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"I can't believe Robards sent us here for this!" Harry grumbled. " 'International incident' my ass! Don’t they have curse breakers in Italy?"
"I expect they do. But you know how it is, everyone wants to be seen working with the Saviour of the Wizarding World," Draco replied, one hand waving dramatically in Harry’s direction. "But see it that way, Potter - at least we're getting a free holiday out of this."
"It's not a holiday if we're working," Harry protested, but he had to admit that their current situation was rather pleasant.
They were sitting on the terrace of a café on the Piazza dei Signori, enjoying Italian coffee in the afternoon sun. The object of their investigation was hard to miss even from where they sat - a 600 year old whale bone, hung in the central stone arch that formed the entrance to the historic magistrate's court. Cursed objects in crowded spaces automatically ranked high on the risk assessment scale, so the first step of their operation was what the Cursbreaker’s Handbook called ‘immersive observation’, and everyone else called ‘watch and see’.
Harry took a sip of his espresso, closed his eyes and leaned back in his chair. He was wearing a washed-out tshirt and jeans, his best effort at ‘blending in with the locals’ and he relished in the warmth of the sun on his skin - nothing like perpetually grey London.
“You’re right”, he sighed. “It could be lots worse.”
“Staking out a smuggling operation up to the waist in the Dublin sewers?” Draco deadpanned.
Harry snorted. “Don’t remind me... Run me through the briefing again?”
Draco grinned and flipped the pages in the folder he had charmed to look like a guidebook on the history of Verona. His idea of ‘blending in’ clearly had been inspired exclusively by Italian fashion magazines - in his white linen shirt, chinos and loafers he looked like the most expensive tourist to ever have walked Verona, but somehow Harry had to admit that it suited him.
“Right,” Draco cleared his voice. “That decorative bone over there – it’s a rib, by the way – was a gift from the Mage of Venice, back in the 1500s, and came equipped with a powerful Veritacompulsion charm. This place was Verona’s court of law, and the spell ensured specifically that any accused led through the gates were incapable of uttering a lie.” He scrunched up his nose. “Not terribly ethical, if you ask me.”
Harry grimaced, nodding in agreement. A waiter in a crisp white shirt interrupted them, smiled politely and asked something in rapid-fire Italian. Without a second of hesitation, Draco replied in the same language, all polite smiles and effortlessly rolled r’s, and he even had the gall to wink at Harry.
Harry suppressed the urge to stick his tongue out at him. Bloody purebloods and their private education.
After the waiter had disappeared, Draco lowered his gaze back to his folder and returned to the matter at hand. “There have been no reports of the compulsion charm affecting anyone after 1800, and with time these types of charms typically lose strength,” he explained. “So no one really kept tabs on it. That is, until last week.”
He took a folded newspaper cutting from the back pages of his book and handed it to Harry.
The text wasn’t terribly illuminating to Harry, what with it being in Italian, but the picture spoke for itself. He recognised the square as the one they were sitting in, surrounded by buildings in earthy tones, palatial with their marble columns, arched gateways and carved coats of arms. But in contrast to today’s peaceful atmosphere of strolling tourists and kids eating gelato, the picture showed the piazza in absolute mayhem. In the foreground, a distraught man clutched his camera bag to his chest while a blonde and clearly furious woman was caught mid-shriek. Further back, at least 10 people of all ages seemed embroiled in a mass brawl, fists flying and bodies rolling on the ground.
“Bloody hell,” Harry muttered.
“Indeed,” Draco nodded. “It seems that for an unknown reason, the Veritacompulsion charm reactivated, and was, if anything, stronger than in the historical sources - or a lot less targeted, in any case. On a square buzzing with tourists, the irresistible urge to tell uncomfortable truths led to this pandemonium.”
He gestured over to the newspaper article that Harry was still holding.
“The council had the police clear the square, and kept it cordoned off under the pretext of a gas leak until Venice’s magical emergency team could put the bone under a containment charm. But as you can see, the story was out already – in the article they list one broken nose, several scrapes, two charges of assault, one restraining order and a divorce.”
“Not a good look for a tourist destination,” Harry quipped, running a hand through his hair.
“No legacy is so rich as honesty,” Draco murmured with an ironic smile.
“Or so violent, in this case.” Harry snorted. “Wait, was that a Shakespeare quote?”
Draco looked up and for a short moment, his expression betrayed something akin to embarrassment, but it was gone in an instant.
“Yes,” he said, eyebrows raised. “Didn’t take you for a reader, Potter.”
