it on the counter between them.

“Fixed up then?” said the taller man.

“Not fixed. And I’m afraid I won’t do it. This item is powered by Dark magic—it’s not
unheard of, a lot of antiques have histories we’re not educated on. But I refuse to fix Dark
things.”

“Hypocritical from the man shagging Draco Malfoy.”

Harry froze, a hand hovering over Aldona’s business card. He turned back slowly. A coldness
so icy that it felt hot filled his veins. These weren’t run-of-the-mill disgruntled customers.
There was something personal and vindictive in the words.

“What?” he gritted out, annunciated sharp, like a dare to repeat it.

“Seems like you make a show of taking on Dark projects,” the man hissed, leaning forward.
“A regular reformer, you are.”

His hand was inches from the compass. When Harry glanced back down at it, something on
the man’s skin, revealed by the rolled-up sleeves of an uncharacteristically sunny day, caught
his attention. It was a tattoo, marked into the skin of his wrist, of a symbol he’d only heard
about: A fox swallowing the head of a snake. An anti-Death Eater symbol. A ‘Wreakers’
symbol, though the name had long died out. It was less the emblem of an organised group
and more a belief system subscribed to by war-craved vigilantes. All bark and no bite, which
had only ever granted them space in the middle of newspapers on droll Wednesday
publications.

“Look,” Harry ground out under his breath, now more irritated than anything else. “You’re
lucky I didn’t turn this in, but I’m the only one in an achievable radius capable of fixing it at
all, and I wasn’t yet aware that you were overconfident arseholes.”

Instead of responding, they looked to each other in some unspoken agreement. The taller man
nodded and turned the sign on the door to closed. Harry kept an even face but drifted his
hand closer to the tip of his wand in the waistband of his trousers.

“I wouldn’t,” said the brute. “Hector is surprisingly fast with the shield spells.”

The tall man—Hector—turned back with a sneer, as if he would fear them.

Harry balled his fist, trying to keep his voice steady. “I’m not sure what gave you the
impression that I take orders.”

“That’s your cue, Dollus,” said Hector.

The man at the counter reached into his pocket and placed a series of A4 white sheets
between them. For a moment, Harry stared down blankly, then got the feeling he was
supposed to reveal something on the other side. He pulled his hand reluctantly away from his
wand and flipped the top one.

He forgot how to breathe. How to keep his heart beating. How to stand on his feet. With
purposefully steady fingers, he flipped through the pages.

Draco crossing the street near the rehearsal hall, mid-step.

Draco and Harry walking Regent’s Park.

Draco just around the corner from Grimmauld Place.

Draco in Diagon Alley, hands full of purchases.

Draco and Teddy on Oxford Street.

Draco and Harry through the window of a Japanese restaurant.

Draco and Teddy again, sitting on a bench across from a pond.

Draco and Teddy again, outside Flourish and Blotts.

Draco and Teddy again, outside his shop.

Draco and Teddy and Harry, faces flushed red, just emerged with high energy from the side
door of Draco’s last time in the pit for the Christmas ballet season.

Draco, from every lovely angle, unaware.

“This is a fucking joke,” he whispered with a harsh laugh, in such disbelief that this could be
happening after so many years of well-earned peace. It simply wasn’t happening. Whatever it
was simply wasn’t. No, he thought. No.

“Are we laughing, Harry Potter?” said the man, starting to gather the photos back into a pile.
“You said it yourself, you’re the only one who can—”

“Someone’s coming!” Hector announced in a panic, tearing his friend’s attention away. With
shaky hands, Harry pulled a page from the disorganised stack and stashed it under the table.
“Oh. Nevermind. Just a shopper.”

Dollus rolled his eyes. “There will be those in the afternoon in Diagon Alley. You’re the only
one who can fix this compass, so you’re going to fix it,” he ordered with his attention
glaringly back on Harry. “So long as you do, your rescue pet remains unharmed.”

“Does that get you far? Threats on perfectly decent peoples’ lives?” Harry raised his chin.

“Worked on just about every other Death Eater in London.”

This hit Harry’s understanding like the weighty missing piece of a puzzle it was. Hadn’t they
been fleeing ‘like rats’, as the papers put it? With no reasons given? Hadn’t Draco been
counting down the remaining reformed for years?

“You threaten their lives to their loved ones,” he stated tonelessly, feeling the surrealness of
the afternoon. Why stay an Auror when the criminals come directly to you and announce
their misdeeds?

“None of the rest have loved ones.” Hector spoke as if he was bored, trying to explain
quantum mechanics to a baby. “Most war criminals don’t. You’re an odd egg.”
“Draco’s not a war criminal.”

“Lucky, that was.”

There was no use in arguing with people like this, Harry thought. The best he could do was
eke them for information when he turned them in. “You threaten their lives directly.”

“Blackmail, Potter. Blackmail. But that’s proved… an unsuccessful venture with yours.”

“Go figure,” Harry spat. “He’s a good person.”

The second man slammed his hand on the counter over the photos, startling them into silence.
“We have a deal? I will give you a week.”

“You’re not going to give me anything,” he said, hand drifting back to his wand.

“If we don’t come up smelling like roses in thirty minutes, someone knows what to make the
consequences for you. Malfoy’s at an office on the south bank right now, isn’t he? Meeting
with the director.”

A description of Draco’s afternoon in real-time switched something in Harry’s head, from the
surrealness of the moment to the realness of the repercussions. This wasn’t some wild duel
he’d speak of later. Not some moment of fleeting drama reminiscent of his youth. This
morning, Draco had dressed smartly and presented his wrists for Harry to attach his cufflinks.
Harry had stuck his toast in his mouth to free his hands, then nodded wordlessly like a
gagged victim while Draco sped through his afternoon—a meeting with a director, a meeting
with the top donators, a meeting with the principal conductor to create a timetable where he
could practice in peace, the dread of travelling all the way to the river to do it.

Suddenly, Harry was very much living in the moment, thinking less of his temper and more
of his husband. Was there someone there right now? If Harry did his best to subdue these two
—and two against one, when he hadn’t done something like this in so long, was intimidating
itself—could he get word to Draco in time?

“If you can imagine,” the man in front of him muttered, sounding proud. “We have friends in
high places. A lot more people hate Death Eaters than love them. You tell a soul, we’ll know.
Malfoy starts changing his path to work, acts careful, we’ll know. And I will personally
watch the life drain from his face and it will be my pleasure. I’ll ask again: Can you fix the
compass?”

Harry’s voice sounded as lifeless as they were threatening to make Draco. “I can try my
best.”

“That’s the spirit! It is… Monday. We’ll be back Friday. One working compass and you can
forget all of this.” He snickered which, at the time, Harry took to simply be the enjoyment of
undermining someone famous for killing Voldemort with a few measly photos. He had no
clue what lay behind the words.

“Fine,” he grunted.
Hector flipped the sign back to open. Harry’s jaw was clenched so tight he thought his teeth
might crack.

“Not a word, Potter,” Dollus cautioned one last time. “This can be easy.”

Harry travelled home in a daze, so distracted that he apparated ten minutes from his house.
Every friend of theirs flitted through his head, options for help reasoned out of just as fast.
Truly, though, stricken by the fear of losing Draco, he could barely find the wherewithal to
come up with a plan with a trusty enough loophole to wager his life. He would have to handle
it alone.

Through the propped doors to the living room, the piano sat empty, unusual for this last week
or so. He thought Draco wasn’t home at all, heartbeat instantly pounding, until he heard the
door to the garden.

“Ah, you’re home,” Draco said when he saw him standing daftly at the door. “I have to tell
you about all those dreadful meet—”

Harry’s impatient approach stopped his sentence completely, taking three paces to reach him
and kiss him within an inch of life. To feel Draco warm and lively under his hands meant
more than it ever had. When he pulled away, his cheeks would be flush with life, too, his lips
soft, his breathing affected. Signs of life.

“Blimey, what a-a greeting,” Draco started the second he left his mouth free to kiss the
heartbeat on his neck. “What’s gotten into you?”

“Nothing,” Harry breathed, holding his face, speaking an inch from his lips. “We always
kiss.”

“Sure… We do…” Draco closed the distance again, quick and affectionate, then stepped
away from his arms, casual, rote in his day. “I got takeaway.”

Everything beautifully Draco that he did that week stung like never before. Harry kept his
word and worked diligently on the compass, mostly research, unable to discover just what
was wrong. He’d sit all day at the till with books of ancient Quidditch tools, the history of
magical tools, and none of it brought him what he needed. And then he’d come home and
Draco would be so Draco it made him angry.

“I made more of that weed-killer, and I experimented with some ideas from that book on
spagyric remedies,” he’d say. “Should help with the pests. It’s sitting in the lab.”

Or he’d spend half the day in lessons, then mention offhand that he’d given the student all the
books he needed because ‘it’s easier to just go replace my own copies’. It was all so bitterly
selfless, like the world was laughing at Harry.

The compass solution lay within the pages of an old book he’d picked up at the rare books
shop—Dark Tools and the Wizards They Caught. There, fifty or so pages in, was an
illustration of the exact compass currently sitting on his workbench.
‘A relic of 18th-century pagan navigation tools.’

The symbol, Harry learned, was influenced by Saxon religion and symbolised the moon, sun,
and eight Wiccan sabbats. And he’d missed hidden features even in his expert disassembling
days earlier. If the sundial was flipped up and out on its miniature glasses-hinge-looking axis,
it revealed a small scythe, etched black into the twelve-o-clock position along the encircling
roman numerals.

It all tumbled into view from there; it was blood magic, eked out with the sharp edge of the
sundial, at which point, when the harvest moon was high on Lammas (One of the eight
sabbats of Paganism, a second jovial book told him. ‘A time to honour the crops and be
grateful for the fruitful earth’, it wrote. ‘A time to reap what has been sown.’ This, in the
context of his current research, held wicked connotations that sent a shiver through him.), the
blood-spiller’s favoured enemy would have their location presented at the scythe, the true
North.

‘But do not be misled. This ancient tool, since destroyed’, read Dark Tools, ‘accomplishes
more than locating an enemy’s position. Upon first sight after the harvest holiday, all spells
will target the enemy with expert precision.’

Harry gulped, feeling ill. With the knowledge that it was blood magic, he could fix it. But
now he held new reservations. No wonder the pair wanted the item fixed. It would
completely change their odds with whoever they targeted next. Their next enemy was
practically doomed.

Thinking of Draco, though, he lost all his morals. A horrible excuse for a hero. And anyway,
he convinced himself, Lammas was in the summer. He could sort it for them, buy Draco’s
safety and eight months to solve the problem with all his friends at his side.

Back at Grimmauld Place, he forced Draco to put down his work. They got takeaway again—
Draco by now was telling him he was working too hard, staying at the shop too late. A
hypocrite through and through—and ate in bed with a movie on. They spoke of the future,
and love, and what they would do for their anniversary that year. Draco was set on the Tuscan
countryside, Harry on Greece. Draco would win. Harry would simply take the Grecian
tendencies with him, mythologise them; he would do anything for Draco, loudly or silently,
die for him without telling a soul, retrieve him from hell without even a glance back, sculpt
him from marble until the gods pitied him enough to bring him to life.

On Friday the sign was flipped to open, the bell on the counter, and his attention on an old
Comet Two Sixty. Minutes ago, with growing cold feet, he’d convinced himself to send an
owl to the rehearsal hall he knew Draco would be at all day.

‘We need to talk. Wake me when you get home. H’

This, he’d decided, broke no rules. He hadn’t told Draco anything and by the time he got
home from rehearsal that night, no matter how late, the immediate danger would be in the
past. He’d tell Draco everything and start to figure out how to remedy the problem he’d
made.
The shop had been quiet, strange for a Friday afternoon, so he decided to glance quickly up
front. It was silent. Through the windows, the muted sounds of passersby carried through.
And the sign on the door read Closed. He frowned. He’d definitely left it on Open, he
thought, as he flipped it back around.

Then, on the desk, the bell was gone, too. He leaned over the counter, spotted it just under the
table, and placed it back at the centre. Something primal and cautious was prickling at the
hair on the back of his neck. His wand was sitting in the workshop and suddenly this was
way too far from his person, even for his sixty seconds away.

He walked at a speed just short of a run back and stared in stunned silence at the empty space
on the workbench where his wand had been laying. Without thinking, he yanked a carving
knife from the wall, gripped it vicelike, and scanned the room. Nothing else seemed out of
place. The broom was as he’d left it, as was the stolen photos of Draco he’d kept on hand all
week, a macabre reminder of what he was working towards. It lay face down by his binders
of customer information. The compass was right beside it in a protective silk bag.
Impulsively, Harry grabbed that too, shoving it deep in the centre pocket of his hoodie.

“Hello!” he called into the empty shop. “You could’ve rung the bell like a paying customer!”
Tentatively, he stepped into the doorway between the workshop and storefront. “No need to
hide! I have it fixed!”

Hector stepped out from between two aisles, his own gnarly white wand gripped in one hand
and Harry’s in the other. “Let’s see it then.”

“Where’s your friend?” Harry asked instead of answering, just before he felt a hulking
shadow of a presence behind him. “Ah, good,” he swallowed and backed to form a triangle
where he could see them both.

“Let’s see it then,” Hector repeated, a bit impatient.

“It’s rude to take a man’s wand.”

“You’ve replaced it fast,” he responded, nodding to the knife pointed towards the floor.

“Left me no choice. That wasn’t a friendly entrance.”

There was something sinister in the air. He’d hoped this would be an easy trade, but his
instincts were telling him otherwise. He took a step towards the front door, which caused
both men to raise their wands.

“Keep your knickers on, I’m turning the sign back to Closed,” Harry said, hands raised with
the knife between his thumb and pointer. Their wand tips drifted down, so he crossed quickly
and flipped it once more.

“In the back,” Dollus grunted.

“Up here’s fine.”

“In the fucking BACK!” he roared.

Harry drew a sharp breath in. He couldn’t help it. The room, which had previously been filled
with nervous energy, now had the same air of panicked urgency he remembered from hold-
ups in American action movies. Guns held high and shaky, fingers too twitchy to be so close
to triggers.

“Alright,” he said.

Their eyes followed as he passed them both, through the shop until his back was to the
exterior wall and the alley.

“The compass,” demanded Hector.

Feeling completely cowardly and selfish, every bit the opposite of the man he was often
storied as, he removed it from his pocket and set it on the workbench. Dollus took it instantly,
running his fingers all over the now-beautifully polished gold and glass.

“How do we know you fixed it?”

“I did,” Harry said firmly.

“You could be lying,” suggested Hector.

“It was blood magic. Theoretically, you could prick yourself and give the blood, it’ll just spin
wildly because it’s not Lammas yet.” Hector stared at him like Harry had seen through him at
the mention of the holiday, as though the compass’ pagan machination was a secret and not
something that of course would come up in the line of repair. “Yeah, I know how it works,”
he added sharply. “You could’ve saved me the time and just told—”

“Ow! Shit,” the other man said, flapping his right hand like a much weaker, smaller man than
he let on. He added a drop to the compass. Harry lifted his chin, trying to catch sight of the
needle through the top of it. “Harry Potter,” he announced with a wicked grin. Sure enough,
the needle spun but it spun lost. They may as well have been standing on the Bermuda
Triangle.

“So we’re done. Give me my wand.” He kept his voice even and calm, though he felt quite
the opposite. When they left, he was going to melt to the floor and stay there for a long while.
Then call it a day and go home. He wished Draco would be home soon, too. Maybe he would
go straight to the rehearsal hall. He’d choose sitting in the lobby waiting as it grew dark over
sitting at home right now.

“Afraid there’s one more order of business,” Hector said. And from his back pocket, he
pulled out a lilac-coloured envelope with a gold seal. “For you.”

Harry took an instinctively large step towards the back corner as Hector stepped towards him.

“It’s just a safety measure for us, you understand.”

He eyed it wearily. “Safe how?”

“Obliviation.”
Harry scoffed. “Of me? Are you mental?”

“This is kindness—we’re not doing it by wand, not leaving you a drooling mess,” said
Hector. “It only removes Draco Malfoy. Memories of, memories associated…”

That sinking feeling in his chest, that something about the afternoon was horribly wrong,
suddenly fought through to the forefront of his brain. “No,” he shook his head hard, as if the
very idea of something that terrible could be knocked loose. “No. I did what you asked, so
we’re done.”

“And you’re going to go home, tell poor little Draco everything, do your fighting best to put
a stop to us.”

Harry pressed his lips thin.

“We weren’t born yesterday. Come off it, Potter. What’s worse—losing you or death?”
Hector hissed. “Which would Draco prefer?”

“I wasn’t born yesterday either.” His grip on the knife tightened, knuckles practically
colourless against his tan skin. “Losing me will put him in danger. It’s death either way.”

“We’re not leaving unless you open the envelope. The problem is, you have to break the seal
yourself. It’s how the woman who sets the curses ensures the proper victim reads it.” Hector
moved to one side of the workbench, his friend to the other, like Harry was a stray cat to
catch.

“I’m not touching it,” he growled back. “I’m no fucking victim.”

Dollus rumbled and took a step in but Hector held up a quieting hand. “I swear we’re not
going after Malfoy. Once we’ve guaranteed our own safety.”

“You’d vow it?” Harry responded quickly, heart beating a mile a minute. They offered him
confused looks. “Vow it,” he repeated. “Unbreakably. And I’ll do it. I’ll touch the letter.”

The two men exchanged another meaningful look across the table. The larger man nodded
slightly, barely a nudge of his chin.

“Hurry up, then,” Hector said to Dollus, gesturing with his wand. “We need to go.”

Dollus looked interestingly reluctant and reserved again. He seemed to have just given the
instruction, but now followed Hector’s orders timidly. Harry couldn’t seem to decipher who
was in charge. Something, too, about Dollus’ demeanour reminded Harry of any young adult
who’d happened into a career through something other than choice—the family business, a
lucky break, a hulking body mass that had tipped him towards intimidation and vigilantism,
though he seemed not to have thought hard enough before starting such a line of work. It
made him almost feel bad about his plan.

Dollus drew close to Harry and extended his hand. Harry swallowed, looking in his dark
brown eyes, lifted his right hand, still holding the knife, and plunged it into the man’s chest.
He shouted, eyes bulging, and stumbled back while Harry ducked instinctively, expecting
correctly that a spell from Hector would head straight for his head the moment he acted.

“He STABBED ME!” the man cried. “HE STABBED ME!”

Harry was beginning to panic slightly, crawling over Dollus’ writhing body towards the back
door of the shop, realising he was at the end of his plan. Hector was coming around the other
side of the workbench so he rushed his ankles, blindly hoping to get at his wand, just as he
felt a hot blast to his side. It sent him airborne, slammed him into the shelves of wood against
the wall hard, and as he hit the floor he felt a second spell suck his shoes solid to the floor. A
third, as he reached instantly to loosen his laces, hit his shoulder and whacked his temple into
the sturdy wooden leg of the workbench. His head was spinning. They were coming from all
over.

The bloody knife was now in Dollus’ hand, the wound, higher than Harry had meant, looked
cauterised.

“I should kill you for that!” Hector shouted in his face.

“You won’t,” Harry panted, blinking hard. “Less attention on you if you Obliviate me.”

The accuracy seemed to make Hector’s face grow even redder. “There are other ways to get
you to take the letter. Unforgiveable ways.”

“I can tell you honestly that it won’t work. I’d go mad before I’d give up.” Boldly, he reached
his hand out again, wobbly in the air. “Vow it.”

Hector glanced at his recovering partner. For the life of him, Harry couldn’t tell who was in
charge. Then, he took Harry’s hand quickly as the man hustled over, leaning down to touch
his wand to where Harry’s hand reached up to take Hector’s.

“Will you refrain from causing Draco Malfoy any harm, magically or non-magically?”

“I will,” Hector said.

The flame licked between their hands, bright and thin, before disappearing. He dropped
Harry’s hand just as fast as the second man picked it back up, looking like he didn’t want to
get within a mile of Harry ever again. Hector touched the tip of his wand to their hands.

“Will you refrain from causing Draco Malfoy any harm, magically or non-magically?” he
repeated weakly.

“I-I will,” Dollus said, though he sounded scared or sad. He glanced nervously at Hector,
who gave him a cold, hard nod. When the rope of fire dissipated, Hector practically threw the
letter into Harry’s lap and pressed the tip of his wand unnecessarily hard into his temple.

“Go on, then,” he said, prodding Harry’s head to the side. He bit his lip to not fight back and,
with a shaking hand, he broke the seal. The letter itself was ridiculous, made to read like an
adoring fan, but before he could lose his nerve, Draco’s face in his mind’s eye, he pulled the
letter out.
Strangely, a taste hit him first. That’s how he knew it had worked. The taste of something
bitter, chemical, and then a wave of nausea so extreme he gagged and covered his mouth. He
felt his shoes lift from the ground, then, as if seeing him incapacitated gave Hector reason to
believe he could set him free.

The deed was done. He could care less about the men now, too focused on keeping the room
from spinning and his lunch in his stomach. His eyes were prickling, he might have been
crying. He was so sad. Too sad to have the words for it. And he felt stupid, deserving of
something like this. But Draco didn’t deserve it.

Something heavy hit his ribs like a sucker punch and, arms and legs weak, he rolled over on
his side without a fight, choking out a cough. Hector stepped on his hand as he leaned over
him.

“You feel that, Potter? You look half-dead.”

Harry just blinked. He was busy using his last moments wisely. He was thinking of his
wedding, of the orphanage and James, of playing the piano together. Why did he give that
up? He was thinking of kissing by the sea, of waking in the dark of night to sleep a little
closer, of Teddy crawling into their bed, of just last evening, giggling in bed, making jokes
and poking fun at each other, planning their lives.

A merrily melodic knock sounded on the front door. It drew him momentarily from his
misery. Aldona’s knock, checking to see if he was in.

“Hector, now!” someone hissed, somewhere past Harry.

A hand gripped his hair and pulled, leaning closer. “You’re not the only martyr in England,
Potter,” Hector jeered. “Enjoy planning a funeral for a man you don’t remember.”

He threw his head down more than dropped it, and Harry let it hit with a sickening thud.
There was a loud crack and he was alone.

“Dona!” he shouted hoarsely, getting to his hands and knees. Nobody came. Horrifyingly, he
realised he didn’t know how it felt to kiss Draco. Or what his wedding ring looked like. The
letter was working. It was really working.

“August… second… anniversary…” he wheezed, slapping his hands blindly on the table
above him until he found the photos of Draco. He stared at them desperately. Silver. His ring
was a stately band of silver, his eyes grey. “August… August…”

He hacked a cough, wet and ugly, and felt the room spin again. He splayed his hands out to
stop himself from tumbling onto his side, and realised too late he’d flung the photos under
the counter in the process. He got on his stomach fast, choking out another horrible sob, not
even trying to pretend like he wasn’t crying anymore. He couldn’t reach it, up to his bicep
into the gap under the table.

He couldn’t remember their first date. Their wedding, at all. How long they’d been together.
This was more painful, this slow iteration of an Obliviation. Terrified, sure his time was
running out, he carefully layered the cursed letter under the flap of the envelope and grasped
it tightly. A clue, for when he felt lucid again. And with his last bit of strength, he reached for
a small wood-carving knife on the table and scratched messily into the cabinet closest: Love
Draco Always.

But he almost blacked out at the second A, managed only a few more lines. Home, he
thought. Home. So he crouched unsteadily, stood with a might will and no centre of balance,
saw his wand on the workbench where… he wasn’t sure why it was there. But he knew he
needed to go somewhere. Home.

He disapparated, appearing just outside his home, riskily in bright daylight, and stumbled
towards the door mostly due to the gravity of his keeling-forward body. Up the stairs, pulling
himself by the bannisters, he stumbled until he reached his unmade bed. He threw the letter
down, kicked his shoes off, a desire to sleep never such a priority in his life, and collapsed
into bed. When he rubbed his face, it was wet. He fell asleep before he could wonder why.

August 2013

The room lays silent for a good minute. The most horrified, tense silence Harry’s ever
endured. No one seems to know what to say. As he told the story, Draco’s hand on his leg had
gripped tighter and tighter. Now, he’s staring at him unblinkingly with wide, heartbroken
eyes.

“When’s your recital, Draco?” Luna asks softly into the silence. Harry breathes a sigh of
relief. He’d been wishing the first question would be a practical one.

“Two—” His voice croaks strangely and he clears his throat. “Two weeks. The seventeenth.”

“Lammas is the seventh,” Harry murmurs.

“Is that your first performance after the holiday?” Hermione joins in.

Harry thinks of Anastasia and their many talks about how easy it is to fall into What now?
instead of taking time to emotionally heal. But this is what he was saying; sometimes there’s
no time for things like that. Though there was a strange tone of discomfort in just about
everyone’s voice, their words were purely practical.

“I mean, we’re doing a Mozart concerto this weekend.”

“It won’t be there.” Ron’s voice is deep and serious. One of those times where Harry truly
sees his friend for the seasoned Auror he is. There’s nothing but confidence in him. “It’ll be
at the outdoor solo recital, not the indoor symphony with other musicians. Outdoor is the
easy exit after attacking.”

Harry’s not the only one who sucks in a breath at the word attack. Pansy, when he looks her
way for the first time, looks pallid, chewing on her lip. Luna’s rubbing a comforting hand up
and down her back, but it doesn’t seem to be doing much.
“This is ridiculous,” says Blaise, running a hand over his head. “They run people out of the
city with blackmail but if they can’t find anything incriminating enough for blackmail they’ll
just threaten to kill you? Why does a lack of crime escalate your punishment?”

“They needed what Harry had to offer.” Draco sounds tired. He keeps rubbing his fingers
over his eyes, dragging at his cheeks. “Threatening exile wasn’t going to do the trick.”

Ron stands, surprising them all. “We should get some sleep. Tomorrow I’ll speak to the Head
Auror, see what we can do. Stopping them before that holiday is ideal, of course. Shall we
meet here again tomorrow night?”

“I can bring dinner,” Neville offers quietly.

“Should you go to work tomorrow, Harry?” Luna asks.

“They think I’m oblivious. I suppose the longer we can leave them thinking that, the better.”

“Well!” she says, affecting a cheeriness that feels wasted on their overwhelmed, emotionally
spent group. “Let’s not forget about the silver lining! Harry loves Draco! They’re all good
again!”

This sends more of a nervous flutter through his system than she probably intends. He meets
Draco’s eye with trepidation and, as Ron and Hermione retrieve their sleeping children and
everyone files out, waits back, almost in the familiarly shadowy hallway, not sure what to
expect. The last of them disappear through the fire and, without missing a beat, Draco walks
to Harry, slips his hands under his armpits, and hugs him as tightly as possible. After a
belated moment of surprise, Harry hugs back. They rock briefly, there in the hallway, Harry’s
hands flat between Draco’s shoulder blades, his arms gripping almost completely across
Harry’s back.

“You were right,” Harry whispers.

Draco’s voice is right in his ear. “What?”

“The letter. I touched it on purpose.”

He sighs. “But not the way I insinuated—how I could’ve even entertained that… while you
were sacrificing everything… I was so sure it was about the note—”

“The note!” Harry practically pushes Draco off so he can see his face. “I wanted to tell you
about all this, I hated keeping it a secret. I shouldn’t have—”

“Nobody thinks carefully when someone’s threatening the people they love.”

After so long together, they really only need to vocalise the first halves of their thoughts in
moments of frenzied communication.

“You thought the note was something else though,” Harry points out. “You wouldn’t say.”

“The night before. Talking about our future, you sounded sure, but—”
“You thought I changed my mind?”

“It would be perfectly okay if you had—have, even.”

“Never. Never.” Harry kisses him, an apology, sympathy, frustration that he’d been stuck
questioning that. “I’m so sorry for everything.”

“You’re sorry? I managed to hate you for a curse you took on for me!”

“You didn’t know. And I was a prick. God, that very first day…” Cold fills his gut. The first
words Draco said to him in his head. Don’t you ever touch me like that again.

“It was incredibly out of character, there was only a brief moment where I thought—”

“I’d become someone who could do that to you?”

“But you weren’t. Merlin, you looked so ill and scared.” Draco starts to frown again.

Harry lifts his hands to frame his face. “We’re okay?”

Draco’s eyes grow comically large. “Of course we’re okay, why wouldn’t we be okay?”

