Chapter Text
Harry hadn’t anticipated that an evening at the Greengrass-Malfoy Divorce Celebration would lead back to their cursebreaking shop, but he wasn’t about to complain. Especially since he certainly hadn’t returned for business.
“Fuck,” Draco whispered into Harry’s mouth. His lips tasted like beer, of the dark malt of the hops and barley that was Harry’s preferred alcoholic drink. “I have been waiting for this. You took your damn time.”
Harry kissed him again, lips pressed together, swallowing Draco’s quick sigh of welcome surprise.
Even on the most casual of days, Draco insisted on wearing the stuffiest Wizarding formal attire, cloaks and embroidery and sometimes even silly pointed hats with ribbons festooned at the tip when they were just going to lounge around the shop waiting for customers. For the Greengrass-Malfoy Divorce Celebration, he had truly outdone himself. Harry felt every inch of the outrageously overdone robes pressed to him from shoulder to hip.
Draco’s robes were midnight blue with constellations around the hems, stars twinkling throughout the fabric and lighting up near the collar. In his sparkling robes, with his gleaming coiffed hair and his thoughtful, shadowed gaze, Draco had looked like something out of a children’s book for little wix on the beautiful balcony of the Greengrass Estate—the Prince of Stars.
The grand balcony of the Malfoy-Greengrass estate was an explosion of color. Harry had seen it as he’d walked up the sweeping front steps, clutching a six-pack of sweating beer in his clammy palms.
“Point Me Draco Malfoy,” Harry had muttered, ducking his head and hoping nobody would come up to him after thirty fruitless minutes searching for Draco through the vast, crowded halls. He could feel a bead of sweat trickling uncomfortably down his spine.
He felt a strange and nauseating mix of emotion, wandering through the gilded, ancient halls. On principle, due to the dizzying mix of envy, self-pity, and gritted-teeth determination to be happy for her anyway that Harry always experienced around Astoria Malfoy, Harry quite fervently didn’t really want to be anywhere that involved her—though Harry supposed with a smug little smile, she was back to Astoria Greengrass now.
It wasn’t that she was a bad person. She was a perfectly alright person, perfectly suited to someone as pristine and poised and put-together as Draco. Her dark, sleek hair floated in ringlets around her shoulders. Her hazel eyes were sly with intelligence and wit.
She was elegant and beautiful, pale as a porcelain doll with pink lips like rose petals. She spoke three languages and played four instruments and painted well enough that her wedding gift to Ron and Hermione had been a portrait of them at the altar.
Harry knew, objectively, that she was a beautiful and kind person and deserving of every happiness in the world. He had no grudge against her—except that he did, because she was married to Draco, and therefore she was illogically, unfoundedly awful. And that just made him feel even worse.
He masked it by making twice the effort to befriend her. Whenever he did so, leaning against the reception desk at the shop to chat or drinking tea in the kitchens of the estate after a hard bout of fieldwork that Draco insisted required a hearty meal to round out the day, he was always dismayed to reckon with how much he genuinely liked her. He could see how they fit together, her and Draco.
Harry’s wand led him through the throng of joyfully drunk, beautifully attired people out to the balcony. He released a breath he didn’t know he was holding as he passed through the stained-glass doors.
Astoria didn’t like gardening. When they’d first established their shop, Harry had been surprised to learn that the myriad lovely and opinionated plants were all Draco’s doing. It seemed incongruous for Lucius Malfoy’s son, who was so diabolically tainted that his touch shrivelled all things. Or perhaps not so incongruous, upon learning that Draco was so much more than an evil man’s son.
Lucius Malfoy had been a fearmongering, cowardly little freak. Even still Draco cringed when he thought of letting him down, though he spat at the mention of his father’s name with a hand gesture like wiping sludge off himself alongside a darkly muttered wandless incantation so old Harry expected it was more superstition than magic.
Harry thanked every deity he could think of that the longer Lucius Malfoy was in prison, the more Draco seemed to be coming into himself.
He had begun with the plants.
Their workshop on the intersection of Diagon and Knockturn was covered in plants that dubiously skirted the line of “house” and “untamably feral”. Shrinking Violets which withered with every new customer adorned their window sills. Spider Plants crawled along the ceiling, weaving shimmering golden-green webs of magic depicting moving images of the sun and stars in the corners of the ceilings. Snake Plants whispered muddled phrases in a language so similar to Parseltongue that Harry caught himself trying to listen to it in the quiet moments of the day.
The stained glass door to the balcony creaked when Harry pushed it. He felt the bubble of Draco’s Muffliato ripple as he stepped into it. Harry knew that Draco, though able to put on a good show of enthusiasm and graciousness, no longer enjoyed large gatherings as he once had when they were younger.
At this juncture of the evening, late enough that the trickle of newcomers had stopped and early enough that tipsy voices had just begun to shout, Draco hadn’t entirely drained his social battery—but he was, nonetheless, conserving it like a dragon with a diminishing hoard. And whenever Draco needed restoration, he found it in his plants.
Yellow Carnations, lavender Hydrangeas, and delicate pink Fortune-Telling Roses all held themselves amidst a lush, magical underbrush of meticulously manicured green, twining around the intricately carved white marble columns of the railing. When Harry stepped out, wincing as the rubber sole of his ratty Chucks squeaked on the gleaming floor, Draco was staring at one of the roses as though it would begin divining his future. A thin stream of purplish smoke trailed from the end of his lit cigarette. A picked-over pack of Parliaments was lying on the delicate iron table next to a pot of Violet propagations that Draco had brought from the workshop.