Harry couldn’t help but grin - at some point between the war, their apprenticeships and their ongoing work collaboration, Draco’s jabs had lost their venom and had somehow developed the character of an ongoing inside joke.
“And I didn’t expect a Malfoy to stoop as low as reading muggle literature,” he retorted, jutting out his chin in pretend belligerence. “Don’t non-magical books scorch your delicate pureblood fingertips?”
Draco actually laughed out loud, and Harry felt a sudden surge of accomplishment.
****
After an hour of observation and another espresso, they were both very awake, and fairly certain that there wasn’t any magical activity, or other suspicious behaviour on the square. Of course, Draco had another enthusiastic and entirely unnecessary conversation with their waiter over the simple act of payment, completely ignoring Harry’s pointed looks, but eventually they left the café and made their way to the archway that sheltered the troublesome whale rib. They stopped a short distance away, Draco leaning against a column and examining the guidebook, while Harry pretended to take pictures with his phone.
“Ok, I’m all set,” Harry said, unobtrusively scanning their surroundings.
Draco nodded. “Let’s go.”
They worked like a well-oiled machine, smoothly interlocking spells and shields. On Draco’s cue, Harry cast a wandless notice-me-not charm that he had interwoven with a shielding spell - his own invention, which had proven crucial more than once. From behind that barrier, Draco could carry out the precise incantations of the diagnostic spell, protected from muggle eyes as well as curse fragments, his wand drawing intricate patterns in the air.
After a moment, Draco inhaled sharply.
“Everything okay?” Harry asked quietly.
“Yeah, let me just…” Draco muttered, before waving his wand in a new pattern, his brows furrowed. After several more seconds, he ended the spell with a decisive slash of his wand, shaking his head as if to clear it.
“600 years of layered spells is a lot to unravel,” he said, rubbing a hand over his forehead. “But I think I got it.”
Harry turned around to face him fully, making sure to keep his posture relaxed.
“So,” Draco began after he had gathered his thoughts. “Over the past centuries, a lot of spells have been cast on this bone, some intentional, some likely just ricocheted off by accident. I think I’ve caught the important ones though - somebody cast an incredibly strong Tempodurus charm on the bone a long time ago, essentially trapping it frozen in time. Then, nothing – until about a week ago, when something pierced the -,” he paused, frowning. “Time bubble, for lack of a better term, reinstating the powers of the original spell, except apparently now affecting everyone indiscriminately.”
“Hmm,” Harry hummed thoughtfully. “How did they manage to both pierce the protective Tempodurus and reactivate and strengthen the original Compulsion charm?”
Draco shook his head. “I didn’t recognise the spell signature. But also, I don’t think that’s really our problem, if I’m being honest – we’re here to make sure it doesn’t go off again.”
For a second, Harry wanted to argue the point - what if someone had purposefully unleashed the truth compulsion? What if they struck somewhere else next? But a pointed look from Draco brought him back to himself, and to the most important phrase of his adult life: ‘Not my responsibility’. It had taken him a while, but after the war, he had come to realise that he had neither the will nor the stamina to carry on saving the world all the time. Spearheading every single charity? Not his responsibility. Sitting in on hearings of every reformed Death Eater? Not his responsibility. Figuring out who had un-frozen the curse on an ancient whalebone in Verona, and why? Not. His. Responsibility.
He was here to envy Draco's flawless Italian, break a curse and possibly get some gelato, pretty much in that order.
He shook himself out of his reflections, and focused on the task at hand.
"I see two options," he said. "Either we try to reinstate the temporal stasis, or we attempt to remove the root of the problem - the original compulsion charm."
Draco lifted a corner of his mouth.
"You clearly have a preference."
"Yeah," Harry acknowledged. "Restoring a solution that's already failed once seems ill-advised."
“Indeed,” Draco concurred. “Let’s get rid of it. But not until the crowds have cleared a little - we’re not breaking a curse in broad daylight with hundreds of civilians around.”
Harry grimaced at the thought of such a scene. “I wholeheartedly agree.”
He took a look at the groups of tourists crowding the square. “Seems like it’ll be a bit. Let’s find a bar? As you so aptly pointed out, since we’re already here, we may as well enjoy it.”
****
The sun had disappeared behind the buildings and the sky was vibrant, a soft gradient from peach to to blue, but the piazza was still far from empty - couples strolling, dog walkers and amateur photographers milled around under the unwavering gaze of the Dante statue in the centre.
Draco had led them to a small Osteria in a side street just off the square where they had ordered not only a bottle of wine, but also a selection of local meats and cheeses. Both food and wine were unsurprisingly delicious, and Harry silently had to concede that Draco had been right - it did feel like a holiday.