“I didn’t tell you about the compass, I pushed you multiple times, rejected you, told you I’d
never love you again, kissed you drunk without consent, kissed someone else… took too
bloody long to find my way back.”

“But you’re back,” he says like it’s the simplest thing in the world. But perhaps love is
simple. It’s all the rest that mucks things up in between.

“Come to bed?”

Draco nods, appearing almost starstruck by the offer. Harry extends his hand.

Already, the house feels less massive without storeys between them. It’s less prisonlike, too,
even though they still shouldn’t go out the front. He can’t help but laugh at Draco’s
expression when he enters the bedroom.

“I know you were living the bachelor life but… Merlin’s sake, Harry.”

“It’s not that bad.” He wasn’t an untidy person, but this week especially, feeling influx in his
life, he’d disregarded cleaning old cups and picking laundry off the floor. That reminds him.
“I was going to talk to you tonight, I decided in Argentina,” he says, stacking the dishware
into a lesser surface area.

“Oh?”

“I was going to ask what we are,” he tells him with an amused smile.

Draco laughs. He sounds happy. Harry missed him this happy. “Well?”

“Draco Malfoy,” he says, wrapping his arms around his waist. “What are we?”
“Mm, great question.” He takes Harry’s glasses off his nose with gentle fingers. “Husbands,
paramours, dare I say, soulmates…”

“Fell in love with you twice,” Harry grins up. “How many can say that?”

They walk vaguely towards the bathroom without discussing it. Argentina feels like ages ago,
but that was just today, running through the streets, sweating and flying and passing out on
sandy earth.

“You know I’ve always been so impressed when your Slytherin tendencies show through,”
Draco mentions as they get undressed. The water is quickly fogging up the mirror. “I thought
‘when I win Harry back and I don’t have to be frustrated with him anymore, I’ll tell him
honestly that I’m impressed by how petty he can be.”

“What are you talking about?”

“That first night. My life is in shambles. My husband hates me. Everything I’ve built falling
apart, and the last semblance of routine is brushing my teeth…” Harry can feel his ears
reddening, cottoned on to where Draco’s going. “And my absolute bastard of a husband
slides it bristles down over that grimy old Grimmauld Place floor.”

Harry grimaces, feeling exposed for his worst, standing in his pants, no less.

“Pansy howled. She was pissed off for me every step of the way, but Merlin, she loved that.
Of course, that was when we still believed it would be much… more temporary.”

“Can we talk about nice things,” Harry moans, fiddling with the fastenings of Draco’s
trousers because he’s standing stupid, bringing up the emotional rubbish bin Harry was in
January. “Like you on a broom?”

“Teddy’s face today, brilliant!” Draco unbuttons his shirt quickly. Harry reaches out the
second his skin is free, placing a palm flat on the sun tattoo. Having his memories back was a
strange feeling. He can remember every time Draco left and returned with a new symbol on
his skin, but he also remembers exactly how it felt to see them all at once for the first time,
flabbergasted by their existence. Both lived in his mind, just as, perhaps, both Harry’s lived in
there now.

“Handsome man,” he says, cocking his head. For so long, Draco had lived buttoned up and
rooms away. “You never stopped loving me.”

“Is that a question?” Draco murmurs, pulling at the waistband of Harry’s pants until they
drop to his ankles.

“No, just flattering.” He hooks his fingers and does the same to Draco. “So you thought about
me a lot?”

“Only when I was breathing.”

“All the time? Day… and night…”

“Of course, what sort of line of questioning is this?”

“Just the kind where I wonder… when you thought of me,” says Harry, following him into
the stream of water. “In what mindsets.” He runs a hand through his flattening hair to push it
back, rubs his face, and when he opens his eyes again, Draco is watching without shame.

“I see,” he says. “Depressed people don’t wank, if that’s what you’re getting at.”

“Aw, Molly should stitch that on a pillow.” Harry kisses him as they trade places. He skates
his hands over Draco’s sides. Depressed people don’t wank echoing in his mind. “Too thin.”
He can run a thumb over the ridges of his torso. “I need to feed you more.”

“It’s been a difficult year.”

It is difficult to take his eyes off Draco under the water, too. He understands. Tilting that jaw
up, drawing a sharp line to his ear, the long, slender line of his neck, the line of his ribcage
when his hands are in his darkening hair and his chest is puffed out with full lungs. The line
of blonde hair leading to the V of his pelvis.

The shower is rather quiet, he realises, just before he looks up and meets Draco’s well-
amused eyes.

“Don’t stop on my account,” he says quietly. “Can’t remember the last time someone looked
at me like that.”

The dual realities in his mind continue to battle for priority. Touching Draco closely in the
hallway for the first time this year had an intoxicating rush to it, but years of knowing the
man inside and out had its own rush, too. Is this how it will be now? Feeling like two Harrys
at once?

“I’ll look at you like that for the rest of your life.”

“Ah, for two more weeks, then.”

Harry clicks his tongue in admonishment. “Have some faith. You’re not going to die in two
weeks.”

Draco shuts the water off, inviting silence and a coldness into the room. Harry’s starting to
think they’ve taken this dramatic series of events in different ways—him with the childlike
energy of someone who’d had too much sugar, and Draco with the dull muteness of someone
who’d been long convinced this would never happen at all. Half the time Draco looked at
him like an endearing memory in a Pensieve, the other half like a ghost, a resurrected soul
he’d already mourned.

He tries to tone down his excitement and is mostly quiet as he brushes his teeth and crawls
into bed. It’s entertaining to realise that he’d been sleeping on Draco’s side of the bed for
eight months as if some part of him knew he might feel a little closer to the man downstairs if
he filled the empty space he’d left in the bed. Now he shifts left to make room, watching as if
in a dream as Draco pulls the duvet out and sinks slowly in.
Without a moment’s hesitation, Harry slides lower against his pillow and crosses his left arm
over Draco’s belly. It’s bizarre that he once again smells like the toiletries in Harry’s—their—
shower. It’s bizarre that he’s here at all.

“Well, this feels strange,” Draco says aloud, in unknowing agreement.

“Yeah.”

“Weirdly intimate,” he adds, as if they hadn’t just emerged naked from the shower together.
That had been a mix of practicality and not wanting to leave each other’s sight, however. This
is another kind of intimacy, more emotional. Naked and in bed seems like it would break
Draco’s brain. He pushes it from his thoughts entirely and grabs closer.

He sighs, the kind that might have been waiting months for a release like this, and feels
Draco’s hand start to comb through his hair.

“It must feel good to finally know what information you had lost about this whole case,” he
speaks softly after a moment. Harry shifts up to look into his eyes. They’re deeply focused,
the brows above drawn into a deep cleft.

“Don’t look at me like that.”

His face un-pinches spectacularly. “Like what!”

“All that stuff in the workshop, everyone was regarding me like it happened yesterday, but it
was back in January. It’s fine.”

“We—I’m looking at you this way because you went through something horribly traumatic
and never had a chance to recover from it.”

“It barely feels like it happened to me,” Harry lies. It had felt like a far-off memory, but as he
retold the story to his friends, the emotions of it had returned. That anguish, the specific grief
of knowing he’d just made the choice to forget everything about his love, is something he
hopes Draco never feels.

“Well, it’s been a terrible year. Let me feel sorry for you.”

“Not all terrible,” Harry mutters.

He thinks of Draco’s face after finally capturing the Snitch full of seeds he’d spent ages
hunting down with Neville years ago. And he thinks of Draco cooking and flying—things
that Harry cares for as Draco cares for music and alchemy. He thinks, with perhaps chronic
optimism, what a gift it was to know so confidently that he loves Draco in his thirties like he
did in his twenties. And how beautiful, too, to know just how deeply he was drawn to James,
no matter what.

Tomorrow they’ll have to tell Teddy, and Harry will find a way to stop him from wanting to
get involved. Ron will bring word from the Ministry. But for now, he pulls himself even
tighter to Draco’s side and ignores how quiet he’s being, and, most of all, wishes he could
 crawl under Draco’s skin, or let Draco slither into his, just to assure himself that on the
inside, they haven’t changed too much.

Chapter End Notes

Thanks so much for reading! I can't believe we've come this far!
 Obermann's Valley
Chapter Notes

Oh, how I've missed uploading, and so tantalisingly close to the finish! Unfortunately, I
fell ill, and this near the climax I couldn't bring myself to grow subpar in my edits. Now
we press on! Hope I haven't lost too many of you in the interim!

The chapter title refers to (more) Lizst—Vallée d'Obermann (Obermann's Valley) from
his Years of Pilgrimage.

See the end of the chapter for more notes

August 2013

Luna drops a book on the kitchen table with enough force to expel all the dust from the page
edges in a cloud. It stills their collected group like a gavel.

“Everything we could possibly need to know about Pagan rituals. Of course, Paganist
practises are harnessed to enhance light and dark magic,” she says, eyeing the room
defensively. “Both are in these pages.”

Harry stares the thick tome down with a hardness in his throat. Ten hours ago, he had woken
up with a firm weight over him and panicked for a moment over the likelihood of sleep
paralysis before remembering that Draco had come to bed with him the night before. In their
sleep, they must have given up on the discomfiture of the previous evening and drifted into
unconscious physical comfort. He sighed, tired and happy, glad their muscle memory had
done what their overworked psyches couldn’t, and felt Draco stir.

“Good morning,” Draco had mumbled.

“Morning.”

He let himself run his hands along the smooth skin of Draco’s back, down the dip of his
spine, lower, earning a heady morning-voiced chuckle from beside his ear.

“’m I dreaming?” Draco mumbled.

Harry kissed his head forcefully, a loud, awakening kiss. “No, I just missed you.”

“Since January?”

“Since last night.”

Draco made a sighing sound and began to shift. Harry was sure he was rolling over to get up
and lament about the importance of a morning routine. It wouldn’t have been bad—on the
contrary, such a return to normalcy would be soothing—but when instead he shifted so their
legs were slotted together, then kissed the crook where Harry’s ear met his jaw, he wasn’t
complaining either.

It felt natural, like something he could do with his eyes closed. Love Draco, please Draco,
like he’d always done, like he did without thinking.

“We’re the same?”

He meant it as a declaration, but his worry defied him.

“You sound the same,” Draco murmured, a tickly sound. “You feel the same,” he added, with
a wandering hand.

Harry squeezed his eyes shut. “Good, I meant… I mean, it’s good to see you want… that
you’d like to… I was worried that things had changed too much, that we weren’t going to be
compatible or… God, or…”

“Can we do this or talk about the complexities of our relationship?” Draco said. “But not
both?”

“This,” he said instantly. “Talk later.”

“But we won’t forget to talk,” Draco whispered, kissing his ear, dazzlingly communicative.

He chose not to question how Draco had gone to bed shell-shocked and woken up
affectionate. Maybe he had a dream that helped place this firmly in reality, or perhaps he’d
just needed a night’s sleep in his own bed for the first time in months. Harry simply allowed
it without question for the connection it offered—an intimacy, though they’d found new
kinds in 2013, that he’d missed more than he could have known.

But it was more than returning to something they’d lost—they kissed like they had in the
hallway, desperate and self-indulgent. Like they were ten years younger again. Like new
lovers.

Then, eight hours ago, when Ron found them in the kitchen, he might have noticed they were
more content than they’d been in a long time; Harry swimming in an extra-large t-shirt, his
hair mussed up even more than usual, cupping his hands around a mug of coffee with the
expression of someone who had just got back from the spa and couldn’t be bothered to raise
their heart rate; Draco beside him in his Chudley Cannons joggers, expression less hardened
than it’s been in months, in a way they all may have worried it could no longer relax into,
with a quill in hand hovering over a crossword.

But Ron entered with too much anger to notice such minute hints of attained peace, to feel
the difference in the air, or to recognise their states of dress.
“There you are,” he said as if annoyed they hadn’t left a note of their location by the
fireplace. “I just discussed the case with Head Auror Samson. You won’t believe this—”

He pulled out a chair opposite their quietly stunned faces. Harry was still having trouble
reentering the high stress of the situation at hand, like Ron’s enraged voice had spilt through
the conscious world into a dream he was having. Draco, too, was setting his quill down
reluctantly slowly.

“He said they’d ‘look into it’. That I, as the Auror on the case, can follow leads as I wish, but
without proof other than Harry’s unofficial testimony, he doesn’t feel comfortable providing
backup.”

Now Harry was awake.

“Just my testimony?” he scoffed. “How about my Obliviation for evidence! Their first
names! Teddy remembers me writing him about a compass. I scratched Draco’s name into the
cupboard! We have photos of Draco!”

Ron raised his hands in surrender, a gesture of agreement. “I told him all of this. That’s when
he told me to keep following those leads.”

“Yeah, to Lammas, which is in two days!”

“Look,” Ron sighed, appealing now to Draco. “It’s a touchy business. They won’t say this
explicitly, but for Harry, the response was intense. Under the belief that this is now against an
ex-Death Eater, they’re a little slow to rearrange their priorities.”

“This isn’t just about Draco though,” said Harry before Draco could respond with whatever
he’d opened his mouth to say. “Ex-Death Eaters have been leaving town for years now for no
good reason, and these people are why.”

“They don’t care about them either,” Draco spoke calmly, carefully folding the newspaper.
“It’s wrong, but true. I’m certainly not saying all ex-Death Eaters are virtuous people. But it’s
not the Auror department’s place to be judge, jury, and executioner. If my life matters, so do
theirs.”

“Should we take it to Shacklebolt?”

Ron frowned again. “I did.”

“And?”

“He said the best he could do was suggest Samson offer Baz, but that it was his prerogative
as Head Auror…”

“So what now?”

Harry felt ridiculous for even temporarily putting his faith in the Ministry. He remembered,
months ago, admonishing Draco for insinuating that a governmental organisation was less
than up to the task, and found himself thankful that an ‘I told you so’ hadn’t entered this
discussion yet. Perhaps Draco had simply added it to what must be a long list of ‘I told you
so’s.

“Now, I go back to the office and try not to hex Samson. But we’ll talk tonight. We’ll do
Lammas ourselves,” he said seriously. “I’m confident we can handle it.”

He left as quick and angry as he’d come.

Beside Harry came a tsk of resignation. “Honeymoon over,” said Draco, kissing the top of his
hair as he stood. “I’ve got to practise.”

And thus, the peachy haze of reunification dissipated.

Five hours ago, Teddy walked into the shop while Harry was sanding a broomstick for an
order to collect later that week, trying to ignore the strange way the world continues in the
face of an emergency.

“Gran said you wanted me to come by,” he’d said, a nervousness already in his voice. Harry
had spoken to her that morning, to tell her that he’d remembered, that there was a present
danger that should be only on Draco, but to be careful. And, he’d said, as soon as Teddy was
awake, send him to the shop so they could tell him.

“I did, yeah,” Harry said. “Feel like giving that a final sanding while we wait for Draco?” He
nodded towards a second broom, waiting patiently. Teddy hesitated.

“Wait for Draco?”

“I’ll send a Patronus. He’s home rehearsing all day, so it shouldn’t be long.”

“Wait for Draco why?”

Harry sanded harder instead of answering.

“Is it good news or bad?” he pressed. “Are you divorcing? Is it about the World Cup? Is it
about me? Is it the recital?”

“When he gets here,” Harry sighed, a bit too much of a hard edge in his voice. It was
undeserved. Teddy was horribly out of the loop, more than he deserved. “Sorry. Good and
bad, it’s… all a bit complicated. I’m stressed.”

“I know,” Teddy murmured. “I can tell. What grit? For the broom?”

They worked quietly as Harry’s stag galloped off after his husband. He tried to make
conversation but there was something awkward in the air, created by his reluctance to let
Teddy know what was happening too early, or left over from the strangeness of the ‘not a
girlfriend’ drop-off the night before. But slowly, they sanded and it lightened. Teddy took
after Harry in that way; working lessened tension, eased the soul. By the time Draco arrived,
they were sitting and sharing halves of a sandwich. He had changed for the day, into slacks
and a nicer shirt, his hair combed back and all semblances of delightful disarray gone.
“Hey, Teddy’s here,” he said. His inflexion attempted cheerfulness, but he sounded
overworked.

Harry wanted to reach out instantly, an impulse he’d never felt as strongly as he had in the
last day, but he focused on Teddy instead. Draco came close, anyway, and took up a stool
right next to him. Harry’s hand almost twitched. He clasped them together.

“Harry wouldn’t tell me anything, do you know how painful that is?” Teddy started
immediately, pointing his sandpaper aggressively at Draco. “He said you both needed to talk
to me, but then just let me stew for ages! All this after Gran said he stopped by this morning,
too. Not fair.”

“I asked him to wait for me,” Draco explained easily. He looked at Harry and it made his
heart skip a beat. “Thanks, I came as fast as I could. Wouldn’t want to miss it.”

“Miss what?” Teddy groaned, seeming suddenly quite the young adult he still was.

Draco’s eyes were still on Harry, who swayed slightly to touch their sides together and said,
“Do the honours.”

“In Argentina, Harry had an… overcoming of the curse. He remembered everything.”

Teddy’s jaw dropped open. “Everything?”

“Every day of it,” Harry said, finally grinning to his right.

“So you’re staying together?”

Draco nodded, his smile just as broad.

This was the best one. Better than Hermione’s face, or Luna’s, or Pansy’s. His eyes were as
wide as Harry had ever seen them, his smile uncontainable, like the impossible had been
made possible.

Quite honestly, he felt like a bad parent. Seeing how relieved Teddy was revealed just how
affected he’d been. And though Harry had known he was stressed, worried to lose Draco in
the awkward separation, seeing the opposite made him happy and sad at the same time. But
that was for him and Anastasia to discuss. This moment was too beautiful to sour.

Harry filled Teddy in on everything they’d discussed the night before—omitting some of the
more viscerally emotional content—and Ron’s fuming announcement that morning. The boy
had slowly straightened up to his full height as he spoke, waiting patiently for the moment
Harry finished to declare, as predicted, “I’ll help.”

“That’s exactly why you were left safe at Andromeda’s last night,” Harry said. “You’re not to
be put in danger.”

Teddy hopped to his feet, face scrunched in deep offence, looking like the picture of Draco.
“I’m fifteen! There’s plenty I can do!”
“Not magic,” Draco pointed out coolly. “Not outside of school.”

“The rules say when your life is in danger, you’re allowed—”

“That doesn’t give us permission to invite you into our life-risking danger.”

“You’re not ‘inviting’ me to do shit,” Teddy retorted passionately. “This is what family does.”
He stepped close and lifted his chin defiantly. Harry tried not to look amused. “If you leave
me out of this, I’ll... I’ll… leave Blaise petrified in the broom shed and take his likeness.”

“Your funeral,” Draco muttered lightly. It was clear that both their resolves were thinning, but
they still had a line. The beauty came in once again being able to know it without needing to
discuss.

And so it came to pass that Teddy, with his endearing loyalty, was allowed to sit in on their
planning so long as he didn’t come along. He’s the closest to the tome Luna drops
ceremoniously on the kitchen table and the first to lean back as the dust explodes into his
face.

“We talked about Paganism in History of Magic,” he offers, coughing, with a dry throat and a
deep desire to participate.

Hermione nods his way, possibly the only other present who’d paid attention to Binns’
lectures. “There was a time when it was as engrained in wizardry as Latin. We’ve shied a bit
towards less spiritual witchcraft, but that doesn’t go and change the makeup of the world we
live in. If someone wanted to—really wanted to, and knew how—they could channel old
magics in a really destructive way.”

As they spoke, Draco had stolen the book, a sly hand slipping it close enough to glance
through. He’s parsing through it with heavy intrigue. “Where did you get this, Luna? It’s
spectacular.”

“It was one of my mum’s,” she says, an uncharacteristic tinge of solemnity cracking up from
below the surface. “I’ve actually earmarked some pages for you; I think there’s an alchemical
element that Harry missed in his research. Something about where you spill the blood and
what metal you spill it with… the nature—what did you call it, Nev?”

“Spagyrics,” he supplies from the other end of the room. He’s organising rows of takeaway
cartons.

“Could help us narrow down where to look for them.”

Draco pulls the book into his arms like a niffler with gold, sticks a pencil behind his ear, and
gathers up blank parchment with a free hand. He catches Harry’s eye as he stands. “Need to
concentrate,” he grunts out before moving four seats down by Neville. The two instantly
begin to converse in muted tones.

“Any books for the rest of us?” Blaise asks enviously, looking to Luna.

“Do you want a book, Blaise?”

It’s Hermione who challenges him, peering over from her own set of expansive notes, maps,
and books lording over the centre of the table. The one closest to Harry reads Ritualistic
Magic and Rural England, and rather belatedly he worries he hadn’t brought as much
homework as he was meant to. Even Ron is peering through his case file and a register of
what he’d explained were known protesters of Death Eaters' release after the war.

Blaise huffs haughtily. “Keep your books. I’ll just plan exactly how I’ll tear them limb from
limb when we find them.”

“Harry, can you draw those symbols out?” she asks him next. It draws from him a loyal
alertness and a keenness to participate.

“The compass ones?” he asks.

“Mmhm, any you can remember. Teddy, maybe you can help Neville with the food, I think
he’s got it all sorted.”

Neville looks up. He’s leaning over Draco’s shoulder, pointing into the book. “It’s all by
name, should make sense.”

Teddy approaches the task with very little enthusiasm but carries on nevertheless. He brings
Harry his meal last before pulling the chair beside him and sitting down with his own food.
The drawings on Harry’s paper are crude at best, but he’s done what he can to recreate the
strange sun-moon symbol and the scythe as precisely as he can remember.

“You know,” he starts, trading the pen for a fork as Teddy tucks in next to him. “I once sat
around this exact table just about your exact age and wished I could be more a part of
something than I was before it was my time.”

“You don’t need to get sentimental, I’m just frustrated,” he shuts Harry down. “Wish I was
older; know that’s not how time works. But you can save whatever speech about my dad and
Sirius sitting across from you we were about to start on, or whatever.”

Harry takes a deep breath and chews slowly to keep from letting that comment fall too hard
on his spirit. There was a phase, around five or six as he was getting very curious about the
odd shape of his family, when Teddy begged for stories about his parents. Again, around
twelve, he’d ask Harry about them that he’d started running out of new facts. He’s returned,
in the fragility of young manhood perhaps, to ignoring it completely. The timing is shit, as far
as Harry’s concerned, because he’s never looked more like them.

“I’m glad you remembered,” Teddy presses on. “What did you in? Remembering your
wedding or something?”

Harry uses the pause while he chews an ambitious bite of sticky rice to think, but it ends up
being unnecessary procrastination. The answer is simple.

“Family.”

Teddy cocks his head.

“It was already growing. Especially with how attentive Draco was being that day…” Down
the table, the man of mention is alternating between dipping sushi into soy sauce and
swallowing with turning pages of the book, occasionally nodding. “But it was seeing you two
flying together. Walking back up with your brooms after. Having a laugh. Being…
yourselves.”

“It wasn’t even about him and you? It was him and me?”

“Him and you is him and me.”

Teddy just shrugs. “Good thing it didn’t happen while you were in the air. Splat.”

Harry passes his doodles to Luna, who sets it between herself and Hermione. They lean in
scrupulously. Meanwhile, at the opposite end of the table from Draco and Neville, Pansy and
Blaise have made themselves busy with—bizarrely—Pansy’s mum’s address book. Every
now and then, they confer without conclusion and offer up a name to Draco, who grows
thoughtful and inevitably says “not in London.”

“We’re trying to pin down just how many blackmails have likely happened,” Pansy tells
Teddy, catching his interested glances.

“The Ministry won’t help much, though, will they?” he asks. “If you’re being blackmailed
you’ve done something worth being blackmailed for…”

“It’s still illegal,” Pansy says, though a look shared with Harry means she knows that won’t
mean much to the powers that be. “And a lot of people perhaps less prominent than Draco
were able to go about their lives very much under the radar. It’s quite possible that the
‘blackmail’ at work was simply ruining one’s relationships by telling their coworkers and
friends who they were in the nineties.”

“But we know what you lot did and we’re still friends.”

She sits rigidly, eyebrows raised. This is a sore spot for Pansy, who, Harry knows from years
of friendship, likes to separate herself from the screechy girl she was at Hogwarts. Though
she’d never say so to Draco, he knows it’s a great relief to her that she never had the
permanent mark of a bonafide Death Eater on her arm. He shovels in another mouthful of
dinner. She purses her lips and nods shortly.

“That’s just the point, isn’t it? If you’ve committed enough atrocities, you’re in Azkaban
where you belong, of course. But there’s no way to know without knowing each of us
walking free whether we’ve lived a life full of remorse.”

“Hey, ‘Mione,” Draco speaks up. “How many of the secluded areas you’ve mapped are
Wiccan?”

“Erm, remind me how we’re defining that?” She pushes two books back to pull the map
closer, where she’s circled several green patches with a red marker. Harry can’t even keep up
with the branching directions of research his friends are undertaking for them.
“Known magical creatures, history of ritual…”

“Maybe three?”

He stands, book cradled in his arm, and needles himself between Harry and Teddy, leaning
over the table. Between them all, he displays a detailed spread on Lammas rituals and his
own handwritten notes. Harry rests a hand on the back of Draco’s knee and leans forward to
look. There are several alchemical equations that mean nothing to him, but Draco points at
them anyway.

“The compass will work if you spill your blood on it during Lammas, but it’ll be weak.
Defeatable, put another way. However, should they know what’s on these pages, we’ll be sure
to run into them trying to perform the full ritual.” He flips to another page further in, with
drawings of Pagan symbols including the sun-moon symbol Harry had drawn. “If they
attempt a ritual to draw power to the compass—a manufacturing of harvest magic—during
the harvest holiday in a magical space with certain properties…” He trails off, vaguely
flipping through the pages again. “Well, that’ll be some trouble. Some trouble, indeed.”

This feels like a purposefully restrained portrayal of this ‘trouble’.

“Hence the magical forests?” says Hermione.

“The highest points in a magical forest with Wiccan history are the best places. What’s that
give us?”

She bites her lip in concentration. “The New Forest, clearly. Probably around Pipers Wait—
that’s the tallest hill. And… Kingley Vale. Bow Hill. Forbidden Forest, too, but they have no
way to get there…”

Blaise frowns. “It’s kind of better if they want to do that, isn’t it? If they do nothing with the
compass then we have no way to find them.”

“It’s good so long as we catch them,” Harry offers, feeling a bit sick with nerves. Two entire
forests, with only an inkling of where they might be within them.

“There’s just the two of them and six of us. We’ll catch them.”

“But…” Neville says, “and don’t come for my throat, I believe in us—” He holds his hands
up to placate them. “What’s our plan B?”

“No recital,” Hermione and Pansy say in unison. Ron mumbles something longer to the same
effect, seeming aware of how close he is to Draco’s fist, should he choose to extend it.

“Shit,” Harry mutters, while Draco exclaims “Sorry?!” beside him. He turns a sharp, stormy-
eyed glare on Ron. “The concert is happening. It’s been months in the making. My largest
published piece. My most meaningful piece.”

“Let’s focus on Wednesday,” Ron replies carefully. “If we devote our attention there, this
could just be a hypothetical we never have to watch play out.”
Harry squeezes Draco’s leg. It hurts to imagine such a close and grand cancellation. Could it
even be rescheduled, if the danger wasn’t resolved? He can think of no consolation to offer.
Instead, he sits helplessly, not studying, not soothing. He provides his drawings and focuses
on his dinner. He’d been so confident when he fixed the compass that they could sort this.
He’d never been good at chess.

The rest of the night resembles Hogwarts during exam season so expertly that Teddy seems to
grow existentially aware that life after O.W.L.s is just a steady slog towards N.E.W.T.s.
Hermione conducts them with ease. Her efficiency paints Ron’s face into one of complete
admiration and a soldier’s obedience. By the time they call it quits, the moon’s hung high in
the sky, they’re all moving a bit sluggishly, and Teddy’s been asleep with his head in his arms
for at least an hour.

Harry prods him up as everyone begins to leave. “I’ll tell you what you missed tomorrow,” he
promises when he catches his worried look at the clock.

Only after everyone’s gone and Harry’s turned lights off and locked doors does he remember
again that he won’t be going to bed alone. On top of that, the light in Draco’s room—the
spare room—is on, like he’s stepped back in time. He raps tentatively on the door, and after a
moment it cracks open and Draco appears in the light.