“Hullo,” Harry said, because that’s what he said nearly every morning at the workshop, and even though it wasn’t morning and Draco’s eyes were shadowed in a way they never usually were. Harry didn’t know how else to gently free Draco from whatever unhappy reverie he found himself in.
Draco glanced at him and nodded. His eyes were a little bloodshot, a little puffy—too sad and too bright for the muffled background music was pulsing around them. “You are late.”
“Fashionably.”
Draco barked a laugh. A little smoke got caught in his throat as he did so, and he covered his mouth with one long-fingered hand. The diamonds on the signet ring of the Malfoy family caught the dim light, as did the silver of the Prince ring, a token from his godfather. “You’ve never been fashionable in your life.”
Harry gestured with the six-pack and grimaced, feeling as graceful as a troll.“I brought beer,” he said, as if it mattered. Draco rarely drank. He already knew this from all the times they went out to the pub after work.
Draco’s order was chips with vinegar and a fizzy water. If he was feeling saucy and rebellious, he had fizzy water with lime. Harry had asked him about it once, curious as he peered at him over the rim of his own frothing pint.
“It takes quite a lot of effort to remain this inoffensive,” Draco had said by way of explanation. Mildly, he added with a teasing twitch of one eyebrow, punctuating the statement with a dripping chip, “Constant vigilance, you know.”
Harry wasn’t certain it was constant vigilance so much as the shadows of Azkaban that darkened the circles beneath Draco’s eyes every time he visited his father, but he declined to comment on that, less from a lack of curiosity and more from a hard-earned sense of self-preservation.
Besides that, Draco had never been inoffensive in his life, drunk or stone-cold sober. Now, lacking his last vestiges of both grace and decorum, Draco grumbled, “Then by all means, help yourself,” with a moody flick of his cigarette. The ember sputtered out on the tabletop, leaving a thin stream of smoke in its wake.
Draco allowed himself one cigarette per day. He usually took it at 4:54pm, leaning against the trim of their workshop’s front door while Harry locked up. The drainage saucer of the Shrinking Violets’ terra cotta on the balcony’s table had two stubbed-out butts crumpled into it.
“Shit party,” Harry offered, wincing as the legs of the garden chair shrieked on the stone. The chair itself groaned in protest when Harry sat down, though he reckoned that was more an attitude problem on the furniture’s part than any issue of Harry’s.
Draco scoffed, a self-depricating flutter of emotion cutting through his scowl. “It’s not,” he argued, defiant as ever. “Astoria and I put on terrific events. This…” he gestured derisively past the stained glass doors with his fourth cigarette of the evening, “divorce is quite nouveau. She insisted on the celebration.”
He sighed, shaking his head and thinning his lips in an expression of intense fondness. “Tori said it would help make a good impression, to embrace a more muggle sensibility for the evening.”
Draco called Astoria Tori when he was being fond. But he called Harry by his last name when he was being a brat, and that was even better. Potter, Draco tsked when Harry strolled into the shop wearing ragged-edged sweatpants. Potter, Draco sighed when Harry offered their curse-breaking services to someone for free, just because they looked in need. Potter, Draco growled when Harry was about to attempt to break a curse in the most reckless, impulsive manner possible.
Tori never got that wealth of emotion. That was all for Harry.
“It’s less of a Ministry charity gala and more of a houseparty than I would have expected,” Harry noted, briefly gazing through the haze of their privacy wards to find Seamus, who had undoubtedly just emitted the powerful “Woo!” that burst through Draco’s charmwork. “Not that I’m complaining.”
“Would you like to donate to the Malfoy family lost cause?” Draco asked darkly, a sardonic tilt to his head as he blew smoke. “I’ll write up a check for you.”
“Not on your life, you greedy bastard,” Harry parried, shooting him a small grin as he paused to select the least jumpy of the six cans before him. When he cracked the tab, foam spat at him like some irascible shellfish annoyed to be disturbed.
“Sure you don’t want one?” Harry nudged the cans towards Draco. They trembled under his gaze, a little more enthusiastic than usual. “Surely your divorce celebration is an exception.”
“I don’t like hops,” Draco deadpanned, but took one anyway.
Every swig Draco pulled made him curl his lip, as if drinking at wand-point. The can shook in his hand until he grasped it so firmly that his fingers left indents in the aluminium, but the beer seemed cowed by the sheer force of Draco’s mood and declined to froth at him as Harry’s had.
“You’re late,” Draco said again, and this time, there was a distinctive pout in his tone. “Tori and I had bets.”
Harry cocked his head and scoffed. “On what, my arrival time?”
“No.” He clicked his tongue sourly. “On whether she would seduce Ginevra first, or I you.” He sighed with overdone drama, leaning back in his chair and staring glumly at the Fortune-Telling Roses. “It seems I’ll be funding her next wedding, if it comes to that.”
~*~
Draco gasped into Harry’s ear as he pressed a sucking kiss to the hinge of his jaw, teeth scraping against skin.
“Fuck,” Draco swore, his breath hitching. “Bordel de merde—“
“NO FRENCH IN THE SHOP!” Draco’s own voice boomed, rattling the cursed necklace beneath its ever-glowing ward. The window panes shook in their wooden cills. The spider plants scuttled to their webs in the corners and crouched apprehensively. Beneath Harry’s hands, Draco startled, nails digging into the back of his hoodie.
Harry laughed into the crook of Draco’s neck as Draco exhaled an irascible string of curses—this time in English.
“Maybe some French in the shop,” Harry murmured, leaning in for another kiss with a smile.