Draco was currently mid-rant, complaining about the historical inaccuracies of one of Verona’s main tourist attractions.
“Juliet never even existed, and Shakespeare certainly never set foot in Verona, so why are people queueing up to see “Juliet’s house”? It’s a beautiful building, I’ll grant you, but it has nothing to do with Romeo & Juliet!”
His cheeks were a little flushed, and while Harry couldn’t claim to have an opinion on the matter, he always enjoyed hearing Draco lecture about the things he was passionate about.
“I never really got Romeo and Juliet anyway,” he chipped in. “It just seems… a little banal and trite, you know? It’s just teenagers in love.”
Draco’s eyebrows shot up. “With all due respect, Potter, you’re wrong,” he announced, emphasising his words by stabbing the air with a breadstick. “If the idea of star-crossed lovers seems over-used to you now, that’s just because Shakespeare did it first and, while copied many times, I don’t think anyone’s done it better.”
Harry reached over the table to grab another breadstick as well, and tilted his head in acknowledgement.
“Maybe you’re right. But still, it’s too dramatic, all the overblown declarations, avoidable deaths and just-a-second-too-late changes of heart…”
“No, no, Potter - the narrative choices may be a little out of date, but you have to look at the underlying themes! The idea that fate is nothing but a series of unlucky chances, a tragedy caused by happenstance, not by the character’s intrinsic fundamental flaws! The notion of how profoundly the Montagues and Capulets fail their children by thrusting them into the corsets of honour-bound filial duty… It may be written in a different time, but it still applies.”
His voice had gone quieter over the course of his pronouncement, and when Harry caught his eyes there was a raw vulnerability in his expression. Harry struggled to find a suitable response, stunned by Draco’s sudden sincerity.
“Also, for the time, the flirting is quite avant-garde - Juliet confessing first and all,” Draco added after a breath, his voice back to normal levels and a lopsided smile on his face. The moment was gone, and Harry felt like he had missed a chance - a chance for what exactly, he didn’t know.
****
By the time the square finally seemed quiet enough for Draco and Harry to attempt the second phase of their mission, the lanterns on the square had turned on, spreading a yellow glow across the centuries old stones. They were establishing a perimeter, Draco transfiguring temporary fencing out of a bread basket he’d nicked from the bar.
“I think this should do it - should look to anyone outside like there’s a construction site here. I even put a sign,” he said, indicating a piece of yellow card board, printed with several hazard signs and bold-printed text in Italian.
Harry rolled his eyes. “Show off!”
Draco grinned cheerily, and finished his preparations.
When he joined Harry under the arch, his face was sober. The plan was simple, but it was ambitious - Harry would lift the containment charm, ready to recast it if there were any difficulties, and Draco would immediately start incanting the ritual words to weaken the compulsion charm. When it was weakened sufficiently, Harry would break the compulsion with Aveho Defixio - the curse-breaker’s equivalent of an all-purpose counter-spell like Finite Incantatem .
This was routine, in some ways, but curse breaking was an unpredictable craft. It was impossible to know how much resistance they would meet - some curses got brittle over time, easy to shatter with one targeted blow, others got stronger and more vicious. This one seemed like the type to put up a fight, Harry thought, remembering the newspaper cutting.
He locked eyes with Draco, took a deep breath and lifted his wand.
“Ready?”
Draco nodded, matching his breathing to Harry’s.
“On your sign.”
“Finite Inclusio!” Harry pronounced.
For a split second, nothing seemed to happen, then he felt an almost imperceptible shift, the sensation of leaning against a door that suddenly opens - then, all at once, the air around them was awash with magic.
Immediately, Draco started reciting a string of Latin, every word deliberate and intentional. The ritual took shape, its magic pushing back against the onslaught.
Harry had expected the curse to feel like an Imperius . A curse like a bludgeon, inserting a foreign thought into a mind through raw power, violently forcing a mind into submission. But where the Imperius was a battle of wills so to speak, this curse felt like an insinuation – a subtle suggestion, a thought that wasn’t quite his own, but deceptively close. It wasn’t trying to insert anything into Harry’s mind, almost the opposite: telling him to let go, to surrender to the impulse of speaking out loud his innermost thoughts.
He closed his eyes and strengthened his barriers, focussing on neutral emotions, on their mission, shutting out all feelings that the curse could use against him.
Opposite him, Draco was continuing to layer the ritual spell, running through the incantation with the ease of yearlong practice. He had a lovely voice, Harry thought.