“Give up on me that fast?” he jokes.

“Just getting my things sorted. Assuming you’d like me back for good.” Harry peers past him
and, to his surprise, Draco opens the door further. “Would you like to come in, nosy?”

At the look of unabashed 'can-I-really?' joy on Harry’s face, he smiles and steps out of the
way completely. A sweeping, gracious hand beckons him in.

There are, of course, the signs of someone actively tidying; on the bed are piles of folded
clothes and a few hanging items, coats and robes mostly, draped neatly. But what catches
Harry’s eye without fail is along the walls.

If it wasn’t so sad, so sweet, it might have been frightening. Propped up or hung with sticking
charms across the blank white walls of the guest room are framed photos of them. At least
five are from their wedding day, although there’s also a small polaroid-sized picture from the
stag night, all of them squeezing close with red faces and sloppy smiles at a pub. Their
honeymoon trip to Italy, too, features in a couple.

A small frame propped on the bedside table has Draco in formal robes and Harry in slacks
and a nice shirt. He remembers the day clearly. Draco’s first concert as the resident pianist, an
impromptu gig that somehow still had him haranguing Harry about not acquiring equally-
impromptu dress robes to attend.

“I had to take them down anyway,” Draco says behind him. “First because they were…
making you sick… then because you wanted to try to remember and needed certain events to
go in blind. I know it all looks a little serial-killer-adjacent.”

“A little?” Harry teases, sitting on the bed with a creak and picking up the frame.
“I know. Imagine if you’d seen this while you were put off by my love.” The bed sinks again
as Draco sits beside him. He rests his head on Harry’s shoulder. For a beat they sit silent,
looking down at their framed selves.

“Look how young we were,” Draco says.

“What d’you reckon, twenty-four? Twenty-five?”

“Something like that.”

He turns his face into Harry’s neck. Harry can feel his slow exhales against his skin. “I
know,” he says in understanding. An even longer beat passes where they sit like that, Harry’s
gaze doggedly fixed to the photo. “Look...” He sets the frame back. “Do you—would you
benefit from seeing a mind healer, too? I can’t imagine what you’ve been feeling.”

“Let’s make it through Lammas and then I’ll think about it.”

It’s a more open response than Harry had expected, truthfully. Beyond the Obliviation, he
knows there is a wealth of life events he might find worth talking about, things Harry doesn’t
necessarily know in their entirety or need to know if he’d rather a third party help him
through. Their efforts to make the year better, to find each other again, seemed to have
opened them both up to considering new things.

Harry helps Draco carry his things upstairs before bed, where he sleeps rather fitfully. All
night, he dreams of Draco disappearing like he’d drifted from his memory, falling peacefully
out of sight and out of mind, as gracefully into nonexistence as Sirius had in the Department
of Mysteries. He calls out for him every time, but his hand disappears to the elbow by the
time he reaches out.

He dreams, too, of his last duels as a young Auror, tired from endless tests to pass and the
transition into practical work, shadowing long-time Aurors on calls. His heartbeat falls into a
panic just as unnaturally fast as it did on the job, but every time he throws up a shield charm,
it appears in the ghostly shape of a figure like a humanoid Patronus, slender and pale-haired,
who takes the shots straight to the heart.

Each time his shouts in his dreams become corporeal, Draco wakes him with sleepy, worried
eyes and pulls him close on their sides, but to be cared for so deeply seems only to exacerbate
the nightmares each time he finally falls unconscious again.

The next time he wakes up, the sun has at least risen and Draco’s fast asleep on his stomach,
so he knows he at least didn’t shout. He watches him for a moment, smiling sleepily at the
two skeletons on his arm performing a dance one might expect at hour twenty-three of a
dance marathon. Careful not to wake him, he presses a light kiss to his shoulder and goes to
the kitchen, where he stares vacantly at the toaster while his coffee brews.

He takes the mug and a small plate of toast out into the fresh air and makes a home for
himself under the wiggentree. There, surrounded by the sounds of a bin lorry and a barking
dog, he closes his eyes and tilts his head back against the trunk.
He’s not sure how he’s supposed to feel the day before something like this. All he knows is
that intense battles for the livelihood of his loved ones have never felt this scheduled. It’s
somehow more anxiety-inducing to look at a clock and count the hours until something life-
changing happens than to stumble unprepared into it.

What’s worse—losing you or death? he’d been asked in the shop that momentous day. They’d
seemed synonymous at the time. Now on the other side of the first option, he’d rather do it
ten more times than entertain the alternative. There’s not a level of emotional damage he
wouldn’t consider inflicting on Draco to keep him alive.

After a while, he sets his coffee in the grass and balances his last piece of toast on top. The
clouds above make his stomach twist, for kettle-death reasons. Even cloud-gazing isn’t safe
from his restless anxiety today.

Kettle-death…

Secret enemies…

Snakes in the grass…

He must’ve fallen unconscious fast and hard because when he hears his name he jerks awake
and feels a handful of bowtruckles scuttle off his shoulders and knees and back towards the
tree. The sky is brighter, blue instead of a peachy sunrise, and Draco’s standing a careful
distance away, fully dressed and waiting reservedly with his hands in his pockets.

“Sorry. I was going to let you sleep but… everyone’s arrived.”

“Everyone’s arrived? What time is it?”

“Noon.”

“Blimey, you’re joking!” Harry scrambles to his feet, shaking one last bowtruckle from the
top of his foot. “I must’ve come out here no later than eight.”

“Closer to seven, I think. But you didn’t sleep well. Not that we have a very active day ahead
of us…” This isn’t sarcasm—on Draco’s face, Harry sees the same distaste for the waiting in
their future that he’s been feeling. He points to his mug. “Don’t forget that.”

Harry stoops to pick up the cold coffee, then takes a few steps to meet Draco in the sun. “If
you know I didn’t sleep, it means you didn’t sleep well, either.”

“That’s just how this works, I’m afraid to tell you.” Draco tilts his head. “We’ve been fused
together by now. ‘Your hand on my chest is my hand… your eyes close as I fall asleep’.”

Harry kisses his cheek and starts walking, feeling better just in that daily euphoria of
remembering Draco.

“If my hand is on your prick, you’re wanking,” he calls behind.

“Piss off! I was being poetic!” Draco walks fast to catch up with him. “Good to have you
fully back, I suppose.”

Harry grins as he pulls open the back door. There was a smile in Draco’s voice, anyway.

September 2009

Harry didn’t talk about Death Eaters. He engaged, if Draco brought up the subject, but maybe
sensing the innate soreness of it all, he tended to treat it like a past life rather than a part of
who his husband was today.

Draco was not so lucky. He was reminded often. It happened today, even, on his way to
Harry’s shop. He was on the north side of Diagon Alley, where shops slowly bled into
wizarding blocks of flats, and the streets were mostly empty. Locals less perturbed by the
steady rain walked quickly with their heads down. Distantly, he was considering whether it
would be worth it to stop off and bring Harry lunch, but his wandering thoughts were
interrupted by a loud shout behind him.

“Oi! Wrong way to Knockturn Alley!”

Naively, he kept walking. There was no reason to think this was being addressed to him. But
then, again—

“Oi! Blood purist!”

Draco’s gait slowed.

“That’s right! Talking to you!”

He turned and found himself face to face with four men, perhaps a few years his senior. This
in itself caused him to groan internally; there was a subsection of Hogwarts alumni who’d
missed the turmoil on the grounds by a few years and took to declaring loudly in pubs that
had they been there, things might’ve turned a bit sooner in Potter’s favour.

“I would hope you’re not talking to me.” He lifted his chin and faced them squarely.

“Fucking scum,” the one on the far left spat. “Is it necessary to flaunt your freedom? I’d be
ashamed.”

“Imagine hosting You-Know-Who in your home and then shagging Harry Potter,” said a
second. “That’s the man who killed his parents. You’ve got no morals.”

“The most I ever did in my dad’s study was steal his gin,” said a third. “Not pledge allegiance
to a murderer.”

“What?” Draco spluttered. Just where he’d gotten the mark had never ever been public
information. Harry didn’t even know. The only people who should, really, were him,
Voldemort, and his parents.
“Coerced into becoming a Death Eater… You walked right in!”

Draco was too stunned by the information to correct this extremely simplified concept of
coercion. “How did you hear…”

“It’s in her book.”

“Whose book?”

“You’d do well to leave,” one of them shot in response. Draco blinked in surprise. Without
another word, he turned and put distance between them, walking fast with his head low.

He felt more eyes on him, heard a muttered nasty word here and there. And when he entered
Flourish and Blotts, the man’s reference to a book weighing heavy on his mind, a woman
leaving pulled her daughter close to her hip.

On the table of new releases was the clear culprit: A book by one Aelis Trengove, Dancing
with Dementors. The photo on the cover, however, was not dementors but a grainy shot of a
post-war trial. Not his, thank Merlin, nor his father’s. Some mid-level ally without a Mark,
whose name he couldn’t even remember.

At the till, the young woman wouldn’t meet his eye. He stuffed the book under his arm,
concealing the cover, and only opened it once he’d pulled the dust jacket off and folded it
away into his pocket.

By the time he reached Harry, he was in a state.

“I think those are the best ones for beginners, you’ve made a perfect choice. You don’t need
me!” Harry was saying to a girl at the front when he walked in. His eyes lifted briefly to
recognise Draco, creased lightly in the corners, then returned to the customer. “Does your
broom have self-braking? Oh, good…”

Draco browsed. He’d long ago given up on keeping track of what came in and out of the
shop. It was always odd bits and bobs, but it made for intriguing look-throughs at times like
these where Harry was busy being horrendously friendly.

Finally, the bell tinkled and, as if woken from hibernation, he moved angrily to the front. It
was a mark of his careful compartmentalising of emotions that he could be intriguingly
fingering a strange pair of gloves only to snap back into a filed-away fury. Harry grinned,
oblivious.

“Who’s this handsome cust—”

“Absolute fucking rubbish.” Draco slammed the book on the counter. “I’m ashamed to even
walk the high street. Everyone staring like I brewed Voldemort his morning tea! I’d eat
biscuits in my bedroom for days just to avoid the halls!”

Harry’s eyes were wide in confusion. “I know!”

“This Trengove woman—do you know her?”

“P-personally? Or—no, no, I’ve never heard of her,” Harry added at Draco’s frustrated glare.
“Did she… write about you?”

He laughed coldly. “I’ve got a bloody chapter! Courtesy of—and this, Harry, is the horn on
the unicorn—my father.”

Harry’s jaw dropped.

“Word is the dementors are getting to him. Left him just enough of a nutter to start
blabbering. She wrote… about the day I got my Mark.”

“Shit,” Harry whispered.

“Can you believe her?”

“It’s audacious, for sure.”

“This is going to hurt my business!”

Across from him, Harry scratched his head and made a noncommittal sound. It stopped
Draco in his enraged rant.

“What?” he snapped.

“Is it?” Harry offered, sounding aggravatingly calm. “We know who you really are. Your
students do. Loads of people. You can’t let what the ignorant blokes say get to your head.”
He looked shiftily between Draco’s eyes. “Er, right?”

“It’s not… ‘a few arrogant blokes’.”

“Maybe you’re reading into it because you… well, because you’ve never had the best outlook
on yourself,” he insisted, a mark too casual to reign in Draco’s temper. “I’ve not once seen
these looks.”

Without a word, Draco stalked to the front and turned the sign to Closed.

“Hey!” said Harry.

“You never see it because they don’t do it when I’m with you,” he practically hissed. “Or if
they do, your rose-fucking-colored glasses don’t see it.” Harry opened his mouth, but Draco
held a hand up. “Step out of this bubble we live in for a minute where we all give each other
beautiful little second chances without question; I know you know about stereotypes and
misconceptions and people whispering when you pass. We both know you’d experience it
even without fame, that you experienced it in primary school. I love you for it, I love that you
understand, but you’re not understanding me.”

“Okay, so I shouldn’t have said the stares don’t exist—”

“It’s stares and words, Harry. Mothers clutching their children. People telling me to get out of
London.”
“How often?” he asked quieter.

“Today? Lately? Average over the years?”

“A-all.”

“Probably ten times walking Diagon today. Before that, honestly, it’s not been terrible; a
glance here and there per outing. You should’ve seen it before we were together.” He
shuddered to even think back, and a wild part of him wondered if he was returning to that. “It
ebbs and flows with the news cycle, you know?”

“I hadn’t noticed. I know we joke. Like when that awful article was printed about you
dragging my reputation down…”

“But even readers didn’t take that seriously. So it was amusing. When they take it seriously…
life just gets a little more difficult.”

“I hadn’t noticed,” Harry repeated.

“You could have,” said Draco ruthlessly, though his tone was softening. “It’s deserved. But
it’s hard and I get frustrated because I’ve built up this life and career and whenever other
people wish to, they can drag it right back down. The press is my god.”

“Oh dear, that’s dramatic,” he replied, mouth turned down in sympathy. “For the record, it’s
not deserved. There’s a difference between doing something bad and then trying to hide out
for the rest of time and doing something bad then confronting your own wrongdoings and
becoming a contributing member of society.”

“I suppose you think I’m the latter.”

Harry gave him an unamused look, eyebrows raised. “When told to take a life, you choked.
When faced with submitting to the path you were already on or fighting for what you knew
was right, you chose the hard thing. You questioned what had been effortlessly laid out for
you. No bad notes—” He waved his hands flippantly. “Calcination. C’est la vie.”

“Don’t just spout words at me,” scowled Draco.

Harry smiled back. “I really am horrified that I hadn’t noticed.”

“You’re blinded by love,” he allowed.

“I have half a mind to write a book of my own.”

“You mean pick from the ghostwriters throwing themselves at your feet?” Draco full-on
snickered, stepping towards the door to turn the sign back to Open.

“Leave it,” Harry said.

Draco dropped his hand in interest. He studied the other man. Cocked his head. Harry had the
look about him—a suppressed grin, narrowed eyes, sparkling—that meant he’d had a good
idea. Before he could question what it was, he showed his hand by leaving the till, taking the
quick few paces to the entrance, and touching his lips to Draco’s mouth right against the glass
of the shop door. No chaste thanks for stopping by kiss either, but one with intentions,
matched with a leg pressed between Draco’s that made his voice come out a bit too high-
pitched as he said, “Merlin’s sake, Harry! Have some business sense.”

“You want the sign on open while we do this?”

He rolled his eyes. “At least go to the workshop. It’ll be less embarrassing for you when I
turn you down away from the view of your customers.”

“You know what you said the last time I suggested the workshop?” Harry said as he pulled
him along.

“Likely reasonable things. About wood shavings.”

“Well, I’m not going to jog your memory.” He closed the door from the storefront to the
workshop for good measure, before turning his attention so completely onto Draco that it
began to misfire in his brain. This didn’t meld with the temper he’d come in with. It was
fitting a square peg into a round hole. Or rather a round peg into a square hole. Whichever
was temporarily easy but left a more exact solution sitting by the wayside.

“Don’t…” he tried. “I don’t want pity affection.”

Harry pulled back, scandalised. “That’s not what this is,” he said. He kissed his ear. “This is
—” His neck. “—an apology—” Warm hands found their way under his shirt. “—and a
reminder that you’re brilliant.” The hands sneak out around his neck and into the hair at the
nape of his neck. “Say you’re good.”

“Harry, come on.”

Hermione would whisper words of affirmation to her babies, an attempt to teach them self-
worth before they even had a solid grasp on English. Harry had taken it up with Teddy, but in
a way that wasn’t strange and sudden to an eleven-year-old who’d just started at Hogwarts
and fancied himself a full-grown adult as a result. Draco had thought himself exempt.

“Say it: you’re good.”

He squeezed his eyes shut. “I’m good.”

Fast enough to steal a gasp from his lips, Harry was kissing him, then teasing his mouth open
and tasting him. His body was pressed against one of the exterior walls, cold stone against his
back.

“You’re selfless,” Harry whispered, close enough that their lips touched.

Eyes still shut, Draco sighed. “I don’t want to play a game. I’ve had a rotten day.”

“This isn’t a game,” he said, pressing close. “I actually think it’s rather important. You’re
selfless.”
“I’m selfless,” he gave in.

“Quite right.”

He tilted his head up almost subconsciously as Harry kissed down his neck. His lips were
warm, the touch just gentle enough to leave him wishing for more. But that was Harry—
excitingly gentle with him.

“You’re loyal,” Harry said, pressing a wet mouth to the sun tattoo on his chest, only months
old.

“I-I’m loyal.”

“Don’t stutter.”

Draco chuckled, but Harry didn’t.

“I’m loyal,” he repeated soberly.

“You’re clever.”

“I’m clever,” he breathed. Harry’s lips were trailing down the muscles of his stomach now.
Draco’s arms had to extend more and more to keep his hands in his hair.

“You’re beautiful.”

This time he hesitated. Partly because Harry’s hands were busy with his trousers. But if that
was it, he’d be lying to himself.

“You’re beautiful,” said Harry again. Draco looked down and saw him staring up from his
knees with absolute sincerity. This was not a game. Quickly, he leaned his head back and shut
his eyes again, as if blocking out other senses would make the words fall faster from the air.

“I-I’m beautiful.”

“What?”

“I’m beautiful,” he said again, barely audible.

“What?”

“I’m beautiful.”

He gasped. Sudden warmth. There long enough to hammer his heart into his chest, and then
gone in a flash.

“You’re beautiful,” Harry echoed.

“I’m beautiful,” he whispered.

Dancing with Dementors gave such a detailed telling of Draco’s youthful arrogance. What a
helpful coincidence that they’d not done the research to know he’d lost it all, that it took an
extremely eager man he was willing to please to gain back even a fraction of that self-esteem.

August 2013

Harry lands somewhere north of Chichester missing Draco like a limb. It’s pitch black; he
can’t even see the sky or moonlight through the canopy of trees. “Lumos,” he whispers just
as, with a crack, Hermione appears, then Ron off to Harry’s right, then Neville with a yelp
and a more early, organic crack, falling from an unfortunately weak floor of branches into a
shallow creek a distance away.

“Nev!” Harry calls, waving his wand arm. His friend looks up from his own lighted wand tip
inspecting his dripping shoe and waves back.

“Bad luck with landing,” he pants when he hikes over to them. “But it’s good to get the bad
luck out of the way early.”

Thanks to the group’s dogged research, they know everything—and hopefully more than—
their antagonistic counterparts as the time creeps closer to midnight and the engraved scythe
that sits in place of the twelve-o-clock numeral on the compass. Draco had deciphered the
exact locations necessary for the compass to reach its deadliest usage, plus secondary and
tertiary locations under the assumption that their research hadn’t been quite as precise as his
own. This led to six hilltops to canvas.

Harry checks his watch. Ten minutes. “Ron and I to Bow Hill, you two to Stoke Down?”

“Right you are.” Hermione tightens the tie holding the upper half of her hair out of her face.
“Sparks if you confront them, if not we’ll see you at Heathbarn.”

They’re all too tense for further conversation. Ron and Harry apparate closer to their hill, out
in a field of rolling grass, now more directly in the moonlight. The climb is inclined but not
difficult, and Harry focuses on his feet as he tries only to think of the immediate task set
before him. He’s still uncomfortable knowing that he and Draco have been separated not just
by patrolling party, but by entire forests. It had been the two of them versus everyone else
when it came down to Ron’s suggestion that they’d be a liability paired together.

“Your willingness to put each other’s lives first is the root of this entire problem,” he’d
pointed out. “Seeing you two together would be a dream come true.”

They hadn’t been able to disagree, especially not when their friends were putting themselves
at risk for them. Harry was having a very particular set of stomach-turning anxieties, actually,
mostly related to the thought of Ron and Hermione as parents now being a part of his circle
of dangerous activity again, and to feeling like if something were to happen to them, it would
be him who’d brought that fate upon them.
Now, Ron treks toward the peak with his wand out and glances at Harry occasionally.
They’re careful not to stumble in the night’s shadows.

“You’re not cross about me splitting up you and Draco?” he ventures after a minute.

“No. I get it.”

“How are you two? Hermione’s been dying to ask but there’s not been a chance.”

“And there’s nothing like prattling on about relationships while walking to the location where
two men might be trying to sway your husband’s murder in their favour as much as possible.”

“Feels apt for us, I think.”

Harry laughs lightly, eyes sweeping the treeline as they walk. “Draco and I are alright.”

“You’re alright.”

“Yeah.”

“Thank Circe,” says Ron, sounding genuinely relieved.

“You know if I haven’t said it enough… Thank you.”

He shrugs humbly. “Just doing my job.”

“Far more, mate. With the Obliviation ending as it did—and in Argentina no less—I worried
you’d think you had nothing to do with it. But without you and ‘Mione’s support, I don’t
think I would’ve picked myself up enough to be in Argentina with Draco that day.”

There’s a pause after he speaks. The only sound is that of an owl, a couple screeching foxes
somewhere deeper in the woods, and their feet in tow.

“I think it was February, maybe, when you sort of snapped—understandably,” Ron clarifies
quickly. “And asked Hermione and me to imagine forgetting each other. The very idea of it
flipped my stomach. I tallied up everything I’d forget… the memories with our children, our
marriage, our relationship, even the war. Decided I’d do just about anything to save you from
that. No matter how far above the job description.'' He gestures ahead, pointedly, at their walk
towards potential conflict.

“I appreciate it. More than you know.”

Ron waves him off. “Almost there. Time?”

“Two minutes.”

“Think we would’ve seen them by now. Or they’d be climbing the hill?”

“They could apparate up.”

“Right.” Ron nods firmly. They plant their feet on the very peak. “Which way’s Hermione
and Neville?”

Harry sets his wand in the palm of his wand. “Point me south,” he orders and watches the tip
rotate a quarter to their right. He points. Ron squints at the horizon, so Harry takes to
sweeping the rest of the plains surrounding the peak, straining his eyes for anything suspect.
Time crawls by. Finally, at midnight, he calls it.

They disapparate, coming down just by Heathbarn Hill. Technically, the men would have
sixty seconds of midnight. This time, they have to run. They break into a sprint up the final
length of the hill, panting. Harry trips, sliding down a foot and almost twisting his ankle on a
protruding rock, but Ron keeps on valiantly, leaving him in his periphery just as Harry’d want
him to. When he catches up, Ron’s standing unceremoniously on top of the hill. It’s a minute
past twelve. No one is there.

“Okay, no one here,” Harry starts immediately, eagerly, but Ron is still scanning the hills, a
bit frantically.

“Did you see sparks?” he asks edgily.

“Hm? No. New Forest—”

Ron cups his hands, framing his mouth, and shouts, “HERMIONE!”

A few birds squawk in a nearby tree, but no one calls out in response.

“HERMIONE!”

“Jesus, behind you,” she pants as they spin on their heels. She and Neville come to a tired
halt on the hill. “Nothing?”

“New Forest,” Harry urges again.

“You're okay?” Ron asks her, placing a hand on her back. She nods dismissively.

“New Forest,” he repeats.

“Yeah, yeah,” Ron acquiesces. “Where?”

“Draco and Luna took Piper’s Wait.”

“Wouldn’t they be at the third hill by now?”

“Not if they’re currently in an altercation at the first,” he says tensely.

They disapparate quickly, cracking onto a high peak, empty.

“Well, that’s good, then, right?” Neville asks, looking dizzy. “They’ve not been—”
 Hermione stops them all with a stony look on her face and a vicelike grip on Harry’s arm.
“Harry,” she says tonelessly. “I just saw sparks.”

He turns wildly, instantly trying to spot red in the sky. “Which way?”

“P-picket Hill.”

He disapparates on the spot, not even waiting on the rest of them, and when he touches down
again, the scene is more hectic than the quiet vignettes he’d shifted through with Ron.
There’s the sound of kicked-up brush through the dark trees and a voice that sounds like
Blaise calling “PANSY” somewhere off in the woods.

“Harry!” Luna calls, running towards him. “Draco’s with you?”

His heart jumps into his throat. “What? No!”

Her face switches instantly into a played-up casualness he sees right through. “Oh, no, that’s
fine, he’s around here somewhere…”

Another crack as Ron appears. “Neville’s getting Apparition-sick. ‘Mione’s with him. We
saw sparks?”

“Blaise and Pansy, they beat us to the third hill. We apparated, too, but—oh, good!”

Ron and Harry turn to follow her gaze and the sound of approaching footsteps in the dark.
Pansy appears from the shadows first, her nose bleeding. She holds a sleeve to her nostrils,
but the stain is growing. Blaise comes tripping in behind her, looking shaken but fine.

“Good, you saw the sparks,” he pants, scanning their recollected group. “Where’s Draco?”

Chapter End Notes

Thanks for the continued enthusiasm!

Feel free to leave some words below in the comments, or find me at

writandromance.tumblr.com. Doing my best to reply as often as I can, but know I read
them all.

See you VERY soon! I promise!

 Aase's Death
Chapter Notes

The chapter title refers to Grieg's 'Aase's Death' from Peer Gynt.

See the end of the chapter for more notes

August 2013

“DRACO!” Harry shouts, voice cracking. It sounds hollow in the trees.

Blaise, to his right, is doing the same. “DRACO!”

“DRACO!”

“MALFOY!”

In the distance, he can hear the others doing the same. Echoes of his name sound out in all
directions, some macabre jabbering of crows, taunting Harry.

“We apparated to the third hill and didn’t see them, but we saw the remnants of their ritual—
DRACO!—and Pansy fell on her face. Then Draco and Luna caught up with us, he thought
he heard a sound, ran off… DRACO!”

“Ran off alone?” says Harry. “DRACO!”

“I know. Daftest fucking—DRACO!” This shout is different; it’s directed to the left of where
they’ve been walking, and is less about volume, more about catching someone’s attention.
Harry follows his gaze and sees a figure in the woods, stalking towards them.

An immense relief rushes his system the moment he walks into their wand light. There’s no
easily visible blood on Draco, he’s not walking strange, he looks—other than a fury on his
face—just fine. When he recognises them, he lowers his own wand, but the expression
remains.

“Jesus,” Harry exhales, bracing his hands on his knees.

Blaise sends more sparks in the air, looking just as relieved. “Merlin,” he laughs, clapping
Draco on the shoulder. “That scare was worth it to see you so ready to duel again, you little
pacifist!”

He shakes his head. “I wasn’t a pacifist; I just didn’t have anything to fight for. Fuck!” He
flicks his wand angrily at a tree, sending a burst of red light and bark exploding from the
surface, then throws a hand in his hair.

“Watch it!” calls Neville, approaching with the rest of their friends. He looks peaky but more
worried about the tree than his own health.

“THIS close!” Draco shouts, brandishing his wand in a way that has them all ducking just a
little. “I saw their backs! Their candles were still smoking! Going to take advantage of Harry,
ruin his life, try to take mine! BOLLOCKS! No FUCKING WAY!”

“Awesome.” Blaise is watching Draco enraptured, grinning, too elated for Harry’s taste. “I
didn’t think you had it in you anymore, you softy.”

Draco scowls, mostly distracted. He paces, shoes squelching in damp leaves.

“Did they see you?” Harry asks.

“If they had, they wouldn’t be alive to tell it,” he mutters darkly.

“Okay, Scary,” Harry murmurs, eyebrows raised. He turns to Ron. “Anything else we need to
do here?”

“Not unless you want to see the remains of their ritual.”

The remains. A sinking feeling hits him, now that Draco’s alive and breathing (fuming, more
like) in front of him. The true state of their situation. “So they managed it?”

He nods solemnly.

Harry hesitates for just a moment. “Let’s see it.”

They head back in a line, trudging much more dejectedly, parallel to the beaten path Draco
had reappeared on. The arrangement is insidiously simple; candles, harvest food, all capable
of being for any well-meaning solstice ritual if only the candlesticks hadn’t burned ashen.
That was the hint of something Darker. They stare and leave it to haunt them with its
effectiveness.

Then Harry catches Draco’s eyes across the circle they form around the hilltop. They’re
ablaze with an intensity he knows can clear rooms and produce words ready to kill. He’s
always felt a bit immune, like maybe that’s why they work. Even Pansy cowers in it
sometimes. He flashes a sympathetic smile his way. Draco blinks, as if surprised by it, and
Harry thought he would be—so caught up in the chase that he’d forgotten everything but.

Everyone files back into Grimmauld place not long after with the morose exhaustion of a
Quidditch team who’d just horribly lost an important match. Draco has calmed down a little,
or at least he’s blasted no more trees. Neville looks about ready to collapse.

“A second?” Harry asks Draco quietly, touching his elbow. They venture back into the re-
neutralised guest room, and the second the door’s shut, he reaches up and lightly thwacks the
back of Draco’s head.
“Excuse you!” Draco exclaims, petting his hair delicately.

“What were you thinking, going off alone like that? We had a system for a reason!”

His eyes are wide in the surprise of being told off. He looks like Teddy, thinking he’d already
gotten away with something he never would. “I had to try to pursue them! Don’t tell me you
wouldn’t have done the same.”

“I wouldn’t, because I know how sick with worry it would make you.”

“Our opportunity was slipping through our fingers,” Draco says. “I was trying to save you the
worry of recital day.”

“By letting me maybe lose you a couple weeks early? Clever.”

“But you didn’t.”

Harry scoffs. “Yes, and that was a kind of self-control that really bodes well for the next
altercation.”

“I don’t know what you want from me, Dartle.”

“I want—need—you to be a team player. You are one, I know. You’ve just momentarily
forgotten. Trust that we’re stronger together, that we need to stick close, that we’re not run-
off-alone people anymore.” He sets his hands lightly on Draco’s cheeks. “How else are we
going to make it through the concert? I’d thought the greatest thing you’d learned since the
Obliviation was to lean on your friends.”

He frowns, dramatically deep. “I do.”

“When we go back in there, we’re going to have to come up with a plan for recital day, and
you’re going to have to trust them to handle things when you’re playing, if you’re so
desperate to still get to play.”

“I do trust them.”

“Great. Act it, so they’ll want to help you. And it’ll save me some panic. Two pixies, one
stone.”

He kisses him fast and pulls the door open. In the living room, their friends sit in various
states of glum flaccidity, sipping at cups of tea. Draco and Harry fall in wordlessly. They’re
followed not even a minute later, however, by Teddy. He shuffles in and takes one look at
their faces. His falls.

“Oh no,” he says. “No?”

“No,” Draco sighs, leaning his head back. He’s resting against the sofa, framed by Harry’s
legs. Above him, Harry runs a comforting hand through his hair. It’s something they
would’ve only done alone, but in the wake of it all, they can’t bring themselves to act
conservatively. Especially, for Harry at least, after the separation in the forest. No one
complains or teases them. Not even Blaise.

Teddy’s shoulders drop at the ‘no’, so ready moments ago to celebrate. Now, his eyes dart
nervously to Pansy, who’s investigating the bloodstain on her blouse. “So the recital,” he
says. “It’s cancelled.”

“Yes,” answers Pansy as Harry says “No.” Her head whips up to him in an instant.

“No,” he repeats, with mock confidence.

“Yes. He can’t,” she argues, then slaps Blaise’s arm. “Tell him!”

“Dangerous,” supplies Blaise.

“The most important performance of my life!” Draco sits up straighter now, bolstered by
Harry’s defiance.

“You don’t get a say!” Pansy jabs an angry finger in his taken-aback direction. “You’d kill for
that concert! And you shouldn’t have a say either!” Harry’s eyes widen as the finger shifts up
at him. “All you’ve done is put Draco at risk—walked around with a secret about his life
being in danger, then gave zero care for trying to gain those memories back for months! Now
we’re scrambling!”

Draco starts to shift tensely on the rug. Harry, dumbfounded, at least has the wherewithal to
brace his hands tightly on the other man’s shoulders; don’t.

“I think what Pansy means… is that you surely care for Draco’s safety more than a concert,”
Hermione tries to appeal. “That the logical decision should be taken, not the one from the
heart.”

“Fine, but I had an idea. Thought this was going to be a planning session, not just a reading
of the verdict. Feel free to tell me it's illogical the second I’m finished.”

She cocks her head in interest and, as she waves him on, Teddy crosses the room and sits on
the couch, rapt in attention. So is everyone else, including Draco’s upside-down face, looking
up over his forehead from the seat cushion. Suddenly the stupidity of this fleeting idea seems
like it’s about to be on full display.

“If there’s protection in place, maybe he could still play, right? In fact, if he doesn’t play, we
have no way to know when we’ll see them again unless you’ve suddenly been able to identify
them?” Harry looks to Ron, who shakes his head quickly. “So the best-case scenario would
be to offer Draco protection while—I say this with love—offering him as bait.”

“A shield charm’s not good enough,” says Ron. “There’s too much room for error.”

“I don’t mean a shield charm. I mean natural protection. An organism famous for its defence
against Dark magic.”
Harry watches Hermione figure it out first and most noticeably, eyes widening and mouth
slackening.

“The wiggentree.” Draco’s voice surprises him for no good reason; he’s just as quick as she.
“You certainly can’t,” he adds when their eyes meet.

“Hermione’s about to tell me it’s stupid, anyway.”

They all turn to her. “It’s not,” she says, voice small.

“It’s not,” Neville adds sagely. “It’s fiercely protective. Most wand making wood is, but
wiggentree especially so. What do you intend to do with it?”

“Woodworking, of course,” says Harry. He holds Draco’s face upside down in his hands,
trying to read his expression and failing miserably. “How mad would I be to try and build
you a piano in ten days?”

“Mental,” he whispers.

“Can’t he just make a stool?” Luna twists a lock of hair around her finger, tilting her head,
fearless despite the glare earned from her wife, who seems offended by how far the
discussion is twisting towards risky but practical solutions.

To Harry, just a bench is a rather genius idea he’s embarrassed not to have thought of. But
Neville shakes his head.

“When we don’t know what Dark magic is coming and it is undoubtedly Unforgiveable, the
bigger the better.”

“Piano it is,” Harry says definitively.

“There’s—no, you can’t, you really can’t.” Draco frees his head from Harry’s hands and turns
to face him. He takes his hands instead. There’s dirt under his usually-neat nails, as atypical
as the soil stains on his cuffs, the speck of Pansy’s blood on his collar. “It won’t be enough
wood anyway. It would be a waste.”

“There’s magic for that, ways to make the wood last longer, stretch further.”

“The bowtruckles hate me.”

“The dead wood doesn’t care what the bowtruckles think of you.”

“I can’t…” Draco squeezes his hands harder, looking as strained by the change in
conversation as Pansy. “You can’t do this for me, it’s too much. There will be other
concerts.”

“Has anyone got a better plan?” Harry asks louder, eyes searching the room and landing on
Ron. More than Hermione, even, he wants his approval that this isn’t a completely
horrendous idea. Almost imperceptibly, Ron gives a light shrug. Draco’s eyes are still
unblinkingly following him when he glances back down.

“I’ll do it no problem, Draco. There’s a lot I didn’t think I’d sacrifice this year,” he tells him
quietly.

Silence takes over the room. Teddy’s attention is volleying between Harry and Draco and the
group opposite the couch. It must be close to two in the morning by now. Everyone’s too tired
to argue with him further even if they wanted. And that thing is happening again, where Luna
and Pansy sit a little closer, where Hermione lays her head on Ron’s shoulder and whispers
something.

Harry clears his throat and pats Draco’s shoulders with a camaraderie that does nothing to
negate their non-platonic demonstrations of the night. “It’s late. We have something to work
with, at least. Anyone who wants a bed here has one.”

When he gets to his feet, so does Teddy, looking dishevelled and like the thirty seconds of
quiet had been enough to practically put him back to sleep.

“Hold on.” He frowns. “I haven’t even heard what happened yet! I waited up!”

Harry gestures vaguely towards their dejected faces. “I think you got the idea.”

*****

Harry is out of bed before Draco wakes up again, but at least the short hours he spent
unconscious were spent without the advent of nightmares. This time when Draco finds him
by the wiggentree, he’s not asleep by its trunk but instead kneeling before it, a box of
woodlice resting under his left hand and an axe gripped loosely in his right.

“Oh dear, already?” Draco’s voice carries through the garden.

Harry says nothing. The branches sway in the breeze, oblivious to their fate. His eyes stay
trained on the wood even when Draco crouches beside him.

They exist without words for another minute, both looking at the tall tree. He can make out
the scratch where Teddy had begun carving his name at ten, not knowing the significance the
tree held for Harry. The bowtruckles had let him. It’s stupid that he’s having trouble
swallowing, or that the axe feels heavier and heavier in his hands with each inhale, like he’ll
never lift it.

“Shall I move the box closer? For the bowtruckles?”

Harry nods and Draco rises, pushes the box closer to the tree, and steps away again. Slowly,
the twiggy creatures begin to emerge and investigate the meal waiting.

In his periphery, he catches Draco’s attention shift from the bowtruckles back to his face. “I
didn’t actually expect anyone to agree to this plan, did you?”
Harry shakes his head.

“Does your voice work?”

“Y-yes,” he responds, wincing at the scratchiness of it.

“Why are you doing this before you’ve even had breakfast? Come in and eat. Have a coffee.”

A bird takes flight from the top branches, shaking leaves free. Harry follows the with his eyes
all the way to their landing in the grass.

“If I don’t do it now I just won’t,” he whispers.

Draco sighs. His hand runs comfortingly across Harry’s shoulders. “Should I?”

The image of Draco in a matching pyjama set and a silk robe wielding an axe is amusing
enough to quirk his mouth up. It’s also, given the bowtruckles, a bit suicidal. Instead of
answering, he stands, grips the axe firmer, takes three paces to the tree, lugs it over his
shoulder, and swings.

CRACK.

There’s a gasp behind him—Draco, surprised by the suddenness of the action. Harry winces,
too, at the wound he’s sliced into the trunk.

“Shit!” Draco scrambles for the woodlice box, folding the top flaps shut before the creatures
can escape. They scrabble at the cardboard, which clenches Harry’s heart even further. He
grits his teeth and swings again. CRACK.

Again, CRACK, and a groaning sound from the tree. The garden door swings open again and
this time Teddy comes running in his pyjamas, too, wide-eyed.

“Merlin’s pants,” he inhales, stopping beside Draco. “You’re really doing it.”

Harry grunts, heaves the axe over his shoulder, and swings again. CRACK. He finds a
rhythm, ignoring his audience, sinking the axehead into the growing wedge over and over.
Woodchips ricochet, some into his face, others towards his watching family. CRACK.
CRACK. CRACK. When the wedge is large enough, he switches sides, cutting into the
uncarved trunk opposite his crafted cut and now in direct view of Draco and Teddy’s
captivated faces.

“You—” CRACK. “—should—” CRACK. “—move.” CRACK. The tree is leaning now,
towards the interior of the garden. Draco seems to snap awake, hugging the bowtruckle box
to his chest, and pulls Teddy quickly to the side. They stand by Harry, against the brick of the
garden wall, as he swings a few final times before, emitting a popping, dying cry, the
wiggentree falls into the grass with a conclusive whump.
Stillness. The bowtruckles surrender to the box, as if they’ve felt the death. The usual brush
of swaying leaves or tweeting birds is absent. Draco and Teddy don’t dare speak first.

Harry stands blankly, shocked, despite doing the work himself, by the length of the tree
horizontal in his garden and the unimpeded sunlight shining on him from a direction usually
shaded.

“I’m hungry,” he murmurs. Draco fixes him with overt attention like he’s prepared to defuse
a bomb.

“Yes, sure, anything,” he responds eagerly. “We could go to that café nearby?”

They eat around a small table in the bustling coffee shop, Draco and Teddy both seeming
hesitant to mention the morning while Harry preoccupies himself with spreading cream
cheese on a bagel. And back home, they all avoid the view from the back window of the
living room. Neville stops by to pick up the bowtruckles and find them a home somewhere
on Hogwarts property, and Harry doesn’t even know who called him. Draco seems a likely
suspect.

“Keep a few healthy twigs,” he tells Harry with a hand on his shoulder. There’s a look on his
face more validating than anything he’s experienced in Draco and Teddy’s tiptoed sympathy;
a shared sorrow for the tree itself, rather than the way it’s affected him. “I’ll try some radical
propagating methods, yeah? Luna said Pansy’s on her way, by the way.”

Harry holds back a groan; he’d imagined the day rather therapeutically, with him out back
prepping the wood and the window open, Draco’s music seeping out to soothe any harsh
feelings that might come up as he approaches his daunting task. But when he braves the
garden again, the music bleeds through as he’d hoped, and there’s no sign of Pansy for a long
while.

Cleaning the trunk is mindless enough. He knows better than to take that for granted given
the difficulties that lay ahead. He strikes the branches down and into a second pile,
intermittently wiping his forehead on the back of his shirt. At least, he thinks, should the
piano survive whatever may be inflicted upon it, should he actually manage the task and
should they make it to a recital day, it’ll be the handmade gift of the century.

Through the window, still, come the sounds of rehearsal. There are four types of practise
Draco engages with. In Harry’s years of careful observation, he’s become attuned to them
expertly, gauging his husband’s mood from their varied sounds like a barometer. The least
worrisome is when, upon hitting a wrong note, he proceeds to plink the missed key ten more
times as though he’s a skipping record, drilling it into his brain. It means nothing more than
diligent rehearsing.

The sound of a hideously wrong note followed by silence has always been slightly more
worrying because the silence is Draco staring heartlessly at a wall as though this tiny mistake
has broken his complete confidence as a pianist in a way only a momentary out-of-body
experience will solve. Harry’s always taken a good guess that there’s a bit of internal
dialogue he wouldn’t approve of going on, some less-than-kind language towards himself in
the brief pause.

A nerve-wracking day is one where the speed of the piece increases exponentially the longer
he practises, so that, when a phrase doesn’t run as perfectly as he’d like, he takes it at double
the tempo or even triple. Harry feels dizzy those days, when he hasn’t asked him gently to put
a silencing charm on the door.

Of course, ‘make Draco tea and beckon him away from the piano by any means necessary’
days were ones where the music sounded beautiful, perfect to Harry in every way, but was
still frequently punctuated by a discordant smashing of as many keys as possible, as if Draco
had passed out with his body on the keyboard.

Harry hears this last pattern today, freezing with a bundle of branches in his gloved hands,
ears pricked up. The music doesn’t start up again. Instead, he hears a loud, high-pitched
laugh. Pansy. He returns to cutting the log clean, sorely missing the sound of music and
unfairly blaming her for its absence. He’s only pulled the saw a handful of times when she
joins him.

“Hiya, Harry, already did it, did you?” She stands with a hand shielding her eyes and taps a
heeled foot against the stump.

“Yeah,” he grunts, tossing the saw down for the more conversation-appropriate task of
gathering branches into the pile he’d started. For a wiggentree, even the smallest twigs are
like gold. He’d once scolded Draco for even insinuating that the tree had monetary value but
now he reconsiders it, like a second life for a commendably well-loved staple of his
Grimmauld Place existence.

A beat. He ignores her rocking on her heels and wraps strong spellotape around a bundle.

“Rough go last night, wasn’t it?”

“Understatement,” he mutters.

Another beat.

“I… want to offer my help. For your plan. So Draco can still perform.”

“Do you?” He throws the branches down, wipes his forehead with his arm, then squares
towards her with his hands on his hips. “I actually might not want you within a kilometre of
the piano when it’s done, just in case your coughs sound a bit too close to ‘incendio’.”

“Hey! I would never, I do want to help. I love Draco—and-and you.”

It sounds like an afterthought, and his stress and exhaustion present in a prominent eye roll
up towards the sky.

“Really, I do! I was frustrated last night, we all were.”

“We all didn’t fault me for trying to save Draco’s life.”

She grimaces, wringing her hands. “Well, I didn’t mean it.”

He doesn’t have time to stay mad, even if he wanted to. And anyway, she was there for Draco
when he would’ve hoped someone would be. The only other person whose shoulder he’d cry
on. The ruthless best friend who’s still not afraid to yell at Harry on Draco’s behalf. He’s
thankful for it, somewhere deep down. Years and years of friendship are tougher to break
than this.

“What’s your idea?”

“Come in!” she brightens. “I’ll tell you both all about it! Ron’s approval has already been
acquired.”

“Ron’s approval?” he questions, following her inside.

“That it wouldn’t interfere with the case from an official standpoint.”

“Merlin, what is it?”

Suddenly, Draco’s at his side, emerging from somewhere by the bookshelves of the living
room like he’d been lying in wait. “An article,” he says ravishingly, excited by a reprieve
from the monotony of musical repetition. “But that’s all I’ve been permitted to know.”

The article, come to find out, needed Ron’s permission because it’s almost entirely fabricated.
The idea, in the roundabout enthusiastic way Pansy tells it, is to give the Wreaker men what
they wanted; Harry leaving Draco and leaving him vulnerable. They’ll tell the world that
they’re finally ready to make a sombre announcement—that due to unforeseen circumstances
in January (which the men will surmise was Obliviation) Harry and Draco have been
separated for most of the year. They’ll make it shameful and oblivious, vaguely call it a
circumstance no one could predict that’s completely unfixable.

“This seems unethical,” Draco notices when she’s done pitching.

“It’s not unethical, it’s untrue.”

He makes a face like these are one and the same.

“Newspapers print corrections all the time!”

“So after the recital, you’ll print ‘Correction: That was completely false’?”

Pansy scowls. “You act like this isn’t a serious situation! You permit planting yourself as a
carrot on a stick at the piano, but draw the line at dishonest reporting?”

“Is this a fake article we have to really interview for?” Harry interjects. His thoughts are on
the dragon-sized task set before him this week, hands already twitching to get back to work.
“Up to you. I can just write it or you can sit for it.”

“Just write it,” Draco sighs. He runs a tired hand through his hair. “This isn’t worth fighting
you.”

“Good!” She grins and reaches into her purse, pulling out a long piece of parchment. “I
already did.”

Harry and Draco both reach for it at once. ‘END OF AN ERA—POTTER AND MALFOY
SEPARATE FIFTEEN YEARS PAST WAR’, she’s titled it, the first hint of the drama-tinged
writing that awaits them. They crowd close and read and read… Draco reaches the bottom
first, so Harry hears his scoff before he catches up.

“Pansy, come on, now.” Draco shakes his head and leans closer to her neat script. “Isn’t this a
little flowery?”

Harry snorts. “Did Rita Skeeter give you lessons? ‘Draco gazes out the rain-stained window
with a longing for something lost and a tear in his overcast eyes’?”

“It’s supposed to be romantic! And sad! Sure, maybe I channelled Skeeter a bit—I usually
consider myself proudly incapable of this soppy sort of feature piece, thank you! But I also
know what a story calls for, whether I like it or not.”

“It’s good,” Draco adds. “The remorse for the joint life we’d built, the call back to where it
all started. The hint to Teddy’s besieged place within the equation.”

“Drawn from true experience a bit much, if you ask me,” Harry murmurs.

“Well, it is lived experience, isn’t it? It’s sort of the story I would have actually written in
February.”

“I get it. It’s good,” he echoes Draco, feeling the strain in the words.

He doesn’t take long to make an excuse about getting back to work, which isn’t much of an
excuse because he has so much to do. At least he won’t have to worry too much about
nightmares; he’ll hardly get enough sleep to have one.

March 2010

In true award-winning passive aggression, Narcissa Malfoy had emptied the home he grew
up in of all valuables, antique furniture, Malfoy family heirlooms and left the rest for him to
take care of if he was ‘so desperate to clean house and erase their legacy’.

Thankfully, today wasn’t up to that task. It was purely investigative, to see if the bold plans
he had for the estate were even possible. Harry had been surprisingly supportive, enough so
that he’d felt the need to suspiciously test the waters for their authenticity.
“I’d like to turn the Manor into an orphanage,” he’d said, casual as possible, hanging laundry,
as if he hadn’t practised the nine or ten words in the mirror while he was at the shop that
week.

“Oh, yes,” Harry nodded enthusiastically without even looking up from the airer. “That’s a
wonderful idea.”

Draco gave him a sidelong glance. “And… I’m changing my last name,” he tried, eyeing him
carefully.

“Whatever makes you happy.”

“Dyeing my hair black.”

“Teddy’s has been for a month; he’ll think you’re copying.”

“I want a snake.”

“Jules has been dying to ask a snake some questions. They’d be fast friends.”

Draco scowled. “I know you’re not really listening.”

“I know you’re testing me,” Harry intonated softly, carefully folding a pair of trousers. “A
children’s home sounds like a great idea. Can you really do it?”

He’d said yes, but in the entrance now, he stared blankly at the grand staircase. The past was
sometimes less temporal than it was spatial and facing the bannisters he’d last seen draped
exquisitely for Christmas reached through and yanked him back to the spirit of the moment—
the heart-thumping fleeting courage, the panic outside, their first holiday season together.

Would the entire property feel like that? Would it be as unfixably cursed as he’d worried?

Harry was a step behind him, quiet and attentive, waiting to react to whatever Draco’s own
reaction was. Their footsteps rang loud through the tall, emptying rooms. When they reached
the parlour, they planted themselves solidly in the doorway for a good minute, incapable of
walking in or leaving. Draco wondered if Harry was also considering the terrible altercation
that occurred there until he spoke.

“When the Snatchers… You knew it was me, right?” he asked quietly, without looking in his
direction. There was nothing from that day in the room, but if Draco raised his head, he could
see the chandelier crashing, feel the debris.

“Yes.”

“Right away?”

“Couldn’t miss those eyes,” he practically whispered.

His own thoughts were travelling speedily past the parlour to a thick door barricading a room
that had once held wine, but also at another point in time, Luna. The fact that it had done both
was horrendous. They should pour concrete right into the cellar. Blast it from existence.
Return it to the earth. A room like this may be salvaged. That one never would.

Harry took a shuddery breath, then doubled back the way they’d come, hands deep in his
pockets. “Show me something that’ll make me smile.”

“With bloody pleasure,” he sighed, shivering, shaking off the room as they walked upstairs.

His bedroom was a snapshot in time, minus the few things he’d packed hastily in a trunk
years ago. Harry laughed happily on entrance, eyes roaming like he’d never be able to see it
all.

“Brilliant,” he said, opening the wardrobe to a line of perfectly hung Hogwarts robes. Moths
feared the Malfoy home; it had left them all in perfect condition. “You could go back next
week.”

“It’s all a bit frozen in amber. Seventh year, to be exact,” he said, straightening Numerology
and Grammatica on his bedside table.

“And if we were in seventh year?” Harry’s attention was back on him, eyes sparkling again
after looking so hollow downstairs.

“I was in seventh year.”

“Yeah, but...”

Draco put a hand flat on his chest, watched him pout. “I’m not entertaining this alternate
universe you live in where we had any possibility of not killing each other at school.”

“One can hope.”

“It’s not hope, it’s delusion. Et suppositio nil ponit in esse.”

“Supposing something,” Harry guessed.

“A supposition puts nothing into being. Or rather, saying it,” he said, touching Harry’s cheek
then patting it lightly, making him blink, “won’t make it so. Let me show you my favourite
room.”

“I thought this was,” Harry protested as he took his hand and pulled. “How is this not—oh.”
He caught up rather fast; he knew Draco too well. “I haven’t seen a piano yet.”

“Could be gone, though,” Draco thought aloud as he guided him back down the stairs,
through a hallway, to the back of the home. “Mother might have taken it.”
“She’d leave you creepy old portraits and ugly dead flower arrangements but not your piano?
That’s—No, yeah, that’s exactly what she’d do,” he corrected at the expression he received.

They passed the kitchen to their left and reached a wide double set of wood doors, carved
with lines of decorative florals at the corners, polished to a sheen. It was the less presentable
of the studies (“Stud-eez?” Harry annunciated in amazement of the plurality), furthest from
the centre of the home.

Harry managed a single step towards the doors before Draco stopped him and took both of
his hands. “No, you have to really feel it for the Eden it was, okay?” Harry nodded, so he
traced their steps back into the hallway and put his back to the path they’d just walked.

“Behind me, to your left, is the kitchen,” he began. “Around eight, your father is already in
his study or gone completely, so you tiptoe to the kitchen and find Reina—the only house-elf
who loves you more than she’s afraid of your parents—to give you morning pastries that taste
like springtime. And if your mother or father asks if she’s seen you, she says no and closes
her hand around the neck of the cursed bust in the entrance hall and comes to you for some
salve or, when you’ve started school, a simple healing charm. They’d never try to find you on
their own, so she manages to keep you unbothered for most of the morning.”

Harry’s eyes were globes, not even blinking in his interest. Draco tugged and got his feet
moving, walking carefully backwards.

“So then you take those pastries and retreat to the second study. It’s back against the lawn,
you see, so your parents never come this direction, and all the good books are in the other
study, anyway. But this one has your favourite piano.”

He dropped one of Harry’s hands to open the door and was delighted but unsurprised to find
it almost untouched. The piano was in the interior corner, where it had always been, but the
books had been carefully picked through for anything his mother might have wanted herself.
Two large lattice windows overlooked the back of the estate, once full of roaming peacocks
and a spitting fountain, which now sat dry.

“Wow,” Harry gasped, running his hand along a velvet green, claw-footed window seat.

“Then you sit here,” Draco pulled him to the piano and pressed him down onto the bench.
“And you play and play. Sometimes you do your summer work. Sometimes your friends
come over. Crabbe and Goyle only ever made it to the main parlour. But Pansy and Blaise
spent eons in this room. Long enough to get plenty bored.”

He pulled Bloodlines and Heritage Architecture from a shelf and handed it to Harry open to
the title page.

“‘Open Pure Blood Legacies to page 41’?” Harry read in a small, scrawled print along the
bottom edge. Pure Blood Legacies was already presented to him before he’d finished
speaking. He flipped through, following the instructions Blaise had left on the margins until
he reached “‘Open Wizarding English Homes to page 13’.”
Draco handed it to him, took Pure Blood Legacies, and waited. Harry flipped through,
squinted, then snorted. “Really? ‘Your mum’s a hedge whore and your dad’s a lobcock’?
What’s that even mean? What was he, twelve?”

“Fourteen, I believe.”

“Hm.” He shut the book and pressed it back into Draco’s chest. His finger tapped a key on
the piano, then a second. “So this is where you learned?”

“Piano?” When he sat down, Harry made room without question. “No. That was in the
ballroom, under my mother’s scrutiny. But… when I started back up, during school, I came
here. Played better without her in the room.”

“The ballroom?”

“Of course the ballroom.”

When Draco was young, he’d called the ballroom France because his mum had taken him to
Versailles and shown him the Hall of Mirrors. It was extravagant, but so was his own grand
hall. We’re going to France, he’d say, grinning, and she’d pick him up and twirl him around
the marbled floors. He couldn’t have been more than five.

That was long gone, but still beneath their feet were the black and white checkered tiles, a
geometric gold flower mosaicked at dead centre. If he stood on its pistil he could look
straight up into the centre of the coffered ceiling where the chandelier hung, sparkling and
bright like stars. From the thin wraparound balcony on the second storey of the room, he
always thought he could leap and reach it. A broom in the space, the devil on his shoulder
always said, would be unequalled joy. His mother, however, would offer unequalled wrath.

Standing there with Harry, surrounded by unlit fireplaces and tall columned windows, he saw
it anew through his husband’s slackened face.

“A bit… ostentatious,” he offered.

“Amazing,” said Harry, rotating on his feet as he walked away and explored the wide-open
space. “I love you.”

Draco laughed. “What?”

“I know we’ve come here before, but not like this, you know? I feel like I’m getting to know
you better.”

Draco crossed the centre of the ballroom to him and wrapped his arms around his waist.
“That’s not comforting.”

Harry cocked his head. “Should be. You didn’t start being a complex person post-war. And a
part of me always tried to picture your life away from school.”
They were swaying slightly. Draco didn’t know who’d started it. “Well, whenever you’re
ready for a trip to Little Whinging, I’m here.”

“Don’t even joke. I never want to see that place again. Watching Sirius pace Grimmauld
Place was all I need to know about the ills of returning to your torturous childhood home.”

“Cheers for warning me, then.”

They were a metronome; back and forth, back and forth. Lazy dancing, the kind a newlywed
couple did when they clearly hadn’t taken lessons.

“Is it that bad being back here?”

Draco gave him a tired look. “What does Luna do sometimes? Sage? This place needs all the
sage in England. I think there are too many bad memories. There’s no way it will succeed as
a children’s home.”

“The children won’t care too much about memories they don’t even have. They weren’t even
alive during the war probably. They just want food. Shelter. Love.”

He clicked his tongue, unconvinced.