“I’d love to actually go on a vacation with you,” he suddenly heard his own voice say, unbidden and involuntary.
Draco’s eyes shot up to meet Harry’s, his expression alarmed, but he kept chanting.
Harry slapped a hand over his own mouth, and tried to regain his composure. Control your feelings , he reminded himself, but it was almost impossible to push down the embarrassment and adrenaline coursing through his blood. He closed his eyes and concentrated on his breathing, recalling the first-ever lesson in course breaking: you’re only ever as strong as your mental defences. With effort, he put his barriers back in place.
It would have almost worked, too. But when he opened his eyes again, Draco was still looking at him, the look on his face betraying his concern, but also his determination, and Harry couldn’t help but feel a fierce sense of affection.
Like a flood bursting through dams, he felt words bubbling up in his chest. He pressed his lips together firmly, but it was no use.
“I enjoy spending time with you so much. It took me much too long to realise that it’s not just because you’re great to work with - it’s because of you. You never cease to astonish me. Like today, I never knew you liked Shakespeare, it makes me wonder how much more there is that I don’t know. And I should have said it much earlier, but I didn’t want to jeopardise what we have.”
All this burst out of him at an astonishing speed, new words formed almost before the previous ones finished, the curse feeding off his unchecked emotions.
“I’m so sorry,” he finally forced out, in control of his voice once more, eyes burning.
He saw Draco staring at him wide eyed, a rapid succession of different emotions on his face, but he kept chanting. Just a little bit longer , Harry prayed to any deity that would listen. But the curse was like a vicious cycle - feelings, once voiced, were bound to trigger reactions. Draco faltered, tripped over a syllable, and Harry could almost feel the panic radiating off him.
He made a split-second decision, and lifted his wand.
“Aveho Defixio!”
The counter-curse couldn’t work, since the ritual wasn’t complete, but Harry tried nonetheless. He poured all the emotions he had just experienced into it: his embarrassment, his affection for Draco, and the fierce urge to protect him from baring his innermost feelings like Harry just had. He recognised the truth – that honesty was only a virtue when it was given willingly.
For a moment, time seemed suspended, Harry standing with his wand arm lifted, Draco’s mouth still open, turmoil on his face. Then the curse broke, soundlessly, but it felt like the air around them thinned, returning to a breathable consistency. The whale bone was just a whale bone once more.
Harry was still breathing hard, and he closed his eyes, unable to face Draco. Shit . How could he have failed so catastrophically at one of the most basic skills of curse breaking? And Merlin, the things he’d said… He had been planning to tell Draco, at some point in the future, but never like this. He hoped against hope that the earth would open and swallow him whole.
He felt a touch on his elbow, and opened his eyes. Draco was standing in front of him, his expression inscrutable. Before Harry could even open his mouth, Draco shushed him with a gesture.
“Don’t you dare tell me to forget everything you said!”
Harry winced, caught out.
“I’m sorry –”
“Don’t apologise either!” Draco continued, looking at Harry with an urgency that wasn’t anger, nor fear, but something else.
Harry didn’t know what to think, so he just stood, looking at Draco with a weak smile.
“This is not how I…” Draco began, trailing off. Closing his eyes, he took a deep breath, squared his shoulders and started again. “What I mean to say is – I would love to go on a real vacation with you. I don’t think I would have ever told you though,” he admitted with a wry smile. “It’s not like I was expecting to have great chances with you, given our history.”
Harry could not believe his ears. But Draco wasn’t done yet, a determined look on his face.
“You see me for who I really am - neither my family, nor my past, yet a product of both of them. And I deeply care about you. You’re nothing short of inspiring. Not for the hero you were forced to be, but for all the ways you’ve grown out of your assigned role, into yourself.”
His posture relaxed and a small smile played around his lips.
"There,” Draco said, his tone matter of fact. “Now we're even."
Harry moved without thinking, his hand catching Draco’s where it was still touching his arm and bringing it to his chest, drawing their bodies closer together.
“You’re incredible,” he said sincerely, and then smiled. “Who would have thought?”
Draco returned the smile, leaning forward until his forehead touched Harry’s.
“Here’s much to do with hate, but more with love,” he muttered.
Harry deduced that this must be another Shakespeare quote out of Draco’s seemingly endless supply, and grinned crookedly.
“You've convinced me – I may see the point of dramatic declarations of love after all.”
His hand moved to the back of Draco’s neck, pulling him even closer. Draco drew a shivering inhale, his hands fitting around Harry’s waist perfectly, and underneath an ancient whalebone, in a city that had seen so many star-crossed lovers but none quite like these, they kissed.