“We’ll give it its own calcination. It’ll start over, just like you. Despite it all, the estate is
beautiful, so what’s better, making something good of it or letting it rot? Which gives undue
power?”

The problem was, Draco was thinking beyond the children. They’d need adults willing to
work in the building, a government okay with sanctioning the former Malfoy Manor as a
children’s home, a public that didn’t protest the very idea.

Harry was simply the optimist to his pessimist, too hopeful still on the basis of his own
speedy forgiveness of Draco to consider the alternative. Even after last year’s Dancing with
Dementors bombshell and the press storm it cooked up, he sympathised but never quite
managed to empathise. It was outside his range of thought to imagine that not everyone
remained open-minded to new information about people who’d changed or been
misrepresented.

Perhaps there would come a day when Harry would wake up dreadfully pessimistic and
Draco would have to keep them from plunging completely into cynicism by taking up the
reigns of hopefulness himself. But for now, thoughts darkly planted in pragmatism, he
avoided the question and moved Harry’s right hand to his shoulder and took his left, swinging
into a more purposeful series of steps.

Harry chuckled. “Evading an answer with distraction. Suave.” And yet he was pliable under
Draco’s hand, matching his grin, letting himself be pulled in circles around the grand room.
Going along with anything.

What must it be like, Draco wondered, after all they’d been through to laugh so easily, to turn
 a temper or grimness into a smile at the drop of a hat? What was it to still see a room like this
for beautiful? Why had he done it, too, at the sight of Draco?

Chapter End Notes

Thanks for the continued enthusiasm!

Feel free to leave some words below in the comments, or find me at

writandromance.tumblr.com. Doing my best to reply as often as I can, but know I read
them all.
 Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues
Chapter Notes

Not dead yet! The universe does not take 'but we've got the final two chapters to publish'
as a reason to take things easy, but nevertheless, we're so close! Thank you to all who
have stuck around, who are interested in seeing how this closes.

The chapter title refers to Frederic Rzewski's 'Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues'. If you're
looking for a performance, Gilles Vonsattel's playing for the Chamber Music Society of
Lincoln Center is stunningly technically perfect. Of all chapters, this one featuring
Draco's solo recital would be a great time to watch a performance, and his is captivating.

Enjoy!

See the end of the chapter for more notes

Harry thinks he’s never spent less time or more time with Draco than he does in the ten days
between Lammas and the recital. After he got the wiggentree into manageable pieces he did
travel to the shop with Anatomy of a Piano and Magical Carpentry to stretch and pull the
planks into the sizes he needed, but it was only a day, and when he got home, one would have
thought he’d recovered from an eight-month Obliviation all over again the way he hung by
Draco’s side.

But first, the shop, which had brought Aldona, who’d given him the chance to share happy
news once again.

“That’s not a broom,” she’d observed, frowning in the doorway and pointing to a wide, thin
board he’d just leaned against the wall.

“No,” he said easily, “but it’s going to be a piano,” then waited, mouth twitching, for her to
react.

She shook her head. “No, you’re not that mental. You’re making a piano? For a man you
can’t even remember? Merlin’s pants, Harry, if that’s really the case then you are a true
nutter.”

“Who said I didn’t remember him?” he asked with a cocked eyebrow, folding a square of
sandpaper.

If possible, her jaw dropped wider. For a long beat, he grinned and she gaped. And then,
when she moved once more, she swept him into a lung-emptying hug, the kind that reminded
him how long they’d been friends. Harry filled her in on everything as he prepared the wood:
Argentina, the Cup pitch and headquarters, its eccentric director, the circumstances of the
Obliviation, the failure on Lammas, recital day, and what a handmade piano had to do with it
all. Her response caught him by surprise.

“These men—one sort of gaunt looking?” she asked, perched on a stool. “Nasally sort of
voice? The other’s larger? Both with short haircuts like a soldier’s?”

Harry stopped what he was doing. “…Yes,” he said. “Both with that old Wreaker tattoo.”

Her face drew into a sharp somberness, her mouth a thin line. “They bought the Peregrines
earlier this year.”

Harry had rushed home, tripped out of the fireplace and right into the coffee table. Draco
watched it all happen with wide eyes and hands hovered in surprise over the keys.

“They’re flying,” he gasped instantly, rubbing his shin.

“Who’s flying?”

“The men, the-the attackers, cursers, Wreakers, whatever you want to call them. They bought
Peregrines from Aldona—she didn’t know who they were, obviously.”

“Bollocks,” Draco muttered, dropping his hands in his lap. His eyes darted around the room,
thinking intensely. “They’re the fastest on the market, aren’t they?”

“To a fault, though. Either way, not good.”

“It’s still all of us against the two of them.”

Harry pursed his lips. “They ordered six.”

Naturally, tension had only grown after that discovery. The operation became more tight knit,
the addition of four more unknown opponents frightening the group into careful secrecy.
Harry moved his build completely into the living room. Draco had no complaints, just as
eager to keep him in sight. Aldona opened his shop when a broom pick up was scheduled.
Hermione set some very complicated silencing charm for them in the centre of the room so
that Draco could rehearse in peace and Harry could construct on his cleared-out side with all
the books he could need. To get each other’s attention, they’d throw crumpled paper back and
forth.

Then Hermione went above and beyond by bringing him a laptop and some sort of ‘hotspot’
so he could watch videos of others building piano skeletons. This took Draco from his work
for such a considerable period that Harry was afraid he’d have to restrict him. But his
transition into ‘tedious’ videos of wood finishing did the job for him and he was soon left
alone to focus.

A new problem arose, though, in the lack of supervision they were offering each other.
Usually, Harry would wake up some time in the night close to an especially-stressful
performance, trudge downstairs, and drag Draco up for some forced rest. Or, during the
holiday season when orders became overwhelming, Draco would hunt him down in the shop
on a Sunday enthusing about the necessity of time off and refusing to take no for an answer.

Now, both stressed beyond belief, there’s no mediator. They work until two or three in the
morning, until Harry has almost hammered a nail into his thumb or Draco has progressed
through the four stages of piano error grief and dropped his head onto the keys. Then one
visits the other’s side of the room, drags them to their feet with eyes already half-closed, and
manages only to peel off the day’s layers before collapsing in bed.

Neville stops by on Sunday to fulfil his promise to try and propagate a few twigs from the
wiggentree. He ends up spending half an hour in the living room on Harry’s side. The piano,
four days in, is an unusable shell. It was so difficult to get the thin rim of the frame in proper
shape that he’d almost wanted to call off the entire recital himself, but then he’d look up and
see Draco stoic and focused across the room, and find it insane that he’d even entertained
such a notion. But the idea of moving on to the pinblock and soundboard practically makes
him break into hives: according to Anatomy of a Piano, even the direction of the woodgrain
in the soundboard influences the sound quality. How horrible would it be if he managed this
feat just to sabotage Draco’s performance anyway?

Neville seems to sense the hysteria in the air. He asks no questions besides checking if he can
be of use. “I already tended to the garden,” he says, causing Harry to drop his wood and give
him a look so full of affection that Neville grows flustered in the spotlight. Then, when he
mentions that everyone wants to feed them the next day, “because they skipped Friday
dinner,” Harry realises he can’t even remember when Friday was. He was only half sure it
was Sunday now. Saturday had seemed to simply overstay its welcome, briefly interrupted by
sundown.

“Let me see how Draco feels,” he replies, peering around for a projectile. He balls up a
parchment of scribbled maths and measurements and lobs it towards the piano, where it hits
Draco right in the ear. He jumps and turns, eyes wide and annoyed.

“Dinner tomorrow? With everyone?” Harry asks.

Draco shakes his head, brows furrowed. Neville sighs in disappointment, but Harry knows
it’s only to indicate that he hasn’t caught the question on his lips, foiled by the silencing spell.
He tries again, annunciating and speaking pointlessly louder.

“DIN-UH? TOO-MAH-ROH?” He points to Neville, then mocks stoking a pan over a hob,
trying to indicate that cooking was taken care of and they simply needed to show their faces.

Draco stares blankly for a moment as though there’s a delay between message sent and
message received. Then he nods and turns his attention away from them immediately.

At the Granger-Weasley house on Monday, they’re horrible houseguests anyway, taciturn to

the point where Harry’s sure they were only invited as a proof of life check. The only upside
is that he doesn’t remember the last time he sat for a meal next to Draco fully in love. This is
the second reason they’re terrible houseguests; they hadn’t existed beside each other besides
(semi)nightly unconsciousness in days and, as a result, spend most of the evening staring
deeply into each other’s eyes and mumbling about the recital.

Oddly, when they get home, they don’t immediately resume their work.

“You’ve got something on your chin,” Harry says by the door, mouth twitching, as he thumbs
Draco’s stubble.

“You’re one to talk. This is almost a beard.”

“We’re a mess.”

“There’s something to be said, you know—” Draco pushes Harry’s hair out of his eyes. “—
for taking an evening off.”

Harry scoffs. “Easy for you to say; if you run behind, your already-perfected performance is a
little less perfected. If I run behind, you die.”

Draco rolls his eyes. “Harry the martyr, Harry the solitary, Atlas—”

“Alright, alright, what did you have in mind?”

It turns out what he has in mind is mostly essentials. They shower, shave, put the suspiciously
large quantity of leftovers they’d been sent home with in the fridge, and return to the living
room as if their legs know no other path.

Draco huffs matter-of-factly. “Listen to the concerto and then I’ll look at the piano?”

Harry smiles and nods, taking him in post-refresh. His eyes, still, are sunken and baggy, his
skin—usually pale but pink with life—colourless. A daydream fills his head, of them packing
their things and driving away, to the coast or the mountains, skipping the recital, skipping the
chance of danger. Going somewhere known only to them.

He sees, now, why it’s easier just to run when given the option.

Draco plays and he watches from the couch, a hand under his chin pushing his cheek up, and
can’t stop the soft smile that persists through its entirety. As beautiful as it is, Harry hears the
exhaustion in the way he plays.

Draco sits back, breathing deep. “What do you think?”

“Exquisite,” he says.

“Thirteen years and I know you can be more honest and knowledgeable than that.”

“Fine.” Harry gets up from the couch and kneels by the piano bench. “It was beautiful.
Clearly you can play it in your sleep. The cadenzas especially… blimey…” Draco’s holding
back a smile. “The third movement sounded rushed, though. The whole thing is a bit… I
don’t know, cautious. Maybe everyone’s right, you do need rest.”
“Then so do you. Off you go then. I showed you mine, show me yours.”

Harry laughs and rises and walks to the piano husk across the room, kicking some wood out
of the way. “There’s nothing to show you, really,” he tells him. He gestures at it all. “Rim…
legs… fallboard… lid…”

Draco runs a delicate finger along the music shelf. “Remember what I said.”

“We’re already gutting the inside of the children’s home piano. Everything I can make, I’m
making.”

The day he builds the soundboard and bridge, Draco comes and sits with him, rolls up his
sleeves, and helps Harry perfect the predrilling for the bridge pins. It’s a tough business, but
having someone beside him who knows the mechanisations so personally takes the load off a
bit. He knows he’s only there because he’d seen, from way across, how terrified he’d been to
set to work.

After all that dedication, it’s difficult on Wednesday to give the piano up, but a man Draco
knows from work appears at their door with a large trunk as expected and Harry knows he’s
well needed. As he carries it in, he favours his left leg, which is artificial from just below the
knee.

“Thank you for coming, it’s mad that we’ve never met,” Harry says, hefting one end of the
trunk into the living room.

“Not that mad,” Fion grunts, setting it down. “Your man stole my position, after all!” Harry
can feel his ears reddening. He stammers over a response, but Fion waves a hand. “The
apparition accident helped me get sober, and getting sober helped me rearrange my priorities.
I’d always fancied piano repair, you see. So, who knows what’s for the best, really?”

“Exactly,” Harry replies emphatically. “We’re lucky to have you. Draco’s just upstairs in his
lab—we’ve been a tad cooped up, tight quarters, so he’s got a silencing charm on, but he’ll be
down before you’re done I’m sure. You really think you can do it all in one day?”

His eyes follow Fion’s close examination of the unfinished wood, something tightening in his
gut like a professor is judging his work.

“Fully confident, Mr Potter.” He peers into the open belly of the instrument and turns his
mouth down, impressed or disappointed. “Draco says it’s an emergency?”

“Er, in a way, yes.”

“I’ve heard that often, usually a musician’s definition of an emergency. But wiggentree
wood… protective qualities…”

Harry shuffles on his feet, clasping his hands closer behind his back.
Fion raises his palms. “I won’t pry. Draco’s tuning it?”

“He is.”

“I’ll see what I can do for the sound quality, as well. This may very well be the only
wiggentree wood piano in existence. Certainly the first I’ve ever seen.”

“Will it… sound tolerable?”

“Concert quality,” Fion says, with such a kind expression that Harry lets out a breath he
thinks he’s been holding for a week.

When Draco reappears, cagey about what he’s experimenting with, he offers Fion a hearty
handshake, which is countered with a firm grip and a yank into a quick, back-smacking hug
that Draco emerges from looking flurried by the friendliness. Fion’s moved from inserting
pins to carefully screwing hammer shanks into a bit called the action. For a minute, the two
of them look over the piano while he lingers across the room. Then Fion whispers something
and looks back at Harry. Draco follows his gaze and meets Harry’s eyes sheepishly, says
something back to Fion, who laughs happily and claps him on the back again. Harry never
knows what.

“Perhaps I am over-inserting myself,” Fion mutters no more than ten minutes later, when
Harry’s returned to observe his work by Draco’s side, “but you both look like Death’s head
on a mop stick. You’ve been building a piano all week, no? And you have undoubtedly been
practising yourself to death’s door,” he accuses Draco. One hand rises from the piano’s
innards to shoo them away. “Go! Rest! I’ll holler before I go.”

He orders it so kindly that they trudge upstairs without question.

“I don’t know if I can sleep with the sun out like this, in the middle of the afternoon,” Harry
says only a few minutes later, staring up at the ceiling in bed. They’d laid down moments
ago, but he’s doubting the likelihood of any real recovery. He gets no response. “Draco?”

Draco is out cold, mouth open, arms flung at random across the bed. He looks to Harry as
though he’s been stupefied into unconsciousness.

“Abandoner,” he whispers, shifting and leaning on an elbow. Really, he’s grateful because
Draco needs it, just a bit envious, too. He pokes a cautious finger into a lock of blond,
sweeping it out of his eye as, vaguely, his thoughts drift to Anastasia and what a shock she’ll
have when he updates her on his life. He wonders, too, if she’s read Pansy’s article. If he’ll be
visiting her with renewed optimism or fresh grief.

He observes Draco a second longer, then carefully rolls off the bed and goes to his wardrobe.
Inside is a black suit, tailored to fit, delivered by Pansy less than a week previous.

“I thought I needed more fittings,” he’d said, surprised to have it thrust into his arms amid
Lammas preparation. It would last only minutes in his active memory, brushed aside by
compass symbols and elevation maps.
Pansy winked. “What if I told you I took some of those beautiful ringlets, brewed Polyjuice
potion, and went on your behalf?”

Harry stared back, slightly horrified.

“I didn’t,” she laughed, but then winked again. “Really, I didn’t!”

He runs a hand down the fabric, expensive even to the touch. He hasn’t owned something this
nice since the last time he bought dress robes; even his wedding attire was less costly. It’s a
bit embarrassing what he’d done while Obliviated, desperate for connection, for identity.
Maybe he’ll stop thinking about what he could have spent all those galleons on when Draco
sees him in it.

For now, it stays hung in the closet, waiting, like him, to be needed. His not an ounce tired,
and in their preoccupation only Jules’ enclosure has remained a humanely livable
environment, so he tidies quietly, humming something distantly orchestral to himself. He’s
dropping mealworms in to a mouthy, inquiring gecko when he first hears movement again.

“Y’didn’t sleep?”

Draco is propped up on the bed, only half awake.

Harry shuts the cage, turning on his heels. “You made it look so easy, I was too intimidated to
compete.”

“Sleep, you insomniac,” he groans and drops back on the mattress. “Do you need a potion?”

“No.”

“If you’re not unconscious in five minutes, I’ll force it down your throat.”

He snorts in the face of the threat, though he does walk back over to the bed. “As if you’ll be
awake to see that through.”

Pulled close to Draco’s warmth, he elects to close his eyes for a minute or two if that’ll get
the man off his case. There are worse places to find himself if he’s too alert to sleep. Draco
smells like the soap in their shower, like fresh laundry, and when he opens his eyes again he’s
surprised to find that it’s dark outside. He sprouts up fast enough to make Draco drop the
book he’d been reading over his head.

“What time is it!” he gasps.

“Calm down, you fiend.” Draco watches him with raised brows. “It’s… ten.”

“Ten at night?” He rubs his eyes and grabs his glasses. “God, is Fion still here?”
Draco shrugs, ridiculously calm.

“Has he called up?”

“Haven’t heard him.”

Downstairs, Harry finds the living room dark and empty, but the piano looks more like a real
piano than it has since he began. He reads the note left on its lid.

Harry and Draco

All strung up. Dampers added for pedal, too. Waiting for Draco’s masterful tuning. Gorgeous
piano, Harry—would have thought you’d bought it professionally made.
Tried to call up three times, no response. Hope you’re not dead!
Best,
Fion

Harry opens the lid and peers in at the intricate metal and wood as if Fion would’ve lied
about completing his task, then taps a key and beams at the horribly flat sound it makes.

Sound it makes.

“Draco!” he shouts, taking the steps two at a time. He bursts back into their room and leaps
onto bed with enough force to throw them into each other from the gravity of the sinking
mattress below his knees. When grey, bewildered eyes meet his, he grins even wider. “Come
tune your new piano.”

The book Draco had left behind at the prospect of tuning his bespoke piano was Introductory
Spagyrics. Harry picks it up while he begins to move through the middle octave with his
tools, hammering the keys methodically. Parchment falls from between the opened pages,
covered in equations and measurements. Stoichiometry, as Draco was apt to gush about.

He sets it aside and flips through the book, distracting himself with barely-comprehendible
chapters on ‘herbal alchemical healing’ or ‘spellcasting for optimal extraction’. Draco
manages to get five entire seconds into a song before Harry lifts his nose. Then he sighs
almost reflexively and sets the book down entirely.

It’s the piece he wrote around their fifth anniversary. The piece that shook him in the
workshop in April, which led to the photos, which led to him thinking all-too-often about
Draco’s mortality, which led to plain thinking about Draco…

Draco finishes it slowly, letting the rests between notes speak for themselves, and when it's
done, he looks up with shiny eyes. “Piano sounds great,” he says with unusually stunted
speech.

April 2011

In Draco’s head was a list of every man or woman who’d walked through the doors of the
Manor to meet with his father, faces bowed in the shadows, and what each one of them
deserved in Azkaban. And a second list existed for cross-reference; how many of them had
gotten what they deserved. He could at least say they were all in the right place or dead.

Another list was the young people, like him, the ones who mostly escaped persecution. And a
list cross-referenced there, too; how many had fled the country.

He needed a new list, now, for boys like Jacob.

He remembered Jacob, and so did Blaise. He’d stood probably with his head at Draco’s
armpit height when the second war started, just about twelve, shipped off most of the year to
Durmstrang, but before the war, his father would come to the Manor, one of many faceless
followers to Draco, and Jacob might come with. He remembers stupid things about him, silly
things; he collected Chocolate Frog cards, but with the goal of having as many duplicates as
possible; he could speak a disjointed Russian that was mostly vulgarity from the older boys
and girls; he had short locs he swore would be down his back one day; he had a kind smile;
he seemed unaware of what his father did, like Draco wished he was, so he never broached
the subject.

Jacob must have known more than he let on because last week he Obliviated himself
completely. Just stuck the wand to his temple and sent all the memories away. He was
twenty-six now, Draco thirty. It chilled him. There were things he wanted to forget, but there
was so much he’d rather not. What was Jacob’s life like, if he’d felt there was nothing to
lose?

Draco hardly ever ended up in Blaise’s office, but they sat there now, surrounded by photos
of awards, of degrees, of Pansy and Draco and Luna, sampling from an extraordinarily
stocked bar cart.

“It’s mental,” Blaise said for about the tenth time. “Mental.”

“Yes,” Draco echoed, swirling his drink in a circle.

“Who’s left then?”

“Goyle’s local, I think. Patterson. Angelov.”

Blaise shook his head. “Angelov’s in Italy. Goyle’s address is local, but he lives at a second
home somewhere in Hertfordshire.”

“So it’s just Patterson. And us.”

“Patterson and you.”

Draco glared, unamused.

“I’m only saying, I’m not the one the papers call greedy. My hands and forearms are clean.”
It didn’t even make sense, but it was Draco’s growing tabloid reputation—that he’d take
bribes, either to remain in London or to remain untroubled by the public. He’d done neither
of course. One only had to shadow him through Diagon Alley to know he hadn’t paid a soul
to remain untroubled by the public.

“Should we… I don’t know, visit? He’s at St. Mungo’s, isn’t he?” he asked.

Blaise shook his head. “He isn’t going to remember us. And anyway, we’re part of what he
wants to forget… I doubt the Healers would even let us through, lest we exacerbate him
somehow.”

Draco forced his attention onto a photo on Blaise’s wall, of him with the Minister for Magic.
He was smiling wide. That same year, Draco had gotten his residency as pianist, which had
been exciting but also the source of new fears, fueling reserve around colleagues he felt
would disapprove of his non-auditioned position and his past alike.

“I’m sorry this is happening,” said Blaise with uncommon but familiar genuineness. “You’ve
got tough skin, though. A phoenix’s resilience, as my mum would say. Don’t go… don’t go
ruminating on Jacob’s methods.”

“Oh,” he replied, lowering his glass. “I wouldn’t. I couldn’t.”

He thought of Harry, of course. But also of Teddy. And Pansy. Even of Rose and Hugo. He
found himself suddenly grateful for his entire family in a way he had not thought of in a long
while. He loved them all, but hadn’t considered what they’d provided him by giving him a
support system; even if he didn’t use it often, the knowledge that it was there was invaluable.

It was a Friday, so there wasn’t much time to speak to Harry outside of preparation for guests.
The news he gave of Jacob—combined inopportunely with the context of who Jacob was—
was abridged and lacked the true, whopping emotion he and Blaise had felt at hearing of the
Obliviation. So he couldn’t blame him for not offering much besides a “that’s terrible,” and
“how long have you known him?” and “does he have family?”

And then, going around the table, Blaise’s thorn was “the lengths young people must go to
for pardon from the public long after they have proved their value to a principled society.”

Draco’s was a gruff, muttered “Jacob.” His rose was the support of family. His bud was a
long silence and a reluctantly offered “concert next week; Lizst.”

Harry saw through the nonchalance, of course, but he waited until their friends had left and
the house was quiet, Jules fed, curtains pulled, to speak of it.

“You know, the Prophet’s been asking me to say my piece ever since the battle’s tenth
anniversary,” he called across to the bathroom, kicking out of his trousers. One might
consider it coincidence that he brought it up while Draco was brushing his teeth but ten years
together and he knew when he was being caught unable to protest, mouth full.

“Now I’m starting to consider agreeing. Pansy has a friend in Features who’s willing to write
it. You could come along or stay out of it, I’ve just gotten sick of you being misunderstood,
of our relationship being misunderstood. I know how brilliant you are, but these rumours
have gotten out of hand and it’s… it’s frustrating. You could read the article before
publication without having to put your name to the quotes within it. It would be perfect.”

Draco spat in the sink. “Doesn’t sound like you’re considering; sounds decided.”

“It’s still in consideration until you agree that I should or shouldn’t.”

“I’m not your minder. You make your own decisions.”

“But I value your input.”

“Don’t see why.”

“Oi, don’t be short with me just because you’ve had bad news,” said Harry, pulling the covers
back. “I’m trying to help.”

Draco sighed, stepping towards the other side of the bed, though he was still fully dressed. “I
don’t like when people take that upon themselves.”

“I…” He crossed the mattress on his knees to stare right at him. “…am not people.”

“I don’t even know what there is to say to a journalist.”

“Wait and see.” Harry kissed his cheek. “Hurry up, I’m knackered.”

*****

REFLECTIONS: HARRY POTTER ON LEGACY, LOVE, AND LENIENCY

by Lea Rendon

The Malfoy Manor, an expansive property in Wiltshire, saw the brunt of the Second
Wizarding War’s more intimate skirmishes and, more famously, became the headquarters for
Death Eaters and Voldemort himself as the battle for the good of wizardkind came to a head
in 1998. Behind its doors, the Malfoy family—husband Lucius Malfoy, wife Narcissa
Malfoy, and only son Draco Malfoy—oversaw the upkeep of the base during this time,
cementing their presence in the Dark history of the estate. But once a vessel of Darkness, the
property in 2011 is unrecognisable; painted a dazzling white with an interior covered in
framed art and sculptures from rising Muggleborn and half-blood artists, it sits waiting to
teach a dramatically different set of young residents about universal topics: commitment,
caring, love, and support. To make such an about-face is a daunting task, but one took up
nevertheless by Draco Malfoy. He had, after all, made the same changes to himself, years
earlier. Elsewhere in London, more reinventing was taking place.

Harry Potter, the uncontested hero of the Second Wizarding War, followed a brief stint in the
Ministry’s Department of Magical Law Enforcement with a long stretch of hermitude.
Though he has never publicised his reason for leaving Aurorship, no owner of a Potter-made
broomstick would complain; Collectors’ Quidditch has been a staple of Diagon Alley ever
since. The quiet life, then, led to quite a shock when his relationship with Draco Malfoy, now
a concert pianist, became public knowledge in late 2001 through a Prophet article.
“I’d actually prefer if we started with an apology for that one, though I know you didn’t write
it,” he asked this reporter with a charming smile. We sat in a shadowy back corner of the
Leaky Cauldron, one of the first wizarding establishments Potter said he’d ever visited at age
11. Photos of Potter that reach history book status usually picture him lanky, seventeen, and
strung out by war. At thirty-one, there is an easiness in his stature that never equates to
cockiness.

In 2001, only three years past the war that stole his final year of schooling at Hogwarts
School of Witchcraft and Wizardry but saved wizardkind, the circles in which Potter and
Malfoy ran began to intermingle, and with it, their interest in a partnership, which 2001’s
Prophet referred to as ‘a defection to the enemy’.

“I’ve always found it interesting to watch people grapple with these flattened images of who
they think Harry Potter the celebrity is; the man who defeated Voldemort single-handedly—”
(“Not true,” he took his chance to set straight, while I was there to listen. “So many heroic
people made that happen, some dying to do so. If I could universally mend one fact in all
those biographies, it would be that.”) “—and the man who dates Draco Malfoy. It does
something to them, to those who have a carefully crafted image of me, to try and conflate the
two.”

But those who know him complexly, he said, understand. It requires something the general
public does not often take the time to participate in; seeing faults in their heroes and the good
in their villains. Not to say that courting Draco Malfoy was a fault or that he should be
considered a villain, he made sure to clarify. But accepting public figures as complete
individuals who make their own decisions, he suggested, was what stopped that shock of an
‘unlikely’ pairing.

“We have a lot in common,” he said. “We were both, really, pawns in a war to those we
loved. We enjoy the arts, working with our hands, dinner with friends, Mahler and Lizst and
Madonna, getting takeaway. We’re just people.”

‘Just people’, I’d suggest, however, with pasts that will never stop shadowing them through
life. This latest announcement, that the Wiltshire manor will be converted into a children’s
home, would undoubtedly play well into a better reputation for Malfoy, one of the few ex-
Death Eaters remaining free in London. But is the estate too cursed? Does Darkness sit
unfixably in the bones?

“I don’t think you’d ever be wrong to associate such a grand gesture with a past even Draco
would admit to be damnable,” Potter said. “But trust me when I say it is not a reputation-
based endeavour. He’s spent his adult life being someone worthy of forgiveness. He’s just
waiting for the world to see that like I have.”

Strategic or magnanimous, the manor is seeking accredited staff to oversee the care of
children and ensure an enriched upbringing through the age of magical schooling. Though
Malfoy plans to begin with younger children, he is, according to Potter, adamant about seeing
them through their schooling entirely. “My own childhood, without getting into detail, is not
a secret in its deficiency. Draco knows the details and more. It’s thoughtful, to me especially,
that he’s considered the older children who might otherwise drag their feet towards the
summer holidays.”
Potter has not returned to the home or family that raised him since the end of the war. They
do not, he told me, care greatly about his achievements or fame. It seemed that Potter himself
did not either; over a decade in the running, Collector’s Quidditch is still entirely operated by
Potter alone, lending to its notoriously unreliable hours. He is a fickle shopkeeper, but a
dependable broom maker.

“One time I stopped by thrice in a week only to find a Closed sign,” said shop regular Eustice
Tippery. “All at varying hours of the day. But when I arrived to collect a bespoke broom for
my grandson the following month, he came running up the street to keep me from waiting a
minute past our agreed upon pickup time.”

“It’s all a part of the fun, really,” 13-year-old Michael Wilden told me. “We always trek up
the high street to see if the Potter store is open. I’ve lost ten sickles betting it would be, but I
won a galleon when he was open on Christmas Eve last year.”

Potter would point to shared trauma or Madonna as sources of unification for him and
Malfoy, but it seems an even greater similarity lays in their ability to choose the least
expected paths set before them, towards entrepreneurship or charity. One can find Collectors’
Quidditch at Diagon Alley’s high street, on the opposite end from Quality Quidditch
Supplies, and as for the children’s home, Potter proudly stated that things were moving
slowly; a sign of Malfoy’s desire for nothing but perfection.

Gobsmacked as I was throughout the interview by the fact that Potter had granted it at all, I
asked him one final time, leaning across the table to whisper in the shadiness of a pub meant
for whispered shadiness, what he would like to say to those who still doubt his husband’s
goodness.

“They should try to find something he’s done that they disapprove of past the age of
seventeen,” he challenged, before shrugging. “There are no words I can say, though believe
me, I have plenty about [Draco]. I could go on and on. But I don’t need to. Actions speak
louder, and he’s proper lapping me in actions. Try revering him for once.”

August 2013

“CRUCIO!”

Harry thinks at first that he’s hallucinating, a hand stilled on his half-tied tie, at the shout
from floors below his bedroom. But his biology disagrees, instantly sending his heart
pumping, his blood chilling.

“CRUCIO!”

That’s no hallucination. His foot slips on the carpet, hitting the tall mirror he’d been
regarding himself in. It tilts precariously but he ignores it, flying down the steps, around each
landing, feeling his breath catch, tumbling into the living room. Blaise’s wand is raised
toward Draco’s heart and Harry moves without thinking or wasting time on recognition. He
collides with him, knocking him off balance. His wand clatters to the floor just out of arm’s
reach.
“Bloody hell, Harry, you’ve gone aggressive, too!” He laughs when Harry sits back on his
heels, breathing fast.

Harry whips his head in a panic towards his piano, where Draco sits frozen, fingers still on
the keys and eyes wide. “Did I hear what I thought I heard?” he murmurs, asking Draco
directly. He nods slightly.

“How else were we going to test the piano?” says Blaise beside him, growing comfortable on
the floor instead of trying to stand.

“And you have it in you to perform an Unforgiveable spell on your best mate?” Harry croaks
angrily.

“Well, the Imperius wasn’t very helpful, and I certainly can’t produce the killing curse for
Draco. All that’s left is Cruciatus. It’s fine, you’ve not been in Slytherin if you haven’t tried
to see if you can manage it on a classmate that’s made you cross.”

Harry stares back, horrified. “You shouldn’t be able—”

“Desire, mate, it’s about desire. And I have a deep, deep desire to save Draco’s life this
weekend. If this is the way I can confirm whether the piano offers protection, then my desire
to save him outperforms my desire not to cause him harm. Anyway, did you hear screams?”

He shakes his head.

“Then stop attacking me and take a moment to be thankful you didn’t have to test the piano.
Then appreciate your own bloody accomplishment, because Draco didn’t even feel a tickle.”

Harry looks back at Draco for corroboration. He nods.

“Our accomplishment,” Harry clarifies weakly. Draco had been the one to think alchemically,
to add spagyrics to the polish, extra protection, soaked into the wood itself. It was a
classically-polished black now, but beneath the surface was an infusion of the most protective
ingredients Draco could formulate. “New rule, no Unforgiveable curses at home without
warning.”

“I should have told you,” says Draco. “I wasn’t thinking clearly. They’re collecting the piano
any minute, we had to act fast. I almost forgot to test again.”

'Almost forgot' because they’ve barely slept. The final touches had only been finished
yesterday. The music director had gone spare when they’d requested more time before
shipping the instrument, not knowing it was being constructed right in the living room.

His heart is still pounding, not quite caught up to Draco’s healthiness after hearing the spell,
as he traipses out back, determined to be unobtrusive during the piano’s collection. He is,
after all, supposed to be separated from Draco. That’s what Pansy’s article would have
everyone believe, anyway, and based on the tabloids she’d proudly placed before them so far,
it had worked.
So he sits in his tuxedo on the wiggentree stump, hiding, trying not to think about how Draco
hadn’t said anything about the suit, had been absent since he’d woken, would be leaving
hours before he did to rehearse—again without the husband he reportedly hates—on site, had
been hit with a cruciatus curse as if it was just another day.

“Will you be out here all afternoon, Winsome?” Draco calls after him not long after. For
once, he’s underdressed and Harry’s over. He crosses the garden with his fists in the pockets
of his trousers and stops in front of him, reaching out to fix his tie without a word. “Why
have you dressed already?”

“So you could approve before you leave.”

He clicks his tongue, nimble fingers tightening the fabric around his neck, refolding the
collar. “I always approve.”

“Wrong.”

“Well, I approve of whatever you need to wear to do what you need to do today.”

Harry swallows. If Dollus, Hector, and their consociates would be on brooms, so would
Draco’s defence. “I can fly in just about anything,” he says. “But if the whole point is that
you still get to have your recital, I’d like to look the part.”

“I thought the ‘whole point’ was that this is the best way to lure them out.”

“That’s the public-facing whole point. My private whole point is two-sided. Do you feel
prepared?”

“I feel anxious. Overworked. Paranoid. Like I could… I might lose…”

Harry doesn’t tell him to finish the phrase. He doesn’t ask him to appreciate his tuxedo-
wearing, or tell him it’ll be okay. He simply reads the raw fretfulness on his face and points
behind him into the garden. “Have you checked on the Moly flowers lately?”

Draco’s eyes widen, a response itself. He clearly had forgotten about them altogether, given
all that had happened since. Under Neville’s careful parenting the last ten days, they’d been
given the proper treatments Harry was too frightened would ruin them. Now, they’re
blooming, shiny, bright, like glittery dandelions.

He leaves Harry’s side and moves closer, holding a stem delicately between his pointer and
middle fingers.

“How did you ever acquire them?” he asks for the first time. “I should’ve—you asked me to
fly so often and I never…”

“Neville helped,” he answers. “We may have contacted your mother’s remaining web of
acquaintances to find her landscaper, then found his distributor… they’re quite rare, I’m sure
you know.”

“I should have flown. Imagine Teddy’s upbringing if I had. As a family, if we’d…”

“You’ll get your chance to fly plenty. Not today; your job today is to stay safe. But any day
after. Better late than never.”

Draco shifts back to him, cupping his cheek. “I have to get ready. The piano will be there by
now. You look… striking, Harry. To think the next time I see you will be at the start of the
concert is unbelievable. You should be walking the empty hall with me, staring out at the
seats, doing what you do best.” “Telling you to imagine everyone in their pants?”

“Quieting my performance anxiety,” Draco smiles.

“See, but you don’t need me to anymore. I’ve ingrained it in your subconscious.” He stands,
straightening his straightened tie and fixing his perfect cuffs. He doesn’t know what to do
with his hands otherwise, and if they reach for Draco, they’ll never let go.

“You know it’s all for you,” Draco says, following him up. “You understand the context of
the movements. How grateful I am to have you in my life. No matter what happens, just
know—”

“No matter what happens,” Harry cuts him off before he can speak in final wishes. “We’ll
come out the other side alive. The rest is nonsense.”

“I’d give my fingers and ears.”

“I know.”

They stand there without speaking, like the turn and walk away will cement the fearsome
afternoon into the present.

“Don’t tell Luna this,” Draco murmurs after a long moment, “but the way I’ve managed not
to panic completely this week is by accepting the type of alchemy she’s trusted all along. The
metaphysical.”

“Bollocks,” Harry says immediately. “Next you’ll tell me you cracked open that herring tin
she gifted you.”

“Cracked and read; life-changing events in my immediate future, a need to depend on my

friends, an enemy that will take long-awaited action... If I could trust the fish, I’d be a fool
not to trust alchemy. It’s helped me.”

“You optimist.” He smiles. “You spiritualist. Help me, then, because I’m losing the plot
today. If it’s working for you, then I want in.”

Draco’s face scrunches in like Harry’s produced a bad smell, not a request for a method of
stress management. “No, it’s ridiculous. I just wanted you to know I’m open.”

“You’re not that open if you won’t even tell me,” he argues.

“I have to get ready.”

“So get ready.”

So then Harry’s watching Draco undress and lecture about spirituality, resisting the urge to
pinch himself, knowing that this is the levity that would provide for a Patronus in an
otherwise fear-inducing day.

“My equivalent of the first step, calcination, has always been a candid concept,” Draco’s
saying, shifting out of the trousers. Harry nods, legs crossed on the bed facing him. “And if
calcination is turning away from my past, then opening up to you, agreeing to a relationship
was undoubtedly the dissolution. That resurfaced parts of myself I’d hardly ever entertained.”

“Like love,” Harry jeers, intrigued. “What’s next?”

“Separation.”

“Ah. Damn.”

“But not literal separation for us, I don’t think. It’s meant to be a review of what’s come up in
the dissolution—what do you want to separate entirely? What do you want to integrate? It’s
embracing a… a ‘shadow self’, they say. Understanding your flaws. It’s the wiggentree fight,
obviously. That’s when I took stock of what I ought to put aside to make things work, when I
realised just how much I wanted whatever gave me you.”

He pulls his shirt over his head, mussing up his hair. Harry looks him over unabashedly. The
skeletons dance easily. The sun sits stark on his chest. No wrong notes sits like a morning’s
red sky of warning, but Harry ignores it.

“What’s next?” he asks eagerly.

“Conjunction,” Draco says, retrieving his slacks from their careful fold on a hanger. “I used
to think we’d skipped separation, conjunction… all of it, right to distillation.”

“But you can’t just skip through.”

He shakes his head, attention focused on fastening the buttons at the waistband. “Just as you
can’t skip steps in chemical processes. Conjunction is… a union of dualities. Merging the
good and bad, the conscious and unconscious aspects into a single essence. That’s post-
Christmas, certainly. Post-Manor. We were great after, better even. You saw the worst of my
family and what it could bring out in me.

“But after conjunction is fermentation. A breakdown. Testing the strength of the solution. To
create sweet wines,” he says, slipping an arm into a shirt sleeve, “grapes must first rot.”

Harry reaches out a hand to attach his cufflink, one of the ones he’d gotten from Neville in
June.

“The curse,” he says knowingly. “The Obliviation.”

Draco nods. “How was I to deny it then? It was all fitting the alchemy too perfectly. But it
was good news, too, to believe that such a terrible thing was part of a process. Because if the
fermentation was in my past, that meant distillation and coagulation were in my future.”
“When were they?”

“Distillation is no longer being controlled by ego, being able to appreciate the beauty of it all
without laying claim to any,” he explains instead of answering. “It’s knowing you deserve
nothing and being grateful for everything.”

“Argentina. When I remembered.”

But to his surprise, Draco shakes his head. “When you kissed someone else.”

He jerks his head back in surprise. “That brought you… gratitude?”

Draco shrugs, pulling on his black jacket, the nice one with the neat, wide lapel and the
coattails. Harry hadn’t seen it in ages. “I almost lost you completely that day because I
wanted you all. Look what I drove you towards. It was a reminder that I didn’t deserve you,
I’d just gotten lucky to have you. And I was grateful, then, to have you at all.”

“So then, the last one,” Harry hurries along, glancing at the clock. “The coag… er…”

“Coagulation.” Draco sweeps away to the bathroom, leaning into the mirror, checking his
hair. “Perceiving life on all levels. Complete unification of matter and the spirit. Nirvana, to
grasp inadequately at religion.”

“Remembering,” he tries again, eyes following Draco to the corner of the bed. He sits,
sinking the mattress, and reaches for his freshly-shined shoes. Harry budges over to right
beside him.

“Still no,” he says. “I am… yes, it is life-changing that you remembered me. Of course. But
was it alchemically influential? It was a relief, not a learning experience.”

“Oh.”

“Not insignificant by any means.”

“Sure.”

Both shoes are on. He stands again. “You’re distracted. Missing the point.”

Harry blinks. “No, I’m not.”

“I don’t think coagulation has happened. Which means it’s still laid out before me. Which
means I must survive today, to live to see it.”

“But surely not everyone… you know, it’s like, not everyone reaches Nirvana,” he offers
warily.

“Just because I’ve subscribed to optimism for once doesn’t give you permission to become a
pessimist,” Draco speaks softly, though he eyes Harry a little more carefully, like he’s
confirmed something by remaining impervious to the coagulated light at the end of Draco’s
tunnel of wishful thinking. “It gives me hope, to think coagulation is still ahead. I like
imagining that on the horizon, or decades from now.”

“So you admit it—the hope doesn’t kill you.”

Draco rolls his eyes. “On the contrary. Hope keeps you alive.”

*****

Harry doesn’t see Draco for hours, some of the longest of his life. But slowly, his friends
trickle in, including Baz and missing Pansy, who’d gone ahead to the venue. Their greetings
are tense, loaded with strange emotions. Talk is focused heavily on the great potential for
conflict and run-throughs of the plan, peppered with an occasional mention of the
performance itself when one of them remembers to incorporate something positive.

Their dress, too, is proof of the underlying plans. Only Hermione is in a dress, with plans to
stay on the ground—she and Baz will be their earthbound backup, neither fantastic on a
broom—but even that has a slit in the side, ‘for movement’ she says pointedly to Ron.

The concert hall is just along the river, and Harry’s been there before when he was allowed to
sit in its posh, padded seating, but the view from backstage gives him an idea of Draco’s own
daunting perspective of a performer. The sea of faces dwarfs the waterfront behind him, full
of unassuming donors, classical music enthusiasts, friends and family. He scans them as if
he’ll recognise six Peregrines worth of audience members dressed finely and seated patiently.
He does spot Fion. And Marise, beside the entire polo group—Tola, Klara, Chris, Graeme,
even Dev. Far closer to the stage sits Hermione, waiting stiffly but politely in a dazzling red
beside Baz, blue hair standing out brightly among the concertgoers.

Try as he might, he won’t find the guest he wishes to hear Draco’s performance the most;
Teddy has been forbidden from attending. He’d argued emotionally, vehemently, when they’d
told him, swearing he wouldn’t try to help, pledging pacifism, but that wasn’t their concern.
Draco and Harry feared him seeing the worst, sunlit and centre stage, should the plan fall
apart.

With a frown, Harry twists away from the curtain leg and startles when he finds himself a few
inches from Pansy.

“Draco wants you,” she says in a monotone, not even blinking at his surprise. Unlike the
uneasy chatting everyone had taken up at Grimmauld Place prior to show time, she’d been at
ground zero with the performer and target all afternoon. It must’ve been a grim setting.

“O-okay.”

She spins, sleek ponytail jumping in the air, and he follows unquestionably.

The green room is small and empty except for one long-legged, pacing form. It is an unusual
practice for Draco, if one is accustomed to his pre-performance ritual, a visibly relaxed and
internally retrospective picture of experienced preparation. This, Harry has always been
certain, was in part because he was never alone before a show, always one of many
instrumentalists, in front of whom he’d never dare to show any apprehension. Even alone,
though, the antsy walking catches Harry off guard. He barely relaxes at the sight of him and
Pansy, which turns out to be just the sight of Harry; when he turns, she’s already left them
alone.

“Pansy’s been a godsend,” Draco says first, stopping in front of him as if they’d been meant
to see each other again before the performance.

“She’s really made up for insinuating I’d aided in your potential murder last winter.”

“There’s no time to be smart,” Draco scowls. “I’ve got to be on in five minutes.”

“I know, I was in position,” says Harry.

“I just realised I hadn’t said—well, we hadn’t revisited since the Obliviation much at all,
really—I was thinking… even if the James thing was about us being good parents, you’d be a
good one no matter what, er, help you had. So even should you be a single parent, you’ve sort
of been one before, and James would—”

“Shut up,” Harry says quickly, a bit harshly, hearing the tinge of fear in his voice. Draco
stuttering through that speech was his own fearful tell. “Shut up.”

Draco’s mouth closes in surprise.

“Send me in to wish me luck, for me to wish you luck, to talk bloody weekend plans, but
none of this… this contingency planning. I don’t want to hear your wishes.”

“That seems unfair. The planning’s been done. Teddy’s been banished. I’ve been scheduled
for homicide.”

“No more than me,” he argues, strained. “It’s both of us at risk or neither of us.”

Draco runs a hand through his hair and shakes his head. “This is a terrible time for denial,
Harry. You did the research. We repeated the research. They’ve said my name over the
compass, it’s their aim on me that will be unmissable.”

“Then I’ll be unmissable when I’m standing in front of you at every moment possible.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

Something’s come over Harry by seeing him one more time, watching his chest rise and fall,
like it did in the shop the day he’d been attacked. A selfishness that threatens to override
heroism. “It’s so tiring, being brave,” he says. “I’m knackered. I want to be weak. Just
walking to the piano is a death wish. We should have cancelled.”

Draco’s frowning. He glances at the clock. “You know I never would have submitted like
that. We’ve got to stand strong. And you want revenge, too. You would regret running the
instant you did.”
“Then-then, if you really stood strong you wouldn’t talk about the possibility of failing in
this. You wouldn’t mention James or speak hypothetically—”

“PLEASE,” Draco snaps. The volume of it falters Harry to a halt. It’s like a slap to the face.
“Will you please just let me tell you I love you? Don’t argue. Sit and listen. Bask in the
beauty of a difficult, emotional conversation.”

When Harry nods silently, chided and pained, he continues.

“I just wanted to say to… be happy. Make family whatever you want it to be, be that James,
be that just you and Teddy, hell, be that moving in with the Granger-Weasleys. You are…” He
clears his throat. “You are sunlight, when you’re happy. It would be such a shame for the
world to go dark just because I’ve…” He at least has the decency not to say it. “And keep up
with piano. You’ve got the potential, if you would give it perseverance. But you tend not to
repeat sections once you’ve ‘got the gist’ for them, when it’s the repetition that truly commits
it to muscle memory. Understand?”

Another silent, astounded nod.

“Thank you for… for this. Just, you know, all of this. Our life.”

“Any time,” Harry murmurs, unable to think of something more appropriate.

There’s much that they don’t say. Harry finds that it feels rather limp to say any of it back,
though he feels it all. Original, heartfelt words find no purchase on his tongue. All he can
think is ‘Don’t die’, which would rank low for a pep talk, and would be the first time he’d
ordered such a thing while Draco stood in his proper orchestral attire.

They don’t speak, either, about the four unknowns, that they’ll be on Peregrines, too.
Certainly, any doubt towards Harry’s piano-making goes unsaid. It is enough, kind words
about love aside, for Draco to put his trust in him by sitting at it. Explaining that he cares for
Harry, wants the best for him, believes in him, is simply redundant once he’s planned his
survival around trusting his woodworking.

Harry’s back by Pansy and Luna in the wings of the stage before he notices he hadn’t kissed
Draco when he’d finished saying his piece and ushered him out, a simple fact that rocks him
unnecessarily as though it’s doomed them through baseline superstition. He wants to run
back, but then applause starts. The curtains are opening. In the wing opposite them, Ron,
Blaise, and Neville stand vigilant, and he searches around them for a glimpse of Draco’s
approaching figure.

An arm, then, so sudden and unexpected that he thinks it’s Pansy pulling him further out of
sight of the audience, grabs his waist from behind. A split second after he registers the arm as
Draco’s it pulls him close and tight and into a fast, startling, forceful kiss. He’s barely got
time to react before he’s watching Draco’s back walk on stage for one of the most nerve-
wracking moments of the afternoon—his moment of highest visibility without touching the
wiggentree wood.
Harry’s not the only one with his eye immediately on the air when Draco emerges from the
side of the stage for his seemingly snail-like walk to the piano. Ron, too, has his face
skyward. But the blue over the south bank is unmarred. And then Draco takes his hands and
throws the tails of his coat behind him with elegance as he sits, and despite his best efforts,
Harry can focus on nothing but the opening notes. He tries not to think of it as a swan song.
He tries to think of it as nothing but what it was meant to be; a seminal concerto, personal,
meaningful, brilliant, even if his hand grips his broom firmly as he listens.

He remembers lucidly the desire to remember musical terms when under the Obliviation,
dying for the lost language to describe Draco’s music, but now, with all of it returned, he
finds that it floats away regardless. He’d heard these movements often, when they were first
being mused into existence, when they were being slashed and rewritten, when they were
overworked in the last week, and thought of them in terms of tempo or expressiveness,
compared them to his previous works, to previous revisions. Standing there, he thinks of it
again only in the naïve, illiterate way he had when he’d known the sound of Draco’s playing
hardly at all.

The first movement is slow to start, ambling, like a walk on the beach. It sticks its feet in the
muddy sand by the water but refuses to touch the tide’s breathing rise and fall. Occasionally,
the waves come too close, the movement scampers back, sudden like one of Pansy’s
screeching giggles, then gets shy, slow again, slower even than before, until something in the
tempo ekes the personality back out. Draco is finger painting, coaxing images with keys.

He barely breathes between the first and the second movements, but it starts so suddenly that
he has no choice but to gasp. Luna, beside him, has her hands pressed flat together by her
lips, and Pansy looks like a statue. Draco’s hands crash onto the keys, a loud, unmissable
chord, and his hair finally shakes from its unflappable position to fall in his face. His hands
come down, again and again, major chords, fast like yelps, gone as soon as they come. This
movement is loud and unpredictable in its arrival. It’s a tennis match. Back and forth. Give
here, take there. Furious, but he can’t tell with what. Love? Frustration? Desire? By the time
it transitions into something slower, Harry needs to take a breath like he’s run a race. And it
finishes like that—like it’s just won a sprint, hands on its knees, breathing hard but grinning,
pants becoming slow exhales, stippled with breathy laughs, all in good fun.

Harry’s been gripping his broom white-knuckled for twenty minutes, standing with his knees
locked, and he’s starting to entertain that maybe he can loosen his hold. He’s starting to think
Draco’s actually a little bit of a prodigy—a term he usually avoids because it would negate
the hard practice he’s watched him put in. But practise alone feels like it wouldn’t explain
how he’s playing a concerto Harry’s heard a thousand times and making it feel as if it’s the
first.

And if Draco’s going to completely upend the traditional form of a concerto, if he’s going to
take the movements slow-fast-slow instead of fast-slow-fast—in the imprecise way Harry’s
capable of thinking right now—then the third movement will be lyrical, much slower than
he’d rushed it the last time Harry saw it practised.

Sure enough, it’s soft, expressive, gentle. Careful, if he were to put it another way, like a
game of chess. It ruminates thoughtfully on every phrase, plans each move expertly, but
executes itself with a nonchalance that’s only achieved through effortful practice. Harry grips
his broom even tighter as the final chords ring out and, after a momentary silence, the
applause starts up again. Through the celebration, he finds Ron’s eyes. He doesn’t look too
relaxed. He flicks his head back to the stage so Harry pays attention again, just as Draco
bows and takes his second piano-less walk across the wide stage.

When he looks at Harry, he smiles widely without showing teeth, and Harry breaks into his
own smile for just a second before his face gapes wide. He points behind Draco, shouts,
“HEY!” of all things, the first word to escape his lips in unexpectedness, and Draco ducks as
he turns back around, a jet of green light breezing past his ear. The crowd’s celebration turns
to panic, just as loud, and much happens during the single breath Harry intakes:

The man who’d fired off the first killing curse is on a Peregrine above the centre of the
crowd, and Harry doesn’t recognise him. But he recognises Dollus beside him looking
disappointed by the inaccuracy of a curse that hasn’t been helped along by the compass. He
raises his wand.

Dollus’ last moments will be Draco’s last if his martyrdom succeeds. But Draco’s twisting in
shiny black shoes, diving towards the piano he’s just poured his lifeblood into—added his
lifeblood to Harry’s, more like. He’s much closer to the instrument than he was to making it
off stage, a well-calculated choice. His body collapses on top of the keyboard just as a more
exacting jet of green light makes contact.

The compass isn’t a perfect tool. The spell hits, but it hits his hip, not his heart, in the urgency
of his dive. At the same moment, the piano appears to absorb a green, almost radioactive
glow that it slowly suffocates like a flame without oxygen until it returns to a polished black.
Draco gapes in shock at his body, Dollus falls limply from his broom, and Harry cuts past the
line of backstage, snapped into action by his husband’s working lungs.

On the stage, he can look up and see the five flyers high above the stage. Dollus, killed
instantly by breaking his promise, falls toward the remainders of the gasping crowd.
Hermione flicks her wand quickly in his direction to slow his fall between shots towards the
sky-bound enemies, while Baz sends a dizzying collection of spells in the air.

Another beam of red speeds towards the flyers from the stage and Harry turns to see Ron
pointing his wand up, mounting his broom. Blaise is doing the same and Neville, though a bit
unsteadily, swings a leg over his with the determination of defending his friends.

Harry runs to the piano, where Draco is still bent over the keys like he’s too shocked to be
alive to move. Harry touches his hip where the spell had, ignoring the scattering audience.

“Okay, Draco? OKAY?” he adds louder over the panic when he doesn’t answer immediately.
Draco nods then. “Well done,” he sighs, referring either to the performance or the quick
action he’d put towards saving his own life.

“Well done, yourself.” Draco pats the piano.

Harry has no time. He’s itching for retribution, just as Draco had predicted, and he needs to
hold his end of the plan. Reluctantly, he lets go of Draco’s hip and ducks just as a stunning
spell passes the gap where his shoulder had just been. It hits Draco’s squarely. He blinks in
surprise and they watch again as the light is absorbed by the piano, extinguished faster than
the deadlier killing curse.

“Back soon,” Harry promises, and he turns for the stage’s drop off, throws the broom
between his legs like second nature, and kicks off.

Instantly, he feels resistance. He jerks his head around. Draco’s run after him and is climbing
onto the back of his broomstick, a hand on the metal around the bristles to stop him from
rising. He catches the disapproval and shock in Harry’s eyes and shakes his head.

“No time to argue,” he says firmly, so resolutely and so true that Harry can do nothing but
glower. He kicks off before Harry gets the chance, wrapping his arms around his waist, and
they start unsteadily into the sky.

Harry can make out Hector now in the pack that’s flying desperately away from the
unexpected army of defence that is Draco’s family. The Peregrines are as fast as advertised,
risking a successful getaway, so Harry lays flatter and tries not to resent Draco for not
wanting to be left behind or for providing additional drag on the broom when his priority is
speed.

“You’re senseless!” he shouts as he thrusts forward, gaining on their friends. Draco’s hands
pull down on his waist in unspoken guidance and he dives quickly in response. Another
killing curse misses their heads.

“You’re welcome!” Draco says loudly in his ear.

They catch up while the concert hall fades like a pinprick into the distance. As the Peregrines
pick up speed, the various states of their brooms come into full play. Ron, who had fervently
denied one of Harry’s brooms over his own, is beginning to drop back, but he uses it to better
his aim, taking carefully positioned shots at the flyers. He manages to hit one, an unknown
man with long, tied back hair, who yelps and manages to stay on his broom, but falls off
when Neville catches him by surprise with a stunning spell while he’s trying to balance and
aim an avenging curse at Ron.

In a series of efficient, pre-planned spells, Blaise slows his fall, sends red sparks up, and
directs a glowing, non-corporeal path of gold between his falling body and the concert hall,
where Hermione and Baz will be presented the other end of the gold cord like a path of
crumbs. When finished, he grips his broom tightly again. He does a double-take when he
catches sight of Draco.

“You’re supposed to be at the piano, arsehole!” he yells through the wind.

“And sit patiently while the men who hurt Harry get away?”

“One of them’s already got himself killed!”

“One more to go,” Draco growls darkly. “And their accomplices for good measure!”
Harry’s attention isn’t on the words flying above him, but is ahead on the group of four
remaining flyers who’ve suddenly huddled close as if talking. When he opens his mouth to
tell Draco and Blaise to quiet, they fan out suddenly, growing fainter and too spread thin to
follow as a group.

“Shit,” he mutters. “They’re separating.”

“We can’t let them get away,” Ron shouts from his position at the helm of their gooselike V
formation.

“What do we do?” Pansy asks in a show of uncharacteristic subordination, watching him

carefully for instruction.

“We separate, too.”

“Is that safe?!”

“Not entirely… er, no,” Ron responds, looking distracted. He glances behind them, the
ground fading below misty clouds. “Neville and Blaise. Pansy and Luna. Harry and Draco,
apparently…”

“You alone, Weasley?” says Blaise, brows furrowed. Harry can’t help but notice the brooms
are growing smaller on the horizon while they’ve slowed to talk.

“Won’t be necessary,” Draco says behind him. “One of them’s paired off with Hector.”

“Helpful—someone who can aim for Draco without dying,” mutters Ron. “Any more tips,
Harry?”

“Oh, er, aim for the broom tails and set them on fire if you can. Imbalance is that broom’s
greatest weakness. Or force them to overcorrect with spells from multiple directions. Don’t
try to match their speed, you’ll put yourself at risk if you’re not a seasoned flyer.”

“Heard, Harry. No time to waste!” Blaise lays flat on his broom and turns his head to Neville.
“Brace yourself, mate. We’ll take the twat far left,” he tells the rest of them. “Remember—
red sparks, location tether for Granger, and do what you must.”

“Gold sparks to call for help!” Ron shouts after their leaving forms. Neville waves a hand in
confirmation.

“Careful, lads,” Luna says seriously, soberly, before soaring off after her wife.

Harry banks right, Ron beside him, Draco holding tight to his waist. There’s no question that
they’ll be on Hector and his partner. It’s undoubtedly why Draco had defied their careful
planning, why he’d joined at all.

“Lean down,” he instructs, laying flat himself. He feels Draco’s chin on his back, his body
close, and he puts all the speed he can into the Firebolt. He’s glad he’d chosen it; their history
does him more good than he’d admit to a non-broom maker. They understand each other, he
thinks, in the same way he and his wand do.
When they finally gain again, the first stunning spell is so closely followed by a second and
third that Harry dives and then keeps diving, metres lower than Ron and barely escaping
contact each time. He can’t catch his breath or lift his wand to counter. The spells keep
directing towards him no matter how much Ron aims with his own curses towards the two
men.

“They’re not going to let up so long as we stay within range.” Draco’s voice in his ear,
calming and stressful, like both a brother in arms and the entity he’d protect most fiercely.
The two together is hard to manage. He begs himself to trust Draco as his own adept partner,
to remember his ferocity, his fury in the woods.

“You’d think Hector would be more careful about hitting you when it could be his end!” he
shouts back. He swerves left so suddenly that Draco’s body slips behind him and his fingers
dig into Harry’s ribs to hold him in place.

“Sorry,” he grunts. His sudden bracing with both hands loses them the persistent shield
charms he’d been throwing up at each torrent of spells. “Hector’s having a field day; trying to
hit you is his best chance of accidentally hitting me without actually aiming to hurt me. It’s
his loophole.”

Harry’s eyes widen as he climbs again, a nasty-looking curse brushing under their feet. “Oh
god, you’re right,” he says. “We should’ve stuck you on your own broom. I’ll get on Ron’s
and—”

“HARRY!”

They’re moving forward with great speed and shifting laterally to dodge spells like Bludgers,
but Harry finds it in him to seek out his friend’s urgent shouting from somewhere above. His
heart jumps into his throat—Ron has a single hand gripping his broom while he dangles
below, a tantalisingly easy target. Harry skids to a halt, feels one of Draco’s hands leave his
side to direct a shield charm at Ron, and he points his own wand at their aggressors, who
seem to also have stalled in the sky, just too far away for him to read their expressions.

He can’t understand why Ron isn’t climbing back on his broom. Instead, he’s staring at them
with wide eyes, jerking them repeatedly at Hector and then down at his own feet. Harry tries
to balance deflecting the flyers relentless spells with piecing the communicative expression
together until he exclaims, “Oh my god, finito!” and Ron moves like a breath let out, freed
from the petrification spell.

“Thank Merlin I’d gripped the broom already,” he croaks, looking pale. “Or I’d have done a
brilliant impression of Dollus at the ha—DUCK!”

Harry ducks instinctually, another killing curse whizzing past him. Too many in one day. He
should have made a broom out of wiggentree wood. But he had, rather characteristically, only
been thinking of Draco.

“Blimey, Ron,” he gasps. “We’ve got to get the upper hand or—”
A great flattening feeling crashes into his chest like he’s been hit by three Bludgers at once,
knocking his breath out and he catches Ron’s stunned face a moment before the world begins
to spin. He’s falling. And falling fast. Does that mean Draco’s falling too?

It’s like that first Obliviation day all over again—him dropping and Draco saving him—but
Draco had saved him because he’d left him safely on the ground, not taught him to love
brooms again. The fact that he was alive and falling, that it had clearly been a stunning spell,
felt like all the luck he deserved. The crushing landing would be only fair.

He does grapple with his wand, trying to slow his own fall—he’s not suicidal. But there’s a
reason Quidditch players are more often saved by referees than by themselves. In the panic
and dizzying, whistling dive, he can barely lift an arm.

A blur streaks toward him in the air, first far away, then closer, closer still, until he can make
out Draco’s determined face. They crash through the tree line at the same time, then
something yanks hard on his arm and he moves for the first time in what feels like hours
away from the ground. It only just pads his fall, though. The forest floor arrives with boorish
speed, he hears a crunch and feels a sharp pain somewhere in his body that he can’t pinpoint.

He’d felt a hand in the fall, but now he thinks he’d dreamed Draco on the broom because he
lays alone in the dirt. Birds squawk like he’s interrupted their afternoon by crashing. The sky
spins between leaves.

“Harry?”

He’d closed his eyes for a second to stop the revolving branches above him and when he
opens them, Draco’s holding his cheeks. His face is covered in thin scratches left by the
brush, his eyes saucers.

“Ron?” he asks, clearing his throat.

Draco looks twice as worried. “Draco,” he gasps in correction.

“No,” Harry groans, using his right hand to sit up, scared to move the left. It still sends
something piercing through his side. Draco helps him, also glancing down and up repeatedly.
“Where’s Ron?”

“Around, surely. Maybe still flying—I don’t know, Hector and the other man both hit you at
once, I sped after, I… think I dislocated your shoulder pulling you up. I’m so sorry.”

“You…” That would explain the sharp pain when he breathed, when he so much as shifted.
“Oh,” he says. “You can do a quick mend, can’t you? We need to get back in the air, we
need…”

“Why do you think I snatched you up?” Draco asks, looking distressed. “When I reached for
you as you fell, I lost my wand. I can try yours, but with a healing spell and someone else’s
wand… and it’s not just your shoulder—have-have you looked?”
 He appears ill as he says it, reluctant to be the bearer of bad news if he hasn’t seen, which
makes Harry very much not want to look at all. But he doesn’t know how long they have
before he needs to jump back into action, so he very warily shifts his eyes downward. What
he sees, he hates. His stomach flips. The angle of his wrist and hand are horribly awkward,
like a child’s drawing, not quite right, like sketched from the memory of what a hand might
look like.

“Oh god,” he grunts, then takes a deep breath and aims a weak smile at Draco, feeling the
emergency need to bolster them. “Better me than you, though, eh?”

Experimentally, he tries to wiggle his fingers and when the sharp pain splinters up his arm,
Draco’s worried expression spins with the trees and the world fades black once more.

Chapter End Notes

Thanks for reading!

Feel free to leave some words below in the comments, or find me at

writandromance.tumblr.com. Doing my best to reply as often as I can, but know I read
them all (even the To Be Like Geese comments, thanks for the resurrected love there,
too)!
 Fantasy Overture
Chapter Notes

And for one last time: the title refers to Tchaikovsky's 'Romeo and Juliet' Fantasy
Overture. Enjoy!

See the end of the chapter for more notes

January 2013

“Hands where I can see them, Malfoy,” said Harry, putting on a gruff, low voice as he entered
the living room. “Step away from the piano. Nice and slow. We don’t need trouble.”

Draco dropped his hands quickly into his lap, exceedingly unamused by Harry in a way only
a life partner could be. “I can’t ‘yes-and’ your carryings-on today,” he sighed, rubbing his
fingers into the sockets of his eyes. “I’m focusing on what I’m presenting for revision. It
needs to be perfect.”

Harry made a huffed sound of doubt. “How can you get advice for revision from your
coworkers if it’s perfect? The whole point of getting their critique is that it’s valuable while
the composition’s still imperfect.”

“No,” he muttered, taking the intrusion as opportunity to sip his tea. Harry had made it for
him around ten that morning before he’d left home and since, in his ebbing attention, it had
grown cold and then been rewarmed by wand every hour or so, a miserably Sisyphean excuse
for a beverage.

“The point,” he explained, watching the other man fuss around in the messy space, “is that I
offer the humbleness of requesting critique, but they say ‘oh, Draco, it’s simply un-critique-
able. There’s nothing to change’.”

“That’s unrealistic, darling; nobody’s flawless.”

Harry moved through the room, tidying papers and gathering old teacups, seeming unaware
of the dragon-sized clue he’d just left for Draco. He didn’t call Draco things like that,
because Draco wouldn’t stand for them most days without countered pestering. No, Harry
and pet names clung to each other like castaways in the same wreckage, only pulled together
in extreme inebriation, extreme anxiety, or both.

He watched his husband with added information carefully, head cocked, and barely
remembered to respond.

“You are,” he answered lazily before Harry could notice the suddenly-attentive staring, the
decoded slip in his language.
And Harry simply rolled his eyes, a hand on a hip, the other still gripping the round mouth of
an empty teacup in his fingers. “Sure. Anyway, you’ve been telling me to take it slower for
days. You must’ve known I wouldn’t be doing that alone.”

“Work has slowed down, then?”

Harry had been busy like he’d never seen him, busier even than at the holidays. He’d been
digging through town for books; research on repairs or brooms or something he remained
quite vague about, and Draco hadn’t thought twice about it besides growing increasingly
worried that he was heading for some exhausted nosedive.

The question affected him strangely, though it was quite a straightforward one, Draco
thought. He chewed his bottom lip, searched the room with his eyes—toward the garden
window, toward the notes on the piano, anywhere but Draco’s face—and said
unconvincingly, “Yes. Yeah, slowed down enough.”

“Good. Maybe now you’re finally comfortable enough to disclose what’s given you such
grief in the workshop.”

But Harry waved a hand dismissively and shook his head. “Rather not. Let’s get takeaway
tonight.” He walked closer again and sat the empty cup down, freeing his hands to take
Draco’s. “Let’s… let’s talk about life, about… us. Like… where shall we go for our tenth
anniversary?”

“I haven’t thought about it much,” Draco shrugged, nodding pointedly to his music. Harry’s
work may have slowed down, but his hadn’t. Shortly after the recital was endorsed, he woke
up and gaped at his compositions as though he’d been under an Imperius curse when he’d
written them. Every day was a fight to find confidence in it again.

“Come off it, please. Give me something to work my daydreaming off of. We need goals.
Something on the horizon for when burnout hits. I need something to look forward to.”

“Fine. Tuscany. Somewhere rural. Nobody around. We’re unknown. Just wine and cheese and
late nights. Sex as loud as we wish. Lay-ins as late as we wish. You’d bring some little
whittling project to busy your hands and I’d write the kind of music I never manage in
London.”

“Hm, sure, you haven’t thought about it much.” Harry narrowed his eyes. “And here I was
thinking I’d fancy seeing the Parthenon.”

“We can go wherever you want to go.”

“Takeaway,” Harry sighed dramatically, shaking Draco’s limp arms in his hands. “Delhi
Kitchen?”

The ‘darling’ was still lingering in his consciousness, like a way Harry was telling him he
wasn’t okay without telling him in so many words. With that in mind, he removed a hand
from Harry’s, shut the keyboard, and stood.
It wasn’t a bad idea, taking the night away from the living room. Evenings spent together
when they had both been so overworked often turned into some of his favourites. A coming
together after so long preoccupied elsewhere. Those nights, takeaway-induced as this one
already was becoming, saw them talking about nothing for hours, chatting shit long enough
to end up on third drinks, picking at cooling cardboard boxes of rice and chicken, dipping
into the conversational realm of workplace drama or family gossip as the night lengthened.

He’d be surprised by the turn this night took, however, with Harry so strangely anxious-but-
loving, so focused on them. There was a feeling hanging thick in the air. It was sweet but
heavy. It felt like a dramatic change creeping towards their relationships, wanted or not, and
it made Draco want to take authority over it, to direct it before it directed itself. So after the
food had been packed away, the movie they’d hardly listened to had come to a close, and
they’d made no rush to get up again, he cleared his throat.

“I’ve been reflecting on something,” he said. “Something I hoped to mention only when we
had a moment to breathe.”

“Okay,” Harry said into a yawn.

“We don’t plan on moving anytime soon?”

Harry sat up straighter, wiped the slumber from his eyes. “Move? Why, do you want to
move? This place is just so safe…”

“No, no. I just… I suppose I was just thinking…” Had he ever hurried into an opportune
moment to discuss their lives without practising and still managed to sound confident? He
spoke slowly and intentionally to avoid the um’s and er’s that threatened to stammer into an
important topic. “We have… all these bedrooms. Though it is usually just the two of us. And
I… abhorred the way I was raised… as a child. So did you. So wouldn’t it—would you ever
—not now exactly, or next month, not next year if you didn’t want to—wouldn’t it be nice to
be the parents we wish we’d had? To someone who needs some?”

Harry listened with large eyes, and when Draco finished, he closed his mouth firmly. Draco
thought immediately it was a sign of a negative response; he’d just gotten Teddy to the point
of burgeoning self-reliance, after all. But he also had so much love to give, and spending it on
Rose and Hugo when Ron and Hermione went on dates would never properly suffice.

“Finish the phrase, Draco,” he murmured. “What are you really saying?”

“I’m saying… picture a child, here. Picture maybe… maybe James. Picture us as parents,
again, together.”

“It would feel different from Teddy, you know. No Andromeda every other week. No second
home. Never just the two of us, even sometimes.”

Draco breathed slowly, eyes darting between Harry’s. He was trying to read whether that was
a comment against it or just a warning. As if he hadn’t thought about this comprehensively.
“We know all that. But what do you say?” he asked. “Or—don’t say anything,” he added, just
as Harry said, “Yes.”

“Oh,” Draco mumbled. “Sorry, I wanted to make sure—”

“Yes,” Harry repeated.

“Will you sleep on it? Tell me tomorrow—I know, I know, you just told me,” he responded to
the unspoken but predictable refutation on the tip of Harry’s tongue. “But I truly will not be
able to get excited unless I know you’ve slept on it and answered from the heart and the
brain.”

“I told you I’d need something to look forward to after all this… this… work stress,” Harry
said elusively. “I think we’ll be a bit busy this year, but after that, it’ll be nice.”

“This is what I mean though.” Draco shifted to sit on his heels, facing Harry more directly.
He didn’t ask what Harry was so sure they’d be busy with. But two days from now, shoved
harshly into his own kitchen table before he’d even fully awoken, he’d wish he had. “A child
isn’t something you use as a light at the end of the tunnel. It’s a responsibility; sometimes a
messy one, an infuriating one.”

“I know,” Harry responded, a tad sharply, voice pitched up and offended. “I’m not thick.
Have you considered that maybe I’m even looking forward to a mess? To hard conversations
and-and late nights and early mornings. Do you not think I’m ready? I’ve raised Teddy and
he’s far from fucked up.”

“I’m not insinuating anything, Harry,” he replied, wide-eyed. “I’m just ensuring… This
would be quite the joint contract.”

“Piss off, so is marriage! We’ve done that quite well. I’ve been a great husband. I protect my
family and I wouldn’t mind if it got bigger. I’d love to give a home to someone who needs it,
so long as you aren’t opposed.”

“I brought up the adoption! Of course, I’m not opposed,” said Draco. “This is…” He lowered
his volume, relaxed his tensing body. “I wasn’t trying to challenge you,” he added softly. “I
just wouldn’t want to rush you into something.”

In the gentleness, Harry relaxed, too. His smile emerged slowly, like stepping into cold
waters, first pulling at the very corners, then widening, deeper and deeper. “You know I don’t
rush in. I’ve been thinking about this, too. But yes, for you, I will save my official answer for
tomorrow.”

‘Tomorrow’, for the second time, brought a strange look to his eye. Draco wouldn’t pry. If he
needed to know something, Harry would tell him. A peacefulness passed between them, then,
and they didn’t speak of children again until they were laying in the dark on their backs
falling asleep.

“I’d have a son,” Harry said aloud, apropos of nothing, breathy and wondrous.
“Yes,” said Draco. He waited quietly for the reply, but Harry said nothing again, and the next
audible noise from him was minutes later when his breathing grew louder and more even.

“So would I,” he told the night. “A son.”

August 2013

This time when Harry comes to, he’s propped against a tree and quickly discovers that it’s the
sound of tearing fabric that’s woken him up. A few paces away, too focused to notice his
opening eyes, Draco is ripping a tail from his tailcoat. He uses his hands but angrily points
Harry’s wand at stubborn, tailor-made seams when he reaches them.

“Costume chaaange,” Harry intonates gravelly, trying to smile. The sound of him pulls
Draco’s head his way like a spell. He abandons his task to fall on his knees by the tree in an
instant, speaking quickly.

“Oh, good, I didn’t want to wake you prematurely. I’ve got a spell to lower the pain—you are
feeling pain, aren’t you?” Harry’s face answers for him, tightly drawn and humorless. “—but
I needed you conscious to know it was working. In the meantime, I thought I’d—”

“Ruin a good tailor’s hard work?”

“Did you faint and forget this is a serious situation?” Draco mutters, glaring but mostly with
concern. “I fashioned a sling. So we can get back to bloody civilisation, have someone
capable look at you… I sent the gold sparks but… I assume everyone else is too busy with
their own lovely little battles to notice. And it may have given Hector our location, of course,
so time is of the essence.”

“Hit me, then.”

Harry grimaces as he shifts, then stays in a grimace, preparing himself. The pain is like a
magnet in his arm, polarised at the shoulder and fingers and absent at the centre.

The spell Draco casts sounds similar to the one Healers use at professional Quidditch
matches, and as it draws over his arm, it covers him in a concentrated, thick warmth like a
treacle or a hot mud soak. He shuts his eyes and breathes slowly in and out with it until he
feels a light kiss on the top of his head.

“That’s not part of the spell,” he mumbles, staring down at this arm, not again daring to
wiggle his fingers.

“No. A supplement just for you.” When Draco leans back and stows his wand, he purses his
lips with a frown. It’s not often that he sees Harry hurt. But when he does, he hates it. He’s
enraged even to find him with regular woodworking injuries, often vowing to find the
commissioner’s name for which broom had led to damage. He’s threatened a child or two,
late at night and just between the two of them, when treating some minor wound Harry had
taken on to stop a student from a greater disaster on the pitch.
The coattail is torn further down the middle. Harry leans his head forward while Draco ties it
around the back of his neck, then tries not to cry out when he gently bends his arm into an
angle that can sit in the cradle of the sling. The pain is better, but manageable only in the
sense that now he might make it on a broom back towards the concert hall with only minor
cussing.

“Keep my wand,” he wheezes when he gets to his feet. “Better in your hands right now,
anyway. Where are we do you think?”

“I think we’ve made it all the way to Putney Heath,” says Draco.

“Merlin.” It sounds like a long broom ride. Had it been that long on the way? “What about
Hector? We should wait. If he might be coming to us, we ought to let him.”

Draco freezes, head cocked and eyes half-lidded in clear disagreement. He doesn’t answer
until he’s turned his attention skyward, circling the trees like he’s searching for an easy flight
path back up.

“You’re not in a state for a duel.”

“I think I’ve duelled feeling much worse,” Harry rebuts, walking through the trees toward his
broomstick. It looks worse for the wear—wood nicked, bristles bent and torn—but usable.
“We could send up more sparks if—”

The bark by Harry’s head blasts apart with great force, sending splinters of wood flying and
him ducking and cussing.

“Shit!” he gasps, lowering his good arm from his face as Draco runs over. He shoves Harry
behind his body and raises his wand. It’s not until Harry follows the direction it’s pointing
that he sets his eyes on Hector, standing six metres away with furious eyes and a steady wand
hand. He can smell the charred wood behind his head still.

“GO AHEAD!” Draco shouts, his left arm rigid behind him, keeping Harry in line. “There’s
nothing but air and opportunity between us! But I’ll block it at least once and that’s all I need.
You’ll be dead before you get a second chance.”

“Acting the hero now, are you Malfoy?” Hector smiles thinly, stepping closer, never dropping
his wand. "It’s nice we can finally meet.”

He stops, now only a few metres from them, and leans to the side to catch Harry’s eyes. It
makes him feel more antsy for action, like he’s a child hiding behind his mother’s legs,
scared by the family friend they’ve run into at the supermarket. He understands the logic of
Draco as shield, the differing consequences should Hector wish to hex each of them, but he
itches for a weapon nevertheless.

“Surprised to see you today, too, Harry,” says Hector.

“Fuck off,” Harry spits, making to step towards him. He’ll use his fists, or summon the fury
of childhood that let him blow up aunts without a wand. Draco steps sideways and into his
path again.

“A little secret weapon today, weren’t you? You managed to shock me, but it was only a
temporary gain. Not worth your efforts. You’ve rejoined the wrong cause, the natural effects
will ensue.”

“You think you’re some vigilante? Some do-gooder?” Draco thrusts his wand forward but
doesn’t cast anything. His breaths—unlike Harry’s slow rolling anger—are fast; adrenaline,
fear, fury. “You’re no wasp,” he bites out, “you’re a bumblebee. You sting once and you die,
and for what? The amount of hate you must have inside to have the Unbreakable vow, to
know the risks and still pursue me… you’re worse than the people you hunt down.”

“And you’re no less hungry for a fight; you know that compass gave me perfect aim and yet
here you stand.”

Hector’s voice is even and cocky, but Harry’s regretful to realise he ought to be—him
injured, Draco with his wand, and Hector with perfect aim. He tries to gauge whether Draco
had surmised that it was Hector with compass-perfected aim, not Dollus and his hip-
connecting killing curse on stage, but if it’s flooded him with new concerns the way it’s just
flooded Harry, he can’t read it on the back of his neck; he hasn’t lowered his wand at all or
taken even a single step back.

“Because of how you treated Harry,” he responds, his voice shaky only to a degree that Harry
would notice. Perhaps he had just discovered, but would never back down now.

“What, charitably? You’re selfish if making him forget you deserves punishment of death.”

“Do not simplify life-threatening things.” Draco’s voice is hard again. Steady. “You would
have killed him if you needed to, and you mean to kill me.”

“You won’t, though,” Harry chimes in loudly, red hot in his veins, feeling the nerves come
through like a buzz telling him to move, act, speak, fight. “I’m not Draco’s only defence. You
never planned for him to have more than me. You meant for losing me to mean losing
everything, but he’s got family he trusts. And they’ll be here any minute.”

Hector chuckles, shifting his weight to one leg. His wand is held high still, but loosely. “You
don’t seem like Draco’s defence at all. You’re the one cowering behind him even though it’s
him I want dead. Why don’t you—”

His sentence, however he’d planned to finish it, is cut off by a jet of green light from Harry’s
wand in Draco’s hand, so fast and wordless that Harry sees the panic in Hector’s eyes even as
his wand raises a blocking spell in time. He almost counters with his own. Maybe that was
Draco’s intent, ever the chess player. Keen for impulsive reactions. Reading his opponent’s
moves and tendencies.

“Tricky, Malfoy.” His voice wavers, a hint of emotion peeking through.

“Draco, don’t,” whispers Harry. They can stun him, get answers, not reduce themselves to his
level, no matter how much Harry wishes to see him dead.
“Draco, don’t,” Hector mocks, smiling, like his close save has proven something of his life’s
purpose. “You can convince the world he’s changed who he is, but not me.”

“I’ve not changed who I am,” Draco growls. “I’ve learned. Grown. Unlike you. But you
don’t have to die today, I suppose, if that’s not what Harry wishes. Put the wand down.
You’re sacrificing yourself for a nonexistent cause, a phantom enemy. Your close-mindedness
will kill you.”

“I’m being close-minded?” His smile grows in disbelief. “I am? Draco Malfoy, calling me
closeminded.”

“It’s not 1997 anymore, halfwit. Harry’s love wasn’t a fluke, it was capable of recreation—
earned, twice. I have friends, colleagues, a career, a family. What do you have left?” He spits,
annunciation harsh and pulling no punches. In it, Harry hears the pain of a year together lost,
the raw frustration, finally with a proper outlet before him. “What have you lost to maintain
this old cause? Was it worth it? What is the point? Which of us hurt you enough to make all
our lives worth ruining?”

Hector opens his mouth, closes it, and opens it again. Harry’s leaning forward, desperate to
hear, to unearth the source of such venomousness, but the words from the slender man’s
throat are, “Avada kedavra.”

Harry’s breath stops in his throat, but Draco jerks his wand in a lightning-fast reaction, the
spell dissipates, and the forest goes silent just as Hector’s body hits the ground with a wholly
human thump. His eyes are wide open, his wand still clutched in his hand, and his jaw hangs
loose, like at any moment he may still answer Draco’s hanging questions.

“Oh my god,” says Harry first. They both stand still, Draco’s wand hand raised. “God,” he
repeats. He stumbles around Draco, who doesn’t stop him, and crouches, putting fingers to
his still warm neck. He feels no pulse.

“Broke his vow,” Draco says plainly, sounding drained.

Harry stands with a wince. Something about the suddenness of it all makes him want to
linger, to draw out a climax that shouldn’t have been so quick to die, but instead he glances at
him one last time and then finds Draco’s still-surprised eyes.

“If I don’t have eyes on Ron soon I’ll lose my mind,” he says quietly. “Please, do the stuff—
the gold trail for Hermione.”

Draco listens, looking disdainfully down at the body and sets the trail to Hermione with
efficiency, but to their surprise the gold tether grows taught vertically, just above the trees.
They glance at each other, brows equally furrowed.

“You don’t think—” Draco starts.

“She couldn’t be.”

“Could you get on the broom—”

“—if you fly it? Yes.”

He climbs awkwardly behind Draco on the broomstick, one arm still tucked tight to his chest,
and trusts all his balance in an arm pulled around his husband’s waist. He hooks his feet, too,
around Draco’s on the footrests.

“Alright?” Draco turns his head slightly back, not enough to really look his way.

“Yes, just go. Go.”

He kicks off. The trees are close. Draco’s face alone has the scratches to prove that they
hadn’t landed in a clearing, but he weaves through well, following the gold line higher and
higher until they emerge through the treetops again and almost collide directly into
Hermione. She yelps and wobbles on her broom with a white-knuckled grip, looking
surprised and relieved.

“Hermione!” Harry grins, surprising himself.

“Oh, both of you, thank Merlin,” she exhales. Out of the trees, the sky’s grown greyer,
foregoing the clear skies of Draco’s performance for an afternoon rain. Her hair has grown
wild in the breeze, almost as frazzled as her aura. “I’ve been looking for you.”

“It must be dire if it’s summoned you into the air.”

She shakes her head grimly. “I kept saying, I wasn’t meant to ride a broom today, and if I did,
everything was worse than we thought—what happened to your arm?” she asks, eyes
growing large.

“Oh, bad fall.” He pulls himself closer to Draco, readjusting his feet.

“Are we the last to return?” asks Draco. “Why’ve you been sent after us?”

“Everyone’s returned, they’ve just been in… differing states of utility. Blaise is preoccupied.
Ron’s already talking to the Aurors… The Wreakers needed to be managed. Most are alive,
except Dollus.”

“And Hector.” He nods downward.

“Tried and failed, did he?”

Draco nods.

“Well, that was a given, up against you,” she says rather kindly. “Ron’s waiting at the
hospital; good thing, too. Looks like you’ll need one, Harry.” Her look lingers, nauseated, on
the knuckles and fingers peeking through the expensive fabric of Draco’s suit coat. Harry
can’t blame her.

*****
Ron’s taken the brunt of the questioning already when they reach St. Mungo’s, appearing to
practically hold court in the waiting room. He sits surrounded by Aurors—some Harry
recognises, some he doesn’t—looking stern-faced and answering curtly. He glances often at
the clock, but when he looks up again to find Harry standing below it in the doorway he
cracks into a smile, does a double-take at his arm, and grimaces. Harry makes the same face
back but caps it off with a quick upturned half smile to convey that he’s more alright than not.
It all takes few seconds at most and communicates everything wordlessly necessary between
them.

And good thing, because then Harry’s being whisked away without a chance to talk,
separated from the action into an empty room with a delightful view of London’s best brick
walls and exterior plumbing, only a thin sliver of sunlight creeping down from above the thin
alley. It’s secluded, though, meaning to him that no one will chance a look up and catch sight
of him—he’d thought he’d seen a flash of camera on the way inside. He’s not here for the
view, anyway. He’s here for this gnawing pain in his muscles to disappear, and he shivers in
the cold of the room as he shrugs awkwardly out of the makeshift sling and his own suit
jacket, revealing a bruised and battered left limb to the Healer on duty.

“Oh… my,” she says, her voice pitched high. For a moment she seems to take it in, then puts
a smile on and meets his eyes. “Don’t you worry, we’ll have you in perfect condition faster
than you can say ‘ouch’. I’ve seen several flying injuries—I’d wager you have, too.”

“I have,” he replies, sucking in a breath as she gently pulls his arm straighter. “You have—ah
—no, I’m alright—a curse remedy department, right? Because Draco should go. There was a
curse pertaining to him. It wasn’t cast on him exactly, but I… I don’t know, maybe he should
—fucking—ah, sorry.”

Pain had rushed through his arm top to bottom, like bones clicking into place, not without
force. The Healer nods empathetically. “I’ve found it’s best if I don’t warn of that bit,” she
says. “Move your fingers?”

He does, cautiously watching his fingertips dance. They’re no longer bent strangely, or
bruised with the trauma of the fall.

“And not to worry; your husband was sent straight there. Funny, Auror Weasley had the exact
same concern as you. He told my colleague Wendy to check on him there, then his wife asked
the same when she returned after you. A Mr Zabini mentioned it, too, though he should have
been more preoccupied with his own health… a loyal set of friends, you all have.”

Harry looks up from his arm. “Wait, Blaise? Is he okay?”

She glances at him, then frowns as though she’s said too much. “Sit here for a spell to make
sure you’re not lightheaded. I’ll send Draco your way when they’ve finished. Would you like
me to tell the nice Aurors outside that you need rest?”

He had, indeed, heard the growing sound of voices outside the door. He’s knackered and
pained, but it seems best to handle it all in one go. “I’d rather have it done with,” he sighs,
rotating his wrist in his right hand. “Thank you though.”
Her mouth quirks up again. “Not a worry. You keep an eye on that arm, if anything feels like
it healed improperly, you come right back and I promise not to take it personally. Tricky
business, hands.”

She leaves through the door and it barely swings shut before opening again. Ron, to his great
relief, is the first Auror through the door, still dressed for the recital. He embraces Harry,
thumping his good shoulder as he pulls back.

“Bloody hell, mate, watching you fall was unsettling. Who knew Draco could still fly like
that, though?”

“You thought that was unsettling?” Harry says. “We’d left you all alone with Hector and his
friend up there.”

“Nah,” Ron shakes his head. They’re both completely ignoring the visitors who’ve followed
him in. “Hector only stayed a second before he went after you. You fell so fast, though, I
think he lost sight of you pretty quickly.”

“And Blaise?” Harry thinks to ask, eyes widening. Thankfully, Ron waves a hand.

“He was hit with a nasty spell. Sliced him up something awful. But he’s healing fine based on
the fact that he’s mouthy as ever and Marise hasn’t let go of his hand since he got here. Baz
said he practically stumbled into her arms when he made it back to the concert hall.”

Neville did a great job of getting him back, Harry learns. And Luna and Pansy, too, are fine.
According to Ron, they’re in the waiting area splattered with blood. “Not mine,” Luna tells
the nurses sweetly each time they inquire.

The Aurors leave just about as fast as they’d come. They ask for his series of events, nod that
they match Draco’s, and wish him well. He has half a mind to order them into an apology to
Draco for refusing to take the situation seriously, but Baz is in the throng and he’s grateful to
him. When Draco returns, he finds out Ron’s already done about the same anyway. He brings
even more information to the recovery room, like how they’d tried to give Ron trouble for
including civilians, and how he’d countered that he couldn’t stop them from coming to a
friend’s aid when the Ministry had chosen personal opinion over support for wizards who
need them.

Draco sounds tired as he says recounts the events, just as ready to be done with it all.

“Your hand looks better,” he adds at the finish, running his fingers lightly over the knuckles.

“Hard for it to have looked worse.”

“No curse problems on my end,” Draco tells him after a long pause. “And the Aurors are
done with us. So we can go. The Duke of Limbs is likely waiting for us.”

Harry doesn’t need to be told twice. He’s never wanted to see his godson so badly.

*****
“Then Mr Weasley said you were fine but your arm was broken and that Draco had leapt off
the stage to join you on your broom and you went flying off over the crowd and the piano
was still green and you were tossing curse after curse in their direction and weaving and
ducking like from Bludgers all the way until you disappeared into the clouds, and Baz
vanished the man who fell into the crowd somewhere and everyone mostly stood around
panicking or running or disapparating until Blaise showed up covered in blood with Neville
holding his weight and that’s when Hermione got on a broom and she went flying off in a
dress and everything, tied it between her legs like a superhero, and then most of you never
made it back because you went straight to St. Mungo’s—and I can’t believe I missed it all
because you doubted whether Harry’s piano would work properly.”

Teddy stops for a gasping breath, completely out of air, and makes as if to start in again, but
Draco puts a hand up. “I see the word of mouth is already spreading quite extravagantly.”

“Mr Weasley's story had gaps. I took liberties. But I didn't take liberties with that injury; I
saw the photo of Harry entering St. Mungo’s. That was ghastly.”

“Thanks,” Harry sighs, flexing his fingers again. Something feels wrong, increasingly, when
he does it but he can’t tell if the strange feeling in his gut is really about his hand or
something else entirely.

He knocks the toes of his trainers together. They’d caught him out back, aimlessly flying
after an old Snitch Harry had bewitched specifically for practising dives. Too antsy to sit still.
“So they’re both dead?”

“The two from the workshop, yes. Their acquaintances, no.”

“If they just… they just stopped trying to kill Draco, they would have been fine.” Teddy
shakes his head wondrously. Harry wishes it was a moment where he could offer wisdom but
he has nothing to add.

“Amor animi arbitrio sumitur, non ponitur,” Draco offers, after regarding Harry and his
silence. “We choose to love, we do not choose to stop loving. They were very unhappy
people. There was too much hate in their hearts, not enough work to solve it. They had an
unhealthy outlet for that hate and it got them killed.”

“So you feel sorry for them.”

Draco shakes his head immediately. “Our feelings do not excuse our actions. But I’m glad the
other men on their side this afternoon didn’t take such a life-or-death approach. They’ve
caved like we couldn’t believe. Ron says he’s gotten the name of every person run from
London.”

Teddy hums, not looking pleased. “Will they come back? Now that they’ve been caught?”

This time, Draco doesn’t have a good answer either. They weren’t run from London without
help.
The next morning they visit Blaise, who’s been busied with blood replenishing potions, and
Harry’s still flexing his hand absently while they share their stories and offer each other
company. He evades the photographers this time by taking the floo and spends most of the
afternoon in the garden with Neville, who wants to try planting a sapling born of his
wiggentree propagations. Harry tests his hand’s dexterity through this; digging the little well,
watering the soil, taking care with its delicate stalk, and finds that his hand is throbbing by
the time he’s done. He ignores it as habitually as he used to ignore his scar.

But the hand needles at him when he least expects it, like when Draco walks past the living
room without stopping to play, or Teddy sits out back looking lonely and tossing his Snitch. It
needles when he makes dinner for three, whether he’s been hard on his hands or not, and it
needles in the workshop, sifting through back orders and imagining how hectic it will be
again to juggle front and back when Teddy leaves for school in September.

In part, the throbbing feels deserved, like the price he’s paid to have Draco alive. He manages
to convince himself it’s soothing to be reminded that he’d been healed from that mangled
mess at all, though deeper down he’s anxious to take up his tools again in the workshop and
evaluate the change in his skill there.

It’s not until the third day after the recital that Draco notices it.

“Your hand—do you do that as a nervous tick now, or is something not right?” he asks after
Harry’s cooked for them all. He’d had the heavy cast iron skillet held in his left hand for too
long and instigated the aching.

He stops flexing his fingers at once. He glances at Teddy observing then looks back into
attentive grey eyes. “Er, both?” he offers in a mumble, predicting the reaction.

Draco drops his fork with a clatter, eyes flashing with sudden emotion. “Harry Potter, you
were supposed to say if it didn’t feel right! How bad, on a scale of one to ten?”

He focuses on the feeling, separates the pain into categories—the wrist, the knuckles. “Not
much, just a two, maybe,” he answers honestly.

Draco throws his hands up. “Merlin’s sake, Dartle, your two is anyone else’s five. Eat and
we’re going.”

“‘Your two is a five’? Come off it, that’s a bit aggrandising. My two is a two.”

“Fine. But I’d force you up for anything above a zero when it’s meant to be a zero,” he
argues, though it’s not an argument, Harry can tell. It’s decided. So he doesn’t put up a fight.
Dinner is shovelled in quickly and he’s strong-armed back to St. Mungo’s, where he’s at least
relieved to find the same Healer on duty. She notices him the second they reach her floor.

“Hand giving you trouble, Harry?” she asks, stopping in the hallway. He shrugs. Beside him,
Draco nods grandly. She smiles. “Not to worry, we’ll get you a room for the night, take care
of it.”
“For the night?” he stammers. But she’s already bustling down the hallway, gesturing back to
him in conversation with another Healer.

There’s a small mishap with the correction of the ‘proximal interphalangeal joint’ in his index
finger, according to the Healer who finds him a room. He’s nice, with gentle hands and kind
amber eyes.

“It’s not a big problem,” he says in a tone that makes him believe it, flicking his attention
between Harry and Draco as he shares the information. “Just requires a little regrowing.”

He lets Harry’s hand go, then leaves them to find his potion and something to sleep in while
they say a quick goodbye.

“You and Blaise can have a little sleepover,” Draco jokes, knocking his shoulder. “Tell scary
stories and beat each other with pillows. And he gets out tomorrow, too, so Pansy and I can
come and collect you together and ask if you want to get together and play again soon.”

Harry laughs good-naturedly. Draco kisses him on the forehead, just on his scar, like he does
when he’s at his most concerned, then again on the lips. Teddy hugs him and they’re gone
before the Healer’s even returned. The potion he hands over when he does appear is
reminiscent of the one he’d last taken at twelve but slightly worse, like it’s missing some
added honey or sweetness Madam Pomfrey had kindly added for him once upon a time.

The night, however, is an easier sleep than at twelve. His bones, for the most part, are
completely grown, and it’s only a slight twinge in his hand that threatens his slumber, nothing
worse than he’d already been handling for days. When he wakes again, sunlight is streaming
in and breakfast is already being served. Someone knocks on his door only twenty minutes
later. He livens up even more, ready to see Draco’s face, but it’s not Draco at all.

“My oh my, you look much better than I’d prepared myself for,” Anastasia says, setting a
coffee down with his name scrawled on the side. “Pink-cheeked and everything.”

“Anastasia,” he says, clearing his throat and pulling the sheets higher. “What a surprise. I’d
say ‘I meant to ring you’ but that sounds horribly similar to a run-in after a bad first date. I
really have been meaning to call.”

She laughs lightly and pulls up a chair. “Well luckily or unluckily, depending on your
perspective, I’ve kept up rather well through the papers. Though I was sure Miss Parkinson’s
article on the separation was a stunt.”

Harry lifts his shoulders guiltily.

“Is there a correction coming? She’s a talented writer, I hope there are no lasting effects for
her, though I’m sure she’d do it ten times over for her friends.”

“They’re working on it now.”

“And what are you working on?” She leans forward. It’s strange to see her not in her office,
without the notes in her hand, the vegetation out the window. Instead of a blouse or nice
dress, she’s dressed as though he’s caught her just before or after a run. “Feeling okay?”

He hesitates just long enough for her to catch.

“I thought you might need a chat, Harry. I’m still me, you’re still you, this just isn’t my
office.”

For a minute, neither of them speak. He flexes his hand, which feels completely ordinary, and
stares past her at the window beyond the second, empty bed and its clearer view of London.
She waits patiently while he pinches his second knuckle between his index and thumb until,
finally, he clears his throat and the words pour out; a complete retelling of the last week and a
half, including the battle in the air and after he’d met the ground so unexpectedly, finishing
with a wobbly explanation of the regrowth potion and the overnight stay.

She listens and responds empathetically, little hums and ughs as he speaks, but when he
finishes she doesn’t do him the honour of unravelling the entire event emotionally for him to
digest. They regress into quiet again. He sips his coffee.

He takes a breath.

“Draco hasn’t said ‘I told you so’ yet.”

She cocks her head. “Should he?”

“He’s always explained his reasoning for not flying, and I’ve always dismissed it, but now
I’m proof of it. Right down to the imprecise healing process.”

“But you’re feeling okay now, aren’t you? And you’ll get back on a broom. You’ve proven
his point, but you’ve proven that it’s a brief obstacle when a great team of Healers are
involved.”

“Yeah, my hand is… fine,” he answers vaguely, watching her expression, gauging it, making
a choice. “And I feel… I feel… Well, I should feel whole, but I feel hollow,” he admits. “I
know Draco feels… er, well, he hasn’t touched his piano yet. So unlike him. And I just think
about Hector standing there raising his wand and almost saying something and I want to yell,
‘Say it! Explain yourself! What have I done to you? Why this?’ but I never can.”

She leans back and crosses one leg over the other, a finger to her lips. In her expression he
sees careful consideration, the kind where he’s handed her a word problem and she’s going to
try and solve it.

“In the stories we read,” she says slowly, “there’s usually a tidy ending, isn’t there? A perfect
set of motives, a carefully drawn out reason that the adversary did what he did.”

“But this isn’t one of those stories,” Harry guesses.

She shrugs. “Maybe not. Maybe so. You do know why he did what he did; he disliked Death
Eaters enough to die for the cause. And maybe you don’t know the exact reason he grew so
radical, but do you need to? You will disagree with whatever it is. You know Draco better.”
“I guess the hollowness could be that. But I keep thinking, too—without more answers, I feel
like it could happen again. Anyone could decide they hate Draco and come after us.”

“But this was an outlier, an increasingly more significant outlier with each passing year,
right? Draco is mostly liked. Sure, there was a dip a couple years ago, but you’ve had dips.
Draco is liked and disliked just as complexly as you are by now. And you’ve never stopped
being vigilant for your own wellbeing, have you? We’ve discussed this greatly when talking
about the war. Would it be so novel for that vigilance to continue, for it to spread to Draco?”

He shakes his head, feeling outsmarted.

“Then continue applying the same methods we’ve always spoken of; be vigilant, but not
paranoid. Enjoy your life, but do what you need to feel safe, be that secret-keeping your
home or adding security to the workshop… Take that balance you’ve had in your life
knowing your celebrity, knowing your history, and keep extending it to Draco.”

Harry takes a deep breath, one that fills his lungs until they pinch tight, then releases it
through his nose, letting his head fall back on the pillows. Speaking to her always felt like
securing broom bristles when the metalworking was done; mind-numbing work all the way
up until the activity actually began, at which point he’d remember how satisfying it was to
witness, how complete it all felt afterwards.

“How did you know to find me here?” he asks, fearing some photograph of him looking
pissed off and pained on his way to the hospital.

She stands and slips a hand in her purse, smiling with a rare casualness. “It was quite nice to
finally meet Draco,” she says in answer. “Circe, does he care about you, maybe even more
than you’ve let on in sessions. And in thanks, give him this from me.” She hands him a small
business card, black and thick, embossed in a way that will impress Draco for no good
reason. “A close friend of mine. He deals in family matters, trauma, grief… a good fit, I’d
think.”

Harry thanks her profusely and when she leaves he dresses. The business card sits in his back
pocket and stays there. It stays there when Draco comes to get him, engulfing him in an
embrace and a distractingly murmured, “I thought it might be a worthy day to start the rest of
our lives,” as they emerge through their floo. Teddy is at Bill’s and the home feels large and
empty.

Harry asks for no clarification and grins wide. “Told you I wouldn’t change my mind,” he
says.

“No,” Draco smiles. “You’re quite set in your ways.”

“Until I need to shift them, that is.” Harry raises a fist as he takes the stairs, eager to the
shower. “Dissolution!” he calls back. “Distillation! Through fire, nature is whole again!”

“Nature is reborn whole,” comes the correction. He can still hear Draco’s laugh as he leaves
him lingering in the entranceway.
 *****

It’s a strange day to be at the Manor, and though Draco’s presence on a weekday afternoon is
accepted quickly, Harry turns some small heads. He smiles at them and waves, feeling much
more knowledgeable about their faces and names than on his last visit. They move quickly
though—their arrival was preceded by an owl to the matron, preempting the corrective article
Pansy still owed them and explaining their intentions, and she greets them with a wide smile
and sparkling eyes.

“Always a good day, these,” she exclaims cheerfully.

“Nothing much will happen today, of course,” says Draco, hands behind his back. He’s
rocking ever so slightly on his heels, Harry notices with a sideways glance. He, too, is keen,
but hides it much better. Harry’s been grinning since before they’d set foot on the winding
estate path up to the main doors.

“On the contrary, the best part of all will happen today. He’s in his room, I believe, unless
he’s gone adventuring since I saw him.”

“Brilliant.” Somehow, Harry’s smile widens.

He’s never seen James’ room, but it’s much as he’d have expected. They knock on the ajar
door and find themselves welcomed into a trove of acquired treasures, picked up throughout
a young life of transitory living. There are drawings spellotaped to the walls—by him and by
friends—and clothes haphazardly draped over any surface that will hold them. A stuffed
dragon rests on its side on the hardwood, knocked off the end of his bed perhaps by stray feet
in the night, and little plastic animals sit in a line on the dresser.

He looks surprised to see them.

“Harry!” he exclaims. “Draco! My mate Angus told me you weren’t married anymore. He
overheard the matron saying so.”

“Far from,” Harry answers. “We just had to say so to keep Draco safe. How are you, mate?”

“And you had a recital. Angus said they tried to get you there, but you sorted it.”

“We did,” Harry nods. “Doing alright?”

“And then Angus told me that you got hurt trying to save Draco, but the Healers took care of
that.”

“Angus a bit of a gossip, then, is he?” Draco mutters.

“He knows how to nick a Prophet. Why’re you here?”

Harry chuckles and sits on the corner of his bed. Draco stands just behind him. Harry thinks
of those eagerly rocking heels and the courage to be the one to broach the topic all those
months ago. He lets him take the lead.
“There’s something specific we wanted to come talk to you about,” Draco says, once Harry’s
given him the look. “Beyond updating you about our own crises. There was… something
we’ve been meaning to do for a while, you see, until we ran into some completely unrelated
obstacles. We’ve been meaning to do something about our family.”

James frowns, looking interested. “Your family?”

“It’s rather small, you see. And we’ve had a wonderful time working on this children’s home
—one of the best decisions I’ve ever made—but beyond that, our own home could use
another body, and we hadn’t thought much about filling that space with one until we met the
right person to do so. And that person is you, if you’d have us. If you wanted to. If it would
make you as happy as it would make us.”

James stares back. He licks his lips and cocks his head. “You mean like, me come to your
home?”

They nod together.

“When does it happen?”

Harry glances up just as Draco glances down.

“As soon as you’ve decided you’d like to,” Draco answers. “Which can take however long
you need. And once it’s been approved and all is settled with the paperwork, the boring
rubbish.”

“And I’d stay there forever? A godson, like Teddy?”

“Well, more, er,” Harry scratches his head, searching for the words. “It would be adoption. So
less a godson, more a… son.”

“Do I have to call you father?”

Behind him, Draco sucks in a breath. With a desire to exist a hemisphere away from his own
father’s parenting, sharing a moniker would be a sore spot.

“No,” Harry says quickly. “You don’t have to call us anything but Harry and Draco, if that’s
what you want. That’s what all of this is about, really; what you want.”

James gazes down at his hand, stained with some sort of paints, and begins to pick at a patch
of green by the lowest joint of his left thumb so reflectively that Harry thinks he doesn’t want
to live with them. His stomach drops like it would if Draco rejected him, if Teddy told him he
wanted to live full time at Andromeda’s. Then he glances back up with a grin that Harry
catches onto and mirrors immediately.

“I want this,” he answers happily, his voice round and whole with confidence.

*****
The adoption takes quite a while to settle, partly because of Harry and Draco’s individual and
combined celebrity, but it slowly moves along. Harry is impatient with it all, itching to
customise the emptied room to James’ liking, to have him at home instead of imagining it.
He’d taken a liking to him from the start, from that first day he’d visited the children’s
home’s new tenants and noticed a young boy climbing a tree to get a better view of the
expansive grounds. ‘Mapping it for quests’, he’d told a nervously-responsible Harry, who’d
only ever been tasked with minding his own child or a Granger-Weasley.

Then Draco had told him stories that made him worry it was pity that brought him to James
—muttered words about his parents' tragic deaths in a wizard-made fire, shared quickly in the
office—but he’d just as fast reminded him that he’d been drawn to him like a magnet before
knowing any of that. They both knew the difference between pity friendship and the genuine
ones, anyway; surely, they would have read the difference in themselves, too.

When it does finally get approved by all necessary parties, Teddy is home for the weekend
and just as keen to move the operation along as fast as possible. He’d provided an
unexpectedly beautiful character statement, speaking gratefully on his upbringing by Harry
and Draco’s easy assumption of responsibility, how he’d invited Harry and Teddy in and
recognised the importance of a family unit.

“Vic helped me write it,” he told Harry when he delivered it to him at the Collectors’
Quidditch till. “It’s a girlfriend task, isn’t it? Like… pointing out shirts I’d look fit in or
telling me I’ve not made eye contact across the Great Hall enough during dinner.”

And Draco’s reputation buzzing at an all-time high helps, reviews of the recital praising his
courage and his friends’ heroics. The ones in music-based publications hardly even mention
the aftermath at all. They treat the murder attempt like a postscript in lengthy, descriptive
articles lauding his compositions as complex, award-worthy works.

This, in tandem with the fully corrective Prophet article, leads to what the group begins
endearingly referring to as the ‘Romeo-and-Juliet’ effect at dinner. The image—
metaphorically and literally captured in a photograph of them standing alert at the piano—of
them willing to die for each other creates sympathy like Harry’s never felt and draws a new
line of questioning towards Wreaker-sympathetic groups who had long existed unperturbed
and the Ministry departments who’d failed to fully appreciate the threat.

It’s not until the second week of waiting for news about James, when the press is dying down
and their hopes, therefore, are rising, that Harry hears the piano again—his piano, now signed
with his name just inside the lid—and it reminds him rather guiltily of the business card stuck
deep in a trouser pocket. He tiptoes into the living room, making sure not to make a scene
about his relief to see Draco sitting there again, and hands it to him wordlessly. Draco takes it
just as quietly, reads it over, flips to its back, then nods minutely and places it in his own
pocket.

“I’ll see to it,” is all he says before he recommences, immediately into a crescendo that
catches Harry by surprise. Draco, he reminds himself, exists solely en media res.

That’s how they are with James, too. The room is prepared but the atmosphere is less the
beginning of something and more the resurgence of something long meant to be. It’s fitting,
then, that the first thing that catches James in awe during his initial tour through the house
and bedroom is a small tapestry above his bed; species of dragons, waiting to roar to life in
the stitches should he reach out and touch, bought long before his arrival, not yet knowing its
purpose.

Teddy explains it to him. He beckons him over to touch his fingers to the threads, then jumps
into an over-exaggeration of Argentina—the poster and their mad dash back to the Portkey
point. James listens enraptured, hanging on his every word, this overnight-big brother. His
hands are held timidly behind his back, fussing with the fabric of his t-shirt, but already
Harry can see the joint-tempest forming, the steadfast companionship of two rambunctious
boys. He can imagine clear as day the quiet school years with James alone and wild summers
with them in the same place, the sound of Draco griping lovingly about their loud tomfoolery
and telling them to go into the garden if they’re going to be that vocal while he’s writing,
asking why doesn’t Harry tell them off, saying he’s too easy—

August 2014

“—on them. Too lax,” Draco is complaining halfheartedly, flattening James’ bedspread much
tighter than necessary. It will be mussed up in thirty minutes when they come back from their
garden Quidditch.

But Harry’s not sure how he’s supposed to be hard on them. It doesn’t come naturally. And he
refuses to be artificially cross. He tells Draco as much, dropping James’ laundry with an
exhale by the wardrobe.

“It came plenty naturally when you were bringing Teddy up,” Draco daringly points out.

“So I’m making up for that now.” He reaches under James’ bed, just at the spot where he uses
his foot to sweep dirty socks under his bed, and comes up triply successful. “Besides,” he
says. “You like to hear them playing. You shouldn’t pretend otherwise or you’ll give them the
wrong idea.”

He’s seen the smile, clear as day, when they’re near enough to hear them together but far
enough not to intrude. Draco comes to life ears-first, happier than ever. He grumbles
something under his breath, which means Harry’s won. Then he speaks clearer.

“House still feels empty, doesn’t it?”

Harry snorts. “Now you’re gonna give me the wrong idea.”

“No, no, you’ve got it right,” says Draco, finally leaving the bedspread be. “Can’t you picture
it? Another child, maybe two? A Lily, perhaps?”

Harry tosses a dirty sock at him. It bounces off his shoulder. “You do know we didn’t seek
out someone with my father’s name, right? That was pure coincidence.”

“A hypothetical Lily,” he concedes, tossing the sock back.

 Draco as a father is more than Harry had been expecting. He’d thought he’d known, having
seen him take such care of Teddy, but something about an adoption paper with his name on it
changes it all so minutely. He’d been aware, though he’d kept it far from the surface, that he
wasn’t quite Teddy’s guardian on paper. He’d been wary of disrespecting the wishes of a
Lupin who wouldn’t have let a 1998 Draco even breathe near his son.

With James, there is no hesitation, only leaping in. He tutors him in the school year, takes
him to the children’s home for lessons with all his friends, gets up with him at night, stays
awake when he’s ill. Harry found him sleeping on the hardwood floor of James’ room one
night when he’d crept down sure he was about to drag him away from the piano. He’d been
sure he had dragon pox. It was allergies.

As for a hypothetical Lily, they’ll need to discuss it later, when the boys are in bed, or James
is asleep and Teddy is out with Vic like he’s so sure they know nothing about.

He’s going to say as much, but the sound of feet says it for him. He shuts his mouth just as
James runs in and grabs immediately for Harry’s wrist. “The wiggentree is still at my ear
level,” he groans, pulling slightly. “You said it grows fast.”

“It does,” says Harry patiently. “But it grows fast and you grow fast. You’re keeping pace.”

“Then you stand next to it. You’re not growing anymore.”

He pulls, ushering him along. Harry barely grasps Draco’s wrist before he’s out of reach, too,
and like a human chain, they travel through the hallway and towards the garden where Teddy
will be undoubtedly waiting, still hovering on his broom beside James’ abandoned one.

“Still growing, Yams, just not upward,” Harry says, laughing at the back of the young boy’s
messy-haired head. “It just changes shape, is all. Happens inside.”

Chapter End Notes

And finally, unbelievably, we've reached the end. If you've picked up this story at any
point along the hardly-trodden, work-in-progress path, my thanks to you for continued
interest and the kind words that helped me trudge on. And if you've found this at any
stage and seen it through at all, thanks to you, too, and I hope you've enjoyed reading as
much as I've enjoyed writing!

I always tell myself I'll consider another story only if an idea comes to me naturally, and
like clockwork it has, so I'm sure we'll cross paths again. Hogwarts-age fic, anyone? I'm
itching for some school-era writing, so if that interests you, keep an eye out!

Until next time!

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